Thomas H. Arthur Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Thomas H. Arthur By Published on June 6, 2024 Download Article as PDF Color him black And count the bruises He was tough and slender Chiseled in bronze He died too young And he smiled too little But his dreams were the dreams of a man. --Sydney Hibbert (1986) This article investigates the career of Jamaican American theatre practitioner, Sydney Hibbert (1932-1990), who worked in Jamaica, London and the United States as an actor, teacher, and poet, and wrote meaningfully about these experiences. (1) Hibbert emerged from a colonized place and culture and was, in many ways, a postcolonial subject who negotiated the differing and often conflicting demands of values and structures created by the British, while also struggling to maintain his identity or connection with his home culture and sense of self. Educated in Kingston and London, he returned home in 1965 and, with other Jamaican students who had studied in London, attempted to establish an indigenous theatre for popular audiences of Black Jamaicans. At first this initiative failed, and Hibbert turned to the American Black Power Movement in Harlem for inspiration. Moving to New York to teach at the Harlem School of the Arts, he found frustration and rejection in the theatre world. When his agent suggested he get rid of his Jamaican accent, he refused. His struggles to preserve his Jamaican identity and find a voice among African American people reveal the challenges and complexity of postcolonial experience. Nevertheless, he managed to have a substantial career as a teacher and performer in the United States and helped start the National Black Theatre Festival of the North Carolina Black Repertory Company that exposed audiences to Black classics and new works. Hibbert was sometimes disillusioned but never idle in his pursuit of artistic accomplishment along with racial justice. (2) Black Jamaicans and the Colonial System Hibbert’s Jamaican, enslaved roots helped shape his personality and professional ambitions. Columbus landed in Jamaica on his second voyage in 1494, an arrival that was a disaster for Jamaican residents who were killed, sent to Spain as slaves, or became slaves in their native land. (3) In 1645, England captured Jamaica from the Spaniards, and in 1670, the slave trading Royal Africa Company was formed using Jamaica as its chief market and a center of their activities in the West Indies. (4) Between 1647 and 1838, British settlers imported between one and two million slaves from West Africa for plantations and estates that produced sugar, cocoa, indigo, and later coffee, with tens of thousands dying on the passage to the Caribbean. (5) Many Black Jamaicans inherited their surnames from plantation owners such as the English merchant Thomas Hibbert who immigrated to Kingston in 1734. The Hibbert family subsequently held interests in sixty estates and controlled almost half of the Jamaican slave trade. They profited from British colonialism’s triangular trade routes which began in the mother country with sugar and rum transported to Africa that was exchanged for slaves transported to the Caribbean, after which the ships were reloaded with sugar for a passage home to England. (6) By virtue of his surname, Hibbert was metaphorically part of this triangle of people, culture, and influence. Along with slavery and trade, the British brought their theatre culture, which became part of the Jamaican heritage. The first professional company to perform on the island presented John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera in 1733 . (7) Throughout the Pre-Emancipation period, whites-only audiences were exposed to Shakespeare plays, farces and melodramas performed by European and American professional companies. (8) In 1775, the Old American Company—the first fully professional theatre group to perform in North America—staged Shakespeare’s Romeo and Julie t. In 1807, the British Parliament abolished the slave trade, and in 1834, slavery in Jamaica, but this had little cultural effect. Even after Kingston’s formerly whites-only theatres began admitting patrons on segregated and then mixed-color bases, these audiences still saw standard classics and a few current English-originated works. (9) For instance, in 1912 the new Ward Theatre opened with Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance . (10) Later, in 1941, under the aegis of the Little Theatre Movement, the Ward Theatre became the home of Boxing Day pantomimes that grew popular for a wide audience, although according to one observer, there were a “token few” black performers—the musicians and a school teacher—in the first Jack and the Beanstalk performance. (11) The next decades saw the “Jamaicanizing” of the British pantomime. (12) Perhaps more significant in the history of Jamaican theatre is the body of African-Caribbean musical and performance traditions associated with folklore, religious rituals and seasonal festivals. (13) These enactments involved storytelling, idiomatic speech, movement, gesture, personification, choreography, audience participation, and pantomime. There are parallels between the techniques of this informal theatre and formal drama which the colonial system defined as “real theatre.” The folk theatre went underground during colonialism, but re-emerged in the 1940s, forming the essential basis, sources, and techniques for a new generation of playwrights and actors seeking to define their Jamaican identity and create an indigenous theatre. Sydney Hibbert (b. 1932) grew up during the early decolonization period when Jamaicans gained universal suffrage in 1944 and full independence in 1962. (14) He had sharp words for Black voting rights: “Universal Adult ‘Sufferage’ (sic), Man to man wid’ a(n) equal X! Count the papers and forget them. Keep some pedigree and class!” (15) He became interested in theatre through a small role in a secondary school production of The Pirates of Penzance which, even though its distinctly British character had nothing to do with his own life experience, settled his goal of acting as his future occupation. “You enter into another world” doing theatre, “you’re the center of that world” he later recalled. “I knew I was always going to do this.” (16) The contrast between the world of Pirates and his own could not have been sharper. He was raised with two siblings by a widowed mother in the “lanes” (back alleys) of the Cross Roads section of Kingston with sanitary conditions so bad that residents petitioned the town council to build sewers. (17) He described it as “a heaven and a hell—a home and a prison.” (18) In a poem entitled “Actor Boy” he writes, “Boy, you come from Cross Roads/ Mek some money man!” Shame at the end of my smile/ Screaming inside my head like voices, Run, boy, run! There’s no inheritance here…” (19) A poem “Morning Call” reflects Hibbert’s disillusionment with the school curriculum: “Hiding inside the sounds change/ London bridge is falling down, Falling down… And the Lane is paved with gold, But the gingerbread houses are scarce/ And Red Riding Hood never plays here.” (20) Opportunities for education were limited because grammar schools charged fees, but Hibbert received a scholarship intended for disadvantaged Black youth at Excelsior College, recently founded by young educator A. Wesley Powell. (21) When Hibbert attended the school, it had outstanding music, speech and drama programs including performance opportunities at the Ward Theatre. While Hibbert was a student. one of Excelsior’s most famous graduates, Louise Bennett (Coverley) taught there from 1946-48. (22) Coverley, who as a student had written poetry in Jamaican patois, became a national icon in theatre, radio and TV, and champion of Jamaican folklore and indigenous literature. Later in his own poetry, Hibbert referred to “Miss Lou” in explaining his use of poetic dialect. After graduation from secondary school, he explored his interest in theatre by attending classes at the private Continental Academy, which offered tutoring in music, dance and drama. During this period, he supported himself with a low-paying civil service position in the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands. (23) Because of its colonial past Jamaica was believed to have a racial blending that created a homogeneous creole multi-racism. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Jamaica in June 1965 and was impressed that so many different nationalities seemed to be combined into one Jamaican identity. (24) However, recent studies indicate that “shadeism,” or colorism, was an open secret in Kingston. In “Examining Race in Jamaica,” Monique Kelly finds that both race category and skin color affected opportunities for schooling and access to household amenities. (25) As another researcher describes it, children acquired a sense of social differences based on skin color at home or in school. Sydney’s dark skin complexion was less desirable than lighter mixed-race skin, so he was considered to be lower class. In a poem describing his childhood, he wrote “your father is not backra (white)/ not even high brown skin.” (26) Perhaps the most important Black influencer in Hibbert’s early life was Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). (27) Garvey established the “Universal Negro Improvement Association” (UNIA) in Kingston in 1914, aiming to achieve Black nationalism through the celebration of African history and culture with a Back-to-Africa message. In 1916, he moved to Harlem, New York where UNIA eventually established 700 branches in thirty-eight states, spreading to more than forty countries in Africa, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. (28) Garvey was deported from the US for possible fraud and lived in Kingston 1927-1935 where he continued to articulate ideas of Black pride and racial success. Though Hibbert was too young to understand Garvey’s message in the 1930s, when his body was brought back for burial at the National Heroes Park in 1964, Jamaica boiled with debates over Garvey’s significance and concepts of Jamaican nationhood. (29) Living in Harlem became a goal and when Hibbert finally moved there, he heard Garvey’s ideas reechoed by Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. Playing ‘the Outsider’ in London Seeking to better themselves in London with professional qualifications was standard practice for Commonwealth citizens. In 1962, Hibbert received a bursary scholarship to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal Academy of Drama (RADA). At the Guildhall, one of his most important roles was in John Gay’s Polly , a classic play rife with racial satire against the British planters and colonization. The actor was likely cast for his Jamaican identity since the story takes place in the West Indies. Instead of white men wearing black makeup, Hibbert was playing a main role as a Black actor in his own skin without makeup. He received critical acclaim for his interpretation of “Cawwawkee,” the West Indian prince who in the story eventually marries Polly. According to historian Richard Dryden, this ballad opera (a sequel to The Beggar’s Opera ) “condemns the British planter, the British soldier, the British slave trade, the transportation of British criminals, and the pirate,” thus labeling all characters as being either fools or knaves except for the heroine, Polly, and the native Indians.” (30) The West Indians were the “good guys” and the white British merchants and planters the “bad guys,” setting up a racial role inversion within a safe, comedic format. Gay’s Polly has been understood as both a superficial satire and/or an early radical anti-colonial statement. Hibbert’s Shakespearean roles also fall into the outsider category, from the title part in Othello, to Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , to Feste in Twelfth Night . Othello the Moor is a Black man in a white Venetian society. Oberon is the king of the fairies and a magical being, outside ordinary human limitations. Feste is a licensed fool, free to observe and comment on the foibles of the play’s authority figures. All three characters were thought suitable for a Black actor. Hibbert received Guildhall’s characterization prize for his Feste, interpreted with humor, satire and menace, in the Shakespeare 400th anniversary celebrations. (31) His success with Shakespearean roles demonstrates his ability to “mimic the colonizer” while still honoring his love of Shakespearian language. When he returned to Kingston in August 1965, he was celebrated in the press, and promoted to the Ministry of Development and Welfare. (32) In the 1970s, Hibbert used his London training at the Colorado and Alabama Shakespeare Festivals. (33) At Colorado, his Othello moved critic J. H. Crouch to compare his portrayal with actors like “the sun-tanned Walter Huston, a liver-lipped Lawrence Olivier and a magnificently bullish Paul Robeson.” The critic wrote, “I had contemplated Othello as an exotic, a stranger, a pantaloon, a victim, a fool, even a black hero in a white melodrama, but he had not been prepared for “the pagan gentility, the curtailed, then unleashed barbarousness of Sidney Hibbert’s Othello.” Kari Howard notes, “The actor was devoted to the detail of character construction— from modest storytelling, through quiet authority, through steely authority through laughing security through rational security, through genuine dilemma, through a disintegration of personality which commands the trance (the most real I have seen).” (34) Hibbard later played Othello at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, where a critic commended the contrast between the actor’s soft-spoken delivery at the beginning and tension of a man maddened by jealousy at the end of the play. (35) Creating Jamaican-centered Theatre Returning to Kingston in August 1965, Hibbert was caught up in the attempts to identify and define indigenous Caribbean culture. His first Kingston project was 1865—A Ballad for Rebellion , written by Jamaican playwright and novelist Sylvia Wynter who had returned from London to teach at the University of West Indies and form “a truly indigenous theatre.” (36) In an interview, she explained the problem: local drama needed more serious audiences than pantomime attendees, as well as fresh, realistic scripts by West Indies playwrights. In addition, new professional standards should be developed. Wynter and her then husband Jan Carew wanted to establish The Jamaican Folk Theatre, starting with a production of her script A Child is Born . (37) This was delayed because the Ministry of Development commissioned her to write an epic historical drama about the Morant Bay Rebellion.” (38) After a year’s intensive research, it was ready in October 1965. Directed by Jamaican Lloyd Reckord, with Hibbert as his assistant and production manager, it featured over a hundred players. Reviewer Norman Rae described it as an elaborate production that ran three and a half hours and contained much “speechifying,” while missing opportunities for dramatic expression. He thought that the basic concept of the play was confused with no point of view and stereotyped character development. (39) It is difficult to assess the impact of this event, already highly politicized because the “Tercentenary of English Colonization” celebrated in 1955 was followed by “Emancipation Day” in 1965. (40) Ballad may not have been an artistic success, but Wynter’s approach to rewriting history more inclusively, from the Jamaican people’s viewpoint, marked a fundamental step in decolonizing the story. (41) Almost all local working Black actors were involved and thereby exposed to her humanization of the Black characters and the shift in collective memory. This predates Wynter’s theoretical writings, but reveals the germinal stages of her decolonial thinking. One concrete result of the performance was that the Ministry of Development promised to commission new West Indian scripts at future festivals. Within a month, Hibbert led a group of young theatre practitioners (five of whom had been in Ballad ) in establishing a new theatre company that aimed to attract audiences “beyond the Europhile elite.” (42) They selected the name “Theatre 77” reflecting their goal, “to establish a fully professional theatre company in twelve years: sixty-five plus twelve makes seventy-seven.” (43) They could not agree on any Jamaican scripts for their first performances, so they chose Edward Albee’s Zoo Story and Miss Julie by August Strindberg. According to company member Yvonne Jones (Brewster), they reasoned that both plays concern the struggle between the “haves and have nots, between the lower classes and those they serve.” Social inequality was “examined so brutally by both playwrights,” they believed that “audiences would see the parallels with their own society, which would make the double bill a sure winner.” (44) Without financial backing or public relations experience, the group nevertheless pushed forward arranging for performances in the Old Library/Dramatic theatre at the University of West Indies Mona campus. Hibbert directed Miss Julie , performed in Zoo Story , and was the producer and stage manager. The review by Harry Milner (a lead actor in Ballad ), published two days after the opening, was mixed: entitled “Promising Start” he praised some acting, but found the production “a bit melodramatic, old-fashioned, and slow.” (45) The show closed early, and the company was left with a large debt in part because of expensive programs ordered by Hibbert. Brewster later wrote that “we all were to blame for the fiasco” due to “over-optimistic audience projections, inflated egos, and a complete absence of financial and logistic planning.” (46) The group soon acquired a new performance space, “The Barn,” and staged the British playwright Roger Milner’s comedy How’s the World Treating You with Hibbert in the lead role. Norman Rae’s review was positive and Hibbert received special praise for his deadpan comedic delivery. (47) Still, the script was not written by a Jamaican and did not deal with the island’s political and social concerns. The company attempted to remedy this by next presenting recital/performances by four Jamaican writers, On the Off Beat , along with Afro-American Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes’s jazz poem Ask Your Mama . (48) These pieces, billed as happenings with the audience bringing their own cushions to sit on the floor, were directed by George Carter, already one of Jamaica’s most established theatre practitioners. (49) Still seeking subjects more relevant to their audience’s lives, the company began to hold improvisational “devising workshops” that were recorded, transcribed with scenes marked for further workshopping. These innovative activities led to Trevor Rhone’s first play Look Two in 1967. During this time, Hibbert was working with the Jamaica Festival Office as a theatre lecturer and drama tutor. (50) Theatre 77, now renamed The Barn Theatre, endured for forty years becoming an important chapter in Jamaican theatre history. Encountering Black Power in America By early 1968, Hibbert had been transferred to the Jamaican Embassy in Washington, D. C. as the cultural attaché, but he soon abandoned the Civil Service to move to Harlem. It was in Washington that Hibbert first encountered the South African playwright Athol Fugard whose work was so important to him in future years. Hibbert studied after hours at the Stage Studio, a method acting school founded by Louise Brandwen (1932-1974), a Russian-born émigré who had trained at the Moscow Art Theatre and worked with Lee Strasberg in Los Angeles. At the Stage Studio, he studied the Stella Adler technique and the teachings of Grotowski, Artaud, and Meyerhold. He was now cast in Blood Knot , one of Fugard’s first plays written as a statement against the South African racial laws. (51) The play premiered in Johannesburg on October 23, 1961, after which it was banned in the city. The American premier of Blood Knot opened Off-Broadway with James Earl Jones playing Zacharias in 1964. (52) The plot concerns two half-brothers who share the same Black mother, but one of them passes for white while the other cannot. In the Stage Studio production Hibbert, a Black Jamaican, played the darker-skinned brother Zach. This was an especially compelling story given the young actor’s experience of racism and shadeism. The significance of Fugard’s influence on Hibbert’s career cannot be overstated. He played a variety of parts created by many playwrights, but often returned to Fugard’s plays and Blood Knot . At Illinois State University in 1970, his training included non-traditional reverse casting such as a class in which white students worked on Black playwright Ron Milner’s Who’s Got His Own while Black students performed Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf . Milner’s play had been a great success at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem in 1967 and represented the trend among the Black Arts Movement’s cultural nationalists to create “Black theatre for the advancement of Black people.” (53) Hibbert also arranged a staged reading of Fugard’s Blood Knot in which he played Zachariah with a white faculty member playing his lighter-skinned brother. In 1982 Hibbert played Zachariah again at California’s South Coast Repertory Second Stage, and in 1986 he played the teacher/servant, “Sam,” in Fugard’s anti-apartheid Master Harold, and the Boys . (54) Los Angeles Times critic Lawrence Christon calls Hibbert a “forceful, compelling figure” in a Master Harold review. (55) The Santa Ana Orange County Register ’s reviewer, Jeff Rubio, focuses on the relationship between the actor’s work, playwright Fugard and South Africa. “The playwright brings apartheid into focus,” writes Rubio, “Fugard demands an identification that is beyond most performers, but Hibbert disappears into Sam.” (56) In 1987 while teaching at the North Carolina School for the Arts, Hibbert played Zachariah again in the university production of Blood Knot , receiving stellar reviews. (57) Studying Fugard, playing his roles, and thinking about racism was becoming a central concern in Hibbert’s lifework. Hibbert was drawn to Harlem in his quest to perform plays written by Black writers about their own identity. Earlier Afro-Caribbeans had been key figures in the international Harlem Renaissance. (58) In the late 1960s Harlem was alive with militant activist ferment due to the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement and assassination of Malcolm X. Black culture was fostered by the New Lafayette Theatre, the short-lived Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, the New Heritage Repertory Theatre, Harlem Dance Theatre, the journal Umbra and the Harlem School of the Arts among others. (59) Hibbert wrote a short prose piece, “Harlem Adagio: Part of a Symphony for Black Men Uptown,” which describes the urban scene. At first, the mood of the essay is upbeat: “at the New Lafayette, there were sold-out houses of people wearing dashikis and afros you couldn’t see around!” Hibbert noticed “Black men were looking each other squarely in the eyes for the first time in their generation’s memory. Malcolm’s words were pouring out of the most unlikely mouths in word-for-word accurate quotes; Stokely Carmichael was upfronting it all over the university campuses; and the Panthers were going to lead this revolution to kingdom come.” (60) Yet Broadway was still difficult for Black actors except for superstars, and local roles were not easy to win for a newly emigrated West Indian actor. (61) After Hibbert’s fifth unsuccessful audition in one day, ranging from Equity Principals Only to Off-Off-Broadway, his agent, who had previously respected Hibbert’s Jamaican identity, urged him to lose his Caribbean accent, something the actor refused to do. His desire to keep his linguistic culture alive was certainly influenced by Louise Bennett-Coverley who, as aforementioned, had taught in Hibbert’s secondary school. In his poem “For Those in Exile,” he wrote, “Talk bad-talk with pride/ For Louise is dictionary now!” (62) At the end of “Harlem Adagio” Hibbert talks about fighting poverty, dodging bill collectors and disrespect, and becomes furious, “Jesus Christ! I gon’ kill somebody if this go on much longer…DAMN!” (63) But then Hibbert was hired as the director of the drama workshop at the Harlem School of the Arts (HAS). After his experience in Jamaica both teaching and working with cultural development, this position was a perfect fit. The school was founded in 1964 by singer Dorothy Maynor, and offered children and adults opportunities to study music, visual arts, and theatre. She wanted children to be exposed to beauty within their community and to develop their talents from an early age. Maynor selected teachers who, like Hibbert, were professional but also adaptable to people coping with deep poverty and racial prejudice. (64) HAS hired five theatre faculty and inaugurated a new performance space in a converted garage in 1969. They presented Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo that told the story of Patrice Lumumba's rise to power and assassination in 1961. Césaire, poet, writer and political figure from Martinique had been one of the founders of the French literary movement Négritude . Césaire advocated for acceptance of blackness in order to free or decolonize the mind. For his part, Hibbert directed a Nigerian play Akowawe with Afolabi Ajayi and the Moari-Moayo [Mbari Mbayo] Players, which included African music and lyrics in English, Swahili, and Yoruba. (65) Variant spellings of Yoruba names have obscured its relationship with the Mbari Mbayo clubs founded by Yoruban playwright Duro Adipo in Nigeria. Adipo’s theatre company produced performances heavily infused with Yoruba rituals, poetry, dance and theatre using authentic, historical instruments. (66) These two events show how Hibbert and the Harlem School of the Arts were instrumental in bringing contemporary pan-African culture to local audiences. Hibbert’s book of poetry, Anansi and Muntu , published in 1986, grew from free-form lyrics performed with musicians in Harlem and Los Angeles in the 1970s. (67) The explosive mid-1970s reception of Jamaican singer-songwriter Bob Marley may have bolstered the appeal of Hibbert’s performance pieces. (68) But the actor’s work had roots in the jazz poetry performed at Theatre 77 in Kingston, particularly Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama—Twelve moods for Jazz , which derived from the Harlem Renaissance. Hibbert writes that “Beyond the meaning of Caribbean words and their color is the rhythm of the language,” a kind of music. (69) He hoped to communicate, “clearly and succinctly, in short staccato sentences” pulsing “like the real jazz” with the “shouts of gospel” when it was “newborn, warm and supine, splendidly cathartic and holy.” (70) An especially notable poem, “A Requiem,” commemorates Paul Robeson’s death in January 1976. It begins, “Paul Robeson left today/With dignity,” and ends “Maybe you and I, small dedication/ Living best the Force we know/For another unsung prophet/ In this Black race, against Time.” Hibbert may have attended Robeson’s funeral held in Harlem at the AME Zion Church and was deeply moved by his life struggles. Another section, Somewhere a Third World, contains poems on South Africa. “Bloodbath: for Six High School Students Shot in Soweto,” decries police brutality in the Soweto riots that protested using only English or Afrikaans in all schools. From the Black point of view, this was the language of oppression. Hibbert writes, “Robbery of a people’s native right/Their chess game of securities and power/ And the UN didn’t even notice/ Black blood dripping/Between the fingers of corporate handshakes….” (71) In a section on going home, he reflects on his exile and identity: “ We climbed over fences to larger fields/And schoolhouse places relearning/Three-hundred years’ curriculum of self. And Britons, never, never, never shall be slaves.” (72) When Hibbert revisited his mother’s house after her death in 1984 he wrote, “Dreams come solid, incessant/ Through long nights remembering/ Where I keep my pain locked up/ Hollowing out my chest.” (73) Anansi and Muntu is a journal defining his Jamaican birthright and identity in the wider international world. Teaching a Postcolonial discourse for future generations Hibbert had personal experience of cultural imperialism in British control of educational curricula as a strategy for handling colonized subjugated people. Sub-par education for African Americans was also a significant problem in the United States. While earning a graduate teaching degree at Illinois State University, he directed the Black Fine Arts Festival. In an interview he said, “We have temporarily lost track of our true cultural heritage and one of the functions of this festival will be to help us reunite this lost past with our present.” (74) He displays a Postcolonial awareness of the need to educate and excavate the African American cultural heritage as an independent story that contradicts the traditional colonial narrative. Hibbert’s teaching embodied these principles in the 1970s. His first full-time teaching job was head of the newly formed Drama department at Rutgers University, Livingston campus. This was six years after the riots in Newark, New Jersey when Black protestors took to the streets to stand against the discrimination, lack of representation and working opportunities in the city. (75) Though Rutgers had created new departments and curricula “to serve the needs of the multi-ethnic community,” Hibbert observed that Blacks had little place or input in a white power structure, which seemed to be less concerned with issues than appearances. (76) While at Rutgers, Hibbert ventured into the American South, lured by a visiting artist opportunity to play “King Lear” at a Virginia university. In this setting Hibbert experimented with delivering his lines in the rhythm and patterns of Jamaican patois (patwa). By this time a formidable teacher, white student cast members remember him “beating a drum and leading us around the room to changing rhythms while vocalizing to the movements.” (77) Rehearsals ended in discussions of how each actor’s movement synched with the lines. “It was an amazing piece of work,” writes the costumer. “Sydney would be speaking quietly and then, suddenly near the end of the play, would burst into an eloquent fury, ripping off the clothing I had put on his back.” (78) In 1983, Hibbert joined the faculty of the North Carolina School for the Arts in Winston-Salem. (79) As one of only three Black NCSA faculty members, Hibbert believed that minority students should be taught survival skills because they would go into the drama world as pioneers. (80) His efforts to get Black actors cast in the same roles as Whites were termed “heroic” in a Winston-Salem newspaper. (81) Hibbert’s approach to teaching was shown in a workshop he offered using an integrated approach to drama, dance, movement, music, poetry, and dramatic literature, while his “Putting Your Best Voice Forward” class dealt with voice production and speech as applied to the “extension of personality.” (82) Hibbert also worked with the Winston-Salem based North Carolina Black Repertory Company, the first showcase for Black theatre professionals in the state and one of the first in the nation. (83) Founded in 1979 by entrepreneur/performer Larry Leon Hamlin and fueled by the same forces that had motivated Hibbert to travel from Jamaica to the United States, the missions of the organization were to “engage, enrich and entertain” with innovative programming of a high quality that “resonates across the community and challenges social perceptions,” to expose “diverse audiences to Black classics,” as well as to develop and produce new works.” (84) Of special importance to Hibbert, the company sought to sustain Black theatre internationally and provide a space in which theatre professionals could earn a living through their craft. (85) Hibbert brought broad experience to the NCBRC and the first Black Theatre Festival, where he performed well-received pieces from Anansi and Muntu and was a guest artist at an “Evening of Aesthetic Ambience,” organized to recognize officers and board members. (86) In the first year of the National Black Theatre Festival that established it as a national force, Hibbert was a special consultant to Hamlin, the artistic director of the company, helping to organize events and influencing the productions of Fugard’s The Island and Sizwe Bansi is Dead . (87) He was in contact with Maya Angelou, his previous director who became the first national chairperson for the Festival. In recognition of his work, Angelou presented him with the 1989 Conference Award for Outstanding Service. (88) After Hibbert’s death in 1990, commemorative articles refer to his accomplishments as an actor, director, writer, and theatrical entrepreneur. (89) His evocative poetry and prose as well as his “exuberance, and demanding nature as a teacher” are noted. (90) Students remember Hibbert’s voice carrying “the heavy flavor of his native accent” combined with his “rich sense of humor” reflecting “the joy he took in life” and “in the practice of his life’s work.” (91) Hamlin summarized Hibbert’s contributions saying, “Sydney believed that no matter the amount of adversity, there was always a way to overcome that. Not only could one dream the impossible dream, but one could make that dream a reality” adding, “One of the things I most liked about him was that his growing up in Jamaica had a lot to do with who he was and how he saw things.” (92) Sydney Hibbert, a man who grew from a rigid colonial education and culture as a child to a postcolonial theatre professional pushed against the racial and cultural barriers of his day, may have longed for respect for his homeland, his home culture, and himself. A choice to earn that respect for self and nation by showing the colonizer’s culture, writ large, that he could accomplish significant things on the field that those colonizers had created, is understandable. His experience surely led him to realize the value of teaching a younger generation to do better and his own Black students to be more empowered and aware. His anti-colonialist drive emerged in his powerful performances of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, now re-envisioned, as much as in roles in Fugard’s plays that brought social and racial inequities and questions about humanity to the fore. The battle that Theatre 77/Barn colleagues fought at home and in Britain, he fought in the United States. Hibbert’s choice, however, seems to have meant walking a lonely path in a culture or society where he may never have felt completely at ease. In his poetry, he displayed a sense of anger and displacement or, as Homi Bhabha has termed it, “unhomeliness.” (93) Hibbert moved from Kingston, Jamaica, to London, to Washington, D. C., Harlem, Los Angeles, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, but he never have found a physical space or social reality that was compatible with his Jamaican identity. As African American journalist Sam Fulwood III writes, animosity often clouds relationships between Caribbean immigrants and native-born African Americans citizens because of competition for jobs and differences in their dealings with whites.(94) In Hibbert’s lifetime people of West Indian descent, a minority within a minority, occupied lofty positions in American life and culture, including former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, Harvard historical/cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson, Caribbean American writer Jamaica Kincaid, and entertainer Harry Belafonte among others. Though Hibbert’s career and life accomplishments are less well-known, attention is merited because of the breadth and quality of his work as well as his passion for changing the racial discourse in Jamaica and the United States. In an age of reclaiming the histories of People of Color and seeking to understand the experiences of people growing up in a colonial setting, this work reconstructs the life of a “Caribbean soul” who successfully negotiated the changes from Jamaican colonial life to a decolonized life in the United States. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Sydney Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu: A Caribbean Soul in Exile , (Rural Hill, NC: Independent Publishing Company, 1986), 44. See also, Gerald McDermott, Anansi the Spider: a tale from the Ashanti , (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1972). Anansi is a folktale character in the shape of a spider, often considered a god of all knowledge and stories, a trickster, one of the most important characters of Caribbean folklore and the genesis of the later Brer Rabbit in the American South. Muntu embraces living and dead, ancestors and deified ancestors. The author wishes to thank Dennis C. Beck, Professor of Theatre: Theatre History/Dramatic Literature at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA and Kathleen Giles Arthur, Professor emerita of Art History, for their invaluable assistance and editorial comments. For general history, see Clinton V. Black, The History of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Longman Publishing & Collins Educational Press,1958); Errol G. Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre , (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Philip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett, The Story of the Jamaican People (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Rundle Publishers,1998); Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 77-98. Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 116-127. Rachel Manley, Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood, (Key Porter Books, 2009), Prologue xi. For specific information on slavery and the processing of sugar see “Sugar’s Revolution” in Ada Ferrar, Cuba: An American History , (New York: Scribner, 2021), 69 -77. Ferrar, Cuba pp. 73-74. Marlis Schweitzer calls these theatrical gatherings “sites that facilitated collective alignment with the “ideals and aesthetics of the ‘mother country,’” as quoted in Susan Valladares’ The Review of English Studies , Vol. 73, no. 309, April 2022, 322. Hill, Jamaican Stage , p. 237, n. 2, also credits Richardson Wright, Revels in Jamaica, 1682-1838 , (New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1937). By the early nineteenth century, segregation had become commonplace in the Kingston Theatre, though not many years later the “caste system,” white sailors and educated blacks, was “overriding racial lines.” Hill, Jamaican Stage , 36-37. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggests in Racism Without Racists , “Since theatre is based in storytelling” and “its ability to lie in the realm of the given,” it can “help [spectators] make sense of the world but in ways that reinforce the status quo,” in Rowman & Littlefield, sixth edition, 96. Hundreds of people saw costumes that were identical to those used earlier at London's Savoy Theatre, in https://old.jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/story0010.html . Yvonne Brewster, Vaulting Ambition: Jamaica’s Barn Theatre, 1966-2005, (Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2017), 23. Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century , (Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2011), 55-78. Hill, Jamaican Stage , 272-289. On folk elements (dance and music) in African-Caribbean plays, see Osita Okagbue, Culture and Identity in African and Caribbean Theatre , (London: Adonis and Abbey Publishers, 2009), 191-201. Sherlock and Bennett, in Jamaican People , p. 368, hypothesize that rejection of Nazism at the end of World War II influenced Britain’s abandonment of concepts of Empire and trusteeship. “Echoes Still Heard,” Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 16. He played on the spelling of suffrage to change its meaning to suffering. “Wid a(n) X” show the lines are written in Jamaican patois. Lil Thompson, “Sydney Hibbert: The Discipline Pays Off,” Winston-Salem Journal , July 31, 1986, 26. They lived at 4 Hart Lane behind Lismore Street, running off of Old Hope Rd. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1934-06-05/page-5/ Hibbert, “The Lane, Tempo Mystique,” Anansi and Muntu , 9. Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” Anansi and Muntu , 13. Hibbert, “Morning Call,” Anansi and Muntu , 12. Black, History of Jamaica , 137-140; A. Wesley Powell, The Excelsior-EXED Story , (Kingston: The Methodist Church in the Caribbean and Americas, Jamaica District), 1989. Powell, 27-28, 41-47. Louise Bennett was awarded a British Council scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London, and returned to teach at Excelsior 1946-48. By writing in dialect, Bennett-Coverley was following in the footsteps of Jamaican poet Claude McKay. “Local Dramatist Returns,” https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-08-04/page-6/ https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-133/out-of-many . King said, “Here you have people from many national backgrounds: Chinese, Indians, so-called Negroes, and you can just go down the line, Europeans, and people from many, many nations. Do you know they all live there and they have a motto in Jamaica, “Out of many people, one people.” And they say, “Here in Jamaica we are not Chinese, we are not Japanese, we are not Indians, we are not Negroes, we are not Englishmen, we are not Canadians. But we are all one big family of Jamaicans.” Monique D.D. Kelly, “Examining Race in Jamaica: How Racial Category and Skin Color Structure Social Inequality,” The Journal of Race and Social Problems , Vol. 18 (2020), 300-312. Hertice Altink, Public Secrets: Race and Skin Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica , (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” 13. The term “high-brown” was used in Harlem in the 1920s and found in Black women’s face powder sold as “High Brown” by the Overton-Hygienic Company, Chicago. Sherlock and Bennet, Jamaican People , 292-315, 362-63. Rupert Lewis, “Jamaican Black Power in the 1960s,” in Black Power in the Caribbean , ed., Kate Quinn, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 55-56. Rex Nettleford, Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica , (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 19-37. Robert G. Dryden, “John Gay's Polly: Unmasking Pirates and Fortune Hunters in the West Indies,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , Vol. 34, No. 4, (2001), 539-557. Stoney Lloyd, “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner , August 4, 1965, 6. Besides those listed above, he played in the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman and Patrick Hamilton’s psychological drama The Duke in Darkness , and four separate characters in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood . He produced Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and Chekov’s Uncle Vanya , which placed on the honor list of productions in the Student Repertory Theatre. “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner. August 4, 1965, 7-8. Hibbert took acting classes from Kingston teacher, Violette de Barovier Riel at her Continental Academy workshop and acted with the Repertory Players, Caribbean Thespians, and the Coke Drama Group. He was married and his wife joined him. Gleaner , August 10, 1963, 19 and Gleaner, August 15, 1965, 20. He portrayed what one reviewer called an elegant Thane of Cawdor in Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Carol McGinnis Kay, “The Alabama Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 30, No. 2 (1979), 205-208. J. H. Crouch, “The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 21 (1970), 465-467. This critic used racial stereotypes that would be considered inappropriate today. Kari Howard, Kaleidoscope , “Drama Review: Othello a Mellow Fellow,” September 29, 1983, University of North Carolina at Asheville, 7. “First Novel Wins Acclaim,” Daily Gleaner , August 9, 1962, p. 24. See Imani D. Owens, “Toward a Truly Indigenous Theatre: Sylvia Wynter Adapts Federico García Lorca,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , 4:1 (2017), 49-67. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1962-11-25/page-9/ The Morant Bay Rebellion broke out on October 11, 1865, when several hundred black people raided the police station and stole weapons stored there. Two planters were killed, and several others were threatened. With the disturbances spreading, the Jamaican authorities put down the rebellion so brutally that direct rule from London was established, which ended representative government in the island for decades. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-17/page-18/ ; https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-26/page-18/ Veronica M. Gregg, “Commemorations in Jamaica: A Brief History of Conflicts.” Caribbean Quarterly 56, no. 1/2 (2010): 23–67, especially 28-29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654952 . Carole Boyce Davies, “From Masquerade to Maskarade,” in Sylvia Winter, On Being Human as Praxis , ed. Katherine McKittrick, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 203-225 https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-02/page-7/ ; Members who had been involved in Ballad were Sydney Hibbert, Billy Woung, Trevor Rhone, Grace Lannaman, and Munair Zacca. Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre , 90-94; Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 16-20. Sydney was fresh from acting and management training in London. Trevor Rhone and Yvonne Brewster had studied at the Rose Bruford College in Kent. Rhone became a well-known playwright and was presented with the Institute of Jamaica Musgrave Gold Medal. Brewster founded the Talawa Theatre Company, London and, after a long career acting, directing and producing was awarded an Order of the British Empire. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 16-17. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-06/page-17/ ; As Brewster tells the story, there was no review. For the post mortem, see Trevor Rhone, Bellas Gate Boy , (Oxford, England: MacMillan Caribbean Writers, 2008), 29-32. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 17-19. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-07-20/page-26/ Daily Gleaner, “Merry-go-round,” June 14, 1966, Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 33. George Carter had been a pioneer theatre director and lighting designer in Kingston since the 1940s. He was lighting designer for the musicals, pageants, dance and pantomimes in the Little Theatre Movement. In 1961 he received an Arts Council award to study in London at Sadler Wells Ballet and the Shakespeare Memorial theatre at Stratford. Hibbert’s post-Theatre 77 lecturing and teaching activities in Jamaica were extensive, as documented in Daily Gleaner, “Trends in Theatre,” October 06, 1965, 26; “New Slants to Known History,” October 14, 1965; “Drama workshop opens today,” April 25, 1966, 16; “Jamaica Festival Kingston and Saint Andrew Training courses,” April 26, 1966, 5; “Continental Academy Drama Course,” April 8, 1967, 18; “Festival Seminar, Drama Seminars,” April 25-29,” 1967, 26; May 11, 1967, 26. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2416/the-art-of-theatre-no-8-athol-fugard It toured to Cape town and other locations until June 1962. Soon after the show closed, laws were passed prohibiting racially mixed casts or audiences in South Africa. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095512988 and https://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/ fugard.html/. The Blood Knot starring J. D. Cannon as Morris and James Earl Jones as Zachariah at the Cricket Theatre in 1964, as noted in “Blood Knot' Lists American Premiere,” New York Times , Friday, January 31, 1964, 16. Milner's most significant contribution to African-American letters was Black Drama Anthology (1972), the earliest and most respected anthology of Black plays. It included works by Milner, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Langston Hughes https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100158957 ) Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Hibbert honored by LA drama critics,” March 27, 1986, A-12. The Drama-Logue newspaper, a weekly west-coast theatre trade publication, gave Drama-Logue Theatre Critics Awards for theatre work done in Los Angeles and Southern California. See https://www.abouttheartists.com/award_groups/184-drama-logue-awards/year/1988 . Lawrence Christon in “Stage Review: Playwright as Exorcist in Master Harold and the Boys ' South Coast Repertory,” Los Angeles Times May 25, 1985, in https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-05-25 -ca-25 15632-story.html. Jeff Rubio, Santa Ana Orange County Register, May 24, 1985, 148. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A6. The Jamaican poet Claude McKay (1890-1948) settled in New York City in 1914 and wrote about Black life in Jamaica and challenges faced by Black Americans, often in the influential Pearson’s Magazine and Liberator . Marcus Garvey, founder of the UNIA, had lived in Harlem from 1916 until 1924. See the excellent film with photos and interviews by the Community Works N.Y.C. and the New Heritage Theatre Group, ( https://www.harlem-is.org/videos ) at https://youtu.be/vGG0LMPlf_Y Hibbert describes the whole Harlem scene, Ananzi , 30-31. See also James E. Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s , (Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement , Vernon D. Mitchell, Cynthia Davis, editors (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). African-Americans Pearl Bailey ( Hello Dolly ) and James Earl Jones ( The Great White Hope) were playing starring roles on Broadway, but the Caribbean American Repertory Theatre (CART) was only founded in 1975. See Olivier Stephenson, Visions and Voices (Leeds: Peepal Press, 2013), and http://southernworldartsnews.blogspot.com/2015/03/caribbean-playwrights-converse-and.html Hibbert, Ananzi , 49. Bennett-Coverley brought recognition to the Jamaican Creole dialect through her poetry and Jamaica Radio series “Mis Lou’s Views” that ran 1965-1982. Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 29-34. He was divorced from his first wife and married Jamaican Claire Gutzmore in Manhattan in 1969. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1969-06-02/page-4/ and https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/903708390:61406?tid=&pid=&queryId=df594283-1d04-45d8-83aa-de0675f898fa&_phsrc=SVt1380&_phstart=successSource . William F. Rogers, Jr., “The Establishment of the Harlem School of the Arts,” Black Music Research Journal , Vol. 8 (1988), 223-236. Negro Digest (later Black World), Vol. 18, August 1969, 50. Spelled two different ways in the same article. See Genevieve Fabre, “A Checklist of Plays, Pageants, Rituals and Musicals by Afro-American authors performed in the United States 1960-1973,” Black World/ Negro Digest, April 1974, 95. Afolabi Ajayi is recorded a as Nigerian recipient of a scholarship to Pomona College where he graduated in 1964; he was deceased by 1975. See https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDAAU440.pdf Okeke-Agulu, Chika. “Rethinking Mbari Mbayo: Osogbo Workshops in the 1960s, Nigeria.” In African Art and Agency in the Workshop , edited by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Forster, 154–79. Indiana University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gh6fp.11 . This is a new discovery that needs to be explored. Reported in “Studies in Caribbean and South American Literature: An Annual Annotated Bibliography, 1989.” Callaloo 13, no. 3 (1990): 564. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931339 . Anansi “is the ‘spiderman’ in Caribbean folktales who “survives by adopting a role” and “guarding his sense of humor that pricks pretension—especially his own,” whereas, “Muntu,” the Bantu word for soul, spirit or otherness, goes with Anansi on his journeys providing stability, an unshakable inner identity. He sees two worlds, past and present clearly though he often chooses to remain quiet and detached,” in Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction.” The actor’s pointed observations are a long way from the “One Love!” sensibilities in Marley’s work. For more on Marley, see Timothy White, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000) and Roger Steffens, So Many Things to Say; the Oral History of Bob Marley , (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction,” p. x. Hibbert aspires to “taste, philosophize, and one day even write the answers clearly, succinctly in short staccato sentences” that will be “hailed as a new style,” pulsing “like the real jazz,” blooming with “the colors and textures of the blues,” and mounting “crescendos like the shouts of gospel when it was just newborn, warm and supine, splendidly cathartic and holy, in “Harlem Adagio,” Anansi, 29. Hibbert, “Bloodbath,” Anansi , 61. Hibbert, “For Those in Exile,” Anansi, 49. Hibbert, “Visit ’84,” Anansi , 53. “The Black Fine Arts Festival,” Illinois State University, The Vidette , Vol. 82, n. 54, April 17, 1970. The theme was “The Meaning of Blackness,” with films and prominent lecturers; The Vidette Vol. 83, no.47, March 9, 1971; Vol. 84, n.39, February 8, 1972; The Vidette , Vol. 84, n. 55, March 21, 1972. The unrest from July 12-17, 1967 “came during a period when racial tensions were exploding into violent conflagrations across the country.” Over several days in Newark, “twenty-seven people were killed — many of them black residents, as well as a white firefighter and a white police detective — and more than 700 were injured,” Rick Rojas and Khorri Atkinson, “Fifty Years After the Uprising: Five Days of Unrest That Shaped, and Haunted, Newark,” New York Times, July 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/nyregion/newark-riots-50-years.html Daily Gleaner , “Jamaican Dramatist Returns for a Visit,” May 23, 1973, 5. On the Rutgers/Livingston situation, see Paul G.E. Clemens, “The Early Years of Livingston College, 1964–1973: Revisiting The “College of Good Intentions” in The Journal of The Rutgers University Libraries , Vol. 6-7, 71-114, in http://dx.doi.org/10.14713/jrul.v68i2.1987 . Pat Woodson, “Hibbert Accepts Lead—First Reading Inspires Cast,” The Breeze , September 24, 1974, pp. 3, 6; Jeffrey Alan Dailey, Communication with author, August 2, 2021. Pat Woodson, “Lear Costume Designs,” The Breeze , October 11, 1974, 3; Pamela Johnson, Communication with author, September 30, 2021. According to the Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, B10, Hibbert had already lectured and done university-level workshops on the Los Angeles, Northridge and Pomona California State University campuses while performing in Southern California in the 1980s. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Winston-Salem Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A-6. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984,16, and Glenda E. Gill, “Schertzer racially biased,” in “Forum,” Chronicle , Thursday, January 21, 1988, A-5. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984, 16; Winston-Salem Journal , December 22, 1985, 40. These organizations included The Flonnie Anderson Theatrical Association and Nell Lite Productions, see Felecia Piggot McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company —Twenty-five Marvtastic Years, (Greensboro: Open Hand Publishing, LLC,2005) 22. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory , 5, “The black self-affirmation fueled by the Civil Rights Movement carried over to the Black Powers Movement and, consequently, to its cultural wing – the Black Arts Movement.” https://www.ncblackrep.org/about-us/html . Winston-Salem Chronicle “Looking Back on 1986,” “Sydney Hibbert performs a mixture of humor and pathos in his Anansi and Muntu ,” Feb. 5, 1987, C-4; McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory, 41, 61; Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Can We Talk?” September 24, 1987, A-8. McMillan, 61; The Island and Sizwi Banzi is Dead written by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona were originally performed in 1972 in Cape town, South Africa. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company , 46-50. Other celebrities were Oprah Winfrey, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, and Roscoe Lee Brown. Mabel Robinson, former NCBR Artistic Director, Winston-Salem Chronicle, December 6, 1990, B-9; Winston-Salem Chronicle , January 10, 1991, A-8. Daily Gleaner , Tuesday, January 15, 1991, 27. Patricia Smith Deering, “Renowned local dramatist remembered,” Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, 25. John Hoeffel, “Drama Professor Sydney Hibbert Dies of Cancer,” Winston-Salem Journal, November 30, 1990, 12; Nathan Ross Freeman wrote and directed a play based on Hibbert, Your Side Mine , that was performed at the Montage Showcase Ensemble in November 1997. See https://www.greensboro.com/ensemble-gives-playwrights-a-chance/article_68b7d190-97d4-5e5b-b6ea-891a97f0c19f.html . Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text , 31/32 (1992), 141-153. Hibbert experienced the “unhomeliness” in the sense of his exile and itinerant life style. Though he became a US citizen in 1978, he was constantly moving from the East to West Coasts. In “Sermon in a Dream-Mass: Port Elizabeth, South Africa,” the lanes of Kingston where he grew up haunted his imagination becoming metaphors for danger and death. Sam Fulwood III, “U.S. Blacks: A Divided Experience,” November 25,1995, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-11-25-mn-6855-story.html . Footnotes Sydney Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu: A Caribbean Soul in Exile , (Rural Hill, NC: Independent Publishing Company, 1986), 44. See also, Gerald McDermott, Anansi the Spider: a tale from the Ashanti , (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1972). Anansi is a folktale character in the shape of a spider, often considered a god of all knowledge and stories, a trickster, one of the most important characters of Caribbean folklore and the genesis of the later Brer Rabbit in the American South. Muntu embraces living and dead, ancestors and deified ancestors. The author wishes to thank Dennis C. Beck, Professor of Theatre: Theatre History/Dramatic Literature at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA and Kathleen Giles Arthur, Professor emerita of Art History, for their invaluable assistance and editorial comments. For general history, see Clinton V. Black, The History of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Longman Publishing & Collins Educational Press,1958); Errol G. Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre , (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Philip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett, The Story of the Jamaican People (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Rundle Publishers,1998); Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 77-98. Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 116-127. Rachel Manley, Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood, (Key Porter Books, 2009), Prologue xi. For specific information on slavery and the processing of sugar see “Sugar’s Revolution” in Ada Ferrar, Cuba: An American History , (New York: Scribner, 2021), 69 -77. Ferrar, Cuba pp. 73-74. Marlis Schweitzer calls these theatrical gatherings “sites that facilitated collective alignment with the “ideals and aesthetics of the ‘mother country,’” as quoted in Susan Valladares’ The Review of English Studies , Vol. 73, no. 309, April 2022, 322. Hill, Jamaican Stage , p. 237, n. 2, also credits Richardson Wright, Revels in Jamaica, 1682-1838 , (New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1937). By the early nineteenth century, segregation had become commonplace in the Kingston Theatre, though not many years later the “caste system,” white sailors and educated blacks, was “overriding racial lines.” Hill, Jamaican Stage , 36-37. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggests in Racism Without Racists , “Since theatre is based in storytelling” and “its ability to lie in the realm of the given,” it can “help [spectators] make sense of the world but in ways that reinforce the status quo,” in Rowman & Littlefield, sixth edition, 96. Hundreds of people saw costumes that were identical to those used earlier at London's Savoy Theatre, in https://old.jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/story0010.html . Yvonne Brewster, Vaulting Ambition: Jamaica’s Barn Theatre, 1966-2005, (Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2017), 23. Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century , (Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2011), 55-78. Hill, Jamaican Stage , 272-289. On folk elements (dance and music) in African-Caribbean plays, see Osita Okagbue, Culture and Identity in African and Caribbean Theatre , (London: Adonis and Abbey Publishers, 2009), 191-201. Sherlock and Bennett, in Jamaican People , p. 368, hypothesize that rejection of Nazism at the end of World War II influenced Britain’s abandonment of concepts of Empire and trusteeship. “Echoes Still Heard,” Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 16. He played on the spelling of suffrage to change its meaning to suffering. “Wid a(n) X” show the lines are written in Jamaican patois. Lil Thompson, “Sydney Hibbert: The Discipline Pays Off,” Winston-Salem Journal , July 31, 1986, 26. They lived at 4 Hart Lane behind Lismore Street, running off of Old Hope Rd. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1934-06-05/page-5/ Hibbert, “The Lane, Tempo Mystique,” Anansi and Muntu , 9. Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” Anansi and Muntu , 13. Hibbert, “Morning Call,” Anansi and Muntu , 12. Black, History of Jamaica , 137-140; A. Wesley Powell, The Excelsior-EXED Story , (Kingston: The Methodist Church in the Caribbean and Americas, Jamaica District), 1989. Powell, 27-28, 41-47. Louise Bennett was awarded a British Council scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London, and returned to teach at Excelsior 1946-48. By writing in dialect, Bennett-Coverley was following in the footsteps of Jamaican poet Claude McKay. “Local Dramatist Returns,” https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-08-04/page-6/ https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-133/out-of-many . King said, “Here you have people from many national backgrounds: Chinese, Indians, so-called Negroes, and you can just go down the line, Europeans, and people from many, many nations. Do you know they all live there and they have a motto in Jamaica, “Out of many people, one people.” And they say, “Here in Jamaica we are not Chinese, we are not Japanese, we are not Indians, we are not Negroes, we are not Englishmen, we are not Canadians. But we are all one big family of Jamaicans.” Monique D.D. Kelly, “Examining Race in Jamaica: How Racial Category and Skin Color Structure Social Inequality,” The Journal of Race and Social Problems , Vol. 18 (2020), 300-312. Hertice Altink, Public Secrets: Race and Skin Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica , (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” 13. The term “high-brown” was used in Harlem in the 1920s and found in Black women’s face powder sold as “High Brown” by the Overton-Hygienic Company, Chicago. Sherlock and Bennet, Jamaican People , 292-315, 362-63. Rupert Lewis, “Jamaican Black Power in the 1960s,” in Black Power in the Caribbean , ed., Kate Quinn, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 55-56. Rex Nettleford, Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica , (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 19-37. Robert G. Dryden, “John Gay's Polly: Unmasking Pirates and Fortune Hunters in the West Indies,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , Vol. 34, No. 4, (2001), 539-557. Stoney Lloyd, “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner , August 4, 1965, 6. Besides those listed above, he played in the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman and Patrick Hamilton’s psychological drama The Duke in Darkness , and four separate characters in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood . He produced Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and Chekov’s Uncle Vanya , which placed on the honor list of productions in the Student Repertory Theatre. “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner. August 4, 1965, 7-8. Hibbert took acting classes from Kingston teacher, Violette de Barovier Riel at her Continental Academy workshop and acted with the Repertory Players, Caribbean Thespians, and the Coke Drama Group. He was married and his wife joined him. Gleaner , August 10, 1963, 19 and Gleaner, August 15, 1965, 20. He portrayed what one reviewer called an elegant Thane of Cawdor in Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Carol McGinnis Kay, “The Alabama Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 30, No. 2 (1979), 205-208. J. H. Crouch, “The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 21 (1970), 465-467. This critic used racial stereotypes that would be considered inappropriate today. Kari Howard, Kaleidoscope , “Drama Review: Othello a Mellow Fellow,” September 29, 1983, University of North Carolina at Asheville, 7. “First Novel Wins Acclaim,” Daily Gleaner , August 9, 1962, p. 24. See Imani D. Owens, “Toward a Truly Indigenous Theatre: Sylvia Wynter Adapts Federico García Lorca,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , 4:1 (2017), 49-67. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1962-11-25/page-9/ The Morant Bay Rebellion broke out on October 11, 1865, when several hundred black people raided the police station and stole weapons stored there. Two planters were killed, and several others were threatened. With the disturbances spreading, the Jamaican authorities put down the rebellion so brutally that direct rule from London was established, which ended representative government in the island for decades. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-17/page-18/ ; https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-26/page-18/ Veronica M. Gregg, “Commemorations in Jamaica: A Brief History of Conflicts.” Caribbean Quarterly 56, no. 1/2 (2010): 23–67, especially 28-29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654952 . Carole Boyce Davies, “From Masquerade to Maskarade,” in Sylvia Winter, On Being Human as Praxis , ed. Katherine McKittrick, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 203-225 https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-02/page-7/ ; Members who had been involved in Ballad were Sydney Hibbert, Billy Woung, Trevor Rhone, Grace Lannaman, and Munair Zacca. Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre , 90-94; Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 16-20. Sydney was fresh from acting and management training in London. Trevor Rhone and Yvonne Brewster had studied at the Rose Bruford College in Kent. Rhone became a well-known playwright and was presented with the Institute of Jamaica Musgrave Gold Medal. Brewster founded the Talawa Theatre Company, London and, after a long career acting, directing and producing was awarded an Order of the British Empire. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 16-17. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-06/page-17/ ; As Brewster tells the story, there was no review. For the post mortem, see Trevor Rhone, Bellas Gate Boy , (Oxford, England: MacMillan Caribbean Writers, 2008), 29-32. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 17-19. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-07-20/page-26/ Daily Gleaner, “Merry-go-round,” June 14, 1966, Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 33. George Carter had been a pioneer theatre director and lighting designer in Kingston since the 1940s. He was lighting designer for the musicals, pageants, dance and pantomimes in the Little Theatre Movement. In 1961 he received an Arts Council award to study in London at Sadler Wells Ballet and the Shakespeare Memorial theatre at Stratford. Hibbert’s post-Theatre 77 lecturing and teaching activities in Jamaica were extensive, as documented in Daily Gleaner, “Trends in Theatre,” October 06, 1965, 26; “New Slants to Known History,” October 14, 1965; “Drama workshop opens today,” April 25, 1966, 16; “Jamaica Festival Kingston and Saint Andrew Training courses,” April 26, 1966, 5; “Continental Academy Drama Course,” April 8, 1967, 18; “Festival Seminar, Drama Seminars,” April 25-29,” 1967, 26; May 11, 1967, 26. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2416/the-art-of-theatre-no-8-athol-fugard It toured to Cape town and other locations until June 1962. Soon after the show closed, laws were passed prohibiting racially mixed casts or audiences in South Africa. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095512988 and https://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/ fugard.html/. The Blood Knot starring J. D. Cannon as Morris and James Earl Jones as Zachariah at the Cricket Theatre in 1964, as noted in “Blood Knot' Lists American Premiere,” New York Times , Friday, January 31, 1964, 16. Milner's most significant contribution to African-American letters was Black Drama Anthology (1972), the earliest and most respected anthology of Black plays. It included works by Milner, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Langston Hughes https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100158957 ) Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Hibbert honored by LA drama critics,” March 27, 1986, A-12. The Drama-Logue newspaper, a weekly west-coast theatre trade publication, gave Drama-Logue Theatre Critics Awards for theatre work done in Los Angeles and Southern California. See https://www.abouttheartists.com/award_groups/184-drama-logue-awards/year/1988 . Lawrence Christon in “Stage Review: Playwright as Exorcist in Master Harold and the Boys ' South Coast Repertory,” Los Angeles Times May 25, 1985, in https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-05-25 -ca-25 15632-story.html. Jeff Rubio, Santa Ana Orange County Register, May 24, 1985, 148. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A6. The Jamaican poet Claude McKay (1890-1948) settled in New York City in 1914 and wrote about Black life in Jamaica and challenges faced by Black Americans, often in the influential Pearson’s Magazine and Liberator . Marcus Garvey, founder of the UNIA, had lived in Harlem from 1916 until 1924. See the excellent film with photos and interviews by the Community Works N.Y.C. and the New Heritage Theatre Group, ( https://www.harlem-is.org/videos ) at https://youtu.be/vGG0LMPlf_Y Hibbert describes the whole Harlem scene, Ananzi , 30-31. See also James E. Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s , (Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement , Vernon D. Mitchell, Cynthia Davis, editors (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). African-Americans Pearl Bailey ( Hello Dolly ) and James Earl Jones ( The Great White Hope) were playing starring roles on Broadway, but the Caribbean American Repertory Theatre (CART) was only founded in 1975. See Olivier Stephenson, Visions and Voices (Leeds: Peepal Press, 2013), and http://southernworldartsnews.blogspot.com/2015/03/caribbean-playwrights-converse-and.html Hibbert, Ananzi , 49. Bennett-Coverley brought recognition to the Jamaican Creole dialect through her poetry and Jamaica Radio series “Mis Lou’s Views” that ran 1965-1982. Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 29-34. He was divorced from his first wife and married Jamaican Claire Gutzmore in Manhattan in 1969. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1969-06-02/page-4/ and https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/903708390:61406?tid=&pid=&queryId=df594283-1d04-45d8-83aa-de0675f898fa&_phsrc=SVt1380&_phstart=successSource . William F. Rogers, Jr., “The Establishment of the Harlem School of the Arts,” Black Music Research Journal , Vol. 8 (1988), 223-236. Negro Digest (later Black World), Vol. 18, August 1969, 50. Spelled two different ways in the same article. See Genevieve Fabre, “A Checklist of Plays, Pageants, Rituals and Musicals by Afro-American authors performed in the United States 1960-1973,” Black World/ Negro Digest, April 1974, 95. Afolabi Ajayi is recorded a as Nigerian recipient of a scholarship to Pomona College where he graduated in 1964; he was deceased by 1975. See https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDAAU440.pdf Okeke-Agulu, Chika. “Rethinking Mbari Mbayo: Osogbo Workshops in the 1960s, Nigeria.” In African Art and Agency in the Workshop , edited by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Forster, 154–79. Indiana University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gh6fp.11 . This is a new discovery that needs to be explored. Reported in “Studies in Caribbean and South American Literature: An Annual Annotated Bibliography, 1989.” Callaloo 13, no. 3 (1990): 564. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931339 . Anansi “is the ‘spiderman’ in Caribbean folktales who “survives by adopting a role” and “guarding his sense of humor that pricks pretension—especially his own,” whereas, “Muntu,” the Bantu word for soul, spirit or otherness, goes with Anansi on his journeys providing stability, an unshakable inner identity. He sees two worlds, past and present clearly though he often chooses to remain quiet and detached,” in Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction.” The actor’s pointed observations are a long way from the “One Love!” sensibilities in Marley’s work. For more on Marley, see Timothy White, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000) and Roger Steffens, So Many Things to Say; the Oral History of Bob Marley , (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction,” p. x. Hibbert aspires to “taste, philosophize, and one day even write the answers clearly, succinctly in short staccato sentences” that will be “hailed as a new style,” pulsing “like the real jazz,” blooming with “the colors and textures of the blues,” and mounting “crescendos like the shouts of gospel when it was just newborn, warm and supine, splendidly cathartic and holy, in “Harlem Adagio,” Anansi, 29. Hibbert, “Bloodbath,” Anansi , 61. Hibbert, “For Those in Exile,” Anansi, 49. Hibbert, “Visit ’84,” Anansi , 53. “The Black Fine Arts Festival,” Illinois State University, The Vidette , Vol. 82, n. 54, April 17, 1970. The theme was “The Meaning of Blackness,” with films and prominent lecturers; The Vidette Vol. 83, no.47, March 9, 1971; Vol. 84, n.39, February 8, 1972; The Vidette , Vol. 84, n. 55, March 21, 1972. The unrest from July 12-17, 1967 “came during a period when racial tensions were exploding into violent conflagrations across the country.” Over several days in Newark, “twenty-seven people were killed — many of them black residents, as well as a white firefighter and a white police detective — and more than 700 were injured,” Rick Rojas and Khorri Atkinson, “Fifty Years After the Uprising: Five Days of Unrest That Shaped, and Haunted, Newark,” New York Times, July 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/nyregion/newark-riots-50-years.html Daily Gleaner , “Jamaican Dramatist Returns for a Visit,” May 23, 1973, 5. On the Rutgers/Livingston situation, see Paul G.E. Clemens, “The Early Years of Livingston College, 1964–1973: Revisiting The “College of Good Intentions” in The Journal of The Rutgers University Libraries , Vol. 6-7, 71-114, in http://dx.doi.org/10.14713/jrul.v68i2.1987 . Pat Woodson, “Hibbert Accepts Lead—First Reading Inspires Cast,” The Breeze , September 24, 1974, pp. 3, 6; Jeffrey Alan Dailey, Communication with author, August 2, 2021. Pat Woodson, “Lear Costume Designs,” The Breeze , October 11, 1974, 3; Pamela Johnson, Communication with author, September 30, 2021. According to the Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, B10, Hibbert had already lectured and done university-level workshops on the Los Angeles, Northridge and Pomona California State University campuses while performing in Southern California in the 1980s. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Winston-Salem Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A-6. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984,16, and Glenda E. Gill, “Schertzer racially biased,” in “Forum,” Chronicle , Thursday, January 21, 1988, A-5. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984, 16; Winston-Salem Journal , December 22, 1985, 40. These organizations included The Flonnie Anderson Theatrical Association and Nell Lite Productions, see Felecia Piggot McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company —Twenty-five Marvtastic Years, (Greensboro: Open Hand Publishing, LLC,2005) 22. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory , 5, “The black self-affirmation fueled by the Civil Rights Movement carried over to the Black Powers Movement and, consequently, to its cultural wing – the Black Arts Movement.” https://www.ncblackrep.org/about-us/html . Winston-Salem Chronicle “Looking Back on 1986,” “Sydney Hibbert performs a mixture of humor and pathos in his Anansi and Muntu ,” Feb. 5, 1987, C-4; McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory, 41, 61; Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Can We Talk?” September 24, 1987, A-8. McMillan, 61; The Island and Sizwi Banzi is Dead written by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona were originally performed in 1972 in Cape town, South Africa. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company , 46-50. Other celebrities were Oprah Winfrey, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, and Roscoe Lee Brown. Mabel Robinson, former NCBR Artistic Director, Winston-Salem Chronicle, December 6, 1990, B-9; Winston-Salem Chronicle , January 10, 1991, A-8. Daily Gleaner , Tuesday, January 15, 1991, 27. Patricia Smith Deering, “Renowned local dramatist remembered,” Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, 25. John Hoeffel, “Drama Professor Sydney Hibbert Dies of Cancer,” Winston-Salem Journal, November 30, 1990, 12; Nathan Ross Freeman wrote and directed a play based on Hibbert, Your Side Mine , that was performed at the Montage Showcase Ensemble in November 1997. See https://www.greensboro.com/ensemble-gives-playwrights-a-chance/article_68b7d190-97d4-5e5b-b6ea-891a97f0c19f.html . Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text , 31/32 (1992), 141-153. Hibbert experienced the “unhomeliness” in the sense of his exile and itinerant life style. Though he became a US citizen in 1978, he was constantly moving from the East to West Coasts. In “Sermon in a Dream-Mass: Port Elizabeth, South Africa,” the lanes of Kingston where he grew up haunted his imagination becoming metaphors for danger and death. Sam Fulwood III, “U.S. Blacks: A Divided Experience,” November 25,1995, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-11-25-mn-6855-story.html . About The Author(s) Thomas Arthur received his PhD in American Studies from Indiana University and is a Professor Emeritus of Theatre at James Madison University (JMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He has written extensively on theatre performance and film practitioners and co-authored See You at the Movies , a book on Melvyn Douglas’s acting and political activities. Arthur has led acting workshops internationally, including in the townships of South Africa as apartheid ended. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Moi-même by Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. In 1968 Paris, Lee Breuer, along with future members of the legendary downtown experimental theater company, Mabou Mines, shot an unscripted, silent satire following a thirteen-year-old boy named Kevin (Kevin Mathewson) attempting to make a film against the backdrop of the May student uprising. Abandoned as unfinished, the project was resurrected by Breuer’s son, filmmaker Mojo Lorwin, who began restoring and re-imagining the unfinished film in the last year of his father’s life Moi-même features a cameo by Jean-Luc Godard, footage of the student protesters outside the Sorbonne, and early performances from several of the original members of Mabou Mines including Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, and Fred Neumann, also known for their interpretations of Samuel Beckett’s work. Faced with hours of unedited silent film (Breuer’s original intention had been to dub the film later), Lorwin spent three years writing a script, editing the picture, and working with a number of voice actors, musicians, and sound professionals to create a feature film out of the raw footage. A collaboration between father and son across half a century, Moi-même is both a lost 60s arthouse film and a new experimental film in its own right, which uses the original footage to tell a story about the political and artistic legacy of the 60s in our time and to explore the meaning of abandoned projects.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Moi-même At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue, NY 10003) on Saturday May 17th at 3pm. It will be followed by a Q&A with Mojo Lorwin and Kevin Mathewson, moderated by Frank Hentschker. RSVP Please note this film has a ticketed entry and is being screened at Anthology Film Archive. Click on the button above to visit the AFA website to reserve your seats. Country USA, France Language English, French Running Time 65 minutes Year of Release 1968/2024 About The Film In 1968 Paris, Lee Breuer, along with future members of the legendary downtown experimental theater company, Mabou Mines, shot an unscripted, silent satire following a thirteen-year-old boy named Kevin (Kevin Mathewson) attempting to make a film against the backdrop of the May student uprising. Abandoned as unfinished, the project was resurrected by Breuer’s son, filmmaker Mojo Lorwin, who began restoring and re-imagining the unfinished film in the last year of his father’s life Moi-même features a cameo by Jean-Luc Godard, footage of the student protesters outside the Sorbonne, and early performances from several of the original members of Mabou Mines including Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, and Fred Neumann, also known for their interpretations of Samuel Beckett’s work. Faced with hours of unedited silent film (Breuer’s original intention had been to dub the film later), Lorwin spent three years writing a script, editing the picture, and working with a number of voice actors, musicians, and sound professionals to create a feature film out of the raw footage. A collaboration between father and son across half a century, Moi-même is both a lost 60s arthouse film and a new experimental film in its own right, which uses the original footage to tell a story about the political and artistic legacy of the 60s in our time and to explore the meaning of abandoned projects. About The Artist(s) Lee Breuer (1937-2021) was an experimental theater writer and director and co-founder of the company Mabou Mines. His most acclaimed works include "The Shaggy Dog Animation"(1978), "The Gospel at Colonus" (1983), "Peter and Wendy" (1996), and "Mabou Mines DollHouse" (2004). Mojo Lorwin (1984-) is a filmmaker, film professor, and former political organizer. His 2019 short Summer in the City is a dream logic black comic exploration of climate change which won the “Best Brooklyn Project” award at the Brooklyn Film Festival in 2020. Get in touch with the artist(s) mojolorwin@gmail.com and follow them on social media moimememovie.com, https://www.instagram.com/mojolorwin/ 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

Jennifer Schmidt Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Jennifer Schmidt By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF The Belle of Mayfair , a musical comedy composed by Leslie Stuart with book by Basil Hood, Charles Brookfield, and Cosmo Hamilton, premiered in London in 1906. The comedy was loosely based on Romeo and Juliet , which did not prevent it from including a number called “Why Do They Call Me A Gibson Girl?” commenting on the American fashion craze sparked by Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrations. The lyrics for the song instructed the listener on how to “affect” the Gibson style: And a monumental curl, And walk with a bend in your back, Then they will call you a Gibson Girl. … The girls affect a style As they pass by With down-cast eye, And a bored and languid smile, … They do their best, for they’ve seen the pictures. [Chorus: They’ve missed the point of the Dana picture,] Which are intended, don’t you see, For all in perfect type should be.