By Liwaa Yazji | A collection of poems from Syrian playwright and filmmaker Liwaa Yazji. < 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 Three Poems Liwaa Yazji Download PDF This collection of three poems was written in 2015 by the Syrian playwright and filmmaker Liwaa Yazji. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat By Sami Ismat Published: May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution:

Iris Smith Fischer Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Iris Smith Fischer By Published on June 2, 2016 Download Article as PDF This special issue, sponsored by the American Theatre and Drama Society, explores forms of research and inquiry offered by theatre and performance in the age of STEM—that is, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. [1] The issue also presents developments in the scientific fields of information technology, biology, and medicine that employ techniques and approaches drawn from theatre practices. The issue poses a number of questions: What challenges and opportunities does this historical moment present for theatre to assert its relevance and necessity? How does theatre engage in alternate forms of inquiry? How does scholarship aid theatre, both by bringing theatre’s methods of inquiry into view or engaging in them itself? Can alternate forms of inquiry close the gap between practice and analysis in theatre, and counter claims that research occurs only in STEM disciplines? How can theatre offer an ethical perspective on STEM research, which claims to be value free? These are humanists’ questions, fueled by recognition that the arts themselves involve forms of research and inquiry, and that the concept of scientific objectivity, with its concomitant rejection of subjectivity, should be reexamined. Scientists, on the other hand, want to know how theatre and performance techniques can aid them in their research and teaching, or in the dissemination of results to colleagues, administrators, and the general public. For many scientists, valuable research is objective and ideology-free, separate from applications of already-produced knowledge, and clearly distinct from the creation of plays, the activities of performance artists, or the types of analysis and evaluation involved in theatre history or dramatic criticism. Yet some scientists question the exclusion of subjectivity, ideology, or empathy from STEM research and inquiry. These inquirers ask how the STEM disciplines can incorporate methods of learning borrowed from the humanities and arts, be opened more fully to participation by women, minorities, and the disabled, and teach students in the STEM disciplines to recognize, value, and use forms of embodied knowledge. The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes that the term research is not proprietary to the STEM disciplines, defining it as “systematic investigation or inquiry aimed at contributing to knowledge of a theory, topic, etc., by careful consideration, observation, or study of a subject.” Yet the OED also recognizes later disciplinary and institutional usages: “original critical or scientific investigation carried out under the auspices of an academic or other institution.” In a similarly broad fashion, the OED defines the term inquiry as “the action of seeking, esp. (now always) for truth, knowledge, or information concerning something,” and offers “search, research, investigation, examination” as related terms. [2] Theatre and performance inquire and investigate, often proceeding carefully and methodically, but offering knowledge through acts, processes, and conceptual lenses such as the mimetic, the epic, the postdramatic. These types of knowledge are often not recognized as knowledge of an objective world. The current cultural dominance of the STEM disciplines is driven both by economic exigencies and underlying ideological assumptions about what constitutes valuable research and inquiry. Identifying performance as research can be seen as a response by artists and scholars to institutional, political, and economic pressures, and as a corollary effort to break out of academic silos and loosen funding restrictions. Performance approached as research allows inquirers to recognize commonalities among disciplines and share their methodologies and techniques. This turn reflects in twenty-first-century fashion the moment in the late nineteenth century when higher education was being organized in institutions but disciplinarity had not yet taken on its more rigid twentieth-century forms. Inquiry in science was not so isolated from inquiry in philosophy or literary history. One thinks of the American pragmatists—Peirce, James, Dewey, Addams, and others—who sought to keep in view the connections between scientific advances and humanistic inquiry. A similar desire has emerged recently in many fields, among them complexity science, biosemiotics, and epigenetics, which encourage awareness of the role of embodied knowledges in research. In this regard Wendy Wheeler usefully distinguishes between conceptual, experiential, and tacit forms of knowledge. Tacit knowledge, or “creaturely skillful phenomenological knowledge,” is essential to human flourishing and artistic creativity but incapable of formulation in propositional language. Yet conceptual knowledge or “abstract intellectual knowledge that ” cannot by itself account for experiential knowledge or “phenomenological embodied knowledge how ,” i.e., readable acts created “in engagement with the world and other embodied creatures.” Biosemiotic methods of inquiry, Wheeler argues, allow access to necessary tacit knowledge through the reading of such acts. While applicable to many realms of life, human and otherwise, she notes, “Skillful being in cultural complex totalities is a specifically human skillful being in the world. Actions (especially, perhaps, political actions) driven mainly by abstract thinking, which forget embodied experience, local knowledge, and skillfulness, are always, almost by definition, dangerous.” [3] Research and inquiry should engage the phenomenological how along with the conceptual that . In an effort to claim the term research for performance practices, some have questioned the tendency in the arts to distinguish between practice and analysis, as Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter point out: While performance practices have always contributed to knowledge, the idea that performance can be more than creative production, that it can constitute intellectual inquiry and contribute new understanding and insight is a concept that challenges many institutional structures and calls into question what gets valued as knowledge. Perhaps the most singular contribution of the developing areas of practice as research (PaR) and performance as research (PAR) is the claim that creative production can constitute intellectual inquiry.[4] The movement known as Practice as Research (PaR) first developed in the United Kingdom, Riley and Hunter note, in response to government assessment tools introduced in the early 1990s to apportion funding based on departments’ research productivity. While humanities scholarship—as opposed to arts creation—more readily fits existing definitions of conceptual knowledge production (in the form of scholarly articles and monographs), arts departments in the U.K. faced the challenge of developing criteria for assessing creative activity as research, a process begun later at U.S. universities, and still ongoing. [5] Today embodied knowledges are being widely discussed at conferences and in publication. In their recent call for a working group on “Transfusions and Transductions: Science and Performance as Permeable Disciplines,” Vivian Appler and Meredith Conti argue, “As with the clinical laboratory and astronomical observatory, the theatre serves as a reflexive and generative site of transformations, a place to penetrate barriers and test innovative ideas, approaches, and practices.” [6] Also promising in closing the practice/analysis divide is the concept of situated knowledge, drawn in part from black feminist thought and summarized here by Lynette Hunter: Unlike scientific knowledge in which the effect of the observer is often a ‘problem’ and many experiments are devised in order to minimize it, in situated knowledge the whole point is that the observer is engaged. It is only through their engagement that knowledge can be manifested, and the observer is both the practitioner who makes things and the audience or respondent.[7] Calling such current developments “a moment of discovery and transition” in the long history of research in performance, Arthur Sabatini emphasizes that the training of performers is built upon considerable research into the capacities of the human body and mind. Use of the voice, breathing, manual dexterity, movement techniques, directing or choreographing for performance are all outcomes from highly proscribed and ever-evolving systems that have been researched, repeatedly tested, and advanced by practitioners worldwide.[8] Institutional pressures and burgeoning terminology may actually present opportunities to explore and document the need for embodied and situated knowledges that cross the institutional divide between arts and humanities on the one hand, and STEM disciplines on the other. Invested in both creativity and discovery, initiatives are coming from all sides to bridge that gap in terms of how research is conducted, students are trained, and knowledge is disseminated. * The articles that follow argue for the value of embodied knowledges from the nine contributors’ rich and varied backgrounds in theatre history, playwriting, both arts and science education (including science museum education), physics, molecular biology, medicine, engineering, information science and technology, feminism, gender and sexuality studies, acting, directing, and—not least—stand-up comedy. Each perspective contributes in its own way to this special issue. Bradley Stephenson, in “This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D. W. Gregory’s Radium Girls ,” approaches embodied knowledges offered by theatre in terms of disability studies, epic theatre, and recent theories of animacy. Building on Mel Chen’s concept of animacy as “the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present,” Stephenson argues that, in Gregory’s re-telling of the historical events involving young female workers poisoned by their interactions with radium-laced paint, “radium itself becomes an actor and character in the play.” Citing disability theory as an ally of performance and theatre studies, Stephenson explores the interactions of biological life with radioactive half-life in order to rewrite our medical understanding of radium’s effects on the body as a complex of transcorporeal agencies. Vivian Appler approaches science—in this case physics, astronomy, and engineering—as “a liberal cultural domain,” a formulation that recognizes the STEM disciplines’ roots in liberal humanism. “Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of The End of the Moon ” argues that scientists and artists alike have a social responsibility to “recognize how theatre and other representational modes of performance impact a cultural imaginary that contains both the sciences and the arts.” Appler calls for a “holistic cultural conversation” to bridge what C. P. Snow once termed ‘the two cultures divide’: “Interdisciplinary performance research can disrupt this biased cultural scenario by examining science-oriented performance artists who work from a feminist perspective.” Appler focuses on Laurie Anderson’s arts residency at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the resulting 2004 performance piece The End of the Moon : Anderson endeavors to instill in her audiences a sense of wonder at the world while also encouraging active participation in the larger culture in which the domain of astronomy is embedded. . . . [She] fills the space between wonder at scientific achievement and an active engagement with the socio-political criticism of those achievements through embodied and technologically transductive performance techniques. By means of transduction or “communication of information across different media,” Appler continues Anderson’s intervention, revealing in the performance a “cyborg system” that invites discussion of gender assumptions active both within science and outside of it. By documenting a woman performance artist embodying representations of gendered scientific research, Appler’s article shares concerns expressed by Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd, and Suzanne Trauth about the barriers women encounter in thinking of themselves as researchers and gaining access to the sciences. Suzanne Trauth’s play script iDream , based on Eileen Trauth’s research and documented by Karen Keifer-Boyd, is designed to “raise awareness and critique hegemonic social narratives regarding who [can] participate in the STEM field of IT [information technology].” The authors of “ iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change” have found that the scientific professions have difficulty creating gender balance. Just as scholarly publications on information technology are not written in language accessible for the general public, “the scientific model of research dissemination leaves little room for the expression of subtlety, nuance, emotion, and holistic representation.” The authors turn instead to girls, their families, and their teachers, to raise awareness of the cultural narratives at work. Transforming Eileen Trauth’s research findings into theatrical scenarios, the authors seek to “stimulate awareness, understanding, and activism about barriers to women in technological fields.” iDream employs several story lines to engage audiences during staged readings and the discussions that follow. In a work process resembling what Appler terms “interactional expertise,” albeit not in a full production or performance art but rather in a script-centered experience, the authors created an exploration of “science opportunities . . . and barriers . . . [focusing] not so much on overt barriers [but] rather the process by which a young woman might unconsciously internalize limits on her dreams.” Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio also investigate theatre’s applications in the interaction between STEM researchers and the general public. Rather than raising awareness of constraining social narratives, the authors report on their use of Viola Spolin’s improvisation techniques to prepare undergraduate life science students to communicate complex concepts to non-experts. Duckert and De Stasio developed a required capstone course to rehearse students in performance skills they need as professionals and public intellectuals, i.e., to make their discoveries “accessible and understandable by linking scientific concepts to concepts the audience already knows.” Moreover, We want our graduates to be cognizant of their audience, to be able to react in real time to the cues the audience members send concerning their understanding of oral and visual communication, and . . . to channel their creative energy and enthusiasm for their work [in order] to communicate scientific information effectively and engagingly. Often initially resistant to engaging in theatrical improvisation, students find that even minimal awareness of performance circumstances improves their ability to communicate. While this would not surprise theatre majors, the incorporation of performance skills into a life sciences curriculum appears to leave life science majors with a new respect for the role that movement, gesture, and facial expression play in communication. The authors also note that, as teachers, they became more aware of public speaking’s embodied character, as well as physiological and neurological elements such as the linkage between mimicry (empathetic physical behaviors) and the action of mirror neurons in fostering an audience’s receptivity. Could performance techniques become part of the life sciences’ methods of disseminating discoveries? Duckert and De Stasio’s capstone course, embedded in their department’s curriculum, suggests that improvisational performance could assist STEM researchers in communicating more effectively with administrators, legislators, and the general public. This possibility also appears in “Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters,” in which George Pate and Libby Ricardo address the use of simulated patients in training medical students for clinical encounters. A relatively recent development, simulated patients—non-actors who volunteer their participation—do not learn a traditional standardized script but are given their characters’ medical and personal histories and also acting guidelines for behaving as their characters would in real-life consultations with their doctors. As the authors note, such “high fidelity” encounters rehearse the performance of empathetic responses to improvised, often unpredictable patient behaviors. The authors’ use of simulated patients follows “recent research suggesting that clinical skills are not ancillary to medical care but in fact affect healing and recovery in measurable ways.” In this regard, Pate and Ricardo’s project resembles that of Duckert and De Stasio, both in regard to the medical students’ initial reluctance to role-play and in the authors’ successful use of workshop exercises to integrate clinical skills with medical knowledge. Drawing a parallel to literary techniques of storytelling, Pate and Ricardo found that such improvisational exercises, like fictional narratives, helpfully “suggest responses without dictating them, urge behaviors without ordering them, illuminate values without oversimplifying them, and in general complicate the matters rather than clarifying or confirming them. . . . [Further,] improvisatory acting situations may offer a greater immediacy and a wider range of possible responses than a poem or story can.” Of all the activity going on in performance as research and research-informed theatre, this special issue presents only a sampling. Many other projects incorporating theatre and performance offer embodied and situated knowledges that can inform scientific research, suggest alternate forms of inquiry, and allow inquirers in the age of STEM to communicate effectively as public intellectuals. References [1] It has been a pleasure to work with JADT editors James Wilson and Naomi Stubbs, and managing editor James Armstrong. I extend my appreciation to them and also to the American Theatre and Drama Society for the opportunity to edit this special issue. My special thanks go to Cheryl Black, ATDS President, and the members of the special issue publications committee, ATDS members all, who both served as readers and provided me with excellent advice. [2] “Research,” “Inquiry,” Oxford English Dictionary (Online) (Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 2000-). http://www2.lib.ku.edu/login?url=http://www.oed.com . [3] Wendy Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006), 49. [4] Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter, “Introduction,” Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xv. [5] Ibid, xvii. Riley and Hunter distinguish among the relevant terms: “The acronym ‘PaR’ in the United Kingdom refers to ‘practice as research’ in its most inclusive sense to embrace music practices, the visual arts, dance, and theatre [while] ‘PbR’ refers to ‘practice-based research’ with a wider reach across the arts and sciences. . . . PbR is also well-established in the United Kingdom and Europe, and contributes to many areas, from the medical sciences to spectatorship studies. PbR emerges from different academic areas, but seems to have particular usage in the sciences. . . . In the United States, especially in the fields of performance and theatre studies, the acronym PAR is common shorthand for ‘performance as research’.” [6] E-mail communication from Meredith Conti, 23 May 2016. [7] Lynette Hunter, “Situated Knowledge,” in Riley and Hunter, Mapping Landscapes , 151. [8] Arthur Sabatini, “Approaching Knowledge, Research, Performance and the Arts,” in Riley and Hunter, Mapping Landscapes , 120, 118. Footnotes About The Author(s) Iris Smith Fischer is Professor of English at the University of Kansas, where she teaches modern drama, semiotics, literary and dramatic theory, and avant-garde performance. From 2007-2010 she served as editor of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Her publications include Mabou Mines: Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s (author, University of Michigan Press, 2011); Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance (co-editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); American Signatures: Semiotic Inquiry and Method, by Thomas A. Sebeok (editor, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Her current book project, "Charles Peirce and the Role of Aesthetic Expression in 19th-Century U.S. Semiotics," examines the intertwined histories of theatre (Delsartist approaches to actor training and public speaking) and the still-emerging field of science-based semiotics. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi By Peyman Shams Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Under the steady yet imaginative direction of Naghmeh Samini, Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play English takes on a life that is both rooted in realism and lifted by metaphor. In this Seattle staging, co-produced by ArtsWest and the Seda Iranian Theatre Ensemble, the story’s intimate frame belies the breadth of its implications. The premise is deceptively simple: in 2008, in Karaj—a cosmopolitan city near Tehran—four adult students gather for a TOEFL [1] (preparation class. They come from different walks of life, each carrying personal stakes in mastering English, and are guided by their teacher, Marjan (Vahishta Vafadari), who enforces a strict “English Only” policy. While for many, learning a second language may be a path to personal growth or even a leisure pursuit, for these characters—like many English learners around the world—it is neither optional nor casual, but a vital necessity. Over six weeks of lessons, shown through a series of short blackout scenes, we watch them struggle with vocabulary, accents, and the cultural weight the English language carries. What unfolds is more than a comedy of miscommunication; it is a layered exploration of identity, belonging, and the uneasy compromises of assimilation. English by Sanaz Toossi, directed by Naghmeh Samini, co-produced by ArtsWest and Seda Iranian Theatre Ensemble. From left: Marjan (Vahishta Vafadari), Roya (Janet Hayatshahi), Elham (Shereen Khatibloo), Omid (Emon Elboudwarej), and Goli (Newsha Farahani). Photo by John McLellan. The classroom is both a literal and symbolic space, where the students’ lives intersect for a brief time, where the rules are clear, but the emotional terrain is anything but. Elham (Shereen Khatibloo), brimming with ambition and impatience, has her sights set on medical school in Australia, and passing this English test is the key to her dream. Competitive and blunt, she is visibly frustrated whenever her English falters. Goli (Newsha Farahani), just eighteen, has no specific plan; she is here simply because she loves English, loves the way it makes her feel, and trusts it will be essential for her future. Roya (Janet Hayatshahi), the eldest, has a deeply personal reason: her son in Canada insists she learn English before she can spend meaningful time with her granddaughter. Omid (Emon Elboudwarej), the only man in the class, is already nearly fluent, claiming to be brushing up for a green card interview, though his ease with the language suggests other, unspoken motivations. Presiding over them all is Marjan, who has returned to Iran after nine years in Manchester. Charismatic yet guarded, she enforces her “English Only” rule with conviction, and seems, perhaps, more devoted to the language itself than to any formal curriculum. From the moment she writes those two words— “English Only”—on the board, the play’s central tensions are set in motion. The rule is meant to immerse the students fully in the language, but it also forces them to abandon the comfort and poetry of their mother tongue. Toossi’s ingenious device removes the need for subtitles: when the characters are speaking their native Persian, the actors use fluent, everyday American English; when they are speaking “English” in class, they adopt a Persian accent, slow their delivery, stumble over grammar, and lose their eloquence. Under Samini’s direction—herself a recent immigrant to the United States—and with a cast composed mostly of Iranian-American actors, this linguistic shift is executed with precision and complete believability. The change is immediate and intuitive; the audience feels the strain of halting, accented speech and the relief of slipping back into the fluidity of one’s native language. In less skilled hands, the device might feel forced, but here it is seamless—an organic extension of the story, and a testament to both Toossi’s writing and the performers’ craft. Samini honors the realism of Toossi’s structure while layering it with visual and symbolic flourishes. Parmida Ziaei’s simple yet effective set design treats chairs as more than functional classroom props: they are stacked, suspended, and rearranged to suggest instability, aspiration, and confinement. In one especially memorable scene, this departure from stark realism—so characteristic of many Persian plays, including Samini’s own work—reaches its height. As Marjan recalls her memories of England, the classroom chairs are transformed into bus seats, making her recollection physically tangible for the audience. Throughout the production, many props are left to the imagination: a blackboard whose writing appears projected on the back wall, an invisible ball passed around in a vocabulary game, an unseen speaker playing a Ricky Martin song. Their absence draws the audience into the act of creation, inviting them to complete the world of the play in their own minds. The classroom emerges in a cold gray-blue palette: the stage opens on rows of blue-gray plastic chairs, soon occupied by characters dressed in varying shades of the same muted spectrum. Only Marjan, the teacher, breaks the monotony—her yellow clothing standing out as a visual marker of someone distinct, someone who has lived beyond the confines of this world. Chih-Hung Shao’s lighting design deepens the atmosphere, using flickering fluorescents to signal scene changes and to underscore the drabness of the setting. The light is often cool, creating a sense of distance and uncertainty, but it warms in rare, fleeting moments of connection. Alongside Shao’s work, Andi Villegas’ sound design reinforces this starkness, keeping the aural world spare and purposeful. Ziaei’s costumes ground the characters in contemporary Iranian streetwear while subtly reflecting their personalities. The play’s music is equally restrained, chosen to serve the text rather than dominate it. When Roya plays a Persian song—unspecified in the script—the selection fits her generation and taste perfectly, while also recalling the “yellow color of amber,” Marjan’s favorite, mentioned in a line of poetry within the piece. The episodic nature of the play mirrors the rhythms of a real classroom: the repetition of drills, the gradual building of trust, the small ruptures that occur when personalities clash. There is no single climactic event; instead, meaning accumulates through games, confessions, and quiet acts of defiance. Some threads are left unresolved. As in a real classroom, the characters avoid fully revealing their feelings, motivations, and secrets, yet each one follows their own personal arc throughout the show, which often remains unfinished and unresolved for the audience. The cast navigates Toossi’s linguistic landscape with precision. Vafadari’s Marjan is a portrait of contradictions—warm yet exacting, nostalgic yet pragmatic. She reveals only fragments of her past: a life in England where she went by “Mary,” [2] a version of herself she liked better, because “small sacrifices,” like anglicizing a name, “can open our world.” [3] Her insistence on an “English Only” policy is not just a teaching method but also a shield, a way of maintaining control and protecting the identity she cultivated abroad. When challenged—particularly by Elham—her calm exterior can fracture, exposing both vulnerability and the subtle prejudices absorbed from years of living under the gaze of another culture. Though she delights in the English language, in Hollywood movies, and even in “American Coca-Cola,” [4] the play never discloses why she abandoned her life in England to return to Iran. Her quiet connection