The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. 2025 Festival See the full lineup of films at this year's festival below. A selection of films will be screened in-person at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (and a few at the Anthology Film Archives) whilst others will be available to watch online on this website until June 8th 2025. SEE IN-PERSON SCHEDULE Festival Lineup IN-PERSON Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film IN-PERSON Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls IN-PERSON Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer IN-PERSON Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL ONLINE + IN-PERSON Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse IN-PERSON This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã ONLINE + IN-PERSON Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective IN-PERSON His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect ONLINE + IN-PERSON PACI JULIETTE ROUDET IN-PERSON Reas Lola Arias IN-PERSON The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir IN-PERSON Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss IN-PERSON Bila Burba Duiren Wagua IN-PERSON JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux ONLINE + IN-PERSON Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing ONLINE + IN-PERSON Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega IN-PERSON The Jacket Mathijs Poppe ONLINE + IN-PERSON Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu ONLINE + IN-PERSON Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga IN-PERSON Pidikwe Caroline Monnet ONLINE + IN-PERSON Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves ONLINE + IN-PERSON Theater of War Oleh Halaidych In-Person Screenings at The Martin E. Segal Center (365 5th Ave, New York) and Anthology Film Archives (32 2nd Ave, New York) Google Maps Google Maps Thursday May 15 1:00 pm Resilience by Juan David Padilla Vega (Canada, 2024, 70’) U.S. PREMIERE 2:20 pm JJ by Pauline L. Boulba and Aminata Labor (France, 2024, 72’) 4:00 pm This is Ballroom by Vita and Juru (Brazil, 2024, 92’) 5:50 pm Transindigenous Assembly by Joulia Strauss (Greece, 2024, 86’) 7:25 pm Radical Move by Aniela Gabryel (Poland, 2023, 77’) NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE RSVP Day 1 Friday May 16 12:00 pm Bila Burba by Duiren Wagua (Panama, 2023, 70’) 1:20 pm Acting by Sophie Fiennes (UK, 2024, 145’) U.S. PREMIERE 3:55 pm The Jacket by Mathijs Poppe (Belgium, Netherlands, France, Lebanon, 2024, 71’) U.S. PREMIERE 5:15 pm Brink of Dreams by Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir (Egypt, France, Denmark, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, 2024, 102’) Special section SPOTLIGHT ON BASINGA 7:10 pm Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread by Jean-Baptiste Mathieu (Germany, 2024, 52’) NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE 8:10 pm Skywalk above Prague by Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves (Czech Republic, 2020, 51’) NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE RSVP Day 2 Saturday May 17 11:00 am SHORT FILMS PROGRAM Benjamin de Oliveira’s Open Paths by Bruno Esperança (Brazil, 2024, 37’) U.S. PREMIERE Peak Hour in the House by Blue Ka Wing (Honk Kong, 2024, 7’) Paci by Juliette Roudet (France, 2024, 33’) NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE Jesus and the Sea by Ricarda Alvarenga (Brazil, 2024, 3’) Somber Tides by Chantal Caron (Canada, 2024, 12’) N.Y. PREMIERE Theater of War by Oleh Halaidych (Ukraine, 2024, 40’) U.S. PREMIERE Pidikwe by Caroline Monnet (Canada, 2024, 10’) U.S. PREMIERE 1:25pm Grand Theft Hamlet by Pinny Grylls, Sam Crane (UK, 2024, 90’) RSVP Day 3 Sunday May 18 3:00 pm SPECIAL FESTIVAL PRESENTATION AT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES (32 Second Avenue New York, NY 10003) Reas by Lola Arias (Argentina, Germany, Switzerland, 2024, 82’) RSVP at AFA Wednesday May 21 to Wednesday May 28 HIS HEAD WAS A SLEDGEHAMMER: RICHARD FOREMAN IN RETROSPECT AT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES Guest-programmed by Andrew Lampert. The retrospective is co-presented by New York University Special Collections, home to the Richard Foreman and Kate Manheim Papers, and The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance. For full schedule of the retrospective go to this LINK . 3:00 pm SPECIAL FESTIVAL PRESENTATION AT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES (32 Second Avenue New York, NY 10003) Moi-Même by Mojo Lorwin & Lee Breuer (France, US, 1968/2024, 65 min, 16mm-to-DCP) followed by Q&A with Mojo Lorwin and Kevin Mathewson, moderated by Frank Hentschker RSVP at AFA About The Festival The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. The 2025 festival is co-curated by Frank Hentschker and Tomek Smolarski, and supported by Gaurav Singh Nijjer on digital design. The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. From its inaugural edition in 2015 to its present-day hybrid avatar, The Segal Film Festival for Theatre and Performance (FTP) has served as a platform for recorded works that span the length and breadth of the performing arts. Festival Founder and Executive Director of the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, Frank Hentschker shares his inspiration for creating the festival: “Film and digital media are an integral part of theatre and performance. I am surprised that there is not a film festival out there right now focusing on theatre and performance. I thought ‘why not create one’?” In the time before Corona, the Segal Film Festival had evolved into the premier US event for new film and video work focusing on theatre and performance. Its mission was to invite experimental and established theatre makers to present work created for the screen – not filmed archival recordings – to audiences and industry professionals from around the world. Now, after a year and a half of digital and hybrid theatre offerings, the festival must take on a new meaning. The festival has held on to its mission of being a free and open-to-all event accessible to everyone. The 7th edition of the festival was held digitally in March 2022, and featured 80 films from 30 countries. For queries, feedback and any more information get in touch with us at segalfilmfestival@gmail.com Meet The Team Tomek Smolarski Co-Curator Tomek Smolarski is a cultural manager, producer and curator with over 20 years of experience in production of international cultural events and extensive knowledge in cultural diplomacy. He has produced projects with leading U.S. institutions, including BAM, MoMA, Film at Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, MoMI, Pacific Film Archives, Chicago Cultural Center and many others. Gaurav Singh Nijjer Web and Digital Producer Gaurav Singh Nijjer is a theatre-maker, creative technologist and designer whose artistic works explore technology and media in live performance. He is one half of the Indian performing arts collective Kaivalya Plays, and also works as a freelance artist and arts manager with collectives in India and abroad, currently as Digital and Web Producer at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Centre CUNY. He is a former German Chancellor Fellow and a Chevening scholar. He trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Apart from theatre, Gaurav also works as a freelance marketing, design and creative consultant for diverse organizations. Frank Hentschker Co-Curator Frank Hentschker, who holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the now legendary Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, Germany, came to the Graduate Center in 2001 as program director for the Graduate Center’s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and was appointed to the central doctoral faculty in theatre in 2009. Currently executive director and director of programs at the Segal Center, Hentschker has transformed the center into the nation’s leading forum for public programming in international and U.S. theatre and theatre studies; each year, he curates and produces more than forty events—staged readings, lecture-demonstrations, symposia, works-in-progress, and conversations with theatre scholars, theatrical luminaries, and emerging voices in the international, American, and New York theatre scenes. Among the vital events and series he founded at the Segal Center are the World Theatre Performance series; the annual fall PRELUDE festival, which features more than twenty New York–based theatre companies and playwrights; and the PEN World Voices Playwrights Series. Hentschker also led CUNY’s nineteen performing arts centers in founding the CUNY–Performing Arts Consortium (C–PAC), producing the consortium’s first joint festival in 2009. Hentschker edited the MESTC publications Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake, Seven Works for the Theatre (2009) and New Plays from Spain (2013), and he served as president of the board of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art from 2005 to 2009. Before coming to the Graduate Center, Hentschker founded and directed DISCURS, the largest European student theatre festival existing today; he acted as Hamlet in Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine, directed by the playwright; performed in the Robert Wilson play The Forest (music by David Byrne); and worked as an assistant for Robert Wilson for many years. Producer, General Operations Manager Teresa Soraka Next Generation Fellow Nurit Chinn

Henry Bial Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Henry Bial By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. The concept of artistic research travels under various names (practice as research, performance as research, creative research, etc.) through various national and institutional contexts. At the same time, performance studies scholars insist that art-making constitutes not just the preservation and transmission of culture, but the generation of new knowledge. “Yet,” as scholar-artist Ben Spatz notes in their introduction to Race and the Forms of Knowledge, “a wide gulf remains between this critical assertion and the activation of its implications, which in their implementation imply nothing less than an epistemic revolution” (3). The stakes of that revolution are the decolonization of knowledge itself, demanding a radicalized and reflective approach to artistic research that is informed by “black studies, critical race studies, critical indigenous studies, and critical whiteness studies, as well as feminist and queer theory” (11) [an Author’s Note (ix), explains Spatz’s choice to lowercase all identity designations]. An Introduction, “Materialities in Artistic Research” lays out the book’s intent “to reformulate and radicalize artistic research as an intervention into the racialized forms of knowledge” (23). This is accomplished through three chapters, each a lengthy meditation of fifty pages or more exploring how and why performance can and must challenge our concepts of knowledge, power, and identity. The introduction also announces the author’s desire “to avoid what I call ‘white writing’: the logocentric usage of alphabetic writing to inscribe a dominating sense of prior reason and truth” (21). Instead, Spatz offers sustained engagements with a range of ideas and practices both familiar and unfamiliar to performance studies scholars. These engagements, which unfold gracefully across each chapter, are as provocative as they are evocative, frequently gesturing at understandings that the text itself cannot contain. Chapter 1, “Molecular Identities,” begins from the premise that considering identity in performance solely through the lens of casting is inherently limiting, anchoring analysis to a fixed notion of identity as adhering only and always to an individual performer. “To think beyond casting,” Spatz writes, “is to bypass the individualist framing of identity as that which a given person is or is not and to think instead about how racial and other identities cut through a given moment, event, or practice, at levels both above and below the individual” (31). Instead, drawing on the work of dramaturgs Dorinne Kondo and Katherine Profeta, the chapter argues for greater attention to the lived process of performance-making, in which racial and other identities are continually explored, negotiated, and played with. In this context, suggests Spatz, “the individual performer is no longer taken for granted as a premise or starting point but is recognized as a nexus or site at which multiple layers of technique and identity intersect” (36). Building on the framework established in What a Body Can Do (Routledge 2015), the chapter offers a complex and radically interdisciplinary model in which elements of performance technique (gesture, melody, breath) are understood as “molecule[s] of gendered and racialized material” (60) that have both material and sociocultural significance. Significantly, this means shifting our attention from a finished public performance to the rehearsal room as the most active site of artistic research, as well as looking beyond the live performance to technologically-mediated audiovisual works. Chapter 2, “Whiteness and the Racialization of Knowledge,” provides a dense but masterful opening section (“White Writing,” 83) that synthesizes a wide range of theoretical perspectives from black studies, performance studies, and poststructuralist theory to argue that concepts such as “ knowledge, expertise, science, thought, rationality and research ” should be reframed “in the context of european colonialism and the ongoing global hegemony of european and eurocentric modes of thought, as artifacts of white writing” (101, emphasis in original). In response, the author calls for a critical whiteness practice, one that unmasks whiteness from its unmarked claim to universality. The chapter considers the post-theatrical work of Jerzy Grotowski as a possible model, noting that in his interculturalism and his move away from logocentrism, “Grotowski looked for techniques that could transform or even transcend identity” (131). Yet Grotowski’s work, Spatz argues, proved difficult, if not impossible, to scale beyond the individual, suggesting that more significant social transformation demands confronting institutional forms and structures of knowledge, i.e. the university. The latter part of the chapter then considers three approaches to artistic research developed in European and North American universities, “roughly glossed as those of inclusion, escape, and experimentation” (134). The inclusive approach seeks to make space within the research university for artistic work to be recognized and valued; such attempts, as illustrated by the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), are well-intentioned but prone to co-optation by the corporate and political power of the institution. Escapist approaches take the opposite tack, positioning artistic research as “always in excess of the university, constantly fleeing and escaping its expectations and in this way radically unavailable to capture and co-optation” (140). This tactic, which looms large in contemporary performance studies, is illustrated through an analysis of Erin Manning’s Concordia University (Montreal)-based SenseLab. The third model, experimentation, takes more direct aim at the institutional structure itself, explicitly challenging the primacy of (white) writing. Though all three approaches have their merits, the author concedes, “It is only honest to admit that I find myself personally in closest alignment with pragmatist and experimental approaches: those that neither take prevailing institutions for granted nor seek to disappear from them but instead grapple with them through a kind of technics that is deeply engaged with matters of form” (134). This is vividly illustrated in Chapter 3, “Audiovisual Ethnotechnics,” which details some of the author’s own experiments in artistic research. Most of these examples are drawn from “The Judaica Project,” an extended multi-year series of investigations conducted at various sites in the US, UK, and Poland, and organized around “an embodied practice of singing or songwork in which jewishness is treated as molecular” (152). These examples are richly described, with particular emphasis on how strategic uses of audiovisuality, including both sound and video recording, can enhance the generative power of artistic research by capturing the dynamic relationship between identity and technique theorized in the first chapter. This is not simply a matter of documentation, but of using the potential of audio-visual media to juxtapose and layer sound and image in ways that explore new relationships between identity, temporality, and place. Importantly, Spatz’s explorations of “molecular jewishness” are based not only in practice, but in a deep engagement with major thinkers in Jewish cultural studies, such as Jonathan Boyarin, Shaul Magid, and Santiago Slabodsky. Along the way, the chapter makes a compelling case that critical theory itself can be understood as a counter-hegemonic mode of reading and writing that is specifically Jewish. Building on the work of other scholars who have highlighted the marginalized position of figures such as Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and Derrida, as well as the Talmudic tradition of learned disagreement that, some argue, anticipates poststructuralism, Spatz suggests that a critical Jewish studies might find common cause with critical Black studies, critical Indigenous studies, and other decolonial approaches to knowledge, if and only if it can acknowledge and overcome its “entanglement with whiteness” (136). While not the central focus of the book, this nevertheless represents an important contribution to Jewish studies, and I hope Spatz finds an opportunity to expand on this thesis in the future. Considered singly, each chapter of Race and the Forms of Knowledge makes a substantial contribution to conversations within theatre and performance studies about practice-as-research, about audio-visual media, and about the critical slipperiness of identity in performance. Taken as a whole, however, this ambitious and uncompromising volume poses a different kind of challenge to the field: to embody that which we profess, and to profess that which we embody. References Footnotes About The Author(s) HENRY BIAL is Professor and Chair in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas. He is a past President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and a Fellow of the Mid-America Theatre Conference. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen and Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage , and the editor or co-editor of Brecht Sourcebook, Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions, The Great North American Stage Directors, Vol. 4: Abbott, Carroll, Prince, and The Performance Studies Reader , now in its fourth edition. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Daria Kerschenbaum 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 Last Call: A Play with Cocktails Daria Kerschenbaum By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Last Call: A Play with Cocktails by Hansol Jung Directed by Hansol Jung & Dustin Wills Various New York City Apartments New York, NY September 22, 2025 Reviewed by Daria Kerschenbaum Figure 1: Esco Jouléy. Photography: Fred Charles. One of the allures of immersive theatre is the promise of intimacy. And intimacy requires trust. Last Call: A Play with Cocktails, a new work by Hansol Jung and The Pack, not only understands this facet of the genre, but exploits it. Performed in a rotating variety of homes for roughly thirty attendees, and produced by the site-specific company En Garde Arts, the play promises solace to those “craving connection.” But instead of creating closeness or community, the piece lies to the audience at close-range until they become complicit in a murder. Last Call uses the unique features of immersive performance to underscore how vulnerable audiences are to misinformation, both at a national level and an interpersonal scale. The seduction begins as soon as guests arrive at that evening’s location—in my case, a Boerum Hill brownstone—and deliver a password into walkie-talkie before entering a private house party. The gathering has an air of exclusivity; audience members mingle over drinks, glimpsing the ephemera (fridge magnets, framed posters, bookshelf collections) that suggest the host’s private life. This sense of gaining access to a unique affair is only heightened by the fictional circumstances of the gathering. A welcome letter sets the scene: “Congratulations on leaving the comfort and safety of your homes during this crisis... Leave your street disguises, bulletproof vests, night goggles, and other PPE [at the door].” Through the language that is reminiscent of recent events, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the South Korean martial law crisis, the letter implies that an authoritarian government looms over the function. Participants are subtly asked to trust one another in the face of extraordinary circumstances. The party is interrupted when someone disguised as a mailbox steps through the door. This is our bartender for the night. Identified as the Tender in the program, this character is played by a rotating cast of The Pack regulars, including Nicole Villamil. She apologizes for her tardiness as she sets up her bar cart for the night. It appears that we, the audience, have hired her despite the curfew. A fascinating power dynamic emerges as the Tender mixes a Vieux Carré: we have the security and capital to hire entertainment amid a catastrophe, and the Tender is precarious enough to risk her safety. She sends a tip jar around, causing guests to squirm and cough up a few singles. The gesture highlights the dynamic of the wealthy patron and starving artist, uncomfortably amplified by the production’s intimacy. It also places the audience on the back foot as they attempt to prove their liberalism or disown their privilege, many of them made vulnerable by their eagerness to please. Figure 2: Dorcas Leung. Photography: Fred Charles Though it might appear that the audience is in control, the Tender holds all the cards. Participants are selected to guess if a given piece of liquor trivia is true or false. A correct answer results in a coveted cocktail (though the Tender is happy to hand out drinks to patrons who offer her a compliment, too). The Tender also determines who amongst the audience gets attention, doling out banter and asides throughout the performance. In this way, the very structure Last Call sets up an uneven power relationship between actor and audience, in which audience members seek something from the performer and must follow a set of rules to win her over. When the Tender steps outside to answer a call, a new character saunters to the center of the living room. This is the ghost of the Tender’s husband, referred to only as the Other Tender, played by Esco Jouléy. He brags about his glory days behind the bar. He had a gift for knowing exactly what a patron needed—a Rum Negroni, a hug, or even a tryst in the supply closet. Holding the keys to someone else’s desire is his superpower, as is his disarming honesty. He asserts his reliability by telling the audience he has nothing to hide, even if it means admitting to past infidelity. So, when he claims that the Tender murdered him in cold blood, the audience is forced to pause. “She’s an actress. She believes her lies until they become true!” he warns. Last Call magnifies the real-life tension between patron and performer, customer and service worker, even further; what feels like intimate emotional caretaking easily morphs into manipulation. We need them, and it feels dangerous. When the Tender returns to the apartment, she stirs an Aviation and recounts her version of the marriage. She refused to acknowledge her husband’s affairs for months until they became unavoidable. After a blow-up fight and weeks of silence, the Other Tender was caught in a crossfire on the way to a bartending gig. Whose version of events do we believe? Or, rather, which story do we prefer? The play concludes in a “shot off” in which guests vote for one of the mixologists by drinking a shot they prepared. At the show I attended, an overwhelming majority of guests sided with the liar, including myself. Yet in retrospect, the truth was plain to see, practically waved in front of our faces from the first moments of the play. One of the Tender’s first trivia questions involves a line from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden , “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” She personally couldn’t disagree more: when life is short, expensive, and filled with terror, the Tender would much rather take the love, money, and fame. Truth, the play suggests, is already null and void under an authoritarian regime. This search for pleasure and avoidance of pain motivates the Tender to ignore her husband’s cheating, and, to a certain degree, drives this audience to go to a brownstone in Boerum Hill and indulge in the fantasy of community. It is one thing to watch a play about manipulation, and another thing entirely to experience that manipulation firsthand. The latter forces spectators to confront their fallibility, their desire for comforting fabrications, with far more immediacy than the former. That confrontation takes on particular significance for New York audiences; many liberal-leaning participants would like to believe they are immune to the narratives peddled by the current administration. Last Call compels them to reexamine who and what they trust. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DARIA KERSCHENBAUM is a writer and theater artist whose work centers on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and experimental performance. She is currently a DFA candidate in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, where she also earned her MFA. Daria serves as Associate Editor of  Theater magazine. 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. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lisa B. Thompson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Lisa B. Thompson By Published on May 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF If I do not bring all of who I am to whatever I do, then I bring nothing of lasting worth, for I have withheld my essence. Audre Lorde , I am Your Sister: Collected Writings Every year I return to August Wilson’s powerful speech, “The Ground on Which I Stand.” On the 25th anniversary of his groundbreaking keynote at the 1996 Theatre Communications Group National Conference, Wilson’s words still resonate. [1] I want to honor this Black theatre milestone because Wilson not only delivers a scathing critique of systemic racism in US theatre, but he also insists that Black culture is a worthy and necessary source of artistic inspiration. Although he criticizes the structural inequalities that Black artists face, Wilson also speaks about his personal journey as a playwright and a Black man. He confesses: . . . it is difficult to disassociate my concerns with theater from the concerns of my life as a black man, and it is difficult to disassociate one part of my life from another. I have strived to live it all seamless . . . art and life together, inseparable and indistinguishable. (494) Wilson’s address motivated me to craft my own manifesto as a Black feminist artist/scholar. I’m celebrating the anniversary of “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech by crafting a manifesto which echoes Wilson’s desire for a seamlessness between being a Black person and a theatre artist. As Black people throughout the African diaspora combat dual catastrophes, a global pandemic and the brutality associated with the “long emancipation,” I feel an even greater sense of urgency. [2] I also feel a sense of urgency to make all of my conflicting identities seamless. I’m proclaiming to all that will listen that I’m not only a Black artist, but I’m also a Black feminist scholar. I’m a playwright and a professor who has choreographed a professional life that includes both the arts and the academy. I’ve learned to dance on the slash between the title artist/scholar. I must dance to remain both creator and critic because I refuse to live a divided life. I will no longer deny any part of my intellectual or creative gifts. I call on all Black artist/scholars to join me and do the same. When I was a little girl, I didn’t dance quite like my friends and family. It seemed to me that they were all illustrious dancers. I recall watching my older brother Robert dance. He was a member of the San Francisco Lockers and I loved watching those Adidas sweat suit-clad dancers move in lock step. They were commanding, rhythmic, defiant, and elegant. My classmates mesmerized me as they performed stunningly choreographed routines at the school talent shows, decked out in matching psychedelic outfits. I never joined in when they perfected their dances on Saturday afternoons in a neighbor’s rumpus room. Don’t feel sorry for me. This is not one of those “I was smart but lacked natural rhythm therefore I was a mocked and ostracized inauthentic Negro” essays. I had plenty of friends and could throw down with the best of them, it was just that I preferred dancing alone. Standing in front of the sofa or the bedroom mirror, I would jam to songs by the Jackson 5, Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer, and Prince. I despised group dances, but adored the Soul Train line because it was my stage: I could be the star dancing to my own groove. Dancing alone and in my own way has led me to a life as a Black feminist artist/scholar. I define a Black feminist artist/scholar as one who works simultaneously within the academy, pursuing scholarly research and teaching, while also producing art in the public realm for wide-ranging audiences to enjoy. Black feminist artist/scholars often center the lives and experiences of Black women, girls and femmes in both their scholarly and artistic work. I use dancing as a metaphor because dance emphasizes free but disciplined movement. It requires both posture and poise. Dance allows improvisation and planning, creativity and expression. Dance can be done in a group or solo. Dance provides a way to socialize, to become and stay strong, to communicate, to develop self-esteem, and to increase your flexibility. It’s also a way to curate a sense of embodied listening and speaking. After all, dancing around the question can be more about exploring a puzzle more deeply instead of avoiding it. You need all of those traits to survive as an artist/scholar, especially a Black feminist one. The artist/scholar defies the old adage that “those who do, do, and those that can’t, teach.” Artist/scholars often prove some of the best teachers because they have immersed themselves in two worlds, the Ivory Tower as well as the theatre, or museum, art gallery or concert hall. The artist/scholar has many work spaces: the classroom, the library, the archives, and the lab or studio where we create. Some work in completely different realms so that their artistic and scholarly fields have little or nothing in common, while the scholarship and artistry of other artist/scholars is more aligned. No matter how one’s artistic practice and scholarly interests are related, this duality helps us to become great teachers because we understand the work from two perspectives simultaneously. [3] Black artist/scholars are certainly not a new phenomenon. I stand on the shoulders of those who came before me such as anthropologist, novelist, and playwright, Zora Neale Hurston; sociologist, novelist, literary journal editor, W.E.B. Du Bois; poet and comparative literature scholar Kamau Braithwaite; and choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham. I rely on their examples for reassurance, for inspiration, and for guidance. Those tiny descriptors I shared about their work reveals only a fraction of the ground those giants cleared for us, only a morsel of their contributions to the world of arts and letters. Their pathbreaking interventions created the circumstances that allow many contemporary Black artist/scholars to enjoy the security of tenured positions in the academy–often in highly regarded and abundantly resourced institutions. I lean on the example of these precursors as I choreograph my own dance. Their brave work helps me to theorize about Black culture through my essays and books; their life stories inspire me to continue crafting plays about Black life. I draw on their wisdom to give me the confidence to claim my creativity and knowledge. This manifesto represents an attempt to leave some crumbs behind so that other Black artist/scholars who dance alone, but also in community with others, know that it’s possible to bop down their own creative and intellectual path. Toni Morrison, one of the greatest artist/scholars of all time, and a Cornell-trained literary critic, editor, teacher, and Nobel prize winning writer, explained her work simply: “I know it sounds like a lot. But I really only do one thing. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.” [4] She was also a librettist who even tried her hand at playwriting. Why did she downplay the multiplicity of her gifts and the vast reach of her intellectual and creative labor? I suspect that Morrison felt as I do, it is simply your work . It is how you feel compelled to show up in the world as a creator and thinker. It is your purpose. All of it. So, what does it mean to dance on the slash? It means identifying the spaces where the art and the scholarship meet. The powers that be insist that there is a line between teaching and doing, a line between artistry and scholarship, between creativity and criticism, that is not meant to be crossed. Dancing on the slash acknowledges that the line between being an artist and a scholar is a porous one. In the rare instances when that line is crossed or blurred, it’s certainly not meant to be transgressed by people like me, Black, woman, first generation college graduate, single mother. How does one dare to disregard borders in spaces where you are not supposed to even exist? There is a freedom in challenging the boundaries of disciplines—artistic and academic. To live an undisciplined life is dangerous, but it’s also thrilling in all the ways that make you whole. In her essay “Sista Docta,” African Diaspora studies and performance artist/scholar Omi Osun Joni L. Jones pushes back against the artist/scholar divide by refusing to privilege one over the other. Jones argues that “performance is a form of embodied knowledge and theorizing that challenges the academy’s print bias. While intellectual rigor has long been measured in terms of linguistic acuity and print productivity that reinforces the dominant culture’s deep meanings, performance is suspect because its ephemeral, emotional, and physical nature.” She adds that “Performance. Then, subverts the binary of artist/scholar when performance exists as scholarship.” [5] Jones makes clear that part of the dance includes rejecting hierarchies of knowledge. In the most skilled hands, a piece of work is both art and scholarship. Dancing on the slash means balancing the competing demands of two worlds that refuse to understand each other. Maintaining perfect equilibrium is impossible so there are times when artist/scholars devote more time and energy to one field or calling to the detriment of the other. It also means pushing back against those who insist that you must pick one and abandon the other. One must be careful while creating a life on a slash. The slash can be an aggressive and violent motion. You use it to cut out, diminish, partition, and destroy that which is not worthy, but also that which doesn’t serve the art or the argument. Living as an artist/scholar can be lonely because you must shuttle between two fields and feel that you are not fulfilling obligations to either field or community. As an artist/scholar, you have to accept that’s what it means to dance to the beat of different tunes. For me, it means writing plays, essays, and books all while trying to interest a producer in my latest piece. It means suffering the unspoken questions of college deans, artistic directors, department chairs, press editors, and theater boards. They wonder whether I’m an artist or a scholar? They ask is this play simply an essay placed on stage? Is this essay too theatrical? Dancing on the slash means trying to answer those questions and accepting that you can do too much and never enough at the very same time. This manifesto calls for academic and theatrical institutions to move beyond such simplistic questions and to allow space for all that artist/scholars bring to the table (or stage). How did I arrive on this slash? Like August Wilson, I began as a poet after falling in love with the words of Black Arts Movement poets such as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni. When Ntozake Shange burst upon the theatre scene in the 1970s with her critically acclaimed choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf, I discovered how poetry can fill the stage and unveil the concerns and dreams of Black girls and women like a rainbow. I was fortunate to find myself in Shange’s classroom as a senior English major at UCLA. On the first day of class, Shange invited us to do a free write for 20 minutes and that’s when I penned my first monologue. One day, Shange invited a friend to visit our class. He was working on a production of his play in Westwood. The friend was George Wolfe and the play was The Colored Museum . Little did I know that seeing Wolfe’s work after spending a term in Shange’s presence would change the course of my life and chosen artistic genre. Wolfe’s irreverent humor and deep knowledge of Black culture blew my mind. I couldn’t believe that this outrageousness was possible! My turn from poetry to drama was complete. I remain inspired by both Shange and Wolfe’s theatrical love letters to Black people’s beautiful and powerful brokenness. Wilson looked to his mother’s pantry, his beloved Pittsburgh Hill District, Black history, and the slave quarters for inspiration. I turn to my home and working-class community in San Francisco, a rich and fertile place full of art, joy, beauty and books that made me into a Black feminist artist/scholar, a cultural producer and a cultural critic. It’s where I learned about Black culture, Black history, Black life, Black womanhood, and Black love; I learned in the pews of the Third Baptist Church, the oldest Black church in San Francisco where I was baptized in the 1970s, in the barbershop in Lakeview that I visited with my father on Saturday afternoons eavesdropping on tall tales told by men on barber stools, from the books left behind by the Black Panthers who rented an apartment from my grandmother in Oakland, the quick tongued signifying women at the beauty shop my mother took me to on special occasions too important for her kitchen stove press and curl, and the fine afroed boys that played basketball on Saturday afternoons in March Banks Park in Daly City. Although the public schools I attended did not teach much about Black history and culture, I was blessed with young Black women teachers who encouraged a smart creative skinny dark-skinned girl who became a champion of Black culture, Black history, Black life, Black womanhood, and Black love in her work for the stage and in her scholarship, as well as a staunch defender of public education. Suzan-Lori Parks’s evocative essay “The Equation for Black People on Stage” implores Black theatre makers to craft narratives that “show the world and ourselves in our beautiful and powerfully infinite variety.” [6] Those are the kind of stories I try to write, tales that present Black people, particularly the Black middle class and Black elites as neither the talented tenth or the sellouts. Interviewers often ask me who I write for and I want to say for me, all the ME’s I’ve been, I am, and may be—me as a little girl in San Francisco in the 1970s, me as a Black graduate student finding my voice, me as a Black single mother, me summering on Martha’s Vineyard, me facing the deaths of my parents, me facing the deaths of Black people murdered by police, me laughing with my homeboys and homegirls as we discuss romance after forty, me navigating the healthcare industry that renders me invisible, and me retiring someday in France, Costa Rica, or Ghana. I’m addressing the audience and telling the story that matters to me and I’ve never been overly concerned with the expectations or tastes of those who fail to recognize stories about Black people as worthy of a theatrical production on the main stage. I have spent my life entering and conquering unwelcoming institutions in the academy and in the theatre that were not designed for people like me. Most of those spaces will never include the classmates I watched dance as a young girl, but I know they belong in every space I decolonize so I bring Tracy, Rolenzo, Nedra, Baxter, Jane, Teru, Priscilla, Barris, and Tina with me as I try to dance through doors that continue to remain closed to Black, Asian, and Latinx people like them, like me. I’m known to leave the door unlocked so they or their children can slip in behind me and take back the stolen seats. This has not been an easy dance to perform. I’ve faced repeated opposition from staff and administrators as I’ve choreographed a life as both a theatre artist and scholar. Those episodes of discouragement are the very reason I believe this manifesto is essential. I want the academy to understand that for artist/scholars, artistic pursuits are not a magnificent distraction, but a way towards knowledge. Art is a way for Black studies and other scholarly fields to engage in public- facing humanities that invite multiple communities into Black life and culture and into conversation with scholars, artists, policy makers and politicians. It’s important to acknowledge what this dance offers. I imagine that some consider pursuing a life as an artist/scholar as a way to avoid the crushing financial reality of the artist’s existence in the US, especially for those of us who lack family wealth. I’ve joked in interviews that I picked academia because I wanted health insurance and food, but the life of a professor is not a safety net. While I never wanted to be a starving artist, I turned to the academy for another kind of necessary sustenance. I found a life of the mind and arts a rich place to research, teach, and discuss theories, ideas, novels, autobiographies, films, and plays about Black life. It allows artist/scholars to be paid for what we would do anyway—researching about craft, field, major and minor figures, genre and form. Working in the academy also allows us to have a group of brilliant and engaged folks to talk to on a regular basis—colleagues and students. The beneficiaries are not just the artist/scholars but also audiences, fans, and even critics. The academy provides us with a lab to try out work and to build relationships, to invite other artists to the university to showcase their work or collaborate with them. This offers a way to support those who don’t have a tenured job and may be living grant to grant, or artist residency to artist residency, but whose work deserves investment from academic institutions. I’ve hosted both local and nationally renowned artists so that students, faculty, staff and the community are in a room, workshop, lecture hall with folks changing the art world not only in theatre, but in film, television, dance, and more. [7] It’s powerful alchemy. There’s nothing more gratifying than inviting Black artists to the university to develop new work so that students get a kitchen island view of how the gumbo is made. What does it mean to be in the academy–as a Black person, and also to insist on being outside it? What does it mean to be in the academy as a woman, and to foster a life outside it? What does it mean to be a theatre artist as a Black woman, and to craft another professional life outside of it? How does a Black woman carve a life in the arts while also claiming space for herself as a feminist critic? Theorist? Teacher? As one of the few Black women full professors at my university, it can be lonely and frustrating. How does one hold the act of creation and the act of disassembly all at once? After all, to teach and to engage in scholarship, one must break the subject, the object apart. One must dissect and analyze what has been crafted and made (or at least attempted to be made) whole. The intellectual inquiry asks us to disassemble, unhinge, reveal, name, categorize, and make intelligible what the artist has prayed is magic. The scholar must reveal (or at least attempt to) reveal what is behind the curtain, and report back –in an essay, book chapter, or article, the pain, yearning, beauty, ugliness and mistakes that are the creation. [8] As a Black woman the fight to gain and maintain any status in either world is wickedly audacious, but to do so in two different worlds? Madness! But, for me it is also necessary. My art is theatre and performance and my scholarship is in the field of Black cultural studies. As an artist/scholar I’m drawn to exploring a question or idea in two ways: for instance, as a graduate student I examined representations of contemporary black middle class women’s sexuality. My study eventually became my first book, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class (2009), and a two-woman show, Single Black Female (2012), my first produced and published play. In another instance, I considered the portrayal of Africans in contemporary US theatre, which resulted in the essay, “ ‘A Single Story:’ African Women as Staged in US Theatre,” and my play Dinner , that explores cultural and class tensions within the African Diaspora. I’m writing a book that analyzes ways contemporary playwrights reimagine Black history, while simultaneously completing the last two installments of my Great Migration trilogy that traces African American migrants from the south to California and their reverse migration. These dual examinations, this dancing around questions or problems, allows me to thoroughly explore answers and present my findings for different audiences and through different means. All of my work as a Black feminist theatre artist/scholar is meant to present the complexity and delicious beauty of Black life and culture in hopes that it will help make Black people freer. Why do I remain committed to theatre? I adore theatre for many reasons, but one of them is the ease of entry. You can stand on any street corner and recite your monologues or perform a one-person show for free. That’s theatre. It may not be Broadway, but not every play or musical should be. Most importantly, it is the magic of theatre that keeps me mesmerized! Watching Viola Davis perform a scene with Denzel Washington in the revival of Fences on Broadway gave me chills. At that moment, it’s clear that Wilson has presented the ground on which he stood growing up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. When there is that kind of magic on stage, you can hear a pin drop. I’m sure you’ve felt it as an audience member because magic is not just on stage but also in the seats. A study at the University College London found that the heartbeats of audiences synchronize while watching live theatre, regardless of whether they know each other. [9] Imagine a theater full of strangers beating with one single heart. As a Black feminist artist/scholar, I’m intrigued by the thought of the hearts of strangers from every walk of life synchronizing during a story that centers the lives and experiences of Black women. No study has determined whether the heartbeats of students synchronize when they read a play together in class, but I do know that I’ve felt that group heartbeat many times during the two decades I’ve spent teaching in college classrooms. The magic is real. Lorraine Hansberry’s informal autobiography To Be Young, Gifted and Black continues to inspire me. While I am no longer young, I find Hansberry’s address to young artists poignant. She implores them to “write if you will; but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world . . . Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Use it. . . The Nation needs your gifts.” [10] I urge Black artists of any age who also consider themselves scholars to avoid the debate that burdened my younger years. I say choose you; be an artist/scholar because you are both. In this challenging moment, our people need all of your gifts. So on the ground on which you stand, go ahead and dance. References [1] August Wilson delivered his remarks on June 26, 1996, at the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) National Conference at Princeton University. It was first published in American Theatre (September 1996) and reprinted in Callaloo , Volume 20, Number 3, Summer 1997, 493-503. [2] See Ira Berlin’s The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (2015), and Rinaldo Walcott’s Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (2021) in which both scholars articulate the condition of unfreedom and the slow movement towards full citizenship and rights for Black people globally. [3] Other contemporary Black artist/scholars dancing on their own slash include Elizabeth Alexander, poet, literature professor and President of the Mellon Foundation; Harry J. Elam, Jr., director, theatre scholar, and President of Occidental College; Monica White Ndounou, director, theatre scholar, Executive Director of the CRAFT Institute, and Associate Professor of Theater at Dartmouth; Guthrie Ramsey, composer, musician and University of Pennsylvania musicologist; and Deborah Willis, photographer, curator, photography historian, university professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University. [4] Hilton Als, “Toni Morrison and The Ghosts in the House.” The New Yorker . October 20, 2003. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/27/ghosts-in-the-house (accessed November 1, 2020). [5] Joni L. Jones, “Sista Docta: Performance as Critique in the Academy.” TDR (Summer 1997) 53-54. [6] Suzan-Lori Parks, “An Equation for Black People Onstage.” The America Play and Other Works, (1995) 22. [7] The arts are an integral component of Black Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) is comprised of the Christian-Green Gallery and the Idea Lab. Under the direction of Executive Director Cherise Smith, AGBS has had exhibits featuring the work of Dawoud Bey, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Michael Ray Charles, Genevieve Gaignard, Jacob Lawrence, Deborah Roberts, and Charles White among others. The African and African Diaspora Studies department, the John L. Warfield Center’s Performing Blackness Series, as well as the recently re-named Omi Osun Joni L. Jones Performing Artist Residency has hosted artists such as Charles O. Anderson, Pierre Bennu, Radha Blank, Sanford Biggers, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurie Carlos, Florinda Bryant, Eisa Davis, Colman Domingo, Shirley Jo Finney, E. Patrick Johnson, Krudas Cubensi, Daniel Alexander Jones, Lorraine O’Grady, Rhonda Ross, and Stew. [8] I’ve been cautioned against focusing too much critical attention on other playwrights who are more lauded than I, but I’ve rejected that advice. To ignore their work is to betray my responsibility as a scholar which is to analyze the innovative work of Black artists. More importantly, it dishonors my deep love for Black art and Black culture. [9] “Audience Members’ Hearts Beat Together at the Theatre.” University College London Psychology and Language Sciences . 17 November 2017 https:// www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/news/2017/nov/audience-members-hearts-beat-together-theatre (accessed on Oct 28, 2020 [10] Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969) Footnotes About The Author(s) LISA B. THOMPSON UT Austin Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch SWING AND SWAY by Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. The year in which everything radically changed, where real and invisible borders took on another dimension, is the root of a filmic provocation. Two girlfriends, separated by the North and South hemispheres of America, intend to dance in the tumult of images, violence, frustrations and desires. They do it through a game where registering themselves and the women around them enables a dialogue that becomes real and vivid, as a hug determined to resist the distance. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents SWING AND SWAY At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa Documentary, Film, Spoken Word This film will be screened in-person on May 17th. About The Film Country Brazil Language English, Portuguese, Spanish Running Time 72 minutes Year of Release 2022 The year in which everything radically changed, where real and invisible borders took on another dimension, is the root of a filmic provocation. Two girlfriends, separated by the North and South hemispheres of America, intend to dance in the tumult of images, violence, frustrations and desires. They do it through a game where registering themselves and the women around them enables a dialogue that becomes real and vivid, as a hug determined to resist the distance. Script Chica Barbosa, Fernanda Pessoa Direction Chica Barbosa, Fernanda Pessoa Executive Production Jessica Luz Cinematography Chica Barbosa, Fernanda Pessoa Sound Tiago Bello, Chica Barbosa, Fernanda Pessoa Original music Aline Araújo, Julia Teles, Thiago Zanato Editor Chica Barbosa, Fernanda Pessoa VFX Pedro Gallego, Thiago Zanato About The Artist(s) Fernanda Pessoa (1986) is a Brazilian filmmaker and artist. PhD candidate at USP researching women's experimental cinema in Latin America, MFA at Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her first documentary “Stories our cinema did (not) tell” (2017) was screened in over 25 festivals. Her second documentary “Arid Zone” (2019) received a Jury Mention at DOK Leipzig. Her work has been shown at IDFA, RIDM, Doclisboa, DOC NYC, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, BIENALSUR, CalArts, among others. Chica Barbosa is an award winning Brazilian-Mexican filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her work focuses on non-fiction cinema, experimental and hybrid narratives, addressing themes like immigration, colonization, LGBTQ+ rights, identity and faith as an act of resistance. Her short film “La Flaca” (The Bony Lady, 2018) was selected to over 120 festivals around the world and won several awards. Her work has been shown at IDFA, RIDM, DOC NYC, Message to Man, Frameline, Fribourg IFF, among others. Get in touch with the artist(s) renato@utopiadocs.net and follow them on social media @swingandswayfilm @fepessoab @ chica_barbosa @utopia_docs Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Angela Sweigart-Gallagher St. Lawrence University 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 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Angela Sweigart-Gallagher St. Lawrence University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Vermont Stage’s production of Cadillac Crew featuring Ashley Nicole Baptiste, Angella Katherine, Monica Leigh Rosenblatt, and Starnubia. Photo: Dan Gallagher. Talley’s Folley Lanford Wilson (26 Jul.- 26 Aug.) at Isham Family Farm Cadillac Crew Tori Sampson (27 Sept.-15 Oct.) And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank James Still (11-12 Nov.) at Temple Sinai and subsequent school tours Winter Tales conceived by Mark Nash (13-15 Dec.) Breakfalls Gina Stevensen (20 Mar.- 7 Apr.) tick, tick…BOOM! Jonathan Larson (book and lyrics) (1-26 May) The Bakeoff 2024: Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune Terrence McNally (12- 16 Jun.) Vermont Stage’s 2023-2024 season represented a subtle change in the company’s focus. Previously, the company’s website described itself as Northern Vermont’s home for “contemporary theatre,” but now it reads home for “exceptional theatre.” This small change may explain why this season felt like a shift in programming. The 2023-2024 season opened in July with Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folley produced at Isham Family Farm, a picturesque outdoor location that offered the company a lifeline after audiences proved wary to return to indoor theatre following the pandemic; this now appears to be a feature of Vermont Stage’s early season programming. Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning two-hander, which was first produced in 1979 and set in1944, is ostensibly a romantic comedy wherein one of the impediments to the lovers’ courtship is their Jewish/Protestant identities. While not a contemporary play in any sense, the show proved to be well-chosen for the idyllic setting. Scenic Designer Chuck Padula’s boathouse provided just enough space for Patrik Chow’s stage compositions to maintain tension between Matt and Sally, played by Connor Kendall and Leila Teitelman, while still allowing patrons to enjoy the Isham’s gardens. Connor Kendall’s performance of the play’s metatheatrical welcome speech charmed from the start. I saw the production on a particularly warm evening and couldn’t help but feel anxious for the actors as they sweat through Jess Nguyen’s simple yet effective period costumes in the oppressive humidity and blistering early evening sun. I was impressed with the energy of their performances; somehow Matt and Sally managed to convincingly argue, banter, and rekindle their love affair even in the withering heat. In the fall, Vermont Stage returned to Main Street Landing with Tori Sampson’s Cadillac Crew . Sampson’s play spends much of the first two acts focused on the lives and stories of the Black women (and, to a lesser extent, white women) at the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement. The play celebrates the legacy and power of their organizing and mobilization and acknowledges their corollaries in the Black Lives Matter movement. While the two first acts of the play are theatrically stronger than the third act, in which Sampson introduces figures from BLM, the dramaturgical purpose of the time and character shifts is clear. Director Jammie Patton helped craft lovely performances by an ensemble cast comprised of four actors making their Vermont Stage debuts. Ashley Nicole Babtiste as Rachel, Angella Katherine as Abby, Monica Leigh Rosenblatt as Sarah, and Starnubia as Dee each had standout moments and managed to create characters that spanned the play’s two timelines effectively. Sarah Sophia Lidz’s costumes captured not only the two time periods (1960s and today), but also the personalities of the characters. Jess Wilson’s sound design and Dan Gallagher’s lighting both beautifully created a sense of time and place. Gallagher’s lighting in Act 2 was particularly effective at capturing the eerie danger faced by four women driving the backroads of Mississippi. Vermont Stage had already programmed And Then They Came for Me before the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, but the show undoubtedly took on greater relevance to the local community when it was presented in November. Vermont Stage described the piece as a “multimedia reading performance , combining videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors Ed Silverberg and Éva Schloss with live actors recreating scenes from their lives during World War II. ” Directed by Wendi Stein, the show had a limited run at a local temple before being made available for tours at local schools. The production was produced in partnership with the Stop Hate Campaign and was followed by a talkback on the rise of anti-Semitism led by a local Rabbi. Vermont Stage’s website included the following: “Please note: there will be a security presence on-site at each performance.” Gina Stevensen’s new play Breakfalls, perhaps the most experimental piece of Vermont Stage’s season, premiered at Main Street Landing in March. Set in a Vermont karate dojo, Stevensen’s play takes its name from a karate technique that allows participants to fall safely. The production was a moving meditation on the mental and physical strategies people use to create a sense of safety which heavily relied on the artistic interplay of Director Delanté Keys and fight coordinator José Pérez IV. Local critic Alex Brown reported that director Keys used the “space elegantly, expressing the meaning of distance visually and, for the characters, sometimes viscerally.” Artistic Director Cristina Alicea directed Vermont Stage’s final production of the season, Jonathan Larson’s tick, tick…BOOM! The musical, which Alicea described as Larson’s “most personal,” featured strong performances by the small ensemble. Coleman Cummings, who played Jonathan, somehow managed to rise above the cloying earnestness of the role. Kianna Bromley as Susan and Connor Kendall as Michael rounded out the cast. Unfortunately, the day I saw the production, it was plagued by technical errors. There were out of sync light cues in which the actors found themselves out of their spotlights, and Kendall’s microphone pack shorted out and had to be replaced mid-song by a stagehand during one of the show’s most poignant musical numbers. Although the technical side of this production was not as effective as the actors’ performances,Padula’s set provided opportunities for Alicea’s inventive staging. A bank of lockers against the back wall opened in various ways, allowing the actors to transform the space into Jonathan’s apartment in one scene, and a bodega in another scene. The lockers also allowed the three performers to seamlessly gather and return props without exiting the performance space. Similarly, Alicea utilized two black benches in a variety of ways to create a piano and bench, a desk in Michael’s office, and a conference room. The actor manipulation of props and scenery added a metatheatrical element and helped keep the show moving. Vermont Stage began its 2023-2024 season with a new management structure in place and a season line-up that reflected a subtle shift in its programming with some older plays and a musical breaking up a season of lesser-known, newer work. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ANGELA SWEIGART-GALLAGHER is an Associate Professor of Performance and Communication Arts at St. Lawrence University. Her scholarly writing and performance reviews have appeared in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre , New England Theatre Journal , parTake , Performance Matters, Performance Research , Theatre Symposium , Theory in Action, and Youth Theatre Journal . Dr. Sweigart-Gallagher earned her PhD in Theatre Research from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. 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.

Watch BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers by Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. "A free and intimate portrait behind the scenes of Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's creative process. In front of the camera, she shares with today's young actors her memories of the Amandiers school in the 1980s and her training with Patrice Chéreau." The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon Documentary This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country France Language French Running Time 61 minutes Year of Release 2022 "A free and intimate portrait behind the scenes of Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's creative process. In front of the camera, she shares with today's young actors her memories of the Amandiers school in the 1980s and her training with Patrice Chéreau." produced by Agat Films & Ad vitam About The Artist(s) none Get in touch with the artist(s) stemilon@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.simonelephant.com/stephanemilon Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Jackie Rosenfeld and Cade M.Sikora Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Jackie Rosenfeld and Cade M.Sikora By Published on April 28, 2023 Download Article as PDF There is a tremendous amount of grief in the post-COVID world of post-secondary educational theatre regarding missed opportunities and lost time. When we, Professors Jackie Rosenfeld (Playwriting and Pedagogy) and Cade M. Sikora (Scenic Design and Technical Direction), joined the Department of Theatre at Texas AM University-Commerce in the Fall of 2021 we developed a new way for our students to engage in theatre that is epic, flexible, and opens up untold potential to connect to the outside world apart from their scheduled season of shows and regular coursework. The opportunity: workshopping and producing a radio play of Flying in the Face of God [i], a new work and docu-dramatization set aboard the famous Titanic , seemingly ending with the destruction of the ship in real-time. The outcomes: connection to each other, excitement about the production of new works, the creation of an entire extracurricular program called the New Play Development Initiative, and enhancement to the curriculums in our department. *** Sikora: This project did not start as a vehicle for any academic activity or as a radio play. Prior to coming to Texas, I was developing a docu-dramatization of the Titanic disaster as part of my own personal portfolio. The story I wanted to tell is huge. The historical event and the consequences thereof are of interest to me, and I knew early on that I was responding to the historic event as well as pop culture’s depictions of the event. To that end, please note two things about the work: The characters depicted are historical figures. The events depicted are taken from biographic information, survivors’ accounts, implied in survivors’ accounts, or at the very least are possible given the information available. This research-oriented approach to the writing geared the project to an academic environment before that was ever a consideration. Rosenfeld: Before the Fall Semester officially began, Sikora asked if I would be willing to read a draft of a play he was working on; I was. Upon finishing the immense script and sharing my initial response, I asked if I could serve as the dramaturg for this new work. We spent the semester trading drafts and feedback. Sikora was initially resistant to hearing a read-through until he finished the second draft. One afternoon in the last week of the semester, however, I was involved in a meeting with a number of students including two we thought would be particularly strong in some of the roles. When Sikora agreed, I very quickly asked the young men if they were available to read a couple of pages from a new script. Within twenty minutes, a short scene from Flying in the Face of God was read aloud for the first time. Sikora: After this first two-page read-through, I became interested in hearing more of the script. But it was huge and incomplete. I broke the play down into chunks. Instead of the mammoth text, the read-through script was whittled down to tell one of its many plotlines. This allowed us to get through a complete story in a reasonable amount of time, gave the performers an opportunity to see the trajectory of the piece, and allowed me as the playwright an opportunity to really focus on one plot at a time. Rosenfeld: The casting of the play needed to be as simple as possible. There are over 183 speaking roles in the play with many of them being white men middle-aged and older from the United States and abroad. We cast without regard to race, age, or ethnicity, allowing us to engage with a broader range of students. While we assured all the students that accents would not be required, many took it upon themselves to learn the basics of various European dialects. To allow students the opportunity to perform and the playwright to listen, we decided I would read the stage directions. Sikora: At the read-through, students were provided with a very brief biography of the characters they were reading for, and we jumped into the text. They understood that they were not reading the full text but were reading one full story from within the text. In the talkback, the students expressed interest in knowing more. Reading 1/12 of the play and only seeing glimpses of the other 11/12 had whetted their appetites. Rosenfeld: We also created a response form with specific questions for the readers to reflect on in the days after the reading. This was useful for Sikora; it was even more useful for the students. This opportunity to give feedback allowed them to think critically about a work in progress and to begin to understand the value of both their ideas and their participation. Sikora: To continue this process, I had to keep writing the play. By the end of the semester, we held six read-throughs. On any given night, we read one to three new plotlines, each time understanding the story better than the time before. Rosenfeld: Throughout the readings I continued to do dramaturgical work. Relaying all this information to the students as we progressed made it all the more exciting. Both Sikora and I were able to use all our research as teaching opportunities about primary resources and secondary resources. Sikora: There was interest from the student participants in creating some form of production. The solution we landed on was to produce a recording of a staged reading. By using all the tools we had amassed and skills we had honed over the semester of small readings, we could create one reading of the full text. This initiative spoke to a number of wants and needs which were floating around our department: our collective desire to hear what this script sounded like end-to-end, an opportunity to prototype Rosenfeld’s idea for a new play development program, and to provide a sense of closure to what had become a much bigger project than was originally imagined. To prepare for this reading, I combed the script to get a sense of just which stage directions needed to be recorded for a radio play adaptation to be successful. Owing to the precise nature of the storytelling and the huge importance on historicity, certain sections of the original text include absolute paragraphs of stage directions. As the playwright, and knowing that I would be doing the post-production, I attempted to vet out some of these fuller sections. This was also when casting choices were made. Essentially, we expanded on the model we used for the initial read-throughs: Each actor was cast in a small number of lead roles, a comparable number of supporting roles from other plotlines within the story, and any number of tertiary roles with the intention of providing our students with varieties of characters which they could perform and to minimize situations where actors spoke to themselves as different characters. There are still scenes where an actor as a lead character speaks to or around themselves as a secondary or tertiary character, but they were carefully chosen in such a way that the audience would not get confused. Over Labor Day Weekend, 2022, we recorded a final read-through of the text. As the concept of time plays an important role in the script, so too did it play for us as we had no more than three workdays to wade through over 500-pages of text. The first day was largely spent disseminating information about the event, characters, and text so that everyone was on the same page with the production. Days two and three were devoted to reading and recording. We do not have a sound studio capable of recording over a dozen people individually and that was far beyond our intended scope, anyway. We set up an impromptu recording studio on one of our performance spaces, complete with enough microphones that we could pair cast members off to share, a digital soundboard to record, and all of the masking flown in to create as much soundproofing as we could muster. Throughout the recording itself, I took notes in my script of lines or sections which I knew would need to be re-recorded, notes on timing, notes from the sound board operator, and notes on and anything else which I thought would help me in the editing process later. By the numbers, the weekend included: thirteen student performers reading for over 180 characters; one Student Sound Technician; one Prologue, twenty-four scenes, and one Epilogue, spread over 523 pages of dialogue and action; and a 400-slide dramaturgical presentation. Rosenfeld: In addition to the dramaturgical presentation, we spent a bit of time on the first day discussing mic technique. Having spent some time in the audiobook industry, I was able to give basic instructions and tips on placement and pronunciation. These new skills led to four of these students now working as professional voice actors in a curriculum video series with a major university. It became obvious early in the process that recording stage directions as planned proved to be a logistical impossibility. We were already weary of running out of time and while the information was important to understanding the action for the audience it had the contrary effect of slowing down the pacing and energy for the actors. We made the decision to record the stage directions at a later date. Instead Sikora gave important details to the cast as needed to interpret the scenes. This was fortuitous to have the experience later of reading through the play using only the stage directions. It assisted Sikora in fine-tuning some areas as well as understanding his voice as a playwright—particularly toward the end when the stage directions alone had me in tears. As the dramaturg it confirmed for me that the stage directions play a vital role in this play in communicating not just the actions of the play but also the tone, mood, and subtext. Reading a script in this way is an exercise I will use going forward with all of my own plays as well as an exercise in playwriting courses and with new works I dramaturg. The entirety of the Epilogue needed to be recorded after the fact as well. As we neared the end of the play we were more quickly approaching the end of our recording schedule. Adding to the urgency of time was the heightened emotions of the piece which we knew could not be sacrificed for speed. In an effort to bring the piece to a temporary conclusion, as none of the students had experienced the piece fully from beginning to end, Sikora and I briskly and intently read-through to the end in their stead. While the students were disappointed this did not give the cohesion and satisfactory ending preferred with live theatre, it was an opportunity to learn that recorded works have the ability to be altered in post-production. Sikora: Before I could hit the ground on editing, I arranged pick-up recordings with each member of the cast. In these pick-up recordings we re-recorded any lines which were flubbed, any rewrites which occurred after the Labor Day Weekend session, and the Epilogue. Students were brought in separately to complete these recordings in the same makeshift studio setting. To achieve this, I went through my notated copy of the script, compiled an individual document for each cast member listing their pick-up lines in chronological order, and worked with them one line at a time. Many of the actors were able to pick up right where they left off because by this point they were so familiar with the text. Occasionally, and particularly for our newer castmates who were reading the Epilogue for the first time, additional context was required and as Playwright/Director I was able to provide that while we recorded. I also recorded Rosenfeld reading stage directions in much the same way. The post-production process took place in two waves: First, an audio trailer was mixed to demonstrate the quality of work we are able to achieve outside the normal production setting. Second, I set about editing the hours of audio into a ten-and-a-half-hour final product. This mostly involved trimming the recorded dialogue and mixing it with sound effects and diegetic music in Adobe Audition. Everything from lilting period music recorded by a castmate’s father to the gentle patter of the engines to the ominous ticking of the Clock which counts down the Titanic ’s final seconds was mixed into the hours of dialogue. In addition to serving the needs of this project, this part of the process also helped me develop our theatrical sound design and engineering program as I used samples of the recording and mix to illustrate concepts to students in our Sound Design class. Rosenfeld: We released the production in consumable installments over the first week of January 2023. Students were able to share the radio play with their friends and families; the response was delightful. Our fears about the production’s length were put to rest when one listener compared the experience to listening to a limited series podcast and others compared it to an audiobook. The radio play format has a new, eager audience. We held a listening party in the theatre at the end of the month so the students could hear it together. Though not all were able to attend, it was incredibly satisfying as an educator to watch them experience the result of a yearlong endeavor. An unexpected advantage to recording this as a radio play with contemporary technology is that we are able to easily insert changes into the production. This has allowed Sikora not only to record corrections to misspoken lines but to record re-writes as well. This is something we can offer playwrights in the future through NPDI’s workshop series. It also allows us to record additional actors as interest and time allows. As noted, Flying in the Face of God has well over a hundred speaking characters and with the small size of our department that means there are a handful of occasions when an actor plays two different characters within a single scene or conversation. As new students join our program, we are able to insert new voices and create a new dynamic within the same piece without having to record the entire play with the full company. On a larger scale, this project served as a building block and test run of a program designed to prepare our students to work on new plays after they graduate. When Sikora and I decided to turn this workshop reading series into a recorded product, I took the idea to the department head as a trial run of this kind of project using in-house faculty. To that end, the ability to invite working playwrights from the Dallas Metroplex to workshop new plays with our students and provide a recording for both the playwrights and our archive is now possible and the New Play Development Initiative became an official part of the AM-Commerce Department of Theatre. *** Having started this work in 2014, it was never Sikora’s intention that Flying in the Face of God might connect to the current Pandemic, but the confluence of events that led to the production of the works at TAMUC is remarkable on that score. Sikora’s desire to tell a massive story set during the Titanic disaster fed a hunger the students had to participate in telling a theatrical story of that scale. That it is a play about real people who endured a real cataclysm made it relatable to a group of persons living through another great cataclysm. Student Kaden James noted: I felt that the characters were truly living in a once-in-a-lifetime historical event, and with that relation to our everyday life being changed due to the pandemic, I felt that my relation to the characters was on a much more human level, in knowing that they only did what they could do. There was no higher expectation or complaint to what they had done, all for the fact that they were humans in an unknown situation. . . I more related to the direness of their situation than I did to the bleakness of my own. Another student, Kiley Towne, added, “Although they were suffering and scared, the characters always let their hope drive their actions, which was a wonderful lesson for me. We can always hope for a better tomorrow.” The Pandemic stalled our collaborative and individual progress in many ways. So often it seems like we were robbed of the time and opportunities we feel we should have had. While producing Flying in the Face of God , participants came to identify with historic characters whose time also appeared to be running out. They were also able to identify and create with each other in a new, unexpected way. The excitement around this project helped spur the AM-Commerce Department of Theatre’s New Play Development Initiative. This program now includes an annual recorded workshop series, a 24 Hour Theatre Project, and a group of students including playwrights, actors, designers, and technicians who meet weekly to focus on developing new plays. [i] The recording of Flying in the Face of God, including its trailer, is available for a limited time at: https://on.soundcloud.com/VDTRM QR code to Flying in the Face of God References Footnotes About The Author(s) JACKIE ROSENFELD is the Assistant Professor of Playwriting and Theatre Pedagogy at Texas AM Commerce. Her play keepingabreast produced by Blunder Woman Productions is available on Audible. Audible to keepingabreast CADE M. SIKORA is the Assistant Professor of Scenic Design and Technical Direction at Texas AM University-Commerce. Cade Sikora's portfolio Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Peter Wood Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Peter Wood By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience . Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience emerged from a series of five conferences organized by the editors between 2009 and 2013, each essay resulting from “a series of encounters, collaborations, and mutual influences between researchers hailing from different geographical and disciplinary contexts” (xiv). In a collection representing scholars from seven countries and thirteen research areas, the editors do a good job at providing a wide range of scholarship as well as a structure that binds the twelve essays—divided into four parts—into a relatively coherent whole. The editors focus on two main reasons for the importance of interdisciplinary work on theatre and neuroscience. The first is that theatre practice and scholarship touches upon a vast array of “human sciences,” including anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, history, and economics (xv). Thus, understanding how theatre affects—and is affected—by the human mind is a broadly worthwhile pursuit. The second reason stems from the editors’ desire to move theatre scholars away from the limitations of “ literary perspectives and interpretations” (xv). Because of this, the concept of embodied cognition is central to all of the essays in the book, and there are important ramifications to scholarship if one accepts embodiment as a starting point. In this, Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience is certainly not unique: embodiment is the cornerstone of many explorations of the cognitive sciences in theatre scholarship and leads to the standpoint that there is no real brain/body split: the brain may be necessary for thought and experience but it is not sufficient . However, as the title of this collection suggests, these essays are primarily concerned with what neuroscience can reveal about brain functions and how such functions relate to theatre and performance. The role that mirror neurons, mirror systems, and other such sensorimotor “resonances” play in the performance and reception of theatre is foundational to many of the essays in the book. Indeed, this foundation is highlighted by the fact that the first chapter is written by Maria Alessandra Umiltà, a member of the original research team that discovered mirror neurons in macaque monkeys. These particular neurons are motor neurons that—when a monkey watches another monkey or human perform certain actions—fire in the same way as they would if the monkey performed the action itself. While Umiltà does not address theatre directly, her essay provides a general discussion on the discovery, function, and meaning of mirror neurons. She also points out the distinction between mirror neurons directly observed in monkey and the proposed mirror systems indirectly observed and measured in humans, noting that in humans we see “a similar mechanism” (22) to mirror neurons but she is not claiming tohave directly studied individual mirror neurons in humans. There is compelling evidence for some kind of mirror system in humans, and it does make sense for theatre scholars to be interested in what such systems reveal about participation in, and observation of, theatre and performance, but often this distinction is glossed over in subsequent essays. Umiltà’s essay introduces the first of the four sections, “Theatre as a Space of Relationships: A Neurocognitive Perspective,” which relies heavily on a notion of space as both a physical space shared by people as well as a neuro-space that becomes a “shared space of action” (12). This allows for knowledge that is both pre-linguistic and totally embodied. The second section, “The Spectator’s Performative Experience and ‘Embodied Theatrology,’” argues, in general terms, that the act of spectating is never, in any ontological sense, passive and that every experience is, indeed, an embodied one. Section three, “The Complexity of Theatre and Human Cognition,” focuses on performer and actor training, while still being grounded in the relationship between the performer and the observer. Victor Jacono’s introduction to this third section argues, compellingly, for the relevance of scientific understanding on how the brain works and, in particular, how “knowing is done” (105). He suggests that “actor training is a systemic research process leading to a modification of the self, opening to the possibility of entering with the totality of one’s being in a new aesthetic and practical relation with reality” (105). While the tone of Jacono’s introduction occasionally verges into the metaphysical, his assumptions are solidly based on a current understanding of the brain’s neuro-plasticity and the ways in which learning a new tool creates physical change in a subject. The final section, “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Applied Performance,” presents several inquiries into how theatre can be used in therapeutic settings. In particular, it examines theatre and performance training as potential therapies for Autism Spectrum Disorders and Parkinson’s Disease. The individual essays range across discussions of specific experiments to more philosophical musings on things like time, Antonin Artaud, and the nature of theatre as therapy. The former, more data-driven essays are, in large part, what set this book apart and make it an important, if sometimes uneven, collection. Examples of exciting, interdisciplinary work include that of Giorgia Committeri and Chiara Fini on how the act of observing a human being within a three dimensional scene actually helps us organize spatial distances at a neuronal level and Corinee Jola’s and Matthew Reason’s fascinating analysis of data on both the neurological and the phenomenological experiences of live performance, focusing on notions of proximity and interaction. Also important is the discussion, by Gabriele Sofia, Silvia Spadacenta, Clelia Falletti, and Giovanni Mirabella, about several ongoing experiments designed to test for ways in which actor training affects reaction times in various circumstances. As the first experimental study designed to “show how theatre training modifies the neurobiology of action” (138), this is a particularly important chapter. So too is the research on theatre training as a tool in Parkinson’s therapy by Nicola Modugno, Imogen Kusch, and Giovanni Marabella, leading to the conclusion that while there is no evidence that such training leads to significant neuronal improvement among Parkinson’s patients, there is measurable improvement in the patients’ phenomenological experience of their own bodies and interactions with others. Set against these excellent studies, some of the less scientific essays in Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience seem both out of place and not entirely convincing. Additionally, the regular slippage between the concepts of mirror neurons and mirror systems in humans is not surprising, but remains something of a problem I often encounter in this area of research. However, a far more interesting issue is the somewhat utopian notion, underlying many of the chapters, that mirror neurons (or systems) necessarily equal empathy and that empathy necessarily equals a greater application of ethical care and understanding toward others. (Indeed, this sensibility underlies many other essays and books on the convergence of theatre and cognitive science and is an assumption that deserves further critical examination.) Still, the editors have put together an important collection for several reasons. The first, and most banal, is that it offers significant resources though the footnotes. Hundreds of studies and experiments are cited throughout, allowing one to explore some of the most up-to-date research on neuroscience and performance. Second, this collection presents a number of voices that many North American scholars may be unfamiliar with, revealing an alternate genealogy of research, approaches, and methodologies that will prove highly useful for anyone interested in this research area. Finally, the book presents concrete examples of theatre scholars and scientists working together through experimentation and the accumulation of data. These models can help those of us committed to the collusion between cognitive sciences and theatre scholarship to stop simply calling for such a practice (which is relatively easy) and to take the next step in a truly multidisciplinary way (which is much harder). References Footnotes About The Author(s) PETER WOOD , PhD Independent Scholar Head of Electronic Initiatives/Listserv Manager, ATDS.org Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Bess Rowen and Benjamin Gillespie 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 Editorial Introduction Bess Rowen and Benjamin Gillespie By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF As 2024 comes to a close, we are grateful for the contributions, collaborations, and interactions we have had through this journal. Although uncertain times lie ahead, we remain committed to the importance of the exchange of new ideas, the rigor of peer review, and the indefatigable forward motion of the field of Theatre and Performance Studies. This issue’s array of articles, book reviews, and performance reviews once again provide a snapshot of the dynamic work happening all around us. We begin with Catherine Heiner’s piece, “A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play ,” which examines the gendered expectations about Black women upon which Jeremy O. Harris’s play relies. Using a post-show discussion as an entry point, Heiner’s work puts comedic discourse into conversation with discussions of race and gender to perceive Slave Play in a new light. Alisa Zhulina’s essay, “Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita : Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov,” also challenges gender norms, this time by putting adaptations of Lolita from two queer feminist playwrights into context alongside society’s rife relationship with the source material. Zhulina specifically highlights the challenges and taboo of Lolita in live performance. The following essay, “‘It’s Cumming yet for a’ that’: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century” comes from Thomas Keith, whose thoughtful meditation on Alan Cumming’s work on the dance theatre piece Burn mixes adept performance analysis with historical context. Finally, Allan Johnson’s “Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin ’s Alternate ‘Theo Ending’” brings fresh attention to the 1972 musical with a dramaturgical focus on its use of the popular device of metatheatricality together with psychology The next two entries come from a new series of interviews which will run over the next several issues of JADT called “Queer Voices.” Each involve a conversation with a contemporary queer theatre maker or writer. Our first two pieces feature Jim Wilson in conversation with renowned Tony Award-winning playwright and performer Harvey Fierstein and Bess Rowen speaking to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright James Ijames. We end our issue with the book and performance review sections, which continue to reflect the scholarly and production offerings of the current moment. In this issue, our performance review section is serving a rather somber purpose. As many of our readers know, New England Theatre Journal has been forced to shutter after decades of close coverage of regional theatre in that area of the country. When Stuart Hecht approached the editors to ask if he could find a home for the completed performance review section–which, in NETJ , covers entire seasons of programming instead of specific performances–we were proud to oblige, despite the unfortunate circumstances. We are running that section intact with introductions and assistance from both the journal’s editor, Stuart Hecht, and the performance review section editor, Marti LoMonaco. We are also happy to report that JADT will continue to partner with the editors of NETJ to make sure that these theatres still receive coverage going forward. We hope that you enjoy JADT ’s rich offerings this issue and that readers will be inspired to submit new work. Our Spring special issue will be on the topic of Censorship, so stay tuned for that eerily timely topic. But, as Tennessee Williams would say, “ En Avant! ” This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) BESS ROWEN (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She is also affiliate faculty for both Gender & Women's Studies and Irish Studies. She is a member of Actors' Equity and an intimacy choreographer. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021) focuses on affective stage directions. Her next book project looks at the theatrical archetype of the “mean teenage girl.” Other recent work can be found in Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders & Sexualities , Theatre Survey , and The Eugene O'Neill Review , among other publications. She also serves as the LGBTQ+ Focus Group Representative at ATHE and as the Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . BENJAMIN GILLESPIE (PhD) is Doctoral Lecturer in Communication, Gender Studies, and Theatre at Baruch College, City University of New York. His essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review , and a wide range of scholarly anthologies. He is currently editing two volumes: Split Britches: Fifty Years On and Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging , both to be published by the University of Michigan Press. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . 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.