[1] For the New York production, which ran from December 1906 through March 1907, Valeska Suratt, a milliner from Indiana, used the role and her dressmaking skills to launch her acting career. Commenting on the hit song for the production’s Baltimore transfer, a review in The Sun exclaims that “Miss Surratt…looks like she had just stepped out from one of Charles Dana’s $1,000 sketches.” The reviewer also notes that the chorus featured a different look than the typical “chubby chorus girls,” stating, “Their places were well filled by tall, willowy creatures, called Gibson girls, who wore the most stunning gowns imaginable and who lifted up their chins in preference to their toes.” [2] This new, aloof physicality and the uniformity sent up by the lyrics of the song—“for all in perfect type should be”—correspond to a general trend in depictions of women in the United States. In Imaging American Women , Martha Banta argues that “ the woman as image was one of the [Progressive] era’s dominant cultural tics.” [3] The allegorical figure of Columbia, for instance, the young attractive woman representing America, appeared with great frequency during this period in political cartoons or as a brand symbol, such as in Columbia Records and Columbia Pictures. Other female allegorical figures towered over the United States in the form of the Statue of Liberty and the 65-foot Statue of the Republic at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition or graced the facades of buildings like the Four Continents statues at the United States Customs House. [4] Matching these stately figures were Gibson’s pervasive drawings of narrow-waisted, large-busted women with upswept hair, button noses, and distant gazes. As Adams, Keene, and Koella discuss in Seeing the American Woman , the Girl was “unindividualized”: “she generally looked down or away…or she danced and promenaded in lines of similar beings.” [5] Thus, as the United States entered the twentieth century, the types of women presented to the public in mass media and entertainment were often idealized, generalized, and detached. With the cultural turn to the visual, “woman as image” became increasingly separated from the living, breathing, individual bodies of women. As images of the American Girl proliferated, however, solo female performers in vaudeville offered alternatives to the disembodied anonymity of these aloof female types. In particular, the practice of mimicry allowed performers like Gertrude Hoffmann, Cissie Loftus, and Elsie Janis to break the “girl” mold with their vividly individualized impersonations of celebrities. Hoffmann, Loftus, and Janis brought attention to the manufactured nature of womanhood in the public sphere through an embodied form of imitation, which allowed them critical, creative space to comment on the celebrity culture of their time. The malleability of their form, in which they embodied several figures at once, gave them an unusual freedom from the strict types and categories for female performers, and their abilities as shape-shifters emphasized a bodily rather than an artificial or mechanical means of reproduction. In response to the commercialization and replication of the female image in the Progressive Era female mimics in vaudeville countered the mass-produced, male-created depictions of women, seen in magazines and chorus lines, with their own unruly reproductions. [6] At the beginning of the twentieth century, mimicry became a highly popular act on variety stages, and while both male and female mimics thrived in vaudeville, women especially dominated the field. A retrospective Variety article from 1948, titled “Vaudeville: Mimics,” reveals the prevalence of female mimics. The author, Joe Laurie, Jr., recalls the “heyday” of mimicry on the vaudeville stage, claiming that “There was an epidemic of imitations in vaudeville from 1905 to 1930.” [7] In a list of the “great artists” of mimicry, the majority are women, and of the artists he mentions who created original material for their acts, all five are women: Cissie Loftus, Juliet Delf, Elsie Janis, Gertrude Hoffmann, and Venita Gould. These mimics “used their own special material,” and Laurie, Jr. considered this to be a superior practice than simply copying material from the acts they were imitating. The majority of imitations in vaudeville, however, like the Gibson acts, consisted of more direct copying. The success of Suratt’s Gibson act, for instance, lay primarily with the gown—in her ability (as a dressmaker) to copy, make, and wear the “$1,000” look. Thus, while the Gibson Girl moved from two-dimensions to three, the emphasis remained on the visual, a priority that was in keeping with the period’s image obsession. In her book, Women and the American Theatre , Faye Dudden discusses theater’s turn to the visual, arguing that the commercialized theater at the end of the nineteenth century was part of an entertainment industry that created a “new kind of public realm.” [8] This new public realm “was not concerned with politics or community interests, but rather aimed at private profit and derived its publicness from the breadth of its marketing ambitions.” [9] While female audience members made an enormous impact on the growth of the mass entertainment market, the period also saw the mainstream success of the “leg business.” This type of entertainment, designed for the male gaze and formerly prevalent only in entertainments for working-class men, became standard fare in vaudeville and on Broadway. Perhaps the best theatrical example of the new public realm and its exploitation of feminized bodies and images was Florenz Ziegfeld’s “Follies,” the annual musical revue that ran from 1907 through 1931 and centered on its spectacular displays of chorus girls. In Seeing the American Woman , Adams et al. discuss the chorus girl as an incarnation of the Gibson Girl, explaining that Ziegfeld “sought primarily the Gibson look for his chorus girl.” [10] Sharing the Girl’s elegant but undifferentiated appeal, these choruses likewise represented youthful beauty and vigor, were vehicles for displaying the latest fashions, and were meant for replication, requiring hordes of women to fill the ranks. Often the extravagant costumes worn by Ziegfeld’s choruses functioned more like scenery, explicitly framing the women as objects and set pieces. Further emphasizing their conformity, the choreography comprised precision line dancing and “geometric formations” that, Susan Glenn argues, “mirrored the early twentieth-century industrial culture” and turned the chorus into a “disciplined female mass.” [11] The “new public realm” also corresponded to the explosion of print media, which, like commercialized theater, increasingly relied on exploitation of the female image. Matthew Schneirov dates the beginning of the “new era” in magazine publishing from 1893, “the year S. S. McClure established McClure’s ” as well as “the year that Frank Munsey cut the price of his magazine to ten cents—well below the cost of unit production—and made his profit through advertising.” [12] Other magazines quickly followed Munsey’s example, and advertising became the chief means of profit, driving down prices for periodical publications and making weekly and monthly illustrated magazines affordable for a broad swath of consumers in the United States. Like the magazines they funded, advertisements became increasingly visual, cutting down on text and relying on imagery, especially that of young, attractive women, to sell their products. The replicable nature of the Gibson Girl led her to be the perfect tool for selling the latest fashions. The Girl, according to Martha Patterson, “created the first national modeling of the one right look ,” and walking down the streets of an American city in the early 1900s meant encountering a sea of Gibson Girls, wearing the uniform of the New Woman. [13] Some of the Girl’s attributes disseminated progressive ideas about womanhood; she was often shown as independent, athletic, and assertive. The popular magazines, in which the Girl appeared, sold women the possibility of refashioning themselves into these sophisticated beings. Of course, by exploiting this attractive image to sell products, the advertiser’s promise of greater freedom led to greater conformity through consumption. Moreover, it was clear that her independence lasted only as long as the period of single life before marriage, and as the model for white beauty and sophistication, she also perpetuated ideas of racial superiority. In the summer of 1907, after Suratt made a hit as a Gibson Girl in The Belle of Mayfair , several vaudeville bills featured imitations of her and the Gibson aesthetic. The Broadway Theatre featured “a new Gibson girl travesty,” and Eddie Foy’s show, “The Orchid,” at the Herald Square Theatre added “a new… imitation of Miss Valeska Suratt, the ‘Gibson Girl,’ by Miss Laura Guerin.” [14] Most notably, the well-known impersonator, Gertrude Hoffmann, added a Suratt imitation into her program. The common vaudeville practice of copying coupled with the viral commercial popularity of Gibson’s drawings—spreading from postcards, to calendars, to cigarette cases, and wallpaper—made the Girl’s appearance on stage rather inevitable. Responding to these trends, imitations in vaudeville and musical comedy both exploited and satirized the superficiality and conformity in the Girl’s appeal. For her Gibson imitation, Gertrude Hoffmann, who used elaborate costumes and make-up to create the effect of her impersonations, copied the gown made famous by Suratt. A review of her performance dwells on the look of her costume: Miss Hoffman [sic], whose eccentric dancing and imitations nightly win much applause, also costumes her part smartly….for the first, of The Gibson Girl, she wore a black velvet Princess of the design worn by Valeska Surratt [sic] in The Belle of Mayfair, with it’s [sic] tight fit and deep V cutout back and front, the fluffiest of fluffy Titian hair. As an exaggeration and burlesque of the type of girl with a kangaroo walk and outlandish poses it was great. [15] Although the review pays close attention to her dress and hair, it also describes her act in decidedly embodied terms. In addition to celebrity impersonations, Hoffmann was known for her elaborate imitations of dance, such as her famous version of Salome. [16] Whereas reviews of Suratt’s performance describe her, in passive, visual terms, as a “living Gibson picture” or “living replica,” [17] the Hoffmann reviewer notes the dancer’s exaggerated movements, which provide a burlesque of the Girl’s unnatural posture. Gibson drew his female figures with an “S”-shaped spine—the result of combining a narrow waist with a large bust and hips. The corsets of the period also emphasized these features, forcing a posture that humorists likened to the curved back of a kangaroo. [18] Hoffmann’s “kangaroo walk” and “outlandish poses” thus satirized the consequences of an actual woman’s body attempting to imitate an impossible ideal. Hoffmann brought further physicality to her imitations by making her costume changes a conspicuous part of the act. An October, 22 1907 review in The Sun describes her practice of changing in full view of the audience: She cavorts back of the scene and is revealed behind a web-like screen changing costumes for dear life with the help of several maids. In a moment she flashes out as George Cohan and gives a rattling good imitation. Behind the screen she goes anon, emerging in the glare of the spotlight as Valeska Suratt singing her ‘Gibson Girl’ melody. In a minute she is Anna Held singing her nonsensational ‘eye’ lyric, and then with another flip of skirt and change of wig she is funny Eddie Foy. [19] Making the frenzied mechanics of her quick changes visible to the audience, Hoffmann exposed the labor behind her visual transformations. This choice, Susan Glenn argues, allowed Hoffmann to “deliberately establish her own presence within each imitation.” [20] It also made a spectacle out of the process of becoming an Anna Held or Eddie Foy, belying any sense of ease behind the elaborate costumes, make-up, and personalities seen in vaudeville through a display of the physical effort behind the curtain. Much of this effort was expended in donning the various trappings of gender presentation. In the space of a few costume changes, Hoffmann represented the masculine figure of George Cohan, two feminine beauty idols, Suratt and Anna Held, and an imitation of the male comedian, Eddie Foy, in ballerina drag. Ending with Foy, as another reviewer comments, made for an effective finale: “to the surprise of the house in the last character, Eddie Foy, in pink tights, ballet skirts, the funny little hat and ostrich walk, with the Eddie Foy smile; she had it all down fine.” [21] After praising Hoffmann’s imitation of Foy’s comedic physicality, the reviewer cannot help but note that she also wore the costume better: “Foy…would find it difficult to imitate Miss Hoffman’s splendid figure.” By highlighting Hoffmann’s feminine physique, the reviewer rushes to reinforce the gender expectations which Hoffmann’s act disrupts. Despite the prevalence of drag in vaudeville, especially female drag, this indicates a discomfort with Hoffmann’s quick assumption of several, differing presentations of gender. Male impersonation by women on stage, such as in breeches roles, has primarily been acceptable as a way for actresses to show off their bodies. Hoffmann follows this rule by choosing Foy’s ballerina act to copy. Like the on-stage costume changes, however, her choice also problematizes artificial markers of gender, taking a typically feminine garment like pink tights and using them to signify a male performer. Moreover, Hoffmann’s athletic physical presence in these acts, which reviewers describe in zoological terms, makes her dangerously masculine. Like other fearfully athletic New Women, Hoffmann displayed an unnerving ability to take on male as well as female attributes. Femininity, of course, has often been equated with reproduction, and the prevalence of female mimics in vaudeville opened questions about the cultural assumptions surrounding women’s “natural” capacity for imitation. With the ingrained associations between mass culture and femininity, Susan Glenn argues, female mimics exacerbated the period’s anxiety surrounding authenticity: “The mimics on the vaudeville stage…could be seen as personifications of a feminized urban consumer culture where being and imitating were one and the same.” [22] Like with the Gibson Girl, advertising used the reproducibility of the female image as a promise to women that they could buy their way to “the one right look.” [23] By impersonating various stars, the mimics encouraged the imitative behavior fostered in celebrity product endorsements, for instance, which were growing in popularity at the time. Want to look like Lillian Russell? Buy Recamier cosmetics. Want to be like Sarah Bernhardt? Buy Pear’s Soaps. [24] Providing a model for successful imitation, the mimics reinforced these attitudes. They did not, however, imitate only the beauty idols of the day. Instead, they often went in the opposite direction, transforming from lovely young women into the absurd, excessive, or racially-coded personalities of the vaudeville stage. In their acts, mimics could play a range of roles, male and female, and surprise audiences with their transformation from a demure young girl into the brassiest of vaudeville personalities. A look at the careers of Hoffman, Loftus, and Janis indicates how the mimic, as solo performer, had artistic control over her performance, and though she based her act on the personalities of other performers, she was free to interpret them according to her own design. This, as Glenn contends, gave female mimics a powerful role: “that of the artist-intellectual who both participated in and critically evaluated the cultural practices of the day.” [25] Mimicry afforded these women the chance to work in a manner similar to the caricaturists of popular magazines, and like caricature they used exaggeration, distortion, and their own unique style to offer a critical and parodic perspective on popular culture. Unlike caricature, however, the mimics’ embodied form of parody went beyond surface-level depictions of women and in return, gave them an unlikely freedom from the restrictive image of the “Girl” in American culture. Hoffmann’s practices as a mimic demonstrate how, as opposed to the photographs of star performers in mass circulation, the portraits offered by mimics were living and breathing imitations—a manual form of reproduction in a mechanical age. Two of the most famous mimics of the time, Cissie Loftus and Elsie Janis similarly emphasized physicality in their acts. Unlike Hoffmann, they eschewed the use of make-up or costume, but highlighted their natural, bodily abilities as mimics. In an interview, Loftus explained that “the born mimic is very independent of such aids to art as costumes, wigs, and makeup,” and Janis, in a separate interview, agreed: “Make-ups do not trouble me. I rely entirely on the inflection of the voice and the copying of action and gesture. That to my mind is the true art of mimicry.” [26] The desire to defend mimicry as an “art” and to stress the inherent skills of the “born mimic” relate to the broader cultural unease associated with imitation. The readiness with which the personalities of other performers could be replicated, challenged the integrity of both live performances, star and mimic, and placed mimicry in an ambiguous relationship to authenticity. Indeed, the vogue for mimicry coincided with modernist cultural anxieties over the impacts of mechanical reproduction in the age of the machine. Inventions from the phonograph to the photograph to the ready-to-wear shirtwaist blurred the lines between imitation and authenticity in an urban, industrialized society. As Walter Benjamin would later theorize in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the “criterion of authenticity,” central to the function of “art objects,” began to break down, as, with the advent of photography “to an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.” [27] Unlike mechanical forms of reproduction like film or photography, however, mimicry was a form of imitation that preserved some of the “auratic” quality Benjamin ascribes to the traditional art object. In interviews, Janis would “compare herself to a newspaper cartoonist,” Glenn notes, who “exaggerates certain characteristics in order to give a more striking air of reality to the finished picture.” [28] The caricaturist and critic Max Beerbohm also makes this comparison in his review of the mimic J. Arthur Bleackley. Beerbohm scoffs at the mimics who give “exact faithful reproduction[s]” of their subjects, because “an exact reproduction of the real thing can never be a satisfactory substitute.” Rather, he writes, the mimic should have a critical perspective: “The proper function of the mimic is, of course, like that of the parodist in words, or of the caricaturist in line, to exaggerate the salient points of his subject so that we can, whilst we laugh at a grotesque superficial effect, gain sharper insight into the subject’s soul, or, more strictly, behold that soul as it appears to the performer himself.” [29] Beerbohm’s insistence that mimicry can reveal the “soul” of both the mimic and the subject articulates the desire of his age to find art and humanity within reproduction and to validate mimicry as an art with “aura.” Moreover, mimicry constituted an embodied form of parody, and unlike most newspaper cartoons, the creators were likely to be women. While both Loftus and Janis had long and varied careers in entertainment, their practices and stage personas as mimics had many similarities. Cecilia “Cissie” Loftus was the daughter of famous performers on the British music hall stage, and in 1891, at the age of 15, Loftus began performing her imitations at music halls to instant acclaim. She made her New York debut in 1895 at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, and although she continued to perform on both sides of the Atlantic, she centered her career in the United States. When Elsie Janis began performing, also at a very young age, she was hailed as “the American Cissie Loftus.” [30] With the encouragement and guidance of her mother Jennie, the quintessential stage-mother, Janis was touring the vaudeville circuits by ten and starring in musical comedies by sixteen. Both rising to fame as girls, Loftus and Janis’s effectiveness as mimics stemmed in part from their youthful, feminine personas, which served to heighten the transformation into their various subjects. Known for her astonishingly wide vocal range and deft physical caricature, Loftus would string together impressions of such myriad acts as the following from a 1908 program: Marie Dressler singing ‘A Great Big Girl Like Me,’ Hattie Williams and her ‘Experience’ song, Caruso as he sings in a phonograph, George Walker singing ‘Bon Bon Buddie,’ Ethel Barrymore reading the letter from the boys in ‘Sunday,’ Bert Williams singing ‘Nobody,’ and dancing the ludicrous figure that is appended, and finally Nazimova in a scene from ‘A Doll’s House’ follow in order. [31] With a range of impersonations from vaudeville, opera, and the legitimate theater, Loftus exhibited the flexibility of her voice, which could capture, for example, the specific quality of the opera tenor, Enrico Caruso, as recorded on a phonograph. That her voice stretched to low vocal ranges added novelty and transgression to her act. Reviews of her performances, however, stressed the simplicity of her acts. A notice in the Chicago Daily Tribune describes Loftus’s charm as stemming from her ingenue-like demeanor: “A dainty winsomeness, supplemented by a sense of genuine humor, the deft touch of the artist, and a mimicry that never in any analysis could be construed into coarseness, was the secret of her popularity.” [32] Despite the sometimes provocative subject matter of her impersonations—like minstrel songs or Nazimova’s Nora—Loftus, as the Tribune is eager to confirm, maintained an image of maidenly propriety. Her decision to perform without make-up played into her girlish appeal. Max Beerbohm notes this effect in his comments on Loftus: “It seemed so strange, that neglect of convention. To be behind footlights and not rouged! Yes, hers was a success of contrast. She was like a daisy in the window of Solomon’s.” [33] Beerbohm’s language evokes a striking comparison between Loftus’s simple, natural artistry—like that of a daisy—and the commercial spectacle of vaudeville likened to a flashy department store window. The critical response to Loftus reveals a difference between the superficial representations of the typical vaudeville act and the embodied nature of Loftus’s mimetic skill. Her style of mimicry surpassed artificial or technical means of imitation to get beneath the skin of her subjects, and thus, beyond the innocent appeal of Loftus’s unrouged face, her decision to forego makeup contradicted advertisements that sold the idea of transformation through consumption (i.e. buying the right beauty products). Moreover, her cultivation of a simple, “dainty” persona, gave her, conversely, significant career versatility, allowing her to experiment with more rebellious personalities as a mimic, or as an actress, to play androgynous roles, such as Peter Pan. Elsie Janis, one of the first American women to get her start in vaudeville through mimicry, similarly maintained a girlish persona to accompany her mimetic talent. From childhood, Janis displayed a natural capacity for capturing the voices and gestures of others. She was rumored to give excellent impromptu impersonations, a skill which she reportedly demonstrated before President William McKinley in 1898, when she was invited to perform at the White House. After performing a few songs, recitations, and imitations of Anna Held and May Irwin, Janis surprised the guests with an impersonation of President McKinley, followed by imitations of “members of the United States Senate, the Justices of the Supreme Court (tripping over their robes), and the stereotypical national mannerisms of some of the assembled ambassadors.” [34] As with Loftus, audiences responded to the contrast, both charming and subversive, of a young girl imitating the mannerisms of mature men and women. One reviewer of her early performances commented, “It might seem incongruous for a child to evoke mental portraits of buxom, beautiful women for an audience. But Elsie’s inflections, gestures, and postures, her duplication of the star’s mannerisms, created a perfect illusion every time.” [35] Despite his reassurance about Janis’s talent, the author’s tone reveals a certain unease with the effect of her impressions, and if the incongruity between a girl portraying buxom women was unsettling, then the difference between the young Elsie and the powerful men she caricatured could only be more so. Janis’s supposed innocence, however, also made her transgressions of power and gender easier to digest. A review of Janis’s September 10, 1923 appearance at the Palace indicates this effect. The author, Mark Henry, is filled with admiration, explaining that he “has reviewed Miss Janis many times, but the pleasure is all his, and if anyone should get a laurel wreath, a gold medal or any other recognition hereafter, it certainly is ‘Little Elsie.’” [36] Even though Janis was 34 at the time of this review, Henry still uses the nickname, “Little Elsie.” Because of the close relationship, both personal and business, between Janis and her mother, Elsie did not marry until after her mother’s death in 1931. Thus “Little Elsie” maintained the image of maidenhood well into maturity, and her act continued to rely on the pleasing transformation from “winsome” girl into crude and brash performer. Henry describes her as “the only woman in the world who can swear, do it with refinement, and make you like her,” [37] excusing her mannish behavior through her feminine charm. With her capacity for creative interpretation, Janis famously added “idiosyncratic combinations” of impersonations to her act. [38] These combinations included “[George M.] Cohan singing one of his songs out of the corner of his mouth; Eddie Foy doing a clog dance; Ethel Barrymore doing Fanny Brice; and Sarah Bernhardt singing ‘Swanee.’” [39] As this description from Armond Fields indicates, Janis’s comedic talent lay in jumbling the famous performers of the day into ludicrous juxtapositions. To do so, it is worth noting, she flexed her virtuosity as an embodied performer, mixing the already intertwined fields of song, dance, comedy, and theater on the vaudeville stage into further entanglement. The effusive Mark Henry of the 1923 Palace review provides another example of this kind of celebrity jumble. He considered her “rendition of ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas,’ as different artistes would sing it” to be “a masterpiece.” [40] Although this review may be hyperbolic, Janis clearly had a propensity for parodying the vaudeville stage, which thrived on the big personalities of its stars. Such pronounced types were ripe for mockery, and by easily mixing and matching the mannerisms of stars, Janis’s act highlighted the way in which the celebrity culture surrounding her rewarded strong personalities. For herself, however, she cultivated an image of the all-American girl; [41] she was a New Woman freed from the pages of a magazine to sendup the star-crazed culture. Especially for attractive young women like Loftus and Janis, simply the act of presenting solo, comic material on the vaudeville stage was a risky move. [42] There was a stark divide in the cultural ethos between beauty and comedy, and most female comedians in vaudeville compromised their femininity in some way in order to succeed as comics. For instance, Florenz Ziegfeld stated that his audiences expected “girls and laughter,” [43] but the subtext of that statement was, of course, that an act consisted of either “girls” or “laughter.” An act was either one of his spectacles composed for the male gaze or a comedy act in which the performer, if female, sacrificed any pretensions to beauty. Often this was achieved with a racial mask, such as Fanny Brice’s Yiddishisms and May Irwin’s “coon songs,” or by making reference to their failure to conform to beauty standards, such as the comedian Trixie Friganza’s jokes about her large build and failed diets. With mimicry, Loftus and Janis found a way to be both feminine and funny. Not only did they maintain reputations of demur womanhood while living public lives, they were also able to inhabit a range of more transgressive personalities in their acts while keeping a stable identity as “legitimate” actresses. They were not immune from the racism and xenophobia of the vaudeville stage: like May Irwin, whom she was imitating, Janis sang “coon songs,” taking advantage of the same racially-based humor. But the chameleon nature of her act gave her the privilege to separate herself from the performance. Indeed, Loftus and Janis exploited the difference between their identities as pretty white women and the ethnic stereotypes or outsized personalities they imitated to prove their skill as mimics. That they chose to capture their subjects without the artificial means of make-up constituted an unusual move to eschew superficial means of representation on the vaudeville stage. That they did it so successfully only further demonstrated the inherently artificial nature of cultural representation in vaudeville. Occasionally, battles broke out between vaudeville performers and their imitators, which exacerbated questions of authenticity. Hoffmann and Eva Tanguay, for instance, engaged in a well-publicized feud in 1908 over who could give the best performance of Eva Tanguay, the original or the imitator. [44] The interpretive flare that the mimics brought to each imitation also made it possible for the imitator to be imitated. At the beginning of her career, for instance, Janis always included of few of Loftus’s impressions in her act. Indeed, Loftus’s imitations were so well-known that several performers imitated Loftus’s imitations of themselves. This practice turned competitive when Loftus and Letty Lind became embroiled in a “dancing war” in London, which ended with Loftus adding an “impression of Lind imitating Loftus imitating Lind to her own act at the Palace” in 1894. [45] A similar battle of Loftus imitations occurred in Louisville in 1902 without the presence of Loftus herself. Since managers often liked to arrange programs so that a star would be performing in the same program as a mimic who impersonated her, it was not unusual that Elsie Janis was performing on the same bill as one of her frequent subjects, Josephine Sabel. Sabel, however, was also performing an impression of Loftus’s imitation of herself at the time. Janis took advantage of this by announcing that she would be giving an “imitation of Josephine Sabel in her imitation of Cissie Loftus giving an imitation of her.” [46] After receiving loud applause for this act, Janis brought Sabel back out on stage, and together they performed an encore of the “Loftus imitation” for the audience. With dueling imitations like these, the acts were no longer about best representing another star’s performance but about valorizing mimicry as a feat in itself. Their battle, therefore, became a virtuosic display of imitative embodiment, the movements back and forth demonstrating each star’s ability to maintain control over representations of herself. By copying themselves to a ridiculous extent, however, they also lampooned the reproducibility of popular performance, and, as each iteration of “Sabel” or “Janis as Sabel” or “Janis as Sabel as Loftus as Sabel” became further abstracted from the original performance, they pointed to the inauthenticity within forms of representation that replicated women’s bodies or images. Unlike the passive, uniform representations of women in magazines or chorus lines, they maintained agency over the act of replication, presenting themselves as accomplished parodists and critical participants in popular culture. Throughout their careers, mimics like Hoffmann, Loftus, and Janis displayed a canny understanding of women’s place in the culture of popular entertainment, and they used their imitations to undermine the expectations surrounding beauty, comedy, and women’s bodies. Perhaps the reliance on spectacle in Hoffmann’s case or the preservation of conventional femininity by Loftus and Janis limited their ability to make radical or political statements—their acts were light satires rather than biting critiques—but their careers demonstrated the opportunities that mimicry presented for experimenting with and embodying different types, personalities, and gender roles. Beyond the range of their performances, their creative interpretations also fought back against the superficialities of feminized consumer culture. Unlike the images of celebrities and the “American Girl” in magazines and advertisements, their mimicry pierced beneath the skin, destabilizing the artificial representations of women in mass media and entertainment by drawing three-dimensional portraits and caricatures with the body as image-maker. Their acts thus exemplified the cultural and political potentials of embodied performance, taking advantage of the live, moving body as a tool for creating original, critical, and “auratic” parodies of popular culture. References [1] “Why Do They Call Me A Gibson Girl?” The Bystander , October 10, 1906, Vol. 12 no. 149, 83, https://books.google.com/books?id=yvERAAAAYAAJ&pg=PT32#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed 29 January 2019). [2] “ ‘The Belle’ At Academy,” The Sun . (1837-1993) , Nov 13, 1906, https://search.proquest.com/docview/537283401?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019). [3] Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia UP, 1987), xxviii. Emphasis original. [4] In Strange Duets (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), Kim Marra discusses the Montana Silver Statue, another allegorical statue at the World’s Columbian Exhibition, which presented “Justice” modeled after the actress Ada Rehan. That these statues were sometimes modeled on famous actresses suggests a cycle of influence between theater and visual media, with the “American Girl” type moving from two-dimensional magazine prints, to living portrayals on stage, and back to three-dimensional images cast in metal and stone. [5] Katherine H. Adams, Michael L. Keene, and Jennifer C. Koella, Seeing the American Woman: 1880-1920 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2012), 84. [6] While in other contexts, the term “female mimic” might refer to a drag performer, such as Julian Eltinge, who mimicked females in his act, I use the term to refer to female performers. Throughout the essay then, “female mimics” refers to women who performed imitations of celebrities of all genders. [7] Joe Laurie Jr., “Vaudeville: Mimics,” Variety , Vol. 170, no. 11 (May 19, 1948): 52, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1285922332?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=15172 [8] Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American theatre: actresses and audiences, 1790-1870 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), 182. [9] Dudden, Women in the American Theatre , 182. [10] Adams, Keene, Koella, Seeing the American Woman , 77. [11] Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000), caption to image 21. [12] Matthew Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America 1893-1914 (New York: Columbia, UP, 1994), 4-5. [13] Martha H. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 33. [14] “Beginning of Summer Season,” New York Times (1857-1922), May 26, 1907, https://search.proquest.com/docview/96730772?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019); “Roof Gardens Open,” New York Tribune (1900-1910), Jun 2, 1907, https://search.proquest.com/docview/571882732?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019). [15] Cady Whaley, “The Cohans,” The Billboard (Archive: 1894-1960), Jun 29, 1907, 10-11, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1031381111?accountid=15172. [16] For further discussion of Hoffmann’s dance impersonations see Glenn, Female Spectacle , and Sunny Stalter-Pace, “Gertrude Hoffmann’s Lawful Piracy: ‘A Vision of Salome’ and the Russian Season and Transatlantic Production Impersonations,” Theatre Symposium , Vol. 25 (2017): 37-48, 110. [17] “Modernized Romeo; Up-To-Date Juliet,” New York Times (1857-1922), Dec 04, 1906, https://search.proquest.com/docview/96609309?accountid=15172; “She Won’t Copy That Gown Again,” Detroit Free Press (1858-1922), Jun 06, 1907, https://search.proquest.com/docview/ 564061242?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019). [18] Ruth Turner Wilcox, Five Centuries of American Costume (Mineola, NY: Dover Publishers, 2004), 146. [19] “Vaudeville At Maryland,” The Sun (1837-1993), Oct 22, 1907, https://search.proquest.com/docview/537464261?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019). [20] Glenn, Female Spectacle , 76. [21] Whaley, “The Cohans.” [22] Glenn, Female Spectacle , 81. [23] Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl , 33. [24] Daniel Delis Hill, Advertising to the American Woman, 1900-1999 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 29. [25] Glenn, Female Spectacle , 95. [26] Loftus quoted in “The Art of Cecilia Loftus,” The Billboard , May 16, 1925; Elsie Janis, “Elsie Janis Tells the True Art of Mimicry,” The Sun (1837-1993), Aug 08, 1915, https://search.proquest.com/docview/534100838?accountid=15172 (accessed 29 January 2019). [27] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn, (Shocken/Random House ed. Hannah Arendt), https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm (accessed 1 February 2019). [28] Janis quoted in Glenn, Female Spectacle , 77. [29] Max Beerbohm, “A Play and a Mimic,” The Saturday Review , June 11, 1904: 749, https://search.proquest.com/docview/9532068?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=15172. [30] Lee Alan Morrow, Elsie Janis: A Compensatory Biography , Dissertation, 1988, 57. [31] “News of the Theaters,” Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1922), Apr 09, 1908, https://search.proquest.com/docview/173390463?accountid=15172. [32] “ ‘Cissie’ Loftus is More than ‘Cecilia’,” Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1922), Jun 22, 1902, https://search.proquest.com/docview/173068991?accountid=15172. [33] Max Beerbohm quoted in John Anderson, “Miss Cecilia Loftus,” Harper’s Bazaar 71, no. 2710 (June 1938): 52-53, 114-115, 120, 126. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1832505976?accountid=15172. [34] Morrow, Elsie Janis , 24. [35] Irene Corbally Kuhn, “Elsie Janis, the one-woman U.S.O. of World War I, is gone,” in Slide, Selected Vaudeville Criticism (Metchuen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1988), 111. [36] Mark Henry, “This Week’s Reviews of Vaudeville Theaters From Coast to Coast by Special Wire: B.F. Keith’s Palace, N.Y.” The Billboard , 35, no. 37 (Sep 15, 1923): 16-17, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1031707084?accountid=15172. [37] Henry, “This Week’s Reivews.” [38] Armond Fields, Women Vaudeville Stars (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006), 159. [39] Fields, Women Vaudeville Stars , 159. [40] Henry, “This Week’s Reviews.” [41] See Deanna Toten Beard, “A Doughgirl with the Doughboys: Elsie Janis, “The Regular Girl,” and the Performance of Gender in World War I Entertainment,” Theatre History Studies 33 (2014): 56-70, for a discussion of Janis’s cultivation of her image as an all-American Girl who could be “one of the guys” with soldiers in WWI. [42] Glenn, Female Spectacle , 43. [43] Glenn, Female Spectacle , 48. [44] Glenn, Female Spectacle , 79. [45] Catherine Hindson, Female Performance Practice on the Fin-de-Siecle Popular Stages of London and Paris: Experiment and Advertisement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 150. [46] Morrow, Elsie Janis , 61. Footnotes About The Author(s) JENNIFER SCHMIDT is a teacher, scholar, dramaturg, and performer. In 2018, she received a Doctor of Fine Arts degree in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from Yale School of Drama. Her research traces the history of the one-woman show in America, focusing on women who write and perform monologue-based solo shows. Schmidt received the American Theater and Drama Society’s Emerging Scholar Award in 2015 and has presented papers at ATHE, ASTR, Theatre Symposium, and the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Her writing has appeared in Etudes and HowlRound Theatre Commons. In the fall of 2019, she will be joining the faculty of Hanover College as Assistant Professor of Theatre. Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky 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: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Joanna Mansbridge Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Joanna Mansbridge By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre . By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. In 1996, John Guare summed up the aesthetic battle in American theatre as “the war against the kitchen sink.” Although the phrase “kitchen sink drama,” in a British theatrical context, signifies a postwar turn toward gritty social realism, in American theatre, this same phrase carries with it vaguely derogatory connotations. The dominance of realism and the thematic emphasis on family in American drama has been pointed out often and emphatically. And while feminist scholars have ably deconstructed realism for its associations with a masculinist representational system, what has been consistently overlooked is the very labor signified by the kitchen sink. As Dorothy Chansky brilliantly demonstrates in Kitchen Sink Realisms , that infamous sink and the domestic labor for which it acts as a metonym have been used as theatrical material throughout the twentieth century, and its continued relevance – as both dramatic theme and stage action – suggests its enduring importance as a topic of social debate. Moreover, realism, Chansky reminds us, is itself a variable and varied form (hence the realisms in her title), shaped by (and shaping) specific socio-economic pressures. Chansky’s impeccably researched and engagingly written study examines theatrical representations of domestic work in twentieth century American drama, contributing an invaluable perspective to sociological questions surrounding feminized labor and theatrical debates regarding realism. Chansky is broadly concerned with reevaluating how the modern American theatre has negotiated the enduring question: Who is responsible for cleaning, cooking, and running the home? This question was posed differently in the 1920 than it was in the 1980s. However, Chansky underlines the structural issue that makes this a particularly persistent debate: “While the representations changed […] the central issue has not: American society offers no practical and affordable way for most adults to combine gainful employment with child rearing and housekeeping” (60). Indeed. Chansky states her goal thusly: “My project here is to examine the multiple ways in which a too-often belittled but perennially popular realm of American theatre can be fruitfully and seriously reassessed” (77). Organized chronologically into seven chapters and an Introduction, the book covers the timespan between 1918 and 2005, the end of World War I and the dawn of the digital era. While the study overall has a chronological structure, Chansky productively complements that linearity by linking the plays thematically as well. Each chapter provides incisive close readings, as well as thick descriptions of the surrounding conditions of production and reception, incorporating relevant and often fascinating historical materials that give the plays a vivid context. Bringing some plays out of obscurity, Chansky points to their popularity in the original context, and their significance as forums for public debates around “woman’s work.” These debates were especially lively, not surprisingly, during periods when women were either gaining employment in greater numbers or marrying in fewer (such as the 1920s and 30s and the 1980s). As Chansky points out, “Domestic labor had not always been portrayed in American drama as a potential trap. Nor had it been something to avoid onstage and hand off to invisible help” (80). Domestic labor, in fact, was staged as pure spectacle in James A. Herne’s hit of 1893, Shore Acres , in which a full act was “devoted to the preparation and consuming of an anniversary dinner” (80). Chansky’s focus on food, cleaning, and domestic labor sheds new light on changing gender roles over the past century, as well as on issues relating to social class, immigration, ethnic identity, and assimilation in the US. In Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cooke’s Tickless Time (1918), for example, Annie, a first generation Irish servant (played in the original production by Edna St. Vincent Millay), accommodates the WASP couple she works for by adapting “ethnic” meals, like spaghetti, for a “modern” middle-class American palette (94). Incorporating data about the number and national origin of immigrant servants in this period adds a rich sociological understanding of this and other plays. Chansky astutely situates references to food and the people who prepare it, instructing contemporary readers about the meaning of these references to early twentieth century audiences. The author also sharpens how we might think about these audiences in the early years of legitimate American theatre. She writes, “theatregoers who read criticism by critics understanding themselves as specialists became, in turn, a cohort who saw theatregoing and drama as salutary and important, even when scripts or genres might suggest otherwise” (84-85). While each chapter offers crucial insights and intelligent reinterpretations, it is the last two chapters, “Prisoners of Total Blame, 1963-1990” and “The Clean House, or Change” that make this study seem especially urgent. The penultimate chapter covers feminism’s second wave and its aftermath in the Reagan era, when debates around family values and women’s new role in the public sphere were hotly contested. Adding to ongoing discussions of canonical plays such as Sam Shepard’s True West (1980) and Marsha Norman’s ‘night Mother (1984), Chansky reframes them from the standpoint of the domestic spaces and laborers depicted in these plays. Pointing out that critics often ignore or are baffled by the Mom character in True West , who enters after the brothers’ climatic fight (and into the decimated kitchen that results), unaffected by the disaster she comes home to find, Chansky succinctly summarizes her appearance on the scene: “While the brothers remain deadlocked in a stranglehold as the lights go down, Mom has shown that she is able to leave, come back, and leave again, as if in some kind of existentially realist fort da maneuver” (455). Sharp (re)readings such as these abound in Kitchen Sink Realisms . The final chapter outlines five post-Nannygate cultural phenomena that shaped American cultural attitudes toward domestic life and plays that dealt with it: the economic prosperity of the Clinton years; the rise in immigrants from Asia and Latin America; a decline in the two-parent family; a “no-turning-back presence of women of all classes in the workforces”; and lastly, a consumerism retooled “as a form of self-improvement or activism” (486-87). From within this context, Chansky looks at three works produced in 2003: Joan Holden’s Nickel and Dimed , a Brechtian play inspired by journalist Barbara Ehrenreich’s exposé of working class poverty; Lisa Loomer’s Living Out , which looks at the relationship between a privileged yuppie mother and her Latina nanny; and Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s through-composed musical set in 1963, Caroline, or Change (2003), which Chansky pithily describes as a work that “portrays tension within a maid/mistress household, the difference between the households of the two, and how historic distance can deflect assessment of present-day problems” (504). Chansky concludes her study with Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House (2005), a play focusing on the relationship between an upper-class white woman and her Brazilian maid, Ana, who is depressed and refuses to clean. This perceptive comedy brings kitchen sink realisms, as a genre, into an age of globalization. While the second-wave feminist struggle for the right to participate equally in the public sphere has largely been achieved, this seismic shift has resulted in a need for imported domestic care. What was once a local division of labor among the predominately white middle classes has now become global division of labor between a developed world in need of domestic laborers and developing world in need of better economic opportunities and living conditions. So just what does a kitchen sink signify onstage? How does it communicate gender, class, ethnicity, and Americanness? And how do these codes of social identity relate to broader public debates around the value of domestic work, the changing demands of the marketplace, and the erosion of “the good life”? The answers to these questions vary vastly, it turns out, depending on the historical context. Whereas in the early twentieth century, a clean kitchen with a live-in servant cooking the meals signified middle class-ness, in the late twentieth century, it might suggest a global division of feminized labor. Chansky’s nuanced, rigorously contextualized readings of both canonical and non-canonical plays provide a rich resource not only for theatre scholars, but also for Americanists interested in adding to their understanding of the social texture of the twentieth century. This immensely satisfying study will be of great value to those working in theatre history, feminist theory and theatre, and American studies, and is equally suitable for upper class undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars. Impressive in both its historical scope and interpretive depth, Kitchen Sink Realisms is an important contribution to scholarship in American drama. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JOANNA MANSBRIDGE Bilkent University 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: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder 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 Editorial Comment Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Page Title This is a Paragraph. Click on "Edit Text" or double click on the text box to start editing the content and make sure to add any relevant details or information that you want to share with your visitors. Small Title This is a Paragraph. Click on "Edit Text" or double click on the text box to start editing the content and make sure to add any relevant details or information that you want to share with your visitors. Small Title This is a Paragraph. Click on "Edit Text" or double click on the text box to start editing the content and make sure to add any relevant details or information that you want to share with your visitors. Small Title This is a Paragraph. Click on "Edit Text" or double click on the text box to start editing the content and make sure to add any relevant details or information that you want to share with your visitors.