with Omid remains unspoken, and her marriage is left entirely offstage. By the end, disillusioned with teaching adults—most of whom aspire to emigrate, a path she once took and then reversed—she turns instead to teaching beginner courses for children. Khatibloo’s Elham is the live wire of the class—sharp-tongued, quick to challenge, and just as quick to conceal her vulnerabilities. Her confidence bristles on the surface, but beneath it lies a deep frustration. In private, she admits she has failed the TOEFL multiple times, a moment of raw candor that reframes her bluster as a form of self-defense. Khatibloo ensures Elham never tips into caricature; her pride and her shame are equally vivid, each fueling the other. Headstrong and restless, Elham shifts constantly between combative energy and moments of visible overwhelm as she wrestles with the English language. She resents the way it makes her sound—like an idiot, as she bluntly puts it [5] —when she knows she is anything but. It’s a sentiment many immigrants, perhaps even Marjan herself, have felt: the sense that, in a new country, the language barrier obscures vast parts of who you are, stripping away wit, intelligence, and nuance until you appear diminished in the eyes of others. “I have this amazing dream sometimes that the Persian Empire kept growing,” [6] Elham confides, savoring the idea that one day American and British children might have to learn Persian to join the global conversation. But she knows it’s only a fantasy; the linguistic war has long since been won, and, as Marjan tells the class, to be success now you need to “forget your Iranian-ness.” [7] Elham does eventually manage to achieve a passing TOEFL score, but her victory is hollow. She still hates English, and her earlier conversation with Roya lingers as a warning about her future. “You’re very smart, Elham, but you’re very rude. In Farsi, you balance yourself out. But wherever you land, you’re going to have quite a hard time adjusting. Because in English, you won’t have redeeming qualities.” [8] It’s a harsh truth, and one Elham seems unwilling—or perhaps unable—to accept. Farahani’s Goli is a burst of youthful optimism. She claims to love English because it is less poetic than Farsi, but her speech betrays her: she cannot help speaking in metaphor, likening English to rice that floats rather than sinks [9] . Farahani captures the contradiction of someone who believes she is practical but is, in fact, deeply romantic. She represents a younger generation that is fascinated by Western culture and optimistically tries to adapt to it as much as possible. Although she remains a member of the class until the end, the play does not tell us whether she passes the exam or not. Hayatshahi’s Roya is the emotional anchor of the play. Her goal is simple—to be with her family—but the conditions attached to that dream make it bittersweet. In one of the most devastating scenes, she plays two voicemails from her son: one in English, clipped and formal; the other in Farsi, warm and affectionate. “Do you hear how much more soft he is in his mother tongue?” [10] she asks, revealing how language can shape not just communication, but personality, intimacy, and even love. Her English is the weakest in the class—she cannot pronounce her grandson’s name, and her progress is painfully limited to counting numbers and naming a few colors. Yet she understands perfectly the difference between “visiting” and “living” when her son uses those words to describe her visit to Canada, and that understanding cuts deep. Midway through the play, disheartened by this realization, she leaves the class, her hopes of reuniting with her son’s family quietly unraveling. Elboudwarej’s Omid is charming yet elusive. His fluency sets him apart from the rest of the class, but that same ease with the language also isolates him. He flirts lightly with Marjan, lingers after lessons, and watches English romantic comedies with her, yet a quiet guardedness keeps him from ever fully revealing himself. His presence disrupts the classroom’s balance, adding layers to Marjan’s otherwise firm authority. His true reasons for enrolling are never stated outright. As a U.S. resident, he occupies a liminal space, searching for a sense of belonging he cannot seem to find in either America or Iran. When news of his sudden marriage surfaces, it provokes Marjan’s anger, and she expels him—ostensibly because his language skills far exceed the class level, but also, perhaps, because his departure reopens wounds she has tried hard to keep closed. English resists offering a neat moral about the worth of learning the language. For Marjan, it represents self-expansion; for Roya, it is a wedge driven between generations. For Elham, it is both a path forward and a daily humiliation. For Goli, it remains a playful tool, and for Omid, a reminder of his perpetual in-betweenness. Samini allows each of these perspectives to stand on its own, resisting any impulse to elevate one over the others. In doing so, she captures the messy truth of a world in which English can be both a key and a colonizer. For some, the absence of resolution may feel like a shortcoming; for others, it will ring true to life, where many stories end mid-sentence. The final moments are among the most powerful. Marjan and Elham speak to each other in Farsi, and for the first time, the English-speaking audience is shut out. It is a small but potent reversal: a reminder of the privacy and completeness of one’s own language, and of the exclusion that comes when you do not share it. It reframes all that has come before, casting the “English Only” rule in a harsher light. English is not without its flaws. The pacing, while steady, can verge on monotony; there are stretches where the rhythm remains so uniform that the tension flattens, moments that might have been enlivened by sharper bursts of energy or, conversely, deepened by longer silences. Certain character arcs feel underdeveloped, most notably Omid’s, and the quietly suggested romance between him and Marjan, which never moves beyond hints and glances. There is also an inconsistency in the cast’s command of Persian—a detail that, while perhaps unnoticed by most, becomes particularly jarring for audience members like myself who speak the language. This is most evident in the final moments when Marjan and Elham speak in Farsi together; for me as a Persian audience member, the uneven fluency did pull focus from the emotional weight of the scene. The deliberate choice to avoid overt political commentary—beyond fleeting references to the difficulty of securing U.S. visas for Iranians—aligns with the play’s thematic emphasis on the personal and the intimate. Yet this restraint also leaves certain dramatic possibilities untapped. In a work so deeply attuned to the cultural and emotional stakes of language, one senses there is room to push further into the realities that shape those stakes. Still, these shortcomings remain minor within the larger fabric of the piece. At its core, English is about what cannot be fully translated: our humor, our tenderness, our anger, our sense of self. It is a reminder that language can open doors, but it can also leave parts of us locked away, sometimes forever. Samini’s direction is attentive to the smallest details: the way a character exhales before speaking, the flicker of recognition when a word lands just right, the slump of shoulders when meaning slips away. The ensemble works as a true unit, each performance distinct yet in harmony with the others. The design elements—set, lighting, costume, sound—are cohesive, each reinforcing the themes without overwhelming them. The symbolic flourishes never feel imposed; they grow naturally from the text, deepening its resonance. What lingers after the play ends is not a single image or line, but a web of impressions: Roya’s voice breaking as she talks about her son, Elham’s stubborn set of the jaw, Goli’s laughter spilling into the air, Omid’s easy charm masking something unsaid, Marjan’s wistful confession that she liked herself better in English. These moments accumulate into a portrait of people caught between languages, between selves, between worlds. English is, in the end, about more than the acquisition of a second language. It is about what we gain in translation and what we lose; about the selves we become in another tongue and the selves we leave behind. In Samini’s hands, it is also about the shared human desire to be understood, and the costs—emotional, cultural, personal—of achieving that understanding. This production invites us to sit in the discomfort of that exchange, to recognize the beauty and the pain of it, and to leave the theatre hearing our own language, whatever it may be, a little differently. English by Sanaz Toossi, directed by Naghmeh Samini, co-produced by ArtsWest and Seda Iranian Theatre Ensemble. From left: Goli (Newsha Farahani), Roya (Janet Hayatshahi), Elham (Shereen Khatibloo), and Omid (Emon Elboudwarej). Photo by John McLellan. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [1] Test of English as a Foreign Language [2] Toossi, Sanaz. English . (New York, NY: Samuel French, an imprint of Concord Theatricals Corp, 2023), 29 [3] Ibid., 32 [4] Ibid., 28 [5] Ibid., 23 [6] Ibid., 51 [7] Ibid., 31 [8] Ibid., 36 [9] Ibid., 4 [10] Ibid., 44 References About The Author(s) Peyman Shams is a PhD candidate in Theatre Arts at the University of Oregon. He grew up in Iran, where he earned his BA and MA in Theatre Arts. His research centers on Middle Eastern and Iranian theatre, with a particular focus on political and social performance. His current work examines censorship and forms of resistance in theatre under authoritarian regimes. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. 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Lucas Skjaret Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Lucas Skjaret By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF ANOTHER DAY'S BEGUN: THORNTON WILDER'S OUR TOWN IN THE 21ST CENTURY. Howard Sherman. London: Methuen Drama/Bloomsbury Publishing Place, 2021; Pp. 268. Another Day’s Begun, Howard Sherman’s first full-length book, centers theatre-makers and how they approached Our Town from 2002 to 2019. Sherman is known for his work with the American Theatre Wing, which co-produces the Tony Awards, and his numerous high-profile administrative positions with significant arts organizations, leading to his large social media presence and frequent writing about the industry. His pulse on the American theatre zeitgeist situates his approach to exploring a play such as Our Town . Scholars consider Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as seminal within the American literary and dramatic canon—and Sherman argues effectively for its legacy. Having opened on Broadway in 1938, it explores themes of American life and mortality in the bucolic, fictional New England town of Grover’s Corners from 1901 to 1913. The play ends with Wilder’s spin on the dance macabre ; we learn about the fates of the townsfolk, following Emily as she reflects upon her life as a departed soul. The play was revolutionary for many reasons, as Sherman argues, particularly its infamous opening stage direction: “No curtain. No scenery.” Besides using a bare stage and mimed properties, Our Town is recognized for its narrator-turned-psychopomp, The Stage Manager. Since its premiere, numerous high schools, community theatres, professional producing houses, universities, and audition rooms have visited Grover’s Corners. While Sherman is not a conventional scholar, Another Day’s Begun presents a robust examination of the continued influence of Our Town on storytellers across mediums and genres. Sherman divides his book into two main sections: the history of Our Town , and then a series of interviews with artists who have worked on productions since 2000. Chapter 1, “Building Grover’s Corners,” chronicles the play's development and original reception. Sherman’s writing balances clarity with curation, connecting the play to Wilder’s life and the historical context in which the thrice Pulitzer prize-winning dramatist wrote. The chapter emphasizes the play’s early impact in the United States and abroad post-World War II, noting that it was the first American play produced in Berlin after the war’s end in 1946. Sherman explains the Department of State pushed to produce American plays “vigorously” in both Germany and Japan during the war, with the Army negotiating directly with playwrights rather than through their agents. He quotes Variety describing this move to use “theatre as a means of bringing democracy to presumably truth-starved German teen-agers.” (15) Sherman considers the play’s life from mid-20th century into the 21st century. Chapter 2, “Expanding Grover’s Corners,” analyzes the play’s impact on a much broader scale. Sherman explores its cultural legacy through numerous adaptations, parodies, derivative stories, and references that spread across almost every storytelling medium. While Sherman includes aesthetically similar adaptations (such as the television musical version starring Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra in 1955) and other more robust re-imaginings — including ballet and opera adaptations — he argues for Our Town’s strong influence in popular culture. One example is his analysis of sitcoms such as Cheers , The Nanny , and Growing Pains , which included diegetic performances of Our Town . Sherman notes that these popular citations require the audience’s knowledge to make sense. He cites contemporary references too, like Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s television hit Riverdale, whose first episode has a “decidedly Wilderian feel” and how, in a later episode Veronica Lodge, a character, mutters, “I feel like I am wandering through the lost epilogue of Our Town’ ” as a “throwaway aside.” (40) Sherman smartly traces changing receptions of the play and does not shy away from negative responses, presenting a healthy balancing of perspectives on Wilder’s seminal work. Chapter 2 evidences the ubiquity of Our Town in creative output since its premiere. The book's primary contribution to scholarship sharpens in its second half, titled “ Our Town : Production Oral Histories 2002-19.” Here, Sherman archives interviews with artists who have worked on the play since the turn of the millennium. While he conducted most interviews, the author also includes artist statements transcribed from a 2006 video interview with Paul Newman, who played The Stage Manager in 2002 at Westport Country Playhouse (251). These oral histories, which serve almost as case studies, begin with David Cromer’s groundbreaking 2002 production. Despite its “utter simplicity and lack of artifice,” signaled by having actors wear contemporary street clothes, Cromer carried out a “ coup de théâtre ” on the audience: the Stage Manager, played by Cromer himself, revealed a detailed vintage kitchen with real bacon cooking and full period-specific costuming for Mr. and Mrs. Webb as their daughter, now deceased, visits this memory. (46) Another notable production discussed is Michel Hausmann’s interpretation at Miami New Drama, which incorporated Spanish, English, and Creole – the “three dominant languages of the city.” (167) The book’s strength derives from this variety of focal productions; from professional to educational productions to more avant-garde interpretations, Sherman ensures a diverse portfolio of perspectives. Having interviewed many theatre-makers over his career, Sherman knows to allow the artists to speak directly to readers about their experiences and approaches to Our Town . These interviews are not only archival but insightful about the craft of theatre-making. Sheryl Kaller, who directed Deaf West and Pasadena Playhouse’s 2017 production, for instance, which centered American Sign Language (ASL) and English, noted that their costume design was period-appropriate but “stayed in hues of blue, gray, and white,” a color palette designed to make the actors’ signing more visible. (198) The interviews reflect on disparate practices and contexts of production; readers directly observe how artists of differing backgrounds, resources, and notoriety discuss their artistic approaches to Wilder’s (nearly) century-old play. In his “Epilogue: 11 O’clock in Grover’s Corners,” Sherman summarizes his experiences of researching and writing the book. Beyond words that often came up in the interviews—universal, mundane, favorite, White, greatest, cheesy, and sacred— he was most surprised by how many interviewees confessed they never read it until they worked on it. Our Town, he argues, has thus “permeated the collective consciousness” of American theater and served as a conduit for American cultures. (247) Howard Sherman’s debut publication is well-researched and well-structured. For those who teach American drama, Wilder, or Our Town , the book has pullable sections that one can assign to add context and perspective to a play that many students might see as antiquated, or unrelatable. Another Day’s Begun provides the perfect dramaturgical companion for any director, scholar, or producer about to visit Grover’s Corners. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Sherman, Howard. Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century. London: Methuen Drama/Bloomsbury Publishing Place, 2021. Footnotes About The Author(s) Lucas Skjaret (he/him) is a third-year MFA Theatre Directing candidate originally from Minnesota. Before his journey south, he worked as a director, costume designer, dramaturg, and teaching artist in the Twin Cities. At Baylor University, he directed Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker; Sam Shepard’s 4-H Club ; Under the Compass Rose , a devised piece; and Men’s Intuition by Itamar Moses. Additionally, he directed the staged reading of Joseph Tully’s new play Mythos of Autumn and co-directed the workshop concert of Favor: The Musical. In Minnesota, Lucas was the founder and artistic director of Market Garden Theatre, in which he directed Another Revolution , My Barking Dog , On The Exhale , and Public Exposure , as well as curated and directed their new works festival, Fresh Roots. He also worked with companies such as Lyric Arts Main Street Stage, Freshwater Theatre, History Theatre, Walking Shadow Theatr Company, Little Lifeboats, The Children's Theatre Company, Park Square Theatre, Artistry, Teater Neuf in Oslo Norway, and others. Lucas received his double B.A. in Theatre Arts and Scandinavian Studies from The University of North Dakota and studied at The University of Oslo’s Ibsen Centre. Lucas is an alumnus of the Directors Lab North in Toronto, Canada and the Kennedy Center Directing Intensive. He has also studied actor pedagogy at The Stella Adler Studio in New York City as well as intimacy direction with Tonia Sima and Theatrical Intimacy Education. As scholar, he has presented work at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, The Comparative Drama Conference, and MidAmerica Theatre Conference, where he also serves as the graduate student representative for the Playwrighting Symposium. His writing has been published in the Texas Theatre Journal and The Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal . His scholarship focuses on exploring performance as identity, translation & adaptation theory, directing practices, arts pedagogy, and Nordic dramatic literature. Lucas is a proud associate member of The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Jesus and The Sea by Ricarda Alvarenga at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. The video fables a submerged phantasmagoria of Jesus in the sea waters of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The action took place on one of the 365 days of the One Year Performance, in which, every afternoon, the artist dressed up as Jesus and produced images in different places, situations and contexts, recreating mythological and everyday imaginaries with one of the most iconographic figures in western culture.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Jesus and The Sea At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Ricarda Alvarenga Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film showcase) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Brazil Language non-verbal Running Time 4 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film The video fables a submerged phantasmagoria of Jesus in the sea waters of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The action took place on one of the 365 days of the One Year Performance, in which, every afternoon, the artist dressed up as Jesus and produced images in different places, situations and contexts, recreating mythological and everyday imaginaries with one of the most iconographic figures in western culture. About The Artist(s) They are a professor in the Dance undergraduate program at UFU (Federal University of Uberlândia) in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais; a Ph.D. candidate in the Performing Arts Graduate Program at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro); and hold a master's degree from the Dance Graduate Program at UFBA (Federal University of Bahia) in Salvador, Bahia. Their work mobilizes actions and compositions in performance, contemporary dance, photography, video, installations, and writing — inferring and interfering with life as a work of art. Get in touch with the artist(s) provisoriocorpo@gmail.com and follow them on social media @ricardalvarenga Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah By Areeg Ibrahim Published: May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution:

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 17 Spring 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. By Marina Johnson Published: May 12, 2025 Download Article as PDF REVIEW: ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. Directed by Mohammad Basha. The Body Ensemble with the support of Al Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. September 9 & December 12, 2025, Marina Johnson Artificial Heart : Thinking into the Future at Al Hakawati Theatre in Jerusalem مش رح اسمحلك تقتل حالك وانا بتفرج ! ناجي ! فكرة خالك عن عالم منزوع السلاح مش حلم. السيدة الأولى, قلب صناعي "I won’t let you kill yourself while I watch! Naji, your uncle’s idea of a world without weapons wasn’t just a dream." - First Lady: Artificial Heart The sound of computerized scanning and the rumbling of bass fills the room as the lights rise on a futuristic laboratory. An anatomical scan of a human rotates on the projection screens against the upstage back wall as green coding and programming data pass along the screen. The Professor, stationed center stage, manipulates screens invisible to the audience, moving in quick, sharp gestures. He is dressed in a silver futuristic tunic, and black slacks, with wires passing over his face, prompting the question of man or cyborg. Behind him is a translucent white and silver cylindrical portal, the kind one might associate with a transportation chamber or other liminal laboratory space, and to his left and right are a couch and two chairs. This stylized beginning made my heart race; I had not seen anything like it before in Palestine and I was eager to go on a journey into the past, present, and future. Artificial Heart (قلب صناعي) was directed by Mohammad Basha and premiered on August 24th, 2024 on stage at Al Hakawati, the Palestinian National Theatre (PNT) in Jerusalem. I watched the play twice, once at Al Kasaba Theatre in Ramallah on September 9th, 2024, and again at the PNT on December 12, 2024. Artificial Heart was written and staged in Arabic, but at the performance I watched in December, supertitles were projected, and many foreigners packed the balcony of the PNT to have the best view of the stage and supertitles simultaneously. The play unfolds across three plotlines, each exploring humanity's reliance on technology and the emotional consequences of this dependence. Each vignette represents a group of people–young people who grew up with technology and use it as an innate part of their lives, an older family who have technology thrust upon them, and a government that sees an opportunity to use technology to maintain power. The storytelling goes back and forth between the three threads, creating an interwoven narrative of a world that, in many ways, eerily mirrors our own. The first thread focuses on an aging couple, Abu Omar and Um Omar, grappling with their failing robot helper. Their humorous and poignant interactions with the robot reflect a society heavily dependent on technology. The couple’s dialogue reveals their nostalgia for simpler times and highlights their desire to reconnect with family, especially their absent son, Omar. Their relationship with the robot mirrors their struggles with memory, aging, and loss, serving as a microcosm of a broader human experience overshadowed by mechanization. By the end of the play, it is revealed that their son Omar, whom they repeatedly mention waiting for, does not exist. In fact, they were not allowed to have a child by the governmental regime which deemed their genes unworthy. This eugenicist act has haunted their lives as they dream of the son they were never allowed to have. The second narrative thread focuses on Sami, a social media influencer obsessed with views and fame. His girlfriend Reema breaks up with him because he is so wrapped up in the promises of a life made easier through technology and cannot take her desire for authentic emotional connection seriously. Sami's infatuation with technological solutions leads him to acquire the robot Sasha, modeled after Reema, as a substitute girlfriend. This relationship showcases the emotional void created by prioritizing efficiency and artificial substitutes over human intimacy. Over time, Sami realizes that Sasha will never seek to connect deeply with him the way that Reema had. Sasha’s inability to return affection in an emotionally connected way is the technological limitation that causes Sami to terminate his relationship with the robot. Sami hosting a live video for his followers with Sasha in the background; Photograph by Mutaz Qawasmi; Courtesy of The Body Ensemble. In the last, and most politically charged storyline, the President collaborates with the Professor to develop a robotic version of himself to perpetuate his rule. The project involves suppressing citizens’ emotional data and memories of trauma to keep order and prevent them from becoming aware of the world's problems. As the Professor conducts lab research, the First Lady seeks him out to share revelations about her traumatic past that, unbeknownst to him, intertwines with his own. The Professor, Naji, actually is the brother of the First Lady, sharing a past as a refugee that he does not remember due to the government-mandated pills which cause people to forget and feel good. The First Lady challenges the Professor to confront his complicity in a system that trades humanity for power. At first, he begs her: Please, I’ve lived my whole life like this. I don’t want to remember. If the memories are that painful, it’s a blessing that they erased them. بترجاك ، انا عشت حياتي كلها بهاي الطريقة ، ما بدي اتذكر ، اذا الذكريات مؤلمة ، هاد بيعني انهم ساعدوني لما محوها. But, as seen in the epigraph to this review, the First Lady reminds him of the ambitions of their uncle, who aspired to see a world without weapons. While not seen explicitly in the play, there is an implication that the President is not only perpetuating his rule with technology, but that he is using the technology itself as a weapon. The Professor reveals he has been having nightmares about his past, illustrating his body’s inability to forget, even if the pills erase the details from his conscious mind. Eventually, he realizes: The idea of a world without weapons wasn’t impossible. Maybe human nature can’t give up violence, but it can avoid turning it into the biggest and most profitable trade—the trade of death. Sure, memories are painful, but no one can force what I remember and what I don’t. Revenge... revenge. How can revenge turn a person into a monster, devouring everything around them? How can we be born innocent children and learn to hate? And hate creates even greater hate! Until it drags us into a spiral, speeding us toward our end. And now, your nightmares will begin, Mr. President. فكرة عالم بدون سلاح ما كانت مستحيلة ، يمكن الطبيعة البشرية ما بتقدر تتخلى عن العنف ، لكن بتقدر ما تحوله لأكبر واربح تجارة ، تجارة الموت. صحيح الذكريات مؤلمة لكن ما حدا بقدر يجبرني شو اتذكر وشو ما اتذكر. الانتقام…. الانتقام. كيف ممكن الانتقام يحول الانسان لوحش يلتهم كل اشي حواليه ... كيف ممكن ننولد اطفال أنقياء ونتعلم نكره ؟! ، والكره يخلق فينا كره أكبر! لحد ما يوصلنا لدوامة تسحبنا وتسرع فينا لنهايتنا، وهلا رح اتبلش كوابيسك انت سيادة الرئيس. The Professor ultimately sabotages the project to reclaim his own agency. At the end of the play, the Professor accesses the project and the images projected are of wars, destruction, weapons, and the technology company, Vita’s, logo. By deleting these files, he takes his own “revenge” here against a fascist system intent on controlling citizens and keeping the arms trade on top. His actions invite the audience to question the roles of memory, morality, and resistance in our lives. These threads, interconnected by themes of loss, humanity, and the ethical dilemmas of technological advancement, collectively critique humanity's surrender to artificial solutions at the expense of emotional authenticity and moral accountability. From the moment the play began, the projections designed by Hayat Laban left me completely engrossed. Paired with Ramzi Sheikh Qassim’s lighting and scenic design and Ivan Azazian’s sound, the technological world was brought to life in a way I had yet to see on stage. The stage was spare, with few physical set pieces present, yet the design and acting filled the world, leaving nothing to be desired. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Mohammad Basha perform as an actor on stage in plays such as لا غبار عليه ( No Dust , 2022) and صالح وبسمة ، فسيفساء القدس ( Salah and Basma: A Jerusalem Mosaic, 2023 ), so it was especially exciting to see a play that he had co-written and directed. In an interview with Basha on December 21, 2024, he was quick to tell me that, despite the fact that Artificial Heart asks how much technology “contributes to nourishing our humanity” or “stripping us of it,” creating the play would not have been possible without technology. Some of Basha’s team had to travel during the creative process, and Zoom and other online communication made collaboration across distance possible. While the play does not touch much on the utility of technology, perhaps because it is assumed that the audience already brings those experiences to the table, the goal of the play was never to vilify technology. Rather, the point of the play is to bring attention to the ways that people use technology to replace their own humanity and governments use it to target citizen populations in ways that are often unknown or unquestioned. This point was made clear through the use of double casting, as each actor took on roles that created a thought-provoking counterpoint between each character. Reem Telhami, most recently seen in the Netflix television series Mo , did not disappoint with her sophisticated depiction of a First Lady who has been thrust into a privileged position as the wife of the President but refuses to disconnect from her past as a refugee. Her demands for a better future contrasted with her portrayal of the eager and nostalgic Um Omar with grace. Firas Farrah who co-wrote the script with Basha, shined as Sami, the Professor, and the elderly parents’ robot. His journey as Sami was both funny and emotionally wrought, going from a man obsessed with how technology could improve his life to realizing that a life void of human desires and love is not the answer. His physically nuanced performance as the Professor, navigating screens both visible and invisible to the audience, stole the show. Fatima Abu Aloul played both Reema and Sasha. She was especially hilarious in her role as the robot, as she embodied a character who, despite trying to please Sami, continued to make choices that left him angry and the audience laughing. Nidal Al-Jubeh played both the President and Abu Omar, embodying two men on either side of a harmful relationship. Al-Jubeh’s stern and unflinching dedication as President to the world he is working to establish stood in stark contrast to the world of Abu Omar whose life has been left wanting due to the actions of the President. The irony of this double-casting decision allowed the audience to reflect on two men of potentially the same generation and how they have shaped, or been unable to shape, the realities around them. In a world currently saturated with conversations about artificial intelligence and the ways that different world governments use it to surveil their citizens, I expected Artificial Heart to tackle the proliferation and dangers of AI. However, after the performance I realized that “artificial” and “heart” were meant to stand in contrast with each other, asking the audience to reflect on what meaning these two words hold in our own lives. The play’s triptych format allows it to tackle its themes from multiple angles. Each story brings a unique perspective, from intimate domestic moments to larger societal commentary, creating a rich narrative experience. Artificial Heart is a dynamic and thought-provoking theatrical exploration of humanity’s evolving relationship with technology, delivering profound commentary on the collision of tradition, progress, and human fragility. References Basha, Mohammad and Firas Farrah. Artificial Heart. Unpublished script in both Arabic and English, 2024. Johnson, Marina, and Mohammad Basha. Interview about Artificial Heart . Personal, December 21, 2024. Program Note, The Body Ensemble. Artificial Heart , 2024. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in TAPS at Stanford University (M.F.A in Directing, University of Iowa). Her dissertation research focuses on Palestinian performance from 2015 to the present. Johnson is the co-host of Kunafa and Shay, a MENA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons, and they are also a member of Silk Road Rising’s Polycultural Institute. Johnson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Theatre/Practice , Arab Stages , Decolonizing Dramaturgy in a Global Context (Bloomsbury) , Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities (Routledge), Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume I: Performers (Bloomsbury). Prior to her Ph.D., she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Beloit College for three years. Select recent directing credits include: The Wolves (Stanford) The Shroud Maker (International Voices Project), Shakespeare’s Sisters (Stanford), The Palestinian Youth Monologues (Stanford), Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche (Beloit College), and In the Next Room (Beloit College). www.marina-johnson.com Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents O Lord! By Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour Review: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE by Robert Wilson / Filmmaker Unknown at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. This film documents the Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: A STORY ABOUT A FAMILY AND SOME PEOPLE CHANGING, performed live by Robert Wilson and the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds at 147 Spring Street, New York City, in April 1972. The production was performed for six hours each day — from 6 to 9 AM and 6 to 9 PM — across seven days between April 24 and 30. The full work, KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, was subsequently performed as a seven-day, 168-hour event in Shiraz, Iran, and stands as one of the most ambitious durational theater works ever staged. The sizeable cast featured an exceptional range of downtown luminaries, including dance critic and poet Edwin Denby, dancer Andy De Groat, theater critic Stefan Brecht, and Wilson's own grandmother, Alma Hamilton. This preservation print was made directly from the 16mm camera original, which was discovered in Anthology Film Archives' basement alongside a group of empty film cans. Archivists at Anthology and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts — the repository of the Robert Wilson Audio/Visual Collection — were able to salvage the film and identified it as the most extensive extant documentation of the Overture. No soundtrack has surfaced, but the film's majestic images and wild visual inventiveness carry a power that renders dialogue unnecessary. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives and the New York Public Library. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE Robert Wilson / Filmmaker Unknown At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 29 at 8:45 PM, and June 5 at 6:45 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 Language Silent Running Time 80 minutes Year of Release 1972 About The Film This film documents the Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: A STORY ABOUT A FAMILY AND SOME PEOPLE CHANGING, performed live by Robert Wilson and the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds at 147 Spring Street, New York City, in April 1972. The production was performed for six hours each day — from 6 to 9 AM and 6 to 9 PM — across seven days between April 24 and 30. The full work, KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, was subsequently performed as a seven-day, 168-hour event in Shiraz, Iran, and stands as one of the most ambitious durational theater works ever staged. The sizeable cast featured an exceptional range of downtown luminaries, including dance critic and poet Edwin Denby, dancer Andy De Groat, theater critic Stefan Brecht, and Wilson's own grandmother, Alma Hamilton. This preservation print was made directly from the 16mm camera original, which was discovered in Anthology Film Archives' basement alongside a group of empty film cans. Archivists at Anthology and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts — the repository of the Robert Wilson Audio/Visual Collection — were able to salvage the film and identified it as the most extensive extant documentation of the Overture. No soundtrack has surfaced, but the film's majestic images and wild visual inventiveness carry a power that renders dialogue unnecessary. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives and the New York Public Library. Performed by Robert Wilson and the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds Preserved by Anthology Film Archives and the New York Public Library 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

Jordan Schildcrout Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 1 Visit Journal Homepage Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom Jordan Schildcrout By Published on March 5, 2015 Download Article as PDF Apocalyptic narratives, based on fears and fantasies about the end of the world and the destruction of humanity, often turn on a character’s success or failure in producing or protecting a child. In such dramas, the survival of a child represents humanity’s hope for the future, and characters go to great lengths to ensure the existence of the next generation. As Lee Edelman has argued in his critique of the ideology underlying such narratives, “reproductive futurism” mandates that the fight for the child is the fight for the future, thus privileging reproductive heteronormativity and stigmatizing the non-reproductive or queer as “the negativity opposed to every form of social viability.” [1] Indeed, certain anti-queer ideologies, based on a loose mixture of biblical narrative and Darwinian theory, argue that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people are inherently detrimental to the survival of humanity. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that most apocalyptic narratives see queer people as, at best, irrelevant, and, at worst, to blame for the destruction of the human race. Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s widely-produced comedy boom [with a small b] (2008) invokes the dictates of reproductive futurism but playfully subverts them, astutely “queering” the typical end-of-the-world fantasy by placing the fate of humanity in the hands of two characters who fail to reproduce. [2] This apocalyptic sex farce follows the travails of a gay male biologist and the female journalist who refuses to have sex with him, even though they are literally the last people on earth. Nachtrieb’s play was originally developed at Brown/Trinity Playwrights Repertory in Providence, Rhode Island, and then premiered off-off-Broadway at Ars Nova in New York City in March 2008, directed by Alex Timbers. Nachtrieb’s 90-minute, one-set, three-character comedy soon had dozens of productions, from major regional theatres such as the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, D.C., to smaller alternative venues in Ithaca, Iowa City, Dallas, and Pasadena. The Theatre Communications Group (TCG) cited boom as the most-produced play of the 2009-2010 season, [3] and by the beginning of 2015, it had over 100 productions in the US and abroad—including Argentina, Germany, Malaysia, and Mexico. Most theatre critics reviewed boom enthusiastically, admiring its synthesis of farcical humor and apocalyptic themes. Many noted the “edgy” and sexy energy of the comedy, praising it as “screwball,” “oddball,” and “wacked-out,” but had difficulty articulating the play’s more thoughtful underpinnings. [4] Ben Brantley of the New York Times astutely recognized the play’s concern with “our enduring fascination with and need for myths about the beginning of life as well as its end,” while Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune myopically dismissed the play because he didn’t find it “credible.” [5] Critics tended to reference the fact that Jules is gay, but they did so parenthetically, as if his homosexuality were simply a funny obstacle to the goal of reproduction. In failing to understand how Jules’s homosexuality functions in the play, theatre critics overlooked the ways in which this wacky comedy presents a challenge to widely-held assumptions about reproduction and the role of queer people in creating the future. Staging the Apocalypse: A Future Without Queers and Queers Without a Future Stories about the end of the world appear in many societies and in many eras, and they inevitably bear the traces of the cultures that produced them, expressing anxieties over real world problems such as war, nuclear destruction, disease, environmental disaster, racism, and poverty. In plays, films, and novels about the apocalypse, the narrative’s optimism or pessimism about overcoming such problems often depends on whether a child, as symbol of the future, survives. For example, both Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) and Liz Duffy Adams’s Dog Act (2004) are apocalyptic comedies that contain hope for the future, concluding with the birth of a child or the promise of heterosexual mating. [6] In twenty-first century cinema, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), based on the novel by P. D. James, and John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009), based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, both offer a grim but hopeful story in which a child survives in a hostile and decaying world, thanks to the sacrifices of a heroic father or father figure. [7] A bleaker future, marked by the failure of reproduction or the death of a child, is depicted in plays such as Endgame (1957) by Samuel Beckett, Marisol (1992) by José Rivera, and Fucking A (2000) by Suzan-Lori Parks. [8] In Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), a mother desperately tries and fails to save her young son from the coming apocalypse, and the film ends with the world evaporating in a blinding white light. [9] In these apocalyptic plays and films that focus on the fate of a child, LGBT characters are typically not central to the story of the future. The diminishment or absence of LGBT people within many fantasies of the future is not surprising, given the powerful rhetoric that situates queer people as antithetical to the future of families, the nation, and humanity itself. Such anti-queer rhetoric relies on three key arguments to create the link between queer sexuality and the end of humanity: 1) the wrath of God against a society that tolerates queer sexuality, 2) the prevalence of HIV/AIDS among men who have sex with men, and 3) the non-reproductive nature of same-sex relations. The struggle against such rhetoric can be seen in the political sphere, where the gay rights movement has fought for the decriminalization of same-sex relations, the health and dignity of those living with HIV/AIDS, and the rights of families headed by LGBT people. In the realm of culture, queer theatre artists have created plays that often ask more complex questions—and, in some cases, offer more subversive answers—about the queer future. In the American theatre, one can see how plays have responded to each of the three key anti-queer arguments that link LGBT people with the end of humanity. Certain religious leaders interpret the biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18-19) as evidence that God will eradicate whole populations, not simply for being homosexual, but for tolerating homosexuality within the culture at all. Therefore, anti-gay forces have blamed the very existence of queer people within U.S. borders for everything from hurricanes and earthquakes to terrorist attacks—as prominent televangelist Jerry Falwell famously did in the days immediately following September 11, 2001. [10] In some cases, the “threat” posed by the existence of LGBT people extends to the destruction of life on this planet as we know it. Take, for example, Harold Camping, a Christian minister with a popular radio show, who predicted the end of the world would occur on 21 May 2011. As Scott James wrote in New York Times , Camping believed that this destruction would occur because “God has been angered by mankind’s sins, like the growing acceptance of homosexuality.” [11] In response to the use of religious ideology to vilify queer people, some plays have attempted to reclaim religious narratives for LGBT people, including Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi (1998) and Paul Rudnick’s The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (1998). [12] Although both plays employ elements of camp, they also contain sincere attempts to undermine the religious rhetoric that imagines queer people as “abominations” who will bring about destruction. McNally’s play depicts a gay man whose life parallels that of Jesus Christ, ultimately bringing grace and salvation to other queer characters. Rudnick’s comedy imagines a gay couple, Adam and Steve, first in the Garden of Eden and then in modern-day New York City, with Adam eventually serving as a sperm donor for a lesbian who gives birth, allowing a lesbian couple and a gay couple to collectively raise the child. When Adam asks what destroyed Sodom, Steve simply answers, “Tourists.” [13] Both plays have proven popular in productions around the country, but they have also met with protests and even death threats. To reposition queer people on the side of creation rather than destruction within the biblical narrative is a subversive and therefore controversial act. The devastation caused by AIDS has also figured prominently in cultural narratives about apocalypse. During the relatively brief era between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Global War on Terrorism, Peter Coviello wrote that “AIDS unseated nuclear warfare as the defining apocalyptic threat to American health and security” and also brought about “the full-scale and unilateral vilification of homosexuality.” [14] Coviello emphasizes the political ramifications of this shift, noting that “the epidemic thus presents to the American public a threatened civic apocalypse whose undeniable menace tacitly sanctions the mobilization of any number of state forces.” [15] The most acclaimed and influential play to confront the relationship between AIDS, government, and the future is Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992), which boldly imagined a gay man with AIDS at the center of a cosmic battle over the fate of humanity on earth. [16] Angels call on Prior Walter, a drag queen suffering from the effects of a weakened immune system, to become a prophet who will tell humanity to stop moving forward, but Prior refuses this prophecy and instead declares, “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens.” [17] It’s not people with AIDS, but rather greed and self-interest, that threaten the ideals of America, and Kushner imagines Prior Walter and other queer characters moving into the future as part of the national fabric. The third major argument that conflates queer sexuality and the apocalypse focuses on reproduction. Studies of LGBT families have shown that “37% of the more than 8 million LGBT adults in the United States report having had a child,” proving that, while queer sexuality may not be reproductive, many queer people are. [18] But anti-gay arguments assume that when it comes to the Darwinian drama of the perpetuation of the species, queer people—and the acceptance of queer people—will lead to a biological “dead end.” This rhetoric can typically be found in arguments against the political rights and social acceptance of LGBT people, as seen in a 2011 editorial by conservative columnist Jeffrey Kuhner in the Washington Times : By its very nature, homosexuality cannot fulfill the primary function of sex: procreation and the reproduction of the human race. It is inherently a socially barren act. A homosexual society is a childless one—doomed to extinction. [19] In the homophobic imagination, queer people are assumed to have no role in the future, and, indeed, they play an active role in destroying the very possibility of a future, because they do not bear children. The theatre has contradicted this notion of “childless homosexuals” by offering numerous representations of LGBT parents, many of them appearing in the most widely produced gay plays and musicals. In some cases, bisexual characters have children from previous heterosexual relationships, as in Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968); and many plays depict gay and lesbian lovers taking parental roles in relation to the other partner’s biological child, as in Jane Chambers’s Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (1980), Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman’s La Cage aux Folles (1983), and James Lapine and William Finn’s Falsettos (1992). [20] Other plays depict gay characters as non-biological parents: as able helpers to their heterosexual friends, as in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958); as foster parents, as in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1982); and as adoptive parents, as in The Kid (2010), a musical based on a memoir by Dan Savage. [21] Some plays show queer families going through the biological process of pregnancy and childbirth, including Paula Vogel’s And Baby Makes Seven (1993) and Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide… (2009). [22] All of these plays serve to construct queer people as reproductive and involved in nurturing children. But must queer people reproduce or raise children in order to be seen as legitimate members of society? Can non-reproductive people serve only to signify the end of humanity in our fantasies of the future? The future of queer people and the role of queer people in the creation of the future—known among cultural critics and scholars as “queer futurity”—have been much discussed in recent scholarship. In particular, queer theorists including Lee Edelman, José Estaban Muñoz, and Jack Halberstam have contributed new perspectives on our understanding of queer futurity. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Edelman argues that, symbolically, queers are presumed to be outside the reproductive social order, and therefore stand in opposition to the innocence, goodness, and hope for the future that “the child” symbolically represents. [23] In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), Muñoz, while acknowledging the need to resist the reproductive imperative, argues against the homonormative politics of pragmatism that simply demand a place at the existing table. [24] Instead, Muñoz looks to art and performance as inspiring utopian visions of a queer future that is neither heteronormative nor homonormative. In The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Halberstam ingeniously finds optimism in “queer failure,” since the queer’s lack of success by heteronormative standards, including reproductive sexuality, can create resistance and viable alternatives to the dominant culture and ideologies. [25] These theories of queer futurity will help illuminate how Nachtrieb’s boom wrestles with dominant ideologies about sex, reproduction, and the future. In this comedy, Nachtrieb subverts and rewrites the apocalyptic narrative by recasting the usual roles, creating an end-of-the-world play with no parents, no children, and no new-born infant. Instead, it gives voice to the queerly non-reproductive and examines their role in making—or unmaking—the future. Apocalyptic Sexuality: Exploding the Reproductive Imperative The play boom takes place at a museum existing in the distant future, where Barbara, a vivacious but rather harried middle-aged docent, welcomes us to her exhibit. Here we can watch two very lifelike automatons enact the historical struggles of Jules and Jo, a man and woman surviving in an underground research lab after the rest of human life has been destroyed by a giant comet hitting the earth. Standing behind her futuristic operating console, Barbara serves as emcee, stage manager, dramaturg, chorus, and musician for this exhibit-performance. She is, perhaps, an unreliable narrator, and her supervisors, displeased with the dramatic license she’s taken over the years, decide to shut down her exhibit. We are watching the final run of an exhibit about humanity’s final run on earth. Except that humanity clearly did not end, because Barbara stands before us, evidence of the survival of human beings into the future. She is simultaneously the mother-creator of this exhibit and the child-creation of the forbearers depicted in the exhibit. Near the end of the play, however, we learn that Jules and Jo did not reproduce. So how is it that Barbara exists in the future? At first boom seems to be a play about sex, but it soon reveals itself as a play about reproduction, which is not the same thing. Jules is a graduate student in biology who has discovered that human life is about to be destroyed by a giant comet hitting earth, but he is unable to convince his fellow scientists of his findings. Desperate to save humanity, he places an ad on Craigslist for a woman who is interested in “intensely significant coupling” (18). Jo arrives at Jules’s lab, which he has converted into a bunker stocked with food and baby supplies—and there are also four fish in a tank, which quietly bubbles away through the entire play. Jules, because he is socially awkward and terminally unhip, might be described as a “nerd,” and his role as the New Adam is further complicated by the fact that he is gay. Jules has never had sex of any kind before, but he identifies himself as homosexual—based on what he clinically describes as the “non-randomness of [his] erections” (19). Perhaps one of the reasons Jules has never had sex is that, as a biologist, he sees sex strictly as a matter of reproduction; indeed, he seems terrified when Jo first enters and demands the “world changing” sex promised in Jules’s ad. The comedy of the aggressive woman chasing the demure man is an inversion of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, in which the male is ardent and the female is coy. This transgression of normative gender roles indicates the play’s queer leanings, and Jo expresses a very queer understanding of utopia when talking about sex. She explains to Jules the thesis of her current journalism assignment: Random sex as the last glimmer of hope in a decaying society.