Sarah Courtis 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 The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Sarah Courtis By Published on November 17, 2022 Download Article as PDF The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical . Warren Hoffman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020; 285 pp. Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity . Ed. Sarah Whitfield. Methuen Drama, London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2019; 241 pp. For a relatively young form, musical theatre carries a long history of racism and white supremacy (among many other issues of identity and representation). Indeed, musicals often reflect the society in which they are written and performed, complicating the often naïve view of what the musical means or does by their expression of deeper political frameworks of creation, production and reception. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical was first published in 2014 in an effort to address the racially-coded history of American musical theatre as a form “by white people, for white people and about white people” (5). The second edition, published in 2020, builds upon this provocation by adding a new chapter on more recent blockbuster shows: The Book of Mormon and Hamilton . An important contribution to musical theatre scholarship, The Great White Way seeks to identify and combat white supremacy in musicals by tracing issues of race historically from Show Boat to Hamilton with a focus on ‘normative’ whiteness, which is often left out of the discussion in musical theatre literature. In an attempt to reveal and (eventually) deconstruct racist notions of white supremacy, Hoffman first endeavours to make it visible, noting that this is just the “ initial step ” to be taken. He acknowledges the context of this book being specifically about the American musical, joining many preeminent scholars in this narrow focus (particularly as he narrows it further to only successful Broadway musicals), leaving a rather large gap to be addressed elsewhere. The overture lays out the premise, challenging preconceived notions of the way race is constructed in musical theatre, particularly in works which don’t appear to be about race at all. Indeed, he notes that “their silence about race speaks volumes” (4) and that “community really means white community, while people of colour are often absent from the utopia that musicals represent” (6). Hoffman complicates the idea of race “revealing that racial meaning is sometimes located in the space between the text and the performers” (26). He interrogates and problematises the concept of ‘universality’ and addresses several myths of musical theatre which uphold normative whiteness, while critiquing nostalgia for ‘simpler times’ which can be found in the revivals of ‘Golden Era’ texts. Act One of The Great White Way consists of three chapters, with case studies of Show Boat , Oklahoma! , Annie Get Your Gun , West Side Story and The Music Man . These chapters consider the early classics which shaped the American musical, while acknowledging the wide field of criticism available and gaps still to be filled. Hoffman provides a close reading of each of these productions, often juxtaposing their use of stereotypes (as in Show Boat and Annie Get Your Gun ) and their silences on race (as in Oklahoma! and The Music Man ). These early texts don’t just portray “the creation, negotiation and consolidation of Caucasian identity” (56), they enact them and solidify normative whiteness through their silences on the topic. Hoffman challenges readers to take note of their own internalised prejudices by noting that “race is a category that affects everyone, whites included, regardless of whether they see themselves implicated in the discussion” (80). These case studies reveal the importance of historical and political contexts in the creation and reception of the original productions and their revivals, outlining the rise and fall of musical theatre through American culture over the last century. The second “act” consists of five chapters, tracing the history of Black and Interracial productions of white musicals and considering the inherent racism of nostalgia. It also includes case studies on A Chorus Line , The Book of Mormon and Hamilton : productions which take clear stances on race and casting practices. Hoffman considers the trend of Black versions of classic white musicals (most notably Hello, Dolly! ) and how they revealed “the way in which the supposed normativity of whiteness was made visible when non-white performers played roles assumed to be the domain of white actors” (112). He suggests that ignoring colour can be a form of whitewashing, and that more diversity in new shows is required. The American political context continues to be traced in the case studies, as A Chorus Line portrays a naïve expression of the American Dream; revivals and revisals are seen to have an economic rather than artistic focus and many of them reflect a nostalgia for ‘simpler’ times (which Hoffman connects to Trump’s slogan: ‘Make America Great Again’). Finally, Hoffman notes the inherent whiteness in The Book of Mormon and Hamilton , both of which (on the surface) appear to be race-conscious. Notions of colonialism and neoliberalism surface within the shows, however, they are subsumed with the musicals’ rather hopeful suggestion that these “are necessary steps on making the Broadway musical a more inclusive and democratic artform” (224). Reframing the Musical, a recent collection edited by Sarah Whitfield, picks up on many themes of The Great White Way , filling some of the gaps left by Hoffman. Whitfield brings together a series of essays by preeminent scholars in the musical theatre field, each focussing on reframing different productions through the lenses of race, culture and identity. In this more democratic format, multiple authors come from diverse backgrounds and bring fresh perspectives on popular musicals as well as shows which had limited runs (and perhaps a more limited impact). Whitfield frames the anthology’s approach by considering who is left out of the “cool white guy narrative” (xvii) consciously centering Critical Race Theory in order to challenge “expectations of default whiteness” (xix). Part one provides three chapters under the theme of reframing identity/identities. The first chapter, by Donatella Galella, considers The Fortress of Solitude (2014) and the power dynamics inherent in a text which “relies upon white authorisation” (4). Her chapter is a call to arms (often cited and taken up by the other authors) for white people to use “racial privilege to do anti-racist work” (5). Galella centralises the Black experience through this case study and notes the way the text mirrored the life of the creative team who were attempting systematic change, while benefitting from a racist system. Broderick Chow provides a personal account of viewing Here Lies Love (2014) as a Filipino, considering the impact of distancing for many audiences in contrast to his more personal gaze. Brian Ganger presents a moving analysis of The Lion King (1997) as both a Black and white musical. He complicates the ‘double event’ by considering the predominantly white creative team and Imperialist story being told by Black bodies, to a Black sound. Part two provides a more historical approach via five chapters aimed at challenging historiographies. Maya Cantu utilizes an approach of ‘recovery’ and “cultural acts of resistance” (67) by recognising the historical and cultural significance of Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith. Arianne Johnson Quinn examines the legacy of Oscar Hammerstein II in Britain, while critiquing the white saviour complex. Sean Mayes calls for justice for the ‘invisible’ roles and contributions, particularly those of Musical Directors and Black people. He calls for more diversity in all shows as well as utilization of the Practice as Research methodology. Alejandro Postigo considers the history of musical theatre in Spain, focussing on the forms of zarzuella and revista . Phoebe Ramsy returns to the concept of ‘recovery as resistance’, highlighting the importance of choreography in Shuffle Along – Or The Making Of The Musical Sensation Of 1921 And All That Followed. This set of scholarly essays establishes the volume’s cross-cultural scope, as well as its activist contributions. Part Three moves away from race in order to interrogate musical structures in identity and social change over the final four essays. Rebecca Applin Warner discusses the musematic relations in Fun Home as a way of analysing Allison’s relationships with her family. Sarah Browne considers the counterculture musical Hair (1967) , providing two calls to action: firstly, to revisit and question older texts, and secondly, to develop and adopt approaches from other disciplines when analysing musical theatre texts. James Lovelock calls for a more nuanced approach to sexuality, noting the lack of representation of Bisexual, Asexual and transgender stories after analysing The Colour Purple, Yank!, Fun Home and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. Wind Dell Woods concludes this volume through a provocative critique of Hamilton, focussing on the casting choices and the conflation of ‘immigrant’ and ‘slave’. These two volumes— The Great White Way and Reframing the Musical— complement each other well, taking up different approaches to topics of white supremacy and racial identity in musical theatre. While there are gaps in each, they are acknowledged; indeed it would be difficult to provide a comprehensive treatise on race in musical theatre (even forgetting the other intersectional identities discussed) in one, or even two, volumes. Each testifies to the centrality of this form of popular theatre in America, while raising important questions for scholars, for artists and for audiences. Their provocations are boldly presented for a new generation of artists and academics to continue building upon—so the initial step of making white supremacy and other issues of discrimination visible will no longer be the only step taken. References Footnotes About The Author(s) SARAH COURTIS Murdoch University/Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts 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:

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. By Marina Johnson Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF The clown paints his face to become someone else — to live in another reality. With white paint, a few colors, and a red nose, he can turn tragedy into comedy. He can walk into a hospital room, where someone lies dying, and turn him into a laughing child. He can enter a refugee camp and make it a festival .… He paints his face, puts on the nose — and for a moment, he’s allowed to dream again. [1] The Clown is a gripping one-man play that delivers far more than its simple title might suggest. At its center is Sobhi (Ezzat Al-Natsheh), a Palestinian clown performer whose painted smile conceals a churning inner world of joy, humiliation, pain, hope, and unrelenting self-doubt. The play follows Sobhi, who is haunted by the traumatic car crash that happened to him and his friend while they were driving to a birthday performance in the rain. Throughout the monologue, Sobhi argues with a second voice, “the Clown,” a manifestation of his inner critic, that alternately mocks, seduces, and confronts him about his lifelong need to please others, his humiliation and bullying, and his guilt over surviving when others did not. As Sobhi recounts memories of family violence, political repression, and the daily humiliations of life under occupation, the clown persona becomes both a survival strategy and a trap that feeds on others’ laughter while concealing his despair. By the end, Sobhi briefly removes the red nose in an attempt to reclaim himself, but ultimately puts it back on, acknowledging that the cycle of performance, masking pain with laughter, will continue. I first encountered this work in rehearsal on August 28, 2025, at El Hakawati Palestinian National Theatre while I was in Palestine. Two weeks later, on opening night, I was already back in the United States, so my friends helped me watch the performance via a WhatsApp video call, a surprisingly intimate way to witness the performance from afar. I could hear my friends laugh and cry throughout the performance as they sat in the red velvet seats of one of my favorite theatres, while I laughed and cried from my couch in the US. I was grateful for the solution that allowed me to witness a play I had been anxiously anticipating by a team I hold in high esteem. The play’s concept originates with Al-Natsheh himself and draws directly from his life story. He shared the material with Mariam Basha, who crafted the script and served as assistant director and choreographer alongside Kamel El Basha, who directed the production. I had previously collaborated with Al-Natsheh on El Manshiyyeh , which I co-directed with Samer Al-Saber, but I’ve also known him for years through his work with the famed Jerusalem clown duo Zaatar and Sim Sim (he is, of course, Sim Sim), as well as his collaborations with Red Noses Palestine. [2] A little-known fact about Al-Natsheh–he keeps a nose on him at all times because sometimes someone around him needs joy, and he is just the one to deliver it. Also, he is often recognized in public as Sim Sim, so the nose allows him to get in and stay in character with/for the kids who recognize him. Al-Natsheh is quick-witted, intellectually agile, and an extraordinarily funny performer. This piece, however, revealed a different register of his artistry. In the opening moments, he applies his makeup onstage, transforming himself into the clown before the audience’s eyes and setting the tone for the performance to come. The text of the play begins with Sobhi describing a fragmented memory of being in a car accident and the feeling of being trapped and unable to scream as the other person in the car dies. He asks: “Why was it me who stayed alive? … I’ll never know what he wanted to tell me.” [3] This tragic car accident serves as one of the play’s anchoring images, its rain-soaked violence symbolizing both literal and psychic rupture. Rain becomes a recurring motif that is at once cleansing and wounding, a metaphor for memory, endurance, and the cyclical nature of grief. Water washes over the narrative as Sobhi attempts to peel back the layers of performance that shield him from his own vulnerability. Interruptions are key to the play. Phone calls frequently interrupt the scenes with people calling Sobhi to offer clown jobs, and we see that he is constantly negotiating work under stressful conditions. In the series of phone conversations, the difficult circumstances of work as a clown are revealed: short notice, low pay, unsafe environments, and often unrealistically high expectations. Other memories also intrude, contributing to the play's fragmented nature. For instance, Sobhi recalls being eleven years old and living with his grandfather, who burned his belongings and constantly insulted him. This bullying carried over to other facets of his life, as he remembers being bullied by his peers for his height and appearance. Image 1: Ezzat Al-Natsheh on stage at El Hakawati Theatre in Jerusalem. Photo credit: Mohammad Basha. The crux of the play lies in the interruptions where Sobhi speaks with “the Clown,” a figure who interjects, comments, argues, and mocks him. They volley between dark humor, confession, and near-prayer, their exchanges revealing a fractured sense of self shaped by personal trauma and the suffocating pressures of social and political life. The Clown criticizes Sobhi for being too kind, for letting people walk over him, and for depending on others’ approval. Sobhi tries to defend himself, but the dialogue shows how entangled they are. At times, the Clown sounds like a bully; at other times, he praises Sobhi and even becomes affectionate. Their battlesome relationship is at the center of the play, and it was what I, as an audience member, wanted to know more about. In a quieter scene that reveals his inner turmoil, Sobhi prays aloud, asking God for relief and strength (Image 1). As he speaks, he reflects on what a clown can do, such as bringing laughter to hospitals and refugee camps, offering brief moments of joy amid hardship. These reflections frame the emotional spine of the play: memories of childhood humiliation, emotional neglect, and constant belittlement for failing to embody the expectations of masculinity. Those wounds follow him into the present, where he struggles as a clown who barely makes ends meet, trapped in a society that relies on him for laughter yet mocks the very profession that sustains him. The Clown, both tormentor and truth-teller, relentlessly probes Sobhi’s insecurities, accusing him of cowardice, failure, and complicity in his own suffering. Their confrontation builds toward the play’s central question: whether Sobhi’s clowning is an act of degradation or a source of purpose. Near the end, the Clown urges Sobhi to “take off the nose.” Sobhi removes it, and the Clown insists that without it, he cannot exist. Sobhi resists, declaring that he is “done performing,” and attempts to walk away. Yet in the moment of refusal, Sobhi recognizes what gives his life meaning. He chooses to put the red nose back on—not as submission, but as an affirmation of the role he has claimed for himself. Without this… who am I? Without the laughter… who remembers me? Maybe the clown is the only part of me that’s still alive. The stage’s visual composition echoes the play's themes. The scenography was deceptively minimal. At the center of the stage lay a patterned carpet that served as a grounding place for the story. Upstage right sat a mound of pastel balloons, eight or more in various soft colors, an oddly cheerful counterpoint to the psychological terrain of the piece. On the opposite side rested a wooden chair draped with a ukulele, topped with a rubber chicken, and accompanied by a red-and-blue striped stand for a computer. The center was left open, allowing the dueling figures, Sobhi and the Clown, ample room to spar, circle one another, and, in Sobhi’s case, to dance. Al-Natsheh transitioned between the two characters simply by sharply turning; when he faced stage right, we knew the Clown was talking in his aggressive and often belittling voice. When he faced stage left, Al-Natsheh was the one in the lead, responding and reasoning with the Clown. The production extended this sense of divided identity into the costume itself. The costume design sharpened the performance’s tonal dissonance: a one-piece clown suit with light blue sleeves and hip pockets, bisected into pink on one side and yellow on the other, its bowtie reversing the colors so that pink and yellow contrasted each other. The result was both whimsical and faintly disquieting, perfectly attuned to the play’s oscillation between humor and unease. Kamel El Basha’s direction provides a steady hand throughout the production, while Mariam Basha’s choreography introduces dances that offer moments of levity and deepen the play’s emotional texture. Al-Natsheh’s acting is remarkably agile, shifting seamlessly between characters—signaled subtly by whether his hair is tied back in a ponytail or left down. What makes The Clown so resonant as a production is the intimate character study at its core. Laughter emerges as both lifeline and trap: an act of resistance against despair, yet also a performance demanded by others that gradually erodes the self. Through the protagonist’s exchanges, the play exposes the gendered and political dimensions of his pain, revealing how patriarchal expectations of strength, the violence of occupation, and the indignities of precarity conspire to “castrate” him emotionally and spiritually. Ultimately, The Clown becomes a haunting meditation on what it means to continue performing joy in a world that constantly humiliates and silences. Blending absurdist comedy with piercing confession and poetic repetition, the play offers a powerful and unsettling portrait of identity under pressure—an unforgettable image of a man struggling to endure, create, and hope while caught between the demands of the world and the echoing chambers of his own mind. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [1] My translation, from Mariam Basha’s script. [2] Red Noses Palestine is a branch of Red Noses International, which employs local clown-doctors to perform in hospitals for sick patients. [3] My translation, from Mariam Basha’s script References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson ( Marina-Johnson.com ) is a PhD candidate in TAPS with PhD minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Certificate in Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Johnson received her MFA in Directing and taught at Beloit College for three years. Johnson continues to work as a director and dramaturg while also co-hosting Kunafa and Shay , a MENA/SWANA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons. During her most recent fieldwork, she directed several productions with Al Harah Theatre and taught directing workshops at ASHTAR Theatre. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. 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Eleanor Russell Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Eleanor Russell By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics . Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017; Pp. 232. In Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics, Soyica Diggs Colbert explores how post-Civil Rights Movement cultural products and performances of blackness re-map black ontologies and histories. In an extraordinary display of interdisciplinary rigor, Diggs Colbert describes—to name only a few examples—how Toni Morrison’s “flying Africans,” George Clinton’s spaceship, Beyoncé’s “Partition”-ary (re-)entanglements with Black pasts, and acts of marching, realize the “webs of affiliation” between contemporary black performances and their revolutionary antecedents. She writes, “ Black Movements explores how artists actively engage with certain pasts and jettison others to remember, revive, and reimagine political movements that seem to have stalled” (7). “Black movements,” as such, inaugurate and name the field of relation between Black presents and Black pasts by way of articulations of black identity, subjectivity, and comportment in revolutionary performance. Diggs Colbert’s previous monograph, The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (Cambridge, 2011) prefigures the role of discursive interplay and performer-reader engagement that is the basic premise of Black Movements. The new book extends the line of thought that the black body, through acts of repetition, can be conjured—or, importantly, erased—by discursive, spatial, and temporal realignments and points of relation that perform revolutionary potential and fervor. The book’s virtuosity lies in the navigation of a plethora of scholarly and political positions. Diggs Colbert deftly summarizes and positions herself between the Afro-pessimist/Afro-optimist debate in African-American studies. In particular, she deploys ideas of opacity and elision toward the theorization of black performance in terms of supplementarity and revolutionary excess. Though drawing from Joseph Roach’s work on surrogation and Butlerian performativity, as well as many other scholars, the work’s greatest strength lies in Diggs Colbert’s treatment of her case studies as theories and/or theorists in their own right rather than merely reflections of pre-determined scholarly positions. Toni Morrisons’s ellipses, for example, make audible the revolutionary capacities of being silenced, functioning as a kind of praxis; Black Movements suggests the duty of the scholar, then, is to articulate how that theory always-already plays out in black life and, in Morrison’s case, via the performativity of text. In chapter one, Diggs Colbert argues that the ellipses empower the reader to become an archivist, interpreter, and writer; as such, just as the characters carve out complex and agentive identities and modes of relation in Beloved, for example, so does the reader, in the Morrison-encouraged expansion of what the act of reading includes. The conceptual breadth and sheer variety of case studies considered in terms of performance type and genre is a strength. This range makes it possible for Diggs Colbert to account for the idiosyncracy, hybridity, and, ultimately, opacity at the heart of black performance —and of black life and politics in performance. The consequence of this variety, however, is that it sometimes leads to a lack of clarity or impact. Specifically, the chapter on marching shows a prodigious command of how the spatial reorganization and mass comportment of, in one example, the Silent Parade in New York City in 1917 works. Diggs Colbert remarks on how the act of marching configured black bodies, costume, and accumulation in order to take up space and make “audible,” per se, the experience of being silenced. The same is true for Diggs Colbert’s discussion about the March on Washington in 1963: “Harnessing comportment in service of social reorganization clarifies how imagination and embodied action work together to shape political spheres as physical locations and ideologies” (154). Yet considering, as she often references, how foundational the publicity of Emmett Till’s brutal murder in 1955 was to the inauguration of the Civil Rights Movement and —the murder, famously, a reaction to Till allegedly whistling at a white woman—the audibly sonic (as opposed to performative silence) elements of anti-black racism and subsequent organizing are unexpectedly absent from this chapter. An odd omission, too, because Till’s supposed act—the whistle—and the act of marching itself in its most formal extreme—foot raised high, crash to the ground, triumphant and war-like— so loud. Obviously, silence as a performative can call attention to the ways that Till and others were literally silenced by being murdered. However, for a work of such breadth and investments in the phenomenology of black life (Fanonian citations abound, especially in the Introduction), the aural frame reads muted. Black Movements offers a conceptual, formal, and multidisciplinary approach to the spaciotemporal re-alignments forged by contemporary black movements with black pasts. In a necessary intervention, Diggs Colbert both critiques and elaborates upon critical race theory and black political radicalism in the fields of performance studies, African American studies, theatre history, and sociology. Black Movements was awarded an Honorable Mention for the Joe A. Calloway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre. It is a significant book, one that should be read alongside the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman, Daphne Brooks, Amber Jamilla Musser and other black feminist thinkers. Like Beyoncé reflecting back on Josephine Baker, Black Movements’ s looks to the legacies of black performance in order to imagine and build black futures. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Eleanor Russell Northwestern 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 Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Julia Rössler Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Julia Rössler By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF The art of playwriting is not fundamentally a narrative art like novel writing; it is dialogic, it proceeds from contradiction, not cause and effect. - Tony Kushner , “Notes About Political Theater”[1] Since the post-war period, American drama and theatre has been shaped by a strong political consciousness: the Theater of the Ridiculous, queer and gay drama, and the growing public presence of Latin-American and African-American playwrights during the 1960s to 1980s reflect a thematic and aesthetic diversification of American drama that is unparalleled in its history. Some scholars relate new formal developments to the impact of postmodernism as the prime characteristic of a distinctly contemporary American drama and theatre. [2] Moreover, it shows a growing interest among dramatists to establish drama and theatre as a site for critical self-reflection and public debate in which “socio-political goals of challenging hegemonic political representations and presenting identities outside the established social ideal of how Americans ‘should be’” are a central function. [3] In the early 1990s, Tony Kushner, for instance, has received much critical attention for his landmark play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1992) in which he documents multiple ills of US-American society, culture, and politics during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. Kushner, who has for years been an openly political voice in American theatre, has on numerous occasions identified himself as a writer of political theatre and describes his political aspirations as a form of “conscious intent to enter the world of struggle, change, activism, revolution, and growth.” [4] Explicit citations of socio-cultural and political events and historical circumstances pervade his dramatic oeuvre in plays such as A Bright Room Called Day (1994), Slavs! (1995), or Angels in America (1992). In many of his plays, dramatic plots and the character’s actions function as symbolic explications of the interrelation between human suffering and the dominant ideologies that inform our understanding of reason, morality, and truth while displacing the absolute value and legitimacy of such notions. In particular, his alertness to the social inequalities and injustices resulting from the discriminatory policies on race, ethnicity, and class give his plays political force and has contributed to his reputation as a receptive analyst of the multiple precarious situations that shape human life and experience. Occasionally, Kushner’s plays give the impression of being a personal venture into the possibilities and limits of a dialectical and Marxists world-view. Many critics see this venture as one main feature of Kushner’s work as a dramatist and yet respond with mixed reactions: Harold Bloom, for instance, voices some concern over an ideological overburdening of Kushner’s creativity and dramatic talent at the expense of his artistic and intellectual openness. [5] Other scholars have taken the political suggestiveness of his plays as cues to explore Kushner’s dramatic and aesthetic style in relation to a close intellectual affinity of his oeuvre with the works of Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, or the theories of Marxism. [6] In this paper, I will situate Kushner’s play Angels in America (1992) in the poetological tradition of tragedy and, in particular, the notion of the tragic. As I will later outline, these two interrelated dimensions have posed profound difficulties both as a matter of literary form and a model of thought during the intellectual climate of the 1980s when Angels was written. Kushner thus resorts to the tragic in a time when it is seen by many as an outdated view on human existence. In this respect, I suggest that Angels in America draws its pressing political consciousness from the way in which Kushner develops his unique poetics of the tragic. It relates the causes of human suffering and agony to concrete moral and political ideologies as well as the ethical implications of human action and will. In this sense, the play most clearly departs from the traditional metaphysics of tragic fate. Even more so, unlike other modern tragedians who negotiate the limitations of human agency as the tragic essence of life, Angels rejects a tragic surrender of human agency in favor of its force to induce change and progress. Finality gives way to visions of progress and profound moral conundrums contribute to a growth of character, will, and new conceptions of freedom. From the perspective of dramatic form, Kushner’s conception of the tragic bears resemblance to one crucial dimension of the Hegelian model of tragic collision which rests on Georg Friedrich Hegel’s assumption, as Simon Goldhill points out, that “the abstract, normative idea of the tragic results in tragedy’s becoming the site where aesthetics, politics, and history are most intimately intertwined.” [7] It is at the intersection of the political and aesthetic innate to the idea of the tragic, in which I place the following discussion of Kushner’s Angels in America . This informs the play’s deeply dialectical grasp of reality and dramatic form. In this vein, the play artfully intermingles aesthetic and politics and can be read to challenge the often presumed separation of the tragic and the political as two mutually exclusive modes of expression and intent while exposing the innate political potentials of the tragic from the perspective of formal structure and ethical inquiry. Visions of the Tragic in the Twentieth Century The tragic, as a site for the literal and figurative envisioning of human agency and its limits has, from the early twentieth century onwards, occupied the minds and creative efforts of American dramatists. [8] Eugene O’Neill’s dramatic works envision the tragic conundrum of human existence as the impossibility to escape suffering. The multiple existential struggles that befall his characters embody this inevitability: the tragic protagonist is one who suffers from shattering inner demons as O’Neill dramatizes a pervading sense of despair against the mechanisms of coping with this innate facet of human existence. It is well known that Arthur Miller envisioned modern tragedy as a transfiguration of the tragic hero’s nobility into the preservation of human dignity against relentless and dehumanizing social orders. [9] While O’Neill bespeaks an insight into the tragic as a human condition as such, Miller’s take on tragedy evokes the quotidian and a concrete social reality. His dramatic accentuation of the average man as a tragic hero inspires a fierce critique on the commodification of human experience and a thoughtful reflection on the changing nature of values, ideals, and virtues in modern US-American society. Dramatists such as O’Neill and Miller have given crucial impulses to many studies that explore the uniquely modern visions of tragedy and the tragic in the mid-twentieth century and link this emergence with the general trend of modern American drama to give shape and meaning to their dramatis personae in relation to social, political, or natural environments and their psychological constitutions. Modern tragedies in this sense are more closely related to a metaphysics of the tragic, although they seldomly refer to the divine or fate as the responsible metaphysical forces but conceive of social, natural, and psychological forces as the constitutive powers that shape human existence. In his study From Büchner To Beckett , Alfred Schwarzer argues that realism and naturalism came into existences as a new poetic of dramatic writing in an attempt to understand and examine the “contemporary version of man’s tragic condition.” [10] He outlines that the modern tragedians dramatize the modern individual’s exposure to natural and social forces that are beyond his immediate control as an essentially tragic experience. [11] Tragedy, hence, serves as a model of thought and dramatic form, as it explores the tragic as a mode and epitome of modern existence in the context of human agency, psychology, or natural and social determinism. During the increased presence of political criticism in the 1980s and 1990s—the time in which Angels was written—tragedy, as a model of thought and a literary form, suffers from a rapid decline of interest. It has often been remarked that in this intellectual climate of the time, tragedy was contemplated as a highly outdated and insufficient literary form with regard to the critical work plays were meant to perform. In her expansive survey on tragic theory, Rita Felski remarks that tragedy was “perceived as the enemy of politics in promoting a sense of hopelessness, fatalism, and resignation” and therefore was cast to the margins of critical discussion. [12] Moreover, in an US-American context, Felski argues, the notion of tragedy became highly unpopular because of its power to displace uniquely American myths such as the “sovereignty of selfhood” and was thus regarded as outmoded in a time in which self-determination and individualism were important ideational cornerstones to the idea of freedom. [13] The Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton situates the occasional abandonment of tragedy from critical debate in the 1980s and 1990s within its particular history of reception as “the word signifies a kind of writing which is no longer possible”. [14] And this principal abandonment of tragedy from critical inquiry results in a discrepancy between theory and practice. In a similar vein, I have signaled in the first section of this paper that this view can be challenged as a premature verdict with regard to Kushner’s Angels in America . In fact, only in recent years a great body of dramatic work has been reconsidered in response to an increased reclaiming of tragedy to critic’s attention (see “Introduction” in this special issue). The skepticism towards the notion of tragedy has survived as a persistent force. In the later twentieth century, George Steiner was a main influence in this regard as he challenged the place and value of tragedy in his book The Death of Tragedy (1961). Steiner’s main claim is that the particular world view that tragedy requires—a metaphysics of the divine and inescapable and unjust fate—has, in modern times, been superseded by the shaping influence of the metaphysics of Christianity and Marxism. The former receives its meaning from the principles of redemption and forgiveness while the Marxist world view draws its effective momentum from the notions of progress, change, and justice. [15] In his personal political commitment to Marxism, Kushner’s association with the tragic seems counterintuitive. Unredeemable failure and radical finality, the cornerstones of tragedy on account of Steiner, are absent from such a logic and thus constitute the basic “anti-tragic” metaphysics of the modern and contemporary period. Because “tragedy is irreparable” and cannot lead to justice, resolution, or atonement but forces us to accept the harrowing insight that “things are as they are,” true tragedy seeks to confront us with the radical and tragic limitedness of human agency. [16] And Kushner’s own aesthetic of theatre coincides with Steiner’s argument to the extent that it renders a certain impossibility of tragedy due to its promotion of a progressivist logic and, as I believe, resistance to the limitedness of human agency. Kushner openly voices his discomfort embracing an essentially tragic outlook on life in his plays: in his essay “Notes About Political Theater” he refers to the “tragic” as a “rhetorical dead end” if it is merely understood as a permanent and universal, or “natural” condition of human existence which withholds the political implications of action and event. [17] In contrast to Steiner’s idea to declare the death of tragedy, Kushner’s Angels in America can be regarded as a successful and imaginative transposition of the tragic into a politically motivated dramatic form in order to explore the dilemmas of contemporary experience. Its openness of form appeals to the investment of the tragic with political meaning and significance which does, in Kushner’s own words, not “lie beyond politics, beyond history” but presents the world as “an interwoven web of the public and the private” suggesting that “the personal is political.” [18] For Kushner, the tragic must rest within the political, the private, and the public and not outside of it, precisely because it—as a dramatic force—artistically enriches drama with multiple impulses of critique, perception, and reflection on the world of lived experience. Meanwhile, Steiner’s claim itself has been challenged from various theoretical directions, let alone through the striking new interest in contemporary rewritings of Greek tragedies (see the article by Konstantinos Blatanis in this issue). But regarding the fact that we need to approach the tragic anew in order for it to work as an insightful operational tool, his arguments are still illuminative. [19] In fact, a number of scholars have made attempts to save the tragic from this “rhetorical dead end” of which Kushner speaks and pursue to interrogate different modalities of the tragic. In this respect, the work of scholars like Williams, Wallace, or Felski reflect a trend to rethink the tragic beyond familiar parameters and to include new frameworks from the field of philosophical aesthetics or reception theory. [20] Rita Felski, for instance, strongly advises to view the tragic as an aesthetic term that involves a “distinctive forming of material” beyond a mere representation of suffering but as a “particular shape of suffering.” [21] The process of shaping that Felski refers to is also a pivotal dimension of Eagleton’s view on the tragic when he writes: “Tragic art involves the plotting of suffering, not simply a raw cry of pain.” [22] Both propose to view the tragic as a particular mode of expression which creates the material composition and symbolic meaning of the play. This appropriation of the tragic beyond the parameters of metaphysics but within the context of drama’s poetological form has its roots in a long tradition of thinking and conceptualizing the tragic. In particular, German Idealism of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century regarded the tragic as a model of philosophical thought. [23] Since then, Michelle Gellrich points out, the notion of the tragic conflict began to inform attempts of a systematic theories of drama and tragedy. [24] In fact, the notion that conflict is an essential element of tragic drama can nowadays be traced in a lineage of thinkers on tragedy from Hegel (1830), to Martha Nussbaum (2000), Raymond Williams (1966), or Terry Eagleton (2009). [25] The German idealist Georg Friedrich Hegel, in his “Lectures on Fine Arts,” was among the first philosophers of the theory of tragedy to explicitly single out the conflict as a central feature of plot for the dramatic arts. [26] In his chapter on the principle importance of action in dramatic poetry he writes: “it rests entirely on collisions of circumstances, passions, and characters, and leads therefore to actions and then to the reactions.” [27] On the one hand, collisions are an important engine for a swift and effective progression of dialogue and plot. On the other hand, and more importantly, in tragedy, the dramatization of collisions or conflicts between individuals has a particular “manner” or quality: the characters embody what Hegel calls a “substantive basis” as they signify meaning beyond their individual existence: they symbolize general systems of value such as the family, body politic, religious faiths etc. [28] The principle task of tragedy consists in plotting such realms of ethical life against each other to kindle the tragic meaning of the conflict. And, as is well known, Hegel builds his argument primarily on Sophocles’ Antigone . In the confrontation between Antigone and Creon about the rightful burial of Antigone’s brother, Hegel recognizes a clash of equally valid systems of value—family (Antigone) versus the body politic (Creon)—which creates a tragic situation resulting from the juxtaposition of two ethically legitimate realms. As both require different imperatives of action and will, a resolution of the conflict inevitably involves a violation of ethical conduct, and finally death. [29] Hegel writes: “each can establish the true and positive content of its own aim and character only by denying and infringing the equally justified power of the other.” [30] This in essence defines the kind of tragic conflict that Hegel had in mind. It is Hegel’s point that this particular shaping and patterning of conflict—plotting equally valid ethical systems against each other—as the “artistic appearance” of tragic drama determines its tragic essence; the condition of Hegel’s poetics of the tragic is the dramatization of positions of mutual exclusiveness and the characters’ “active grasp” of this conundrum as tragic. [31] But he also acknowledges that the powers and forces that are plotted against each other are subject to historical change: in ancient tragedy, the character’s actions were features of their “essential nature” that was defined by some external law or ethical code. [32] In modern drama, Hegel argues, the internalization of the notions of freedom, free will, and self-determination manifest the codes of conduct: To genuine tragic action it is essential that the principle of individual freedom and independence , or at least that of self-determination , of will to find in the self the free cause and source of the personal act and its consequences, should already have been aroused. [33] Hegel argues that the tragic requires the principles of freedom and self-determination, the theoretical possibility to act otherwise based on one’s own assessment and judgement. Or as Glicksberg put it: “freedom of choice . . . is basic to the tragic conflict.” [34] This refers to another important focus of Hegel’s view on the tragic: his concern with the human subject from a modern perspective which sees the individual’s conflicts as a confrontation between internal and external, or as Goldhill writes, between “inner freedom and external necessity.” [35] Hegel’s notion of tragic action envisions a basic understanding of human agency as an end in itself and thus maps out a pattern of inner logic to the tragic conflict. Williams, rephrasing Hegel’s argument, understands the particular nature in which the tragic conflict figures in modern drama as a “self-contained model of integrity.” [36] American culture has been particularly responsive to the notions of individualism and freedom in their shaping and forming of cultural and national identities, an aspect that is also put to critical scrutiny in Kushner’s poetics of the tragic. Overall, Hegel’s attempt to view tragedy as an embodiment and reflection of human progress on account of the dramatization of tragic collisions has been widely influential for subsequent tragic theory. And the theorems of the transformative impulses of historical and social progress have been particularly attended to by Marxist critics (e.g. Raymond Williams). But I want to conclude my discussion of Hegel by referring to a critical expansion of the kind of critical work the tragic conflict can perform which bespeaks Kushner’s formal procedure. According to Michelle Gellrich, the shortcomings of Hegel’s interpretation lie in his way “of naturalizing the disruptive strategies tied to tragic collision” and she makes the point that Hegel circumvents “textual resistance” [37] in favor of dramatic resolution and closure in order to qualify tragedy as a literary form that achieves a “higher level of spiritual consciousness.” [38] Angels in America : The Poetics of the Tragic Angels in America is set in the New York winter of 1985 to early 1986 amidst the AIDS crisis and Ronald Reagan’s presidency. While the first part, Millennium Approaches , serves as a prolonged exposition which stages the onset of the tragic conflicts that happen in the protagonist’s lives, the second part, Perestroika , becomes centrally a matter of how things can end: in the surrender to fatal error, loss, and suffering or the recognition of the powerful forces and value of human will and agency. This two-part structure in itself mirrors the play’s appropriation of the tragic as a matter of dramatic structure and ethical inquiry. The interrelatedness of both dimensions constitute the particular aesthetic and political implications that are essential to Kushner’s poetics of the tragic: a dialectical dynamic between irreconcilable conflict and resolution, surrender and resistance, self and other. As the play plots the existence of its characters as a series of struggles with conflicting ideologies and ethics, it recalls the hermeneutical infrastructure of tragedy as the tropes of fate (illness), unbearable conflict, or the unavoidability of human suffering are among the salient concerns of the play: Kushner’s play expresses a grasp of reality in which racism, the decline of the ethics of care, irresponsibility and multiple forms of social-cultural discrimination pervade the United States of the 1980s. In the play, all account for the personal struggles the characters have to endure as their actions and decisions are motivated by the internalization of spiritual ideals, religious faiths, or the paralyzing experience of rejection and discrimination. The play’s expansive dramatis personae, on the one hand, symbolizes the omnipresence of suffering on a global scale, and on the other hand, creates a dynamic intersection of multiple storylines and scenes, as the play’s dramatic world impresses through its unusual level of scale and complexity. All minor subplots converge in the play’s dramatization of the relationship between Prior Walter and Louis Ironson. In particular Louis’s reaction to Prior’s incurable illness manifests a dramatic center from which various actions, encounters, and confrontations subsequently precede. This dramatic center unearths Kushner’s negotiation of the tragic as a site of irreconcilable, moral conundrums which cast the protagonists in a profound state of existential precarity about their own ethical situatedness. Like in classical tragedy, this often involves dramatic situations that test a character’s strength and will. Luis’s confrontation with his partner’s outbreak of AIDS emerges as an impossible test of will and character and challenges him to compromise his idealist and dialectical world-view which he holds sacral. In a central scene in the play, Louis probes into the unethicality of his anticipated separation from Prior in a conversation with the Rabbi on the occasion of his grandmother’s funeral: LOUIS : Rabbi, what does the Holy Writ say about someone who abandons someone he loves at a time of great need? RABBI : Why would a person do such a thing? LOUIS : Because he has to. Maybe because this person’s sense of the world, that it will change for the better with struggle, maybe a person who has this neo-Hegelian positivist sense of constant historical progress towards happiness or perfection or something, who feels very powerful because he feels connected to these forces, moving uphill all the time. . . . Maybe that person can’t, um, incorporate sickness into his sense of how things are supposed to go. Maybe vomit . . . and sores . . . and disease . . . really frighten him, maybe . . . he isn’t so good with death (25).[39] The conversation reflects the dramatization of Louis moral conundrum as a crisis of authenticity of the self. Louis’s self-understanding is spiritually and intellectually informed by Hegelian ideals of progress and reason, as the striving towards such ideals is associated with life’s meaning and the purpose to achieve “happiness or perfection.” Louis’s attempts to justify his struggle resonates with the plays’ careful crafting of Louis’s conundrum as an intellectual one: he becomes an object of his own reflection and contemplates the rationale of his actions; self-doubt (‘maybe’) pervade his speech as he refers to himself as ‘this person’ in order to objectify his own actions. In this sense, the play links the crisis of the authenticity of the self with a tragic rift between one’s integrity to the self and one’s loyalty to the other. This involves an active grasp of Louis’s situation as irresolvable and tragic, as the play stages his choice in light of the inevitable violation of his ethics of self or the care and loyalty towards the other. These situations of profound collision and struggle create a level of abstraction in Angels in America that motivates a reflection beyond its concrete and local exploration of the competing ideologies of race, sexuality, and politics. [40] As the intellectual and emotional resourcefulness of the play comes from such an exploration of universal experiences of human existence—such as suffering, love and morality, free will—the careful plotting of the tragic conflict becomes an elemental dramatic feature in Kushner’s poetics. Moreover, in the play this rift between autonomy of the self and the self’s situatedness within communal and interpersonal bonds bespeaks a specific conundrum of the self-perception of the modern subject. In this sense, Angels more explicitly engages with the tragic dimensions of human experience as it reflects on the agential powers of the modern sense of the self which oscillates between self/other, integrity/betrayal, and progress/stasis. The manifestation of the modern sense of self involves a self-perception as an autonomous self that is informed by individualism and freedom as “inner facult[ies]” to use Terry Eagleton’s words. [41] The play does not merely exemplify such struggles but promotes critical examination of the “self-contained model of integrity” as an absolute imperative for action. [42] In this sense, such profound confrontations of mutually exclusive value systems give rise to the dramaturgy of tragic tension. Hence, the dynamic of the tragic is symbolized by Louis’s personal conundrum as the play explores modern notions of selfhood through the prism of the self in relation to the other. On a different level, the play effects a great suggestiveness about the actual realities of American conservative value systems as sources of tragic outcome in its representation of Joseph ‘Joe’ Pitts struggle. Joe, Louis’s first affair after his separation from Prior, is stricken by an internal struggle: faithful to the beliefs of Mormonism, he rejects his own sexual orientation. His marriage to Harper, who suffers from a morphine addiction, is shaped by his failing attempts to simulate attraction and sexual interest which protects him from the “one thing deep within” him which is “wrong or ugly” (40). Joe’s contemplation of Mormonism (a world view which, in the play, is also embodied by Hannah and Harper) as a “second skin” and a layer of “protection” (201) is radically subverted by Kushner as he puts the tragic inherent to Joe’s conflict in the service of critiquing precisely those mechanism of oppression and injustice that are innate to such value systems, i.e. the denial or rejection of homosexuality. The coloration of Joe’s languages with despair and emotional numbness poetically conveys the sense of unbearable existence as a response to the sanction of one’s will, autonomy, and true self. Or, as Joe tells his wife Harper, “so long as I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it” and “I’m a shell. There’s nothing left to kill.” (40–41). It is precisely this powerful disruptive force of tragic conflict, according to Gellrich, which contains a potential to critique and displace the dominant systems of value: Dramatizations of tragic conflict . . . are problematic for critical approaches based on assumptions of normative order because they are subversive. Typically they question a culture’s truths and systems of knowledge, overturn standards of rational consistency, and upset a basis in the tragic action from which resolution, synthesis, or catharsis might come. In short, conflicts in tragedy indirectly challenge the terms on which such critical accounts stand[43] And precisely because the tragic commonly engages with the metaphysics of unalterable fates, natural and cosmic forces, and the absolutisms of civic orders that are beyond human control, Angels , in its fierce political intent, interrelates suffering from AIDS to systematic powerlessness and stigmatization; suffering from AIDS bears political meaning insofar as it gestures towards the mechanisms of power involved in its public perception: in the play, Roy Cohn, who has just been diagnosed with the illness, forbids his doctor to diagnose him with AIDS: “ No , Henry, no . AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer” (47). Roy refuses to assume the role of a tragic subject as an outcome of the illness because its potential withdrawal of status, agency and power: “Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay,” and Roy continues, “like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout” (46). Moreover, in its firm place within the aesthetic spectrum of political drama, Angels does not welcome an orientation of the tragic as an end to human agency. Kushner’s play is distinct as it resists the rash impulse to view human experience as essentially tragic, a notion, which is most explicitly spelled out in the event of unpreventable, physical suffering. Kushner’s grasp of reality rejects the tragic as a site for the failing and suspension of human agency which does not principally exclude tragic circumstances from his dramatic universe. Angels ’s tragic figures are those who suffer from misfortunes that give no hope for resolution or betterment. In classical tragic thought, this dramatization promotes a perception of human existence as tragic by nature due to humans’ limited agency and freedom in light of fate, natural disasters, or hereditary forces. However, in Kushner’s play, the response to the inevitable restriction of one’s own agency—for which the sick body functions as a central symbol—do not inevitable lead to surrender and resignation. Prior’s and Roy Cohen’s bodies are stricken by severe pain, bodily dysfunctions, and severe liaisons: “ Prior stops, suddenly feeling sick again: leg pain, constricted lungs, cloudy vision, febrile panic and under that, dreadful weakness ” (279, original emphasis). This plight of suffering is refigured into powerful metaphors for the persistence of human will as forceful dimension of human agency which can challenge the hopelessness that metaphysical determinisms of a tragic view on life commonly involve. In the case of Prior, Joe, and Harper, for instance, the growing consciousness to oppose the loss of their individual will coincides with a spiritual strengthening that eventually triggers life-changing actions. Prior, despite the physical agonies of his battle with AIDS, displays a striking strength and sense of hope which lead him to reject the prospect of relief and eternal spiritual life offered by the Angels. Prior’s comment, “I HAVE SIGHT I SEE ” (224) alludes to the new forms of perception and his strength of will. In as much Prior’s new found perception of life is triggered by his rejection of the Angel, Harper’s personal catharsis comes with her learning the truth about her husband’s real sexual orientation: HARPER : Look at me. Look at me. Here! Look here at — JOE ( Looking at her ): What? HARPER : What do you see? JOE : What do I . . . ? HARPER : What do you see? JOE : Nothing , I— ( Little pause ) I see nothing. HARPER ( A nod, then ): Finally. The truth (244). Prior and Harper both experience such a “threshold of revelation” (199, 218): Harper finally recognizes her husband’s attempt to conceal and suppress his true sexual nature. She experiences a sense of liberation from knowing the truth. The withholding of truth has been the tragic force of Harper’s inner imprisonment as she only finds relief in her hallucinations and her imaginary friend. This prospect of overcoming and opposing tragic circumstances that the play offers, prompts the question of its ending. According to David Kornhaber, much criticism of Kushner’s play finds the ending unsatisfactory because of its “downgrading of revolutionary demands” that Angels otherwise seems to promote. [44] And yet, in Kornhaber’s view the ending circumvents the final surrender of the characters to tragic defeat in the formation of an inclusive polis and a civic community that the play finally stages. The coda of the play, set during a “a sunny winter’s day, warm and cold at once” (288) in Central Park during January 1990, suggests reconciliation instead of irreversible alienation as one alterative outcome of tragic circumstances. Indeed, on this level, dramatic closure is channeled into visions of social change and progress that the character’s imagine during this final conversation in which tragic situations find internal closure in the character’s hopeful envisioning of a better, more just future. This ending also reflects Kushner’s own belief in the transformative potentials of theatre and the political work his plays are meant to perform, or as Louis says: “That’s what politics is. The world moving ahead” (288). This view on the dynamic of constant movement through struggle and conflict also effect the play’s symbolic structure from the point of view of dramatic form. In “Notes About Political Theater,” Kushner writes that in his view, the narrative form of drama is a matter of “contradiction.” [45] Throughout, the play’s aesthetic is grounded on this premise. Kushner’s elaborate use of conflict and juxtaposition as dramatic devices create those situations that contain the tragic tensions. These are not so much concerned with the dramatization of a verdict over human existence as essentially tragic. Rather, these function as a symbolic representations of the human condition in contemporary America as an outcome of particular socio-political and cultural structures. In this respect, the play is reminiscent of the conventions of social realism in its sharp exposure of the multiple inequalities in US American society and its discriminatory ideologies on the grounds of race, sexuality, or religion as a main sources of suffering. It also reflects on the human condition of the modern subject as a sphere of inseparable and conflictual interconnections and relations between the private and the public, the personal and the political, the self and the other. In Kushner’s craft, theatre’s capacity for symbolic representation intermingles with his precise vision of the unique dynamic of dramatic form and reflects his inspiration to create art that is meaningful beyond its self-contained enclosure. Recurrently, the play develops a discursive dynamic that springs from its stress on a composition of dialog that is motivated by the negotiation of different world-views and ideologies. The integrity of the dramatic categories of dialogue and dramatis personae to express meaningful communication and interaction are essential in Kushner’s poetics. Moreover, the poetics of the tragic are grounded in the play’s negotiation of the place and value of human will and agency in the American consciousness and perception. In a scene between Louis and his on-and-off friend Belize, a former drag queen who now works as a nurse, the dynamic of the conversation is driven by the exchange of viewpoints when the implicit question of politics and the implications of one’s own situatedness lead to a heated confrontation: LOUIS : But I mean in spite of all this the thing about America, I think, is that ultimately we’re different from every other nation on earth, in that, with people here of every race, we can’t—Ultimately what defines us isn’t race, but politics. . . . (94). BELIZE : Here in America race doesn’t count. LOUIS : No, no, that’s not—I mean you can’t be hearing that. BELIZE : I— LOUIS : It’s—Look, race, yes, but ultimately race here is a political question, right? Racists just try to use race here as a tool in a political struggle (96). . . . BELIZE : Unlike, I suppose, banging me over the head with your theory that America doesn’t have a race problem (97). . . . BELIZE : You have no basis except your—Louis, it’s good to know you haven’t changed; you are still an honorary citizen of the Twilight Zone , and after your pale, pale white polemics on behalf of racial insensitivity you have a flaming fuck a lot of nerve calling me an anti-Semite. Now I really gotta go (99). As Louis and Belize argue about the politics of race in the country and spring from implicit suggestions to explicit accusations, the dramatic function of such situations is pivotal in the play to create the movement from the specific to the general: beyond the prisms of psychological individuality and socio-cultural determination, the characters of the play can be regarded as embodiments of different world views that are constitutive for the level of abstraction interrelating the dramatic reality and the actual empirical reality of US-American society it refers to: Joe/Hannah (Mormonism, Conservatism), Roy Cohen (Republicanism, corrupt law), Louis (American individualism) and so on. In a conversation between Louis and Prior on the subject of different faiths, Louis ponders on the question of guilt as a matter to be “ abs tracted”: PRIOR : You could never be a lawyer because you are oversexed. You’re too distracted. LOUIS : Not distracted; ab stracted. I’m trying to make a point: . . . LOUIS : That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation which disperses all the complexity in some unsatisfying little decision—the balancing of the scales (38-39). The occasional establishment of the protagonists as objects of critical contemplation resonates with a Hegelian logic of the tragic conflict. But in contrast to Hegel’s interpretation that sees the characters as abstract representations of the family and body politic, Kushner’s protagonists are not limited to ethical archetypes but are finely crafted and autonomous individuals. [46] To this extent, the play relies on the staging of rational contemplations, motivations, social and political environments to establish meaningful dramatic action. This effects a logic of representation to realistically portray and seek answers. Even the play’s interspersed minor monologues rarely express subjective, inner perceptions but stage the characters’ confrontation with the validity of different world-views and involve ethical inquiries (e.g. Joe or Louis). Besides, while in the Hegelian model the tragic, internal resolution and formal closure are a necessity to achieve tragic drama, in Kushner’s poetics of the tragic, dramatic conflicts neither ultimately lead to defeat nor to absolute resolution. The dynamic of juxtaposition and debate pervades the play and relieves the tragic of its traditional task to mean final surrender. Ambiguity, movement, and the value of will are all associated with the tragic. Even though Angels permits the prospect of dramatic resolution as a metaphor for the agency of an open dialectic, its attitude towards the political and historical circumstances that lead to a tragic outcome are far from conciliatory intent. It does not involve a sense of resignation in light of the harmful conditions that shape human existence. The seriousness of tone and concern that permeates much of the dialogue of the play creates a dramatic space motivated by the constant negotiation of the state and the ethics of social politics. Moreover, essential to the play are its staging of real circumstance and personalities to reach a symbolic level of reflection. Roy Cohen is the play’s epitome to rely on a historical framework that relates the play to the reality of politics; of all characters, Cohen is the most distressing symbol for the play’s negotiation of the ethical decline and ill state of American politics: JOE ( A beat, then ): Even if I said yes to the job, it would still be illegal to interfere. With the hearings. It’s unethical. No. I can’t. ROY : Un-ethical. Would you excuse us, Martin? . . . ROY : Un-ethical. Are you trying to embarrass me in front of my friend? . . . This is—this is gastric juices churning, this is enzymes and acids, this is intestinal is what this is, bowel movement and blood-red meat! This stinks, this is politics , Joe, the game of being alive. And you think you’re. . . . What? Above that? Above alive is what? Dead! In the clouds! You’re on earth, goddamnit! Plant a foot, stay a while (70-71). Kushner’s rewriting of the infamous jurist Cohen marks his attempt to create a close relatability between the imaginary and the real; his creation of Roy is informed by evoking the actual realities of American politics rather than by parodic and sarcastic intent. In fact, Kushner felt it necessary to clarify the terms of his inclusion of Roy Cohen into the dramatis personae not as a bleak imitation but as an artistic as well as a metaphorical transposition of actual conditions into a dramatic form: in a footnote on the character of Roy Cohen he writes: “The character Roy M. Cohen is based on the late Roy M. Cohen (1927-1986), who was all too real; . . . But this Roy is a work of dramatic fiction; his words are my invention, and liberties have been taken.” [47] Kushner’s oeuvre constantly negotiates the interplay between art and politics – or, put differently, the creation of a distinctly artful and politically meaningful drama. Occasionally, the play breaks with realistic representation and rational discourse as its own principles of dramatic form. In many situations in the play in which unbearable physical or spiritual suffering give occasion for angels to appear, hallucinations to enter the mind, and visions to inspire new forms of insight and understanding, the boundaries of reason and possibility are crossed: in the Diorama Room of the Mormon Visitors’ Center, Prior suddenly sees Louis on stage as part of the costumed mannequins and questions the reliability of his own mind and senses: “Am I dreaming this, I don’t understand” (197). These situations are saturated with symbolic meaning as the rational gives way to the irrational and the play’s own experimentation with dramatic form. When trial victim Ethel Rosenberg frequently appears on stage and hunts Roy Cohen’s consciousness, or when Prior is confronted with the appearance of Angels and his forefathers, the protagonists inner struggle is externalized and transformed into a physical and material presence on stage. On a formal level, this inclusion debases the play’s own reliance on a narrative model of contradictions of reason and introduces the irrational which, from the perspective of formal structure, adds to the play a sense of openness, ambiguity, and a heightened sense of theatricality. This stylistic hybridity bears testimony to Kushner’s openness to form and his devotion to the exploration of dramatic and theatrical territory which is playfully expressed in his own conception of the “Theater of the Fabulous.” [48] Kushner’s achievement with Angels in America is his construction of the tragic beyond the promise of ultimate spiritual transcendence and as a site where human action and will are a matter of ethical and political acts that bear meaning to questions of responsibility, justice, and change. In this sense, the inclusion of the visionary and the irrational also gesture towards the utopian, and the final reward of change which is perhaps most clearly symbolized in the epilogue of the play. If, as Goldhill argues, the essence of true tragic drama according to Hegel was a matter of the subject’s final reconciliation between inner freedom and external necessity, the ending of Angels reaches no such formal or ethical closure. Prior still suffers from AIDS and remains unreconciled with Louis. But Prior’s final words of the play “we won’t die secret deaths anymore. . . . The Great Work Begins” (290) link struggle and suffering with the prospect of a more hopeful future, in which structures of injustice, discrimination, and exclusion can be overturned. Conclusion Kushner’s play derives much of its dramatic and artistic force from the unique interplay of aesthetics and politics. At the beginning of this paper I have argued that the political and the tragic are often regarded as a mutually exclusive dramatic aesthetic. The benefit of creating a relation in the context of political theatre has therefore so far been overlooked. Moreover, Angels in America , as this paper intended to argue, is one striking example of American drama in which the role of the tragic renders the dramatic properties of conflict and contradiction essential to the symbolic value of the play. Change comes from struggle is one of the key ideas that informs the political dimension of the play. Hence, and in contrast to Steiner’s approach to place the tragic in the realm of the metaphysical, I read Tony Kushner’s Angels in America as a striking example that rejects such logic. The play displaces the tragic mode from a universal one—one that refers to a permanent and metaphysical condition of human existence—and situates it in a local contemporary setting to evoke the political challenges of the 1980s and 1990s America. Moreover, in contrast to Hegel, Kushner’s contemplation of the tragic is rooted within a complex, self-reflexive theatre aesthetic. And while Hegel’s view reconciles the tragic in a transcendent experience of the human consciousness, Kushner envisions the tragic as a force resulting from political, personal, and historical circumstance that the protagonists seek to control, confront, and overcome. This struggle, in essence, speaks of the play’s central metaphor on the transformative power of human agency as a social and political responsibility to achieve change and progress. What Kushner has in common with Hegel is the concentration of the human subject as the main locus of the tragic, and the importance of contradiction and collision as a matter of an ethical and formal necessity to express the tragic sense innate to his play. And, in Kushner’s case, within this conjunction of the tragic resides a resonant and meaningful symbiosis of art and politics. Overall, what appears as fitting final description of the innate political dimension of Kushner’s poetics of the tragic is perhaps best summarized by Christopher Bigsby as a “arena for debate.” [49] In this line of thought, I read Tony Kushner’s Angels in America as a continuation of American dramatists’ ongoing interest in and imaginative preoccupation with tragedy and the tragic—among whom rank such great dramatists such as Eugene O’Neill or Arthur Miller. Unlike his predecessors, Kushner subjects tragedy’s metaphysical offerings to critical scrutiny and establishes the tragic as a distinct modality of the poetics of drama as it informs its shape, patterns, and forms of expression. What I refer to as the poetics of the tragic in Kushner’s Angels in America thus describes Kushner’s attempt to reconcile the tragic as a specific poetological mode of composition and expression with a politically motivated theatre that overall promotes a sense of social relevance of art in general. References [1] Tony Kushner, “Notes About Political Theater,” The Kenyon Review: New Series 19, no. 3/4 (Summer–Autumn 1997): 19. [2] Annette Saddik, in her book Contemporary American Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) writes: “contemporary American theatre as an experimental theatre of inclusion and diversity that, in postmodern fashion, questions the nature of reality, presents multiple versions of truth(s), complicates the notion of an origin or ‘essence’, and destabilises the illusion of fixed identity by blurring the boundaries between role-playing and authenticity, or acting and being,” 7. See also: Kerstin Schmidt. The Theater of Transformation. Postmodernism in American Drama , (New York: Rodopi, 2005). [3] Saddik, Contemporary American Drama , 5. [4] Tony Kushner, “Political Theater,” 26. See also: Tony Kushner. “How do you Make Social Change?” Theater 31, no. 3 (2001): 62–93. [5] Harold Bloom, “Tony Kushner,” in Modern American Drama , ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005), 297. [6] Christopher Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). [7] Simon Goldhill, “The Ends of Tragedy: Schelling, Hegel, and Oedipus,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (October 2014): 635. [8] Much criticism has explored tragedy’s importance to the dramatic oeuvre of Eugene O’Neill: see for instance Miriam M. Chirico, “Moving Fate into the Family: Tragedy Redefined in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, ” The Eugene O’Neill Review 24, no. 1/2, (Spring/Fall 2000): 81-100; Stephen A. Black, “ Mourning Becomes Electra as a Greek Tragedy,” The Eugene O’Neill Review 26 (2004): 166–88. [9] Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” The New York Times , 27 February 1949 http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/11/12/specials/miller-common.html (accessed 09 September 2018). [10] Alfred Schwarz, From Büchner To Beckett: Dramatic Theory and the Modes of Tragic Drama (Athens, Oh: Ohio University Press, 1978), 5. [11] Schwarz, Tragic Drama , 10. [12] Rita Felski, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Tragedy , ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 4. [13] Ibid., 11. [14] Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (New Jersey: Wiley, 2009), 65, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ub-lmu/detail.action?docID=320111&query=9780631233602. [15] George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. [1961]), 332–42. [16] Steiner, Tragedy , 8–9. [17] Kushner, “Political Theater,” 22. [18] Ibid., 21. [19] A brief reference to German Romanticism and Friedrich Schiller as the most prominent philosopher and representative of viewing life as an essentially tragic experience shall suffice at this point to stress the long tradition of critical thought that interrelates tragedy and metaphysics. [20] Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Companion to Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination , (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Felski, “Introduction,” Rethinking Tragedy . [21] Felski, “Introduction,” 10. [22] Eagleton, The Idea of the Tragic , 63. [23] Goldhill, “The Ends of Tragedy,“ 634. [24] Michelle Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory. The Problem of Conflict since Aristotle . (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 19. [25] Eagleton, The Idea of the Tragic, Raymond Williams. Modern Tragedy . (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966). [26] G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art . Volume 11, trans. T.M.Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). [27] Ibid., 1159. [28] Ibid., 1194. [29] An excellent reading of Hegel’s approach to tragedy can be found in Rowan Williams’ The Tragic Imagination (2016) in the chapter entitled “Reconciliation and its Discontents: Thinking with Hegel”. [30] Hegel, Aesthetics , 1196. [31] Ibid., 1194–97. [32] Ibid., 1194. [33] Hegel qtd. in Williams. Modern Tragedy . 33 [34] Charles Glicksberg, The Tragic Vision in Twentieth Century Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), xii. [35] Goldhill, “The Ends of Tragedy,” 636 [36] Williams, Tragic Imagination , 63. [37] Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory , 10;22. [38] Ibid., 32. [39] Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 2013), emphasis added. Subsequent references will be provided parenthetically. [40] A highly illuminative discussion on the way in which Kushner represents American ideologies and myths in his play is offered by David Savran’s essay: “Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How ‘Angels in America’ Reconstructs the Nation,” Theater Journal 47, no. 2 (1995): 207–27. [41] Eagleton, Idea of the Tragic , 118. [42] Williams, Tragic Imagination , 63. [43] Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory , 10. [44] David Kornhaber, “Kushner at Colonus: Tragedy, Politics, and Citizenship,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (October 2014): 737. [45] Kushner, “Notes About Political Theater,” 19. [46] Goldhill, “The Ends of Tragedy,” 635 [47] Kushner, Angels in America: The Characters In Millennium Approaches , 2013. [48] Kushner, “Political Theater,” 32. [49] Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights , 87. Footnotes About The Author(s) JULIA RÖSSLER works at the department for North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt. In her dissertation, she considers the principal role of mimesis in contemporary Anglophone drama. She is one of the organisers of the international conference “Tragedy in American Drama and Theatre: Genre—Mediality—Ethics” and guest-editor of this issue. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Marvin Carlson | A comprehensive catalogue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars. < Back More Information & Order Details To order a print copy of our pocket edition, go to Lulu (https://bit.ly/theatreresourceslulu) Theatre Research Resources in New York City Marvin Carlson Download PDF Edited by Frank Hentschker and Margaret Araneo Theatre Research Resources in New York City is now in its seventh edition. An essential text for anyone conducting research in theatre and performance in NYC, the book includes a comprehensive list of discipline-specific research facilities, including public and private libraries, museums, historical societies, university and college collections, acting schools, and film archives. Each entry features an outline of the facility’s holdings as well as contact information, hours, services, and access procedures. The book is available in print form in a new pocket edition as well as online. To access the book online, click here. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth 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 iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF Introduction While an abundance of data clearly shows a gender imbalance in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, it is less clear how to motivate change regarding both overt and subtle barriers that hold women back. [1] This is particularly the case in the STEM field of information technology (IT). Since subtle gender barriers are transmitted through the cultural norms, values and gender roles of a society, creating a gender-balanced IT profession requires a way of addressing these emotional and implicit factors. The problem is that the scientific professions, on their own, are unable to do so. Information about structural barriers to social inclusion reported in scholarly publications is generally inaccessible to the lay person. Further, the scientific model of research dissemination leaves little room for the expression of subtlety, nuance, emotion, and holistic representation. Hence, artistic practice – specifically theatre for social change through relational aesthetics of transformative learning – can be employed to stimulate awareness, understanding, and activism about barriers to women in technological fields. It can also enable dissemination of research findings beyond the STEM academic community. In response to this opportunity, an original play, iDream , was written to communicate, in dramatic fashion, research results from an investigation of factors contributing to the under representation of women in the IT field. It did so by tackling the issues of experiencing, internalizing, and overcoming barriers to inclusion. The characters, plot, and dialogue of the play come from prior research that both developed theory and empirically applied it in over one hundred life history interviews with women working in the IT field. The characters in the resulting play embody the struggles of those who are marginalized in the IT field by virtue of gender but who seek inclusion and equality in the information society. Following staged readings of the play, audience feedback, and audience learning assessment, the play script was revised. The final version is now available to the public on the project website. This essay considers the challenges and opportunities of using theatre to address the important societal issue of exclusion in STEM disciplines. Backstory In 2007 Eileen Trauth sat at her computer having just sent her final report to the National Science Foundation (NSF) about a multiyear investigation into the gender imbalance in the STEM field of IT. She had developed and empirically tested a theory in the course of conducting life history interviews with women IT workers in the USA. During interviews that sometimes went on for three hours, these women willingly poured out their life stories – about their families, their communities, their schools, their hopes, and their dreams. They spoke about their interests and their passions, and about the people who helped or hindered their progression along a path that brought them to be participating in the interviews. She had already started publishing academic papers that added to cumulative scholarly knowledge about the problem of gender in the IT profession. But something was nagging at her. “How can I communicate what I have learned in this research in such a way that I can reach beyond my fellow academics? I want the results of my research to change the hearts and minds of parents, policy makers, educators, students and, ultimately, society,” she mused. Yet she recognized that scientific writing isn’t set up for such advocacy. This reflection and a fortuitous conversation the following year launched her on a journey through uncharted interdisciplinary waters. The conversation was with Suzanne Trauth, a playwright, who had just finished co-creating and presenting a play about Hurricane Katrina. The play was based upon interviews with residents of New Orleans and written in the genre of theatre for social change. Being aware of the interviews Eileen had conducted, Suzanne suggested a collaborative venture. Eileen’s research had revealed that the barriers to women entering and remaining in the IT field were not limited to those that are explicitly imposed on women, such as parents overtly discouraging their daughters from enrolling in computer science degree programs, or guidance counselors explicitly steering women students away from careers in computing. She had also found evidence of barriers that are implicitly internalized by young women themselves, when they receive messages from adults, peers, and the media about where they do and do not belong. As a result, they are sometimes unconsciously holding themselves back, which is being mistakenly diagnosed in the popular discourse as women “losing interest” in technology. Eileen was searching for a way to give voice to the powerful emotions expressed by the women she interviewed. There were times when she listened helplessly to the women express their feelings about isolation, exclusion from workplace socializing, being subjected to negative gender stereotypes, self-doubt, and being passed over for promotion. She wanted to communicate not just the facts she learned about the gender imbalance; she also wanted to communicate what it feels like to be on the margins. However, nuanced writing about subtle and unconsciously internalized barriers, writing that conveys what it feels like to be excluded, is the antithesis of scientific writing. Empirical research results that are published in scientific journals are expected to be presented in a straightforward manner, emphasizing objectivity and, typically, quantitative data. The emotion, nuance and subtlety that were an integral part of Eileen’s story of barriers did not fit with mainstream scientific research reporting. Consequently, she believed that her scholarly papers were telling only part of the story. She was also becoming increasingly dissatisfied with limiting the dissemination of her research results to fellow academics. Over the course of the project she had developed a growing desire to communicate to the broader public what she had learned about the nature of these gender barriers. She wanted to make a difference with this research and contribute to societal transformation. In recognizing that her research had taken her down the path toward advocacy, she was confronted with the limits of her discipline to effectively advocate for change. She acknowledged that art could pick up where science left off. Thus, this collaborative, cross-disciplinary project was born. This essay, about employing theatre to make a difference in STEM fields, recounts the process of enacting an NSF grant to develop and produce a play as an intervention to address the gender imbalance in science and technology. It also investigates some of the challenges associated with an effort to bring three different disciplines to bear on the enactment of societal change. That is, the play needed to satisfy the demands of playwriting in the relational aesthetics of theatre for social change. Performance arts can call people into relationship with each other and to objects, ideas, and places: a relational aesthetic , a term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1988. [2] While doing so it needed to incorporate the results of scientific research and theorizing about gender barriers in the IT field into the characters and story line of the play. Finally, the play needed to evidence audience learning in the forms of awareness, attitude change, and intended behavior. Eileen Trauth is a professor of information science and technology, and gender studies, who conducts research on gender exclusion in the IT field. [3] She was principal investigator on this grant and co-wrote the play. She wanted to transform the findings from research interviews about gender barriers in the IT field into a medium that allowed for greater expression of emotion and subtlety than what is afforded by scientific journal articles. Karen Keifer-Boyd is a feminist arts educator and scholar of art pedagogy who served as the project evaluator; she wanted to assess the transformative learning that resulted as the playwrights, cast, and audience members experienced the performance of the play. Suzanne Trauth, a playwright, was a project consultant and co-creator of the play script. Her goal was to write a play script that would further societal transformation about barriers to achieving one’s dreams. Transformation: From Transcript to Play Script Theatre has frequently provided a venue for reaching audiences in order to achieve social goals beyond the purely aesthetic by healing, promoting action, encouraging community, and supporting transformation. [4] One articulation is called theatre for social change, which is enacted in times and places of crisis. [5] While theatre for social change has various understandings, our use of the term to describe our project is consistent with Thornton’s [6] depiction of theatre for social change as a set of five defining characteristics. The first characteristic is intentionality. Theatre is being used to alter the actual world, not just reflect it. In our project the intention is to create awareness, educate, and inspire action related to gender barriers in the IT field. The second characteristic is community, based on either geographical location or identity. The community shapes and informs the theatrical work. In our project the community consists of women IT workers whose voices are projected through the work to a potential community of IT workers in the audience. The third characteristic is hyphenation, the intersection of performing arts and sociocultural intervention. In our project the sociocultural intervention is awareness and education about gender barriers to IT careers. The fourth characteristic is conscientization: awareness leading to action. In our project awareness of gender barriers is intended to motivate behavior to resist them. The final characteristic is aesthetics. In theatre for social change multiple perspectives are often in evidence with the aim of giving voice to the voiceless. In our project two perspectives were employed (that of the playwright and that of a scientist) to give voice to an underrepresented group in the IT field: women. There are a number of current examples of theatre for social change. Katrina on Stage: Five Plays, [7] is a collection of works that employ theatre to promote awareness and activism about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking (2004) was written to promote activism about abolishing the death penalty. William Mastrosimone’s Bang, Bang, You’re Dead (1999) was written to increase public awareness about violence in high schools. Insofar as the intention of our work is to create awareness and understanding, it also shares a goal of applied theatre, which is to focus on the use of theatre to educate and engage with social issues. Applied theatre is also sometimes referred to as Applied Theatre for Social Change. [8] The project discussed here employs relational aesthetics in which actors, readers, and audience members experience qualitative research findings as theatre for social change, which highlights the issues associated with oppressive societal institutions. [9] One approach in theatre for social change is to transform research findings into an original play script. This approach has several labels, including: performed ethnography, research-informed theatre, and performed research. According to Tara Goldstein et al., Performed ethnography and research-informed theater are research methodologies that involve turning ethnographic data and texts into scripts and dramas that are either read aloud by a group of participants or performed before audiences.[10] They developed a framework of research-informed theatre to analyze the melding of research, theatre, and education to produce transformative learning. Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon employed performed research techniques in her performance piece SHOT! (2009) in order to reframe the discourse about an impoverished North Philadelphia community. [11] Intended as theatre for social change, the play script—when read, performed, or experienced as audience—brings awareness about gender barriers in the IT field and teaches how to challenge, change, and overcome inequities in IT fields. It shares with other forms of arts activism the goal of using “theatre in the service of social change.” [12] Other forms of activist theatre are: community theatre, popular theatre, grassroots theatre, agit-prop (from agitation and propaganda) or protest political theatre, participatory theatre, Freirean “Theatre for Development,” [13] or Boalian “Theatre of the Oppressed”—also referred to as forum or playback theatre. [14] While the staged readings of iDream were performed with professional actors in professional theatre venues, we expect that it might also be performed by schools or community groups and be followed by audience talkback sessions. Our study of attitudinal change for the actors and the audience members at staged readings suggests that the pedagogy of this play project works through embodied learning when performing the play script as a staged reading, or experiencing the staged reading as an audience member. While our learning assessment occurred for staged readings of the play script we believe it is reasonable to expect that a full production would also result in embodied learning. As theatre for social change it aims to remove social and institutional barriers that women experience in the IT field. Theatre, dance, films, and animations in STEM fields is typically used only for explanatory purposes; the arts help non-scientists visualize abstract science concepts as well as bio-physical processes invisible without specialized apparatus. For example, Vince LiCata wrote the play DNA Story (2009) [15] to teach non-scientists about DNA structure and X-ray crystallography. In contrast, our goal was not to explain scientific concepts but rather to raise awareness and critique hegemonic social narratives regarding who could participate in the STEM field of IT. As theatre for social change, iDream performs research about women’s experiences in the IT fields in order to heighten awareness and to advocate for change. The NSF grant scheme that funded this project to transform research findings into an original play script, and to assess it as transformative pedagogy, was directed at innovative ways to communicate research results to a public audience. [16] The original research upon which the play project was built was a qualitative field study of women working in the IT profession. [17] Eileen Trauth interviewed 123 women working in the IT field in the USA. The themes explored in the interviews were: the extent to which the IT field in is socially constructed as a man’s world; pressures on women in the IT field, and how these pressures affect their professional development and working lives; the relationship between working in the IT profession and a woman’s gender self-image; and, finally, how women in the IT profession cope with the challenges presented to them. During open-ended interviews that ranged from one to three hours in duration, women discussed their life stories that led them to their current position in the IT field. They discussed their demographics, the type of work they did, personal characteristics, significant others in their lives, and influences from the larger society regarding gender roles and working in a technical field. At the outset of each interview Eileen explained her interest in understanding variation among women in the ways that they were exposed to, experienced, and responded to gender barriers throughout their careers. [18] While this research was being conducted, Eileen had not envisioned developing a play script as a way to enact societal transformation regarding gender barriers. But she was conscious at the time of the evocative and emotionally compelling nature of the narratives. Hence, in 2008, when Suzanne Trauth proposed writing a play based on the research findings, Eileen was quite receptive to the idea. Two intended audiences were envisioned as the play was being developed. Teenagers constitute the primary audience for the play—those who are experiencing and internalizing barriers to participation in the IT field. While the research that informed iDream is primarily about factors influencing the underrepresentation of women in the IT field, it is also recognized that underrepresentation is an issue for men in certain racial, ethnic, socio-economic, and sexual groups, and that gender stereotypes are enacted by members of all genders. However, while the learning objectives of awareness and understanding, attitude change, and intended behavior about gender, race, ethnicity, and class stereotypes that are embedded in a culture could apply to men as well as women students, the focus of this particular project was on the factors affecting the underrepresentation of women in the IT field. The secondary audience for the play consists of significant adults in teenagers’ lives—parents, teachers, coaches, guidance counselors, and others who are in a position to influence them. Hence, while performances of this play are intended for younger audiences, in order to make the play appealing to adults as well some themes that were intended primarily for this secondary audience were also embedded in the play script. An example is an adult’s effort to hold a young person back from pursuing a dream out of a desire to protect her or him from the same trauma s/he experienced. A concern raised during review of the grant proposal was the need to demonstrate how the play would be compelling to the target audience. In response, at the initiation of the project Eileen Trauth conducted a focus group with undergraduate women currently enrolled in an IT degree program. As relatively recent high school students they were in a position to provide feedback on the story line and advice on techniques to engage the audience. For example, participants said that when they were in high school they lacked exposure to the range of IT educational options that were available in college; they believed that creating greater awareness and understanding about this would be valuable to high school students. As a result, the three main characters in the play and their respective stories relate to a range of IT careers. With respect to awareness and understanding about imposed and internalized barriers to women, participants recommended that the message be conveyed with subtlety. Consequently, promotional materials about the staged readings of iDream emphasized its focus on current issues facing today’s high school students: how to follow one’s dreams while coping with real world issues such as obtaining tuition money for college, and dealing with the expectations and advice of significant people in their lives (parents, boy/girlfriends, guidance counselors, and teachers). Making a decision about careers in the IT field was positioned as the setting for the exploration of these larger themes of concern to high school students. The focus group participants also recommended the use of humor and audience engagement to make the play appealing to high school students. To that end, the script incorporates the vernacular of 18-year-olds, their music and language, their relationships, concerns, and sense of humor. It also includes references to popular video games, and references to contemporary social media and texting. Further, some characters only appear in a technology-mediated way, such as through text messages: MOTHER: Have you done your homework? AMANDA: Duh. It’s Friday night. I have a date with Jimmy. ( She texts and laughs. Mother grabs the cell phone. ) MOTHER ( reads, confused ): What is this? OMG. MOS. 5. CTN. BBL8R. ILU. WYWH. It sounds like a foreign language. Like a…a code or something. Are you hiding something from me? ( Amanda takes the phone back. ) AMANDA: OMG you are so boring. MOTHER: I want to know what you’re talking about. AMANDA: I’m making plans with Jimmy. Though Amanda’s mother reads the text messages, she doesn’t understand their meaning. The scene operates on two levels: it is a humorous exchange that underscores the generational differences between mother and child while, simultaneously, emphasizing Amanda’s obsession with the coded language of texts. Later, Amanda’s teacher Ms. D uses her student’s preoccupation with texting as a means of engaging her interest in a technology career in cryptography. The goal of this project, as theatre for social change, was to create transformation on the part of audience members who experience the play—about intentional and unintentional barriers that can be imposed upon and internalized by young people in the pursuit of their dreams about careers in the IT field. Eileen Trauth was focused on ensuring that the characters and the story arc in the play communicated research findings about gender barriers in the IT field and embodied the theoretical constructs of a gender theory that she developed and that was used in the research that inspired the play. According to this theory, The Individual Differences Theory of Gender and IT, the underrepresentation of women and gender minorities in the IT field can be explained by the interaction of three sets of factors (theoretical constructs). The first is individual identity: demographic characteristics (such as age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socio-economic class) and type of IT work (such as computer hardware development, software design, or user support). The second factor is individual influences: personal characteristics (such as personality traits and abilities) and personal influences (such as role models and mentors). The third factor is environmental influences (such as cultural norms about gender roles). [19] Even though this project was undertaken to communicate the results of scientific research about gender barriers, the play had to satisfy aesthetic requirements as well. Suzanne Trauth had primary responsibility for writing the play script. She focused on ensuring that its aesthetic design created forward momentum with believable characters who live through a discernible story arc shaped by strong conflicts that force the characters to act to achieve objectives. The higher the dramatic stakes, the greater would be the audience engagement during a performance. Hence, a script was needed that would generate a high level of engagement during its performance in order to achieve the goal of societal transformation through awareness, attitude change, and intended behavior regarding gender barriers in the IT field. In the play, three girls—Khadi, Theresa, and Amanda—are high school students confronting an uncertain future: whether or not to go to college and, if they decide to, what they would study and how to make that happen. They are encouraged by Ms. D., the dynamic teacher of their Digital Design course, to explore the male-dominated fields of information and computer technology—computer science, computer engineering, and information science. In doing so, they begin to discover their places in the world while they struggle with the obstacles—personal, family, and academic—that might prevent them from following their dreams. The play focuses on the conflicts faced by all three protagonists: Theresa’s desire to attend college versus her father’s demand that she work in a hair salon with her cousin; Amanda’s blossoming interest in higher education versus her mother’s low expectations—and her boyfriend’s priorities—for Amanda’s future; and Khadi’s confusion about her choice of college versus the instability of her home life and lack of appropriate mentorship. iDream has a single plot with three threads that are woven together as the three friends face life decisions. By graduation day, Theresa has asserted her independence, Amanda has traded an early marriage for college, and Khadi has found her mentor in an empathetic boyfriend. In view of our goal, the interacting arcs of the three primary characters drove the narrative and textual foundations that held the production together. The integration of their three stories and the personal, academic, and familial barriers they confront as they face the challenges of planning for life after high school become the scaffolding upon which the moment-to-moment actions of the play unfold. Their objectives drive the narrative. The conflicts raised in the play reflect the range of obstacles discovered as a result of the research on barriers to careers in STEM for women and underrepresented groups. Theresa struggles with cultural and parental expectations. Her father is focused on the short term economic benefits of Theresa’s employment immediately after graduating high school. He does not see the long term economic benefits from Theresa remaining out of the labor force for four years while in college. Khadi confronts a lack of consistent mentoring about her future. And Amanda must tackle low parental expectations that affect her self-esteem. THERESA: Papi tells me to get my nose out of the books and learn to do something practical so I can earn money for the family. KHADI: Dad would say “yeah” but Mom is worried about money. I would need a scholarship or something. AMANDA ( mimics her mother ): Mom says, “I’m not wasting good money on college when I’m not sure you’ll even graduate high school.” All performance elements play a crucial role in the dissemination of the research findings. The story arcs of the characters express the results of the research: as the three girls confront personal and social barriers to achieving their goals, they embody the questions and concerns raised in the course of the interviews undertaken by Eileen Trauth. This storytelling, in turn, triggers audience engagement, via personal empathy during the performance and the public discussion afterward. Art and science converge in an exploration of career opportunities in the twenty-first century, and barriers that might hold people back. The focus is not so much on overt barriers that are imposed on individuals; rather the play dramatizes the process by which a young woman might unconsciously internalize limits on her dreams. Research-Informed Theatre Two forms of research were involved in this project. One form of research was the field study of women working with IT that produced the theoretical constructs and findings about the gender imbalance. These findings were, in turn, embodied in the characters and story line of iDream . The characters are a composite of the stories told by the adults about barriers they experienced and observed over the course of their lives, and the constructs of the theory used in the research. The other form of research was the process of obtaining and incorporating feedback into the writing and revising of the play script. Hence, the relationship of the audience to the performance was an integral part of this project. It was through audience engagement that this second kind of research was accomplished. The transformation of a scientific product into a theatrical process was intended to enact transformative learning through relational aesthetics in the experience of reading, performing, or viewing the play: to build awareness, change attitudes, and motivate behaviors and actions. The goal was to shift perspectives about individual, environmental, and social forces at work in creating barriers for women in technology fields. According to Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor, Director of the Institute for Women’s Studies, and a professor in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy at The University of Georgia, societal transformation is a movement to change oppressive forces and begins with investigating the ways the forces form and operate. [20] Jack Mezirow notes: Transformative learning refers to the process by which we transform our taken-for-granted frames of reference . . . to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action.[21] The need for societal transformation is evident in the data about both the significant underrepresentation of women and gender minorities (e.g., black men and LGBTQ individuals) in STEM fields such as IT and in the hegemonic masculine culture that pervades the high tech world. [22] Two groups of individuals are the focus of the societal transformation: those who are experiencing and internalizing the barriers and those who are in a position to tear them down. The development of the play script involved the creation of an initial draft based on the results of Eileen Trauth’s fieldwork and her interactions Suzanne Trauth. This was followed by two workshopping sessions and a series of public staged readings of iDream . Following each of these, the play script was subsequently revised. The script was first workshopped with actors at a table reading with Suzanne Trauth, Eileen Trauth, the director, and the dramaturg in attendance. The goal of this session was for Suzanne, the director, and Eileen to hear the play being read for the first time. The second script workshop occurred a month later on a stage in front of a small audience comprised of teachers, college students, and high school students. The project team observed the script being presented in a staged reading format and gained initial audience feedback on the script. Six staged readings of the play with professional (i.e., Equity) actors in front of public audiences were then held in 2012. The first staged reading was in June 2012 for an audience of several hundred NSF-funded STEM researchers. In October 2012 the remaining five staged readings in front of public audiences were held, three in New Jersey and two in Pennsylvania. Each performance was followed by audience talkback sessions held immediately afterward. Following each event, the script was revised. The final version of the play was completed in 2013. The New Jersey performances were held at Premiere Stages in Union, New Jersey. The audiences for the two daytime performances were recruited from high schools in Jersey City, Elizabeth, and in and near Union. The students came from urban schools that have significant ethnic and socio-economic diversity in the student bodies. Suzanne Trauth and John Wooten, Producing Artistic Director of Premiere Stages (who was also a consultant on this project) invited theatre teachers in these high schools to bring their students. The third performance took place on a Saturday evening as part of a new playwrights series with an audience consisting of adults who came to see the staged reading of a new play; the subject matter of iDream was not the main motivator for attendance. The two Pennsylvania performances were held on a Saturday night and a Sunday afternoon at the State Theatre in State College, Pennsylvania. The audiences for these performances were recruited from newspaper announcements, posts to email listservs, and an interview by a local television station with Eileen Trauth, Suzanne Trauth, and the director. The performances were also listed among the upcoming events on the theatre’s website. Audience members at all five performances were presented with a pretest and an informed consent form to sign, both of which provided background information about the project. In addition, immediately preceding each performance, the director came onto the stage and gave a brief introduction to the project and the play. We achieved engagement with the target audience by writing the script in such a way as to build empathy with the characters, by relating the storyline to the audience members’ own experiences, and enabling them to “see themselves” in the unfolding drama. In this way, audience members were drawn into the circumstances in iDream . Audience members’ connection, in a visceral way, to the play provided the emotional energy moving the story along to the climactic moment. THERESA ( proudly ): My trigonometry exam. I got 99 out of 100. ( Father reluctantly takes the paper and studies it. ) FERNANDO: 99 out of 100. ( teases ) Why not 100 out of 100? But what will you do with 99 out of 100 in your cousin Maria’s beauty shop? This trigonometry will help you cut hair? ( He hands the paper back to Theresa. ) THERESA: I was thinking about college— FERNANDO: No, Theresita. You will go to beauty school. You will have a trade that you can be proud of. You will be able to help your family. In America we have a better life. It has been hard and I work many long hours. But I do it for you and Mami and Imelda and Juan. Theresita, I know you are smart. But you must do this for the family. THERESA: But things change and it is different here now. FERNANDO: Your family never changes. THERESA: I could get a scholarship. FERNANDO: No Theresa! You cannot give any information to the school about our family. You must NEVER talk about us to [outsiders.] Do not betray your family. THERESA: But Papi, this is our country now. They are not outsiders— FERNANDO: No. Come and set the table. No more talk of [outsiders]. And no more talk of numbers. ( He leaves. Theresa presses the exam to her heart. ) During the talkback sessions, audience members, who had experienced being devalued as a woman or person of color, were emotional in their responses; they related the characters to their own lives. Two sub goals were embedded in the overall goal of stimulating awareness, understanding, attitude change, and activism. One sub goal was to generate awareness about types of careers in a field that has been stereotyped as being the exclusive domain of men. The second sub goal was to create awareness about both overt and subtle barriers to participation in the IT field, which are experienced by members of underrepresented gender groups. Karen Keifer-Boyd was responsible for designing and implementing the learning assessment. Research-informed theater can be transformative learning if the relational aesthetic experience of a performance “exposes a discrepancy between what a person has always assumed to be true and what has just been experienced, heard, or read.” [23] Consequently, Karen designed an assessment to gauge changed assumptions and attitudes about women in the IT field by audience members who attended the staged readings of iDream . Three forms of data constituted the audience learning gains assessment. First, audience members were asked to complete a pre-survey form consisting of open-ended questions. Second, at the end of each staged reading, Eileen Trauth, Suzanne Trauth, the director, and actors responded to questions and comments from the audience members during a talkback session. Karen Keifer-Boyd and a graduate student attended the staged readings and took handwritten notes regarding audience responses during these sessions. A third form of data came from a follow-up online survey that was sent to audience members who had completed the pre-survey. Responses during the talkback sessions and follow-up survey consistently showed that iDream “speaks” to the audience. One mother revealed, “I didn’t know the computer field was so broad.” A Latino actor commented that one of the characters “behaved just as my mother did.” An adult Latina audience member said: “The play was telling my life.” Some women audience members related the play to their own experiences of gender stereotyping and being dissuaded from IT careers, or not being given the same opportunities as their male counterparts. One woman audience member “strongly identified with Theresa because it brought back memories of being the oldest in an Italian family and being expected to help the family [rather than undertake a career].” Audience members revealed that after experiencing the staged reading iDream they were now aware that the IT field is available to women and underrepresented minorities and showed some evidence of change in their perceptions of who can pursue IT careers. For example, an audience member stated, “The careers were presented as really accessible in the play.” One student stated, “Students play games but they don’t think about how they’re made. The play did a good job of presenting careers.” A 41 year-old woman responded on the post-survey, “After the play I know they [IT professionals] do more than just ‘develop software,’ which was my original answer.” The audience members also revealed awareness of implicit and explicit barriers that can be both imposed and internalized. They identified with the characters, or knew people and experiences reflected in the play. A mother in the audience stated, “My daughter is nine and when she was five she told me that other kids told her math is not for girls. This play showed the options in the computer field.” Another area of awareness was about resources, particularly the role of teachers in helping underrepresented groups overcome restrictive stereotypes. Nearly all of the respondents in the post-survey mentioned the significance of the teacher in the play as encouraging the three female characters to pursue college and careers in IT. A male audience member stated, “I am pleasantly amazed with the presentation of representing a message in art. … This play spoke to … a dream deferred because the barriers are there, but the story also presented opportunities.” We are aware that identifying the arts as a venue to articulate women’s experience of barriers in STEM might perpetuate a stereotype of the arts as a feminized discipline in contrast to the masculine STEM fields. Throughout the life of this project, which included talkback sessions following the six staged readings and seven presentations at a diverse set of conference venues, there were numerous opportunities for this issue to be raised. Yet it never was. But this doesn’t invalidate the concern. Indeed, Eileen Trauth, in her capacity as a scholarly journal reviewer, has encountered this arts-feminine/science-masculine stereotyping in manuscripts she reviews. For this reason, we believe that it is best to anticipate the potential for this issue being raised and to be prepared to address it in discussions and workshops that accompany future performances of the play. Enacting transformative learning through relational aesthetics in theatre for social change is not to prescribe or expect specific behavior changes. Rather, it is a pedagogical design of this play project that awareness and attitude change set in motion behavior changes specific to each individual’s life and circumstances. For example, one female high school student related the character of Theresa in the play to her brother, who has an interest in gaming and graphic design. She intends to tell her brother he could make a career out of developing video games. A high school teacher “appreciated seeing the struggles of students at home and the different cultures represented, so I can understand and help get students through graduation.” Several audience members recommended that all high school students should see the play. For example, a college professor recommended to all in attendance at one of the staged readings that all first-year college students should see the play because “there’s confusion about STEM—everyone thinks it’s too hard.” A student asked that the script be made available to schools “so they could perform it. Another asked about courses for her daughter to take that would help her “attack gender bias in the IT community.” Transformative learning, a goal of this project as theatre for social change, is “behaving, talking, and thinking in a way that is congruent with transformed assumptions or perspectives.” [24] Assessment of the impact of experiencing staged readings of iDream indicates pedagogical potential for transformative learning. The accessibility of the play script, not only literally by downloading from the play website, but also in the familiar dramatic aesthetics of its construction, lends it the potential for societal transformation through widespread education of high school students, parents, teachers, and counselors about the overt as well as the subtle barriers to participation in the IT field that confront women and other underrepresented groups. Postscript At the conclusion of the project a website was created to make the iDream play script available to those interested in reading and/or performing the play ( www.iDreamThePlay.com ). The final version of the play script became available to the public in 2014. The website also provides resource materials related to overcoming gender barriers in the IT field, such as a short video about the project and interviews with cast and production personnel. These materials offer an opportunity for both documenting and disseminating the performance, and for analyzing the performance process. Three questions accompanying the video convey the learning objectives of the play. How do we help people become aware of the subtle barriers that exist in our society, ones that are often unconsciously internalized, that hold young people back? How do we engage students in thinking about college and careers in science and technology? How do we awaken them to the possibility of creating their own individual dreams—and acting on them? As high schools, community groups, and universities perform the play or do in-class readings, these three questions can guide group discussion, providing a pedagogical design to be adapted to particular groups and places. The goal for the artist working toward relational aesthetics is to create an event or set in motion a social experience, which is the actors’ and audience’s experience of the art. In this project, the play script is the vehicle for creating art as experience. Groups can read and perform the script together and then work with the prompts and resources on the play’s website to reflect on their attitudes, perceptions, and positionality in relation to the IT field. The “Resources” section on the play website was created in response to audience members’ requests for a place to learn more about IT careers. Resources include information about information technology careers, organizations of underrepresented groups in information technology, and articles about theatre and STEM. The website is an important way for high school teachers to learn about the play and to produce a staged reading or full production in their schools. It provides a way to advance knowledge and practice, and enable others to build upon the results of the project. Through dialogue and research motivated by the play, further awareness, attitude change, and transformative learning with intended and actualized behaviors toward addressing gender barriers in STEM fields are the ultimate goals of the generative pedagogical design. From Karen Keifer-Boyd’s perspective as an arts educator who teaches students how to teach new media art, the benefit of working cross disciplinarily lies in the potential of the play script as education and art, to be used to challenge gender inequities in the IT field. Within her discipline she sees the potential for girls to be motivated to creatively play with technology as a mechanism for opening their minds to possible careers with technology. She believes society and institutions need to encourage such play. For Suzanne Trauth, a playwright, framing the issues of gender equality in the context of theatre reminds all involved in the process that these issues are not unique to the STEM fields. The American theatre has long struggled to establish gender parity with regard to the production of plays by female playwrights. That struggle is in the process of being addressed in recent years with the Dramatists Guild’s initiation of The Count, an ongoing study that explores the question of who is being produced in American theatres. In the November/December 2015 issue of The Dramatist , the organization presented for the first time three years of data from regional theatres across the country: only 22% of the plays produced from the regional sample were written by women. Meaningfully, playwright Marsha Norman, the author of the article, suggested that “if life worked like the theatre, four out of five things you had ever heard would have been said by men.” [25] Clearly, the American theatre has a distance to travel in achieving gender equality on its stages. In confronting the STEM issues, the artistic side of the collaboration is reminded that the goal of gender parity crosses disciplines. By the end of the project we came to see that it was really just the beginning. We had embarked upon this project with the goal of producing a play script as a way to disseminate Eileen Trauth’s research findings. The National Science Foundation funding supported development of a play script, and the production of a series of staged readings in order to obtain developmental audience feedback that would inform a subsequent revision of the script. That project is completed and the play script is currently available at the iDream website for those interested in reading or presenting a full production of the play. But we now view our original project as the inaugural steps of a longer-term mission. Eileen Trauth and Suzanne Trauth are currently exploring an expansion of this venture to broaden access to the story begun in iDream by using video story-telling and interactivity as options for greater engagement with the subject matter for a wider variety of audiences. References [1] This work was supported by three grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF #1039546 , NSF #0204246 , NSF # 0733747). We would like to thank, in particular, Dr. Jolene Jesse at the National Science Foundation for her encouragement to pursue this project. [2] N. Bourriaud, Esthétique Relationnelle/Relational Aesthetics , trans. by S. Pleasance and F. Woods (Dijon, France: Les Presses du Réel, 2002). [3] See, for example: Eileen M. Trauth, “The Role of Theory in Gender and Information Systems Research,” Information & Organization 23, no. 4 (2013): 277-93. Eileen M. Trauth, “Are There Enough Seats for Women at the IT Table?” ACM Inroads 3, no. 4 (2012): 49-54. Eileen M. Trauth, and Debra Howcroft, “Critical Empirical Research in IS: An Example of Gender and IT,” Information Technology and People 19, no. 3 (2006): 272-92. [4] See: Diane Conrad, “Exploring Risky Youth Experiences: Popular Theatre as a Participatory, Performative Research Method,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 3, no. 1 (2004): Article 2. Retrieved from http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/3_1/pdf/conrad.pdf . Susan Denman, James Pearson, Deborah Moody, Pauline Davis, and Richard Madeley, “Theatre in Education on HIV and AIDS: A Controlled Study of Schoolchildren’s Knowledge and Attitudes,” Health Education Journal 54, no. 3 (1995): 3-17. Jeff Nisker, Douglas. K. Martin, Robyn Bluhm, and Abdallah S. Daar, “Theatre as a Public Engagement Tool for Health-Policy Development,” Health Policy 78, no. 2 (2006): 258-71 . [5] James Thompson, and Richard Schechner, “Why Social Theatre?” The Drama Review 48, no. 3 (2004): 11-16. [6] Sarah Thornton, “What is Theatre for Social Change?” in From the Personal to the Political: Theatre for Social Change in the 21 st Century with Particular Reference to the Work of Collective Encounters: A Review of Relevant Literature (Liverpool: Collective Encounters’ Research Lab). [7] S. M. Trauth, and L.S. Brenner, eds. Katrina on Stage: Five plays ( Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011). [8] Applied Theatre Action Institute. 