Alex Ferrone Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Alex Ferrone By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Ugo Chukwu, Will Dagger, Alina Troyano/Carmelita Tropicana, Octavia Chavez-Richmond, and Karen Lugo in Soho Rep’s production of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (World Premiere). Photo by Julieta Cervantes. For longtime frequenters of the downtown New York theatre scene, Carmelita Tropicana is a household name. In her decades-long career as a performance artist, actor, author, and teacher, she has built a body of work that alloys raucous humor and fantastical role play—with the help of a roster of memorable personas and characters—to interrogate the entanglements of queerness, ethnicity, nationality, and gender. As she toured her work across the country, collecting a raft of honors and awards along the way, she reached a wider audience still when her work was profiled by José Esteban Muñoz, whose book Disidentifications regularly introduces Tropicana to generations of theatre and performance scholars who might not otherwise experience the joy of seeing her perform live. At the end of 2024, her show Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! opened at Soho Rep, a collaboration with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whom Tropicana taught and mentored while he was a graduate student at NYU. The play is, at once, a fantastical odyssey into the canon of one of our most beloved performance artists and a nostalgic love letter to the avant-garde performance ecology in which she continues to figure so prominently. The central conceit is as provocative as it is simple: Tropicana (playing herself) contemplates retiring her iconic persona, so Jacobs-Jenkins (played by Ugo Chukwu) offers to buy her. But such a persona can hardly be contained by so bald a commercial transaction. As Carmelita transfers from body to body, the stage gives way to a phantasmagoric dreamscape populated by Tropicana’s alter-egos, mentors, and heroes—until Carmelita finally comes home to roost, gloriously embodied by Tropicana again at last, in a direct-address coda that changes with each performance. Tropicana invited me to talk about the play with her at the Park Avenue Armory, where she and Jacobs-Jenkins share a studio as artists in residence. This interview was conducted on April 25, 2025. It has been edited for length and clarity. Alex Ferrone: I want to talk about Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! , of course, which I loved, but I thought we might start at the end. Carmelita Tropicana: The end! AF: ( Laughs ) Yes, because I was so moved by the ending of the show. I saw it the day after Nikki Giovanni passed away, and you ended the show by reading her poem “Nikki-Rosa.” There was something special about remembering her that way and inviting the audience into this collective mourning—and celebration too. I wondered why that poem specifically, why this invocation of Black love as Black wealth. CT: Well, it’s such a beautiful poem. She’s really known for it. It just states things in such an uplifting way. Like, this is what it is, and they don’t understand. They’re trying to speak for us, but they can’t possibly know. If you’re white, I’m not sure you can know what it really is to be Black in America. So, here’s somebody who was really important as a queer artist—and it was really beautiful, that poem, and what it meant—so, you know, I felt she needed to be remembered in a really good way. AF: You did that. CT: I wanted the show to end with a coda from Carmelita, because all throughout the play, I’m not Carmelita. Other people are Carmelita. But at the very end, I am fully in my body as Carmelita, and I can address the audience. And the coda is always different. It changes. Whatever happens during that day or that week, I point it out. I will remember. There was another director who died, David Schweizer, who had directed one of my pieces, the Cucaracha piece [ With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?/Con que culo se sienta la cucaracha? ], and he also directed me and Marga Gomez in Single Wet Female . He saw the show maybe three weeks before he passed away, and he was just beaming. And that’s the image I have of David. Like this. ( She beams ) He was queer from the very beginning, you know? All his animal prints—he was always in animal prints. Always. And he was beaming. Sometimes people can be kind of jealous when others do well, but there was none of that. There was just generosity. There was just happiness at having seen the show. In fact, he told Marga that she had to come see the show. She had to come to New York. And that’s the image I have of David. So, I also mentioned him in one of my codas . It was like a memorial for him. To me, that’s important: to remember people as we’re going along. AF: This ties into something I hoped to talk about, which is the importance of queer genealogies and mentorship. It’s such a big part of the show. I mean, the fact that there’s a picture of Branden right there on the table! ( Points to the framed photograph of Jacobs-Jenkins on the opposite end of the table. ) I think the concept of mentorship means something particular among queer people, those kinds of intergenerational queer connections or mentor–mentee relationships. While I was watching the show, I thought a lot about my own mentor, Darren Gobert, who lived and worked in New York in the late nineties and early aughts, who was so enmeshed in that performance culture. I knew the show would land for him in such a special way, since he’d spent so much time in that space—Soho Rep specifically and just downtown New York theatre in general. And now here I was sitting in that space too, and I couldn’t wait to talk to him about it. CT: That’s important. You have to pass things on. Alina Troyano/Carmelita Tropicana in Soho Rep’s production of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (World Premiere). Photo by Julieta Cervantes. AF: There are multiple generations of queer mentorship within the play. You were a student of María Irene Fornés, and she appears as a character. Branden was a student of yours, and he appears as a character—in addition to co-creating the show with you. What was it like working on this with a former student, now no longer as mentor and mentee but as collaborators? CT: ( In unison ) Collaborators. It’s very different. The world changes, you know. He was no longer the student that I met in 2007. He can’t be, and neither am I, so it’s very different. It’s more like colleagues coming together and trying to figure it out. We said we were going to work on something in 2015. Now, from 2015 to 2024, that’s a lot of years in between, and we were busy with other things. He was busy with his work, I was busy with mine, and then COVID happened too. There were a lot of intervening years, you know, where things happened, so we both grow. You know, you change, and we are no longer who we were before. His feet are also in the Broadway world now. 1 We really started working on the play in 2016 because that’s when we got a grant. When you get a grant, it’s sort of like, okay, you gotta do it. 2 We began by looking at the film My Dinner with Andre . That was where we started: it was going to be much more of a conversation, that sort of script. And then it went through different iterations. First, there was going to be a BJJ character, but it was going to be him on stage with me. It was going to be a conversation, the two of us. But he was not interested in performing at all. At all . I mean, eight shows a week, no. And he’s right. He had a lot of other commissions, and in the interim period he became a father—there were a lot of different things. So we began one way, and then the show went a very different way. But I became much more involved with Soho Rep. We’re both board members at Soho Rep, which is where he did An Octoroon . AF: Yes, of course. CT: That was really wonderful. That’s what really catapulted his career, so in a way it’s been his home for a long time. I came to Soho Rep because I saw a play in 2008, directed by Sarah Benson, and it was like, oh my god . It was so amazing and so weird and so not anything that I would do. AF: Was it [Sarah Kane’s] Blasted ? CT: Yes! AF: I’ve only seen a recording. Such an excellent, iconic production. CT: Not the type of work I do at all, but it was really important, and I thought, well, I’ve got to come to this theatre again. And I was very happy I did. Not that I love everything , but everything is done in a certain theatrical way that’s thoughtful. So even if I see something and don’t necessarily like it, there’s always something there that makes it worth it. AF: There’s a real meditation in Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! on the future of downtown, experimental theatre culture. I mean, we all knew this was the last ever Soho Rep show in that space. 3 CT: Exactly. AF: That must have felt really meaningful. CT: Oh yeah, it was. When they told us that we were going to close the space, it was like, whoa, we’re going to close this . You know, it was very—( She gestures )—for everybody working there, because it wasn’t just our show. Mimi Lien, who had done sets for Soho Rep, people who were working there from before that have a history, that are attached, that have a real feeling for the space and what it was like. It was this dumpy place where magic happened. Such magic. Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Karen Lugo, Ugo Chukwu, Alina Troyano/Carmelita Tropicana, and Will Dagger in Soho Rep’s production of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (World Premiere). Photo by Julieta Cervantes. AF: The play asks, at a certain point, what does downtown New York theatre mean now? It’s a shift I imagine you’ve observed firsthand over the last few decades. How do you feel about the culture of downtown experimental theatre, whether now or looking toward the future? CT: I think there’s still “downtown” theatre. Back when I was starting out, it was “experimental”—there are still shows that are very experimental. What has happened is that, geographically, they used to be just downtown. The space of downtown, from 14th Street all the way to Tribeca: that was it. But now it’s expanded to different boroughs because—what’s affordable? Where can people live? Where can theatres be that’s cheaper? Where does the young population go that will come see the shows? So all of that is taken into account. I just saw Rheology by [Shayok] Misha Chowdhury, who actually just had a show at Soho Rep called Public Obscenities , which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Rheology was wonderful. It still has the sensibility of downtown, but he’s doing it at Bushwick Starr, all the way in Brooklyn. AF: ( Laughs ) Ah yes, all the way . CT: All the way , you know! It’s a beautiful play, and it’s him and his mother. It’s really very touching, and again it has that sensibility. That’s Misha. 4 But then you have people like Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte, who did a show at Soho Rep called Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken [ Present It’s That Time of the Month ] , where you have to go through a vagina to get to your seat. It was wonderful and almost a nod to the eighties, sort of a talk show format interacting with the audience, and they had people coming up that were guest stars. I was one of the guest stars. AF: Oh, that’s amazing. CT: And I loved it. I really didn’t answer any of the questions, so Becca went like this. ( Mimes throwing cue cards over her shoulder ) I hadn’t performed in so long, and I just really wanted to talk about certain things—like, you know, a sexual workshop I had attended with Betty Dodson, the masturbation guru, and my research on hyenas, which are a matriarchal species that I find fascinating. I mixed it up. I even had a costume. And Becca was like, well, let’s do it. They were really very generous. They were great. And at the end of the show, Becca closed with a stand-up routine that was beautiful, touching, dark, hysterically funny—and that’s still very much, in my opinion, downtown-ish experimental-type theatre. AF: So, you see this sensibility still, but it’s not limited to this or that place the way we sometimes talk about it. CT: Club culture is like this. There’s still club culture—in Brooklyn, all over the place, kids doing drag. You know, I’m less likely to go to a rave or go to a club at 10 or 11—I used to, but it’s less me now—so I haven’t seen what kids are doing, but there’s all kinds of stuff. AF: Well, there were a lot of young people in the audience at Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! CT: Which is great. I love it. That’s the audience I want. I know I can get the others, but I want that one. AF: And it was a vocal young audience. They were responding really enthusiastically to the show. I was fascinated by the pop that José Muñoz got every time he was mentioned. You know, in my case, I first encountered your work through Muñoz, through theory. And I wonder if that’s also true for a lot of young people, college students. CT: José is having quite a renaissance, let me tell you. And he has been there throughout it all because, in the academy, he’s a queer icon. What’s really great is that we were friends for a long time. We were friends from the moment we met. It was like, oh my god , because he’s funny . He was funny. No, he is . He was, he is, he was, he is. He was really funny. And he did not believe in high or low culture. He loved everything. He was brilliant. And his parties were amazing. I was at Wesleyan once and I started talking about the parties José gave, and that’s all the queer students wanted to hear about. AF: I want to hear about it! CT: José would have these salons that were just amazing, and it was all about connecting people. José is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of my life. Because a lot of the people that I know come through José. In the eighties, I met a lot of my friends through WOW [Café Theater]. Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Maureen Angelos of the Five Lesbian Brothers, Split Britches—Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, Deb Margolin—all those people that I met through WOW, they’re still my friends. But in the nineties and into the aughts, it was through José. José was the connector. AF: I’m interested in the relationship between theory and performance when you have an audience that is so plugged into theory, which I wouldn’t say is the case for most audiences. The average theatregoer isn’t necessarily up on performance studies. But your audiences are , which I suspect gives you a different kind of grist to work with. CT: You know, I never started with theory. In fact, I didn’t read a lot of stuff that José wrote because I’m superstitious. Like, if I read it, then I’m just going to do that . But over time that changed. At some points, I would be stuck, and I would go, let me see what José wrote about me , because you can mine that stuff. So, the theory is there. I’m not a theorist. I’m not going to talk theory. That’s not where I come from. But I like that it exists in the world, that people are looking at it, because it’s about ideas. Alina Troyano/Carmelita Tropicana and Ugo Chukwu in Soho Rep’s production of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (World Premiere). Photo by Julieta Cervantes. AF: A lot of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! takes place in what the show calls “phantasmagoria”—this dreamscape, which is also kind of an archive, a repository of images, and it explodes onto the stage. Talk me through how you ultimately chose that space —or infinite space, in a way—to work through the ideas of the play. CT: Well, I’m a persona. I mean, I have a persona. ( Laughs ) I have a persona. I started from the point of view of what it means to have a persona, why we have them, why we take them on. I was trying to figure out this world of personas—they’re characters but they are also real—and I was thinking of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author , characters who maybe don’t want to be in your show, who are fighting for agency. That’s where it started for me. AF: I found those sequences so exciting because of the accumulation of all these traces of performances—characters you’ve played, objects we’ve encountered but that crop up again, but now they mean something new. That kind of resignification feels very queer to me. CT: Which one are you thinking of? I’m curious. AF: In terms of objects, the plunger is one of those iconic images. CT: Yes, and that comes from Jack Smith, so it has that lineage. It’s like Duchamp and the urinal, taking an ordinary object and just elevating it. Jack Smith did that to me. I’ll never see a plunger the same way again. Caleb [Hammons], one of the producers, actually made for me little plunger earrings—so then it becomes something else again. I love the visuals of a work. Like, if I don’t have an outfit… ( Laughs ) I know it’s vapid, but Carmelita has to have an outfit. And once I have an outfit, it’s like, yes , I’m dressed for the party. My sister [Ella Troyano] made a film called Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen . In the very beginning, I’m wearing a rainbow-colored dress that Uzi Parnes designed that has fruited boas—he did the production design and the costumes for the film. When I come out in Phantasmagoria , I’m wearing a belt with bananas on it—which are not just Carmen Miranda but also Josephine Baker. Things that reference people who are important to Carmelita’s persona. AF: Again, it’s those genealogies, right? CT: I had to explain the bananas to somebody the other day. They were young and they weren’t familiar with it. AF: I think a lot of young queer people right now will probably associate bananas with a drag queen called Nymphia Wind. CT: Oh my god, I love Nymphia! AF: The bananas live on. CT: I love her. She’s “downtown” weird. And so absurd and playful. AF: Playfulness is underrated, isn’t it? It’s not taken as seriously as it should be. CT: Exactly. Humor is serious, just couched in a different way. AF: There’s also a lot in the play that’s actually really poignant. I’m thinking of [the character] Branden’s speech at the end of the show, which is kind of a mournful reflection on youth. On being at a point in your life when you’re looking backwards and forwards at the same time, filled with uncertainty. CT: Branden’s monologue is very moving. I had no idea that this play could make people cry. AF: ( Raises hand ) It did. CT: When you’re doing something, you’re hoping to move people, but you don’t know what effect you’re going to have. AF: Part of that final speech, too, is thinking about what young theatre makers are doing today, which is where the play ends before Carmelita closes the show with the coda. Are you excited about what young queer theatre makers are doing now and the kinds of things they’re experimenting with? CT: Oh yeah, absolutely. There was another play at Soho Rep called Wolf Play [by Hansol Jung], and it really got to me. It was from a very different perspective, told with a puppet, and it really worked. I saw it twice. It worked and it was very moving. I haven’t been as involved in plays that have puppets, but this really worked for me. So, I am excited. There’s a new generation that’s coming up and doing great work. AF: I want to pick up on something we discussed at the top, which is the importance of solidarity. You referred to the line in Nikki Giovanni’s poem, “I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me,” which I think says there’s a limit to how much you can understand the experiences of another person or another community that’s not your own. CT: I think that’s a kind of a dialectic that’s going to go back and forth. So, no, you can’t. But maybe at some point, yes, you can. And it really depends on being sensitive about how you speak. The world changes and you evolve. I changed a word in Milk of Amnesia when I learned more about the history. Now, is that censorship? Am I censoring myself? No, I don’t think so. I’m being careful about certain words. Words are important. AF: The discourse is evolving all the time, so we’re constantly going to be making those kinds of adjustments. CT: Which is not a bad thing. And sometimes maybe we do too much, sure, so then there’s the self-correcting, but, you know, we’re figuring it out. AF: That’s productive, though. I think that gesture is so meaningful. Like, we’re working on it. As a community—or as a community of communities—we can work together and try to figure it out. We need that coalition-building more than ever, that kind of collaboration and solidarity. CT: Yes, I totally agree. There are ways that we’re going to be different from another person, and there are ways that we are similar. Sometimes the stakes are different. But your stakes are important to me, and my stakes are important to you. And then we have a lot of stakes in common as well. There’s something really hopeful in that. References [1] At the time of our interview, Jacobs-Jenkins’s latest play, Purpose , had just opened on Broadway at the Hayes Theater—the same venue in which his play Appropriate was revived a year earlier, earning him the Tony for Best Revival. Purpose would go on to earn him the Tony for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2025. [2] In addition to becoming resident artists at the Armory, Tropicana and Jacobs-Jenkins received a Creative Capital Award and a MacDowell Fellowship to support their then-unnamed collaboration. [3] In the summer of 2024, Soho Rep announced it would be leaving its home at 46 Walker Street due to rising rent costs. Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! was the last show in its longtime downtown space. It has since been sharing space with Playwrights Horizons. [4] A few months after our interview, Playwrights Horizons announced Rheology as part of its 2025–26 season, scheduled to open in April 2026. Footnotes About The Author(s) ALEX FERRONE is an Assistant Professor of English in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at l’Université de Montréal. He is the author of Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and has published articles in Modern Drama , Theatre Survey , and Comparative Drama . His current book project, Tacky , examines class's performative conflations with race, ethnicity, and queerness, and he is also working on a project on the unpublished plays of Louis Peterson. He is the current Book Reviews Editor of Theatre Journal . 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 Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

PRELUDE Public ity Information Fill in your performance details for the Prelude 2024 festival organized by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center. Since 2003, The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center has presented the PRELUDE Festival. The annual PRELUDE festival is dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance, interdisciplinary and mediatized performance. PRELUDE offers an array of short performances, readings, and screenings — a completely free survey of the current New York moment and the work being prepared for the next season and beyond—as well as new commissions and panel discussions with artists, scholars, and performers. PRELUDE is a place to discover what voices are shaping the future of theatre and performance in NYC, to observe, engage, commune, and critique. PRELUDE 2023 October across New York City At the Segal Center: Oct 11-14, 16, 19 For more details and questions, contact: Ann Kreitman Co-Producer, PRELUDE '23 ann4prelude@gmail.com 847-471-1550 Tayler Everts Co-Producer, PRELUDE '23 tayler4prelude@gmail.com 480-313-2595 Performance Name Artist(s) / Group Name Your Email Address Performance Description Performance Image (Include credits in file name) Upload File Artist(s) / Group Bio (Please include all relevant bios from your team that you would like displayed on the website.) Artist(s) / Group Links (Website, Social Media etc.) Artist(s) / Group Image (Include credits in file name) Upload File Performance Type (Tick all that apply) * Required Theater Circus / Movement Dance Discussion Film Mime Multimedia Music Opera Performance Art Puppetry Spoken Word Other Performance Language Performance Duration Audience / Content Description or Warnings Grant / Foundational / Partner Acknowledgement Submit Thank you for submitting your information! We will be in touch soon with more details.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. By Jovita Jacob Selwyn Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF Kareem Fahmy’s premiere of Dodi and Diana , directed by Reginald L. Douglas and produced by the Mosaic Theater in DC, was broadly advertised as a “sexy, thrilling new play, where fate, royalty, and passion collide!” This collision took the form of “astrological doubling”, using astrology as a non-realist dramaturgical device to link the titular royals to its central characters. Through this device, Fahmy evokes a sort of mystic, almost mythical sense of reincarnation, using it as a lens to examine “the most intimate aspects of marriage and love” (Mosaic Theater trailer). The production certainly primed the audience for seduction: the entire stage was a dimly lit, opulent Paris Ritz hotel room, brilliantly designed by Shartoya R. Jn. Baptiste. The space was bathed in gold shades; brass frames adorned the walls, textured drapes lined the windows, and at the center, a king-size plush bed was draped in luxurious silk sheets and pillows (Image 1). The space felt both indulgent and claustrophobic, a gilded chamber where seduction and entrapment coexisted. Married couple Jason (Jake Loewenthal) and Samira (Dina Soltan), whose simmering sexual tension was undeniable, find themselves confined inside this lavish yet liminal space, at Jason's instigation. Under the guidance of an astrologer, Jason repeatedly insists that leaving the room at any time during a mysterious 72-hour convergence—culminating in a solar eclipse—will bring their relationship ill fortune. The eclipse, in Fahmy’s narrative world, intentionally coincides with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s fatal car crash. This reference is subtly foregrounded in the opening scene: the space remains concealed behind curtains and darkness while projected car headlights cut through the stage. There is a sudden flashing of lights followed by the sound of a crash, reenacting the trauma of the accident. A few minutes later, the curtains open and Jason walks up on stage. This performance sets up Jason and Samira as mirrors to Dodi and Diana’s infamous interracial relationship. Fahmy takes this doubling a step further by linking the couple to Diana and Dodi through astrology, labeling them “astrological doubles” to imply that their relationship is governed by the same celestial forces and perhaps destined for a similarly dramatic or scrutinized fate. Image 1: Dina Soltan as Samira and Jake Loewenthal as Jason, on day one of being trapped in the hotel room. Photo Credit: Chris Banks. Jason and Samira’s forced confinement within this box of a hotel room reveals a great deal about who they are, what they want, and how their repeated patterns reflect signs of an unhealthy marriage. On the surface, their relationship appears to be laced with overflowing love and devotion to one another. The graceful and smooth choreography of their intimacy, directed by Sierra Young, plays a huge part in shaping the overly saccharine image. Their bodies move with elegance, each anticipating and responding to the other’s speed and momentum. Their arms and legs intertwine in a series of twists, turns, and movements that feel sexually intimate, rushed yet tantalizing, rough yet delicate. The constant kissing, caressing, and touching in seemingly alluring ways (Image 2), evoke a sense of unease to witness these intimate moments. It feels voyeuristic, as if one were invasively peering into the private life of this intensely in-love pair, whose constant physical affection borders on the cloyingly enviable. However, this abundance of physical affection paradoxically reveals an underlying emotional hollowness. The incessant need for touch and proximity begins to feel like a desperate attempt to fill a void. Whenever Samira wants more than just kissing and caressing, Jason finds a way to interrupt the moment and withdraw, as if deliberately avoiding sleeping with her. They often lie half-naked, sprawled across the bed and entangled with one another, but the encounters always end on an awkward note. Throughout the play, Fahmy consistently makes us wonder if their attraction alone is powerful enough to sustain their relationship. After a certain point, the couple slip into a relentless loop of attempted intimacy so repetitive and insistent that it becomes painful and unbearable to watch. This loop reveals the deep imbalance in their desires: Samira craves deep emotional and physical connection, often initiating sex, while Jason, racked with insecurity, cannot bring himself to sleep with her while sober. Alcohol and drugs become important in exposing the fractures within the relationship. Jason strikes a clandestine deal with the hotel bellboy, slipping him a generous sum of money to procure drugs. When the substances finally arrive, Jason and Samira consume them along with copious amounts of alcohol, and the scene transforms into a woozy, altered state. This shift is rendered vividly through expertly executed lighting, designed by Sage Green. The hotel room lapses into a nightclub-like atmosphere, saturated with electric blues, neon pinks, and chartreuse greens that pulse across the stage. The fast- shifting lights paired with booming pub music create a sensory environment that mimics the dizziness of intoxication, making the audience feel as though the room itself is spinning. Within this heightened atmosphere, Jake’s and Dina’s performances expand physically and emotionally. Their movements become looser, more urgent, and more reckless, allowing the scene to surge towards a feverish climax. In their intoxicated haze, the couple finally collapse together, spent. But when the light and sound shift again to the ordinary hotel room, indicating the start of a new day, sobriety returns and so does stark clarity. The fragile connection they briefly achieve during inebriation disintegrates once again. Restless attempts at connection, failed stabs at intimacy, and the slow surfacing of frustrations, insecurities, and long-buried resentments create the play’s momentum: a cyclical, suffocating rhythm that mirrors the eclipse’s slow movement toward totality. The play’s engagement with astrology places it in conversation with a long lineage of theatrical cosmology. In Greek mythology and even Shakespeare, eclipses were understood as omens, especially for rulers, and horoscopes were thought to reveal one’s innate character (Sondheim). And yet, even in that world, sometimes the will remains free. Fahmy gestures toward this tension between fate and agency by tethering Jason and Samira to the royal love story of Diana and Dodi. The dramaturgical premise suggests that while the interracial, hyper-public couple of the 1990s were undone by forces far beyond their control, Jason and Samira, who remain confined, anonymous, and ordinary, might yet choose differently. And yet, to my utmost chagrin, this play refuses that resolution. Instead of embracing each other with renewed clarity, Jason and Samira remained mired in their unresolved resentments, leaving the allusion provocatively incomplete. Image 2: Dina Soltan as Samira’s astrological double, Princess Diana, and Jake Loewenthal as Jason’s astrological double, Dodi Fayed. Photo Credit: Chris Banks. While frustrating, this uncertainty does lead to a limited degree of dramaturgical success. Astrology fills the world of the play, but it never fully controls the story: the idea of Jason and Samira as “cosmic doubles” nudges them toward repeating a tragedy, yet it does not seal their fate. Instead, the play forces both characters to confront the insecurities and secrets that gradually pull them apart. Jason carries guilt over accidentally killing Samira’s dog, and that Samira weaponized the incident. Samira in turn has hidden her potential overseas acting opportunities, knowing that they would sharpen Jason’s sense of inferiority and that he would not want her to go. These layers of messy toxicity prevent them from building the secure and healthy relationship they both desire. Their point of breakdown comes from the discovery of fractures within their relationship, not from the stars. In this way, astrology functions as both a mythic frame and a psychological alibi: in the claustrophobic environment of the Ritz Paris suite, the astrological layer creates a formal tension that holds the production together. This friction is imperative to the play’s design, mirroring the instability of the marriage itself; the setting is glamorous and yet restrictive, because it turns out that Jason and Samira’s relationship is, too, a beautiful trap (Image 3). In the end, the play Dodi and Diana does not deliver a fully resolved mythic parallel nor a neatly coherent naturalistic drama. Instead, it offers a fractured portrait of two people caught between who they are and who the world tells them they might be. The play succeeds best when showing the grinding pressure that external narratives and internal wounds exert on an intercultural marriage. Even if it fails in uniting its loftier ambitions, it remains a compelling exploration of how the sexy and thrilling collision of fate, royalty, and passion conspire to shape, and sometimes destroy, the intimacies we build. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Works Cited Mosaic Theater. “Dodi and Diana Teaser.” YouTube , www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouO5fOZJMow . Accessed 12 Feb. 2026. Sondheim, Moriz. “ Shakespeare and the Astrology of His Time. ” Journal of the Warburg Institute , vol. 2, no. 3, 1939, p 243–59. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/750101 . References About The Author(s) Jovita Roselene Jacob Selwyn is a PhD candidate in performance studies at the University of Maryland. She holds a BA in English literature from Lady Doak College, Tamil Nadu, and a dual Master’s degree (M.Litt & MFA) in Shakespeare and Performance from Mary Baldwin University, Virginia. Her current research interests include cultural amalgamation of Shakespearean and Indian performances, diasporic studies, and adaptation theory. 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.

Ira S. Murfin Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances Ira S. Murfin By Published on May 30, 2018 Download Article as PDF Spalding Gray’s autobiographical monologues exemplified the affective immediacy of virtuosic first-person storytelling during the 1980s and 1990s, and helped establish a distinct theatrical genre of autobiographical performance. Even though they were most frequently encountered in their film or video adaptations, Gray’s performances suggested the apparent authenticity with which an authorial voice speaking directly to an audience, free of technological or even representational apparatus, can be imbued. Although he was a key figure among a cohort of downtown solo performers in New York who were gaining widespread media exposure at the time, Gray’s reputation eventually reached beyond even the mainstream marketing of the avant-garde. [1] Retroactively recast in the popular imagination as simply an author and actor, without the avant-garde asterisk, Gray went on to play the role of quintessential New York theatre world hyphenate as a mainstream character actor, offbeat celebrity raconteur, and hip comic memoirist. However, despite the traditional literary and theatrical associations attached to Gray’s monologue genre, which I include in the category of extemporaneous live works that I call “talk performance,” I find that it was entwined with media forms and formats at its very roots. [2] Gray’s earliest talk performances were dependent on media technologies not only for composition and circulation, but they also made use of the physical presence of media to generate the performances in the moment and, counterintuitively, to resist the pull of mediation. My argument developed from research in Gray’s professional archive, in particular audio and video documentation of his works at various points in their processes of development. [3] These resources provide evidence that media presences occasioned and influenced Gray’s talk performance practice from the start, and that as Gray shifted the media relationships that generated his performances and the media venues within which they circulated, the nature of the performances themselves changed as well. In order to understand the processes of media interaction that defined Gray’s work over time, and to connect those processes to other, seemingly remote, media phenomena, I draw on theories and terminology related to media from several fields. In particular, I have found more recent scholarship on the problems and possibilities of performance and other cross-media relationships in the context of the cultural saturation with digital and internet technologies surprisingly applicable to Gray’s integration of analogue and print media formats within his extemporaneous performances. The term I use to describe the dependence of Gray’s performances on his live interactions with fixed media sources, “intermedial contingency,” recycles Fluxus artist Dick Higgins’s 1965 “intermedia,” which he coined to speak productively about work that belongs to no single established art category, but emerges at points of overlap between existing categories. [4] I find that this usage is also informed by the way the term has more recently been taken up in theatre and performance scholarship concerned with digital media and performance. In the 2006 collection Intermediality in Theatre and Performance , editors Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt ground their understanding of theatrical intermediality in the “presence of other media within theatre productions,” writing that “…intermediality is associated with the blurring of generic boundaries … and a self-conscious reflexivity that displays the devices of performance.” [5] Kattenbelt later writes that theatre offers a “performative situation” (a term he attributes to Umberto Eco) “… in which the other media are not just recordings on their own, but at the same time and above all theatrical signs.” [6] Similarly, in their 2012 book Multimedia Performance , Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer define intermedial performance in terms of the interaction between media components: “Intermedial theatre subsumes media, uniting both live and mediated elements within the frame of performance … In intermedial performance, the realms of the live and the mediated develop reciprocity and are framed as complementary and symbiotic elements of the performance whole.” [7] I argue that Gray’s extemporaneity was triggered by, responsive to, and dependent upon his interaction with another media presence on stage, both procedurally for himself as a performer and as a means of making the spontaneity and variability of his performances legible to his audiences. This argument depends on recent media theory to explain how new media have impacted the communication ecology through the concepts of remediation and mediatization. The former, closely associated with the work of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, describes the processes by which media reproduce, obscure, and define one another, while the latter identifies communicative structures’ saturation and constitution by media and processes of mediation even before other media enter the picture. [8] Further, I draw on terminology developed by linguistic anthropologists Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs to generically describe the processes by which the meanings of verbal performances are actively produced through the interaction between a performance and its circumstance — “contextualization,” in their terms. They then label the process by which a performance can be prepared for removal to another, more stable, context in order to be studied, replicated, circulated and, tellingly, read as text, while still remaining reasonably intact and coherent, as a process of “entextualization.” [9] This article recuperates early performances of Gray’s that have not circulated widely in order to offer an account of the development of his signature autobiographical monologues that turns out to be quite different from the one supported by his late-career and posthumous reputation as a masterful, if troubled, comic raconteur. I track Gray’s monologue format from its beginnings as an element of Three Places in Rhode Island , the trilogy of performances that became the foundational work of the renowned experimental theatre company The Wooster Group (TWG). I then turn to the generative strategies he used in two pivotal, though not widely known, early pieces, India and After (America) (1979) and The Great Crossing (1980), to show that they were developed in relation to the physical presence of fixed media objects, specifically non-dramatic texts and technologies for audio playback, with which Gray interacted and to which he responded extemporaneously in performance. In this, I build on theatre scholar Teemu Paavolainen’s argument for labeling onstage objects as such, rather than as “props” or “sets,” in order to free them from the inert and purely representational connotations the theatrical terms have accrued, and instead to emphasize the material presence and practical functions of the objects in question. [10] As physical mechanisms for accessing linear, unchanging content, Gray’s media objects differentiate themselves from and subject themselves to the instability of live performance. Rather than memorizing and reciting a composed text as in traditional theatrical performance, in which the actor becomes the playback mechanism, Gray emphasized the contingency of his live presence through his spontaneous interactions with media objects that stored, and from which he could retrieve, the fixed content of his performances. Gray structured his performances through these acts of retrieval: playing and stopping the record, reading (or listening to another performer read) a text that he brought onstage. In this way he kept his performances always contingent upon the occasion and demonstrably different from the media objects to which he related. Gray’s eventual celebrity was based on his apparent virtuosity as a storyteller, but his earliest experiments with extemporaneous talk were rooted in the intermedial contingency described above. While his explicitly intermedial works emphasized the shifting and negotiated nature of his live performances, the better known adaptations of his later monologues to film and book formats were made possible by their increasingly streamlined, repeatable, and narratively unified source performances. Over time, Gray’s monologues became less procedurally tied to the occasion of performance by excising their reliance upon his interactions with external media. Though he eventually gained a significant measure of fame and professional success for these entertaining and influential later works, this article looks at Gray’s original approach in his early talk performances. Though he newly generated and (re)constructed his performances for his audience each night in such a way that his “personal history would disappear on a breath,” I found that media played a surprising role in that process. [11] It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the film version of Swimming to Cambodia , directed by Jonathan Demme in 1987, to a popular understanding of Gray and his performance practice. The monologue was the direct result of a small role Gray played in the 1984 Roland Joffé film The Killing Fields , about the American bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and the subsequent genocide perpetrated there by the Khmer Rouge. The film used Thailand as a stand-in for Cambodia, and Gray’s monologue centered on his experiences there while making the film and, in the original version, the aftermath of those experiences once filming had concluded. Gray initially presented Swimming to Cambodia in two parts, which premiered in early 1984, and required audiences to see the entire work over the course of two nights. The first part portrayed Gray’s awakening, during the shoot, to American military imperialism, and suggested an uneasy corollary between the war in Southeast Asia and adventure-seeking Western artists returning to the region to make a film about that war. However, the second part presented a more complex and less morally satisfying picture of Gray’s struggle to integrate his new political awareness into his life at home. It focused on the tension he felt between his newfound social conscience, which urged him toward a life of service advocating for the Cambodian refugee community, and his professional ambitions to take advantage of the career opportunities his first major film role offered and move toward the comfortable life he imagined a Hollywood career could provide. The two-part version of the monologue ultimately ended with Gray in LA, driving between auditions, while still wrestling with his indecision about whether he should return to the East Coast and devote himself to humanitarian work, or accept that the situation of humanity is beyond repair, that there was nothing he could do about it, and so might as well stay in Hollywood to enjoy the decadent end of civilization as best he could. [12] Three years later, Jonathan Demme’s 85-minute film adaptation of the live monologue offered a much more streamlined version, focusing almost exclusively on Gray’s political and personal awakening in the first half of the original. This more narratively unified, less ambiguous revision circulated widely and established the elements of Gray’s signature style for a new mass audience, including other artists who took up the autobiographical monologue form. These include the personal disclosure found in documentary theatre pieces and staged memoirs ranging from David Hare’s Via Dolorosa (1998) to Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2001), which have collectively come to be known in more traditional theatre circles as “one-person shows,” the self-reflexive reportage heard on public radio programs such as This American Life , the extemporaneous delivery of The Moth and other live storytelling shows, and especially the wholesale uptake of Gray’s table, microphone, water glass, and notebook in the theatrical monologues of his most apparent stylistic progeny, the monologist Mike Daisey, not to mention the surprisingly robust roster of solo performances about Gray that have emerged since his death. [13] Even Gray’s own subsequent monologues adhered closely to the template of Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia film, maintaining a stable authorial voice, satisfyingly coherent narratives, and trim running times in line with the movie, making them more easily available to publication and film adaptations. [14] Figure 1. Gray in the film version of Swimming to Cambodia , dir. Jonathan Demme, Cinecom Pictures, 1987. In contrast, Gray’s use of fixed media objects to emphasize the contingency of live performance and trigger extemporaneous fragmentation in some of his earliest works designated and emphasized the performance event as something other than either authored text or recorded media. Gray was developing a means of generating a performance through live, real time interactions between himself and the onstage media object – a record player, a book, or a personal journal in the cases discussed below. Each unique performance iteration relied upon Gray interacting with, and responding to, the object and its inscribed or recorded contents by reading a fragment of text aloud or dropping the turntable’s needle on the record, for example, and then building on his own personal associations with that bit of content as he encountered it. In time, this process would consolidate into a genre of autobiographical solo performances that has become associated with the very impulses Gray’s early performances seemed to criticize or sublimate: privileging the recalled past over present experience, constructing an apparently authentic authorial voice, and shaping memory into linear narrative. I argue that in making use of the difference between what he was doing onstage and the recorded or inscribed objects with which he interacted, Gray was dealing with the media environment in which his work developed by both introducing and holding off the possibility of the mediated circulation to which it would eventually succumb. His later monologues, while still showcasing his newly polished virtuosic extemporaneity, were able to scrub the material presence of media from his performances in order to arrive at a more set and settled product, primed for media adaptation. The more media interference in the work, in other words, the more tied to the original idiosyncratic performance event it would be. And the more seamlessly extemporaneous, the more available to media reproduction and circulation the work became. The eventual availability of Gray’s talk performances for adaptation to other media fundamentally relies upon a process by which the situational dependence that defined the early performances discussed here and that knit them to their occasion could be removed from the performance situation with enough contextual material intact to make his monologue legible both in terms of the narrative content it sought to deliver, and in terms of its origins in live performance. Linguistic anthropologists Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, seeking to self-reflexively examine how ethnographic researchers like themselves approach cross-cultural verbal performances (storytelling and other forms of marked public address), articulated a taxonomy to define the stages of this process. Bauman and Briggs identify performance as a negotiated and relational process that provides a situationally dependent “special interpretive frame within which the act of speaking is to be understood.” [15] They refer to the process by which a talk performance and its situational support structure can be understood in terms of their mutually constitutive interrelationship as a process of “contextualization,” that is the active integration of the ongoing participatory exchange between audience and performer with the linguistic content of the performance. In order to subject performances to analysis and comparative study, though, and by extension in the case of Gray, in order to enable circulation and the accrual of value within a wider political economy, Bauman and Briggs contend that the contextualized performance must be decontextualized, or made portable, and then recontextualized elsewhere under more stable conditions controlled by the researcher, the book publisher, the film producer, etc. They refer to the process that prepares a talk performance, which they call discourse, for re- and de-contextualization as, simply, entextualization: “the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit – a text – that can be lifted out of its interactional setting.” [16] They argue that this extraction becomes the first step in a process that transforms a fundamentally responsive and changeable contextualized performance into a fixed, authoritative text, decentered from the occasion of its original utterance, and recentered in a standardized, replicable, and circulatable format. “Control over decentering and recentering is … one of the processes by which texts are endowed with authority, which in turn places formal and functional constraints on how they may be further recentered: An authoritative text, by definition, is one that is maximally protected from compromising transformation.” [17] Certainly this could be a description of Gray’s transition from intermedial talk performer, dialogically generating and sequencing his performances in front of a new audience each night, to the authorial figure he became, for whom spoken words and authored text became more or less interchangeable methods of delivering set content across multiple media platforms. This meant that he moved, in the course of his career, from his initial experiments with what media theorists J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin have called “hypermediacy,” in which a medium draws attention to itself in order to distinguish its processes of mediation from other media, to an ultimately successful example of what they term “transparent immediacy,” or the apparent disappearance of a medium through its own total integration within another medium. Both are examples, situated at either end of a spectrum, of the now inevitable processes of entwinement between and across media that Bolter and Grusin labeled “remediation.” [18] This capacity for media to distinguish themselves and disappear within, against, and in relation to one another is a product of a more total cultural mediatization , which media scholar Andreas Hepp identifies as the sustained and ongoing environmental presence of media and processes of mediation that structures cultural formations, logics, and interactions even in absence of any specific instance of mediation. Hepp writes: While mediation is suited to describing the general characteristics of any process of media communication, mediatization describes and theorizes something rather different, something that is based on the mediation of media communication: mediatization seeks to capture the nature of the interrelationship between historical changes in media communication and other transformational processes. [19] Hence the presence of media became a structuring logic in Gray’s work even before the possibility of the work’s mediation had been introduced, while media presences also functioned as the force in resistance to which his iconoclastic performance format initially defined itself. By meeting Gray at an early and foundational moment, this article positions him quite differently than do understandings of his persona