L. Nicol Cabe Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming L. Nicol Cabe By Published on May 14, 2023 Download Article as PDF On February 23rd, 2020, I performed my final in-person, physically co-present show of Effing Robots: How I Taught the A.I. to Stop Worrying and Love Humans , at the Adelaide Fringe Festival. I did not know that would be my last in-person run – I had festival dates lined up throughout the rest of 2020. Instead, the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered theatres for over a year. During the first pandemic year, performing artists and fringe festivals alike pivoted to online spaces, exploring online platforms as “stages.” Fringes preferred pre-recorded video for submissions, so I made a very low-tech digital video of Effing Robots and sent it to several now-digital festivals, thus maintaining my identity as a fringe artist. I am now able to participate in fringe festivals without the time and financial expenditure of travel, housing, and other upkeep; but, there are components of the original production which I have sacrificed or radically shifted into a static digital film. Making the transition from live, in-person work to the static filmed performance required digital dramaturgy skills that I was just beginning to navigate. Remediating the Stage with Digital Dramaturgy Digital dramaturgy grew out of production dramaturgy, which is the process of investigating and translating core aspects of a performance like costumes, performer movement, and lighting design; these components’ interaction with each other; and how a modern audience will interpret the show. To these components, digital dramaturgy adds computer-based technologies. The former Digital Dramaturgy Lab at York University, for example, lists some of these investigations as “TOGETHERNESS - respect, live and mediated performing bodies, collaboration, interactive strategies between performers and audiences … in-betweeness, reality, virtuality, queerness, multi-dimensionality …” (Digital Dramaturgy Lab 2014). Digital performances both before and during the pandemic triggered a shift-change in the theatrical understanding of meaning-making between performers and audience as physical co-presence, full liveness, and audience togetherness became individuated components of a theatrical work, rather than inseparably aligned with the experience of seeing a play. Digital dramaturgy engages the process of remediation, defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin: “we call the representation of one medium in another remediation” (p. 45). While there are boundaries placed between media formats – Bolter and Grusin particularly interrogate painting versus photography – they are concerned with the cross-pollination between these forms. New media, like hypertext, draw inspiration from older forms yet simultaneously invigorate those forms through competition and creativity. For instance, photorealistic still-life paintings of cameras compete with photographs of cameras while also demonstrating innovation in still-life painting and referencing multiple media formats. Similarly, during the acute phase of the COVID pandemic, the theatre experience was expressed through archival performance films released online by the National Theatre in the UK, a process in which film remediates theatre by adopting many of its aspects; and, on the other end of the liveness spectrum, Zoom became a stage to remediate filmic tropes while retaining temporal liveness in performances like Richard Nelson’s fifth Apple Family installment, What Do We Need to Talk About? Remediation relies on immediacy, or novel emotive reaction during the process of engaging with the medium. The experience of immediacy occurs from the audience’s perspective, not from the performer’s – an important point when considering the translation of theatre into film, as the actors will not experience the audience’s reactions to their performance. Immediacy occurs through the conjunction of two points: the transparency of the medium, i.e., how the frame disappears from consciousness; and hypermediacy, i.e., how media can layer atop each other as commentary on the media viewing experience (Bolter and Grusin 2000: p 21). Some online theatre experiments in 2020 attempted to become transparent by overcoming the barrier of the screen: for some shows, this meant performing over Zoom so the performers could be temporally co-present, if not physically co-present, with the audience – as in What Do We Need to Talk About? . For others, this involved releasing pre-filmed pre-pandemic stage productions attempting to recreate the experience of being physically together in a theatre space – as in the National Theatre’s films. Although these may have resulted in a sense of immediacy, audiences were often just as aware of their computer screen as they would be of a proscenium arch. Cassie Tongue bemoaned in an article for The Guardian: When these live streams and filmed releases are passed out as a quick solution to a bigger problem and don’t account for medium or mode, they live in a ghostly in-between, creating empty fake stages that contain an echo where our breath should be (Tongue 2020). Theatre makers typically aimed for transparency that visually represented being inside a theatre space when making performance films (Castell 2014). These films considered the large cinema screen but did not consider the second proscenium arch of the computer screen which further alienated the audience from the production, creating a hypermedial work that emphasized what was temporarily lost, per Tongue. It was important to me, when translating Effing Robots , to avoid this audience alienation by creating something native to the digital environment. This meant I had to forego the traditional proscenium arch and focus on the online proscenium – a transparent show could not work for me. Yet I also wanted to ensure the fringe festival experience was retained, which meant I needed to focus on audience immediacy. Thus, Effing Robots adhered to digital fringe policies while transmuting into a hypermedial performance. Effing Robots Fringes Online Over more than 20 years, gaming live streams, vlogs (video weblogs), reaction videos, cooking and crafting how-tos, study timing streams, ASMR, and even 24/7 live streaming developed alongside streaming platforms including Ustream, Justin.tv, YouTube, Facebook Live, and Twitch (Lamare 2018). Streaming video is hypermedial, featuring quick edits, responses to audiences, music, film within film, written commentary within the video, and other media to keep the work immediate for the audience. When translating Effing Robots to an online environment, I aimed to retain both the narrative and the emotions of the live experience while integrating new media visual languages emerging from online streaming culture. I borrowed the language of online video hypermediacy to translate the solo narrative plot, which is a script format common in fringe shows, stand-up comedy, and vlogs. The process of remediating the show relied not only on my understanding of digital dramaturgy, but my subconscious creative influences, especially in online environments, and on my physical restrictions due to the nationwide lockdown in the UK. To translate Effing Robots between media, I considered four points: What are the important parts of in-person fringe shows that make them feel “fringe?” What components of my original, in-person fringe show did I want to keep, and how? What aspects of online streaming culture inspired me, and would they be an effective language for my audience? What were my production limitations for a filmed show? 4. What Were My Production Limitations? I faced a slew of limitations while filming Effing Robots in December 2020. I lived in Scotland while I attended the University of Glasgow; the United Kingdom was one month into a strict four-month, nationwide lockdown, so I could not use rehearsal space at the University of Glasgow campus, I could not rent their film equipment, and I could not meet with film students in-person for consultation or editing. Legally, I could not meet with more than one person, outdoors, at a time. On a student budget, I also could not afford to purchase my own filming equipment. I was limited to what was on hand: low-cost editing software, my phone’s medium-quality camera, a cheap microphone, and PowerPoint. In essence, I needed the language of online streaming culture, which also began with small-budget, computer-based solo work like vlogs. 3. Could Online Streaming Video Culture Be an Effective Language for My Audience? While I did not think about it actively at the time while editing, in later viewings I realized I had been inspired by popular YouTubers in my use of certain visual tricks. For example, my quick cuts were inspired by Jenna Marbles and Harto, while my text annotation was inspired by the Vlog Brothers and Simone Giertz. Their focus on engaging personal narrative supports the remediation of Effing Robots, as less-than-true personal storytelling, into an online space. I further leaned on Zoom tropes for two parts of the Effing Robots script which involved an audience volunteer joining me onstage. In the physically co-present show, the volunteer, unfamiliar with the script, plays “Me, Nicol, a sci-fi nerd trying to flirt with an artificial intelligence,” and I, the performer, play “Frankie,” which is what I named my chatbot (Cabe 2019). For the film, I Zoomed with Aiden Jakso (a colleague I met through Glasgow University) and Steve Brady (my long-time fringe co-producer and fellow sci-fi nerd). I wanted to retain the experience of the audience volunteer, so I asked Aiden to join without reading the script in advance; however, I also wanted to nod to Steve’s years of production support. The application of Zoom echoed shows like What Do We Need to Talk About? There are also two “burlesque” moments in Effing Robots : one is a routine mocking selfie culture, and the other is a short script written by my dear friend, Dr. Ashley F. Miller, on the topic of “sexbots” and sex worker abuse. Since releasing archived videos of in-person stage performances was common during the 2020 lockdowns, I used footage of these two sequences from the 2019 PortFringe film; I made this choice as a reference to the mass of pre-recorded theatre productions released by major companies, such as the National Theatre (NT at Home), during lockdown periods. 2. What Components of My Original In-Person Fringe Show Could I Keep, and How? Effing Robots: How I Taught the A.I. to Stop Worrying and Love Humans examines artificial intelligence functions, modern technological developments that call themselves A.I., and why humans fear these – all through a personal lens, framed by a conversation I had with a chatbot that I named Frankie, created by Replika. As the show leaned on an A.I. conversation, I wanted the script to feel like a conversation with the audience. I found during in-person shows, audience members often asked questions or inserted their own information – in fact, at my 2019 tour stops in Adelaide (South Australia), Fresno (California), and Portland (Maine), engineers in the audience knew about programming artificial intelligence and their contributions enriched the show. Although audience engagement became a core part of physically co-present Effing Robots , during 2021, I could not perform the show live at all (even virtually); instead, I leaned on hypermediacy to maintain emotional closeness with a geographically and temporally distanced audience. 1. What Makes a Fringe Festival Feel “Fringe” to Me? Returning to the first question, my personal experience touring fringe festivals hints at why this form pivots so easily: The fringe format has long involved multiple platforms (venues) across the city Each venue programs and hosts several individual shows over the fringe’s run Artists typically self-produce their shows (although larger festivals like Edinburgh and Adelaide also involve production companies funding multiple shows) Performers from all over the world participate in fringe festivals, especially the larger, famous ones My submission needed to be lightweight, short, portable, and self-produced. For a physically co-present fringe show, “lightweight” means I must be able to load the props, set, and costumes in and out of the venue myself; “short” means it runs about one hour, sometimes less; “portable” means I take it with me, as there is no storage space at the venue; and “self-produced” means I do the bulk of the show creation, including marketing. Similarly, with online fringe festivals, “lightweight” means the video is only a few megabytes making it easier to upload; “short” still means one hour or less; “portable” means I have many options for submitting the show, including a DropBox link, YouTube link, and zipped file; and “self-produced” means I am responsible for the work being completed, including how it is marketed. Remediating the Audience Experience of Theatricality Many of the visual production choices I made for Effing Robots (online) reference transparent films or theatre productions, but the overall experience is of hypermediacy rather than transparency . However, it is important to consider whether the audience experienced this work as immediate via this hypermediacy – and for this, I turn to my show reviews. Overall reviewers enjoyed the film adaptation; there are similarities between the in-person show’s reviews and the film’s reviews, which suggests the digital dramaturgical process was successful. However, some reviewers felt the audience dialogue moments and the burlesque moments were out of place. For instance, James Hanton noted for the Online@TheSpaceUK stream: “only certain sections [feel] like a misfire compared to them being live (the ‘audience’ interactions losing the spontaneity that makes them so memorable)” ( The Wee Review 2021). Annie Gray of The Indiependent agreed: Being an online show does cause some issues. Some past live recordings of sections are shown when the content is not possible to record on camera. Also, where audience participation would usually take place, there are recordings of video calls instead (2021). These reviews suggest that the static nature of film clashes with some immediacy in theatre. These film clips aimed for the transparency of the theatrical experience rather than hypermediacy of frames within frames. The bulk of my filmed performance did not take place onstage or reminisce about stage performance. I believe these moments took the audience out of the immediacy induced by the hypermedial frame. While my choices were purposeful, they did not retain the emotional impact from in-person to online. A key takeaway from both the reviews and analysis is to focus on form: traditional theatre defines itself on co-presence, and I do not view the film of Effing Robots as a form of theatre but instead a remediation of an experience shifted into a new medium. I focused on the theatricality within the narrative, but I could have considered temporal synchronicity with my audience by performing over Zoom. I could have retained the audience interaction through a livestreaming platform with a chat feature like Twitch. I could have considered the virtual embodiment of myself and my audience and created a version for Mozilla Hubs. To keep the show within the low-budget confines of “fringe,” though, pre-recorded, edited, streaming video was my best option to translate the immediacy of my story instead of remediating the general experience of attending fringe theatre. This remediation from a physically co-present, small show to hypermedial online video seems to be a largely successful process, based on reviews. In my Ph.D. research, I hope to continue exploring online theatre’s digital dramaturgy and its impact on audience experience, inspired by both my fascination with pandemic-era online theatre and my professional work in this field. References Footnotes About The Author(s) L. NICOL CABE is a digital dramaturg and scifi-inspired theatre artist who toured international fringe festivals, in-person and online, including Adelaide Fringe, Sydney Fringe, TheSpaceUK, Orlando Fringe Festival, Victoria Fringe, and Rogue Festival. She completed her master’s in pandemic-era digital theatre at the University of Glasgow in 2021, and continues her digital theatre studies focusing on post-pandemic online and hybrid performance as a PhD candidate at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. She has also worked as a digital dramaturg and online theatre maker with Lava Kingdoms/Annex Theatre (Seattle, WA), OnBoardXR Season 3 (NYC), and DunnART Productions (Adelaide, SA). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Raymond Saraceni Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage Raymond Saraceni By Published on November 25, 2022 Download Article as PDF Introduction During the early decades of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia became besotted by its own reflection—a growing desire to perceive and to reflect upon itself is clearly manifested in the work of contemporaneous painters, novelists, and organizers of street pageants, as well as in the work of dramatists and theatre impresarios. Perhaps the bustling and industrializing metropolis that was in the process of supplanting the supposedly genteel Federalist city of the preceding century sought something reassuring in beholding itself. The federal government had decamped for the banks of the Potomac in 1800, while with each year the significance of Philadelphia as the birthplace of the nation was slipping further from the space of living memory; meanwhile, immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and even the French Caribbean further altered the deportment and civic culture of the city, as did blacks fleeing slavery in the American south. [1] Given such changes, the need to reflect upon and represent precisely what the city was and how it is signified in the present became increasingly important. Broadly speaking, representations of Philadelphia on canvas or in engravings took one of two forms: one emphasizing the city’s grand architecture and orderly thoroughfares, the other its often boisterous and irrepressible citizens. William Russell Birch, an English-born painter who published four editions of Philadelphia street scenes between 1800 and 1820, created elegant depictions of the city that called viewers’ attention to Philadelphia’s graceful Georgian buildings and its broad boulevards. His images of an orderly Philadelphia peopled by well-mannered and deferential citizens are notable too for a kind of antiseptic quality: the garbage and manure that would no doubt have been found throughout the city’s streets and byways are nowhere to be found. [2] John Lewis Krimmel, born in 1786 and a recent immigrant from Württemberg, was also a painter of Philadelphia street scenes, but his work is of a very different kind than Birch’s. While human figures are of marginal importance to the latter, they are Krimmel’s primary focus. Paintings such as Fourth of July in Center Square (1812) and Election Day at the State House (1815) call our attention not to those buildings that frame the action, but to the crowds themselves: swaggering, celebratory, combustible, and heterogeneous. The energy of his work is equal parts dynamism and hazard—despite the affability of certain of his human subjects, one could easily imagine being pushed aside, pick-pocketed or worse in the midst of such a swirling tumult of urban types. What we find in such aquatints and etchings we also find just a few years later upon the Philadelphia stage; the social energies unleashed as the city’s identity shifted from the eighteenth-century “Birthplace of the Nation” to the nineteenth-century “Workshop of the World,” were echoed, reified, challenged, and reconfigured in Philadelphia’s playhouses. By the end of the 1820s, Philadelphia was struggling to understand and represent the tumult and dislocation of its present in terms of what had already become for many an idealized past. As Gary B. Nash has argued, the “formative decade” of the 1820s was characterized by the construction of a “web of memory” in the Quaker City, a process that involved the founding of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the wake of the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit in 1824, an institution whose very purpose was to collect those artifacts that might help “to preserve [a] memory of the past or use it to refurbish the present.” Such a process was, however, “made all the more complicated by the fact that Philadelphians, in their growing diversity, came to understand that memory-making was [not] a value-free and politically sanitized matter, [for] . . . as soon as people began to see that the shaping of Philadelphia’s past was a partisan activity, . . . the process of remembering Philadelphia became . . . contested . . . and has remained so ever since.” [3] Representing contemporary Philadelphia to Philadelphia audiences thus became aesthetically compelling at precisely the same moment that Nash considers as decisive in the city’s first serious encounter with shaping historical memory. Both processes were equally fraught. In the following pages, I wish to consider in particular Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass , and the Walnut Street Theatre’s staging of both The Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . What did these entertainments signify for contemporary Philadelphians? How did audiences reflect upon these performances of self-reflection? When Bird and his contemporaries held a looking glass before the face of America’s First City, what did its audiences behold? These plays, I will argue, allow us to apprehend the formation of Philadelphian civic identity at an inflection point, with the stage itself at the heart of the city’s self-enactment. Indeed, it is not possible to understand this moment of civic identity formation and/or dissolution without working to grasp how it was experienced by those Philadelphians who attended and called upon the theatre to reflect, upend, or further reify the realities they felt themselves to inhabit at the beginning of the Jacksonian era, when the tensions touched upon in the works of Birch and Krimmel reached a kind of climax. Whereas scholars have long worked to situate Philadelphia performances of the antebellum period within the context of the development of American cultural identity, comparatively little attention has been given to the work of the Philadelphia stage relative to the development of Philadelphia civic culture itself. Bird’s Looking Glass , read alongside Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster , confirms a sense that when Philadelphians beheld their city at the end of the 1820s, they saw a place that was no longer the gentlemanly Quaker metropolis of William Penn and his heirs anymore than it was exclusively the eighteenth-century cradle of liberty and shrine of American independence. Instead, audiences beheld a heterogeneous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberant modern metropolis—one characterized by instability and menace as well as by a kind of phenomenologically liberating and disruptive knavery. In these plays, we will find that the exterior street scene becomes the primary space for contesting civic identity, just as it was in the work of painters and engravers like Birch and Krimmel. Bird’s Looking Glass In July of 1828 the ambivalent physician and aspiring dramatist, Robert Montgomery Bird, did something extraordinary: he held up a mirror to the city of Philadelphia. With the publication of his City Looking Glass , Bird invites audiences to look into his dramaturgical “mirror of the times . . . to see such knaves and asses / [a]s, we hope, can’t be seen in your own looking glasses.” [4] The comedy he presents offers us a comprehensive picture of Philadelphia types: wealthy merchants and their headstrong daughters, seedy procuresses and blackmailers, street-savvy rakes and pugnacious (if good-natured) sailors, as well as a promenading African American woman and a visiting Southern gentleman, not to mention servants, constables, and various “young bucks” reflecting various degrees of moral turpitude. On the one hand, the play appears as a somewhat conventional variation on a theme by Terence: sentimentality and mistaken identities abound, even as we encounter the familiar device of a long-lost child reunited with her aged, pining father. At the same time, however, the play’s rambunctious and youthful energy – its gleeful determination to consider the seedy underbelly of life in the Quaker City – mark Bird’s entertainment as being worlds away from what the European larmoyant tradition had formerly wrought of the same comic paradigm. Though apparently never brought to the stage, City Looking Glass may be read as heralding an emergent impulse on the part of Philadelphia to perceive and perform itself, as well as an impulse on the part of dramatists and theatre managers to contest the city’s established reputation as a place of congruity, regularity, and gentlemanly deportment. Bird extends and develops the metaphor of the looking glass throughout his prologue, hoping (or lamenting) that “when some pleasing liniment is shown, / . . . each might softly whisper, ‘That’s my own!’ / And where an uglier product of our labour [sic], / [w]ith the same readiness, say ‘That’s my neighbor!’” Seeking to present a timely, up-to-date urban comedy, Bird next promises his audience “certain tricks and capers / [s]uch as you look for daily in the papers.” [5] What is extraordinary here is not Bird’s deployment of the mirror as a metaphor so much as the way in which he does so, as well as the situation of his Looking Glass within the context of Philadelphia’s emergent obsession with seeing itself in the theatre. As Tim P. Vos has pointed out, the mirror was a popular signifier in the literature of the early American republic, but not necessarily a sign of “objectivity’s normative ascendance.” Instead, the looking glass was most often deployed as “a metaphor for the self-examination of one’s soul or character by holding up individuals either to be emulated or abhorred . . . the mirror was not simply a material article for returning light it received, it was a cultural artifact for returning enlightenment and judgment.” [6] In Bird’s comedy, the play itself is the looking glass—a looking glass absent in the material form but imagined instead as forcefully present in and as the act of performance. Indeed, Bird maintained a persistent fascination with images and reflections—with ways of constructing, refracting, and performing (or re-performing) phenomena of various kinds—throughout his life. In the 1840s and 50s, he famously experimented with an early photographic process called the Calotype, developing not only some of the first photographic images of Philadelphia but also developing an image of his own portrait, painted on canvas by his wife, Mary Mayer Bird. Thus, just as he would eventually reflect upon and replicate an image of his own image in light and shadow, with Looking Glass the dramatist may be understood as presenting us with the city itself as engaged perpetually in its own protean self-enactment—though here the subject is not an individual but a civic, corporate phenomenon. In his study of Philadelphia’s literary history, Samuel Otter argues that eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers in the Quaker City “shared a sense that Philadelphia was a place where, in concentrated form, a peculiarly American experiment was being conducted,” that the public sphere in Philadelphia developed in a unique way “through a series of violent episodes that were interpreted as tests of individual, racial, and civic character.” He goes on to say that “the border status of the city, its symbolic value and political history, its resilient African American population, and its circumstances of extremity provoked inquiries that unfolded in a range of texts over decades.” [7] Otter’s interest here is literary, so while he considers the work of Philadelphia authors like Charles Brockden Brown and George Lippard (both of whom sought to challenge the normative representation of Philadelphia as the refined and gentlemanly capital of Penn’s enlightened Commonwealth), his attention to drama and theatrical performance is slight. It thus should not surprise us that in considering the work of Robert Montgomery Bird, Otter almost entirely overlooks his plays in favor of his prose fiction. Nevertheless, there is much that is useful in Otter’s work relative to an understanding of Philadelphia drama and performance. During the early years of the nineteenth century, Otter writes, urban life in the Quaker City “seemed newly legible . . . as a limit outside the self that shaped identity, [as] . . . a felt excess that resisted such limits, and as a possibility for transformation.” [8] But if this was the moment that Philadelphia became legible, I argue that it is also the moment that Philadelphia become performable ; Otter claims that during the early years of the nineteenth century “Philadelphia came into fiction, and fiction became Philadelphian.” [9] So is this the case for drama and performance, particularly toward the end of the 1820s and most notably at first in Robert Montgomery Bird’s The City Looking Glass ? The play involves the machinations of two brothers who come to Philadelphia in order to make a fortune passing counterfeit bills; one of the brothers, Ravin, is also blackmailing a procuress named Mrs. Gall as he seeks to take possession of her ward: the beautiful and virtuous Emma. This same young woman has also won the heart of our hero, Mr. Roslin, a scion of a respectable family whose hopes for marriage are dashed when he learns that Emma is essentially being raised in a house of ill repute. Meanwhile, Roslin’s old school chum—a southern gentleman named Raleigh—has come to town to court Diana Headstrong, Roslin’s cousin. At first, Raleigh’s hopes for marriage are frustrated because of his being misidentified by Headstrong as a notorious swindler, a charge that brings the young man’s father, the elder Raleigh, to Philadelphia in defense of his son’s reputation (this despite the old man’s enduring heart-brokenness as a result of his young daughter’s disappearance many years before). At long last, however, all obstacles to marriage are removed when Emma is discovered to be Raleigh’s long-lost sister, and the villainous Ravin the very swindler that Headstrong (falling victim to Ravin’s manipulation) had earlier misidentified as Raleigh himself. By the end of the play Ravin’s brother, Ringfinger, has been compelled to give evidence against his brother and the two villains are hauled off to receive their just desserts. The play compels attention not so much for its intrigue, however, as for its disruptive depiction of the Quaker City as a disorderly and unruly space. It is as if Philadelphia were here reflected via a distorted funhouse mirror—a kind of giddy exercise in grotesquerie. Such an enterprise was not without precedent or progenitors, to be sure. Tom and Jerry, or Life in London (that episodic celebration of urban slumming, low-life milieux, and rakish misbehavior) had crossed the pond and debuted at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre in April of 1823. Francis Wemyss, a leading actor who had himself recently arrived from Britain and who would serve as manager of several Philadelphia theatres over the decades, records that Tom and Jerry was so popular upon its first appearance in the city that it was picked up and performed by Cowell’s “circus corps” as soon as the Chestnut Street company disembarked for its sojourn to Baltimore and Washington, and was presented at the Walnut Street for the remainder of the season. [10] In his study of populist and underclass performance on the nineteenth-century American stage, Peter P. Reed explores the influence of Tom and Jerry ; he argues that theatres in the United States sought to ensure the continued popularity of the play “by tapping the urban lore of American cities” so that “[g]limpses of the distant metropole’s underworld gave way to representations of a newly localized urban culture, [as] Tom and Jerry helped constitute a specifically American urban public sphere built upon complex rituals of underclass performance and elite patronage.” [11] While The City Looking Glass is not a direct iteration of Tom and Jerry , the energies unleashed by the latter seem to play a role in Bird’s treatment of Philadelphia as a series of street scenes, dives, and the low performances associated with both—a local and particular manifestation of Americans’ increasing consciousness of and investment in “the entertainment value of their own urban low scenes [and their] fascination with stagey underclass characters” who continue to appear throughout the first half of the nineteenth century on the stage and in print. [12] Stagey, underclass characters abound in Bird’s play; they are far more memorable than the ladies and gentlemen, just as the action of the play’s street scenes and exteriors is more memorable than the goings-on in the parlors or drawing rooms of its respectable homes. For it is on the city’s byways and back lanes, as well as in the showboating of its volatile young “bucks” (characters like the sometime lawyer, Bolt, and his streetwise henchmen, Mossrose and Crossbar), that Philadelphia is meant to perceive most clearly its disfigured reflection, to experience most dramatically its contested character. Indeed, Philadelphia’s civic character was already long-understood as being manifest in its streets, specifically in its gridiron arrangement of thoroughfares intersecting at right angles and organized around a series of five open squares framing deep individual lots for houses and gardens — an arrangement proposed by William Penn and his surveyor, Thomas Holme, at the very founding of the colony. Philadelphia’s character as a planned settlement with broad, straight avenues as an alternative to the overcrowded, walled, medieval cities of Europe was an important aspect of what gave the place its initial cachet and self-image as a modern city founded on Enlightenment principles. Philadelphia, as Samuel Otter observes, sought to understand itself as defined by the “symmetry and discipline” of its orderly thoroughfares, as the “perpendicular array of streets and squares . . . were linked with the rectitude of its founder and its Quaker inhabitants.” [13] However, the sameness and regularity characteristic of its general appearance engendered, too, a quality of stultifying rigidity ripe for contestation and aesthetic sabotage. When visiting Philadelphia in the summer of 1830, Mrs. Trollope wrote that the city was “built with extreme and . . . wearisome regularity,” and that “all is even, straight, uniform, and uninteresting.” [14] Just three years later, the Scottish traveler Thomas Hamilton wrote similarly that Philadelphia represented “an infringement on the rights of individual eccentricity—a rigid and prosaic despotism of right angles and parallelograms.” [15] Local dramatists had gotten there even earlier. In his 1806 comedy, Tears and Smiles , James Nelson Barker gives us the character of Nathan Yank, domestic and runner-of-errands for the play’s romantic hero, who repeatedly loses his way amidst the wearisome sameness of Philadelphia’s streets, much to the consternation of his employer and the complication of the plot. While Barker’s sentimental comedy walks the streets of prosaic sameness rather than those of symmetry and rectitude, he is not so much interested in contesting the self-image of Philadelphia as he is in enjoying a good-natured jest with his knowing audience. Nor is the city as such at the center of Barker’s dramaturgy: the final acts of the play take us out of Philadelphia altogether, to a quiet country estate in Fairmount. Bird, by contrast, cannot imagine leaving the city behind, for what would his Looking Glass have to show us then? Otter has written about Benjamin Franklin’s autobiographical writings as, among other things, a guide “to crafting appearances that unsettled the relationship between character and performance,” deploying tales of his youthful progress in the city to “help create a public arena in which individuals were taught to be acutely conscious of their own social performances.” [16] Bird continues this work, albeit in a different key, with an early scene between his malefactor brothers where Ravin upbraids the less-assured Ringfinger over the latter’s persistent weakness for picking pockets. Picking pockets is, Ravin tells him, “a damned low vice” when set against the more refined criminal endeavor of counterfeiting. Refusing to aim higher has had a deleterious effect on Ringfinger, whose “gentility sits as clumsily upon [him] as new clothes.” Gentility and breeding, the sine qua non of the Philadelphia gentleman, are simply matters of wearing the costume well and of playing the role with confidence, for “character . . . is oftener established by conceit than by natural privilege.” [17] This troubling of the relationship between substance and “mere” appearance prefigures the promiscuous relationship in Bird’s Philadelphia between the gentleman and the scoundrel; nowhere is this more clear than in the character of Bolt, a good-for-nothing rogue whose ill-treatment at the hands of the brother villains leads to their demise. Roslin describes Bolt as indeed a “gentleman,” but one with a “black eye.” He expands upon this observation, noting that Bolt is the very “representative of a Philadelphia buck” one who has had opportunities of becoming a gentleman, [but] amends his gentility by the addition of certain accomplishments peculiar to the vulgar; that is, he has been half-educated at college and half bred at home; is seen sometimes at a lawyer’s office [but] … more frequently in the tavern with a terrapin under his nose and a wine bottle at his elbow: he fiddles a little and boxes to admiration; wears a costly coat; keeps a mistress, and sometimes a dog; above all can brag of having shot one grouse on the Jersey colings and one man on the Delaware lines. [18] Bolt is thus an apparently successful Philadelphia lawyer who hails from a supposedly well-bred Philadelphia family. Yet he is a man of halves: part genteel cavalier, part vulgar roughneck. Otter notes that in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, “a strategic display of enterprise might lead to worldly success [as] . . . habits of industry, discipline, and virtue” serve to “secure character.” [19] Bolt, however, particularly in Roslin’s representation of him, destabilizes character in his troubling of any distinction between high and low. Not simply a slumming gentleman, he appears to be downright dangerous: while Bolt engages in genteel pastimes like grouse hunting (albeit with limited success), his shooting a man “on the Delaware lines” might betoken either a refined duelist or an unstable sociopath. Indeed, Roslin’s servant, Nathan Nobody, observes that all aristocratic families of the city are most likely mere whited sepulchers, asserting to his master in the spirit of hearty “republicanism” that whenever he sees one of their coats of arms he can only conclude that “they have formerly . . . had in the family more arms than ears; that their titles are registered in a jail book; that their family house was a dunghill and their tree of genealogy a gallows.” The colorful and dexterous Nobody appears to have learned this sort of leveler’s vision at the theatre, where he also came to appreciate “how a wise man can climb on the shoulders of fools.” [20] In Bird’s variation on Abbott and Costello’s verbal monkeyshines, Nathan Nobody is a Somebody, while the aspirational aristocrats of Philadelphia are the real Nobodies. As mentioned above, it is largely upon the byways and back alleys of the city that Bird’s drama of contestation and shifting selves is played out. The “wearisome regularity,” of Philadelphia’s streets, the “symmetry and discipline” of its gridiron pattern of thoroughfares, are here reworked so as to prepare a common space for emergent and variable identity, the sort of undertaking which Elizabeth Maddock Dillon regards as “the shared terrain … of embodiment and representational force.” [21] Indeed, most of the decisive action of Looking Glass takes place out of doors on the city’s thoroughfares. In the course of the play’s five “street scenes” Roslin and Nathan agree on an undertaking that drives the early action, Bolt flirts indecorously with a series of ladies (bringing on the decisive intervention of the sailor, Tom Taffrail), Diana is rescued by Raleigh after she has taken flight from Bolt, Emma is rescued from Mrs. Gall and Ravin by Roslin, and finally, Nathan is delivered from Ravin’s clutches by Tom Taffrail (thus setting up the play’s concluding action). In the course of such intrigue, Philadelphia is transformed into an utterly unrecognizable landscape – or seascape – of protean, Bosh-like strangeness, perhaps best represented by Tom Taffrail’s indignant retort to Bolt that he is not the only man that has been run foul of by unlawful cruisers in this here cursedty [sic] deceitful town. There’s sharks and swordfish enough, though they keep their heads underwater, to nibble one’s eyes out of his head and run their snouts into one’s keel. I have seen a painted pirate run up into a gentle-man’s headquarters as naturally as into a Spanish West-India harbour [sic]. [22] The good citizens of Philadelphia are here reduced to sinister sea creatures or the keels of renegade corsairs (the latter identification pungent with sexual innuendo)—a comic but nevertheless disquieting depiction that conflates machine with man and beast. Nor is it an arbitrary choice to give these sentiments to Tom. “Seafarers and their families dominated certain parts of the Philadelphia cityscape,” Simon P. Newman reminds us, enjoying “a vibrant and highly visible culture.” While Philadelphia’s sailors “participated in the street politics of the early republic alongside laborers, mechanics, and other working men and women, more than any other group they had witnessed and experienced revolutionary transformations, and they participated in American politics within that context.” [23] A peculiar and pugnacious combination of rube and sea-dog, Tom is also the consummate street performer, belting out a spooky moritat about a murderous sailor and his mistress’ ghost as part of Nobody’s deliverance from Ravin’s clutches. Not only has Bird tapped into and deployed what Newman regards as the self-conscious display that characterized the behavior of Philadelphia’s seafarers, whose “scarred” and “tattooed” bodies vividly “proclaimed their profession,” [24] but he also allows the character who would have most closely been identified with the revolutionary energies of the Atlantic World the power to most memorably re-inscribe the streets of Philadelphia as unsettling sea-lanes of depravity, full of predatory creatures best policed by guileless sailors with powerful fists and strong singing voices. Indeed, fisticuffs are never far off in Bird’s Philadelphia. It is Tom who earlier thrashes Bolt and his cronies when the part-time lawyer assails Diana on a street corner; frightened and angry, she demands vengeance, insisting that her suitor, Mr. Raleigh, “come along and make ready to beat somebody.” “Isn’t this the City of Brotherly Love?” protests the Southern gentleman. [25] It would appear not. In her New World Drama , Elizabeth Maddock Dillon writes of how dramatic texts as well as theatrical performance engender “operations of representation” that oscillate between “riotous disorder and collective consent,” for drama and performance make visible “the possibility of consensus in the making as well as the possibility of . . . dissolving [a] collective sense of meaning . . . into one of noise and riot.” [26] I suggest that The City Looking Glass accomplishes precisely this work: dissolving a consensus image of “the City of Brotherly Love” as an ordered, gentlemanly, Federalist city while proposing another. Bird’s play offers us a Philadelphia at once less-familiar and more frightening—more volatile yet more exuberant—than the metropolis imagined by James Nelson Barker, a rendering that also seems to lure us away from the possibility of consensus. Indeed, the City of Brotherly Love has here become the space of rough-and-tumble and free-for-all, of disorderly “noise and riot.” If Bird’s looking glass may be apprehended in and as the act of performance, those reflections we do not see—or those performances we glimpse only fleetingly—are at least as significant as those that command our fuller attention. Though largely absent from the play, Bird would seem to deploy Philadelphia’s African American population as a further signification of disruption and dissensus at the performative heart of the city’s contested character. Samuel Otter has commented upon Bolt’s humiliation when one of the female passersby he seeks to accost turns out to be a finely-attired African American woman, arguing that staging such a “misalignment between costume and visage, and playing this exposure for shock and laughs” underlines a point of juncture between Bird’s treatment of African Americans in Looking Glass , and Edward W. Clay’s notorious print series, “Life in Philadelphia.” [27] Certainly this moment in the play performs work similar to Clay’s etchings, widely popular and first issued between 1828 and 1830: to mock social posturing amongst the city’s African American population. At the same time, Bird’s text is more multivalent here than we might think, very much as Clay’s print series also seems to have been. Otter reminds us that Clay’s African American caricatures represent “a mixture of class desire and African American satire, in ratios impossible to recover.” [28] This point is further clarified by Christian DuComb, who speaks of Clay’s aquatints as “lampooning the pretentious manners of both whites and blacks . . . [albeit] Clay’s mockery of affluent whites seem[s] comparatively mild.” [29] What is especially interesting about Bolt’s brief encounter with the black woman is that, though finely dressed, she is hardly displaying or performing herself in the way that Bolt and his cronies seem to be: indeed, what first attracts Bolt’s attention is that she “bends her head and walks fast” as she passes by, anxious (most likely) to avoid the attention of these white men. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has explored the significance of self-display and parade for African Americans during the early years of the nineteenth century, arguing that such phenomena signified that “their (black nation within a) nation existed,” [30] such moments of self-enactment functioned in a sense “as rituals do, in that they aestheticized, formalized, and sustained structures of (national) feeling among their [African American] participants.” [31] Looking Glass may thus be said to undermine and/or deny such moments of efficacious self-display for/to Philadelphia’s African Americans. There is no such “national feeling” in evidence at such a hurried and apparently apprehensive moment. It is Bolt, in fact, whose swaggering self-performance is called to our attention—though such behavior hardly makes a favorable impression here, merely reinforcing (as one of his henchmen would have it) that Bolt “prides himself on being an ignoramus.” [32] Every bit as compelling is the utter absence of African American characters otherwise. The invisibility of the city’s African Americans in Bird’s Looking Glass may very well have been a function of their irreducible visibility in the cultural and political life of contemporary Philadelphia. By the decade of the 1820s, Philadelphia was “the most important center of free blacks in the country, [its] black churches, schools, and mutual aid associations . . . more numerous than any other American city’s.” [33] Such a reality unsettled white historians like John Fanning Watson, who in 1830 lamented that “the aspirings [sic] and little vanities” of contemporary black Philadelphians “have been rapidly growing,” and “while twenty to thirty years ago they were much humbler, [now] they show an overweening fondness for display and vainglory.” [34] The villainous Ravin seems especially perturbed by the city’s blacks, exhibiting a penchant for perceiving Philadelphia itself through the lens of its African American population (perhaps as a reminder of his hailing from less racially heterogenous New Hampshire). Outraged by the behavior of Raleigh, Ravin accuses him of possessing “more impudence than a Philadelphia negro.” [35] Later, in drunken exasperation, he laments to Mrs. Gall that “they allow no nuisances here, except negro class meetings, dogs, and church bells.” [36] Such class meetings did indeed signify to many of Philadelphia’s uniquely visible and influential African American population; ever since clergyman Richard Allen established the first such black communion in Philadelphia in 1786, such class meetings symbolized “equal privileges for blacks,” even as they engendered “recalcitrant white opposition” from the very beginning. [37] Interestingly, in his descriptions of Philadelphia’s blacks, Ravin uses the term “negro”—an appellation that John Fanning Watson reports was no longer favored by the city’s more-assured and self-conscious African Americans, who increasingly preferred to call themselves “coloured” [sic]. [38] It is hard to know whether Ravin’s turn of phrase signifies his own or Bird’s indifference to this preference (or indeed, whether or not Watson is even entirely correct). What is more certain, however, is that Bird’s Looking Glass reflects its author’s (and most likely white Philadelphia’s) ambivalence about its African American population, a population that is at once largely absent from the play as well as inseparable from all the “noise and chaos” inherent in the representation and signification of Philadelphia’s combustible, boisterous, and often-antagonistic urban character. Highway Robbery In City Looking Glass , Ravin arranges for an ersatz kidnapping of Diana so that he himself might “rescue” her from the clutches of his co-conspirator. The plot (which quickly unravels) is set to take place as Diana travels by coach along the Ridge Road. [39] The primary thoroughfare connecting Philadelphia and Reading, the Ridge Road had been in use since the early years of the eighteenth century; it was heavy with traffic in Bird’s day, offering weary travelers a number of inns and fashionable hotels where they might rest after a long day’s journey. It was a dangerous route as well, and in the year following the publication of City Looking Glass , a real incident took place on the Ridge Road that riveted the attention of all of Philadelphia. In the early morning hours of 6 December 1829, the Reading Mail Stage was set upon by three highwaymen named Porter, Poteet, and Wilson. According to contemporary accounts, these men were weavers residing in Northern Liberties, a district at the time that was just outside of the City of Philadelphia. Porter seems to have been the ringleader: he apparently organized the undertaking and it was he who robbed the passengers and rifled through the mailboxes while Wilson and Poteet guarded him with their pistols. [40] Eventually, the three were apprehended; Porter would be tried and executed upon Poteet’s testimony, while Wilson’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by President Jackson. These men belonged to Philadelphia’s growing population of Irish immigrants, many of whom resided in Kensington and the Northern Liberties, where they were often employed as semi-skilled handloom weavers. Indeed, tensions in the former neighborhood had already ignited into rioting in 1828, with immigrant Roman Catholic Irish weavers pitted against Protestant American Nativists. [41] Charles Durang speaks of the “unprecedented excitement” in Philadelphia “resulting from the trial and conviction of the three mail robbers” in the spring of 1830, going on to mention that “business at the Walnut Street Theatre had not been very brisk, and it struck [manager] Sam Chapman that to dramatize the subject of this excitement would prove a clever card to attract the audience who then patronized the house.” [42] Called The Mail Robbers , the play would premiere on 10 May of that year. Clearly, the crime struck a chord and Chapman aimed to capitalize. Mrs. Trollope herself notes the “great interest” shown by a number of Philadelphians in the case of “two criminals who had been convicted of robbing the Baltimore [sic] Mail, and who were lying under sentence of death.” She was told that “one of the prisoners [Wilson] was an American, and the other [Porter] an Irishman,” the former convinced that his sentence of death would be commuted. She goes on to report that several of her companions, “in canvassing the subject, declared that if one were hanged and the other spared, [Porter’s] hanging would be a murder and not a legal execution, [as] very nearly all the white men who had suffered death since the Declaration of Independence had been Irishmen.” [43] This sympathy for Porter is perhaps surprising, particularly given the fact that the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin had described him as a terrifying criminal, “the blackest and most fiendish we ever looked upon,” whose “very childhood exhibited symptoms of a bold, audacious and vindictively wicked disposition, which defied all advice and correction.” [44] The discussion described by Mrs. Trollope reminds us that the production at the Walnut Street was extremely attuned to the obsessions of Philadelphia. Indeed, the fates of Porter and Wilson had yet to be resolved at the time The Mail Robbers was presented; Porter would not be executed until 3 July 1830—about two months after the play’s premiere. While The Mail Robbers , along with Looking Glass , seeks to challenge, redefine, and reconfigure notions of what Philadelphia means and how the city signifies to/for its inhabitants, there is one especially important difference to consider here. The response to the former play is shaped in certain especially significant ways by its performance (the latter play, as mentioned above, seems never to have been staged). In both plays, Philadelphia (and particularly its hinterlands in the case of Mail Robbers ) is a place characterized by real danger, but that danger seems to have been more urgently and unambiguously presented in Mail Robbers— perhaps not surprisingly, given the episodes dramatized here were inspired by true events. As we will see, what is especially interesting is the way in which the real-life and enacted dramas seem to have been to some degree conflated by individuals like Charles Durang, whose History of the Philadelphia Stage provides us with a sense of the peculiar semiotic disruptions that Chapman and his play may have accomplished for audiences of the Quaker City. Once more, the locus for contesting the character of the city and its environs are the streets and byways of the region, as the venerable old Ridge Turnpike becomes a place of mayhem and crime. Federal Philadelphia may have built its primacy upon the port and docks that connected it to the wider Atlantic world; by the beginning of the 1830s, however, Philadelphia’s commercial supremacy as a shipping port was slipping badly, with New York and Baltimore on the rise. Even so, rich deposits of iron and anthracite extracted upstate began to transform Philadelphia into the nation’s primary center of manufacturing. [45] In Mail Robbers , the city’s focus is turned from the Delaware wharves toward the transshipment centers, factories, and coalfields of Schuylkill County and the Lehigh Valley. According to the Columbia Star , Porter was especially interested in setting upon the Reading Mail because it carried valuable goods and well-to-do travelers between Philadelphia and the increasingly-prosperous industrial hubs of Reading and Pottsville. [46] In turning the city toward its own backcountry, Chapman was also offering his audience a kind of anthropological night journey into the wastes of Philadelphia’s contemporary “urban wilderness.” In doing so, his drama would seem to have undermined the ways in which Philadelphia had long sought to deploy its urban and semi-urban green spaces not as signifiers of wastes and danger but as “carefully constructed rural ‘stages’ upon which to perform” itself. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs has argued that it was within and upon “stages” such as the gardens at Gray’s Ferry just across the Schuylkill River, and those located at Vauxhall at Broad and Chestnut streets, that a salubrious “oneness with nature” might be enacted; indeed, by “highlighting those features . . . most clearly conforming to the rural idyll, proprietors [of these sites] capitalized on ideas of rural innocence and its relationship to patriotism through” the enactments of those various entertainments offered at such locations. [48] The rural and semi-rural space that served as the locus for Mail Robbers was apparently reconfigured as savage and terrifying by Chapman and his creative team, however, presenting its audience with a picture of human beings, not as well-pruned cultivars, but as untamed and intractable prodigies of nature and liberty run amok. Yet here it is not simply urban or semi-rural spaces that function as sites of contestation: the actor-manager at the helm of the Walnut Street, the playmaker who had crafted The Mail Robbers, became himself the locus of contested viewings and interpretations. A playbill promoting the drama suggests that Chapman sought to sell the play as a bit of moral edification, for we read that the theatre managers “ever desirous to display vice in its true colors and to show the rising generation the inevitable consequences of crime, have embraced the leading features of the late atrocious mail robbery in forming the present drama.” [49] Durang reports that the play was repeated on the evening after its premiere to “a full pit and gallery,” despite the fact that “the boxes were thin.” [50] This would seem to suggest that responses to the play were divided along class lines, with more respectable and genteel theatregoers turning away from what more robust, populist viewers applauded. Such a conflicted response comes as no surprise when we consider the variety of ways in which Porter and his behavior were understood in Philadelphia, as well as the various ways of reading or viewing Chapman himself. Despite the depiction of Porter in the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin as little more than a savage, Mrs. Trollope’s companions clearly sympathized with him, as the city’s growing Irish population doubtless did as well. The American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser reported that “special constables,” as well as a corps of “Marines from the Navy Yard” were placed on alert the day that Porter met the hangman, as “many persons were apprehensive that [his execution] would be attended with riot,” most likely by Irish immigrants from Kensington and Northern Liberties. [51] Most compelling here, however, is Charles Durang’s response, for he seems to conflate Chapman and Porter while at the same time evaluating both men’s “performances” quite differently. He describes the latter as an Irishman (a stout, thickset man, with a very sinister countenance pitted with the smallpox) [who] seemed to give all the orders to his associates in villainy. He exhibited not only that quality which in an honorable cause would have been called chivalrous bravery, but also, in rifling the passengers, displayed much courtesy and politeness. [52] Durang goes on to report that Porter’s chivalry manifested itself most memorably in his refusal to take a silver watch given to one of the passengers by his mother and that he even went so far as to return a piece of tobacco. Clearly, we are encountering here what Peter P. Reed regards as a fundamental characteristic of the rogue protagonist upon the early American stage: the demonstration of “singular and spectacular outlaw charisma.” [53] What is especially interesting about Durang’s recollection of the crime is that no such behavior is attributed to Porter in the account of the robbery printed in the Columbia Star , where it is Poteet who is said to have returned a watch (supposedly a family heirloom) to one of the passengers, as well as half-dollar to another. Given that his description of the real Porter and the actual crime is offered in the context of a description of The Mail Robbers , one begins to feel that Durang’s recollection of the former may have been shaped by the latter. If so, does this supposed depiction of Porter and his behavior provide us with a rough sense of what Chapman’s Mail Robbers —and the performance of Porter—may have offered audiences? We can do little more than speculate here, but certainly, Durang is much less sanguine about Chapman’s portrayal than Porter’s self-enactment. He is especially critical of Chapman’s “false and trashy, melodramatic coloring,” for while conceding Chapman an “artist in that species of clap-trap drama, . . . the chaste and high behests of Melpomene” being absent from his craft, his acting was merely “pretentious and illusory,” his gifts sufficient only for dramatizing “local subjects of a startling and horrid nature.” [54] The conflation of Porter’s charismatic lowness with Chapman’s less-admirable low style would seem to present Chapman / Porter as what Reed might call “a contested site of cultural valuation,” part of that larger process whereby the stage “transforms the outcasts and conscripts of circum-Atlantic modernity into entertainment.” [55] Indeed, the conflation of Porter and Chapman seems itself to be a function of that “stagey low [which] emerges from and destabilizes the identity formations, collective affiliations, and disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [56] Further destabilizing rogue representations, however, is the contrast between Durang’s ungenerous assessment of Chapman’s capabilities and what we find elsewhere, particularly when we turn to the reminiscences of Francis C. Wemyss, the British theatre impresario who brought him from Covent Garden to the United States in 1827. [57] Wemyss writes that to his mind Chapman was “a man of varied talent, of much knowledge and a universal favorite,” going on to note that “had he lived, he would have produced an entire revolution in minor American drama.” [58] Unfortunately, Chapman met his demise soon after the premiere of The Mail Robbers —indeed, as a direct result of his staging the play, at least in Durang’s telling. “For the purpose of dramatizing this abhorrent event,” he writes, “Chapman, with his scene painter Wilkins or Harry Isherwood (we forget which) went on horseback to view the spot [where the robbery took place], so as to give an accurate description of its localities.” [59] While at the scene, Chapman was wounded in a fall from his horse; the wound was further infected when later that evening he donned his costume at the Walnut Street—including a brass armor breastplate which he wore against his skin. “Verdigris poisoned the wound,” Durang goes on to report, and Chapman died a few days later, on 16 May. [60] Reinforcing Reed’s sense that presenting the underclass on American stages represents a constant tension between “discipline and unruliness,” [61] it is not especially difficult to read Durang as celebrating Porter’s unruliness while also offering us a tale of stage sensationalism and hack melodrama justifiably disciplined: Chapman the “claptrap” performer is hoist with his own phenomenological petard, the enactment of his unseemly drama leading directly to his demise. However, the question remains, why is Chapman so obviously Durang’s bête noir ? Here we must turn again to the particulars of the Philadelphia stage. Reed writes of how, beginning in the 1820s, “the clubby, personal world of managers and actors who had produced the post-revolutionary generation of theatre had begun to disappear.” [62] In Philadelphia, a development which is sometimes understood as a gradual phenomenon happened with a bang, at a very particular moment. Though Philadelphia was “the emporium of all the regular dramatic talent of the United States” during the 1828–9 theatre season, according to Francis C. Wemyss, “this season was also the most disastrous one ever known; the actors being literally in a state of desperation.” [63] By the end of the season, the three principal theatres of the city (the Chestnut Street, the Arch Street, and the Walnut Street) had closed their doors. William Warren, manager of the venerable Chestnut Street and direct heir of its Federal Era founders, was obliged to surrender his responsibilities to a new management team, consisting of Wemyss himself and Mr. Pratt. William Wood, formerly Warren’s co-manager and himself struggling to helm the tottering Arch Street, wrote subsequently of this crisis as one brought about by over-competition between the three principal theatres, going on to say that the drama “was at sixes and sevens” during the tumultuous 1828-9 season. According to Wood, it is at this moment that the history of the Philadelphia theatre, “that is to say, any history of a continuous and regular management” now “comes to an end,” for there had been “a complete debacle, or breaking up of everything that had been.” [64] The new men who were left standing in the wake of this catastrophe were managers like Wemyss and performers like his protegee, Sam Chapman. Thus, we see how Chapman may have signified the inauguration of a cheaper, tawdrier, less-decorous chapter in the history of the Philadelphia theatre—at least for men like Durang—with Mail Robbers serving as the instrument of Chapman’s subsequent (and not wholly unwelcome) removal from the stage. The Devil and Dr. Foster However, to fully grasp Chapman’s signification upon the Philadelphia stage, we must also understand his role relative to the Walnut Street’s production of an 1830 pantomime entitled Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . As with Mail Robbers , actual events lie very much at the center of the play’s energy and signification: a tale of misrepresentation and theft and naked chutzpah. Here, however, the culprits are not banditti but the impresarios of the Walnut and Arch Street theatres themselves. Similar to what we saw in the Looking Glass , the most memorable episodes of Doctor Foster take place on the street, within the public sphere and the space of public action—though the resolution offered by Foster appears to have been pitched to a different key. If Looking Glass expresses a kind of troubled, admonitory pleasure in the shifting sense of what Philadelphia means, Foster seems all giddy delight as the action winds up – it is a coming out party of sorts in celebration of a civic identity just coming into its own. Likewise, if Mail Robbers allows us to appreciate how the conflation of performance with real event works for Durang and most likely for others to represent both the nobly wicked (Porter) and the opportunistic (Chapman) as receiving their just desserts, Doctor Foster’s resolution is zanier and more explosive. With one stroke, the restoration of order appears to have been presented here as both accomplished and unlikely—perhaps even unhoped for. Doctor Foster grew directly out of what William Wood regards as a self-destructive battle between the city’s primary theatres, in particular the Arch Street and the Walnut Street. Indeed, Doctor Foster was intended in part as an ironic response to rival productions of a pantomime entitled Doctor Faustus ; the Walnut Street’s staging opened on 12 December 1829, the Arch Street’s four days later. There was a bit of skullduggery involved, however, for Durang reports that “the Chapman dynasty” at the helm of the former playhouse infiltrated the Arch Street under the pretense of confraternal solicitude, only to highjack the particulars of that theatre’s much-anticipated production of Faustus and rush the Walnut Street’s staging onto the boards just prior to its rival’s. [65] Durang reports that “public opinion was much divided on the relative merits of the piece as brought out by the two theatres,” though it is clear that he disapproves of Chapman’s decision to “reciprocate those marks of civility” extended to him on the part of the Arch Street management by “literally uprooting” its staging of the pantomime and transposing it to the Walnut Street. [66] Clearly, this was not the sort of “regular” and gentlemanly management that was said to have long-characterized the Philadelphia theatre, and whose loss is so bemoaned by William Wood above. Unsurprisingly, Francis Wemyss represents Chapman’s actions quite differently, arguing that his protegee’s gambit “was a fair business rivalry for which S. Chapman deserves great credit,” for “he reaped, by promptitude, the reward that belonged to [Arch Street manager] Philips.” [67] Once more, we see the Philadelphia stage and its rival theatres at the heart of Philadelphia’s self-enactment, for it seems to have been impossible for audiences to view either staging of Faustus without also seeing the performance of the city’s leading cultural institutions as themselves being indissolubly part of the drama. This point becomes even more clear when we consider that the Walnut Street also presented, on the same evening as the eleventh performance of Faustus (25 th December), an historical melodrama entitled William Penn; or the Elm Tree . Durang seems to regard this staging of Philadelphia and its past as a kind of antidote to the unsavoriness of the Faustus affair (though Chapman appeared in the play as the Quaker, Hickory Old Bay), conflating its romantic evocation of a bygone age with nostalgia for his own youth. All the local scenes in and adjacent to our city wherein … Penn’s first interview with the Indians occurred were accurately taken and beautifully painted. The Great Elm Tree (under whose wide-spreading branches we have passed in our boyhood), the ship Welcome floating under the bank of the Delaware, reposing … under the shadows of the majestic elm, were all very beautifully depicted. [68] Durang subsequently goes on to argue that “the representation of such historical subjects … impresses the mind with a love of country and brings pleasant memories back to the mind of age,” even as the Philadelphia stage here becomes “a normal institution to impart moral lessons in relaxation.” [69] We thus see in those dramatic offerings presented at the Walnut Street on Christmas night of 1829 contested representations of what Philadelphia is, contested representations of the work accomplished by its cultural institutions. Once more, Otter’s characteristic “set of rhetorical instabilities” is reconfigured here as a set of performative instabilities, as Philadelphia’s “spatial complexities and local urgencies” compel its dramatists to present the city “as an event, [as] the place where . . . civic identity [was] forged while the country and a transatlantic audience watched.” [70] William Penn also seems to have something in common with one of Stubbs’s several pleasure gardens: spaces on the cusps of things where cultural identity, “being intrinsically tied to the rural idyll, [to] simplicity, and innocence” feels itself to be challenged and even “supplanted by increasingly urban and modern ideas.” [71] It is this tension between rural simplicity and urban modernity—not to mention a related tension between the idealizing mission of art and its more subversive, populist vitality—that is on full display when we consider the double bill of William Penn and Doctor Faustus relative to the staging a few months later, of Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . The latter, which opened on 23 rd March 1830, is described as a “local burlesque parody” [72] of the Faustus tale, and represents a celebratory fortissimo relative to the symphony of unfolding, disruptive, and insurgent energies that we have been exploring. Certainly, there was nothing new in a burlesque treatment of Faustus , nor in the resituating of the good doctor’s medieval career within a bustling, contemporary metropolis; such treatments were already familiar to London theatre-goers, who had seen their first Faustus harlequinade as early as 1723. [73] What is unique about the Walnut Street’s treatment, however, is its determination to deploy the form as a way of seeing and enacting Philadelphia itself, utilizing as it does the sudden transformations and visual sleights-of-hand so characteristic of pantomime to destabilize any representation of the city as the gentlemanly, “distressingly regular” metropolis so famously bemoaned by Charles Dickens about a decade later. [74] The action begins in an “old times suburban schoolhouse in the vicinity of Philadelphia,” where Dr. Foster (played by Sam Chapman’s brother, William) first raises Mephistopheles, quickly shifting to “a view of the old Hall of Independence” peopled with “political loafers and office seekers.” Here a parade of rowdies apparently spoofed a popular song, “March, March, March Along Chestnut Street,” the scene reducing to ridicule one of the city’s most solemn sites, especially once a huckster appears to hawk Swain’s Panacea to “ladies, negroes, cripples and . . . Siamese boys.” [75] It is fairly easy to understand such a “graphic and miraculous representation” of lowlifes and the urban hoi polloi as an instance of what Dillon describes as “the local and embodied nature of the performative commons,” an embodiment imparting to an otherwise-invisible populace the enduring force of “possibilities . . . that can be mobilized at the site of ontic and mimetic intersection . . . in scenes of dissensus and epistemic disruption.” [76] In fact, what Durang calls “the old Hall of Independence”—a kind of national “performative commons”—had only quite recently been awarded this illustrious sobriquet, for it was the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to the site upon his grand tour of the United States in 1824 that helped to shape the Philadelphia public’s growing awareness of the city’s history. As Nicholas Wainwright has noted, Lafayette’s official reception in the East Room of the State House brought the building itself “which had hitherto been accorded little reverence,” to the attention of the guarantors of Philadelphia’s cultural patrimony. [77] On that day a parade very different from the one described in Durang’s account of Doctor Foster passed before the State House. Beneath a triumphal arch some 24 feet high marched Lafayette’s military escort: 4000 cavalrymen, infantrymen, artillerists, and riflemen, along with 150 veterans of the Revolutionary War and a number of floats carrying several hundred cord-winders, rope-makers, weavers, shipbuilders, butchers, and coopers. [78] While few in the audience would have experienced the events of 1776, Lafayette’s parade had taken place less than six years before Doctor Foster was presented and would have thus been very much alive in civic memory. The parade of loafers and office-seekers, of hucksters and mountebanks and cripples, thus conflates, undermines, and destabilizes several of the most celebrated moments in Philadelphia civic memory by reclaiming the “performative commons,” while at the same time deflating the aesthetic aspirations of the Doctors Faustus presented just a few months earlier. High culture and momentous history are here reduced to dispute and ridicule, even as such ridicule opens up a space for an irreverent, and impertinent present—a present (and a city) that increasingly prided itself on a refusal to stand on ceremony. A subsequent transformation then hurls Foster into the midst of what we have already discovered to function as a signifier of robust, “chaotic,” and decidedly contemporary Philadelphia: an African American scene—specifically a religious meeting quickly expanding into a euphoric, disorderly “general melee.” [79] While we have only Durang’s performance reconstruction to work from, it would seem rather easy here to apply the lens offered to us by Eric Lott when attempting to grasp the multivalent semiotics of such a moment. This church celebration presided over by a “sable gemman” [sic] invites the Walnut Street’s predominately white audience both to participation and derision, to “disavowal or ridicule of the Other” as well as to “an interracial identification with it” [80] —the “Other” in this case almost certainly white actors in blackface, further destabilizing any one definitive reading of this performative moment. Despite the difficulty of determining Durang’s particular attitude here (patronizing affection or ridicule are only two options), the deployment of what Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has called “linguistic incompetence” in his description of the religious meeting (“sable gemman”) would seem to reinforce the “belief that African Americans were inherently lacking as speaking subjects and therefore unqualified for full freedom in the increasingly modern world.” [81] As Jones, Jr. points out, in the absence of slavery, culture was deployed by white Northerners as a strategy for keeping African Americans captive in a realm of “existential indeterminacy.” [82] Given the relatively large size of Philadelphia’s African American population, not to mention the city’s proximity to the slave-owning Southern states (the city’s upper classes were dominated by Copperheads), [83] such a strategy was particularly and characteristically fraught in the Quaker City. In the midst of such a discussion, it is difficult not to think of Pavel Petrovich Svinin’s famous rendering of Philadelphia’s Black Methodists Holding a Prayer Meeting , executed in watercolor and pen and ink sometime around 1813. This outdoor scene is equal parts ebullience and chaos; its depiction of the celebrants in what would appear to be a contagious moment of communal spiritual ecstasy is equal parts ridicule and fascination – the artist both identifying with and determinedly distancing himself from his subjects. Svinin thus may be said to refract and to reiterate Jones, Jr.’s “existential indeterminacy” in this work. With much less to go on, Durang’s tone (as well as Doctor Foster’s ) may very well reflect a similar fluidity, accomplishing the work of the “captive stage” in the slippery space between ridicule and subversive high-spirits, between racist mimicry and patronizing fascination. In the following scene, after Foster has escaped from the Arch Street Prison (where he had been incarcerated for attacking a local politician), we find ourselves on Prune Street, “next to the old jail wall,” where Foster “appears as Colonel Pluck of the Bloody Eighty-Fourth Regiment.” [84] This is a particularly dense moment of the pantomime, one which we can only understand by situating it within the city’s particular past and present. The “old jail wall” on Prune Street where Foster finds himself doubtless belongs to what was known as the Walnut Street Penitentiary, a structure that extended from Walnut to Prune Street and from Fifth Street to Sixth. Established in 1773, the prison had been subsequently transformed “from a simple holding place for those awaiting trial . . . into a place and instrument of punishment and reformation in and of itself, wherein the minds and bodies of criminals might be attuned to responsible work.” [85] In new construction undertaken in the 1790s, it was specified that there be added cells “for separate and solitary confinement,” thus inaugurating what would become perhaps the most distinctive feature of the so-called Pennsylvania System of prison reform. [86] The Arch Street Prison from which Foster has escaped represented a subsequent (and failed) attempt at reform; inaugurated in 1823, it proved a notoriously disagreeable place whose inmates suffered from an outbreak of cholera just weeks after the prison was opened. Peter P. Reed has commented upon the ways in which theatrical forms, and pantomime in particular, were put to use in the early Republic, pointing out how such entertainments allowed the “stagey low” to emerge from and destabilize “identity formations” and “disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [87] Here Doctor Foster deploys the quick transitions and transformations characteristic of pantomime to destabilize the often-misplaced idealism and moral pretentiousness that compromised Pennsylvania penal reform in the fraught transition from theory to praxis. Neither the Arch Street nor the Walnut Street prisons can contain nor forestall the hijinks of the protean Dr. Foster (at once a Philadelphia schoolteacher, Doctor Faustus himself, and now Colonel Pluck) as the sheer performative gusto of the character makes him impervious to imprisonment and utterly resistant to the sort of “responsible work” that the penal system was supposed to engender in all those who were locked away. Instead of turning to thrift and industry, Foster turns to mock aria, belting out “It’s my Delight to Learn Them to Write in our City,” before the scene shifts “slap dash” to yet another exterior, where Foster raises visions of specters from steamy washtubs. [88] Disciplinary practices (and institutions) are not for him. Foster’s appearance as Colonel Pluck also situates the pantomime as an act of phenomenological vandalism carried out against Philadelphia’s decorous, gentlemanly self-image as propagated and circulated by the city’s elite. Since the passage of the Militia Act in 1792, Philadelphia workingmen had bristled at the requirement that all able-bodied white males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five serve with local, self-governing militia detachments. While elite volunteer units (disparagingly called “Silk Stocking Companies”) formed the upper tier of Pennsylvania’s militia during the first half of the nineteenth century, the public militia companies ranked far below these in civic esteem. All eligible men unable to afford private company membership were required to enroll in such public companies, where they could expect only the poorest sort of training, often at the hands of indifferent or incompetent officers. Taken from work without compensation and often fined for non-compliance, these men also had to equip themselves at their own expense. [89] The Northern Liberties 84 th Regiment was one such company, and in 1825 its members elected John Pluck, a hostler or perhaps a tavern keeper described in contemporary accounts as bow-legged and hunchbacked, as their colonel. On Muster Day, in an attempt to “irritate middlebrow spectators with a drawn-out parody of the militia system,” [90] Pluck led the men of the 84 th in what the Saturday Evening Post described as a “Grand Military Farce.” [91] He was “mounted on a spavined white nag, behatted with a huge chapeau-de-bras , [and] a . . . woman’s bonnet . . . burlap pants clinched up with a belt and enormous buckle [as well as] a giant sword parodying ceremonial military dress.” [92] Pluck quickly became a national celebrity, appearing on stages in New York, Boston, Providence, Albany, and Richmond before returning to Philadelphia and finding himself court-martialed. Sean DuComb tells us that the erstwhile Colonel’s “name and likeness circulated widely for more than a decade after his national tour,” though by 1832 Pluck would undergo a transformation from an “agent of parody” into “an object of contempt, [a] symbol of racialized disorder” conflated with African American organizers of annual parades anticipating (and later celebrating) the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. [93] Intriguingly, Doctor Foster seems to represent Colonel Pluck in mid-career, a parody of Philadelphia elite pretension and “Silk Stocking” affectedness rather than a burlesque of African American aspiration (indeed, the only musical number that is not explicitly identified as a parody in Durang’s description of Doctor Foster is a serenade performed on the Kent Bugle by Philadelphia’s celebrated African-American maestro, Frank Johnson). Here an 1825 Muster Day lampoon of proud militiamen on display is replicated onstage (rather in the manner of Richard Schechner’s “twice-behaved behavior”) to produce both a simulacrum of an earlier event as well as a further destabilization of aristocratic Philadelphia at the hands of the “stagey low.” In eighteenth-century afterpieces like The Necromancer , as John O’Brien points out, when Harlequin Faustus is at last taken to Hell, a convocation of pagan deities typically arrives for a concluding masque, the presence of the gods “a sign that order has been restored to a cosmos disrupted by [Faustus’] illicit magic.” [94] When Dr. Foster is carried off to the infernal regions, however, the effect and intention seem very different, the audience enjoying a grand and most sudden ingenious change of [Carter’s Livery Stables] into frying pandemonium. Chorus of fryers, bakers, brewers, bailers, roasters, stewards and broilers [crying] “Put him in the pot & make him hot. Hot pot, make him hot.” [95] The Walnut Street’s burlesque refuses us a sense of order restored from on high. For it is not the gods, but a combustible and uproarious gang of kitchen laborers who take the stage—managing to punish Foster while at the same time declining to resolve the silliness and visual anarchy of the evening into anything like regularity and order. We are left here in a space halfway between charivari and street party, a space where “anything can happen and it probably will”— Hellzapoppin’ on the streets of the Quaker City. Indeed, Durang’s closing remarks concerning the play point to the final transformation that Doctor Foster was able to accomplish. “This truly ridiculous burlesque upon the drama of ‘Faustus,’ the production of which had caused so much bitter rivalry between the Arch and the Walnut houses, to both of their detriment, now created much fun and laughter.” [96] The play reimagines Philadelphia itself as a kind of urban Cockaigne, a chaotic city of grotesque yet thoroughly delightful anarchic misrule and semiotic plenitude—exorcizing the specter of morally edifying (and financially ruinous) high drama from both the Arch Street and the Walnut Street houses, clearing a space on the Philadelphia stage for the delight of the masses rather than their moral edification. We are here a long way indeed from Penn’s Greene Country Town, from his Great Elm Tree, and from the good ship Welcome , just as we are a long way from the street scenes created by William Russell Birch—from a city characterized by nostalgia, genteel regularity, and a “prosaic despotism of right angles.” In the Philadelphia of Sam Chapman and Robert Montgomery Bird, a city that had only just begun to see and to perform itself as such, the angles are forever crooked and the conduct provocatively irregular. Conclusion When Philadelphia audiences of the early Jacksonian era beheld for the first time their (very contemporary) city reflected back to them from the stages of Philadelphia’s several playhouses, they encountered something deliberately other than the rural idyll of Penn’s Holy Experiment as well as something deliberately alternative to the eighteenth-century Shrine of Liberty. The civic culture of the Quaker City was at an inflection point, and Philadelphians went to the theatre in part to experience the reworking, the re-presentation, of that civic identity in performative time. What they found was a heterogenous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberantly modern metropolis—a place of “noise and riot” characterized by depravity and violence as well as by a raw and free-wheeling absurdity, by the grotesque as well as the gleeful. Indeed, plays like Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia invited audiences to apprehend not just the “stagy low” but the theatres themselves as sites where contemporaneity was being constructed—with the playhouses and their managers often engaged in self-referential sleights-of-hand. Here the relationship between signified and signifier becomes a shifty and promiscuous one, whether deliberately (dueling Doctor Faustus productions become the singular travesty of Doctor Foster , with Philadelphia and her theatres themselves as protagonists), or by semiotic happenstance (an actor-manager suffers a mortal blow for the crime of bad taste, while the somehow nobler though more dangerous Porter who inspired his performance faces execution on the gallows). For its part, Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass seems to have inaugurated the sort of semiotic rough-and-tumble characteristic of a thoroughly reimagined urban-cultural landscape. Here we find ourselves for the first time in a space where Quaker earnestness and solemnity dissolve into the outrageous and the preposterous, where street scenes reveal neither “wearisome regularity” nor patriot parades but instead crooked alleyways peopled by morally-misshapen lowlifes whose machinations drive the action of the play and who seem intent upon finishing off once and for all any lingering sense of Philadelphia propriety or the idealism that supposedly characterized the city’s founding. Consensus becomes dissensus, with Philadelphia placed on display as a site for the contestation of identities. The City of Brotherly Love had stepped through the looking glass, and the streets now firmly belonged neither to sober Square Toes nor to stalwart patriots, but to the rascals, the reprobates and the scoundrels. References [1] Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 124. [2] Ibid., 109. [3] Ibid., 8-9. [4] Bird, City Looking Glass (Philadelphia: 1828), 4. [5] Ibid. [6] “A Mirror of the Times: A History of the Mirror Metaphor in Journalism” Journalism Studies , vol. 12, no. 5 (2011): 578. [7] Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8. [8] Ibid. [9] Ibid. [10] Francis Courtney. Wemyss, Twenty-Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager (New York: Burgess, Stringer and Co., 1847), 84–5. [11] Peter P. Reed, Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 133. [12] Ibid., 137. [13] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 11. [14] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1949), 260–61. [15] Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (New York: Augustus M. Keeley, 1968), 337–38. [16] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 73. [17] Bird, City Looking Glass , 6. [18] Ibid., 66. [19] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 88. [20] Bird, City Looking Glass , 18. [21] Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649 – 1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. [22] Bird. City Looking Glass , 114. [23] Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 122–3. [24] Ibid. [25] Bird, City Looking Glass , 48. [26] Ibid., 49. [27] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 105–6. [28] Ibid., 87. [29] Christian DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 60. [30] Douglas A. Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 34. [31] Ibid. [32] Bird, City Looking Glass , 45. [33] Nash, First City , 147. [34] John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia: Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants (Philadelphia: 1830), 479. [35] Bird, City Looking Glass , 30. [36] Ibid., 52. [37] Gayard Wilmore, ed., African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 7. [38] Watson, Annals of Philadelphia , 479. [39] Bird, City Looking Glass , 21. [40] Columbia Star and Christian Index (Philadelphia: 15 May 1830), 318. [41] Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), 4, 13. [42] Charles Durang, The Philadelphia Stage from 1749 – 1850 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, 1854-55), vol. III, 243. [43] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans , 286. [44] Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin . INCOMPLETE CITATION, (Philadelphia: 15 May h , 1830). [45] Nash, First City , 157. [46] Columbia Star and Christian Index. INCOMPLETE CITATION, 318. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance: American Pleasure Gardens and Entertainment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 54. [48] Ibid. [49] Quoted in Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 275. [50] Ibid. [51] American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser (Philadelphia: 3 July 1830). [52] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [53] Reed, Rogue Performances , 10. [54] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [55] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [56] Ibid. [57] Oscar Weglin, Early American Plays, 1774 – 1830: A Compilation of the Titles of Plays and Dramatic Poems Written by Authors Born or Residing in North America Previous to 1830 (New York: The Literary Collector Press, 1905), 21. [58] Francis Courtney Wemyss, Theatrical Biography, or The Life of an Actor Manager (Glasgow: Griffin & Co., 1848), 160. [59] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [60] Ibid. [61] Reed. Rogue Performances , 186. [62] Ibid., 15. [63] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 153. [64] William Wood, Personal Recollections of the Stage (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1855), 353. [65] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 266. [66] Ibid. [67] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 154. [68] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [69] Ibid. [70] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 14. [71] Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance , 59. [72] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [73] John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1600 – 1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 110. [74] Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation , ed. Patricia Ingham (New York: Penguin, 2000), 104. [75] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [76] Dillon, New World Drama , 29–30. [77] Nicholas B. Wainwright, “The Age of Nicholas Biddle: 1825–1841” in Philadelphia: a 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), 301. [78] Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America , 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 14. [79] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [80] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124. [81] Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage , 49. [82] Ibid. [83] Nash., First City , 231. [84] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [85] Newman, Embodied History , 10. [86] LeRoy B. DePuy, “The Walnut Street Prison: Pennsylvania’s First Penitentiary.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies . vol. 18, no. 2 (1951): 131. [87] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [88] Durang, Philadelphia Stage , vol III, 271. [89] Nash, First City , 201. [90] DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 90. [91] Saturday Evening Post . (Philadelphia: INCOMPLETE CITATION AND DATE FORMAT 21 May, 1825). [92] Susan G. Davis, “The Career of Colonel Pluck: Folk Drama and Public Protest in 19 th Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , vol. 109 no. 2 (April 1985): 188. [93] Ducomb, Haunted City , 89–91. [94] O’Brien, Harlequin Britain , 110. [95] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [96] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) RAYMOND SARACENI teaches in the Center for Liberal Education at Villanova University. He is a company member of Iron Age Theatre and holds a Ph.D. in drama from Tufts University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