2015. Retrieved from http://appliedtheater.org/ . [9] Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York, NY: TCG Books, 1993). [10] Tara Goldstein, Julia Gray, Jennifer Salisbury, and Pamela Snell, “When Qualitative Research Meets Theater: The Complexities of Performed Ethnography and Research-Informed Theater Project Design,” Qualitative Inquiry 20, no. 5 (2014): 674-685, 674. [11] Kimmika L.H. Williams-Witherspoon, “On SHOT!: A Rationale for Resesarch and Dramas Depicting Violence in the ‘Hood’,” Theatre Topics 23, no. 2 (2013): 169-83. [12] Tim Prentki, and Sheila Preston, eds. The Applied Theatre Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009), 12. [13] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2007). [14] Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed. [15] Personal copy from the author. [16] National Science Foundation, Informal Science Education (#1039546). [17] National Science Foundation, “A Field Study of Individual Differences in the Social Shaping of Gender and IT” (#0204246). [18] For further explanation see: Eileen M. Trauth, “Odd Girl Out: An Individual Differences Perspective on Women in the IT Profession,” Information Technology and People 1, no. 2 (2002): 98-118. [19] See: Eileen M. Trauth, Jeria L. Quesenberry, and Haiyan Huang, “Retaining Women in the U.S. IT Workforce: Theorizing the Influence of Organizational Factors,” European Journal of Information Systems 18 (2009): 476-97. [20] Juanita Johnson-Bailey, “Positionality and Transformative Learning: A Tale of Inclusion and Exclusion,” in The Handbook of Transformative Learning: Theory, Research and Practice , edited by Edward W. Taylor, and Patricia Cranton (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2012), 260-73. [21] Jack Mezirow, “Learning to Think Like an Adult,” in Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress , edited by Jack Mezirow & Associates (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 7-8. [22] Claire Cain Miller, “Technology’s Man Problem” The New York Times , April 2014. [23] Patricia Cranton, “Teaching for Transformation,” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 93 (2002): 63-71, 66. [24] Ibid, 66. [25] Marsha Norman, “Why the Count Matters,” The Dramatist , Nov/Dec, 2015. Footnotes About The Author(s) Eileen Trauth is professor of information sciences & technology, and women’s gender & sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. She conducts research on societal, cultural and organizational influences on the information technology profession with a special focus on gender and social inclusion. She held the 2008 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria, and served on the scientific advisory board for Female Empowerment in Science & Technology Academia (FESTA) , a European Union project to increase female academic participation in science and technology. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Australian Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland. She is editor of the Encyclopedia of Gender and Information Technology and editor-in-chief of Information Systems Journal. ( www.eileentrauth.com ) Karen Keifer-Boyd is professor of art education and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. She was the 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria, and received a Fulbright in 2006 for research in Finland on intersections of art and technology. Her writings on feminist pedagogy, visual culture, inclusion, cyberart activism, transcultural dialogues, action research, social justice arts-based research, and identity are in more than 50 peer-reviewed research publications, and translated into several languages. She co-authored Including Difference: A Communitarian Approach to Art Education in the Least Restrictive Environment (NAEA, 2013); InCITE, InSIGHT, InSITE [ amazon.com ] (NAEA, 2008); Engaging Visual Culture [ davisart.com ] (Davis, 2007); and co-edited Real-World Readings in Art Education: Things Your Professors Never Told You [ amazon.com ] (Falmer, 2000). ( www.personal.psu.edu/ktk2/ ) Suzanne Trauth is a playwright, novelist and screenwriter. Her plays include Françoise , which received staged readings at Luna Stage and Nora’s Playhouse and was nominated for the Kilroy List; Midwives developed at Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey; Rehearsing Desire ; iDream , supported by the National Science Foundation’s STEM initiative; and Katrina: the K Word . She is a member of Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey Emerging Women Playwrights program and the Dramatists Guild. She wrote and directed the short film Jigsaw , nominated for best film in the shorts category at the PF3 Film Festival and screened at New Filmmakers, NY. Ms. Trauth has co-authored Sonia Moore and American Acting Training and co-edited Katrina on Stage: Five Plays. Her novels include Show Time and Time Out . ( www.suzannetrauth.com .) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 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.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Alex Lefevre Image Credits: Article The Puzzle is a new original musical with music and lyrics by Alex Lefevre, Assistant Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University and libretto by Marybeth Berry, Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of South Carolina: Lancaster and received its European premiere in the Spoleto Festival in Spoleto, Italy as a part of the La MaMa Spoleto Open curated by La MaMa Umbria International in June 2025. The musical debuted in a developmental reading at Coastal Carolina University as a part of their new works series in May 2024. This production in Spoleto, Italy marked the first fully staged production of the musical. The Puzzle takes place in Berlin, Maryland and tells the story of Jenna Adams, her mother Nanette, her six-year-old son Jake, and his two aunts Erica and Susan. In the opening number, “One Day”, the characters go through their daily routines until Jake’s father and Jenna’s husband, Scott, is killed in a car crash. Jake, overwhelmed by grief, is unresponsive until Jenna creates a song to accompany an old puzzle of Scott’s which serves as a breakthrough for the young boy. Nanette, the town busybody, sets up Jenna on a blind date with Taylor, a florist new to town. All goes well until Nanette suddenly bursts into their date and proclaims that her dog Mitzi has been injured by one of Jake’s puzzle pieces striking her in the eye. As a result, Nanette throws the puzzle in the trash, sending Jenna and Taylor on a date in the dumpster to successfully retrieve it. At the town’s fall festival, Jake begins to play the puzzle song by ear at the keyboard which Jenna attributes to the musical ability of her late husband and seeing it as a sign to move on. Through the course of the song “I Can Teach You”, Jenna and Susan convince Erica to teach piano lessons to Jake and over a decade passes highlighting major events including Taylor’s proposal to Jenna, the death of Mitzi, and Jake’s acceptance into NYU. At the end of Act I, it is revealed that Susan will be taking Jake to New York City and moving there herself as a part of a separation from Erica. Act II begins with a married Taylor and Jenna now working together at the flower shop and Jenna sharing a secret passion: writing children’s books. Jake, a sophomore music major at NYU, is unsure that he wants to continue studying music as he feels he is living in the shadow of his deceased father. Susan travels with Jake to Maryland for spring break and is served divorce papers by Erica. At an explosive family dinner, chaos ensues when the impending divorce is revealed to the family along with Jake’s plan to take a gap year in Africa. Erica and Jenna storm out with Susan and Jake following behind. Susan takes responsibility for leaving and the couple vow to find a way forward, while Jake apologizes to Jenna who gives her unconditional love to her son. In the final scene, five years have passed, and Jake is now married with a child on the way. Erica and Susan are living in New York together, Jenna is a successful writer, Taylor has hired a new store manager, and Nanette has tragically passed away. Susan speaks at the opening of her latest art exhibit based on her family, gathered in support, entitled “The Puzzle”. Marybeth Berry and I began writing The Puzzle in January of 2021. COVID-19 had crippled the theatre industry, and the world, and writing this show became our creative escape. We would meet weekly on Zoom to work and create weekly writing goals. We would start by discussing the characters and what we would ideally like to happen during a scene. The next meeting, we would read through the newly written scene, and I would choose moments that I felt would “sing” and began work on crafting a song. As our show is entitled The Puzzle , we attempted to shine the light equally on our different characters so that it was a true ensemble piece with each one of the characters representing a piece of our figurative puzzle. In the words of librettist Marybeth Berry, “It had been years of laboring to create the characters, the relationship dynamics and ultimately the story. Similar to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, The Puzzle focuses on life, loss, grief, love pain, triumph and survival. We can all see ourselves in this piece and we can all relate to a character, relationship, or simple moment because, in the words of the show, ‘it’s often in the mundane that we find the momentous.’” Songs and scenes were constantly being tweaked but by the start of 2024, we had a strong working draft of the libretto and score. Coastal Carolina University selects a new musical every May to be developed as a reading in their New Works Series and The Puzzle was honored to be the selection for 2024. Adam Pelty, Associate Professor of Theatre, helmed the reading as the director and Micah Young was the Music Director. Through the course of one week of rehearsals, new songs and scenes were implemented and seeds of ideas for the Spoleto production were planted. In the original CCU reading, the character of Scott had already passed as we started our prologue. Pelty suggested that there would be great power if the audience could experience the death first-hand. After being accepted into the Spoleto Festival, a new opening number was written with the car crash and funeral embedded in the opening number. While the original lyrics of the opening number “One Day” were kept for the start with each of the characters describing their everyday routines, it now ends after the funeral with the characters singing lines like “One Day is just like the others until one day it’s not” and “One day I will wash his coffee mug, right now I can’t put it away”. For the production in Spoleto, three new songs were implemented as well as significant cuts to the book to streamline our storytelling. While The Puzzle runs two hours and 30 minutes including a fifteen-minute intermission, with our Friday night Spoleto performance starting at 9:30pm, ensuring that we were maintaining our running time was essential. Reflecting on the process of putting up this production, Shelby Sessler who played Erica says “Watching pieces get moved, added, and cut from the reading to the production itself was fascinating to watch. We were experimenting with how each scene read even up to our opening to find the right tone to tell the story. It felt like a whirlwind of creativity.” There was no better place to experience this whirlwind than La MaMa Umbria. Full Cast of The Puzzle La MaMa Umbria is described on their website as a “non-profit cultural center and artist residence founded in 1990 by legendary theatre pioneer, Ellen Stewart.” Even with seeing all the photos available online, nothing can prepare one for the sheer beauty of this remarkable theatre space. Lisa Neal Baker who played the role Nanette shares “Every time we would return from an outing or a day of work, it felt like we were walking back into a serene fairytale- flowers blooming, birds chirping, butterflies everywhere with majestic mountains as your backdrop. With only eight days to come together to put this incredibly touching story together, having the calm, quiet serenity of La MaMa made it that much easier to focus, create and develop our characters and how their individual stories touched each other.” Actor Zach Hathaway, who played Jake, had previously performed at La MaMa Umbria in another production with Marybeth Berry. He states “Returning to La MaMa Umbria for the second time has been an incredibly special and fulfilling experience. There’s something truly magical about being in a space so deeply committed to nurturing artists and celebrating the craft of performance. Ever since my first time here three years ago, I’ve longed to return to that creative atmosphere, where collaboration and artistic exploration are at the heart of everything.” The staff of La MaMa Umbria ensured that our experience would be a positive one. They welcomed us with open arms, provided phenomenal meals with ingredients often plucked out of their on-site garden, and even splashed our bus with buckets of water as we pulled out of their driveway as a symbol of safe travel and hopefully an eventual return. Kenley Juback, who played Susan, echoes this sentiment: “Not only is the scenery irrevocably beautiful but so are the people. The love, friendship and artistry that finds you here from the La Mama Umbria staff is rare.” In fact, our performances of The Puzzle were filled with staff from La MaMa Umbria who came to support our work and promote new musical theatre. Known primarily for producing experimental theatre, La MaMa Umbria embraced our show in an astounding way. Director Jason Trucco, who was also in residence at La MaMa Umbria with us stated “I think the most experimental thing that can be done at an experimental theatre today is a Broadway musical.” Performing in a festival brings its own set of unique challenges, especially when it comes to the technical aspects of performance. In order to create the different locations, present in The Puzzle , we decided to turn to projections to set the scenes in addition to basic set pieces. According to Hans Boeschen, our stage manager and technical director, “The idea of projections arose from the challenge of visualizing the final scene which reveals an art gallery. The idea of this gallery installment is so unique that a projection was really our only option to capture the symbolism and heart of the moment. Using various A.I. tools, I worked to create backgrounds that not only helped identify the setting, but, hopefully, reflected the aspects of the characters and underlying themes of the book.” The use of A.I to create backgrounds was not a simple process as rarely did the computer outputs match what we as a team had in mind artistically. However, there were some happy accidents that occurred in the creation of the projections. Boeschen explains “Unintended interpretations from the computer could lead to some interesting deeper symbology. For example, Susan’s character struggles to connect with her art early in the production. I had asked A.I. to include blank canvases lying against the wall. Instead, it gave me an image where all the canvases were turned away and all we saw were their backs, almost as though Susan couldn’t bear to look at them.” The final projection of Susan’s art gallery display proved be the most difficult. No matter how precise the description we provided the computer, it could not produce anything with the necessary heart to culminate our piece. In the end, it was the original paintings of our cast member Shelby Sessler who played Erica, that we were able to scan into the computer to create the final images of Susan’s art instillation. Even with a simplified set, transitions between scenes still proved to be a challenge. We initially had our actors dragging tables and chairs from backstage before and after every number. Not only did this prove to be laborious, but also time consuming. Director Jared McNeill, also in residence at La MaMa Umbria, came to one of our early runs and provided the suggestion that we leave the set pieces on the side of the stage and allow our audience to see the actors putting together the set as they would put together the pieces of a puzzle. This brilliant suggestion not only helped us to facilitate our transitions in a more efficient way, but it also aided in our storytelling. Our actors began to see the transitions not just as necessary stage business but as extensions of their characters. Actor Alex Cowsert who played Taylor says “It was important for me to continue the story forward when assisting with scene transitions by remaining in the correct time period for the show. For example, if I was helping with a transition in the second act, I wanted to keep my older Taylor’s glasses on so it wouldn’t seem I was ‘out of character’.” Being at La MaMa Umbria allowed us as a creative team to get input from international directors like Jason Trucco and Jared McNeill. Their creative questions and ideas sparked many conversations about the next iteration of this musical for which we as authors are incredibly grateful. Kenley Juback performs “Something To Fix” The final piece of the puzzle of any theatrical work is always the audience, which in the case of this production, was Italian. While there is a song with a chorus in Italian, “Bambola Mia”, The Puzzle is a musical that is performed in English. Adriana Garbagnati, part of the La Mama Umbria family and an enormous supporter of our show, suggested that we write a synopsis of the show and provide copies to the audience much as one would receive at an opera. Blaize Berry, son to librettist Marybeth Berry and technical assistant for the production, wrote a thorough synopsis of the show that I then translated into Italian. Though most of our audience had a basic facility with English, the synopsis proved to be useful as we noted many of our audience members following along as the show progressed. Even with the added challenge of the show being performed in English, our audiences were still able to be moved by the show as was evidenced by the sniffles and tears present during our run. Librettist Marybeth Berry states “The themes in this show resonate with all walks of life and all cultures. The language barrier taught us that our show has more to offer than just entertainment. It touches others deeply and profoundly. Audience members recognized their own loved ones and own life experiences in our creation. It was a gift that transcends all typical barriers because of its simplicity.” Katie Gatch and Alex Cowsert perform “Dumpster Diving” The Puzzle has had an incredible journey from our living rooms in South Carolina on Zoom to the stage of La MaMa Umbria as a part of the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Actor Katie Gatch who played Jenna, said that working on a production of a new musical “felt like a door popping into existence in front of me, the threshold uncrossed, and I get to be the one to see what’s on the other side.” With the support of La MaMa Umbria, we certainly were able to see what’s on the other side, and it was thrilling. Writing and producing a new musical is a complicated process, but one that is ultimately highly rewarding. After this run, The Puzzle , or Il Puzzle as it was called in Italy, has only just begun to have its pieces assembled. References References About the author(s) Alex Lefevre (composer/lyricist The Puzzle) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC. He has played on Broadway in the orchestras of Aladdin, Anastasia, Beetlejuice, Cats, Newsies , and White Christmas , along with work Off-Broadway including The Fantasticks and Avenue Q and on national tour with Anastasia, Hairspray, and Irving Berlin’s I Love a Piano . An avid proponent of new musicals, Lefevre has music directed productions in both the New York Musical Theatre Festival and New York Fringe Festival as well as at 54 Below, The York Theatre Company, Primary Stages, and Ars Nova. As a composer, his work has been featured in the NEO Concert at the York Theatre Company celebrating New, Emerging, and Outstanding musical theatre writers as well as in the San Diego Fringe Festival, the Scranton Fringe Festival, the New Works Series at Coastal Carolina University and La MaMa Umbria. For the past three years, Lefevre has served as an opera coach for Varna International both in the United States and Italy, working on Mozart’s Don Giovanni , Puccini’s Suor Angelica , and Weill’s Street Scene . European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. By Malek Najjar Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Ashtar Muallem’s Awalem/Cosmos is a one-woman performance infused with text, music, and aerial arts performance, co-written by Ashtar Muallem, and co-written and directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Muallem, who has toured the production around the world, performs the work in Arabic, English, and French. I attended this production in Portland, Oregon, at the AWOL Dance Collective, produced by BOOM Arts on Saturday, March 1 st , 2025, after attending a movement workshop with Muallem earlier that day. A self-described Jerusalemite artist who navigates life between Palestine and France, Muallem bills Awalem/Cosmos as “a one-woman theatrical performance” ( Cosmos English). In the press materials, she describes the show thus, Ashtar practices yoga, and meditation, and explores tarot reading and hypnosis on the internet. Her elastic body mirrors her dual life, between two countries, cultures, and languages, between solitude and togetherness. In a satirical manner, she presents her beliefs, inviting us to participate in a ceremony where poetry blends with humour and subjectivity merges with the universal. Through Ashtar’s art, we embark on a journey of balance, contradictions, and the beauty of interconnectedness. ( Cosmos English) The audience enters to Muallem sitting in the lotus position wearing a white blouse tied at the waist and black yoga pants on a large white cloth pooled on the stage, which also ascends high above her to the rafters. She performs several actor vocal exercises and speaks casually to the audience as they take their seats, asking if they are comfortable and whether anyone has practiced yoga or meditation. She then asks everyone to inhale and exhale together, “to get into the group’s atmosphere” (YouTube). This metaphor of “inhale, exhale” becomes central to the piece as it progresses. Muallem begins the actual performance with a Tibetan singing bowl, which she rings and circles with a mallet while laying on her side. Ashtar Muallem performs in Cosmos/Awalem by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba, . Directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. She tells the audience she is neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim, nor from the East or West. “I abdicated duality and saw that the two worlds aren’t but one. Everything is one,” she states. She then begins a series of exercises with a yoga stretching strap while she speaks about the primacy of the body and the need for harmony between the body, soul, and spirit. She tells the audience of her grandmother, a religious woman who wanted Muallem to be like her, a “prayer addict” living in Jerusalem, a city of peace with a market filled with the smells of za’atar, sumac, sesame, and curry. However, despite the beauty of the city, there was a tension that convinced her at the age of eighteen to leave her country to study circus in France. She spends months in the new country, unable to speak the language until she attends a pro-Palestine rally where she hears the shouts “Free Palestine! Victory to Palestine!” There, she is asked about the history of her country and explains the 1948 War, the 1967 War, the division of Jerusalem into quarters, and the occupation zones that dictate where Palestinians are allowed to live or travel under occupation. When asked by foreigners what the solution is to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she says: “The solution is simple. It is within us.” (YouTube) Although never mentioned, her tenure in France seemed to coincide with the COVID-19 lockdown, leaving her with a hopeless feeling that she would never be allowed to perform theatre again. She flirted with the idea of becoming a YouTube influencer but found little success. With her vanishing hope, she came to study Zen and its koan “You cannot control external circumstances. Pain is a part of life” (YouTube). She learns that everything happens for a reason and that there is a predestiny at work. Music begins, and she performs a beautifully choreographed aerial sequence as she ascends the silk and performs gravity-defying maneuvers. Suddenly, she stops, pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and smokes high above the stage floor. “Are you surprised that I’m smoking?” she asks. “I have plenty of time to burn” (YouTube). She says that her true lover, solitude, complements her as she cooks, reads, dances, and repeats affirmations in her lockdown. She realizes she is a vortex of creativity and creates rituals where she hugs and kisses herself, sometimes cradling and speaking baby talk to her own leg as she would an actual baby. She watches a tarot reader named Estelle online who always predicts correctly. She also learns to read the aura surrounding people by crossing her eyes and looking directly at them; a technique she employs on the actual audience watching the production. Ashtar Muallem performs in Cosmos/Awalem by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba, . Directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. She then tells us that she finds that some people have blockages, and that men are told not to cry and they, in turn, tell their children not to cry either. To remedy this, she pulls a male audience member from the audience and leads them upstage right to a table with a chopping block and a chef knife, where they sit on a chair facing the audience. She produces a basket of onions and tells the participant to cut them until they are done. “You will cry freely and I will move freely” she says. As a mournful Arabic song plays, she dances, returns to the aerial silk, ascends, and performs a balletic dance high above the stage with unbelievable accuracy and speed. When she descends and escorts the man from the stage, she tells us how we, like the onion, are constituted of many layers, with each layer representing an identity we have assigned ourselves. “For us to access our truths,” she states, “we need to peel off these layers.” (YouTube) [1] She repeats a mantra, “Those who never cry are full of tears” (YouTube). She says she has seen too many men carrying weapons, but too few who cry. “I wonder if men let their tears fall then perhaps our world would be washed from all the wars?” she asks. She then breaks into a humorous infomercial voice as “Ashtar the Influencer,” urging audiences to purchase onions in the lobby. Her last words are “May peace be upon you. Namaste.” Muallem’s embodied performance of physical and vocal mastery, her congenial tone, her direct address, and her spiritual quandaries combine to make Cosmos/Awalem an enjoyable and thoughtful evening of performance. It is clear that she is exploring her role as an artist in the world and her life as a woman, as a Palestinian, and as a spiritual seeker in the hopes of unravelling her complicated emotions regarding the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, war, and occupation. Perhaps, instead of an onion, a more apt metaphor might be the artichoke. One may not cry while peeling an artichoke, but each layer peeled leads not to tears, but to the heart. After all is said and done, isn’t that the journey Muallem has asked us to take during this poignant evening of performance? Ashtar Muallem performs in Cosmos/Awalem by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba, . Directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes SOURCES: Cosmos: A One-Woman Theatrical Performance, Co-written and Performed by Ashtar Muallem. Co-written and directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba.” ASHTAR Theatre, 11 September, 2003. Media kit. Muallem, Ashtar. “AWALEM with English sub.” YouTube, uploaded by ASHTAR Theatre 7 January, 2024. https://youtu.be/HUhNyBJnASU?si=sHnGUAGOPOKxj0Vx . [1] On this particular evening of performance, I was unexpectedly the one asked onstage to chop the onions. As I sat there cutting the onions I found myself much less interested in the task as I was in the mesmerizing aerial performance unfolding before me. References About The Author(s) Malek Najjar is a Full Professor of Theatre Arts with the University of Oregon. He holds a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies (UCLA) and his Master of Fine Arts in Directing (York University). He is the author of Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures and Creators and Arab American Drama, Film and Performance: A Critical Study, 1908 to the Present. He edited Heather Raffo’s Iraq Plays: The Things That Can’t Be Said and The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi ; Four Arab American Plays: Works by Leila Buck, Jamil Khoury, Yussef El Guindi, and Lameece Issaq & Jacob Kader . He is co-editor of Until I Return: The Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi and Mona Mansour: The Vagrant Trilogy (with Hala Baki) and Six Plays of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (with Jamil Khoury and Corey Pond). Malek has directed with Silk Road Rising, Golden Thread Productions, New Arab American Theatre Works. Malek is a performance editor for Arab Stages and a board member of the Middle East North African Theater Makers Alliance. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jorge Huerta Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Jorge Huerta By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Much has happened in the field of Chicano theatre studies, both as praxis and theory since 1965 when the Teatro Campesino (Farmworkers’ Theater) was founded as the cultural arm of the farm workers’ union in California. The original aesthetic of the Teatro was commedia dell’arte-like sketches, termed “actos” by Luis Valdez. The Chicano theatre groups that followed in the footsteps of the Campesino collectively created their own actos exposing the many problems that plagued their communities. Paralleling the Chicanos’ theatrical rumblings from California to the Midwest were the Cuban, Puerto Rican and other Latinos on the East Coast, expressing their realities in the streets and on stages from the boroughs of Manhattan to Florida. There was some interaction between the politically-charged “Nuyoricans” and the equally politicized Chicanos but initially, the three major groups had distinct agendas. I was a high school drama teacher when I first witnessed the Teatro Campesino in 1968, an event that changed my life. I realized that I knew nothing about the history of Chicano or Mexican theatre and determined to pursue a doctorate in theatre in order to research the field. I began my graduate studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1970 and discovered that the majority of articles and a handful of dissertations I located focused on the early Spanish religious folk theater of the Southwest; plays and performances that had been “discovered” in the 1930s by anthropologists rather than theatre scholars. There were articles and reviews about the then five-year old Teatro Campesino but little else. Not a single book, no plays in print and no anthologies of plays had been published. There was much archival work to be done. With my Ph.D. in hand (apparently the first Chicano to earn a doctorate in Dramatic Art) I joined the faculty of the Theatre Department at the University of California, San Diego in the fall of 1975 as a young assistant professor, eager to change the face(s) of the American theatre. Literally. I was very fortunate to have a supportive faculty and administration over the years as I witnessed the many changes in the field of Theatre Studies and used my academic affiliation to gain the attention and respect of the field. I had no idea what Life had in store for me and the communities of Chicanas, Chicanos, Mexicans, and other so-called minorities eager to see their realities portrayed on stages across the land. At the close of the 1970s Time Magazine declared that the 1980s would be “The Decade of the Hispanic,” a prediction that never came to pass. What did happen, however, was an influx of foundation, state, local and federal dollars, however limited, designed to enhance the growth and development of what was being called “Hispanic Theatre.” The 1980s and ‘90s saw a proliferation of projects aimed at enhancing the financial and aesthetic development of Hispanic theatre in mainstream regional theatres as well as in Chicano and Hispanic theatre companies. The era of professionalization had arrived and with it we saw Latinas and Latinos entering graduate programs in all aspects of theatre. Alongside the enhancement of the production of plays came the development of scholarship focused on the theatre and performance(es) by Chicana (read female), Chicano, and other Spanish-surnamed people living in the US. I called this incursion into theatre and performance studies departments “infiltration” which it was and which continues to resonate Also emerging were young scholars, the second generation of graduate students in theatre and performance whose focus was on all aspects of the Latina and Latino experience. The roster of young scholars began to grow and today we have scholars at all levels teaching in departments of theatre, performance studies and related disciplines in high schools, colleges and universities from coast-to-coast. The field has grown to such an extent that one cannot teach all of the plays that have been published by or about Latina/os in a year-long course. The scholarly books about Latino theater are still too few; there is much to be discussed and written about in terms of the breadth and scope of the scholarship as well as the myriad number of anthologies of plays that have been published. Further, every scholarly journal has published articles about Latina/o theatre including the one in your hand but we need more. The careful reader will note that I’ve gone from referring to “Chicano,” to “Hispanic” to the more common designation today, Latina/Latino because that is the demographic of most Latina/o theatre groups: a pan-American roster that includes Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and etc. These Latino theatre companies are bringing a diverse community of artists and audiences into their theatres, all interested in our common goals as citizens and “dreamers.” Enhancing this goal the Latino Theatre Commons was founded in 2014 as national coalition of Latino theatre companies, artists, scholars and allies under the auspices of Arts Emerson at Emerson College, Boston. The LTC has participated in the organization and fund-raising of a historic month-long national festival of Latino Theatre companies produced by the Los Angeles Theater Center in 2014; a “Carnaval, Festival of New Works” at DePaul University in Chicago in 2015 and several regional convenings. Further, I am thrilled that the scholars have been integral contributors to these events and gatherings documenting the events, people and teatros in Café Onda and the HowlRound website as well as other refereed publications. As evidenced in the many initiatives emanating from regional alliances across the country and the Latino Theatre Commons, it is clear that Latino theatre artists and scholars are continuing to challenge their audiences and students in ways that were unheard of in the 1960s. The times have changed, the technology has changed but the people remain people and I believe the playwrights and theatre companies are still attempting to determine who they are not only in this society but as members of the international communities in struggle. As the players become more and more diverse in their own legacies: African, Asian, indigenous and yes, European, they will seek new ways to define themselves. Judging from everything that is happening at the local, regional and national levels; in the academies as well as in the communities, I believe the future of Latina/o theater is in very good hands. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Jorge Huerta is Chancellor’s Associate Professor of Theatre Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is a professional director and a leading authority on contemporary Chicana/o and US Latina/o 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 Comment New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Musical Theatre Studies “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Performing Anti-slavery American Tragedian Murder Most Queer The Captive Stage Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Bess Rowen 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 Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T Bess Rowen By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T Bess Rowen Debbie with a D performs in Debbie with a D’s Tennessee with the Tea at the AllWays Lounge in New Orleans in March 2026. Photo: Nick Shackleford. In March of 2026, I had the pleasure of seeing my second Debbie with a D drag show in New Orleans. The first time I had seen her perform was as part of a drag brunch connected to the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival a few years ago, and this year she returned to the festival program with Debbie with a D’s Tennessee with the Tea . This adult Drag Queen Story Hour was produced by The Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans, led by Co-Founding/Producing Artistic Directors Augustin Correro and Nick Shackleford. Drag queens Tara Shay Montgomery, Vantasia Divine, Muffy Vanderbilt III, Kozmik, Laveau Contraire, and Debbie herself each read the plot of a specific Tennessee Williams play before performing a lip sync inspired by the plot. Debbie served as the emcee and also contributed a story herself. After seeing her perform in two shows involving Tennessee Williams, I wanted to ask her more about her connection to theatre and how she sees it connecting to her drag work. And, of course, in the current political climate, I wanted to know more about how being a full-time drag queen feels at this moment. Debbie with a D has received many awards and honors, including two Mardi Gras Bourbon Street Awards, 2026 King Cake Queen, and Gambit ’s #1 Drag Queen in New Orleans. You can also find her in the newest iteration of Queer as Folk . She is not only a celebrated and talented drag queen, but she also has a master’s degree in public health. She is particularly adept at combining her advocacy work in this field with her drag, which is something we discuss at the end of the following interview. We also discuss her theatrical origins, her love of Tennessee Williams, her drag journey, the importance of queer art, and how she came to be a public health drag queen. This interview was conducted via Zoom on April 24 th , 2026. It has been edited for length and clarity. Bess Rowen : Thanks so much for doing this! You had teased a bit of your theatrical past and your involvement with Tennessee Williams, so maybe we could start there? Or maybe how you got into drag? Debbie with a D : I guess the quickest way to go through it all is to start all the way back. I was homeschooled Pre-K through 12 th grade, but I was part of this megachurch. My father was a pastor, and they did huge theatrical productions for Christmas and Easter. And because I was homeschooled, that was my first introduction into a theatrical situation. Of course, I loved it! Once I started college, I still wanted to do like whatever theatre I could get into. But because it wasn’t part of the church and I wasn’t necessarily great because I hadn’t been to acting classes in home school, I was not getting roles in college. But I did do a bunch of theatre classes there, but oddly enough I did not really come across any of Tennessee Williams’s works at that point. BR : I’m not surprised by that. A lot of people don’t actually encounter him in the discipline of Theatre anymore. DwaD : It’s crazy! Because his work is so good. There were a couple other theatre-related things I did along the way. Eventually, I was cast in Picasso at the Lapin Agile in college. After coming out, leaving the church, and finishing college, I was working in a coffee shop—where I actually met my partner. He was in town for a post-bac program to get into medical school in New Orleans. He had already lived in New Orleans, so we always knew that he was going to be coming back. We did long distance for a little bit and then I followed him down here. I went and got my master’s in public health at Tulane. I didn’t want to move solely for a relationship, so I had to do something for myself. That’s why I went back to grad school. All of that time, there was no theatre really in my life. But then I got my day job managing a clinic at Crescent Care. About a year into that job, I started feeling like I had no big projects. I asked myself: What are my interests now? What are my hobbies and art? So I tried out for a play here in New Orleans and started working with a couple of the small production companies. Then I auditioned for a show at Le Petit Theatre and was cast in Jesus Christ Superstar . I was a swing, one of the priests, and an understudy for Jesus. But it was there that I met Augustin Correro and Nick Shackleford, co-founders of the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans. Nick was playing Jesus, and Augustin was the director. I had met Augustin earlier that year as he had come in and interviewed for a job in the clinic. Then, within that year, I auditioned for the show and he hired me. Shortly thereafter, they started the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans. They asked me if I’d be interested in being a production manager. I’d also started doing drag by then. I became the production manager for Small Craft Warnings and The Rose Tattoo in the first two years the company was producing work. BR : Weird Tales was the first thing I saw from Augustin and Nick. And that was before they had a connection with The Lower Depths Theater at Loyola University. DwaD : I had never experienced Tennessee Williams until I was the production manager for the company. And what was the first one they did? Kingdom of Earth ! That was my first experience with Tennessee Williams. I went in not knowing anything. But I came out changed, and deeply feeling things. As someone who, at that point, had experienced lots theatre, it was just one of the most visceral feelings I’ve ever left a theatre feeling. Somehow, Williams makes new what you’ve been feeling your whole life. You think, “How did he put words to that?” BR : I am delighted by that way into Williams! I feel like we often encounter people who love Williams, and even queer people who love Williams, but most people only know the “big three”: A Streetcar Named Desire , The Glass Menagerie , and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . So, I’m delighted that your intro was Kingdom of Earth and Small Craft Warnings , which are absolutely bread and butter parts of what his entire work means to those of us who love all of it, but now what most people encounter for the first time. Have you ever seen or encountered those big ones that everyone talks about? And what did you think when you saw them? Were you expecting this other version of him and his work from later on in his career? DwaD : I saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Le Petit the last time they did it. That was my first time seeing it. My second time seeing Cat was when the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans put it on. BR : Do you have a favorite Williams play? Is Small Craft Warnings your favorite? DwaD : Small Craft Warnings for sure is up there. I also love The Rose Tattoo . I love the scene where Serafina comes in covered in the ashes. Camino Real too. BR : So out there! But also a delight. There’s a one-act version and also a full-length version of Camino Real . The Williamstown Theater Festival did a production with Pamela Anderson this summer, which was the perfect casting that none of us knew we wanted. DwaD : That’s amazing. BR : It’s such a wackadoo play. I don’t know if you know where it comes in his oeuvre, but it’s after Streetcar and before Cat . Williams was convinced that it was going to be his next big hit. And people were like, “What is this?!” They kept putting him in this box of playwrights whose plays are sentimental and realistic. But he was never actually writing that. But Camino Real has these grander themes that I think—for those of us who really dig the later plays—are used to seeing. But boy were his audiences not ready for it when it premiered. DwaD : But maybe they are now . It’s like the original White Lotus ! BR : That’s such a good connection! I have never thought about it like that, but absolutely. Talk about family dynamics gone astray, and failing aristocracy. DwaD: Miserable people that don’t necessarily meet, but then are all in the same station and place. But then: Who’s gonna die ? BR : Is Small Craft Warnings the original White Lotus ? DwaD : I think so. You heard it here first! BR : I think you’re so right that Williams puts words to things that we feel deeply. I think especially as queer people—although I don’t know that we have sole ownership over Williams at this point—we see that he has compassion for all of his characters. And he’s deeply interested in how society treats the most vulnerable. He’s able to really see that and unflinchingly look at that in a way that still makes it seem like there is hope. I’m wondering if you can loop in your fabulous drag work by talking a little more about this latest version of Debbie with a D’s Tennessee with the Tea that I know you’re doing in collaboration with Nick and Augustin. Can you talk a little more about how you got involved in that? DwaD : I’d like to jump back to the bookmark we left on my drag from before. I had just started my day job, finished grad school, and had done the production of Jesus Christ Superstar . After three weeks of intense rehearsals every night after work, and I was exhausted. I loved it, but it wasn’t sustainable and I had to pay off my student loans. So, I let theatre go for a while, but stil attended the various festivals in New Orleans on nights and weekends. But soon I started getting that theatre itch again. And I thought: I’m queer. I could try drag. But I had no clue where to start. It was Vinsantos DeFonte who started the New Orleans Drag Workshop. I had seen a couple of little articles pop up about that. I looked it up and sent him a message to see if I could join the workshop. I ended up being in the eighth cycle of that workshop. That experience gave me knowledge of the drag basics: what I need to purchase, creating a character, and starting on the journey of learning costuming, wigs, and makeup. Because each of those is its own profession! But an eight-week course does not a drag queen make. I started with a booking maybe once or twice a month. But then the pandemic hit and I was locked in my house. I had so much time that I just started practicing a lot of those skills, and thankfully, it went really well. At one point, right before the pandemic hit, Poppy Tooker—an institution in New Orleans—put out a casting call for her Drag Queen Brunch book. It was a Facebook open call, so any drag queen who wanted to be in it could be in it. She could pay $50 for the day for the photo shoot. And I, being a new queen, was like “$50 for a gig? Absolutely!” But I think a lot of the other queens that had been doing it longer were not so impressed. But I lucked out and ended up on the back cover of that book. Then I ended up doing a bunch of brunches with Poppy at Tujague’s, Dickie Brennan’s, and all around New Orleans. So there’s the Vinsantos tie-in, the Nick and Augustin tie-in, and the Poppy Tooker tie-in. Unintentionally, these were my introductions into the Tennessee Williams scene in New Orleans. After the drag brunch book was published, I ended up getting a bunch of bookings, which allowed me to put more money into costuming and better products, and consequently more gigs. Later, I was on the new version of Queer As Folk as an extra in New Orleans, but that paid so much money. They wanted all the local queens to be in the show as regulars to make it feel like New Orleans. That pushed me to take the leap into full-time drag three years ago. BR : And here you are, a multi-award-winning drag queen. Debbie with a D. Photo: Scotty Kirby. DwaD : I still cannot believe it. Through Poppy Tooker, I got involved in some of the Tennessee Williams drag brunches. And Nobu or [Dickie] Brennan’s wanted us to do a Tennessee Williams themed drag brunch. That was the first time I started thinking about what it would look like for a drag queen to interpret Tennessee Williams. I did a mix where I cut in different clips from Streetcar of Blanche saying crazy things into Ava Max’s “Sweet but Psycho.” BR : Yes, I remember that! And one of the other queens had been the runner-up in the Stella Shouting Contest that year, and she did the Stella shout for us. Iconic. DwaD : I think we did that show three times with Poppy. Then Nick and Augustin approached me about doing Tennessee with the Tea in the annual Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival in New Orleans. They were really the visionaries on the project. They approached it as a Drag Queen Story Hour where we would get local playwrights to write reimagined versions of the plays, and then various local queens reading the stories and interpreting them. BR : Now that you’ve gotten to do this show a few times, what’s your favorite play that’s covered in there? And were there plays that you didn’t know before the show? DwaD : At this point, I have seen everything covered in Tennessee with the Tea , so getting to see the drag interpretations has been a lot of fun since I get the references. But not all of the queens doing the interpretations have seen all the plays. Probably most of the queens didn’t really know much about Tennessee Williams other than A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . So, some of them were like, “What the fuck is going on? What is the story here?” BR : Which is a correct response. DwaD : I loved it. It’s been fun to get to watch them know Tennessee Williams in this draggy way for the first time. And then get to explain to them a little bit the plot of each show. BR : I appreciate that when you set up the conceit of the show at the top you say that these are actually not exaggerated versions of the plot. The stories are literally telling the audience the plot, but I feel like some audience members don’t believe that. But it’s true! People are also rarely describing a Williams play blow by blow. Williams plays have been kind of deranged since the start, so that’s half the fun! DwaD : Yes. And my favorite performance in the show is probably The Glass Menagerie version that Muffy Vanderbilt III did as the unicorn. BR : The splicing of Menagerie with the Toni Braxton song “Un-Break My Heart” as “Un-Break My Horn!” was hilarious. As a Tennessee Williams scholar who also loves and writes about drag, I saw this show as an amalgamation of all the things I like in one place. The things that I love about Tennessee Williams are his deep sensitivity, and the ability to see the strange, the crazed, the queer, as the characters say in The Mutilated . You’re here to see the strange, the crazed, the queer, but you’re also here to see drag queens do what drag queens do best, which is to both poke fun and look at something from a really interesting angle; to highlight something you didn’t see before. They let you see the work in a completely different way. I mean, talking about Cat on a Hot Tin Roof dressed like Cat in the Hat, I was living. Like, give me a drag queen name pun in real life, Cat in a Hat on a Hot Tin Roof is exactly what I want. I mean, The Glass Menagerie is my favorite Williams play, and now I will never look at it again without thinking about “Un-Break My Horn”! What is your dream role, in drag or out, in Tennessee Williams’s oeuvre? DwaD : I think there are two that pop to my mind. One is Maxine from Night of the Iguana . And the other is Violet from Small Craft Warnings . I mean, come on, reimagined as a drag queen? Handies under the table? BR : Handies under the table, yes. But also such deep feeling. I love Violet. I also think a drag version of Maxine running the hotel in Night of the Iguana would be really fun. DwaD : Also Lot in Kingdom of Earth . He dresses in his mother’s clothes. BR : Definitely. Also, you’ve touched on this a little bit, but I’m curious about why you think we keep going back to Williams today, especially from a drag perspective. DwaD : As humans, we love stories and storytelling. But his work is more than just stories. It leaves you feeling more human. And somewhere in the midst of this onslaught of language and words—and bless all the Williams leading ladies who have to memorize all of that—something from the words falls away and you’re left with the emotion and impact of being human that Williams is trying to convey. I feel like his plays are like those optical illusions where if you look at it long enough, another picture emerges… BR : Magic Eye! DwaD : Tennessee Williams is Magic Eye. His words come at you fast and fierce, but once you sit there and lock in, you get what he’s saying. And not every playwright has that ability. With Williams, in just about every scene there are moments that you’re like “oh, they’re human. Oh I’m human. I felt that.” He was ahead of his time in storytelling, in creating relatable characters that are timeless. Regardless of it being decades after he has written these characters, they are still incredibly human. And there’s drama of course! And who doesn’t love a little bit of tea? BR : That’s beautifully put. Part of this interview series is also about what it’s like to make queer art now at this tumultuous moment. Williams is part of that, but as a queer artist who’s making queer art right now, what is that like? DwaD : Since it’s my full-time job, I have to find ways to be marketable in a country where an event can be targeted, or where it is not beneficial for a business or brunch spot to be widely visible. If they hire a drag queen now, they’re very clearly aligning themselves with one political view. It’s become very political to be visible. I have to find ways to survive and make a living by being palatable. However, I don’t always necessarily think of that part as creating the art. Being a drag queen and being visibly queer is an act of resistance at this juncture in the country. And so there is an aspect of any visibility—regardless of if it’s for work or as a creative outlet—there is an aspect of art in it because I’m a product of the time, and the things I’m doing are products of the time. But for me, it doesn’t always feel like that because I also do drag for a living. However, there are spaces when I get to do art more explicitly, and that is really special. I host this show at Oz on Tuesday nights on Bourbon Street—it’s a competition every week. It’s mostly drag queens who compete, but we’ll get some burlesque performers, drag kings, comedians, and live vocalists. But it’s heavily drag queens, and many of them trans. Especially over the last three years it’s been really great to see—and great to create a space—where there is a little bubble of safety, where everyone gets to be and express themselves through art. Part of my art is creating the space for others to create art. A lot of these queens have started their journey during the last three to five years while in this show. And that’s brave given the political state of things. Do we need to vote? Yes! Do we need to do other things? Yes! But in this queer space where we are creating art tonight, it is okay to take a deep breath, enjoy art, enjoy your creative process, and find a way to refresh oneself for the work ahead. So, I think that’s what queer art is doing now. It is an outlet and a way for us to take a breath, reflect, figure out what is important to us, so when it’s time to work, we can work . BR : Times of great political upheaval and repression often produce astonishing art. It’s radical to have a space of queer joy right now because there are people who don’t want that to exist. And I know whenever I’ve had the privilege to be in spaces like that, I always feel refueled and recharged. And that’s what drag does for me. That is why I try to see as much live drag as I possibly can, everywhere I go. That community and that art is sustaining, especially right now. DwaD : You know, I’m just putting it together right now, but you saying that you seek out drag wherever and thinking about how it helps us recharge—it’s kind of how we feel human, which is also what Tennessee Williams is doing. It’s like watching people create and perform their art that is about themselves. There’s something similarly trance-like, especially right now when it is political, and it means that much more that you’re being visible and okay with that. You are seeing someone who is being real, maybe afraid, but they’re being brave. You’re seeing all of these different aspects of a person and that’s so beautiful and relatable . And I think that touches on the things that Williams captures in those plays. He gets you to see those things in his characters. And maybe that’s why I like both of these things! BR : I love that connection. The vulnerability involved in making art that shows people as they truly are is definitely a commonality between Tennessee Williams and drag. I do think there’s a special experience I have when I watch drag as well as when I watch Williams’ plays. I’m on this ride, and I’m ready for you to take me wherever you want. I want to transition to another area of your life where I think you’re making some brave space and also leaning into your Master’s in Public Health and the training you have involved in keeping communities safe and informed. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you got into this sort of activism, education, and work? DwaD : After I completed my Master’s degree, when I first started doing drag, I was still doing full-time work at the clinic. I was managing the HIV testing program, and a couple of the clinic’s programs had done community outreach. We had medical mobile units that went out to churches, parks, festivals, concerts and do free testing. We started giving out at-home HIV test kits. And we were doing testing at the bars in the French Quarter for years before the pandemic. When I started doing drag, I knew what was possible in terms of outreach from where I was performing and the resources I could bring into the community. I was doing grant writing for a CDC clinic and knew what deliverables they were looking for, especially community-based programs. We were supposed to identify members of the community who would be able to help us reach the community and make a finded program more likely to succeed. As I started doing drag, I was finding myself in this place where I was becoming that community person who knew everybody, and I was trusted by the community. I also had the access and knew how to code switch into the public health speak. Our healthcare system is a mess. A superpower I have is connecting people with resources. Even when I first started doing drag, I joked that I would be the “public health drag queen.” I created an event called Debbie with Plan B where I was bringing out Plan B and HIV test kits and then doing referrals for PrEP at the events. Eventually, the Plan B stuff dried up, but I was still able to have a medical mobile unit out or have someone from the clinic there for referrals. But I usually still had tests to give away, and that eventually turned into COVID test kits. When I made the jump to full-time drag, a clinic started asking if I’d be their person on the ground for PrEP referrals. They started compensating me to put on the talent competition that I was telling you about on Tuesday nights. They would sponsor a lip sync battle halfway through the show. I’d have two queens come out and do a lip sync battle, but before that, I’d say a sixty-second thing about PrEP and DoxyPEP and U=U [Undetectable = Untransmittable]. And then the lip sync battle would happen, and the audience would choose a winner. After that, I would quiz people on the information that I had told them. If they answered questions correctly, they got drink tickets. So there was motivation for people to recall that information. More recently, that also became connected with the anti-smoking campaign that Louisiana is doing too. BR : That’s fantastic! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. DwaD : Thank you! References Footnotes About The Author(s) BESS ROWEN is Associate Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She is also affiliate faculty for both Gender & Women's Studies and Irish Studies. She is a member of Actors' Equity and an intimacy choreographer. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021) focuses on affective stage directions. Her next book project looks at the theatrical archetype of the “mean teenage girl.” She also serves as the President-Elect of the American Theatre & Drama Society and co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 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.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Steve Earnest Image Credits: Article Interview with Walter Bart, Artistic Leader of Wunderbaum Collective and Director of Die Hundekot-Attacke from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Wunderbaum, Co-creators of Die Hundekot-Attacke at Theaterhaus Jena Walter Bart was born in Rotterdam in 1978 and completed his training as an actor at Toneelacademie Maastricht in 2001. In the same year, he founded the collective Wunderbaum with Maartje Remmers, Wine Dierickx, Marleen Scholten and Matijs Jansen (they were later joined by stage designer Maarten von Otterdijk), and together they created more than 50 productions over the past 22 years. Wunderbaum collaborated with Johan Simon’s company Hollandia and with NTGent before the collective joined up with Theater Rotterdam in 2010. Theater Rotterdam continues to be Wunderbaum’s basis today. From 2018 to 2022, Wunderbaum formed the team of directors of Theaterhaus Jena. With Wunderbaum, Walter Bart created theatre for the main and the small stage as well as other venues across the city. They developed concepts, directed and performed. The collective’s most recent productions include “Alfa Romeo”, “Wunderbaum spielt LIVE, online läuft es schief” (both in 2024), “La Cordista”, “Der Platz” and “Die Hundekot-Attacke”, a co-production with Theaterhaus Jena that was invited to the 2024 Theatertreffen. About the Incident in Question In February 2023 Choreographer and Ballet Leader of Hannover Opera Marco Goeke walked up to critic Wiebke Hüster , confronted her about a scathing review she had published about his new work “In the Dutch Mountains” the day before. Angered about her comments, Goeke then pulled out a back of dog excrement (from his pet dachsund) and violently smeared it all over Hüster’s face. The police and authorities then got involved and Goeke, a rising star in the German dance scene, was first suspended and later removed from his post as Director of the Hannover Ballet. The incident made national news across Europe (as well as the New York Times ). The Hannover Ballet stated that Goeke’s impulsive and violent actions damaged both Ms. Hüster as well as the reputation of the company itself. The incident was universally condemned as an attack on the freedom of the press. ES: So your background, you're now the artistic director of Theaterhaus Jena? WB: No, no, I used to be, until 2020. But together with my group, Wunderbaum, we are an actors' collective from the Netherlands. And we are based in Rotterdam, in Theater Rotterdam. And then we read that this theater was looking in 2018 for a new artistic direction, or a new artistic leader. ES: And they specifically asked for a collective to apply for the leadership role? To come in as a group of people leading? WB: Yeah, a group of people. They wanted a group of people. Not just one, and that's kind of like the way this theater, the background of this theater is. They like to work as a... Yeah, and it has partly to do with the history of it, because it was torn down. I will give you a book of the history of the theater house, it's pretty interesting. It's like, after the wall came down, they... I mean, the whole East was like... Kind of like, they didn't know in what direction to go, of course. So, they were all kind of... And all the money was gone. All the money was gone, so they were really poor. And they tried to... They invited a group from the Ernst Busch, in 1990s, 91. And that's a group of actors from the Ernst Busch Schule in Berlin, and they... it was a class from the Ernst Busch who took over this theater. . So the leaders of this theater, they just drove there, and they said to a few actors, come over to Jena, you'll get the whole theater, and do what you want. ES: It sounds like an excellent opportunity for a group of young actors studying theatre to finish their last year in this situation. Was it? WB: It was okay. But there was not a lot of money. And they got a... Good luck.Yeah, good luck. And the theater was really run down. It was really terrible., like a mess. And I'll show you later the building. And then... So there is something like this situation in the DNA of the house, there's a strong collective vibe. And then it's also led by a group of... They call them... It means like some sort of a board. But in the board are also technicians, for example, from the theater. And they decide of the future, so they choose the next people. And so for that reason, I think the theater also always had like a collective background. And then they asked us to come and we... But we are an actors' collective, so we are six actors. It's funny, we worked quite a lot in the U.S. as well, as a group. ES: So has your company visited the USA? WB: We did two, three co-productions with the Red Cat Theater in Los Angeles. The Red Cat. It's Mark Murphy. There's so many theaters in Los Angeles. It's part of the Disney Theater. It's the Red Cat. And then we went to play in Austin in the Fusebox Festival a few times. And in New York also in a theater. And we did... Yeah, Detroit. We've been in the U.S. quite a while. But never in Carolina. It's a pity. No, no, no. Maybe Atlanta would be the closest. The U.S. is so huge. So the actors are also involved in decisions about how they run the theater. And now this group, the actors, and my girlfriend, who's a director, and our set designer, do it till this summer. And then we moved to Berlin. But Wunderbaum stays in Rotterdam. But I moved to Berlin. And then they asked me as a director to do this piece. So they invited me again. ES: So what about this piece? I wanted to know how you developed this project. WB: Obviously, it was a big story at first. Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of like... Why make a play out of this? I always thought... Because a lot of people didn't know how to talk about it. And I kind of liked that about it. Because you felt there was a huge insecurity. Because of course the press framed it pretty fast as an attack on the freedom of speech. And then you felt on the artistic side, people who deal with critics, they think, okay, what can I say about it? The image of somebody putting... Yeah, it's so extreme. And all the time you... I felt there was such much... People were so uncomfortable to talk about it. So, there was not an honest talking about it. t's also like... And for me that kind of fitted in the time. I think in this time there's a lot of subjects. And I think it certainly has to do with Corona. It also has to do with politics. That I felt there's a lot of topics where people don't immediately say there, open your mouth. It's like immediately... And not in the first conversation. But say, okay, are you a Trump voter? Or are you a Biden voter? Or are you a pro this or pro Corona? Believe me, that's a big problem. I know, of course. We follow the American politics day by day. I'm hooked on it, unfortunately. It's stupid. Make a play about that. Yeah. I think Americans have to do it themselves. It's already a play. ES: It is. We're living it. WB: But then I felt like this kind of discomfort, is that a word? Where you don't know how to talk. And I thought that was in this subject a lot. Because it's kind of like... You didn't know what to say about it, actually. Or you don't know. People were not like... And then I thought that... So it would be great to... Because it's so difficult to talk about it. But then theater is the best place also to talk about it. Because it happened in a theater. ES: What actually happened in the theater and how did you guys make the piece? WB: It happened in a theatre in Hanover, the incident. So, then we made the concept about the theater. And I did it before with Wunderbaum. And that piece played also in the United States. Which one now? It's called Looking for Paul . And it also won in Edinburgh. We won a big theater award for it. And it is about... It was the same concept. It is a group of actors who want to make a piece. But they end up in a fight. So they don't make it to the premiere. And they fail. So they don't... But that's in fiction. It's like... We play a group of actors. We're developing a play. And they don't succeed. And in the end, they decide to read the emails they wrote each other during the rehearsal process. So, it's like this meta. So, it's a group of actors reading emails. About why they didn't succeed. And then you follow this group of actors and all their thoughts. And I knew that this way of having more perspectives on one subject and blurring the line of fiction and reality. WB: So, it's kind of like a pseudo-documentary work. Because the actors use their own names and use real stuff and mix it with fiction. And then I thought it's also a great way to... It's on reality TV now. Everybody is so interested in that, but I don't understand that. Not, exactly. We cringe at Survivor . ES: I can't believe that. My wife likes to watch The Bachelor . WB: I would leave the room to watch The Bachelor . It's terrible. What is it? The Bachelor . This married idiot. This young single idiot wants to date all these girls. It's so stupid. And the women are like, Oh, he's so sweet. I'm like, shut up. It's funny. ES: This totally took over our culture. I wonder why. WB: Yeah, me too. I think it will go away. I hope so. It's like zombies. ES: It's like zombies. They just came and took everything. And now, please go. WB: Well, of course, in a way, I think TikTok took over. I mean, the younger generation is, of course, watching TikTok. And it's the same. What I like about TikTok is hat's reality TV. Everybody can produce it. So, it's getting easier and easier. I read this Michael Cohen thing. I read it every day. This process that's happening now. He said, no, I'm going on TikTok at night. When I'm tired and I want to lose stress, I go on TikTok. And then he goes on TikTok saying these stupid things, you know, about this process. He also has this trouble that he's saying too much about the process. I don't know. But it's legal. ES: He can do this. Yeah, he can do it. Freedom of speech. WB: Exactly. But I'm so surprised people do that. I would never, like, at night when I cannot sleep, go live. Or maybe you've been drinking or something. You say things. Yeah, I would be way too scared. But that's kind of funny as well, that these people see this reality. I don't know. They don't care. ES: So how did you develop the script? Just by improv? WB: We started writing in the reality. As a group. We wrote it together, which is the great thing about it. And then, so we knew that when we would, and we did the writing together with a reality timeline of what happened for real. So, we knew when we would do the press release of it, that there would be a lot of reactions. And we wanted to have these reactions in the writing. So we did the press release that we were going to make it. And then we, everything that happened, we used in writing. So, we had characters. And these characters, yeah, they write about their perspective, with the reality of the incident as a background. And then the joke was that they, because nobody comes to Jena, besides theatre critics. There's a lot of times we don't get a lot of critics, because it's in the province. In the story, there's only one newspaper following us. It's the local Thuringer Zeitung. And they, it's very hard to get attention from other newspapers. And then we thought if we do this topic, that's the storyline. The actors think, hey, when we make a piece with this topic, maybe more press will come. So let me ask you though, before we go forward. ES: So, who are the actors? Are they playing themselves as actors, inviting the press? Or who are they? WB: They are the actors from the theater. Actors from the company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, they play themselves. But they play themselves. Because what they play is, they develop characters out of this. And they just decide to, as a group, they decide to take this on as a project. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And in the fiction, I'm not part of the fiction. So there is, in the fiction, there's no director. Okay. So they develop it as a collective. Okay. Because we thought it was more interesting. Not to have the dynamic of it. Not to have the director in it. But that's also how we work, in a way. Because all the material you would make. Because everybody is the director, in a way. Yeah, exactly. ES: Are you in the show? WB: No, I'm not. But that's what, Wunderbaum and my collective, we all direct. And we are all directors. So, there's no hierarchy. Maybe you, I don't know if it's... ES: No, I understand fully. I know groups like this. Yeah, it's like... And sometimes that's the best way to work. WB: But sometimes... it sucks. (laughs) But sometimes it's more efficient. You direct it. Everybody does this. We got three weeks. Shut up and listen to him. Or whatever. You do whatever. Exactly. That's exactly how we work. Exactly. It's what works best. And then, that was kind of the joke in it. That they don't have a job anymore next year. Because this is the last production they make here. Oh, I saw that in the script. Okay, this is gonna be our last show here. Yeah, so this is the last show. It's not really, it's not totally true. Because now they rehearse for another. There's gonna be one more summer production. But... We play, it's the last season. Next year they are all jobless. So, they don't have work next year. ES: Really? WB: Yes, that's the truth. So, they are all jobless next year. And that's why we thought it might be good to get as much press as possible for this thing. ES: Well, getting in the Theatertreffen is a good gig. WB: Exactly. So that's also playing with it. They also try in the script, they also say maybe if we make this, the Theatertreffen will come. So, the Theatertreffen is even part of the script. So we were kind of... And then it kind of like, how it developed. So how it developed, it developed in the best possible way. Reality. So yeah, that's it. And then we decided to dance. So there is like a dance part in it. Because it's also about the dance world. Because it's of course about a choreographer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, there's a dance sequence, okay. We worked with a choreographer. And he taught us how to dance. Modern dance, and in their rehearsals, they dance. They work on a dancing show. And in the end of the emails, they present this dance material they rehearsed. That you will see. So, it's first emails, reading, and then dancing. And it's the idea that the dance is bad, so the critic also says, this sucks, you know, so they all want to... Well, they tried to really dance, so we worked with a real choreographer. We tried to make the dance not ironical. But of course, it's a really bad dance. I mean, to the standards of modern dance, it's not good. But they worked hard on it. And in the characters, they try to... In the dances, they also try to tell the story with dance. The story of what happened. The story of the incident. The story of the incident they try to tell in the dance. Is told in the dance. And it was good because it's way more abstract. Because of course, there's a lot of like... You cannot... The incident itself on stage would be very... I don't know, not that interesting. And also not tasteful. I mean, for the critic, it's a lot about taste as well. What words do you use if you want to... And of course, there's a lot of discussion also in German theater about reproducing things. So, you would reproduce a violent act. Do you want to do that? No. ES: Why do you think this work is important? WB: Oh, God, I really don't know. ES: Well, do you think the questions about the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press... WB: No, not totally. But I think it's very much about... Or what can the theater express? No, I think it's about the periphery and the center. So, it's like where the center is. It's in a theatre in Berlin, in Germany. And what's the periphery? How do you call it? Is that a word? What's outside the center? The work is about where the center of everything is, right? Yeah, I think that's it. And they try to get... And these actors, they are very aware that they are not in the center. ES: And they try to become the center? Okay, I understand. WB: Yeah, they try. They know that we need... And in that way, it's... Yeah, it's about where is the center and what's important and what do we think as actors or as theater makers is important. And that's, I think, the main question and how we function in this media is also a big topic because we found out when we did it that we're like... You have this DPA, Meldung , it's called in Germany. And I know it's... I think you will have it in America as well that when you do like a press thing and then it goes to all media. So, you have like, you write something, and it goes to all news channels. ES: A press release? WB: Yeah. Yeah, but then a press release... normally when we do a press release with theater it doesn't end on the front page of all newspapers. But now it did. Okay. So we got like... And then we found out how this media works. And they... Because the word dogshit is in it, people click on it because they are interested in the story of the dogshit. So people want to read that. So it's also a lot about how media functions and how attention works. It's pretty inevitable to talk about. It's like so much... about how these media function. They have this clickbait thing so that journalists also get paid for how many clicks they have. Of course, I mean, it's also this... I think it's this Trump thing. Of course, the drama. Every article where there is Trump in it, people click on it. ES: Really? People are that... You think people outside of the USA are interested to know what's going on with Trump? WB: Totally. Yeah. That's fascinating. It's like... But it's like a real-life show. It's like the biggest entertainment there is. Like the president... Wow. The porn star. It's like better than The Bachelor . I thought it was only... USA late-night talk hosts. They always talk about Trump. I'm like, what are they going to do when he's gone? Because that's where they get all their material. They're talking about Trump. ES: Yeah, yeah. I think they're happy that he's back. Because now they know what to talk about again. WB: Yeah. I mean... I mean, how are they going to talk about... I don't know. About migrants at the Mexican border. But then... Without Trump. Exactly. That's... That's the whole... I mean, you know... Because you see it here. You see a little bit in Germany. Of the migration. References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University . He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Encounter Rafael de Balanzo Joue and Daniel Pravit Fethke's work Resilience Thinking Walkscape in Brooklyn, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Social Practice CUNY. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Resilience Thinking Walkscape Rafael de Balanzo Joue and Daniel Pravit Fethke Interactive Performance Sunday, June 9, 2024 @ 3pm Endale Arch, Prospect Park, Brooklyn Meet at Endale Arch / Grand Army Plaza entrance. Social Practice CUNY Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event A meditative group-walk through the northern end of Prospect Park that is designed around thinking through ecologies of resilience. Following an infinity-loop pathway, participants will begin making quiet observations about sites in the park both spectacular and mundane. As the walk continues, the group will focus more on radical collaboration and the creation of new liberatory communities. Touchpoints will include utopian urban planning, histories of queer cruising, and ways of seeing Prospect Park as a radically resilient public sphere. Rafael de Balanzo Joue and Daniel Pravit Fethke Rafael de Balanzo, MLA, Ph.D. in Sustainability Science, is the founder of the Urban Resilience Thinking Design Studio. He is currently a faculty of the Math & Science Department (SLAS), at the Graduate Center of Planning and Environment (GCPE) at Pratt School of Architecture (SoA), senior researcher for the Pratt NSF-funded project, Exploring Transdisciplinary Approaches to STEM Teaching and Learning and active collaborator of the Pratt Public Sphere. His research in Sustainability science used the resilience thinking design approach by understanding the social-technological-ecological systems dynamics and cycles of change in linked complex adaptive systems such as cities, communities, and buildings. He is a member of the Habitat Action Without Borders Work Program of the Architects Without Borders International (ASF-int), he received the 2021-2023 Russell Sage Research Project Grant Award and the 2022-23 CUNY Interdisciplinary Research Grant. He previously received architecture awards from the Belgium Government and the Associations of Spanish and Catalan Architects and he was the recipient of the 2019 Colombia Fulbright Chair for Urban Resilience at Del Tolima University, Ibague, Colombia. He is also a Social Practice CUNY Graduate Center fellowship 2022/23, adjunct professor at Queens College, CUNY; EINA School of Design at the University Autonoma de Barcelona and visiting professor at ENSAP School of Architecture and Landscape in Bordeaux in France and Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He taught previously at the University Pompeu Fabra, ELISAVA School of Engineering and Design, Barcelona, Spain, and the University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art, UK. https://www.pratt.edu/people/rafael-de-balanzo-joue/ Daniel Pravit Fethke is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator from New York's Hudson Valley. He has exhibited work internationally in Bangkok, Berlin, Barcelona, and domestically at the Yale School of Art, Recess Art Space, and the Knockdown Center. Daniel was a resident at the Wassaic Project (2024), and will be a Culinary Resident at the Ox-Bow School of Art (2024-25). Teaching is a central part of his practice, and Daniel regularly facilitates workshops, cooking classes, and creative gatherings that center food and recipes as ways to explore identity and culture. He co-founded the mutual aid food pop-up Angry Papaya, and has hosted workshops at Dia:Beacon, the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Ox-Bow School of Art. He has published writing in the Berlin-based Soft Eis Magazine, as well as with Commercial Type's online catalog. Daniel received his B.A. in Modern Culture & Media Studies from Brown University in 2015. He recently published an autobiographical Thai-American cookbook through Pratt Institute, where he also received his MFA in Fine Arts in 2023. He currently lives and works in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. https://danfethke.com/ Visit Artist Website Location Meet at Endale Arch / Grand Army Plaza entrance. Social Practice CUNY The SPCUNY educational network amplifies the collective power of socially engaged artists, scholars, and advocates throughout the City University of New York’s rich tapestry of faculty, staff, and students working for social justice. Based at the CUNY Graduate Center, SPCUNY’s theory of educational transformation fosters structures for diverse creative leaders who will empower New York City as an inclusive, justice-driven cultural landscape. This initiative is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Visit Partner Website

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF by Kalina Stefanova Image Credits: Article “Thank you!” as a Theme, “Thank you!” as a Code (highlights of the International Theatre Festival of Sibiu and its 32 nd edition) “Let’s say “thank you” to God, to our friends, parents, children, to everyone, that we are alive, that we can smile, that we can love, that we can share; let us thank all those who help us make this festival happen…. this huge and spectacular family that wants goodness and beauty on earth.” This is how Constantin Chiriac, the founder, president and, in effect, main engine of the Festival since 1993, ends his address in the catalogue this year. The phrase “Thank you”, though, was not only a theme of the 32 nd edition. It is a code to the essence of the Festival in principle, an explanation, at least partial, of its transformation over the years into a phenomenon of a world scale – so far the third largest one, after those in Edinburgh and Avignon. In the same address Chiriac pinpoints the main reasons for the theme’s choice, yet one of them stands out: “… in a time of heightened conflict, when war and hatred bring so much destruction,” what was sought out was “… a theme that would make us more open, more thoughtful, and more beautiful…” – “a magic word” that can tame even “those who do us no good…” This is an excellent encapsulation of the broad-minded manner in which the Festival has been cut out from its very start. It is with the same broad-mindedness and extraordinary panache that its editions continue to be created over the years. It is the Festival that transformed Sibiu – the 15 th in size city in Romania, with a population of 134000 – into a very sought-out destination, with over 100000 visitors arriving there especially for the event. At the same time, despite the throngs of people and the numerous new, glossy buildings, Sibiu hasn’t lost its authentic atmosphere and spirit. And this too the city owes to the Festival, to its distinct respect for tradition – respect that characterizes many of its accompanying undertakings. Like the Walk of Fame. There are other such Walks around the world, yet what distinguishes the one in Sibiu – containing already 77 stars of stars – is its special whereabouts. It connects the place of the oldest theatre in Romania (built in 1788) with the place where the future new building of the National Theatre “Radu Stanca” – the organizer of the Festival – will stand. Yet, among the numerous such undertakings marked with the Festival’s “hats-off” to tradition and its focus on building bridges between the past, present and future, what stands out most is the main rubric in its program, entitled Heritage Performances . Initiated back in 2005, it presents emblematic productions of “Radu Stanca” Theatre. Importantly, the “set” selected for each year does not necessarily differ in full with the one of the previous Festival edition. There are shows which could be in the selection for many years. Such is the case with the famed and spectacular Faust of Silviu Purkarete, created back in 2007, which was the very first show in the rubric this year too; or another long-running Purkarete’s production – The Scarlet Princess, staged in 2018, which also featured there. 