and his career primarily based on the media adaptations of his later performances that circulated widely following the film adaptation of Swimming to Cambodia . Scholarly considerations of Gray’s career tend to either focus approvingly on him as a deceptively strategic performer who used the persona of a self-involved neurotic to uncover “universal” truths about the human condition, or else they critique what the authors see as Gray’s narcissistic privileging of his own experience in contrast to his shallow or facile treatment of the complex dynamics of power and representation in his monologues. The two most sustained studies of Gray’s work occupy these poles, with William W. Demastes’s posthumous celebration of Gray’s work, Spalding Gray’s America (2008), evincing the former, and Michael Peterson’s earlier Straight White Male: Performance Art Monologues (1997) consolidating the latter attitude around Gray as one of the chief representatives of monologic solo performance in the 1980s and 1990s. The cross-media adaptations of his monologues to film, video, and text, and the new performances that followed those media adaptations came to rely on a spectacularized sense of Gray’s masterful skills as storyteller. Peterson commented that “the table, notebook, and water glass of most of Spalding Gray’s performances … constitute[s] and legitimate[s] the presence of the solo performer in a manner more subtle than but perhaps as effective as more obvious design elements. Such physical elements of the monologic apparatus can emphasize the heroic aspect of the performance…” [20] This presentation of his work as heroically authoritative authenticated the assumption that it had been strategically planned out, highly structured, and probably fully written out in advance of his performance, an assumption that became more and more true over time. According to the alternate narrative I emphasize here, however, Gray actually first employed carefully arranged circumstances to newly generate his material in an ever-shifting performative present to which he subjected himself, rather than controlled. As he took more ownership of the media he used to structure his performances, he began to strip away the depersonalized intervening media that kept those performances anchored to the present in favor of material more closely enmeshed with the content of his monologues. In the examples discussed below, for instance, he moved from using random dictionary entries to structure India and After to a linear reading of his own travel diary in The Great Crossing . I argue that this would ultimately lead to the ostensibly immediate form for which he became known, in which no external media presence was apparent, while also leading him away from the extemporaneous contingency his early use of media sources enabled. The implications of the apparent paradox that the recontextualization of his performances in other media depended on the removal of contextualizing media from the performances themselves would eventually come to a pivotal head for Gray in the middle of a performance of his little-known monologue, The Great Crossing . The Wooster Group and Three Places in Rhode Island Gray came to his performance work via Richard Schechner’s influential experimental theatre company, The Performance Group (TPG), which he joined in 1971 along with his on-again-off-again partner Elizabeth LeCompte. LeCompte quickly became Schechner’s assistant director and was frequently put in charge of rehearsals in his absence. Taking advantage of the access to TPG’s theatre, The Performing Garage, granted by such an absence , LeCompte and Gray formed a small sub-cadre of TPG members and began experimenting with structured improvisations. These improvisations came to obliquely focus on Gray’s childhood memories and associations, which LeCompte as director shaped into an impressionistic, mostly movement-based performance called Sakonnet Point (1975), after a place where Gray’s family spent their summers in his home state of Rhode Island. This formed the first of a trio of works they would go on to make together over the next four years, all based in Gray’s memory and personal history, which came to be known as Three Places in Rhode Island , or the Rhode Island Trilogy . These performances are now understood as the inaugural work of what became The Wooster Group, the successor to TPG, which continues its work in The Performing Garage under LeCompte’s direction and is often considered the most influential contemporary experimental theatre company in the U.S. [21] The shared origins, and surprising similarities, of what became Gray’s and LeCompte’s signature styles can be identified in two structuring forces that emerged in TWG’s early work. The first was the use of physical objects and furniture, the table in particular, as structural through lines with scriptive powers of their own around which performances could be built and connected to one another. [22] The second shared strategy involved integrating external fixed media presences — written text, recorded audio, or video — into performances as dramatic content and intermedial counterbalance to theatre as a live and ephemeral medium. As early in the Trilogy as the imagistic, mostly wordless Sakonnet Point , the physical objects Gray and LeCompte introduced substituted for the usual textual foundation upon which performances are built. The process of creation involved the company responding improvisationally to objects Gray found in the garbage or in The Performing Garage , and the work grew out of the material possibilities and limitations which that space and those objects introduced, without a script or pre-conceived form. The set pieces and found objects became the raw material out of which the performance was built through the associational responses of Gray and his fellow performers. Actions and objects and the relationship between them were woven together into a structure that drew on individual identity and memory, but represented no reality but the present and no people but those in the room. [23] Gray and LeCompte made similar use of live citation in the present of material imprinted in the past for the second segment of the Trilogy, Rumstick Road (1977), which was built around audio Gray had recorded of interviews he had conducted with members of his family about his mother’s suicide a decade earlier. The historical anecdotes and documentary materials that made up Rumstick Road were not dramatically unified or psychologically resolved within the frame of the performance. Instead, they were “gone through,” as one might go through old letters or photographs, generating a fragmented and entirely new experience for audience and performers. The recordings of Gray’s past interviews with his family members took the place of a dramatic text, on the basis of which Gray and his colleagues transmuted personal associations into performed actions developed over the course of their rehearsal process, treating the recordings as “found” material often in spite of its personal significance for Gray. Having gained some distance on his personal material through mediation, Gray was able to privilege his role as a responsive performer. In 1978’s Nayatt School , recorded material was again onstage, but even more distant from Gray’s present than the familial tapes of Rumstick Road . In this case, the performance employed an LP recording of the original New York production of T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party , which Gray used to illustrate and notate his own history with the play. In particular, he associated the play’s main character, Celia Coplestone, who suffers a psychological crisis, seeks salvation in religion, and ultimately martyrs herself, with his mentally ill, religious mother and her suicide. Though ostensibly autobiographical, his material relationship to the play in the piece was equally temporal and kinesthetic. It was to the recording, and even more to the physical record, that he related. Gray responded in the moment to chance intersections with the fixed object as he dropped the needle at different points on the record, commenting dialogically while the snippets played for the audience. After introducing the record itself as a physical object, he reviewed Elliot’s background and biography and his own history with the play, which he had once performed in a Catholic convent in upstate New York, while spinning off childhood memories of his mother whose connection to the play was not initially clear. Skipping around to different scenes on the record, he summarized what had happened, what was happening, and what was going to happen in the play, while also isolating idiosyncratic aspects of the recording: the sound of laughter, the inflection of certain lines’ delivery, the play’s subtly surreal cyclical construction, declaring that “the more I listen to it, the more it starts to break down in terms of meaning.” [24] Figure 2. Spalding Gray in The Wooster Group’s Nayatt School (1978). Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. Photo: © Clem Fiori. Courtesy of The Wooster Group. As Gray began to work out his relationship to onstage recorded media, he also relied upon offstage media capture and playback for the development of his approach, and on media metaphors in order to conceptualize and articulate what he was trying to do. In a 1997 conversation with Richard Schechner, he recalled his first attempts at monologuing in rehearsal, “Elizabeth LeCompte would tape them, transcribe them, and say, ‘Here let’s do it again like this.’ And that’s when I began to realize that what I was speaking was text, and could be used as a text.” [25] A February 1978 recording provides a glimpse into his performance technique emerging in rehearsal through improvisational interactions with the record, interspersed with dialogic interactions with LeCompte. Gray grew frustrated with trying to listen to, summarize, and speak over the record all at once, and bristled at LeCompte’s suggestion that he should be able to respond immediately to each drop of the needle. He compared the difficulty in finding something generative every time he dropped the needle to the well-honed skills jazz improvisation requires: “…jazz musicians do that and they play all night before they get warm, we’re talking about a very short space of time, that’s the problem….” [26] However, by the time they were performing the piece on tour in Amsterdam that fall, Gray had become capable of skipping through the record with alacrity and coordinating his summary with bits of information about his own life, weaving together a unique performance at the intersection of the recorded and the live. [27] Despite his own use of jazz improvisation as a musical corollary for what he was attempting, it is perhaps more relevant to note that at the same time in 1978 as Gray was stopping and starting a turntable to play snippets of The Cocktail Party in Soho, early hip-hop artists dozens of blocks north in the Bronx were similarly using turntables to cue up and repeat break beats at house parties and block parties, creating contingent, responsive, unchoreographed performances out of the material intersection between DJ, vinyl albums, and audience. [28] Whether the source was a dance record or modernist drama, the live events in both cases emerged from the interaction between the fixed media object and the responsive, improvisatory present of performance. India and After (America) Eventually, the mediated separation between past experiences and the performative present that Gray had developed in the Trilogy made it possible for him to detach a new set of independent talk performances from the larger theatrical apparatus of TWG, substituting a dialogic relationship with media for LeCompte’s direction and the TWG company. He later told theatre scholar David Savran: “…the monologues never would have come into being had not the Group been my first supportive audience, at the table, in Nayatt. And then it was a matter of shrinking the table down to a desk.” [29] In the post-Wooster Group solo performances he began presenting in the spring of 1979, Gray established the working process he would employ some version of for the rest of his career: reliance on memory rather than memorization, and on the conditions of the present moment to call up the past. Building on the use of pre-recorded audio in Rumstick Road and Nayatt School , his early talk pieces extended the fixed media presence to include onstage texts to which he could respond extemporaneously in performance, often using those sources to prompt or sequence a unique arrangement of narrative units. In particular, two of the most idiosyncratic of these early independent works, India and After (America) (1979) and The Great Crossing (1980), integrally relied upon the physical co-presence of pre-existing text within the piece. These texts – journal entries, newspaper articles, book passages, dictionary definitions – served to structure the everyday content of Gray’s experiences from outside of his authorial position, and to present each performance as a unique, collaborative experience shared by Gray and his audience. In February of 1976, LeCompte and Gray had traveled to India as actors in the Performance Group’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children . Traveling with LeCompte and on his own in India after the tour had ended, Gray had a very hard time psychologically, succumbing to self-doubt, anxiety, and an unquenchable longing for idealized experiences. [30] What he called his “lost will” would continue for more than a year after his return to America, manifesting in various illnesses and depressive episodes. Gray responded by seeking out a range of therapies and self-improvement strategies, both in New York and on a cross-country retreat to Santa Cruz. He also made some impulsive and risky choices, including signing up to perform in pornographic films for a time, and refusing to give his name to the police after walking out on a check at a Las Vegas steakhouse, which landed him in jail for a week. Three years later, he returned to that year for one of his first post-Wooster Group performances, which he came to call India and After (America) . Dealing for the first time with his recent life rather than his childhood and young adult years, Gray turned again to external media as a way to both fragment and knit together his still-fresh memories in performance. The presence of fixed media served to distinguish the action of remembering and relating his recent experiences from a textually stabilized recounting of the same events. Though Gray’s talk performance, in his own estimation and in popular reception, would eventually come to seem merely an entertaining way to deliver autobiographical material, there is much evidence that Gray was initially at least as concerned with the performance event as a delimited site where a performance could be constructed and disseminated all at once as he was with spinning a good yarn. In an early notebook entry he wrote of his idea for what he was then calling “Speaking Memory”: “I want to put myself in a meditative non rehearsal state and try to allow the presence of the audience to influence the quality and subject matter of my memory… set up a space for myself and be there[,] work out a memory structure in which I begin with one memory….” [31] Gray began relating the memories that would become India and After in much the way he had imagined “Speaking Memory.” At home in his loft with only a few others present and the tape recorder running, he began with one memory, of the plane from New York to Amsterdam on the way to India. [32] However, he found himself dissatisfied with what turned out to be a mostly linear account of such recent experiences and he became interested in resisting the drift toward narrative unity. He told Savran some years later that it was the fidelity of his account that he wanted to try to interrupt: “I was too close to the material. It came out like a travelogue. I didn’t know how to fragment it by chance. All the other pieces had been fragmented by memory.” [33] He cast around for a structural device that would help create the distance he felt he needed between his psychological source material and the instance of performance, as the “found” recordings in Rumstick Road and Nayatt School had done . The solution he hit on was to employ a de-personalized intervening text to structure the piece from outside of his authorial consciousness. His first attempt at introducing an external fixed element against which the action of remembering and telling could be defined came that summer of 1979, while he was in residence at Connecticut College. Gray performed his new, then untitled, work about his travels in India as an in-progress presentation for students at the college. He identified the genesis of the piece as a period when he was traveling in Kashmir after the end of The Performance Group’s tour of Mother Courage . In later performances, he would refer to this as the critical moment when he “lost his will.” He explained, I found myself in Kashmir with only one book and that was, by accident, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse , which I had read before. And this book, because I was in an isolated mountain village, I was able to give a lot of concentration to it automatically. There was no work, there was a relationship suddenly with Virginia Woolf, which saved me from some of this terrific culture shock and somehow touched me down with some of my own culture and past. So what I’ve done is that I’ve cut out some sections from this book and I’m going to experiment with reading them in and out of my talk, so that there will also be some readings from passages of that book. [34] Gray’s intention seems to have been to use Woolf’s book much as he had the recording of The Cocktail Party in Nayatt School , as a source of mediated cultural fragments through which he could explain his own experience. In this case, Woolf’s introspective, quasi-autobiographical novel, focused on parental relationships and problems of memory and perception, was to create a parallel mental plane that Gray could treat as a kind of home base as he recounted the foreign-seeming settings and circumstances through which he traveled. However, in the end, To the Lighthouse does not appear to have offered Gray the structural counterpoint he was after. His use of the passages dropped away after he read just two selections early on, leaving him to complete the narrative in the same linear fashion he had previously. In this telling, Gray found himself increasingly alienated by his foreign surroundings in India during the tour and unable to make sense of his experiences as he continued to travel afterward. Eventually he found himself far off the usual tourist path in Ladakh, at the Tibetan border, where he was troubled to find that he felt so anxious and conflicted in the midst of what seemed to him an entirely harmonious culture. At this point Gray fled, apparently toward the comfortingly familiar angst of the West, but he found that his indecision, disorientation, and profound sense of alienation only persisted once back in familiar surroundings. To the Lighthouse turned out to be too enmeshed with the piece’s narrative content to mimic the strange displacement he experienced both at home and abroad. Gray instead cast around for a structuring device that would remain outside of the work, aesthetically and thematically indifferent, and would act upon his telling to constrain its structure and estrange its contents in a way that would actually reflect the seeming randomness of the experiences themselves. The reconfigured final template for India and After , which he would continue performing for a number of years , included a second onstage performer (usually Meghan Ellenberger) who read prompt words and their definitions at random from a large dictionary and then arbitrarily assigned time limits to Gray’s anecdotes. In response to each word, Gray would call up some part of an incident from his time in India and the year after, and try to tell it before Ellenberger rang a bell indicating the end of his allotted time, whether he had finished the story or not. Figure 3. Screenshot of Gray and Meghan Ellenberger in a 1980 archival video documenting India and After (America) in performance. A far cry from both the iconic staging and the media aesthetics of the 1987 Swimming to Cambodia film. VHS, Spalding Gray Papers, GRS071, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. [35] Drawing on an extensive, though still limited, palate of anecdotes, not all of which he got to every night, Gray’s associations could be direct or oblique. Some connections seemed obvious, like a memory of disciples of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh at his ashram in India rushing to the spot where his chair had just been in response to the word “unseat,” or “co-signer” triggering the story of LeCompte bonding him out of the Las Vegas jail. Other responses were humorously counterintuitive; in one performance, “Protestantism” triggered an explicit story from a pornographic film shoot. At times Gray even resisted storytelling in favor of literal-minded enactment: the word “dumb,” with the definition “without speech,” prompted him to stammer and then go silent for a full minute, an action with no apparent relation to the past. Some of his associations and memories proved more poetic than personal: “ivory white” caused him to recall a Hindu religious story about the god Krishna revealing his divinity to his mother; “mitten” made him think of Kashmiri shepherds he had met who claimed they had never heard of New York or even Delhi, while on another night this same story was called up by the word “triangulate.” [36] Reflecting the dictionary’s rigid order and stability in the face of its non-linear uses, Gray actually told the snippets of his stories in more or less the same way every time, down to the phrasing of individual sentences. But the structure of the performance broke up the sequence and flow of the narrative, creating odd juxtapositions and points of entry, cutting off or starting stories at what would ordinarily be a mid-point, and often altogether eliding narrative segments that might otherwise be of import. This structure served to highlight the act of remembering in order to materialize the performative instance as distinct from the narrative content of the memories themselves. The usual understanding of this approach, affirmed by Gray and his observers both, is that the fragmentation produced by the random structure reflected the fragmentation of his psychological breakdown. [37] However, Gray had also inadvertently hit on a way to complicate the Westerner-transformed-by-travel-in-the-non-Western-world narrative that the linear telling invited. By procedurally scrambling the sequence of events he also scrambled the too-easy causal or metaphorical links by which he otherwise connected his mental disturbance to his travels in India, or even one incident to the next. By giving up structural control, Gray was able to displace the task of making sense of his experiences from an all-knowing authorial position onto a shared process in the performative present. And by privileging his idiosyncratic telling over an imperative to accurately communicate what happened, Gray thwarted the narrative expectations of both literary and dramatic form. This foregrounded the mental labor involved in extemporaneously calling up narrative fragments rather than assuming the authorial responsibility to curate and organize the work in advance. Though Gray still drew on personal memory, structurally India and After more closely mirrored burgeoning experiments with sampling and other media collage techniques occurring elsewhere at that same time, including The Wooster Group’s continued intermedial experimentation in Gray’s absence. Rather than obscuring his presence in the live performance, though, Gray’s use of the logic of recorded media to structure the piece emphasized what he was doing in the moment: responding, relating, strategically recounting. Ironically, it was the use of these contingent intermedial strategies that made this work particularly unavailable to the kind of wholesale mediatization that would be key in popularizing his later performances. The Great Crossing While Gray used apparently neutral external media to distinguish the recalled past from the moment of performance in India and After (America) , he employed a more personal textual source in order to deal with an even more immediate past in his little-known monologue The Great Crossing (1980). In its earliest versions, much of the performance consisted of verbatim readings from his private journal, detailing a trip across the country he took with his new girlfriend Renee in order to tour his monologues on the West Coast. This was in fact the very tour on which he began performing The Great Crossing , so the journal entries were just weeks old. At the same time, he also used public textual detritus collected along the way (newspaper articles, a new age magazine) to approximate the physical and cultural environments he passed through. And in at least some instances, he brought the piece’s narrative up to the very moment of performance, as if challenging himself to do away entirely with the traditional division between authoring the work and presenting it publicly. Like nearly all of Gray’s work, The Great Crossing depended on some deliberate separation of his past experience from his telling in the present. But no other work brought the two into such close, even overlapping, proximity. As he read his travel diary, he verbally footnoted what he had written, explaining and commenting on his ostensibly private thoughts. In this way, the raw material of his daily jottings were structured by his extemporaneous comments on that material in the moment of performance, a hybrid perhaps of the “found” personal media in Rumstick Road and the intermedial improvisation with The Cocktail Party in Nayatt School. As archival recordings of his West Coast tour suggest, Gray was caught between two creative strategies and what they might mean for his artistic future. The more narratively coherent strategy he found himself moving toward held the promise of positioning his still-new talk performance format, which was just beginning to gain traction on tour outside of New York City, into something repeatable and commodifiable that could serve his popularity and provide financial support. The strategy of media contingency generating extemporaneous discovery in performance that that he had been using meant that on some level he was re-making the work each night, keeping him nimbly responsive and present in the moment, but deliberately leaving no trace. Gray prefaced the reading from his diary with a straightforward reading of a different, very public source text: two newspaper articles he had encountered on his trip. The first described a shift in nuclear policy under President Carter from a strategy of mutually assured destruction to the capability for sustained, low-level nuclear war to act as a deterrent throughout an engagement. This was followed immediately by an article about a woman in Phoenix who had seen the face of Jesus in a tortilla. Gray delivered both in the same calm and measured tone, as if setting a baseline for the presence of performed text in the piece, no matter the source. After the newspaper readings had introduced the disparate and seemingly random sources he would draw on, Gray began his own story by emphasizing the incidental composition of his performance, explaining that, “It could start anywhere, but I’m choosing June 24 th at Schiphol Airport, a place of great anxiety for me…” He then launched into three stories of fraught departures from Amsterdam – the first cribbed from India and After and the most recent immediately preceding his “Great Crossing” in late June of 1980.[38]. Back in New York, Gray and his girlfriend Renee set off on a cross-country trip. As their journey began, Gray introduced the other, more personal, textual source around which the performance would be structured – his diary entries from the road. He explained the conceptual motivation for this in terms of building in a space between a past actor who had experienced the things described, but had no control over their presentation, and the present performer who could narrate and comment upon, but would not be held responsible for, that past actor’s deeds: [39] The thing that I’ve been working from is this diary here, now the idea was that I was trying to find at least two of the – at least two Spalding Grays – and trick him, the perverse Spalding Gray who is here in front of you tonight would trick the private Spalding Gray who kept a diary not thinking he was going to read it but thought that he would speak openly about the situation and therefore be able to censor things … [40] (Gray, “ The Great Crossing ; S.F …”) Figure 4. Gray’s journal entries for July 12-13, 1980. The passages he read onstage during The Great Crossing can be found starting on July 9th and running through the month of July, 1980. He did not always confine his reading to his own writing, he sometimes also read the information printed in the journal itself, such as “New Moon, Orangemen’s Day” on the 12 th . Journal: 1980, Spalding Gray Papers, C35.4, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. The diary represented both the most immediate record of these past experiences and the earliest impulse toward transforming them into narrative material. Rather than the random needle drops of Nayatt School or the rules-based structure of India and After , here Gray was moving in a linear fashion with pre-determined material, relying on his own impulses to determine when he would switch registers from text to extemporaneous talk. When he felt the impulse to reflect or comment, he would stop and verbally footnote what he read in the moment, before returning to the structured text. As there is no video document of The Great Crossing available, I cannot say if that switch was visible, but it was certainly audible in the shift from his perfunctory, seemingly disinterested delivery of the diary entries, undifferentiated from his reading of the newspaper articles and other found texts, to the enlivened, engaged commentary that reflected the voice, by turns ironic, curious, and anxious, which would come to be identified with Gray’s onstage persona. Paradoxically, it was Gray’s inscribed past consciousness that he posited as uncontrollably confessional, and his extemporaneous presence as a performer that could stabilize and edit what the journal’s text revealed. Here the media presence served mostly to distinguish his “private” past self from the “perverse” self in the present who commented upon the past self’s actions, bonding him in his physical presence more to the performance event than the often problematic adventures the diary revealed. Indeed, the entries proved truly personal: petty, ponderous, emotional, graphically sexual, and mundane. The journal showed Gray to be motivated, and hindered, by both selfishness and self-consciousness, and to be much more immediately concerned with his own creature comforts and internal monologue than his later ironic travelogues would usually suggest, preoccupied as they were with the unusual characters he met along the way. It became clear that Gray was wrestling with his form, wondering if he could continue performing monologues in the way he had been over the previous year or so, as contingent intermedial procedures, or if he would eventually have to commit to a more conventional dramatic literary model. The contradiction between the ambition and economic necessity to reach a larger engaged audience and the personal and creative impetus to process his experiences almost as they occurred, came to a head in an apparently authentic moment of mid-performance crisis on the Seattle stop of his tour. Caught between his extemporaneous impulses and the apparent pressure to present something entertaining and replicable, he stumbled over the very premise of his monologue format, and where he should take it next, telling his audience: You can only tell the same stories so many times; I can’t stand it anymore. Tonight’s stories are all new, I haven’t dealt with them at all, I feel they are best at their freshest, and I am really at the point where I really don’t know what to do with that problem, since I am in the position where I am trying to make a living from doing what I do and I think I can’t do it. Because it means setting them, and making them into routines and acting and being a stand-up comedian or what have you. [41] In this moment of crisis, he saw clearly that in beginning to make his talk performances more available to repetition and wider circulation, he was also letting go of some of the extemporaneity and discovery that keeping his performances anchored in the present had enabled. The loss that Gray recognized was the slipping away of an idiosyncratic format that resisted easy distinctions between inscription and enaction. Without a media presence to intervene in the flow of his narrative and differentiate Gray in the present from Gray in the past, Gray himself became more like one of his media sources as a performer, capable of starting at the beginning and playing through to the end in more or less the same way every time. While Gray’s crisis during the Seattle performance was a petulant complaint about having to dramatically reenact an experience no longer personally useful to him, it was also an expression of deep frustration that the unique character of his talk pieces as contingent, situational, intermedial, emergent phenomena might be lost in the course of his creative and professional development. In light of his eventual success, it is easy to dismiss this early dilemma as an independent artist merely anxious about “selling out,” but focusing on this early work also complicates the status he acquired in subsequent years as a popular storyteller situated within established genres: part comic raconteur, part literary author. Since his death in 2004, publication and archival projects have only further cemented his literary status; meanwhile, the genre of autobiographical monologue the mass media adaptations of his performances helped establish is now so common it no longer registers as procedurally or conceptually audacious by any measure. [42] The Great Crossing did not go forward in its original form following the West Coast performances and Gray’s crisis in Seattle. [43] Instead, a new, more replicable approach emerged in its aftermath. Gray premiered a new monologue at Dance Theatre Workshop in New York later that year called Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk , which re-configured the events of The Great Crossing as unbroken past tense narration, without the presence of the diary entries. [44] This transition from the ephemeral, contingent, and intermedial format of The Great Crossing to the set narrative of Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk , which was eventually published in Gray’s first monologue collection, best represents the change in Gray’s approach from the extemporaneously generated, conceptual and situational early performances to the replicable and circulatable, recognizably dramatic form that his monologues would ultimately take. [45] Later versions of the monologue presented an even more tightly controlled narrative, with elements added to the physical setting that came very close to what would become the official-looking set of Swimming to Cambodia : his habitual table and chair, with a map hung behind it, and a pointer on his desk. That monologue would follow a few years after this one, enabled by a mainstream film role and leading to opportunities for publication and film adaptations. Even later on, text and other external media still remained an occasional part of his monologues. Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk retained the twin newspaper articles that opened the piece and even continued to add printed media found on the trip — a placemat from a steak house in South Dakota, a news clipping about end times survivalists in Oregon, an article from the new age Good Times newspaper about UFOs on Mount Shasta. [46] Early versions of Swimming to Cambodia , too, ended with an extended reading from a stack of philosophical books Gray had turned to for guidance after a difficult return from Thailand. [47] But the intermedial contingency that had initially defined his talk performance practice no longer obtained. Although he was able to preserve the spectacularity of his skills as an extemporaneous performer across media, his performances were no longer tethered to the collective present of the performance event. Despite the wide circulation that Gray’s mediated work in film, video, and text enabled, the possibilities it had originally presented for a formally, procedurally, and conceptually daring alternative to the familiar tropes of literary and dramatic narrative and authorship were sidelined in favor of the artistic success and formal influence he ultimately achieved. References [1] During the 1980s, Gray was often associated with a number of iconic artists also making solo performances in downtown Manhattan, many of them crossing paths at the venue PS 122, including Laurie Anderson, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, and Eric Bogosian. All were known for using the minimal material of their bodies and voices (and, in Anderson’s case, even more pronounced live interactions with media technologies than Gray’s) to create work that could be aesthetically challenging and politically provocative, but that also became quite popular and circulated widely on tour, in publications, and as audio and video recordings or broadcasts. [2] I use the term “talk performance” as a critical category by which I identify uses of extemporaneous talk as a material and a process, rather than simply a tool to convey narrative content. By framing talk, and not artistic discipline, as the defining aspect of Gray’s performances in my broader, ongoing research, I connect them to the performance work of other artists from different disciplinary backgrounds who I identify with the category by their use of extemporaneous talk as a central part of their practices, in particular the poet David Antin and the dance artist and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. [3] My research was enabled by a Dissertation Research Fellowship I received from the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin, where Gray’s archive is held, and benefitted from the aid of the Theatre and Performance Curator, Helen Baer, during my initial visit to the HRC, and later Eric Colleary on a follow-up visit, both generously responding to several inquiries. [4] In his 1965 essay (reprinted in 2001 with a further commentary he added in 1981 and an appendix by his daughter, the art historian Hannah Higgins), Higgins proposed that intermedia does not just mean the inclusion of more than one media, but that something new emerges between existing categories, with its own set of rules. For Higgins, it is not enough to merely remove a disciplinary element that appears particularly stultifying, like a play’s script, because the unscripted play will just default to imitating a scripted one in the absence of further disruption. Another element must be introduced to ensure the intermedial object or event remains in-between. Dick Higgins and Hannah Higgins, “Intermedia,” Leonardo 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2001): 49–54. [5] Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds., Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 11. [6] Chiel Kattenbelt, “Theatre as the Art of the Performer and the Stage Of Intermediality,” Chapple and Kattenbelt, 37. [7] Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer, Multimedia Performance, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 71. [8] J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media , (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Andreas Hepp, Cultures of Mediatization, trans . Keith Tribe (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012.) [9] Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology , no. 19 (1990): 59-88. [10] In his study of performer-object interaction, Theatre/Ecology/Cognition , Paavolainen uses the broad term “object,” rather than the more specialized terms “props” or “set,” to speak about non-human or animal presences in theatrical performance. This leaves open questions of agency in the interactions between onstage performers and objects, which he sees as mutually constitutive through the object’s “affordances” (a term he borrows from psychologist James J. Gibson,) or intended interfaces, on the one hand, and the actions of the performer on the other. Teemu Paavolainen, Theatre/Ecology/Cognition: Theorizing Performer-Object Interaction in Grotowski, Kantor, and Meyerhold. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 13-16. [11] Spalding Gray, Sex and Death to the Age 14 . (New York: Vintage, 1986), xii. [12] Spalding Gray, “ Swimming to Cambodia ; Part 1; 1/31/84,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C4766, Harry Ransom Center. [13] These include Blues for a Gray Sun (Nilaja Sun, 2004) , A Spalding Gray Matter (Michael Brandt, 2005), Swimming to Spalding (Lian Amaris, 2009), and Who Killed Spalding Gray? (Daniel MacIvor, 2017) to cite only examples that include his name in their titles. [14] All four of the monologues Gray made after Swimming to Cambodia were published in mass-market editions intended for literary consumption, not theatrical production: Monster in a Box (1992), Gray’s Anatomy (1993), It’s a Slippery Slope (1997), and Morning, Noon and Night (2000). Two of these were also adapted to film themselves: Monster in a Box (1992) was directed by Nick Broomfield, and Gray’s Anatomy (1997) by Steven Soderbergh. [15] Bauman and Briggs, 73. [16] Bauman and Briggs, 73, original emphasis. [17] Bauman and Briggs, 77. [18] Bolter and Grusin, 54. [19] Hepp, 38, original emphasis. [20] Michael Peterson, Straight White Male: Performance Art Monologues (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 5. [21] David Savran, Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), 3-5. [22] Gray’s table, which, along with his habitual notebook, water glass, and flannel shirt, defined his post-Wooster Group performances, persists to this day in TWG’s work as a long, forward-facing table, often installed at the same level as the floor of the stage, where actors sit when not “acting” and from which text is often read aloud. [23] Savran, Breaking the Rules , 57-59. [24] Spalding Gray, “BSE II Oct. 23 (Mickery 1978); Intro and Celia (Mickery 1978); Nayatt Oct. 1978,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C5155, Harry Ransom Center. [25] Richard Schechner, “My Art in Life: Interviewing Spalding Gray,” TDR: The Drama Review 46, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 162. [26] Spalding Gray, “Intro CP – Spalding’s Improv Feb. 8 ‘78; Nayatt; Cocktail Party II; Nayatt 1978,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C5198 Harry Ransom Center. [27] Gray, “BSE II Oct. 23 (Mickery 1978); Intro and Celia (Mickery 1978); Nayatt Oct. 1978.” [28] In his history of hip-hop, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, Jeff Chang offers an account of DJ Kool Herc discovering this method through audience observation at rent parties in the Bronx in the mid-1970s. Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martins Press, 2005), 77-85. [29] Savran, Breaking the Rule, 106. [30] He would, in fact, become particularly associated with what he eventually termed, in Swimming to Cambodia, his search for the “perfect moment” while traveling. A version of this search is described in preliminary terms in this work, along with the crippling indecision and self-doubt that accompanied it. [31] Spalding Gray, Journal: 1978-1979, Spalding Gray Papers, Series I, Subseries C: Notebooks, 1964-2003, undated, C35.1, Harry Ransom Center. [32] Spalding Gray, “India and After,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C4927, Harry Ransom Center. [33] Savran, Breaking the Rules , 73. [34] Spalding Gray, “ India and After (Ct. College)” 1979, audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C4929, Harry Ransom Center. [35] My thanks to Kathleen Russo, Gray’s widow, for permission to use images of items in the Spalding Gray collection at the HRC on behalf of Gray’s estate. [36] Gray, “ India and After ,” 1980. [37] Gray told Savran that he sought out the new structure because the linear telling “didn’t work the way my mind was working at the time I was going through it.” And Savran said the final format “puts the spectator in a position similar to that of the monologue’s distressed subject.” Savran, 73. Similarly, William Demastes wrote that India and After “duplicated on stage what was going on in Gray’s head during his breakdown in India and after.” Spalding Gray’s America (Milwaukee: Limelight Editions, 2008), 69. [38] Spalding Gray, “ The Great Crossing ; S.F.; Last Performance; September 13,” 1980, audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C5007, Harry Ransom Center. [39] In many ways this anticipates an argument that David P. Terry would make about the split between the past actor and the confessional performer in Gray’s much later monologues. “Once Blind, Now Seeing: Problematics of Confessional Performance,” Text and Performance Quarterly , 26, no. 3 (July 2006): 209–28. [40] Gray, “ The Great Crossing ; S.F.; Last Performance; September 13.” [41] Gray, “ The Great Crossing ; S.F.; Last Performance; September 13.” [42] It is tempting to wonder if the crisis in Seattle about the necessity of setting his monologues in order to succeed professionally might provide some insight into whether pressures to continue producing and performing monologues even after the process was no longer useful to him could have contributed to Gray’s suicide in 2004, especially given his ongoing obsession with his mother’s suicide and his anxiety about replicating it himself. However, I hesitate to see Gray’s death in fatalistic terms despite the theme of suicide that ran through his life. For one, I think it is a stretch to imagine that because Gray talked about fear of suicide as a topic in 1977, or balked publically at professional pressures in 1980, that his despair and evident decision to take his own life in 2004 was somehow inevitable, or that his personal and professional successes in the intervening years are somehow rendered irrelevant. But also, as neurologist Oliver Sacks suggested in his 2015 New Yorker article about his evaluations of Gray before his death, the various circumstances of Gray’s life and death — the long shadow cast by his mother’s suicide, his reliance on his monologues as quasi-therapeutic processes, and the head injury he suffered in a car accident that made it difficult to write or perform and contributed to a debilitating depression in the last few years of his life — seem too intertwined with one another to draw out any conclusive causal links. (“The Catastrophe: Spalding Gray’s Brain Injury,” The New Yorker, 27 April, 2015.) Instead, I am interested in continuing to track Gray’s posthumous circulation as a media phenomenon. I argue that Gray’s estate has tended to frame Gray’s legacy in literary terms, instigating several posthumous publishing projects, including an edited volume of his journals and what exists of his unfinished last monologue, Life Interrupted . ( The Journals of Spalding Gray [New York: Knopf, 2011]; Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue [New York: Crown, 2005].) On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, performing artists influenced and impacted by Gray’s work have created an entire genre of autobiographical solo performances that make use of his physical setting and his stylistic approach, as well as a more idiosyncratic, small but significant subgenre of performance works that deal explicitly with Gray’s life, death, and work as their main topic. (See note 13.) [43] My understanding of the transition from The Great Crossing to Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk is based on my archival research at the Harry Ransom Center, where Gray’s papers are held. However, in his survey of alternative theatre, Beyond the Boundaries , theatre scholar Theodore Shank makes a brief reference to this same work being performed in San Francisco under the title Points of Interest (America) . I have not seen other evidence that Gray used that title, which would suggest an interesting serialized relationship with India and After (America) , but it is possible he used it at some point before or after he was calling it The Great Crossing. Theodore Shank, Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 178. [44] Spalding Gray, “ Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk ; DTW 11/22/80,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C5093, Harry Ransom Center. [45] Gray, Sex and Death… , 117-149. [46] Spalding Gray, “ Nobody Wanted To Sit Behind A Desk ,” 1982, Betamax, Spalding Gray Papers, GRS103-104, Harry Ransom Center. [47] Spalding Gray, “ Swimming to Cambodia ; Part 1; 1/31/84,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C4766, Harry Ransom Center. Footnotes About The Author(s) Ira S. Murfin is a Chicago-based independent scholar, artist, and arts programmer. His research investigates the relationship between extemporaneity, artistic discipline, and media technologies in late 20th Century artistic vanguards. In his creative practice he primarily works with talk as a performance material. His article “Talking Text and Writing Extemporaneity: Aligning David Antin’s talk performance and editorial practices” will be published in Performance Research issue 23.2 in May 2018. More information can be found at www.IraSMurfin.com Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder By Published on May 6, 2023 Download Article as PDF On a mild day in June 2020, four actors, each in their own car, paraded through the small, rural college town of Sewanee, Tennessee. Similar to the pageant wagons of medieval times, the goal was to bring theatre to the people all while offering entertainment, enlightenment, and an opportunity for fellowship. The production: The Front Porch Plays , an evening of socially-distanced, Covid-safe, micro-theatre. Actor Virginia Craighill performs for community members. Made popular in Spain, micro-theatre aims to create intimate theatrical experiences by performing short-form theatre to small audiences. Developed in response to the financial crisis in Spain, micro-theatre became a way to produce new theatre at a time when the arts were underfunded. Productions are produced quickly, with minimal financial investment, making them affordable for artists who want to create theatre that is accessible. The Front Porch Plays was also created in response to a crisis: the Covid pandemic. Theatre has always been a communal event: it is both created and consumed together. As it became clear that the country’s three-week social experiment in isolation in the spring of 2020 was going to extend through the summer I began to explore ways to tell stories which allowed for human interaction while also maintaining social distancing. Inspired by the innovative work being done by arts organizations forced to pivot away from their traditional programming, The Front Porch Plays was born. My interest in site-specific theatre makes me look at my surroundings through a different lens. I see possibility in unlikely places. I’ve hosted new work in kitchens, art galleries, and even a freight elevator. However, because of the pandemic indoor spaces were off-limits. Social distancing would require more space. Luckily, our town, which sits on the Cumberland Plateau provided the perfect setting. Like so many theatre artists, I found myself feeling an enormous sense of loss as our new reality became apparent. A world-premiere production of a new play, two years in the making, was shut down eight days into rehearsal while other projects I had planned were put on hold. In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote monologues for two theatre companies that were pivoting to online programming. These events offered me the opportunity to write while contributing to the theatre community that had been decimated. With those two pieces as my foundation, I began writing additional monologues. My hope was to create a short collection of monologues that worked in conversation with one another. Monologues can be deceptive in their simplicity; however, a well-written monologue not only tells a story, but it has a clear objective and is active. Each character I created wanted something very specific: a mother who wanted to pass down her cast iron skillet; a teenager who wanted the freedom to watch a comet she would only see once in her lifetime; a man who wanted to connect with his neighbor. While none of the monologues explicitly mentioned the pandemic, the subtext of each piece informed the audience that these were people unable to move freely in the world, who were trying to make connections with others despite barriers. Once I had several monologues to choose from, I settled on four that I knew I could cast from within my community. The goal was to make the event long enough to feel fulfilling while keeping it short enough to perform multiple times a night for multiple groups of people. We began by rehearsing over Zoom and then gathered outdoors to run the show. To help with transitions we added a guitar player. The monologues, when presented together, ran approximately 12 minutes in total. Because we are a small town, I was able to create a route each night that required only a three to five-minute drive between each stop. We limited ourselves to five performances each night which meant that with performance and travel time, I was only asking for 90 minutes of commitment from the actors. The show was billed as “socially distanced micro-theatre from the safety of your front porch.” Hosts were asked to limit guests to ten. This made it easier to social distance, but in the spirit of micro-theatre, it also created a more intimate experience. Word spread quickly as community members, eager for something to look forward to, signed up. Guests waited; some gathered on their front porches, others in lawn chairs in their yards, and they cheered when we arrived. The project was so popular that we added a second weekend of performances. Community members waiting for the arrival of the Front Porch Plays . The audience was asked to social-distance and limit their group to 10 people. The response from the community was overwhelming. One audience member wrote, “We would like to thank you so much for your efforts in providing a really special experience this past weekend! It was such fun, and really perfection! We continue to marvel at how the community comes together and shares their many gifts with others!” Another responded by saying, “This was such a gift. It was a reminder of the outside world, a way to enter another world, and a way to be (safely) in community.” Once I knew the project was possible, I created a “how to” guide to walk people through the entire process and offered it to theatres royalty-free as long as their performances were free of charge. The project was quickly picked up by the Nomad Theatre, based in Indiana. Rather than charging admission, they chose to accept donations. On their first day of performances, they raised more than $1300 which was then split between organizations that support Black and LGBTQ+ communities. According to producer Connie Blick, “Each and every one of us felt alive again, being able to be creative and share our talents in front of an audience.” Theatre artists have always responded in times of crisis. It is the way we make sense of the world around us. At a time when we were otherwise isolated from one another, theatre once again offered a way to examine the human condition while creating connection and community. Actor Jim Crawford performs his monologue for community members in Sewanee, TN. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ELYZABETH GREGORY WILDER is currently the Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence at Sewanee: The University of the South. Her work has been produced, developed, and commissioned by the Royal Court, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Denver Center Theatre, New Conservatory Theatre, Arden Theatre, Cleveland Play House, Geva Theatre, Sloan Foundation, and Pioneer Theatre, among others. Elyzabeth is a graduate of NYU and an alum of Youngblood. www.wilderwriting.net 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:

DeRon S. Williams Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. DeRon S. Williams By Published on April 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration . Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration , edited by Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, is a collection of adroitly composed essays committed “to engaging and interrogating the vastness of McCraney’s theatrical imagination, the singularity of his writerly voice, the incisiveness of his cultural insights and critiques, the creativity he displays through stylistic and formal qualities, and the unorthodoxies of his personal and professional trajectories” (3). There is no absence of scholarship about Tarell McCraney’s award-winning, imaginative plays, and screenplay, Moonlight ; however, this is the first full-length project for McCraney scholars to examine, practitioners to reference, and pedagogues to engage. Well-researched and curated, this book serves as an excellent foundation for multi-faceted study through its series of essays, interviews, and commentaries. The volume is interdisciplinary in scope, focusing on one of the 21st century’s most significant and singular playwrights, highly regarded for his deeply entrenched cultural and symbolic writings and intergenerational mix of emotionally adept Black characters. Opening with a career chronology, editor Sharrell D. Luckett underscores the trajectory of McCraney’s life as an artist and activist, a cornerstone to his “unprecedented success” (4). This simple yet effective addition coupled with editor Isaiah Wooden’s fascinating introduction helps contextualize McCraney’s lived experiences and rise to fame. The title of Wooden’s introduction, “Ogun Size Enters; or, An Introduction,” draws on McCraney’s dramaturgical practice of spoken stage directions. Like McCraney, Wooden’s introduction reemphasizes and reinvigorates the “investment in an idea of ‘theatre as community’” (9). He uses this section, then, to establish a communal foundation across critical scholarship, performance practice, and pedagogy by orienting readers to previously explored themes and topics. Subsequently, Wooden outlines the book’s overall structure, which he says they organized to “draw attention to some of the repetitions, revisions, resonances, and reverberations reflected in and across McCraney’s oeuvre” (12). There are eleven essays in this collection, evenly distributed among the first two sections, followed by a series of interviews in the third. “Part 1: Space, Faith, and Touch,” features six informative, interesting critical essays. Collectively these essays contemplate the ways in which McCraney “queries and queers spatial, spiritual, and haptic matters” (12). While most of the authors explore these themes within Head of Passes , Wig Out! , Choir Boy , The Breach , and Moonlight , two also offer a greater understanding of McCraney’s dramaturgical approach by investigating the artist’s affinity for Miami and his treatment of time. Donette Francis’s “Juxtaposing Creoles: Miami in the Plays of Tarell Alvin McCraney” introduces the phrase “Black southern hemispheric epics,” a notion that suggests that McCraney’s topographical dramaturgy, despite locale, has a “Miami sensibility.” Francis “brings together the triangulation of the Black, southern, and hemispheric in order to grasp all the relevant geopolitical and cultural frames necessary to read place in McCraney’s oeuvre” (21). Equally as important is editor David Román’s essay “The Distant Present of Tarell Alvin McCraney,” where he revisits his 2014 American Quarterly article, which he explains “was written primarily as an introduction to McCraney and his dramaturgy” (53). For Román, McCraney’s use of time, specifically the notion of “the distant present,” forces us to consider when the contemporary moves from now to then,” through the character’s embodiment of “historical values of their communities while refining their own individual perspectives and points of view” (63). The essays in “Part 2: Brothers, Sisters, and the Gods among Us” examine McCraney’s Brother/Sister Plays ( The Brothers Size , In the Red and Brown Water , and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet ) and dramaturgical devices. Perhaps the most enlightening among this strong set of essays are GerShun Avilez’s “Scenes of Vulnerability: Desire, Historical Secrecy, and Black Queer Experience in Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet ” and Jeffrey McCune’s “One-Size Does Not Fit All: Voicing Masculinities in a Pursuit of ‘Freedom.’” Avilez attends to the ways in which McCraney explores the dilemmas of queer existence and establishes McCraney and his work, with particular attention on Marcus, as a part of a genealogy of Black queer writers. In doing so, he brilliantly divides the conversation into two, first, focusing on “social vulnerability” and secrecy as a way of connecting “Black individuals with same-sex desire(s)” (116); and, second, concluding with a discussion of how embodied encounters “interpenetrates vulnerability” and “define queer life” (116). In contrast, McCune’s article looks at the notion of masculinity in McCraney’s plays and the various ways in which he “teaches us to read Black masculine performance and space” (169). Introducing the phrase of canonical black masculine narrative, a notion that “configures masculinity as a singular production” (169), McCune examines McCraney’s use of spoken stage directions “to interrupt and reprimand conventional audience theatrical readings” (171). Unlike earlier sections, which are more scholarly, “Part 3: Art, Creation, and Collaboration” deviates from the anthology’s established form, introducing readers to McCraney’s various collaborators. I found this section to be particularly useful for practitioners—and the field’s grasp of 21st century theater-making. Several of his recurrent collaborators in the last two decades, including Tina Landau, Robert O’Hare, and Teo Castellanos, just to name a few, present insights into McCraney’s developmental and performance process. This section is followed by “Tarell Alvin McCraney, in His Own Words,” where McCraney briefly engages in conversation with all three of the editors. This strikingly succinct interaction unearths the essence of McCraney by mostly avoiding questions of process and production and focusing on his mere existence. Like the Career Chronology, this section serves as a bookend to a selection of well-crafted essays that ushers in new, interesting aspects to explore. Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration is an exceptional text, offering a concrete foundation for McCraney scholars, practitioners, and novices. As a result of its interdisciplinary approach, the book extends beyond theatre and performance studies, as it critically engages fields of religion, culture, gender, and sexuality. Ultimately, the strength of this book lies in how it frames the complexities of McCraney’s Black radical imagination and extraordinarily cultural storytelling through the investigation of his “various dramaturgical strategies and theatrical devices” (8). References Footnotes About The Author(s) DERON S. WILLIAMS Eastern Connecticut State University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Derek Miller Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage On Bow and Exit Music Derek Miller By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF To begin at the end: actors land in a tableau; lights fade; curtain falls. In the American musical theatre, a final chord sounds in the orchestra. End of play. But not end of production, nor end of performance. For the curtain rises again; lights come back on; actors pose for their bows. And, in many musicals, the orchestra accompanies this whole sequence. This ultimate, non-diegetic musical moment stamps indelibly the fate of some shows. [1] Recalling the industry run-through of The Music Man , the show’s creator Meredith Willson noted that curtain call as particularly memorable, a sign of good things to come for his masterpiece: The piano started “Seventy-Six Trombones.” Out came the dancers playing their pantomime trombones, swinging cross that stage as proud as you’ll ever wanta see anybody be. That’s when the audience burst into spontaneous rhythmic applause as though cued to do so—as it has happened with every audience from that day forward. (Walter Kerr described it a year later in a Saturday Evening Post article on the theatre, saying that “the rhythmic hand-clapping which greeted the finale of The Music Man on opening night was the only time I have ever felt a single irresistible impulse sweep over an entire audience and stir it to a demonstration that could not possibly have been inhibited.”) [2] While that show’s curtain call aroused an unusual level of fervor in its audiences, Willson’s story exposes the importance of “bow music,” the music that plays while the cast takes their bows, and “exit music,” which plays as the audience leaves the theater. This essay explores the role of bow and exit music in the American musical. Bow and exit music—arriving as they do at the liminal moment when the preceding narrative gives way to everyday life—help audiences interpret the musical as an artistic phenomenon and encourage a particular audience relationship to the show as a commercial product. Performing this dual function, bow and exit music resemble film and television music for title sequences, end credits, and trailers. As a recent essay on that topic summarized, “Title and credit sequences link the inside and outside of fictional texts, the acknowledgement of the real-world origin of a film with its story and storyworld. In doing so, they also connect the institutional and economic reality of a film to its story.” [3] As a form of popular mass entertainment, American musicals, like film and television, must always negotiate “economic reality.” Indeed, the strain between the twin domains of art/commerce is audible in much research on the American musical. [4] Bow and exit music announce with particular poignancy the musical’s struggle for both cultural significance and financial success. The pages that follow provide an interpretive framework for understanding how bow and exit music work in the musical theatre. First, I consider how bow and exit music both sustain and disrupt extant theories of the non-musical curtain call. I then explore productions that use bow and exit music to reinforce or inflect the preceding narrative, either by emphasizing a show’s theme or by reshaping how audiences interpret characters. Shifting to commerce, I attend to shows that rely on bow and exit music to create economic demand. Finally, I argue that bow and exit music allow us better to recognize the strangeness of the creative labor that makes and performs musicals. Throughout the essay, my readings of individual shows model how we may better understand the American musical’s attempts to reconcile art and commerce when we listen carefully to the musical’s final moments. Studying Liminal Performance Events It is hard to know both where bow and exit music come from and how frequently they were heard in any given period of musical theatre history. The practice’s origins remain entirely obscure, though Michael Pisani’s herculean research into music from the nineteenth-century theater suggests that recovering this history may be possible. [5] Available evidence suggests that, at least since the so-called Golden Age (roughly 1940 to 1965), bow and exit music have been as normal a part of the American musical as choruses and eleven-o’clock numbers. For the analyses that follow, I examined 34 piano-vocal scores for musicals that opened between 1930 and 1984, among which only two (Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel [1945] and Allegro [1947]) included neither bow nor exit music. Because most scores are available only by rental from licensing agencies, my survey favored successful shows by well-known composers, that is, works that the major university libraries I consulted saw fit to purchase for their collections. I expanded that archive beyond published scores to include printed production scripts, as well as two film recordings. It is not impossible that my haphazard sample overestimates bow and exit music’s importance. However, given that bow and exit music derive from standard Broadway production practices (as I explain below), my sample likely provides an adequate view of bow and exit music’s normal place in the American musical theater. Indeed, while no archive speaks fully to the performances it documents, bow and exit music are so completely artifacts of production—that is, they come out of such particular production circumstances—that wherever bow and exit music appear in the archive, they most likely sounded in performance. I hazard that my archival explorations underestimate both the practice’s prevalence and the nuance with which it has been deployed. Why then, despite this prevalence, have these musics received so little scholarly (or even lay) attention? For one thing, bow and exit music exemplify liminal performance elements, elements that occur at the border between the theatrical event as such and the broader performance event that encloses it. [6] Other musical examples of such liminal performance events include overtures and entr’actes. Non-musical practices such as curtain speeches and intermissions fit into this category. Bow music, of course, underscores the paradigmatic liminal event in the theater, the curtain call, during which performers offer themselves to the audience for recognition and applause. Critical attention to curtain calls, while scant given the practice’s ubiquity, acknowledges the practice as a peculiar mélange of the semiotic field of the theatrical illusion and the phenomenal field of the performance. On the one hand, curtain calls provide finality, ending the play and the theatrical event. Yet the curtain call, as part of the performance event, also remains susceptible to audience interpretation; we cannot help but “read” the curtain call and its meanings just as we read the play. For Terence Hawkes, the curtain call thus manages an important kind of double “closure,” referring both to the audience’s ability to read a play as a meaningful semiotic system (to “close with” a play) and to the final moment of the play itself (“closure” as in “the end”). The curtain call has particular force, according to Hawkes, on the modern stage, which invites the audience to interpret everything they see and encourages a state of “total semiotization” in which there exists no “event, no matter how gratuitous or unsought for. . . that a modern audience would be unable to close with.” [7] In other words, Hawkes believes that the circle of meaningful representation in theatre now encompasses any event that takes place in and around a performance, which includes the curtain call, despite that practice’s traditional closure “to critical discussion.” Moreover, Hawkes suggests that curtain calls, far from signifying only unconsciously and accidentally, often reflect explicitly on the semiotic system that preceded them. “Actors rehearse” their bows, Hawkes notes; they circumscribe their behavior to suit the moment. Having just played Hamlet, an actor will not “laugh or caper about as a man might who has scored (in the soccer fashion) a success.” In short, the theatrical event that precedes the curtain call limits what performers can do in the curtain call itself. The curtain call represents, then, not a moment after the play so much as the play’s “edge,” which appears to the audience immediately before the play’s ultimate disappearance. [8] Director William Ball emphasizes that theatrical traditions and actors’ egos play their own crucial role in staging a proper curtain call. For instance, Ball insists that curtain calls be kept short and also create a natural dramatic arc by inspiring a crescendo of applause. He identifies the curtain call as a “disciplined ritual,” in which performers should bow simply, accepting audience praise “with ritual gratitude.” [9] Ball’s emphatic reuse of the word “ritual” underlines the curtain call’s obedience to codes of behavior as strict as those that mark the performance of the play itself. Moreover, to actors, the curtain call adds an essential layer of meaning that Hawkes leaves out. The order in which actors bow and the strength of the audience’s applause reveal to the actor the relative success of her performance. This fact challenges a director staging the bows for, say, Romeo and Juliet , in which Mercutio’s performance has likely inspired more audience adoration than Romeo’s. Ball recommends directors bring the two lovers out together after Mercutio, thus ensuring the necessary crescendo. [10] In determining the order of the curtain call, the director gives a “profoundly significant signal of approval” to the actor. [11] Doing right by performers when staging the curtain call influences the quality of an actor’s performance: “if the actor feels betrayed, he won’t act well.” [12] Ball thus reverses Hawkes’ line of causality between play and curtain call. For Hawkes, the performance determines the actor’s possible behavior during the curtain call. Ball emphasizes rather that the curtain call’s staging affects the actor’s ego and, therefore, the quality of the actor’s performance. Bert States, like Hawkes, recognizes that character persists during the curtain call, “remain[ing] in the actor, like a ghost.” [13] Yet States also stresses that the bowing actor performs not only herself and the character, but also her vulnerability as a performer, particularly by revealing the residual effects of her labor. In States’s words, the actor cannot, “refuse to display his ‘wounds’: the paint, the perspiration, the breathlessness, all the traces of having been through the role—or the role, like a fever, having been through him. Even the trace of fatigue . . . is in order because it suggests that this was hard work.” [14] These theorists of the curtain call all agree that the curtain call means something in relation to the play that it ends. They view the curtain call as a multi-layered performance that inflects the quality of the theatrical event that preceded it, reflects the tenor of the dramatic proceedings, and offers the labor of performance for the audience’s consideration. At this “seam” between the “fiction of the play” and the “fiction of manners,” audiences and actors alike return to the real world through this ritual that sews together reality and dream. [15] As Nicholas Ridout summarizes, the theater’s “machinery of representation. . . still generat[es] sparks of representation that contaminate. . . a straight face-to-face encounter” between actors and audience. [16] The curtain call, far from a merely pro forma theatrical ritual, still shimmers with meaning accrued from and borne by the just-concluded performance. All of the elements that these writers—Hawkes, Ball, States, and Ridout—recognize in the curtain call resonate, too, in bow and exit music. Yet bow and exit music, far from merely duplicating the above functions, retune the way audiences interpret the production, receive performers’ labor, and transition from the play back into the rest of their lives. Typology To understand how precisely bow and exit music expand the rich phenomenal experience of the non-musical curtain call, we must first address the fact that bow and exit music are, as a rule, not original musical compositions. Rather, they repeat (sometimes with variations) music that the audience has already heard in the show. Bow and exit music thus present a fundamentally different interpretive problem than the related practice of end credit music in film and television. End credits for today’s prestige television programs often employ a popular song that shapes how audiences interpret the episode that has just ended. [17] But that song only rarely features in the episode itself. These “novel musical postfaces,” as musicologist Annette Davison names them, speak from entirely outside the show, offering an external, sometimes jarring, commentary. [18] Musicals, by contrast, provide their own musical material for the curtain call. As post-show underscoring, bow and exit music may not be part of the theatrical performance, but the songs they rehearse were part of that performance. Bow and exit music thus also diverge from historical uses of music at the end of a performance. Music, of course, plays an important role in most Western theatrical traditions dating back to Greek tragedy. Many theatres use song (and sometimes dance) to close an evening’s entertainments. Such songs may be chosen for their energy, to provide the audience with an extra dose of good cheer on their journey home. Bow and exit music are often selected for the same purpose. But where other traditions draw on popular music from outside the show, bow and exit music are composed from internal musical ideas. They do not simply extend the performance event by providing extra music, but rather extend the music of the theatrical event into the performance event. The musical relationship between bow and exit music and the musical itself takes four basic forms. The first type of bow and exit music is no music whatsoever. Porgy & Bess , Carousel , Allegro , and West Side Story include no bow music in their printed scores. [19] These shows follow closely the operetta or opera tradition, in which, after the final chord, one neither can nor should say more, musically. The second and third types (the most popular) feature a single song for the bow music, often a show’s trademark number. The song can appear either with lyrics or without. A charming example of a single song with lyrics comes from Kiss Me, Kate , in which the cast sings “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” as they bow, but with new a couplet: “So tonight just recite to your matie / ‘Kiss me, Kate, Kiss me, Kate, Kiss me, Katie.’” [20] Babes in Arms ends with a full cast version of “Where or When”; Cabaret ‘s cast bows to a company rendition of the title song; and Damn Yankees closes with everyone singing about “Heart.” [21] Alternatively—the third category—the single song might appear without lyrics, in a purely orchestral guise. This is the case for Guys and Dolls , in which a reprise of the title song serves first as the finale, sung by the entire company. Composer and lyricist Frank Loesser then repurposes the same number for the bows. The score notes simply: “Repeat Orch[estra] only for Curtain calls.” [22] My Fair Lady harps on “I Could Have Danced All Night”; The Music Man trumpets “Seventy-six Trombones”; Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music circles back to “Night Waltz I” from the Entr’acte. [23] Finally, some shows feature a medley, as Sondheim’s Follies does, with bow music that includes fragments of “Who’s That Woman?” and “Beautiful Girls.” [24] Funny Girl ‘s bows take place mostly to the rousing “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” but transition to the ballad “People” near the end. [25] Summarizing bow music’s four general categories, we have: none; single song with lyrics; single song without lyrics; and medley. Each of those forms encourages a different array of interpretations, as the short examples above hint. Thus, the choice among these types, as well as the specific songs chosen, reflect and inflect our understanding of a musical. Representational Strategies Single Songs and Themes Let us consider now how bow music sustains the fundamental dichotomy of all curtain calls, that between the representational apparatus of the text and the phenomenal experience of the performance. The simplest way to bring closure to the theatrical event is simply to restate the central theme of the musical, usually with a single song. While, as I explain below, productions pick single songs for non-artistic reasons, too, a well-chosen single song can neatly reinforce the intellectual and emotional experience of the play. For example, the single song without lyrics accompanying Fiddler on the Roof ‘s curtain call is, unsurprisingly, “Tradition.” [26] The same song opens the show, serves as the show’s thematic center, and represents a natural choice for the bows. Yet the choice of an upbeat and rousing final tune can also work against the rest of the play. Man of La Mancha ‘s “The Impossible Dream” became that show’s popular standard, yet the title song appears as the bow music, selected perhaps for its driving rhythm. That choice is particularly odd given that the play’s final moments depict Cervantes and his servant’s departure to face the Inquisition, while the cast sings “Impossible Dream.” The driving bombast of the title song, repeated as the bow music, tramples “Impossible Dream”’s memorable rising melody and drowns out the play’s stoic and moving final strains. [27] The show’s creators might well have heeded one Broadway music director’s warning that the selection of bow and exit music “should be made with regard to the audience’s experience of the show.” [28] For some concept musicals of the 1970s, the single song’s emphatic closure was itself a dangerous trap. Unlike Golden Age musicals with clear resolutions, concept musicals often thrive on uncertainty and open-endedness. Nonetheless, many of those same shows sought to retain ties to the earlier tradition and devised new strategies for using bow and exit music to reinforce their shows’ thematic opposition to closure. Consider, for instance, A Chorus Line , one of the finest examples of the musical as meta-theater. The show’s subject—the life of a Broadway chorister—organized and inspired the show’s creative process and determined the musical’s narrative structure. Strikingly, the show maintains its vertiginous metatheatrical sensibility in the curtain call, or rather, in the lack thereof. As the playscript notes: “Lights fade on ‘Rockette’ kick line [at the end of ‘One’] . . . . After singers cut off, orchestra continues vamp phrase, very loud, until cut off cue from stage manager. There are no additional ‘Bows’ after this—leaving the audience with an image of a kick line that goes on forever.” [29] The stage directions suggest both the oppressive repetitiveness of the chorister’s life in the “very loud” vamp, and, in the refusal to offer the performers for bows, a gesture towards the absence of closure as the show’s meaning. That is, although an individual chorister’s career may end, the chorus line “goes on forever.” A Chorus Line acts against audience expectations about the curtain call-as-closure to deny the finality that the moment usually provides, while still working within the single-song paradigm described above. Pippin , like A Chorus Line , is a highly metatheatrical show. The printed piano-vocal score of Stephen Schwartz’s work includes No. 36 “Bows,” consisting of the opening number, “Magic to Do,” with lyrics. [30] Schwartz seems to have imagined traditional bows, in which the company closes by celebrating the illusions they had promised the audience at the start of the show. The play, however, ends in a state of extreme anxiety about the “magic” of play-making and needed a different kind of sonic curtain call. In director Bob Fosse’s ingenious staging—as captured on video of the touring production—the bows make meaning not through music, but through speech. [31] The play, a sort of bildungspiel about a sensitive son of King Charlemagne, takes place within the frame of a commedia troupe’s performance. Everything goes drastically awry in the musical’s final scene when Pippin declares his independence from the show. The Leading Player then strips Pippin, his wife Catherine, and their son of costumes, lights, and music. “Orchestra, pack up your fiddles. Get your horns. Let’s go,” orders the Lead Player. Then, to the pianist, who has been vamping throughout the last scene: “Take your damn hands off that keyboard.” The Leading Player then snarls at Pippin, “You try singing without music sweetheart.” Pippin complies, singing a few a cappella bars of the finale. Catherine speaks: CATHERINE Pippin … do you feel that you’ve compromised? PIPPIN No. CATHERINE Do you feel like a coward? PIPPIN No. CATHERINE How do you feel …? PIPPIN Trapped … but happy … (He looks from one to the other and smiles) which isn’t too bad for the end of a musical comedy. Ta-da! [32] The three then bow and “ the curtain comes down .” At this point, the curtain call is extremely fraught. The end of the play hinges on Pippin and his family’s escape from the mode of representation, a fact wryly acknowledged in Pippin’s reference to “a musical comedy” and in their bowing. If the production returned to the typical mode of closure for a musical, using Schwartz’s music cue for the bows, it would have evacuated the meaning that the show’s final moments had so carefully constructed. Fosse solved this problem by having the cast members announce each other with a handheld mic, to no musical accompaniment. Only after introducing the cast (and then the conductor) by name, does the company sing a reprise of “Magic to Do.” This curtain call thus has an unusual soundtrack: the names of the performers. Fosse’s choice emphasizes actors over characters and assumes a stance explicitly outside the make-believe world of the play. Pippin thus continues the tradition of the sonically scored curtain call, and even returns to the single-song format eventually. But by replacing music with the actors’ names, Fosse’s Pippin production closed in the metatheatrical spirit that pervaded the rest of the play and defined its ending. Medleys and Characters While Pippin uses sound during the curtain call to question the possibility of closure and to critique representation itself, other shows use music to reinforce the representational apparatus. Music, for instance, can act like a costume, a residue of character that clings to the actors as they receive the audience’s applause. The Harold Prince/Chelsea Theater version of Candide , for example, uses medley to rich effect, as the principals take their calls accompanied by songs associated with their characters. [33] The company bows first to “Battle Music,” Paquette and Maximillian to “Life is Happiness Indeed,” the Old Lady to the Spanish chorus from “Easily Assimilated,” Candide and Cunegonde to “Oh Happy We,” and Voltaire to “Bon Voyage.” The entire company then sings the latter song’s final chorus. Music works here almost leitmotivically; the songs index character. But unlike a truly Wagnerian leitmotiv, which metamorphoses along with the changing circumstances of its referent, the melodies in the bow music remain fixed to specific conceptions of character. The music therefore restricts how we read character while the actors bow. Consider particularly Candide and Cunegonde, who find redemption in their final musical number when they accept a simple, quotidian existence and embrace the nobility of work and family. When the couple bow, they do so to the music of their Act I duet, in which Candide’s dream of a modest life clashes with Cunegonde’s fantasies of wealth. Certainly, “Oh Happy We”’s elegant, spry melody makes livelier bow music than the hymn-like finale, “Make Our Garden Grow.” But the journey of these two characters to arrive at the finale’s insights washes away in the return of the former tune, which, even if we have forgotten the lyrics, evokes instability in its irregular meter. The choice of music suggests an actor playing Oedipus who, before bowing, washes the bloody makeup from his eyes and changes into a clean tunic. The bloodied costume that clings to a bowing actor signals the Oedipus who has been through a journey. But the choice of music for Candide and Cunegonde here erases their journey. The selection of “Oh Happy We” for the bows may very well be self-consciously ironic. Whether the production used this tune wittingly or not, the musical underscoring instructs us to read character in a particular way. A slightly different effect arises from the leitmotivic medley at the end of Trevor Nunn’s revival of Oklahoma! [34] The curtain call is a dance number, fully choreographed by Susan Stroman. First, the men’s and women’s choruses and featured dancers bow to “The Farmer and the Cowman,” then Ali Hakim to his solo number, “It’s a Scandal! It’s a Outrage!,” then Will and Ado Annie to “All er Nothin’.” Aunt Eller, then Curly and Laurey all bow to “Beautiful Mornin’,” a fittingly bucolic tune that was also the show’s finale. Before this final trio appears, the antagonist, Jud, bows to the bathetic duet he sings with Curly, “Poor Jud is Daid.” The noble theme, as sounded in William David Brohn’s orchestration for brass choir, underscores not Jud’s function as a melodramatic villain, but rather his humanity. Indeed, the song reminds us, if we recall the words, that Jud is dead, and that Oklahoma! resolves at the expense of Jud’s life. If Jud bowed instead to his aria, “Lonely Room,” a twitching, minor key number, full of clustering dissonances, our reception of that character during the bows would differ significantly. [35] Nunn adds one further flourish after all the actors have bowed: the entire company gathers in a group to reprise the choral section of the title song. As a quick key to the implications of this gesture, consider Andrea Most’s reading of Oklahoma! Most suggests that “anyone willing and able to perform the songs and dances can join” the community of a musical. [36] But neither Jud nor Ali Hakim is on stage to sing “Oklahoma” during the play’s wedding scene. Nunn’s decision to have them sing with the full company here thus suggests that these two characters, identified by Most as outsiders, are actually integral to the community, as I have argued elsewhere. [37] When Jud and Ali Hakim sing “Oklahoma” with the full company, the tensions necessary to create a stable community come to the fore. The audience recognizes that the community cannot make Oklahoma without the internal pressure provided by Jud and Ali Hakim. In the full company reprise of the title song during the bows, those two purported outsiders perform their true status as insiders. The Nunn production’s bow music helps us better interpret these characters. Bow music can thus be another residue of character, like a costume. Medleys prove particularly useful forms for this use of bow music because the medley allows the bow music to speak directly to each character by playing that character’s best-known tune. But by selecting a melody for each character, bow music cues specific aspects of a character, adding a last moment of semiotic representation that draws on and revises what we have experienced in the rest of the show. Commercial Strategies The original production of Oklahoma! , as captured in the score and in a published playscript, ends not with the now-famous title song, but with a full company reprise of the duet “People Will Say We’re in Love.” [38] In many ways, the song is a bizarre choice for the bows, being neither an anthem for the show nor for the company, but rather a private song for Curly and Laurey. Indeed, the number’s conceit is that the lovers should not show public affection because the community might comment on it. Yet during the bows, the whole cast sings it. Why? Because the production team expected the song to be a hit. This factor, the song’s potential economic afterlife, is the final—and perhaps most important—function of the musical curtain call. That is, bow music cues the audience to buy a cast album. In this respect, the musical theater’s bows differ significantly from those of non-musicals. As Nicholas Ridout observes, although all curtain calls “conclude a market transaction,” because the actual economics of the performance were “sorted out before the curtain even rose,” the curtain call’s applause (and the performers’ acceptance of applause) forms part of a gift economy. [39] But in many musicals, both musical motifs and commercial motives underscore this gift exchange between the audience and the actors. Bow music, for such musicals, answers the demands of commerce: which tune is most salable? Thus, Gershwin’s Girl Crazy wraps up with “Embraceable You” before jumping to “I’ve Got Rhythm”; Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey signs off with “I Could Write a Book” (in fairness, about half of the songs from that show have hit potential); and the same authors’ The Boys from Syracuse goes back to “Falling in Love with Love.” [40] I noted above that Funny Girl ’s curtain call music transitions from “Don’t Rain on My Parade” to “People.” I conjecture that the change in tune cued star Barbra Streisand’s entrance. Both songs became huge hits and remain associated with Streisand, but only “People” put Streisand on Billboard charts in 1964. Indeed, she had recorded that number as a single even prior to the show’s premiere. [41] This economic imperative is so insistent that the great production team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II refused to let bow music’s commercial potential pass them by, even in their shows without bow music. As noted above, some of the pair’s most high-minded works, such as South Pacific , The King and I , and The Sound of Music , follow the operatic tradition and include no bow music. Those shows do, however, include scored exit music, music to be played while the audience leaves the theater. Exit music does not distinguish itself enough from bow music formally to merit a separate discussion. It does, however, underline how much these last two musical numbers speak to the musical theater’s commercial interest. For if bow music, due to the presence of the actors, contains traces of its representational function alongside its economic imperatives, exit music seems to have given up representation entirely. Exit music exists almost solely to worm a catchy tune into the audience’s ear. One guide to writing a musical explains that exit music supplies “the flavour that will be left in the public’s ear, the one you want them to keep humming as they make their way to the lobby and perhaps buy on cassette or compact disc.” [42] Thus, South Pacific ’s exit music is “Some Enchanted Evening” (a number one hit for Perry Como in 1949), which leads into “Bali Ha’i”; The King and I features “Whistle a Happy Tune” and then “Shall We Dance”; and The Sound of Music essentially repeats the entr’acte with a medley of the title song, “Do Re Mi,” and “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” [43] In the 1950s, these shows were big business; the albums for all three sat high on the Billboard Charts at various times. [44] And although these three shows offer themselves for the audience’s approval in silence during the curtain call, accepting the purer gift relationship suggested by Ridout, they immediately assume an actively commercial stance as the audience files out of the theater. Thus, if a show’s representational economy recedes in the final moments of a performance event, through the use of bow and exit music, the economics of representation come to the fore. Musical Labor Exit music—and some bow music—thus faces as much towards the audience as towards the actors. That is, if one regards bow and exit music’s “sparks of representation” (to use Ridout’s phrase) as fundamentally coloring the fictional world of the play, the economic imperatives that undergird these musical numbers project outwards, into the audience, now figured as consumers. As I suggested above, the naked commercial desires in bow and exit music differ meaningfully from the ghosted economic exchange in the non-musical curtain call, as theorized by Ridout. But the dual model I have described thus far for bow and exit music remains fundamentally the same as that theorized by Hawkes, Ball, States, and Ridout. There remains one significant element of the curtain call hinted at by Ball and States that I have not yet addressed: labor. Unlike non-musical curtain calls, curtain calls underscored by bow and exit music conspicuously divide labor between two groups of performers: actors and musicians. The usually invisible labor of technicians, not to mention the persistent but forgotten labor of countless other creative and administrative performers (house staff, casting agents, etc.), always ghosts the curtain call, and merits consideration in the general theory of curtain calls. But the case of musicians who play bow and exit music differs from that of backstage workers accustomed to having their labor go unacknowledged. In other circumstances, musicians can and do accept their own applause, not only for non-theatrical performances, but even in other categories of music drama such as opera. Silent curtain calls, by allowing on- and off-stage performers to rest together, equalize the labor of instrumentalists and stage performers. [45] Such unity becomes more apparent when compared to musical theater’s bow and exit musics, which undermine the integration of music and drama in the so-called integrated musical by so clearly dividing the laboring performers into two camps. During musical curtain calls, the actors transition towards their leisure time while the musicians continue to work. And in shows with exit music, a particularly speedy actor may be out the theater door before the musicians have played their final chord. Just as William Ball suggests that the order in which actors bow can impact the quality of their performances, James H. Laster, advising aspiring music directors, suggests that exit music’s liminality also informs its quality. A “young, inexperienced orchestra may feel that the exit music is not important,” Laster warns. “But they need to be informed that their job is not finished until the cut-off at the last note of the exit music.” [46] Steve Suskin, author of a book on Broadway’s orchestrators, hears not boredom or inattention, but rather joy in exit music. Embedded among the musicians for a performance of Sweeney Todd , Suskin explained the end of the show thus: Everybody leaves; everybody except the orchestra, which plays the exit music. But it is a lighthearted group of musicians playing now: the drama is over, the tension is gone, the spell is broken. It is now merely music. [The music director] gives the final cutoff, the music ends with a crisp button from the brass, and we file out of the pit. [47] Whether the musicians celebrate bow and exit music as a moment for relaxed improvisation or let their minds wander at the seemingly unimportant (and often unhearable, beneath applause and chatter) end of a long performance, the fundamental disparity remains: musicians continue their labor in the musical theater well after other performers have ceased their own work. And what of the labor that goes into creating bow and exit music? A show’s orchestrator and her staff traditionally select and arrange the bow and exit music, often only in the last moments of a show’s rehearsal process. Yet, while the final decision about such music occurs quite late, the tunes are frequently among the first written for the show because bow and exit music often derive from among a production’s “utility” arrangements, arrangements made during the rehearsal period to fulfill practical needs in the rehearsal room. As Robert Russell Bennett, the dean of musical theater orchestrators, explains, “You take three, four, or five of the principal melodies and arrange them (with the tune in its original form complete in each case) so that, at the direction of the conductor, they may be played” by any section of the orchestra at any volume. [48] Such utility arrangements provide placeholder music for scene changes and underscoring, as well as the overture, entr’acte, and the “Chaser, Exit or Outmarch.” [49] Each of these categories later receives “special treatment” as the production takes final form and as the orchestrator has time to focus on them individually. In Bennett’s general narrative of an orchestrator’s work, however, that time might arrive only during the final few preview performances. [50] Two points here deserve underlining. First, in bow and exit music the orchestrator and team of arrangers announce themselves as essential members in the vast peripheral, artisanal workforce that crafts a Broadway show. [51] Their work on bow and exit music enhances both the artistic value of the show, when bow and exit music addresses the play’s representational apparatus, and the production’s economic value, when the exit music helps inspire sales of recordings. Second, bow and exit music, though the last elements of a show in performance, appear very early in the production process (at least, in their form as utilities). This fact strongly differentiates bow and exit music from the non-musical curtain call, which directors rarely think about until dress rehearsals. Although the production staff might settle on bow and exit music quite late in the process, the tunes from among which the staff chooses, far from being an afterthought, literally underscore the show’s rehearsals. The practice of relying on utilities codifies those melodies as essential to the entire structure of the show: they are the beginning (overture), middle (entr’acte), and end (exit music), well before the company sets the rest of the show. As a result, songs written early, songs that captured a relatively primitive conception of a show, occupy a large sonic space in the rehearsal period. [52] Fundamentally, utilities reveal how much work a show’s purely orchestral music does for the rest of a production. It is no coincidence that utilities are so called: they are, first and foremost, useful. Even if they later sound differently (or disappear entirely), they noisily—and, paradoxically, inconspicuously—underscore a significant portion of the production process. The utilities that become bow and exit music may end up as the musical last word or as an afterthought, but they are often also part of a show’s origin. Take a Bow This article has considered how bow and exit music affect our interpretation of the musical theater, and particularly how these musical practices amplify the often discordant relationship between the musical’s artistic and commercial aspirations. Like the curtain call that bow music underscores, bow and exit music occupy a strange border at the end of the theatrical event and near the end of the performance event. Despite a relatively narrow set of formal types available for bow and exit music, productions have used those musics to reinforce the show’s theme, to revise the audience’s understanding of character, and to promote the show’s commercial afterlife in recordings. A longer analysis of a specific show might benefit from exploring more the choice of songs (particularly in relationship to the overture), and the details of tempi (usually moderate to fast), meter (usually duple), or arrangement (usually the same key and orchestration as an earlier iteration). One might also consider bow and exit music as utilized by a particular orchestrator, composer, director, etc. With a more comprehensive data set, one might explore how bow music changes from era to era, or from subgenre to subgenre. As I hope this sketch of bow and exit music’s functions makes clear, musicals do not cease making meaning when the curtain falls, but actively and consciously continue to do so until the moment that an audience member steps out of hearing range of the orchestra. In other words, music performs in the musical theater longer than any other medium. And when we listen to that music, we might have to reinterpret some shows. To conclude with one example, consider The Pajama Game , the Richard Adler and Jerry Ross musical of 1954. In a recent history of the musical theater, Larry Stempel accuses George Abbott, the show’s original director and co-book writer, of avoiding politics. The plot concerns a struggle between management and labor at a pajama factory, a struggle that constrains the romance between a foreman and a shopworker/union leader. As Stempel notes, the show opened in the midst of the McCarthy hearings, a climate not amenable to claims for strong workers’ rights. Citing Abbott’s own statement denying any “propaganda” in the show, Stempel declares Pajama Game “militantly apolitical,” with “no serious intent of any kind.” [53] As far as most of the show goes, Stempel is right, the politics are tepid. Even the finale plays up romantic fun rather than politics, with a version of the title song that accompanies a fashion parade, culminating with the appearance of the leads, Babe and Sid wearing only a pajama top and bottom, respectively. That number also functions as a curtain call; the principals appear in the appropriate order. The entire company then sings the title song’s chorus. [54] This is charming, but, as Stempel complains of the entire show, emphasizes the romantic plots at the expense of the management-labor conflict. But then the company sings a different tune. They do not sing the ballad “Hey There,” a hit for Rosemary Clooney in 1954. [55] They do not sing the catchy love duet “There Once Was a Man.” They do not sing the jazzy “Steam Heat,” which featured iconic Bob Fosse choreography for Carol Haney. No, they sing none of the show’s hits. Rather, the entire cast sings a march in six-eight time, which, while certainly energetic, is not memorable enough to sell an album. They sing the show’s rallying labor cry: Seven and a half cents doesn’t buy a helluva lot, Seven and a half cents doesn’t mean a thing, But give it to me every hour Forty hours every week That’s enough for me to be Livin’ like a king. [56] This number’s return, at this moment, is a striking political gesture, a reminder that behind the play’s love stories lurks a serious economic struggle. This message, moreover, occupies what is traditionally the most overtly commercial moment in musical theater. We might, then, hear this bow music’s explicit turn to economics as a wry wink at the function of bow and exit music itself. The number says in all seriousness that economic circumstances are at the root of contemporary life, even as it asks you to buy the recording when the performance ends, that is, when the music finally stops. [57] References [1] Diegetic music forms part of the narrative world of a play; characters within the narrative frame can hear it and/or produce it. Only the audience hears non-diegetic music. For example, in The Pajama Game , “Steam Heat” is a diegetic number, a literal performance in which three characters dance and sing for their fellow union members. “Hey There” is non-diegetic: the character Sid Sorokin does not sing; the actor does. [2] Meredith Willson, But He Doesn’t Know the Territory (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 153-154. [3] Phil Powrie and Guido Heldt, “Introduction: Trailers, Titles, and End Credits,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 8 (2014), 111. [4] See, for example, Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Harburg, The Broadway Musical: Collaboration in Commerce and Art (New York: NYU Press, 1993) and Steven Adler, On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). [5] Michael V. Pisani, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London & New York (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014). [6] For a theory of the boundaries between the theatrical and the performance event, see Richard Schechner, “Drama, Script, Theater, Performance,” in Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 2003). Scholars of film titles and end credits seem to prefer Gérard Genette’s language of “paratext” to describe those musical practices. See Powrie and Heldt, “Introduction: Trailers, Titles, and End Credits,” 111-112. [7] Terence Hawkes, “Opening Closure,” Modern Drama 24 (1981), 355-356. Hawkes offers the example of a pimple on an actor’s nose as an unintentional element that audience members might “be prepared to acknowledge, interpret, and even perhaps to applaud.” [8] Hawkes, “Opening Closure,” 356. [9] William Ball, A Sense of Direction (New York: Drama Publishers, 1980), 143. [10] Ball, A Sense of Direction , 145. Ball cites other plays such as Othello , The Three Sisters , and The Man Who Came to Dinner that pose similar problems in balancing star supporting turns against the work of a relatively unsympathetic lead. [11] Ball, A Sense of Direction , 145. [12] Ball, A Sense of Direction , 146. Dressing room assignments are, Ball notes, similarly loaded status symbols for actors, and, like curtain calls, can affect an actor’s work on stage. [13] Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 199. [14] States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms , 203. [15] States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms , 203. [16] Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 162. [17] See Annette Davison, “The End is Nigh: Music Postfaces and End-Credit Sequences in Contemporary Television Serials,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 8 (2014) for an explanation of this practice’s origins and uses in The Sopranos . [18] Davison, “The End is Nigh,” 197. Davison observes that some shows have begun linking end credit music more closely to the preceding episode’s “sound world” (212). [19] George Gershwin, Du Bose Heyward, and Ira Gerswhin, Porgy and Bess (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Gershwin Publishing Corporation/Chappell & Co., Inc., 1935); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Carousel (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1945); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Allegro (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1948); Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins, West Side Story (Piano Vocal Score) (New York: G. Schirmer, Inc. and Chappell & Co., Inc., 1959). [20] Cole Porter, Kiss Me, Kate (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappell & Co., Inc., 1967), No. 24a “Grand Finale—Last Curtain.” [21] Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Babes in Arms (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappell & Co., Inc., 1960), No. 23 Curtain Calls; John Kander and Fred Ebb, Cabaret (Piano-Vocal Score) Times Square Music Publications Company, 1968), Curtain Calls (No. 29); Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Damn Yankees (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1957), No. 33 Heart (Bows). [22] Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1953), “The Happy Ending.” [23] Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, My Fair Lady (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappel & Co., 1958), Music for Curtain Calls (No. 27); Meredith Willson, The Music Man (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1958), Curtain Call Music (No. 26); Stephen Sondheim, A Little Night Music (Piano-Vocal Score) Revelation Music Publishing Corp. & Rilting Music, Inc., 1974), Bows (No. 33). [24] Stephen Sondheim, Follies (Piano-Vocal Score) Range Road Music Inc., Quartet Music Inc., Rilting Music Inc., and Burthen Music Compnay, Inc., 1971), No. 20 Bows. [25] Jule Styne, Funny Girl (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappell-Styne, Inc. and Wonderful Music Corp., 1964), Curtain and Exit Music (No. 30). [26] Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, Fiddler on the Roof (Piano-Vocal Score) Sunbeam Music Corp., 1965), Music for Bows (No. 34). [27] Mitch Leigh, Joe Darion, and Dale Wasserman, Man of La Mancha (Piano-Vocal Score) , Revised ed. (Greenwich, CT: Cherry Lane Music Co., 1965), Bows (No. 30). The show does, however, conclude No. 31 Exit Music with “The Impossible Dream.” [28] Joseph Church, Music Direction for the Stage: A View from the Podium (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 240. [29] James Kirkwood, Michael Bennett, and Nicholas Dante, A Chorus Line (New York: Applause Books, 1995), 145. [30] Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson, Pippin (Piano-Vocal Score) CPP/Belwin, Inc., 1988). [31] Pippin, His Life and Times , dir. David Sheehan (Tulsa: VCI Home Video, 2000), DVD. [32] Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson, Pippin: A Musical Comedy (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1975), 83. [33] Leonard Bernstein et al., Candide (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Schirmer Books, 1976), Bows (No. 22). The printed score includes stage directions and dialogue from the Prince production. Those directions indicate that, when the curtain rises after the finale, “ the COMPANY pours out onto the ramps [around the seating area] as the PRINCIPALS take their bows in the order of their precedence to the following music ” (230). Bracketed character names above particular measures in the score indicate when in the number each character appears. The score of the original production included no bow music (Leonard Bernstein, Lillian Hellman, and Richard Wilbur, Candide (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: G. Schirmer, 1958)), while the authorized Boosey & Hawkes edition (Leonard Bernstein, Hugh Wheeler, and Richard Wilbur, Candide (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Jalni Publications, Inc. and Boosey & Hawkes, 1994)) does include No. 28 Bows. That number appears to be the final section of the Overture (bars 231-287), minus ten bars of melody from the upper woodwinds. [34] A film documents this production’s incarnation at the Royal National Theatre in London. Oklahoma! , dir. Trevor Nunn (Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2003), DVD. [35] Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, actor Shuler Hensley’s performance as Jud was exceptionally well received. Hensley received multiple awards for his performance, including the Olivier, Tony, and Drama Desk Awards for Supporting Actor in a Musical. “Awards,” Oklahoma! (2002), Internet Broadway Database, http://ibdb.com/production.php?id=12938, accessed 26 May 2015. [36] Andrea Most, “‘We Know We Belong to the Land’: The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! ,” PMLA 113, no. 1 (1998), 79. [37] Derek Miller, “‘Underneath the Ground’: Jud and the Community in Oklahoma! ,” Studies in Musical Theatre 2, no. 2 (2008). [38] Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma! (New York: Williamson, 1943), Finale Ultimo (No. 29). [39] Ridout, Stage Fright , 162, 164. [40] George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Guy Bolton, and John McGowan, Girl Crazy (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: New World Music Corp., 1954), Final II (No. 25); Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and John O’Hara, Pal Joey (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Chappell & Co., 1962), Curtain Calls (I Could Write a Book); Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and George Abbott, The Boys from Syracuse (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Chappell & Co., 1965), No. 20 Curtain Music. [41] As one biographer explains, “Barbra agreed to go into the studio and record [‘People’] as a single. But since Capitol Records, not Columbia, was to record the cast album, Columbia executives were reluctant to do anything to promote Funny Girl . In the end, they agreed to release the single only if ‘People’ was on the B side of the record. Columbia would do little to promote the song, instead focusing their efforts on the A side, ‘I Am Woman.’” Christopher Anderson, Barbra: The Way She Is (New York: William Morrow, 2006), 119. Despite Columbia’s lack of interest, that single spent 12 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number five. Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 1986). [42] Stephen Citron, The Musical: From the Inside Out (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), 257. The author notes, even more practically, that up-tempo exit music also “facilitate[s] clearing the aisles” more quickly. [43] Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, South Pacific (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1949), Exit Music (No. 49); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, The King and I (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1951), Exit Music (No. 46); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, The Sound of Music (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1960), No. 47 Exit Music. “Some Enchanted Evening” spent five weeks at number one for Perry Como (his B side, “Bali Ha’i,” hit number five), while also reaching the top 10 on recordings by Bing Crosby, Jo Stafford, Frank Sinatra, Ezio Pinza (the song’s originator in his role as Emile de Becque), and Paul Weston. Whitburn, Pop Memories . [44] South Pacific appeared on the pop charts at number seven on 21 May 1949; number one was Kiss Me, Kate . Within two weeks, South Pacific was the best-selling popular music LP in the country, where it remained for 69 weeks, ultimately spending 400 weeks on the top charts. Laurence Maslon, The South Pacific Companion (New York: Fireside, 2008), 153. The King and I performed the least well, hovering around number four (for both 75s and 33s) in summer and fall 1951. The Sound of Music spent 276 weeks on Billboard’s Top 200, including 16 weeks at number one. Joel Whitburn, The Billboard Albums , 6th ed. (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 2006). [45] I sense some condescension in how conductors accept audience accolades on behalf of the orchestra, particularly when the conductor joins the actors or singers on stage, leaving the musicians in the pit below. The disparity between conductor and instrumentalist seems slightly less wide in musicals, even if the conductor bows quickly for the audience during the bow music, perhaps because such a gesture permits the orchestra a fleeting moment of performance without the conductor’s guidance. Or, as one writer makes the same point negatively: “Providing the playing of the bow music will not fall apart if the conductor stops beating time, he can acknowledge [the actors’ pointing at the orchestra during bows] by turning and bowing to the audience.” James H. Laster, So You’re the New Musical Director!: An Introduction to Conducting a Broadway Musical (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2001), 146. [46] Laster, So You’re the New Musical Director! , 127. [47] Steven Suskin, The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 289. Broadway music director Joseph Church affirms Suskin’s view that exit music achieves an “informality” that “reflects the relaxation of the theater experience in its closing moments.” Church, Music Direction for the Stage , 240. [48] Robert Russell Bennett, Instrumentally Speaking (Melville, NY: Belwin-Mills Publishing Corp., 1975), 107. [49] Bennett, Instrumentally Speaking , 107. Bennett suggests that, among these standard orchestral numbers, only the overture regularly merits careful attention, and not much care at that. Even a “fancy permanent” or “New York overture,” as Bennett wryly calls it, earns little more than a single orchestral read-through before opening night. A 1951 New Yorker profile of Bennett opens describing the composition of The King and I ’s overture, completed mere hours before the first tryout in New Haven. Herbert Warren Wind, “Another Opening, Another Show,” The New Yorker (1951), 46. Today, overtures have become quite scarce, according to Joseph Church. Church, Music Direction for the Stage , 239. [50] Bennett, Instrumentally Speaking , 111. Conductor Rob Berman recently affirmed that, while “composers might have some input” in choosing exit music, the selection derives usually from among the utilities. Exit music remains “one of the last pieces of music created for a show.” Robert Simonson and Kenneth Jones, “Ask Playbill.com: A Question About Exit Music and Musicals,” Playbill.com , http://www.playbill.com/features/article/ask-playbill.com-a-question-about-exit-music-at-musicals-187760 . [51] Suskin, Sound of Broadway Music provides an excellent account of orchestrators and arrangers, who occupy the strange liminal space between creative artistry and technical labor that defines so much backstage work. [52] The situation differs, of course, for revivals, for which the score already exists. In such cases, the production staff may have even more creative energy to expend on overtures or bow and exit music, as evidenced by the Candide and Oklahoma! revivals discussed above. [53] Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (New York: Norton, 2010), 424. [54] Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, The Pajama Game (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1955), No. 25 “The Pajama Game—Closing.” [55] “Hey There” spent 24 weeks on Billboard ’s “Honor Roll of Hits” (issues of 24 July 1954 to 1 January 1955), reaching number one in the 2 October 1954 issue (survey week ending 22 September) and remaining there through the issue of 13 November (survey week ending 3 November), for seven weeks at the top. Another song from the show, “Hernando’s Hideaway,” spent 18 weeks in the top twenty (issue of 29 May 1954 to 25 September 1954), but never reached number one. The “Honor Roll of Hits” combines sales of recordings and sheet music with juke box and radio performances. [56] Adler and Ross, The Pajama Game , No. 25a “Seven and a Half Cents—Reprise.” [57] For a list of piano-vocal scores consulted, many of which are also cited in the body of the essay, see my personal website, http://visualizingbroadway.com/broadway/bow_and_exit_music_table.html . Footnotes About The Author(s) Derek Miller is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University where he teaches courses in theater history and dramatic literature. His articles on theatrical and musical performance have appeared in publications including Theatre Journal and Studies in Musical Theatre . His book, Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770-1911 , is under contract with Cambridge University Press. More information at scholar.harvard.edu/dmiller . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue May Irwin American Musical Theater Musical Theatre Books New York's Yiddish Theater Chinese Looks Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project On Bow and Exit Music Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Zach Dailey Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Zach Dailey By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF BROADWAY BODIES: A CRITICAL HISTORY OF CONFORMITY. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. What exactly is a “Broadway body?” This is the question central to Ryan Donovan’s timely 2023 monograph Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Published in a new era of “miracle” cures and adaptive assistance technology juxtaposed with the body-positivity movement circulating via social media, Donovan’s book situates itself firmly in the middle of this conversation. Well-researched and readable, this tome contributes to the continually growing body of work at the intersection of performance studies and greater cultural studies, namely race, queer, gender, disability, and fat studies. Early in his introduction, Donovan defines what he means by a “traditional” Broadway body: “the hyper-fit, muscular, tall, conventionally attractive, exceptionally able triple-threat performer (one highly skilled in acting, dancing, and singing)” (4). In defining this term, Donovan is not endorsing this definition , but rather critically establishing what he wants to interrogate: how did this body type become the stereotypical Broadway body? As Donovan points out, this issue is not simply a social one. On the contrary, the proliferation of a Broadway body grounds labor disputes: getting consistent work is how actors survive in this business. By being constantly disqualified due to physical characteristics, the canonization of the Broadway body has created a sizeable socioeconomic problem in our industry. Donovan highlights these central issues through interviews with working actors, critiquing casting calls, and analyzing theatrical texts and performances. After defining the Broadway body, Donovan parses that definition through lenses of size, sexuality , and ability. In the book’s first chapter, Donovan analyzes the megahit musical A Chorus Line (1975). Here, the author considers how the original production of this show developed into a global commercial phenomenon that required triple-threat performers to keep the machine going for its thirty-year production history. Donovan argues that the casting of A Chorus Line is where this idea of a “Broadway body” originated, since all performers in this show had to be able to sing, dance, and act with the best of them. To illustrate how formative A Chorus Line ’s casting policies were, the case studies of the ensuing chapters of this book examine Broadway productions post- Chorus Line . Donovan’s next two chapters form a section titled ‘Size'. In Chapter 2, which considers Dreamgirls (1981), the author postulates how the body of a character’s original actor affects the future casting of said role, centering the character Effie White and the fat body of original performer Jennifer Holliday. Holliday’s performance and body cast such large shadows that future actresses of the role wore fat suits, despite the character not needing to have a fat body. In Chapter 3, Donovan considers the casting of fat women on Broadway, with his main case study being the roles of Tracy Turnblad and Motormouth Maybelle in Hairspray (2002). Hairspray ’s producers required actors to literally “weigh-in” weekly and attend boot camps before they were cast. These two chapters illustrate Donovan’s methodological approach to his central question, simultaneously dissecting the texts of a Broadway production and examining the conforming machine of Broadway casting. The author notes how “standardized” bodies are enforced and argues for the dismantling of such enforcement. Broadway Bodies ’s next section considers ‘Sexuality’. While the relevance of sexuality in a project dedicated to the politics of casting and bodily appearance may not be immediately apparent, Donovan contends that the casting of straight or closeted actors in queer parts reinforces embodied conformity. Chapter 4’s case study of La Cage aux Folles (1983) questions the politics of the queer affectations performed by the show’s two heterosexual leads alongside the burgeoning AIDS crisis that decimated much of the cast. While La Cage may have registered as an important piece of theatre for the gay pride movement, the liberation espoused by critics and the media at its Broadway premiere was undercut by the fact that the gay couple onstage was played by Gene Barry and George Hearn, actors who were decidedly not gay. Chapter 5 further addresses LGBTQ+ representation in theatre through the 1990s and 2000s, accenting boundaries broken by openly queer actors. While the number of queer roles has grown exponentially over the last forty years— not to mention that openly queer actors have played straight romantic leads to great acclaim for decades— many mainstream LGBTQ+ roles are crafted with stereotypes in mind, further reinforcing bodily conformity on Broadway, argues the author. While Donovan described the Broadway body as “hyper-able,” his last section instead highlights spectrums of ‘Ability’ found in both actors and their roles. Chapter 6, for example, documents and interrogates Deaf West’s 2015 Broadway revival of Spring Awakening. Featuring d/Deaf actors and hearing actors working in tandem to create roles, Donovan states that this landmark production illustrated a level of inclusion that Broadway strives to employ yet rarely does. After all, Broadway is a commercial venture, and while Deaf West’s Spring Awakening was a critical darling, the show fiscally faltered. In his final chapter, Donovan considers the long history of disabled characters, from Porgy in Porgy and Bess to Farquaad in Shrek , being played in “crip face” by non-disabled actors. Donovan contrasts this bodily erasure with the rise of disabled Broadway stars, namely Ali Stoker and her Tony Award-winning performance as Ado Annie in the 2019 revival of Oklahoma! While Broadway rarely puts its money where its mouth is regarding disability inclusion, Donovan portends that Stoker’s celebrity may mark a new beginning for casting and non-conformity. Donovan concludes his book by documenting four activist groups who are working to change casting practices on Broadway, as well as by highlighting the 2022 Olney Theatre Center production of Beauty and the Beast that cast the romantic leads against type, signaling a potential shift in representational and production practices. As a reader, I greatly appreciate how Donovan opens his book with a personal narrative regarding his time as a musical theatre dancer, specifically noting how his height and size were cast as barriers to employment. A person’s relationship with their body is an extremely personal one, a concept that Donovan takes to heart throughout this book. Through his personal lens and insightful case studies, Donovan successfully illustrates that casting reflects more than just a theatrical decision – it reflects and shapes societal norms. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ZACH DAILEY is the Assistant Professor of Theatre History at the University of Houston-Downtown. His research interests include regionality on the commercial American stage, fatness in performance, and non-performative internet/social media movements. His research has been published in Theatre Annual , and he has presented at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Comparative Drama Conference, among others. Professionally, he is a director, dramaturg, and actor. He received his PhD from the Fine Arts Doctoral Program at Texas Tech 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 Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. 2024 Festival See the full lineup of films at this year's festival below. A selection of films will be screened in-person at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center whilst others will be available to watch online May 16th onwards, for a period of three weeks. SEE IN-PERSON SCHEDULE Online, In-Person "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Online Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) Online Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Online / In-Person I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Online, In-Person MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films Online / In-Person ORESTEIA Carolin Mader In-Person SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa Online The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine Online The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula Online Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith Online "talk to us" Kirsten Burger In-Person Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Online GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Online, In-Person Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Online / In-Person Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover In-Person QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Online, In-Person Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler Online The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard Online The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Online next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Online BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon Online / In-Person Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska In-Person Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Online Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre Online, In-Person Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Online / In-Person Red Day Besim Ugzmajli Online Snow White Dr.GoraParasit In-Person The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Online / In-Person WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou Online / In-Person Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong In-Person ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller Online Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter Online Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade Online, In-Person My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville Online / In-Person Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 Online The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski Online / In-Person The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Online / In-Person Wo/我 Jiemin Yang In-Person Screenings at the Segal Center Find it on Google Maps (365 5th Ave, New York) Thursday May 16 6:00 -7:40 PM Queendom by Agniia Galdanova 7:50 – 8:50 PM Maria Klassenberg by Tomasz Śliwiński and Magda Hueckel (World Premiere) RSVP Day 1 Friday May 17 6:00 – 7:00 PM Genocide and Movements by Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos and Luis Carlos de Alencar 7:00 – 8:00 PM Swing & Sway by Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa 8:00 – 9:30 PM Making of Pinocchio by Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill RSVP Day 2 Saturday May 18 11:05 AM – 12:05 AM Who is Eugenio Barba by Magdalene Remoundou 12:10 - 2:15 PM Schlingensief: A Voice That Shook the Silence by Frieder Schlaich 2:20 - 3:50 PM ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED by Claudia Muller 4:00 – 5:51 PM Dancing Pina by Florian Heinzen-Ziob RSVP Day 3 Monday May 20 2pm – 3:30 PM Die Kinder der Toten by Kelly Copper & Pavol Liška - Nature Theater of Oklahoma 3:35 – 5:20 PM Viewing of selected short films from the festival lineup Red Day by Besim Ugzmajli (15 Mins), Interstate by Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can (6 Mins), Wo/我 by Jiemin Yang (11 Mins), I AM NOT OK by Gabrielle Lansner (12 Mins), MUSE by Pete O'Hare / Warehouse Films (10 Mins), ORESTEIA by Carolin Mader (6 Min), "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper by Ellen Callaghan (6 Mins), Snow White by Dr.GoraParasit (18 Mins), The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit by Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula (23 Mins) 5:20 – 6:40 PM Chinoiserie Redux by Ping Chong, Kristina Varshavskaya 6:45 – 7:45 PM Revolution 21 by Martyna Peszko (US Premiere) 7:50 – 9:30 PM The Hamlet Syndrome by Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosolowski RSVP Day 4 About The Festival The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. The 2024 festival is co-curated by Frank Hentschker and Tomek Smolarski, and supported by Gaurav Singh Nijjer on digital design. The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. From its inaugural edition in 2015 to its present-day hybrid avatar, The Segal Film Festival for Theatre and Performance (FTP) has served as a platform for recorded works that span the length and breadth of the performing arts. Festival Founder and Executive Director of the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, Frank Hentschker shares his inspiration for creating the festival: “Film and digital media are an integral part of theatre and performance. I am surprised that there is not a film festival out there right now focusing on theatre and performance. I thought ‘why not create one’?” In the time before Corona, the Segal Film Festival had evolved into the premier US event for new film and video work focusing on theatre and performance. Its mission was to invite experimental and established theatre makers to present work created for the screen – not filmed archival recordings – to audiences and industry professionals from around the world. Now, after a year and a half of digital and hybrid theatre offerings, the festival must take on a new meaning. The festival has held on to its mission of being a free and open-to-all event accessible to everyone. The 7th edition of the festival was held digitally in March 2022, and featured 80 films from 30 countries. For queries, feedback and any more information get in touch with us at segalfilmfestival@gmail.com Meet The Team Tomek Smolarski Co-Curator Tomek Smolarski is Film and Performing Arts Curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York, with over 20 years of experience in production of international cultural events and he has extensive knowledge in cultural diplomacy. He initiated and executed projects with partners all over the US such as BAM, MoMA, Film at Lincoln Center, Museum of the Moving Image, Anthology Film Archives, NYU Skirball, Abrons Arts Center, Martin E. Segal Theater Center, La Mama Theater, Joe's Pub, RedCat, Odyssey Theater, Berkley Arts Museum and Pacific Film Archives, Chicago Cultural Center and many others. Gaurav Singh Nijjer Web and Digital Producer Gaurav Singh Nijjer is a theatre-maker, creative technologist and designer whose artistic works explore technology and media in live performance. He is one half of the Indian performing arts collective Kaivalya Plays, and also works as a freelance artist and arts manager with collectives in India and abroad, currently as Digital and Web Producer at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Centre CUNY. He is a former German Chancellor Fellow and a Chevening scholar. He trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Apart from theatre, Gaurav also works as a freelance marketing, design and creative consultant for diverse organizations. Frank Hentschker Co-Curator Frank Hentschker, who holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the now legendary Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, Germany, came to the Graduate Center in 2001 as program director for the Graduate Center’s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and was appointed to the central doctoral faculty in theatre in 2009. Currently executive director and director of programs at the Segal Center, Hentschker has transformed the center into the nation’s leading forum for public programming in international and U.S. theatre and theatre studies; each year, he curates and produces more than forty events—staged readings, lecture-demonstrations, symposia, works-in-progress, and conversations with theatre scholars, theatrical luminaries, and emerging voices in the international, American, and New York theatre scenes. Among the vital events and series he founded at the Segal Center are the World Theatre Performance series; the annual fall PRELUDE festival, which features more than twenty New York–based theatre companies and playwrights; and the PEN World Voices Playwrights Series. Hentschker also led CUNY’s nineteen performing arts centers in founding the CUNY–Performing Arts Consortium (C–PAC), producing the consortium’s first joint festival in 2009. Hentschker edited the MESTC publications Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake, Seven Works for the Theatre (2009) and New Plays from Spain (2013), and he served as president of the board of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art from 2005 to 2009. Before coming to the Graduate Center, Hentschker founded and directed DISCURS, the largest European student theatre festival existing today; he acted as Hamlet in Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine, directed by the playwright; performed in the Robert Wilson play The Forest (music by David Byrne); and worked as an assistant for Robert Wilson for many years. Producer, General Operations Manager Teresa Soraka Next Generation Fellow Nurit Chinn

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel By Samer Al-Saber Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF Amer Hlehel as Basel in Hoota, directed and designed by Amir Nizar Zuabi. Photo credit: Saeed Qaq. Courtesy of Amer Hlehel. HOOTA . By Amer Hlehel. Directed and designed by Amir Nizar Zuabi. Produced by Qadita and Sard, Haifa. Staged at Ramallah Municipality Theatre for the 14 th annual Wein a Ramallah Festival. Aug 11, 2023. Reviewed by Samer Al-Saber, Stanford University As Palestinian audiences have come to expect from actor and author Amer Hlehel, his latest one-person performance, Hoota , draws spectators into a journey of expansive storytelling and engaging theatricality, marking crucial political turning points and personal dilemmas through a conflictual individual history that stands in for a greater human experience. The play’s gut-wrenching story transcends its protagonist to communicate the meaning of factionalism in war-torn regions, where the flow of violence begets more violence, and the cycle of armed operations turns into its own inescapable cause for existence. Individuals find themselves caught in crossfires that force them to join the nearest militia to protect themselves. New groups emerge to liberate territories only to be taken by other groups, one overcoming the other, while innocent populations suffer conditions outside their control. The meaning of this play emerges in the protagonist Basel’s running in a flow of political and military currents that are beyond his understanding, until it is no longer possible to run. Amer Hlehel as Basel in Hoota, directed and designed by Amir Nizar Zuabi. Photo credit: Saeed Qaq. Courtesy of Amer Hlehel. Amer Hlehel as Basel in Hoota, directed and designed by Amir Nizar Zuabi. Photo credit: Saeed Qaq. Courtesy of Amer Hlehel. The play opens with Basel as an eighth grader who attempts to impress the students in his class and the girls in his neighborhood by conquering the deep hole, Hoota , that lies just outside his village. His gamble o n this dangerous once-in-a-lifetime adventure leads to immeasurable joy, success, fame, gossip, and consequences. But Basel’s childhood of lovingly memorized poetry , folktales, childish behavior, and village rumors quickly becomes a nostalgic memory as a war overtakes his region—which is unnamed, standing in for devastation in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, and Eastern Europe. As Basel grows older, he identifies the contemporaneous historical junctures that mark battle-ravaged sites, while maintaining the anonymity of his village, thus turning Basel into an ‘everyman’ wrecked by continuous destruction and unending rebellion. The protagonist finds himself in the midst of fighters, more fighters, other fighters, and then newfangled fighters who become different fighters; he participates or not, as needed to survive. Amer Hlehel as Basel in Hoota, directed and designed by Amir Nizar Zuabi. Photo credit: Saeed Qaq. Courtesy of Amer Hlehel. The genius of the play manifests in Hlehel’s commitment to the theoretical premise that vicious inter-population conflict, even when supported by imperial powers, requires, at its core, a human being to pull the trigger against another, both being in a similar position regardless of the ideology underpinning their political factions. He leaves the cause of war outside the journey and transcends the political and economic material circumstance to focus on the mechanism that sustains the destructive impulse: survival. Basel is handed a gun by an unknown faction while being shot at. He shoots back at an equally unknown faction. Once saved by a faction, he must belong and, at times, participate. The condition of war on the ground is an unrelenting current, and all factions want the same thing: to stop it. The author conceptualizes a world that is familiar to its audience, then applies a theoretical situation of “kill or be killed,” and allows the protagonist to respond to a constantly changing situation, where the power structure shifts, cycling through common political ideologies: Marxist, democratic, Leninist, radical, extremist, fundamentalist, and religious. The only common factor in all of them is individuals pulling the trigger of a handgun. Amer Hlehel as Basel in Hoota, directed and designed by Amir Nizar Zuabi. Photo credit: Saeed Qaq. Courtesy of Amer Hlehel. The production relies on Hlehel’s ability to function as narrator, holding the audience’s attention as the story moves from the village into the mire of factional warfare. Like a skilled storyteller, he directly addresses the audience, transitioning them from one event to another. As he grips the listener with a vocally consistent and clear narrative, he embodies the characters in each scene, characterizing them with individualized physical and vocal qualities and distinct personalities. Playing characters ranging from schoolchildren to determined militants, Hlehel presents people who interact during peaceful times, followed by unforgiving times of disorder and turmoil. Director and designer Nizar Amir Zuabi represents the hole with a cloth that captures dark ink-like liquid as the gory events of the play shed innocent and guilty blood alike. The uneven liquid progressively becomes a marker of time and increasing bloodshed, unpredictable but salient. Muaz Jubeh’s lights paint the white cloth with an expressive backdrop, matching the intensity of stage events and symbolically gesturing to various political factions as it changes color. Summer King’s suspenseful music tells the story of a world upended against its will, guiding the audience’s emotional state. Zuabi’s streamlined concept intelligently illustrates the world of the play while rightfully spotlighting the spine of this production, the solo performer. Amer Hlehel as Basel in Hoota, directed and designed by Amir Nizar Zuabi. Photo credit: Saeed Qaq. Courtesy of Amer Hlehel. Underneath Hoota’s stab at universality, the foundational Arab context of its makers will always haunt its viewer and its host theater. Most countries mentioned in the play are majority Arab. The play’s title, Hoota , gestures to a natural site in Syria’s Reqqa, where ISIS once discarded dead bodies. To an Arab audience that carefully follows the struggles of their people in neighboring countries over the past few decades, contextual references abound to news from the field, to stories of siblings on opposite sides and once-peaceful neighbors losing all trust. To a Palestinian audience that has witnessed the ebbs and flows of factional politics and the rise and fall of organized militias, Hoota strikes a deep emotional chord. To all audiences, the durable cycle of violence, by no means senseless but by all means cruelly self-fueling, is unmistakable. At the ‘Wein a Ramallah’ festival in Palestine, Hoota is a one-person performance accompanied by a mental newsreel from familiar civil wars and invasions and the ongoing destruction of Arab lives in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya. This newsreel also recalls Palestine’s painful past and present, Lebanon’s civil war, Syria’s recent carnage, and Iraq’s devastation over three decades. No doubt, this reel matches the image-world of the author and creative team. Amer Hlehel as Basel in Hoota, directed and designed by Amir Nizar Zuabi. Photo credit: Saeed Qaq. Courtesy of Amer Hlehel. The breathtaking seventy-minute performance at the Ramallah Municipality theater was met with a well-deserved standing ovation. Hlehel’s marathon performance departs from his previous one-person show, Taha (2014) , which carried a more moderate pace that relied on a combination of paced poetry and a dash of conceptual magical realism. Hoota begins as a recognizable tale but quickly spins out of control, leaving the audience and the performer breathless. The running motif and accompanying pattern of switching sides create a staccato rhythm: rapid, unstable, shifting, and unpredictable. The violence of the situation depicted on stage places the audience in the situation of the characters in the play, begging for it to end, only to be disappointed by another historical turn and the reinvigoration of the cycle. The structure and performance of the play thus match their spoken content like a burning star, its hellish blaze almost never-ending. To watch Hoota is to enter the nightmare and accept that it is ours: inescapably, we are both the killer and the corpse. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Samer Al-Saber is an Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. He is affiliated with the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at the Stanford Global Studies Division. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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 33 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Dan Venning ARTICLE Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Eileen Curley ARTICLE Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Michael P. Jaros ARTICLE Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Stephanie Lim ARTICLE Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Dohyun Gracia Shin BOOK REVIEW Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Jaclyn I. Pryor BOOK REVIEW Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Shane Strawbridge BOOK REVIEW Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Vivian Appler BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans INTRODUCTION Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Heather S. Nathans PROLOGUE Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Baron Kelly ARTICLE Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Bernth Lindfors ARTICLE Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Elizabeth M. Cizmar ARTICLE 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Eric M. Glover ARTICLE A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Isaiah Matthew Wooden ARTICLE A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Khalid Y. Long ARTICLE Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Lisa B. Thompson ARTICLE Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Michelle Cowin Gibbs ARTICLE Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation Olga Sanchez Saltveit ARTICLE “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green ARTICLE Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Heather S. Nathans INTERVIEW Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Nicole Hodges Persley INTERVIEW Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. DeRon S. Williams BOOK REVIEW Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. Erith Jaffe-Berg BOOK REVIEW The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Jasmeene Francois BOOK REVIEW Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. Kaitlin Nabors BOOK REVIEW The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Richard Hayes BOOK REVIEW Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Winners ERROL HILL AWARD WINNERS 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

Watch Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread by Jean-Baptiste Mathieu at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Constantly pushing the limits of the body and the laws of physics, tightrope walking is about navigating between acrobatic elegance and the earth's gravitational pull. The artist must master the skillful technique that enables them to move forward as if dancing, without losing their balance. It's a fascinating circus art, both for the performer and the audience.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Jean-Baptiste Mathieu Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Friday May 16th at 7:10pm and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Germany Language French Running Time 52 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film Constantly pushing the limits of the body and the laws of physics, tightrope walking is about navigating between acrobatic elegance and the earth's gravitational pull. The artist must master the skillful technique that enables them to move forward as if dancing, without losing their balance. It's a fascinating circus art, both for the performer and the audience. About The Artist(s) Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga was seven years old when she witnessed a tightrope walker crossing between two buildings — a moment of pure fascination that sparked a true calling. Now a star in her field, she is one of the rare women to perform more than 30 meters above the ground on a 300-meter-long wire. Tatiana lives with her three-year-old daughter and the artists from her company in a village nestled at the foot of the Cévennes mountains. The film follows their preparations for a spectacular challenge: crossing the Saint-Denis Canal toward the Stade de France. The feat Tatiana is about to accomplish is a technical, artistic, and human endeavor. Around her, an entire team is mobilized. In Saint-Denis, her partner and technical director Jan Naets is assisted by five riggers. For three days, he oversees the setup of a complex installation and trains those who will ensure the wire’s stability from the ground. Balancing grace and calculated risk, Tatiana captures everyone's attention. Each performance is an aerial and choreographic adventure, accompanied live by musicians playing melodies and rhythms that strike the perfect chord. It’s an undertaking that couldn’t happen without the help of many volunteers who take part in stabilizing the wire — a delicate operation requiring constant adaptability. Get in touch with the artist(s) cie@ciebasinga.com and follow them on social media https://www.jeanbaptistemathieu.fr/films-documentaires/decouverte-passions/tatiana-funambule-des-cevennes-au-stade-de-france https://www.facebook.com/CieBasinga/ 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

Allan Johnson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” Allan Johnson By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF The musical Pippin (1972), with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and book by Roger O. Hirson, famously employs an anarchic, metatheatrical narrative structure. As the actors are drawn deeper into the world of an inset play that they are performing, called Pippin: His Life and Times , the boundaries between their individual identities and their roles within the play begin to blur, highlighting the complicated interplay between self and performance and the complexity of filling or rejecting the social roles that one has inherited. This play-within-a-play recounts the story of Pippin, a fictionalized son of Charlemagne who goes on an episodic journey in search of the meaning of life. At the climax of the musical, the Leading Player and the other performers prepare Pippin for the ultimate “grand finale” in which he is expected to leap into a blazing fire as the climax to the play-with-a-play, and, in doing so, fulfill his presumed destiny. Faced with a dawning awareness of being manipulated by the performers around him, Pippin realizes that true fulfillment is not to be found in external validation and, instead, chooses a more authentic life away from the artifice of performance. In Bob Fosse’s original 1972 production, the musical ends with Pippin (both the actor embodying the role of “Pippin” and the now fully self-actualized character of Pippin) leaving the production to live a simple family life with his wife, Catherine, and stepson Theo. The Leading Player and troupe, exasperated by his defiance, remove the scenery, leaving Pippin, Catherine, and Theo alone on a bare stage in the musical’s final moment. In contrast, the 2013 Broadway revival directed by Diane Paulus introduced a revised ending in which Theo returns to the stage after Pippin and Catherine have exited. In this scenario, Theo is rejoined by the Leading Player and troupe, who now resume the musical with Theo in the lead role singing the opening of the iconic “Corner of the Sky.” The so-called “Theo Ending,” the most common choice of ending in professional productions today, including the 2021 Off West End revival directed by Stephen Dexter, reflects the cyclical nature of the hero’s journey. Despite the seemingly minor change that it creates in the overall structure of the work, its addition results in a necessary critical recalibration of the metatheatrical elements at play within the musical. To date, there has been surprisingly little academic discussion of Pippin nor consideration of the metatheatrical conceit employed in the musical’s conclusion, including both the original Fosse ending and the revised Theo ending. In The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz, Paul Laird merely refers to “the show’s ambiguous ending, when the Leading Player strips away the production elements.”(1) Robert Emmet Long describes the work somewhat unassumingly as “a concept musical in which the sense of estrangement in Pippin’s world makes a comment on our own contemporary one.”(2) Despite its innovative structure and thematic depth, Pippin has not received the scholarly attention it deserves, particularly when acknowledging its significant contributions to the development of metatheatrical techniques in contemporary musical theatre. Dissecting the implications of the “Theo Ending” underscores the critical importance of the recent revision, particularly how the “Theo Ending” revisits and reinvigorates the central theme of male psychosocial development, not only reshaping the resolution of the musical, but also shifting from the work’s comparatively static resolution to a new perspective on the evolving nature of masculine identity. One possible explanation for the emergence of the “Theo Ending” is that it makes the musical, for want of a better word, more “commercial.” Seen this way, it is more in tune with the trends in contemporary commercial musical theatre, which emphasize crowd-pleasing, satisfying conclusions, often accompanied by the reprise of the musical’s most widely popular number—in this case reprises of both “Corner of the Sky” and “Magic to Do.” This is at least partially true and, as I demonstrate below, Pippin has seen numerous updates and revisions since its inception. Additionally, the “Theo Ending” crucially brings into sharper focus the nature of the Leading Player as not simply an embodiment of Pippin’s ego or subconscious, or as a cypher for the forces of capitalist surveillance culture, but rather as the voice of the collective unconscious—what psychologist Carl Jung saw as the deepest and most perplexing layer of the psyche that unites all humans through a shared language of archetype and understanding. I argue that Pippin and Jungian theory can engage in a productive dialogue about the nature of male psychosexual development that enhances understanding of both without subordinating one to the other. As the son of King Charlemagne, Pippin struggles with the formidable shadow of his father, as well as the scheming of his stepmother, Fastrada and his half-brother, Lewis, who leave him trapped between the expectations of his class and his desire to find something more authentic and, perhaps ironically, something more “exceptional” than becoming Holy Roman Emperor. The metatheatrical techniques of the musical, further intensified and complicated by the “Theo Ending,” reflect the psychoanalytic process itself, particularly in the way they reveal the multi-layered, often contradictory aspects of the self. Viewed through this lens, the “Theo Ending” ultimately reflects a bolder and more daring approach to the metatheatrical contours of the work, while also serving as a poignant mirror to the masculine shadow and archetypes that underlie Pippin’s transformational journey, as well as Theo’s similar journey, which is set to follow his stepfather’s. The significance of the new ending lies in its reinforcement of the musical’s central thematic figuration: that the pursuit of extraordinary accomplishments, while enticing in youth, ultimately results in a debilitating lack of authenticity and connection to the world around oneself. By shifting the narrative focus to Theo in the final moments, this ending emphasizes that this struggle is not confined to the protagonist but is a recurring challenge across generations. Metatheatre in Pippin Hirson’s original book for Pippin (already an almost complete revision of a musical of the same name that Schwartz wrote while attending Carnegie Mellon University)(3) underwent a substantial metamorphosis under Fosse’s direction, which altered both the tone and narrative trajectory of the musical. Known for his penetrating and assertive directing style, Fosse left an indelible mark on the musical’s development, and his collaboration with Schwartz during the original production was marked by passionate disagreements and creative conflicts that continued to drive the development of the musical.(4) Fosse recreated the character of the Leading Player, originally known in a different form as the Old Man, after casting director Michael Shurtleff introduced him to actor Ben Vereen. Reshaping the role specifically for Vereen, Fosse transformed the Leading Player into the essential narrative fulcrum for the musical’s metadramatic layers.(5) Stuart Ostrow contends that Fosse’s addition of this character turned Schwartz’s work “from a sincere, naïve, morality play to an anachronistic cynical burlesque."(6) A further crucial alteration made by Fosse was a slight modification of the musical’s ending. In the original book, Pippin closes the show by declaring himself “trapped, but happy;” Fosse opted to eliminate the final two words, leaving Pippin “trapped” in a state of tantalizing ambiguity.(7) This directorial choice not only underlines the pervasive fear of being trapped by social expectations, which is woven into the revised narrative, but also challenges the convention of a happy marital resolution as the best and most desirable conclusion. Pippin might have found a wife, but that is no guarantee of his happiness. The work concludes on an ambiguous note regarding Pippin’s fate and the dynamics of desire, ambition, and the quest for fulfillment that he strives for but ultimately fails to achieve. The ending of Pippin has evolved over time, creating an enduring sense of ambiguity for critics and audiences regarding its significance and the role of the Leading Player in it.(8) As Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi describe, metadrama encompasses “theatricality, reflexivity, auto-referentiality, forms of theatrical illusion, or what is called play-within-the-play.”(9) This framework of metadrama introduces a sense of self-reflexivity and dramatic irony, a narrative deice that Yifen Beus acknowledges has early origins despite its seemingly postmodern ambiance and tone. (10) The use of metatheatricality in Pippin is emblematic of the form’s evolution over dramatic history, as the technique can be traced back to the works of early Greek playwrights of the fourth century BCE, including Euripides and Aristophanes.(11) In these classical Greek comedies, characters could be acutely aware of their role within the theatrical performance and frequently broke the fourth wall to address the audience directly, a dramatic tradition also notably employed by William Shakespeare in works such as Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream .(12) Closer to Pippin ’s time, the backstage musical films of the 1920s and 30s, including The Broadway Melody (1929), 42nd Street (1933), Footlight Parade (1933), and Dames (1934), interpolated the lives of performers into the performance itself, suggesting an equally resonant influence on the form of Pippin. This blurring of the boundaries between the world of the play and the real lives of the actors is a recurring theme in the history of musical theatre, including perhaps the most famous example of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (1948). The plot conceptually turns on the juxtaposition of reality and fiction as a theatre troupe stages an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew . In Porter’s musical, the interplay between the characters’ on-stage personalities and their off-stage struggles becomes a central thematic focus, a dynamic explored in darker and more sombre ways in later works such as A Chorus Line (1975) and Follies (1971). Iconic pieces of 1970s musical theatre, these two works drew not merely on the metadramatic mode employed in earlier musicals and musical movies, but also upon Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (or “alienation effect”) to challenge prevailing norms of dramatic representation that prompted audiences to engage with the material in a more introspective and critical way. By using methods such as direct address, visible stage mechanics, and deliberate breaking of the fourth wall, Brecht aimed to disrupt the passive consumption of theatre and instead promote a socially aware audience experience. More recent musicals such as Nic Doodson, Andrew Kay, and Ben Norris’s The Choir of Man (2017) have taken this self-reflexivity in a new direction that, in the twenty-first century, now seeks to engage rather than alienate or distance the audience. In it, the actors use their real names, and the book is updated with each successive cast, incorporating specific real-life details such as their birthplaces and family backgrounds into the narrative, blurring the line between the performers’ onstage personas and their authentic identities. Metatheatrical techniques witnessed a remarkable revival during the postmodern era. The Fantasticks (1960) and Man of La Mancha (1965) transpose the original metatextual elements of their source material—Edmund Rostand’s Les Romanesques (1894) and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605 and 1615)—into productions that first emerged during a time of significant social and cultural upheaval in the United States involving personal liberation, self-discovery, and the questioning of social norms. These works stand alongside Cabaret (1966), Hair (1967), Godspell (1971) and King of Hearts (1978) as part of a movement toward more experimental and thematically complex musicals that collectively began to push the boundaries of the genre—not only by moving away from the conventions of the book musical form but, in doing so, introducing political and social commentary in a way that was more explicitly daring than in earlier eras. Pippin ’s self-referential and metatheatrical approach elevates the act of performance to a central narrative device. With a conscious and continuous self-awareness within the narrative structure of the work, Pippin’s developmental journey is entirely dependent on the unfolding of that journey within the play-within-a-play structure. In this sense, Pippin represents a fusion of the long history of metatheatre with a new postmodern reckoning with the validity of historical narrative. More specifically – and in sharp distinction to The Fantasticks , Man of La Mancha , Cabaret , Hair , and Godspell – Pippin is an example of what Phillip Zapkin describes as “historiographic metatheatre . ”(13) Historiographic metatheatre refers to a type of performance that not only recounts an historical event, but also self-consciously examines the nature of historical representation itself and, in doing so, modulates and manipulates both the methods of the historian and the established historical record. Thus, works of historiographic metatheatre question the ways in which history is constructed and understood, often blurring the lines between fact and fiction, and reality and performance. Zapkin is drawing upon Linda Hutcheon’s influential definition of “historiographic metafiction,” defined by Hutcheon as fiction that “works to situate itself within historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction” by manipulating and challenging its own very nature as historical.(14) E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), a classic example of historiographic metafiction, weaves together the lives of three fictional families with historical figures such as J.P. Morgan, Harry Houdini, and Henry Ford, blending reality and fiction in a way that questions the traditional boundaries of historical storytelling and, through this, scrutinizes the history that America told of itself through the twentieth century. Doctorow’s Ragtime would later be adapted into Flaherty, Ahrens, and McNally’s Tony Award-winning musical of the same name, which led to the emergence of more historiographic metatheatre musicals into the twenty-first century, including Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015) and Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s Six (2017). The significance of these works inhere in their ability to reflect on the nature of historical storytelling itself, questioning and reshaping the way historical narratives are constructed and consumed. Both critical and popular successes, the works examine the interplay between historical facts and representation in the form of musical theatre, portraying both historical events and the processes through which they are remembered and interpreted. There is a long tradition of historical musicals that detail real events or the lives of individuals, such as Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s 1776 (1969) , Maury Yeston and Peter Stone’s Titanic (1997), and Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry’s Parade (1998) . But what establishes Pippin as an early frontrunner in the historiographic metatheatre tradition of Ragtime, Hamilton, and Six is its innovative use of metatheatricality to interrogate the nature of historical representation, personal identity, and, ultimately, the psychological forces that shape our understanding of both. Pippin stands apart by not only dramatizing historical moments or figures, but by using metatheatricality to explore the internal dynamics of its characters’ psyches. This self-referential technique places Pippin at the forefront of the historiographic metatheatre tradition, prefiguring later works that similarly use metatheatrical devices to explore and comment on the representation of historical figures and events, offering new perspectives on the past through the lens of contemporary performance. The events of the inset play, Pippin: His Life and Times , are set in the early Middle Ages: however, the period and context during which that story is told have varied considerably across productions. The original 1972 production broadly adhered to the eighth-century setting, with a group of itinerant miracle play performers set in an imaginary design tapestry that blended elements of eighth-century costumes with the flair and sensuality of twentieth-century vaudeville and burlesque. The effect was striking, and Tony Walton won a Tony Award for Best Scenic Design, while Patricia Zipprodt was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Costume Design. In many ways, this bold visual design served as a metaphorical reflection of the fragmentary nature of history and its retelling, visually representing the historiographic metatheatrical maneuvers of the play-within-a-play while emphasizing the musical’s attentiveness to themes more consistent with the sexual revolution of the late twentieth century. Later revivals, however, have made use of a number of innovative interpretive interventions in the staging of the musical’s metatheatrical narrative arc and the startling ending. The 2013 Broadway revival, directed by Diane Paulus, moved the setting of the inset play to the world of the early-twentieth-century circus, a rich terrain for examining tensions between external glamour and internal fulfillment, and the musical’s Off West End revival in 2021 was set in the 1967 Summer of Love. Staged as a protest storytelling circle that gathered to denounce war, this reinterpretation contextualiszd Pippin’s quest within the ethos of social upheaval created by the Vietnam War and the countercultural rebellion that emerged alongside it. In each of these interpretations, metatheatrical elements highlighted the permeability of the historical record: the traveling wonder play, the circus, and the countercultural hippie context each illustrate how the story of a young man’s growth toward individuation can adapt to different cultural, historical, and social contexts. In navigating the function and design of the play-within-a-play, directors and designers are confronted with the challenge of maintaining plausibility and coherence in the seeming chaos of the invented and at times contradictory narratives. At the heart of the metatheatrical dynamics of Pippin is the deliberate and artful dissolution of the boundaries between historical fact and narrative fiction. In reforming the historical account of Charlemagne and his eldest son Pippin (in reality, Pepin [c. 768 to 811]), Pippin tests the delicate balance between narrative authenticity and theatrical form. Charlemagne’s reign marked a pivotal moment in European history. Unlike his father, Pepin is mostly forgotten by the established historical record, largely because he was ultimately exiled, leading his younger brother Louis the Pious to become their father’s successor. The musical’s historiographical narrative artifice (embodied in the form of the Leading Player, who manipulates his constructed historical record), challenges both personal and collective historical narratives and, perhaps more provocatively, draws attention to the artifice of the historical record itself. As the putative director of the inset play, the Leading Player explicitly directs Pippin’s own developmental story in favor of spectacle, enticing him with a series of caricatured versions of “meaningful” pursuits: war, politics, and hedonistic sexual pleasure. The Leading Player’s cruelty and sadism trivialize the portrayal of events, such as in the Act I song “Glory,” which stylizes the horrors of war as a battle against the Visigoths, a historically inaccurate context as the Visigoths had already been largely defeated before Charlemagne’s reign. Here, the Leading Player reframes battle as an opportunity for personal glory, which relies only on the existence of an anonymous enemy. Fosse’s signature “Manson Trio” dance routine, which first appeared in the original production of this song, shows the Leading Player responding to the bloodshed with a stylized detachment and a parodically mechanical vaudeville dance that trivializes violence with jazz hands and bravado. His manipulation of these moments reduces complex, often violent historical events to consumable performance, emphasizing his control over the inset play and underscoring the performative nature of historical narrative. In her seminal work The Death of Character , Elinor Fuchs discusses the role of metatheatricality in disrupting narrative immersion, particularly in the reemergence in the 1930s of the mystery play in the symbolist works of playwrights such as Maurice Maeterlinck and August Strindberg. “The medieval mystery plays told the sacred history of the world,” Fuchs writes,. “The moralities, based not on history but on doctrine, recapitulated this universal form through a central figure’s progress toward salvation.”(15) Just as miracle plays used allegory to explore spiritual questions, Pippin employs its metatheatrical structure to interrogate contemporary notions of selfhood and identity rather than medieval concerns regarding the correct way to embody spiritual devotion and redemption. This shift brings with it a distinctly Jungian engagement with the psyche, and Pippin thus not only explores the nature of identity and selfhood but also enacts this process of individuation through the metatheatrical form. Pippin’s Individuation Embedded within the thematic tapestry of Pippin is the exploration of individuation through a quest for life’s meaning, a journey frequently hindered within the musical by Pippin’s pursuit of external validation. His search for purpose leads him through a series of episodic vignettes—he tries to find his purpose in war, hedonism, politics, love, and fatherhood. Each illuminates different facets of his personal and psychological journey toward what Jung called “individuation” the integration of different aspects of the self in order to achieve psychological wholeness. Jung explained that “the aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona, on the one hand and the suggestive power of primordial images on the other.”(16) Jung’s theories, particularly his concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes, are deeply rooted in his study of artistic and cultural artifacts. He believed that these artifacts, including myths, fairy tales, and religious narratives, contain symbols and motifs that reveal universal patterns of the human psyche. In their influential book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover , Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette highlight four of Jung’s twelve primary archetypes—the four named in the book’s title—which they identify as the essential functions of mature masculinity. The King archetype represents the benevolent and authoritative aspect of masculinity and embodies qualities such as leadership, responsibility, and wisdom. The Warrior archetype represents assertiveness, courage, and the ability to protect and fight for what is just. The Magician is associated with insight, knowledge, and transformative power and emphasises the importance of intellect and spiritual awareness. Finally, the Lover emphasizes the relational aspects of masculinity and represents sensitivity, emotional depth, and the capacity for intimate relationships,. Though Moore and Gillette’s work postdates Pippin and thus did not directly influence the original production, there are striking parallels between their archetypal framework and Pippin’s journey. In Pippin , the protagonist literally embodies the roles of King, Warrior, and Lover throughout his quest for meaning and, at various points in the musical, he also reflects the Magician archetype, particularly in his search for existential understanding and transformation. These symbols are manifestations of the collective unconscious, a shared reservoir of experience and knowledge that transcends individual consciousness. Jung believed that individuation entails a psychic journey of personal discovery in which the individual confronts and integrates his or her hidden or shadow aspects, those aspects of self, such as desires, fears, repressions and unresolved conflicts that have been pushed to the limits of our own awareness as a protective strategy for the ego. Pippin presents an allegory of this process. Following the opening number, “Magic to Do,” in which the Leading Player and ensemble remind audiences that history is not a singular, unchanging truth, but rather a rich field of diverse stories, perspectives, and interpretations, the actor playing the role of “Pippin” is introduced. “He may be a little nervous; this is his first time playing the role,” the Leading Player explains to the audience, breaking the fourth wall and explicitly identifying the metatheatrical nature of Pippin’s character arc as both a participant in the mystery play, and a new actor to the role. This self-referential comment draws an uncanny parallel between the character Pippin and the performer playing the role; the character of Pippin’s nervousness comes from having to give a valedictory speech to the faculty of the University of Padua, while the nervousness of the performer of that character comes from this being his “first” performance of the role. Here, Pippin, recently honored as Scholar of the House, struggles with the tension between accepting this prestigious role and pursuing a more meaningful existence, mirroring the performer’s own apprehensions about stepping into this new role. In a gesture that will be brought into sharper focus in the musical’s final moments, there is a convoluted overlap of “self” and “role,” between the nervous character of Pippin and the “first-time actor” performing that role, insomuch as all social behaviours are a performance. Pippin’s intention, as introduced in “Corner of the Sky,”is to find his own unique place in the world and to transcend the mundane to achieve the extraordinary. In this widely popular song (indeed, one of the most musically successful numbers in the show), Pippin explores the complexity of human ambition, which seems to necessitate a ceaseless pursuit of meaning. For the youthful Pippin, meaning and purpose seem attainable only through grand, exceptional achievements, dismissing the ordinary as inherently unfulfilling. This dichotomy between the extraordinary and the ordinary underscores Pippin’s internal conflict and his relentless search for significance beyond conventional success. For Pippin, the “false wrappings of the persona”(17) are reflected in his frequent desire to fulfill the expectations imposed on him by his position in society (first as a student, then as a warrior, lover, leader and, finally, father), while at the same time painfully and pitifully recognizing that the persona society imposes on him does not suit him. His negotiation of identity comes through engagement with archetypal figures—the authoritarian father, a menacing mentor embodied by the Leading Player, and the nurturing anima represented by Catherine—who, together, serve as symbolic manifestations of various facets of Pippin’s subconscious mind. Each of these characters plays a crucial role in developing Pippin’s understanding of himself and the world around him, contributing to the rich palette of themes explored in the musical. “The suggestive power of primordial images,” to use Jung’s phrase, is powerful and unmistakably reflected in the figure of the Leading Player and his coercive performers, emblematic of the overwhelming desire for greatness and visibility that Pippin must ultimately reject in favor of a more authentic understanding of self. In Jungian analysis, as in Pippin’s own journey, this process often involves confronting the “shadow,” the repressed or rejected aspects of the self that have been pushed into the depths of the unconscious in order to find harmony between the self and its public expression. Midway through Act II (18), the song “Extraordinary” offers a striking encapsulation of the pursuit of the extraordinary and, ultimately, the futility of the search, as Pippin will only later come to fully realize at the musical’s conclusion. The seductive lure of fame and greatness, a fundamental facet of social masculinity, captures Pippin’s imagination and mirrors the societal expectations surrounding him as he navigates the maze of masculine archetypes and expectations. This otherwise light, pop-inflected song reflects the collective desire for recognition and significance that often defines a man's worth in the eyes of society. It ultimately captures the inner conflict still stunting Pippin’s individuation—the struggle between conforming to external expectations and carving out an authentic identity. As a whole, the musical gestures toward the paradoxical recognition that the more exceptional someone wants to be, the more he runs the risk of losing his authenticity through the erosion of personal coherence and the fragmentation of the self. In this way, the song captures a key paradoxical insight at the thematic heart of the musical: the more one seeks to stand out and achieve exceptionality, the greater the risk of losing one’s true self. The quest for extraordinary achievement often leads to a fragmentation of identity, where the pursuit of external validation undermines personal authenticity. Theo’s Individuation Pippin was, in its formative stages, a fairly standard book musical about the growth and development of a minor historical figure, and did not include any of the metatheatrical elements now most associated with the work. Indeed, in an earlier formation, the musical ended with Pippin’s attempted assassination of his father, until producer Hal Prince encouraged Schwartz to use that material as the first act and then continue Pippin’s story in the second act.(19) In the Fosse ending, Pippin’s decision to settle down with Catherine while feeling “trapped”(20) reflects a dejected yet also deeply human capitulation to societal norms. It represents a mature compromise between his personal desires and commitment to family, highlighting the complex negotiation of masculinity in relation to societal expectations of being father, protector, and provider. Carol de Giere imagines that “on one level, the show’s ending reflected transitions in Schwartz’s own life as he and [his wife] Carole settled into the first home of their own in rural western Connecticut.”(21) It is thus not insignificant that the Theo ending once again extends the timeframe depicted by the musical by expanding the story to imagine Theo’s own subsequent search for his “corner of the sky,” ultimately mirroring Prince’s initial suggestion to explore what happens beyond the climax. Just as Prince’s advice questioned the boundaries of when a narrative can or should conclude, the “Theo Ending” proposes an ongoing cycle of self-discovery and endeavor and is not confined to a single life, but is a recurring journey that is passed down through generations. By positioning Theo as the new seeker of the “corner of the sky,” the “Theo Ending” offers a poignant echo of the burden of parental and societal expectations that Pippin experienced and had to overcome. This original Fosse ending is a clear example of what the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index of folktales, used to categorize similar narrative structures across a wide range of folkloric traditions, calls a “treasure at home” narrative, in which a journey is undertaken only to find that what the protagonist had been seeking was already at home. The significance of this narrative archetype lies in the dramatic irony of a protagonist embarking on a long journey in search of riches, only to discover that the treasure or fulfillment he sought lay within the familiar confines of his own home. The “treasure at home” narrative emphasises the idea that true happiness and contentment are often found in the ordinary and mundane aspects of life, rather than in distant and extraordinary adventures. It emphasises the importance of appreciating and valuing what one already has and suggests that the pursuit of external success and wealth only ultimately lead back to the simplicity and richness of one’s home and family. In the context of Pippin , Pippin’s desires and dreams, symbolized by his search for his “corner of the sky,” gradually intertwine with the realization that the seeds of his own contentment have already been sown in the family life he has created and, at least for a time, tried to discard. What is most striking when considering the masculine archetype and metatheatrical form of Pippin is that the alternate “Theo Ending” explicitly points out that the voice of the Leading Player is not merely symbolic of Pippin’s ego and subconscious. Rather, it symbolizes a collective psyche that is crucial to the development of the individual from youthful innocence to mature masculinity. Each whispered word of the Leading Player, which Pippin has now learned to recognize and control by the show’s culmination, represents the conflicting demands of societal expectations and personal desires that each individual must learn to deal with. The Leading Player becomes a manifestation of the Jungian collective unconscious, the deepest and most inaccessible layer of the human psyche comprising symbols, archetypes, and primordial images that are common across humans. These archetypes and their associated drives are innate and not shaped by personal experience. According to Jung, the collective unconscious forms a reservoir of common myths and symbols of humanity that influence our thoughts, behaviours, and perceptions: The existence of the collective unconscious means that individual consciousness is anything but a tabula rasa and is not immune to predetermining influences. On the contrary, it is in the highest degree influenced by inherited presuppositions, quite apart from the unavoidable influences exerted upon it by the environment. The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences, and hence it exerts an influence that compromises the freedom of consciousness in the highest degree, since it is continually striving to lead all conscious processes back into the old paths.(22) The collective unconscious acts as a source of personal and cultural expression, tapping into a vast reservoir of archetypal meanings that transcend individual experience. Whereas the Fosse ending emphasized the singularity of Pippin’s developmental story (i.e., that his conflict with the Leading Player and the other performers represented an inward psychic journey toward individuation that was unique to him), the “Theo Ending” reemphasizes the universality of the journey toward individuation that occurs in all humans. Although not biologically related to Pippin, Theo nevertheless inherits the “predetermining influences” that shaped his stepfather, and the explicit recognition of the Leading Player of these influences underlines the crucial role they play in Pippin’s development from youthful naivete to mature masculinity. The reintroduction of Theo at the end and his subsequent confrontation with the Leading Player demonstrates the ongoing process of individuation that goes beyond a single life. It points to the permanence of archetypal challenges and the perpetual human search for meaning, establishing the idea in the show’s final moments that the path to maturity and self-knowledge is a universal journey. The musical’s initial Broadway run in 1972 was met with much critical acclaim, and the work has enjoyed considerable success in Broadway and West End revivals over the past 50 years. While the musical was very much a product of its time and place, its enduring appeal is due in no small part to the mutability afforded by the metatheatrical structure, which allows directors to continue to reshape the thematic contours of the work. The “Theo Ending” reiterates the universal human search for purpose and meaning, achieved by reconciling the innate complexity of the self with its external, public expression and, even more so than the Fosse ending, speaks to a conceptual pluralism in which all humans are united by a shared journey of self-discovery. This interplay between the individual and social expectations—between the authentic self and its social mask—is the central theme of Pippin . More importantly though, the musical’s engagement with a notoriously porous historical record of a largely forgotten son of Charlemagne embeds it within a broader postmodern context in which the boundaries between truth and fiction are constantly renegotiated. By presenting Theo’s journey toward individuation as a continuation of Pippin’s, the musical emphasizes the eternal cycle of growth and transformation that characterizes human experience. Despite the typically postmodern ambiguity of the metatheatrical close, the revised “Theo Ending” points out that the search for one’s own “corner of the sky” is not unique to Pippin, but is a universal experience shared by others, including Theo, who also encounters the fantastical voices of the collective unconscious in his own psychic drama of growth and individuation. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Paul R. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 76. Robert Emmet Long, Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors 1940 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 165. Robert Emmet Long, Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors 1940 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 165 Paul R. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 62; Robert Emmet Long, Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors 1940 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 165. Douglas Watt, ‘Bob Fosse Added a “Leading Player” Made Pippin Easy’, Sunday News 19 November 1972, Leisure, p. 3; Carol de Giere, Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz from Godspell to Wicked (New York: Applause, 2008) , p. 88. Stuart Ostrow, A Producer’s Broadway Journey (London: Praeger, 1999), p. 117. Paul R. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 66. Paul R. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 76. Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi, ‘“Theatre”, “Paratheatre”, “Metatheatre”: What Are We Talking About?’ in Theatre and Metatheatre: Definitions, Problems, Limits, ed by Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 1-20, p. 1. Yifen Beus, ‘Self-Reflexivity and the Play within the Play and its Cross-Genre Manifestation’, in The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, ed by Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 15-26. See: Emilie Ruch, ‘Metatheatre and Dramaturgical Innovation: A Study of Recognition Scenes in Euripides’ Tragedies Electra, Helen, Iphigenia in Tauris, and Ion, in Theatre and Metatheatre: Definitions, Problems, Limits, ed by Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 153-176; Marco Vespa, ‘Animal Metaphors and Metadrama’ in Theatre and Metatheatre: Definitions, Problems, Limits, ed by Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 193-212. Bernhard Greiner, ‘The Birth of the Subject out of the Spirit of the Play within the Play: The Hamlet Paradigm’, in The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, ed by Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 3-14. Phillip Zapkin, ‘Compromised Epistemologies: The Ethics of Historiographic Metatheatre in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties and Arcadia’ , Modern Drama, 59:3 (2016), 306-326. Linda Hutcheon, ‘Historiographic Metafiction, Parody and the Intertextuality of History’, in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, ed. by Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 4. Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 39. Carl Jung, ‘The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious’ in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 7, (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 172. Carl Jung, ‘The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious’ in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 7, (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 172. The original production had no interval; however, all recent productions have now employed a two-act format with interval. Carol de Giere, Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz from Godspell to Wicked (New York: Applause, 2008) , p. 83. Paul R. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 66 Carol de Giere, Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz from Godspell to Wicked (New York: Applause, 2008) , p. 86. Carl Jung, ‘The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology’, in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 7, (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 112. Bibliography Bacon, Lloyd, director. 42nd Street . Warner Bros., 1933. 89 minutes. Bacon, Lloyd, director. Footlight Parade . Warner Bros., 1933. 104 minutes. Beaumont, Harry, director. The Broadway Melody . Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929. 100 minutes. Beus, Yifen. “Self-Reflexivity and the Play within the Play and its Cross-Genre Manifestation.” In The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, edited by Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner. Rodopi, 2007. Brown, Jason Robert. Parade . Book by Alfred Uhry. TCG, 1998. de Giere, Carol. Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz from Godspell to Wicked.New York: Applause, 2008 . Edwards, Sherman. 1776 . Book by Peter Stone. Concord Theatricals, 1969. Fuchs, Elinor. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After Modernism . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Enright, Ray, director. Dames . Warner Bros., 1934. 91 minutes. Flaherty, Stephen, and Lynn Ahrens. Ragtime . Book by Terrence McNally. TCG, 1998. Greiner, Bernhard. “The Birth of the Subject out of the Spirit of the Play within the Play: The Hamlet Paradigm.” In The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, edited by Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner, 3-14. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Hamlisch, Marvin. A Chorus Line . Book by James Kirkwood Jr. and Nicholas Dante, lyrics by Edward Kleban. Concord Theatricals, 1975 Link, Peter. King of Hearts . Book by Joseph Stein, lyrics by Jacob Brackman. Samuel French, 1978. Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographic Metafiction, Parody and the Intertextuality of History.” In Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Jung, Carl. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 7. London: Routledge, 1977. Kander, John, and Fred Ebb. Cabaret. Book by Joe Masteroff. Concord Theatricals, 1966. Laird, Paul R. The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond . New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Leigh, Mitch. Man of La Mancha . Lyrics by Joe Darion, book by Dale Wasserman, 1965. Long, Robert Emmet. Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors 1940 to the Present. Continuum, 2003. MacDermot, Galt, James Rado, and Gerome Ragni. Hair . Hair . Theatrical Rights Worldwide, 1967. Marlow, Toby, and Lucy Moss. Six: The Musical. Concord Theatricals, 2017. Miranda, Lin-Manuel. Hamilton: An American Musical. Hamilton Uptown LLC, 2015. Ostrow, Stuart. A Producer’s Broadway Journey . Praeger, 1999. Paillard, Elodie, and Silvia Milanezi, ““Theatre”, “Paratheatre”, “Metatheatre”: What Are We Talking About?” In Theatre and Metatheatre: Definitions, Problems, Limits, edited by Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi. de Gruyter, 2021. Porter, Cole. Kiss Me, Kate . Book by Samuel and Bella Spewack, Concord Theatricals, 1948. Roberts, David. “The Play within the Play and the Closure of Representation.” In The Play Within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, edited by Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner. Rodopi, 2007. Ruch, Emilie. “Metatheatre and Dramaturgical Innovation: A Study of Recognition Scenes in Euripides’ Tragedies Electra, Helen, Iphigenia in Tauris, and Ion. ” In Theatre and Metatheatre: Definitions, Problems, Limits, edited by Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi. de Gruyter, 2021. Schmidt, Harvey. The Fantasticks . Lyrics and book by Tom Jones. Samuel French, 1960. Schwartz, Stephen. Godspell . Book by John-Michael Tebelak. MTI, 1971. Schwartz, Stephen. Pippin . Book by Roger O. Hirson. MTI, 1972. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Oxford University Press, 1994. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet . Arden Shakespeare, 1982. Sondheim, Stephen. Follies . Book by James Goldman, 1971. Vespa, Marco. “Animal Metaphors and Metadrama.” In Theatre and Metatheatre: Definitions, Problems, Limits, edited by Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi. de Gruyter, 2021). Watt, Douglas. “Bob Fosse Added a “Leading Player” Made Pippin Easy.” Sunday News 19 November 1972, Leisure, 3. Yeston, Maury. Titanic . Book by Peter Stone, 1997. Zapkin, Phillip. “Compromised Epistemologies: The Ethics of Historiographic Metatheatre in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties and Arcadia .” Modern Drama 59, no. 3 (2016): 306-326. Footnotes About The Author(s) ALLAN JOHNSON is Associate Professor in English Literature and Associate Dean (Doctoral College) at the University of Surrey. He is the author of Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Masculine Identity in Modernist Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature: Immanence, Occultism, and the Making of the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2022), and numerous articles and chapters on twentieth-century literature and drama. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. By Malek Najjar Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Ashtar Muallem’s Awalem/Cosmos is a one-woman performance infused with text, music, and aerial arts performance, co-written by Ashtar Muallem, and co-written and directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Muallem, who has toured the production around the world, performs the work in Arabic, English, and French. I attended this production in Portland, Oregon, at the AWOL Dance Collective, produced by BOOM Arts on Saturday, March 1 st , 2025, after attending a movement workshop with Muallem earlier that day. A self-described Jerusalemite artist who navigates life between Palestine and France, Muallem bills Awalem/Cosmos as “a one-woman theatrical performance” ( Cosmos English). In the press materials, she describes the show thus, Ashtar practices yoga, and meditation, and explores tarot reading and hypnosis on the internet. Her elastic body mirrors her dual life, between two countries, cultures, and languages, between solitude and togetherness. In a satirical manner, she presents her beliefs, inviting us to participate in a ceremony where poetry blends with humour and subjectivity merges with the universal. Through Ashtar’s art, we embark on a journey of balance, contradictions, and the beauty of interconnectedness. ( Cosmos English) The audience enters to Muallem sitting in the lotus position wearing a white blouse tied at the waist and black yoga pants on a large white cloth pooled on the stage, which also ascends high above her to the rafters. She performs several actor vocal exercises and speaks casually to the audience as they take their seats, asking if they are comfortable and whether anyone has practiced yoga or meditation. She then asks everyone to inhale and exhale together, “to get into the group’s atmosphere” (YouTube). This metaphor of “inhale, exhale” becomes central to the piece as it progresses. Muallem begins the actual performance with a Tibetan singing bowl, which she rings and circles with a mallet while laying on her side. Ashtar Muallem performs in Cosmos/Awalem by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba, . Directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. She tells the audience she is neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim, nor from the East or West. “I abdicated duality and saw that the two worlds aren’t but one. Everything is one,” she states. She then begins a series of exercises with a yoga stretching strap while she speaks about the primacy of the body and the need for harmony between the body, soul, and spirit. She tells the audience of her grandmother, a religious woman who wanted Muallem to be like her, a “prayer addict” living in Jerusalem, a city of peace with a market filled with the smells of za’atar, sumac, sesame, and curry. However, despite the beauty of the city, there was a tension that convinced her at the age of eighteen to leave her country to study circus in France. She spends months in the new country, unable to speak the language until she attends a pro-Palestine rally where she hears the shouts “Free Palestine! Victory to Palestine!” There, she is asked about the history of her country and explains the 1948 War, the 1967 War, the division of Jerusalem into quarters, and the occupation zones that dictate where Palestinians are allowed to live or travel under occupation. When asked by foreigners what the solution is to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she says: “The solution is simple. It is within us.” (YouTube) Although never mentioned, her tenure in France seemed to coincide with the COVID-19 lockdown, leaving her with a hopeless feeling that she would never be allowed to perform theatre again. She flirted with the idea of becoming a YouTube influencer but found little success. With her vanishing hope, she came to study Zen and its koan “You cannot control external circumstances. Pain is a part of life” (YouTube). She learns that everything happens for a reason and that there is a predestiny at work. Music begins, and she performs a beautifully choreographed aerial sequence as she ascends the silk and performs gravity-defying maneuvers. Suddenly, she stops, pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and smokes high above the stage floor. “Are you surprised that I’m smoking?” she asks. “I have plenty of time to burn” (YouTube). She says that her true lover, solitude, complements her as she cooks, reads, dances, and repeats affirmations in her lockdown. She realizes she is a vortex of creativity and creates rituals where she hugs and kisses herself, sometimes cradling and speaking baby talk to her own leg as she would an actual baby. She watches a tarot reader named Estelle online who always predicts correctly. She also learns to read the aura surrounding people by crossing her eyes and looking directly at them; a technique she employs on the actual audience watching the production. Ashtar Muallem performs in Cosmos/Awalem by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba, . Directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. She then tells us that she finds that some people have blockages, and that men are told not to cry and they, in turn, tell their children not to cry either. To remedy this, she pulls a male audience member from the audience and leads them upstage right to a table with a chopping block and a chef knife, where they sit on a chair facing the audience. She produces a basket of onions and tells the participant to cut them until they are done. “You will cry freely and I will move freely” she says. As a mournful Arabic song plays, she dances, returns to the aerial silk, ascends, and performs a balletic dance high above the stage with unbelievable accuracy and speed. When she descends and escorts the man from the stage, she tells us how we, like the onion, are constituted of many layers, with each layer representing an identity we have assigned ourselves. “For us to access our truths,” she states, “we need to peel off these layers.” (YouTube) [1] She repeats a mantra, “Those who never cry are full of tears” (YouTube). She says she has seen too many men carrying weapons, but too few who cry. “I wonder if men let their tears fall then perhaps our world would be washed from all the wars?” she asks. She then breaks into a humorous infomercial voice as “Ashtar the Influencer,” urging audiences to purchase onions in the lobby. Her last words are “May peace be upon you. Namaste.” Muallem’s embodied performance of physical and vocal mastery, her congenial tone, her direct address, and her spiritual quandaries combine to make Cosmos/Awalem an enjoyable and thoughtful evening of performance. It is clear that she is exploring her role as an artist in the world and her life as a woman, as a Palestinian, and as a spiritual seeker in the hopes of unravelling her complicated emotions regarding the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, war, and occupation. Perhaps, instead of an onion, a more apt metaphor might be the artichoke. One may not cry while peeling an artichoke, but each layer peeled leads not to tears, but to the heart. After all is said and done, isn’t that the journey Muallem has asked us to take during this poignant evening of performance? Ashtar Muallem performs in Cosmos/Awalem by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba, . Directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes SOURCES: Cosmos: A One-Woman Theatrical Performance, Co-written and Performed by Ashtar Muallem. Co-written and directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba.” ASHTAR Theatre, 11 September, 2003. Media kit. Muallem, Ashtar. “AWALEM with English sub.” YouTube, uploaded by ASHTAR Theatre 7 January, 2024. https://youtu.be/HUhNyBJnASU?si=sHnGUAGOPOKxj0Vx . [1] On this particular evening of performance, I was unexpectedly the one asked onstage to chop the onions. As I sat there cutting the onions I found myself much less interested in the task as I was in the mesmerizing aerial performance unfolding before me. References About The Author(s) Malek Najjar is a Full Professor of Theatre Arts with the University of Oregon. He holds a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies (UCLA) and his Master of Fine Arts in Directing (York University). He is the author of Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures and Creators and Arab American Drama, Film and Performance: A Critical Study, 1908 to the Present. He edited Heather Raffo’s Iraq Plays: The Things That Can’t Be Said and The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi ; Four Arab American Plays: Works by Leila Buck, Jamil Khoury, Yussef El Guindi, and Lameece Issaq & Jacob Kader . He is co-editor of Until I Return: The Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi and Mona Mansour: The Vagrant Trilogy (with Hala Baki) and Six Plays of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (with Jamil Khoury and Corey Pond). Malek has directed with Silk Road Rising, Golden Thread Productions, New Arab American Theatre Works. Malek is a performance editor for Arab Stages and a board member of the Middle East North African Theater Makers Alliance. 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.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran By Matthew Randle-Bent 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:

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 15 Spring 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) By Suzi Elnaggar Published: June 15, 2024 Download Article as PDF Raphael Cormack’s Midnight in Cairo offers a glimmering portrait of the female stars of Egypt’s Roaring ‘20s. The book combines meticulous research and a narrative style that appeals to a broad audience, which bring to life the 'divas' of the era through detailed biographical vignettes. These stories capture the jubilant glamor of the period, showcasing the lives of these fascinating performers both on and off the stage. Midnight in Cairo has resonated with readers beyond academia, as it offers an entertaining and insightful foray into a pivotal moment in Egypt’s performance history. Cormack organizes the narrative into “a theatrical story in three acts”: Act I: Setting the Scene , which focuses on the historical performance context pre-1920s; Act II: The Leading Ladies , which provides the biographies of the key female performers; and Act III: Curtain Call , which tracks the political and social developments in Egypt from the 1950s forward, providing a brief retrospective in contrast to the earlier era (10). In the first act, Setting the Scene , which encompasses chapters one through four, Cormack provides a brief overview of Egyptian theatre and performance history up to the 1920s. By beginning with Ibn Daniel’s thirteenth-century shadow plays, Cormack pushes against the narrative that Egyptian drama began with the intrusion of European colonialism. This approach not only counters pervasive historiographic narratives but also positions Cairo of the 1920s within a broader regional performance history. Cormack vividly paints Cairo of the 1920s as a sort of cosmopolitan fever dream, suggesting, “Egypt was all over the front pages, and Cairo’s residents must have felt they were living at the centre of the world” (100). He focuses, in particular, on the vibrant nightlife and cultural scene in Ezbekiyya, a Cairene district known at that time for an abundance of dance halls, theatres, and other performance venues. Written in an engaging narrative style, this first ‘act’ of Midnight in Cairo serves as an excellent primer on performance history in Egypt; the focus on a diverse array of notable figures, writers, producers, and actors, as the narrative throughlines makes for a delightful read. In the second act of Midnight in Cairo , The Leading Ladies , which spans chapters five through eleven, Cormack explores the lives of significant female film, stage, and musical stars of 1920s Egypt through chapter-long vignettes. The biographies intersect and build on each other, with some women becoming recurring figures, background players in the others’ narratives. The chapters focus respectively on stage-actress turned journalist Rose al-Youssef, theatre troupe leader Fatima Rushdi, singer and actor Fatima Sirri, widely known songstress Oum Kalthoum, musical theatre star Mounira al-Mahdiyya, film actor Aziza Amir, and comic actor and dancer Badia Masabni. While a few men, such as Aziz Eid, feature prominently throughout, the chapters focus on the women’s groundbreaking careers and complex lives. Notably, Cormack addresses both their triumphs and challenges, a choice that is exemplified by the highlighting of Rose al-Youssef’s controversial editorial choices, use of misogynistic cartoons, and an all-male staff for her eponymous still-running magazine. Yet, her story is ultimately portrayed as a tale of triumph, as Cormack emphasizes her unlikely rise in Egyptian society, stating, “it is hard to imagine that a young girl who had turned up alone in Alexandria at the beginning of the twentieth century could possibly have started her own literary journal in Egypt if she had not found her way into the world of arts and become one of Egypt’s biggest stars” (148). Cormack extends the stories of these women into the twilight of their careers and lives in the 1950s, fulfilling the book’s core mission to “tell the history of Cairo’s nightlife through the eyes of the women who made it what it was” (321). Curtain Call , the final act, which covers chapter twelve and the conclusion, serves as a fitting denouement, opening with an anecdote of a young Edward Said visiting Badia Masabni’s establishment in 1950 to watch the famous dancer Tahiyya Carioca. Cormack leverages this happenchance encounter between Said and Carioca to chronicle Egypt’s journey from the precipice of the 1952 Revolution to the present day. In the concluding chapter, Cormack adopts a more personal tone, reflecting on feminism, contemporary Egypt, and regional cultural transformations. While providing a modern perspective, this subjective shift sometimes contrasts sharply with the detailed historical narrative he established earlier, which casts a somewhat somber tone on the ending. This discordance may feel jarring, yet it also effectively draws the reader into the ongoing dialogue about Egypt’s past and its present. In crafting nuanced portraits of the iconic ‘divas’ of the era, Cormack extends beyond drama and theatre to include music, dance, and film. He situates these arts within the broader historical, political, and cultural contexts that shaped the performers’ lives, their artistic expressions, and their legacies. Cormack enriches the narrative by interweaving tales of lesser-known figures and personal dramas, creating a rich tapestry that captures the vibrancy of the 1920s Cairo stage scene. The book touches upon fraught subjects, if too briefly, such as intercultural tensions, misogyny, blackface, and colonialism. While Cormack does not approach these critically or in-depth (as that is neither the style nor objective of the text), their inclusion serves to make Midnight in Cairo a well-rounded entry into the performance history of the region. This approach makes the book accessible and informative, appealing to a general audience as well as theatre students and scholars from other disciplines, such as historians and literary scholars who focus on Egypt or the Middle East. However, performance and theatre scholars will also find much of interest within the text as Cormack gives a glimpse into oft-overlooked pre-1950s Egyptian drama, music, and dance. Cormack’s use of archival photographs and excerpts from interviews and the writings of the stars themselves adds authenticity and depth, showcasing the era’s glamour and the significant, yet often overlooked, contributions of these women. Cormack’s Midnight in Cairo is a love letter to a bygone era of Egyptian glitz and glamour. Bringing to light some of Egypt’s most fascinating female figures, often marginalized in narratives that typically focus on Western perspectives, the text makes these women both legible and truly dazzling. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Suzi Elnaggar is an Egyptian-American performance scholar, freelance dramaturg, and theatre-maker. She was a 2021 Kennedy Center Dramaturgy Intensive Fellow and works as both a developmental and production dramaturg. She is pursuing an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama and MENA Studies at Northwestern University. She holds an M.A. in Theatre Studies from Baylor University, where she researched the work of Heather Raffo through the lens of trauma studies. She has been published in Asian Theatre Journal , Arab Stages , and Theatre Times . Her research interests include recontextualizing Greek tragedy, post-colonial theatre contexts, decoloniality in performance, theatre of social change, the intersection of trauma and performance, and work that centers around SWA/MENA (Southwest Asian/Middle Eastern and North African) experiences. Her scholarship and practice center community, collaboration, and context. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Previous Next Attribution: