European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage 2024 Report from London and Berlin Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF By Dan Poston Image Credits: Article Covid pushed many people out of the theatre, but in Germany, at least, it was not just Covid. For several years before, regular theatregoers had begun to complain of a stagnation in the theatre. The once-innovative “post-dramatic” directorial styles that had drawn international crowds to German theatres and festivals in the late 20th and early 21st centuries had grown standard, rote. Visitors and young people who had only seen realist, dramatic theatre before could still experience the revelation of intelligent, well- theorized, post-everything theatrical aesthetics in their first attendance at a theatre in Berlin. But after a while, the experience devolved into just another yelling actor in a dark, minimalist room interrupted occasionally by heavy intermittent electronic music instead of scene changes. Yet more cycles of Brecht Kabuki or a Castorf stage flooded with orange balls pouring out of cupboards did not seem to cut through the deadening sense of nothing-new. In Germany as in many parts of the world, theatregoers had quietly retreated even before the pandemic into their living rooms and bedrooms, where innovation took the form of a new abundance and diversity of streaming films and series available on demand. General historians will likely focus on how the pandemic created a newly mediatized society, but for many of us, the ready, mass obedience to strict public- health guidelines during the pandemic was also a result of so many of us having lost our connection to in-person institutions and events: we were already increasingly sitting at home, anyway, waiting for something, well, dramatic. Although I had continued to attend theatrical productions on a limited basis, as available, during the pandemic period, I experienced the desire for a renewal of theatregoing on a post-pandemic trip to London in Fall 2023. In short, I was surprised to feel again like a bored tourist, longing to have some contact to Shakespeare, to live Culture. It was professionally necessary, anyway, since I was writing and teaching about the Bard, so I booked a ticket at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in Southwark. I had been reading early modern travelers’ accounts of going to theatre, and this proved a helpful way to frame my walk across the Thames, embracing rather than snobbishly shirking from an authentic, new tourist impulse. Why, after all, should the dramatic tourist theatre be any less interesting than the intellectual theatre of Berlin, the conceit of theory to one side? The audience in the lobby was an appealing, sociable group of highly educated tourists, vibrant evening celebrants, and people working in theatre or culture, a familiar scene. The ushers led us into the closed round Jacobean winter theatre—modelled after Blackfriars —with an admirable mixture of routine professional friendliness and vigilance. They stood watch at each entrance of the auditorium throughout the entire show, adding an energy to the spectacle. I could not decide if their vigilance had to do with pride and excitement about working in such a London institution during peak-rent neoliberalism, or if it had been impressed upon them how easily even this modern wooden theatre might accidentally burn up with everyone inside if the wax candle lighting went somehow awry. I decided it was probably both, though I am sure the Globe complex has a formidable sprinkler and fire-prevention system in place. I noted the relief of feeling safe from yelling actors here, a fact which I associated with some small distance from the War in Eastern Europe, and I gave myself what felt like almost scandalous permission to look forward to hearing what some traditionally trained Shakespearean actors would do with a classic text. My only hesitation, which had nearly prevented me from buying tickets, was that the text to be performed was not Shakespearean at all but rather Ibsen’s Ghosts . O n second and third thought, however, this bit of anachronistic meditation on theatrical ghosts seemed peculiarly, teasingly smart, a way of making something new in a well-established, historicist tourist venue. The production, in this sense, turned out to be entirely satisfying, a validation of director Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production concept and the Globe’s artistic direction under Michelle Terry, who has begun to widen the productions staged there beyond texts from the early modern period. The stage candelabra lighting ritual, performed by the actors, immediately established the conversation between the Shakespearean stage’s essential anti-realism and Ibsen’s conventional drama of servants and bourgeois rulers behaving as if they really are captured in the four walls of an established house. Seeing the faces of other audience members in-the-round doubled for the gaze of the Shakespearean theatre on its later cousin, 19th-century picture-box realism. This effect was emphasized by the production’s backdrop: a large, square mirror, reminiscent equally of a cheap bordello as of the hard regime of tightened neoclassical control in Versailles’ 17th-century mirror room. The stage was otherwise bare, though covered by a large, long-shag burgundy rug on which the artist-son, Osvald (compellingly played by Stuart Thompson), lay and seemed to dream much of the action of the evening, as if himself gazing back on or hallucinating theatre history from a plastic technicolor simulacrum of the 1970s. Rosanna Vize’s highly effective set and costume designs gave strong visual support to the production’s well-crafted and subtle play with multiple historical ages of avant-garde production and fraught relations with realism. Osvald’s costume—a faux-fur sweater jacket over a plain white undershirt and light boxer shorts—featured a faded, elaborate floral pattern that evoked Renaissance court doublets and beast masquerading, at the same time as gesturing towards a slipperiness between much more antique figurations of the satyr and contemporary, neo-bohemian, art-world fashion. This still minimalist aesthetic of allowing-the-ghosts-in, this conversation with the gaze of various historical theatres and the avant-garde, was captured by one of the opening gestures of the play when Osvald, before lying down for his reverie, lit a real cigarette on stage. The smell of that cigarette lingering throughout the intermission-less Ibsen drama participated in an already well-entrenched 21st-century performance tradition of smoking actors critically reminding us of the suspiciously sanitary odor of our own mega-liberated time. It also quickly established the play’s driving allegory of an artist understanding his “rebellion” as a sociologically forced exile, about which he previously—as the supposed hero of a happy family non-drama—had been kept effectively and relatively brutally in the dark. The acting was accomplished with intelligence and spirited handiwork. The mother, Helene, played by Hattie Morahan (known for her award-winning turn as Nora in a 2012 production of A Doll’s House ), dominated the dark bare stage. Her nervous tight stage business became increasingly legible, in the exposed allegory of the play, as a 19th- century effort to keep artists and their next-generation representations away from the corruption of society’s actual making, while at the same time seducing them just enough into a torpidly incestual drama to prevent what would otherwise be their disastrous free relation to the state and the servant classes. European Realism became for the duration of the play a moment within the Shakespearean theatre’s long, shuffling repertoire. The English Renaissance theatre was opened again as a laboratory for contemplating the extended human transhistorical in both directions, past and future. With exquisite scenic minimalism and the speed of a sharply cut and knit-together text (clocking in at 100 minutes), Hill-Gibbins’ Ghosts staged the artist’s paradoxical epiphany about his own exile from the actual primal scene of Realism: the intentionally guarded, representational inaccessibility of the driving truths and negotiations of society’s actual practical, historical construction and business deals. Realism became in the Shakespearean gaze a ma nufactured narcissistic ghost-machine, the previously glimpsed netherworld of entrances from a backstage now blocked—not by a façade with necessary doors but more essentially by a supposedly endlessly revelatory mirror, a very basic but entirely effective installation mimicking Louis XIV’s mechanism of virtual social surveillance while displaying how easily and cheaply such a mechanism could be constructed, at will, via mass, industrial production. By foregoing bourgeois furniture and historicism in favor of lightly suggestive long-historical minimalism and the surreal, visual centering of the fantasizing artist, the production opened the bare allegorical dimensions of the play and its meditation on what the artist and ultimately art can be, if anything other than ghosts among ghosts. Productions at the Sam Wanamaker are dominated by the tourist desire to visit Shakespeare’s original site of creation. This production seized this reality and dealt with it not as an impediment to original creation but as a critical tool for showing the artist’s relation to theatre vis-à-vis one of the most famous, classic plays meditating on just this theme. In Ibsens’ Ghosts , the will of the young painter, returned as the prodigal son from art school in Paris, to create a new mirror for his time, society, and family is fatally and ironically mixed up with his art education being a doomed escape, arranged by his mother’s financial management, from the disease and corruption that he is otherwise due to inherit from his father. This meditation on artistic abyss and generational juncture at the center of Ibsen’s realist dramatic career functions like a theatre-historical Verfremdungseffekt. Paradoxically, it brings the audience nearer to contact with the floor and room of modern artistic creation and exposes that site’s (childlike) separation from society—the artist’s ambivalent inheritance of society’s own will to erase its hidden bad deals—even as the artist thus captured attempts to critically represent society. Ibsens’s Ghosts at the Sam Wanamaker, in short, fulfilled the tourist wish to approach the Shakespearean ghost by demonstrating the realism of a transhistorical, always returning artistic dilemma only contingently attached to a period’s furniture or wallpaper. If the double-binds of bourgeois false consciousness was Ibsen’s pet theme, Hill-Gibbins’ production used the Shakespearean gaze to more fully unearth the less historically bound, allegorical dimension of the drama. Sitting as it were in the presence of one of the larger, shaping ghosts of Shakespeare’s theatre, Queen Elizabeth I, audience members read Ibsen’s play about uncanny revenants differently. Helene haunts Helen, and vice versa, beauty in her maternal capacity becoming the controlling, tragic demi-goddess on which the play ruminates. Regine (the household maid who lights the lights and is destined to be the artist’s muse before it is revealed she is his half-sister) doubles for the state in the fantasy that beauty will make the state its servant, rather than both being the servants of other, baser powers-that-be. The artist as the pure liberated heir of beauty is doomed by his actual mixed heritage, the same construction that blocks his potentially monstrous love affair with the state. Fated to be an impotent mental invalid, a quasi-universal, de-historicized ghost-heir about whom the realist world will tell some seemingly objective history, the Shakespeare-like, authorial artist-ghost of this production attempted to break the double-bind of realism by thrusting the representation of his own compositional dreaming on stage. With the Shakespearean theatre came the loosened historical gazes of other theatres, including those most ancient and our own most contemporary, the recurring self-reflective moment of an artist attempting to create a theatre both freed and captured autotrophically again by its ghostly colleagues. When Helene, unable to repress the ghosts she has attempted to keep at bay along with the corruption of the family’s past and present, declares in Act 2 that “there are ghosts everywhere,” the actress seemed to show her seeing us, too, seeing ourselves as images in the mirror. The audience was appropriately riveted, as energized as our kind sentinels at the doorways, who then ushered us out with the assurance of professionals knowingly relieved again that the theatre did not entirely burn down, despite its one slight violation of code, that anti-Zeitgeist cigarette. Laios. Photo © Mark Brenner When I walked after the play north across the Millenium Bridge over the Thames that night, I decided to continue this new engagement with the theatre as a returning tourist. In May, I was able to secure several tickets for productions at the annual Theatertreffen in Berlin, where most of the jury-invited shows continue to sell out within the first hours of tickets becoming available. These used to be named the ten “best” productions of the year in German-speaking countries, but now they are simply called ten “remarkable” productions since few of us working in culture and the arts today want to be burdened with assigning hierarchies to works (see the essay on the Berlin Theatertreffen elsewhere in this iss ue.) One of the most buzzy productions of this year’sfestival was Falk Richter’s autofictional, family history play The Silence , which had been selling out at the Schaubühne since its November premier, but I was unable to get a ticket for that show using the ordinary purchase system. As it was, my first show at the festival was Yael Ronen and Shlomi Shaban’s Bucket List , which was staged away from the festival theatre (the Berliner Festspiele) at the Schaubühne, where it had been playing since it opened in December. The playwright and director Yael Ronen has been a fixture of Berlin theatre since 2009, when her Israeli-Palestinian-German ensemble comedy Third Generation, about the conflicts in the Middle East, debuted at the Schaubühne. For more than a decade, her dark, humane, and funny comedies have been a steady part of the repertoire at the Maxim Gorki Theatre; three of her plays were invited to previous Theatertreffen editions, including her 2021 “almost-a-musical” Slippery Slope , which was also co-created with Schaban. Shortly before arriving at the full theatre, I realized that the Theatertreffen premiere of Bucket List had been scheduled to take place on Yom HaShoah, the annual day of remembranc e for the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and for Jewish heroism and resistance to Nazism. The date, May 9, was also exactly six months after the play’s premiere, and in the space of that half-year, the cultural atmosphere in Berlin, as in many cities around the world, had changed significantly. The December premiere had been met with anti-Israel protests and heightened security at the Schaubühne. In the days following the October 7 terrorist attack of Hamas against Israeli civilians, the Gorki had cancelled performances of Ronen’s The Situation (Theatertreffen 2016), a piece that centered around a Berlin-Neukölln language class and Syrian, Jewish-Israeli, Palestinian-Israeli, and Palestinian dialogue. The Gorki’s statement at the time took a nuanced but decided stance supporting Israel in response to the recent atrocities and ongoing (still ongoing) hostage situation. Six months after the premiere, when many people in the auditorium were returning to see Bucket List for a second or even a third time, Berlin was particularly charged by a series of relatively small, international and local student and general protests against Israel’s conduct in the ongoing war between it and H amas. Many of those protests had featured anti-Semitic slogans, occupied lecture halls, and even violence against Jewish individuals and institutions. Later in the month, a scandal would erupt when the President of the Technische Universität Berlin, Geraldine Rauch, liked several tweets with anti-Semitic content and then fought successfully to keep her job atop one of the city’s most important universities. It was, in short, an out-of-the-ordinary time for the Theatertreffen premiere of a play by two Israeli artists that meditated on the trauma of October 7, a world of increasing war, division, and terror, and the schizogenic, über-normality of ongoing, clever, smartphone-set sociality with its boring-stressful, rapid- change “turn to the left, turn to the right,” mass shock-therapy choreography (to quote one of the production’s central musical numbers.) Sitting in the theatre, I had a moment of deja-vu taking me back to the previous years’ Theatertreffen, when I saw the Ukrainian director Andriy May’s Putinprozess, a play that delved into the personal experiences of theatre-makers forced to flee from war as their theatres became bomb shelters and targets. Here again with Bucket List the reality of war and the suffering of its many victims flooded the cultural space. There ought to be a German or French word for the basic ambivalence of even highly engaged cultural consumers towards the transformation of cultural spaces into war-time spaces of activism, trauma coping, and refuge. Whatever that useful, important, healthy, dangerous, callous, or irresponsible Kriegsunterdrückungsgestalt might actually be named, it could be felt—again, ambivalently—in the audience just as it was complexly thematized in both productions, a year apart: a reminder of our world’s increased exposure to new, lethal conflagrations over that interval of time. The mood had decidedly shifted, partially, of course, due to the different historical responsibilities involved in the Ukrainian/Russian versus the Israeli/Hamas/Palestinian conflict. Whereas in the previous year, the instinct for both repression and bold certainty seemed stronger in the audience, the audience for Bucket List seemed sadder, more troubled, and more wary. Bucket List. Photo © David Baltzer Bucket List has a loose, impressionistic narrative about a patient who remembers waking up on a Saturday with his world having fallen apart, a thoroughgoing sense of alienation from self and the previously known life-scene. His name, surfacing uncertainly and somewhat robotically out of the second musical number (a darkly hilarious pastiche derived from the “Bobby” opening number of Company ), is Robert, but the scien ce-fiction context leaves open if anything about “Robert” and “his” memories are real at all or simply a postmodern, perhaps personalized insertion of “normal” memories into an otherwise mostly erased psyche. That is to say, the main plot conceit is that Robert is an imperfectly compliant recipient of a new, thorough happy-memory-replacement therapy developed by the overdrivenly neoliberal health-care firm, Zeitgeist, which hopes to profit from an accelerating PTSD pandemic. The acted-out personal memories, which largely comprise the show, might thus belong to those more painful memories to which Robert still clings in order to give his now lonely identity dramatic coherence and context. But the “sad” memories thus displayed seem troublingly not-painful-enough, framed as they are by the diagnosis of PTSD and the visually surrounding, abstracted evidence of unutterable, mass violence. Perhaps, the darker subtext of the productions suggests, even these ultimately bittersweet, sentimental moments of personal anguish are a strategic part of Zeitgeist’s functional brainwashing. In the clinical language of the attending doctor characters: suffering may be pathological when the technology to erase it exists, but a little bit of disorderly, remembered suffering may help melancholic loser-consumers (as Robert is specified) more wary of Zeitgeist to still feel human, a perhaps important factor in their tolerance of the prescribed therapy. The doubling, ensemble aes thetic of Bucket List —with its four engaging actors (Ruth Rosenfeld, Damian Rebgetz, Carolin Haupt, and Christopher Nell) d ressed in black and fluidly trading roles and observer positions—leaves open, like much of Ronen’s work, the extent to which material used in the show is autobiographical, and to whose specific autobiography it belongs. The basic sequential, episodic narrative of individual departures, losses, and partial returns stages different but emotionally and intellectually intertwined moments of breakage: adolescent rebellion, the end of a first love relationship, the long split of a mature marriage, the recovered memory of an early sexual trauma, and a mid-life individual breakup with reality. That latter breakup takes place as “Robert” undergoes a process akin to “mindfulness meets lobotomy” in which the promise of Zeitgeist begins to be realized: “in the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.” Reality continues to phone-stalk Robert and the ensemble, and the traumas of Saturday, October 7th, 2023, and its (ongoing) aftermath blend with other known and unknown traumas via crucial moments of marked linguistic slipperiness and generally suggestive scenic elements. The minimalist, abstract set, designed by Magda Willi, looked similar to an Apple Store installation, dominated by clean, white, pseudo-humanely rounded shapes and simple architectures for basic, flexible staging and (product) interaction. The symmetrical, bulky wh ite background module of this corporate-like display structure featured two large holes vaguely suggestive of eye pupils. There, in silent projection, slightly abstracted images of war intermittently accompanied the split-screen jazz-rock-opera d rama of formerly mundane, now privileged, romance. From the side of the stage, a three-person band provided the varying rhythms and catchy Broadway sound for what the opening number suggested was the irresistible, childlike offering of war’s singing. The virtuoso, musical coolness of the band was centered in a memorable number featuring the guitarist (Thomas Moked Blum) singing the part of a BBC correspondent reluctantly taking a break from a cocaine-fueled love affair to report on hundreds of adults and children being killed, raped, and abducted, before returning home to his pleasure pad like a good professional, “not such a bad day” after all. Anguish, the cheerful cruelty of economic coercion and enforced agreeability in still- buffered milieus, the questions of how to create, live, react, and grieve responsibly culminated in the final number. The anonymous articles of light white clothing falling from the rafters throughout the play littered the stage. Crumpled on the floor, they represented Robert’s left-behind memories, the ghosts of the ungraspable real dead from James Joyce to the Holocaust to today’s latest non-headlines, and the discarded drafts of a writer, as Robert finally sang, trying to pass on hope without simply contaminating another page: through failure, neglect, limitation, selfishness, inability, forgetfulness and inattention—the same negatives that created the possibilities and inevitability of imagination. The aesthetic was high, humane postmodernism, the moment of the postmodern that never took decisive hold because the internet changed everything. This was the moment, now “precious,” when there was to have been a return to the idea of progressive understanding of what it was to be (universally) human via the recognized, shared experience of becoming diversely what we all were, in the midst of plastic chaos. C’est la vie. Ronen, Shaban, and the ensemble showed and mourned a generational aesthetic that has become an impossibility when there are much more urgent and serious processes and concerns at stake. In her laudatio after the show (a speech that this year replaced the ordinary audience talk-back), Carolin Emcke described her experience of this Theatertreffen premiere, a half year after the original premiere, as a kind of looking back through a snow globe at both the estranged recent past and the world-picture of childhood and earlier life. The internet, after all, performs an entirely different world- picture, one that has finally put the ambiguously emerging fence up between this aesthetic age and that of postmodernism, when the individual for all its subjectivization was still operative as the crucial center of discernment. The internet, that corporate never- endingly blank-staring, data collecting Zeitgeist, has a different, eusocial teleology, decidedly towards the hive mind and what that mind wants to articulate, or manage through aesthetics. Macbeth. Photo © Armin Smailovic If Bucket List survives—as it should—in an anthology somewhere, it ought to be read as a paragon of just-human honesty. In the theatre that night, the play was alive in a different manner. The audience’s applause was complicated, indiscernible, and consciously so: tepid, non-committal, or serious, it reflected as well as the play and players on stage did (although less bravely) the inability of art to break through the forcefields of caution and concern that are both refuge from and perpetuators of our new scenes of war, loneliness, and capture. I, for one, as I believed we all in that audience felt poignantly as isolated ones, believe that powerlessness is not a critique of works like Bucket List but a confessed limitation of art essentially in the face of bad politics. When Ronen appeared on stage after the show to accept the recognition given by the Theatertreffen producers, she wore a glamorous green, sparkling robe, the stunning color in contrast to the white set, black-clad actors, and the white, anonymous garments that had drifted down during the 75-minute piece from near some invisible heaven, to be picked up and used by the actors in recreations of remembered scenes. In one of the most poignant and funny episodes of the play, “Clara” (Carolin Haupt) had donned a fallen white dress and re-enacted a scene of childhood ballet training, dancing ever more vigorously as her teacher (Ruth Rosenfeld) admonished her to gesture with her left leg: “the other left!”, the teacher continued to correct her, until Clara gave up in frustration, unable to correct a mistake she was not making. The color of Ronen’s robe that evening reminded us of the difficulty of saying which is the correct way to grieve, to be active, to do honor to the dead and the living: through the pale seriousness of representation, through the postmodern exposure of so many crumpled-up unread drafts of history littering the theatre floor as the floor and waste bucket of the writer’s studio and bedroom, or through the recovered, inherited, and willed exuberance of individuality, hope, complexity, even ironic glamour that was and is a thread of the happiness with which those victims of human violence live and lived through or did their best to live through it all? The audience seemed to share an understanding that we have no real right left leg left to stand on, in any case. The next show I attended, back at the Festspiele main theatre, was for me—as for many attendees—the highlight of a superb festival. Lina Beckmann (Germany’s 2011, 2022, and 2024 Actress of the Year) open ed Laios unassumingly, charmingly, as if giving a pre- theatre talk to acquaint the audience with the classical context s of the play they were about to see. A short, open question-and-answer session about the knowledge of Greek myth that we were bringing to our spectatorship segued seamlessly into one of the most beguiling, memorable dramatic monologues I have ever witnessed. In a 90-minute, true tour-de-force, the equally unassuming and breath-taking Beckmann donned masks, applied makeup, and performed virtuoso stretches of dialogue, narrative, alternative narrative, and commentary, all with a historically deep yet satisfyingly contemporary perspective on the myth she was relating. Making use of an “antique” hurdy gurdy in place of an aulos, Beckmann dove into the complex, queer biography of Oedipus’ usually brushed-over father, gripping the audience with expertly mixed light humor, tragic pathos, postmodern alienation, Butoh aesthetics, and archeological enactment. The simple bare set design by Johannes Schütz displayed an array of props and reconstructed ancient masks, fitting for Beckman’s marathon-like, two-hour performance, which rarely failed to be imbued with a sympathetic, humane spirit even as she changed registers of acting and narration with world-class finesse, endurance, conviction, and irony. A particularly effective, minimalist element of the staging was the use of what seemed to be a negative, live, back-projection system to occasionally create glowing “positive” white shadows of foregrounded props and human figures on the darkened stage backdrop. Annete ter Meulen provided the lighting design, Wicke Naujoks the costume design, and Sybille Meier the dramaturgy for a show sparkling with carefully interwoven, intricately non-distracting historical, political, and pop-cultural references and ornamentation. A feeling of relief and gratitude swelled in the audience for Karin Beier’s masterfully directed production. Theatre was back. We had forgotten. Beckmann’s performance used the full range of human voice, spirit, emotion, knowledge, and craft. It was tasteful, almost perfectly modulated. Perhaps three-quarters through there was a feeling of too-much, some repetition to be cut—perhaps the species was lost hopelessly in the spin-cycle of senseless, layered myth—but this was caught by the astonishing speed of the abrupt end, leaving ringing in the air the pathos-laden recognition question asked equally suddenly by the classical texts to their contemporary audiences, by both Laios and Oedipus to each other as unknown father and son, and by the actress to herself and all of us really living in that room—in a symmetry with the lighthearted, informal opening of the play: “ Bist du das?”, “Are you that?” Here was a production again that understood the grain of the voice, the thousand variations of quiet and rhythm, for example. Individual moments—Beckmann’s uncanny coughing prophecy as the oracle in a late-night snack café or her brief embodiment of the sphinx—were enough to justify anyone’s return to theatre spectatorship; no film or image or reading could match the layered, immersive, physical understanding of the Sphinx and the Pythia that this live experience granted its audience. More impressive, in a way, was to be in the audience and feel that all of this was mutually appreciated, that theatre’s return—a novel and progressively incremental cultural achievement—was being greeted and appreciated collectively by a sensitive, living, packed audience, alive to subtlety, in historical agreement about how much of the useless noise (polemics, false honesty, and all that) could be supplanted by complex, understandable rendering. Roland Schimmelpfennig’s poetic text—part 2 of the 2023, five-part Beier-Schimmelpfennig Thebes series, ANTHROPOLIS , created at the Hamburg Deutsches Schauspielhaus— performed a new archeological layer of classical reception. We gave Beckmann seven enthusiastic standing ovations, the applause itself only ending out of the humane impulse to give the actress a chance to rest and recover after such an act, to disappear again with our gratitude into her life. Walking out of the theatre back onto the street in the crowd, the feeling was palpable: art had changed the season. The city buzzed and hovered again in the talk, reflective social silence, and enlivened eyes and ears of the groups lingering, coalescing, and dispersing into a hopeful evening. After the previous two experiences, I entered my last Theatertreffen production of the year suffering from the curse of high expectations. The veteran Dutch director Johan Simons’ Macbeth production had been marketed as a revelation of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy as a meta-comedy. What this meant in practice was that most of the speed, quick-pivoting nuance, and dizzying altitude variations of Shakespeare’s text were suppressed in favor of slapstick and elastic improvisation. The very long production (3 hours and 20 minutes) from the Schauspielhaus Bochum featured three talented, decorated actors sitting in what looked like a bare, well-lit, not well-kept modern neoclassical bath or decrepit sanatorium spa environment (stage design by Nadja Sofie Eller). There was plenty of irony, reference, and momentary pastiche to unpack, and the full insider audience had the intellectual chops to do so. But there was also a lot of time to think again about the invocation of the old writing advice never to set a short story in a bathtub. In sum, the audience witnessed a lengthy production of Waiting for Godot set to the text of Macbeth , as if we were invited to the long eternal life of the three witches, occasionally painfully acting out the script (or not), changing and condensing roles, waiting for something that would never come, waiting in that sense primarily for an authentic impulse to do something, embarrassed when that thing was active, heroic, violent, or requiring movement. A smart but long and intricately created satire produced at the audience’s expense is a puzzle to critique, like a meal of fine morsels that ironically deconstructs taste and dramatic expectation beyond all simplicity, action, and brevity. Ghosts. Photo © Marc Brenner About a quarter of the audience chose to take their seats on the smart side of things, but many in the audience used the long time of watching actors play smart theatre games on stage to look around the room and wonder if we were required to admire the emperor’s new clothes, 124 years after Ubu Roi , let alone more than four centuries since audiences first took in James I’s accension and Macbeth . Boos were reported in the intermission. For all its brilliant performative quotations, the production might have benefitted from borrowing the concept of the most famous Macbeth production of the century so far. Adding Punchdrunk’s 2011 Sleep No More into the comic world of the citational production—inviting the audience to wander and enter into the active game-playing of the actors—would have enlivened the piece; more precisely, as it was, it felt like the audience was cast as regressive, back-in-time, pre-2011 certainly. The use of a standard picture-box proscenium stage and a standard darkened auditorium felt here like an act of cruelty, creating an artificial sense of a fixed, conservative bourgeois theatre where most of the audience would have been relieved to experience anything more truly experimental. In an exception that proved the rule, one of the most memorable, humorous, and gripping moments of the production—when the three actors sat at a table open to the audience in front of the curtain for the feast scene—performed this gesture of openness. The acting, as an extended study of relational improv, was memorable, almost never naturalistic, and thickly layered over the much- daggered text. Marina Galic, Jens Harzer, and Stefan Hunstein fluidly played all the characters in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Simons’ casting and dramaturgy indeed innovatively and critically exposed the play’s structure of doubling and tripling in a sophisticated, meta-comical fashion. Galic took on the meta-role of the driving second (as Lady Macbeth, Banquo, and the Macduffs) to her real-life spouse, the much celebrated, Iffland-Ring-wearing Harzer as the king (Macbeth, Duncan, and Malcom). With Hunstein as the comically weirdest of the weird sisters, sometimes joining the pair in extended, bizarre make-out sessions, the impressive acting trio created many memorable, sparkling, insightful moments in the productions’ often revelatory, though drawn-out reduction sauce. I walked home that evening from this year’s Theatertreffen, then, ambivalent, wondering if the trend towards supposed insider productions and the decadent professionalization of the audience would continue (getting its second life after the pandemic) or if the new truly green sprouts of complex, generous, humane cultural achievement would be sustained and allowed, well, to flower. In the conversations afterwards, it struck me that critics and audience members downplayed a significant, surprising “return” of the German theatre towards a literary, new-author’s theatre: amidst the praise for productions like Bucket List and Laios , the writing was only minimally mentioned. Given the high and impressive production values from the other artists an d arts involved in making great theatre, that might be understandable. But it would be dishonest to not add the corrective that these productions also featured texts that deserve to be read and studied, that buoyed the performances and scenic designs and assemblages also on display. Just as Shakespeare, the outsider poet from Stratford, composed plays that we know drew much of their compelling material from the spectacular genius of ensemble—from the extraordinary talents of actors, architects, politicians, and impresario-businesspeople—a remarkable new generation of playwrights in Germany are sneaking their play texts like ghosts through the cracked mirror side-stage doors of a post-literary theatrum mundi. As superstitious as we might be, it would be a shame if we contemporaries again largely failed to remark upon them. References References About the author(s) Dan Poston is an Assistant Professor in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Tübingen. His intellectual biography of the quintessential public taste-maker Joseph Addison was published by the University of Virginia Press in December 2024. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. By Marina Johnson Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF Arab Stages ISSN: 2376-1148 Vol. 19 (Spring 2026), pp. 62-65 Hanna Eady’s Almonds Blossom in Deir Yassin is a haunting work of memory and moral reckoning, a four-character play that moves fluidly across time, psychic space, and geopolitical terrain. Rather than a straightforward historical drama, Eady constructs a piece that unfolds “in the Palestinian memory, in Gad’s head, in Israel, in Palestine, and on the site of Deir Yassin.” The result is a play that refuses temporal linearity and narrative comfort, embodying instead the fractured condition of a history too long repressed. In this production, the living and the dead share the stage as the massacre’s silenced testimony presses insistently against Gad, a former soldier who was present at the massacre, and his faltering attempts at justification and forgetting. Seattle-based Dunya Productions deepens the resonances inherent in the text by situating it in the former Cherry Street Mosque, a nearly century-old building that has served at different times as a Jewish school, an Islamic school, and now as the emerging Cherry Street Village—a joint endeavor among interfaith and arts organizations. As the city’s Central District undergoes rapid transformation, the effort to restore this building as a community hub becomes an act of preservation and imagination, resisting the erasures that urban development often produces. Set on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, the work insists that memory is not past; it is a present tense, a haunting that continues to shape those who survive and those who inherit. At its center is Gad, an aging Israeli man tormented by visions and memories he cannot control. He is the last surviving member of his military unit, which had been involved in the Deir Yassin massacre. His psychiatrist, Dr. Levi, accompanies him to the site of the former village, now a mental institution, in an attempt at therapeutic exposure and in preparation for a celebration honoring him at that site. Instead of resolution, the visit collapses the fragile border between hallucination and haunting, seemingly summoning Amal and Zidan, a father-daughter duo who initially appear as ghosts, but gradually reveal themselves as embodiments of history and truth. Amal uses poetic and incantatory language to cut through Gad’s rationalizations as he denies his past acts. Her exhortation, “Come out of the darkness… show your bloody hands,” is both an accusation and an invitation to confess. As an audience member, I was not certain to what extent Amal was real; she seemed to always occupy a liminal space that defied categorization. Was Amal both a living 70-year-old woman and a ghost who haunted Gad? In my interpretation, she was simultaneously a ghost, a memory, a witness, and a child. To have the main Palestinian character occupy this opaque space seemed odd, as the Israeli characters seemed to occupy very specific characterizations. Dr. Levi, a representative of institutional authority, attempts to manage Gad and his deteriorating mental state, offering medication and rehearsing the script he is expected to recite at the ceremony honoring him and his military unit. But her own encounters with Amal destabilize her certainty. Her insistence that Gad focus on his own mental well-being, divorced from historical reality, reveals the limitations of psychological frameworks that avoid political truth. The past demands to be confronted, through the presence of Amal and Zidan. The script’s interplay between the psychological and political gives the play its charge. The dramaturgical structure slowly builds toward the play’s devastating reversal: Zidan, the elderly Palestinian man we think is Amal’s father, confesses that he is not what he seems. He reveals that he was once a Jewish Irgun fighter who participated in the massacre. Zidan was shot and abandoned by his fellow fighters, only to be rescued by Amal’s father, who placed a keffiyeh around his neck before being killed moments later. Mistaken for a Palestinian because of the keffiyeh, Zidan adopted a new identity, “Zidan Yassin,” raising the infant Amal as his daughter. Zidan’s confession thus resonates as both personal tragedy and collective indictment, exposing how violence reverberates across generations and identities. This revelation reframes the relationship between the two characters and transforms Amal’s presence onstage from that of a protected child into a living embodiment of the history Zidan carries. Amal’s final proclamation, “HOPE! That’s my name,” echoes through the theatre not as naïveté but as an insistence on memory and the continuity of Palestinian presence. Dramaturgically, this shifts the audience’s attention from the perpetrator’s confession to the persistence of Palestinian life, positioning Amal’s declaration as both a reclamation of narrative and a gesture toward the future. Eady, who grew up inside the Green Line, belongs to a lineage of Palestinian theatre that uses fractured temporality to counter attempts at erasure. [1] Yet Almonds Blossom in Deir Yassin is distinctive in its focus on interrogating the psychological architecture of denial among its Israeli characters. In the United States, there has been a necessary dialogue on the representational discourse of plays from and about the SWANA world. While essential, these frameworks sometimes sidestep deeper questions of historical responsibility, narrative control, and the ethics of staging political trauma. Eady’s play pushes these conversations further. It challenges audiences, particularly American ones accustomed to consuming stories about the Middle East through a humanitarian or apolitical lens, to confront the structural and historical specificity of Palestinian dispossession. Visually, this production was simple but striking. The stage was dominated by a single bare almond tree, its branches twisting upward like an arrested gesture. Leo Mayberry’s projections animated the tree in slow, subtle transformations; blossoms emerged, trembled, and fell. Mayberry expanded the visual field with images of Palestinian landscapes—terraces, stone walls, olive groves—and later with horrifying scenes from Gaza. These projections anchored the story within a broader continuum of violence. They reminded viewers that the ghosts of Deir Yassin are not relics of a distant past but part of ongoing dispossession and massacre. Image 1: Nabra Nelson as Amal and Tom Wiseley as Gad. Photo Credit: Samia El-Moslimany. The performances were uniformly strong, with Nabra Nelson’s Amal at the center. Nelson brought extraordinary depth to the role. Clad in a richly embroidered Palestinian thobe, she embodied Amal with paradoxical stillness and volatility: Her gestures were small but precise, her shifts between tenderness and accusation seamless (Image 1). Her voice, resonant and controlled, carried the weight of generations. She was not just a character; she embodied a lineage. Tom Wiseley’s portrayal of Gad was also compelling. He captured the character’s oscillation between rationalization and collapse, his voice revealing layers of denial, fear, and yearning for absolution. Wiseley also designed the lighting and served as production manager, a testament to Dunya Productions’ collaborative ethos. Alyssa Norling’s Dr. Levi brought sharpness and restraint to her role, making the character’s clinical rationality feel both chilling and heartbreakingly inadequate. Bradley Goodwill’s Zidan, with his quiet gravitas and understated emotionality, grounded the play’s final confession with devastating clarity. The sonic landscape, composed by renowned Palestinian musician Habib Shehadeh Hanna, enriched the production. The music was aching, ritualistic, and melodic, and it served as both emotional undercurrent and narrative guide. It marked shifts in time, underscored moments of confrontation, and imbued the performance with the weight of ceremony. Dramaturg Ed Mast provided accessible and essential context for audience members unfamiliar with Deir Yassin, available both in the program and in the lobby; this helped situate the play within a broader political and historical frame. On opening night, the post-show conversation led by organizers from No Tech for Apartheid extended the production’s reach, connecting the themes of historical complicity to contemporary technological infrastructures that enable state violence. The conversation echoed the play’s refusal of closure. It demanded that audiences remain unsettled, recognizing that the past is not dormant but animated, always insisting on return. In the end, Almonds Blossom in Deir Yassin offers no catharsis, nor does it attempt to redeem its characters through forgiveness. Instead, it insists on truth-telling as the precondition for healing. It invites audiences to bear witness not as passive observers but as participants in an unresolved story, one that continues to shape the present through its echoes, absences, and persistent calls for justice. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [1] “Inside the Green Line” refers to the territory that Israel took control of after the Nakba, demarcated by the 1949 Armistice Line, which was often drawn in green ink on maps. References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson ( Marina-Johnson.com ) is a PhD candidate in TAPS with PhD minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Certificate in Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Johnson received her MFA in Directing and taught at Beloit College for three years. Johnson continues to work as a director and dramaturg while also co-hosting Kunafa and Shay , a MENA/SWANA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons. During her most recent fieldwork, she directed several productions with Al Harah Theatre and taught directing workshops at ASHTAR Theatre. 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.

Heather S. Nathans 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 Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF In 1986, during my first year at Dartmouth College, I had the good fortune to take a seminar on Black Theatre with Professor Errol Hill (1921-2003). [1] More than thirty years later I still count myself lucky to have had my introduction to the history of Black Theatre under Errol’s guidance. His rigorous scholarship and penetrating questions helped to set the standards for my own further explorations of Black Theatre History over the coming years, and I still remember our final chat many years later at a 2002 ASTR conference when he was asking me about the progress of my new book on slavery and US theatre. Errol would have been 100 years old this year. A century after his birth, he still stands as one of the giants in the field of Black Theatre scholarship. His landmark History of African American Theatre with Jim Hatch (1929-2020), his work as a playwright, his foundational study, Shakespeare in Sable , his pioneering book, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900 , his many edited collections of plays by Black dramatists, as well as his monumental Theatre Collection, now housed at Dartmouth College—all of these contributions have shaped the development of the field in innumerable ways for thousands of scholars and students who never had the chance to meet him. For those who did have the chance to work with him, his mentorship proved equally invaluable—generous and exacting in equal measure. The award that bears his name with the American Society for Theatre Research has recognized more than thirty outstanding works in Black Theatre since its launch in 1997. (The list of those winners is included in the Book Review section of this issue and can also be found on the ASTR website at astr.org.) What I miss most—even thirty-five years after our first encounter in Hanover, NH—is the bellow of laughter that would erupt from this most dignified and handsome of men, transforming him into a joyous figure always ready to welcome new colleagues to the field. I spoke recently with his wife, Grace Hope Hill—his partner in his life, his research, his theatrical productions, and over many years of travel and adventure. I said how much I still missed his laugh. Grace exclaimed, “His laugh was so loud.” She also shared a story of Errol’s early days that links to so many of the themes shared in this issue about the need to support and document Black Theatre. In the 1950s, the University of the West Indies in Jamaica received a 300£ donation from a British bookstore owner (at Foyles Bookshop) and Errol, then serving as a “Drama Tutor” in the program, headed out into communities across Jamaica to develop new works by regional authors. As Grace recalls, “He helped with the writing, directing, and acting… We worked with very limited funds and did everything ourselves. Errol was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” That statement sums up Errol’s contribution to Black Theatre Studies so beautifully – for both those who knew him and those who never had the chance to meet him, “He was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” Help us celebrate Errol’s legacy in this issue dedicated to Black Theatre. Honor the innumerable artists and scholars who have created and documented the field of Black Theatre for more than two centuries of passionate work and those who are propelling it forward into the future. Ronald N. Sherr, "Errol G. Hill," oil on panel, Dartmouth College References [1] For more on Errol’s extraordinary career, including his time with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Yale University, Dartmouth College, as a professional actor and playwright, and as an accomplished scholar, see the link to his papers now housed at Dartmouth College: https://archives-manuscripts.dartmouth.edu/agents/people/1185 . Footnotes About The Author(s) HEATHER S. NATHANS Professor, Tufts 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.

Stephanie Lim Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Stephanie Lim By Published on December 10, 2020 Download Article as PDF For a woman to bear a child, she must . . . in her own personal way, she must . . . love her husband. Love him, as she can love only him. Only him . . . she must love—with her whole . . . heart. There. Now, you know everything.[1] Frau Bergman, Spring Awakening In the opening scene of Spring Awakening , Wendla begs her mother to explain where babies come from, to which her mother bemoans, “Wendla, child, you cannot imagine—.” In Deaf West Theatre’s version of the show, Frau Bergman speaks this line while bringing her pinky finger up to her head, palm outward, but Wendla quickly corrects the gesture, indicating that her mother has actually inverted the American Sign Language (ASL) for “imagine,” a word signed with palm facing inward. [2] As part of a larger dialogue that closes with the epigraph above, Bergman’s struggle to communicate about sexual intercourse in both ASL and English is one of many exchanges in which adults find themselves unable to communicate effectively with teenagers. The theme of (mis)communication is also evoked through characters’ refusal to communicate with each other at all, as in the musical number “Totally Fucked.” When Melchior’s teachers demand he confess to having authored the obscene 10-page document, “The Art of Sleeping With” (which they claim hastened the suicide of his best friend Moritz), they reject his attempts to explain. Whereas the dialogue between Bergman and her daughter demonstrates failed communication due partly to lack of linguistic proficiency, Melchior finds himself “totally fucked,” because the adults refuse to listen to him entirely. Moments such as these abound in Deaf West’s production of Spring Awakening and profoundly inform the musical’s dramatic arc, continually demonstrating the boundaries between Deaf and hearing worlds. These breakdowns of communication—either the inability to communicate with others or the refusal to—make the dramatic consequences of a show about miscommunication all the more compellingly tragic. The production’s choices move beyond an access-oriented approach for d/Deaf audiences, [3] as the integration of ASL adds a dramaturgical emphasis to the musical’s themes. In re-imagining the world of Spring Awakening in a d/Deaf context, the “real world” spaces off-stage that often privilege oralist and audist practices are radically inverted onstage, rendering verbal communication unreliable and, instead, prioritizing the literal gestures and physicality of sign language. Exploring the relationship between Deaf West’s Spring Awakening and traditional stagings of the show, this paper looks specifically at how the production’s intricate gestures and staging make visible the boundary between Deaf and hearing communities. The production provides not only the literal stage upon which the Deaf and hearing worlds convene, but also a space where Deaf culture and silence are often emphasized, reconsidering traditional renderings of the Deaf/hearing divide within the space and modalities of musical theatre. Troubling “All That’s Known”: Interrogating the Hearing Line English and ASL scholar Christopher Krentz offers a productive way to understand the space between Deaf and hearing worlds through what he calls the “hearing line,” or the “invisible boundary separating deaf and hearing people.” [4] Drawing from W.E.B. DuBois’ “color line,” Krentz’s hearing line calls attention to—and calls into question—the complex, ever-shifting, and uneven binary between deafness and “hearingness,” whereby identities are formed and shaped. If, at the hearing line, one’s ability to hear informs one’s identity (and corresponding privilege), the world generated in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening is an analogous manifestation of this line, made visible across private and public spaces. Additionally, in the same way that reading and writing offer for Krentz a mutual space for Deaf and hearing worlds to convene—“a place where differences may recede and binaries may be transcended” [5] —so too does the stage attempt to enlighten and alter the complicated relationship between Deaf and hearing identities. In Deaf West’s Spring Awakening , the hearing line is continually emphasized and intensified to both convey and bolster the frequent failures of communication between the adults and teenagers, a point made relentlessly in traditional productions of the musical and in the original 1891 play by Frank Wedekind. The hearing line is also troubled, disrupted, and circumvented at times, often through musical numbers, to accentuate Deaf culture, identity, and silence. In the process, the show exposes, challenges, and reconsiders the hierarchical positions of the Deaf/hearing worlds found at the hearing line, both in the show and in the real-world—ultimately attempting to bridge the gap between the two worlds. Although ASL/English productions such as this have attempted to increase access for d/Deaf audiences, Deaf West’s musical productions (which to date include Oliver! , Sleeping Beauty Wakes , Big River , Pippin , Spring Awakening , and an adaptation of Medusa ) are nonetheless criticized for not being fully accessible. d/Deaf audience members have continually noted the difficulty in understanding ASL used on-stage because of SimCom [6] (which weakens and obscures linguistic meaning, made via the hands and face, known as non-manual markers), the ineffective lighting design in some scenes (at times either too dark or too bright), and the inconsistent use of captions and clear sightlines (or clear access to d/Deaf actors’ communicative gestures and expressions). [7] Jehanne C. McCullough denounces Spring Awakening in particular for being for hearing people rather than for Deaf people because the overall design and casting of the show continually works in favor of hearing audiences. [8] As a hearing audience member, I acknowledge my own limited perspective and hearing privilege in my viewings and readings of the show. Because of the space always-already created by musical theatre (i.e. sound-centric), and given Deaf West’s uses of SimCom and captions, I was afforded more opportunities to understand what was going on. Nonetheless, by highlighting the casting, staging, and choreographic choices of Deaf West’s revival, I hope to point out how frequently the production emphasizes Deaf perspectives over hearing ones, generating an overall shift towards Deaf modalities of experiencing musical theatre. More explicitly than in their previous musicals, this production challenges the hearing line by including various moments that attempt to prioritize and even simulate Deaf experience. Several scenes in the show not only emphasize the hearing line but also purposely call into question the hierarchy that holds audism and oralism superior to deafness. During the first classroom scene, for instance, Herr Sonnenstich calls on various students to recite from Virgil’s Aeneid , enforcing what is known as oralism, the nineteenth-century practice of teaching d/Deaf students through lip reading and vocalizing, which rejects the use of ASL altogether. When Ernst uses ASL to facilitate his own vocalization of the poem, Sonnenstich berates him and angrily strikes a pointing stick against the desk. Later, when Moritz vocally recites a word incorrectly (“multim olim” instead of “multim ille”), Sonnenstich chastises him, mocking the way Moritz sounds when vocalizing and even making up random hand gestures to accompany his voice. In traditional productions, Moritz’s failure is often performed and read as a result of his laziness, his lack of scholarly aptitude, and the fact that he is caught sleeping (an action noted in the libretto); however, Moritz’s vocalized error here, wholly unaccompanied by ASL, adds a layer of complexity to the situation: his mistake might also be a mispronunciation if he does not vocalize regularly. As a result of Sonnenstich’s offensive conduct, Melchior stands up for Moritz and tries to minimize the humiliation by attempting to rationalize the mistake. Suggesting that “multim olim” be recognized as a new critical commentary on Aeneas , Melchior uses SimCom so that his classmates can all understand him. This being Melchior’s first scene also critically positions him as an ally and advocate of Deaf culture, Deaf identity, and language—an important position he maintains throughout the show. By setting the production clearly in the historical context of the late 1800s, Deaf West’s version presents oralism as the framework through which to understand the show. Many of the adults’ actions also uphold audist and oralist ideologies, a dramaturgical choice that affixes specific nuance to the constant miscommunication that pervades the show thematically. At the same time, the dramatized suppression of a rich and vibrant language like ASL and Melchior’s presence as a hearing character who undertakes the plight of his Deaf classmates bring to light the ethics of such an oppressive system. The overall story arc between Wendla and Frau Bergman also presents the devastating consequences that miscommunication, or rather the desire not to communicate at all, can have. Demonstrating the hearing line within the privacy of the home, Wendla asks her mother to explain where babies come from, as discussed in this paper’s opening example. Frau Bergman, rather than explaining the truth—birth as a natural, physiological phenomenon that may result from intercourse—evades the question and explains the process of conception as vaguely as possible, in part because she does not know how to expound on the topic through ASL. The full damage of Bergman’s failure to explain how babies are conceived is revealed in Act Two, when the Bergmans find out Wendla is pregnant. Wendla’s response is to cry out, “My God, why didn’t you tell me everything?” [9] —the only line in the show vocalized by Deaf actor Sandra Mae Frank, rather than voiced by the Voice of Wendla, Katie Boeck. Interestingly, the emphasis on communicative failure also falsely suggests the opposite of what happens: if only Wendla could “hear,” her mother could have fully communicated the truth in English. This mother-daughter relationship, as well as the relationship between hearing and deafness, is further exaggerated and complicated when two doctors become involved in Wendla’s pregnancy. The first, Doctor von Brausepulver, communicates with Wendla using SimCom during their run at The Wallis and using English only on Broadway; when Frau Bergman asks about Wendla’s nausea, Brausepulver ends by speaking but not signing, “Not uncommon. Trust me, child. You’ll be fine ” (emphasis added), performing the emphasized phrases in an over-enunciated and exaggerated manner at Wendla, indicated both vocally and physically. [10] Immediately after, Brausepulver speaks with Frau Bergman off to the side, a whispered conversation that is never spoken aloud to the audience. This secret, “silent” conversation is contrasted soon after by the second physician, Schmidt, who is recommended by Bergman’s “doctor friend” to perform Wendla’s abortion, unbeknownst to Wendla. In this second scene, Schmidt (played by a deaf performer) signs to Bergman in ASL only, “Now, listen to my instructions carefully,” and explains where to bring Wendla. These scenes function together ironically: Brausepulver whispers to Bergman to avoid Wendla’s overhearing him, even though she is deaf, while Schmidt communicates with Bergman in ASL, a language Bergman herself struggles with. The tragedy of Wendla’s eventual death is partly caused and greatly augmented by the adults’ inability and unwillingness to communicate with her and with each other. While the scenes above perpetuate the normative hierarchy of the hearing line (wherein the hearing world is often dominant), other scenes intensify the divide and prioritize silence and ASL. Specifically, Moritz’s confession to his father about failing his final exams is one of the production’s two brief scenes that are communicated entirely through ASL, though subtitled in English. Herr Stiefel continually probes Moritz for an explanation of how they can show their faces publicly: “What are your mother and I supposed to do?” “What do I tell them at the bank?” “How do we go to Church?” Stiefel’s interrogation insinuates that the family will be negatively perceived by the community because of Moritz’s failure, and the shame of Moritz’s failure can also be read as a further marginalization of the family as d/Deaf. In any staging of the scene, silence always permeates the interaction between Moritz and his father; that is, all questions go unanswered, as Moritz is unable to respond at all out of fear and/or shame. But in Deaf West’s staging, the placing of two d/Deaf actors onstage alone further heightens the power of “silence,” not as a passive space or absence of sound, but as a space that includes energy, emotion, and movement, particularly that of ASL. For hearing audiences, the minute-and-a-half scene is ostensibly done in complete silence, except for Herr Stiefel’s brief vocalized yells. While hearing audiences might experience the aural “silence” of this scene, it is the magnitude and force of Stiefel’s rage when he interrogates Moritz that is emphasized, redefining the notion of silence itself. Anyone with experience being reprimanded by a parent can immediately sense Herr Stiefel’s nonstop “shouting,” conveyed through his agitated signing and aggressive movements, like grabbing Moritz by the collar, as well as the word “failed” continuously projected/subtitled on the back wall. Silence here shows what “the deaf family experience [is] like, and how signing can be loving, but can also be angry and scream-like, thus proving to the audience how diverse of a language ASL is.” [11] Moreover, although this scene is punctuated by captions projected onto the back wall—still privileging hearing audiences in providing them a means by which to understand the scene—the prioritizing of and focus on ASL rather than on vocalized speech compels hearing audiences to reconsider the ways in which meaning is communicated, changing how audiences hear and listen , particularly in the space of musical theatre. As a further punctuation of the hearing line, the production’s casting of Deaf/“Voice of” pairs (utilized for the characters of Wendla, Moritz, Martha, Otto, Thea, and Ernst) purposely positions the younger characters in the Deaf world, thereby creating a clear alliance among the students rather than among any of the adults, none of whom were cast in Deaf/Voice of pairs, as noted in the Playbill. In addition, Melchior is positioned as the hearing line in human form, performed by a hearing actor who is fluent in ASL. That Melchior uses SimCom is problematic from a linguistic and logistical point of view, since he is the main character and has a great deal of dialogue. Dramaturgically, however, Melchior is the hearing line made manifest—a human bridge between d/Deaf and hearing worlds, such that SimCom becomes a metaphor for Melchior’s existence in and ability to move in-between both worlds. Notably, of the parents portrayed in the production, Melchior’s are the only Deaf/hearing couple—his mother being Deaf and his father being hearing, using SimCom. Melchior’s actions can thus be read as an attempt to mediate the relationships across both worlds, particularly between teachers and students, and adults and teenagers. On the one hand, because the show employs SimCom with specific characters (rather than double-casting all of the characters) in order to demonstrate the failures in communication, an ironic result is to impair another essential line of communication, diluting the messages from stage to audience. On the other hand, the use of SimCom for adult characters like Brausepulver and Frau Bergman heightens the collapse of communication and highlights the Deaf/hearing dichotomy. By using Deaf/Voice Of pairs, delineations between Deaf/hearing in the adults, and SimCom in the case of Melchior, the characters influence and embody the ever-shifting state of the hearing line in the world of the play. Musically, the production also presents, pushes against, and interrogates the hearing line through the use non-spoken and gestural languages. These languages accentuate the teenagers’ emotional, psychological, and physical states. For example, “And Then There Were None” is both an intensification of the Deaf/hearing dichotomy and an attempt to circumvent the hierarchy produced by and at the hearing line. In the epistolary song, Moritz and Frau Gabor, Melchior’s mother, write a series of letters to each other, detailed within the song’s lyrics. Although Gabor is certainly the most sympathetic and idealistic of the adults, the song itself portrays her unwillingness to believe Moritz’s “veiled threat that, should escape not be possible, [he] would take [his] own life,” creating a more nuanced iteration of her own failure in communication: she “hears” him but refuses to actually listen to what he says. Since the actors playing Moritz and Frau Gabor are d/Deaf, the number compels audiences to focus on the signing rather than on the singing. Hanschen and Georg are the only hearing characters that briefly perform lyrics through SimCom; however, the staging of the song concentrates on Gabor and Moritz, who are later joined by Otto and Ernst—all characters who are played by d/Deaf actors. Therefore, rather than marginalizing the physicality of ASL, it is put front and center, while the Voices Of are off to the sides. This is also a visceral reversal of the limited use of ASL in theatrical settings: typically, d/Deaf access to a show is performed solely by platform interpreters, who are placed off to the sides of the stage. By putting deafness and Deaf identity at the forefront, Deaf West inverts the hearing line dramaturgically through its characters and linguistically for its audiences. A second song that places emphasis on physicality, gesture, and ASL is “Totally Fucked,” which highlights the younger characters’ resistance to their adult counterparts. In traditional stagings of the show, “Totally Fucked” is the ultimate anthem of teenage angst and rebellion, underscored by the music itself. Deaf West stages this number as a rock concert, putting even more emphasis than the original Broadway production on the physical, aggressive, and sometimes sexually and linguistically explicit movements of the choreography. What becomes most important in this song—and indeed, throughout the show’s many musical numbers—is not so much the lyrics but, rather, the gestural and non-verbal languages that accompany the lyrics and music, including choreography, lighting design, and the principal focus on ASL, as in “And Then There Were None.” Sarah Wilbur suggests that Deaf West’s version of the show triumphs because of these layered gestural economies, that is, “the demands that the company’s multifaceted use of gesture places on audiences, performers, and producers.” [12] As a “visual-gestural language,” [13] ASL becomes the most powerful tool on Deaf West’s stage. “Totally Fucked” is, in all productions, a mutinous response to the “yes” or “no” that adults demand of Melchior and his peers. But in Deaf West’s version, the song also becomes an outright reversal of the hearing line in which hearing and oralism are traditionally favored. Deaf West’s “Totally Fucked” takes physicality and gestures to new heights and meanings, imbuing a song known for its loud and extreme chaos with ASL, a language just as intense, powerful, and “loud” (or, in this case, boisterous) in its own unique way. In this way, both multiplying and subverting the traditional modalities of musical theatre beyond merely vocalized speech and music, Spring Awakening highlights a Deaf perspective, a rewriting of the hearing line, through its transformative inclusion of Deaf culture, identity, and language. “I’m Gonna Be Your Bruise”: Sharing Signs On and Across Bodies Additional restructurings of the hearing line occur within Deaf West’s practice of “sharing signs,” [14] when two (or more) actors sign words/phrases together. The use of shared signs reveals how important meaning-making can occur via ASL on and across the literal bodies of performers and characters, which English alone cannot achieve. This practice arises frequently throughout Spring Awakening to emphasize the intimate and physical (often sensual and sexualized) connections between characters. In a show explicitly about sex, shared signs also add complexity to the relationships between characters and bolster the already-sexualized content of the libretto and music. Shared signs first appear in the production during “My Junk,” when Hanschen channels Desdemona and masturbates to Correggio’s Jupiter and Io . With Herr Rilow (Hanschen’s father) constantly rapping on the bathroom door, Hanschen’s urgency to “finish” is augmented by two, three, and eventually five girls who help him sign and masturbate simultaneously: Wendla holds up the picture, while Thea’s right arm signs with Hanschen’s left; when Fraulein Grossebustenhalter asks Georg to “bring out the left hand,” Hanschen switches arms, this time signing with Martha’s left arm while masturbating with his own left; finally, when Rilow demands that Hanschen go back to bed, Martha and Thea sign together, while Anna takes on the task of stroking Hanschen, and Heidi rubs Hanschen’s arms, put above his head to signal his letting go of all control. The abundance and entanglement of hands becomes visually striking, and sharing signs is conceived as an overt sexual act, used to create and complete Hanschen’s stimulation, arousal, and climax—a sexual awakening that is already written into the character. Moreover, this early sequence of shared signs, with its explicit sexual content, adds a related charge to subsequent uses of this device, which acquire similar connotations of intimacy, physicality, and sexuality. The use of shared signs in the songs following “My Junk” reinforce the teenagers’ desires to feel , close to each other and/or anything at all, since the adults in their lives refuse to do so. “The Word of Your Body,” performed by Melchior and Wendla and later reprised by Hanschen and Ernst, first occurs when Melchior and Wendla touch hands for the first time and a brief pause transpires between them. Focusing on the chorus (“O, I’m gonna be wounded. / O, I’m gonna be your wound. / O, I’m gonna bruise you. / O, you’re gonna be my bruise” [15] ), the signs and shared signs for “wound” and “bruise” speak directly to the song’s meaning, especially because the performers sign on the other person’s body. Their signs for “wounded” are made individually, but the repeated sign for “wound”—made with index fingers pointing in and slightly twisting in opposite directions—becomes an entangled idea, as they literally crisscross over and under each other’s arms while signing. Additionally, using an ASL variation to indicate “bruise,” performers sign the color “black”—made by swiping a finger across one’s forehead—on the other person’s body: in the first line, they each point to Melchior for “I’m gonna” and then sign “black” on each other’s foreheads, but in the second line, they point to Wendla for “I’m gonna” and then sign “black” across each other’s chests. As in ASL, the position of the signs adds further meaning to the song: the forehead could signify a mental “bruise,” while the chest signifies the heart or the soul/spirit, suggesting the ways in which Melchior and Wendla’s impending relationship will affect the characters. Since ASL is not normally signed on another person’s body (but, instead, on the affected spot of one’s own body), the repeated act of signing on and across another’s body makes the black and blue metaphor all the more violent and serves as a foreshadowing for the ambiguous brutality and possible rape between Wendla and Melchior that occurs later in the show. Deaf West’s staging of “Touch Me” also utilizes shared signs to visually represent the characters’ sharing of knowledge and of themselves with each other, diminishing the original staging’s emphasis on individual experience and suppressed, inner turmoil, while also accentuating relationships that are both erotic and indeterminate in nature. Melchior and Moritz’s shared signs during “Touch Me” produce ambiguous, bisexual dimensions in both characters and also positions Melchior as “top” regarding both Moritz and Wendla. The very act of sharing signs parallels Melchior’s desire to share his (sexual) knowledge with Moritz, and Moritz’s mutual desire to learn about sex from Melchior, prompted by Melchior’s self-assured insight about how it must feel for a woman to give herself to another, “defending yourself until, finally, you surrender and feel Heaven break over you.” In Raymond Knapp’s reading of Huck and Jim’s relationship in Deaf West’s Big River , Knapp notes that the sharing of signs reinforces their already-intimate friendship and “comes across as a rueful acknowledgment of their impossible love.” [16] Just as Big River ’s Huck and Jim establish a hierarchical rapport through their sharing of signs (especially in “Muddy Water”), Melchior’s position of intellectual authority over Moritz is reinforced through their interconnecting signs as well. Melchior and Moritz’s homosocial relationship—like Huck and Jim’s—is expressed gesturally, evoking homosexuality through physical, shared signs. The shared signs of “Touch Me” also move beyond Melchior and Moritz. In the original Broadway staging of the song, Melchior briefly grabs and controls Moritz’s arms during the song’s chorus (“Touch me—just like that. / And that—O, yeah—now, that’s heaven” [17] ), gesturing toward sight or enlightenment (guiding Moritz’s hands toward Moritz’s eyes) and the discovery of sexuality. The rest of the song is performed by the whole ensemble individually, choreographed within the limited spaces around and on their own bodies. In Deaf West’s version of the number, however, Georg’s solo and final chorus of the song results in a burst of choreography and shared signs amongst the younger characters. Melchior and Moritz sign together and constantly link hands and arms, and several other cast members also pair up to sign together for the chorus (Wendla and Ernst, Thea and Heidi, and Martha and Anna). This choreography underscores the sexuality of the song’s lyrics and altogether multiplies the sexual connotations of shared signs. That the performers appear here in same-sex and mixed-sex pairs adds further homosocial and bi/homosexual undercurrents to a song literally about sex and sexuality. Although the multiplicity of shared signs here could perhaps suggest something like a sexual orgy, the pairing up of the girls and of characters like Wendla and Ernst also highlights the consequences of repressing the truth about sex and of isolating girls and boys: children will educate each other about sex if their parents refuse to. By accentuating the act of sharing through the physical act of sharing signs, and by drawing sharp attention to how sign language can function in tandem with and across multiple bodies, Deaf West shifts the hearing line towards a d/Deaf production of knowledge and community- and relationship-building. “And Now Our Bodies Are The Guilty Ones”: Deaf Experience & Expression Deaf West’s production further revises the hearing line by prioritizing moments of d/Deaf experience and expression. This includes an emphasis on the body and on touch in particular, calling attention to the importance of physical expression and contact found at the hearing line from a d/Deaf perspective: effective ASL depends on the physicality of the speaker, and physical touch holds particular importance within the formation of Deaf community and interactions. Moreover, the production highlights Deaf modalities of meaning-making, including through language and music. That the production generates instances of d/Deaf sensory experience and expression also contests versions of deafness that, in the past, have been romanticized or demonized—that is, the writing of deaf characters who are either pitied or detested. Similar to nineteenth-century deaf writers who “subvert power arrangements, not to mention concepts of reality and order,” [18] Deaf West thereby rewrites the power dynamics of the hearing line and produces a d/Deaf sensibility and awareness of the world and of music in particular. Further building upon the play’s themes of communication and connection, the production stresses physical touch and sense over sight and language to simulate characters’ need to be close to others and their (blind) desire to feel anything at all. Two “games” take place in which characters are blindfolded, accentuating physicality, sensory deprivation, intensification, and feeling . In the first instance, the students play a version of blind man’s buff with Moritz: depriving him of sight, the students continually circle around him, slapping and smacking various parts of his body, then quickly pulling away before he can catch them. The second game occurs at the top of Act Two, when Melchior and Wendla are blindfolded and play a game of trust, walking on chairs that are continually being set down by the cast, literally trusting the other cast members with their “safety” and feeling their way across the stage to the piano. These blindfold games, in which characters willingly deprive themselves of sight—seemingly the most important element to ASL—address the unspeakable-ness of their lives and underscore the fact that not everything can be verbally or even gesturally communicated between them. Metaphorically, these scenes also depict the teenagers “feeling their way” through life, an irony since they actually do not know what they are doing, despite the adults always being portrayed and thought of as the most ignorant and naïve. [19] These acts of blindfolding, though ironic in a d/Deaf context, maintains focus on the sense of touch found at the heart of Deaf culture. Moreover, the actions limit the usual emphasis on English-centered or hearing-centered modalities and communication. Much like the ASL-centric “silent” scene in which Moritz admits his failure at school to his father, several scenes also show central characters briefly privileging Deaf modalities of meaning-making over English- and hearing-centered ones, or the consequences of the opposite. The scenes also primarily revolve around characters’ desires to “feel something” beyond merely the physical or emotional—that is, to feel something inexpressible through language alone. For instance, during Wendla and Melchior’s beating scene, Wendla continually presses Melchior to beat her with a wooden switch, expressing a longing to feel something (“My entire life. I’ve never . . . felt . . . Anything ”). The actor playing Melchior momentarily foregoes SimCom to sign, “I’ll teach you to say: ‘Please.’” The words are projected for hearing audiences, making this one of Melchior’s two ASL-only lines and adding a disquieting moment to what is already the most harrowing line in the scene. Melchior’s second and only other ASL-only line occurs a few scenes later, right before they have sex, when he signs “forgive me” onto Wendla’s hand; that this too is done in aural silence, with words projected, functions conversely to his line during the beating scene and demonstrates his deep regret for what transpired. Throughout these scenes, Melchior’s use of ASL-only is in the first instance chillingly harsh, but in the second an attempt at compassion, such that his brief but powerful uses of ASL over English perpetuate a complicated sexual politics at the hearing line: Melchior, who exists simultaneously in the hearing and Deaf worlds, exercises his knowledge of sex and ASL both to influence the situation but also to communicate intimately with Wendla, who is primarily read as Deaf although she has a Voice Of partner on stage. Although the act may falsely suggest that language alone can successfully express his raw, complicated emotions, Melchior’s abandoning of English functions as an attempt to communicate fully and intimately with Wendla in ways that no other relationship on stage does. In contrast to Melchior and Wendla’s relationship, a later scene between Ilse and Moritz demonstrates the damaging consequences of unequal communication between d/Deaf and hearing individuals, wherein English and hearing are privileged. While Wendla believes being beaten will allow her to feel something , Moritz believes ending his own life will allow him to feel something different than the despair caused by school and his parents, again a desire inaccessible via language. Ilse unknowingly runs into Moritz as he is searching for his gun and becomes an embodiment of the failures that can be found at the Deaf/hearing divide, specifically in her audist actions. Moritz, too distracted and overwhelmed by his own personal crisis, rejects Ilse’s continued requests (in SimCom) to walk her home, causing Ilse to purposely abandon her use of ASL. She indignantly proclaims in English-only, “You know, by the time you finally wake up, I’ll be lying on some trash heap.” She then removes her wig to reveal her baldness, having recently undergone chemotherapy, before walking offstage. [20] The performative function of removing her wig could, in part, be read as Ilse’s way of trying to stay in control of the situation even beyond her linguistic prerogative, and unlike Melchior’s purposeful abandonment of English with Wendla, Ilse’s actions reimpose the communication gap. The fact that Ilse gives up her position as an ally by discarding the use of ASL not only perpetuates the normative hierarchies of the Deaf/hearing divide and hearing line, but also demonstrates the disheartening consequences of what happens when people cease their attempts to truly communicate and empathize with each other. Momentarily generating a Deaf experience of musical meaning-making, [21] a single ASL-only musical line occurs at the very end of the show, during “The Song of Purple Summer.” These moments highlight for (predominantly hearing) audiences an even wider spectrum of Deaf (multi-)sensory experiences and meaning-making modalities that move beyond sight and speech alone. When Melchior is confronted by the ghosts of Moritz and Wendla, he decides not to kill himself and realizes that they will always be with him; this is musically signified in the repetition of the phrase “Not gone.” However, coupled with ASL, and repeated several times by the ensemble, one phrase omits the singing in favor of the signing; that is, the phrase is signed in ASL but not sung in English. As in Deaf West’s productions of Big River and Pippin , this crucial musical moment is placed towards the show’s finale, displacing hearing audiences from the audist realm but also repositioning them within the Deaf side of musical experience. No longer is music (or meaning) simply about tones and sounds, but it is now instilled with physicality and feeling for both Deaf and hearing audiences. As one final gesture toward the Deaf/hearing divide, the production splits the pairs of characters—deaf and “Voices Of”—from one another, adding dramaturgical intricacy to the deaths of characters. Before Moritz commits suicide, he pushes the Voice of Moritz’s mic down, indicating that he no longer needs an aural voice anymore; the actor playing the Voice of Moritz subsequently walks offstage, and Moritz proceeds to sign his lines without vocal accompaniment, with words projected on the wall. This matches the aural silence of the only other ASL-only scene in the show, the earlier scene between him and his father. The second death occurs when Wendla is taken to get an abortion: in a burst of chaos onstage, one doctor grabs Wendla while another grabs the Voice of Wendla, ushering them offstage in different directions; the shrieking that follows (indicating her pain and subsequent death) comes from Wendla’s side of the wings rather than the Voice of’s. As with Ilse’s earlier abandonment of ASL, Moritz’s voiceless suicide demonstrates an end to his interaction and communication with the (hearing) world, embodied through his voluntary separation from his Voice Of. This is contrasted with the unwanted death of Wendla—brought about by the actions of her mother—which includes the involuntary separation from her Voice Of and subsequent vocalized cries. The varying degrees of d/Deaf expression and experiences performed in the show—of emotions, music, life, and death—symbolize the limitations of spoken language and hearing in partiality of d/Deaf perceptions of the world on stage. In ways that traditional stagings cannot, the production’s d/Deaf lens enhances the meanings and complexities of these themes, characters, and relationships. “And All Shall Know the Wonder”: Reconsidering the Hearing Line Certainly, the integration of ASL in Deaf West’s production opens up the predominantly hearing space of musical theatre, generating a communal space geared towards accessibility and inclusion. Critics and scholars have continually praised Deaf West’s production of Spring Awakening for its groundbreaking ways of addressing issues of inclusion, accessibility, and diversity in theatrical productions, particularly with regard to the intersection of disability activism and the national theatre scene. It brought the first actor in a wheelchair, Ali Stroker, onto the Broadway musical stage, and it was also the first to provide access and innovative interpretation services to deaf-blind theatregoers. Disability Studies scholar Rachel Kolb asserts that the production’s power lies in its ability to reconsider “a question that is increasingly relevant in culture: how to tell stories in more inclusive ways.” [22] But more significantly, the dramaturgical effects of Deaf West’s staging, their artistic use of sign language via shared signs, and the retelling of Spring Awakening through a d/Deaf perspective deliberately rewrites the hearing line. While Krentz’s notion of the hearing line specifically attends to Deaf stories within literature, his ideas certainly extend to the stage, where distinctive worlds can be represented, tested, and played out. The theatrical choices in Spring Awakening thus present, interrogate, and invert the Deaf/hearing dichotomy on-stage, dramatically and dramaturgically, and give audiences a view at the damaging effects of oralism and audism found in the real-world. Rather than suggest that the hearing line itself is a negative factor, Krentz merely notes its existence, arguing that it illuminates the differences that exist between the two worlds. Yet the hearing line does create a hierarchy of difference in reality: the two sides are not equal. Such a difference plays out as a real-world divide in American culture that exists between the Deaf and hearing communities, ideologically affirmed through oralist, audist, and ableist practices and institutions—especially in the case of musical theatre. This emphasized difference and separation has also stigmatized the Deaf community as less than normate bodies, historically “viewed as a physical impairment associated with such disabilities as blindness, cognitive, and motor impairments,” and something to be diagnosed and corrected. [23] Deaf West has made it their mission to trouble the imbalances of the hearing line, not only calling attention to the hearing line itself but also calling it into question and, hopefully, subverting it in the process. In reconsidering the hearing line, ASL/Deaf musical theatre thereby becomes a 21 st century platform on which to bridge the gap between the Deaf and hearing worlds. References [1] Steven Sater, Spring Awakening (New York: Theatre Comminications Group, 2007), act 1 scene 1, Adobe Digital Editions PDF. [2] . This interaction also suggests that ASL is not Bergman’s native language, further signaling the divide between mother and daughter, and adult and teenage characters. [3] . Following Deaf Studies and cultural practice, the use of the lower-case represents the audiological state. The upper-case represents the Deaf community and culture. [4] . Christopher Krentz, Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 2. [5] . Krentz, Writing Deafness, 16. Krentz attributes this space to what Disability/Deaf Studies scholar Lennard J. Davis’s calls literature’s “deafened moment,” wherein “reading and writing are basically silent and visual acts” that produce “a meeting ground of sorts between deaf and hearing people” (Krentz, 16). In the context of Spring Awakening , the stage is “deafened” in a completely different manner: an extremely loud, un-silent space, sanctioning the sharp physicality of rock music and, in so doing, tilting the passive nature of literature toward the active, dynamic nature of musical theatre. [6] . “SimCom,” or Simultaneous Communication, refers to the simultaneous use of sign language and verbal speech by a speaker. Although it seems practical and useful for speakers in a Deaf/hearing space to use SimCom for the benefit of all present, research has shown that the messages produced and received by SimCom are not equivalent—and thus obstructive to communication—because the grammatical structures of both languages are vastly different. Such actions are akin to speaking in one language while writing in another. As such, ASL most often suffers when this practice is used. For more on SimCom, see Stephanie Tevenal and Miako Villanueva, “Are You Getting the Message?: The Effects of SimCom on the Message Received by Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing Students,” Sign Language Studies 9, no. 39 (2009): 266–286. Also see Ronnie B. Wilbur and Lesa Petersen, “Modality Interactions of Speech and Signing in Simultaneous Communication,” Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research 41, no. 1 (1998): 200–12. [7] . Kayla Epstein and Alex Needham, “Spring Awakening on Broadway: Deaf Viewers Give Their Verdict,” The Guardian , 29 October 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/oct/29/spring-awakening-broadway-deaf-viewers-give-verdict . For more on creating an equitable space for d/Deaf audiences, see Brandice Rafus-Brenning, “The Aesthetics of Deaf West Theatre: Balancing the Theatre-Going Experience for Deaf and Hearing Audiences” (Master’s thesis, California State University, Northridge, 2018), 1–29. [8] . Jehanne C. McCullough, “10 Things the Raving Reviews Don’t Tell You About Spring Awakening,” 6 December 2015, https://jehanne.wordpress.com/2015/12/06/10-things-the-raving-reviews-dont-tell-you-about-spring-awakening-2/ . Soon after McCullough’s post was published, The Daily Moth posted a dialogue with McCullough, Deaf West’s Artistic Director DJ Kurs and ASL Master Linda Bove, in which Kurs and Bove explained the intent of the show, including their artistic reasoning behind using SimCom. See The Daily Moth (@TheDailyMoth), “Spring Awakening: Accessibility for Deaf,” Facebook video, 9 December 2015, https://www.facebook.com/TheDailyMoth/posts/464086633793242?__tn__=-R . [9] Sater, Spring Awakening , act 2 scene 6, Adobe Digital Editions PDF. [10] . This action performs the myth that deaf individuals can read lips or can hear better at higher volumes. This misconception is also often generated by the person speaking (or shouting) in a slow, almost childlike way, again calling attention to the hearing line. On Broadway, Brausepulver also verbally emphasized the lines and used the ASL for “fine,” although he did not use ASL for the rest of the scene. [11] . Christian Lewis, “Spring Awakening Is Currently Broadway’s Most Important Show,” Huffington Post , 4 December 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/christian-lewis/spring-awakening-is-curre_b_8721352.html . [12] . Sarah Wilbur, “Gestural Economies and Production Pedagogies in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening .” TDR: The Drama Review 60, no. 2 (2016): 146. [13] . Wilbur, “Gestural Economies and Production Pedagogies,” 148. [14] . Raymond Knapp. “Disabling Privilege, Further Reflections on Deaf West’s Big River,” Studies in Musical Theatre 9, no. 1 (2015): 105–9. [15] Sater, Spring Awakening , act 1 scene 5, Adobe Digital Editions PDF. [16] . Raymond Knapp, “‘Waitin’ for the Light to Shine’: Musicals and Disability,” The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies , ed. Blake Howe et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 828. [17] Sater, Spring Awakening , act 1 scene 4, Adobe Digital Editions PDF. [18] . Krentz, 17. [19] . This is most pronounced by Frank Wedekind’s own description of the original play as “a tragedy of childhood” and his dedication of the work “to parents and teachers.” See Emma Goldman, “Frank Wedekind—The Awakening of Spring,” in The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (The Anarchist Library, 1914), 27 February 2009, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-social-significance-of-the-modern-drama#toc21 . [20] . Notably, this action occurred only during performances at The Wallis. During the production’s Inner City Arts and Broadway runs, Rodriguez completed her lines in SimCom and exited the stage without removing her wig. In an article for Cosmopolitan , Rodriguez shares her experiences during chemotherapy of both wearing wigs and being bald in public, eventually learning to be comfortable with her appearance and regaining her self-confidence. For more on her experience, see Krysta Rodriguez, “What I Learned About Myself From Going Out Bald in Public,” Cosmopolitan , 30 March 2015, available at http://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/a38428/krysta-rodriguez-cancer-bald-wigs/ . [21] . Numerous scholars working across the fields of music, performance, and Deaf studies have pointed out the multimodal, multi-sensory ways in which d/Deaf people “listen” to music—that is, through a combination of visual, physical, and kinetic sensory encounters and experiences. See Joseph Straus, Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (Oxford University Press, 2011); Jessica A. Holmes, “Expert Listening beyond the Limits of Hearing: Music and Deafness,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 70, no. 1 (2017): 171–220; Carol A. Padden and Tom L. Humphries, Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Harvard University Press, 1990); and Anabel Maler, “Songs for Hands: Analyzing Interactions of Sign Language and Music,” Music Theory Online 19 (2013). [22] . Rachel Kolb, “‘Spring Awakening’ and the Power of Inclusive Art,” The Atlantic , 18 October 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/spring-awakening-and-the-power-of-inclusive-art/411061/ . [23] . Megan A. Jones, “Deafness as Culture: A Psychosocial Perspective,” Disability Studies Quarterly 22, no. 2 (2000), available at http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/344/435 . Footnotes About The Author(s) STEPHANIE LIM studies the inclusion of American Sign Language in music and musical theatre performance and the resulting cultural translations/adaptations that occur. She is the Disability Studies Assistant Area Chair for Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA), where she is also a Michael K. Schoenecke Leadership Institute Fellow. Publications appear in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Everything Sondheim, Studies in Musical Theatre, and Popular Culture Studies Journal. Stephanie is a CSU Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program (CDIP) Fellow and teaches undergraduate courses in English and Theatre at California State University, Northridge, where she received her BA and MA in English. She is currently a PhD student in Drama & Theatre at University of California, Irvine. 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 "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison 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 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Report from Berlin Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Marvin Carlson Image Credits: Article The company of Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller is widely regarded in Europe today, especially in Germany, as the most radical and boundary challenging company in contemporary Europe. Since 2006, they have been engaged in a monumental postmodern exploration of the works of Ibsen, most notably in their extended elaborations of The Wild Duck and John Gabriel Borkman, presented as part of the Berlin Theatertreffen in 2011 and 2012. Despite their continual challenge to traditional structures and regulations, so formidable is their reputation in Germany that in 2024, when René Pollesch, the director of the leading Berlin theatre, the Volksbühne, unexpectedly died, they were considered as an interim replacement. Such an appointment was hardly thinkable given the company’s long history of activities, which included physical damage to their venues and outraging critics, audiences, and authorities alike. In the event the Ministry of Culture appointed as the new director Matthias Lilienthal, a less revolutionary choice than Vinge and Müller, but an artist strongly associated with experimental work, having served as dramaturg at the Volksbühne under the legendary Frank Castorf and subsequently as director of Berlin’s HAU theatre, an important home for international experimental work. It was thus in many ways appropriate that the first major production of the new administration was the most recent offering in Vinge and Müller’s ongoing Ibsen-Saga, taking on one of Ibsen’s most challenging works, the monumental Peer Gynt . Given my long-time love of Ibsen and my more recent interest in these ground-breaking artists, I booked a trip to Berlin for one of the six performances. As usual in Berlin, I had little difficulty finding other attractive offerings to fill out a five-day trip. To begin with, Peer Gynt , however, for the first time in the Saga, the performance was announced for a specific period of time, beginning at four in the afternoon and ending at midnight. One of the most significant features of this company’s performance has always been its disregard for a set structure or time. Now for the first time, although the contents and their arrangement differed each night, the production stopped, as advertised, promptly at twelve. The plastic curtain often used during the evening was drawn closed, and Vinge (Peer) made a final appearance to write on it with a white marker the defiant “Eight hours is still not theatre.” Peer Gynt , by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Vegard Vinge, Ida Müller, Trond Reinholdtsen at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, 2025. Photo© Julian Röder In the past, the Company has often pushed back against attempts to limit its excesses by incorporating references to these attempts into the production, and this terminating gesture is in that tradition, but in my opinion, this was a significant capitulation, removing one of the most critical and distinctive elements of the company aesthetic. Each audience member must decide for themselves whether, given its aesthetic, a VM production willing to compromise on central issues is better than no VM production at all. It seemed to me that the production I attended, third in the series, carried this compromise throughout the evening. It was, on the whole, the safest, least challenging, and most conventional of any VM production I have seen. No excrements on stage or destruction in the house (the single modest invasion of the audience space would have been perfectly acceptable at Lincoln Center), and I feared that the capitulation on the running time was emblematic of a general softening of the company’s essential rough edges. Friends who saw the closing performance reported that a certain amount of more disturbing material was then included, but the evening still ended promptly on time. Peer Gynt , by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Vegard Vinge, Ida Müller, Trond Reinholdtsen at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, 2025. Photo© Julian Röder Comparatively tame as it was, the production I saw was unmistakably a VM creation. The interior public spaces of the Volksbühne, like those of the Prater, the space used by the company in previous years, were covered with giant graffiti-style posters featuring now primarily American action heroes and images of military aggression and destruction. These themes were repeated in the production, since although the Ibsen Saga imagery has been extremely wide ranging, geographically, culturally and historically, their Peer Gynt has a distinctly urban American feel with particular attention to guns, marching soldiers and military machinery (a constantly recurring motif is a squad of mindlessly marching soldiers moving lockstep across the upstage, an area also frequently crossed by large carboard cutouts of military vehicles, tanks, and jet fighters). It may be that this interest in connecting Peer Gynt to a particular cultural background may owe something to the memory of the last great monumental staging of this play in Berlin, that of Peter Stein in 1971 at the old Schaubühne on the Halleschen Ufer. Stein subtitled his interpretation “a play of the nineteenth century” and stressed the close ties of the work to the industrialization, colonialism, and capitalism of that era. It seemed to me, though, that Stein’s orientation was much better fitted to the play than a focus on militarism, but then much of the VM interpretation still remains to be seen. Peer Gynt , by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Vegard Vinge, Ida Müller, Trond Reinholdtsen at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, 2025. Photo© Julian Röder Perhaps the single scene in Ibsen’s play most directly tied to the military is that (often omitted) in which Peer oversees (with disapproval) a young man cutting off his finger to avoid the draft. The VM version of this scene is a film clip, showing a close-up downward view of a fist with the “fingers” extending from the knuckles replaced by frankfurters. These were slowly cut away from the tips backward into small rings of meat, which from time to time were splashed with spurts of ketchup, suggesting both blood and a culinary preparation. This was one of my favorite images in the production, and very typical in its imagination and shock of a VM presentation. The other sequence I found most memorable was an extended pursuit of Peer by a large cardboard cutout of a New York City police car, which, in its pursuit, created mayhem in the surrounding artificial urban setting, crushing a telephone booth and crashing through a display window to enter a military recruiting office where Peer had taken temporary refuge. Generally speaking, except for the set length the production contained the now familiar elements of the Ibsen Saga—the cartoonish costumes and settings, the grotesque rubber masks, the amplified sound tracks emphasizing the sounds of walking, marching and physical contact, the grotesquely distorted voices, the alternation of live and filmed action, and the general freewheeling style in which the unexpected, and often the shocking and outrageous, is regularly evoked. As in the earlier elements of the Saga, an Ibsen play provides the essential but completely negotiable framework. Although each evening offered different variations, all essentially covered Ibsen’s first act, from Peer’s opening story about the encounter with the stag until his departure from the village into the mountains, although hints of later events, scenes and even characters (like the malevolent bureaucrat/director Stockmann) from previous VW productions, and a huge variety of cultural refences, contemporary and historical, find their ways into the assemblage. Even though I found this one of the weaker VM productions, it was, like all of them, a memorable and thought-provoking theatre experience. One final note should be included. Vinge and Müller have now become an essential element of the German theatre scene, and to a lesser extent, the international one—the night I went, I encountered colleagues from the U.S., England, France, and Sweden. Combined with a limited run, this guaranteed that the 800-seat theatre would be completely sold out with record-breaking waiting lists. Ironically, however, this passion does not stimulate many to, in fact, undergo the actual ordeal of sitting through an eight-hour VM production. Indeed, the evening I attended, nearly half of the seats were empty after the first two hours. These can hardly have been people unaware of what was being offered, so I must conclude that VM have found or created an audience that applies to the process of spectatorship the same flexibility that Vinge and Müller apply to the process of artistic production. This being Berlin, I was able to attend a different Ibsen production at a major theatre the following evening, this time Hedda Gabler at the Berliner Ensemble. When it celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2017, the neo-baroque Theatre am Schiffbauerndamm, intimately associated with the work of Bertolt Brecht, still performed in its same elegant, neo-baroque and distinctly un-Brechtian traditional home. Two years later, however, it opened two smaller and more contemporary spaces, the Neues Theatre (180 seats) and the Werkraum (99 seats) at the rear of the courtyard behind the original house. I first attended the Neues Theater in 1922 to see Wagdi Mouawad’s powerful exploration of Middle Eastern tension, Vöge l, and to see Hedda Gabler (in an adaptation by Merelv called Hedda ). I visited for the first time the more intimate Werkraum. Hedda, directed by the young Norwegian Heiki Riipinen, who is also a professional drag queen, follows Ibsen’s original far more closely than the WM Peer Gynt , yet it is still a far more unconventional reworking of Ibsen than might be found on any major professional stage in the Anglosaxon world. Each year, the new Werkraum invites two young directors to work as Artists in Residence there for a year, during which they create two new productions each. This year’s artists are Norwegian Riipinen, whose first offering was a six-hour overnight piece called Insomnia, and Iranian Alireza Daryanavard. Hedda offers a decidedly queer reading of the Ibsen text, in which Pauline Knof’s center position as Hedda is seriously challenged by the cross-dressed dominatrix of Judge Brack, flamboyantly played by Nina Burns, and my particular favorite—Max Gindorff, as a charmingly winsome Thea and amusingly dotty Aunt Julia. Marc Oliver Schulze, though playing the gender appropriate role of Tesman, enters effectively into the campy cartoonish spirit of the whole. Paul Zichner as Ejlert does not seem to fit into the ensemble, though his lacey bouffant blue costume (one of the exaggerated and generally successful sartorial creations of Louise-Fee Nitschke) is one of the evening’s most extreme. The tone of the whole is set when the audience enters to witness the Tesman living room, its furniture still covered, but with Hedda already lying face up and dead downstage, the pistol by her outstretched arm, and a pool of plastic fake blood under her head. We will, of course, return to this image at the end, but here Hedda is ignored by the others until she enters the scene by simply getting up, putting away the gun, and entering the conversation while Gildorff, temporarily playing the maid, tidies up by carrying off the obviously fake pool of blood. A central moment in any production of the play is the burning of the manuscript, and Riipinen gives this special attention. Alone among the characters, Hedda interacts several times with spectators, asking them to provide or hold items (such as a bullet for the gun, for example). Here she pantomimes striking a match and was offered a lighter the night I attended. She then left the stage and the auditorium, and an onstage video followed her through the lobby and out into the Berliner Ensemble courtyard, where she burned the papers in front of a crowd of curious onlookers on the way to or from the theatre Kanteen. Returning to the stage, she tossed the lighter back to the spectator and continued with the play. Another striking addition to the role Knof provides is several extended pantomime sequences, a kind of silent soliloquy, such as the moment before she shoots herself. Facing the audience, she carefully considers and rejects a series of possibilities, first shooting herself in the breast, then the heart, then the womb, then (like Ejlert) the genitals, then the mouth and the temple, before finally deciding on the side of the head, thus recapitulating the arc of the play in this single sequence. After her death, the other characters gather upstage to observe her, the living to the left (the Judge now in an incongruous judicial wig, and the dead Ejlert to the left on a raised platform, but now with clearly fraudulent angelic wings and (at last) vine leaves in his hair. I was able to add one final classic work, Moliere’s The Misanthrope, at the Deutsches Theater. This is not a new piece, having entered the repertoire in 2019, but it remains an attractive one, due in part to the excellent translation in rhymed verse by Jurger Gosch, in part to a crisp and intelligent direction by Anne Lenk, and primarily to the formidable acting skills of two leading figures of the contemporary German stage, Ulrich Matthias in the title role and Franziska Machens as Célimène, his elusive object of desire. Despite Matthias’ strength, Lenk’s production keeps the dramatic focus well balanced between the two, and the others, excellent performers all, are rather eclipsed, even Manuel Harder, as Alceste’s long-suffering and remarkably tolerant friend Philinte. Ultich Matthes and Franziska Machens in The Misanthrope, directed by Anne Lenk at Deutsches Theater, 2019. Photo© Arno Declair The highly stylized neo-baroque costumes by Sibylle Wallum provide the main visual variety to the production, which is mounted in a setting that aroused much discussion when the work opened. The design, by Florian Lösche, was formally very simple, a three-sided box the walls of which were entirely composed of densely hung silver and black elastic ropes, pushed aside for entrances or exits, and occasionally wrapped around a body for a particular effect. Early reviews spent much time complaining that this set had been copied from various earlier productions of other works in Frankfurt and elsewhere, but the idea is a basically simple one and could easily have occurred to a number of designers. I remember seeing a Japanese production of a Mishima play with almost exactly the same configuration, and used, I might say, with vastly more variety on the part of the company. In any case, original or not, it did not seem to me particularly well suited to this play or this interpretation, other than providing a striking and essentially neutral background against which a company of extremely skilled actors could display their abilities. Manuel Harder, Ulrich Matthew and Lisa Hrdina in The Misanthrope, directed by Anne Lenk at Deutsches Theater, 2019. Photo© Arno Declair I had expected that one of these long-time favorite pieces would provide my most memorable theatre experience of this trip, but was surprised that this turned out to be a new work , K , based partly upon Kafka’s The Trial and partly on the author’s biography. The production was presented in the elegant neo-baroque main stage of the Berliner Ensemble and was the creation of one of Berlin’s most imaginative directors, Barrie Kosky. Kosky has recently returned to freelance directing after a decade as Intendant at the Komische Oper, where his productions were regularly among the most praised and discussed in the city. His interest in Jewish culture has always been strong (he is both Jewish and gay), and he was, in fact, the first Jewish director to create a production for Bayreuth. K is thus a work of particular importance to him, and his unconventional approach is clearly indicated by the subtitle, “A Talmudic Vaudeville.” Indeed, the production derives its material equally from conventional autobiographical and biographical sources and from the surrealistic slapstick of the Jewish vaudeville of Eastern Europe, which Kafka loved. It is this tradition that provides much of the staging detail—the costumes, makeup, wigs, scenery, and general acting style. In the vaudeville tradition, cross-dressing is essential, and Kathrin Wehlisch perfectly incorporates the Chaplinesque little man caught up in a world beyond his control or comprehension. Her bravura performance begins with carefree 1920s tap dancing abandon and moves seamlessly through a carnival of mixed farce and horror, typified by the marvelous Constanze Becker, who appears as the grotesque landlady Frau Grubach, wielding a formidable extermination apparatus, with a Kafkaesque cockroach displayed prominently on its side. After K’s arrest, the stage is transformed into an expressionistic forbidding synagogue, with candelabras, giant Hebrew letters, and an enormous Talmud ark dominating all. Oppressive Bach chorales echo in profoundly incongruous jazz rhythms in the background for the benefit of Christian observers (the ingenious musical direction is by Adam Benzwi), but the imagery is overwhelmingly orthodox. The deep voice of K’s never seen lawyer Huld (Gabriel Schneider) resounds from behind the Ark, like the voice of Jehovah himself, uttering gnomic observations in Hebrew, but the Ark emits other figures of clear secularity, and most memorably, a chorus of three vaudevillian Rabbis, whose mixture of Yiddish comic patter and songs and spirit folk dances is a guaranteed show stopper. The production does not end with a sentencing but continues with K’s punishment, presented by a half-naked K cringing downstage as he suffers the torment of Kafka’s here unseen writing machine, while the rich voice of Constanze Becker comes over the loudspeaker reading “In the Penal Colony.” Projected behind K are the characters presumably being etched into his body—a seemingly endless unrolling of Hebrew letters. The play ends with scenes from the final year of the terminally ill Kafka and continues to combine moments of joy with profound suffering. They are seen through the eyes of Kafka’s last love, Dora Diamant, beautifully played by the Komische Opera leading soprano Alma Sadé. She reads passages of Kafka’s final diary, and at last, as his suffering ends, moves into a warm and deeply moving singing (in Yiddish) of Robert Schumann's " Dichterliebe," a most appropriate conclusion to this fascinating and complex theatrical and musical evening. For my final evening in Berlin, I attended one of the city’s biggest (in every sense of the word) theatre attractions, a production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar , presented by the Komische Oper in a hangar of the abandoned Tempelhof airport. In 2023, this theatre, one of Berlin’s most honored, closed for extensive renovations, its 1882 neo-baroque building having miraculously survived the bombing of World War II, but now much in need of updating. While this work continues, the theatre is housed at the Schiller Theater in Western Berlin, with occasional special spectacles in Hangar 4 of Tempelhof. A trip to Hanger 4 is an experience in itself, reminding me of other remote performance locations like Mnouchkine’s in Paris. Walking from the nearest subway to the rather remote and very large former airfield, one passes by the monument to the Berlin airlift, which was once a central symbol of resistance to a divided Berlin, with Tempelhof at the center of its lifeline. Arriving at the grounds, one follows a torturous path through the structures, first passing a small group of Christian protesters bearing signs denouncing this “blasphemy” while a few tonsured figures in monkish robes and rope belts worked their rosaries and provided a distinctly theatrical ambiance. The lobby was itself a gigantic hangar, open to a beautiful autumnal sky and well provided with comfortable sofas and concession stands for pre-theatre drinks. Between this area and the open runways, a large set of pink neon three-dimensional letters appropriately spelled out #allesaußergewöhnlich (everything extraordinary). The bell sounded, and the lobby crowd emptied into a neighboring hangar, a huge cube with metal grandstands rising up on three sides, an elevated runway stage thrust out into the empty center space, and leading to a huge illuminated cross composed of metal poles and struts. Along a higher platform on the fourth was the Komische Oper orchestra, fronted by three guitarists, a keyboardist, and a percussionist. The wildly idiosyncratic costumes of Frank Wilde ranged from billowing to form-fitting, and from the cartoonish capes and hats of the Jewish authorities, like the most bizarre at Oberammergau, to virtually authentic Roman armor or acid-based punk rock. The huge crowd, more of them later, wore various forms of simple earth colored, vaguely Biblical garments, allowing them to easily merge effectively into a seemingly homogeneous mass. Jesus (John Arthur Greene) was simply gowned in a white plaited robe, with the traditional beard and long hair, a strongly muscular build. Bal Arslan as Mary Magdalene combined sanctity and seduction in a scarlet red evening gown and shaved head. Both offered powerful voices and strong presences, but the crowd favorite was clearly the mercurial Judas of Sasha Di Capri, equally effective in a sardonic falsetto and a vibrant full-throated expression of both affection and rage. Another clear favorite was Jörn-Felix Alt as a camp Herod, the gyrations of whose multicolored billowing costume are a show in themselves. Despite the considerable talents of the soloists and the orchestra, and in spite of the occasional and perhaps inevitable eruption of high kitsch in the music, the score and the scenic design with its huge glittering cross, what made the evening truly memorable was the nearly 400 extras who formed a constantly moving mass surrounding and at times engulfing the main action. Director Andreas Homoki and choreographer David Cavelius have woven these hundreds of voices and gesticulating bodies into a visual fabric I will long remember. As a theatre historian in Berlin, I found myself almost inevitably recalling the legendary mass spectacles staged here over a century ago by Max Reinhardt at his Grosses Schauspielhaus. For the first time, I felt I understood the incredible performative power of such displays. References References About the author(s) Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Centre, CUNY. He earned a PhD in Drama and Theatre from Cornell University (1961), where he also taught for a number of years. Marvin has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, Greece, the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Jean Nathan Award, the Calloway Prize, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the founding editor of the journal Western European Stages and the author of over two hundred scholarly articles and fifteen books that have been translated into fourteen languages. His most recent books are Ten Thousand Nights: Highlights from 50 Years of Theatre-Going (2017) and Hamlet's Shattered Mirror: Theatre and the Real (2016). European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus 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 ZAZ William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF ZAZ By Ryan K. Johnson  Directed by Ryan K. Johnson  Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University Columbus, OH September 5th, 2025 Reviewed by William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus On September 5, 2025, the five of us experienced the dance company SOLE Defined’s world premiere of ZAZ at The Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts. According to the company’s website, SOLE Defined’s mission is to create pieces “designed to evoke the senses, creating sonic and kinetic performative archives of Black American History through the lens of African Diasporic Percussive Dance methodologies.” ZAZ powerfully realizes this goal: in ninety minutes the show’s director and playwright Ryan K. Johnson leads an energetic cast of six to manifest an expressive docudrama that performs the lived experience of the Black community of New Orleans and reckons with the devastating legacy of Hurricane Katrina. ZAZ deftly casts the theatrical space as a living palimpsest where oral histories, news reports, diverse dance forms, and mourning rituals materialize and dissipate through the physicality of these dancing storytellers. Nearly to the date, this run marked the twentieth anniversary of the disaster that laid bare the social and racial undercurrents dominating America. SOLE Defined’s immersive work responds to that moment by shepherding the bodies in the space—performers and audience alike—in a theatrical experience of shared kinesthesia. ZAZ (Cast: Claude Alexander III, Duante Fyall, Jada Hicks, Quynn Johnson, Ryan K. Johnson, Shannan E. Johnson, Jodeci Milhouse, Funmi Sofola), photo: Becca Marcela Oviatt. The production’s intentional flow submerged the current of audience’s bodies in its scenography as soon as they entered the space. Throughout four audience banks oriented around and facing each side of the set’s central dance floor, we sat among the fifty-some chairs at hazily lit cocktail tables that transformed the black box space into “ZAZ,” the titular New Orleans jazz club. Audience members were scattered throughout the space; some sat in a corner, while others of us shared tables with our backs facing a projected wall displaying performance information integrated with family photographs, posters, and other trappings found in a French Quarter establishment. The seating arrangement fostered an unexpected theatrical communion, which was continued in ZAZ’ s initial moments: amid jazz-infused hip-hop beats, ZAZ ’s host — played by Shannan E. Johnson — beckoned the audience to join her on the dance floor. Several audience members jumped in and improvised, troubling the boundaries between spectator and spectated. As individual actors dressed in everyday clothing subtly integrated into the crowd, they herded all the moving bodies in a coordinated line dance. The collective energy was effervescent, drawing all — even those who remained sitting — into the joyous community of New Orleans.   The celebration was cut short by the wail of sirens. News clips of the impending hurricane replaced the wall projections, sending us back in time to the weeks preceding August 23rd, 2005. The audience returned to their seats, leaving Johnson onstage to narrate this piece’s origins and his individual connection to the “Big Easy.” Then, this literal calm-before-the-storm shattered, and the audience was engulfed by a frightening simulation of Hurricane Katrina. From an overhead projection, the scuffed dance floor rippled as the water droplets of Katrina’s rain invaded the narrative space. The bright noise of New Orleans horns transformed into a somber-toned spiritual intertwined with the roar of helicopters. The wild abandon of social dance gave way to an athletic pas-du-deux between two embattled survivors struggling for a rescuer’s attention, their movements illuminated by isolated shafts of search lights. This was ZAZ ’s power in action: the protean, visceral design emerged through a combination of audience immersion and integrated sound, projection, and lights. As the past evaporated with each scene, experience accumulated on the performing bodies. In nearly every sense, the body was the chief investment of ZAZ . In lieu of distinct set pieces, ZAZ championed the visual effect of the promenade. Performers ebbed, flowed, and exploded onto the scene through the nooks and crannies of the entire space, causing the audience to constantly reorient themselves toward the next area of focus. The sonic world of the play married the quintessentially Black musical forms of jazz, hip-hop, and spirituals with the polyrhythmic resonances of body percussion . The cast of ZAZ , photo: Becca Marcela Oviatt. Floor mics caught these punctuated flows along with the scrapes of sand dancing and raps of tap shoes. In one sequence, as the ensemble danced ferociously, they lit the darkened stage with headlamps affixed to their foreheads, re-centering the locus of control from the light grid to the individual performers. ZAZ’s narrative structure prioritized corporeality over character as Johnson’s individual arc melded with the collage of collective experience. The performers cycled through a variety of characters, transforming their voices and changing clothing frequently, and the action never lingered on a single story long enough for emotive identification. Hurricane Katrina’s effects on the entire community were impressed upon all the attendees. In a particularly poignant moment, cast members dressed as government officials demanded the audience leave their seats. Dividing us by gender, the rescuers marshaled us throughout the audience banks and declared that we were now “displaced.” This aestheticized imposition harkened to the actual displacement of thousands of New Orleans’ s citizens that were shuttled across the country, never to return to their neighborhoods. In reenacting this harrowing experience, ZAZ highlighted the callousness of the government’s process using the actual bodies in the audience. This unique and effective method of theatrical identification crowned ZAZ ’s comprehensive commitment to the body.   As promised in their company mission, the feast of stimulation is the beating heart of ZAZ . Its use of theatrical space and the bodies within it heralded the lived — and living — resilience of a community assaulted, not only by nature, but by our leaders’ apathy towards their plight . ZAZ offers no prescriptive solutions, only experience. Yet, this vivid piece contends that acknowledging that experience is the first step towards a better future. As a coda, the closing moments of the performance advanced this proposition by returning us to the communal dance floor. Now burdened with knowledge and tempered with soul , the continued rhythms of the bodies joyously echoed forth after the storm.  The audience — pulled into the narrative, moved emotionally and physically — kept dancing even after the actors left the stage. References Footnotes About The Author(s) WILLIAM DEVITO is a theatre director and PhD student in Theatre at The Ohio State University. JUANITA MEJIA RESTREPO is a Master’s student in Theatre at The Ohio State University and recent graduate of the MFA Acting program at Purdue University. M. NANCE (they/them) is a PhD student in the Theatre program at The Ohio State University. As a theatre artist, their praxis centers dramaturgy, playwriting, and directing. ROBERT PIKE (he/him) is a theatre artist and PhD student in the Theatre program at The Ohio State University. RUFUS ZAEJODAEUS is a media design MFA at The Ohio State University with an emphasis on immersive experiences. 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. 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European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 22, 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Staging Tradition, Testing Form: The Second Showcase of the National Theatre of Sofia Published: July 15, 2026 Download Article as PDF By Savas Patsalidis Image Credits: Article Featured Image: Aleksander Tonev and Yocheva rearranging the “constructivist” stage design of Petya Boyukova in Convenience Store Woman (Keiko Furukura). Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. Prologue The second Mini Showcase of the Ivan Vazov National Theatre brought me back, in the heart of winter, to a lightly snow-dusted and quietly beautiful Sofia. Three times larger than its inaugural edition, and therefore more representative of the theatre’s recent artistic trajectory, this year’s program aimed at more than a parade of productions ; it felt like a statement of identity. And as Peter Brook famously reminded us, theatre is not the building but the event. The question, then, is, what kind of event the national stage of Bulgaria seeks to articulate today through its choices. The choices included sixteen productions staged across six days, a theatrical endurance test that invoked a wide range of sensations and impressions. The program unfolded as a mosaic of classics and contemporary stage writing, engaging with trauma, psychology, existential dread, satire, black humor and social critique , not always with the same sharpness, but with a consistent sense of purpose. What follows is a necessarily selective commentary on the works I was able to see, beginning with two promenade performances staged within the theatre’s own architectural body. 1. Fragments in Motion The first performance, pointedly titled The Infinite Stages , invites us on a mental journey back in time. Written by Martina Novakuva and Miguel Valentin, the narrative carries us through key periods that shaped the institution’s history, including the First Balkan War, the First World War, and the devastating fire that razed the building to the ground, events that left a lasting imprint not only on the theatre’s trajectory but also on the country’s cultural memory. Starting point of the promenade performance The Infinite Stages at the North Box Office of the National Theatre (Slavyanska Street), 10 minutes before the walk inside the theatre begins. Photo: Stefan Zdraveski As with many performances of this kind, history is not presented as a cohesive narrative but as a fragmented experience of passage through the mist of time. We do not watch; we traverse. With headphones on, we climb staircases, slip through corridors and backstage areas, as live scenes alternate with archival recordings and sonic fragments. The result is a weave of simultaneous stages that reveal themselves as we advance. Each wall seems to carry its own story, sometimes historical, sometimes mythical; each corner holds the echo of an earlier bow. If, in Shakespeare’s oft-quoted line, “All the world is a stage,” here the world becomes many stages at once. Mirror reflections in one of the rooms visited during the promenade performance. “Who hasn’t ever wished to be called by another name. Nothing is more contemporary than our ghosts.” Promotional text from the performance’s official site. Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. I emerge from the experience enriched on multiple levels, yet I would have been even more rewarded had this historical charge been activated less declaratively and more viscerally. Had the narrative incorporated more inventive scenic and technological interventions, the experience might have gained greater density and theatrical voltage. In such forms, the aim is not simply to guide an audience through a building, but to shift it inwardly, to let the space pass through the spectator. If life indeed contains infinite stages, theatre must convince us each time that the one we are crossing is utterly, irreducibly singular. 2. When Excess Overwhelms Meaning The other promenade piece, Petrovs in and Around the Flu , drawing on the 2016 novel by Alexey Salnikov, plunges us into the feverish everyday life of a Russian family stricken by a severe flu, an illness that gradually morphs into a metaphor for psychic disintegration and a broader crisis of identity. “Don’t look for a plot. Let the actors lead you. Just don’t get lost—the theatre can be a terrifying place.” From the official site of The Petrovs In and Around the Flu. Photo: Stefan N. Shterev. Directed by the young and promising Boyan Kracholov, the production unfolds along deliberately unpredictable tracks. The choice of a promenade structure appears designed to spatialize the fragmentary texture of the source material. Around ten locations within the Ivan Vazov National Theatre host distinct action-images, each a shard of a world in disintegration. The directorial aim is clear: to implicate the spectator in this instability, exposing them to the family’s collapsing routines and latent violence at close range, without protective filters. Scene from The Petrovs in and Around the Flu, winner of the Icarus 2024 award for Best Director. Photo: Stefan N. Shterev. What eluded me, however, was a clear sense of how each scene conversed with the space that contained it. Too often, the encounter between text and location feels incidental, at times even disorienting, in ways that hinder rather than deepen audience engagement. I understand the impulse behind the heightened vocal intensity and physical extremity of the performances: chaos rendered through excess. Yet when spectators are asked to inhabit chaos, clarity becomes essential if intensity is to register as meaningful rather than merely loud. One of the closing scenes of Petrovs in and Around the Flu. Photo: Stefan N. Shterev. That said, despite the reservations that surfaced as I watched, I found the overall venture compelling. It was an oblique reading of a difficult text, a slanted, fertile, and courageous approach. And when boldness is grounded in genuine artistic intent, it deserves respect, even if its execution does not always land with full force. 3. A Mirror Left Unbroken Marilyn Monroe’s Last Session , presented at the Studio, was directed by Deyan Donkov, who also appears on stage as the psychoanalyst Dr. Ralph Greenson. The text is authored by two psychoanalysts, Vivian Pramatarov-Hamburger and Andreas Hamburger. The action unfolds over the night from August 4th to 5th and touches on familiar biographical coordinates of the Hollywood icon: childhood abandonment and foster institutions, the absence of maternal care, failed marriages, fear of loneliness, dependency on medication and the anxiety of sustaining a public image that ultimately consumed the fragile Norma Jeane. Deyan Donkov, Monroe’s “psychoanalyst” facing the audience. On screen Anna Kashko as Marilyn in Marilyn Monroe’s Last Session. Photo: Georgi Todorov. The dramaturgical core lies in Monroe’s relationship with Greenson, where the boundaries between professional detachment and emotional entanglement grow dangerously blurred. As a concept, the play is intriguing. It does not aim for straightforward biography but gestures toward a psychological drama about a fractured self—between Marilyn and Norma Jeane—and about the limits of psychoanalysis when confronted with the human hunger for love and acceptance. A genuinely fresh text might have emerged had the authors pursued this fault line more rigorously. Instead, they remained confined within a relatively superficial handling of the material, guided by familiar tropes and easy melodrama. The familiar, and the melodramatic, however moving, rarely become challenging in the sense of offering a new angle of perception. I found myself questioning, for instance, the directorial choice to present Marilyn Monroe as the perennial sex kitten, complete with the breathy, coquettish, almost childlike voice. The premise of psychoanalysis presupposes the shedding of masks. One enters that room not to perform but to unveil, to strip the soul bare. Yet rather than witnessing a rupture with the myth, we are offered, in part, its reproduction. We do not truly see illuminated the fracture between the desire of the gaze and the destruction of the body, nor are we pressed to confront questions of responsibility, exploitation, or the manufacture of public image. It is not enough to display the icon; one must fracture the mirror—yet that fracture never fully occurs. I would, however, single out the use of video (Maya Vselenska, Stefan Zdraveski) as one of the strongest elements of the production. The dialogue between live performance and projection is deftly handled. Each intrusion of video opens an additional layer of perception, at times commenting on or counterpointing the stage reality, reminding us that Monroe exists first and foremost as image, and that images often outlive the human being they once framed. Anna Koshko’s Monroe is poised and fluid, yet remains on the surface, never quite reaching the depth or inner rupture the role requires. Photo: Georgi Todorov. Donkov delivers a measured performance as the psychoanalyst, functioning effectively as the narrative axis of the evening. The young and striking Anna Koshko as Monroe moves with ease but remains on the surface, without the depth or inner rupture the role demands. The direction does little to draw her away from stereotype and toward risk. Something more oblique, more unsettling, would not have been excessive—it would have been necessary. 4. The Architecture of Mourning Pieces of a Woman has been part of the Ivan Vazov National Theatre repertoire since 2022. Based on the play of the same name by Kata Wéber, with dramaturgical adaptation by Mayia Pramatarova, it does more than tell a story: it confronts trauma and the experience of pain, illuminating the psychological and emotional dimensions of loss. Intense encounter between Mother (Maria Kavardzhikova) and Daughter (Radina Kardzhilova) in Pieces of a Woman by Kata Wéber. Photo: Stefan N. Shterev. The narrative follows a young couple awaiting their first child. They choose a home birth which ends in tragedy, as the newborn dies shortly after delivery. From there, the play turns its gaze inward, focusing on the mother’s silent, interior struggle along with the gradual unraveling of the couple’s relationship. Each parent processes grief differently, enduring the pressure of family and societal expectations while clarifying responsibility and seeking justice when the story takes a judicial turn. The suffering body and the trauma following the death of the child. Radina Kardzhilova and Albena Stavrena (the nurse). Photo: Stefan N. Shterev. Pieces of a Woman does not seek easy emotional resolution. It is a study of mourning, silence, the female bodily experience and the impossibility of communication when the unthinkable occurs. Premiered in Budapest and widely known through Kornél Mundruczó’s 2020 film adaptation starring Vanessa Kirby, the play has a reputation for raw emotional honesty. Director Kris Sharkov skillfully leverages theatrical form, with set design and costumes by Nikola Toromanov. Spectators are seated in the round, with many scenes unfolding behind them, while four screens suspended above the centre of the stage project live footage of what cannot be seen directly. The effect is claustrophobic. As spectators, we feel trapped within the drama, just as the protagonists are; there is no exit. The staging becomes more than an aesthetic choice: it functions as a kind of prison, a commentary on grief which, though it burns from within, cannot be confronted head-on. It can only be approached obliquely, through its angles. Scene from Pieces of a Woman. Photo: Stefan N. Shterev. At the centre of this structure is Maria Kavardzhikova as the mother, Magdalena, in a striking performance recognised with the ASKEER Award. Without theatrical flourish or exaggeration, she conveys far more suffering than words can contain. Her interiority, restraint, and authenticity render grief visible, removing the need to perform it. Radina Kardzhilova, as the daughter, moves with precision through the fissures of her role, conveying a quiet disintegration. Together with Stefan Valdobrev, Martin Dimitrov, Ana Papadopulu, Tsvetan Aleksiev, and Zhaklin Daskalova, the ensemble demonstrates strong stage presence. Their realist performances generate chemistry and articulate fracture and tension, even for spectators who do not understand Bulgarian. The production, sensitive yet courageous, conveys the unbearable weight of loss with honesty, depicting tragedy without melodrama. It does not seek catharsis, and perhaps for that reason it becomes all the more essential. Grief has no climax; it has duration. 5. Too Much Stage, Too Little Intimacy On the same day, I saw Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on the main stage of the Ivan Vazov National Theatre. It was the theatre’s first staging of the play, directed by the young, already award-winning Boyan Kracholov, marking his main-stage debut with a work of considerable complexity. The Bulgarian translation is by Svetla Maneva, while the Shakespearean passages are rendered by Alexander Shurbanov. Crowd scene from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, nominated for the Icarus Award 2026 for Best Director and Set Design. Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. The play is a tragicomedy that elevates two minor courtiers from Hamlet into central figures, trapped within the margins of a story they cannot access. Their world is governed by instability and epistemic confusion. Attempts to impose order consistently fail, most clearly in the famous coin-toss scene, where chance itself appears to malfunction and heads repeatedly defy probability. Randomness ceases to behave as randomness, and laughter becomes a cover for existential unease. Tragedy is never shown directly, but it is constantly inferred through its effects. Stoppard constructs a surface dense with verbal traps—witty, agile, and often humorous—beneath which lies a tightly structured philosophical architecture. Kracholov foregrounds the metatheatrical dimension and the rhythmic intelligence of the text, with clear echoes of Samuel Beckett, yet the production does not fully carry its philosophical tension into stage dynamics. The result is a disjunction between conceptual density and performative delivery. Ideas remain legible, but not fully embodied in rhythm, pacing, or spatial interaction. Despite strong performances, particularly by Nencho Kostov and Plamen Dimov, and the visually compelling set design by Boris Dalchev and Mihaela Dobreva, the relationship between stage and audience remains uneven. The scale of the main stage dilutes the precision and intimacy the text demands, dispersing attention rather than concentrating it. In this configuration, the performance struggles to sustain the close intellectual focus required by Stoppard’s dramaturgy, where meaning is carried as much by linguistic cadence as by action. The production reveals careful preparation and clear directorial intention, but it stops short of fully resolving the gap between philosophical structure and theatrical articulation. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two friends inside a tragedy they cannot yet see (Nencho Kostov, Plamen Dimov). Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. 6. The Weight of the Unseen Someone is Going to Come by Jon Fosse (1996), an author presented for the first time to the Sofia audience, carries the creator’s distinct poetic and existential voice. The story revolves around a Woman and a Man who move to an isolated house by the sea, seeking absolute solitude, a pure space for their relationship to develop. Almost immediately, however, a creeping sense of threat emerges: “Someone is going to come.” The phrase is repeated, as a voice, a whisper, then a shadow. The anticipation of a third party, real or imagined, gradually erodes the couple’s bond. When the Other eventually appears, it is not an event per se; it is the confirmation of a preexisting fear. The action does not unfold externally; it emerges from within the characters, through psychological tension, pauses and repetition. The dreaded someone operates on multiple levels, as a visitor, a projection of jealousy, a symbolic figure of death or loss, or even as the impossibility of perfect union between two people. Fosse seems to suggest that no relationship can exist in complete isolation ; the Other is inevitable, even when nameless. The evocative set design by Boris Dalchev and Petya Karadzhova. Photo: Ivan Donchev. The style is structured around Fosse’s characteristic minimalism: short sentences, extended silences, and a dramaturgy of tension produced through absence rather than articulation. Language operates cyclically, with a near-musical logic. Repetition functions not as a limitation of expression but as a rhythmic inscription of affect—particularly anxiety, jealousy, and fear of abandonment. The Woman’s experience is shaped by isolation as a form of pressure, while the Man’s subject position is marked by acute insecurity, his demand for exclusivity gradually transforming into coercive control. The relational dynamic does not disintegrate in response to external events; rather, it undergoes internal corrosion, generated by self-reinforcing structures of fear. The empty maritime landscape operates as an externalization of interior voids. Nature does not offer consolation; instead, it intensifies ontological exposure, amplifying conditions of diminishment and solitude. Intense encounter between the Woman (Elena Dimitrova) and the Stranger (Kire Gyorevski), whose arrival disrupts the couple’s life. Photo: Ivan Donchev. Director Katya Petrova foregrounds the delicate existential tension of Fosse’s text, resisting overt dramatization in favour of sustained atmospheric restraint. The precarious set by Boris Dalchev and Petya Karadzhova functions as a spatial analogue of relational erosion. Its circular design, with a moving vehicle on peripheral tracks, reflects the dramaturgical logic of repetition: words returning, phrases looping, and thoughts circling without resolution. Stage movement translates linguistic recurrence into physical rhythm, while Svetlozar Georgiev’s soundscape deepens the sense of suspended tension. Man (Veselin Mezekliev) and Woman (Elena Dimitrova) in a remote house among the fjords, where they seek a brief escape from the city to revive their marriage. Photo: Ivan Donchev. Performances by Elena Dimitrova and Veselin Mezekliev are understated yet concentrated, built on precision and restraint, while Kire Gyorevski’s “Other” introduces a destabilising contrast through heightened physicality, vocal excess, and rhythmic disruption. Their interplay allows fear to surface not through action but through controlled variation within repetition. Carefully calibrated silences generate anticipation, shifting dramatic weight away from event and toward expectation itself. The production sustains a quiet intensity that aligns closely with Fosse’s dramaturgy. Silence is not treated as absence but as structural presence, reinforcing the idea that in Fosse’s theatre, meaning is produced less through what is spoken than through what remains suspended. 7. Trapped in Repetition Convenience Store Woman , by Japanese author Sayaka Murata, is not one of those novels that can easily be adapted for the stage. Its pervasive irony, social satire, and the existential anxiety that runs through the story, combined with its strong Japanese aura, make the task of adaptation particularly challenging. The story follows Keiko Furukura, an employee at a 24-hour convenience store in Tokyo who finds meaning and identity only within the rules and routines of her workplace. Outside that context, society deems her strange, as she has always struggled to mimic what others consider “normal” behavior. When a cynical and disillusioned new employee, Shiraha, enters her life, he pressures Keiko to conform to societal expectations such as marriage and a conventional career. As their uneasy relationship develops, Keiko is forced to confront whether she should continue living according to the rigid but comforting structure of the convenience store or attempt to reshape herself to fit a society that has never fully accepted her. Boryana Yovcheva as the Convenience Store Woman (Keiko Furukura). Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. Director and dramaturg Mariy Rosen translates Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman into a visually stripped, almost clinical stage world. Metallic constructions evoke a corporate skyline, while cold white lighting drains the space of warmth or emotional contrast. Petya Boyukova’s set design reinforces this aesthetic of functionality—precise, efficient, and deliberately distant. The production positions itself between social satire and existential study, circling questions of conformity, normalcy, and social exclusion within a system that rewards compliance. In this sense, repetition and routine are not only thematic material but also structural principles. Yet this approach exposes a central difficulty: sustaining theatrical tension within monotony. Rather than generating pressure, the accumulation of repetition often remains inert. This becomes apparent early on in the extended opening sequence, which, despite its narrative clarity, lacks performative density. The shift between narration and live dialogue does not establish a consistent rhythm, nor does it fully integrate its formal layers. Similarly, the use of recorded voice and live action remains underdeveloped, relying more on juxtaposition than on dramaturgical necessity. With tighter structuring and more decisive transitions, these elements could have carried greater tension rather than functioning as illustration. Some of the monologues addressing gender roles, labour, and social expectation remain too familiar in tone, reiterating ideas the novel already articulates more subtly, and could have benefited from further condensation in adaptation. Aleksander Tonev, clown-like but domineering, in the life of the Convenience Store Woman. Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. Within this framework, Boryana Yovcheva captures the external rhythm of routine and its psychological containment, yet the performance rarely breaks through into deeper interiority. Aleksander Tonev, by contrast, adopts a more physical and sharply articulated presence, bringing contrast and energy to the stage dynamics. Aleksander Tonev and Yocheva rearranging the “constructivist” stage design of Petya Boyukova. Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. Ultimately, by steering Keiko’s world toward a more direct narrative of nonconformity, the production reduces the productive ambiguity of Murata’s novel. What is lost is not clarity, but tension: the unstable space where conformity is both critique and survival strategy. 8. Ideas Without Embodiment Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Talk About the Future of Technology , written and directed by Ivan Panteleev, begins with a concept that is, in principle, compelling. Rather than constructing a biographical portrait of two technological figures, the production attempts to stage a discourse on digital futures through their symbolic and cultural weight. Yet this conceptual ambition is not matched by dramaturgical articulation. Cartoon-like, kitschy set design by Elie Veli. Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. The opening sequence, supported by live music by Milen Apostolov, Petko Slavov, and Ivan Yurukov, and framed by references to industrial revolutions, initially suggests a layered and responsive theatrical structure. For a brief moment, the production appears to operate across multiple registers, historical, technological, and performative. However, this complexity quickly dissipates as the performance settles into illustrative commentary rather than dramatic progression. The cast on stage, overshadowed by oversized figures of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. What follows is a gradual shift from theatrical exploration to a sequence of recognisable and largely pre-digested ideas about artificial intelligence, technological anxiety, and the continuity between industrial and digital revolutions. These ideas are not developed through conflict or stage action, but delivered as thematic statements, which remain external to the performative core of the work. The staging multiplies perspectives and narrative voices, but these function less as dialogic exchange and more as discrete informational positions. Instead of generating tension between viewpoints, the structure accumulates commentary. Likewise, the use of varied theatrical forms and devices reads as a demonstration of available techniques rather than integrated dramaturgical logic. The central questions—what it means to be human in a technologically accelerated world, and how innovation reshapes agency and control—remain at the level of articulation rather than experience. They are posed, but not problematised on stage. As a result, sociopolitical reflection does not emerge from action or interaction, but remains external to it. What is ultimately missing is not thematic relevance, but dramaturgical transformation: the passage from discourse into embodied conflict. Without this shift, the production remains illustrative rather than performative, closer to a staged essay than to theatre that generates its own necessity. 9. The Safety of the Stage Mirror Theatre Theatre by William Somerset Maugham centres on Julia Lambert, the celebrated star of the London stage, and examines the porous boundary between performance and lived identity. Julia inhabits a world in which professional, social, and private roles constantly overlap, making selfhood inseparable from performance. When a younger admirer destabilises her sense of control, she is forced into a confrontation with aging, desire, and identity. The narrative ultimately follows her return to dominance, reasserting authority both on stage and in life, where performance itself becomes survival strategy. Theatre’s set design by Chavdar Gyuzelev and costumes by Tsetska Ivaylova . Boyka Velkova, director and actress (in the leading role) in red Photo: Petko Mavrodiev Boyka Velkova’s adaptation preserves the satirical tone and light comedic surface of Maugham’s text, maintaining its focus on theatrical illusion and social performance. The production is constructed around the idea of theatre within theatre, with acting as a continuous negotiation between mask and authenticity. Velkova’s direction highlights Julia’s transformation most clearly in its treatment of her midlife crisis: the gradual shift from self-satisfied theatrical narcissism to a more vulnerable awareness of her own constructedness. Irinei Konstantinov offers a controlled and technically precise performance, while the ensemble maintains a consistent level of craft within a carefully regulated stage environment. The visual world, created by Tsetska Ivaylova and Chavdar Gyuzelev, combines refined aesthetics with psychological suggestion, though it remains primarily illustrative rather than dramaturgically disruptive. Occasional moments of direct address and informal interaction—such as actors acknowledging the audience or a waiter serving wine—introduce brief ruptures in the fourth wall, but these gestures remain episodic rather than structurally integrated. Ultimately, the production remains faithful to the tonal and structural logic of Maugham’s original, but it does not significantly reframe it. Its psychology remains legible, but not newly interrogated. In a contemporary context marked by sharper uncertainties around identity, performance, and visibility, the staging feels more like a careful reproduction of theatrical irony than an active reinvention of it. As a result, the spectator’s position remains largely observational rather than critically or emotionally implicated. Viara Tabakova and Iriney Konstantinov. Photo: Petko Mavrodiev. 10. The Space of ‘There’ The performance-installation TAM , conceived and choreographed by Deyan Gergiev, proposes a hybrid form between contemporary dance and spatial installation, where movement, sound, and scenography operate as interdependent systems rather than separate theatrical elements. The title itself— tam (“there” in Bulgarian)—functions as both a spatial marker and an existential axis: a point of projection for memory, absence, and desire, constantly shifting between presence and displacement. TAM cast members creating movement with the ripples of a large sheet: Snezhina Petrova, Yavor Valkanov, Kaloyan Trifonov, and Vasileva Kaneva. Photo: Petko Mavrodiev. The piece deliberately rejects linear narration in favour of an environment in which the spectator is positioned within, rather than in front of, the performance. Body, sound, and space are configured as a single perceptual field, closer to a living installation than to conventional choreography. Audience proximity or direct incorporation into the action dissolves the boundary between observer and event, placing perception itself under negotiation. Evocative lighting by Viktor Georgiev and Gabriela Kardzhilova’s set design, with piles of pillows that serve as props, hiding spots, or acting structures. Photo: Petko Mavrodiev. Movement is restrained yet highly charged, built on repetition, duration, and controlled exhaustion rather than expressive climax. This produces a tension that accumulates gradually rather than resolves, sustained by a carefully calibrated interplay of silence, rhythm, and physical persistence. The atmosphere oscillates between stillness and subtle disturbance, with sound, voice, and light forming a unified sensory structure that animates the space from within rather than decorating it from outside. A recurring rhythmic logic runs through the piece, comparable to tidal motion: gestures return, dissolve, and re-emerge with slight variation, generating a temporal experience that is cyclical rather than progressive. Within this structure, time becomes perceptual rather than narrative, inviting reflection that is bodily as much as intellectual. The lighting design by Viktor Georgiev and the scenography by Gabriela Kardzhilova, with its accumulation of pillows functioning alternately as terrain, obstacle, and concealment, reinforce this sense of mutable spatial logic. Objects are not static props but shifting agents within the performance environment. TAM constructs a total sensory field in which perception is continuously reoriented. Its effect lies less in spectacle than in sustained atmospheric pressure, where memory and physical presence overlap. In this sense, the work operates as an embodied spatial experience rather than a representation of movement. . 11. Trust as Dramaturgy I first saw Medea at the Varna Festival and wrote about it at length in a review published in The Theatre Times (January 2026 ). Since I consider it a strong production, it would be reductive to omit it here, particularly in a text that engages with multiple works from the same showcase. What interests me in this context, however, is not the production itself, but the broader relationship between tragedy and simplicity, a question I did not fully address in my earlier review. Radina Kardzhilova, a dynamic and fearless Medea. Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. One of the recurring challenges in staging ancient tragedy today is an uneasy, often defensive attitude toward simplicity. It is frequently treated with suspicion, as though it were aesthetically impoverished or dramaturgically insufficient, requiring compensation through interpretative excess or formal complication. In this framing, it is frequently mistaken for naivety—an entirely different condition. Simplicity, however, is never a starting point; it is an achievement. It presupposes reduction through knowledge, discipline, and interpretative clarity. It is not absence of complexity but its distillation into legible form. Naivety, by contrast, bypasses this process entirely. Where simplicity condenses, naivety merely flattens. Despite the communicative strength that simplicity can generate, many contemporary stagings gravitate toward an undifferentiated complexity that risks obscuring rather than intensifying meaning. This tendency often stems from an assumption that difficulty of access is equivalent to artistic depth, and that clarity somehow diminishes artistic authority. Yet clarity is not the opposite of depth; it is one of its conditions. Depth emerges not from obscurity, but from the precision with which a work articulates and sustains its questions. Ancient tragedy, despite its canonical status, is still frequently described as a “popular” or “public” form of theatre, yet accessibility remains culturally ambivalent. What is easily intelligible is sometimes dismissed as insufficiently serious, as though legibility were incompatible with complexity. In reality, however, accessibility and depth are not mutually exclusive categories; they depend on how meaning is structured, not on how difficult it is to decode. The dance scene of Medea (Radina Kardzhilova) and Jason (Velislav Pavlov). A deceptive opening scene of love and happiness. Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. To render emotionally and conceptually dense material with clarity is among the most demanding tasks in theatre. In this sense, simplicity in staging tragedy is not a reduction or simplification of thought, but a discipline of articulation. It is also a risky position, since it requires constant vigilance against sliding into oversimplification or conceptual flattening. Such an approach presupposes measure, precision, restraint, and above all trust in the dramatic text itself—trust in its internal density and its capacity to sustain meaning without excessive interpretative layering. Without this trust, even deconstructive strategies risk losing their object. Deconstruction presupposes a prior understanding of the structure it interrogates; a grasp of what its being deconstructed. Without that, it ceases to be useful analysis and becomes erasure. Declan Donnellan’s Medea offers a clear example of this economy of means. Stripped of decorative excess and interpretative overcoding, it is a production governed by clarity of intention rather than accumulation of concept. Donnellan removes Medea from mythic abstraction and places her at eye level with the contemporary spectator, not to diminish her stature, but to render her structurally legible as a human presence. In doing so, she becomes less distant and more disquieting: not an elevated figure of myth, but an intelligible proximity that intensifies, rather than softens, her violence and vulnerability. . Valentin Ganev as Creon. Photo: Stefan Zdraveski. Scenographically, the production avoids any sense of excess. Its language is one of radical minimalism: a bare stage structured around a single small platform at its centre. Thornton Wilder’s dictum that “Theatre is two boards and a passion” finds a literal realisation here, where meaning emerges not from accumulation but from intensified presence. That intensity is carried by Radina Kardzhilova, one of the leading actresses of the Bulgarian National Theatre, in a performance defined by physical and emotional exposure without protective distance. Moving among the spectators, she erases the conventional, protective separation between stage and auditorium, transforming proximity into ethical unease. The spectator is no longer external to the event but structurally implicated within it, drawn into a form of theatrical encounter that is immediate rather than mediated. The Chorus, similarly placed within the audience, resists any ornamental or stabilizing function. It operates instead as a shifting collective consciousness --at times questioning, at times empathising, at times withdrawing —thereby reflecting and destabilising the spectators’ own oscillations between judgement and identification. In this configuration, the audience is not only observed but mirrored. Donnellan’s direction constructs a Medea that is stripped of mythic abstraction yet not reduced in scale. Rather than an icon of monstrosity, Medea emerges as a structurally legible subject, negotiating exclusion in real time. Her rage is no longer allegorical excess but articulated response, produced within the constraints of rejection and social dislocation. The production’s force does not derive from spectacle, but from precision: a clarity that does not simplify but exposes relations. In this sense, it acquires a political dimension, not through explicit statement, but through the staging of exposure itself —of bodies, voices, and structures of exclusion made perceptible within a shared space. What sustains the production is not simply trust in the text, but its disciplined calibration between text, performer, and audience: a fragile architecture in which meaning is not illustrated from above but risked in real time. Epilogue The Ivan Vazov National Theatre showcase demonstrates that theatre cannot rely solely on the stability of the classical repertoire. The selected productions span a broad formal and thematic range, from tragicomic surrealism to psychological minimalism and installation-based performance. While some works are distinguished by clarity of intention and directorial precision; others remain anchored in strong conceptual premises that are not fully realised in performance, resulting in uneven degrees of theatrical articulation. The more experimental works tend to attract smaller audiences. This is not solely a question of accessibility, but of risk: they demand a different kind of attention from the spectator, one that is less passive and more exposed. At the same time, this demand is not always matched by an equivalent precision in staging, and in some cases the openness of the conceptual frame risks drifting into dramaturgical indeterminacy. Yet it is precisely this tension—between exposure and articulation—that sustains theatre as a living form. Without it, performance risks becoming repetition rather than encounter. Seen as a whole, this second showcase reveals a repertoire marked less by synthesis than by productive instability, between convention and experimentation, clarity and excess, compositional control and moments of formal uncertainty. Its significance lies less in coherence than in friction, in the points where different theatrical languages test, and occasionally strain, one another within the same institutional frame. In this sense, the repertoire does not present a unified artistic identity, but a field of negotiation between established forms and emerging practices, between inherited expectations and the uneven pressures of transformation. References References About the author(s) Savas Patsalidis is Professor Emeritus in Theatre Studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he has taught at the School of English for close to 35 years. He has also taught at the Drama School of the National Theatre of Northern Greece, the Hellenic Open University and the graduate program of the Theatre Department of Aristotle University. He is the author of fourteen books on theatre and performance criticism/theory and co-editor of another thirteen. His two-volume study, Theatre, Society, Nation (2010), was awarded first prize for best theatre study of the year. In 2019 his book Theatre & Theory II: About Topoi, Utopias and Heterotopias was published by University Studio Press. In 2022 his book-length study Comedy’s Encomium: The Seriousness of Laughter , was also published by University Studio Press. In addition to his academic activities, he writes theatre reviews for various journals. He is on the Executive Committee of the Hellenic Association of Theatre and Performing Arts Critics, a member of the curators’ team of Forest International Festival (organized by the National Theatre of Northern Greece), and the editor-in-chief of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques , the journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review of 'In The Heights' at the Teatro Variedades Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Spring in Europe – Beyond the Theatertreffen Power, Shame, Vanity and Opportunism – Productions of the 63rd Berliner Theatertreffen “The more I give to thee, the more I have…” 15th edition of the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova Finding Lear’s Shadow: Compagnia de' Colombari's King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival Robert Wilson Beneath a Cabbage Leaf: 7 Solitudes at the Nacionalinis Kauno Dramos Teatras NE:BITEF 2025: The Festival that Refused to Disappear Displacing the Orient: Postcolonial Negotiations in Purcărete's Adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights Staging Tradition, Testing Form: The Second Showcase of the National Theatre of Sofia Poetics of the Unfulfilled: The Seagull at the Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre, Veles, North Macedonia Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Editorial Comment Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF In JADT’s inaugural issue co-editors Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter J. Meserve declared their intentions for launching the fledgling journal, stating: “our aim is to promote research on American playwrights, American plays, and American theatre, and to encourage the thoughtful contemplation that will lead to a more enlightened understanding of our literary and theatrical heritage and of America’s continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts.” Nearly thirty years on and almost eighty issues later, JADT honors the original mission of the founding editors. Since 1989, however, the research terrain has shifted dramatically, and the publishing landscape has altered considerably. Our focus is now more inclusive as we endeavor to promote research on theatre and performance not just of the US, but of the Americas; and our venue is no longer a print edition with a run of about four hundred copies, but a digital platform that can reach thousands of potential readers. This current issue reflects our latest modification: we are delighted to introduce JADT’s newest addition, a book review section. This space will highlight the ongoing and vital research in our expanding field and provide a platform for both emerging and established scholars to explore the ways in which literary and theatrical heritages in the Americas are forged, contemplated, and understood. We are confident Roberts and Meserve, both pioneering theatre historians and academics, would be thrilled to widen the discourse. We begin this special issue with a look at the current state of the field by focusing in on the areas of expertise of several JADT board members. Each piece is a short, informal, and engaging take on the trends, developments, and shifts the author sees in her or his respective area. We are delighted to include contributions from Michael Y. Bennett, Kevin Byrne, Jorge Huerta, Esther Kim Lee, Jordan Schildcrout, Maurya Wickstrom, and Stacy Wolf. As readers of JADT have come to expect, the issue showcases the work of notable scholars in the field. The two articles selected for inclusion here employ innovative historical and theoretical approaches in the analysis of performances, dramatic texts, and audience reception within their cultural contexts. The first, “‘Re-righting’ Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s]” by Thomas F. Connolly, uses the methodological tools of microhistory to analyze Sherwood’s Pulitzer-Prize winning play as a call-to-arms for a war-wary United States. Connolly urges us to consider how critically-acclaimed dramas performed in shifting political and social circumstances endure or vanish. In the second article, “Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway,” Peter Zazzali considers the role of celebrity in the success of screen actors on Broadway stages, and the impact such star turns have on the perception of the art of acting. He argues that celebrity is a socially induced phenomenon that results in regressive perceptions of stage acting, and by extension, the art of theatre, and examines the phenomenological connection between “stars” and their adoring audience in the context of Broadway. This issue concludes with our first collection of book reviews, edited by Susan Kattwinkel at the University of Charleston. The range of books reviewed further testify to the richness of our field and provide insight into recent publications in Antebellum American and LGBTQ Theatre. These reviews are of Gay Gibson Cima’s Performing Anti-slavery: Activist Women on Antebellum Stages, reviewed by Heather Nathans; Douglas A. Jones, Jr.’s The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North, reviewed by Beck Holden; Jordan Schildcrout’s Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater, reviewed by Laura Dorwart; and Daniel J. Watermeier’s American Tragedian: The Life of Edwin Booth reviewed by Karl Kippola. We are delighted to launch the book review section with these four, and look forward to future submissions that represent these and other areas of our journal’s mission. If you know of a publication suitable for review in JADT, please send the information to kattwinkels@cofc.edu . A list of books received can be found at www.susankattwinkel.com and individuals interested in writing reviews for future issues, should consult this list and contact Susan Kattwinkel directly. We are grateful for Susan Kattwinkel’s herculean efforts in launching the book review section, as well as for the support of our incredible editorial board, managing editors, and the staff of the Martin E. Segal Center. And finally, we hope the state-of-the-field essays, scholarly articles, and book reviews published here, in the words of JADT’s founding editors, encourage thoughtful contemplation leading to a more enlightened understanding. They have for us. Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Co-Editors References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Musical Theatre Studies “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Performing Anti-slavery American Tragedian Murder Most Queer The Captive Stage Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Benjamin Gillespie Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Benjamin Gillespie By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF This roundtable brings together key voices in the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project including co-directors Linda S. Chapman and Alyce Dissette along with Ain Gordon and Moe Angelos . The discussion offers a behind-the-scenes look at a significant initiative to preserve the legacies of eleven pioneering LGBTQ+ performance artists including Ain Gordon, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Lola Pashalinski, Carmelita Tropicana, John Kelly, Richard Move, and Ishmael Houston-Jones. The project, which began in 2024, is housed under the Pick Up Performance Company and was born out of a shared recognition that queer performance histories—especially those emerging from the experimental downtown New York scene—remain vulnerable to erasure. The group discusses the logistical, political, and ethical stakes of preserving ephemeral theatre, dance, and performance work, particularly when much of it was created in non-traditional theatre spaces such as bars and clubs and beyond institutional frameworks. Overall, the roundtable explores questions of archival accessibility, digitization, and the necessity of preservation from the unique perspective of living artists shaping their own histories and how they are told. This wide-ranging conversation reflects on personal and intergenerational connections and the role of community in shaping how queer art is made and remembered. It also considers the archive as an artistic undertaking that resists linearity through embracing the complexity and contradictions embedded in queer history. Finally, the respondents offer an intimate and pragmatic look at how queer collective memory, aesthetics, and activism intersect to shape a more inclusive historical record of performance. This roundtable conversation was conducted on May 23, 2025 via Zoom. It has been edited for clarity and brevity. Benjamin Gillespie: I thought we could start by having each of you briefly introduce how you got involved with the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project. Linda S. Chapman: I left New York Theatre Workshop in 2020 after twenty-six years with the company. In 2023, Alyce and Ain asked me to join the board of the Pick Up Performance Company following the death of Ain’s father and co-artistic director, David Gordon. They asked me to help develop new projects for the company, extending the work that Ain and David did to making new work with “friends and family”, very much a part of the ethos of the Pick Up Performance Company. I had already begun preliminary work on organizing my longtime partner Lola Pashalinski’s archive. Alyce had worked with David Gordon on creating an incredible digital archive for him over the course of six years ( https://davidgordon.nyc/ ) which I had followed closely, and I thought maybe she could advise me on creating an archive for Lola. Understanding that, for a performer, it’s more difficult to raise funds to support archive work, we started thinking: Who else might we invite into this idea to help? Of course, Ain and Alyce were right there—and would need Ain’s work organized. And I had been in conversation with Moe and the Five Lesbian Brothers about their thoughts around archives and where they might go. There was some nascent interest already, and then, organically, the rest of the group came together. The project evolved out of our conversations together. Carmelita Tropicana joined in. Alyce was doing work with John Kelly and so he joined. Ishmael Houston-Jones and Richard Move were also artists from the community that we deeply admired. It developed organically out of the desire to preserve this work. Moe Angeles (right) on the stoop beside the St. Marks Baths on the street of that same name, being documented by Rio Sophia (left) from Queer/Art/Mentorship. Photo by Jess Dobkin Moe Angelos: I’m a downtown theater/performance maker and have been a character in that landscape for a long time. I’m one of the Five Lesbian Brothers. Linda produced all of our plays at New York Theatre Workshop. We are all connected. I think at some point I was kvetching, “What are we going to do with all our stuff?” because there isn’t just one, but five of us. We’re a company. I knew it was going to be some work to figure out what to do with the archive because there are a lot of voices who might want different things. The Brothers have figured that out, but I was informally consulting with Linda, asking “How do we go forward?” Because we’re getting old. One of us will die eventually. Our first concern was not to leave a huge mess for the other Brothers. Just to make it cleaner. That tumbled into a whole set of questions: How do we collect, catalog, digitize, store? Who’s going to take our stuff? Because it’s important. It’s a piece of history—self-made playwrights, devisers, whatever we are. Sometimes I look back at performance work that was done and think, “Oh my God, that was an amazing idea!” But it’s gone—forgotten. Couldn’t some of those things be captured for others so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel? That’s how I got scooped up into this fantastic world of the project. Alyce was gung-ho on the project and kindly asked the Five Lesbian Brothers to be a part of it. One offshoot of the archive project is generating collaborations within the group as well. Ain just directed my revised show This Used to Be Gay last weekend which was a great success. I learned so much from the process. Ain, you did a beautiful job directing. I got nothing but wonderful feedback, especially the new visual elements. It really enhanced the piece. Ain Gordon: There’s nothing to decorate and stage if there isn’t a script. Thank you for making that, Moe. I enjoyed it. I’m a fan. With regards to the project, there are a couple things I want to mention. My father and I co-directed the Pick Up Performance Company. He died in 2022. There were the tangible realities of going from a two-artist budget to a one-artist budget project company, and questions about how to practically handle that. It felt jerry-rigged to bring someone else in as co-director, but familial extension is in the DNA of the company. Alyce and I moved to the idea of “friends and family”—artists who have worked with me or who worked with David who don’t have infrastructure for their projects, bringing them under the Pick Up Company umbrella to offer a home for their work. It felt like a way to serve the community and grow the company in a way that feels right. Orbiting conversations about archiving happened without me at first. Things do happen behind my back! ( laughs ). But it eventually came back to me. As a playwright and theatre-maker, I do a lot of work sourcing archives and overlooked stories. I have strong feelings about how history is traditionally constructed and how people are sucked into believing it’s a fact when, in reality, it’s just an interpretive engine. Archives also tend to be for the converted. People go looking for what they already know is there. That’s a problem. We talked a lot about that and how to pierce that wall. We also talked about how we might not be able to secure real support for our individual archives, but that a critical mass could attract interest and also offer a contextual portrait of a geographic, generational moment. Over the years, as theatre-makers we didn’t all collaborate directly all the time, but we were side by side seeing each other’s work. We were making work in parallel. That interaction is useful for researchers and for young queer theatre-makers to know about. Alyce Dissette: I feel as if I’m the more pragmatic member of the team ( laughs ). I recall having a coffee over Christmas break two years ago with Moe and Linda. They were talking to me about where to go with Lola’s archive, where to go with the Five Lesbian Brothers’s archive. I’m not a complicated thinker. I just said, “You’re never going to raise money for individual archives. So one way to approach this may be to put us in a group—a group that made some sort of sense for us to work together.” That conversation led to other conversations. We brought in Ain—because not too much secret goes on without him knowing! ( laughs .) And then we all talked for a while. Ain, Linda, and I curated the other artists that would participate—thinking about what made sense aesthetically and practically in terms of forming a group initiative. Then we tested the waters to see if we could actually raise money for such a thing. It was one of those wonderful moments where nobody was negative about this idea or about these artists. It’s a very special group we’ve created. They represent a time when two things were happening in the field: first, they were emerging as queer artists and gaining legitimacy in the downtown art scene in New York; second, they were simultaneously being hit with the AIDS epidemic. Those two factors were major in the careers of these people. We also have a generational divide. Lola is our oldest artist. Richard Move is our youngest artist. That’s also representational of the impact they had on the field and on LGBTQ+ rights. A lot of the artists that came through while they were working died. A lot of people died. And people seem to forget that. So, I said that I would be co-director of the project. But I didn’t want to do it alone, and Ain suggested Linda as my partner in crime. We’ve also formed an amazing group of advisors representing the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Library of Congress, the National Theatre Archive Project, and other movers and shakers in the field. They’ve been more than generous with their time and support. Gillespie: It’s wonderful how all of you are connected and have a common vision that honors individual artists’ perspectives. I should mention that this project also relates to the work I’m doing in my scholarship. I’m currently working on an anthology about Split Britches’s work that documents the last two decades of work by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver including scripts, interviews, essays, along with a companion digital archive with photos and video to accompany the book. More broadly, I’m interested in queer legacy, performance archives, and how intergenerational connections can be made and sustained between younger and older queer artists. What is the mission of the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project, and what are its central goals? Dissette: The two central portions of the mission are 1) To create legitimate archives that go into a permanent collection so that the work will be saved, and 2) To figure out a way to make the material publicly accessible as opposed to disappearing into a collection only scholars can access. Obviously, the process of archiving a career, a body of work, is a huge undertaking. It takes a lot of time and work. But then where does it go? We don’t want it to disappear in boxes. One of the things we did with David Gordon’s archive is make it publicly accessible online, and it is available now ( https://davidgordon.nyc/ ). Because the Mellon Foundation gave us the funding for that project, we were able to create an in-depth artistic legacy that people can access online. That’s a new thing in the digital age. It’s exploding in some places and nonexistent in others. But for us, both parts are essential: a legitimate collection that lives somewhere, and public access. Ideally, there will be public access for the entire group so that anyone can search and access all eleven artists in the project. We don’t know where that will land yet. We can work on that while doing the pragmatic work of assembling the archives—which is a long and complicated process. Chapman: Could I just add a subsection of our mission? Alyce and I don’t feel we can do more than help put these archives together, but we’d like to distribute some of our findings and the work we’re doing to support the larger community. We’re developing inventory systems, making connections throughout the community of people interested in theatre and performance archives. We’re organizing an event in June (2025) on digital archives, bringing together the American LGBTQ+ Museum, The Feminist Institute, and our project. We’re seeking opportunities to meet people in the community. We’re reaching out to the major archives including Fales Library at NYU, the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and others. We’re hoping to contribute beyond just building the archives to help disseminate what we’re learning for others to benefit. Gillespie: And you did an exhibition at BAM last year right? Dissette: The BAM exhibition was huge for us. It really helped kick things off. BAM’s artistic leaders were instrumental partners. At the time, BAM was producing Taylor Mac’s Bark of Millions and they wanted to show there was an existing LGBTQ+ artistic legacy—that this work didn’t just appear out of nowhere. There was whole history and community of artists practicing for decades. Amy Casello is a great thinker and supporter of it all. Gillespie: Is BAM also one of your community partners? Dissette: Yes. We did a few events in conjunction with the exhibition last year. We are in conversation with BAM about future collaborations. Institutions get busy, especially now, but we want to maintain a community around this project throughout its development. We’ll do a few events every year as we work, and BAM is certainly a part of that community. Gillespie: I want to ask about the actual archives themselves. You mentioned the digital archiving process. What are some of the challenges or difficulties with building performance-based archives? It’s obviously quite different than other genres of art when you’re archiving ephemeral work. Gordon: One of the challenges is right here among us: there are very different types of performance histories across the artists in our group. Carmelita, John, and to some extent the Five Lesbian Brothers did a lot of work in clubs, which are very rarely documented. Or if they are, they’re on very endangered media formats. This is part of what I mean when I say that history is a kind of fictive engine. There are economic factors that make some work easier to document and some harder. Then there’s the question of how the archive tells the story of why things are missing or absent from the record, or do we just passively let the absence remain? What is the narration that frames that absence for an uninitiated viewer? Dissette: These are very particular archives. They’re artist-driven, not institutionally driven, and that’s a very different approach. We’re using the David Gordon Archive as a model because David made all the decisions about how he wanted his work left behind. There’s video, scripts—we had to figure out how to organize it so it could be accessible. Then there’s the boring digital labor of scanning everything. When we sent his forty boxes to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, we had digital copies of everything meaningful. David contextualized everything by writing what he called “scripts,” but they’re really stories—decade by decade—about how the work was made and what happened. That matched his philosophy that art and life are the same thing. Each artist will need to find their voice in this process—how they want to frame their body of work and what they want people to know. Then there’s the more conventional archive methodology: organizing scripts, video, letters, documents. There’s just a lot of stuff, and we need to figure out what will be saved and what digitized. David’s online archive is organized by decade. All the work from that decade is listed. You click on the work, and everything—programs, photos, etc.—are accessible from that page. This isn’t something you can do on WordPress. It was professionally programmed. We hope to have resources to do something similar. But first we have to do the grunt work—organizing archive materials and making them accessible. And it’s a lot of labor. Most of us don’t even know what we have yet. We’re just starting. Angelos: And then there’s the inherent problem with live performance. We’re doing the work to be in the room with the people in the room. It’s not necessarily intended to be recorded. We’re not making a movie. We’re not making a video. It’s ephemeral. You can’t really capture what was happening behind the camera at a club. And we did a lot of one-offs—someone’s benefit, an avant-garde-arama, and other things like that. We’d write a specific thing for a one-off event and maybe all that’s left behind is a lyric sheet. So that’s interesting too. We did a lot of that type of work. We all did. Dissette: We were just talking about that yesterday with Carmelita—about starting to organize things. She has all these sheets of paper, and now they need to be organized in some way. Chapman: In the case of Lola’s work with the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, they weren’t able to record it most of it. They didn’t have access to equipment in those days. We’re talking about the late 1960s into the early 1980s when Lola left the company. That was the time people were just starting to record performances. So there’s very little live documentation—at least from that period. With the Five Lesbian Brothers, and with David and Ain’s work, some performances are documented. But it’s uneven. The other thing I want to add, and this isn’t about digitization per se, but I think an important part of our mission is that our artists are all living. They’re all still alive and are making the decisions about what they want to be archived. With Lola, for instance, we’re doing oral histories and transcribing those as a form of storytelling—the kind Ain described so beautifully. Gillespie: It’s important that you mentioned that these are artist-led projects. Oftentimes, archives aren’t consolidated by the artists themselves. That’s what’s so exciting about this project. The artists have a lot of say in how their work will be digitized or archived, but also in how that legacy will look in public-facing contexts. Gordon: Yes, and the word “consolidation” is exactly the one I want to avoid. There’s a project I did for the Mark Taper Forum. I have fourteen of the twenty-five drafts of that script. I want all fourteen to be in the archive. I want everyone to know what hell that was. Gillespie: I understand that impulse because then you get to see the artist’s process. That’s a big part of the work. Gordon: It fights what I think writing history tends to do—making it seem like there was a series of steps that led inevitably to the thing that’s now historicized. And that’s rarely the case in creating performance. I’m interested in making the archive demonstrate the chaos of the creative process. History narrows an array of events into a traceable sequence that appears to have led to the thing it wishes to historicize. But that’s the opposite of what actually occurs, at least for me. That’s not how any work comes to be. In a lot of these downtown shows, someone would ask you to participate in a show. I’d say, “Okay, great!” I had a title but hadn’t written a word before I was invited to participate. Chapman: Here’s an example. Lola and I made a piece about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas that we worked on for many years. It relates back to how HIV impacted our work. We started the piece with our friend Georg Osterman, another member of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. We were making a piece about Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson. George passed away in 1995. We had a draft script and we were ready to go into production. But without Georg—because the work was so personal to both George and Lola—we didn’t see how we could go forward. Our friends and community encouraged us to think differently. They didn’t want all that work to be lost. That led us to evolve a new piece about Gertrude and Alice. But that work would never have come about without the AIDS epidemic. That’s the unwieldy kind of story that we’re documenting. It’s part of telling the story of a whole era. Gillespie: Do you feel there will be difficulties navigating how to tell this story without narrowing it—or “consolidating” it? (I promise I won’t use that word again, Ain!) How will you present it publicly in a way that’s visible to people who might not have been around or don’t necessarily know the context. One thing about this group is that you all knew each other. You were all working in the same time and place. You saw a lot of the work. But a future viewer may not have. And it’s still important for them to try to understand it. Moe: What do you think the challenges might be in telling your story through the archive, or the Five Lesbian Brothers’ story? Angelos: All of what we’re talking about is rooted in personal relationships, right? That’s the part I don’t know how to make legible—other than “we were in the same room at the same time.” But it’s such an important part of this work. It’s the “family business,” as the Pick Up Performance Company says. It’s about who you know. I don’t know that it’s so different from insider trading—it’s who you know, and who shares some sensibility in a context. We were all in New York City. And what did that mean in that era? The city was very different. You could still hang out your shingle and start making shows without an MFA from Yale or wherever. No dis on that, but I don’t know if it’s possible to do it the same way now. There was this autodidactic process, and we were teaching ourselves as we went. That feels very different now. It’s hard to make it legible without sounding like, “It used to be better—get off my lawn.” But it really made a difference. We didn’t have to work four days out of five for the landlord. I don’t know what young artists do now. I don’t know how they do it. Gillespie: And your work in This Used to Be Gay really captures that history in a unique way. You’re calling back to a queer history that helps contextualize the work being made and tell that story. It’s also very funny. Chapman: I worked at Theater for the New City in the early eighties. It was my first administrative job. That’s where I met Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, who had worked with Spiderwoman Theater. That was even before Split Britches emerged from the work they did together. I saw the first two WOW festivals—before there was a dedicated WOW space. In her show, Moe takes us back to the original WOW Café theatre on 11th Street. Then we move 4th Street. I’m very connected to that history. I’m motivated and inspired by the begats—seeing Gordon’s work at Dance Theater Workshop, knowing he came out of Judson Church, where George Bartenieff and Crystal Field had worked. Those connections, how these artists influenced each other beyond our group—it’s eternally fascinating! I get excited about how these elements of community affect aesthetics, how we make work, what we’re interested in. I think our particular brain trust in the project—our artists—is really dynamic. There’s so much potential in how we relate and communicate across aesthetics and generations. There’s so much more to explore beyond sorting papers and digitizing materials. We’re telling the story of work in the East Village, a sort of performance phenomenon. You can’t recreate those moments or that time and place. It’s unique. Ain Gordon (left) with Josh Quillen in “Relics and their Humans" at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Photo: Darrell Hoeman Gordon: I think telling the story is the same as designing the experience of the archive itself, especially for someone arriving at it online. It's like the first ten minutes of a live performance. I ask the same questions: What will they see first? What will set the tone? How do we make it feel the way we want it to feel? How do we disassemble the linear steppingstones that history likes to create and convey some of the randomness, the chaos, and the chance? Those things can happen—it depends on how it’s designed, what kind of contextualizing the artists do. Personally, I loathe finding aids. I won’t even read them anymore—I go straight to the indexing. Because the finding aid does exactly what I don’t want done. So how do we rethink finding aids for these archives? Could we write something different? Maybe six different people write six different versions, and users can choose which one to follow. I don’t know, but I want us to think about that. Chapman: And we’re talking about people who were groundbreaking. These are artists telling stories that had never been told before. They were pushing against years of repression and silencing. And once you break that open . . . who knows? I don’t think we’re finished exploring that yet. Dissette: It’s a little overwhelming, to be honest. But one good thing about archiving is that it takes time. It’s not like a production. We will learn things as we go, and I’m counting on that. We certainly made it up as we went along with David’s archive. I have colleagues who work in tech. I worked at the Voyager Company that produced those CD-ROMs. I ran the first digital art contest back in the 90s. I’m interested in the process. And what we gain are opportunities that emerge within that process. That’s the most interesting part of this work to me. Gillespie: The digital archives of David Gordon ( https://davidgordon.nyc/ ) and Lola Pashalinski ( https://performingartslegacy.org/pashalinski/ ), as they stand now, are kind of independent of this project, right? Do you imagine that the archives you’re assembling in this project will resemble the work on those archives? Dissette: David’s archive is independent and is strictly a model for what we’re doing. It’s not part of this project except to show what’s possible. Lola’s current online presence is through the Entertainment Community Fund’s Legacy Project . That’s another kind of framework where many artists are represented. They designed the portal. It’s a possible model for us, but I’d like something more complex, technologically speaking. They did a really good job creating infrastructure where people could enter information. But my fantasy is that we partner with a major institution to create a portal—a really complicated portal—where this would be one entity, and other entities could also live in the future. Gordon: In fantasy land, all of us would be on one portal. If you searched “1980,” you’d get everything all eleven artists made in 1980—not just one. Dissette: That’s the cool thing about David’s archive—it has a search engine. You can’t do that in many places. As the technology improves, there are more possibilities. But there are also difficult decisions. Video will be all over the place. There’s no way to consolidate it. Ishmael Houston-Jones has something like thirty videos at the NYPL through Dance Theater Workshop. In David’s case, we partnered with the NYPL Performing Arts Library since his work was going into their permanent collection. So now there’s a direct link to the NYPL Digital Collections where David’s videos live. The public can access it online. But we don’t know yet what will be streamable outside the NYPL system. Right now, to view most of it, you need to physically go to the library. Sometimes, there’s a lack of sophisticated understanding about what websites can be. David’s site was designed by someone who is a media artist, someone from MIT—an artist in her own right. She and David talked through the vision. Then she came back with a structure for the archive. That’s different than someone just making categories in WordPress. It’s a different level. Chapman: Also, the Legacy Project site for Lola is not a complete archive. It does have a fairly developed chronology of all the work. But it doesn’t have all the photos. It doesn’t have a lot of audio. It’s material that we could easily transfer to another kind of site if we want to do that as we develop. But it’s not complete. We’re further ahead because we actually do have a dedicated archivist, but these are incredibly time-consuming processes. Gillespie: It sounds like the archives, in an ideal world, are kind of a new collaborative art project where the artists themselves will collaborate with a media artist to think about how this will look and be mapped out in a non-traditional, nonlinear way. That is really interesting because it’s kind of a queering of the archive itself. It’s not chronological. You want these to tell the story in a way that’s messy and real and shows the connections between artists. Dissette: It’s important to say also that they wouldn’t have access to anything without producers, which in this project are Linda and myself. The producers are the people who are facilitating a process. Just putting an archivist with an artist will not be enough. There must be someone guiding the process at some level. I mean, it’s like a show. Chapman : I think making new work out of the archival materials is something a lot of us are interested in right now. Dissette: David Gordon named it “Archivography.” The performances were called “Live Archivography,” and then there’s the website. I think also he resented being relegated to historicizing as the only fundable action. He had more to give. And I think that’s actually the benefit of us all doing it before he died. Gillespie : I’m curious about funding. What is your approach right now, or what are your plans for procuring funding to help with this project? Angelos: Oh, we’re going to ask the NEA and NEH immediately! ( laughs ). Their new mandate—what the NEA is supposed to do now—is fund disaster recovery. And, you know, this is a disaster! Gordon: We’re all in recovery. Angelos: Just little gallows humor there . . . Chapman : Alyce is going through all the various funding agencies that we can think of. And Ain and Alyce particularly have really developed great language which we are using. We’re leaving no stone unturned. Of course, anybody we ever knew who ever gave any money as an individual is getting approached. We’ve had a very generous anonymous donation. Because of some former funding that the Pick Up had, we’re able to start making this a project that is part of the broader work of the company. Dissette: Having been raising money for a long time, one of the wonderful things about raising money for this project is that everybody we’ve talked to likes the project. Nobody had told us it’s a terrible idea. Nobody. And nobody’s been even middle-of-the-road about it. That’s been the response universally so far. We got initial startup money from the Howard Gilman Foundation which has helped. But we will need more. We’re approaching some major foundations about that. And the fact that we're committed to making the process be part of the community—working with the community—is key. And so NYSCA and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs have been supportive of this, in addition to our other projects though the Pick Up Performance Company. Funding takes a while, especially big funding. They commit money years in advance. But we’re working on it. The artists are also helping. Gillespie : Do you see additional projects like Moe’s This Used to Be Gay with the Pick Up Performance Company connected to the project? Gordon: If the artists are interested in it then absolutely. It’s artist-driven from our standpoint. Some of these artists have enough infrastructure that they wouldn’t necessarily want to do that. Some don’t. It would be very case by case. We’re absolutely open to it, and also in no way mandating it. Gillespie We’ve talked about digital archives, but what about the physical archives? Have you thought about what to do with all the paper? Chapman : Absolutely. And we do also have other artifacts besides just the paper. Those are all big questions that come up as we’re putting these collections together. But I think the physical collections are really important too. Dissette : We have said that the physical archives could go to different repositories as long as the virtual one unites them all. But there are some people who are also interested in perhaps the physical archives going into one repository. So that’s a moving part of a conversation now. Collage image created for the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project – in top center photo left to right Co-directors Linda S. Chapman, Alyce Dissette, archivist Vivian Stein, Advisor Robert Croonquist References Footnotes About The Author(s) MOE ANGELOS is a theatre artist and writer. She's one of the OBIE-Award winning Five Lesbian Brothers and has been a member of the Wow Café Theatre in NYC since 1981. She's a main collaborator in The Builders Association, creating media-infused performances that have toured all over the universe that is accessible to non-billionaires. She has collaborated with many downtown NYC luminaries including Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Anne Bogart, Lois Weaver, Kate Stafford, Carmelita Tropicana, Brooke O’Harra, Half Straddle, New Georges and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company. She has been a mentor in Queer/Art/Mentorship several times and in Toronto, her work has been presented at FADO Centre for Performance Art and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. In October 2024 she was in the latest Builders' premiere at the Skirball Center at NYU, Atlas Drugged which is about artificial intelligence's insidious influence on the democratic process, which now seems more plausible than ever. During Covid-19, she appeared on Zoom, Twitch and Streamyard and currently by day, she works in United Scenic Artists 829 painting scenery and helping make Hollywood dreams come true. Moe is not on the socials so don't try to click and subscribe but if you're curious ask ChatGPT about her. LINDA S. CHAPMAN (Co-Director LGBTQ+ Artist Archive Project) is Founding President of Youth Arts New York (YANY) providing experiences in the arts, science, and civil society to engage youth in building a future of peace, social justice, and sustainability. A current member of the Board of the Pick Up Performance Company, she retired in 2020 as the Associate Artistic Director of New York Theatre Workshop. Chapman joined the company in 1995 and served as an instrumental curator, advocate, and collaborator. Prior to her time at NYTW, she was Managing Director of The Wooster Group from 1983—94. She was a co-producer of DYKE TV, a grass roots, public access program, made by and for the lesbian community. Linda is also co-writer and performer of the Obie Award-winning Gertrude and Alice: A Likeness to Loving with her life partner of forty years Lola Pashalinski, their two-character play about Gertrude Stein and her longtime companion Alice B. Toklas, directed by Anne Bogart. She co-adapted Ann Bannon’s lesbian classics The Beebo Brinker Chronicles for the stage with playwright Kate Moira Ryan. The play was awarded a GLAAD Media Award and nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. She is a Lilly Award and Prelude ‘23 Frankie Award winner. ALYCE DISSETTE (Co-Director LGBTQ+ Artist Archive Project) is a producer for performing, visual, film, and digital artists who has worked in a wide range of venues and projects from staff member in the Metropolitan Opera Presentations Department to former Executive Producer of the PBS national series, “Alive from Off Center,” and on digital media productions with the Voyager Co. She has worked with hundreds of artists including filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, François Girard, Mark Pellington, visual artist James Turrell, author Art Spiegelman, and in the performing arts, Sir Richard Alston, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Karin Coonrod, Ain Gordon, David Gordon, Philip Glass, Nona Hendryx, John Kelly, Urban Bush Women, and Robert Wilson. She has served on the Board of Directors for Dance/USA and the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York. She produced the multi-faceted archive project for director/choreographer/writer David Gordon that is considered a model in the field. She has been the Producing Director for the Pick Up Performance Company since 2001. AIN GORDON is a three-time Obie Award-winning writer/director/actor, a two-time NYFA recipient a Guggenheim Fellow in Playwriting, and a Creative Capital Awardee. Gordon’s work often focuses on marginalized/forgotten histories and the obscured figures found within. Recent projects include Relics And Their Humans : collaborating with Josh Quillen to frame a real-life couple from Dover, OH, at Krannert Center (IL), Arizona Arts Live, Wexner Center (OH), and La MaMa (NY); These Don’t Easily Scatter : excavating the early years of the AIDS crisis in Philadelphia, in collaboration with the William Way LGBT Community Center with support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage plus development at Boston University; Radicals In Miniature : collaborating with Josh Quillen on a series of requiems to personal icons at Baryshnikov Arts (NY), International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Quick Center, Connecticut College (all CT), Williams College and The Yard (both MA); and 217 Boxes Of Dr. Henry Anonymous : culminating a 2-year residency at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania focused on Dr. John Fryer who, in 1972, disguised as Dr. Anonymous opposed the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of homosexuality as a disease at the Painted Bride (PA), Baryshnikov Arts (NY), Transylvania University (KY) and the Center For The Art of Performance UCLA. Gordon’s work has also been seen at BAM Next Wave, New York Theater Workshop, the Mark Taper Forum, Flynn Center, HERE Arts Center, DiverseWorks, Performance Space 122/PSNY, Dance Theater Workshop/NYLA, George St Playhouse (NJ), and MASS MoCA, among many others. Gordon is a former Core Writer of the Playwright’s Center (MN), has twice held the post of Visiting Artist at the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (PA), a former Artist-In-Residence at NYU Tisch School of The Arts, former Resident Artist at The Hermitage (FL), and was a 2020 Pabst Endowed Writer-In-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Gordon has been a Director of the Pick Up Performance Co(s) since 1992. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Alexander Pettit Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Border that Beckons and Mocks: Conrad, Failure, and Irony in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon Alexander Pettit By Published on May 28, 2014 Download Article as PDF The horizon is a border that cannot be crossed. “Beyond the horizon” is thus a meaningful locution only in the language of metaphor, where, like “the end of the rainbow,” it beckons and mocks, promising delight and abundance even as it emphasizes limitation.1 Eugene O’Neill’s Robert Mayo, poet manqué and protagonist of Beyond the Horizon, is drawn to the metaphor but curiously unequal to it.2 Place-bound by circumstance (as he realizes) and torpid by nature (as he does not), he cannot ground the metaphor in his own experience or animate it with his own imagination. His principal mode of conceptualizing life “beyond the horizon” is imitative. Specifically, Robert tries and fails to reify the metaphor after the fashion of Joseph Conrad, whose biography is a record of traversed national borders and whose fiction, abstractly a sustained negotiation of borders between description and metaphor, more concretely concerns experiences at sea, on land, and, yes, at the borders between. Robert, perennially a failure, fails thrice in this enterprise: he is unable to leave the hard-scrabble farm he loathes, to imagine life beyond the farm, and to enrich the life he does lead with the benefits of a vibrant imagination. The borders that circumscribe his life are both imaginative and geographical, and they are absolute. In this way O’Neill backhandedly thematizes the centrality of living to literature, making a Conradian play out of un-Conradian materials. O’Neill had acknowledged his indebtedness to Conrad at least by 1920, when he remarked that during his tenure at Princeton, Conrad, Wilde, and London were “much nearer” to him than Shakespeare.3 Princeton did not endure in O’Neill’s life (he flunked out in 1907), but Conrad did. Partly inspired by The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” the feckless youngster “got the urge for the sea” and, in 1910, shipped out to Buenos Aires.4 A voyage to Honduras in 1909 and 1910 had already given him a taste of the sea; another voyage, to England in 1911, would complete this phase of his life. O’Neill’s nautical period, albeit short compared to Conrad’s sixteen-year span, was by all accounts intensely lived. It provided fodder for at least thirteen plays written from 1913 to 1920, comprising much of O’Neill’s apprentice drama as well as the work that brought him fame. The Conradian strain in the early plays has been amply recognized, particularly in the maritime plays and mostly with respect to The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” Peter Lancelot Mallios observes that the title of O’Neill’s early Children of the Sea borrows the first-edition American title of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and notes that in 1918 Current Opinion considered that novel and others by Conrad alongside O’Neill’s In the Zone.5 That same year, the premiere of O’Neill’s Ile prompted Louis Sherwin to write that “[O’Neill’s] sailors live as Joseph Conrad’s Marlow and Lord Jim and the unforgettable crew of the Narcissus live.”6 A particularly regrettable passage in florid 1921 write-up supposes that with “all its kelp of thronging legends,” Conrad’s novel “stirred uneasily in [O’Neill’s] blood.” More soberly, the author notes the “scenic similarity between the opening pages of ‘The Nigger of the Narcissus’ and the stage directions of ‘The Moon of the Caribbees.’”7 When “Anna Christie” premiered a few months later, the New York Evening Telegram declared it payment of “one more generous installment in [O’Neill’s] debt to Joseph Conrad.”8 Even The Emperor Jones, a maritime play only in a tangential sense, prompted the reviewer Maida Castellun to represent Brutus Jones as Conradian in his “hallucinations and reversions to the primitive savage,” presumably by way of nodding at Heart of Darkness.9 More recent critics have teased out other connections. Travis Bogard argues that The Nigger of the “Narcissus” informs Bound East for Cardiff and that “the central situation” of O’Neill’s Warnings “was quite possibly suggested” by The End of the Tether.10 He detects traces of Conrad’s “To-morrow” in The Rope, in Chris Christopherson and its rewrite “Anna Christie,” and in the short story “Tomorrow,” the narrator of which O’Neill professedly conceived as “a sort of Conrad’s Marlow.”11 Chris Christopherson is akin to The Shadow Line, The Secret Sharer, and Heart of Darkness.12 Like Castellun, Bogard associates Conrad’s African novella with The Emperor Jones, which the Italian poet Eugenio Montale had thought beholden to Lord Jim.13 A recent reference work finds O’Neill’s Thirst “heavily influenced” by Conrad.14 Bogard is justified in claiming that “at least through 1920 . . . the impact of Conrad on O’Neill’s work was deeper than that of any other writer.”15 One might be forgiven for thinking that Conrad figures in just about everything the young O’Neill wrote—except Beyond the Horizon. O’Neill composed that play in 1918 and, with its producer John D. Williams and its star Robert Bennett, revised it in January 1920, preparatory to its premiere on 3 February.16 The play is essentially if uneasily tragic. O’Neill traces the decline of Robert Mayo, whose appearance (he is “tall [and] slender”with a “high forehead and wide, dark eyes”), constitution (he is tubercular), and aspirations (literary, of course) place him among the alternate versions of himself to which O’Neill was drawn throughout his career.17 The young man aborts his plan to ship out with his Uncle Dick when he abruptly decides to wed the depressive Ruth Atkins. Marriage destroys the literary ambitions that Robert had cherished but never prosecuted. Landlocked and bitter, he mismanages his and Ruth’s family farms past hope of recovery. His tuberculosis returns and kills him. Robert’s robust, bibliophobic brother Andrew, a skilled farmer and seaman, comes home to say goodbye and perhaps to take up with his brother’s widow, whom he had once loved. Less blunt in its recognition of its author’s indebtedness to Conrad, Beyond the Horizon is no less beholden to the novelist. The producer Williams said something comparable when he observed that the script gave him the “feeling of the sea” that he admired in Conrad but, happily for its prospects on stage, did so “without the sea scenes.”18 Bogard is unique among scholars in noticing a Conradian strain in the play, but he sees Conrad serving only as a source for the play’s putative interest in the “power of hope to sustain men.”19 This is an odd remark, given the falseness and fugitivity of hope in Beyond the Horizon. What Bogard misses, I think, is O’Neill’s ironic use of an influence that the playwright had previously used without much in the way of inflection. Predecessors like Smitty in The Moon of the Caribbees and In the Zone embody the amalgam of unlearned wisdom and unflagging gumption evident in, say, Singleton from The Nigger of the “Narcissus” andCaptain MacWhirr from Typhoon. But Robert pointedly fails to attain this status. O’Neill built the irony of contrast into his conception of Beyond the Horizon. He meant to write an inversion of his maritime one-acts, its theme fortified by the hardening of borders that are permeable in the geographically expansive maritime plays. In an April 1920 letter to the New York Times, O’Neill remembered a Norwegian sailor—“a bred-in-the-bone child of the sea”—much given to complaining about his decision to abandon his family’s farm for the sea. What would have become of such a man, the playwright wondered, had he stayed put? O’Neill continued: “from that point I started to think of a more intellectual, civilized type—a weaker type . . . who would have my Norwegian’s inborn craving for the sea’s unrest, only in him it would be conscious, too conscious, intellectually diluted into a vague, intangible, romantic wanderlust.”20 As he would throughout his career, O’Neill imagined a misfit. The finished play retains this anti-Conradian conception of its protagonist. Robert’s tuberculosis, for example, is an instance of a larger “weakness” and the emblem of a defining isolation. Robert thus anticipates Tennessee Williams’s tubercular and solipsistic Lot Ravenstock in The Kingdom of Earth more nearly than he recalls the “calm, cool, towering, superb” James Wait in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” who introduces himself by saying, “I belong to the ship” and whose worsening tuberculosis facilitates his creator’s meditation on the nature of the commonweal.21 The energies of the novel are coalescent and productive, if troubled. O’Neill’s diminution of his source is to the point; and Robert’s failure to achieve even the incidentally agential status of Wait, or the generalized vigor of Singleton, MacWhirr, and others of their type, is central to the playwright’s method here as it is in his creation of later characters. Haunted inadequacies like Don Parritt in The Iceman Cometh and Jamie Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten are destroyed by their inability to achieve the status of those whom they admire and resent. Robert differs from them principally in O’Neill’s selection of an extratextual point of comparison for him. Read in this way, Robert exemplifies the anxiety about “belonging” that O’Neill would soon explore in The Hairy Ape and that would remain central to his sense of tragedy. The tragic and ironically Conradian elements of Beyond the Horizon collaborate against Robert, making him contextually ajar in the manner of the proletarian “ape” Yank on Fifth Avenue or the passed-out city-slicker Jamie on the steps of a farmhouse. I have argued elsewhere that Robert’s inability to learn from his failures gives him “Aristotle’s reversal without the recognition.”22 If this makes Robert unlike Oedipus, it also marks his distance from those exemplary sailors whom the narrator of The Nigger of the “Narcissus” describes as “men enough to scorn in their hearts the sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate.”23 Robert actually searches for a “fate” on which to pin his misfortunes, as what sturdy tar or tragic hero ever did? In stage direction, Robert “looks about him wildly, as if his vengeance were seeking the responsible fate” (60; 600). Having failed at farming, Robert blames “the farm” for his failure (131; 635). Nemesis was never so inert. Neither is anagnorisis often so elusive: Robert’s promising admission that he has been an “utter failure” is followed by his cockamamie assertion that he will henceforth “write, or something of that sort” (130-31; 635). Robert blames fate even as he greases its wheels; a Dunciadic incompatibility of skill and aspiration has precipitated his poverty and could hardly be expected to remedy it. He oscillates between tempting fate and, to recur to Conrad, bewailing its hardness. His temperament distinguishes him from the sturdy generation that Conrad had celebrated in The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: Robert recalls the “successors” of such as Singleton, those “grown-up children of a discontented earth” who “learned how to whine.”24 More generally, Robert’s sedentariness and blame-mongering point up his remove from Conrad’s Victorian ethics, expressed as an aphorism in Nostromo: “Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.”25 Against the contrastive backdrop—the dynamism and stoicism of the sailor shadowing the physical and moral slackness of the pretender—O’Neill’s attitude toward his protagonist becomes evident. Robert’s “weak[ness]” and his “intellectual” inclinations cordon him off from the sphere of action celebrated by Conrad (and Carlyle, Tennyson, Dickens, Charles Kingsley, and many others). This prevents him from even attempting the crossings and straddlings of Conrad’s bona fide travelers and indeed those of the earlier O’Neill. Robert’s adherence to a skewed, roseate version of Conrad’s Asia provides the sturdiest evidence of O’Neill’s ironic use of a familiar influence. Robert remains ignorant of the novelist’s proviso that one must earn “Eastern” transcendence by labor, maturation, and the acceptance of risk. Marlow of “Youth” and Captain MacWhirr of Typhoon represent the proper synthesis, as does Captain Whalley of The End of the Tether, who has spent “fifty years at sea and forty out in the East.”26 A “peevish Hamlet who whines and snivels through his futile and dismal life,” as St. John Ervine called Robert years ago, O’Neill’s protagonist never works up the sweat that sanctifies the maturity of Conrad’s better sort of China Seaman.27 In the opening scene, Robert tells Andrew about his urge to travel: “it’s just Beauty that’s calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell of the East, which lures me in the books I’ve read” (13; 577). Getting from here to Conrad requires some winnowing, because the writers whom O’Neill openly references in his plays tend to be poets. From what “books,” we must ask, does O’Neill intend Robert to have wrung this platitude? Surely none by the English decadent poet Arthur Symons, author of the one book we see Robert reading: although O’Neill uses him, as he uses Conrad, to emphasize Robert’s shortcomings, Symons is all Eurocentrism and muffled libido.28 Edward FitzGerald and Rudyard Kipling seem likelier candidates, as being the “Orientalist” poets whom the young O’Neill most admired and who appear most often in O’Neill’s plays.29 But FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam essentially catalogues a set of mythopoetic attitudes, remembered fondly but wryly in O’Neill’s later comedy Ah, Wilderness!30 Its mannered and vinous melding of body, mind, and spirit recommended it to O’Neill in his attempts to seduce the teenaged Beatrice Ashe in 1914–15 but could hardly have served the tepid Robert, who even at the moment of death declines to accept the purely metaphorical status of his fancied destination and for whom romantic companionship proves antithetical to travel.31 Asiaphiliac dreamers of Robert’s sort will always be drawn to poems like Kipling’s “The Long Trail,” from which O’Neill’s young surrogate Richard Miller quotes in Ah, Wilderness!32 That poem, however, is geographically promiscuous, more about smashing through boundaries than savoring the yield of their traversal. Kipling’s point is that sailing about anywhere is great fun; dawdling, much less pausing to ponder “Beauty,” is contrary to his purpose. The other poem referenced in what Doris Alexander calls Richard Miller’s “ecstasy of Kipling” is “Mandalay.”33 Robert seems an unlikely admirer of this poem as well. That poem’s narrator is no dreamer like Robert, no brainy and fretfully repressed Symons. He is a louche and mouthy man’s man intent on trumpeting the superiority of his “Burma girl” to the “fifty ’ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand” who do not “understand” what he calls “lovin’.”34 Risibly, Richard Miller quotes from this poem in order to convey to his fiancée an aura of sexual sophistication, as he had earlier quoted from Kipling’s “The Ladies”—more sex, Burma again—to impress an (unimpressed) prostitute.35 Robert kisses Ruth “passionately” once before they tumble into a Strindbergian marital inferno (26; 583), but on the whole he seems no more interested in sex than he is in farming or for that matter sailing. It is easier to appreciate O’Neill’s enthusiasm for Kipling or FitzGerald than to imagine Robert’s. But we need not imagine a poet behind Robert’s effusion about “the mystery and spell of the East.” In the second edition, O’Neill cut or allowed to be cut Andrew’s response to Robert: “You’ve got that idea out of your poetry books” (14). The numerous eleventh-hour deletions were motivated by a mandate to prune a bulky script; but they are potent, thematically, and the poetical or “feminine” Robert of the first edition was attenuated in the revision.36 The first-edition reading perhaps encodes a joke (Andrew wouldn’t know Conrad from Kipling), but the revision allows a writer of prose in Robert’s fantasy. And O’Neill, having at least acquiesced in the deletion for performance, chose not to restore the original reading in the second edition. Especially given that this edition debuted in the stately, canon-making Complete Works (1924), his retention of the truncated passage may be considered an endorsement. The language of Robert’s attraction to “the East” feels Conradian, recalling for example the passage from “Youth” in which Marlow remembers his first exposure to “the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and sombre, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise.”37 Both Robert’s and Marlow’s accounts stress alterity, mystery, and a familiar if imprecise transgressiveness. Marlow’s past is the future for which Robert vaguely yearns, but Robert’s ignorance of the demands imposed by a life like Marlow’s renders his fantasy fatuous and, again, ironic. When he adds bits about his “need of the freedom of great wide spaces” and “the joy of wandering on and on,” his error becomes clear (13; 577). He is ignorant of the difference between land and sea that Conrad treats dialectically, and he is therefore able to imagine a maritime approach as similar to a terrestrial terminus in its compatibility with the act of “wandering.” Robert regards “the mystery and spell of the East” as a place to be stridden through as Wordsworth might stride through a field of daffodils; and he imagines Captain Whalley’s “unsurveyed tracts of the South-Seas” as navigable without the nuisance of captains, shifts on deck, and Sartre’s hell of other people generally.38 Robert has failed to recognize a border that Conrad thematizes in “Youth” and The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” as he does in The End of the Tether, the opening passage of which contrasts “the low swampy coast . . . a mere smudge of darkness beyond a belt of glitter” and “the adamantine surface” of the sea, where the sun’s rays “seemed to shatter themselves . . . into sparkling dust.”39 Whalley, blind by the end of that novella, is inured to the contrast, but this merely ironizes Conrad’s emphasis of it. Water may protect, mediate, bound, or serve as a foil for the culturally specific “mystery and spell” that Robert craves. It does all these things in Conrad’s fiction. It cannot, however, convey or mimic the qualities generated by a land and its people. Robert doesn’t grasp this simple point. Furthermore, the “great wide spaces” that Robert imagines are guarded by ports packed with bodies, and there is no interior Asia in Conrad to balance the interior Africa of Heart of Darkness, no Kurtz to push past those who guard the border. In The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and “Youth,” a thin coastal strip constitutes a border that is impermeable but richer in theme for being so. Bombay Harbor in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” is cacophonous, actively in dispute with the Western presence. Bangkok Harbor in “Youth” is silent, somberly resistant to it. Both sites are teeming; neither is penetrable. Conrad’s panoramic description of Bangkok Harbor distinguishes between a spacious marine zone and a crowded quay: Marlow sees “the wide sweep of the bay, the glittering sands, the wealth of green infinite and varied, the sea blue like the sea of a dream, the crowd of attentive faces, the blaze of vivid colour . . . .”40 And Conrad’s ports are not observable outside the context of observation; the author assures us as much by his almost Brechtian interest in the spectator’s power to animate spectacle. When the captain of the “Narcissus” negotiates wages with new recruits in Bombay Harbor, “the feverish and shrill babble of Eastern language struggled against the masterful tones of tipsy seamen, who argued against brazen claims and dishonest hopes by profane shouts.” Unavoidably, “the resplendent and bestarred peace of the East was torn into squalid tatters” by the din.41 Robert longs for a place whose “spell” would be broken by his presence. He shares interests with Conrad, not ideas or modes of imagination. “A good dose of sea-sickness” would cure Robert of his silliness, Andrew suggests in a deleted passage (14). Reading Conrad carefully would help, too. Andrew Mayo, not his brother, ships out as Conrad and O’Neill had done, embarking on the voyage to the Asia that Robert relegated to imagination when he married Ruth. Now and then Andrew sends letters home. Singapore, he writes, is “a dirty hole of a place and hotter than hell.” This annoys Robert, who, absorbing the brunt of O’Neill’s irony, complains that his brother’s letters “read like the diary of a—of a farmer!” (88; 615). The irrationality of Robert’s irritation conveys the intensity of his frustration about being unable to experience “the East” in a manner consistent with his imagination, first hand or through the agency of his brother, who remains comically unaware of Robert’s desire to make him the Marlow that Robert himself has failed to become. Andrew’s return in act two, scene two, allows Robert another opportunity to criticize his brother’s perceived lack of sensitivity to wonders about which he, Robert, has only fantasized. Robert chides Andrew for the inadequacy of his letters. “Oh, I know I’m no author,” replies Andrew, “I’d rather go through a typhoon again than write a letter.” Robert jumps on this: “With eager interest,” he responds, “Then you were through a typhoon?” (98; 619). Indeed, he had been, and in the China Sea at that, where Captain MacWhirr and his crew had survived such an inclemency in Typhoon. Andrew describes the ordeal: Had to run before it under bare poles for two days. I thought we were bound down for Davy Jones, sure. Never dreamed waves could get so big or the wind blow so hard. If it hadn’t been for Uncle Dick being such a good skipper we’d have gone to the sharks, all of us. As it was we came out minus a main top-mast and had to beat back to Hong-Kong for repairs (99; 619-20). In the second edition, that’s it. In the first edition, Andrew presses his point as best he can. He describes the typhoon as “Hell,” echoing his remark on Singapore. “And as for the East you used to rave about,” he adds, “well, you ought to see it, and smell it!” Finally, this land of “Chinks and Japs and Hindus and the rest of them . . . . has the stink market cornered” (100–01). One may detect an echo of the narrator of Typhoon on the “repulsive smell” of the breath of a “Chinaman,” and Andrew’s reliance on racial amalgamation recalls Conrad’s descriptions of Bombay and Bangkok Harbors, although experiences that inspire painterly nuance in Conrad prompt in Andrew mere biliousness.42 Robert is crushed by Andrew’s account. He might have been embarrassed, too: he has missed a joke at his own expense, and the culprit is a lack of perceptiveness, not “fate.” Andrew’s plodding, elliptical narration links its speaker to MacWhirr, him of the laconic epistolary style and the hostility to “the use of images in speech.”43 Particularly in the second edition of Beyond the Horizon, the description that Andrew squeezes out is as free of “images” as MacWhirr could wish—suitably so, as both characters mistrust speech and regard books as inadequate records of human experience. But Robert, not Andrew, is the butt here: if he has read Typhoon, he has failed to apply its lesson to himself. Egoless and plain-spoken good is beyond Robert’s grasp, and his diminution of Andrew recalls the loquacious chief mate Jukes’s inability to regard MacWhirr as anything but “stupid.”44 Jukes at least senses the dignity that undergirds his quiet captain, and ultimately he provides the contrast required to bring MacWhirr into proper relief. Of course Jukes accomplishes this by writing, an act as alien to Robert as the celebratory impulse that belatedly takes root in Jukes. The complementarity of MacWhirr and Jukes gives way in Beyond the Horizon to a set of antitheses: Robert, who cannot act as Andrew does, lacks both MacWhirr’s intellection and Jukes’s admittedly muted capacity for discovery. O’Neill’s intentions in this matter are impossible to prove but not difficult to infer, and no great imagination is required to find Conrad behind proximate references to “typhoon” and “China Sea” in a play by an admirer of Conrad still in search of his own voice. More broadly, it would have been hard for any serious writer of the period to take up voyages to Asia without nodding at Conrad. But in Beyond the Horizon O’Neill does more than nod: he employs ironically an influence that he had once used without much in the way of inflection, drawing on Conrad to critique character where he had formerly paid him the simpler compliment of imitation. He thus extends his long homage while demonstrating the deft use of sources widely recognized in his gleanings from Strindberg and, in Mourning Becomes Electra, Aeschylus and Sophocles. Beyond the Horizon is in this sense crucial. In the four- or five-year period initiated by its composition, O’Neill would establish himself as the theater’s premiere destroyer of once firm “borders” between, for example, serious tragedy and modern American drama, the inner and outer lives of characters, and naturalistic and experimental modes of dramaturgy. O’Neill’s hyperkinetic experimentalism belies the stasis that characterizes Beyond the Horizon. Even the metaphor embedded in the play’s title mocks a protagonist embordered geographically and imaginatively, in contradiction, as O’Neill surely knew, to the temperament and practice of the playwright’s model Conrad. ----------- Alexander Pettit, University Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the University of North Texas, has recently published essays on Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Luis Valdez, Native American Drama, and Joni Mitchell and Caryl Churchill. ----------- [1] The author is grateful for the assistance of John G. Peters. [2] William J. Scheick notes that “everything in the play . . . implies the inability of humanity to get beyond the horizon in any sense.” See William J. Scheick, “The Ending of O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon,” Modern Drama 20 (1977), 295. [3] Eugene O’Neill, qtd. in Olin Downes, “Playwright Finds His Inspiration on Lonely Sand Dunes by the Sea,” Boston Sunday Post, 29 August 1920, reprinted in Mark W. Estrin, ed., Conversations with Eugene O’Neill (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 10. Stephen A. Black has O’Neill reading Conrad in 1905; see Stephen A. Black, Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 87. [4] Eugene O’Neill to Arthur Hobson Quinn, 13 June 1922, in Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer, eds., Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 170; in this letter O’Neill says he read The Nigger of the “Narcissus” “some time before” sailing for Buenos Aires. Travis Bogard asserts that O’Neill read the novel in 1911. See Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (1972), rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 39; the claim derives, unreliably, from Croswell Bowen and Shane O’Neill, The Curse of the Misbegotten: A Tale of the House of O’Neill (New York: McGraw-Hill, 195), 30. [5] See Peter Lancelot Mallios, Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 141, 223. Mallios remarks that “the subject of Conrad and O’Neill is largely unexamined,” 420, n. 4. [6] Louis Sherwin, “Ile” (1918), in Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher, eds., O’Neill and His Plays (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 132. [7] Pierre Loving, “Eugene O’Neill,” The Bookman 53 (August 1921), 515, 517. [8] “How Joseph Conrad Influenced O’Neill,” Evening Telegram (New York), 16 November 1921. [9] Maida Castellun, “O’Neill’s ‘The Emperor Jones’ Thrills and Fascinates” (1920), in Jordan Y. Miller, ed., Playwright’s Progress: O’Neill and the Critics (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1965), 23. A thin piece by the young William Faulkner links Conrad and O’Neill by supposing that Conrad has transcended the “age” and “locality” in which he wrote and that O’Neill seems likely to do so; see Faulkner, “American Drama: Eugene O'Neill” (1920), in Carvel Collins, ed., William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 85. [10] Bogard, Contour in Time, 24, 38–42. [11] Eugene O’Neill to Waldo Frank, 31 March 1917, in Selected Letters, 78. See Bogard, Contour in Time, 106n., 154n., 161n.; see also Peter Egri, “The Iceman Cometh: European Origins and American Originality,” The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter 5.3–6.2 (1981–82) http://www.eoneill.com /library/newsletter/ (accessed 7 April 2014). [12] See Bogard, Contour in Time, 158. [13] See Bogard, Contour in Time, 135; see Montale, “O’Neill and the Future of the Theatre” (1943), in Horst Frenz and Susan Tuck, eds., Eugene O’Neill’s Critics: Voices from Abroad (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 71. [14] “Thirst: A Play in One Act,” in Robert M. Dowling, ed., Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, vol. 2 (New York: Facts on FileInfobase, 2009), 460. [15] Bogard, Contour in Time, 39. [16] See, for example, Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Playwright (Boston: Little Brown, 1968), 472-73. [17] Eugene O’Neill, Beyond the Horizon (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 2; O’Neill, Beyond the Horizon, in O’Neill, Complete Plays, 1913-1920, ed. Travis Bogard (New York: Library of America, 1988), 573. Subsequent references to the play appear intratextually. Initial locators refer to the first edition, which, as representing O’Neill’s unalloyed intentions, seems likely to constitute the best record of an influence that need not have concerned Bennett and Williams. Second locators refer to the second edition, reprinted with corrections in Complete Plays, 1913-1920. [18] John D. Williams, qtd. in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 422. [19] Bogard, Contour in Time, 126. [20] Eugene O’Neill, “A Letter from O’Neill,” New York Times, 11 April 1920. [21] Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus: A Tale of the Forecastle (1897; New York: Doubleday, Page, 1924), 18. [22] Alexander Pettit, “A Touch of the Wrong Poet: Arthur Symons and the Ironizing of Tragedy in Beyond the Horizon,” The Eugene O’Neill Review 34 (2013): 97. [23] Conrad, Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 25. [24] Conrad, Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 25. [25] Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (1904; New York: Doubleday, Page, 1925), 66. [26] Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether (1902), in Conrad, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether, ed. Owen Knowles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 131. [27] St. John Ervine, “Counsels of Despair” (1948), in Eugene O’Neill’s Critics, 86. [28] For Robert Mayo and Arthur Symons, see Pettit, “A Touch of the Wrong Poet,” passim. Robert is reading Symons’s ode “To Night” as the play opens. [29]For the young O’Neill and FitzGerald, see, e.g., Black, Beyond Mourning and Tragedy, 87. For O’Neill and Kipling, see, e.g., O’Neill, qtd. in Kyle Crichton, “Mr. O’Neill and the Iceman” (1946), in Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, 193; and Black, Beyond Mourning and Tragedy, 64, 66. [30] See Eugene O’Neill, Ah, Wilderness!, in O’Neill, Complete Plays, 1932-43, ed. Travis Bogard (New York: Library of America, 1988), 49. [31] The dying Robert hears the “old voices” of the fairies in which he once believed, “calling him” to “start [his] voyage . . . beyond the horizon” (163; 652). Scheick argues that “just as abstract words reveal the essentially vaporous nature of Rob’s youthful dream, the use of this same language, now fragmented and brokenly articulated, in order to create a modified version of the early dream likewise suggests Rob’s self-delusion” (“Ending,” 295). Scheick’s Robert descends from an “initial articulateness,” which I struggle to detect, to a near incoherency that I find broadly characteristic of him (293). For O’Neill, Ashe, and FitzGerald, see Doris Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle: The Decisive Decade, 1924-1933 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1992), 173-74. [32] See O’Neill, Ah, Wilderness!, 97. [33] Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle, 184; see O’Neill, Ah, Wilderness!, 97. [34] Rudyard Kipling, “Mandalay,” in Daniel Karlin, ed., Rudyard Kipling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), lines 2, 37–38. [35] See O’Neill, Ah, Wilderness!, 58; see Rudyard Kipling, “The Ladies,” in A Choice of Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, Made by T. S. Eliot (New York: Scribner’s, 1943), 211. [36] For the thematic effects of the 1920 revisions, see Alexander Pettit, “The Texts of Beyond the Horizon: Ruth Mayo, Agnes Boulton, and the Women of Provincetown,” The Eugene O’Neill Review 15 (2014): 20-28. [37] Joseph Conrad, “Youth” (1898), in Conrad, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether, 38. [38] Conrad, End of the Tether, 131. [39] Ibid., 129. [40] Conrad, “Youth,” 38. [41] Conrad, Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 4. [42] Joseph Conrad, Typhoon (1902), in Conrad, “Typhoon” and Other Stories (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1924), 13–14. [43] Ibid., 25. [44] Ibid., 102. ----------- The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014) Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Guest Editor: Cheryl Black (University of Missouri) With the ATDS Editorial Board: Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University) Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg Circulation Manager: Janet Werther Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue The Border that Beckons and Mocks: Conrad, Failure, and Irony in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Jan Fabre | This volume of monologues is the second collection of works by Jan Fabre for the theatre in an English translation. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Jan Fabre: The Servant of Beauty Jan Fabre Download PDF Seven Monologues for the Theatre Flemish-Dutch theatre artist Jan Fabre is considered one of the most innovative and versatile artists of his day. Over the past twenty-five years, he has produced works as a performance artist, theatre maker, choreographer, opera maker, playwright, and visual artist. This volume of monologues is the second collection of works by Jan Fabre for the theatre in an English translation. Fabre, born in Belgium, is a total theater artist: writer, director, designer, and choreographer. Includes: We need Heroes Now (2010), Little Body on the Wall (1996), The Emperor of Loss (1994), She was and She is, Even (1975), and others. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Henry Bial Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 2 Visit Journal Homepage Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Henry Bial By Published on May 30, 2014 Download Article as PDF The value of interdisciplinary inquiry in the study of American drama and theatre has been persuasively established, so much so that it is virtually a commonplace. Scholars working in the field today routinely draw on work from the humanities, from the social sciences, from ecobiology and cognitive science and any number of other disciplines. Yet just as globalization has not eliminated the nation state, the disciplines themselves persist. For all that scholars work to position our projects and ourselves “at the intersection between,” disciplinary assumptions linger, ghostly revenants haunting our curricula, our journals, our professional societies. Most surprisingly, perhaps, the disciplinary boundaries seem most impermeable between two fields that would seem to have the most common ground: theatre/performance studies and film/media studies. Consider inter alia the American Theatre and Drama Society, whose website lists 125 member publications since 2009, of which fewer than 10% give serious consideration to film and/or digital media.1 Over the same period, Theatre Journal has published 101 articles, 15 of which address film or television (5 in a single special issue on digital media), while the journal you are reading now, JADT, has published 51 articles with none crossing that disciplinary boundary.2 Conversely, since 2009, Cinema Journal, the publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, has published no articles that address the live stage.3 Hence, a disconnect: despite our overt recognition that the story of American drama in history, theory, and practice is a story of theatre and film—not to mention radio, television, and, increasingly, videogames and the internet—we generally ignore this recognition in shaping our research projects. This essay argues that the study of American drama and theatre not only allows, but also often requires the scholar to research and write across the disciplinary divide between theatre and film (as well as other related arts: radio, television, music, new media). Readers are forewarned that the overall tone is less scholarly than polemical, reflecting the sense of urgency that I feel is needed at this moment in the history of both disciplines: theatre and performance studies on the one hand, and film/media studies on the other. The title “Hot Pursuit” is drawn from the legal doctrine that allows law enforcement personnel to cross municipal, state, and (subject to certain treaty obligations) national boundaries if failing to do so would allow a suspect to escape apprehension. Too often in academia, scholars allow disciplinary boundaries to impede if not halt their pursuit of ideas. Though we claim to value interdisciplinary inquiry, we have many incentives (hiring committees, tenure and promotion, outcomes assessment, etc.) to reify disciplinary norms. Though we may desire to know everything about everything, we have to draw fences around our arguments or the book never gets finished. Hence the project that begins as “ethnicity in performance” may eventually become “Jewish memory on the US stage, 1989-1997.” The use of “principles of exclusion” such as identity, nation, genre and period is an accepted fact of academic life. It doesn’t make us bad people, or even bad scholars. Yet if we are to go after the big ideas, the ones that speak to the circulation of meaning and power within the global culture, we must work to overcome our reluctance to intrude on someone else’s turf. Constructions of identity and nation, for example, don’t just exist in the theatre. They don’t just come from the television screen. If we want to prevent such constructs from eluding our grasp, we must cast a broad net. More importantly, we must be willing to follow our subjects wherever they may lead. Toward that end, this essay considers five “myths” that must be overcome in order to facilitate such boundary-crossing scholarship. By myth, I mean an idea once held as sacred truth but now considered fictional. Though they are generally recognized as false-to-fact, myths nevertheless continue to exert influence on contemporary thought. The first three of the myths I consider have their genealogy in European modernist ideas about art; therefore resistance to these myths may be understood as a way to embrace an understanding of American drama that is “more American” (more populist, more postmodern, more problematic). The last two myths are ones that I see as more pervasive in American scholarship and popular discourse; thus pushing back against them is of particular urgency to scholars of American drama. Myth #1: Theatre is High Culture. Film is Low Culture We know, of course, that theatre has never been the exclusive province of the wealthy, nor has film ever been confined to the lower class. Yet the notion that theatre is culturally superior to film continues to permeate theatre and performance studies in any number of ways, even if the terms “high” and “low” remain unvoiced. We see it in theatre people’s characterization of film and television as sites of “selling out.” Village Voice theatre critic Michael Feingold epitomizes this point of view: “a disheartening number of theater folk share the tourist audience's preoccupation with mass culture, to the point where I sometimes feel like the hero of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, watching his friends turn into stampeding animals. But I'm not capitulating, even if the popularity of a show like Glee proves that an impulse from the theater can sometimes stir up TV's currents.”4 We see it in the patronizing tone of surprise that theatre critics use to praise a Hollywood star who performs well in a live theatre role, as well as the gleeful malice with which those same critics eviscerate the film star who acts poorly on stage. As Patrick Healy writes, “Hollywood stars often come to Broadway to prove something to themselves or to audiences, though they rarely admit it.”5 We also see it, interestingly enough, in performance studies’ valorization of the live as superior to the mediated, epitomized by Peggy Phelan’s oft-quoted formulation, “performance’s only life is in the present.”6 It is all very well to celebrate performance as that which disappears, to highlight theatre’s capacity to surprise, to point to a tradition that stretches (in the West) back to Thespis. Yet in so doing, do we not also implicitly and explicitly devalue those theatrical innovations and interventions that seem to smack too much of film? Why, as Jessica Sternfeld writes, do “theater scholars develop an arrogant, even disgusted tone when mentioning the megamusical, if they mention it at all”?7 Why, when we have rejected—or at least challenged—the (neo-)Aristotelian approach to drama in so many other quarters, does Spectacle remain the most abject element of theatre studies? For the same reason, perhaps, that Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov still abound on U.S. stages, despite a quarter century or more of attempts to de-canonize Dead White Guys: European modernism, with its attendant anti-theatricality, still lurks as the American art world’s unindicted co-conspirator.8 Film studies is haunted by the high-low myth in a different way. Concerned with establishing its legitimacy as a discipline, cinema studies for many years adopted many of the aesthetic prejudices of theatre, considering only certain types of film to be worthy of serious scholarly investigation. Films that proved too popular with the masses were suspect as art, unless and until they achieved canonical status. Most especially, film studies has tended, like theatre, to eschew sentiment, lavishing greater praise and attention on films marked by reflexive irony or existential dread, another sign of European influence.9 Hence film and media studies finds itself with a catch-22: having argued for disciplinary legitimacy (and even superiority) on the grounds that their object of study reaches more spectators than any other art form, the field for many years focused on those objects more likely to be enjoyed by a self-selected few. Only in the last twenty years has the scholarly study of popular film and television become widespread. Lee Grievson notes that the 2003 renaming of the Society of Cinema Studies’s as the Society of Cinema and Media Studies “marked a newly expansionist sense of what the discipline would cover.”10 So where are we? Theatre scholars, rapidly losing ground to film in the academy (as measured in majors, facilities, and teaching lines), gravitate toward performances that demonstrate theatre is a “higher” art form than film. Film scholars, battling to win ground from theatre (and literature), have until recently aimed their sights at work that establishes film as a “higher” art form than the general public might think. What falls out of this equation are the popular performances, including those most likely to span both disciplines: the filmic adaptations of Broadway hits, the musicals based on movies, the televised plays, the live-to-movie-theatre broadcast, and so on. The most likely site for discussions of such “crossover” performances is popular culture studies, which since the 1990s has begun to immigrate into nearly all academic domains. But popular culture studies in general, whether concerned with the live, the mediated, or the material, is further bounded by a generalized distrust of the so-called Culture Industry, a view that rests on the Marxian assumption that artworks generated for profit are (by definition) exploitative of the masses who consume them. While such a view has value as a diagnostic, challenging us to think critically about the entertainment we consume, it is ultimately self-negating. Combined with assumptions of high and low culture, such critique leads us to the absurd conclusion that the audience (the People) are always right, except for the many times that they are wrong, hoodwinked by hegemonic capitalist (and later neoliberal) structures of power. To cross this boundary, to properly apprehend the subjects of popular entertainment, we need to move past the high-low distinction, to “Americanize” the study of American drama. This is not to say that concepts such as class and taste are no longer relevant, but rather to admit that studying cultural aspects of performance need not entail rejection of all aesthetic criteria. Conversely, the study of aesthetics cannot be fully extricated from cultural considerations. Blur this border, and the theatre/film border will become significantly more permeable. Myth #2: In both theatre and film, the discrete work of art should be the primary object of study Traditional scholarship in both theatre and film (as well as most other arts) is an object-driven discipline. Or to put it another way, both theatre studies and film studies are tautologically defined by their objects of study. A theatre scholar studies plays and other theatrical events; a film scholar studies films, and perhaps other “screen” media such as television shows or websites. A work that does not fit within the boundaries of the scholar’s genre is considered at best terra incognita, at worst Out Of Bounds. Such object-driven disciplinary formations echo nineteenth century definitions of the nation-state, which has always existed more as an ideal than as a reality. They hang on a concept of the work of art that all parties recognize to be limited, if not actually false. For it is not simply the genre of study that we regard as a fixed object, but also the site. The theatre scholar routinely speaks of a play or production as if it could be contained within two hours traffic upon the stage. The film scholar speaks or writes of a film as if it were a unitary object, beginning at the opening credits and ending when the lights come back on. Yet our own experiences of both media demonstrate that, in the words of the 1935 stage production, 1959 film, 1983 radio broadcast, 1993 television broadcast, and 2002 live-to-movie theatre telecast opera Porgy and Bess, “It ain’t necessarily so.” A theatrical production changes nightly. A long-running play changes casts, venues, and (frequently) dialogue. Cabaret with Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles is not the same performance with Michelle Williams in the role (nor is either the same as a production whose performers are not recognizable from film and television). A film is comparatively more stable, but may include multiple cuts for different markets, as well as second-order viewing opportunities on television, DVD, airplanes, computers, and iPads. Moreover, as both disciplines place greater emphasis on cultural (rather than purely aesthetic) considerations, on audience reception, and on the post-performance circulation of meaning, the myth of the discretely bounded unitary artwork becomes increasingly unsustainable.11 This problem multiplies exponentially when, taking a page from performance studies, we begin to look not just at the artistic product but also at the process. What is the ontological status, for example, of a film script, of a rehearsal on a film set, of “deleted scenes?” What can theatre learn from studying auditions, replacement casts, or out of town tryouts? In practice, theatre and film scholars tend to consider process opportunistically. This is to say that we consider it only when a) access to such material is possible, and b) such material is sufficiently provocative as to enhance or illuminate our assessment of the final product. Perhaps it must be this way. Mustn’t all scholars balance the impossibility of knowing everything against the need to know something? And yet, if we expand our definition of the artwork, we might begin to blur the genre boundaries in productive ways. Should a revival of a play, for example, be treated differently from a remake of a film? What conditions determine whether a work of art is considered de novo or as a reiteration of a prior work? Can theories of adaptation applied to studies of what John Tibbetts and James Welsh call “stage plays into film”12 be readily applied to films adapted for the stage? Why has hardly any discipline taken notice of (much less theorized) the phenomenon of live television or movie-theatre broadcasts of stage performances?13 When we can properly articulate such ontological distinctions, we may begin to better understand the challenges ahead. Myth #3: Theatre is a Writer’s Medium. Film is a Director’s Medium. Among the consequences of our focus on the discrete artistic product is the attempt to attribute authorship of that product to the playwright (in theatre) or the director (in film). The assertion that the primary creator of a theatrical work is the playwright is not simply a convenient fiction nor a reflection of professional norms. Rather, we attribute authorship to the playwright because it is primarily as texts that theatrical creations circulate through time and space. Productions of, say, Oedipus separated by hundreds or thousands of years and/or hundreds or thousands of miles are nevertheless recognized as The Same Play on the basis of a shared written text. This despite the fact that the text may have been translated, emended, or otherwise transformed in the journey. We validate the playtext through its attribution to its “original creator,” the playwright. This is the Jew that Shakespeare drew. Yet the logic is circular, because the playwright is defined by the creation of the text. I believe that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare are actually the work of another Englishman, coincidentally also named William Shakespeare. This emphasis on the text/playwright dyad persists despite the fact that biographical criticism (the so-called “intentional fallacy”) has been deeply destabilized by New Criticism, poststructuralism, and reader-response theory. Driven perhaps by an imperative to “represent,” we routinely talk about our scholarship, our syllabi, and our production seasons as if the text were the play, and the playwright its only creator. The instability of the text, like the multiplicity of creative partners (actors, designers, stage managers, directors) and other vagaries of the artistic process, is treated as an occasionally illuminating curiosity. In other words, even though we know that the playscript is not the end product of the theatrical enterprise, we often behave as if it were. By contrast, the film script most often comes before the artistic process reaches fruition, and rarely circulates with the promiscuity of a theatre script. The objet d’art that is distributed, studied, and archived is the film itself. Because of this, it is the director’s contribution to the process that is most readily visible to scholars and cineastes. Hence the frisson of finality that emanates from the phrase “Director’s Cut.” It is a marketing term, of course, but an instructive one for a number of reasons. First, it reveals the desire to cling to the popular and scholarly notion of the auteur director. Second, the phrase “Director’s Cut” nearly always refers to a re-release and/or DVD “special edition,” tying it to the multiple media (film, broadcast television, video recording, online or on-demand video, etc.) through which this apparently unitary artwork is distributed. Third, the very necessity of the term “Director’s Cut” belies its own claim: if the director were truly the Author of the film, the so-called “Director’s Cut” would require no special labeling. Moreover, to the degree that film as a medium tends to emphasize (in comparison to theatre) the visual over dialogue, we can easily forget that theatre is not radio, that film is no longer silent. Yet the impossibility of archiving live performance and the seductive visuality of film are not likely to be overcome. What then, is the trans-genre scholar to do? Some significant interventions have been made through attention to filmic adaptations of plays and mixed media performances, as well as through experiments in multidimensional archiving of theatre events. Nevertheless, unless and until we move beyond the need to study a bounded Artistic Product, we will continue to be haunted by the need to identify a singular Artistic Producer. We will continue with scholarship that tacitly ignores the essentially collaborative nature of both art forms. Hot pursuit, then, means directing greater attention to process, both before and after the performance. When we consider the training, pre-production, rehearsal and rewrite processes, we see that theatre and film are fluid and multiple creations, arising from the joint inspiration and efforts of many artists, not just the one to whom authorship is formally and imperfectly attributed. When we consider the role of the audience in constructing the meaning of the artwork—let us stipulate for the moment that the audience does play such a role—we see as well that the concern with authorship is something of an academic fiction. Scholars and critics tend to consider the Artist retrospectively, not unlike juries consider a criminal defendant. What did this person do? The audience, for the most part, considers the Artist subjunctively, as police consider a fleeing suspect. Of what acts might this person be capable? Are they acting alone or in conspiracy with others? What can be learned about this person from studying the scene of the crime? Myth #4: East is East and West is West and Never the Twain Shall Meet For scholars of American drama and theatre, “New York” is a synecdoche for live performance and “Hollywood” a metonym for the film industry. Perhaps because of the continent that separates these metropoles, U.S. scholars rarely focus on the fact that many playwrights work as screenwriters (and vice versa), that many film directors also work on the stage, and that actors and designers often cross the theatre/film boundary routinely. One reason, of course, is the aforementioned emphasis on the finished work of art, and the definition of that art as the product of a playwright or director’s imagination. An artist-driven approach to scholarship would go a long way toward remedying this problem. One lamentable consequence of the influence of critical theory on both theatre and film studies is that we have, for the most part, stopped writing artist biographies. Out of approximately 300 studies listed in Theatre Journal’s “Doctoral Projects in Progress in Theatre Arts” from 2009-2013, there are fewer than 10 biographical projects, and fewer than 30 single-artist studies.14 The comparable list from 1966 alone has 12 biography projects and 30 single-artist studies out of 104 titles.15 While scholars still undertake the occasional reassessment of the impact of a major figure (e.g. Linda Ben-Zvi’s Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times) or a thematic analysis focused on a single author (e.g. Harry Elam’s The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson), we have generally ceded the field of artists’ life stories to journalists, amateurs, and the artists themselves. When, if at all, scholars read these biographies, it is generally with an eye toward extracting information in support of an object-driven analysis of the artist’s work. While the life of the artist should not, of course, be the determining factor in the interpretation of her artistic work, it is dangerous to lose sight of the human stories that lay within our field of study. Such stories are vital partly because they are human--the human being does not fit neatly into categories of medium or genre—but mostly because they are Stories. Narratives have a remarkable ability to cross disciplinary and generic boundaries. As Michel De Certeau reminds us, “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.”16 A strong narrative, we know, can compel our involvement in film and theatre, story and song. More importantly, these particular narratives, these “tales from Hollywood” and “Broadway memories” and “my life as a famous person” books often tell us more about the real circulation of artists and ideas across multiple media than we can glean from peer-reviewed “Major Works” studies. When we shift the focus from the object to the artist, we recognize the limits of genre/media-based boundaries. A study of the film work of, for example, Katharine Hepburn, would be obviously, tragically incomplete without a consideration of her stage career. In Viewing America: Twenty-First Century Television Drama (2013), Christopher Bigsby lists several prominent American playwrights who also write (or have written) extensively for television, including David Mamet, Marsha Norman, Adam Rapp, and Theresa Rebeck.17 Bigsby also identifies many respected television writers who began their careers writing for the stage, most notably Aaron Sorkin.18 Yet just as crimes committed in Mexico may be considered inadmissible in a Texas trial, scholars often make the conscious choice to exclude such extraterritorial evidence in our consideration of an artist’s oeuvre. For example, many if not most readers of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre know that Eric Overmyer wrote On the Verge (1987). How many know that he also wrote five episodes of St. Elsewhere (1986-87) and two episodes of The Wire (2006), amidst a long career in television? How many consider this when teaching or producing On the Verge? Conversely, how many film critics and historians consider the stage beyond their purview? Jonathan Rosenbaum, for example, notes in his introduction to Discovering Orson Welles that most scholars in “Welles studies” ignore Welles’s stage work, suggesting that “they’re more parochial than Welles himself was.”19 The theatre/film boundary is persistent. To demonstrate its permeability, we must be willing to cross it in hot pursuit of those artists whose careers we examine.20 Audience-driven research similarly offers unexploited potential for boundary crossing intervention into the mythical opposition between New York and Hollywood. How many theatre audiences since the 20th century are ignorant of film? How many film audiences are truly innocent vis-à-vis theatre? True, some filmgoers (and television watchers) obviously have limited exposure to professional theatre; nevertheless, amateur, community-based and educational theatres are widely accessible.21 Certainly audiences recognize differences between media, and may indeed be more receptive to one or another form of communication. Yet all media provide cultural input, so to speak, and to ignore this threatens the utility of our research. Hot pursuit, then, means not just following the artist across the theatre/film border, but following the audience as well. This will not be easy. The audience is frustratingly diverse, and our means of accessing their response to any artwork are sketchy and incomplete. Perhaps this is why, despite the valuable theorizations of spectatorship provided by Susan Bennett, Marvin Carlson, and others, so many scholars find it far simpler to concentrate on what the Artist Intended rather than to hypothesize what the Audience Received. But the dichotomy is a false one. Recall that the unitary Artistic Producer is a fiction, no less so than the unitary Audience. If we cannot analyze either with certainty, perhaps we can—like quantum physicists, political pollsters, and bookmakers—learn to express our conclusions in terms of probability. There is (you should excuse the pun) a good chance this would help. MYTH #5: Theatre is the Past. Film is the Present. Digital Media is the Future The argument that theatre is a discipline rooted in the past while film and media studies are contemporary and forward-looking serves the need of film and media studies to separate itself from its “parent field,” rebutting those who would argue that film is merely Theatre By Other Means. In so doing, it replaces one fallacy—post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this)—with another—post hoc ergo excellens ut is (after this, therefore superior to this). The latter form of reasoning is, not coincidentally, a critical pillar supporting the concept of Manifest Destiny as it applies to US domestic and foreign policy, and so we might read it as a particularly (though not exclusively) American phenomenon. This myth draws support from a mistaken, if understandable, confusion between the study of theatre or film and the industry of entertainment. There is no doubt that film and media have displaced theatre as primary sources of mass entertainment in western culture. This says nothing, however, about the vitality of either medium as an art form or a site of scholarship. Pace Benjamin, a century and a half of photography has eviscerated neither art nor art history. Moreover, the integration of film and video into live performance is potentially a great step forward for the theatre and studies thereof. In fact, a performance studies approach might lead us to reverse the terms in this formulation. The play, after all, belongs to the repertoire, a shifting repository of cultural memory that continues to grow and change in response to local conditions. The film belongs to the archive, remaining fixed into eternity. The Hairy Ape is continually reinvented; Citizen Kane stays the same.22 In order to overcome the false premise of a backward-looking theatre and a forward-looking digital age, scholars must relentlessly historicize our sites of inquiry. We must strive to imagine ourselves into the Now that animated past performances, and we cannot take for granted that we fully grasp the Present. Whatever phenomenon we hope to illuminate, we must range broadly forward and backward across history, avoiding the pitfalls of Grand Narratives while embracing the boundary-crossing potential of detailed local narratives. We must also recognize that our own arguments are bound by time and place. If they are to remain relevant into the future they must continually be re-made. What is to be done? Calls for greater interdisciplinarity at the institutional level are by now commonplace. To the degree that consolidation of academic departments, public scholarship, and “strategic clusters” serve the neoliberal agenda in higher education, one might even argue that interdisciplinarity is the New Normal. Yet just as increased global migration has led many people in many countries to insist on tighter border controls, so too has the trend toward interdisciplinary scholarship caused a kind of backlash amongst scholars who fear the dumbing down of traditional disciplines (or, more cynically, the loss of their own discipline’s power in the intellectual marketplace). As this backlash is most common amongst those with the most to lose (department chairs, journal editors, senior faculty), the disciplinary pressures on emerging scholars remain strong. Hence at the level of the individual scholar, or even the individual work of scholarship, disciplinary borders remain difficult and dangerous to cross. To counter this, scholars of American drama and theater must embrace the doctrine of hot pursuit. We need not and should not give up our recognition of what is distinct about live performance, but we cannot and must not allow our subject to escape across the theatre-film border. Our scholarship must maintain its performativity in both senses of the word: it must remain liminal, processual, and multi-vocal; and it must establish—by its very articulation—that there is more to cultural analysis than can be contained within disciplinary or generic frames. It is no longer a question of being interdisciplinary, but of being post-disciplinary. We must even dare, at times, to be undisciplined. -------- Henry Bial is Chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Kansas where he holds a joint appointment in American Studies and Theatre. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (2005), the editor of The Performance Studies Reader (2004; Second Edition, 2007), and the co-editor of Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions (with Scott Magelssen, 2010) and Brecht Sourcebook (with Carol Martin, 2000). He currently serves as President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). --------- Endnote: [1] See: http://www.atds.org/publications/year/ —numerical calculations based on the list as retrieved 25 January 2014. [2] Theatre Journal, volumes 61-65; Journal of American Drama and Theatre, volumes 22-25. [3] Cinema Journal, volumes 49-52. [4] Michael Feingold, “The Response to the Tony Awards Shows That Show Business Is No Longer Business As Usual,” 2010 blog post at VillageVoice.com, http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-06-22/theater/response-to-tony-awards-shows-business-is-not-business-as-usual/ Retrieved 1 March 2014. [5] Patrick Healy, “Broadway’s New Kid.” New York Times (24 February 2013), AR1. [6] Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993),146. [7] Jessica Sternfeld, The Megamusical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 5. It should be noted that Sternfeld’s book, along with recent work by Stacy Wolf, David Savran, Elizabeth Wollman and others have begun to counter this phenomenon. [8] See Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). [9] For an extended discussion of this phenomenon, see Lee Grievson, “Discipline and Publish: The Birth of Cinematology,” Cinema Journal 49, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 168-176. [10] Ibid., 175. [11] This is not to dismiss the widespread use of intertextual reading strategies, but to point out that even these strategies tend to focus on a singular discrete work to be interpreted in light of other singular works. [12] John Tibbets and James Welsh, eds. The Encyclopedia of Stage Plays Into Film (New York: Facts on File, 2001). [13] Cf. Brian Herrera and Henry Bial, eds. “As Seen on TV,” a special section of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 24, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 91-168. [14] See Theatre Journal 61, no. 2 (May 2009): 359-362; 62, no. 2 (May 2010): 329-332; 63, no. 2 (May 2011): 305-309; 64, no. 2 (May 2012): 317-322; 65, no. 2 (May 2013): 315-319. Numbers are approximate because several projects appear in more than one year. [15] See Educational Theatre Journal 18, no.2 (May 1966): 122-125. [16] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 181. [17] Christopher Bigsby. Viewing America: Twenty-First Century Television Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), x-xi. [18] Ibid. [19] Jonathan Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 9. [20] Notable examples of artist-driven studies include Leslie Kane’s Weasels and Wisemen: Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet (Palgrave, 2001), Christopher Bigsby’s Arthur Miller (Harvard University Press, 2010), and David Luhrssen’s Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). [21] Though studies by the National Endowment for the Arts suggest that less than 20% of the U.S. population regularly attends live theater, their polling methodology explicitly excludes amateur performances such as elementary and high school plays. SeeNEA brochure, All America’s A Stage: Growth and Challenges in Nonprofit Theater (2008). http://arts.gov/publications/all-americas-stage-0 (accessed 1 March 2014). [22] Such a reformulation, however, takes us back to the limits of object-driven analyses. The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014) Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Guest Editor: Cheryl Black (University of Missouri) With the ATDS Editorial Board: Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University) Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg Circulation Manager: Janet Werther Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue The Border that Beckons and Mocks: Conrad, Failure, and Irony in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Xiaoqiao Xu Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Xiaoqiao Xu By Published on December 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF MADE UP ASIANS: YELLOWFACE DURING THE EXCLUSION ERA. Esther Kim Lee. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 268. Esther Kim Lee’s recent scholarly book presents essential reading in Asian American and theater history. In Made-Up Asians:Yellowface during the Exclusion Era , Lee proposes the framework of yellowface and contends that it intentionally created and sustained Asian exclusion in American society. Instead of focusing on how Asian people in and beyond America reacted to yellowface performances, Lee focuses instead on the technology of yellowface, used mainly by white actors and actresses to don Asian characters during the Exclusion Era in the United States between 1862 and 1940. Made-Up Asians traces the origin of yellowface to British pantomime—when Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837) performed as a Chinese clown in Whang-Fong; or, the Clown of China (1812), which was written by Charles Isaac Dibdin Jr. at Sadler’s Wells. Kazrac, Grimaldi’s most popular character was the famous prototype of “clown yellowface,” presented in Aladdin; or, the Wonderful Lamp (1813) as a Chinese slave assisting Aladdin to gain wealth and power, epitomizing Britain’s fantasies about ‘the Orient’ as exoticism and opportunism. Later, as Britain attempted to expand the opium trade in China during the Opium War (1839-1842), Victorian theater featured increasingly pejorative representations of China and Chinese people, usually emphasizing physical torture. British versions of Chinese culture largely influenced people in theUnited States. The Americanized Aladdin (1815) created an Americanized character with traits deemed local, which influenced “Chinaman” characters; these depictions changed over more than a century: from clownish and comic to menacing and vile, channeling reactions toward Chinese people that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chapter two focuses on “scientific yellowface,” linking yellowface and race science. As immigration flourished, changing metropolises in the United States, nineteenth century citizens sought guidance on how to comprehend human and cultural differences. Meanwhile, as Lee examines, phrenology and physiognomy became popular: just in time to cater to American audiences’ curiosity about the ‘Mongolian race,’ including Chinese and Japanese peoples. Race science cast the Anglo-Saxon race, or the Caucasian race—which often denoted whiteness—as most noble. Directly linked with physiognomy, theater embraced this ranking by concentration on actors and actresses’ physical looks—presenting the beauty of whiteness. Accordingly, nonwhite actors were primarily regarded as lowbrow performers and entertainers. While white actors were believed capable to “portray all humans” (67), including “the yellow race,”portrayals of Asian characters echoed descriptions in race science texts, shows Lee, emphasizing the Mongolian fold, eyebrows, nose, and broken English, instead of observance of real Asians in everyday life. These “made-up Asians,” to quote the book’s title, together with exhibitions of “exotic Asians,” reinforced white Americans’ sense of normality and superiority. Lee’s scholarship is extensive with detailed examples. Chapters three, four, and five elaborate on the development of yellowface makeup. Chapter three, for instance, examines how “private yellowface” evolved via theatrical makeup guidebooks. After the Civil War, the American stage presented myriad international and ethnic characters, a craze that influenced amateurs’ private performances. Scant sources for costumes and makeup led Samuel French to provide an all-in-one service package for amateur actors, from guidebooks reprinted from British authors to license rights and scripts. Most importantly for Lee’s research, French published the first step-to-step makeup guidebook: How to “Make-Up: A Practical Guide to the Art of “Making-up” (1877), which thoroughly explained how to stage Asian characters. The invention of greasepaint in the late nineteenth century pushed forward makeup technology to create supposedly “natural” makeup for Asian characters. However, this version of naturalism did not result in bringing Asian and Asian American actors into the industry, nor observing Asian people in everyday life. Instead, based in race science, such“natural” portrayals stereotyped and excluded Asians from immigration and naturalization into the United States, while enriching white actors for range and professionalism. During the Exclusion era, when Asian women faced harsh immigration obstructions, stage representations of tragically beautiful Asian women became most popular. Blanche Bates—a white American actress whose career was already established in New York City before performing the tragic female leads in Madame Butterfly (1900) and The Darling of the Gods (1902)—exemplifies this trend. Lee’s scholarship reveals that Bates’s influence was so profound that she was regarded as America’s model for representing East Asian female characters. Bates promoted her artistic excellence by denying universality and staging otherness. Chapter Four shows how the technologies of cosmetic yellowface relished fictional tragedies of Asian women on stage, while real-life experiences of Asian women were ignored. By the end of the Exclusion Era, the prosthetic Oriental eye became the most critical aspect of yellowface makeup, analyzes Lee. The film industry’s photorealism led performers to look as much like their characters as possible in close-up shots, pressing on the evolution of yellowface makeup. Wearing “Chinese” greasepaint was not enough for early black-and-white films since actors still looked too white—hence not “Chinese” enough. To highlight their racial difference, the Oriental eye, with its epicanthic fold, emerged as the most significant marker. For example, Boris Karloff impersonated Fu Manchu in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), among the most infamous examples of the yellow-peril trope, with the prosthetic Oriental eye created by the Makeup Department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). The invention of the more natural epicanthic fold continued, with foam latex technology coming out around 1944 and moveable fake lids in 1970. These technologies further alienated and excluded Asian and Asian Americans from stage and screen, reinforcing European heritage and Hollywood’s norm of whiteness. As Chapter Five concludes, only those who were considered white could perform Asian characters; their performances reiterated that Asians deserved to be excluded from citizenship and American society. Esther Kim Lee’s work demonstrates how yellowface has profoundly influenced the twenty-first century. As a technology of exclusion, yellowface blocked possibilities for Asian American actors and actresses to be cast in leading roles—and theater history. While whiteness is reinforced when actors remove their yellowface make-up, the real sufferings of Asian and Asian Americans gets obscured, sunk into oblivion. Made-Up Asians is an invaluable read that dissects the historical construction of yellowface and its persistence in contemporary times. References Lee, Esther Kim. Made-Up Asians: Yellowface during the Exclusion Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. Footnotes About The Author(s) Xiaoqiao Xu is a lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Cinema at the University of British Columbia. Xiaoqiao Xu’s research covers a wide range of topics, from late imperial China to modern China, with a particular focus on women’s literary and theatrical productions. Her work explores the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, challenging the neatness of the contrast between the old and the new. Xiaoqiao analyzes female gazing and recurring objects, as well as female playwrights’ engagement with gender politics to gain a deeper understanding of the roles women played in Chinese society. In her current research, she examines women’s engagement with religion, particularly Buddhism and Daoism. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Maureen McDonnell Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Maureen McDonnell By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Alison Bechdel offered a complicated and compelling memoir in her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), adapted by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori into the Broadway musical Fun Home (2015). Both works presented an adult Bechdel reflecting on her father’s troubled life as a closeted gay man and his possible death by suicide. As Bechdel herself noted, “it’s not like a happy story, it’s not something that you would celebrate or be proud of.” [1] Bechdel’s coining of “tragicomic” as her book’s genre highlights its fraught narrative and its visual format indebted to “comics” rather than to comedy. Bechdel’s bleak overview of her father’s life and death served as a backdrop for a production that posited truthfulness as life-affirming and as a means of survival. Fun Home ’s marketers, however, imagined that being forthright about the production’s contents and its masculine lesbian protagonist would threaten the show’s entertainment and economic potential. It was noted before the show opened that “the promotional text for the show downplays the queer aspects,” a restriction that was by design. [2] According to Tom Greenwald, Fun Home ’s chief marketing strategist and the production’s strategy officer, the main advertising objective was to “make sure that it’s never ever associated specifically with the ‘plot or subject matter.’” Instead, the marketing team decided to frame the musical as a relatable story of a family “like yours.” [3] The marketers assumed that would-be playgoers would be uninterested in this tragic hero/ine if her sexuality were known. Ticket buyers who perceived the lesbian protagonist’s sexuality as a barrier to their “recognition of [her] humanity” risked not experiencing the subsequent ethical empathy that tragedy might elicit. [4] In the marketers’ efforts to circumvent the lesbophobia and taboos against suicide they imagined would-be playgoers might hold, they became complicit in such prejudices. As the production was met with commercial and critical success, a “both/and” marketing approach surfaced: that the production was both timeless and timely, with the production newly presented as a vehicle for affirming emerging legal gains for LGBTQ+ rights generally, and marriage equality in particular. This rising sensibility that lesbian characters and culture were commodifiable might justify future shifts from Broadway’s systematic exclusion of lesbian characters, even if for mercenary, capitalistic reasons. The creative team voiced their support of lesbians and their rights throughout the run, a departure from the endorsed narrative of Greenwald’s company. The producers began to echo the creative artists’ advocacy after two nearly simultaneous events: the production’s anniversary of winning five Tony Awards and the Orlando mass shooting as the deadliest incident of violence against LGBTQ+ people in US history. The producers’ commentary swerved in June 2016 when they began championing both the production and the communities it represented, albeit a year after the show’s critical reception was secure. These evolving campaigns suggest the vulnerability of productions that feature female actors playing sexual minorities and gender non-conforming characters. By featuring a butch lesbian as its lead, Fun Home was culturally revolutionary, providing a cultural—and commercial—landmark for mainstream musical theater. The musical featured three different actors performing the characters of Alison Bechdel: “small” Alison at 8, “medium” Alison at 19, and Alison at 43. The categorizations emphasized the characters’ visual differences (e.g. “small” versus “youngest”), in keeping with what may be a cartoonist’s default parameters. The adult Bechdel character served as a narrator, drawing at an artist’s table as she observed and commented on the memories enacted by her younger counterparts. An early line of Alison’s summarizes the plot: “Caption: Dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town. And he was gay, and I was gay, and he killed himself, and I became a lesbian cartoonist” (“Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue”). [5] This expository line frontloaded the musical’s conclusion within the first eleven minutes of performance. [6] The musical’s disclosure was strikingly more efficient than that of the marketing team. It was only after Fun Home opened that Tom Greenwald revealed that the “marketing team jokingly referred to [the play] as a ‘lesbian suicide musical.’” [7] This inaccurate characterization invited misdirection of a familiar type. [8] Despite a long cultural history that presents lesbians as necessarily isolated, doomed, and suicidal, this production challenged those tropes by presenting a lesbian protagonist who survives the dramatic action. [9] This theatrical and biographical outcome indicates the political dimensions of Fun Home ’s tragedy, as its lack of an abject lesbian underscores that the tragic lesbian figure is conjured and constructed rather than fixed and innate. The team’s “joke” not only reinforced a stereotypical narrative about lesbian death, but also suggested that they saw the narrative arc of Bruce Bechdel (Alison Bechdel’s father) upstaging that of his daughter (it is Bruce who dies by suicide in the musical). Despite the decentering and misrepresentation of Alison Bechdel’s character, playgoers would have been able to easily learn that this dramatic protagonist’s real-life counterpart helped shape this creative narrative rather than becoming a victim of it. The marketing team’s omission of Alison Bechdel from the promotional campaign was perhaps motivated by their desire to make the show more broadly appealing to investors by erasing her sexuality and survival. Such concerns about financial solvency reflected the financial structure of 21 st century Broadway productions, a time in which corporate interests frequently override artistic innovation. [10] Theater scholar Steven Adler writes of this trend, noting that production often depended upon partnerships, sometimes with the powerful real estate moguls who owned the theaters, [which] provided the best means of mounting shows. Corporations, with extensive financial and marketing resources, recognized fertile territory in the hardscrabble of midtown Manhattan and joined the fray. A Broadway presence might bolster the corporate brand, as with Disney. [11] Disney-authorized productions are sometimes called “McMusicals” (a term that emphasizes the production’s consumability) or “technomusicals,” which theater director and scholar John Bush Jones describes as “a phenomenon . . . driven by visual spectacle” and “engender[ing] little or no thinking at all.” [12] Such spectacles are often mined from popular movies and books whose familiarity allows productions to draw upon already established fan bases. American musical scholar Elizabeth Wollman points out that these moments of: synergy allow[] a company to sell itself along with any product it hawks. The Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast , for example, can be mentioned in Disney films and television shows, or advertised on Disney-owned radio stations. Disney musicals can also serve as advertisements for one another.[13] Wollman notes that “shows with corporate backing can now be hyped internationally in myriad ways long before a theatrical property begins its run,” a factor that contributes to Broadway functioning as a “global crossroads, populated by transnational corporations catering to tourists.” [14] Given that only one in five Broadway shows recoup their initial investment, derivative productions and revivals included, the marketing campaign reflects both the financial precariousness of theater generally and reticence about Fun Home ’s cultural content specifically. Investor caution is especially warranted with musicals, particularly if they are new. Commercial houses rarely undertake such efforts. Instead, creative teams who wish to develop those works mostly rely on non-profit theaters whose educational and artistic missions state their willingness to sustain financial loss. Such collaborations can be contentious, as revealed by Ars Nova’s decision to file suit for breach of contract over their billing after their production Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 transferred to Broadway in 2016, or result in a commercial juggernaut like Hamilton. [15] Fun Home ’s move from the Public Theater to Broadway was underwritten by three primary producers, Kristen Caskey, Barbara Whitman, and Mike Isaacson. In an interview published shortly after their investment was recouped, the producers provided a thumbnail sketch of the skepticism people held towards the production: “They said we were insane to do this,” said Mike Isaacson. “Really? You’re bringing that to Broadway?” recalled Barbara Whitman. “I think crazy was the word we heard most,” said Kristin Caskey.[16] Admittedly, the producers’ diction may have been only unintentionally ableist. But such comments problematically echoed the disproven historical notion that people who were sexual minorities were mentally ill, another suggestion of discomfort about Fun Home ’s treatment of sexuality from people outside of the creative team. [17] Such stereotypical conflation of “insanity” and lesbianism re-produced the specter of the tragic lesbian the producers attempted to discard. Frank disclosures aren’t the only way lesbianism surfaces within Broadway musicals. Musical theater scholar Stacy Wolf’s generative work invites playgoers to deploy “a spectatorial/auditorial ‘lesbian’ position that is not essentialist but rather performative: any willing, willful spectator may embody such a position of lesbian spectatorship” which can “lesbianize” the text. [18] Fun Home extends itself beyond presenting a “hypothetical lesbian heroine” because its protagonist’s sexuality is not solely dependent on viewers decoding subtext or deploying Wolf’s rhetorical techniques but is additionally affirmed by depicting the character Alison’s queer childhood and subsequent coming out. [19] Moreover, Fun Home offers an androcentric lead, a break from Broadway’s dominant tradition. Fun Home ’s departure from highlighting feminine lesbians risks what literature scholar Ann M. Ciasullo cautions against: dehumanizing the butch lesbian who is imagined as “too dangerous, too loaded a figure to be represented.” [20] However, one of the chief innovations of Fun Home was its butch lesbian lead. Instead of functioning as a surrogate or scapegoat, the theatrical Alisons’ desires “lead the way to a different future” rather than “fasten[ing]” lesbians “to the image of the past.” [21] This theatrical breakthrough appears nowhere in the advertising campaign. In their attempts to de-lesbianize the production, the marketers buried both the lede and the lead. There have been other musicals that prominently include identifiable lesbian characters, although that misrepresentation is often uneven at best and sometimes presents lesbian characters whose sole function seems to be as “the object of the show’s most unsavory jokes.” [22] Lisa Kron, the lyricist and book writer for Fun Home , revealed her response to what she saw as a trend: “there was a moment where someone would say the word lesbian as a non sequitur because it was funny. I’d be so on board, and then I’d be slapped in the face by it. It was just like, This character’s a joke. This is not a person .” [23] Within the production, actor Beth Malone navigated this pitfall when delivering adult Alison’s line that someone she saw briefly as a child was “an old-school butch.” Malone explained her delivery of this line and her efforts to recuperate that term as follows: When I say the word “butch,” I say it with the color of, like I’m saying the word supermodel. Because from my lens, the word butch is the most beautiful adjective I can come up with. “Oh my God, she was an old-school butch !” Like satisfying words coming out of your mouth. Still, it gets titters because the word “butch” is a punch line. For every other show that has ever existed, “butch” and “dyke” have been a punch line for the end of a gay man’s joke. So now we are taking that word, like the word queer, we’re owning it and saying, butch is a beautiful thing.[24] In Malone’s account, her artistic and activist sensibilities converged in playing this role. Such moments are bolstered because Fun Home featured a number of queer characters who are not solely defined by their orientation or gender identity, and whose presence is important for the plot. [25] Although these features were present in other productions, the non-existent track record for butch-centered musicals indicates an asymmetrical Broadway history characterized by sexism and lesbophobia. If we compare Fun Home with another contemporary musical with an LGBTQ+ lead character, Kinky Boots is an apt choice. Based on a 2005 film inspired by true events, Kinky Boots took thirty weeks to recoup its $13.5 million investment, roughly the same timeline as Fun Home (which had lower ticket prices). [26] Kinky Boots had a fuller theatrical tradition than Fun Home to draw upon: male actors inherit a variety of gendered performance traditions, theatrical practices that are increasingly familiar to and co-opted by straight playgoers. [27] Gay male leads and gender non-conforming characters played by male actors are not new features of musicals. (Consider this partial history: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Rent, Kiss of the Spider Woman, La Cage Aux Folles, Falsettos, A Chorus Line, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Avenue Q, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Spring Awakening, and Cabaret .) Stacy Wolf usefully points out a key difference between this theatrical tradition and the one women inherit, noting that “the visibility of white gay men’s alliance with musicals stems in part from capital (cultural and real) and the general visibility of a relatively identifiable affluent, urban, white, gay male culture.” [28] This disparity in capital was indicated in material ways by Fun Home ’s relatively small cast of nine, orchestra of seven, and slim advertising budget, all of which kept production costs low. Kinky Boots ’ cast was more than three times the size of Fun Home ’s, and had an orchestra of thirteen musicians. The diverging cultural capital of gay men and lesbians also surfaced in the showcasing of the titular “kinky boots” in that production’s poster campaign, and the cloaking of Bechdel’s experience within that of Fun Home , whose posters evoked the colors of the 1970s in color values too deep to invoke a rainbow flag. [29] The advertisements for Kinky Boots flaunted sexual and gender transgressiveness whereas Fun Home ’s marketers closeted their characters. Fun Home ’s marketing team was not alone in minimizing its connection with underrepresented groups outside of Broadway’s cultural mainstream. For instance, Hamilton ’s producers deliberately distanced Hamilton from the hip hop music and culture that influenced Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show, a redirection that included a name change of the show itself from Hamilton Mixtape despite his earlier hit In the Heights . [30] (Bechdel’s book title, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic , was also abridged.) Such concerns about a production’s broad appeal surface in Fun Home ’s production history, as seen in one critic’s question: “Is America ready for a musical about a middle-aged, butch lesbian?” [31] This hesitancy was echoed by the creative team and by Bechdel, who drily noted that “Lesbians are inherently uncommodifiable. . . . It’s a gift.” [32] Bechdel, in her suggestion that being imagined as uncommodifiable offers lesbians a way to resist being dehumanized, echoes the precise concern of Fun Home ’s marketers. In other words, Bechdel doesn’t realize how right the marketers imagined her to be: she hits a nerve along with her punchline. Lisa Kron discussed this concern after the musical won the 2015 Tony Award: We were constantly having to rewrite the assumed narrative, which was that this was not commercially viable. Because it’s a serious piece of work. You know, it’s not a pure entertainment, even though it is very entertaining. Because it was written by women, because it not only focuses on women characters but lesbian characters and more than that has a butch lesbian protagonist.[33] Kron clearly states her diagnosis of people’s reticence about the show’s viability: misogyny and lesbophobia, particularly towards masculine lesbians. Within that interview, Kron revealed the persistence of that narrative, even after the show was hitting crucial markers of success: Even when we were succeeding, even when it had had a successful run at the Public and we were selling tickets on Broadway, still the question was being asked “do you think this will work on Broadway?” These financial concerns lingered, despite the production’s relatively quick financial solvency. The investors of Fun Home recouped their investment of $5.25 million dollars within eight months. [34] The tour also returned its investment within eight months, benchmarks that belie the supposed need to commercially closet Fun Home. [35] The marketing of Fun Home reveals a two-pronged approach. The first tactic universalized the musical. The subsequent tactic encouraged playgoers to see the production as politically engaged. In one article, readers are told that: The subject matter, obviously, is a complication in a Broadway market dominated by lighter material. The show’s producers, Kristin Caskey, Mike Isaacson and Barbara Whitman, who raised $5.2 million [sic] to finance the Broadway transfer, are emphasizing the father-daughter relationship and journey of self-discovery, rather than the sexuality, the suicide or the fact that Alison’s father ran a funeral home (“Fun Home” was the Bechdel children’s nickname for the business).[36] Occasionally members of the creative reinforced the producers’ tenet that Fun Home is about a generic family whose story resulted in a “father-daughter heartbreaker.” [37] Judy Kuhn, who played Alison’s mother, Helen, appeared in a promo saying that “[e]verybody can relate to [the play] because everybody has a family.” [38] Elsewhere, the investor Kristin Caskey suggested that the musical offers an opportunity for “seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.” [39] Caskey volunteered that: this is how I saw the show: It was about a child and her relationship with a parent, and as she became an adult, how she came to peace with how she saw that parent. . . . I think a broad audience can relate to that, and will give the show a chance to be commercial.[40] Caskey’s comments removed gender and sexuality as factors within the theatrical work, suggesting their irrelevance for audiences. This sidestepping so overgeneralized the musical’s protagonist and her narrative arc that it nearly misrepresents the show. By the production’s end, the producing team detoured from its initial, sanitizing premise of the musical’s universal family to advance a counternarrative: that the show served as a cultural milestone. These antithetical approaches— that the production was both ahistorical and historically prescient—occurred concurrently during the Broadway run. As Fun Home prepared to move to Broadway from the Public Theater the notoriety of Bechdel’s book became a promotional tool, although not an automatically synergistic or positive one. [41] In February 2014, the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina Upstate announced that Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic would be part of their optional summer reading programs. Politicians responded by voting to defund those public colleges. Rep. Garry Smith, R-Greenville, justified his vote by explaining that the book “goes beyond the pale of academic debate. It graphically shows lesbian acts.” [42] (Readers who pick up Bechdel’s book expecting pornography might be disappointed to find relatively few anatomical moments, aside from her drawing of a male corpse in her father’s embalming studio.) Alison Bechdel and the production team went to South Carolina in April 2014 so that the cast could perform part of the musical as the six-month censorship debate was swirling. [43] This unanticipated pre-Broadway debut “tour” marked a pivot: the creative team began to directly comment on and interact with the censorship debate even as Fun Home ’s marketing products featured no references likely to cause controversy. The production’s responsiveness escalated in the upcoming months: the cast put Fun Home in dialogue with real-time national debates about marriage equality. The play opened a few days before the US Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments about the Obergefell v. Hodges case. Beth Malone commented on this timing in an interview given before the court decision: Right now, the Supreme Court is arguing for our rights as human beings, and I’m going home to my wife tonight who I married in a court of law in New York City. This is a time in our lives. This is quite a time. This is quite a season.[44] Fun Home ’s actors commented on that case in front of larger audiences as well. As he delivered his Tony speech for playing Bruce, Michael Cerveris spoke of his “hope” that the Supreme Court would support LGBTQ+ citizens’ right to marriage. [45] Eighteen days later when the court confirmed marriage equality, the evening’s performance included a new prop: a rainbow flag brought on to stage after the bows. Beth Malone put the flag around her and did a victory lap around the stage, before saying “What an amazing time to be an American. We owe this night to the people who came before us.” [46] In other interviews, Malone specified the activist and artistic pasts to which she felt indebted: The only reason Fun Home itself can be a mainstream Broadway show is because of the fringe work of my sisters that came before me, like the Five Lesbian Brothers, doing this downtown theatre that was so edgy and it was happening in the margins. The margins had to exist for a really long time before it incrementally crept toward the center.[47] After the Supreme Court passed this civil rights case in June 2015, Fun Home began to be included in publications marketed towards LGBTQ+ readers. One such instance was the article within Out magazine that exclusively featured the actors who identified as lesbian or gay in the Broadway production (Beth Malone, Roberta Colindrez, and Joel Perez) alongside Bechdel and Kron. [48] In another produced segment, Malone appears with her wife in a video that features her Fun Home pre-performance commute. [49] These curated moments provided evidence for Malone’s sense that lesbian rights are moving towards “the center” of public sympathy and support. The marketing of Fun Home as proof of American exceptionalism to seventeen ambassadors from the United Nations in March 2016 also hinted at a newfound security for LGBTQ+ people. [50] Three months later, however, Fun Home responded to an intensely harmful event that targeted LGBTQ+ people. The crimes committed at Pulse (a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida) resulted in the deaths of forty-nine victims and the wounding of fifty-eight other people. This event sparked a number of responses from Broadway workers, including at the Tony Awards which were held on the day of the attacks (12 June 2016) as scheduled. Although individual Broadway actors participated in an Orlando tribute, Fun Home was the only production to travel to Florida to be physically present with the victims, survivors, and their families. [51] Beth Malone and Michael Cerveris each wrote publicly about this pilgrimage in tones consonant with the LGBTQ+ advocacy they articulated before the production’s run. [52] The producers’ willingness to highlight the LGBTQ+ themes of the production was newly evident: Mike Isaacson : “For our company, there is no choice but to respond with what we have, what we know, and the belief that it leads to something.” Barbara Whitman : “I think we all had that same reaction: What can we do? This is something we can actually do.” Kristin Caskey : “It was one of those perfect moments where everyone aligned and did so quite quickly, understanding that many of the ideas and themes within ‘Fun Home’ would be a perfect gift and a way for the community to come together in advocation for LGBT rights.”[53] Their unified perspective diverged from Tom Greenwald’s earlier recommendation to “never ever associat[e] [the play] with . . . the subject matter.” At this moment, some fourteen months after the show opened on Broadway, the producers unambiguously voiced their objection to the homophobic and lesbophobic crimes. [54] Particularly striking is Caskey’s transition in framing Fun Home : the show is no longer about “a child and her relationship with a parent,” but a “gift . . . for the community to come together in advocation for LGBT rights,” with her suggestion that the artistic production and political advocacy were linked. The trio continued this pattern of speaking to LGBTQ+ people when in Orlando, writing in a joint statement that “as the first musical with a lesbian protagonist, we so often hear from audience members at ‘Fun Home’ that it was the first time they saw themselves represented on a Broadway stage. We all feel so helpless, but hopefully this will allow us to give back to the LGBT community in this tiny way.” [55] Here, the protagonist’s identity was presented as a pioneering choice, rather than a detail that needed to be hidden. Moreover, the producers acknowledged their debt to the LGBT community rather than distancing the show from that community. Such a development from reticence and repression to an overt championing of LGBTQ+ individuals’ rights was remarkable and challenged the historical pattern of excluding lesbian characters from Broadway stages. These actions that openly acknowledge and affirm the production’s debt to LGBTQ+ artists speak to the gains that the production enabled. Ceveris and Bechdel offer ways to see the historical context of the run. Michael Ceveris says: We’ve played through an extraordinary moment in our country’s history and the most progressive and heartening ways and the most retroactive and terrifying ways. We played through the Supreme Court’s decision, we played through the naming of the first national monument to gay and lesbian rights, and we played through a massacre that was horrific enough in itself and in its aftermath, when some of the hatred and reactionary comments that were made were just as horrifying. If there was ever a play that arrived on Broadway in the moment it was most needed, I think this would be it.[56] Ceveris encapsulated his perspective of the show as a necessary one. Bechdel’s comments featured her characteristic ambivalence: it’s a funny moment. It’s a very funny moment for LGBT culture and civil rights right now. I feel like the play and the success of the play is very much tied into what’s happening in the culture.[57] Like Bechdel in her emphasis of the production’s connection with the contemporary moment, Fun Home ’s composer Jeanine Tesori spoke of production’s role in advancing agendas outside the theater: And so I think that this has met our time, it’s a musical of our time. It makes me think . . . it’s available, what else can it do? What are the next stages? Where are we, what can we express [in] that conversation, the global conversation, the national conversation?[58] The answers to Tesori’s questions are forthcoming: it remains to be seen what artistic and commercial risks might be undertaken to create a more diverse, inclusive theatrical tradition for women actors to inhabit. Despite the censorship that characterized Fun Home ‘s early promotion, the producers ultimately reckoned with a literal tragedy that befell LGBTQ+ people. This transition suggests a recognition that tragedies can be spurred by settings, such as a homophobic society, rather than by LGBTQ+ people’s existence. Fun Home ultimately offered a way forward for a more varied performance history and for productive interplay between onstage representation and offstage politics. Fun Home ’s temporal context offers a useful demarcation of the interplay between civic and theatrical tragedies, and the creative ways that theater can elicit empathy. References [1] StuckinVermont, “Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on Broadway,” 11:49, YouTube , 22 April 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9vD7Nc0L3k (accessed 1 May 2017). [2] Sarah Mirk, “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’ Will Now be a New York Musical,” Bitch Media , 11 October 2013, www.bitchmedia.org/post/alison-bechdels-fun-home-will-now-be-a-new-york-musical (accessed 17 January 2017). [3] Kalle Oskari Matilla, “Selling Queerness: The Curious Case of Fun Home ,” The Atlantic , 25 April 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/04/branding-queerness-the-curious-case-of-fun-home/479532/ (accessed 21 August 2016). [4] Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 334. [5] This line was taken from a “Stuck in Vermont” interview with Bechdel in 2008. Bechdel’s comment appears around 4:50 minutes into the clip. The varied sources for the musical suggest the creative team’s early openness to Bechdel’s contributions beyond the published pages of her visual memoir. StuckinVermont, “Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on Broadway.” [6] According to Robert Petkoff, the actor playing Alison’s father during the tour, the content of the show remained a surprise to some playgoers: “There are people in the audience who are like, ‘What?! I saw kids dancing on the poster—this doesn’t seem to be that story!’” Lori McCue, “The star and designer of ‘Fun Home’ on how their show still surprises audiences,” The Washington Post , 27 April 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2017/04/27/the-star-and-designer-of-fun-home-on-how-their-show-still-surprises-audiences/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.80af729129a9 (accessed 20 July 2017). [7] Matilla, “Selling Queerness.” [8] Heather K. Love charts this genealogy in “Spectacular Failure: The Figure of the Lesbian in ‘Mulholland Drive,’” New Literary History 35, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 120–22. [9] The phrase “Bury your gays” serves as a shorthand for this narrative in popular media. GLAAD (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) provides data on the occurrence and type of LGBTQ+ representations on film and TV. See their Studio Responsibility Index for film data (www.glaad.org/sri/2018), and the “Where We Are On TV” reports (www.glaad.org/tags/where-we-are-tv). [10] Steven Adler, “Box Office,” The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical , eds. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 356. [11] Ibid., 352. [12] Quoted in Mark N. Grant, “The Age of McMusicals,” The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 304–15. Jones’s primary examples of the category “technomusical” are Disney productions and those affiliated with Andrew Lloyd Webber. [13] Elizabeth Wollman, The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 145. [14] Ibid., 145, 144. [15] Michael Sokolove profiles Hamilton ’s producer Jeffrey Seller in “The C.E.O. of ‘Hamilton’ Inc.,” The New York Times , 5 April 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/magazine/the-ceo-of-hamilton-inc.html (accessed 10 May 2018). For an overview of the Great Comet attribute dispute and resolution see the following: Michael Paulson, “Three Words Lead to a Battle Over ‘Great Comet’ on Broadway,” The New York Times , 19 October 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/theater/three-words-lead-to-a-battle-over-great-comet-on-broadway.html (accessed 17 May 2018); Michael Gioia, “ Great Comet Billing Dispute Prompts Lawsuit,” Playbill , 28 October 2016, www.playbill.com/article/ars-nova-sues-great-comet-producers-and-explains-why-were-taking-a-stand (accessed 17 May 2018); Michael Paulson, “Dispute at ‘Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812’ Leads to a Lawsuit,” New York Times , 30 October 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/theater/dispute-at-natasha-pierre-the-great-comet-of-1812-leads-to-lawsuit.html (accessed 17 May 2018); Jeremy Girard, “Peace Now: ‘Natasha, Pierre’ Production and Non-Profit Group Agree to Secret Deal,” Deadline, 2 November 2016, www.deadline.com/2016/11/broadway-lawsuit-natasha-pierre-josh-groban-1201845138/ (accessed 17 May 2018). [16] Michael Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups on Broadway,” The New York Times , 13 December 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/12/14/theater/fun-home-recoups-on-broadway.html (accessed 3 June 2016). Caskey repeated the characterization of the show as “crazy” in her conversation with Whitman preserved at Story Corps. “Fun Home producers Barbara Whitman and Kristen Caskey,” Story Corps , 1 April 2016, www.archive.storycorps.org/interviews/fun-home-co-producers-barbara-whitman-and-kristin-caskey/ (accessed 14 June 2018). After the Tony Awards, Isaacson repeated this diction: “Everybody had been telling us we were crazy, even stupid” (Paulson, “Winning”). As the production went on tour within the US, Isaacson described the “whole endeavor [as] a crazy leap of faith” (Moffit, “Taking on ‘tough stuff’”). Michael Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Finds That Winning a Tony is the Best Way to Market a Musical,” The New York Times , 9 June 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/theater/theaterspecial/fun-home-finds-that-winning-a-tony-is-the-best-way-to-market-a-musical.html (accessed 15 June 2015). Kelly Moffit, “Taking on ‘tough stuff’ with beauty, talent, humor: St. Louis-produced ‘Fun Home’ opens at The Fox,” St. Louis Public Radio , 17 November 2016, www.news.stlpublicradio.org/post/taking-tough-stuff-beauty-talent-humor-st-louis-produced-fun-home-opens-fox (accessed 21 August 2018). [17] The American Psychiatric Association included homosexuality in the second and third editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . The classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder was omitted in their 1987 volume. Neel Burton, “When Homosexuality Stopped Being a Mental Disorder,” Psychology Today , 18 September 2015, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201509/when-homosexuality-stopped-being-mental-disorder (accessed 20 August 2018). [18] Stacy Wolf, “‘Never Gonna Be a Man/Catch Me if You Can/I Won’t Grow Up’: A Lesbian Account of Mary Martin as Peter Pan,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 4 (1997): 494. She uses “lesbianize” as a verb in A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 26. This claim about audience reception is also a starting point for Wolf’s book-length projects, including Changed for Good , in which Wolf argues that Wicked musically and visually codes Elphaba and Glinda as the show’s central couple. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). [19] Chris Straayer’s phrase describes viewers’ willful interpretations of texts that do not secure the character’s sexuality or heroism. “The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine in Narrative Feature Film,” in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture , eds. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 44–69. [20] Ann M. Ciasullo, “Making Her (In)Visible: Cultural Representations of Lesbianism and the Lesbian Body in the 1990s,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 605. [21] Love, “Spectacular Failure,” 129. In the footnote that follows this sentence, Love references Elizabeth Freeman’s “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations,” New Literary History 31 (2000): 727–44. [22] Ben Brantley, “Candy Worship in the Temple of the Prom Queen,” The New York Times , 20 April 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/theater/reviews/30blon.html (accessed 9 June 2016). In Stagestruck , playwright Sarah Schulman offers a productive overview of lesbian theatrical context and the ways that lesbian characters are considered more commodifiable when presented from non-lesbian playwrights, with Rent as a key example. Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). [23] Mirk, “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home.’” [24] Adam Hetrick, “For Beth Malone, ‘Butch is a Beautiful Thing’—What This Fun Home Star Learned Playing Lesbian,” Playbill , 29 June 2015, www.playbill.com/news/article/for-beth-malone-butch-is-a-beautiful-thing-what-this-fun-home-star-learned-playing-lesbian-351968 (accessed 1 July 2015). [25] These are key features of “The Vito Russo Test.” See “The Vito Russo Test,” GLAAD, www.glaad.org/sri/2018/vitorusso (accessed 14 August 2018). [26] Andrew Gans, “Tony-Winning Musical Kinky Boots Recoups Initial Investment,” Playbill , 3 October 2013, www.playbill.com/article/tony-winning-musical-kinky-boots-recoups-initial-investment-com-210206 (accessed 19 June 2017). According to Brent Lang, the recuperation happened in large part because of the high costs of Kinky Boots tickets. “ Kinky Boots Recoups $13.5 Investment,” The Wrap , 3 October 2013, www.thewrap.com/kinky-boots-recoups-13-5m-investment/ (accessed 19 June 2017). For additional context, Rent recouped in fifteen weeks, Avenue Q took forty weeks, and Matilda took some nineteen months to recoup its $16 million capitalization (Adler, “Box Office,” 352). Fun Home ’s cost of $5.25 million in 2015 was less than that of Spring Awakening in 2007, which cost $6 million. Spring Awakening ’s production team was concerned that their box office might suffer from their production’s content: like Fun Home , that musical includes suicide, adult language, homoeroticism, and teenage sexuality. For Matilda box office details, see David Cox, “Broadway Musical ‘Matilda’ Turns a Profit,” Variety , 5 December 2014, www.variety.com/2014/legit/news/matilda-recoups-broadway-musical-1201372084/. For all other box office details, see Adler, “Box Office,” 352. [27] Michael Ceveris, incidentally, “set the record for playing the most performances as the East German rock ‘n’ roll singer Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” For information on Ceveris’s record, see Carey Purcell, “Michael Ceveris on the Closing of Fun Home: ‘It Arrived on Broadway in the Moment it Was Most Needed,’” Out, 22 August 2016, www.out.com/theater-dance/2016/8/22/michael-cerveris-closing-fun-home-it-arrived-broadway-moment-it-was-most (accessed 12 February 2017). [28] Stacy Wolf, “The Queer Pleasures of Mary Martin and Broadway: The Sound of Music as a Lesbian Musical,” Modern Drama 39, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 52. [29] Other details specific to Bechdel’s experience were stripped from the campaign. Whereas the cover for Bechdel’s book referenced the family’s funeral home, including a Mass card reappropriated as her book title, the musical’s poster omitted that background and that prop. [30] See Sokolove, “The C.E.O. of ‘Hamilton’, Inc.,” where Jeffrey Seller characterized the name change as a result of “gentle but persistent prodding before Miranda finally agreed.” Patricia Herrera writes about the ways in which Hamilton “proclaims an inclusive narrative of American identity that obscures the histories of racism that are at the base of so much of the American experience,” as well as the promotional distance from the show’s “acoustic environment shaped by Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American musical, oral, visual, and dance forms and practices.” Patricia Herrera, “Reckoning with America’s Racial Past, Present, and Future in Hamilton ,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past , eds. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 262, 260. [31] June Thomas, “ Fun Home Won Five Tonys. How Did a Graphic Memoir Become a Musical?” Slate , 8 June 2015, www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2013/10/08/fun_home_is_america_ready_for_a_musical_about_a_butch_lesbian.html (accessed 21 April 2017). [32] Rae Binstock, “Why Lesbian Spaces Will Always Be in Danger of Closing, and Why Some Will Always Survive,” Slate , 20 December 2016, www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/12/20/why_do_lesbian_spaces_have_such_a_hard_time_staying_in_business.html (accessed 21 April 2017). [33] “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’: The Coming-Out Memoir That Became a Hit Broadway Musical,” Democracy Now! , 30 July 2015, www.democracynow.org/2015/7/30/alison_bechdels_fun_home_the_coming (accessed 14 May 2017). [34] Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups.” [35] Andrew Gans, “National Tour of Fun Home Recoups Investment,” Playbill , 17 May 2017, www.playbill.com/article/national-tour-of-fun-home-recoups-investment (accessed 19 June 2017). [36] Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups.” [37] Patrick Healey, “Moving Your Show to Broadway? Not So Fast,” The New York Times , 8 May 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/theater/theaterspecial/moving-your-show-to-broadway-not-so-fast.html (accessed 2 May 2017). [38] “Life with Father! Learn the True Tale Behind the New Broadway Musical Fun Home ,” Broadway.com , 23 March 2015, www.broadway.com/buzz/180076/life-with-father-learn-the-true-tale-behind-the-new-broadway-musical-fun-home/ (accessed 13 March 2017). [39] Paulson, “Tonys.” Kristen Caskey was played off by the orchestra in the midst of her acceptance speech. Lisa Kron’s acceptance speech was not televised, but can be found here: Jerry Portwood, “ Fun Home was the big musical winner at the awards,” Out , 8 June 2016, www.out.com/popnography/2015/6/08/watch-lisa-kron-gives-moving-tonys-acceptance-speech (accessed 9 June 2016). [40] Healy, “Moving.” [41] The Public Theater’s Public Lab held a run of Fun Home in 2012 in their Newman theater, and a subsequent off-Broadway run at the Public Theater that began in September 2014. Manuel Betancourt, “From the Public to Broadway: Fun Home ’s Growing Pains,” HowlRound , 22 October 2015, www.howlround.com/from-the-public-to-broadway-fun-home-s-growing-pains (accessed 27 August 2018). [42] Betsy Gomez provides commentary on this provision, which “mandates that students be allowed to avoid encountering educational material they find ‘objectionable based on a sincerely held religious, moral, or cultural belief.’” Betsy Gomez, “This Compromise Is Not Acceptable: CBLDF Joins Coalition Condemning South Carolina Budget Provision,” Comic Book Legal Defense Fund , 13 June 2014, www.cbldf.org/2014/06/this-compromise-is-not-acceptable-cbldf-joins-coalition-questioning-south-carolina-budget-provision/ (accessed 22 May 2017). [43] Democracy Now! , “Alison Bechdel’s ’Fun Home.’” [44] Hetrick, “Butch is a Beautiful Thing.” [45] Michael Ceveris gave the speech on 8 June 2015. Michael Musto, “Lesbian Musical Crushes Gershwin Show, and Other Tony Awards Revelations,” Out , 8 June 2015, www.out.com/michael-musto/2015/6/08/lesbian-musical-fun-home-crushes-gershwin-show-tony-awards-revelations (accessed 10 June 2015). [46] These moments have been preserved by the production team, and can be easily accessed on their webpage. The Playbill Video site shows Kron commenting that the play is “at the cusp of an evolving opening moment.” Playbill Video, “Lisa Kron, Michael Cerveris, Judy Kuhn and Emily Skeggs Have Fun Talking “Fun Home” at BroadwayCon!,” 7:51, YouTube , 3 February 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdltIKzwLUk (accessed 13 March 2016). [47] Hetrick, “Butch is a Beautiful Thing.” [48] “Out100: The Fun Home Family,” Out , 9 November 2015, www.out.com/out100-2015/2015/11/09/out100-fun-home-family (accessed 17 May 2016). The shoot includes a stylist, an approach reminiscent of some of Rent ’s promotion techniques which included clothing lines at Manhattan’s Bloomingdales and fashion spreads featuring the cast. See Michael Riedel, “Available at Bloomies: The ‘Rent’ Rags Can Be Yours—For a Price,” New York Daily News, 30 April 1996, 35. [49] Theatre Mania, “A Day with Fun Home Star Beth Malone,” 6:35, YouTube , 30 September 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hQw_uwzJCc (accessed 3 June 2016). [50] As Matilla notes, US Ambassador Samantha Powers took her colleagues to this event in May 2016, see “Selling Queerness.” [51] Carmen Triola, “‘Fun Home’ Is Going to Orlando to Perform a Benefit Concert for Pulse Shooting Victims,” FlavorWire , 6 July 2016, www.flavorwire.com/583516/fun-home-is-going-to-orlando-to-perform-a-benefit-concert-for-pulse-shooting-victims (accessed 22 July 2016). [52] For additional reports of this trip, see the following: “Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ Cast Sets Benefit Performance for Orlando Victims,” Hollywood Reporter , 5 July 2016, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/broadways-fun-home-cast-sets-908612 (accessed 11 April 2018); Michael Ceveris, “Taking ‘Fun Home’ to Orlando for a Catharsis Onstage and Off,” The New York Times , 6 August 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/08/06/theater/taking-fun-home-to-orlando-for-a-catharsis-onstage-and-off.html (accessed 11 April 2018); Hal Boedecker, “Pulse benefit: Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ plays Orlando,” Orlando Sentinel , 5 July 2016, www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/tv/tv-guy/os-pulse-benefit-broadway-s-fun-home-plays-orlando-20160705-story.html (accessed 11 April 2018). [53] Mark Kennedy, “Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ cast sets benefit for Orlando victims,” AP News , 5 July 2016, wwwapnews.com/c90a05bc88204ae4950c0ada08bf48e8 (accessed 22 July 2016). [54] After their advocacy, Isaacson was awarded an Equality Award from the St. Louis chapter of the Human Rights Campaign, and Caskey was appointed the executive vice president of Ambassador Theater Group’s North American operations. See Judith Newmark, “‘Fun Home’ reaps more honors for its producers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch , 20 November 2015, www.stltoday.com/entertainment/arts-and-theatre/culture-club/fun-home-reaps-more-honors-for-its-producers/article_492d110f-3d24-574a-8517-a4dcd372b5f5.html (accessed 6 June 2018); Gordon Cox, “Broadway Producer Kristen Caskey Joins Ambassador Theater Group,” Variety , 29 November 2016, www.variety.com/2016/legit/news/kristin-caskey-ambassador-theater-group-north-america-1201928759/ (accessed 6 June 2018). [55] Matthew J. Palm, “‘Fun Home’: Cast is here for you,” Orlando Sentinel , 20 July 2016, www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/arts-and-theater/os-fun-home-orlando-benefit-20160713-story.html#nt=inbody-1%20Ceveris%20%E2%80%93%20idea%20in%20middle%20of%20show,%20producers%E2%80%99%20response (accessed 22 July 2016). [56] Purcell, “On the Closing of Fun Home .” [57] Democracy Now! , “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home.’” [58] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) MAUREEN MCDONNELL is Director of Women’s and Gender Studies and Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University. Her research interests include gender studies, early modern drama (including Shakespeare), and American Sign Language in performance. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 22, 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Displacing the Orient: Postcolonial Negotiations in Purcărete's Adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights Published: July 15, 2026 Download Article as PDF By Ion M. Tomuș Image Credits: Article Featured Image: A scene from The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert, directed by Silviu Purcărete, Photo by Alexandru Condurache What does it mean for a Romanian director to stage a Yemeni story drawn from an Arabic canonical text? Silviu Purcărete’s The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert (based on One Thousand and One Nights) , produced by the “Radu Stanca” National Theatre in Sibiu, is structured around a triple displacement: a story from Yemen, mediated through the vast and unstable textual corpus of One Thousand and One Nights , is reimagined on a Romanian stage for a contemporary European audience. Premiered in Sibiu on 5 December 2025, with set design by Dragoș Buhagiar and original music by Vasile Șirli, the production presents itself not as a straightforward dramatization of the 1001 Nights , but as the theatrical recovery of an almost forgotten story from within this narrative labyrinth. It should also be noted that Vasile Șirli’s music, recently awarded the UNITER Prize for Best Original Music for Theatre in 2026, does far more than accompany Purcărete’s universe: it gives it breath, memory, and ritual tension. In this sense, sound becomes one of the forces that connects the story’s multicultural imaginary with the distinctive scenic spectacularity of his Sibiu productions. This layered act of cultural transfer raises a problem that cannot be adequately addressed through the binary of fidelity and betrayal, nor through a simple accusation of exoticism. One Thousand and One Nights is not a neutral source text: in European cultural history, it has been repeatedly translated, rearranged, eroticized, infantilized, and monumentalized as “Oriental” literature. Any contemporary adaptation of the Nights therefore enters a field already overdetermined by Oriental frameworks of reception. Yet Purcărete’s position is not identical to that of a metropolitan Western director staging the East from the symbolic center of the empire. Romanian theatre occupies a more ambiguous location: historically European, but culturally and geopolitically marked by semi-peripherality, belatedness, and its own negotiations with Western models of cultural authority. I do not intend to review Purcărete’s production in the usual sense. Such a review would probably end, as many encounters with his recent work do, by acknowledging the value and force of yet another major staging. My interest lies elsewhere: in the way this adaptation handles the Orientalist imaginary it inevitably inherits. The production uses its images, pleasures, and theatrical conventions, but also shifts them, exposes their artificiality, and leaves them slightly unsettled. Seen from the semi-peripheral position of Romanian theatre, Abul Hossein’s story becomes not simply an exotic object to be displayed, but a space of mediation, memory, and performative re-narration. Across Silviu Purcărete’s Sibiu productions, from Faust to Metamorphoses , The Scarlet Princess , Jonah and now The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert , multiculturalism is less a declared theme than a theatrical method: myths, legends, literary canons, and popular narratives from different cultural traditions are absorbed into a shared scenic language of image, music, rhythm, and corporeal excess. As Faust and Metamorphoses , Abul Hossein transforms a canonical or semi-canonical textual source into a spectacular stage organism, in which narrative matters less as a plot than as a generator of visions, processions, grotesque bodies, choral energies and ritualized theatrical experience. At the same time, the connection with The Scarlet Princess is especially relevant, since both productions return to an exotic world not in order to reconstruct an “authentic” Orient, but to explore how stories migrate, mutate, and become theatrical matter in a European context. Seen together, these productions also show how Sibiu, through the institutional ecosystem and the visibility of Sibiu International Theatre Festival, has become a privileged space for Purcărete’s large-scale intercultural theatre, a place where local repertory, global sources, and festival spectatorship meet in a distinctive form of theatrical cosmopolitanism. Brief Theoretical Framework and Genealogy of the Text The postcolonial approach used in this article begins with Edward Said’s understanding of Orientalism not as a simple collection of stereotypes about the East, but as a system of representation through which the “Orient” is produced as an object of knowledge, fantasy, and control. In this sense, the Orient is less a geographical reality than a cultural construction shaped by unequal relations of power. European representations of the East have often depended on a fundamental asymmetry: the West looks, describes, classifies, and stages, while the East is looked at, described, classified, and staged. This asymmetry is especially important in relation to One Thousand and One Nights , a text whose European reception has long been mediated by fascination, translation, eroticization, and exotic display. However, to read every European adaptation of the Nights as a simple repetition of Orientalism would flatten the complexity of theatrical production. Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity, mimicry, and the “third space” offer a more flexible vocabulary for approaching adaptation as a process of negotiation. A theatrical adaptation does not merely transfer a source text from one culture into another; it also displaces it, reorganizes it, and exposes the tensions between inherited images and new contexts of performance. The “third space” is useful here because it names a zone in which meanings are neither fully original nor fully borrowed, neither entirely dominant nor entirely resistant. It allows to see Purcărete’s production not simply as an appropriation of an Oriental text, but as an ambivalent encounter between several cultural positions. This ambivalence becomes even more visible when the object of analysis is theatre rather than literature alone. Performance adds bodies, voices, costumes, music, rhythm, spatial relations and immediate presence of the authors. Postcolonial theatre studies have shown that the stage can both reproduce cultural hierarchies and disturb them, sometimes at the same time. A text may carry Orientalist associations, but performance can exaggerate, parody, fragment, or estrange those associations. In other words, theatre does not merely illustrate ideology; it materializes it, makes it visible, and sometimes makes it unstable. This is particularly relevant in the case of a Romanian director staging One Thousand and One Nights . Romania does not occupy the same historical position as the Western powers most associated with Orientalist representation. At the same time, it cannot be placed outside Europe or outside European cultural hierarchies. Its position is liminal: neither a classic colonizer nor a classically colonized country, but part of a semi-peripheral Eastern Europe that has often defined itself in relation to Western cultural authority. This matters because Purcărete’s adaptation does not speak from the secure center of imperial privilege. It emerges from a culture that has itself been subjected to forms of marginalization, belatedness, and self-exoticization within Europe. The production’s engagement with the Orient must therefore be read through this double displacement: it stages and already Orientalized text, but from a cultural position that is itself not fully central. Within this framework, The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert can be approached as a negotiation rather than a verdict. The question is not whether the production is simply Orientalist, but how it handles the inherited theatrical and cultural codes attached to the Orient: whether it repeats them, distances them, transforms them, or leaves them productively unresolved. The story of Abul Hussein is a story of displacement. A respected Yemeni man, overcome by shame after an embarrassing bodily accident during his wedding celebrations, abandons his social identity and flees into the desert. His flight is not heroic, but comic and desperate: he attempts to escape not danger, but memory. Years later, when he returns in disguise, he discovers that the humiliating event has survived as a point of communal reference. His shame has become part of public time. The tale is brief, ironic, and structurally simple, yet it contains several themes central to One Thousand and One Nights : the instability of identity, the power of storytelling to preserve what individuals wish to erase, and the transformation of private experience into collective narrative. A scene from The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert, directed by Silviu Purcărete, Photo by Alexandru Condurache Yet this story does not reach the modern European stage through a transparent line of transmission. One Thousand and One Nights has a famously troubled editorial history in the West. Antoine Galland’s eighteen-century French translation played a decisive role in introducing the Nights to European readers, but it also helped establish the work as an object of Orientalist fascination. Later versions, including those by Edward William Lane and Richard Burton, further shapes the text according to different European expectations: moral, ethnographic, erotic, scholarly, or exoticizing. As a result, the Nights entered European consciousness not simply as Arabic literature, but as literature already filtered through translation, selection, censorship, commentary, and fantasy. At the same time, it would be misleading to oppose these European distortions to a single, stable, “authentic” original, The Nights is itself a compilation, a layered and mobile corpus made of stories that circulated across Arabic, Persian, Indian, and later European contexts. Its identity is palimpsestic rather than fixed. This matters for any theatrical adaptation. When Purcărete stages Abul Hussein , he is not adapting a pure source but entering a long chain of retellings. The question, then, is not only what story is being adapted, but what histories of translation, exoticization, and cultural mediation the story brings with it. Orientalism on the European Stage The European stage has often approached One Thousand and One Nights less as a complex narrative corpus than as a reservoir of images. Its stories have frequently been translated into theatrical languages of spectacle: veils, lamps, palaces, deserts, sensual dances, shimmering fabrics, stylizes violence, and music meant to evoke a generalizes East. In this tradition, the Nights becomes less a text to be interpreted than a visual atmosphere to be consumed, orientalist theatre, in this sens, is not defined only by what it represents, but by how it organizes looking: the Orient appears as an aesthetic surface, available to the spectator’s gaze. This theatrical orientalism relies on recognizable codes. Costumes tend to signal difference immediately; music often functions as cultural shorthand; lighting produces mystery, heat or sensuality; movement vocabularies suggest ritual, seduction, or archaic collective energy. These elements do not necessarily belong to any specific Arab, Persian, Indian or Yemeni tradition. Rather, they form a composite stage language through which Europe has repeatedly imagined the East as timeless, excessive, irrational, and visually seductive. The problem is therefore not simply inaccuracy, but asymmetry: one culture becomes the active producer of images, while another is transformed into a decorative object. This is the representational field in which Purcărete’s The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert enters. The production cannot entirely avoid the inherited codes attached to One Thousand and One Nights : the desert, the sultan, the world of storytelling, and the musical-visual richness of the performance all carry Orientalist resonances. Yet Purcărete’s approach also appears to complicate the logic of exotic display. Rather than presenting the Orient as a stable object of fascination, the production foregrounds theatricality itself: narration, rhythm, collective performance, and the unstable passage from one image to another, the result is not a pure escape from Orientalism, but a partial displacement of it. The audience is invited to look at an imagined East and to observe how much it is made, performed, and continuously rearranged on stage. Close Reading: Purcărete’s Oriental World In the production directed by Silviu Purcărete at the Radu Stanca National Theatre, the stage manifests as a choral, dynamic, and vibrant universe, within which a cast of over thirty actors utilizes music and movement to embody storytellers, spirits, and complicit witnesses. The visual world of the show creates a dialogue with the iconography traditionally attached to One Thousand and One Nights . The mention of a sultan, a Yemeni protagonist, and a flight into the desert activates a long European archive of Orientalist images: sand, heat, veils, turbans, lamps, shadows, sensual interiors and ceremonial excess. The question is not whether such images are present, but how the production handles their theatrical charge. Purcărete’s theatre has often worked through accumulation, grotesque amplification, and visual excess. In this sense, the production does not necessarily reject spectacle; rather, it appears to make spectacle unstable. The stage image invites the spectator to admire an exotic Orient as a coherent world, and it foregrounds its own constructedness. Instead of reflecting an actual place or culture, the "Orient" is often treated like a stage set. It is patched together from exotic fragments—costumes, gestures, colors, and rituals—rather than real human experiences. This distinction is important. Orientalist theatre usually depends on the illusion that the spectator is seeing “the East”. Purcărete’s visual language, by contrast, tends to remind the audience that what is being seen is already staged fiction. The production therefore occupies an ambivalent position. On the one hand, it cannot fully escape the pleasures of the exotic display. The source material itself has reached the European stage through centuries of visual and literary Orientalization, and any theatrical adaptation of the One Thousand and One Nights risks activating those codes. On the other hand, Purcărete’s scenographic imagination does not seem interested in reconstructing a culturally specific Yemen or an “authentic” Arab world. The visual register is more abstract, carnivalesque, and dreamlike than documentary. This abstraction may be read as a strategy of displacement: the production cites Orientalist imagery without fully stabilizing it. The spectator recognizes signs of the Orient, but these signs are absorbed into a broader theatrical universe that is excessive, artificial, and self-conscious. This does not make the production innocent. Abstraction can also erase cultural specificity. When the Orient becomes a floating theatrical atmosphere, it may cease to be a lived historical or cultural space and become once again a European fantasy. Yet the very instability of the visual field complicates a simple accusation of exoticism. Purcărete reproduces the Oriental image, and he theatricalizes it, exaggerates it, and places it inside a visual system where all identities appear fragile, fluid and performative. A second level of negotiations concerns the performers’ bodies. Orientalist performance has historically asked actors to perform difference through codified movement: languid gestures, ritualizes poses, decorative dances, or choreographies meant to suggest sensuality, primitiveness, or. Mystical otherness. In such cases, the body becomes a surface on which cultural fantasy is written. The performers are made to embody an imagined East for the pleasure of the European gaze. A scene from The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert, directed by Silviu Purcărete, Photo by Alexandru Condurache Purcărete’s production seems to complicate this mechanism by placing the actors within a collective and highly theatrical physical vocabulary. The bodies on stage are not simply to create an Oriental world. They become narrators, witnesses, musicians, figures in a moving tableau, and elements of a larger scenic machine. This choral organization shifts attention away from individual ethnic representation and towards the process of the storytelling itself. The actors on stage produce the conditions through which the world of One Thousand and One Nights appears. This is where the director’s own theatrical language becomes important and crucial. His productions often rely on grotesque corporeality, stylized group movement, sudden changes of rhythm, and the transformation of the actor’s body into a visual musical instrument. Such physicality does not belong specifically to an imagined “East”, it is closer to a broader Eastern European stage tradition in which the actor’s body is treated as expressive matter: disciplined, exaggerated, sometimes comic, sometimes ritualized, but rarely naturalistic. In this context, the performers are not asked to “look Oriental”. They are asked to participate in a theatrical composition that turns bodies into signs, sounds, rhythms, and images. Still, the ambivalence remains. Even when the choreography does nor explicitly imitate Arabic or Islamic cultural forms, the context of the Nights may lead the audience to read stylization itself as Oriental. A procession, a chant, a collective gesture, or a musical rhythm may be perceived as “Eastern” because the director’s frame encourages such a reading. This is precisely the problem of the gaze. Orientalism does not reside only in the object represented; it also resides in the habits of perception brought by the spectator. Purcărete’s production may displace Orientalist embodiment, but it cannot fully control how bodies are read once they appear inside the world of the Nights . The most productive reading, therefore, is that the show redirects the body away from ethnic imitation and toward performative transformation. The actors’ bodies do not secure cultural authenticity, but instead they reveal the stage as a space where identity is manufactured, repeated, exaggerated and dissolved. The title gives unusual importance to the desert: Abul Hossein’s story is about flight into an empty space. In Oriental visual culture, the desert is one of the most persistent images of the East. It is often staged as an exotic landscape: vast, timeless, silent, dangerous, and spiritually charged. It can suggest freedom, barbarism, purification, or oblivion. Because of this inherited symbolism, the staging of the desert is politically loaded. To present it merely as a picturesque Oriental background would be to repeat one of the oldest clichés of European representation. So Purcărete asks for a different reading: the desert may be understood as a space of disappearance, suspension, and identity loss. Abul Hussein flees into the desert because he is unable to inhabit the social world after this shame has become visible. The desert is therefore the opposite of community. It is the space in which he hopes to escape memory, names, witnesses, and narrative itself. This is crucial for the postcolonial reading of the adaptation. If the desert is staged as exotic scenery, then the production reinforces a familiar European fantasy of the Orient as empty, archaic, and available for projection. But if the desert is staged as an existential void, the meaning changes. It becomes a theatrical figure for displacement itself: the desire to vanish from social identity, to escape the gaze of the others, and to interrupt the circulation of stories. In this sense, the desert is more than “Eastern”, it is psychological, social, and theatrical. The irony of Abul Hossein’s flight is that the desert fails to erase him. He tries to disappear, but the story preserves him. He abandons his home, but his shame remains behind and enters communal memory. The desert, then, is not a place for liberation. There is no space beyond narrative, because the very act of fleeing becomes part of the tale, the reading moves the production away from the exotic desert of Orientalist spectacle and toward a more universal meditation on memory, shame, and the impossibility of controlling one’s own story. At the same time, we should be careful with the term “universal”. Universalization can be another form of erasure. If the desert becomes only an abstract existential void, the specific cultural and narrative origins of the tale may disappear. Purcărete’s negotiation lies precisely in this tension. The desert is both a sign inherited from the Orientalist imagination and a theatrical space that exceeds that inheritance. It is recognizable as part of the world of the Nights , and it also functions as a non-place where identity, geography, and narrative stability break down. The final level of negotiation concerns language and cultural specificity. The story of Abul Hossein contains names, social codes, religious references, and cultural markers that locate it within an Arabic-Islamic narrative world. Yet any Romanian stage adaptation must translate, select, and transform these markers. Translation is never neutral here, it decides what remains foreign, what becomes familiar, what explained, what is erased and what is converted into theatrical effect. The handling of religious and / or cultural markers is equally significant. Prayers, invocations, social rituals, marriage customs and formulas of address can either preserve the specificity of the source world or become decorative signs of otherness. A production may choose to retain them to mark the difference of the tale; it may also minimize them in order to make the story more accessible to a Romanian and European audience. Both choices have consequences. Retention may risk exoticizing difference if cultural markers are presented as spectacle. Erasure may risk neutralizing the text by turning it into a generalized fable about shame. Nevertheless, Purcărete decided to work between these alternatives: he transforms the story into a performative event in which names, places, and narrative formulas function as entrances into theatricality. The Arabic-Islamic specificity of the source is not entirely preserved, but neither is it completely removed. It survives as a set of traces in the title, in the narrative premise, in the figure of the sultan, in the world of storytelling, and in the atmosphere of ritualized narration. The production’s most important gesture may be its refusal to resolve the tension between exotic image and theatrical abstraction. The visual design, the performers’ bodies, the desert, and the translated text all move between recognition and estrangement. Orientalist codes remain present, but they are not allowed to settle into a stable fantasy of the East and they are displaced into a space where the audience is invited to see spectacle as a construction. Purcărete’s negotiation is an ambivalent staging of an already ambivalent text. One Thousand and One Nights comes to the Romanian stage carrying the weight of European Orientalism, but also the instability of a corpus that has always travelled across languages, cultures, and forms. The story of Abul Hossein performs this inheritance and so, the production opens a third space in which the Orient is neither authentically recovered nor passively consumed, but is displaced, rearranged, and made theatrically uncertain. A scene from The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert, directed by Silviu Purcărete, Photo by Alexandru Condurache The Semi-Peripheral Gaze: Romania as a Third Space Purcărete’s position as a Romanian director is not incidental to the postcolonial reading of The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert . Romania occupies a historically layered cultural space, shaped by Byzantine, Ottoman, Balkan, Central European, and Western influences. It is geographically and symbolically a place at the edge of several cultural maps, often imagined from the West as not entirely European, not entirely modern, or not fully central. In this sense, Romania has also been subjected to forms of external representation, simplification, and self-exoticization. This does not mean that Romanian theatre is automatically immune to Orientalist habits of seeing. Purcărete works within European theatre, and his visual language is legible within international festival circuits and Western aesthetic expectations. The semi-peripheral position can produce sensitivity to cultural displacement, but it can also generate a desire for recognition by reproducing dominant European forms. This double bind is precisely what makes the production interesting. Romania’s location may therefore generate an unstable gaze, that has been formed between margins: European, but not central; historically exposed to Ottoman influences but also shaped by Western models; capable of recognizing otherness, yet still capable of staging it. Purcărete’s adaptation does not belong fully to the Western Orientalist framework, but neither does it claim access to an untouched Arabic origin. It operates in between. The production becomes a site of negotiation where inherited images of the Orient are repeated, displaced, and made theatrical, while Romania’s own semi-peripheral cultural position complicates the authority of the gaze. This reading does not resolve all the deliberate contradictions of Purcărete’s adaptation. To describe the production as hybrid or as occupying a “third place” should nor become a way of excusing every representational problem. Hybridity can be a useful concept, but it can also soften the political force of postcolonial critique by shifting attention away from material inequalities: who has the institutional power to stage, translate, circulate, and profit from the image of another culture? The question of audience is equally important. Abul Hossein is produced within a Romanian national theatre and is likely to circulate mainly before Romanian and European spectators, including festival audiences already accustomed to Purcărete’s visual language. This reception context shapes the politics of the adaptation. The performance may destabilize Orientalist codes, but it also offers them to an audience trained to enjoy theatrical exoticism. Silviu Purcărete’s The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert is a useful case study for thinking about the complexity of postcolonial cultural exchange in contemporary European theatre. The production works inside an inherited field of images, stories, and expectations, displacing them through theatrical excess, abstraction, collective performance, and the semi-peripheral position from which it speaks. Its importance lies precisely in this ambiguity. The Romanian stage is not outside the European structures of representation, but neither does it coincide neatly with the imperial centers usually associated with Orientalist discourse. This makes Silviu Purcărete’s adaptation a valuable example of how East European theatre engages with non-Western source material from a position that existing postcolonial frameworks do not always fully address. Such productions require a vocabulary attentive not only to domination and appropriation, but also to meditation, belatedness, self-exoticization, and cultural in-betweenness. The broader question remains open. In a world in which One Thousand and One Nights circulates simultaneously as world literature, heritage object, children’s fantasy, erotic archive, and Hollywood franchise, what does it mean to stage one of its minor stories in a mid-sized Romanian city with a great theatrical heritage, and a great festival, such as Sibiu International Theatre Festival? Perhaps the answer lies not in recovering an authentic Orient, but in making visible the unstable routes through which stories travel, survive, and change hands. References References About the author(s) Dr. Ion M. Tomuș is a Professor at “Lucian Blaga” University, Sibiu, the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies, where he teaches courses in History of Romanian Theatre, History of Worldwide Theatre, Text and Stage Image and Drama Theory. He has published studies, book reviews, theatre reviews, and essays in prestigious cultural magazines and academic journals in Romania and Europe. Since 2005, he has been co-editor of the annual Text Anthology published by Nemira Publishing House for each edition of the Sibiu International Theatre Festival. Since 2005, Ion M. Tomuș is part of the staff at Sibiu International Theatre Festival (SITF is the third performing arts festival in the world, preceded by the ones in Edinburgh and Avignon). As part of SITF, Ion M. Tomuș coordinates Aplauze , the festival’s official daily journal, and oversees two editorial projects: Cultural Conversations and the annual volume of Aplauze . Ion M. Tomuș was Head of the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies, at “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu (2011-2019) and now he is the Chair of the PhD School in Theatre and Performing Arts at the same university. Since October 2016, Ion M. Tomuș is advising PhD students in the field of Performing Arts at “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu. Institutional Affiliation and Contact: “Lucian Blaga” University, Sibiu, Faculty of Letters and Arts, Department of Drama and Theatre Studies. 12 Banatului St, 550011, Sibiu. ion.tomus@ulbsibiu.ro European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review of 'In The Heights' at the Teatro Variedades Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Spring in Europe – Beyond the Theatertreffen Power, Shame, Vanity and Opportunism – Productions of the 63rd Berliner Theatertreffen “The more I give to thee, the more I have…” 15th edition of the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova Finding Lear’s Shadow: Compagnia de' Colombari's King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival Robert Wilson Beneath a Cabbage Leaf: 7 Solitudes at the Nacionalinis Kauno Dramos Teatras NE:BITEF 2025: The Festival that Refused to Disappear Displacing the Orient: Postcolonial Negotiations in Purcărete's Adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights Staging Tradition, Testing Form: The Second Showcase of the National Theatre of Sofia Poetics of the Unfulfilled: The Seagull at the Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre, Veles, North Macedonia Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Abdelkader Alloula, Jalila Baccar, Fatima Gallaire, Tayeb Saddiki | A collection of dramatic texts from the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Four Plays from North Africa Abdelkader Alloula, Jalila Baccar, Fatima Gallaire, Tayeb Saddiki Download PDF As the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has recently begun to be recognized by the Western theatre community, an important area within that tradition is still under-represented in existing anthologies and scholarship, and that is the drama from the Northwest of Africa, the region known in Arabic as the Maghreb. We hope that this first English collection of drama from this region will stimulate further interest in the varied and stimulating theatre begin produced here. It engages, in a fascinating and original way, with such important current issues as the struggle for the rights of women and workers, post-colonial tensions between Maghreb and Europe, and the challenges faced in Europe by immigrants from the Arab world. Plays contained in this collection include: The Veil by Abdelkader Alloula (Algeria) Araberlin by Jalila Baccar (Tunisia) House of Wives by Fatima Gallaire (Algeria) The Folies Berbers by Tayeb Saddiki (Morocco) Edited with an Introduction by Marvin Carlson Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

By Valère Novarina, Frank Hentschker | This volume contains two new American translations of works by Valère Novarina < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu An Incomprehensible Mother Tongue Valère Novarina, Frank Hentschker Download PDF This volume contains two new American translations of works by Valère Novarina, one of the major voices in avant-garde theater of the past forty years. Novarina is celebrated for his unique theatrical writing, exploring language beyond the conventional limits of communication, while pairing buffoonery with incantatory mysticism in the traditions of François Rabelais and Antonin Artaud. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Watch STATIONS + LA FEMME À LA CAFETIÈRE + LA MORT DE MOLIÈRE by Robert Wilson at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. A triple program of video works by Robert Wilson, spanning three distinct creative phases. STATIONS (1982, 56 min) An enigmatic and hauntingly vivid work in which Wilson envisions the inner life of an eleven-year-old boy — his daydreams and fantasies rendered as a universe both magical and sinister. The tape's pivotal image is a young boy looking through a large kitchen window, which becomes the portal for a series of dramatic, often startling inner visions. Fire, metal, wind, glass, and water serve as points of departure for elegant pictorial compositions and evocative metaphors. Unfolding without dialogue or spoken language, STATIONS articulates the fear and mystery of a child's interior world and his relation to the outside world beyond. A characteristic Wilson work: precise, controlled, deeply strange. LA FEMME À LA CAFETIÈRE (1989, 7 min) In this brief and exquisite collaboration, Robert Wilson and dancer Suzushi Hanayagi bring to life Paul Cézanne's painting La Femme à la Cafetière. The work exemplifies Wilson's ability to translate a static visual image into living tableau — a transformation of painting into performance, flattening time and depth into a new kind of presence. LA MORT DE MOLIÈRE (1995, 24 min) A collaboration between Robert Wilson and playwright Heiner Müller in which they imagine the death of Molière — representing it as a series of tableaux, with text passages recited by Müller himself. "Cinema watches Death at work," wrote Wilson of the piece. Müller's commentary adds another layer: "The poem watches a dying man at work, his name is Molière. The poem is not a film. The film watches an actor playing a dying man called Molière." The piece sits at the intersection of theater, film, and literary elegy — a meditation on mortality and artistic legacy made by two of the defining figures of 20th-century avant-garde performance. Total running time: approximately 90 minutes. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents STATIONS + LA FEMME À LA CAFETIÈRE + LA MORT DE MOLIÈRE Robert Wilson At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This program will be screened on May 31 at 5:30 PM, and June 2 at 6:30 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country United States / Germany Language English, French, German Running Time 90 minutes Year of Release 1982 / 1989 / 1995 About The Film A triple program of video works by Robert Wilson, spanning three distinct creative phases. STATIONS (1982, 56 min) An enigmatic and hauntingly vivid work in which Wilson envisions the inner life of an eleven-year-old boy — his daydreams and fantasies rendered as a universe both magical and sinister. The tape's pivotal image is a young boy looking through a large kitchen window, which becomes the portal for a series of dramatic, often startling inner visions. Fire, metal, wind, glass, and water serve as points of departure for elegant pictorial compositions and evocative metaphors. Unfolding without dialogue or spoken language, STATIONS articulates the fear and mystery of a child's interior world and his relation to the outside world beyond. A characteristic Wilson work: precise, controlled, deeply strange. LA FEMME À LA CAFETIÈRE (1989, 7 min) In this brief and exquisite collaboration, Robert Wilson and dancer Suzushi Hanayagi bring to life Paul Cézanne's painting La Femme à la Cafetière. The work exemplifies Wilson's ability to translate a static visual image into living tableau — a transformation of painting into performance, flattening time and depth into a new kind of presence. LA MORT DE MOLIÈRE (1995, 24 min) A collaboration between Robert Wilson and playwright Heiner Müller in which they imagine the death of Molière — representing it as a series of tableaux, with text passages recited by Müller himself. "Cinema watches Death at work," wrote Wilson of the piece. Müller's commentary adds another layer: "The poem watches a dying man at work, his name is Molière. The poem is not a film. The film watches an actor playing a dying man called Molière." The piece sits at the intersection of theater, film, and literary elegy — a meditation on mortality and artistic legacy made by two of the defining figures of 20th-century avant-garde performance. Total running time: approximately 90 minutes. Director / Artist: Robert Wilson LA MORT DE MOLIÈRE: In collaboration with Heiner Müller Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) About The Artist(s) Robert Wilson (October 4, 1941 – July 31, 2025) was an American director, playwright, and visual artist who fundamentally reshaped experimental theater over more than five decades. Born in Waco, Texas, he studied at the University of Texas before moving to New York, where he trained at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, a performance collective that became the incubator for his early landmark works. Wilson's theater — often described as a "theater of imagery" — is distinguished by its radical reimagining of theatrical time and space, its use of exquisitely composed light and movement in place of conventional narrative, and its synthesis of visual art, music, dance, and text into unified stage pictures. His work sits at a radical distance from naturalism: performers move with ritualized, slow precision, language is treated as sound as much as meaning, and the stage itself functions as a living painting. His breakthrough came with Deafman Glance (1970), a six-hour silent opera that electrified Paris audiences and prompted the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon to describe Wilson as the fulfillment of Surrealism's deepest aspirations. Throughout the 1970s Wilson created a series of epic-scale works that redefined theatrical duration, culminating in his collaboration with composer Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach (1976), a five-hour opera that premiered at the Avignon Festival and later played the Metropolitan Opera. It is widely regarded as one of the defining works of 20th-century performance. Over the following decades Wilson collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists — Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, Heiner Müller, Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, Willem Dafoe, and Marina Abramovic, among many others — while also directing canonical texts by Shakespeare, Beckett, Wagner, Ibsen, and Ionesco. He staged productions at the world's leading theaters and opera houses, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Berliner Ensemble, the Thalia Theater Hamburg, La Scala, and the Salzburg Festival. Alongside his theater work, Wilson was a prolific maker of video art. Beginning in 1978 he produced a series of innovative television works including VIDEO 50, DEAFMAN GLANCE, and STATIONS, transposing his theatrical visual language into the moving image. He also created an extensive series of Video Portraits of figures including Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 1991 Wilson founded The Watermill Center on Long Island, a "laboratory for performance" housed in a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation, which continues to host residencies, exhibitions, and productions. His drawings, sculptures, and installations are held in major collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Wilson received numerous honors throughout his life, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the Drama Desk Award, Obie Awards, and a 1986 Pulitzer Prize nomination. He died on July 31, 2025, at the age of 83. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut 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 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Adil Mansoor in Amm(i)gone at Long Wharf Theatre. Photo: Curtis Brown Photography Black Trans Women at the Center Eva Reign, Elisawon Etidorhpa, Simone Immanuel, Asteria LaFaye Summers, Indie Johnson (28 Sept. online, then streamed through 1 Oct.) The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion, adapted by Jonathan Silverstein (8 Nov. – 10 Dec., various locations) A View from the Bridge Arthur Miller (10 Feb. – 10 Mar., Canal Dock Boathouse, New Haven) Sanctuary City Martyna Majok (28 Mar. – 21 Apr., TheaterWorks Hartford) Darren Criss Benefit Concert (13 May, Lyman Center for the Performing Arts) Amm(I)gone Adil Monsoor (28 May – 23 Jun. Yale Theatre and Performance Studies Black Box) Long Wharf Theatre used two marketing slogans during the 2023-24 season: “Theatre is for Everyone” and “Theatre of Possibility.” The two themes come together in the statement on the theatre's home page, “We are committed to revolutionizing the power and possibility of live theater [sic] as a catalyst to bring people together and   fulfill our promise of 'theatre for everyone.'” The themes came together in Long Wharf's four in-person dramatic productions, which were presented in a variety of venues, exploring where it is possible to do theatre, and bringing people together to experience stories representing the diversity of New Haven's communities. Three of the four shows were co-productions with other East Coast theatres, connecting these theatre communities. The Year of Magical Thinking, produced in partnership with the Keen Company, was an adaptation by Jonathan Silverstein, the director, of Joan Didion's book, performed by Kathleen Chalfant. Last year Long Wharf left the theatre space it had occupied since 1965 and adopted a mobile theatre model; The Year of Magical Thinking took that to an extreme by being performed in Long Wharf supporters' living rooms and public libraries around New Haven. In a New Haven Register article, Kit Ingui, Long Wharf's managing director, explained that the show is designed to be staged in intimate spaces. Indeed, the show I saw was simply Kathleen Chalfant, as Joan Didion, talking to us, the audience, about the year during which both her husband and daughter died. The staging at the Milford Public Library was minimal: a low platform, two side tables, a chair, and a table lamp at one side of the library's meeting room—space enough for a grieving woman to tell us her loss. Anshuman Bhatia was credited with the lighting design, but there was no stage lighting. It was a simple, powerful piece. A View from the Bridge was performed on the top floor of the Canal Dock Boathouse, a carpeted room with a curved wall of windows looking out at the New Haven Harbor and Long Island Sound. The setting was composed of planked platforms, three free-standing doorways, a row of coat hooks, furniture, and a hanging lamp in a corner of the room, with the audience in seating banks wrapping the playing space by 90 degrees. Stage lighting equipment was hung on a black truss grid. The open deck outside the windows was used for street scenes, and the fateful knife fight was staged there. Microphones and speakers brought the noise and dialog inside for the audience, but it was easier to hear the action than to see it. The show tapped themes important to Long Wharf Theatre—immigration, gender roles, and homophobia—and probably had resonance for New Haven's large Italian-American community. However, the casting muddied the message. Alfieri, Eddie's lawyer and the narrator, was played by Patricia Black, a woman wearing a man's suit. It was hard to believe that Eddie, who worries that Rodolpho is homosexual and who has trouble dealing with the two female characters as his equal, would confide in a woman. Sanctuary City was a coproduction with TheaterWorks Hartford and was performed in TheaterWorks's theatre. It was co-directed by Jacob G. Padrón, Long Wharf's artistic director, and Pedro Bermúdez. Set in Newark, starting shortly after 9/11 and running through late 2005, it's a three-character piece about two undocumented alien teenagers—girl G and boy B—trying to stay in the USA, and B's lover, who complicates G and B's relationship. It's a compact story about the struggles of two Dreamers, well-acted by Sara Gutierrez and Grant Kennedy Lewis, but a tight playing space made it hard for me to see them. Emmie Finkel designed a setting with translucent panels for video projections by Pedro Bermúdez. The panels forced the action downstage where audience members and support columns blocked my view. Some of the projections were pretty but slowed the show. The show's opening was a video of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. That attack triggered tighter rules and suspicion of immigrants—part of the play's background—but I doubt anyone in the audience needed to be reminded of what happened on 9/11. For the final show, Long Wharf Theatre presented Amm(i)gone , a Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and PlayCo show produced in association with Kelly Strayhorn Theater and presented in the Theater and Performance Studies Black Box at Yale University. It was a one-person show created and performed by Adil Monsoor, supported in his storytelling by recorded video, live video, and audio recordings in a setting of Ramadan lanterns, cubes, and panels with mashrabiya lattice work. It was an intensely personal story about coming to America from Pakistan, Adil's relationship with his mother, and the tension between familial love and religious duty. His mother has become extremely religious and struggles to accept Adil’s queerness. To connect with her, Adil engaged with her by phone on a project to translate Sophocles' Antigone into Urdu. Antigone is often viewed as a conflict between Antigone and Creon over civil law and religious duty, but Adil emphasized the love between Ismene and Antigone, which endures despite Ismene's concern that Antigone is making a terrible mistake. During the post-show talk-back, one audience member identified herself as a gay Asian woman who came from an extremely religious family. This was the first time she'd seen her story on stage, and she was grateful. I thought about my own Catholic grandmother struggling to reconcile Church Law with her daughter's remarriage after divorce. It was a show about being gay, Muslim, and an immigrant, but it spoke to many. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Long Wharf Theatre has announced the 2024-25 season with the marketing slogan “Building our future together”: Artistic Congress, the 5th Annual Black Trans Women at the Center: New Play Festival , She Loves Me , El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle Of Doom,  and Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Toward Destiny . The Artistic Congress will be a conference, held a little more than a week before the US presidential election, to discuss theatre and democracy, consider the intersection of creativity and civic engagement, and create a broad network of artists amplifying the impact of collective effort—building our future together. References Footnotes About The Author(s) KARL G. RULING is the technical editor for Protocol , the journal of the Entertainment Services and Technology Association. Prior to that position, he was the technical editor for Theatre Crafts and Lighting Dimensions magazines, and a contributor to Stage Directions . He has an MFA in theatre design from the University of Illinois, and a BA with majors in Dramatic Art and Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has designed scenery, lighting, special effects, or sound for over 100 productions. 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.

Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen 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 Introduction Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF This Fall 2025 issue of the Journal of American Drama & Theatre is once again brimming with compelling topics in the form of articles, book and performance reviews, interviews, and roundtable discussions. Teya Juarez leads the issue with a pressing query into the use of fat suits on stage, particularly in Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale . Her analysis of the harms of costuming actors in fat suits is particularly resonant in the current moment shaped by the proliferation o f Ozempic and other weight loss drugs. Jewel Pereyra's article offers a fascinating deep dive on the importance of the Afro-Filipina American jazz singer and dancer Maggie Calloway’s "performances of aggregation." As Pereyra states, Calloway both preserved a form of Filipino culture and addressed the pressures of American cultural influence by “staging these political conflicts in front of popular audiences.” In keeping with our interest in expanding the range and scope of materials featured in JADT , the issue features a roundtable with members of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. Heather Nathans and Javier Hurtado curate this discussion titled “What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre.” The participants include artists and scholars in the field who have dedicated their careers to telling the stories of marginalized communities : Benny Sato Ambush, Henry Bial, Kristoffer Diaz, Kim Marra, and Harvey Young. These major voices speak to the complexity of issues surrounding diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in U.S. theatre. Our ongoing “Queer Voices” series explores the state of contemporary LGBTQIA+ theatre and performance through interviews. In this issue, Alex Ferrone talks to storied performance artist Carmelita Tropicana on her recent show Give Me Carmelita Tropicana !, the final performance at Soho Rep’s longtime theatre space; Benjamin Gillespie speaks to Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill to discuss the major success of the controversial Prince Faggot in New York; and Jen-Scott Mobley and Maya Roth ask playwright Jen Silverman about intimacy, paradox, and provide an update on Silverman’s wide range of writing projects. This issue also features four book reviews from our Book Review Editor Stephanie Lim. Lauren Friesen reviews Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage , edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter (Routledge, 2024); Henry Bial reviews Ben Spatz’s Race and Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research (Northwestern University Press, 2024); Eileen Curley reviews Marlis Schweitzer’s Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century (University of Iowa Press, 2020); and Sierra Rosetta reviews Bethany Hughes’s Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity (New York University Press, 2024). If you are interested in reviewing a book, send a query to jadtbookreviews@gmail.com . We are thrilled to welcome JADT ’s new Performance Review Editor, Jennifer Joan Thompson. After adding this section to the journal two years ago to provide more space for scholarly reviews in the field, we are grateful to now have a dedicated editor to run this section. This issue’s performance reviews feature The Shed’s production of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size by Isaiah Wooden; Audible Theater’s production of Dead Outlaw by Elliot Lee; a roundup up the 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival by Lindsey Mantoan; and a multi-author review of the dance piece ZAZ from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, directed by Ryan K. Johnson. We encourage our readers to submit their review pitches to jadtperformancereviews@gmail.com . Finally, JADT continues its ongoing commitment in providing a home for the New England Theatre In Review, formerly housed within the New England Theatre Journal . Editor Martha S. LoMonaco has curated a collection of New England-based theatres and seasons including Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres by Paul E. Fallon, theaters in the Berkshires by Steven Otfinoski, and the Long Wharf Theatre by Karl G. Ruling. In these uncertain times, it is remarkable to see the range of scholarship in our field capturing the vitality of theatre and performance practices and studies across the Americas. We hope you enjoy reading the issue as much as we did. References Footnotes About The Author(s) BENJAMIN GILLESPIE   is Assistant Professor of Theatre History & Performance Studies at Santa Clara University and co-editor of the  Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) . He is editor of  Split Britches: Fifty Years On   (University of Michigan Press, 2027) and co-editor of  Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging  (University of Michigan Press, 2026) and  The Routledge Companion to LGBTQ+ Theatre and Performance in North America  (Routledge, 2027). BESS ROWEN is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She is also affiliate faculty for both Gender & Women's Studies and Irish Studies. She is a member of Actors' Equity and an intimacy choreographer. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021) focuses on affective stage directions. Her next book project looks at the theatrical archetype of the “mean teenage girl.” She also serves as the President-Elect of the American Theatre & Drama Society and co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) . 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.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Savas Patsalidis Image Credits: Article Returning to Almada As I have done in recent years, this July (2025) I returned once again to Almada, drawn not only by the calibre of its annual festival, one of Portugal’s most significant theatrical events, but also by the atmosphere it cultivates: warm, relaxed, and almost familial in its sense of coexistence. In contrast to larger, often impersonal festivals with their endless parallel events and hurried transitions from venue to venue, the Almada Festival offers a markedly different experience. Here, one feels at home. The experience is more embodied, more communal, and, in a subtle yet clear sense, quietly anti-systemic. There is no imperative to engage in relentless networking, business cards at the ready, pressure to "see everything." Instead, there is time, time to watch, to listen, to feel, to reflect, to write, to encounter the city and its people. For me, this constitutes a form of cultural resistance: an alternative to the dominant festival logic of overproduction and consumption, what we might describe as the “festival-as-supermarket” model. Under the artistic direction of the energetic Rodrigo Francisco, the Almada Festival has organically embraced a philosophy of community , not merely as a thematic or managerial motif, but as the core of its artistic practice. Its programming does not cater to any particular aesthetic ideology or social elite, nor does it play into the dichotomy of "experts" versus "the masses." Instead, through its inclusive framework, it opens aesthetic proposals to a wide-ranging public, aiming not simply to disseminate the art of Dionysus, but to cultivate spectatorship itself, exposing audiences to a plurality of theatrical quality languages and stylistic vocabularies. One particularly emblematic gesture is the festival’s annual invitation to audiences to vote for the performance they would most like to see return the following year. This is not merely symbolic; it re-enacts a genuine form of co-curation, an authentic dialogue rather than a token gesture of “participation.” Staged in Restraint, Anchored in Emotion : Marius (Directed by Joël Pommerat) The first performance I attended was Marius , drawn from Marcel Pagnol’s emblematic Marseille Trilogy , directed by Joël Pommerat and staged on the main stage of the Teatro Municipal Joaquim Benite. The plot is relatively straightforward, some might even call it predictable: a young man (Marius) is torn between the dream of escape and the pull of romantic love. Life unfolds in a small café owned by his father, César, near the Marseille harbour, a place of routine, familiar encounters, philosophical banter, quarrels, and laughter. It serves as a communal hub, a kind of agora or informal tribunal, where everyday lives are continuously staged and restaged. For Marius, who longs to become a sailor and flee toward the unknown, the tightly composed and almost claustrophobic stage design by Éric Soyer becomes a metaphor for entrapment. Marius (Michel Galera). the dreamer of Marcel Pagnol’s Marius. Compagnie Louis Brouillar. Stage design: Éric Soyer. Cast: Damien Baudry, Élise Douyere, Michel Galera, Ange Melenyk, Redwane Rajel, Jean Ruimi, Bernard Traversa, Ludovic Velon. Photo: Agathe Pommerat. Courtesy of Almada Festival Into this enclosed world enters Fanny (Elise Douyere), Marius’ great love. Yet, as is often the case in narratives of departure, it is the dream, rather than the love, that ultimately prevails. Marius departs secretly at night, chasing the freedom promised by the sea, forsaking the stability and emotional security his relationship offers. Pommerat’s direction adopts an everyday, almost anti-theatrical rhythm, one that allows silences, hesitations, and tentative confessions to generate atmosphere. The staging resists melodrama; emotional charge emerges organically through dialogue, through the cadence of the local dialect, through understated humour tinged with melancholy, and through small, restrained gestures: a glance, a touch withheld, two bodies falling in love without ever fully closing the physical distance between them. Particularly in the scenes with Fanny, the physical detachment intensifies the spoken word, as the absence of bodily expression lends weight and space to language itself to perform its acoustic “physicality.” Fanny (Elise Douyere), thoughtful and troubled, at César’s café where her beloved Marius works. Photo: Agathe Pommerat. Courtesy of Almada Festival A striking aspect of this production is its origin in carceral space. Marius was first developed and staged in a high-security prison (2014–2017), with most of the current cast composed of formerly incarcerated individuals. Only the actress playing Fanny is a trained professional. This choice lends the production not only a profound social resonance but also a form of raw authenticity. Even the occasional performative imperfections or technical inconsistencies do not weaken the work’s power; on the contrary, they enhance its credibility and emotional depth. As noted earlier, thematically, Marius does not tread new ground: the sea as desire, love as dilemma, the conflict between duty and longing, father and son, these are familiar tropes. One might even be reminded of Eugene O’Neill’s sea plays, written during roughly the same period as Pagnol’s trilogy. Nor is the portrayal of Fanny, patient, compassionate, self-sacrificing, foreign within the representational codes of early 20th-century patriarchy. And yet, Pommerat’s direction holds the viewer’s attention through emotional restraint and formal discipline. The intensity is not on the surface, but it is there, quiet, unmistakable. In a world driven by acceleration and spectacle, Marius reminds us of the power of waiting, of deliberation, of the understated. Behind the Curtain, Beyond the Gaze: Teatro Delusio (Familie Flöz) At the open-air theatre of Escola António da Costa, we watched Teatro Delusio by the internationally acclaimed German ensemble Familie Flöz, a wordless performance imbued with the atmosphere of silent cinema and the precision of corporeal theatre. Its narrative centre is not the stage, but rather its backstage, that liminal zone where the dream of theatricality collides with the muted, repetitive routines of its unseen labourers, electricians, stagehands, ushers. Teatro Delusio . Opening scene with the three puppeteers presenting the star of the show to the audience. Cast: Andre Angulo, Johannes Stubenvoll, and Thomas Van Ouwerkerk . Direction & Scenography: Michael Vogel. Masks: Hajo Schüler. Costumes: Eliseu R. Weide. Lighting: Reinhard Hubert. Sound Design / Music: Dirk Schröder. Photo: Eckard Jonalik. Courtesy of Almada Festival At the heart of the piece are three theatre technicians, Bob, Bernd, and Ivan (played by Andre Angulo, Johannes Stubenvoll, Thomas Van Ouwerkerk), who emerge as emblematic figures of a world both invisible and essential. Through a sequence of slapstick-inflected episodes, we follow their backstage frictions, aspirations, vanities, and unspoken dreams. While the "front stage" dazzles with lights, applause, and spectacle, the backstage unfolds as a silent tragedy, the tragedy of waiting, invisibility, and failure, the tragedy of an unacknowledged life. Movement and mask convey the energy of Teatro Delusio . Photo: Eckard Jonalik. Courtesy of Almada Festival The three performers portray a total of 29 characters, ranging from conductors and dancers to eccentric directors and narcissistic stars. Their performance displays remarkable technical precision, choreographic clarity, and performative dexterity in their seamless transitions between roles, bodies, and tasks. This is physical acting par excellence, where the mask, intricately designed by Hajo Schüler, becomes a living surface, capable of transmitting fear, joy, awkwardness, and despair. Rather than concealing, the mask reveals. Backstage, a crew member longs for the spotlight of the star’s attention, while she prepares to dazzle her adoring audience. Teatro Delusio . Photo: Eckard Jonalik. Courtesy of Almada Festival Using purely visual means, without a single line of spoken dialogue, Teatro Delusio manages to explore themes of human solitude, the yearning for recognition, jealousy, love, and fulfillment. It is a dramaturgy of silence, where laughter and poignancy coexist in a fragile equilibrium. One does not laugh at the characters, but rather through them, recognising in their gestures the viewer’s own minor failures, deferred desires, and the barely perceptible weight of obscurity. Love of fame and recognition won’t take long to lead the members of the backstage crew into conflicts, confrontations, and absurd quarrels that spark laughter with their gags, but also evoke a deep sense of sympathy. Teatro Delusio. Photo: Eckard Jonalik. Courtesy of Almada Festival The absence of linguistic barriers explains why Teatro Delusio has toured in 34 countries to this day. Though meticulously structured, the performance might have benefited from a slightly tighter dramaturgy, particularly in the final twenty or so minutes, where the repetition of certain motifs risked narrative dilution. The birth scene, for instance, felt inventive but dramaturgically unanchored, an idea left unexplored. Nevertheless, this is a profoundly hybrid and meta-theatrical work where puppet theatre, mime, physical comedy, slapstick, tragedy, and farce are woven into a fluid structure that dialogues with the tradition of theatre within theatre . It is, in many ways, a reflexive homage to theatre itself, and especially to the mask, both as material object and as metaphor for identity, secrecy, duplicity, and existential disappointment Familie Flöz turns our attention to the invisible processes of stage-making, evoking resonances with productions like Ellie Dubois’ No Show (the Herald Award recipient at Edinburgh Fringe, 2017) in which the audience watches what does not happen when a performance collapses before their eyes, or Constanza Macras/Dorky Park’s Open for Everything (2012) , which centres on marginalised performers (from Roma communities), giving voice to those who remain in the shadows. Most notably, it echoes Michael Frayn’s ageless Noises Off (1982), an ingenious meta-farce that reveals the chaos behind the scenes of a matinee performance. In all these cases, gaze shifts from centre to margin, from performance to infrastructure, from protagonist to technician or outsider. What emerges is a commentary on theatrical visibility and the politics of spectatorship: Who is seen and thus rendered a subject of the gaze? And who remains unseen? What does it mean, literally and metaphorically, to be offstage, in theatre and in life? The closing moments offer no catharsis, only a bittersweet image of a world perpetually left behind. The characters remain there, in a space with no curtain, no lighting, no applause, only their breath, and their gaze, fixed upon an audience that does not see them. The performance does not speak.But it is loudly heard. A Classroom Against Oblivion: El mar. Visión de unos niños que no lo han visto nunca (Concept Xavier Bobés & Alberto Conejero) This Spanish documentary-style performance, El mar. Visión de unos niños que no lo han visto nunca (“The Sea: As Seen by Children Who Have Never Seen It”), performed by Xavier Bobés and Sergi Torrecilla, is based on the true story of Antoni Benaiges, a teacher in a remote village school in Bañuelos de Bureba (Burgos) in 1936. It is rooted in an act of historical remembrance and poetic reconstruction, a gesture of tender resistance through memory and education. Xavier Bobés and Sergi Torrecilla (in red shirt) on stage. Of the two, Torrecilla is the one who performs and narrates excerpts from the children’s writings, Conejero’s text, and Benaiges’ own words and Bobés the one who activates memory through the use of objects. Photo: Alberto Conejero. Courtesy of Almada Festival The story begins in 1934, when Benaiges, using his own savings, purchased a gramophone and a printing press for his rural classroom, encouraging the children to express themselves creatively. Two years later, his students produced a small booklet titled El mar. Visión de unos niños que no lo han visto nunca , in which they described how they imagined the sea, though none of them had ever seen it. Benaiges promised to take them to the coast that summer. However, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and his execution (July 25, 1936) at its onset rendered this promise tragically unfulfilled. Jou Serra and Mario Andrés Gómez’s lighting score, combined with Albert Coma’s projections and Julià Carboneras’s soundscape, creates an immersive and suggestive atmosphere that brings the audience closer to the space and time of the story enacted by the two actors. Photo: Alberto Conejero. Courtesy of Almada Festival The performance treats this historical episode with emotional delicacy, ethical clarity, and narrative restraint. Built around the aesthetics of documentary theatre and object theatre, the piece deploys minimal theatrical resources. Objects do not simply support the storytelling; they act as catalysts of emotion, charged relics that summon the affective memory of a vanished world. Through the use of live cameras, the children's perspective is expanded and brought into the visual field, layering the adult narration with the imaginary gaze of childhood. There is nothing ostentatiously innovative about the staging. On the contrary, the production is deliberately unassuming, almost “non-theatre” in its visual economy. It pivots around empathy, emotional presence, and the quiet beauty of relationality. Though it occasionally borders on melodrama, the performance maintains its composure, evoking emotion for the right reasons. It creates a subtle oscillation in which the spectator feels at times like the teacher, and at others, like the child. On stage, the two performers, Xavier Bobés and Sergi Torrecilla (wearing the red shirt), engage in a complementary enactment of memory: Bobés through the material activation of objects, and Torrecilla through the performative narration of texts drawn from the children’s writings, Alberto Conejero’s script, and Antoni Benaiges’ own words. Together, they articulate the dialectic between the “here-and-now” of theatrical presence and the “there-and-then” of historical absence, thereby bridging past and present with nuanced subtlety. With humility and clarity, they share the story and the memories it holds, honoring the legacy of Benaiges while elevating the values of hope, education, and human dignity, all conveyed through the fragile yet enduring voices of children. It is unsurprising that the piece has been presented widely across Latin American countries. Originally premiered at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya in February 2022, it has since been nominated for several Max Awards, including Best Play, Best Direction, and Best Actor (Bobés) for its performance at Teatro Corral de Comedias. To Move Is to Survive : Zugzwang (Concept and Performance Le Galactik Ensemble) Presented in the outdoor space of Escola D. António, Zugzwang (2021) marks the second collective creation of the French company Le Galactik Ensemble, following their earlier piece Optraken (seen at the same venue the previous year). Borrowing its title from the chess term zugzwang , a situation where any move leads inevitably to disadvantage or loss, the performance transforms this concept into an explosive physical allegory of human precarity and imbalance in a world of constant destabilisation. The set of Zugzwang (by Mathilde Bourgon) at the end of the performance : a bombed-out landscape, a pile of construction materials that would regain their shape and “threatening” role in the very next show Photo: Martin Argyroglo. Courtesy of Almada Festival Five acrobats encounter one another in a volatile scenographic landscape, somewhere between workshop, construction site, and laboratory. For sixty minutes, they compose a narrative of survival, not through language or plot, but through somatic confrontation with risk. The body becomes a storytelling device, contending with gravity, collision, imbalance, and fear. Each movement appears to be dictated by an environment that resists trust. The performers live, quite literally, in a constant state of zugzwang. Le Galactik Ensemle in action. Mathieu Bleton, Mosi Espinoza, Jonas Julliard, Karim Messaoudi, and Cyril Pernotrelo engage in a continuous struggle for survival in a world of unexpected obstacles and difficulties. Reacting and moving quickly is not a matter of choice but of necessity. Photo: Martin Argyroglo. Courtesy of Almada Festival The set design by Mathilde Bourgon, a kinetic, fragile mechanical architecture, populated by rails, pulleys, ropes, collapsing doors, and unpredictable surfaces, plays a pivotal role. It is not a passive backdrop but an active opponent, reactive, obstructive, sometimes deceptive. Visually, the piece evokes the mechanical traps of silent cinema, yet it resonates with a distinctly contemporary anxiety: the instability of material systems and environments. The performers do not merely move upon it, they survive within it. Struggling with the collapsing set. Photo: Galactik Ensemble. Courtesy of Almada Festival Everything falls apart. They have to do something to get out of the mess. Photo: Galactik Ensemle. Courtesy of Almada Festival For those unfamiliar with Le Galactik Ensemble, it is worth noting that their work specializes in what they call “situational acrobatics,” a form of real-time physical risk-taking, in which safety is never entirely guaranteed and failure is always a possibility. Nothing is wholly predetermined. The tension derives from this very volatility: perpetual edge, where everything could go wrong, and often nearly does. It s precisely at this threshold that theatricality emerges. Humour plays a crucial role, not as comic relief, but as a mechanism of resistance. It is the humour of despair and survival. The figures on stage are not superhumans but clowns, fragile, fallible, exposed. The grotesque, the comedic, and the existential coexist in a performative poetics of insecurity. As in the work of Aurélien Bory’s Compagnie 111 [i] or Cirque Inextremiste, [ii] physicality here is not for spectacle, but a necessary language for articulating the inexpressible. The ensemble performs with remarkable collective precision. There are no individual protagonists; the group functions as a single, interdependent organism navigating a hostile world. Acrobatics, choreographic tension, and acting discipline converge, not to showcase virtuosity, but to reveal necessity. This is a dramaturgy of survival rather than display. Zugzwang offers no resolution. There is no comfort, no catharsis. It presents a world that remains unstable, where every move carries the risk of collapse, and yet... stillness is not an option. One must keep moving, because to stop is simply to cease to exist. Listening to Absence: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Directed by Teresa Gafeira) Staged in the experimental venue of Teatro Joaquim Benite, this production by Companhia de Teatro de Almada is based on Peter Handke’s deeply personal novella A Sorrow Beyond Dreams , written in the aftermath of his mother’s suicide. The work resists conventional, plot-driven dramaturgy, opting instead to trace the inner rhythms of grief, and the writer’s struggle to render them communicable through language. Scene with the two protagonists (Duarte Guimarães and Pedro Walter) in Handke dramatized novella. Photo: Rui Mateus. Courtesy of Almada Festival Set in rural Austria between the two World Wars, the narrative unfolds against the backdrop of Handke’s mother’s life, her marriage, her disillusionment, her psychological collapse, and eventual death by overdose. Handke offers no sentimental embellishments. His narration oscillates between clinical observation and introspective inquiry, not aiming to provoke emotion, but to understand: How does one do justice to a life that disappeared in silence? The actors Duarte Guimarães and Pedro Walte share the text on stage, seamlessly voicing passages from Handke's novella. They embody the narrator’s internal monologue rather than portraying discrete, fully developed individual entities. Photo: Rui Mateus. Courtesy of Almada Festival This very question forms the basis of Teresa Gafeira’s directorial approach. The piece is delivered as a dual vocal monologue, wherein two performers do not “act” but testify, functioning as emissaries of an internal elegy. Their delivery is austere emotionally contained, eschewing outbursts of sentimentalism in favour of restraint. However, the absence of surtitles made the work significantly less accessible for non-Portuguese speakers. Despite prior familiarity with the source text, the live experience lacked linguistic and emotional immersion. It became difficult to apprehend how the words carried their weight, how silences sculpted their resonance, or how the performers physically processed the inner landscape of grief. While the vocal interpretation remained faithful to Handke’s style, the visual and spatial potential of the stage was left largely underutilized. The projected images functioned more as atmospheric backdrop than dramaturgical interlocutors. As a result, the possibility of a multimodal dialogue with memory remained underdeveloped. The performance lingered in a liminal space, powerful in speech, but theatrically rather undercharged. And yet, the ethical core of the work remained intact. The performance did not “display” grief, it remembered it. It whispered sorrow through language. That act alone carried immense weight. Mourning was not an emotional identification but a form of justice through articulation. Handke does not ask the audience to empathise but to reflect: How can theatre represent a life shaped by silence? How does theatre speak when the other no longer can? In this regard, the production aligns with other theatrical meditations on mourning, not as pathos, but as remembrance of absence. From Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape , where the voice of a cassette becomes the medium of grief, to Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Antigone , where loss is rendered as somatic burden and vocal repetition, theatre becomes not a mirror of life, but a ritual of memory. Such performances do not scream. They do not shock. They demand attention, silence, and time. They ask us to listen to what is never fully said. And the very fact that they continue to exist, and to insist, in an age of speed and information saturation, is itself a political gesture of interiority. A quiet monument to theatrical dignity in the face of erasure. A Language of Gesture, A Geometry of Motion: Quatro Cantos num Soneto and The Look (Choreography Fernando Duarte and Sharon Eyal) Fernando Duarte’s Quatro Cantos num Soneto undertakes an ambitious project: to translate Luís de Camões’ sonnets into the language of dance, capturing not only their semantic content but also their rhythm, texture, and contemplative depth through bodily gesture. Rather than illustrating the poetic text, the choreography treats it as a score for corporeal expression. The dancers of the Portuguese National Ballet (Ana Lacerda, Inês Amaral, Isabel Galriça, and Paulina Santos) do not narrate; they transcribe. Their movements become elliptical stanzas, undulations, and gestures that evoke musical interpretation more than dramaturgical action. Quatro Cantos num Soneto premiered at the Teatro Municipal Joaquim Benite, July 17, 2025. Music: Selections from John Dowland and Diego Pisador, curated by Ricardo Leitão Pedro. Costume Design: Ana Lacerda. Lighting Design: Fernando Duarte. Photo: Hugo David. Courtesy of Almada Festival The sonic landscape, enriched by precise vocal recitations of the sonnets, intensifies the performances’ multisensory atmosphere. The result is less a conventional dance narrative and more a case of "poetry in motion." However, this multilayered approach risks fragmenting the spectator’s experience. The continual interplay of speech, sound, and movement situates the piece in an intermediate space, neither pure dance theatre nor lyrical portraiture, demanding sustained attention, openness and patience from the viewer. Absent is a dramaturgical climax. The work foregoes linear progression and emotional crescendo. Instead, it offers introspection, poetic silence, and an invitation to contemplative observation of the body as a vessel of language. This is a piece that resists facile visual consumption. It does not seek to move the audience emotionally but to attune it. It is an “anti-spectacle,” an embodied reminder that silence, too, possesses rhythm. The Look Immediately following was The Look , choreographed by Sharon Eyal and originally created in 2019 for the Batsheva Dance Company. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s quote, “Nobody can hurt me without my permission” ( Time Out/ Israel, Feb. 24, 2019), this masterful work delicately balances group movement with individual expression, and mechanical synchronization with organic flow, maintaining an exquisite tension throughout. The dancers, dressed identically, move en masse , as if forming a single body, yet never surrender their individuality to the anonymity of the collective. Each body retains its uniqueness. The Look . Costume Design: Alon Cohen. Lighting Design: Daniel Nørgren-Jensen. Music: Ori Lichti. Photo: Hugo David. Courtesy of Almada Festival Whether moving as solitary units or as coordinated formations, their ceaseless motion and repositioning releases an atmosphere that is hypnotic, mesmerizing, and almost trance-like, an effect intensified by the cold, geometrically regulated lighting. Movement patterns unfold in relentless cycles: mechanical repetitions that mirror the steady pulse of the human body. These motions are intricately shaped and sometimes provoked by Ori Lichtik’s precise and nuanced musical score. Together, they create a physical rhythm where the dancers’ bodies transcend their materiality, taking on the quality of fleeting shapes or abstract concepts rather than solid forms. The Look . Photo: Hugo David. Courtesy of Almada Festival Compared to Eyal’s other works, such as the emotionally charged Love Chapter II (2017) or the hybrid 2 Chapters Love (2022), The Look adopts a rather more formalist and abstract choreographic language. While Love Chapter II and 2 Chapters Love emphasize raw emotion and narrative complexity, The Look strips movement down to its essential elements. Here, the dancers function more as vessels of energy and repetition, articulating phrases in an algorithmic dance vocabulary of movement . The Look stands as a significant addition to Sharon Eyal’s artistic corpus. Structurally rigorous and aesthetically entrancing, it probes the very essence of “looking,” of perceiving movement as meaning. The gaze of the dancer becomes inseparable from the gaze of the spectator. This very sense of disciplined sensitivity was realized by the dancers of Companhia Nacional de Bailado. They did not “perform” the choreography; they embodied it. Without exaggeration or unnecessary embellishment, they delivered a performance of unity and aesthetic discipline. Their aim was not to impress, but to articulate, as a single organism, the expressive potential of the work. Broken Images, Breathing Bodies: Extra Moenia (Conception and Direction Emma Dante) My recent visit to the Almada Festival concluded with Emma Dante’s polyphonic performance Extra Moenia (Latin for Outside the Walls ) , which once again confirmed her unique theatrical method: a choral mosaic of bodies and voices, in which the traditional notion of plot gives way to the dramaturgy of coexistence. The opening scene of Extra Moenia . Photo: Roselina Garbo. Courtesy of Almada Festival Extra Moenia is not a conventional performance. It is a living body in motion, a collective choreography of everyday gestures and fractured social realities. Fourteen performers from Dante’s company Sud Costa Occidentale awaken within a set resembling a makeshift shelter. As they dress and begin to move through the performance space, they confront a world beyond the safety of its walls, a world marked by crisis, war, destitution, and displacement. Extra Moenia, premiered in March 2025 at Teatro Bellini in Naples.The production is a collaboration between Teatro Biondo Palermo, Atto Unico – Carnezzeria, and Sud Costa Occidentale. Photo: Roselina Garbo. Courtesy of Almada Festival The rhythm of the performance constantly shifts. Scenes alternate like snapshots: a railway station, a marketplace, a congregation in prayer, a beach turned into a site of shipwreck. Dante composes a palimpsest of contemporary wounds, embodied by emblematic figures: a refugee from Ukraine, a migrant from Congo, an Iranian woman removing her veil, a conservative family, a group of football players from Palermo. Each character carries trauma, but each also contains a sliver of hope. Extra Moenia. Costume Design: Mariella Gerbino. Movement Assistant: Davide Celona. Production Assistant: Daniela Gusmano. Sound Department Head: Giuseppe Alterno. Artistic Coordination: Giuseppe Baiamont. Photo: Roselina Garbo. Courtesy of Almada Festival Aesthetically, the narrative evokes the logic of social media: brief, rapidly shifting images that allow no time for sustained reflection. Thematically, war, displacement, patriarchy, and ecological collapse are introduced more as reference points than as subjects of in-depth exploration. This fragmentation risks aesthetic overload but simultaneously reflects with accuracy the disorienting experience of contemporary social disintegration. Dante’s primary tool is the body, not the idealized, but the socially worn body that bears tension, fear, and desire. A body that does not enact roles but reveals its political weight as a record of violent coexistence, a container of memory, and a site of survival. The tone oscillates between the satirical and the tragic, from the noisy market scenes and station announcements to monologues about rape, war, and displacements. The finale, featuring a "sea of plastic," is visually and emotionally powerful. It symbolizes a collective shipwreck, a space where the body becomes an archive of trauma. At times, the multiplicity of themes results in aesthetic saturation. The accumulation of images and messages leaves little room for reflective engagement; nothing fully settles. The rapid pace of the performance allows little space for depth or contemplation. In a way, the direction seems primarily concerned with creating a kaleidoscope of impressions, with inclusivity as its dominant image. Despite the fragmentation and underdeveloped elements, the performance as a whole manages to transcend the limitations of its elliptical narrative. It draws the audience into a theatrical experiment that breathes with History, a collective ritual devoid of heroics or final applause, yet filled with bodies that persist. And in an era marked by aesthetic fatigue, that very persistence becomes a vital necessity. Epilogue: Listening to the Present This year’s festival, with its 20 productions, local and foreign, each with its own style, managed as a whole to shape a diverse ensemble that powerfully highlighted urgent issues concerning contemporary theatre: how can human experience be conveyed in an age of acceleration, instability, and global rupture, where the world seems to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions? How can contemporary theatre speak again in a voice that is neither obsolete nor overloaded, but capable of listening to the present and articulating possibilities for the future? From the sparse, introspective study of the body as a medium of language in Quatro Cantos num Soneto and The Look , to the fragmented, overwhelming polyphony of Extra Moenia , the precarious balancing act of Zugzwang , and the sharp-witted comedy Les Gros Patinent Bien—Cabaret de Carton by the French company Compagnie Le Fils du Grand Réseau , created by Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan, where the only stage props were dozens of cardboard boxes, the performances did not merely depict reality; they sought to reconstruct it, interrogate it, and resist it. They offered no easy answers, no closure and no comfort. Instead, they acted as mirrors and warnings. They invited vigilance, critical attention, and an openness to complexity. Perhaps this is the essential quest: to sustain our relationship with theatre not as an escape, but as a confrontation, a space of reflection, conflict, and creation. A space where light and darkness, past and present, art and life breathe together. A space that still believes in the necessity of meaning. References [i] This is a Toulouse-based performance company founded in 2000 by director and scenographer Aurélien Bory. The environment plays a significant role in storytelling. It is an active force. See Plan B (2003), Plus ou moins l'infini (2005), Sans objet (2009), and Plexus (2012), among other works. [ii] Cirque Inextremiste is a French contemporary circus company founded in 1998 by director and performer Yann Ecauvre. It blends physical theatre, circus arts, street performance, and often risk-taking acrobatics. Extrêmités (2012), Extension (2014), Exit (2017), Warning (2022) are among their most notable productions. References About the author(s) Savas Patsalidis is Professor Emeritus in Theatre Studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he has taught at the School of English for close to 35 years. He has also taught at the Drama School of the National Theatre of Northern Greece, the Hellenic Open University and the graduate program of the Theatre Department of Aristotle University. He is the author of fourteen books on theatre and performance criticism/theory and co-editor of another thirteen. His two-volume study, Theatre, Society, Nation (2010), was awarded first prize for best theatre study of the year. In 2019 his book Theatre & Theory II: About Topoi, Utopias and Heterotopias was published by University Studio Press. In 2022 his book-length study Comedy’s Encomium: The Seriousness of Laughter , was also published by University Studio Press. In addition to his academic activities, he writes theatre reviews for various journals. He is on the Executive Committee of the Hellenic Association of Theatre and Performing Arts Critics, a member of the curators’ team of Forest International Festival (organized by the National Theatre of Northern Greece), and the editor-in-chief of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques , the journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.