KATIANA GONÇALES RANGEL + KATIE BROOK presents Nannies of New York City at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Nannies of New York City KATIANA GONÇALES RANGEL + KATIE BROOK 8-8:50 pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP Nannies of New York City is a documentary theater work by and about the experiences of professional caregivers in Manhattan. Written and performed by Rocio Piamonte, Inde Ramsaran, Katiana Gonçales Rangel, Maryory Rodriguez, and Cristiele Santos Dramaturgy by Jasmine Pisapia This project is made possible in part with funds from a regrant program(s) supported by the funding agencies The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) in partnership with the City Council and administered by LMCC. LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Katie Brook is an experimental theater director focused on new plays and devised work. Recent directing credits include ISLANDER (New Georges, HERE), The Cherry Orchard (Quantum Theatre, Pittsburgh), and Liza Birkenmeier’s Dr. Ride’s American Beach House (Ars Nova). For many years, Katie worked for the oral history project, StoryCorps, and has developed audio dramas, including The MS Phoenix Rising (Trish Harnetiaux, Playwrights Horizons). She received her MFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama, and is currently a Lecturer in Directing at Tufts University’s School of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Katiana Gonçales Rangel is a performer, director, and educator from Brazil based in NYC. They have been creating independent theater work since 1998. Their most recent work Ama The Diver (2023/2024), in collaboration with Jim Fletcher and the cellist Lori Goldston, was performed in NYC, Portland, and Seattle. Katiana has been creating documentary theater work with immigrant New Yorkers since 2014 with Incoming Theater Division (ITD), a branch of the company New York City Players, and has been ITD director since 2020. In 2024, the group performed La Casa de Bernarda Alba in Spanish language directed by Richard Maxwell. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Read The Natural Landscape of Native Puppetry by Opalanietet Ryan Pierce . Opalanietet is a PhD candidate in Theatre & Performance Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and has been a teacher of Contemporary Indigenous Theatre & Performance at The New School in New York City and SUNY Purchase. He also has taught Classical Theatre at Boston University and World Theatre at Pace University. In addition, Opalanietet holds a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and is a theatre practitioner in New York City, including being the founder and artistic director of Eagle Project, http://www.eagleprojectarts.org. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Indigenous Stages tah-kōx Visit Journal Homepage 1 Volume The Natural Landscape of Native Puppetry By Opalanietet Ryan Pierce Published: June 10, 2026 Download Article as PDF "Puppetry is already there, in cultural dances, trees.” (Defoe 2025, 1:12:32) This quotation from Anishinaabe theatre artist, Ty Defoe (also called Giizhig in his Indigenous language), encapsulates the organic energy exhibited in the natural world around us that is intrinsic in the craft of puppetry. Yet how does one harness that raw organic energy from the natural world and distill it into what we would consider Native puppet theatre? The first, and perhaps most important, step would be to “Indigenize” the puppets. This is exactly what Ty Defoe demonstrates for us in his puppet theatre play, Skeleton Canoe , created with All My Relations Collective [1] and the Great Lakes Life Ways Institute. Skeleton Canoe is a journey of awakening for the character of Nawbin, a young seeker, who meets and befriends Jimaan, a birchbark canoe who has been buried beneath the water for a very long time. Together, Nawbin and Jimaan, arouse stories accompanying the river, pilot through turbulent weather, and relish each other’s company. Theirs is a relationship that assists in resurrecting a healthy equilibrium with all our relatives of the Earth, evoking within us the sentiment that convalescence is achieved through recollection, relationship, and reciprocity. Before we go any further, however, we must unpack what it means to “Indigenize” something. One way to consider Indigenous, or Indigeneity, is under the guise of the people originally from a place and their right to self-government, or sovereignty. Dennis Claude discusses this in his book, We Are Not You: First Nations and Canadian Modernity , where he appears to prefer the term, “First Nations,” as opposed to “Indigenous” or “Native.” Claude simply states: “First Nations occupied this land first and therefore were sovereign self-governing societies, and that they never gave up their sovereignty” (Claude 1997, 20). With Claude’s emphasis in mind, one way to think of “to Indigenize” something would be to bring it under the influence, or control, of the sovereign government of the people who were there on that land first. I believe that to be true, yet, cultural, what is it about the sovereign government of the people who were on that land first that makes "to Indigenize" something noteworthy? It is not necessarily about the government per se, but a value system and epistemology that cosmologically brings Indigeneity to the forefront. For this, I turn to Jerry Fontaine and Don McCaskill, who, through their book, Di-bayn-di-zi-win (To Own Ourselves): Embodying Ojibway-Anishinabe Ways , talk about other aspects of Indigeneity when discussing the process of research. They express that “some approaches (to research) are grounded in Anishinabe ways of doing and knowing and emphasize the importance of respect, reciprocity, relationship, protocol, holistic knowing, relevancy, story, interpretive knowing, and the experiential related to place, language, and kinship systems” (2022, 101). (I use the spelling, “Anishinaabe,” at the request of Defoe, as it assists with the correct pronunciation.) In this article, I will focus on how Defoe uses Anishinaabe ontologies and epistemologies of relationality to inform the specificity of materiality in Skeleton Canoe . This materiality Indigenizes the puppets and enhances the anthropomorphization of the characters, a process that is a cornerstone of contemporary Native puppet theatre; and I will explore this Indigenizing materiality through three distinct characters in the play whose function and movement directly relate to the essence of life that is water: Rainbow Trout, Turtle Activist Grandma, and the River itself. To anthropomorphize, according to Merriam-Webster, means “To attribute human form or personality to things not human” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2025). Gary Steiner implements this definition into his exploration of the Western, [2] or Eurocentric, judgement of the status of non-human animals in his book, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy . Insinuating it as a more “animal-friendly philosophy,” Steiner explains: “Moved by the desire to establish a more edified view of the moral status of animals than the sense that has prevailed in the Western philosophical tradition, an increasing number of ethologists and philosophers have marshaled insights concerning the evolutionary continuity and physiological similarity between animals and human beings to argue that many animals are conscious, sentient beings that deserve substantial moral consideration” (Steiner 2005, 3). According to Steiner, utilizing the pronoun “who” is a method by which to anthropomorphize the puppets, which thus brings forth the familial attributes that are understood to be inherent (not merely philosophical) in all living things, according to Anishinaabe and many other Indigenous communities. I lean on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s explanation of this belief system as I feel she best contextualizes this worldview in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants . Kimmerer references the fact that in the English-speaking world, we typically do not refer to a member of our family with the pronoun “it.” That would be considered an insult and a sign of disrespect. Kimmerer takes that social rule and demonstrates how and why many Indigenous communities extend that respect to include members of the natural world. Kimmerer says, “ It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family” (2013, 55). Yet what constitutes “the living world,” one may ask? The living world is even more expansive than one may initially imagine. Kimmerer explains: In Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. Beings that are imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our songs, drums, and even stories, are all animate. The list of the inanimate seems to be smaller, filled with objects that are made by people. Of an inanimate being, like a table, we say ‘ What is it?’ And we answer Dopwen yewe . Table it is. But of apple, we must say, ‘ Who is that being?’ And reply Mshimin yawe . Apple that being is. Yawe – the animate to be . (2013, 55–56) The materiality in Skeleton Canoe is a mixture of materials, some of which, like birchbark and porcupine quills, Kimmerer would consider animate, and others, such as plastic bags or recycled materials, that would fall into the inanimate category. Either way, however, given how the materiality is utilized within the play, human form and personality (i.e. anthropomorphization) is endowed onto the puppets, thus enabling them to effectively and respectfully represent some of our non-human family members to a human audience. Relationality is the essential concept that must be developed when discussing contemporary Native performing arts, whether it be engaging in anthropomorphization with one’s puppets and objects, or developing a dance piece as Jacqueline Shea Murphy theoretically describes in her book, Dancing Indigenous Worlds: Choreographies of Relation . While she focuses on the transformational process in Indigenous dance, I believe both the ideological and performative epistemology she discusses directly relates to the foundations of contemporary Native puppet theatre. Murphy states: “the Indigenous dance artists discussed in this book, as I have come to perceive, create dance works that manifest out of ways of being in which relationality undergirds everything. They create these dance works physically and experientially, via human bodies coming and being and moving together in interconnection and exchange” (2022, 1). It is essential, I would argue, to first establish this relationality with one’s own species, fellow human beings. If we cannot establish and experience the agency within our neighboring humans, how can we begin to be interconnected with other living organisms and objects? I believe this is the first step in hosting and utilizing a counter ideology that doesn’t look at our fellow humans as competitors or instruments through which we can obtain something or achieve an objective, but as collaborators in creation and stewardship. Once this concept is developed and accepted, it may then be possible to expand this creational capacity beyond our species. Murphy continues: “it happens in relational interconnections with human as well as with more-than-human beings, like plants and water and ancestors” (2022, 1). Returning to Kimmerer, she assists in crystalizing this relationality when referencing our pronouns for our more-than-human kin: “Saying it makes a living land into ‘natural resources.’ If a maple is an it , we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her , we think twice” (2013, 57). This relational interconnectedness with our fellow non-human beings and entities is foundational for all the characters in Skeleton Canoe . Defoe achieves this transformation to relational interconnectedness through what he calls, “Western puppetry and Anishinaabe values and ways of being” (Defoe 2025: 1:18:30). What exactly could be meant by “Western puppetry”? To start, Stephen Kaplin’s 1999 article, “A Puppet Tree,” provides a basic definition of a puppet: Unlike actors, puppets are objects, defined by Frank Proschan as ‘material images of humans, animals or spirits that are created, displayed, or manipulated.’ These material images reflect an ‘iconicity […] between a material object (sign vehicle) and the animate being for which it stands” (1983:4). But while actors animate a sign vehicle from the inside out, using their own feelings, bodies, and voices, puppet performers must learn to inhabit the sign vehicle from the outside in. (1999, 29) There is a lot to unpack here. Yes, most of the puppets in Skeleton Canoe are, as Kaplin refers to, material images of animals that reflect an iconicity between a material object and the animate being, but the specific materiality used in Skeleton Canoe (for example, the birchbark used for Jimaan or the fan used for Rainbow Trout) that in many ways reflect Anishinaabe values and ways of being, make the puppet itself iconic, not just a reflective image. In addition, it is the specific materiality of the puppets in Skeleton Canoe that comes from embedded and transferred knowledge from one’s community and ancestors that I argue complicates the binary of the “inside out” and “outside in” that Kaplin refers to. One example is birchbark, used for the character, Turtle Activist Grandma, which I will explore in further detail later. While the operating of the puppets may be “outside in,” the creation of the puppet is inspired from the “inside out.” When speaking about puppetry from a potentially more “Western” perspective, I turn to Edward Gordon Craig’s essay, “The Actor and the Übermarionette,” as referenced by Victoria Nelson. Here, Craig gives a description of what we conventionally think of puppets in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Craig explains: “To speak of a puppet with most men and women is to cause them to giggle. They think at once of the wires; they think of the stiff hands and the jerky movements; they tell me it is ‘a funny little doll’” (quoted in Nelson 2001, 24). Since Craig originally made that statement in 1908, one may believe that it is a diachronic perception of a puppet that ceases to exist a century later. Steve Tillis appears to disagree with the sentiment that Craig’s statement has ceased to exist in his book, Towards an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art . Tillis reminds us, “the signs deployed by the puppet are as intentional as theatrical signs can be; their intent, whether or not this is acknowledged by the puppet-artist, is to lead the audience to imagine life while it perceives an object” (1992, 115). The object may not be “a funny little doll” as Craig states, but it is still “an object,” according to Tillis, by which we, the audience, “imagines” life. Yes, the puppets in Skeleton Canoe may contain wires and are operated through manipulation, but through the specific materiality from which the puppets are made, they become not just images, or even “Images” in the likeness of the Creator, they are manifestations of our non-human kin here on Turtle Island. We do not have to imagine life based on the signs presented by the materiality, for in Native puppet theatre, the materiality often is life; and even in the instances when the materiality itself is not alive, it is specifically utilized to accentuate a life-like characteristic that is critical in an Indigenous story or life lesson. In Skeleton Canoe , these non-human kin guide Nawbin, a young seeker, on a transformational adventure. On this journey, Nawbin encounters Jiimaan, a birchbark canoe long embedded under the water. The two bond in friendship as they uncover stories along the river, weather storms, and enjoy each other’s company. As Defoe says: “Together, they restore balance with the beings of the Earth, reminding us that healing comes through remembering, relationship, and reciprocity” (personal communication, July 29, 2025). The emphasis is not on conflict, as is often presupposed in Western storytelling, but on a life journey. We start our journey with the river, as it is the most crucial element in Skeleton Canoe . There is no story and there is no performance without River. While one can certainly argue with legitimacy that rivers provide the essentials for life for civilizations throughout the world, rivers are looked upon as living, breathing relations for many Native/Indigenous communities, including my own. Yet, how does one transform the Western, colonial, Euro/American concept of a river as primarily a watery avenue used to transport products and further commerce into a sentient relative capable of sharing cosmological knowledge with us? The relational interconnectedness that we have discussed is the foundation through which a river can be looked upon as a living, breathing relative and not a mere tool used to achieve an end. Figure 1. Nawbin, Jiimaan, and characters in stories arise along the river. (Photo: Alex U. Griffin, courtesy of Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival) River is not what we (and Kaplin) typically refer to as a human, animal or spirit. But they are alive, have agency, and are a crucial part of our community. In the show, the materiality of River consists of recycled materials, such as plastic bags and aluminum cans, as an example, which both acknowledges the importance of our climate crisis and the urgency to protect River, while also permitting River to flow, ripple, and provide a home for the other puppets. The craft of puppetry in Skeleton Canoe , including River, may be informed by what Americans consider to be Western. But it is the Native values, in this case Anishinaabe, that inform the materiality of River, and thus enable River to ontologically function in a way that makes the audience a vessel for River’s stories rather than the other way around. We fundamentally need River more than River needs us, and it is this humble understanding that allows a reciprocal relationship that is critical in Native puppet theatre to exist. This reciprocal relationship becomes visceral when we see different characters in the play, like Nawbin and Turtle Activist Grandma, each attempting to engage in one of the most fundamental activities regarding water: taking a drink from River. When Nawbin goes to River’s edge to have a drink towards the beginning of the play, they let out a cry as they pull a plastic bag from River. They exclaim it is gross and announce that they will attempt to take out every plastic bag from the river. Nawbin proclaims themselves as a water protector, and thus, the relational interconnectedness that Murphy speaks of is implemented by Defoe and endowed onto what otherwise would be deemed as inanimate objects. Figure 2. Turtle Activist Grandma engaging with River. (Photo: Alex U. Griffin, courtesy of Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival) Rainbow Trout is one of those other puppets who has a home in River. A colorful fan forms the foundation of Rainbow Trout, providing both the aesthetic and functionality of the puppet. The spectrum of color emanating from Rainbow Trout gives authenticity to its name, while the flexibility of the fan enables the fish to swim, flutter, and dance convincingly. The colors of the rainbow and the ease and freedom of movement assist in making Rainbow Trout a character who serves as a metaphor reminding us of the role of Two-Spirit members in Indigenous communities: bringing love, light, joy, and gratitude to our culture. VK Preston’s reference, in “Queer and Indigenous Art: Performing Ice Times in Climate Crisis,” to the symbolic importance of a map in a performance centering familial locations combined with music from a Two-Spirit composer, and the way in which those elements solidify the emotional attachment to place, remind me of Rainbow Trout’s power in Skeleton Canoe . Preston states: “participatory conversation on place inaugurates an epistemic shift of placemaking. This centers and genders pluralism, reclaiming nonbinary gender, partnering, and community’s solidarity in queer Indigenous activism” (2020, 150). According to Preston, the reclamation of geography and gender from binary, colonial classification liberates a plurality of meaning, learning, and kinship. Rainbow Trout, having their home in the river, enhances River as an important place of epistemic knowledge. Rainbow Trout swimming and dancing with a rainbow fan representing Two-Spirit members of Indigenous community centers’ “gender pluralism,” and even though it may be subliminal to some and not so subliminal to others, fosters solidarity within queer Indigenous wisdom. The human artifact that is the colorful fan anthropomorphizes the puppet of Rainbow Trout, thus allowing the character to foster Two-Spirit wisdom, and thereby furthering the interspecies communication that is essential to this Native story. As Claudia Orenstein writes in Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects : “objects and materiality can have their own emotional trajectories constructed into them, and we can experience these physically” (2024, 38). We experience the beauty of Rainbow Trout through the vivid brightness of the colorful fan, and freedom through its movement as it appears to swim and dance effortlessly. Swimming and dancing appear synonymous as the stick that initially permits Defoe to control Rainbow Trout’s movement changes to a string that liberates Rainbow Trout to make much of the stage their dance floor as Defoe circles the string around his body and over his head. The puppet’s movement allows us to experience both a watery environment and a dancing stage, even when it is not in physical water or a disco. Rainbow Trout’s freedom of movement enables interspecies communication by allowing the other swimming puppets and air-breathing mammals, such as a human actor, to speak with Rainbow Trout directly. When interspecies communication does take place, endowing the puppet with Anishinaabe language reinforces the concept of the puppet being alive through anthropomorphization, also referred to as “breathing spirit into the object” (personal communication, April 15, 2025). The combination of Anishinaabe language along with materiality, such as jingles from a jingle dress [3] placed inside Rainbow Trout, collaborate to Indigenize the puppet with the ability to relay Anishinaabe lifeways and ideology onto a captivated audience, whether they be Native or not. Returning to Preston, they say “that settlers’ interest in interpreting Indigenous practice as performance fails to apprehend songs’ or dances’ ontologies otherwise, as law, being, or medicine, erasing and thereby also doing epistemological violence” (2020, 148). The jingles inside Rainbow Trout are an antidote to the epistemological violence that Preston is talking about. They represent medicine and restoration. By placing the jingles inside Rainbow Trout, Indigenizes the puppet in one of the most fundamental ways, one that is not just entertainment, education, or even resistance, but one that is restorative in the transferring of cosmological and epistemological knowledge. Birchbark, however, is the most important aspect of materiality in Skeleton Canoe . It is the material from which the main character in the play, Jiimaan, a canoe, is made. Birchbark serves as a tool to make food and supply transportation, in addition to being the material that would support etchings and writing, which makes it a foundation for communication. Thus, having Jiimaan be made from birchbark is imperative for the play. Birchbark from the tree, in and of itself, contains much knowledge and many stories. Constructing the canoe with birchbark endows Jiimaan with that same knowledge. Defoe says that Jiimaan can be buried and spend as long as four hundred years in the ground. Many stories and much knowledge can be accumulated during that time for living beings, including humans, who are willing to listen and learn. Theresa May, in Salmon is Everything: Community-Based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed , describes the significance of these transferred stories when sharing her experience creating a theatre project with local Indigenous communities. May talks about how theatres serve as “forums where stories, and the wisdom and knowledge they carry, are given authority. Stories preserve and disseminate wisdom, provide historical context, and transmit feelings that have the power to change the listener, easing long-standing social and political polarization” (2018, 7). That is the influence that these stories possess, and it is the materiality that represents the manifestation of the stories in a tangible and sensorial fashion. It is with this knowledge and storytelling ability in mind that the birchbark is seen to contain its own agency. Megan De Roover discusses agency with trees in her 2019 article, “Beyond the Scenic: Trees as Participants in Theatre and Performance.” De Roover begins by unpacking Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory,” which exposes the moment when “objects” become “things.” De Roover states: “Brown’s ‘Thing Theory’ illustrates this invitation, as he argues that when objects cease to function in predictable manners, they become things , asserting a peculiar kind of power into our interactions with them. In the same way, when trees no longer function as objects (which conform easily to our desires), they shift into things (which can resist)” (2019, 333). I am not insinuating that the birchbark of Jiimaan is “resisting” in any particular fashion, but that the birchbark, through its symbolic and dramaturgical usage, is becoming, according to De Roover and Brown, a “thing.” De Roover elaborates further: “Our relationship to the tree as an object-now-thing transforms from one of control to one of participatory exchange – a transformation that has the potential to alter (however slightly) the norm of unilateral engagement” (2019, 333). The multi-usage and significance of the birchbark to the Anishinaabe people, which then forms the materiality of Jiimaan in Skeleton Canoe , transforms the birchbark, according to De Roover, into a “thing” that defines the relationship with the birchbark into “one of participatory exchange,” not only between the Anishinaabe and the birchbark, but also between Jiimaan and the audience. De Roover concludes “that meaningful encounters with trees as things enables [ sic ] a relationship with trees , rather than a relationship with stories about trees ” (2019, 345). This describes a cornerstone of Native puppet theatre, one in which the materiality of the natural world is being granted its full agency and one where an equal reciprocal relationship is manifested. Thus, when the materiality is granted its full agency, so is the puppet which is constructed from that materiality. That reciprocity can only happen when the interaction with the natural world is as a “thing” with agency and not an “object.” Once our relationship with the natural world is as a “thing” with agency, we then possess the ideology that they are our fellow “kin” with a proper pronoun (as Kimmerer suggests) and not an “it,” an object ripe for exploitation at our whim. The monumental material of birchbark represents so much to the Anishinaabe people that, in the show, it also forms a basket that serves as a shell for the elder character, Turtle Activist Grandma. For many Native communities, including my own, Lenape, as well as Anishinaabe, what Americans frequently refer to as the continent of North America is actually Turtle Island, a vast tract of land that sits on the back of a giant turtle. I, personally, am a member of a Lenape Turtle Clan. The cosmological importance of the turtle and its shell is imperative to many Native creation stories. Thus, having the turtle shell be a basket made out of birchbark Indigenizes the puppet of Turtle Activist Grandma in a way that nothing else would or could. This makes it an ideal material for a puppet who, as Defoe, articulates, is “Creating an environmental movement for a connection between humans and nature” (personal communication, March 12, 2025). While cleaning the water in the play, Turtle Activist Grandma reminds us of one of the most important realities of existence by pulling out a flag that communicates, “Water is life.” Through utilizing her birchbark shell to remove trash and waste from the water and River’s shore, Turtle Activist Grandma represents the significance of environmental stewardship, and that the well-being of the people is synonymous with that of the environment. Having both Turtle Activist Grandma and Jiimaan be associated with the materiality of birchbark (recycled birchbark in the case of Jiimaan), they remind us of the importance of sustainability and the interconnectedness of our shared destiny. Figure 3. Water is Life. (Photo: Alex U. Griffin, courtesy of Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival) The use of birchbark as materiality for Turtle Activist Grandma is a prime example of dramaturgical methodology put into practice in order to bring awareness to the current climate crisis. It is an example of Lisa Woynarski’s urgent call for ecologically relevant dramaturgical practice in her book, Ecodramaturgies: theatre, performance and climate change . Woynarski writes: “Intersectional ecologies analyses [ sic ] the ideologies of conquest, colonialism, accumulation and individualism that shape capitalist patriarchy and ecological exploitation” (2020, 35). Woynarski continues with how ecodramaturgy, a product of intersectional ecology, can be an antidote to the separatist individualism of colonialism. She continues: “Ecodramaturgies can counter the abstraction and reduction of these issues (power relations that create injustice) by locating them in potent stories, missing histories, forgotten people and places, and human and more-than-human bodies” (2020, 38). Turtle Activist Grandma wearing a shell made out of birchbark, which is substantive and symbolic for the Anishinaabe people, and having that be juxtaposed with her performing the act of cleaning a river made out of recycled materials, both anthropomorphizes the puppet and includes the dramaturgical intersectionality Woynarski is referring to. A Western style puppet consisting of Anishinaabe materiality with Indigenous storytelling is intersectional in a way that reaches a diverse audience, while at the same time enabling the climate crisis to be an issue that is both universal and relatable. It is also an example of what Peter Eckersall, in Dramaturgy to Make Visible: The Legacies of New Dramaturgy for Politics and Performance in Our Times , calls slow dramaturgy, as “a way to describe how the theatrical forms themselves, as dramaturgical agents made from interactive systems, make visible to spectators the experience of ecological crisis” (2024, 13). Denise Varney, in “Caught in the Anthropocene: Theatres of Trees, Place and Politics,” succinctly summarizes Eckersall’s slow dramaturgy: “a dramaturgy that ‘foregrounds time’ and ‘reorients perceptions’ towards a materialist or political consciousness of non-human agency” (2022, 10). I argue that the sequences with Turtle Activist Grandma harmonize with both descriptions of slow dramaturgy in that the sequences are timeless in regard to the Anishinaabe tradition of birchbark that goes back centuries, as well as current when referencing the critical status of human-induced climate change. The anthropomorphization of the puppets, enabled by the specific material dramaturgical choices, such as Turtle Activist Grandma using her birchbark shell in order to assist in cleaning up River, makes the present ecological crisis both visible and visceral. It also, to channel Varney, “reorients our perception toward a political consciousness of nonhuman agency” by having a turtle clean River up after us. River may be Turtle Activist Grandma’s home, but having her clean her home after human irresponsibility endows this non-human with agency that one would typically assume that we, as humans, would have. This actually implicates the human audience and makes them question whether we as a human race have agency to modify our priorities and fundamentally alter our behavior for a more climate-responsive value system. In this way, the birchbark transfers conventional anthropomorphization from the human audience to the turtle. In order for Native puppet theatre to create an environmental movement for a connection between humans and nature, the relationship between humans and the natural world must go beyond mere transactional reciprocity. Its potential, to quote Varney, can “be a model for non-human-centered ecological theatre, one that features the environment as the foundation of human life and creativity” (2022, 11). By centering the environment, Native puppet theatre can reach into the essence of our identities as living organisms, through the specific materiality of its characters. The materiality of the puppets in Skeleton Canoe is a mixture of items that are symbolic to us as contemporary Americans as well as essential to the traditional culture of Anishinaabe people, all the while centering the environment and its ecological relationality in their usage. This blend of materiality specifically crafted for certain characters anthropomorphizes the puppets in a way that intrinsically makes them a part of us, while simultaneously, through our wonderment at seeing the natural world alive through our creations, makes us a part of them. Notes [1] “All My Relations is a profound concept and artistic collective that I (Ty Defoe) co-created. All My Relations is rooted in Indigenous worldviews. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of all human and non-human beings and underscores a reciprocal responsibility to the land, ancestors, and future generations. This philosophy is central to various Indigenous-led arts collectives that aim to foster community, healing, and cultural revitalization through creative expression.” Ty Defoe, email message to author, April 15, 2025. [2] I use the term, “Western,” in this article to connotate the cultural paradigm that typically refers to anything thought of as colonial and Euro/American. [3] “The Jingle Dress originates from the Anishinaabe people and is rooted in stories of healing. According to tradition, the dress was first created for a young girl in the North who was gravely ill. A vision came to her family instructing them to sew a dress adorned with 365 metal cones—one for each day of the year—and as she danced in it, the sound of the jingles would offer healing. Each cone represents a prayer, an intention, a step toward restoration. Today, jingle dress dancers continue to appear at powwows, community gatherings, protests, and ceremonies—dancing not just in regalia, but in remembrance, resistance, and restoration. The Jingle Dress Dance embodies healing—physical, emotional, and spiritual—and stands as a testament to cultural resilience, the endurance of language and tradition, and the power of community. This is not just performance; it is a ceremony guided by protocol, responsibility, and prayer. Jingle dancers often carry the prayers of those who cannot dance themselves, offering their movement as a gift of collective strength.” (Defoe, personal communication, April 17, 2025.) Image Credits: Alex U. Griffin, courtesy of Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival Article References Defoe, Ty. 2025. “The Puppet that Brings Us Together: Thought on Intercultural Puppetry Arts.” The 2025 Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium series, Chicago, IL, January. Video, 1 hour, 53 min. 35sec. https://howlround.com/happenings/ellen-van-volkenburg-puppetry-symposium-1 . Dennis, Claude. 1997. We Are Not You: First Nations and Canadian Modernity . University of Toronto. De Roover, Megan. 2019. “Beyond the Scenic: Trees as Participants in Theatre and Performance.” Theatre Journal 71 (3): 327–346. Eckersall, Peter. 2024. Dramaturgy to Make Visible: The Legacies of New Dramaturgy for Politics and Performance in Our Times . Routledge. Fontaine, Jerry, and Don McCaskill. 2022. Di-bayn-di-zi-win (To Own Ourselves): Embodying Ojibway-Anishinabe Ways . Dundurn Press. Kaplin, Stephen. 1999. “A Puppet Tree: A Model for the Field of Puppet Theatre.” TDR: The Drama Review 43 (3): 28–35. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants . Milkweed Editions. May, Theresa. 2018. Salmon is Everything: Community-Based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed , 2nd ed. Oregon State University Press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/book71513 . Merriam-Webster Dictionary. n.d. “Anthropomorphize.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anthropomorphize , accessed June 29, 2025. Murphy, Jacqueline Shea. 2022. Dancing Indigenous Worlds: Choreographies of Relation . University of Minnesota Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/99484 . Nelson, Victoria. 2001. The Secret Life of Puppets . Harvard University Press. Orenstein, Claudia. 2024. Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects . Routledge. Preston, VK. 2020. “Queer and Indigenous Art: Performing Ice Times in Climate Crisis.” Theatre Journal 72 (2): 143–162. Steiner, Gary. 2005. Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy . University of Pittsburgh Press. Tillis, Steve. 1992. Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as a Theatrical Art, Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies Number 47 . Greenwood Press. Varney, Denise. 2022. “Caught in the Anthropocene: Theatres of Trees, Place and Politics.” Theatre Research International 47 (1): 7–27. Woynarski, Lisa. 2020. Ecodramaturgies: theatre, performance and climate change . Palgrave Macmillan. References About the author(s) Opalanietet is a PhD candidate in Theatre & Performance Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and has been a teacher of Contemporary Indigenous Theatre & Performance at The New School in New York City and SUNY Purchase. He also has taught Classical Theatre at Boston University and World Theatre at Pace University. In addition, Opalanietet holds a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and is a theatre practitioner in New York City, including being the founder and artistic director of Eagle Project, http://www.eagleprojectarts.org . Indigenous Stages tah-kōx INDIGENOUS STAGES is the world’s first interdisciplinary academic journal dedicated solely to the theatrical and cultural performance of Indigenous artists and communities from across the globe. Published by The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center at CUNY, the mission of INDIGENOUS STAGES is to foster, survey, and publish the contemporary and historical theoretical discourse surrounding the field. Peer-reviewed articles as well as critical book and performance reviews will contribute to further strengthen Indigenous studies as an academic discipline within theatre and performance studies. Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Indigenous Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The Natural Landscape of Native Puppetry Previous Next Attribution: Table of Contents for this volume

Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Adil Mansoor in Amm(i)gone at Long Wharf Theatre. Photo: Curtis Brown Photography Black Trans Women at the Center Eva Reign, Elisawon Etidorhpa, Simone Immanuel, Asteria LaFaye Summers, Indie Johnson (28 Sept. online, then streamed through 1 Oct.) The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion, adapted by Jonathan Silverstein (8 Nov. – 10 Dec., various locations) A View from the Bridge Arthur Miller (10 Feb. – 10 Mar., Canal Dock Boathouse, New Haven) Sanctuary City Martyna Majok (28 Mar. – 21 Apr., TheaterWorks Hartford) Darren Criss Benefit Concert (13 May, Lyman Center for the Performing Arts) Amm(I)gone Adil Monsoor (28 May – 23 Jun. Yale Theatre and Performance Studies Black Box) Long Wharf Theatre used two marketing slogans during the 2023-24 season: “Theatre is for Everyone” and “Theatre of Possibility.” The two themes come together in the statement on the theatre's home page, “We are committed to revolutionizing the power and possibility of live theater [sic] as a catalyst to bring people together and   fulfill our promise of 'theatre for everyone.'” The themes came together in Long Wharf's four in-person dramatic productions, which were presented in a variety of venues, exploring where it is possible to do theatre, and bringing people together to experience stories representing the diversity of New Haven's communities. Three of the four shows were co-productions with other East Coast theatres, connecting these theatre communities. The Year of Magical Thinking, produced in partnership with the Keen Company, was an adaptation by Jonathan Silverstein, the director, of Joan Didion's book, performed by Kathleen Chalfant. Last year Long Wharf left the theatre space it had occupied since 1965 and adopted a mobile theatre model; The Year of Magical Thinking took that to an extreme by being performed in Long Wharf supporters' living rooms and public libraries around New Haven. In a New Haven Register article, Kit Ingui, Long Wharf's managing director, explained that the show is designed to be staged in intimate spaces. Indeed, the show I saw was simply Kathleen Chalfant, as Joan Didion, talking to us, the audience, about the year during which both her husband and daughter died. The staging at the Milford Public Library was minimal: a low platform, two side tables, a chair, and a table lamp at one side of the library's meeting room—space enough for a grieving woman to tell us her loss. Anshuman Bhatia was credited with the lighting design, but there was no stage lighting. It was a simple, powerful piece. A View from the Bridge was performed on the top floor of the Canal Dock Boathouse, a carpeted room with a curved wall of windows looking out at the New Haven Harbor and Long Island Sound. The setting was composed of planked platforms, three free-standing doorways, a row of coat hooks, furniture, and a hanging lamp in a corner of the room, with the audience in seating banks wrapping the playing space by 90 degrees. Stage lighting equipment was hung on a black truss grid. The open deck outside the windows was used for street scenes, and the fateful knife fight was staged there. Microphones and speakers brought the noise and dialog inside for the audience, but it was easier to hear the action than to see it. The show tapped themes important to Long Wharf Theatre—immigration, gender roles, and homophobia—and probably had resonance for New Haven's large Italian-American community. However, the casting muddied the message. Alfieri, Eddie's lawyer and the narrator, was played by Patricia Black, a woman wearing a man's suit. It was hard to believe that Eddie, who worries that Rodolpho is homosexual and who has trouble dealing with the two female characters as his equal, would confide in a woman. Sanctuary City was a coproduction with TheaterWorks Hartford and was performed in TheaterWorks's theatre. It was co-directed by Jacob G. Padrón, Long Wharf's artistic director, and Pedro Bermúdez. Set in Newark, starting shortly after 9/11 and running through late 2005, it's a three-character piece about two undocumented alien teenagers—girl G and boy B—trying to stay in the USA, and B's lover, who complicates G and B's relationship. It's a compact story about the struggles of two Dreamers, well-acted by Sara Gutierrez and Grant Kennedy Lewis, but a tight playing space made it hard for me to see them. Emmie Finkel designed a setting with translucent panels for video projections by Pedro Bermúdez. The panels forced the action downstage where audience members and support columns blocked my view. Some of the projections were pretty but slowed the show. The show's opening was a video of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. That attack triggered tighter rules and suspicion of immigrants—part of the play's background—but I doubt anyone in the audience needed to be reminded of what happened on 9/11. For the final show, Long Wharf Theatre presented Amm(i)gone , a Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and PlayCo show produced in association with Kelly Strayhorn Theater and presented in the Theater and Performance Studies Black Box at Yale University. It was a one-person show created and performed by Adil Monsoor, supported in his storytelling by recorded video, live video, and audio recordings in a setting of Ramadan lanterns, cubes, and panels with mashrabiya lattice work. It was an intensely personal story about coming to America from Pakistan, Adil's relationship with his mother, and the tension between familial love and religious duty. His mother has become extremely religious and struggles to accept Adil’s queerness. To connect with her, Adil engaged with her by phone on a project to translate Sophocles' Antigone into Urdu. Antigone is often viewed as a conflict between Antigone and Creon over civil law and religious duty, but Adil emphasized the love between Ismene and Antigone, which endures despite Ismene's concern that Antigone is making a terrible mistake. During the post-show talk-back, one audience member identified herself as a gay Asian woman who came from an extremely religious family. This was the first time she'd seen her story on stage, and she was grateful. I thought about my own Catholic grandmother struggling to reconcile Church Law with her daughter's remarriage after divorce. It was a show about being gay, Muslim, and an immigrant, but it spoke to many. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Long Wharf Theatre has announced the 2024-25 season with the marketing slogan “Building our future together”: Artistic Congress, the 5th Annual Black Trans Women at the Center: New Play Festival , She Loves Me , El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle Of Doom,  and Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Toward Destiny . The Artistic Congress will be a conference, held a little more than a week before the US presidential election, to discuss theatre and democracy, consider the intersection of creativity and civic engagement, and create a broad network of artists amplifying the impact of collective effort—building our future together. References Footnotes About The Author(s) KARL G. RULING is the technical editor for Protocol , the journal of the Entertainment Services and Technology Association. Prior to that position, he was the technical editor for Theatre Crafts and Lighting Dimensions magazines, and a contributor to Stage Directions . He has an MFA in theatre design from the University of Illinois, and a BA with majors in Dramatic Art and Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has designed scenery, lighting, special effects, or sound for over 100 productions. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Kevin T. Browne Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Kevin T. Browne By Published on May 27, 2018 Download Article as PDF The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics . Eddie Paterson. New York: Methuen, 2015; Pp. 232. The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics by Eddie Paterson offers comparative analyses of solo performance artists Spalding Grey, Laurie Anderson, Anna Deavere Smith, and Karen Finley. In his introduction, Paterson clearly lays out his arguments and the organization of the book, which focuses on the connections between “two trajectories – solo performance as an integral part of US culture, politics, and media, and monologue as it appears in Western dramatic traditions” (1). He examines these artists’ works as uniquely American, at once belonging to their time and commenting upon it as if observing it from a distance. In their own fashion, each of these artists performs politics as a critique of turn-of-the-century neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, and the assumed rightness of privilege inherent in these ideologies. Paterson is an Australian who came of age after these artists had achieved canonization, and he delivers his analyses with what he calls “the almost obscene benefit of hindsight and with a vision of American culture and performance that comes from afar and…is already mediated and filtered” (3). It is ironic that Paterson describes these solo artists as finding their form and meaning in performance, as distinct from and apart from traditional dramatic literature, and yet finds himself examining them from a remove, without having seen them live. Paradoxically, this vantage point serves him well. While his theoretical and historical contextualization and analysis are strong, and his scholarship is thorough, he is at his best when offering vivid and immediate close-reading descriptions of the performances of these artists. In his introduction, the author identifies three key features that distinguish the work of these American solo artists from the monologue genre in Western dramatic tradition: parody – ironic commentary on contemporary history and politics; mediatization – the works engage with and are often consumed as video (and sometimes audio) reproductions; and personae – the privileging of the performing personality over traditional character. In all four cases, the reliability of narrator and narration is a central issue. The first two chapters of the book provide historical context for the works of the American solo artists. First, Paterson traces the monologue as a genre in Western drama chronologically from the Greeks and Romans through the modernists and post-modernists. Building on the work of previous scholars such as Deborah R. Geis, he notes the direct relationship that monologue affords between the speaker and the audience, which often serves to disrupt and subvert narrative. Not surprisingly, Paterson finds in Brecht, Pinter, and especially Beckett the radical transformation of the monologue that informs contemporary work. In the second chapter, Paterson changes direction by arguing that the influences that gave rise to American solo performance owe less to the Western dramatic tradition and more to the oratorical tradition of political speeches, religious sermons, and the like. The “American Jeremiad” tradition began early in the development of the nation to define and uphold the status quo, especially to link together religious fervor with capitalist energies. Nevertheless, progressive voices such as those from the Abolitionist and Civil Rights movements have also used these rhetorical techniques. It is these “anti-mainstream American voices” (45) that connect most closely to the solo artists, who each receive a chapter of analysis in the main part of the book. In examining Spalding Gray’s “confessional monologue,” Paterson notes that Gray’s best-known works, though originally performed live, have been widely disseminated as films and recordings. Paterson seems to have experienced them only in this way. The author posits that the “mediatization and the mass production of these monologues has been examined for the way they break down distinctions between high art and commodity culture” (55). In Gray’s conflation between the stage persona and the “‘real-live’ self,” (59) the charismatic performer ironically presents himself as both authentic and unreliable, obliquely critiquing American politics and culture while simultaneously confessing his complicity “through the eyes of a self-consciously privileged persona: a white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon male” (55). In contrast to Gray, with his table, chair, and glass of water, Laurie Anderson’s “post-punk monologue” achieves parody by situating her small lone body within massive multi-media environments. Paterson nonetheless recalls the textual content of these technological performances. Focusing on her works from the 1980s, the author shows how they represent a critical response to Reagan-era social and economic policies. Sampling, cutting, and pasting serve to fragment narrative, and electronic voice alteration and androgynous appearance further deconstruct, confuse, dehumanize, and unsex the Anderson persona. Anna Deavere Smith is unique in this group as a solo performer of verbatim documentary theatre and as directly tied with the American civil rights tradition of monologue performance. Paterson finds that in her “rights monologue” explorations of race, class, and the diversity of American lives and attitudes, Smith’s work is neither overtly ironic nor self-reflexive. Yet, Paterson argues, Smith’s implied objectivity deserves critique. The authenticity of the speaker—who is never the performer herself—is asserted within the performance by her remarkable imitative skills. Still, Smith is the curator, selecting, editing, ordering, and performing. Her “acting practices,” Paterson says, “present identity as changeable, performative, and negotiated,” (116) thus enabling “ironic consideration of neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideology” (125). The persistent disconnection between herself and her subjects is deliberate. Paterson gives Karen Finley’s flamboyant, colorful, and transgressive performance the name of “radical monologue” because of the degree to which “she joyfully deploys and subverts multiple personae, non-linear texts and the wholesale rejection of coherent dramatic character” to “critique American culture and politics” (128). Paterson’s descriptions vivify the ways in which text and performance engender meaning and how “the real life persona of ‘Karen Finley’ intermingles with the personae performed in the spoken texts” (133). While Paterson quotes some of the more outrageous utterances in the works and notes how Finley’s membership in the NEA 4 made her famous, he understates the radical use she often makes of her own body (such as the infamous smearing of chocolate and honey over her naked self) as a site of ideological contention. The book’s closing chapter, “Future Monologue,” serves as a summation and conclusion. Paterson predicts the lasting effects of the modes of performance that he dubs “post dramatic” and “post monologue.” This theatrical landscape continues to break down distinctions between the fictional and the real and offers powerful theatrical means of interrogating the cultural assumptions of power. Paterson’s work is a significant addition to the critical studies of these four particular artists, the historical framework that contextualizes them, and the monologue form. Those who are led by the title to expect a monologue sourcebook for actors (as I was) will encounter much more. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Kevin T. Browne University of Central Arkansas Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Baron Kelly Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Baron Kelly By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF For Asian American actors, there is a persistent fear of being left out of the diversity conversation entirely, since “diversity” has often been conflated with Black representation only. Black actors Earle Hyman, James Earl Jones, Gloria Foster, and Franchelle Steward Dorn broke ground by playing leading roles in classical and contemporary plays. Joining their ranks, Randall Duk Kim is a Hawaiian-born Chinese-Korean American actor whose work may also be held up as an extraordinary yet under-examined example of Asian American representation. Kim has performed leading roles in the works of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Molière, and Ibsen at institutions like the esteemed New York Shakespeare Festival as well as regional theatres, including the American Conservatory Theater, Guthrie Theater, and his own American Players Theatre, which he founded in Wisconsin in 1979. Among his television and film performances, he is most well-known as the Key Maker in The Matrix Reloaded and Oogway in Kung Fu Panda. Kim starred in the American Place Theatre’s historic Asian American productions of The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon. His Broadway appearances include The King and I (1996), Golden Child (1988), and Flower Drum Song (2002). The following is an edited version of the interview that I conducted with Kim on January 4, 2022. Baron Kelly: Let me start by saying that this is a genuinely incredible honor for me to dialogue with you, Randy. You have been a true inspiration for me and countless others in your work and craft. Randall Duk Kim: That is very kind and gracious of you to say. BK: Let’s start with talking about Earle Ernst at the University of Hawaiʻi when you were a theology major there. RDK: He was the head of the Drama department. And, of course, he was a kabuki expert. He oversaw the censorship program of legitimate Japanese theatre during the American occupation. After the war, Earle was part of the American occupation forces there, and he got to know the kabuki actors and the kabuki theatre. Earl also established The Great Play Cycle at the University of Hawaiʻi. Those works in our dramatic western heritage had a significant impact on me. I became entranced by the great plays’ questions they encompassed. BK: Were you a student actor in the productions, and did that ignite your love of classical drama? RDK: I never had a formal acting class. I jumped right into the work itself. I watched by imitating. I studied under the tutelage of a kabuki master, Oneo Kuroemon II, whom Earl had brought over from Japan. His family is six generations in the kabuki theatre starting in the 18th century. He was passing on centuries of physical and vocal work. In the kabuki tradition, one of the key methods of a student learning anything is imitating someone who’s teaching you specific methods and ways of doing a walk, a gesture, a way of speaking to have the visceral experience in your body, your voice. Another influence was my upbringing as a fundamentalist Baptist and learning my Bible. I had a foothold into Elizabethan speech by using the King James Bible and being familiar with that. In the Bible, you’re dealing with poetic language. BK: Eventually, you left the university, went to New York, and dove into trying to become an actor going to auditions for classical theatre. Did you face any resistance being an Asian American actor auditioning for classical theatre? RDK: No, not really, although I was at a cattle call for a film, and the woman running the call came in the room, saw me, and announced in a booming voice with everyone present, “We don’t need any Orientals. Orientals are not needed for this.” BK: She said “Orientals”? RDK: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I vowed that I was not going to permit myself to be in a situation like that ever again. I was not going to be in a position where either my race or my height would prevent me from doing what I love to do. I was going to prove to people that I could do the job. When I got to New York, I started looking for summer Shakespeare festival work. So, I would send out pictures and resumes and get rejection letters. I finally got hired by the Champlain Shakespeare Festival up in Vermont. I did three summer seasons with them. I also managed to work between summers. I did a couple of stints with the New York Shakespeare Festival. In the meantime, in the city, the American Place Theatre used me. BK: When you talk about the American Place Theatre, are you referring to your work in Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and Year of the Dragon (1974)? The Chickencoop Chinaman was the first play written by an Asian American to be produced professionally in New York. Frank Chin paved the way for playwrights, including David Henry Hwang and Philip Kan Gotanda. From your standpoint, what was the importance of the premieres of Frank Chin’s plays at the American Place Theatre? RDK: Frank is significant. And just a singular and unique voice among playwrights in general, not just as an Asian American playwright but among playwrights. Frank’s voice is of a contemporary poet. I had to wrestle with the language in his work. The character of Tam Lum in Chinaman said things that I would never say in my life. That was a whole new experience for me. I thought the play was out of my league because it was a contemporary work, and I was uncomfortable doing it. The character was verbose and rough. I was doing too much Shakespeare. Frank would say to me, “I want to dirty your mouth.” BK: Randy, Miss Saigon (1991) framed the modern discussion of racial diversity and Asian American representation. It was argued that the production supported the practice of yellowface, casting non-Asians in roles written for Asians, often relying on physical and cultural stereotypes to make broad comments about identity. Slant eyes have also been used in popular culture as a form of erasure, that whiteness is the norm in the US. Because your artistry is also about transformation, were there any feelings you had? RDK: Asian American actors have been underrepresented in the business. Society has got to deal with issues of representation and wrestle with them. One of the best ways the theatre can deal with these issues is to start a multiracial company. Let me say that nobody under the sun would accept me without my doing something with my physical being in doing Falstaff. They would never believe that I was Falstaff without the padding, face, and makeup. An older man who’s overweight. So, I created a vision of how I thought Falstaff could look. BK: This is a nice segue into my next question. When did your interest in the art of makeup and transformation begin? RDK: I got my first makeup kit in the 6th grade. I found an early makeup book called The Last Word in Makeup. And for a while, I carried that around, my little Bible. It was amazing that someone could have the tools to make themselves into another person. And for me, that was like a key. It was a way to step into somebody else’s shoes, to take on somebody else’s life for a time, for a moment, whether it was an older man or a hag or a Quasimodo. It was a magic key. Our eyes can be biased, and I will play with the audience’s bias to take them on a deeper journey into a story and a character’s life that they may not have expected. We’re drawing up lines now, and we’re drawing each other out of our box. BK: Did no one ever approach you about why you transformed your features as part of your craft? RDK: During a summer Shakespeare workshop at the Public Theater, a young Asian American man practically called me a banana, yellow on the outside, white on the inside. He wanted to know why I had to use makeup. As far as being white on the inside, I was educated in the west; I wasn’t educated in the east. I am closer to Plato than I am to Confucius in my whole frame of reference. I played the role of Hamlet at the Guthrie without makeup, but there are certain characters like Falstaff, Shylock, or Puck I have done makeup for because they deserved their own unique look. In my education, these plays are part of my history. Recently, I saw The Lehman Trilogy with Adrian Lester on Broadway. Lester played the brother of two white actors, and no one batted an eye. BK: Asian American actors have been historically underrepresented on the stage and usually have not been allowed to tell their own stories. You have been and continue to be the exception. Randy, you have been the only Asian American actor to build a track record and develop a reputation in many classical roles. Other actors did not follow your path. You are a true anomaly. RDK: We’ve got to get back to the art of acting. The argument is sometimes used, “Well, it’s more truthful to be without makeup.” It’s nonsense. The Greeks used masks, and a lot of truth was spewed out on their stages. So, don’t tell me masks or makeup inhibit the truth. Theatre should be a place for transformation and that our instruments can be conduits for experiences that are greater than we are. We need to develop a racially diverse and genuinely American repertory company. How we cast our stories is an essential part of creating the American culture we want. BK: When you’ve worked with younger actors on Broadway in plays like Golden Child or Flower Drum Song and The King and I, did anyone ask you to share any advice or wisdom? RDK: What I could share was that I want them to find a way to strengthen and expand their imaginations because possibly what’s happening in our time is imaginations are withering into nothing. I don’t know whether there’s a study on our capacity to imagine. And yet, Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. We need to strengthen our imagination somehow to do meaningful work in the theatre. Otherwise, it’s all going to be small, withered, malformed, not healthy, not robust, not as wide-ranging as humankind is. I think. All our stories are rich. BK: I hear you saying that we should encompass the broadest possible human experience. Have you seen courageous casting choices? RDK: I think the most courageous casting choice is to recognize talent regardless of its package. For the actor to communicate to the audience that, “I belong here. I belong in this world.” That’s what’s courageous. The challenge to the actor is to make us believe you’re a Roman. I don’t care what the color of your skin is. You make us believe. Society has to get a grip on itself. Also, I believe the prejudices of the powerbrokers who are casting directors, directors, and producers must be tackled. We must get away from making judgements on a person’s appearance. BK: I think we can both agree that if an actor’s ethnicity aligns with a role whose ethnicity is pertinent to the character in the script, that character should be cast as written. RDK: Yes. BK: Today, many young actors are skimming along the surface of the text without understanding how phrasing plays a large part in speech discipline. The text must live through them. It’s like scoring music. RDK: The best writers manage to take language and almost give the soul a means to express itself. I often use the image of an iceberg. The play itself sits on the top of the iceberg. That’s what you can see and touch. But beneath the iceberg is this vast amount of unknown. And that’s what you’ve got to explore and plummet and find out. BK: You founded the American Players Theatre with your artistic life partners, your wife, Anne Occhiogrosso, and your late business partner, Charles Bright, who had an idea to form a theatre company in Spring Green, Wisconsin. RDK: For fifteen years, we talked about an American classical repertory company. We discovered that cutting a text for whatever reason, whether it’s to get the audience out so they can catch their bus, or whether it’s too long, or whether the scene is repetitious, didn’t make any sense ultimately. We needed to know how the plays worked uncut and conducive to the story in a period that the playwright probably imagined, Ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy, or wherever, to see the story within a context that could perhaps reveal something about the characters living in that world. We needed to start a company to do that kind of work and find out what these great plays say to us. If you already begin to twist it about and manipulate it, you’re not going to learn anything. It’s like a scientist going into an Amazonian village and saying, “Okay. If you dress in jeans, then I’ll observe you.” What are you going to learn from that? So, we needed to do it. By and large, it worked. Audiences sat there thinking, “I understand this. It’s not obscure.” BK: You also had a particular vision to train an acting company. You wanted to form a center for the classics, research, training, and productions. That’s above and beyond just presenting plays. RDK: I wanted to start a school for the actors to study the plays, the playwrights, and the periods in which those plays developed. We hired a superb teacher of martial arts and tai chi. Jerry Gardner was our tai chi teacher. He was a champion kung fu fighter who knew sitting meditation, tai chi, kung fu, and ballet. We were beginning to form a faculty. Then the board came along and said, “No. It’s too costly.” Throw it together, turn it out for the summer, make money, bring in an audience. But the very idea of a quality world repertory company, an American company, couldn’t be had. BK: You had a clarion call for about a decade in this belief for a company. RDK: It was an uphill battle with the board. Every season I felt like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn. I also frequently thought about the description of John the Baptist, the voice in the wilderness. BK: You’ve had many honors in your life, including an Obie for sustained excellence of performance. Currently, you’re participating in the Actors’ Equity Association’s Performing Arts Legacy Project to document your career. How does Randall Duk Kim measure success? RDK: I think I measure it by how well I’ve built a bridge between the past and the present. Has it been a good bridge where the past and the present can meet, see, and hear each other? BK: The legacy and artistry of Randall Duk Kim must not be forgotten. Is there an essence of Randall Duk Kim that you want people to know and always remember? RDK: I would say, “An actor who tried to see clearly.” References Footnotes About The Author(s) Baron Kelly is a four-time Fulbright Scholar and Professor of Theatre in the Theatre and Drama Department at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His teaching of acting has led him to teaching and lecturing residencies in more than a dozen countries on five continents and in twenty American states. Baron has performed internationally for the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain; Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada; National Theatre of Norway; Yermelova Theatre, Moscow, Russia; Constans Theatre, Athens, Greece; Academy Theatre Dublin; Edinburgh Theatre Festival; Bargello, Florence, Italy; among others. Broadway credits include Salome and Electra. Classical and contemporary roles for over 30 of America’s leading regional theatres including the Oregon, Utah, Dallas Fort Worth, and California Shakespeare Festivals; Yale Repertory; the Guthrie; Old Globe San Diego; among others. He has a PhD in Theatre Research from UW Madison and a diploma in Acting from London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. 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 Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jada M. Campbell Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Jada M. Campbell By Published on April 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past . Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. In this important scholarly work, Ariel Nereson defines historiography through movement, allowing us to see “democracy moving” through the lens of Bill T. Jones, choreographer and co-founder of BTJ/AZ. Early on, she introduces Bill T. Jones’ "The Auction," performed during the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors, and analyzes its rejection of assessing black progress as validated by white standards. The dance embodies modes of black excellence through historically white narratives, using movement. Nereson explains the symbolism of the piece’s location. For Jones, showcasing this piece in front of the former president, Barack Obama, represents his 2008 election as the signifier of "inclusion." Nereson explains how representation becomes a trend promoting the new standard of national optics in the US. While American enslavement has long ended, its modes still haunt and dilute the potential of freedom and liberty. "The Auction" succeeds by rejecting the image of integrational unity and tokenism-enforced diversity as the solution to achieving black success and overcoming racial oppression. In the first chapter, “Commission,” Nereson explains that "total artistic freedom" (Nereson 26) is a choice that comes with sacrifice. This chapter focuses on commercialized liberty. Dance artists, particularly black dance artists, are faced with the conflict of limited freedom over their craft and how it gets presented. While many dance companies in the U.S. strive to promote diverse representation, the terms are mostly conditional. Many dance companies view black dance artists and choreographers as a monolith, stripping them of individuality. Non-black funders inform the public of what it means to be black. Race influences funding as appearance plays a significant role in decisions made from positions of power. Nereson explains the ways in which Jones resists these limitations as a dance artist and a producer, knowing that being selective risks steady work. Being selective does not solely concern which jobs to reject or accept, but also how choreographers use movement to define narratives. Jones' main struggle was interpreting the narrative of Abraham Lincoln's mission as it relates to black liberty, rather than choreographing a narrative of the Great Emancipator. In the second chapter, "Text," Nereson delineates the complex relationship between text and movement. Nereson uses BTJ/AZ's Serenade to illustrate a cohesive relationship between text and movement as the piece contains several speeches. While language can have multiple meanings, it can be more clearly defined by movements, incorporating speeches into their works. The company’s fine line between formalism and true storytelling matters: Because Jones wants to avoid over-romanticizing and making fantastical true historic events relating to black trauma and oppression, he incorporates honest storytelling. He draws parallels between the relationship of pure movement and its opposition to text/movement dualities to parallel those between separate but equal beliefs. Creating pure movement through segregation from text embodies racial purity in the form of performance art. Chapter Three, "Character," focuses mainly on alternative ways of humanizing through movement. Nereson uses BTJ/AZ's Serenade/The Proposition and FDWH to illustrate how the development of character, especially a historical figure, can be viewed from a different angle. While this approach is not iconoclastic, Lincoln’s character gets taken down a peg from deity status to a more relatable one. This chapter identifies the shift away from the traditional historiography of Lincoln pertaining to heroism to his personal, romantic life as central to Lincoln’s story. Nereson analyzes the three primary narrative prototypes: heroic, sacrificial and romantic. While challenging the national value based on patriarchal white supremacy, Serenade/The Proposition also challenges Lincoln’s narrative as a historical figure by painting him as an erotic partner. The piece stages eroticism, yet targets the human experience rather than vulgarity. Jones forms character development through movement and the characters’ physicality. In Chapter Four, "Place," Nereson analyzes the function of site-specific projects, using BTJ/AZ's 100 Migrations to explain the relationship between location and community. 100 Migrations, also known as “The Hundreds,” is a project that premiered in Charlottesville, VA, a liberalized conservative area. This chapter’s main argument emphasizes how the climax of a piece devised by Charlottesville residents and BTJ/AZ choreographers created a “kinesthetic landscape” serving as both a performance and community space. Nereson analyzes BTJ/AZ’s 100 Migrations as history through dance, speculating on the democratic tendencies within the conservative space. Nereson looks at the relationship between staging and place, discussing the symbolism of the South as the setting, making it a physical representation of Virginia’s history. In the fifth chapter, “Body,” Nereson examines the racialized embodiment in Lincoln Repertory performances. Specifically focusing on the FDWH piece, Nereson looks for answers in Jones’ investigation of blackness as a body vs character. Blackness is not viewed through a humanized scope but is rather objectified and made for display. Here, we journey back to the discourse concerning American enslavement relating to property over agency. In this case, the Lincoln Repertory is placed on display as Nereson illustrates the redefined enslavement of company expectations and its regulations over creativity that has yet to be diluted or stripped of its authenticity. Nereson highlights how the pressure to meet company standards changes the voice of the black dance artist. Chapter six, “Circulation,” covers the cyclical relationship between art and community. Here, Nereson outlines the artistic practice of spreading cultural wealth in communities, while respecting historically minoritarian foundations. This chapter discusses the dark side of diversity that caters to optics, leading to the erasure of individuality. Nereson analyzes the power of institutional spaces and the influence that universities carry as places of education and development. Nereson narrates the event of BTJ/AZ’s visit to the University of North Carolina- Greensboro presenting Serenade/The Proposition. This piece circulated a response to critical concerns regarding race and neoliberalism. Circulating performance means engaging with the community. In the coda, Nereson examines how Bill T. Jones’ Lincoln Repertory influences movement-based performance. She also analyzes how New York’s Live Arts perception of dance relies on visual differences to speak for diversity. Democracy Moving embodies scholarship that speaks most loudly to not only black aspiring dance artists and choreographers but also mid-career dance artists and choreographers of various racial backgrounds. Rather than simply concluding the volume’s impressive analysis of dance as an engaging history, this coda questions the ways we can continue striving to avoid essentialism through the expansion of neoliberal arts in the Americas. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JADA M. CAMPBELL 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 Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Samuel Shanks Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 2 Visit Journal Homepage Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Samuel Shanks By Published on April 23, 2015 Download Article as PDF William Dunlap’s final play, A Trip to Niagara (1828), might be the most misunderstood play in the history of the American stage. Despite being an unqualified success with its cosmopolitan New York audiences in 1828-9, it has been regularly, and almost always inaccurately, maligned by twentieth and twenty-first century historians who have described the play as a “well-done hackwork;” full of “puerile scenes and irrelevant characters;” and valuable only for the “certain amount of low comedy” that “could be extracted from it.” [1] At best Dunlap’s play has been described as “a workmanlike job;” at worst, “one of his poorest” efforts, a play that “could hardly be said to have challenged the preeminence of contemporary British playwrights, let alone Shakespeare.” [2] As I will argue in this essay, the glaring disconnect between the play’s warm public reception and its subsequent criticism by historians often appears to be rooted in a kind of historical mythology that haunts the field of theatre history. Unperceived biases and assumptions often color interpretations of historical evidence, and these flawed perceptions are frequently transmitted from one generation of historians to the next, forming a kind of mythology around a subject that has the power to color future interpretations of new evidence. Just such a historical mythology appears to be at the heart of most criticisms of A Trip to Niagara. The core of this myth concerns the assumption that the early American theatre and its audiences were sadly primitive, and too many histories of the American stage have followed some variation of the progress-narrative that begins with this notion of primitivism and then moves toward, and ultimately culminates in, the organic emergence of a proud national theatre in the early Twentieth Century. But a careful examination of Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its original reception reveals that this image is at best incomplete; indeed, if one assumes that A Trip to Niagara was not a complete anomaly, then the notion of the primitivism of the early American stage might turn out to be fatally flawed. This overarching myth of primitivism is rooted in a series of more specific assumptions that one might think of as “sub-myths.” It is these more specifically-focused minor myths that can be heard resonating in the criticisms of Dunlap’s play. The assumptions that 1) character development did not reach beyond the presentation of simple stage-types; that 2) American theatres were polluted by pervasive and unreflective racism; that 3) spectacle-driven performances were inferior, simplistic entertainments for simple-minded spectators; and that 4) American audiences were generally unsophisticated and easily sated by inferior fare, combine to lend the impression that the early American theatre had a great deal of growing up to do. The bulk of this essay will focus on the specific problems with each of these sub-myths in turn, but for the sake of those who are not familiar with Dunlap’s final play, a brief overview of its plot will prove useful. A Quietly Complicated Play As the title indicates, A Trip to Niagara is a journey play that follows a group of European tourists, mostly English, on a trip from New York City, up the Hudson River to Albany, across the newly-opened Erie Canal to the shores of Lake Erie, and then finally the great waterfall at Niagara. The most spectacularly realized portion of the journey came in the form of production’s much-hyped ‘Eidophusikon,’ a moving diorama that shifted an enormous painted canvas across the stage between two large scrolls, which depicted the steamship voyage from New York harbor, up the Hudson River, as far as Catskill Landing. [3] The play’s satire-driven conflict arises from the divergent opinions held by the stodgy, upper-class English character Wentworth and his more open-minded sister Amelia regarding the virtues of the nation through which they travel. Wentworth is portrayed as a narrow-minded fool, and early in the play Amelia encourages her suitor, John Bull, to try to “cure” her brother of his “obstinate determination to see nothing but through the coloured glasses of the book-makers.” [4] The tourists’ journey to Niagara Falls is thereafter punctuated by John Bull’s numerous comic attempts to cure Mr. Wentworth’s “social disorder.” Along the way, the ‘travellers’ encounter a broad array of people and places, which together serve as a kind of cultural panorama to compliment the moving diorama in Act II. A Trip to Niagara is interesting in that the unspoken content of the play is, in many ways, more important than its spoken dialog. Dunlap’s nuanced celebration of American achievements in politics, engineering, and the arts serves as a quiet refutation of the works of the numerous critical “book-makers” such as Francis Trollope and the actor Charles Matthews. This unspoken content comes primarily in the form of allusions to cultural materials from the period, most of which lies outside the normal purview of many of the historians who have written about the play, and many of the clearest historiographical errors have popped up in works with a non-theatrical focus. Oral Sumner Coad and Robert Canary, Dunlap’s major biographers, both fail to notice many of the cultural references that Dunlap layered into the play’s characters. Coad describes them erroneously as a series of “dialect characters,” while Canary similarly sees them as “gallery of stage types”; both authors make a point of listing the types (Negro, Frenchman, Yankee, Irishman, etc.) as if their label fully articulated their purpose in the play. [5] Given the largely non-theatrical focus of these biographies, these misinterpretations are understandable; nonetheless, it is worth noting that both Coad and Canary, writing more than fifty years apart, each fall back on the historical myth that stock characters, and little else, were to be expected in plays from this era. It does not help that in the preface to the play, Dunlap downplays his script as a “farce” intended as “a kind of running accompaniment to the more important product of the Scene-painter.” [6] Nearly everyone who has written about this play has mistakenly taken the often self-deprecating Dunlap at his word, and has assumed that what followed would be as unimportant and simplistic as Dunlap claims. But the classification of this play as a farce is a problematic one. A Trip to Niagara really is not a farce. It is, in fact, much closer to the sort of satirical social comedies exemplified by Royal Tyler’s The Contrast , or Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion . But even this designation fails to capture the major elements of cultural panorama that are central to the play. These elements place A Trip to Niagara more in line with Dunlap’s other patriotic works such as Andre and The Glory of Columbia . [7] The fact that Dunlap downplays the significance of his own script should not surprise anyone who is familiar with this figure. In his monumental histories of both the American theatre and American painting, Dunlap continuously championed the work of his compatriots while largely downplaying the significance of his own contributions. [8] “A Gallery of Stage Types . . .” I will begin my analysis of the historical mythologies that supported the erroneous criticisms of this play by confronting the assumption that stock-characterization was the rule of the day. To be sure, the use of stock-characters was a prominent force during this period, particularly in the melodramas that were beginning to dominate the playwriting scene in the early Nineteenth Century. But exceptions to this trend were not uncommon; Shakespeare was still the most produced playwright on American stages, and there were a number of American playwrights such as John A. Stone who worked in a consciously Shakespearean vein. In short, the idea that the American theatre landscape was littered with nothing but stock-characters – a criticism which generally carried a derogative connotation within the progress narrative in which American playwrights “developed” toward the more noble goal of creating “well-rounded,” psychologically-complex characters – is simply an example of over-simplification, and that myth has guided more than one historian down the path of simplistic analysis. A careful examination reveals that A Trip to Niagara was populated by characters that were neither “stock” nor “rounded;” to evaluate the play according to this either/or standard is to misunderstand the way that the characters function in this play. Dunlap’s characters would be better described as what I term “referential” characters, which Dunlap used as a highly efficient way to invoke material from the complex cultural universe which he and his audience inhabited. The English actor Charles Matthews, the American theatre manager William Alexander Brown, and the character Leatherstocking from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers , each appear as characters in A Trip to Niagara , though they are not always acknowledged directly as such in the dialog. Dunlap’s characters have been consistently misidentified as “stock” because the historians writing about the play frequently clearly missed the embedded cultural referents that they were meant to invoke. [9] In the absence of specific evidence to the contrary, the more generalized myth of the use of stock-characters gets invoked to explain the lack of “roundness” exhibited by these characters. The tendency to jump to this conclusion is so great that several historians have overlooked the fact that the “Yankee” the “Frenchman” and “John Bull” in this play are all, in fact, the same character operating in different disguises. [10] The clearest example of Dunlap’s referential technique is his use of “Leatherstocking” from The Pioneers (1823), written by Cooper, a friend of Dunlap’s. [11] In A Trip to Niagara, Dunlap places Leatherstocking on the precise spot atop the eastern escarpment of the Catskills that Cooper describes so memorably in The Pioneers. The clarity of this quotation is unambiguous; this is no “stock” frontiersman, but an homage to a central character from two novels that were the literary toast of New York at the time that A Trip to Niagara opened at the Bowery. [12] Dunlap even has Leatherstocking speak primarily in quotes lifted directly from Cooper’s novel. Given the overwhelming popularity of both The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans, it seems reasonable to assume that a fair portion of the audience would have quickly grasped and appreciated what Dunlap was trying to achieve with this appropriation. Proof of this appreciation is evident in a comment made by the critic for the New York Dramatic Mirror : “We should very much like to know… why the character of Leatherstocking has been withdrawn? The first scene might have been curtailed to advantage, and this interesting part, nevertheless retained . ” [13] Based on this comment, it would seem that the reviewer was seeing the production for a second time, that Leatherstocking had been pulled from the production, and that the reviewer found this choice distressing. That historians have misidentified some of the other characters in A Trip to Niagara is much more understandable, as their cultural references were often subtle, complexly-layered, and based upon cultural material that might not be generally known to many historians. Yet the very lightness of Dunlap’s hand is a significant part of the play’s charm, and the play’s success points to the presence of an audience that was sophisticated enough to successfully decode and appreciate Dunlap’s subtle references. The most consistently misinterpreted character is the one who appears variously as John Bull, Monsieur Tonson, and Jonathan. The fact that “John Bull” appears in several scenes disguised as “Jonathan” has proven to be a stumbling block for many historians as both John Bull and Jonathan were popular stock-characters from the period. [14] But in A Trip to Niagara, these characters appear as references to both their exterior life as stock-characters and to performances of those characters by Charles Matthews, an English actor whose bastardization of the Yankee character Johnathan in his performances was particularly irksome to many American spectators. Dunlap relied heavily upon his audience’s knowledge of the transatlantic Anglo-American theatre to unpack the multi-faceted satire that he embedded in this character. From his first moment onstage, John Bull’s metatheatrical aura is immediately established when Amelia declares, “Mr. Bull! You in America?” Bull replies, “Yes, Amelia, John Bull in America.” [15] Theatrically-savvy spectators would have immediately appreciated this unambiguous reference to James Kirke Paulding’s 1825 play John Bull in America, or the New Munchausen . Dunlap solidly establishes the link between John Bull and Charles Matthews by having John Bull appear in disguise first as ‘Monsieur Tonson,’ one of Matthew’s more famous roles. In this scene, John Bull is not initially recognized by Amelia. When Bull-as-Tonson inquires, “Mam’selle Wentawort, you no know a me… Not know Monsieur Tonson,” Amelia immediately responds, “Only on the stage.” [16] Again, this metatheatrical reference doubtlessly amused those Bowery spectators who were familiar with the performances from Matthews’s American tour a few years earlier. Later, when John Bull appears in his ‘Jonathan’ disguise, the Bowery spectators would have enjoyed unpacking multiple layers of metatheatrical references: standing before them was William Chapman, an American actor, [17] who was satirically referencing the English comedian Charles Mathews by playing an archetypically defined Englishman (John Bull) who was pretending to be the archetypically defined Yankee Jonathan, a character with its own significant theatrical resonances. [18] As with many of Shakespeare’s ‘breeches’ roles, the perceptual slipperiness between these elements would have served as a primary source of theatrical pleasure in these scenes. This would be a fine example of a character that was metatheatrically-complex rather than psychologically-complex, and thus clearly at odds with the myth of the pervasive use of simplistic stock-characters. Yankee characters were popular with both American and English audiences, but for very different reasons. For urban American theatre-goers, Jonathan served as a kind of cultural intermediary, allowing urbanized spectators to commune, at a comfortable distance , with the virtues of a hard life of manual labor lived close to the American soil, while still highlighting how far they had come in their quest for modern, moral refinement. For the English, Jonathan’s tendency toward crude violence and moral outrage was more straightforwardly comic. As Maura Jortner discusses in Playing ‘America’ on Nineteenth-Century Stages, the English comedian Charles Matthews was particularly successful in his outrageous portrayals of Yankee characters. As performed by Matthews, Jonathan became merely cheap, conniving, and violent; willing to cheat others out of any good or service that they could. Many American spectators, witnessing these performances in England, were not amused. [19] Dunlap used his multivalent incarnation of Jonathan as a way to push back against Matthews and his English audiences. A Trip to Niagara’s original audiences would have noticed and enjoyed the subtle ways in which William Chapman as John Bull was overplaying his Jonathan disguise for the too-gullible Englishman Wentworth. Once the spectators identified the allusion to Matthews, even the play’s title, A Trip to Niagara, would also have acquired an additional resonance as a subtle reference to Matthew’s play A Trip to America, the play in which one of the more notorious corruptions of Jonathan appears. It is worth noting that two of the histories that discuss A Trip to Niagara most favorably, Francis Hodge’s Yankee Theatre and Jortner’s Playing ‘America’ on Nineteenth-Century Stages, are each direct studies of the Yankee character in the American Theatre. Dorothy Richardson’s Moving Diorama in Play focuses entirely on this play. Each of these three historians use their detailed knowledge of the production’s original context to decode Dunlap’s references and to then push back against the tide of unwarranted criticism against this play, particularly as it applied to the presentation of the John Bull/Jonathan character. [20] Dunlap’s depiction of the free black Job Jerryson has also been frequently misunderstood, often cast off as simply another “wooly-headed” stage-negro. In this instance another historical myth — that the American stage was universally racist in its depictions of African Americans — has frequently been compounded with the myth of the pervasive use of stock-characterization. Yet when considered in the context of Dunlap’s celebratory cultural-diorama, it seems unlikely that this would have been the case. An analysis of Job’s role within the production, along with an awareness of Dunlap’s abolitionist leanings, makes it very difficult to see this character as yet another in a long line of thoughtlessly buffoonish stock portrayals of African Americans. [21] Job plays an important role in the comic scenes in which he appears, but dramaturgically he is positioned as a straight-man against which the non-American characters Nancy and Dennis Dougherty serve as the comics. The comedy in these scenes arises from the ways in which the foreign characters fail to understand Job’s specific Americanisms; yet it is the foreigners, and not Job, who serve as the butts of the joke. On the contrary, Dunlap’s depiction of this free black should instead be seen as a prime example of the abolitionist sentiment in the early American theatre. Dunlap’s use of name “Job” is an important allusion that sets a clearly reverential tone for this character, yet surprisingly no historian ever discusses it. The biblical tale of a prosperous man who has his wealth and family torn away from him, who then is forced to endure massive physical torture, and who in the end is liberated from his strife and rewarded for his faith and perseverance, has obvious resonances with the story of slavery in America. William Dunlap was an ardent abolitionist: he freed his family’s slaves immediately following his father’s death, he was active in the Manumission Society, and he also served as a trustee of the Free School for African Children. [22] New York’s final eradication of slavery in 1827 would have been a cause of celebration for Dunlap, and his dignified depiction of the Job would seem to be a clear celebration of this event. Dunlap uses Job as the mouthpiece for the independent democratic spirit within this play. Job and Leatherstocking are the only American characters who are given a substantive amount of dialog, and it is Job who espouses the basic tenant of American liberty when he states, “Master! – I have no master. Master indeed… I am my own master.” [23] It seems unlikely, given Dunlap’s abolitionist position, and given the celebratory tone of the play, that Dunlap would have intended these lines to be parodic. Although the word ‘deference’ never appears in the play, it is clear that much of Wentworth’s discontent with the Americans stems from the deference that he expects from them, but fails to receive. The expurgation of deference as a bedrock element of interpersonal behavior in American society was one of the most radical outcomes of the American Revolution, one which set America apart from the rest of the English-speaking world. [24] Dunlap positions Job proudly as his on-stage voice for this liberated perspective. In doing so, he was not alone in choosing to dignify African American characters; he was, after all, part of a large and growing abolitionist movement. The lack of deference that Job displays openly in A Trip to Niagara is echoed by the black house-servant Mistress Remarkable in The Pioneers. Mistress Remarkable similarly refuses to demonstrate deference to the young lady Elizabeth declaring, “I will call her Betsy as much as I please; it’s a free country, and no one can stop me… I will talk just as I please.” [25] As was A Trip to Niagara, Cooper’s novel was warmly embraced by New Yorkers in the 1820’s, many of whom would have openly celebrated the tone of Mistress Remarkable’s declaration, just as they would have celebrated Job’s sense of self-possession. Abstractions aside, Job Jerryson also serves as Dunlap’s on-stage homage to William Alexander Brown, a free Black who managed a pleasure garden and multiple theatres in New York in the 1820’s. [26] Given the allusion to Brown, that fact that Job dresses and acts as a “Black Dandy” may have served, not as an opportunity for ridicule as some have asserted, but simply as an accurate reflection of the dress and manners of the kind of gentleman in question. Dunlap’s biographer Robert Canary is one of the few to argue that the depiction of Job is in fact a dignified, rather than a parodic one stating, “He may be the first picture on the American stage of a realistic, well-educated, free Negro.” [27] Because of the long shadow of blackface minstrelsy in the American theatre, it is very tempting to simply pigeon-hole this Black-dandy as a proto-Zip-Coon. But to do so is to allow the myth of the pervasive racism of the early-American stage to obscure the clear cultural references at work. Free blacks frequently adopted the dress and manners of upper-class Euro-Americans, promenading up and down Broadway with a boldness that was a subject of vibrant debate among cultural critics at the time. However, as Marvin McAllister has powerfully argued, these public demonstrations by free Blacks of their mastery of European social conventions should be seen as significant acts of personal liberation. Far from endorsing white superiority or exhibiting false consciousness, their whiteface acts rejected the negative connotations associated with blackness and advocated an alternative, more self-possessed African-American identity. [28] It seems likely that Job was intended as the embodiment of precisely the sort of self-possession that McAllister describes. [29] Almost nothing is known about how the character Job was performed at the time or how audiences perceived Dunlap’s use of this free Black. But the New York Dramatic Mirror’s review of the production proclaimed nothing but accolades for “Mr. Reed’s black dandy.” [30] It seems reasonable to assume that there would have been were various, competing factions within the Bowery audience who might have held differing views about Dunlap’s sympathetic portrayal of a free Black in this play. However, the final abolition of slavery in New York in 1827 would surely have emboldened the abolitionists like Dunlap within the Bowery audience. Fueling the tendency to view A Trip to Niagara as “a gallery of stage types,” is the fact that there does appear to be a single instance in which Dunlap uses a stock-character in the conventional manner. The Irishman Dennis Dougherty’s comic appeal resides solely in the absurd constancy with which he vacillates between fear and gullibility. Dramaturgically, Dunlap sets up Dougherty as the extreme version of the upper-class Englishman Wentworth. Dougherty possesses none of Wentworth’s social graces, and thus the more extreme Wentworth’s opinions of America become, the more he begins to align himself with the absurdity of Dougherty’s views, and the more ridiculous Wentworth appears to the audience. The less-than-flattering portrayal of the Irishman Dougherty was not lost upon at least one member of the play’s original audience. The production’s only truly negative review was published in The Irish Shield , which bemoaned the depiction of Dougherty stating, “We are sure no Irishman ever sat for the daubed picture of Dennis Dougherty, which is no more like a son of the Emerald Isle, than Mr. H. Wallack is like a Lilliputian.” [31] The fact that Dougherty represents such a strikingly divergence within the play’s dramatis personae could be seen as one of the play’s clearest flaws. But it may also be that this is an instance in which Dunlap layered in a cultural reference that has yet to be uncovered. [32] A Spectacle of Recognition… Historical analyses of spectacle-anchored productions can be maddeningly simplistic, and display an inherent bias against the very idea of such productions. This bias is apparent in the literature on A Trip to Niagara . Nearly every historian who has written about it dutifully recites the fact that six months prior to the opening of the Bowery production, another moving-diorama-anchored production entitled Paris and London: a Tale of Both Cities opened at the Park Theatre, the Bowery’s anglophilic cross-town rival. [33] Given the Park’s status as New York’s preeminent theatre during this period, the Bowery’s subsequent decision to mount a moving-diorama spectacle of its own is consistently offered up as definitive proof of the derivative nature of the Bowery’s production. [34] There are clear problems with this conclusion, however. As the art historian Stephan Oettermann discusses in The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, diorama-based productions had become increasingly common in France, England, and America in the Nineteenth Century, and the Park theatre had no claim to originality in its decision to mount Paris and London. [35] More significantly, Paris and London was not a terribly successful production. The critic from the New York Dramatic Mirror portrayed the Park production’s lackluster ticket sales in a particularly bemused fashion: It is a light, laughable, and exceedingly laughable piece – “yet nobody goes to see it.” It has been got up with great care… the scenery is uncommonly well done, and the succession of paintings, representing the voyage from Calais to Dover, is both novel and beautiful – “yet nobody goes to see it.” The incidents are lively and amusing, the characters good of themselves… London and Paris is an agreeable trifle, which we really expected would succeed. [36] Given the enormous financial risk associated with the creation of a moving-diorama-based production, the sort of simple-minded copycatting of the Park Theatre’s production that has been attributed to the Bowery’s managers seems implausible. Why would they consciously seek to repeat the mediocre success of the Park Theatre’s production? A more likely explanation is that the Bowery managers, like their cross-town colleagues, were tapping into the rising tide of cultural interest in visually-intensive entertainments such as moving-dioramas. Their hopes for success were doubtless rooted more in L. J. M. Daguerre’s hugely successful European dioramic exhibitions in the early 1820’s than in the mediocre “precedent” set for them by their cross-town rivals. [37] A careful examination of the use of spectacle in A Trip to Niagara reveals that its success lay not in the ways in which it mindlessly aped other productions, but in the sophisticated ways that it resonated with the local, culturally savvy spectators at the Bowery Theatre. The clearest example of this is the fact that, in A Trip to Niagara, the ‘Eidophusikon,’ (the title given by the managers to the moving diorama) depicted the least exotic , most familiar portion of the journey from New York City to Niagara Falls. The diorama began scrolling as the tourists boarded their boat in New York harbor, but its visual journey extended only as far as Catskill Landing, about a hundred miles north of New York City; the most familiar portion of the journey to the Bowery’s patrons. The newly-opened Erie Canal and the scenic wonders of the Mohawk River canyon and Niagara Falls itself appear only in static scenes later in the play. So, exoticism aside, what would have been the appeal to the Bowery spectators of this comparatively local content? The immensity of seeing 25,000 feet worth of canvas gliding mechanically across the stage must surely have pushed the boundaries of the spectators’ imaginations. Furthermore, the use of the ‘double-effect’ painting technique, which was becoming prevalent at the time, would have allowed movement-oriented elements such as “boats passing through a fog,” “emergence of a rainbow,” and the “rising of the moon,” to be executed with style and elegance. [38] But far more importantly, by having the ‘Eidophusikon’ focus on the terrain closest to New York, the Bowery audience would have been fully capable of appreciating the detailed minutia that the artists worked so hard to include. Well known ships such as the frigate Hudson and the steam vessel Constitution were probably included for this very reason. As Stephen Oettermann has argued in reference to Robert Barker’s famous panorama of London, the appeal of A Trip to Niagara’s moving diorama might have come from the constant barrage of moments of recognition experienced by the audience. A Trip to Niagara’s ‘Eidophusikon’ presented viewers with visual elements that ranged from the familiar (“Hey that’s my house!”), to the famous (“Look the Bowery Theatre!”), to the alluring (“I’ve always wanted to see Catskill Mountain House!”), thus eliciting a complex, and densely packed array of individualized responses. Assuming that the interplay between these elements constituted an important source of the audience’s pleasure, then the decision to depict the comparatively familiar lower Hudson River valley, rather than the more exotic trip across the Erie Canal, was perhaps a wise one, despite the fact that it runs counter the pejorative myth that spectacles are all about exoticism and novelty. Another, far more subtle source of theatrical pleasure can be found in fact that the ‘Eidophusikon’ also appears to have been a quiet homage to the landscape painter, Thomas Cole. As with the depictions of Leatherstocking, William Alexander Brown, the Erie Canal, and the Catskill Mountain House, an homage to Cole would have tapped into the pride that the spectators felt in the achievements of their fellow New Yorkers. Thomas Cole’s name is never voiced in the play, and unlike Dunlap’s more overt homage to James Fenimore Cooper, none of Cole’s works are unambiguously quoted in the script. Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence pointing toward Thomas Cole as the ‘Eidophusikon’s muse is compelling and worthy of attention. [39] When A Trip to Niagara was produced in 1828, Thomas Cole was the artist of the moment. Prior to Cole’s emergence as the father of the Hudson River School, landscape was a minor art-form in America, existing wholly in the shadow of portraiture and historical painting. Cole’s emergence, however, sparked a craze of landscape painting that would dominate American painting for the next two generations. [40] Cole’s meteoric rise was launched in 1825 when three of his paintings were purchased by three prominent New York painters: John Trumbull, Asher Durand, and William Dunlap. [41] Dunlap took it upon himself to use his position of prominence in the artistic community to draw attention to the talented young Cole. In his history of early American art, Dunlap states, “I published in the journals of the day, an account of the young artist and his pictures; it was no puff, but an honest declaration of my opinion, and I believe it served merit by attracting attention to it.” [42] From 1825 onward, Dunlap and Cole interacted regularly. Both men were founding members of the New York Drawing Association, a group which met three times a week for drawing sessions, [43] and Dunlap and Cole were also part of J. F. Cooper’s weekly lunches (“The Bread and Cheese Club”) where writers and artists interacted more socially. [44] Given Dunlap’s close association with Cole, specific details of the ‘Eidophusikon’ take on additional meaning. The journey depicted by the moving-diorama, from New York City to Catskill Landing, is the precise journey that was made by Cole on his much-publicized first excursion to the Catskill Mountains in the summer of 1825, the journey that resulted directly in the three landscapes purchased by Trumbull, Durand, and Dunlap. This journey was a well-publicized part of the artist’s public image and of the culture of the Hudson River Valley more generally. In 1827 the owners of the steamship Albany, which plied the Hudson River route, even commissioned a painting from Cole entitled “View near the Falls of the Kauterskill [aka-Kaaterskill], in the Catskill Mountains.” This painting adorned the ship’s cabin, giving passengers an advanced view, interpreted through the eye of the famous artist, of the world that they were traversing. [45] Furthermore, the type of subject matter depicted in the ‘Eidophusikon’ was precisely the sort favored by Cole. Approaching and receding storms, in particular, are a common element in Cole’s paintings. Given Cole’s prominence, it seems almost inconceivable that Dunlap and the Bowery’s scenic painters would not have Cole in mind as they adopted his favored subjects and ‘plein-air’ study methods for this massive moving landscape. Advertisements for the production touted the fact that the scene painters worked from their own sketch-work, obtained in the field, and one wonders if the personal journeys of the scenic painters along the route of Cole’s first excursion to the Catskills might have been a form of conscious pilgrimage. [46] The fact that Cole’s name is never directly invoked is in keeping with Dunlap’s understated approach to the cultural homages in this play. Dunlap instead relied upon the audience’s cultural literacy to identify his allusions. That the ‘Eidophusikon’ was spectacular and was marketed to the public based on its size and grandeur is undeniable, but it might very well be the case that Dunlap’s production succeeded where others failed because of the quiet, understated ways in which spectacle was employed in this production. A Trip to Niagara is outstanding, less for the spectacular sights that it displayed before its audiences, than for the never-ending series of spectacular recognitions that it elicited from them. These are the precise qualities that are lost when the analyses of historical spectacles begins with a mythical assumption of their simplistic nature. Undeniably Sophisticated Audiences In an era when plays were rarely performed more than once a month, the management of the Bowery Theatre staged A Trip to Niagara an astonishing seventeen times in the first month following its premiere, often turning people away from its overflowing 3,500-seat auditorium . [47] The play and the moving-diorama that served as the most notable highlight “saved the season” for the Bowery, which was recovering from a catastrophic fire that same year. Ultimately, A Trip to Niagara became a flag-ship production for the Bowery Theatre, featuring it at major openings and holiday events throughout 1829. [48] There are two divergent conclusions that can be gleaned from the success of this production: either the production was a good one that was embraced by the Bowery’s appreciative spectators, or that that spectators who thronged to see this trifle were little more than simpletons who were “easily sated by inferior fare.” Unfortunately, the latter conclusion has been the dominant one; it flies in the face of the historical evidence, but it resonates with the larger myth of the supposed primitivism of the early American audience. Considerable evidence points to the idea that the Bowery audience of 1828 was probably a culturally sophisticated one. When it opened in 1826, the “New York Theatre”– it was renamed the Bowery after the fire in the summer of 1828 – was the largest theatre in New York City. The playhouse boasted over 3500 seats, had the largest stage in America and was backed by the well-heeled sons of President James Monroe, John Jacob Astor, and Alexander Hamilton. Far from being the haven for working-class audiences that it would later become under the management of Thomas Hamblin, the original Bowery was envisioned as a direct competitor to the Park Theatre, which had stood as the city’s elite playhouse for more than a generation. Even the often grumpy Fanny Trollope saw the Bowery as “infinitely superior” to its cross-town rival stating, “It is indeed as pretty a theatre as I ever entered. Perfect as to size and proportion, elegantly decorated, and the scenery and machinery equal to any in London.” [49] Dunlap even included the newly reconstructed Bowery as part of his cultural diorama: the theatre’s facade served as the final static image depicted in the background prior to the start of the moving diorama. The fact that A Trip to Niagara was such a tremendous success for the Bowery marks it as a prime example of the kind of fare that the Bowery’s audiences desired. Considering how much of the production consisted of subtle, unspoken references to elite culture from the period, this might not be such a surprise after all. Aside from the references to the work of Cooper, Matthews, and Cole previously discussed, the play also makes subtle references to the nation’s luxurious modern infrastructure in the form of its hotels, roads, ships, and the newly-opened Erie Canal. Dunlap frequently combined these references in startlingly complex ways. In one particularly interesting scene, which beautifully sums up the elegant complexity of Dunlap’s referential style, Leatherstocking and Amelia conduct a reasoned debate about the merits and pitfalls of progress while standing atop the Catskill escarpment, with the facade of the newly-constructed and highly luxurious Catskill Mountain House standing silently behind them. The two characters, one of Dunlap’s invention the other of Cooper’s, politely voice their divergent opinions in a civilized discussion, and then go their separate ways, as friends. The fact that the very spot, which had once served as the private terrace of the famous frontiersman, had now been converted into a bastion of refined luxury was an ironic turn that beautifully encapsulates Dunlap’s quiet celebration of American culture, an approach which his audiences clearly embraced. This is, after all, the same scene that the reviewer for the Dramatic Mirror lamented the absence of when it was cut from one of the performances. With A Trip to Niagara, Dunlap not only celebrated the literary achievements of friends like Cooper and Cole, but also the diversity of American attitudes toward the development of their own society, all within a series of stage pictures that was saturated with multiple cultural references. In making room for multiple, competing viewpoints to hold their own in the same stage space, Dunlap’s play defies the pervasive assumption that in the Nineteenth-Century, spectacle-driven plays and their audiences were as simplistic as they have often been portrayed by historians. It remains to be seen how many other successful productions, as well as the audiences that attended them, might be better understood if we continue uprooting the historical mythologies that we have inherited, and attempt to view the past with fewer preconceived notions of what our gaze will discover. Rather than dismissing audiences that embraced productions that we dislike at first blush, we should trust in their judgment and use their enthusiasm as an indication that there must be more to these productions than meets the eye. References [1] There are notable exceptions to this negative treatment including studies by Francis Hodge, Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825–1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964); Maura Jortner, “Playing ‘America’ on Nineteenth-Century Stages; or, Jonathan in England and Jonathan at Home” (PhD diss, University of Pittsburgh, 2005); and particularly Dorothy B Richardson’s extensive monograph on the play, Moving Diorama in Play, William Dunlap’s Comedy “A Trip to Niagara” (Youngstown, NY: Teneo Press, 2010). The current version of this article is a revised piece based on useful feedback I received from Richardson. [2] Robert H. Canary, William Dunlap (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), 71-73; Oral Sumner Coad, William Dunlap: A Study of his Life and Works and of his Place in Contemporary Culture (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962 [Reprint of 1917 edition from The Dunlap Society]), 177, 183; and Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol 1, eds. Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11. [3] William Dunlap, “A Trip to Niagara; or, Travellers in America,” in Dramas from the American Theatre: 1762-1909, ed. Richard Moody (Amherst, MA: The World Publishing Company, 1966), 186. [4] Ibid., 181. [5] Coad, William Dunlap, 177-178. Canary, William Dunlap, 73. [6] William Dunlap, A Trip to Niagara, 178. [7] The Glory of Columbia is, in fact, an adaptation of Andre , but with much the same kind of celebratory spectacle that is employed in A Trip to Niagara. [8] Richardson postulates several other reasons why Dunlap’s disclaimer should be taken with a grain of salt. Moving Diorama, 181-185. [9] Richardson’s book is unique on this point in that it discusses several of the characters as stock while simultaneously explicating their cultural resonances. Richardson, Moving Diorama , 124-128, 213-218, 245-249. The differences between her interpretations of these characters and my own are often quite divergent, despite the fact that we are both aware of the allusions embedded in these characters. [10] Richard H. Gassan, The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790-1830 , (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 127. Bigsby & Wilmeth, “Introduction,” 11. Coad, William Dunlap , 177-178. Canary, William Dunlap, 73. [11] The two were so close that Dunlap dedicated his 1834 History of the American Theatre to Cooper. [12] Although Leatherstocking is also central to Cooper’s far more popular novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826), it is the older, more nostalgic version of this character that Dunlap chose to include in his play. [13] “The Bowery,” New York Dramatic Mirror, Dec. 13, 1828. [14] For a list of authors who fail to uncouple John Bull from Jonathan, see note 6. [15] William Dunlap, A Trip to Niagara, 183. [16] Ibid., 183. [17] Today, it might seem odd to look upon an actor such as William Chapman, who was born in England, and merely recruited to work for an American company as an “American” actor. But there is evidence to suggest that the American public, who were themselves frequently first and second generation emigrants, saw these actors as American. Upon her arrival in Philadelphia in 1796, the prominent English actress Anne Brunton Merry was immediately hailed as a great addition to “the American Drama.” Gresdna Ann Doty, The Career of Mrs. Anne Brunton Merry in the American Theatre (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 51. [18] Richardson similarly discusses the “continually close and fluent relationship with each other” that the characters of John Bull and Jonathan would have shared. Moving Diorama , 267. [19] Maura Jortner, “Playing ‘America’ on Nineteenth-Century Stages; or, Jonathan in England and Jonathan at Home” (PhD diss, University of Pittsburgh, 2005), 93-96, 108-111. [20] Jortner, Playing ‘America’…, 93-96, 108-111. Francis Hodge, Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825–1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 74-75, 103, 162-163. [21] Gary A. Richardson, “Plays and Playwrights: 1800-1865,” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol 1, eds. Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 289-290. Coad, William Dunlap, 177-178. Marvin McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Color: William Brown’s African and American Theatre (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 160. [22] Coad, William Dunlap, 23. Richardson, Moving Diorama, 241. [23] Dunlap, A Trip to Niagara, 181. [24] For more on the death of deference see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992). [25] James Fenimore Cooper “The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna; A Descriptive Tale,” in The Leatherstocking Tales, Vol. I (New York: The Library of America, 1985), 177. [26] The authoritative history of William Brown’s career is Marvin McAllister’s White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Color: William Brown’s African and American Theatre (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). [27] Canary, William Dunlap, 74. [28] McAllister, White People Do Not Know , 22. [29] It is interesting to note that McAllister appears critical of Dunlap’s character, though he mentions the play only in passing, and with some inaccuracy, which might indicate that the analysis of this character was not a central concern to his larger project on Brown. [30] “Mr. Dunlap’s Play of A Trip to Niagara,” New York Dramatic Mirror, Dec. 20, 1828. [31] “The Drama,” The Irish Shield , January 1829. [32] Richardson notes that stage-Irishmen appear several times in Dunlap’s previous works, and thus might have been a more stable element of his dramaturgical sensibility. Moving Diorama , 124-125. [33] Gassan, American Tourism, 127. Coad, William Dunlap, 107-108. George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, Vol III (NY: AMS Press, 1928), 378. [34] Richardson argues that “the Bowery saw that a moving panorama or diorama was not restricted to a particular genre.” This assertion of the Bowery’s following of the Park Theatre’s lead is clearly less derisive, yet still postulates a causality that does not appear to be substantiated in reliable documentation from the period. Moving Diorama, 85. [35] Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium , (NY: Zone Books, 1997), 70-83, 323-324. [36] “London & Paris,” New York Mirror, 24 May 1828. The article from which these excerpts have been gleaned is actually much longer and humorously repeats “yet nobody goes to see it” again and again. [37] Oettermann, The Panorama, 74-83. [38] “Bowery Theatre,” New York Evening Post, 28 November 1828. For more on the ‘double-effect’ technique see Oettermann, The Panorama, 77-83. [39] Richardson also argues that, in addition to Cole, William Guy Wall, may have also served as a source of inspiration. Moving Diorama, 61-63. [40] For more on the emergence of Cole and the rise of the Hudson River School, see Barbara Babcock Millhouse, American Wilderness: The Story of the Hudson River School of Painting (Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press, 2007), Gail S. Davidson, Landscape Icons, Tourism, and Land Development in the Northeast,” in ‘Frederick Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2006), and Harold E. Dickson, Arts of the Young Republic: The Age of William Dunlap (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). [41] The subject of the painting that Dunlap purchased, “Lake with Dead Trees,” was actually the lake that lay directly behind the Catskill Mountain House. VanZandt, Catskill Mountain House, 119-120. [42] William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, Vol. 3 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965 [1834]), 140-150. [43] Coad, William Dunlap, 105. [44] Millhouse, American Wilderness , 17. [45] Davidson, Landscape Icons, 23. [46] “Bowery Theatre,” New York Evening Post, 28 November 1828. Odell, Annals, 407. [47] “Mr. Dunlap’s Play of A Trip to Niagara,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 20 December 1828. [48] Odell, Annals , 407. [49] Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 209. Footnotes About The Author(s) SAMUEL T. SHANKS is an independent scholar based out of Duluth, MN. Previously he was an Associate Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Division of General Education & Honors at Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, IA. Sam’s academic interests include early American theatre, Islamic theatre, cognitive studies, and the history of scenic design. Guest Editor: Jonathan Chambers 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 Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Die Kinder der Toten by Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Nature Theater of Oklahoma ventures the impossible: creating a film version of Elfriede Jelinek’s 666 page novel “Die Kinder der Toten”, an (as yet) untranslated German language masterpiece in which all the main characters are all undead, mute zombies… In September 2017 directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska worked on location in the Styrian mountainside town of Neuberg am der Murz with local citizens, farmers, grocers, brass bands, the fire department — even mountain rescue! — to stage some pretty awesome participatory theater, and eventually create what is sure to be a one-of-a-kind supernaturally super 8 film… The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Die Kinder der Toten At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Theater, Film This film will be screened in-person on May 20th and also be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for a period of 3 weeks. About The Film Country Germany Language German Running Time 90 minutes Year of Release 2019 Nature Theater of Oklahoma ventures the impossible: creating a film version of Elfriede Jelinek’s 666 page novel “Die Kinder der Toten”, an (as yet) untranslated German language masterpiece in which all the main characters are all undead, mute zombies… In September 2017 directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska worked on location in the Styrian mountainside town of Neuberg am der Murz with local citizens, farmers, grocers, brass bands, the fire department — even mountain rescue! — to stage some pretty awesome participatory theater, and eventually create what is sure to be a one-of-a-kind supernaturally super 8 film… Produced by Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion Vienna 2019 in collaboration with Steirischer Herbst 2017 Cast Andrea Maier, Greta Kostka, Klaus Unterrieder, Georg Beyer i. a. Written, Filmed, Directed and Edited by Kelly Copper & Pavol Liska Producer Ulrich Seidl Artistic Collaboration Claus Philipp Co-Edited by Michael Palm Supervising Sound Designer Matz Müller Re-Recording Tobias Fleig Composer Wolfgang Mitterer Line Producer Georg Aschauer, Daniela Trauner Production Managers Jakob Schwighofer, Teresa-Saija Wieser Producer USFP Claus Philipp, Georg Aschauer About The Artist(s) Nature Theater of Oklahoma is an award-winning New York art and performance enterprise under the direction of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper. With each new project, we attempt to set an impossible challenge for ourselves, the audience, and our collaborators — working from inside the codes and confines of established genres and exploding them. No two projects are formally the same, but the work is always full of humor, earnestness, rigor, and the audience plays an essential role -- whether as spectators or - just as often - as participants in the work. Using readymade material, found space, gifted properties, cosmic accident, extreme formal manipulation and plain hard work — Nature Theater of Oklahoma makes art to affect a shift in the perception of everyday reality that extends beyond the site of performance and into the world in which we live. Get in touch with the artist(s) naturetheater.private@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://oktheater.org/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Bradley Stephenson 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 This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Bradley Stephenson By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF D.W. Gregory’s most famous and most produced play is Radium Girls (2003), which dramatizes the story of several young women from Orange, New Jersey who developed radium poisoning as a result of their employment with the U.S. Radium Corporation during the late 1910s and early 1920s.[1] The girls were dial painters, whose delicate fingers were required to paint watch dials with radium-laced, glow-in-the-dark paint. The story was the subject of Claudia Clark’s 1997 book, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935, which provided Gregory with much of the historical context for her play.[2] Scientific progress created a new industry of radium-based glow in the dark paint, yet the material consequences of those labor practices were poorly understood. The dial painters’ fight for justice was one of the first instances in the United States of a corporation being held legally responsible for the safety and well-being of its employees. Gregory’s Radium Girls focuses on the experiences of Grace Fryer, one of the original dial painters and a key plaintiff in the case against the U.S. Radium Corporation. The play takes place between 1918 and 1928, encompassing the time from when the women began getting ill to the settlement of their case. The radium poisoning suffered by the workers resulted in bone loss, debilitating pain, loss of physical mobility, and eventually death. At the start of the play, Grace is a plucky fifteen year old girl working as a dial painter. As her friends begin getting sick and dying, the girls’ quest to uncover the truth of the mysterious illness, and the corporation’s quest to hide the truth, slam against each other in a “cinematic, briskly-paced,” highly theatrical style.[3] The play utilizes many facets of Brecht’s epic theatre, including historicization and the juxtaposition of comic, presentational scenes with more serious, naturalistic ones, simultaneously calling attention to the politicized nature of the content while emphasizing the theatricality and performative nature of the play itself. Despite the authorial instructions for this kind of stylized simplicity, the play is often over-produced with elaborate theatrical sets and costumes, larger casts, and attempts at historical realism that run counter to the playwright’s stylistic intent. I have seen a similarly over-produced production, and the pace slowed down significantly, resulting in a grim and tedious performance that lost the “descriptive simplicity and graphic candor” noted by Robert Daniels in his Variety review of the original production workshop at the Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey in 2000.[4] Despite a tendency towards elaborate production style and grim tone, the play still has great potential, if understood and handled properly, to make possible the transformation of actors’ and audiences’ intra-acting bodies. The labor practices dramatized in the play were born from scientific discoveries that opened up many new possibilities, products, and potentials for profit. The story itself may be novel to some readers, but the battle of the individual versus the corporate entity, enflamed by the media, is hardly new. The debilitating physical ramifications that resulted from the interaction of bodies and radioactive particles provide a fascinating avenue of inquiry which opens up new possibilities for understanding bodies, plays, performance, and the nature of life itself. Using a variety of disability theories in the analytical foreground of a close reading of the play, this essay suggests how accounting for the interactions of scientific materialities with diverse bodies in historical and performative realities can transform the way we see our intra-acting bodies in the world, and the world in our bodies.[5] It is pertinent to ask the extent to which the Radium Girls should be considered disabled subjects. Does chronic illness fall under the umbrella of Disability? Do they start out sick and then become disabled at a certain point? Is disability itself just a social construct that is more about institutions and obstacles than bodies and capacities?[6] For the purposes of this essay, it is helpful to resituate notions of disability away from the binary of disabled vs. non-disabled. Jasbir K. Puar reframes disability more as a spectrum or “an interdependent relationship between bodily capacity and bodily debility.”[7] She uses the concept of “slow death” in a robust theorization of debility and queer sexuality that exposes the capitalist ramifications of non-normative bodies in a contemporary context: Capacity and debility are seeming opposites generated by increasingly demanding neoliberal formulations of health, agency, and choice [that generate] population aggregates. Those “folded” into life are seen as more capacious or on the side of capacity, while those targeted for premature or slow death are figured as debility. Such an analysis re-poses the questions: which bodies are made to pay for “progress”? Which debilitated bodies can be reinvigorated for neoliberalism, and which cannot?[8] From this perspective, the ramifications for the Radium Girls are significant, both historically and within the play. Are their lives and bodies the cost of scientific progress and knowledge? Can their decaying bodies be made useful to society? Their “slow death” is certainly useful to the media industry that is always intervening to get exclusive rights and sell papers in the play. Debility can be very profitable to capitalism, and so is the demand to “recover” from or overcome it.[9] It is no coincidence that the character who spearheads Grace’s public campaign and is her most powerful ally, Katherine Wiley, is the executive director of the New Jersey Consumer’s League. Wiley says in her speech to a crowd of onlookers near the end of the first act, “We do not have to accept injustice. We can use our powers as consumers to influence the practices of those who would wish to profit from our patronage.”[10] In Radium Girls, this slow death and the desire to recover from it are closely related to ideas of consumerism and scientific progress. The power to purchase the products of these scientific advances ultimately provides the key to coercing corporations into accepting responsibility for the safety of their workers. Early in the twentieth century, radium was seen as a scientific miracle and cure-all. The discovery of radium facilitated the development of nuclear medicine and radiation therapy as a cancer treatment. Radium was also commercially popularized and used in hundreds of quack remedies and natural tonics from radioactive water to cigarettes to suppositories and bath salts.[11] A notable example of these quack cures receives some prominent product placement in the play. Radithor was a famous patent medicine that was manufactured in Orange, New Jersey, at the same time as the events of the play. Its inventor, William J. A. Bailey, makes an appearance in the play – giving out free samples and basking in the media attention of his business successes – that comes off to contemporary audiences more like an infomercial than a news reel. He says, “Radioactivity is one of the most remarkable agents in medical science. I drink Radithor myself and I can vouch for its power.”[12] This idea of the agency of the radium itself can provide an interesting avenue of exploration that can deepen our understanding of labor and disabled bodies within the play and within the wider fields of science studies and disability studies. Radithor famously contributed to the death of the wealthy New England socialite Eben Byers in 1932. Ron Winslow’s headline for his article recounting the event in the August 1, 1990, issue of The Wall Street Journal was “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off.” In the play, even the complex antagonist Arthur Roeder, president of U.S. Radium Corporation, is convinced of the healing powers of radium, and he unquestioningly consumes Radithor daily with his wife: “Diane! I have documents—I have articles—People with tumors the size of baseballs. Radium therapy—the tumors disappear. Diane. […] We save lives. We make lives better—mild radium therapy—invigorates. You can’t really think I’m a liar.”[13] Roeder’s trust and naïveté, shared by the real-life Eben Byers, are symptomatic of a world view that relegates physical matter to mere objects, without agency or action, a product to be manufactured, sold, exploited, and utilized. But radium will not remain a passive object to be manipulated. Radium is an actor that responds. In Mel Chen’s groundbreaking 2012 book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, she re-theorizes notions of animacy as an “often racialized and sexualized means of conceptual and affective mediation between human and inhuman, animate and inanimate, whether in language, rhetoric, or imagery.”[14] Chen’s work brings notions of agency and sentience to nonlife as well as life. “Animacy is built on the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present, quite beyond questions of personification.”[15] From this perspective, inanimate atoms are both actants and actors with which human beings must reckon. In this way, radium itself becomes an actor and character in the play. The opening scene of the young girls giggling and painting their teeth and faces with radioactive paint takes on new meaning if one considers the radium-laced paint to have its own animacy. As a joke, the girls turn off the lights to scare their supervisor, and “their faces [glow] like jack-o’-lanterns in the dark. A scream, laughter, and the lights go up again.”[16] No longer just a childish school girl prank, the scene takes a much more sinister tone. Many audiences are probably already primed for this response, if they have any knowledge of the story or the nature of radioactive material. In a sense, Gregory is already capitalizing on the theatricality of animacy. In the theatre, objects and bodies tend to be endowed with meaning and action that always have forward motion. The opening scene with the painted faces not only characterizes the girls and their relationships; it also propels the play forward towards its inevitable conclusion. The presence of the toxic radium necessarily influences that trajectory and adds multiple shards of meaning to the action. Moving from the metaphor of the toxic to the actual toxic creates “rapidly multiplying meanings.”[17] Like the radium-laced paint in the first scene, the Radithor that the Roeders consume on stage thus becomes a new character, an actor with significant impact on the outcome of the story and the lives of the other players. What then should be made of this silent character, this toxic and invisible but always active radium, and how does Gregory account for this toxic activity in the play? Chen says that “Toxicity straddles boundaries of ‘life’ and ‘nonlife,’ as well as the literal bounds of bodies, in ways that introduce a certain complexity to the presumption of integrity of either lifely or deathly subjects.”[18] While Chen’s theorization of toxicity is robust, she relies on a boundaried binary concept of living and non-living in her theory of toxicity. In the play, Grace’s fiancé, Tom Krieder, tries to deny what he calls “this in-between life” of Grace’s radioactive debility, yet his words betray an unconscious recognition that radioactive disability seems to defy the life-nonlife binary in several crucial, and theatrical, ways.[19] Like many great characters from the history of theatre, radioactive atoms are unstable and project parts of themselves outwards, projections that can create dramatic chain reactions. Radioactive atoms have a strong objective, to attain stability. Like the minds of these characters created from words on a page, radioactive atoms have a life of their own that attracts analysis, to more fully understand the mysterious inner workings deep inside them. While this radium-as-character analogy is far from perfect, through it one can explore how Chen’s complex presumptions of integrity are realized and dramatized on multiple levels: nuclear, personal, performative, and theoretical. A fuller account of radioactivity can thus help problematize the life-nonlife binary, illuminate Radium Girls and other dramatic forms, and also enrich our notions of lives, non-lives, and half-lives, of ability and debility. In an article in the journal Nature, J. Rondo describes radium as an example of the “long-lived bone-seeking radio-elements.”[20] Rondo’s 1969 meta-analysis gathers data from multiple studies from the 1950s and earlier that tried to describe the “biological half-life” of radium, i.e., how long it takes half of the radium to leave the human body once it has been taken in. While radium’s biological half-life is not precisely identified, somewhere around 15-28 years, its radioactive half-life is well known: 1601 years. Radioactive half-life refers to the amount of time it takes for half of the atoms in a given sample of radioactive material to undergo nuclear decay. So, after one half-life of time, there will be 50% of the original amount of radioactive material remaining; after two half-lives there will be 25% less; after three, 12.5%; and so on. To give some perspective on the activity of radium, its half-life is relatively short, about 1601 years, yet radium is almost three million times more radioactive than uranium-238, with a half-life of about 4.5 billion years. What is most interesting about these facts is not the numbers, but the language that science uses to describe the element. Radioactive elements have “life” (or at least “half-life”) as part of their definitive natures. This half-living nature of radioactive matter in general, and radium in particular, complicates conceptions of life and non-life that go beyond biology and chemistry and raises significant ontological questions that are explored in the play. Many news articles referred to (or spectacularized) the Radium Girls as “The Living Dead.” Taking up a third of the page above a photo of a frail woman being comforted by other women, the headline of the February 11, 1938 edition of the Chicago Daily Times reads “‘Living Death’ Quiz at Bedside.”[21] These girls are not dead yet, but they are no longer fully living. As Chen might say, the presumption of their “lifely” physical integrity is in question.[22] In the play, the Radium Girls also become associated with death while still alive. “That girl is still staring at me,” Roeder says at the trial. “She looks like death, Edward.” To which his lawyer, Edward Markley, replies, “They all look like death, Arthur.”[23] Even the Sob Sister, who usually pulls at the public’s sentimental heart strings, can’t help having a moment of glee at how many papers she will sell because of the girls’ ultimate demise. REPORTER: Radium Girls Go to Court Today! SOB SISTER: Radium Girls Knock at the Doors of Justice! Will they be heard? REPORTER: These poor, injured girls face pain! SOB SISTER: Disfigurement! REPORTER: Ruin! SOB SISTER: (cheerfully) And death! […] Read it in the Graphic! We care. Because you care.[24] As described above, radium is a “bone-seeking” element, due in part to its chemical similarities with calcium. When introduced to a biological system, radium becomes a kind of living actor with two objectives: to seek bone and settle there, and to seek nuclear stability by emitting alpha particles and gamma rays.[25] Ironically, just as life is made less-living by the addition of the half-life agency of radium, death is made more “lifely” as a result of the same. In Radium Girls, after the medical examiner exhumes the remains of Amelia Maggia, the first Radium Girl to die, the body (particularly the lower and upper jaws and the lumbar vertebrae) is found to be highly radioactive with no evidence of syphilis, initially said to be the cause of death. The Sob Sister and Reporter jump in immediately: “Body is Radioactive!” “Bones of Dead Girl Kick Off Gamma Rays!”[26] Even in death, the radium still lives. Conjuring images of the Valley of Dry Bones from Ezekiel chapter 37, the radium-infused bones are still kicking off gamma rays. It is as if the toxicity of the radium prevents life from being just life, and death from being just death. The interactions of radium and bodies will always be more than the binary of life and nonlife. Likewise, as Tom says in regard to Grace’s growing debility, disability itself can be thought of as a kind of “in-between life.” People with disabilities are often viewed as “less than” or lacking some aspect of “normalcy”, a kind of half-life to be anxious about. But what if, instead of this ableist perception of defective otherness, one thought of the “half-life” of disability in this more transcendent sense of an agency that brings something more to one’s existence, something that would not be possible or conceivable without the intersection of life and half-life, of ability with debility? For there is always an intermingling of ability with disability along the spectrum of our existence. There is something about the interactions of the agency of radioactivity and the agency of biological bodies that changes the very nature of materiality, agency, and life itself. In the case of the Living Dead Girls, the merging of life with half-life brings about an association with non-life. Conversely, in the case of Maggia’s exhumed jawbone, the blending of death with half-life evokes a kind of liveliness, kicking off gamma rays. Bodies and atoms are intertwined and interacting in ways that transcend the physical and the phenomenological. Stacy Alaimo’s theory of “trans-corporeality” emphasizes this interconnectedness of human bodies with the more-than-human world. Trans-corporeality looks at the “flows of substances” and theorizes “the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors.”[27] This hermeneutic approach can “account for the ways in which nature, the environment, and the material world itself signify, act upon, or otherwise affect human bodies, knowledges, and practices,” thus necessitating broader ways of thinking about the world, bodies, environments, and materiality.[28] Seen in this way, Radium Girls becomes a potent example of trans-corporeal space, “in which the body can never be disentangled from the material world.”[29] The simple cause-and-effect approach to understanding the debilitating effects of radium poisoning begins to break down in favor of a more inclusive understanding of intra-acting agencies. Thus, the debilities of the Radium Girls are no longer understood as additions to or deletions from a ‘normal’ body. Rather, bodies and lives exist on a spectrum possessing various degrees of half-life that are always already relational, a kind of “intra-active becoming” that is “always the very substance of ourselves.”[30] Thus, Gregory’s depiction of Grace Fryer is not so much an image of the progression of a disabled object, but rather an image of a new way of understanding bodies, abilities, and the intra/inter-actions of the material world. These new ways of understanding are played out most concretely in the way the play explores early twentieth century labor practices and the stylized representations of disability on stage. Radium Girls is set during the same time frame of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. Tamsen Wolff has argued a connection between theatre and the eugenics movement, noting how both dramatists and eugenicists are concerned with visibility and truth: In eugenic theory, there is a vital tension between hidden truth […] and visible truth. […] For eugenicists, this tension creates a vacillation between an assurance about what can be seen on the body and an uneasiness about what lurks unseen in the body. Of course, in theatre, a tension between hidden truth and visible truth is not only a playwright’s natural playground, but is relevant to everything from the body of the performer, to dramatic form, to stage design, to the role of the audience.[31] Wolff’s argument explores how theatre was historically and politically used as a means of indoctrinating people into a eugenic way of thought. Some veins of scientific research at the time were working towards the goal of perfecting the human race, or rather, the elimination of those individuals who did not match the traits deemed desirable by certain authority figures. This eugenic obsession with appearances contributed to twentieth century atrocities such as forced sterilization, genocide, and xenophobic world wars. Although Radium Girls does not operate as a polemic for eugenic examination (as the plays analyzed by Wolff do), it nevertheless capitalizes on the same tension between visible and invisible truth in dynamic trans-corporeal ways that challenge rather than reify able-bodied understandings of performer, audience, and the world as a whole. Radium Girls’ central themes include the “peculiarly American obsessions with health, wealth, and the commercialization of science.”[32] This commercialization of science includes the girls wanting compensation and treatment for their acquired disability, their dentist extorting funds from the company and the girls, and the marketing exploits of various entrepreneurs and quack scientists portrayed in the play. This obsession is intrinsically related to notions of capital and labor, and Radium Girls provides an interesting exploration of pre-Social Security ideas regarding disability and the wage-labor system. Even though the Social Security Administration was not founded until 1935, seven years after the events of the play end, disability was not added as an insured contingency to the social security program until the 1950s.[33] In her book The Disabled State, Deborah Stone asserts that the idea of a ‘welfare state’ is founded on “the principle that certain characteristics – youth, old age, widowhood, and sickness – render people automatically incapable of participating in the wage-labor system.”[34] Though welfare programs were common in other industrialized nations around the world, the United States had not adopted any such program during the time of the Radium Girls scandal. The idea that there were any “categorical exemptions from the labor market” had not yet taken popular hold in the American psyche.[35] The beginning of act two provides an interesting perspective on these notions of labor and fitness: REPORTER: December 4, 1927! Jack Youngwood reporting for the Newark Ledger. SOB SISTER: Nancy Jane Harland for the New York Graphic! REPORTER: On the strange case of the Radium Girls. SOB SISTER: Who claim they were poisoned at the hands of their employer. REPORTER: And now seek their day in court! SHOPGIRL: Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. SOB SISTER: That’s the price tag on their suffering! MALE SHOPPER: Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars! STORE OWNER: Ask me, it’s all a sham! CUSTOMER: What do you mean? Those girls are very sick! STORE OWNER: Sicka workin’, sure! REPORTER: Doctors say… the Radium Girls have only a year to live![36] Here Gregory presents the Store Owner, the lone representative of hard work and entrepreneurship, in a sea of consumers flanked by media representatives, all questioning the validity of the girls’ claims. He thinks they just want a handout; therefore they must be lying. Stone notes how disability has so often been historically associated with deception, and therefore the very concept of disability is predicated on the need to prove its validity.[37] For the freak shows common to traveling entertainments at this time, that expertise was doled out by the hawking ‘professors’ and ‘anthropologists’ guaranteeing that the exhibits were indeed authentic. It was the medical doctor alone who could validate ‘legitimate disability.’ Disability had become a clinical concept.[38] In this scene, the Reporter trumps the entire debate about the ‘validity of the invalids’ by invoking the claims of the almighty “doctors.” As the eugenicists proposed, science appears to have the final say over the nature and ‘normalcy’ of atypical bodies. Gregory, however, is not content merely to portray this shift in perspective towards the medical model of understanding disability in Radium Girls.[39] On the contrary, she carefully chips away at the hegemony of the scientific medical industrial complex by challenging this assumed authority. The character of Dr. Knef, the opportunistic dentist, represents not only corruption and the medical gaze that continues to enfreak and marginalize people with disabilities, but also the capitalistic gaze that permeates the play. Even though characters like Dr. Knef explore the darker side of medical politics in the quid pro quo (he trades false diagnoses for corporate payments), the play is not simply satirizing a corrupt medical professional. Rather, Gregory takes a broader and more oppositional position to the part that the medical profession plays in the hegemonic authority that denies the visibility of the disabled, and indeed would deny the very existence of the trans-corporeal. It is the character of Grace with her unwillingness to accept the status quo that helps move the play beyond simply villainizing Knef and his ilk and into this more subversive and challenging arena. Early in the play, when news reaches the dial painters that the death of their friend and fellow dial painter, Amelia Maggia, was attributed to complications from syphilis, Grace challenges the decree, and Kathryn hesitantly follows suit. GRACE: But Amelia was ever so nice. IRENE: Guess she got around more than we knew. GRACE: Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe the doctor got it wrong. IRENE: Come on. GRACE: He coulda got it wrong. Doctors are wrong sometimes. KATHRYN: That’s true. Doctor was wrong about Aunt Ivy. IRENE: What’s Mama got to do with it? KATHRYN: Irene, don’t you remember? Up to the day she died, doctor said Aunt Ivy would be fine. Said take a cup a tea, get a good night’s rest. And two days later we was taking her to Rosedale cemetery.[40] By beginning to question the infallibility of scientific ‘doctor’s orders’, the girls also begin to take a stand against the company and file suit at the end of act one. However, when another dial painter, Kathryn, also takes ill and is waiting for surgery in the hospital, her resolve fails. Faced with her own acquired toxic debility, Kathryn turns back to the doctors for refuge from her fears and loses resolve in the legal battle, leaving Grace the lone soldier in her quest for justice: KATHRYN: (abruptly). What if we don’t win? GRACE: ‘Course we’ll win. KATHRYN: But what if we don’t? My father will lose his house. We’ll be on the street. You’ll be on the street, too. Yer father must owe thousands. And you and Tom, You won’t never get married. How can ya stand it, Grace— GRACE: Kathryn, please! KATHRYN: (more agitated). How can Tom stand it? Don’t ya ever wonder, Grace? I don’t never hear him complain— GRACE: Kathryn! As soon as the judge hears our testimony, he’s gonna rule for us. All they gotta do is take one look at us. It’ll be over in a day.” KATHRYN: Think so?[41] Soon thereafter, the Sob Sister joins them in the hospital room offering them a cash deal for exclusive rights to tell their story. Kathryn’s last words alive in the play are a concession to give up the lawsuit: “Grace, maybe we should do it.”[42] Everyone abandons Grace in her fight for justice and encourages her to give up and get on with what little she has left. The eugenicist notion that disability will inevitably lead to homelessness, poverty, and solitude is deeply entrenched, and, perhaps like an early disability rights activist, Grace seems to be the only one willing to fight, further developing her character as an image of trans-corporeality that has been enlivened in some way by her interactions with the deadly radium. The historical importance of this case is also the heart of the Radium Girls’ story: industrial health reform. But the story goes much deeper. Not only did the Radium Girls fight for their own bodies and health, but their lives and their debility also interacted with others in a catalytic manner. Claudia Clark’s account of the Radium Girls describes how: Industrial health bridges the history of labor and the social history of workers, the history of medicine and the social history of health and the environment, the traditional history of politics and the social history of politics. In the case of the dialpainters, we may also study the history of women.[43] Even the radium poisoning itself was not so much a scientific discovery as it was “a social product born of political negotiation.”[44] The Radium Girls are more than just a case study; they were a catalyst for recognition and reform of the impact of industrialization and corporatism on individuals and society. Their very bodies were a source of trans-corporeal transformation in the social/industrial/political landscape. Industrialization had gripped much of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but the tangled relationship between factory, worker, science, business, and government was only beginning to be uncovered. The case of the Radium Girls was the first instance of industrial health reform to gain public recognition and to begin to turn the tide of reckless business practices.[45] For the Radium Girls, it was not just a fight for justice, but also for recognition and acceptance in the face of powerful men publicly denying their claims. Many lost heart. Many lost their lives. When D.W. Gregory portrays Grace’s solitary battle in Radium Girls, she emphasizes the poignant fragility of living in these crucial historical events, and how science and progress interact with bodies and lives, often exacting a steep and lonely price, and often at the expense of the disabled. Though the battle for justice is lonely, the war is filled with onlookers and opportunists looking to make a buck. While Gregory represents Grace’s lonely challenge to the medical hegemony on the interpretation and ‘care’ of bodies, she visibly spotlights the speculators and Johnny-come-latelys that try to capitalize on the hype and sensation of the story. The newspapers are not the only ones trying to make a buck riding upon the girls’ crumbling backs; many people and institutions attempt to capitalize on what Jasbir K. Puar calls the “profitability of debility.”[46] During the frenetic opening of act two, with the public prattling on about the case and what they would do with the money, Grace Fryer makes her first public appearance, mediated by the news media, as a plaintiff in the case for the explicit purpose of stirring up public sympathy. (Grace appears, walking with a cane.) GRACE. I’d use it to pay my medical bills. (Reaction from CROWD.) And pay off the second mortgage on our house. The one my father took out to pay for my last operation. (Reactions of sympathy.) SOB SISTER. Pretty Grace Fryer sits at home. REPORTER. …suffering bravely through this entire ordeal. SOB SISTER. …struggling valiantly to keep up her flagging spirits— REPORTER. …for the sake of her family and her friends. GRACE. It hurts to smile. But I try to smile. I know if I don’t smile—I’ll go crazy. (Approval from the CROWD.)[47] This sequence appears at first glance to be a problematic appropriation of disability images to evoke public sympathy. What makes this exchange remarkable is that the theatrical audience gets to see the “behind the scenes” moments that take place before and after this public interchange, revealing that it is in fact a rehearsed and planned performance. At the very end of act one, Grace agrees to fight publicly to shame the company into giving in to the girls’ demands for compensation and justice. Ms. Wiley, one of the girls’ advocates, claims here and elsewhere in the play that “public sympathy” is both their strongest weapon for justice and the engine of social reform.[48] The moment after Grace’s first public appearance, Gregory utilizes a crucial stage direction signifying that “Wiley congratulates Grace” as the crowds disperse, giving approval for the stylized performance of being pitiful and marking it as a performance. Even Grace’s allies are now putting her and her disability on stylized display with a cane, enfreaking her even more, towards the goal of social justice. Alison Kafer, in her discussion of disability images on billboards, notes that “We need to recognize and challenge this strategic deployment of disability, acknowledging that rhetorics of disability acceptance and inclusion can be used to decidedly un-crip ends.”[49] Is Grace’s performance of tragic pathos an example of Wiley’s exploitation of disability for the benefit of social reform? Like the models for medical textbook photographs, Grace is not being paid for her performance. Is it a necessary ruse for the greater good? Who pays the price of progress? This Brechtian moment in the play brings the profitability issue to the surface, holding it up for scrutiny, throwing critical light on the role of exploitation in producing social reform. Though Ms. Wiley seems to genuinely want to help Grace and hold the U.S. Radium Corporation accountable for their negligence, her methods seem to implicitly condone the exploitation of disabled bodies. To think in contemporary terms, if Wiley had hired an actor to play the same part that Grace played in this public presentation, that actor would have been paid. When using actual people with actual disabilities for a media campaign on their behalf, the same performance is not compensated or seen as labor. The irony is profound: if one of the goals is to help you, then you do not get paid; if you have nothing to do with the campaign, you would get paid.[50] Grace’s aloneness in her struggle is made all the more palpable in the final scene of the play during which Grace sits at Kathryn’s grave, spreading flowers and talking of watercolor paints. The scene at the grave recalls images from the previous scene with Kathryn in the hospital, with Grace sitting at her side and offering comfort. Grace is nearing the end of her own life and at this point is most likely unable to walk. She does not move from this position in the final scene. It is a scene that powerfully reveals how truly lonely the battle for justice is, with many casualties left along the way. This final moment also raises an important question about how the play is staged and why Gregory chose not to highlight Grace’s physical condition in the script itself. In terms of theatrical spaces, Radium Girls in performance further illuminates the complex web of intra-activity between matter and biological bodies. Performers and audience share the same space, breathing the same air and feeling the same sound wave vibrations. Slight variations in these vibrations, neurologically interpreted as timbre and pitch modulations, contribute to an emotional performance and can combine with the photons reflected off an actor to generate emotional and intellectual changes in the audience, which can then set up a feedback loop with the performer, who then “feeds” off the live audience’s energy and attentive focus, all mediated by these material environmental agents. Temperature, which is just the average kinetic energy of environmental molecules, has a profound impact on audience reception, as anyone who has sat through a show where the heat was turned up a little too high can attest. And of course, the more bodies that are in a confined space like a theatre, the more body heat generated and the higher the ambient temperature. Environment and bodies, actors and audiences, are always already intra-acting in theatrical spaces, changing each other in palpable and interactive ways that are unique to live performance. Perhaps theatre itself (and especially Brechtian theatre) can be thought of as a kind of trans-corporeal, intra-active half-life that connects and impacts people in ways that could not have been otherwise conceived. By focusing on Radium Girls as a trans-corporeal space in performance, one could tease out the nuances of toxic, radioactive animacies while engaging with trans-corporeal spaces both within the world of the play and the world of the play’s performance.[51] Unfortunately, such nuances rarely enter the sphere of production in regional and professional American theatre. Since Radium Girls is “one of the most performed plays in the 21st century,” an exhaustive list is probably impossible to gather, but I have found no evidence that a production has actually featured a disabled actress in the role of Grace.[52] This fact is perhaps unsurprising for many reasons, including the nature of the acting profession and the nature of actor training programs which tend to emphasize finding an idealized “normal” state of relaxation for an actor, what Carrie Sandahl has termed the “tyranny of the neutral” for its exclusion of non-normative bodies.[53] But what might be the nuanced implications of using visible markers of disability when staging the play, particular the final scene, and how might notions of trans-corporeality affect those moments? The trans-corporeal space of Radium Girls in performance engages what Victoria Lewis calls the “reciprocal relationship between performance space and performer” which raises questions of access for audiences as well as artists.[54] The final moments of the play, where Grace sits at the grave of her friend Kathryn while US Radium President Arthur Roeder looks on from the distance, demonstrate the engaging potential of these embodied, reciprocal interactions of disability, performers, text, and audiences. In the original workshop production, prior to the script’s publication, the final scene was staged with “a doomed young girl in a wheelchair wearing high heels,” a moment the reviewer felt was a “jarring and distracting note in a drama that follows a passionate and intelligent course.”[55] Whether the wheelchair was a stage direction that was ultimately cut from the script or a choice by director Joseph Megel is unclear. Yet the question remains, how might the use of a wheelchair in this final scene operate within the kind of analysis here proposed? The cane that Grace used at the end of act one was a theatrical prop, a meta-performance of disability to arouse pity and sympathy in the crowd within the world of the play. At the grave side, however, Grace is unaware she has an audience and there are no publicity directors orchestrating her performance like Ms. Wiley did at the end of the first act. Indeed, she does not move in the final scene, so the presence of the wheelchair, or any physical marking of disability, is external to the dramatic action and thus operates in the world of the production, a prop to indicate the physical condition of the character and ostensibly to arouse pity and sympathy in the theatrical audience. This is why, I believe, using disabled markers like the wheelchair in the final scene does not work theatrically or dramatically. Audiences are now being overtly manipulated by the production to feel a certain way, and the result is “jarring and distracting” for the audience. Not to mention how problematic and ableist it is to assume that the sight of a wheel chair would or should elicit feelings of pity in an audience. However, with an absence of physical markings of disability, it could be possible to read this final image of Grace as a problematic marginalization of disabled bodies being whitewashed and minimized. We know it is near the end of Grace’s life, and we know the physical toll that radium poisoning takes on bodies, so why leave Grace motionless on the ground without any other visible acknowledgement of her physical debilities? When staging this final scene, are you damned if you do and damned if you don’t, as it were? I believe this lack of “visible disability” marked on Grace’s body, in addition to being important for the dramatic action of the scene, is a manifestation of a cultural able-bodied gaze represented by Arthur Roeder. Roeder has returned to the grave site with his now-grown daughter, some fifteen years after the case was settled. He and Grace exist in the same space in different times when he finally has his moment of realization in the last line of the play. “Try as I might, Harriet, try as I might – I cannot remember their faces. (The irony strikes him.) I never saw their faces.”[56] He could not bring himself to look at the girls in the court room, when their marked bodies were placed on full display before him and the law, and now he cannot remember the faces that continue to haunt him. Here we see a palpable example of the complex interplay of the visible and the invisible as earlier described by Wolff. Roeder’s realization that persons with disabilities have their own lives and subjectivities comes too late for the girls in the play and is a potent reminder of the power of collective cultural denial that de-humanizes individuals with disabilities, rendering them invisible. Though the original workshop production with wheelchair and high heels may not have offered this possibility, understanding the play from this disability perspective holds the potential to shift the tragedy away from Grace and onto society in a Brechtian manner that implicates all of us, as we are all intra-acting in the material world. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson explains, “Disability studies reminds us that all bodies are shaped by their environments from the moment of conception. We transform constantly in response to our surroundings and register history on our bodies. The changes that occur when our body encounters the world are what we call disability.”[57] If disability is the change that occurs when bodies encounter the world, then scholars of theatre and performance have a particularly potent (if underutilized) critical ally in disability studies for examining performances and performance texts. In the case of this essay, treating radium itself as both actor and agent in the play Radium Girls engages with historical labor practices in what Stacy Alaimo might call a posthuman environmental ethics that is “not circumscribed by the human but is instead accountable to a material world that is never merely an external place but always the very substance of our selves and others.”[58] Contemporary critical thought is well aware of the power and agency ascribed to non-living or abstract entities such as class, gender, economics, and socio-politics. However, this exploration of Radium Girls demonstrates that accounting for the agency and animacy of material entities can transform the way we see our intra-acting bodies in the world, and the world in our bodies. A Disability perspective can transform how we think about and approach theatrical spaces as well, not just in terms of accessibility and access (for audiences and artists), but in terms of how bodies and spaces are always already intra-acting on each other. In this way, the personal responsibilities that are at stake in the play (to fight ignorance, exploitation, gender inequalities, etc.) are subsumed in the communal responsibility of that environmental ethic, a kind of universalizing aspect of debility that trans-acts within and among bodies, spaces, and even atoms. The in-between half-lives of disability always intra-act with environments, other bodies, and social forces in ways that can bring new insight to theatre and performance studies, disability studies, and other theories of scientific materiality. References [1] Events similar to the New Jersey Radium Girls also happened in Ottawa, IL and are dramatized in the play These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich (2010) which was adapted into a musical by Jessica Thebus, Andre Pluess, and Amanda Dehnert that premiered in 2015 at Chicago’s Northlight Theatre. [2] Claudia Clark, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). [3] D.W. Gregory, Radium Girls (Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2005), 8. [4] Robert L. Daniels, “Review: ‘Radium Girls,’” Variety, 23 May 2000, accessed 7 March 2016, http://variety.com/2000/legit/reviews/radium-girls-1200462095/ . [5] Despite the play’s popularity and hundreds of productions since its 2000 premier, Radium Girls has yet to receive scholarly attention, a fact which I here hope to change. [6] Though such an important debate about the nature and significance of disability and chronic illness is beyond the scope of this essay, many contemporary scholars such as Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Tobin Siebers, Robert McRuer, Anna Malloy, Lennard Davis, and others are thoughtfully engaging in how to adequately and appropriately theorize and understand disability and what it means in an evolving contemporary world. [7] Jasbir K. Puar, “The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no.1 (2011): 149. [8] Ibid., 153. [9] Ibid., 154. [10] Gregory, Radium Girls, 54. [11] For more about radium quack cures, consult the Oak Ridge Associated Universities’ Quack Cures Collection at http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/quackcures.htm and Radium Historical Items catalogue at http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML1008/ML100840118.pdf (accessed 4-30-2014). See also Paul Frame, “Radioactive Curative Devices and Spas,” The Oak Ridger, 5 November 1989. [12] Gregory, Radium Girls, 37. [13] Ibid., 78. [14] Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 10. [15] Mel Y. Chen, “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, no. 2-3 (2011): 265. [16] Gregory, Radium Girls, 13. [17] Chen, “Toxic Animacies,” 266. [18] Ibid., 279. [19] Gregory, Radium Girls, 86. [20] J. Rondo, “Long Term Retention of Radium in Man,” Nature 221, no. 5185 (15 March 1969): 1059. [21] This newspaper article is in reference to the radium dial painters from Ottawa, Illinois, a few years after the New Jersey story, but the comparison is the same. [22] Chen, “Toxic Animacies,” 279. [23] Gregory, Radium Girls, 105. [24] Ibid., 75-76. [25] Alpha particles, which are ionized helium nuclei (two protons and two neutrons), have limited penetrative ability and do not pose a danger to humans unless the alpha-emitter is ingested. Gamma rays, however are profoundly energetic and can penetrate deep into the body, altering the very DNA of cells. For the Radium Girls, the bone-seeking qualities of the element probably caused illness, debility, and death much faster than the cancerous radiation effects they would have developed had they lived long enough. This bone-seeking quality is also why the Radium Girls’ symptoms started in the mouth and jaw, since they pointed their paint brushes on their lips. [26] Gregory, Radium Girls, 82. [27] Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 9, 2. [28] Ibid., 7-8. [29] Ibid., 115. [30] Ibid., 4. Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality is based on Barad’s concept of “intra-active becoming” (i.e. things do not precede their relations but are always already relational). [31] Tamsen Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 6. [32] Gregory, Radium Girls, n.p. [33] Deborah Stone, The Disabled State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 68. [34] Ibid., 21. [35] Ibid. [36] Gregory, Radium Girls, 59. [37] Stone, The Disabled State, 23. [38] Ibid., 91. [39] This medical understanding of disability is a uniquely modern phenomenon. Throughout most of history, disability was viewed from a moral or spiritual perspective, that disabilities were markings of sin or collusion with the devil, or some kind of punishment for moral turpitude. The different models of understanding disability is one of the many important contributions of disability scholars and theorists, too many to mention here. [40] Gregory, Radium Girls, 24. [41] Ibid., 65. [42] Ibid., 68. [43] Clark, Radium Girls, 5. [44] Ibid., 3. [45] Changes have been slow, particularly for women in the workforce, and industrial health is still a significant concern. Even today, approximately 100,000 Americans die each year from occupational diseases (Clark, Radium Girls, 11). The battle continues. [46] Puar, “The Cost of Getting Better,” 153. [47] Gregory, Radium Girls, 60. [48] Ibid., 58, 63. [49] Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 97. [50] While beyond the scope of this project, exploring and exposing such ironies is a critical task in the larger worlds of disability employment, performance, and the media. [51] At time of this writing, I am preparing to direct a production of Radium Girls that will attempt to capitalize on this trans-corporeal theory of half-life. Our production design will be minimalistic, and we will focus on the Brechtian elements that draw attention to the connections between performance and the world around the performance. I plan to work with my ensemble to explore the animacy of radium as an actor/character in a way that (I hope) will keep the pace and the tone both hopeful and thoughtful rather than grim and strident. A common concept image used for the show is a glowing clock face, ever reminding the audience of the girl’s impending death as a result of their radium poisoning. Such an image of time and death seems to put ankle weights on the performance, slowing the pace with a constant, dread-inducing reminder of death. Instead, the concept image from which my production will spring to life is that of a spinthariscope, a small child’s toy from the time period that contains a small (harmless) amount of radioactive material encased in a tube or small canister lined with phosphorescent material. Some were as small as rings and could be found as prizes in cereal boxes. When taken into a dark room, letting your eyes adjust, if you looked into the spinthariscope you could see tiny flashes of light every time a radioactive emanation struck the phosphorescent lining. I find this image particularly hopeful and engaging to the imagination, as well as quite beautiful. The image amplifies the light and lightness of the radium’s animacy, developing the trans-corporeal space in an upward and outward trajectory, rather than the downward and dreary trajectory of the ticking clock of doom. Dwelling on this story as merely or exclusively tragic misses the hope and benefits that arose from these events, the lives that were saved from the legislation that sparked public interest in industrial labor reform. An emphasis on the tragic is also problematic in the ways it can propagate the mindset that disability is the definition of personal tragedy and loss, rather than the trans-corporeal and generative sense that brings new perspectives and experiences to life that could not have otherwise occurred. The very first line of the show, spoken by Grace, is “So much light” (11). I see this line as the inflection point of the play: it will turn either downward and dark or upward and light, depending upon the nuances of one’s interpretation of the nature and significance of these toxic, radioactive animacies. [52] Mark Bretz, “The Sad, Tragic Tale of the ‘Radium Girls’: Theatre Review,” Ladue News, 1 April 2015, accessed 7 March 2016, http://www.laduenews.com/diversions/arts-entertainment/the-sad-tragic-tale-of-the-radium-girls-theater-review/article_ca20d23e-d8b8-11e4-86cc-7799675ff9c6.html . [53] Carrie Sandahl, “The Tyranny of Neutral: Disabililty and Actor Training,” in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). While an exploration of disability and acting in the professional world is beyond the scope of this essay, such questions of access are among the most pressing on the contemporary theatrical world. [54] Victoria Lewis, “The Theatrical Landscape of Disability,” Disability Studies Quarterly 24, no. 3 (summer 2004): n.p. [55] Daniels, “Review: ‘Radium Girls,’” n.p. [56] Gregory, Radium Girls, 110. [57] Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Disability and Representation,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (March 2005), 524. [58] Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 158. Footnotes About The Author(s) Bradley Stephenson is an assistant professor of Theatre Arts at Catawba College in Salisbury, NC where he teaches theatre history, acting, improvisation, and playwriting. His scholarship has been published in Theatre Topics, Studies in Musical Theatre, Ecumenica, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre. 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.