… No past. No future. All that matters is the moment. [Two people] meet to fulfill each other’s carnal needs, to find a moment of freedom, release, of sensory bliss that makes them forget how motherfucked up everything is. In no-strings sex, hope is still possible. (19-20) As José Muñoz reminds us, “Utopia lets us imagine a space outside of heteronormativity,” and here Jo (a straight woman with a masculine sounding name) recognizes the limitations of the present, eschews what Muñoz calls the “pragmatic politics” of neoliberal progress, and finds hope in a “no-strings” sexual ethos usually associated with non-reproductive or queer sexuality. [26] Once Jo realizes that this gay man is not what she expected, she attempts to leave, but she is stopped by the sound of the apocalypse. As Barbara dramatically plays the timpani, a low rumble grows louder and louder, finally exploding in a deafening boom. The stage then goes completely dark and silent, with only the fish tank still lit and bubbling, until Jules’s generators kick on and we see that both Jules and Jo have survived. Now the play turns from sex to reproduction, since the future of humanity depends on it, and the roles are reversed as Jules pursues the reluctant Jo. “We have to rebuild the human race!” cries Jules (32). Jules has completely absorbed the mandates of what Lee Edelman describes as reproductive futurism. Edelman argues that The Child is the fetishized symbol of the heteronormative social structure, and that “queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children.’” [27] Jules, even though he is a gay man, is fighting for the child who represents the future of humanity on earth, the comic version of Clive Owen’s character in the film Children of Men (2006), who heroically risks his life to protect the world’s only infant. But Jules is no Clive Owen. He’s a bumbling nerd who comes up with ridiculous ways to try to impregnate Jo, each of them laughable failures, involving turkey basters, a booby-trapped toilet, and scenarios employing alcohol and a Jake Gyllenhaal mask (39). Even while his crazy schemes to create a child are farcical, the comedy is darkened by the fact that Jules is trying to force Jo to have a baby against her will. Around the time that boom was frequently produced across the country, America witnessed a spike in attacks on women’s health and reproductive rights, which rekindled debates about a woman’s authority over her own body, especially when it comes to questions of sex and reproduction. [28] In depicting Jules’s treatment of Jo, this play gives us a woman who is essentially a victim of kidnapping, attempted rape, and what Margaret Sanger famously called “enforced motherhood.” [29] To comprehend why Jules, an otherwise affable loser, is doing these horrible things, it is helpful to understand him as the disciple and representative of biological science. Darwinian orthodoxy holds that men with all their sperm are supposed to be promiscuous, but women with precious few eggs are supposed to be choosy. As biologist Joan Roughgarden writes, the theory of sexual selection holds that “a male is naturally entitled to overpower a female’s reluctance lest reproduction cease, extinguishing the species.” [30] In other words, the importance of that great Darwinian goal, the perpetuation of the species, trumps a woman’s right to choose and her authority over her own body. Nachtrieb’s play puts Darwin to the test by taking its inherent fear about the death of the species at face value: if the perpetuation of the species literally depended upon an act of sexual coercion, would it be “natural” and morally acceptable? The play’s answer is clearly no. It satirizes Jules’s mania for reproduction, and the fact that he is a gay man shows how ideologically constructed (rather than “natural”) this mania actually is. He tries to play the role assigned to him by Darwin, but he fails in the act. Which raises the play’s trickier question: Why does Jo refuse to reproduce? Unlike Jules, she is heterosexual, but she won’t play the role assigned to her in the Darwinian scheme and instead takes on the role of Edelman’s anti-child queer. Jo bluntly states: “I hate babies. They bother me physically, philosophically, and symbolically” (33). In refusing motherhood, Jo embodies what Edelman calls “the negativity opposed to every form of social viability” or, in Freudian terms, the death drive. [31] After the boom of the apocalypse, her death drive goes into overdrive. Against Jules’s insistence on the continuation of the species, Jo argues that “Maybe it’s time to end our reign of terror and die and decay and become soil.… Look at all the acts humans commit across the planet with casual, unconscious cruelty. We deserve to be blown up” (34). Furthermore, faced with the end of the world, Jo actually wishes to die—but she has an over-developed self-preservation instinct that renders her unconscious whenever she is in physical danger, and therefore she cannot cause harm to herself. So Jules needs Jo to create life, and Jo needs Jules to end her life. In this fight between Jules and Jo, between reproductive futurity and the queer death drive, the audience can perhaps see the dramatization of an internal conflict. What is the role of the queer person in reproductive futurity? If you are the last man or woman on earth, do you accept or refuse the imperative to reproduce? That imperative is supported by strong forces, including scientific, religious, and political discourses, and Jules represents the acceptance of that duty. Jo, on the other hand, represents what, as José Muñoz reminds us, Herbert Marcuse called “The Great Refusal,” the protest “against the repressive order of procreative sexuality.” [32] One of the ironies of the play is that the expected social roles have been reversed: the gay man sides with reproductive futurity, while the straight woman declares the Great Refusal. This refusal to reproduce has long been a theme in Western culture, and even a cursory glance at a few key examples will show the wide range of possible significations that can be found in these repudiations, which might be sinful, mad, virtuous, or revolutionary. God slew Onan because he “spilled his seed on the ground” in order to avoid impregnating his dead brother’s wife (Genesis 38:8-10), and many early Christians, certain that the End of the World was at hand, believed there was no point in producing children, preferring instead to focus on spiritual salvation. [33] The women of Aristophanes’s classical anti-war comedy Lysistrata (411 BCE) declare a sex strike, refusing to create children “borne but to perish afar and in vain” in the war. [34] The melancholy prince of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601) shuns Ophelia by telling her it would be better to be locked away in a nunnery than “be a breeder of sinners” (III.i.122). In modern drama, the heroine of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1891) chooses suicide over motherhood, and Tennessee Williams’s Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), despite his family’s desire for him to produce an heir, refuses to create new life with his wife, Maggie. Resistance to “enforced motherhood” has been important throughout the history of the feminist movement, with many battles fought over contraception, sex education, abortion rights, and women’s authority over their own bodies. But the significance of motherhood can be especially fraught within various feminisms. Some writers take an essentialist view of the ability to mother as a source of empowerment, often despite the oppressions of patriarchal “pronatalism,” while others have viewed pregnancy and child-rearing as enslavement within the patriarchy, as a hindrance to female agency and autonomy. [35] Scholar Joyce Meier illuminates this tension when she writes about the social conditions behind the refusal of motherhood in African-American drama and literature, from Angelina Grimke’s Rachel (1906) to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). In these narratives, women choose “sexual abstinence, abortion, and infanticide as strategies of resistance” against a racist social order that subjects black children to slavery, lynching, and poverty. [36] Audiences attending boom may find their understanding of Jo’s refusal of motherhood shaped to some extent by their familiarity with the drama of non-reproduction as it has played out in history, religion, feminist theory, and fictional representations. Ultimately, the play validates Jo’s “queer” choice not to reproduce, and Jules relinquishes his agenda of reproductive coercion. Jules and Jo have spent the entire play fighting about their personal responsibility to perpetuate the species, and in the end Jo wins the argument. Knowing that they can survive for only so long on limited supplies, they open the lab door, letting in the floods created by the comet hitting the earth, and presumably they drown. The final twist of the play [spoiler alert] is that this suicidal act is what actually perpetuates the species. Those four fish, silently swimming in their bubbling tank throughout the whole play, are now liberated by the flood, becoming the ancestors of humans like Barbara, who will exist 65 million years later—which, not coincidentally, is the span of time between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the emergence of homo sapiens . So Jules and Jo did save the human race, each in their own inadvertent way, since he nurtured and cared for those fish, and she liberated them. But inadvertent is the key word here. Both Jules and Jo are Darwinian failures, but by chance their failures lead to Barbara’s future. This, then, is the play’s argument: the future itself is queer, and the line from Point A to Point B is not a straight path. In her final speech, Barbara reminds the audience that the existence of humanity depends upon “millions and millions of lucky coincidences” and that “the world will just keep on spinning and moving and changing and adapting” (52). Here Nachtrieb seems influenced by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who argued in his best-selling book Wonderful Life (1989) that homo sapiens are “a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.” [37] Gould notes that “small and apparently insignificant changes” can impact the future in substantial ways, [38] and his theory of contingency posits that evolution does not follow an inevitable path of “progress” but is instead the result of “a staggeringly improbable series of events… utterly unpredictable and quite unrepeatable.” [39] Although finding the dramatic and ironic potential inherent in this contingent view of human existence, Nachtrieb also contradicts Gould’s thesis by creating a fantasy in which millions of years of evolution are, in fact, repeatable, resulting in human beings who create museums, play musical instruments, and tell stories about their origins. Endings and Beginnings The play boom mocks our human arrogance for presuming that we could control the destiny of the species even if we tried, and while we are obsessing about the cataclysmic boom, it would be wiser to listen closely and appreciate the constant bubble of nature and life that either will or will not carry on, either with us or without us. Traditionally, tragedy wrestles with fate and ends in death, while comedy ends in (heterosexual) marriage and celebrates life. In its own way, boom mashes the two genres together, finally accepting fate and death, but also bringing together Jo and Jules as a non-reproductive “couple” who accidentally create new life. Nachtrieb crosses the fine line between tragedy and comedy by highlighting the slippage between endings and beginnings, and our inability, because we cannot know the future, to distinguish between them. Other plays about our fears of annihilation, including The Skin of Our Teeth and Endgame , are built with cyclical structures, ending as they began and promising, if not the hope for new life, at least the hope for one more day. One can also see the conflation of beginnings and endings in the popular misinterpretation of the Mayan calendar and its “prediction” of the apocalypse in 2012, which falsely imposed linearity on a cyclical system, seeing “the end” in what is actually a new beginning. [40] Similarly, that moment when Jules and Jo open the door is simultaneously the end of one world and the beginning of another. Barbara’s museum exhibit presents both a tragedy and a comedy, a tale of death and birth, of the end and the beginning. [41] Nachtrieb, who double majored in theatre and biology at Brown University, has written a play that tests conventional notions about the perpetuation of the species, and in doing so he also challenges the reproductive imperative that has often been used to hinder the social inclusion and political equality of LGBT people. Like much of the best science fiction, boom does not directly address political issues but creates an imaginary world that allows the audience to consider more clearly the ideology at work behind a defamiliarized reality. While many plays provide depictions of good gay parents in response to the accusation that homosexuality is a biological dead end, boom challenges the very premise of that accusation. In the process, it also addresses the situation of anyone, regardless of sexuality, who may not comply with the reproductive imperative. Perhaps this is one reason why the play has been particularly successful at smaller “fringe” and university theatres that tend to attract younger audiences, who may be questioning how sex functions in their own lives and what they may or may not “owe” to the future. Of course people who choose to reproduce or raise children are contributing to the future, and I don’t believe that this play (or this essay) is meant to diminish the important role of parents, no matter the sexuality or the relationship status of the parent. Instead, I believe the play expands our understanding of who contributes to the future, including those who do not biologically reproduce but may help to build the future in other ways. Jules, for all of his neuroses, is not selfish, and we see him nurture the fish in his lab, caring for them even under the most dire circumstances. Jo’s radicalism and commitment to her own liberation ultimately lead to the liberation of those fish, too. So within the play’s fantasy, the ideal is a combination of responsibility to others (Jules) and a commitment to individual liberty (Jo), and when these two characters finally unite, they inadvertently fulfill their “destiny” as the new Adam and Eve. It’s also worth noting that Jo’s journalistic habit of writing down all of her experiences in Jules’s lab leads to the creation of the documents that will serve as the historical basis for Barbara’s museum exhibit. Language, knowledge, and narrative are among the gifts that Jo gives to the future. Through this fantasy of apocalyptic doom and new beginnings, boom engages with arguments about the position of queer people in society and in the future, especially around the question of procreation. Nachtrieb’s play is ultimately a comedy because, while it threatens its non-reproductive characters with doom, it also liberates them from the burden of the reproductive imperative and exonerates them for their “failure” to procreate. Seen from this perspective, Nachtrieb’s utopian fantasy aligns with Halberstam’s view that “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” [42] The play directly argues against the use of reproductive futurity as an ideological weapon to enforce conformity or oppress the non-conforming. If nature is indeed based on chaos and chance, then the burden of mandatory reproduction is lifted, and all our anxieties about our duties to Darwin and to the future vanish. Once they accept their failure, Jules and Jo can finally embrace each other and face the end—which is actually a new beginning—together. Unlike apocalyptic narratives that focus on the production or protection of a child, boom gives the stage to two non-reproductive characters who give voice to their fears and anxieties about reproduction, and then are ultimately relieved of them. Nachtrieb’s play argues that 65 million years in the future, the rhetoric of the reproductive imperative, which says that queers have no role in creating the future, is just so much insignificant noise. None of us can know our role in creating the future. The deafening boom of “the end” may not be as momentous as we imagine, perhaps not even meriting a capital B. Meanwhile, from the quiet but persistent bubbling, new worlds beyond our expectations may emerge. [43] References [1] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 9. [2] Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, boom (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2009). All subsequent references are incidated in parentheses. [3] “Top Ten Most-Produced Plays,” Theatre Communications Group. http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/attopten.cfm (accessed 19 January 2015). [4] Nelson Pressley, “The Elements Unite to Create Woolly’s Boom ; Production Crackles with Quirky Writing, Earnest Characters,” Washington Post (12 November 2008), C4; Bert Osborne, “When A Blind Date Predictably Goes Boom : Comedy About Two Outcasts a Change for Aurora Theatre,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution (23 September 2009), D1; Kerry Lengel, “Offbeat Boom Delivers Apocalyptic Belly Laughs,” Arizona Republic (1 November 2009), AE4, www.proquest.com , (accessed 19 January 2015). [5] Ben Brantley, “Meeting Cute on the Eve of Destruction,” New York Times (21 March 2008), E3. Chris Jones, “Not With a Bang at Next Theatre, but a Muddle,” Chicago Tribune (16 September 2009), 3.3, www.proquest.com , (accessed 19January, 2015) [6] Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth , in Three Plays (New York: Harper Perennial, 1985); Liz Duffy Adams, Dog Act: A Post-Apocalyptic Comedy (New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2009). [7] Children of Men , directed by Alfonso Cuarón (2006; Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2007), DVD; The Road , directed by John Hillcoat (2009; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2010), DVD. [8] Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958); José Rivera, Marisol (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1994); Parks, Suzan-Lori, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. “Fucking A.” in The Red Letter Plays . (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004). [9] Melancholia , directed by Lars von Trier (2011; Los Angeles, CA: Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2011), DVD. [10] John F. Harris, “God Gave U.S. ‘What We Deserve,’ Falwell Says,” Washington Post (14 September 2001) C3. [11] Scott James, “From Oakland to the World, Words of Warning: Time’s Up,” New York Times , 19 May 2011,http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/us/20bcjames.html (accessed 14 June 2012). [12] Terrence McNally, Corpus Christi (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1999); Paul Rudnick, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2000). [13] Rudnick, 85. [14] Peter Coviello, “Apocalypse from Now On,” in Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations , ed. Joseph A. Boone et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 42, 50. [15] Ibid., 50. [16] Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994). [17] Ibid., 148. [18] Gary J.Gates, “The Real ‘Modern Family’ in America,” CNN, 25 March 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/24/opinion/gates-real-modern-family (accessed 10 January 2014). [19] Jeffrey Kuhner, “Obama’s Homosexual America,” Washington Times , 24 February 2011. < http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/feb/24/obamas-homosexual-america/ > (accessed 13 June 2012). [20] Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band (New York: Samuel French, 1968); Jane Chambers, Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (New York: JH Press, 1982); Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein, La Cage aux Folles (New York: Samuel French, 1987); William Finn and James Lapine, Falesettos (New York: Plume, 1993). [21] Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey (New York: Grove, 1959); Harvey Fierstein, Torch Song Trilogy (New York: Samuel French, 1982); Patrick Healy, “A Gay Adoption Becomes a Musical,” New York Times , 6 May 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/theater/07kid.html (accessed 26 January 2014). [22] Paula Vogel, And Baby Makes Seven (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1993); Michael Feingold, “Review: The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism, with a Key to the Scriptures ,” Village Voice , 11 May 2011, http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-05-11/theater/the-intelligent-homosexual-s-guide-to-socialism-and-capitalism-with-a-key-to-the-scriptures/full/ (accessed 26 January 2014). [23] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). [24] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). [25] J. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). [26] Muñoz, 35. [27] Edelman, 3. [28] “Editorial: The Campaign Against Women,” New York Times . 20 May 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opinion/sunday/the-attack-on-women-is-real.html (accessed 13 June 2012). [29] The entrapment and coercion of women for the sake of reproduction in a decaying future society was most famously imagined by Margaret Atwood in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), made into a film starring Natasha Richardson in 1990. In this dystopian future, a patriarchal fascist authority categorizes women as wives, whores, or handmaids, who must bear children in a form of reproductive servitude. [30] Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 168. [31] Edelman, 9. An interesting example of the refusal of motherhood in an apocalyptic narrative can be found in the 1967 Czech film The End of August at the Hotel Ozone . After a nuclear war which seems to have killed off the world’s male population, a band of feral young women roam the countryside, killing animals for food and vandalizing the remnants of a dead society. At an abandoned hotel, they come across an old man who represents culture, domesticity, and the possibility of reproduction. In the end, the women murder the man and continue on their way through the countryside. The film seems to be a horror show about men’s fear of empowered women, but I believe a resistant feminist reading is also possible. Thanks to Susan Stryker for bringing this film to my attention. [32] Muñoz, 134. [33] Elizabeth Abbott, A History of Celibacy (New York: Scribner, 2000), 48. [34] Aristophanes, Lysistrata , trans. Jack Lindsay (London: Fanfrolico Press, 1926), accessed through Project Gutenberg, < http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7700/7700-h/7700-h.htm >. [35] Ann Snitow, “Feminism and Motherhood: An American Reading,” Feminist Review 40 (Spring 1992), 32-51; Katharyn Privett, “Dystopic Bodies and Enslaved Motherhood,” Women: A Cultural Review 18:3 (2007), 257-281. [36] Joyce Meier, “The Refusal of Motherhood in African-American Women’s Theater,” MELUS 25:3-4 (Autumn-Winter 2000), 117-139. [37] Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 291. [38] Ibid., 287. [39] Ibid., 14. [40] G. Jeffrey MacDonald, “Does Maya Calendar Predict 2012 Apocalypse?” USA Today , 27 March 2007, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-03-27-maya-2012_n.htm (accessed 15 January 2014). [41] This slippage between apocalypse and genesis is neatly depicted in the poster design for the Woolly Mammoth Theatre production in Washington, DC. The image shows a group of comets approaching the surface of the earth—or perhaps a group of spermatozoa approaching an egg. The “heads” of two comets/spermatozoa form the double “o” of boom , signifying both the end and the beginning in the same graphic. [42] Halberstam, 2-3. [43] I’d like to thank Nick Salvato and Sara Warner for inviting me to present an early version of this essay at the Resoundingly Queer Conference at Cornell University. I’m grateful to the editors Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson for their support, and to David Foley, Libby Garland, and the anonymous readers at JADT for their extremely helpful suggestions during the revision process. This article is dedicated to all the scientists in my family and to my partner in the fishbowl, David Zellnik. Footnotes About The Author(s) JORDAN SCHILDCROUT is Assistant Professor of Theater & Performance at SUNY Purchase. He is the author of Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater (University of Michigan Press), and his scholarship has been published in Theatre Journal , Journal of American Culture , and Journal of Popular Culture . He also works as a dramaturg, most recently on a revival of Paula Vogel’s And Baby Makes Seven at the New Ohio Theater in New York City. Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee 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 Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama 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 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.

Kirsten Lee Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond Kirsten Lee By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF W. E. B. Du Bois is often recognized as a pioneering supporter of Harlem Renaissance theatre, particularly for his involvement with the Krigwa Players at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL). Committed to the development of a “real Negro theatre,” as he called it, Du Bois’s work with the Krigwa Players brought him into close contact with amateur and professional African American playwrights, dramaturgs, and performers. 1 Du Bois’s involvement with the Krigwa Players of Harlem represents only one facet of his work with African American theatre in the 1920s. A more expansive view of Du Bois’s involvement with theatre during the Harlem Renaissance would show how he collaborated with Black community theatres outside of Manhattan. Indeed, part of the Harlem Krigwa Players’ interpretation of Negro life celebrated Black migrations throughout the United States, illustrated by the fact that “Persons from 27 states have enrolled in Krigwa,” according to Du Bois on January 1, 1926. 2 As this article argues, Du Bois tried to represent and facilitate a broader movement promoting Black theatre grounded in Harlem but not limited to there. Ultimately, tracking the Krigwa Players’ impact inspiring Black theatre-making during the interwar period restores to view drama’slongstanding importance in African American communities. Du Bois always saw the growth of Black theatre as a national project that would rely on and speak to “Negro districts” across the United States. 3 These “Negro districts,” Du Bois understood, were cityscapes shaped by the population flows summarized as the Great Migration. Though Du Bois argued that “The Negro [was] already in the theatre and [had] been there for a long time,” he lamented that performance for “mainly a white audience” expecting “a minstrel, comedian, singer” was “the norm for the black actor” in the United States.” 4 Under such circumstances Du Bois insisted that “a Negro audience desiring to see its own life depicted by its own writers and actors” was the foundation for the “new Negro theatre” capable of contesting the racist stereotyping on display in American performance traditions. 5 For Du Bois, “Negro districts” would prove essential to provide both the audience and the artists, for Du Bois, and thus to transformation of American theatre. Black theatre’s growth in these decades was the direct beneficiary of such migrations and emerging cityscapes, which brought artists from across the United States and the world into dense urban communities. Though we may be tempted to think of the Great Migration showing up in African American plays of a slightly later period, associated with works like James Baldwin’s Amen Corner (1954), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and August Wilson’s The Century Cycle (1982-2005), Du Bois’s stewardship of the Little Negro Theatre movement provides an earlier example of the Great Migration’s impact on African American drama. While Baldwin, Hansberry, and Wilson contend with the cultural transformations and consequences of the Great Migration in African American communities through playwriting, Du Bois’s work within the Little Negro Theatre movement provides an example of African Americans experimenting with theatre-making during the Great Migration’s heights. Studying Krigwa in Harlem and beyond shows that Du Bois saw the Great Migration and its émigrés as critical to the national development of African American theatre. Figure 1. “135th Street, all Negro cast drama,” ca. 1925. Image used with permission of the New York Public Library Archives, the New York Public Library. Figure 2. “135th Street, all Negro cast drama” ca. 1925. Image used with permission of the New York Public Library Archives, the New York Public Library. In July 1926, Du Bois penned a piece in The Crisis announcing a launch of a project he had been working on for the past three years at the 135 th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Over these three years Du Bois had been working closely with Ernestine Rose, head librarian of the 135 th Street Branch, on the possibility of a “proposed ‘Little Negro Theatre,’” as he wrote on April 17, 1923. 6 Rose proved receptive to the idea from the first moment Du Bois presented it, passing along the request to the library's central administration in May 1923. The NYPL agreed to support the “theatre matter” provided that the Harlem Krigwa Players kept the operation rather small, offering the 135 th Street Branch basement as a potential location (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2). 