20 years after the start of the rubric, these heritage performances could be viewed as forming a special collection – something like a live theatre museum . Notably: a museum not only of the output of “Radu Stanca” Theatre and, thus, of Romanian theatre, but of world theatre as well. For, I dare say, these productions have changed the face of theatre at large. It has to be underlined that they are live shows, part of the repertoire of “Radu Stance”, not revived especially for the Festival. There are many theatre museums around the world – with important expositions of photos, set-designs, costumes, recreated offices of prominent playwrights, directors, and artists, with arrays of artifacts from emblematic productions, etc. Yet, the special “collection” formed by the heritage performances of the Sibiu Festival is reminiscent only of the Asian “living national treasures” – artists or genres. Here, though, the scale is different – it concerns a whole art form. And an art form in development at that! For, as the time goes by the heritage performances develop, improve; the very chance for the viewers to make a live comparison between them over the years also gets enriched. This gives the “collection” a special educational added value too, transforms it into a one-of-a-kind spiritual institution in the whole theatre world. Mind you: there is no bombastic title of this unique undertaking; it’s been unfolding to no fanfare. Simply, with the Heritage Performances rubric the Festival says a most humble and yet most inspired “Thank you!” to the Theatre and serves it with an astonishing devotion and dedication. With the this unofficial live museum of theatre Festival creates for the audience, the artists and the students alike a direct access to the assets of an idiosyncratic theatrical spiritual bank which get incessantly enriched and renewed. Among the shows included in the rubric this year, the one that stood out for me was Games, Words, Crickets… directed by Purkarete . Maybe because it reminded me of another face of Purcarete’s talent, so different from the one manifested in the monumental Faust and in the colorful The Scarlet Princess . Or simply because under this talkative title – seemingly very concrete, yet as though decided to not disclose what the show is about – there is so special gem of a production. It has already been separately covered for this magazine after its premiere in the illuminating review by the esteemed scholar and critic Ion Tomas. (vol. 18, 2023) Yet, I believe it deserves to be placed again and again under our spotlight for more readers to find out about it. The main character in Games, Words, Crickets… is the poetic word, the word with God’s sparkle in it – the word as a beginning, as a gift from above gathering heaven and earth, flesh and spirit, all in one, united by beauty, by love, by life. Poetry in this show is high and elevating, childish and jumpy, playful and full of joie-de-vivre. A hymn, a prayer, a fable, a story in white verse… A praise for poetry itself, a praise for the Holy Mother, a praise for the plum brandy as a gift sent to the man for help and for joy, a praise for the invincible Balkan spirit… In brief: a praise to God and all His creations… By Nazim Hikmet, Paul Verlaine, Shakepeare, Sergey Esenin, Radu Stanca, Mihai Eminescu, Marin Sorescu… As if all the world and all human life from days of yore till now, as it has been seen by the poets, is now gathered in the palm of one human being who presents it to us with such rapture, such joy, such trepidation as though he himself creates every word, every line, every image, every nuance before us and for each and everyone of us. Constantin Chiriac is the astonishing actor who savors the joy of sharing with us as if the very birth of all that poetry. I have seen him in many roles and have always wondered if there is any one he can not handle. Now I know the answer. For, this role is much more difficult than all the rest. Here there is no one person to impersonate so organically as if you are that very person. There is no one face, body, soul, behavior to enliven on stage and yet to remain your own self intact. Great poetry is to hand your soul to the others without leaving anything just for yourself so that you can find a shelter there. Great poetry is to give your eyes to the others so that they could see the world through them, to reach out to them as a small child, without fear and trust them with anything to hide. So that you could share the joy of the spring’s advent, the mystery of moon, the sky’s tenderness, the elusiveness of dream, the joy of the crickets’ song, love, happiness, gratitude to God, to nature, to life, the exaltation of dance … During this show one gets to live though all this in its pure form. Chiriac wakens all these feelings in us not only through the poets’ words but also through his own attitude to everything these words have to say, cry out, cover, shy away from, hide… At one point, he is as if a pure spirit, lost in nature’s beauty, in another, he gluttonously eats a piece of water melon while the juice flows freely down his arm; immediately afterwards, already on his knees and with head resting on the back of his hand – surely the only part of it not sticky then – he prays… And in all that he is so organic, not a hint of falseness cracking the air of full truthfulness he exudes. In his aforementioned address Chiriac recalls how when his parents made him happy and he didn’t know how to thank them, they would caress his head. Later on, he would regularly say “thank you” “with so much truth in my voice that it brought tears to their eyes.” In this shared memory, I believe, is the key to his acting approach in Games, Words, Crickets… as well as one more explanation of all he does for the Festival and the theatre in principle. Even in an address of just three paragraphs he needs the “anchor” of a concrete story – something that he has felt with his own heart; a need for enveloping the spirit in a body, for making the common feel personal, so that it doesn’t sound empty, so that it could touch, convince, feel true. This show does not narrate a single story, as it usually happens in theatre, or one big story, as it usually happens in the theatre of Purcarete. In it every poem is a story in its own right, shared as a first-hand experience, and at first glance these stories may seem small but it is exactly they that form the big story of our life. The very choice of the poems as well as the concrete collage of them makes this even more palpable. Exactly as it is said in one of them, “Words have their time. You can’t just throw them around when you want.” At times Chiriac steps aside, so that he could look at the words and everything they have to say from “the outside” – to see them together with us, the audience. For instance, when the air in the theatre hall is charged with rapture – our rapture with one of the poems – he looks at us and says, “Paul Verlain!” in such a manner as if asking, “How splendid it is, isn’t it?” At the same time, as if a conductor summoning the sound at the end of a rapturous music piece, he puts an exclamation mark instead of a dot. Chiriac’s masterpiece of acting in this show is not at all an unexpected tour de force. He has started his career with poetic recitals – a popular genre at that time in Romania – and has a formidable experience in this field. I myself have witnessed many a time how his speeches at international forums, where he’s in his capacity as a Festival head, all of a sudden soar into poetry, or he takes everyone by surprise reciting a famous monologue by Shakespeare, for instance. The hall then gets so quiet, as if people hold their breath, and the respective event immediately gets uplifted to another level. Even in such cases his poetical detours are not simply reciting of a beautiful text, they are an expression of his joy that this text exists and that he can share it with us. And again, at the end, when he tells us what the poem is, the way he pronounces the title and the poet’s name imply the same, “How splendid it is, isn’t it?”, unuttered with words but expressed with eyes, which accompanies the poetry in Games, Words, Crickets… Although it may not seem so from all already said Games, Words, Crickets… is a one-man show. Yes, it is only Chiriac who has the floor throughout it, yet he is not alone on stage. There are 17 more actors there and part of them are there quite before he makes his entrance. Clad in white shirts and light beige mid trousers, as if giant children, in the beginning they are snowmen, with just hinted most characteristic features; then, with the advent of spring, they “melt down”. Then they build crystal pyramids from transparent wine glasses – pyramids which start slowly gliding on a thin transparent belt horizontally on stage, at the background of sounds of water created before us with of a bucket and small plastic bottles. Further on, one of them would hold a long stick with a lantern and an etude about the moon follows. Then all of them grab umbrellas, wind blows, and it’s already autumn. Then they grab pillows and snuggle, and the night falls…. Not simply do these “grown up” children become the background of poetry on stage, Purcarete transforms them into the very atmosphere of the poetic images and feelings – an unusual Chorus who “comments” and “reacts” on behalf of nature. “What’s going on?”, Chiriac asks them at one point, when the night starts falling down, and they respond with the usual sounds of dusk. This is a dialogue with nature as a Chorus and, naturally, the answers do not come back in words. And again as a Chorus, these “grown-up” children, together with us, are also audience of all the poetry Chiriac endows us with – as it were our extension on stage. It would be so easy for a director to use multimedia instead as a background of such a show. But would even the most technically modern multimedia be able to substitute all these live eyes and hearts, all the different frequencies exuded by these 18 human bodies and souls? And would it be able to achieve such depth of the communion between the man and the world, such diversity of the nuances of this communion, as it happens in Games, Words, Crickets… ? It does great credit to Purcarete that he has chosen to achieve all this and, most importantly, to create the impalpable via the most authentically theatrical and yet most difficult way. Towards the end of the show, during something like a dance, while Chiriac, standing slightly aside, shares with us the n’th portion of beauty, suddenly it turns out that among the dancers there are two other Chiriacs – puppets of his size, attire, face and manners, each one of them led by several puppeteers. The three of them sit at a table: he en face to us, his doubles at the two sides. The doubles start repeating each gesture of his, each mimic, and the feeling gets to be surreal. Exactly as the watermelon minutes before that, or the ode to the brandy wouldn’t let the show stay on just one lyrical wave, and do balance it instead, now the two counterparts endow it with an additional dimension and make it even livelier. After the “talk” of the three (with a voice-over of Chiriac), another dance follows – the Zorba’s sirtaki. All 17 actors dance, including the doubles, only Chiriac, again aside, sets the rhythm with a bell and starts the last poem: “Oh, stay and sip from one more cup at the old crossroads of old rivers, for when it comes to love and wine all men become most joyous givers…” As he continues with the marvelous lyrics of Kazantzakis and other poets, he joins the dance and, although the lights soon go off, the music and his words keep on resounding – as a hymn of life – life that goes on even when the actors on its stage have already stepped down and new ones are soon to make their entrance there… “Poet of the stage, that’s how Silviu Purcarete was defined by Georges Banu, the late brilliant Romanian-French critic. Adriana Mocca, a Romanian actress, in turn, called him “a collector of beauty”. To me, Games, Words, Crickets… is a hymn of life exactly as poetry and beauty – life as it could be and as it is created to be. There is nothing ugly in it. The ugly and the evil are not invited there. Only the games, the words, the crickets, and everything the dots that follow in the title imply. To me this show is much more difficult and complex an endeavor than the mega-productions, like Metamorphoses, Faust, and The Scarlet Princess . Of course, they require a mighty directorial talent few others possess – a type of talent that has deservedly earned Purcarete a world-wide recognition as a master of exuberantly rich theatricality (if I may take the liberty to paraphrase another esteemed Romanian critic and scholar Octavian Saiu). Yet, to be able to create such an inseparable entity of poetry and beauty, as he does in Games, Words, Crickets… , and, moreover, to manage preserve its fine frequency vibrations for a whole hour and twenty minutes so that its integrity doesn’t fall apart is an even more extraordinary achievement. The fact that Purcarete is equally good at both the breath-taking spectacular and the intangible that makes one holds one’s breath, lest the spell gets broken, places him among the very few contemporary directors of such a strikingly wide diapason. Electra – a production by another revered Romanian director, Michai Manuitiu – was included in the Heritage performances too and stood out with its special status. Created back in 2005, it gained a cult status over the following years. In the beginning of 2025 it was revived in its fully original shape and even with some of its original actors. Of course, now, some of the young actors of “Radu Stanca” Theatre share the stage with them. It is exactly this passing of the acting torch before the audience’s eyes that not only makes the production unique but further underlines the importance of the rubric as a live spiritual territory. For, with Electra in the Heritage “collection”, this unique live theatre museum goes one step further: it manifests the possibility for organic upgrading of the theatre art within one and the same production in a “time lapse” of two decades. Notably too, Manuitiu’s Electra could serve as a point of reference, an idiosyncratic mirror in which major differences between theatre of 20 years ago and theatre of today stand out, alas, not always in favor of the latter. For instance, the distinct asceticism in terms of the material, like set-design, costumes, etc. stands in stark contrast with the many-ness that tends to overwhelm the nowadays stages. Also, Electra looks and feels like a stylized ritual and, with very few exceptions, doesn’t get into the literal illustrativeness when it comes to the elements of violence in the plot, unlike contemporary theatre which seems nearly obsessed with direct displays of violence. That is why Electra doesn’t look like a B-rated movie focused on close-ups of the very destruction of the human flesh’s integrity but feels rather like a dance or a painting. As for the regular theatre program, among the main accents was No Yogurt for the Dead , written and directed by Tiago Rodriguez, a production of the NTGent, Belgium (co-produced by Culturgest, Lisbon, Weiner Festwochen and Picollo Teatro di Milano – Teatro D’Europa). This show, to me, is like an unusual diary of a contemporary Scheherazade. A first-hand narrative, most of the time directly en-face to the audience, is the main approach for building the story. Importantly, again no multimedia interferes here – i.e. we are not being offered “to go to the movies” in the theatre, as often is the case these days. Moreover, theatre is especially emphasized. The audience is introduced to the story by one of the characters – a nurse. She is played by the only one of the three actresses in the show who plays just one role from the beginning to the end. The other two actresses assign themselves the roles of a father and a son, as well as two fake beards that will help us distinguish them – long and short (as their characters will be called, respectively – Long Beard and Short Beard). In the course of the action, they will not only openly exchange these roles, but will also get to play others, yet from the moment they “get into” all these roles, they are completely truthful, nearly without any detachment. This dance of realism and overt theatricality is a very good balancer for the story, as it doesn’t let it become merely documentary, although it is a true one, nor does it let it trespass into the territory of the sentimental and succumb to pain, although it is about the death of a dearest person. The story is about (and of) the director’s father – a respected journalist who writes his last reportage in the form of a diary in the hospital during his last days before his death. It is this diary which is the basic material for building the action – it is something like a magnet which draws together the fragmentary pieces of the story. However, it is not an ordinary diary but, exactly like Scheherazade, it sort of manages to win back from death another day and another day, and another day… And, like Scheherazade, this diary has its own secret: in the end, it turns out that in it there are only inarticulate scribbles – dashes and dots. Most of the action takes place around and in a hospital bed on the left of the stage. On the right, an uneven and fragmented hill rises, made of what looks like pieces of pressed cardboard with visible cracks between them, like in a glacier. There is another hospital bed on it – with a patient. However, he is most of the time in a half-back position or sitting sideways to us. So we don’t get to see him well, but we hear him almost all the time. For, his role is to “provide” the main musical background of the story – on a guitar. The major musical accents in the show, though, are the songs sang by the two actresses who play the father and the son. And their singing is remarkable, I dare say, it’s truly unforgettable! These songs, like the diary, are not ordinary ones. They too are like a magnet, even a stronger one than the diary. For, it is exactly they that gather the crumbling world of the dying man and restore not only the contours but as it were the very flesh of his slipping life. They are like the flickering of a fire which is about to go out, but, when it flares up again, it burns for a little while as if it was never about to die. Flare-ups that are sort of mirages, as if death is not coming and there is still plenty of time left for memories here, in this world, with those closest to us. These songs are the major strength of the show. Not only because of the way they are performed, but also because of the very choice of time and space, when the action should stop its horizontal course and fly up (or downwards, if that’s how we imagine the past). Most often this happens unexpectedly, as if out of the blue. Yet it is always exactly “on time”, when the story has fallen apart into too many pieces – because of the playing with roles and wigs, because of the strange use of two languages at the same time (the nurse speaks in Flemish, the father and son in Portuguese), because of the very fragmentary montage of the separate pieces… And then – then a song bursts forth and immediately brings everything together. And just as until then the characters (and even the story itself) have “acted like men” – iron, strong and cold-blooded – now they all of a sudden give way to their feelings and let their tears flow. The theatre at this moment is pushed aside and it is the human being in principle who remains on stage – the human being with everything that is a symbol of the heart – love, longing, tenderness, pain… The human being, like one big heart, fills the stage, the theatre, us. These songs decipher the dashes and dots in the father’s diary. They transform them into meaning, that is, into life. It is through them that death not only gets postponed, they make death pointless, even when the son finds his father’s bed already empty – waiting for the next patient. It is these songs that “make” the show. They contain the key to Tiago Rodrigues’ directorial talent: his fееl for the innermost human and his skill to fill the stage, the theatre, and us with this so elusive a “substance”; and, importantly, his ability to do so not the usual way, through familiar theatrical means, and, yet, paradoxically, to manage to achieve the oldest thing in the theatre – to move you to the bottom of your heart. I intended to write about the shortcomings of the show too. About its numerous endings, some of which it could easily do without. About the fact that some details of the story border on clichés, like the pen the son keeps forgetting to bring to his father and when he does so, he is already gone. Or that some contemporary performative clichés could have easily been avoided, like serving tea to the audience during the funeral, as if the viewers too are attending it… However, now, when time has passed since I saw the show in Sibiu, I find that the flows have faded and lost significance; that, when I think of this unique diary-reportage in songs, it grabs me by the throat as if it were my personal piece of memory. A memory of something the significance of which we find out much later after it happened, when time has erased the unnecessary little details. A memory which as if lifts us up, moves us away from the usual time-track, and extends our life each time when we remember it… I also think now what an amazing gesture of a son to his father’s memory this show is! The other production from the regular theatre program of the International Theatre Festival of Sibiu that struck me most was Jonah , at that time the newest directorial work of Silviu Purkarete . A co-production of the Romanian “Radu Stanca” National Theatre in Sibiu and the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, it steps on a Romanian play (by Marin Sorescu) which is, in turn, based on the famed Biblical story. The main performer is Asian (the Japanese star Kuranosuke Sasaki) and there are three speechless characters played by Romanians. “Why do people waste their time on things that are useless after death?” – wonders Jonah, the main character of the play, created back in 1968. This question, so topical in the nowadays world of excesses, is like a pitchfork both for the play and the production. The focus of both aligns according to this question. I.e. Jonah , as a play and as a production alike, is about all the rest: “… the spiritual communion that brings us closer to the primal energies of nature in which divinity manifests itself,” if I may take the liberty to quote the excellent description of the show in the Festival catalogue. Jonah , the show, is like a revelation. It is wise in a Biblical manner and luminous in a New Testament way. The first feature is a contribution of the playwright, the second – of the director. The play is a 26-page monologue, which I strongly recommend for reading – it brings a true literary joy. Jonah, like his namesake in the Bible, is in a big fish, but here the fish is in another, even bigger one, which in turn is in a third. However, notably, the direction of the “opening” of these, so to speak, Matryoshka type of fishes is the opposite of the way we do open Matryoshka dolls in reality, as here Jonah goes from the smaller fish to a bigger one and then to an even bigger one. I.e. the direction is vice versa. None of these fishes appear to be familiar with one of the main laws of life formulate by Jonah: “There should be a grid at the entrance of every soul. So no one can get inside it [armed] with a knife.” (He reaches this conclusion as a result of his personal observation after having managed to cut his way from fish 1 to fish 2.) I can’t help sharing yet another of Sorescu wisdoms presented as Jonah’s lines: “In the life of the world, I think, there must be a moment when all people think about their mother, even the dead. The daughter about the mother, the mother of her mother, the grandmother of her mother… until you arrive at the first mother great and good… What stillness then must be in the world! In that moment, if someone cried for help, he’s be heard by the whole earth.” Another unforgettable image is the dream Jonah has of building “a wooden bench in the middle of the sea. A grand construction of planed oak, so that the more cowardly seagulls could rest on it during a storm. … the wind to settle there from time to time [too], and, thinking of me, say, ‘He never made anything worthwhile in his life apart from this wooden bench, putting the sea all round it.’ I’ve given it a lot of thought, and that is what I’d really like to do. Oh, what a sanctuary, to sit head in hands, in the middle of the soul.” The so profound and so beautifully put insights Jonah comes up with do not make the play abstract. The poetical streak that goes through it intertwines with a splendid sense of humour and with the extraordinary ingenuity of the character in his attempt to talk with the world inside and outside of the fishes. For, “like any very lonely man, Jonah talks aloud to himself”, as Sorescu describes him in the beginning of the play. “He asks questions and gives answers, behaving all the time as if there were two characters on stage. He ‘splits’ and then ‘contracts’ himself back according to his inner life and stage demands.” This distinct dialogical nature of Jonah’s monologue – both as contents and as a manner of expression – is also a substantial strength of the text, as it doesn’t let the viewers’ attention get distracted from the stage for a single second. At one moment, two other fishermen enter the stage – they too have been swallowed by the fish – but they serve as just another spring-board for Jonah’s imagination. To handle the role of Jonah is a big challenge, indeed, since, apart from the concrete man, the actor has to be play as it were the whole world – the sea, the fishes, his wife, the wives of the other two fishermen in there, his mother, the cloud, whose shadow weighs in the fisherman’s net…. Sorescu very well knew this and he even suggested, “if the role is too difficult, another actor may play the last two scenes.” Purcarete’s decision to invite an Asian actor to perform Jonah further enhances the role, and considerably at that! In the first place, the main character, “his” world and “his” life, which at their very core are Romanian and, thus, also bear the distinct characteristics and mentality of the Balkans, get to be seen “from the outside” – through the eyes of a totally different culture in general – and get to be explored via a totally different sensitivity. Apart from that large cultural new viewpoint, there is also the personal new point of view of the actor himself. In interviews Sasaki mentions that before his work on the role he was not familiar with the Biblical story about Jonah and the whale, so he plays the role as the story of an ordinary fisherman. This, of course, doesn’t mean that the viewers familiar with the story would entirely forego searching for allegorical layers in the play. On the contrary! And this, in turn, adds yet another parallel viewpoint. Finally, the very organic disassociation of Sasaki from the Biblical story can be perceived as type of an estrangement in handling the character, adding one more perspective. This perspective might be perceived as a hint at the typical estrangement in the traditional Asian theatre. The effect of all that is very similar to the Matryoshka effect of the fishes in the play and on stage, each one opening up new perspectives towards Janah and the world. Sasaki is impressively economic in his choice of acting means of expression. During a considerable part of the time he sits or squats in the middle of the proscenium, and in the second case his hands are embracing his legs. This outside ascetics is coupled with the special inner finesse that humility and wisdom result in. This combination helps every detail of the text to stand out. So none of the words he utters, nor anything in-between the lines, gets lost en route to the audience; everything resonates with crystal clarity. In the beginning of the play Sorescu underlines that the role requires “great flexibility and simplicity”. This is exactly what Sasaki brings to it. Sorescu defines his play as “a tragedy in four scenes”. Indeed, in the original text, after Jonah manages to get out of fist 1 and then out of fish 2, and again doesn’t see the sun, at the very end, he gets out his knife again and “cuts open his own stomach”, pronouncing at the same time the final words, “Somehow we’ll find our way to the light.” Having decided not to follow these instructions and to cut the end and the final line of Jonah, Purkarete in effect changes the genre of the play and, thus, allows both the main character and respectively the whole show to dwell in the sphere of light – both literally and figuratively. He doesn’t follow Sorescu’s instruction for the set either. While in the original the milieu is predominantly naturalistic – inside the fishes, thus, very dark, the set-design in Purkarete’s Jonah is mainly in light, pastel tones. During the first part of the action, a large, slightly wrinkled, paper curtain in off-white plays the role of a back-wing of the proscenium, leaving the rest of the stage off-sight. It is right in front of it where Jonah sits with only a small aquarium with a red fish in it next to him. Then this curtain gets torn from behind at only several places, so that Jonah, already behind it, appears to be like a giant – with hands and legs far apart. Afterwards he cuts all of it, when he gets into the bigger fish. The overall feeling this curtain brings, together with most of the rest of the set, yes, could be of a vast water space, but could also easily be of a vast sky. For, Jonah and his whole world feel like being imbued and enveloped by that tenderness which exists only in the sky. Maybe he actually floats on a cloud, like in an Asian fairy-tale? And maybe this cloud is in another cloud, and it, in turn, is in another one…. In its colours – pastel in both literal and figurative sense, and in its inner light, Jonah resembles Games, Words, Crickets… The semblances continue in that both are one-man shows, yet there are other actors on stage – here, apart from the other two fishermen, we also get to see the actress who sings a beautiful melody as a music background. At the same time, the roles of the three speechless actors are not really big, unlike the role/s of the 17 actors in Games, Words, Crickets… To me, Jonah is even more difficult as a directing task than Games, Words, Crickets… On the one hand, it is very chamber-like. I first saw it during its visit to Sofia before the Sibiu Festival and the size of the National Theatre’s big stage and hall suddenly ceased to matter. Jonah managed to turn them into the most intimate chamber theatre – in terms of impact. At the same time, the production is monumental in a special way – so to speak, monumental from the inside – because of the revelatory feeling it evokes. I guess Jonah is a future “exhibit” in the Festival’s Heritage “collection”. A remarkable demonstration of how cultures could hug and understand each other on the stage, and how together they could hug, understand and love the human being. In other words, Jonah is another opportunity for the International Theatre Festival of Sibiu to say “Thank you!” to the theatre and to the audience . References References About the author(s) Professor Kalina Stefanova is an author or editor of sixteen books: fourteen books on theatre, and two narratives. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the New York University and has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), Meiji University (Japan), and at the Shanghai Theatre Academy (China), among others. In 2016, she was appointed the Visiting Distinguished Professor of the Arts School of Wuhan University, China, as well as Distinguished Researcher of the Chinese Arts Criticism Foundation of Wuhan University. She served as IATC’s vice-president for 5 years (2001-2006) and as its Director of Symposia (2006-2010). In 2007, she was the dramaturg of the highly acclaimed production of Pentecost by David Edgar, directed by Mladen Kiselov, at the Stratford Festival in Canada. Since 2001, she has regularly served as an evaluation expert for cultural and educational programs of the European Commission. Currently she teaches at the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Liwaa Yazji | A collection of poems from Syrian playwright and filmmaker Liwaa Yazji. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Three Poems Liwaa Yazji Download PDF This collection of three poems was written in 2015 by the Syrian playwright and filmmaker Liwaa Yazji. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

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

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

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

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

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

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