7 By July 1923 local theatre professionals such as Anne Wolter, a former director of Harlem’s Acme Players, were offering their services to Du Bois for the creation of a Negro drama company housed at the 135 th Street Branch. 8 Though Rose wrote to Du Bois in September 1923 suggesting that there was a groundswell of interest in the library’s theatre project, it was not until December 1925 that Du Bois submitted a memorandum to the NYPL outlining the specifics of such an African American theatre. 9 According to his memorandum, Du Bois waited in part because he wanted to be sure that the project would fill a need the existing landscape of New York’s Black theatre scene (Fig. 3). 10 Figure 3. Selection about the Harlem Krigwa Players and subsequent Black theatres from Claude McKay's essay "The Negro Theatre Movement in New York" written for the Federal Writers' Project. Federal Writers' Project Negro Group Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Du Bois’s 1925 memorandum to Rose acknowledged the then-cresting renaissance of African American drama, noting that “We have today, as we did not have previously, a half dozen or more good plays, several Negro dramatists who are writing, and a number of artists and painters who are willing to cooperate.” 11 Critically, though he would lead the Krigwa Players who would call the 135 th Street Branch their home, Du Bois viewed this collaboration with Harlem’s public library as the beginning of a broader and cross-regional “Little Negro Theatre movement.” 12 The ethos of Krigwa, an initialism adapted to transliterate “Crigwa” or “The Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists,” foregrounded Black arts as a foundation of thriving Black communities. 13 In their 1926 handbill announcing their values and plays for the season, the Harlem Krigwa Players introduce the project’s mission, namely to build “in High Harlem, New York City, a Little Theatre which shall be primarily a center where Negro authors before Negro audiences interpret Negro life as depicted by Negro artists.” 14 The Harlem Krigwa Players thus envisioned this urban “center” as the heartbeat of the 135 th Street Branch’s dramatic productions and also the “headquarters in New York” coordinating a network of Black theatre companies across the U.S. 15 In his first public-facing article on the project, the now-famous "'Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre': The Story of a Little Theatre Movement," Du Bois introduced the Krigwa Players as part of a national renaissance in Black theatre. In this 1926 article for the Crisis Du Bois describes the national development of “a new Negro theatre,” which he identifies as the as-yet underdeveloped form of the Renaissance: “Today as the renaissance of art comes among American Negroes, the theatre calls for new birth.” 16 Though Du Bois’s article on the Krigwa Players is often celebrated for its theory of the four principles that should guide “a real Negro theatre,” namely that African Americans should create theatre about us, by us, for us, and near us, he identified the Great Migration as a major precondition for "assembling the “us” in his reference. 17 Inherent in Du Bois’s definition of real Negro theatre is an urban landscape of segregated neighborhoods: “The theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people.” 18 Through Krigwa the theatre becomes a way to re-imagine Black communities’ relationship to “expressions of racial and spatial violence” within cities as an invitation to make art. 19 In Du Bois’s theory the majority-Black area of a city becomes as important a precondition for theatre-making as Great Migration émigrés themselves. Du Bois's diagnosis of African American theatre of the New Negro era fixates on the markets for dramatic productions in Black urban hubs across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic especially. For Du Bois, newly congregated densities of African Americans across the country, especially in cities being transformed by Great Migration émigrés, made the national growth of Negro theatre possible. Du Bois’s diagnosis of African American theatre of the New Negro era fixates on the markets for dramatic productions in Black urban hubs across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic especially. For Du Bois, the idea of “real Negro theatre” could be made real through a model he would at times call the Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre (or KPLNT) aligned with the principles out Black theatre-making he developed in Harlem. In the 1926 Crisis article, for example, he announces that “A second K. P. L. N. T. is being organized in Washington, D.C.,” expressing hope that “the movement will spread widely” beyond the nation’s capital. 20 He also praises “some excellent groups of coloured amateurs are entertaining colored audiences in Cleveland, in Philadelphia and elsewhere” in the same article. 21 Yet he criticizes Philadelphia and Cleveland “groups of coloured amateurs” for casting Black performers in white-authored plays rather than writing and mounting their own productions. 22 To transform these tendencies, Du Bois suggests that there must be a total overhaul of how Black communities view and make theatre, a transformation only possible in response to “a Negro audience desiring to see its own life depicted by its own writers and actors.” 23 By being on stage or writing plays, Black actors, dramaturgs and playwrights could reconfigure their relationship to the Great Migration by aestheticizing its causes, its consequences, and its cityscapes. Du Bois saw this aestheticization as Krigwa’s major work. Du Bois believed Harlem’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre would provide a portable model to unite Black creatives around the issue of producing theatre. The Little Negro Theatre model ultimately was meant to stimulate Black art in all its forms. Dedicated to spreading the Little Negro Theatre model beyond Harlem, the Krigwa Players Cabinet encouraged African Americans across the country “to get together a small congenial group of persons who want to do artistic work, who want to write, draw, paint, produce plays, recite, embroider, or work in any other artistic line.” 24 According to a circular written by the Krigwa Players dated January 1, 1926, each local Krigwa band, as they were to be called, would be expected to “each year produce a play, one written by its own members or one of The Crisis prize plays, or any other good play.” 25 In addition to producing an annual play, the 1926 circular encouraged local Krigwa bands to buy books, host poetry readings, curate art exhibits, visit local museums together, and to publish their works in The Crisis . 26 As the 1926 circular emphasized, each local band was to prioritize “meetings of artists who are working at their art” over “formal organization with a lot of officers and points of order.” 27 The Harlem Krigwa Players planned for The Crisis to help these local bands to connect with each other, imagining the magazine as a mediator. 28 For Du Bois and the Krigwa Players, the Litte Negro Theatre model was a way to build a national network of Black artistic communities across the United States through theatre. Their excitement for the nationalization of Black art via theatre motivated the 1926 circular’s hopeful conclusion, asking, “In how many centers can we have next the beginning of a real Krigwa Theatre which will put on a play” by 1927. 29 This hopeful conclusion was more than idealism and declared a commitment to growing Black theatre and drama as a craft. Many Black communities wrote The Crisis in 1926 indicating their interest in forming a local Krigwa band and the corresponding Little Negro Theatre, showing the immediate popularity of Krigwa’s model. Leota A. Bell of Kalamazoo, Michigan, for example, wrote to Du Bois on April 1, 1926 expressing her regrets that she could not at that time organize a local Krigwa band while confirming that she hoped to in the future. 30 That same month Reverend Neol L. J. Gonsalves of Lexington, Virginia wrote to Du Bois indicating that despite his best efforts he could not form a local Krigwa band due to lack of interest. 31 In late April 1926 W. R. Herndon of Denver, Colorado wrote Jessie Fauset at The Crisis regarding local interest in forming a Little Negro Theatre, pending further information “concerning the Krigwa idea and about organization.” 32 In November 1926 the Dixwell Community House of New Haven communicated interest in organizing “a group of players at the Dixwell Community House,” hoping to collaborate with The Crisis to produce plays the magazine publicized. 33 In reply to Du Bois’s recommendations, a Miss Leonora E Pritchett asks for the rules for a local Krigwa band at the Dixwell Community House. 34 Carrie Clifford of the Washington, D.C. Krigwa band wrote to Du Bois on July 12, 1926 asking for help sourcing a play for their debut production. In her letter Clifford took care to mention to Du Bois that the D.C. Krigwa band hoped to generate materials that could be used by other Little Negro Theatres. As Clifford posits, “Some of our members are also writing plays and hope the N.Y. Little Negro Theatre may use some of theirs some future day.” 35 The D.C. Krigwa band’s playwrights epitomized Du Bois’s dream for the Little Negro Theatre model, namely, to grow the development of Black-authored plays performed by Black actors in Black communities. But the D. C. Krigwa band’s ambitions also made real the dream of the Harlem Krigwa Players Cabinet to stimulate cross-regional collaboration among Black playwrights, dramaturgs, and performers. Though he only led the Krigwa Players of Harlem from 1925 to 1927, Du Bois calls the 135 th Street Branch’s Little Negro Theatre a small triumph in “a long wearisome fight” to develop African American drama during the New Negro era. 36 Reflecting on his work in Black theatre in a 1927 draft of an essay titled “The New Negro Theatre,” Du Bois identifies a few select cities confirming as the sites of recent national progress “toward Negro drama.” 37 Three times great pageants of Negro history and aspiration have been given in New York, Washington and Philadelphia, where audiences of perhaps 30,000 saw thousands of colored actors do folk-drama with surprising aptness and simplicity. Then there came in Harlem and spread to other cities companies of colored players in conventional Broadway plays who outside of certain obvious misfits of bloodplot and circumstance rose to heights of real dramatic ability and drew large colored audiences. 38 For Du Bois the genre of folk-drama, often understood to “arise from the community for which it was intended,” was more suited to real Negro theatre because he believed in the importance of Black artistic self-determination in all media. 39 It would not be enough to have “companies of colored players in conventional Broadway plays”: to Du Bois the growth of African American drama required Black creative collaboration and leadership on and offstage. 40 Though the Harlem Krigwa Players are speculated to have disbanded in part due to creative and financial disputes between Du Bois and playwright Eulalie Spence, their impact endured throughout the decade. 41 At the end of the 1920s African Americans were still writing the Harlem Krigwa Players expressing fervent interest in joining “the National Negro Little Theatre movement,” sometimes writing Du Bois personally to ask “Couldnt[sic] we have a little colored theatre here, such as you have in New York.” 42 The Little Negro Theatre model continued to inspire Black communities to democratize the dramatic arts throughout the New Negro Renaissance. Poised at what he thought would be the end of his formal leadership in New Negro theatre, Du Bois celebrates how the Little Negro Theatre movement “has been suspiciously begun” and “leave[s] it with fondest benediction to those better able than [he] to conduct its growth.” 43 He offers the following questions as a method for aligning the priorities of African American theatre with the values of Black artistic self-determination: The future is bright for the Little Theatre idea in Harlem. But the seed sown needs a period of incubation. We must make up our minds to certain things. Is Negro life dramatic and interesting? Do we want profit or art? Will we subordinate ourselves to authority? When these things are settled we can build a real Little Theatre movement.44 Du Bois positions Harlem’s Little Negro Theatre as one of many sites nationally of New Negro era theatre where “the future is bright.” 45 Seeing New Negro theatre as a medium for movement-building irrevocably tied African American drama to the Great Migration and the mass movements that created “Negro districts” across the country. It is these “Negro districts” bustling with Black (im)migrants that Du Bois sees as the critical laboratories of “real Negro theatre.” 46 Krigwa Little Negro Theatres were to be the means of Black creative freedom made real through the work of theatre-making. As Du Bois well understood, building a “real Little Theatre movement” would require Black creative communities united around the issue of artistic and political freedom, committed to the liberatory potential of art rather than a particular medium. 47 A hundred years later, projects like the National Black Theatre and the Black Ensemble Theatre continue to treat theatre-making as movement work and as a medium capable of harnessing “the Liberationist spirit of the past […] as a catalyzing force for our collective creative future.” 48 In such contemporary declarations, the Krigwa ethos lives on. References 1 W. E. B. Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre’: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement,” The Crisis , July 1926, 134. 2 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” Typescript, New York, N.Y., January 1, 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b034-i170 . 3 W. E. B. Du Bois, “In High Harlem, ca. October 5, 1927,” Typescript, New York, N.Y., October 5, 1927, 3, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b208-i040 . 4 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 5 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 6 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Letter to New York Public Library,” Typescript, April 17, 1923, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b022-i296 . 7 Ernestine Rose, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Typescript, April 24, 1923, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b022-i297 ; Ernestine Rose, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Typescript, May 10, 1923, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b022-i301 . 8 Anne Wolter also developed the National Ethiopian Art Theatre, which maintained some correspondence with Du Bois during these years as well, and requested his expertise and oversight. Anne Wolter was white, though she worked closely with many Black collaborators. 9 Ernestine Rose, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Typescript, September 29, 1923, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b022-i303 . 10 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Memorandum to the Librarian of the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library,” Typescript, New York, N.Y., December 18, 1925, 1, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b030-i555 . 11 Du Bois, “Memorandum to the Librarian of the 135 th Street Branch of the New York Public Library,” 1. 12 Du Bois, “Memorandum to the Librarian of the 135 th Street Branch of the New York Public Library,” 1-2. 13 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa prize leaflet,” Typescript, New York, N.Y., 1927, 1, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b039-i276 . 14 “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre Handbill,” Typescript, New York, N.Y., 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b034-i166 . 15 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 1. 16 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 17 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 18 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 19 Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism , vol. 17, no. 3, 2017, 10. 20 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 136. 21 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 22 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 23 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 24 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 1. 25 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 1. 26 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 1. 27 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 1. 28 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 2. 29 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 2. 30 Leota A. Bell, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Manuscript, April 1, 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b171-i485 . 31 Neol L. J. Gonsalves, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Manuscript, April 19, 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b033-i360 . 32 W. R. Herndon, “Letter to Jessie Fauset,” Manuscript, April 27, 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b033-i503 . 33 B. V. Lawson, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Typescript, November 3, 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b033-i114 . 34 Leanora E. Pritchett, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Manuscript, November 10, 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b033-i116 . 35 Carrie W. Clifford, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Manuscript, July 12, 1926, 1, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b032-i497 . 36 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The New Negro Theatre,” Typescript, New York, N.Y., 1927, 2, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/pageturn/mums312-b215-i129 . 37 Du Bois, “The New Negro Theatre,” 2. 38 Du Bois, “The New Negro Theatre,” 2-3. 39 Helene Keyssar, “Theodore Dreiser’s Dramas: American Folk Drama and Its Limits,” Theatre Journal , vol. 33, no. 3, 1981, 367. 40 Du Bois, “The New Negro Theatre,” 2-3. 41 For more on Du Bois’s dispute with Eulalie Spence, see Kathy A. Perkins, ed., Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950 (Indiana University Press, 1989), 106; New Perspectives Theatre Company, “Eulalie Spence,” accessed January 26, 2026 , https://www.newperspectivestheatre.org/eulalie-spence . For more on Harlem’s Black theatre scene after the Krigwa Players, see Claude McKay, “The Negro Theatre Movement in New York,” Typescript, Federal Writers’ Project New York Negro Group, n.d., Federal Writers’ Project Negro Group Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, accessed January 27, 2026, https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/10563282 . 42 Ardella V. Richardson, “Letter to KRIGWA,” Manuscript, December 26, 1931, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b060-i379 ; Sharlie Norman and Charlotte Van Buren, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Typescript, July 9, 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b044-i150 . For examples of late 1920s correspondence to Du requesting information on the Black theatre movement, see J. W. J. Lovell, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Typescript, February 24, 1929, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b049-i387 ; Mila M. Bray, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Manuscript, June 6, 1929, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b047-i333 . 43 Du Bois, “In High Harlem, ca. October 5, 1927,” 1. 44 Du Bois, “In High Harlem, ca. October 5, 1927,” 4-5. 45 Du Bois, “In High Harlem, ca. October 5, 1927,” 4-5. 46 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 47 Du Bois, “In High Harlem, ca. October 5, 1927,” 4-5. 48 National Black Theatre, Our History , https://nationalblacktheatre.org/mission/ , accessed 17 Apr. 2026. Footnotes About The Author(s) Kirsten Lee is an Assistant Professor of English at Auburn University, where she specializes in early African American print and material culture, intellectual history, transnationalism, archival poetics, and Black women writers. Her current book project studies the aesthetic relationship between calls for reparations and abolitionism in Black print and manuscript across the long nineteenth century. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in  Early American Literature ,  American Literary History , and  Resources for American Literary Study . Since 2025, she has served as a co-director of the Black Women Diaries Project alongside Dr. Jennifer Putzi of the College of William and Mary. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. 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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 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.

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

Andrew Gibb 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 Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Andrew Gibb By Published on December 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF PERFORMANCE IN THE ZÓCALO: CONSTRUCTING HISTORY, RACE, AND INDENTITY IN MEXICO'S CENTRAL SQUARE FROM THE COLONIAL ERA TO THE PRESENT. Ana Martínez. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020; Pp. 222. In recent years, our understanding of the deep complexities of race and power in early colonial Mexico has been advanced greatly by scholars treating the era from a range of interdisciplinary approaches. Many works have taken up performance as a primary analytical lens, including Linda A. Curcio-Nagy’s The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City (2004), Patricia Ybarra’s Performing Conquest (2009), Paul A. Scolieri’s Dancing the New World (2013), and Leo Cabranes-Grant’s From Scenarios to Networks (2016). Ana Martínez’s 2020 Performance in the Zócalo expands the discourse in important new directions. The author’s architectural and scenographic expertise brings spatial considerations to the fore in fresh new ways, a perspective heightened by the book’s diachronic analysis of a single space (Mexico City’s central Plaza de la Constitución, popularly known as the Zócalo) over time, from the sixteenth century through the twenty-first. Martínez’s unique approach is to“study urban spaces through embodied practices across time”(5). To manage such study over a span of more than five centuries, she carefully selects a handful of key events staged in Mexico City’s main square from the colonial period through the Porfiriato and into the twenty-first century. Martínez further frames her analysis by choosing case studies that foreground the agency of Indigenous participants, a move that not only resists foundational and ongoing erasure of Native Mexican identity and history, but also provides a basis for her central thesis that the space and flows of the Zócalo have always served as a“site of officialdom and liberation” (5). Martínez’s particular interdisciplinary methodology takes advantage of the“overlapping areas of performance studies, Mexican studies, and urban studies”(11), borrowing equally from the insights of scenographers, sociologists, and critical geographers. Each of the five chapters begins with a thorough contextualization of a particular historical spectacle, including a spatial description of the plaza at the time of the performance. Analysis then progresses through a thick description of the event, setting up a theorized exploration of its social meaning(s). The first chapter is a study of a civic festival mounted in the square and surrounding streets in 1539, less than two decades after Cortés’s destruction of the Mexican capital of Tenochtitlán. Martínez interprets the festival– a four-day jumble of mock battles, athletic competitions, and public banquets–as a Spanish/Indigenous collaboration, intended by the former as a celebration of the newly-constructed colonial center, and seized upon by the latter as an opportunity to perpetuate pre-conquest forms of cultural expression. Notable here is Martínez’s use of contemporary maps, both Spanish and Native. With Chapter Two, the author treats the 1721 Paseo del pendón (parade of the royal banner), by which viceregal authorities attempted to appropriate a nearly two century-old local celebration for the purposes of strengthening imperial ideology. As Martínez shows, the compulsion of Native participation by colonial officials unintentionally created a space for Indigenous artists to reassert the place of their communities into the imagining of Mexican identity. Here the author makes excellent use of contemporary paintings in arguing her point. Chapter Three takes us into the twentieth century, and the centennial commemoration of Mexican independence staged in the Zócalo by President Porifirio Díaz in 1910. Mounted just a few short months before the outbreak of the Revolution, one might expect the celebrations to have represented the final gasp of Mexican authoritarianism. Instead, Martínez argues that these spectacles (including the first delivery of the grito from the balcony of the National Palace) cemented the Zócalo as the premier space for performing Mexican identity, and (particularly in the case of the Gran desfile histórico ) solidified a narrative of past Indigenous glory and current Native absence that continues to haunt Mexican popular historiography today. Having established the centrality of the Zócalo as Mexico’s commemorative center, Martínez shares with the next chapter an example of liberatory counter-performance in the plaza: the 2001 Zapatista march on Mexico City. Quoting movement leaders such as Comandanta Esther, the author brings the spoken words of Indigenous agents directly into her narrative. With the final two chapters of the book, Martínez effectively contrasts twenty-first century performances that underline her thesis regarding the Zócalo as a space for performing both officialdom and liberation. First, she critiques President Felipe Calderón’s use of the 2010 bicentennial celebrations to boost support for his unpopular administration, spotlighting the participation of notable Mexican theatre artists otherwise known for their criticism of governmental authority. Martínez also notes the parallels between the historical parades of 1910 and 2010, with respect to both the appropriation of Native culture and the exploitation of Indigenous performers. With the final case study, Martínez treats the 2018 inauguration of President López Obrador, during which he symbolically received the Bastón de mando (baton to lead) from Indigenous leaders. She focuses on the potential of AMLO’s recognition of Native sovereignty, while expressing the reservations shared by many regarding the new administration’s commitment to Indigenous rights. Scholarship on historical performance in the Americas will benefit greatly from the architectural and urban studies lenses that Martínez brings to her analysis. Her attention to the historical relationship between Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and its successive governments furthers the understanding of all interested in that aspect of Mexican society and history. Methodologically, the book represents an excellent example of transhistorical curation of case studies, enabling a chronically wide-ranging argument by limiting focus to a single, highly symbolic performance space. The structure also serves the book’s usefulness as a teaching tool, in that it can be assigned in its entirely, or broken into chapters to serve the needs of any number of discipline-specific seminars. With this work, Martínez has made significant contributions to both Mexican history and to our understanding of how sociopolitical power circulates through performance References Martínez, Anna. Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Footnotes About The Author(s) Andrew Gibb is Graduate Advisor and Co-Area Head for Theatre History, Theory, and Criticism in the School of Theatre and Dance at Texas Tech University. He is the author of Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West (Southern Illinois UP, 2018), and has published work in Theatre History Studies , New England Theatre Journal , Latin American Theatre Review , Theatre Symposium , and Texas Theatre Journal . Dr. Gibb is a past editor of Theatre Symposium : A Publication of the Southeastern Theatre Conference , and has served as the Association for Theatre in Higher Education's Vice President for Conference, as well as the Pedagogy Symposium Co-Chair for the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Dr. Gibb was awarded the Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the M.F.A. in Acting from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 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.

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

Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, (former) Editor, New England Theatre in Review 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 New England Theatre in Review Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, (former) Editor, New England Theatre in Review By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF The mission of New England Theatre in Review ( NETIR ) is to document the history of producing theatres in the New England states by assessing their artistic merits, how they reflect and respond to their audiences and immediate communities, and how they fulfill their position as regional leaders supporting the growth and maturation of American theatre. Our reviewers write one-thousand-word essays that address the theatre’s full season of productions; administrative and business practices as sustainable institutions; and gender, ethnic, race, and LGBTQ+ equity, both in hiring practices and season programming. At the top of each essay is a full list of the shows, with production dates, from the 2023-24 season. Readers of this edition of NETIR who are interested in the previous history of these theatres are encouraged to consult the back issues of New England Theatre Journal. In the aggregate, these astute chronicles of the work of major American producing theatres, including American Repertory Theater, Barrington Stage, Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, Hartford Stage, Huntington Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre, Portland Stage, Shakespeare & Company, Trinity Repertory Theatre, Vermont Stage, and Yale Repertory Theatre, provide an on-going critical history that is unique in American theatre scholarship. NETIR has been particularly assiduous in documenting theatre during and after the coronavirus pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter and its manifestations via “We See You White American Theatre” and other activist movements. The exigencies of the pandemic, coupled with the equally urgent need to reform theatre structure and practice along anti-racist lines, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) both on and off stage, became the twin foci for theatres across America from 2020-21 forward. Since we are still in the post-pandemic, post-reckoning era, with many theatres continuing to struggle to regain the audiences, funding, and community support of the pre-COVID years, our reviewers continue to assess the health and well-being of their theatres right now. Have theatres changed the number, type, and/or style of plays produced; revamped artistic and administrative personnel that impact programming and operations; published new guidelines and/or DEI measures? Are virtual productions still happening? Are COVID regulations (masking, vaccinations, etc.) still in place in whole or in part? Is there any sense of “back to normalcy” or, perhaps, a new normal, whatever that may mean? This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) MARTHA S. LOMONACO is a theatre director, historian, and writer. She is Professor Emerita of Theatre and American Studies at Fairfield University, where she was resident director and ran the theatre program for thirty-four years. She is the author of two monographs Every Week, A Broadway Revue: The Tamiment Playhouse, 1921-1960 and Summer Stock: An American Theatrical Phenomenon ( Choice 2004 Outstanding Academic Title) and an edited collection, Theatre Exhibitions , volume thirty-three of Performing Arts Resources . She has been editor of New England Theatre in Review since 2010. Marti holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from New York University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jeffrey Ullom Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 1 Visit Journal Homepage Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival Jeffrey Ullom By Published on March 9, 2014 Download Article as PDF In May 2011, Marc Masterson departed Actors Theatre of Louisville for a similar position as the artistic director of South Coast Repertory Theater in San Diego. Reportedly, he initially offered to remain and assist with the search for a replacement, but his proposal was not accepted as the leadership of the theatre wished to proceed without [ . . . ] [scribd id=211700037 key=key-2mngwhiptfnekrms8lyg mode=scroll height=930 width=600] 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 Between Blackface and Bondage: The Incompletely Forgotten Failure of The Underground Railroad's 1879 Midwestern Tour “One Live as Two, Two Live as One”: Bert Williams and the Uprooted Bamboo Tree Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival Feminist Periodization as a Structural Component of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Rosa Schneider Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Rosa Schneider By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF A hush falls over the previously raucous crowd as the image projected across the wall of Theatre for a New Audience and onto the bodies of the actors on stage suddenly becomes clear. The famous photograph of the August 7, 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, fills the space. Shipp and Smith hang from a tree in the background, while in the foreground a huge crowd of white spectators smile, point at the bodies, and make eye contact with the photographer. As the audience watches in mute horror, the projection is manipulated so that Smith and Shipp’s bodies appear to sway in the trees, bringing immediacy to a decades-old event. It is within and against this backdrop that BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant, the three most versatile characters in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014), attempt to stage a lynch trial on the docks of a Louisiana town for Wahnotee, a Native American accused of murdering a black child. The photograph of this particularly brutal twentieth-century lynching deepens the action on stage, occurring in the 1850s of the original play. These innovations force the audience to become complicit in the trial and its bloody aftermath and simultaneously bring the audience as close to a sensation of death as possible without burning the theatre down around them. [1] This eye-catching and difficult scene, which I call reconstruction, is a key part of Jacobs-Jenkins’ compilation of theatrical techniques. Collectively, these techniques teach Jacobs-Jenkins’s twenty-first-century audience to respond both on a theatrical and a racial level in order to work in a manner they would not have been able to otherwise. Jacobs-Jenkins manipulates melodramatic structures— such as the sensation scene, tableau, and what in this article I term melodrama’s gaze—that play upon and reimagine the history of melodrama in the United States. These changes not only alter the way slavery’s violence is portrayed on stage but make melodrama comprehensible to a twenty-first-century audience unused to the genre’s demands. These reconstructions allow Jacobs-Jenkins to transform Dion Boucicault’s wildly influential melodrama The Octoroon into his own version, An Octoroon . The two plays follow essentially the same plot, but Jacobs-Jenkins makes crucial changes to the universe of The Octoroon, particularly to the characters. Jacobs-Jenkins removes many of the white characters, notably the majority of Boucicault’s plantation owners, while consolidating those he keeps. George Peyton, the new owner of Terrebonne (the plantation on which both plays take place), is merged with Salem Scudder, the well-meaning but destructive Northern overseer of Boucicault’s original, who feels particularly protective of Zoe, the eponymous octoroon. [2] George inherits Scudder’s interest in technology, particularly photography, maintaining an important plot point and gateway to the sensation scene. [3] Cuts such as these are logical, as the removed figures emphasize previously established power structures. However, these changes then create a lack of economic diversity, as the white characters who remain all belong to the upper echelons of slave-owning society. That separation makes even starker the divisions between the enslaved and laboring African-American characters and the white leisure class. Further, the elimination of characters like Scudder, Judge Caillou, and Jules Thibodeaux narrows the universe of the melodrama. Rather than showing “life in Louisiana,” which is Boucicault’s subtitle, with Terrebonne as one of a network of plantations, Jacobs-Jenkins’ edits make the plantation a world unto itself. As we shall explore at greater length below, Jacobs-Jenkins also makes significant changes to the ending of The Octoroon . Thus, with changes to character, plot, and form, Jacobs-Jenkins walks a fine line in An Octoroon between rewriting a singular play and reconstructing an entire genre. It is difficult to overstate the importance of melodrama as a theatrical form in the nineteenth-century American landscape. Between 1820 and 1870, melodrama was ubiquitous in American culture, attracting diverse audiences “from elite males to urban workers and business- class women, by the time of the Civil War.” [4] Cutting across class and racial lines, melodrama served as a location for audiences to project their hopes and assuage their fears of a rapidly changing society. The theatres and the plots explored therein served as a training ground for business-class audiences to “acquire, rehearse, and perfect the manners of polite society.” [5] Knowing this history helps us to understand the effect of Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstructions. As part of this reconstruction, Jacobs-Jenkins chooses several tools that are essential to melodrama, including the sensation scene, the tableau, acting styles, and staging methods, and then fundamentally changes their core by altering melodrama’s gaze. “Melodrama’s gaze” refers to what could be included on stage in these productions: the plotlines that were of interest to the consumers and creators, the characters who could embody those stories, as well as the tools and techniques used to actualize these narratives. Jacobs-Jenkins’s changes allow him to represent subjects—slaves and slavery—that nineteenth-century melodrama’s toward which practitioners were often happy to gesture but with which they refused to engage in any depth. Slavery was long a topic on the melodramatic stage in both England and the United States, as is evident from the multiple versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin playing simultaneously during the nineteenth century. As Linda Williams argues in Playing the Race Card , melodrama is “the fundamental mode by which American mass culture has ‘talked to itself’ about the enduring moral dilemma of race.” [6] The subjects of the stories and the stories themselves that the genre told, however, were not as capacious as one might expect. An example of this exclusionary effect is the way Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was adapted into melodrama, stripping away the agency of many of its female characters. While these plotlines were partly cut for time, as only so many plots and characters from a novel can be translated onto the stage, there is also a specific set of generic conventions that Stowe’s characters like Mrs. Shelby or Mrs. Bird could not fulfill. In discussing George L. Aiken and Henry J. Conway’s adaptations, Bruce McConachie explains that: both playwrights were necessarily drawing on production practices and theatrical conventions ill-suited to realizing Stowe’s matrifocal ideals in production. Strong-willed mothers rarely appeared on the antebellum stage; most stock companies would have been hard pressed to cast several such roles since companies generally contained two to three times as many male as female actors. [7] We can thus see melodrama’s gaze at work. While Stowe’s original included a character like Mrs. Shelby, who decried the slave system from a matrifocal, anti-capitalist point of view, the melodramatic form could not accommodate such a character. There is thus a space for Jacobs-Jenkins to expand the audience’s understanding of and experience with slavery. Jacobs-Jenkins’s weaving together of theatrical techniques from different eras creates a new genre, one that incorporates elements of performance styles from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries alongside each other rather than prioritizing one century’s vision over another. Through these techniques Jacobs-Jenkins reconstructs the violence of slavery, bringing it onto the stage in a manner that marks a significant departure from the ways the institution had been represented previously, which often emphasized and lingered on physical and sexual violence. Excessive violence is often depicted to evoke sympathy for its victims. However, the spectacle can have the opposite effect: not only leaving the audience with an uncomfortable sense of voyeurism but habituating them to the sight of a black body in pain. [8] On the other hand, just as reprehensible as overemphasizing the violence of slavery is pretending that violence didn’t exist or attempting to make it palatable. Jacobs-Jenkins takes a third route, and his reconstruction of certain elements of melodrama helps the audience see the institution’s violence in a new light. Jacobs-Jenkins’s interest in form is apparent in the way he mixes elements from the American and British versions of The Octoroon . In the American version, distraught over her inability to be with George and her fear of M’Closky, Zoe commits suicide, and the play ends with her death. In the British version, M’Closky is stopped by George, and the owner of Terrebonne marries Zoe. The British audiences were outraged at the separation of the lovers, which Mark Mullen, in “The Work of the Public Mind,” reads as a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of slavery. The audience in London didn’t understand why the Peytons could not just move to a state where the law forbidding George to marry Zoe did not apply. [9] As part of his amalgamation, however, Jacobs-Jenkins includes the onstage stabbing of M’Closky, an addition in the British production, but concludes An Octoroon with the bleaker ending of Zoe’s desire to kill herself rather than become M’Closky’s property, an element of the original American version. This blended production then concludes with Jacobs-Jenkins’s own interpolation into the narrative, giving the last words and emotional beats to the female slaves Dido and Minnie, who emerge as the real heart of the play. These various endings drastically change the impact of the play, as it is significantly different, for example, if Zoe is sold but then redeemed by her white lover than if she kills herself to avoid becoming property. His reconstruction of melodrama’s gaze through his elevation of the three female slaves, Dido, Grace, and Minnie, to the center of the play, is Jacobs-Jenkins’s most extensive and provocative alteration to Boucicault’s original. These women are reconstructed as desiring agents with distinct backgrounds and personalities, who challenge the melodramatic conventions regarding the representation of slaves, especially the violence of slavery. Dido, Minnie, and Grace’s conversations educate the audience about the emotional, familial, societal, and violent cost of slavery for its victims. They actively mold the performance of their enslavement, rather than functioning as passive signifiers of slave life as they do in Boucicault’s original. This shaping occurs not only at the verbal level, through their self-conscious commentary on their positions, but also through a physical level, as Dido and Minnie are the only characters who work. They sweep cotton in the opening moments of the play, as well as serve breakfast and clean up the messes left by the white characters. While An Octoroon does include male enslaved characters (an older slave named Pete, and his grandson, Paul, both played by the Assistant in blackface), Jacobs-Jenkins’s most significant generic reconstructions occur with the enslaved women. Jacobs-Jenkins’s focus on Minnie, Grace, and Dido is also a significant departure from the genre’s customary depiction of the institution and the people trapped within it. Typically, the “stage Negro” fulfilled the low-comedy stereotype, whose comedic value was derived from “his odd dialect and his misuse of words. His special characteristic was inflated pride in badges of rank.” [10] While The Octoroon partly broke this tradition by placing Terrebonne’s slaves at the forefront of the play and turning them into a constant visual presence, [11] it did use these slaves as comic relief, with Peter, Solon, and Grace performing minstrel-like routines. [12] Boucicault’s slaves also adhere to many of the character tropes proliferated by minstrel depictions of black life. Minnie, Grace, and Pete are happy and loyal to their masters and do not run away, as most slaves at Terrebonne do in Jacobs-Jenkins’s version. The slaves are so secure within the system that the oldest slave, Pete, corrects a neighboring planter and Captain Ratts regarding how much his grandson was worth before he died, monetizing Paul even as he is mourning him: “What, Sar! You p’tend to be sorry for Paul, and prize him like dat. Five hundred dollars!—Tousand dollars, Massa Thibodeaux.” [13] The genre’s traditional refusal to engage with slavery is surprising, as melodrama would seem perfectly poised to stage the sights of slavery as a method of critique. However, while melodrama frequently depicted the institution of slavery onstage, either as sensational material or for abolitionist purposes, the scenes had to fit into larger established narratives so that the story could achieve legibility, [14] and the genre used the institution as a “mere resting point in the rush to affirm order at the play’s close.” [15] Additionally, melodrama by necessity was reactionary rather than revolutionary: the structure of the form is generally an arc that describes a fall from, and restoration to, innocence. [16] This compulsion to return to stasis has a wide-ranging effect not only on the genre’s sensibilities but on its portrait of American society, which was by definition conservative. Jeffrey Mason writes that melodrama was ever in pursuit of “the restoration of a condition that had, unexpectedly, inexplicably, and unfortunately been altered . . . culture is constantly in the process of attempting to come full circle and return to its point of origin.” [17] This originary impulse undercuts any great social change the melodrama might show, such as a successful slave rebellion or abolitionist appeal. However, Jacobs-Jenkins directly opposes the generic conventions and representations discussed above, by means of the characters that actively participate in the plot through their speech and commentary upon the action. His reconstruction centers on Dido and Minnie and occurs on multiple levels, but it is particularly noticeable in the unexpected way the two house slaves, and to a lesser extent, the field hand Grace, speak when they are in private, as well as what they say. When the three women are not observed by the white characters, they use contemporary slang and jargon, and demonstrate modern opinions regarding the division between labor and self, encapsulated in Minnie’s advice to Dido: “I know we slaves and evurthang, but you are not your job. You gotta take time out of your day to live life for you.” [18] Essentially, these women speak their own language. While it is true that BJJ and Assistant use a similar elastic vocabulary, their speech appears less out of place, as it is primarily bracketed off in the metatheatrical scenes, such as the prologue or the introduction to the sensation scene. In both cases, BJJ brings the audience out of 1859 into a significantly more contemporary space. Thus, what is crucial about Dido and Minnie’s language is that there is a meaningful disconnect between their surroundings, the 1859 plantation of The Octoroon , and their dialogue. The intention behind this change is explained in the script, as a note at the very beginning of the melodrama section. Jacobs-Jenkins writes: “I’m just going to say this right now so we can get it over with: I don’t know what a real slave sounded like. And neither do you.” [19] What emerges from this ignorance is a language that rejects the stereotyped “black voice” accent most commonly associated with slavery in the popular media. In An Octoroo n this language particularly emerges when Dido and Minnie escape from the panoptic gaze of the white characters. Dido, Minnie, and Grace’s manipulation of language gains additional significance when we consider the history of the representation of slavery in the theatre and other genres, such as prose. In slaveholding societies like the United States and England, there was a long tradition of employing slave narratives to publicize and garner support for abolition. While some of these narratives were written by the subjects themselves, they were often channeled through white interlocutors, who changed events and attitudes to appeal to wider audiences and in the process monetized the slaves’ stories. Sometimes the attempt to include more authentic elements, such as the reproduction of accents recorded in the Slave Narrative Project conducted by the W.P.A. in the 1930s, resulted in more obstruction than illumination and reinforced the damaging stereotypes they aimed to combat. This heavy-handed imitation obscured any deep engagement with the personal lives of the enslaved. [20] The impact and importance of Dido, Grace, and Minnie’s modern language is especially apparent when these women interact with the white characters. When they are back under the disciplinary gaze of George and Dora, the daughter of the neighboring plantation owner, Dido and Minnie use the same black-voice accent as Pete and Paul, emphasizing deference and obedience: DIDO : Bless’ee here it be. Here’s a dish of hoecakes—jess taste, Masr George—and here’s fried bananas; jess smell ’em. [21] The artificiality of this devoted and obsequious slave is glaringly obvious especially when we consider Dido and Minnie’s introduction. At the beginning of the play, Minnie chats with Dido about their work, while Dido reluctantly sweeps cotton about the stage: DIDO and MINNIE are discovered. DIDO is sweeping laboriously. MINNIE is just sort of lying down somewhere, fanning herself. MINNIE ( eventually ): Do you need help or…? DIDO : Naw, girl, I got it. Beat, while DIDO sweeps. MINNIE : You know, if you sweep on a diagonal with lighter, faster strokes, it’s a little more efficient. DIDO : Girl, what are you talking about? [22] From this brief exchange, we learn that Minnie thinks critically about how to make her job easier, and that Minnie and Dido address each other with familiarity, even if that familiarity is tinged with annoyance. It is leagues away from the style of speaking reproduced above. From examining the form of their conversations, we now turn to the content, analyzing what they say. At the end of the show, Dido speaks to Zoe with the same obsequiousness that she showed with George. When Zoe steals away to visit Dido in the slave quarters to obtain some poison to kill herself so that she doesn’t fall into M’Closky’s hands, Dido delays Zoe with an exaggerated black voice accent: “Missey Zoe! Why are you out in de swamp dis time ob night? And you is all wet! Missey Zoe, you catch de fever for sure!” [23] Dido and Minnie’s self-conscious performance while under the panoptic gaze of the slave-owners is not surprising. What is surprising is that, as we can see, they reproduce those behaviors when in conversation with Zoe, who is not white, but is a member of the plantation aristocracy. Dido and Minnie’s interactions with authority figures, as well as their descriptions of their quotidian lives, is made possible by Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of melodrama’s gaze. Dido and Minnie frankly discuss how various forms of slavery’s violence impact them, and this discussion is underlined with a specific brand of humor. In an interview with the Village Voice , Jacobs-Jenkins asserted that the goal of his writing is to make the audience “laugh and then you have to think about your laughter for a second.” [24] Jacobs-Jenkins achieves this goal, as the moments that are most distressing are also the most humorous, reaching a crescendo when the two women discuss the physical violence that plagues their lives. While Pete, Paul, and Wahnotee exchange threats of perpetuating physical attacks, [25] Dido and Minnie are subject to threats of sexual violence. Within the first few moments of their introduction, they discuss the reality of plantation life, and the constant threat of assault: MINNIE : You ever had to fuck him? DIDO : Who? MINNIE : Mas’r/Peyton DIDO : Oh, naw! You? MINNIE : Naw, he only like lightskinnded girls. But Renee, you know, who was fuckin’ him all the time . . . MINNIE : Would you fuck him [George]? DIDO : No, Minnie! Damn. Would you? [Beat] MINNIE : Maybe. DIDO : Yeah, well, I get the feeling you don’t get a say in the matter. [26] This exchange turns on a subtle humor, more understated than Dido and Minnie’s other revelations, such as their acknowledgment of forced illiteracy [27] or their reluctance to run away. [28] However, this discussion regarding the implicit and constant presence of sexual violence raises disturbing questions. It seems to endow Minnie and Dido with a measure of agency and suggests that they and Renee had a choice in whether or not to sleep with George. The implications of this conversation spiral outward quickly, asking the audience to consider who Zoe’s mother was; though Zoe is treated well by the Peyton family, she was most likely the product of some measure of sexual violence. This awareness of unspoken sexual violence in the punch line is the closest the play comes to using the word “rape.” The agency that the modern dialect seems to ascribe to Minnie and Dido reveals itself to be fleeting, and it is clear that they exist within a violent system. While Jacobs-Jenkins recognizes and represents the violence inherent in the system, Minnie and Dido’s conversation is an important departure from the method by which melodrama staged slavery’s violence. In his version of the seminal melodrama Uncle Tom’s Cabin , George Aiken greatly increased and stylized the brutality of Tom’s cruel owner, Simon Legree, against Tom. He brought onto the stage “an aestheticized paraphernalia of cruelty (long whips, cuffs, and chains),” [29] which were put to great affective use. However, this display of physical violence was not a condemnation of the institution of slavery, but a demonstration of the wickedness of Legree, certifying his status as a villain of melodrama. Indeed, all of Legree’s added violence and wickedness became attributable to his personality, in fulfilling his role as an “anti-man-of-principle.” [30] Because the focus of the melodrama was on character, and not the institution, Uncle Tom’s Cabin “presents not a dialectic of class and economics, but specific interactions between villains and victims.” [31] This collapsing of focus can also be seen in The Octoroon , as the abuses on the plantation can be attributed to M’Closky and the mismanagement of Northern interlopers, rather than the systemic corruption of an unfair practice. Abolitionist melodramas also relied on violence in an attempt to make the horrors of slavery real for an audience who may not have understood them. However, as Douglas Jones writes, this attempt to bring the brutality of slavery closer to the white audience depended on an empathy that “readily occludes the inimitability of the captive’s suffering as a means to confirm the onlooker’s freedom; as a result, it promotes stasis and erases the magnitude of the nation’s ordinary sin.” [32] The brutality of these representations was thus more about the effect they created in the white onlookers than the subjects of that violence. The saturation and highlighting of the black body in both physical and emotional torment was the most common path through which ex-slaves could claim humanity. [33] A secondary but no less important element of the reconstruction of melodrama’s gaze is that it shifts the representative world, exploring and acknowledging multiple types of violence beyond the physical and sexual. Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction highlights the institutional demands that the enslaved see themselves as property and participate in their own dehumanization. In conversations that are hidden from their masters but are heard by the audience, Dido tells Minnie that she “grew up at the Sunnyside place on the other side of the hills. Mas’r Peyton won me in a poker game like ten years ago.” [34] Dido’s blithe story of how she came to Terrebonne is startling, as is her disregard for the destruction of familial relationships that this narrative implies. But what is most unexpected is the casualness with which she describes a complicity that is revealed to be widespread: DIDO : And this one time, Solon was like, “Girl let me borrow your baby for a second?” And so Rebecca’s dumb ass like gave him the baby and then that nigga turnt around and fucking sold the baby. MINNIE : What? DIDO : Yes, girl. Apparently Massa was about to sell Solon and Grace’s baby, but then Solon switched Rebecca’s baby out for they baby at the last minute and Massa didn’t know the difference so he just sold Rebecca’s dumb-ass baby. [35] The humor carrying this exchange is complex. On one level, it is funny because there is an asymmetrical relationship between the form and the content: what Dido and Grace say and how they say it. This exchange is also comic because it is a rare moment of triumph: Solon and Grace are able to take advantage of Judge Peyton’s stupidity. However, Dido and Minnie’s discussion simultaneously gestures to a darker point: a Peyton family inability to see African-Americans as individuals. Zoe can’t distinguish between an older and a younger black woman, and her father, Judge Peyton, also thought that African-Americans were interchangeable. [36] While this exchange reflects badly on the Peytons, it also reveals Dido and Minnie’s complicity with and active participation in perpetuating this system. This willingness is apparent again when Dido and Minnie learn that they are to be sold to help pay the debts on the plantation. Rather than run away, they participate in the sale, manipulating the process so that they will be purchased by Captain Ratts rather than Jacob M’Closky, who has a reputation for beating his slaves. [37] Dido and Minnie dress in their best “slave tunics” to convince Captain Ratts, whom they “seduce,” into buying them. [38] Minnie describes living on his boat as though it were a vacation: Imagine: if we lived on a steamboat, coasting up and down the river, looking fly, wind whipping at our hair and our slave tunics and shit and we surrounded by all these fine, muscle-y boat niggas who ain’t been wit a woman in years? [39] For both Dido, who thinks that the situation still sounds dangerous, [40] and Minnie, this is a chance at a better life, although this new life still seems fraught with the potential for sexual assault. Minnie and Dido’s attitudes run counter to modern cultural expectations, which would have them run away for the possibility of a better life rather than accepting the confines of slavery. However, in the world of An Octoroon, this is one of the only opportunities Minnie and Dido have to take control of their situation and make decisions regarding their bodily autonomy. While the ending is played for laughs, when Minnie wonders if “something were to happen that somewhere rendered these last twelve hours totally moot,” it is an indication of the effect of Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction that the audience really feels for Minnie and Dido and their lost autonomy. [41] In An Octoroon, Dido, Minnie, and to a lesser extent, Grace, are not the objects of the jokes, and the audience does not laugh at them or their situation. Rather, Jacobs-Jenkins manipulates the humor found in the distance between Dido and Minnie’s modern vocabulary and performance style and their nineteenth-century conversational topics. He makes their situation strange and unfamiliar at the same time as they sound as though they are standing on a street corner in twenty-first-century Brooklyn. [42] Instead of relying on overly familiar tropes, An Octoroon shows us anew the horrors of slavery, forcing us to consider the depth and diversity of the institution’s brutality. Jacobs-Jenkins continues to represent the diversity of the institution’s brutality in his next revision of melodrama’s gaze with his treatment of Zoe. While the majority of her dialogue emerges from The Octoroon , [43] Jacobs-Jenkins uses Zoe to juxtapose melodramatic convention with a modern understanding of racial performance. As we have seen, Zoe enthusiastically participates in the hierarchical structures of the plantation, holding herself above the house and field slaves alike. She insults Dido and kicks Pete, ordering him to “Wake up you, silly Nigger! Where’s breakfast?” [44] Not only does she place herself above the field hands and participate in the casual violence of her peers, but she also does no work aside from showing George the plantation. It is thus clear that Zoe is afforded freedoms as the daughter of Terrebonne’s owner. However, Jacobs-Jenkins indicates that despite her real privileges, Zoe’s status as an octoroon requires that she suffer within an institution that surrounds her and is responsible for her birth. Indeed, Jules Zanger argues that in the North, an octoroon “represented not merely the product of the incidental sin of the individual sinner, but rather what might be called the result of cumulative institutional sin, since the octoroon was the product of four generations of illicit, enforced miscegenation made possible by the slavery system.” [45] In fact, Zoe’s entire presence in the play, especially her heritage, reminds the audience of the reality of interracial desire and an uneven balance of power. [46] This attitude then helps us to understand Zoe’s response when she is forced to reveal herself as mixed race. When George confesses his love to her, Zoe racializes herself and teaches an unbelieving George how to recognize the signs of her African heritage. This scene is a crucial demonstration that, despite all her other advantages, she is still trapped within a system that is interested in controlling its victims’ minds as well as their bodies. [47] In a scene that is taken in its entirety from The Octoroon , Zoe shows George the signs of her African heritage, transforming her body into “an artifact of racial hybridity” [48] : ZOE : George, do you see that hand you hold? Look at these fingers; do you see the nails are of a . . . bluish tinge? GEORGE : Yes, near the quick there is a faint blue mark. ZOE : Look in my eyes; is not the same color in the white? GEORGE : It is their beauty. ZOE : No! That—that is the dark, fatal mark and curse of Cain. Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black—bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the rest. [49] George’s examination of Zoe’s physical features for signs that the audience cannot see is a deeply tragic image. Zoe reveals not only her self-hatred—she calls herself “an unclean thing” [50] —but also the extent to which she is trapped within the system of chattel slavery. Anyone who is able to read Zoe’s body will know how to classify her, thus endangering not only her body, but her education, upbringing, and social class. Zoe is trapped within a disciplinary system that limits her choices and her happiness and curtails her options. While this scene is remarkably affecting, there remains a significant disconnect between written text and what is seen, a discord not present in Boucicault’s original, and the potent emotion and danger behind Zoe’s confession seems misplaced. This disconnect is deliberately designed, as Jacobs-Jenkins stipulates that Zoe’s role be played by “an octoroon actress, a white actress, quadroon actress, biracial actress, multi-racial actress, or an actress of color who can pass as an octoroon.” [51] Jacobs-Jenkins thus seems to undercut the reveal of this scene: if the audience can read Zoe as mixed-race already, there’s no need for her to confess. However, I would argue, that these casting specifications demonstrate the insidious nature of racializing thoughts, which ascribe negative qualities to physical minutiae, rather than the revelation of Zoe as an octoroon. Because Zoe’s opinions on race and self-worth are directly imported from the melodrama, they are in direct contrast to the play’s other explorations of race. [52] Jacobs-Jenkins builds on his reconstruction of melodrama’s gaze with a re-engagement with elements of nineteenth-century melodrama: the tableau and the sensation scene, discussed below. The tableau manipulates several artistic practices, operating simultaneously on a visual, emotional, and auditory level. The technique allows the audience to pause, read, and absorb the emotional impact of a scene, much as one would do with a painting. Peter Brooks describes tableau as providing a “visual summary of the emotional situation” of a scene, in the process fulfilling “melodrama’s primordial concern to make its signs clear, unambiguous, and impressive.” [53] In nineteenth-century melodrama, the tableau appears in moments of crisis, wherein speech and narrative fail and the emotion of the scenes can only be understood through images. Typically, it works as a punctuation mark to a particular plotline, occurs at the end of a scene, and inspires an affective response. Jacobs-Jenkins primarily follows its usual placement as a punctuation mark at particularly emotionally-charged moments. The ends of the first three acts of each melodrama section includes a tableau: Jacob M’Closky triumphing at the end of Act One, Wahnotee mourning over Paul’s body at the end of Act Two, and Zoe’s auction at the end of Act Three. However, BJJ also draws particular attention to the extraordinary nature of this theatrical feature, engaging and exploiting it. As Act One nears its end, Jacob M’Closky sets in motion his plot to ruin the Peyton family and purchase Zoe. As he revels in his expected outcome, he dives into his tableau. The stage directions describe the scene: M’CLOSKY stands with his hand extended toward the house. Music. An attempt at a TABLEAU. He holds the TABLEAU for a while before DIDO walks in with a washing bucket and some laundry. [54] We see BJJ, the character-as-playwright, rewriting melodrama in real time as M’Closky poses uncomfortably on stage. M’Closky fulfills all the requirements for a tableau: he stops the action, allowing the audience to read his posture, establishing him as the villain. Rather than serving as a punctuation mark, or creating a moment of overwhelming emotion, however, M’Closky’s overtly performative pose never quite lands, and the life of the plantation quickly resumes around the frozen overseer. This change is signaled through a return to the constant, underlying musical accompaniment. [55] Furthermore, the reassertion of the quotidian is signaled by Dido’s entrance with the laundry, which startles M’Closky, and resets the scene to a normal theatrical time. However, a moment later, the tableau is attempted again, but this time it emerges from a moment of real violence: [M’CLOSKY re-enters, stalks over to DIDO] DIDO : Hi, Mas’r M’Cl— [M’CLOSKY strikes her violently] M’CLOSKY : And don’t you ever fuckin’ sneak up on me like that again, you nigger bitch! [An actual TABLEAU.] [56] The legibility inherent in this image is why the tableau works: because the audience can quickly grasp the power dynamics of a white-presenting man physically threatening a black woman, allowing the audience to read and understand an essential power dynamic of slavery, without lingering on Dido’s pain. This tableau also reveals how much is left up to the director in An Octoroon . The stage directions only suggest that a tableau occurs, but in performance, we see that M’Closky strikes Dido, then remains standing over her. Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of the tableau forces us to re-evaluate the genre’s ability to produce and manipulate our emotions. The tableau only works when it is connected to real emotion, rather than to the conventions of the drama. Jacobs-Jenkins’ reconstruction of the tableau helps the audience see anew the violence of slavery. Like the sensation scene, tableau insists on the audience’s attention. This demand for awareness is reiterated in Act Two’s tableau, which finds Wahnotee, in an expression of grief, bending over the body of the slain boy Paul: To his horror, WAHNOTEE finds him dead, expresses great grief, raises his eyes. They fall upon the camera. He rises with a savage growl, he seizes tomahawk and smashes camera to pieces, then goes to Paul, expresses grief, sorrow, and fondness. Maybe he starts to make a grave—sobbing and digging his hands? I don’t know. In any case, there’s a TABLEAU. [57] The violence against black bodies is an essential part of slavery, and the incidental way in which Paul is murdered, mentioned in the stage directions, but not noted in the dialogue, mirrors the Peytons’ inattention to the details of their slaves’ lives: “ M’CLOSKY strikes PAUL on the head. PAUL falls dead. During the following, a large pool of blood begins to gather around PAUL’S body and M’CLOSKY’S feet. ” [58] This tableau provides the audience with a rare moment of unbridled pathos that isn’t undercut by an attempt at humor. Indeed, this is a moment that deeply humanizes Wahnotee, who is otherwise, even in Jacobs-Jenkins’s version, a thinly drawn stereotype, addicted to rum, speaking a mishmash of various languages, and prone to violence. This tableau also defies stereotypes of Native Americans that were familiar from the so-called Indian plays of the early nineteenth century, where Native American characters often played upon racial fears, threatening white characters with the possibility of sexual and physical violence. But in this tableau, Wahnotee is given space to grieve. Although M’Closky may not take notice of Paul’s death, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of Wahnotee’s tableau requires the audience to realize that these characters are not disposable. Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of the first two tableaux links these highly performative moments more closely with the text of An Octoroon . These scenes join together emotion and the violence against black bodies on stage. The final tableau, appearing at the end of Act Three, continues this work, as it punctuates the auction of Terrebonne and Zoe’s sale to M’Closky. The slave driver’s interruption of the auction adds a layer of drama to an already spectacular venture, which “materializes the most intense of symbolic transactions . . . money transforms flesh into property; property transforms flesh into money; flesh transforms money into property.” [59] The practice of staging slave auctions has a long history as a method of creating pathos for the enslaved. Henry Ward Beecher, the famed Northern abolitionist preacher, raised money to liberate young biracial girls from slavery by transforming the pulpit of his Brooklyn church into an auction yard to “heighten the emotional power of his rhetorical appeal as he evoked . . . a form of ‘spectatorial sympathy’ to play upon the affective responses in his audiences.” [60] It was converted into a specifically theatrical spectacle, however, when in The Octoroon Boucicault represented it onstage for the first time. [61] Like its first-act cousin, the tableau that emerges from An Octoroon’s auction scene also results from a theatrical failure. The sale of Terrebonne is, as Lafouche the auctioneer describes it, “a shitshow,” [62] as the majority of the Terrebonne slaves have run away, and those that are left are either old and infirm like Pete, or three women, not nearly enough to save the plantation. The scene, which should be one of high tragedy, is turned uncomfortably comic, as Dido and Minnie request to be sold together, and spend time preening to attract the attention of Captain Ratts. Lafouche reports, “the, uh, the property has requested that it be sold along with another piece of property? . . . can it do that?” [63] While not part of the reconstruction of the tableau specifically, Jacobs-Jenkins’s modern intervention into the scene emphasizes the auctioneer’s dehumanizing language, turning what should be a moment for consternation into comedy. The momentum of the scene is further derailed by the spectacle of George and M’Closky, played by the same actor, fighting each other. While double casting is a cause for humor in this scene, it is part of a larger historical argument and an important feature of Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of melodrama. These two types that George and M’Closky embody, the kind slave owner hero and the evil, scheming overseer villain, were common roles in American melodrama, and come with expected behaviors and performance histories. But because these characters are here contained in one body, all of their actions are collapsed into a single, interchangeable entity. The only differences between them are a broad accent and M’Closky’s mustache and hat: easily removable costume pieces. Jacobs-Jenkins thus erases any difference between these historical touchstones, suggesting that the authority figures in plantation culture were exactly the same. Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon, in their article “Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon,” also note that “by having one actor play both of these white male characters, An Octoroon illustrates the uncomfortable similarity between a desire to own, master, or marry the mixed-race heroine, Zoe, and the implicit similarity in both endings.” [64] Merrill and Saxon acknowledge that George’s desire to possess Zoe, while dressed in slightly kinder clothing, mirrors M’Closky’s. As the bidding war over Zoe escalates, and the other powerful members of the plantation class, including Captain Ratts and Dora Sunnyside, attempt to trump the slave driver’s bid, M’Closky and George’s animosity erupts in violence: “ GEORGE rushes M’CLOSKY, slash himself, who draws his knife .” [65] After a measure of order is restored by Lafouche, M’Closky exalts over the members of the established plantation class, and goes into his pose: “ M’CLOSKY jumps on up on his chair, throws money in the air, and makes it rain.” [66] M’Closky’s purchase of Zoe, and his subsequent flaunting of his wealth, results in a tableau that whiplashes the audience into a realization that Zoe has been commodified and dehumanized even more pervasively than when she identified her African features to George. Similar to the tableau in Act One, this frozen image quickly transmogrifies the humor of the scene to tragedy. Thus in this tableau, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction operates on two significant levels: first, the tableau’s sudden shift in tone draws attention to its violence, and second, it breathes new life into a nineteenth-century theatrical element. In both cases, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of the tableau forces the audience to absorb the quotidian violence of slavery, working through legible images and sensations rather than overwhelming scenes of physical violence. Just as the tableau operates through easily graspable images, so does the sensation scene. These two devices work on multiple levels of signification beyond the spoken word, revealing an unspeakable truth to the characters and audience. There are similarities between the way the tableau forces the audience to confront the ordinary violence of slavery and the operation of Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstructed sensation scene. After a long, metatheatrical prologue, where BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant explain and walk the audience through the meaning and history of the sensation scene, they end up reciting the whole scene, with interjections and commentary. [67] As they approach the end of the scene, BJJ announces that he “tried to figure out the next best thing, something actually related to the plot. I hope it isn’t too disappointing.” [68] The actors give themselves a shake and dive right back into the scene. George delivers an impassioned condemnation of lynch law, attempting to persuade the surrounding crowd of angry sailors not to rush to judgment, with one crucial change: he stands in front of, and among, Shipp and Smith’s swaying bodies. [69] George’s plea catalyzes a series of revelations that culminate in the exposure of An Octoroon’s villain: the dastardly slave-driver Jacob M’Closky. The sensation scene unfolds as the villain is revealed, and the boat carrying the last shipment of cotton from Terrebonne plantation explodes, represented in this version by an expulsion of cotton into the audience. Due to casting restrictions that are enumerated at the top of the show, BJJ, the playwright of the frame narrative, confesses that he “grossly underestimated the amount of white men I actually would need here,” [70] and the mob that surrounds the action and heightens the stakes is played by the audience rather than actors. George’s commentary on justice and lynch law spills beyond the confines of the stage, and into the twenty-first-century crowd. Audience members were unsettled by George’s speech, made clearly uncomfortable with their sudden involvement in the story. This discomfort expressed itself in many ways: from strained and nervous laughter, to gasps and murmurs, growing stronger as they sat with the image that seemed to expand as the photograph extended beyond its frame and onto the bodies of the actors. The face of a man staring at the audience and pointing proudly at the bodies that hang in the trees was newly embodied as it was projected directly onto George’s shirt. It is through this alchemy of dialogue and image that George’s body, ambiguously raced to begin with as he is played by a black actor in whiteface make-up, becomes the medium for bringing the violence of the Shipp and Smith lynching onto the stage without exploiting it. As George and M’Closky debate Wahnotee’s innocence or guilt, the projection remains, hanging over the action. The photograph is not given any context and the actors do not refer to it, except when it needs to come down. [71] By projecting the image of the Shipp and Smith lynching above this fictional debate, Jacobs-Jenkins summons a sharper sense of danger to M’Closky and George’s argument, reminding the audience that the discussion of lynching taking place had real-life consequences. The use of this photograph, and the diverse feelings it provoked in the audience as it remained projected on the back wall, are crucial elements of Jacobs-Jenkins reconstruction of the sensation scene. In its original context, the sensation scene mixed pathos and action, often overwhelming the audience. These scenes were produced by “extraordinary theatrical effects, often featuring disasters such as shipwrecks, avalanches, volcano explosions and so forth.” [72] The scenes were exciting in their own right, but the nineteenth-century audience particularly marveled at “the technical feat involved in replicating aspects of life that seemed beyond the resources of the stage.” [73] These technical feats created perceptible physical reactions in the audience, forging a community out of the spectators. Lynn M. Voskuil describes the construction of this feeling community: what mattered most was not merely that spectators felt such responses, but that they believed they felt them in common . . . intrinsic to their play-going experience was not only the bodily sense of nervous shudders and quivers but also the sagacity both to cultivate and manage them. [Sensation theatre required] a sophisticated spectator, one practiced at decoding spectacle and awake to its mechanisms and bodily effects. [74] While the photograph of the Shipp and Smith lynching produced these feeling communities (and the most memorable moment of the play), the projection had other consequences. The maintenance of the photograph requires the stage to be darkened to appreciate the full effect, which in turns requires an unnatural cessation of movement by the actors, as well as plot. The action can only proceed to the point at which the three frame characters, BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant, described it in the metatheatrical prologue of the scene. [75] The photograph transfixes the actors and the audience, holding both in place and preventing them from looking away, either from the lynching that has already occurred or the threat of the lynching that is possibly to come. However, the focus on the Shipp and Smith lynching literally blocks out and overwhelms the situation on stage. The audience cares less about the trial of Wahnotee when its attention is focused on the Shipp and Smith photo. Thus, like the tableau, which can only be held for a short period of time, the sensation scene sets the stage, but needs to be removed for the plot to continue forward. However, once the photo is taken down and M’Closky is revealed as a villain, Jacobs-Jenkins offers us one more complicated result of his reconstruction of the sensation scene, as he stages M’Closky’s murder. Examining this moment in terms of the characters, we see a Native American planning to kill a white man in retaliation for the murder of a black child. But when we look at the bodies of the actors, a different image emerges: We see a white man dragging a bleeding black man off to be lynched, choking and screaming, “Help! Help! Help!” The stage directions note that the violence in this moment—Wahnotee and M’Closky’s fight, Wahnotee’s stabbing of the slave driver, and Wahnotee’s clear desire to lynch M’Closky—should seem “ incredibly real .” [76] The violence of the Shipp and Smith lynching, projected and overwhelming the debate on how to move forward, is repeated and recreated, as Jacobs-Jenkins wraps up the recreation of the sensation scene. After the emotional intensity of the sensation scene, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction ends on a deadpan note. Once Wahnotee drags a screaming M’Closky offstage and the audience is pelted with explosive cotton balls, Assistant is the only actor left on stage. He turns to the audience, and recounts the action: “And then the boat explodes ( beat) . Sensation.” [77] This impassive delivery undermines the traditional forms of the genre, as it points the way to new methods of representation and emotion. Jacobs-Jenkins’s subversion of the sensation scene is part of An Octoroon’ s larger effort to reconstruct the formal aspects of the genre so that it becomes increasingly capacious in its representation of slavery. It accomplishes this first by shifting melodrama’s gaze so that the play not only foregrounds characters Boucicault’s original treats as punch lines, but elevates them so that these two dark-skinned black women are the heart of An Octoroon . [78] By interjecting and juxtaposing modern dialogue and character development with dialogue that casually confirms the horrors of their quotidian existence, Jacobs-Jenkins makes slavery’s violence understandable in new ways. The changes in melodrama’s gaze also alter the way that we understand the damage slavery has done to Zoe, who, although she is privileged in some ways, is still bound both by the self-hatred and racialization that leads to her suicide. This article also argues that Jacobs-Jenkins takes on more traditional elements of melodrama, such as the sensation scene and the tableau. In both cases, his reconstructions allow a twenty-first-century audience to feel some of the same effects as their nineteenth-century counterparts. By using comprehensible images, the tableau and sensation scene insist on the audience’s attention. Simultaneously, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstructions rocket between emotional states: from comedy to tragedy, from overwhelming sensation to blunt statement of fact, reinventing before our eyes a core American theatrical tradition. And in the process, he provides new ways of viewing and understanding slavery. References [1] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Onstage Press, 2014), 121. This article uses the published version of An Octoroon , as well as the recording of a performance of the Sarah Benson-directed production, recorded June 6, 2014, and housed at the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library. I will also refer to instances from the Theatre for A New Audience production of the same play. TFANA and Soho Rep’s productions were both directed by Sarah Benson, the artistic director of Soho Rep. BJJ: So for a while I was thinking maybe I could actually just set this place on fire with You inside— PLAYWRIGHT: bring you as close to death as possible. BJJ/PLAYWRIGHT: That would be amazing. BJJ: And then, of course, rescue each of you one by one, PLAYWRIGHT: And then perform the rest of the show out on the street. BJJ: But that would be crazy PLAYWRIGHT: And Soho Rep. doesn’t need that. BJJ: And also I would only be able to do this show once. [2] While the omission of Salem Scudder lessens the number of characters that Jacobs-Jenkins had to account for, his dismissal had other consequences, particularly that Zoe is less universally cared for. In An Octoroon , Zoe is beloved of the Hero and the Villain, but in The Octoroon , with Scudder’s feelings of protectiveness toward her, there is a greater sense that she is a desirable commodity. Scudder’s presence in Boucicault’s original, as a well-meaning, but ultimately harmful presence on the plantation—partly to blame for Peyton’s financial woes—is an indication of the “paternalistic, racist myth of a genteel plantation culture, threatened more by a villainous Yankee than by its own inherent injustices.” Harley Erdman, “Caught in the ‘Eye of the Eternal’: Justice, Race, and the Camera, from The Octoroon to Rodney King.” Theatre Journal 45, no. 3 (October 1993): 335. This kind of specific regional nuance is of less importance in Jacobs-Jenkins’ worldview. [3] Although The Octoroon’s plot hangs on photographic evidence that Scudder’s camera provides, BJJ and Playwright point out that twenty-first-century audiences are no longer impressed or even swayed by this type of evidentiary material. BJJ explains that “we’ve gotten so used to photographs and moving images that we basically have learned how to fake photographs, so the kind of justice around which this whole thing hangs its actually kind of dated.” (Jacobs-Jenkins, 120.) While we can still be shocked by the photograph of the Shipp and Smith lynching, the audience is less impressed by the evidence the photograph of M’Closky provides. [4] Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre & Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), ix. This monograph includes an excellent history of the American engagement with the melodramatic form. [5] Ibid., 228. [6] Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), xiv. [7] Bruce A McConachie, “Out of the Kitchen and Into the Marketplace: Normalizing ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ for the Antebellum Stage,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 3, no. 1 (1991): 11. [8] Saidiya Hartman begins her seminal work, Scenes of Subjection, with a similar observation. Viewing the consequences of a slave’s body, ravaged by violence, she writes that “Rather than inciting indignation, too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity—the oft-repeated or restored character of these accounts and our distance from them are signaled by the theatrical language usually resorted to in describing these instances–and especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering.” Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3. [9] Mark Mullen, “The Work of the Public Mind,” Nineteenth Century Theatre 27, no. 2 (Winter 1999), 100. [10] David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater & Culture: 1800-1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 190-1. [11] Mullen argues that the very visibility of the slaves was Bouicault’s nod to an anti-slavery position, “The Work of the Public Mind,” 98. [12] Dana Van Kooy and Jeffrey N. Cox. “Melodramatic Slaves,” Modern Drama 55, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 470. [13] Dion Boucicault, “The Octoroon.” In Early American Drama , edited by Jeffrey H. Richards (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 471. [14] Douglas A Jones, The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 140. [15] Van Cooey and Cox, “Melodramatic Slaves,” 462. [16] Ibid., 462. [17] Jeffrey D. Mason, “Staging the Myth of America,” in Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 15. [18] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 137. [19] Ibid., 43. [20] For an excellent discussion of the difficulties of slave narratives and their staging, see Jones, Captive Stage , 139-141. [21] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 57. [22] Ibid., 45. [23] Ibid., 131. [24] Tom Sellar, “Pay No Attention to the Man in the Bunny Suit.” Village Voice . 28 September 2015. http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/pay-no-attention-to-the-man-in-the-bunny-suit-7189537 . [25] Pete threatens Minnie: “Drop dat banana fo’ I murdah you!” and “It’s dis black-trash, new Mas’r George; day’s getting too numerous round; when I gets time, I’m gonna have to murdah some of ’em fo’ sure!” (Jacobs-Jenkins., An Octoroon , 51, 52), while Paul threatens to “gib it to” Wahnotee if the boy finds the Indian drinking rum (ibid., 60), while Wahnotee destroys George’s camera and drags M’Closky offstage (ibid., 81, 128). [26] Ibid., 47-9. [27] Ibid., 83. Minnie: I couldn’t read that sign out front, because I can’t read. Dido: I can’t read it either. You know it’s illegal for us to read. Minnie: Yee-uh, but I was hopin’ you wuz one of them secret reading niggas. You know, like Rhonda. Dido: Rhonda can read?! Minnie: Shh, girl! It’s a secret! [28] Ibid., 50. Minnie: Haven’t she heard these slave catchers got these new dogs nowadays that can fly and who are trained to fuckin drag yo’ ass out of trees and carry you back? And then, even if you can outsmart these flying dogs, once you free, what you gonna do once you free? You just gonna walk up in somebody house and be like, “Hey. I’m a slave. Help me.” That kind of naiveté is how niggas get kilt. [29] Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2005), 119. [30] McConachie, “Out of the Kitchen and Into the Marketplace,” 15. [31] Mason, “Staging the Myth of America,” 119. [32] Jones, The Captive Stage, 141. [33] Ibid., 142. [34] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, 46. [35] Ibid, 66. [36] When Zoe approaches Dido to ask her for poison at the end of the play, she clearly doesn’t recognize Dido, whom she calls “Aunty” and “Mammy.” Zoe invents an entire history between them: “my own dear Mammy, who so often hushed me to sleep when I was a child” (Ibid., 133), although Dido did not grow up on the Peyton plantation, and is in fact the same age as Zoe (Ibid., 134). Zoe cannot see Dido as an individual, but purely as a stereotype. In Minnie’s eyes, this ignorance arises from Zoe’s choice to align herself with the white characters, in her words “hang out wit all these damn white people all the damn time” (Ibid., 134). [37] Ibid., 100. [38] Ibid., 106. [39] Ibid., 102. [40] Ibid., 102. [41] Ibid., 138. [42] While this article focuses on Dido and Minnie’s ability to transverse the generic conventions of melodrama, the male characters also engage in temporal crossing. BJJ/Assistant/Playwright, in their various cross-racial guises, step out of character and transition seamlessly between the play and the frame. [43] Dora Sunnyside, the daughter of the neighboring plantation owner and Zoe’s friend (and rival), also does not move between the framing device and the main story. While this article is primarily focused on race rather than class, it might be worthwhile to consider how these two characters are united in class status. [44] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 56. [45] Jules Zanger, “The ‘Tragic Octoroon’ In Pre-Civil War Fiction.” American Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1966): 66. [46] Merrill and Saxon, “Replaying and Rediscovering,” 131. [47] Mullen, “The Work of the Public Mind,” 110. [48] Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon. “Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon.” Theatre Journal 69, no. 2 (June 2017): 130. [49] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, 76-7. [50] Ibid., 77. [51] Ibid., 25. This type of open-ended yet specific stipulation is used for all of the actors and characters of color. It is also odd that the only explicitly mixed race character is asked to own and represent her identity in a way that no other character, including those who put on cross-racial make-up technologies, are asked to. [52] For the male characters, race is significantly more fluid. Although BJJ suffers as a “Black Playwright” — as his work is prejudged as a reflection of current racial issues or a retelling of African folktales, a situation he describes in the metatheatrical prologue “The Art of Dramatic Composition” — he is able to put on whiteface make-up and “become” white and much more socially mobile. While Assistant’s use of blackface, or Playwright’s use of redface do not afford them privileges (Paul is killed, while Wahnotee is nearly lynched), the two actors do not seem bothered by their transformations. [53] Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 48. [54] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 64. [55] The music for the TFANA production was composed by César Alvarez and played by the onstage cellist, Lester St. Louis. While the Soho Rep and Theatre for a New Audience productions had constant musical accompaniment as well as a particularly evocative closing song, no specific musical directions are mentioned in the script. There is often a stark division between what is described in the stage directions and what appears on stage in Jacobs-Jenkins’ plays. We find this intentional vagueness throughout An Octoroon , including, as we shall see, Jacobs-Jenkins’ descriptions of his tableau: “Maybe he starts to make a grave—sobbing and digging his hands? I don’t know ” (ibid., 81). However, this desire to leave the creation of the theatrical world up to the director is also included in his 2010 debut, Neighbors , at the Public Theater. Neighbors grapples with theatre history in much the same way as An Octoroon , re-engaging with the minstrel tradition rather than melodrama. Particularly fascinating are the stage directions in Neighbors that describe minstrel interludes, including many traditional characters like Sambo, Zip Coon, Topsy, and Mammy. These interludes are drawn in excruciating detail, describing outlandish physical and sexual situations. Sambo’s interlude, for example, includes an insanely large penis, which ropes a watermelon, and which he chews through. Jacobs-Jenkins, Neighbors , 358. Neighbors ’ stage directions are incredibly detailed, while those of An Octoroon are more suggestive. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, “Neighbors.” In Reimagining A Raisin in the Sun, edited by Rebecca Ann Rugg and Harvey Young (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 307–403. [56] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 67. [57] Ibid., 81. [58] Ibid., 80. [59] Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 215. [60] Lisa Merrill, “‘May She Read Liberty in Your Eyes?’: Beecher, Boucicault and the Representation and Display of Antebellum Women’s Racially Indeterminate Bodies,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 26, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 133. [61] Mullen, “The Work of The Public Mind,” 104. For further information on the performance history of slave auctions, see Jason Stupp, “Slavery and the Theatre of History: Ritual Performance on the Auction Block.” Theatre Journal 63, no. 1 (March 2011): 61-84. [62] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 106. [63] Ibid., 106. [64] Merrill and Saxon, “Replaying and Rediscovering,” 151. [65] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 110. In the Theatre for a New Audience production, this conflict became an extended scene, and a display of physical skill and comedic timing from Austin Smith, the actor who played BJJ/George/M’Closky. Smith rolled around on the ground before the auction block—where Zoe stood, gasping in horror—fighting himself. The characters shouted encouragement, and at one point, Dora kicked over George’s knife, which had gotten lost in the scuffle. The severe emotional shift, from a side-splitting scene to one of extreme pathos, was felt extensively in the audience, and carefully cultivated. [66] Ibid., 111. [67] Interjections with phrases such as: “Playwright: Anway, Pete’s like,” and commentary such as “This is actually a hole in Boucicault’s plot. Not mine.” Ibid., 119. [68] Ibid., 122. [69] Ibid., 122. [70] Ibid., 113. [71] The actors’ choice not to acknowledge the photograph is echoed in the stage directions. While Jacobs-Jenkins requires a lynching photograph, he does not specify an incident, or even a date range, that the production should employ, Ibid., 222. He leaves the choice to the director and designers. [72] Matthew Wilson Smith, “Victorian Railway Accident and the Melodramatic Imagination,” Modern Drama 55, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 508. [73] Michael Diamond, Victorian Sensation: Or, the Spectacular, the Shocking, and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Anthem Press, 2003), 219. [74] Lynn M. Voskuil, “Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture, and the Victorian Public Sphere,” Victorian Studies 44, no.2 (2002): 250. [75] Ibid., 115-120. [76] Ibid., 128. [77] Ibid., 128. [78] Although approaching this scene from a different argument, Merrill and Saxon also pay close attention to Dido and Minnie’s final exchange, noting that it allows the audience to “refocus their attention on the material conditions and lives of ordinary black women rather than the eponymous octoroon.” Merrill and Saxon, “Replaying and Rediscovering,” 152. Footnotes About The Author(s) ROSA SCHNEIDER is a doctoral candidate in the Subcommittee on Theatre within the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia UnXiversity. Her research focuses on the performance of history, race, and cultural memory, on American and Caribbean stages. She has presented work at ASTR, where she serves as a member of Executive Committee of the Graduate Student Caucus, and she is also the resident dramaturge and co-artistic director of Strange Harbor, an experimental theatre company in Brooklyn. Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. 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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 18, Fall, 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF By Philippa Wehle Image Credits: Article From the daily chorusing of the ever-present cicadas to the familiar fanfare of Maurice Jarre’s trumpets, which have announced the opening of new shows in Avignon since early festival times, and the black swifts piercing the sky with their loud screams as they fly over the majestic 14th-century walls - - Avignon, the yearly festival I’ve attended since 1968 with a few missed years, is once more on my mind. Avignon, the name always brings forth indelible memories of navigating my way over cobblestones and through jubilant crowds to the many outdoor cloisters and other spaces serving as theatres during the festival. My yearly foray into this remarkable festival was no exception this year. No matter what shows may have disappointed or which ones delighted, Avignon for me is a yearly must despite my advanced age and frailties. I had to be there for the 77 th Avignon festival. I had to discover what the festival’s new director Tiago Rodrigues had in store for us. Seated among some two thousand spectators in the open-air Honor Court of the Popes’ Palace, I was ready and eager to receive Welfare , a new work by Julie Deliquet, director of the Gérard Philippe theatre in St. Denis. She is only the second woman to be invited to present a show in the Honor Court in the seventy-seven-year history of the festival, and I was looking forward to discovering her work even though some were saying that the Honor Court’s forbidding dimensions call for majestic stagings and that Deliquet’s choice of an ordinary school gymnasium was questionable. Welfare . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage. Deliquet’s Welfare , an adaptation of American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s 1973 documentary, does indeed take place in a replica of a school gymnasium someplace in New York City in the 1970s. Stagehands are slowly taking down sports equipment and moving other athletic paraphernalia out of the way in preparation for the day’s welfare center, temporarily located in a make-shift venue. They bring out a table for the social workers who are about to begin dealing with the day’s cases while empty bleachers offer seating for the clients. A young man with a guitar provides musical commentary. A policeman strolls by. It is December. Throughout Welfare ’s two and one-half hours a cast of fifteen actors reenact the hardships of the homeless and the poor, single mothers, drug attics and others in desperate need, as well as the beleaguered director of the Welfare Center and his staff as they try to navigate their way through the overwhelming dysfunction of the system. Some clients need immediate attention. Others wait on the bleachers or wander about aimlessly. These are not anonymous people. They have names: Valerie Johnson, Roz Baker, and Larry Rivera. Their complaints are valid and their frustration is tangible as are those of the team trying to help them. Reactions range from angry outbursts to forlorn acceptance. When Valerie Johnson is told “There is no Valerie Johnson in our records. You will have to wait until January 1 st ,” we cannot help but commiserate with her, especially when her anger becomes so loud that she is carried off over the policeman’s shoulder. We also cannot help but laugh at the absurdity of the heavily pregnant woman who is told that she has to get written medical proof of her pregnancy in order to receive her stipend. Of course, we are touched by the gentleman who tells us that his dog is all he has, and we sympathize with the center’s director who is overwhelmed. Still, there is something missing. Deliquet’s theatre is a theatre of testimony. Welfare documents the situation of welfare recipients and those who help them, but the play seemed not to elevate beyond reporting. We are simply witnesses to these case histories dating from the 1970s and the losing battle that clients and staff endure. In an interview, Julie Deliquet shared that she hoped that her show would be received with anger and that her theatre would invite us to rethink the way we create society. Yet, drawing our attention to the flaws of the welfare system as it existed in the United States in the 1970s is puzzling when the system was overhauled twenty years ago and despite its many flaws, it is no longer the portrait that we encounter on Deliquet’s stage. In contrast to the many lives encountered in Welfare, The Confessions , by British author Alexander Zeldin, tells the tale of just one woman, Alice, a child of the working class in Australia, born in 1943. Based on hours of interviews Zeldin conducted with his mother, The Confessions is a portrait of an “ordinary” life with its many stories told in a series of hyper-realistic moments by nine actors playing all of the roles: mother, father, husband, friends, lover. The Confessions . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage. The play begins in the family kitchen in Australia where we meet Alice fighting with her parents who want her to go to university while she wants to break free of her confined life as a child of a conservative, narrow-minded milieu. Multiple scenes follow Alice’s determination to reinvent herself. London in the 1980s, marriage and divorce, jobs as an art history professor and social assistant, even a sexual assault. We follow her into her living room with friends, and back in a kitchen with other friends. Other scenes are set in other kitchens and other living rooms, with other sofas, chairs, sinks and refrigerators. The play’s hyper-realistic dialogue and sets and the many personal moments captured over a lifetime, leave us wishing for something beyond the stark realism of this “ordinary life.” All of it , a trilogy composed of three monologues written for actress Kate Flynn, by Alistair McDowall, co-directed by Vicky Featherstone and Sam Pritchard, and presented in Avignon by the Royal Court Theatre from London, also tells stories of women dealing with “ordinary lives,” but these three female characters escape their everyday lives through sharing their inner worlds with us. All of it . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The first monologue takes place in War time, 1940. Speaking in blank verse, a woman is sitting in her rather shabby dining room in a home she shares with her father. She is trapped at home during an air raid. To protect her against the bombs outside, she has a Morrison shelter, a large wire cage on the dining room floor, into which she crawls and stays until the air raid is over, more confined than before and still talking all the while. In the second monologue, a woman speaks to us in a pre-recorded voice that echoes throughout the theatre. She has become obsessed with a stain on her wall. As she stares at the molding, she starts to see double. Talking to herself in a psychotic rant, she becomes increasingly drawn into to the moldy green wall as it turns into rubble. The third monologue portrays a woman from birth to death. It is composed of half sentences and repeated words, from baby’s babbling to discovering language, school, her first kiss, university, motherhood, and death. She delivers her lines on a microphone, varying rhythms from fast to slow and back, repeating words, noises, and finally the mutterings of old age. Her stunning performance of “a whole life in one breath” was extraordinary. Director and Visual Artist Philippe Quesne’s new creation Le Jardin des Délices (The Garden of Delights) , loosely based on Jerome Bosch’s sixteenth century triptych of fantastical allegories, received its premiere in the Carrière Boulbon, an awe-inspiring quarry 15 kilometers outside of Avignon. The quarry had not been used as a theatre for the past seven years and one could feel a sense of expectancy and excitement in the audience. What magic would Philippe and his Vivarium Studio players conjure up for us? Le Jardin des Délices . Photo: Phiippe Dauphin. Soon, a white tourist bus appears to our left. It is being pushed into the quarry by a group of passengers, two women and six men, stranded in the middle of imposing limestone cliffs. They slowly look around and take in the landscape, barely saying a word to each other. They don’t seem concerned that they are lost and that their bus is broken down, but they do have a plan. The bus driver brings out a shovel and pickaxe and they begin digging in the quarry’s chalky soil in preparation for the arrival of a large stone egg. Le Jardin des Délices . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage. It is time to gather for the first in a series of rituals and performances that compose Le Jardin des délices . Circling around the egg, they pay tribute to this mysterious presence with music provided by a guitar, a tambourine and a recorder and even a piano played by the bus driver inside the bus. When the performance ends, they take their leave with a kiss and a bow to the egg, along with a handful of earth. What secret does the egg hold? The promise of a new life, or a way out of their predicament, perhaps, but they choose not to open it. Other rituals, other performances follow as the travelers explore possible ways to fill their time in this “garden’ where nothing green grows. While folding chairs are placed around in a wide circle, long time Vivarium artist Gaetan Vourc’h, tour guide and master of ceremonies, invites the group to feel free to express themselves in any way they choose. One reads a poem, another balances a chair in his mouth, and others strike poses reminiscent, perhaps, of figures in Bosch’s Triptych, they go about inventing micro-performances and creating “works of art.” Perhaps a stage for individual performances might provide more entertainment. They remove the sides of the bus to reveal an open stage on which one of the travelers, a man in bright red long johns, sings opera in full throat, but here again, this performance does not seem to satisfy them. Magic perhaps might offer some answers. “Do you believe in miracles?” Gaeton asks as he provides a demonstration. “Abra Cadabra” and his bald head is covered with a thick head of hair. This is fun but clearly, they must organize themselves. Perhaps this is the garden of earthly delights but as Gaeton asks, “What is your long-term strategy?” They must come up with a plan. Wearing Medieval costumes and wigs, they make their way to the quarry walls with Gaeton among them dressed as a skeleton. The play’s title lights up against the walls in giant letters with skeletons flying overhead, seeming to beckon to them. The egg is cracked open now but instead of entering it, they try to climb up the quarry walls with ladders that are much too short. Caught in the middle of an impressive lightning and thunderstorm, they seem lost until a shimmering triangle of light appears overhead. Perhaps this offers a better world than the disappointing garden of earthly delights. They seem to disappear into the smoke and loud noises and dogs barking, moving toward a better world, perhaps. They are survivors. Tiago Rodrigues’ Dans la mesure de l’impossible , ( As Far As The Impossible ), a play that Rodrigues created in 2022 at the Comédie de Genève, was a welcome choice to replace Polish director Krystan Lupa’s The Emigrants when it had to be canceled to the regrets of many. Dans la mesure de l’impossible . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage . Based on interviews with thirty some collaborators of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders who shared their harrowing experiences and first-hand accounts to create this powerful piece, performed at the Avignon Opera House, with just four performers and a percussionist. The show presents a number of questions. How to manage a refugee camp? How to deal with life and death decisions? How to survive when it is clear that one cannot change the world alone? In this world where the impossible is an everyday companion, Tiago Rodrigues offers us a theatre of words which puts us in touch with a reality that is deeply moving. The set is composed of large white sheets floating above the stage at different heights, suggestive of a tent where humanitarian workers retreat to recover from their encounters with disaster and death on a daily basis. These will be pulled up to varying heights and configurations throughout the show. Four actors, two women and two men—the humanitarian workers--deliver their lines in a mix of English, French and Portuguese. They are joined by a musician/ percussionist whose masterful drumming provides running commentary throughout the two-hour show. Thanks to them, we become familiar with the everyday lives of workers in humanitarian aid, those who witness horrors every day, and who are forced to make split-second decisions, as they provide relief from disaster and other emergencies. The geographical areas that they travel to throughout the world are referred to as The Impossible. Back home with family and friends is The Possible. “We work.” they tell us. “It’s a real job, helping to save others.” But they also admit that their work is no more than “a band aid placed on human suffering.” Of course, they are aware that the world cannot be saved and that they must go deeper into the frontier of the impossible. The stories they tell are the real-life stories that the interviewed humanitarian workers had told Tiago and his team, transposed into a form of documented theatre composed of testimonies. The horrors reported are almost too much to bear. Still, these brave humanitarians survive despite all of their scars, comforted by a beautiful rendition of a Portuguese “fado” sung a capella by one of the women. The final moments of the show, a virtuoso drum concert, sends the ear-splitting sounds of war throughout the theatre, as a reminder of the world of the Impossible. Black Lights , by noted choreographer Mathilde Monnier, portrays equally harrowing stories but of a different nature and they exclusively concern women—women who speak in a different voice, a voice between text and dance. Black Lights . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage . Inspired by a TV series, H24, on Arte, based on twenty-four hours in a woman’s life in the form of written texts by well-known women, with a focus on different kinds of violence, Mathilde Monnier chose eight of these texts as the source for her choreography performed at the open-air Carmes cloisters theatre. It was a delight to visit this new dance piece by Mathilde Monnier who had created so many wonderful pieces at the festival, beginning in 1996. Performed by eight dancer/actors of different ages and different nationalities on a stage covered with the gnarled roots of olive trees, we are confronted with the mental and physical impact of different degrees of violence. One tells us how she felt when she had to smile at her old professor when she knew what was really on his mind; another was knocked down and doused with gasoline, another regrets her docile compliancy when receiving a compliment. From uncomfortable moments and regrets to horrifying attacks, the performers of Black Light show us the experience of domination, oppression, violence and defense, legs raised high as if kicking their aggressor, fingers extended in front of a face as if to ward off an unwanted attacker and twisted bodies. Among the many Avignon shows that introduced us to varied and crucial responses to the realities of today’s world, Rebecca Chaillon and her team of Afro-descendant sisters, showed us the reality of their world as black women treated as objects of white fantasy, racism and violence in Carte Noire nommée désir , a remarkable performance piece in which they present their situation head on with urgency, humor and brio. Carte Noire nommée désir . Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage . At the Gymnase du Lycée Aubanel, a large indoor theatre in the heart of Avignon, eight black women stand on a white stage in front of us. Themes of black and white play are introduced from the beginning of the performance and even before. There are two separate audiences on either side of the stage. Only women of color were invited to sit on comfortable sofas and enjoy refreshments facing the “white” audience seated on uncomfortable seats across from them. Rebecca Chaillon, her naked body covered with white cream, is scrubbing the floor with Clorox as if her life depended on it. Her friend is sitting at a potter’s wheel, making white clay coffee cups. They exchange a few words. Time drags on as we take in this painful picture of a “devoted” servant on her knees for close to forty-five minutes. In the following scene, Rebecca begins to braid long pieces of white cloth into her black hair. Soon she is joined by her friends who perform a lengthy ritual of hair braiding as if in a beauty parlor for black women. They create a masterpiece of long heavy black and white braids that Rebecca will wear throughout the performance. Seated in the middle of a circle of her sisters, Rebecca seems to enjoy their shared admiration. Later, as Rebecca smokes and thumbs through magazines, she begins to read a number of racist want ads out loud on the order of “White Man, French, looking for his black pearl” to the delight of the audience who enjoys these outrageous ads. The audience is also delighted when invited to play “Questions pour un Champion,” a popular TV game show, with Rebecca and her company feeding them questions. They seem to know all of the answers and enjoy shouting out their response. Carte Noire “plays” with the audience in other ways too. Some are provocative and even dangerous. Performers racing into the audience to “steal” women’s handbags, creates moments of chaos and anger. Others are tongue-in-cheek amusing. A beautiful black performer lying on a table covered in foaming milk, while a group of her black friends raise their coffee cups to her, draws our laughter. One especially powerful and “shocking” tableau features a nanny surrounded by her employer and others. They do not seem to think it odd that her body is pierced front and back with a long spike, as if she has been impaled. On the contrary, they seem to be enjoying themselves, placing little plastic white babies on the pike, one after the other, as the Mother, a lovely lady In Scarlet O’Hara white dress, happily looks on. Thank goodness for other moments of wild twerk dancing and amazing aerial stunts. Carte noire, nommée désir was brave and thrilling and wonderful. A great moment in the 77 th Festival. The official Avignon 77 was a great success, 225,000 audience members and theatres were 94 % full. Tiago Rodrigues’ rich programming gave full weight to the socio-political questions of our time and many new artists were invited for the first time. There was a large presence of English-language shows In keeping with Tiago’s decision to focus on the English language this year. As thrilled as I was with this year’s festival, I admit to being disappointed that American talent was so underrepresented. Only two American companies were invited to the festival, Elevator Repair Service’s Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge , based on their debate in 1965 and Tajal Harell’s choreographed performance The Romeo . The other English language contributions were mostly British, a response to Brexit, it seems. In whatever language, however, Avignon remains the “festival of my dreams.” References References About the author(s) Philippa Wehle is a professor emerita of French, drama studies, and literature at Purchase College. She writes widely on contemporary theatre and performance and has translated numerous contemporary French language plays by Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Philippe Minyana, José Pliya, and others. Her current activities include translating contemporary New York theatre productions into French for supertitles. Professor Wehle is a Chevalier in the French Order of Arts and Letters. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Report from London (December 2022) Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 “Regietheater:” two cases The Grec Festival 2023 The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Report from Germany Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Theater of War by Oleh Halaidych at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Since the first hours of the full-scale Russian aggression, the collective of theatrical workers in Ukraine faces a new reality of war and turns the theater into a shelter for refugees and a center of humanitarian help. Actors, directors, and art managers get new social roles. Amidst the crisis, they live their young lives and find a place for art, joy, and mutual support.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Theater of War At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Oleh Halaidych Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film Program) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Ukraine Language Ukrainian Running Time 40 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film Since the first hours of the full-scale Russian aggression, the collective of theatrical workers in Ukraine faces a new reality of war and turns the theater into a shelter for refugees and a center of humanitarian help. Actors, directors, and art managers get new social roles. Amidst the crisis, they live their young lives and find a place for art, joy, and mutual support. About The Artist(s) OLEH HALAIDYCH Documentary filmmaker and neuroscientist based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Graduated from the Sergiy Bukovsky documentary film program (Kyiv, 2021) and the cinematography workshop at the Kharkiv Academy of Visual Arts (Kharkiv, 2019). Holds MS in Applied Physics and Mathematics (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, 2008-2014) and Ph.D. in biophysics (Leiden University, 2014-2018). OLHA TUHARINOVA Documentary film director and producer based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Holds an MA in architecture (Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture, Kyiv, 2018). She entered the world of documentary cinema in 2017 as a programmer for the International Festival of Film and Urbanism “86”. Directed and produced the documentary web series “Her Place” (2020), dedicated to female representatives of professions previously prohibited for women in Ukraine. She is pursuing a DOC NOMADS Erasmus Mundus joint master’s degree. Get in touch with the artist(s) halaidych.oleh@gmail.com / olhatuha@gmail.com / LLC KSHTALT PRODUCTIONS and follow them on social media halaidych.oleh@gmail.com , https://vimeo.com/olehhalaidych, olhatuha@gmail.com , https://vimeo.com/olhatuha, Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse