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

Bradley Stephenson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Bradley Stephenson By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF D.W. Gregory’s most famous and most produced play is Radium Girls (2003), which dramatizes the story of several young women from Orange, New Jersey who developed radium poisoning as a result of their employment with the U.S. Radium Corporation during the late 1910s and early 1920s.[1] The girls were dial painters, whose delicate fingers were required to paint watch dials with radium-laced, glow-in-the-dark paint. The story was the subject of Claudia Clark’s 1997 book, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935, which provided Gregory with much of the historical context for her play.[2] Scientific progress created a new industry of radium-based glow in the dark paint, yet the material consequences of those labor practices were poorly understood. The dial painters’ fight for justice was one of the first instances in the United States of a corporation being held legally responsible for the safety and well-being of its employees. Gregory’s Radium Girls focuses on the experiences of Grace Fryer, one of the original dial painters and a key plaintiff in the case against the U.S. Radium Corporation. The play takes place between 1918 and 1928, encompassing the time from when the women began getting ill to the settlement of their case. The radium poisoning suffered by the workers resulted in bone loss, debilitating pain, loss of physical mobility, and eventually death. At the start of the play, Grace is a plucky fifteen year old girl working as a dial painter. As her friends begin getting sick and dying, the girls’ quest to uncover the truth of the mysterious illness, and the corporation’s quest to hide the truth, slam against each other in a “cinematic, briskly-paced,” highly theatrical style.[3] The play utilizes many facets of Brecht’s epic theatre, including historicization and the juxtaposition of comic, presentational scenes with more serious, naturalistic ones, simultaneously calling attention to the politicized nature of the content while emphasizing the theatricality and performative nature of the play itself. Despite the authorial instructions for this kind of stylized simplicity, the play is often over-produced with elaborate theatrical sets and costumes, larger casts, and attempts at historical realism that run counter to the playwright’s stylistic intent. I have seen a similarly over-produced production, and the pace slowed down significantly, resulting in a grim and tedious performance that lost the “descriptive simplicity and graphic candor” noted by Robert Daniels in his Variety review of the original production workshop at the Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey in 2000.[4] Despite a tendency towards elaborate production style and grim tone, the play still has great potential, if understood and handled properly, to make possible the transformation of actors’ and audiences’ intra-acting bodies. The labor practices dramatized in the play were born from scientific discoveries that opened up many new possibilities, products, and potentials for profit. The story itself may be novel to some readers, but the battle of the individual versus the corporate entity, enflamed by the media, is hardly new. The debilitating physical ramifications that resulted from the interaction of bodies and radioactive particles provide a fascinating avenue of inquiry which opens up new possibilities for understanding bodies, plays, performance, and the nature of life itself. Using a variety of disability theories in the analytical foreground of a close reading of the play, this essay suggests how accounting for the interactions of scientific materialities with diverse bodies in historical and performative realities can transform the way we see our intra-acting bodies in the world, and the world in our bodies.[5] It is pertinent to ask the extent to which the Radium Girls should be considered disabled subjects. Does chronic illness fall under the umbrella of Disability? Do they start out sick and then become disabled at a certain point? Is disability itself just a social construct that is more about institutions and obstacles than bodies and capacities?[6] For the purposes of this essay, it is helpful to resituate notions of disability away from the binary of disabled vs. non-disabled. Jasbir K. Puar reframes disability more as a spectrum or “an interdependent relationship between bodily capacity and bodily debility.”[7] She uses the concept of “slow death” in a robust theorization of debility and queer sexuality that exposes the capitalist ramifications of non-normative bodies in a contemporary context: Capacity and debility are seeming opposites generated by increasingly demanding neoliberal formulations of health, agency, and choice [that generate] population aggregates. Those “folded” into life are seen as more capacious or on the side of capacity, while those targeted for premature or slow death are figured as debility. Such an analysis re-poses the questions: which bodies are made to pay for “progress”? Which debilitated bodies can be reinvigorated for neoliberalism, and which cannot?[8] From this perspective, the ramifications for the Radium Girls are significant, both historically and within the play. Are their lives and bodies the cost of scientific progress and knowledge? Can their decaying bodies be made useful to society? Their “slow death” is certainly useful to the media industry that is always intervening to get exclusive rights and sell papers in the play. Debility can be very profitable to capitalism, and so is the demand to “recover” from or overcome it.[9] It is no coincidence that the character who spearheads Grace’s public campaign and is her most powerful ally, Katherine Wiley, is the executive director of the New Jersey Consumer’s League. Wiley says in her speech to a crowd of onlookers near the end of the first act, “We do not have to accept injustice. We can use our powers as consumers to influence the practices of those who would wish to profit from our patronage.”[10] In Radium Girls, this slow death and the desire to recover from it are closely related to ideas of consumerism and scientific progress. The power to purchase the products of these scientific advances ultimately provides the key to coercing corporations into accepting responsibility for the safety of their workers. Early in the twentieth century, radium was seen as a scientific miracle and cure-all. The discovery of radium facilitated the development of nuclear medicine and radiation therapy as a cancer treatment. Radium was also commercially popularized and used in hundreds of quack remedies and natural tonics from radioactive water to cigarettes to suppositories and bath salts.[11] A notable example of these quack cures receives some prominent product placement in the play. Radithor was a famous patent medicine that was manufactured in Orange, New Jersey, at the same time as the events of the play. Its inventor, William J. A. Bailey, makes an appearance in the play – giving out free samples and basking in the media attention of his business successes – that comes off to contemporary audiences more like an infomercial than a news reel. He says, “Radioactivity is one of the most remarkable agents in medical science. I drink Radithor myself and I can vouch for its power.”[12] This idea of the agency of the radium itself can provide an interesting avenue of exploration that can deepen our understanding of labor and disabled bodies within the play and within the wider fields of science studies and disability studies. Radithor famously contributed to the death of the wealthy New England socialite Eben Byers in 1932. Ron Winslow’s headline for his article recounting the event in the August 1, 1990, issue of The Wall Street Journal was “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off.” In the play, even the complex antagonist Arthur Roeder, president of U.S. Radium Corporation, is convinced of the healing powers of radium, and he unquestioningly consumes Radithor daily with his wife: “Diane! I have documents—I have articles—People with tumors the size of baseballs. Radium therapy—the tumors disappear. Diane. […] We save lives. We make lives better—mild radium therapy—invigorates. You can’t really think I’m a liar.”[13] Roeder’s trust and naïveté, shared by the real-life Eben Byers, are symptomatic of a world view that relegates physical matter to mere objects, without agency or action, a product to be manufactured, sold, exploited, and utilized. But radium will not remain a passive object to be manipulated. Radium is an actor that responds. In Mel Chen’s groundbreaking 2012 book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, she re-theorizes notions of animacy as an “often racialized and sexualized means of conceptual and affective mediation between human and inhuman, animate and inanimate, whether in language, rhetoric, or imagery.”[14] Chen’s work brings notions of agency and sentience to nonlife as well as life. “Animacy is built on the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present, quite beyond questions of personification.”[15] From this perspective, inanimate atoms are both actants and actors with which human beings must reckon. In this way, radium itself becomes an actor and character in the play. The opening scene of the young girls giggling and painting their teeth and faces with radioactive paint takes on new meaning if one considers the radium-laced paint to have its own animacy. As a joke, the girls turn off the lights to scare their supervisor, and “their faces [glow] like jack-o’-lanterns in the dark. A scream, laughter, and the lights go up again.”[16] No longer just a childish school girl prank, the scene takes a much more sinister tone. Many audiences are probably already primed for this response, if they have any knowledge of the story or the nature of radioactive material. In a sense, Gregory is already capitalizing on the theatricality of animacy. In the theatre, objects and bodies tend to be endowed with meaning and action that always have forward motion. The opening scene with the painted faces not only characterizes the girls and their relationships; it also propels the play forward towards its inevitable conclusion. The presence of the toxic radium necessarily influences that trajectory and adds multiple shards of meaning to the action. Moving from the metaphor of the toxic to the actual toxic creates “rapidly multiplying meanings.”[17] Like the radium-laced paint in the first scene, the Radithor that the Roeders consume on stage thus becomes a new character, an actor with significant impact on the outcome of the story and the lives of the other players. What then should be made of this silent character, this toxic and invisible but always active radium, and how does Gregory account for this toxic activity in the play? Chen says that “Toxicity straddles boundaries of ‘life’ and ‘nonlife,’ as well as the literal bounds of bodies, in ways that introduce a certain complexity to the presumption of integrity of either lifely or deathly subjects.”[18] While Chen’s theorization of toxicity is robust, she relies on a boundaried binary concept of living and non-living in her theory of toxicity. In the play, Grace’s fiancé, Tom Krieder, tries to deny what he calls “this in-between life” of Grace’s radioactive debility, yet his words betray an unconscious recognition that radioactive disability seems to defy the life-nonlife binary in several crucial, and theatrical, ways.[19] Like many great characters from the history of theatre, radioactive atoms are unstable and project parts of themselves outwards, projections that can create dramatic chain reactions. Radioactive atoms have a strong objective, to attain stability. Like the minds of these characters created from words on a page, radioactive atoms have a life of their own that attracts analysis, to more fully understand the mysterious inner workings deep inside them. While this radium-as-character analogy is far from perfect, through it one can explore how Chen’s complex presumptions of integrity are realized and dramatized on multiple levels: nuclear, personal, performative, and theoretical. A fuller account of radioactivity can thus help problematize the life-nonlife binary, illuminate Radium Girls and other dramatic forms, and also enrich our notions of lives, non-lives, and half-lives, of ability and debility. In an article in the journal Nature, J. Rondo describes radium as an example of the “long-lived bone-seeking radio-elements.”[20] Rondo’s 1969 meta-analysis gathers data from multiple studies from the 1950s and earlier that tried to describe the “biological half-life” of radium, i.e., how long it takes half of the radium to leave the human body once it has been taken in. While radium’s biological half-life is not precisely identified, somewhere around 15-28 years, its radioactive half-life is well known: 1601 years. Radioactive half-life refers to the amount of time it takes for half of the atoms in a given sample of radioactive material to undergo nuclear decay. So, after one half-life of time, there will be 50% of the original amount of radioactive material remaining; after two half-lives there will be 25% less; after three, 12.5%; and so on. To give some perspective on the activity of radium, its half-life is relatively short, about 1601 years, yet radium is almost three million times more radioactive than uranium-238, with a half-life of about 4.5 billion years. What is most interesting about these facts is not the numbers, but the language that science uses to describe the element. Radioactive elements have “life” (or at least “half-life”) as part of their definitive natures. This half-living nature of radioactive matter in general, and radium in particular, complicates conceptions of life and non-life that go beyond biology and chemistry and raises significant ontological questions that are explored in the play. Many news articles referred to (or spectacularized) the Radium Girls as “The Living Dead.” Taking up a third of the page above a photo of a frail woman being comforted by other women, the headline of the February 11, 1938 edition of the Chicago Daily Times reads “‘Living Death’ Quiz at Bedside.”[21] These girls are not dead yet, but they are no longer fully living. As Chen might say, the presumption of their “lifely” physical integrity is in question.[22] In the play, the Radium Girls also become associated with death while still alive. “That girl is still staring at me,” Roeder says at the trial. “She looks like death, Edward.” To which his lawyer, Edward Markley, replies, “They all look like death, Arthur.”[23] Even the Sob Sister, who usually pulls at the public’s sentimental heart strings, can’t help having a moment of glee at how many papers she will sell because of the girls’ ultimate demise. REPORTER: Radium Girls Go to Court Today! SOB SISTER: Radium Girls Knock at the Doors of Justice! Will they be heard? REPORTER: These poor, injured girls face pain! SOB SISTER: Disfigurement! REPORTER: Ruin! SOB SISTER: (cheerfully) And death! […] Read it in the Graphic! We care. Because you care.[24] As described above, radium is a “bone-seeking” element, due in part to its chemical similarities with calcium. When introduced to a biological system, radium becomes a kind of living actor with two objectives: to seek bone and settle there, and to seek nuclear stability by emitting alpha particles and gamma rays.[25] Ironically, just as life is made less-living by the addition of the half-life agency of radium, death is made more “lifely” as a result of the same. In Radium Girls, after the medical examiner exhumes the remains of Amelia Maggia, the first Radium Girl to die, the body (particularly the lower and upper jaws and the lumbar vertebrae) is found to be highly radioactive with no evidence of syphilis, initially said to be the cause of death. The Sob Sister and Reporter jump in immediately: “Body is Radioactive!” “Bones of Dead Girl Kick Off Gamma Rays!”[26] Even in death, the radium still lives. Conjuring images of the Valley of Dry Bones from Ezekiel chapter 37, the radium-infused bones are still kicking off gamma rays. It is as if the toxicity of the radium prevents life from being just life, and death from being just death. The interactions of radium and bodies will always be more than the binary of life and nonlife. Likewise, as Tom says in regard to Grace’s growing debility, disability itself can be thought of as a kind of “in-between life.” People with disabilities are often viewed as “less than” or lacking some aspect of “normalcy”, a kind of half-life to be anxious about. But what if, instead of this ableist perception of defective otherness, one thought of the “half-life” of disability in this more transcendent sense of an agency that brings something more to one’s existence, something that would not be possible or conceivable without the intersection of life and half-life, of ability with debility? For there is always an intermingling of ability with disability along the spectrum of our existence. There is something about the interactions of the agency of radioactivity and the agency of biological bodies that changes the very nature of materiality, agency, and life itself. In the case of the Living Dead Girls, the merging of life with half-life brings about an association with non-life. Conversely, in the case of Maggia’s exhumed jawbone, the blending of death with half-life evokes a kind of liveliness, kicking off gamma rays. Bodies and atoms are intertwined and interacting in ways that transcend the physical and the phenomenological. Stacy Alaimo’s theory of “trans-corporeality” emphasizes this interconnectedness of human bodies with the more-than-human world. Trans-corporeality looks at the “flows of substances” and theorizes “the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors.”[27] This hermeneutic approach can “account for the ways in which nature, the environment, and the material world itself signify, act upon, or otherwise affect human bodies, knowledges, and practices,” thus necessitating broader ways of thinking about the world, bodies, environments, and materiality.[28] Seen in this way, Radium Girls becomes a potent example of trans-corporeal space, “in which the body can never be disentangled from the material world.”[29] The simple cause-and-effect approach to understanding the debilitating effects of radium poisoning begins to break down in favor of a more inclusive understanding of intra-acting agencies. Thus, the debilities of the Radium Girls are no longer understood as additions to or deletions from a ‘normal’ body. Rather, bodies and lives exist on a spectrum possessing various degrees of half-life that are always already relational, a kind of “intra-active becoming” that is “always the very substance of ourselves.”[30] Thus, Gregory’s depiction of Grace Fryer is not so much an image of the progression of a disabled object, but rather an image of a new way of understanding bodies, abilities, and the intra/inter-actions of the material world. These new ways of understanding are played out most concretely in the way the play explores early twentieth century labor practices and the stylized representations of disability on stage. Radium Girls is set during the same time frame of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. Tamsen Wolff has argued a connection between theatre and the eugenics movement, noting how both dramatists and eugenicists are concerned with visibility and truth: In eugenic theory, there is a vital tension between hidden truth […] and visible truth. […] For eugenicists, this tension creates a vacillation between an assurance about what can be seen on the body and an uneasiness about what lurks unseen in the body. Of course, in theatre, a tension between hidden truth and visible truth is not only a playwright’s natural playground, but is relevant to everything from the body of the performer, to dramatic form, to stage design, to the role of the audience.[31] Wolff’s argument explores how theatre was historically and politically used as a means of indoctrinating people into a eugenic way of thought. Some veins of scientific research at the time were working towards the goal of perfecting the human race, or rather, the elimination of those individuals who did not match the traits deemed desirable by certain authority figures. This eugenic obsession with appearances contributed to twentieth century atrocities such as forced sterilization, genocide, and xenophobic world wars. Although Radium Girls does not operate as a polemic for eugenic examination (as the plays analyzed by Wolff do), it nevertheless capitalizes on the same tension between visible and invisible truth in dynamic trans-corporeal ways that challenge rather than reify able-bodied understandings of performer, audience, and the world as a whole. Radium Girls’ central themes include the “peculiarly American obsessions with health, wealth, and the commercialization of science.”[32] This commercialization of science includes the girls wanting compensation and treatment for their acquired disability, their dentist extorting funds from the company and the girls, and the marketing exploits of various entrepreneurs and quack scientists portrayed in the play. This obsession is intrinsically related to notions of capital and labor, and Radium Girls provides an interesting exploration of pre-Social Security ideas regarding disability and the wage-labor system. Even though the Social Security Administration was not founded until 1935, seven years after the events of the play end, disability was not added as an insured contingency to the social security program until the 1950s.[33] In her book The Disabled State, Deborah Stone asserts that the idea of a ‘welfare state’ is founded on “the principle that certain characteristics – youth, old age, widowhood, and sickness – render people automatically incapable of participating in the wage-labor system.”[34] Though welfare programs were common in other industrialized nations around the world, the United States had not adopted any such program during the time of the Radium Girls scandal. The idea that there were any “categorical exemptions from the labor market” had not yet taken popular hold in the American psyche.[35] The beginning of act two provides an interesting perspective on these notions of labor and fitness: REPORTER: December 4, 1927! Jack Youngwood reporting for the Newark Ledger. SOB SISTER: Nancy Jane Harland for the New York Graphic! REPORTER: On the strange case of the Radium Girls. SOB SISTER: Who claim they were poisoned at the hands of their employer. REPORTER: And now seek their day in court! SHOPGIRL: Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. SOB SISTER: That’s the price tag on their suffering! MALE SHOPPER: Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars! STORE OWNER: Ask me, it’s all a sham! CUSTOMER: What do you mean? Those girls are very sick! STORE OWNER: Sicka workin’, sure! REPORTER: Doctors say… the Radium Girls have only a year to live![36] Here Gregory presents the Store Owner, the lone representative of hard work and entrepreneurship, in a sea of consumers flanked by media representatives, all questioning the validity of the girls’ claims. He thinks they just want a handout; therefore they must be lying. Stone notes how disability has so often been historically associated with deception, and therefore the very concept of disability is predicated on the need to prove its validity.[37] For the freak shows common to traveling entertainments at this time, that expertise was doled out by the hawking ‘professors’ and ‘anthropologists’ guaranteeing that the exhibits were indeed authentic. It was the medical doctor alone who could validate ‘legitimate disability.’ Disability had become a clinical concept.[38] In this scene, the Reporter trumps the entire debate about the ‘validity of the invalids’ by invoking the claims of the almighty “doctors.” As the eugenicists proposed, science appears to have the final say over the nature and ‘normalcy’ of atypical bodies. Gregory, however, is not content merely to portray this shift in perspective towards the medical model of understanding disability in Radium Girls.[39] On the contrary, she carefully chips away at the hegemony of the scientific medical industrial complex by challenging this assumed authority. The character of Dr. Knef, the opportunistic dentist, represents not only corruption and the medical gaze that continues to enfreak and marginalize people with disabilities, but also the capitalistic gaze that permeates the play. Even though characters like Dr. Knef explore the darker side of medical politics in the quid pro quo (he trades false diagnoses for corporate payments), the play is not simply satirizing a corrupt medical professional. Rather, Gregory takes a broader and more oppositional position to the part that the medical profession plays in the hegemonic authority that denies the visibility of the disabled, and indeed would deny the very existence of the trans-corporeal. It is the character of Grace with her unwillingness to accept the status quo that helps move the play beyond simply villainizing Knef and his ilk and into this more subversive and challenging arena. Early in the play, when news reaches the dial painters that the death of their friend and fellow dial painter, Amelia Maggia, was attributed to complications from syphilis, Grace challenges the decree, and Kathryn hesitantly follows suit. GRACE: But Amelia was ever so nice. IRENE: Guess she got around more than we knew. GRACE: Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe the doctor got it wrong. IRENE: Come on. GRACE: He coulda got it wrong. Doctors are wrong sometimes. KATHRYN: That’s true. Doctor was wrong about Aunt Ivy. IRENE: What’s Mama got to do with it? KATHRYN: Irene, don’t you remember? Up to the day she died, doctor said Aunt Ivy would be fine. Said take a cup a tea, get a good night’s rest. And two days later we was taking her to Rosedale cemetery.[40] By beginning to question the infallibility of scientific ‘doctor’s orders’, the girls also begin to take a stand against the company and file suit at the end of act one. However, when another dial painter, Kathryn, also takes ill and is waiting for surgery in the hospital, her resolve fails. Faced with her own acquired toxic debility, Kathryn turns back to the doctors for refuge from her fears and loses resolve in the legal battle, leaving Grace the lone soldier in her quest for justice: KATHRYN: (abruptly). What if we don’t win? GRACE: ‘Course we’ll win. KATHRYN: But what if we don’t? My father will lose his house. We’ll be on the street. You’ll be on the street, too. Yer father must owe thousands. And you and Tom, You won’t never get married. How can ya stand it, Grace— GRACE: Kathryn, please! KATHRYN: (more agitated). How can Tom stand it? Don’t ya ever wonder, Grace? I don’t never hear him complain— GRACE: Kathryn! As soon as the judge hears our testimony, he’s gonna rule for us. All they gotta do is take one look at us. It’ll be over in a day.” KATHRYN: Think so?[41] Soon thereafter, the Sob Sister joins them in the hospital room offering them a cash deal for exclusive rights to tell their story. Kathryn’s last words alive in the play are a concession to give up the lawsuit: “Grace, maybe we should do it.”[42] Everyone abandons Grace in her fight for justice and encourages her to give up and get on with what little she has left. The eugenicist notion that disability will inevitably lead to homelessness, poverty, and solitude is deeply entrenched, and, perhaps like an early disability rights activist, Grace seems to be the only one willing to fight, further developing her character as an image of trans-corporeality that has been enlivened in some way by her interactions with the deadly radium. The historical importance of this case is also the heart of the Radium Girls’ story: industrial health reform. But the story goes much deeper. Not only did the Radium Girls fight for their own bodies and health, but their lives and their debility also interacted with others in a catalytic manner. Claudia Clark’s account of the Radium Girls describes how: Industrial health bridges the history of labor and the social history of workers, the history of medicine and the social history of health and the environment, the traditional history of politics and the social history of politics. In the case of the dialpainters, we may also study the history of women.[43] Even the radium poisoning itself was not so much a scientific discovery as it was “a social product born of political negotiation.”[44] The Radium Girls are more than just a case study; they were a catalyst for recognition and reform of the impact of industrialization and corporatism on individuals and society. Their very bodies were a source of trans-corporeal transformation in the social/industrial/political landscape. Industrialization had gripped much of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but the tangled relationship between factory, worker, science, business, and government was only beginning to be uncovered. The case of the Radium Girls was the first instance of industrial health reform to gain public recognition and to begin to turn the tide of reckless business practices.[45] For the Radium Girls, it was not just a fight for justice, but also for recognition and acceptance in the face of powerful men publicly denying their claims. Many lost heart. Many lost their lives. When D.W. Gregory portrays Grace’s solitary battle in Radium Girls, she emphasizes the poignant fragility of living in these crucial historical events, and how science and progress interact with bodies and lives, often exacting a steep and lonely price, and often at the expense of the disabled. Though the battle for justice is lonely, the war is filled with onlookers and opportunists looking to make a buck. While Gregory represents Grace’s lonely challenge to the medical hegemony on the interpretation and ‘care’ of bodies, she visibly spotlights the speculators and Johnny-come-latelys that try to capitalize on the hype and sensation of the story. The newspapers are not the only ones trying to make a buck riding upon the girls’ crumbling backs; many people and institutions attempt to capitalize on what Jasbir K. Puar calls the “profitability of debility.”[46] During the frenetic opening of act two, with the public prattling on about the case and what they would do with the money, Grace Fryer makes her first public appearance, mediated by the news media, as a plaintiff in the case for the explicit purpose of stirring up public sympathy. (Grace appears, walking with a cane.) GRACE. I’d use it to pay my medical bills. (Reaction from CROWD.) And pay off the second mortgage on our house. The one my father took out to pay for my last operation. (Reactions of sympathy.) SOB SISTER. Pretty Grace Fryer sits at home. REPORTER. …suffering bravely through this entire ordeal. SOB SISTER. …struggling valiantly to keep up her flagging spirits— REPORTER. …for the sake of her family and her friends. GRACE. It hurts to smile. But I try to smile. I know if I don’t smile—I’ll go crazy. (Approval from the CROWD.)[47] This sequence appears at first glance to be a problematic appropriation of disability images to evoke public sympathy. What makes this exchange remarkable is that the theatrical audience gets to see the “behind the scenes” moments that take place before and after this public interchange, revealing that it is in fact a rehearsed and planned performance. At the very end of act one, Grace agrees to fight publicly to shame the company into giving in to the girls’ demands for compensation and justice. Ms. Wiley, one of the girls’ advocates, claims here and elsewhere in the play that “public sympathy” is both their strongest weapon for justice and the engine of social reform.[48] The moment after Grace’s first public appearance, Gregory utilizes a crucial stage direction signifying that “Wiley congratulates Grace” as the crowds disperse, giving approval for the stylized performance of being pitiful and marking it as a performance. Even Grace’s allies are now putting her and her disability on stylized display with a cane, enfreaking her even more, towards the goal of social justice. Alison Kafer, in her discussion of disability images on billboards, notes that “We need to recognize and challenge this strategic deployment of disability, acknowledging that rhetorics of disability acceptance and inclusion can be used to decidedly un-crip ends.”[49] Is Grace’s performance of tragic pathos an example of Wiley’s exploitation of disability for the benefit of social reform? Like the models for medical textbook photographs, Grace is not being paid for her performance. Is it a necessary ruse for the greater good? Who pays the price of progress? This Brechtian moment in the play brings the profitability issue to the surface, holding it up for scrutiny, throwing critical light on the role of exploitation in producing social reform. Though Ms. Wiley seems to genuinely want to help Grace and hold the U.S. Radium Corporation accountable for their negligence, her methods seem to implicitly condone the exploitation of disabled bodies. To think in contemporary terms, if Wiley had hired an actor to play the same part that Grace played in this public presentation, that actor would have been paid. When using actual people with actual disabilities for a media campaign on their behalf, the same performance is not compensated or seen as labor. The irony is profound: if one of the goals is to help you, then you do not get paid; if you have nothing to do with the campaign, you would get paid.[50] Grace’s aloneness in her struggle is made all the more palpable in the final scene of the play during which Grace sits at Kathryn’s grave, spreading flowers and talking of watercolor paints. The scene at the grave recalls images from the previous scene with Kathryn in the hospital, with Grace sitting at her side and offering comfort. Grace is nearing the end of her own life and at this point is most likely unable to walk. She does not move from this position in the final scene. It is a scene that powerfully reveals how truly lonely the battle for justice is, with many casualties left along the way. This final moment also raises an important question about how the play is staged and why Gregory chose not to highlight Grace’s physical condition in the script itself. In terms of theatrical spaces, Radium Girls in performance further illuminates the complex web of intra-activity between matter and biological bodies. Performers and audience share the same space, breathing the same air and feeling the same sound wave vibrations. Slight variations in these vibrations, neurologically interpreted as timbre and pitch modulations, contribute to an emotional performance and can combine with the photons reflected off an actor to generate emotional and intellectual changes in the audience, which can then set up a feedback loop with the performer, who then “feeds” off the live audience’s energy and attentive focus, all mediated by these material environmental agents. Temperature, which is just the average kinetic energy of environmental molecules, has a profound impact on audience reception, as anyone who has sat through a show where the heat was turned up a little too high can attest. And of course, the more bodies that are in a confined space like a theatre, the more body heat generated and the higher the ambient temperature. Environment and bodies, actors and audiences, are always already intra-acting in theatrical spaces, changing each other in palpable and interactive ways that are unique to live performance. Perhaps theatre itself (and especially Brechtian theatre) can be thought of as a kind of trans-corporeal, intra-active half-life that connects and impacts people in ways that could not have been otherwise conceived. By focusing on Radium Girls as a trans-corporeal space in performance, one could tease out the nuances of toxic, radioactive animacies while engaging with trans-corporeal spaces both within the world of the play and the world of the play’s performance.[51] Unfortunately, such nuances rarely enter the sphere of production in regional and professional American theatre. Since Radium Girls is “one of the most performed plays in the 21st century,” an exhaustive list is probably impossible to gather, but I have found no evidence that a production has actually featured a disabled actress in the role of Grace.[52] This fact is perhaps unsurprising for many reasons, including the nature of the acting profession and the nature of actor training programs which tend to emphasize finding an idealized “normal” state of relaxation for an actor, what Carrie Sandahl has termed the “tyranny of the neutral” for its exclusion of non-normative bodies.[53] But what might be the nuanced implications of using visible markers of disability when staging the play, particular the final scene, and how might notions of trans-corporeality affect those moments? The trans-corporeal space of Radium Girls in performance engages what Victoria Lewis calls the “reciprocal relationship between performance space and performer” which raises questions of access for audiences as well as artists.[54] The final moments of the play, where Grace sits at the grave of her friend Kathryn while US Radium President Arthur Roeder looks on from the distance, demonstrate the engaging potential of these embodied, reciprocal interactions of disability, performers, text, and audiences. In the original workshop production, prior to the script’s publication, the final scene was staged with “a doomed young girl in a wheelchair wearing high heels,” a moment the reviewer felt was a “jarring and distracting note in a drama that follows a passionate and intelligent course.”[55] Whether the wheelchair was a stage direction that was ultimately cut from the script or a choice by director Joseph Megel is unclear. Yet the question remains, how might the use of a wheelchair in this final scene operate within the kind of analysis here proposed? The cane that Grace used at the end of act one was a theatrical prop, a meta-performance of disability to arouse pity and sympathy in the crowd within the world of the play. At the grave side, however, Grace is unaware she has an audience and there are no publicity directors orchestrating her performance like Ms. Wiley did at the end of the first act. Indeed, she does not move in the final scene, so the presence of the wheelchair, or any physical marking of disability, is external to the dramatic action and thus operates in the world of the production, a prop to indicate the physical condition of the character and ostensibly to arouse pity and sympathy in the theatrical audience. This is why, I believe, using disabled markers like the wheelchair in the final scene does not work theatrically or dramatically. Audiences are now being overtly manipulated by the production to feel a certain way, and the result is “jarring and distracting” for the audience. Not to mention how problematic and ableist it is to assume that the sight of a wheel chair would or should elicit feelings of pity in an audience. However, with an absence of physical markings of disability, it could be possible to read this final image of Grace as a problematic marginalization of disabled bodies being whitewashed and minimized. We know it is near the end of Grace’s life, and we know the physical toll that radium poisoning takes on bodies, so why leave Grace motionless on the ground without any other visible acknowledgement of her physical debilities? When staging this final scene, are you damned if you do and damned if you don’t, as it were? I believe this lack of “visible disability” marked on Grace’s body, in addition to being important for the dramatic action of the scene, is a manifestation of a cultural able-bodied gaze represented by Arthur Roeder. Roeder has returned to the grave site with his now-grown daughter, some fifteen years after the case was settled. He and Grace exist in the same space in different times when he finally has his moment of realization in the last line of the play. “Try as I might, Harriet, try as I might – I cannot remember their faces. (The irony strikes him.) I never saw their faces.”[56] He could not bring himself to look at the girls in the court room, when their marked bodies were placed on full display before him and the law, and now he cannot remember the faces that continue to haunt him. Here we see a palpable example of the complex interplay of the visible and the invisible as earlier described by Wolff. Roeder’s realization that persons with disabilities have their own lives and subjectivities comes too late for the girls in the play and is a potent reminder of the power of collective cultural denial that de-humanizes individuals with disabilities, rendering them invisible. Though the original workshop production with wheelchair and high heels may not have offered this possibility, understanding the play from this disability perspective holds the potential to shift the tragedy away from Grace and onto society in a Brechtian manner that implicates all of us, as we are all intra-acting in the material world. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson explains, “Disability studies reminds us that all bodies are shaped by their environments from the moment of conception. We transform constantly in response to our surroundings and register history on our bodies. The changes that occur when our body encounters the world are what we call disability.”[57] If disability is the change that occurs when bodies encounter the world, then scholars of theatre and performance have a particularly potent (if underutilized) critical ally in disability studies for examining performances and performance texts. In the case of this essay, treating radium itself as both actor and agent in the play Radium Girls engages with historical labor practices in what Stacy Alaimo might call a posthuman environmental ethics that is “not circumscribed by the human but is instead accountable to a material world that is never merely an external place but always the very substance of our selves and others.”[58] Contemporary critical thought is well aware of the power and agency ascribed to non-living or abstract entities such as class, gender, economics, and socio-politics. However, this exploration of Radium Girls demonstrates that accounting for the agency and animacy of material entities can transform the way we see our intra-acting bodies in the world, and the world in our bodies. A Disability perspective can transform how we think about and approach theatrical spaces as well, not just in terms of accessibility and access (for audiences and artists), but in terms of how bodies and spaces are always already intra-acting on each other. In this way, the personal responsibilities that are at stake in the play (to fight ignorance, exploitation, gender inequalities, etc.) are subsumed in the communal responsibility of that environmental ethic, a kind of universalizing aspect of debility that trans-acts within and among bodies, spaces, and even atoms. The in-between half-lives of disability always intra-act with environments, other bodies, and social forces in ways that can bring new insight to theatre and performance studies, disability studies, and other theories of scientific materiality. References [1] Events similar to the New Jersey Radium Girls also happened in Ottawa, IL and are dramatized in the play These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich (2010) which was adapted into a musical by Jessica Thebus, Andre Pluess, and Amanda Dehnert that premiered in 2015 at Chicago’s Northlight Theatre. [2] Claudia Clark, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). [3] D.W. Gregory, Radium Girls (Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2005), 8. [4] Robert L. Daniels, “Review: ‘Radium Girls,’” Variety, 23 May 2000, accessed 7 March 2016, http://variety.com/2000/legit/reviews/radium-girls-1200462095/ . [5] Despite the play’s popularity and hundreds of productions since its 2000 premier, Radium Girls has yet to receive scholarly attention, a fact which I here hope to change. [6] Though such an important debate about the nature and significance of disability and chronic illness is beyond the scope of this essay, many contemporary scholars such as Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Tobin Siebers, Robert McRuer, Anna Malloy, Lennard Davis, and others are thoughtfully engaging in how to adequately and appropriately theorize and understand disability and what it means in an evolving contemporary world. [7] Jasbir K. Puar, “The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no.1 (2011): 149. [8] Ibid., 153. [9] Ibid., 154. [10] Gregory, Radium Girls, 54. [11] For more about radium quack cures, consult the Oak Ridge Associated Universities’ Quack Cures Collection at http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/quackcures.htm and Radium Historical Items catalogue at http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML1008/ML100840118.pdf (accessed 4-30-2014). See also Paul Frame, “Radioactive Curative Devices and Spas,” The Oak Ridger, 5 November 1989. [12] Gregory, Radium Girls, 37. [13] Ibid., 78. [14] Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 10. [15] Mel Y. Chen, “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, no. 2-3 (2011): 265. [16] Gregory, Radium Girls, 13. [17] Chen, “Toxic Animacies,” 266. [18] Ibid., 279. [19] Gregory, Radium Girls, 86. [20] J. Rondo, “Long Term Retention of Radium in Man,” Nature 221, no. 5185 (15 March 1969): 1059. [21] This newspaper article is in reference to the radium dial painters from Ottawa, Illinois, a few years after the New Jersey story, but the comparison is the same. [22] Chen, “Toxic Animacies,” 279. [23] Gregory, Radium Girls, 105. [24] Ibid., 75-76. [25] Alpha particles, which are ionized helium nuclei (two protons and two neutrons), have limited penetrative ability and do not pose a danger to humans unless the alpha-emitter is ingested. Gamma rays, however are profoundly energetic and can penetrate deep into the body, altering the very DNA of cells. For the Radium Girls, the bone-seeking qualities of the element probably caused illness, debility, and death much faster than the cancerous radiation effects they would have developed had they lived long enough. This bone-seeking quality is also why the Radium Girls’ symptoms started in the mouth and jaw, since they pointed their paint brushes on their lips. [26] Gregory, Radium Girls, 82. [27] Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 9, 2. [28] Ibid., 7-8. [29] Ibid., 115. [30] Ibid., 4. Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality is based on Barad’s concept of “intra-active becoming” (i.e. things do not precede their relations but are always already relational). [31] Tamsen Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 6. [32] Gregory, Radium Girls, n.p. [33] Deborah Stone, The Disabled State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 68. [34] Ibid., 21. [35] Ibid. [36] Gregory, Radium Girls, 59. [37] Stone, The Disabled State, 23. [38] Ibid., 91. [39] This medical understanding of disability is a uniquely modern phenomenon. Throughout most of history, disability was viewed from a moral or spiritual perspective, that disabilities were markings of sin or collusion with the devil, or some kind of punishment for moral turpitude. The different models of understanding disability is one of the many important contributions of disability scholars and theorists, too many to mention here. [40] Gregory, Radium Girls, 24. [41] Ibid., 65. [42] Ibid., 68. [43] Clark, Radium Girls, 5. [44] Ibid., 3. [45] Changes have been slow, particularly for women in the workforce, and industrial health is still a significant concern. Even today, approximately 100,000 Americans die each year from occupational diseases (Clark, Radium Girls, 11). The battle continues. [46] Puar, “The Cost of Getting Better,” 153. [47] Gregory, Radium Girls, 60. [48] Ibid., 58, 63. [49] Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 97. [50] While beyond the scope of this project, exploring and exposing such ironies is a critical task in the larger worlds of disability employment, performance, and the media. [51] At time of this writing, I am preparing to direct a production of Radium Girls that will attempt to capitalize on this trans-corporeal theory of half-life. Our production design will be minimalistic, and we will focus on the Brechtian elements that draw attention to the connections between performance and the world around the performance. I plan to work with my ensemble to explore the animacy of radium as an actor/character in a way that (I hope) will keep the pace and the tone both hopeful and thoughtful rather than grim and strident. A common concept image used for the show is a glowing clock face, ever reminding the audience of the girl’s impending death as a result of their radium poisoning. Such an image of time and death seems to put ankle weights on the performance, slowing the pace with a constant, dread-inducing reminder of death. Instead, the concept image from which my production will spring to life is that of a spinthariscope, a small child’s toy from the time period that contains a small (harmless) amount of radioactive material encased in a tube or small canister lined with phosphorescent material. Some were as small as rings and could be found as prizes in cereal boxes. When taken into a dark room, letting your eyes adjust, if you looked into the spinthariscope you could see tiny flashes of light every time a radioactive emanation struck the phosphorescent lining. I find this image particularly hopeful and engaging to the imagination, as well as quite beautiful. The image amplifies the light and lightness of the radium’s animacy, developing the trans-corporeal space in an upward and outward trajectory, rather than the downward and dreary trajectory of the ticking clock of doom. Dwelling on this story as merely or exclusively tragic misses the hope and benefits that arose from these events, the lives that were saved from the legislation that sparked public interest in industrial labor reform. An emphasis on the tragic is also problematic in the ways it can propagate the mindset that disability is the definition of personal tragedy and loss, rather than the trans-corporeal and generative sense that brings new perspectives and experiences to life that could not have otherwise occurred. The very first line of the show, spoken by Grace, is “So much light” (11). I see this line as the inflection point of the play: it will turn either downward and dark or upward and light, depending upon the nuances of one’s interpretation of the nature and significance of these toxic, radioactive animacies. [52] Mark Bretz, “The Sad, Tragic Tale of the ‘Radium Girls’: Theatre Review,” Ladue News, 1 April 2015, accessed 7 March 2016, http://www.laduenews.com/diversions/arts-entertainment/the-sad-tragic-tale-of-the-radium-girls-theater-review/article_ca20d23e-d8b8-11e4-86cc-7799675ff9c6.html . [53] Carrie Sandahl, “The Tyranny of Neutral: Disabililty and Actor Training,” in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). While an exploration of disability and acting in the professional world is beyond the scope of this essay, such questions of access are among the most pressing on the contemporary theatrical world. [54] Victoria Lewis, “The Theatrical Landscape of Disability,” Disability Studies Quarterly 24, no. 3 (summer 2004): n.p. [55] Daniels, “Review: ‘Radium Girls,’” n.p. [56] Gregory, Radium Girls, 110. [57] Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Disability and Representation,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (March 2005), 524. [58] Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 158. Footnotes About The Author(s) Bradley Stephenson is an assistant professor of Theatre Arts at Catawba College in Salisbury, NC where he teaches theatre history, acting, improvisation, and playwriting. His scholarship has been published in Theatre Topics, Studies in Musical Theatre, Ecumenica, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Tison Pugh Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Tison Pugh By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF A relatively new term in the critical lexicon, ludonarratology theorizes the intersection of games and narrative structures in a particularly apt formulation for the theatrical world. Of the intersection of gaming and literary art, Astrid Ensslin explains that “narrative, dramatic, and/or poetic techniques are employed in order to explore the affordance and limitations of rules and other ludic structures and processes.” [1] That is to say, ludic, literary, dramatic, and poetic themes and structures often overlap, with kaleidoscopic refractions of form, structure, and story. From this new perspective, ludonarratology allows a clearer eye on the ways in which the theatre encourages its actors, producers, and audiences to engage in the rituals of play. Certainly, as a site simultaneously recreational and professional in its ambitions, the theatre multiplies the ludonarrative potential of characters qua players, in that actors must adopt the personae of their roles, with these characters then assuming complementary or contrasting stances toward one another as the plot unfolds. Such a dynamic is strikingly evident in Edward Albee’s masterpiece, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), the first act of which alerts viewers to its ludic themes through the subtitle “Fun and Games.” The actors undertaking the parts of Martha and George and of their late-night guests, Honey and Nick, must bring to life the antagonism expressed in the protagonists’ mutually tormenting games, with these sadomasochistic structures challenging viewers to consider the inherent ambiguity of Martha’s and George’s relative positions to each other. Much formalist, structuralist, and even poststructuralist narratology assumes that a given text’s protagonist is clearly identified, and much ludology similarly envisions a sharp distinction between the competitors of a game, yet sadomasochistic ludonarratology, as an interpretive and eroticized dynamic, complicates these simplistic views. Indeed, sadomasochism dismantles the certainty of many narratives because it implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—blurs the categories of sadist and masochist, leaving interpreters of the ludic story unsure of its overarching direction and thus capable of identifying with the players only through an ephemeral sense of relation that might waver in the scene’s next beat. When a game’s players continually shift in their respective positions toward one another, how can one win, how can the other lose, and how can viewers pierce through the dissolution of ostensibly antagonistic roles to determine the game’s meaning? Sadomasochistic ludonarratology envelops characters, players, and interpreters in complex wrangling over the very meaning of desire, with striking repercussions to the play of the game for all involved, particularly when plotlines reveal the characters and structures hidden from view that nonetheless guide the game’s unfolding. Under such circumstances, absence and inaction function as meaningfully as presence and play, alerting interpreters to the structural secrets hidden yet subversively in effect in sadomasochistic narratives. Theatre, Character, and Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology As a whole, the theatre creates a ludic world in and of itself, one that is defined by its lexicon of play, in which playwrights pen plays brought to life by actors playing roles. The theatrical experience is by definition an immersive one, and Sebastian Domsch posits the necessity of immersion for ludonarrative experiences: “Playing games and reading fiction are both activities that involve the temporal and partial neglect of knowledge in order to function.” [2] We know the gameworld differs from the real world, but it proceeds apace into the ludonarrative pleasures at hand. Beyond this creation of a playful zone, the theatre approximates a game in the tension between the guidelines of performance codified in a script and the inherent potential to disrupt these expectations. Building on Elizabeth Bruss’s foundational work in literary ludonarratology, Lynda Davey theorizes that theatrical narratives exhibit ludic features both in the interactions of playwrights and spectators and in the additional elements introduced through the narrative’s inherent performativity, which must be realized by actors, mise-en-scène, lighting and other requisite elements of a theatrical production. [3] Blanket statements about the theatre’s ludic aspects cannot cover all plays and all performances, yet sufficient overlap between theatre and game arises for ludonarratology to illuminate their mutual pleasures. Surely Tom Bishop is correct in his statement that “one does not need a fully worked-out theory of the nature and place of play in human life to perceive or discuss the ludic in drama.” [4] It is the objective of this essay, if not to propose a universal theory of drama, to flesh out a theory of sadomasochism in a particular theatrical artifact while suggesting its utility throughout a range of ludonarrative forms. Games require players, plays require characters, and characters require actors (i.e., players) to play them, with the overlap among these terms highlighting the ludic potential in dramas that stage agonistic and antagonistic relationships among their characters. Many formalist and structuralist theories of narrative envision characters primarily as essential functions of a story deployed to advance its plot, such that they retreat from any sense of organic individuality into a strictly utilitarian position. Aristotle, in his foundational assessment of narrative and drama, asserts that characters must align with a given plot’s ambitions: “In the characters too, exactly as in the structure of the incidents, [the poet] ought always to seek what is either necessary or probable, so that it is either necessary or probable that a person of such-and-such a sort say or do things of the same sort.” [5] Extending this Aristotelian view, Joel Weinsheimer points to the ways in which narrative structures envelop and thereby erase characters: “As segments of a closed text, characters at most are patterns of recurrence, motifs which are continually recontextualized in other motifs. In semiotic criticism, characters dissolve.” [6] Characters become subsumed as their narratives progress, acting in a particular fashion so as to adhere to the expectations of the plotline’s unfolding. Both narratives and games are almost universally established upon a bedrock of conflict, and Baruch Hochman pinpoints the utility of antagonism for discerning a given character’s motivation and identity: “we tend to think of character—of people, to begin with—in terms of conflict, which may be moral, social, or psychological in nature.” [7] Viewers understand the rudimentary structure of many ludonarrative artifacts simply by identifying the characters’ relationship to one another through this lens of conflict. And certainly, such a binary relationship pitting protagonist against antagonist is encoded into the characters of myriad narratives and games, both in the theatre and beyond, such that the assumption of a sharply defined antagonism bleeds into critical perspectives on narratology and interpretation. The binary of protagonist/antagonist, nearly ubiquitous as a narrative and ludic device, predetermines a story’s outcomes, as Ronald Jacobs details: “By arranging the characters of a narrative in binary relations to one another, and doing the same thing with the descriptive terms attached to those characters, narratives help to charge social life with evaluative and dramatic intensity.” [8] Interpreters can anticipate much of the developing action of a drama simply by understanding the characters’ relationships to one another through the oppositional logic of protagonist versus antagonist, in much the same manner as spectators of a game. Whereas formalist and structuralist insights into characters focus on their positions in an overarching storyline, poststructuralist insights have expanded an understanding of their necessity beyond the paradigmatic and functionary. James Phelan discerns characters performing in a trifold fashion as mimetic (representing a personality), thematic (representing a central idea), and synthetic (representing a narrative construct). [9] The theatre productively complicates the concept of character, and Brian Richardson, in terms similar to Phelan’s, argues that dramatic characters fulfill mimetic, formal, and ideological functions, as he further theorizes the necessity of a “performative fourth dimension” in light of the fact that “when a play is enacted on stage, the characters’ portrayal by actors can greatly affect the representation and its reception; dramatic representation by its very nature tends to complicate, enhance, or dissolve the unity of a character.” [10] A particular character bears the potential to shift markedly when performed, as the actor undertaking this role might strengthen or undermine its defining aspects through the vagaries of performance, and although it is more likely that a performance would alter a character’s mimetic features, shifts in its thematic and synthetic functions are possible, too. As Thomas Malaby proposes, games are inherently processual—“Every game is an ongoing process. As it is played, it always contains the potential for generating new practices and new meanings, possibly refiguring the game itself”—with this assessment readily applicable to the ways in which plays and the characters within plays shift according to the codes of performance. [11] Ludonarrative characters liberated from zero-sum formulations of victory/loss operate within a similar framework, for in these instances they transcend the default archetypal positions of protagonist or antagonist. Typically, to play a game involves seeking to defeat one’s opponent yet not concomitantly to view one’s opponent as the co-protagonist of this joint endeavor. In many texts, whether ludonarrative or not, the protagonist and antagonist share the goal of victory over the other, no matter how loosely this victory might be defined, with disruptive potential emerging when their wrangling implicitly troubles any narratological assumption of a single protagonist journeying through various plot points to the climax and then concluding with the dénouement. Whereas in many instances the protagonist and antagonist represent simply the flip sides of the same coin, in other circumstances the “protagonist” and the “antagonist” inhabit roles defined by their mutual aggression but also by the potential for their mutual overlap such that the binary dividing them crumbles. For the interpreter of such a ludonarrative artifact, one’s sense of kinship with a protagonist is always provisional, and no end of interpretive alliances could be formed with characters assigned an antagonistic position that they nonetheless evade. As a hermeneutic relevant to desire, narrative, and game, sadomasochism enlightens the fruitful possibilities of disentangling the protagonist/antagonist binary and instead locating characters qua players in fluctuating relationships to one another. At first glance, sadomasochism would appear to represent yet another instantiation of binary logic: sadist versus masochist, in an erotic ritual pitting protagonist versus antagonist under a veneer of cruelty. Indeed, Leopold Sacher-Masoch’s foundational text of masochism, Venus in Furs , ends explicitly with a moral based on antagonism: the protagonist Severin, humiliated and defeated following his affair with the alluring Wanda, realizes that “woman, as Nature created her and as man up to now has found her attractive, is man’s enemy; she can be his slave or his mistress but never his companion.” [12] Venus in Furs delineates masochistic ritual as a game to be won or lost, yet this is only one potential ending of a sadomasochistic encounter, particularly when the binary of sadist versus masochist is reassessed as a complementary positionality accessible to both players. These archetypal positions need not stand in direct opposition to each other but might instead enable fluctuating, orbiting points of contact. In sadomasochism’s most profound contradiction, a masochist typically seeks out a sadist, thereby initiating the scripts that they will fulfill in complementary service to each other, yet in so doing, the masochist, at least implicitly and if only temporarily, assumes the dominant position. In a cash-based, capitalist economy of desire, those who write the checks control the scenarios, even while casting themselves as the abject and pitiable site of desire’s unchecked degradations. In this light, sadomasochism shatters the logic of much formalist and structural narratology, for most narratological theories presume a clearly identified protagonist. Within a sadomasochistic framework, the linearity of the protagonist’s quest gives way to undulating gyres of desire, with the sadist and masochist contributing unpredictably to the form and structure of the plot. The narratological aspects of sadomasochism are readily apparent, with Gilles Deleuze, in his iconic work Coldness and Cruelty , declaring that both masochism and sadism “tell a story.” [13] More so, masochism is inherently dramatic in its roles and staging, with Deleuze outlining its theatrical characteristics: “Masochism is above all formal and dramatic; this means that its peculiar pleasure-pain complex is determined by a particular kind of formalism, and its experience of guilt by a specific story.” [14] The masochist and the sadist ostensibly inhabit radically opposed roles yet this presumption falters in its very enunciation, particularly when the masochist initiates the encounter. In these instances, the purported victims orchestrate the erotic episode that concludes with the consummation of their desires, and so masochists and sadists do not stand against each other in fixed poles but engage in endless negotiations about the very meaning of desire, as Deleuze further explains: “Dialectic does not simply mean the free interchange of discourse, but implies transpositions or displacements of this kind, resulting in a scene being enacted simultaneously on several levels with reversals and reduplications in the allocation of roles and discourse.” [15] In this manner, sadomasochism, rather than enforcing strict binaries, subverts them, and applying this insight to the ludonarrative realm complicates spectators’ understanding both of any game afoot and of the respective positioning of its players. As a ludonarrative construct, sadomasochism applies particularly well to the theatrical realm, for although in many instances a game’s parameters are clearly demarcated, the theatre facilitates a more porous sense of play and game, one in which its players stand on unequal footings. In his description of theatre’s dark play , Richard Schechner underscores how play dissolves its own borders and how play’s protean force summons potentially dangerous situations. The traits of dark play include that it: “(a) is physically risky, (b) involves intentional confusion or concealment of the frame ‘this is play,’ (c) may continue actions from early childhood, (d) only occasionally demands make-believe, (e) plays out alternative selves.” [16] Dark play intriguingly approximates many of sadomasochism’s most complex psychological and erotic factors: in the possibility of physical harm; in the unsettling reality of sexual play at hand; in the potential for a sadomasochistic impulse to have its roots in childhood desires; in the dissolution of the construct of “make-believe” through its insistent, brute enactments; and in the sadist’s and the masochist’s adoption of their roles that allow them to access alternate aspects of their quotidian personas. Schechner further explains: “Dark play occurs when contradictory realities coexist, each seemingly capable of cancelling the other out. . . . Dark play subverts order, dissolves frames, breaks its own rules, so that the playing itself is in danger of being destroyed.” [17] Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? exemplifies these dynamics, in that the audience must “live in this meaning” of the theatrical experience, as they are simultaneously ensnared in Martha and George’s sadomasochistic game that expands ever outward, catching Honey and Nick within its web. Narrative and metanarrative merge as Honey and Nick model the audience’s reaction, with spectators, watching from the promised safety of their seats, becoming entwined in the unfolding game. As a ludonarratological hermeneutic, sadomasochism disrupts the ostensible clarity of players as adversaries, compelling interpreters to forgo the standard binary of victory/defeat for a looser, more ambiguous sense of the game’s boundaries and aims. Martha and George complicate the very meaning of game as they fiercely struggle over their marriage and their phantom child, with Albee collapsing the dualistic force of protagonist and antagonist and leaving only an oscillation of desiring characters in his wake. Martha and George’s Sadomasochistic Games The plot of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is stunning in its apparent simplicity: after attending a faculty party, Martha and George host their new acquaintances, Honey and Nick, for a round of drinks. For the three acts of the play—“Fun and Games,” “Walpurgisnacht,” and “The Exorcism”—Martha and George bicker viciously, frequently ensnaring Honey and Nick in their hostilities, while playing four so-called games: “Humiliate the Host,” “Hump the Hostess,” “Get the Guests,” and “Bringing Up Baby.” [18] The titles of these pastimes allude to Martha and George’s mutual attempts to humiliate each other, to George’s fear of (but potential desire for) cuckoldry, to their joint aggression against Honey and Nick, and to the phantom child that symbolizes their joyless marriage. Each game, C. W. Bigsby notes, “clearly act[s] as a substitute for sexual excitement.” [19] With its classic form, adhering to the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? marches inexorably to its conclusion, as Martha and George divulge each other’s devastating truths, while their guests both observe this debacle in horror and are conscripted into its play. As Walter A. Davis avows, “Aggression is the force that structures [ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ] by ripping through all masks and roles.” [20] On the narrative’s surface, aggression abounds: Martha’s antagonism toward George positions her as the sadist to his masochist, and she inhabits this role with zest and pleasure, reveling in the humiliation she metes out to him. Before proceeding further into this discussion, however, it should be noted that Albee questioned a sadomasochistic interpretation of their marriage, declaring, “I think [Martha and George] love each other very much. It’s not an ‘S and M’ relationship. I mean there’s some problems there. They’ve had a lot of battles, but they enjoy each other’s ability to battle.” [21] Here Albee appears to envision sadomasochism as incompatible with love, but many would dispute this presumption. Also, Albee graciously conceded to an interviewer pursuing the gender dynamics of his oeuvre, “I don’t observe my plays the way you and other . . . critics observe them. I don’t think about them in those terms, so I can hardly talk about them that way.” [22] As Albee suggests, the fact that he would not discuss his play within a sadomasochistic framework—or likely within a ludonarrative framework as well—does not discount the insights gleaned from these complementary theories. Martha’s sadistic impulses define her character and her relationship with George, particularly when she insults his manhood, pointedly telling Nick and Honey “that maybe Georgie-boy didn’t have the stuff . . . that he didn’t have it in him!” She climactically concludes that he is a “FLOP! A great . . . big . . . fat . . . FLOP!” (210), with her words clearly alluding to his impotent penis. With George symbolically castrated, Martha stands as the more virile of the two, a dynamic further evident when he comments on her masculinity, telling Nick that “Martha is the daughter of our beloved boss. She is his . . . right ball, you might say” (184). Martha agrees, “I’m loud, and I’m vulgar, and I wear the pants in this house because somebody’s got to” (260). Violence, often staged yet painful in its consequences, belongs in the sadist’s repertoire, and Martha recounts an incident of physical abuse when her father was teaching George to box and she sucker-punched him: “I yelled, ‘Hey George!’ and at the same time I let go sort of a roundhouse right . . . just kidding, you know? . . . and he was off balance . . . he must have been . . . and he stumbled back a few steps, and then, CRASH, he landed . . . flat . . . in a huckleberry bush!” (191). Martha’s qualification that she was “just kidding” fractures the binary of play and seriousness, as her punch purportedly launched in jest proves her aggressive physicality with George. Furthermore, in her role as sadist Martha stands symbolically impervious to penetration of any sort, such that it would appear impossible to act upon her or otherwise to overturn the roles of the sadist/masochist dyad. This aspect of her character is evident in her retelling of her schoolgirl days at “Miss Muff’s Academy for Young Ladies.” Through this institution’s crude yet obvious allusion to female genitalia, Martha synechdochally represents herself through her vagina, as she then explains how she was “revirginized” following her brief marriage to the institution’s lawn mower (206). Through the impenetrability of her hymen—registered both in its purported reconstitution following this aborted union and in the phantom child who was never born (and who thus necessitated hymeneal penetration neither in its conception nor in its delivery)—Martha symbolizes the impermeable, imperious woman whose lovers cannot act upon her during even their most intimate encounters. Deleuze tersely comments, “The masochist is morose,” with this assessment applying well to George and his longsuffering, hangdog affect. [23] The hapless victim of his wife’s sadistic torments, George presents himself as emasculated and metaphorically castrated, acquiescing to her sadistic ploys. When Martha asserts that “ Some men would give their right arm for the chance” to marry the daughter of a college president, George replies sardonically, “Alas, Martha, in reality it works out that the sacrifice is usually of a somewhat more private portion of the anatomy” (171). George accepts his masochistic role in the play’s opening act, yet he resents it as well, telling Nick: “Do you think I like having that . . . whatever-it-is . . . ridiculing me, tearing me down, in front of . . . (Waves his hand in a gesture of contemptuous dismissal) YOU? Do you think I care for it?” (214). Explaining to Nick that he has “been trying for years to clean up the mess I made”—referring to his marriage to Martha—he reveals his coping strategies to be the masochistic triad of “accommodation, malleability, adjustment” (222). In this merciless game in which they have entangled themselves, George relies on a strategy of accommodation, apparently having lost any hope of shifting roles with his tormentor. Notwithstanding the appearance of Martha and George’s oppositional roles as firmly established, Albee adumbrates the inevitable erosion of the sadomasochistic binary. In a crucial revelation of the interlocking and mutually undercutting identities of sadist and masochist, George admits the pretense of their outwardly antagonistic relationship: “Now, on the surface of it . . . it looks to be a kind of knock-about, drag-out affair, on the surface of it” (223). Also, at several moments throughout the evening, George stages small rebellions against Martha’s sadistic tyranny, pettily insulting her. “Well, that was probably before my time ” (157), he declares in response to Martha’s questions about Bette Davis’s films, and when discussing the condition of her teeth, he again needles her about her age (163). Such scenes corrupt the logic of sadomasochism as based upon fixed positions, a theme amplified when Martha delights in George’s staged murder of her. He “shoots” her with a gun from which “a large red and yellow Chinese parasol” blossoms, and she asks him, “Where’d you get that, you bastard?” with the stage direction noting she does so with a joyous intonation (192). Indeed, this mock-violent ploy clearly arouses her, as she soon intones, “Yeah . . . that was pretty good. ( Softer ) C’mon . . . give me a kiss,” and then escalates this erotic encounter by placing his hand on her breast (193). George spurns her advances—“What are we going to have . . . blue games for the guests?”—and it is evident that his words wound Martha, as it also evident that he has seized momentary advantage in their sadomasochistic sparring. Martha encourages George to leave aside his masochistic posturing—“I like your anger. I think that’s what I like about you most . . . your anger” (162)—yet it is her sadistic treatment of him that sparks his anger, in a repeating circle of abuse and attraction. The cruelty of Martha and George’s game is balanced out by its pleasures, and several moments suggest that George not only approves but enjoys Martha’s humiliating tactics, thus pointing to the gratification he finds in their sadomasochistic rituals. In one of her salvos against his masculinity, Martha begins, “George hates Daddy . . . not for anything Daddy’s done to him, but for his own . . .”; as her words trail off, the stage directions indicate that George is “ Nodding . . . finishing it for her ” as he then declares “inadequacies” (205). This moment depicts George’s participation in his emasculation, his guiding of the sadist who torments him yet does so at his behest. A telling sign that George understands his masochistic role appears in his ready acceptance of cuckoldry, or more accurately, his insistence on his masochistic role such that cuckoldry becomes nearly unavoidable. Adultery and cuckoldry can be likened to a zero-sum game in which the lovers win and the cheated-on spouse loses, but George bleaches cuckoldry of its zero-sum dynamics by embracing his masochistic role. When Martha begins seducing Nick, George observes them, with the stage directions indicating not merely his awareness but his enjoyment of his wife’s actions: “ George enters . . . stops . . . watches a moment . . . smiles . . . laughs silently, nods his head, turns, exits, without being noticed ” (266). When Martha warns him, “We’re going to amuse ourselves, George,” he agrees, “Unh-hunh. That’s nice.” She further cautions, “You might not like it,” but he genially accedes, “No, no, now . . . you go right ahead . . . you entertain our guests” (269). This encounter might appear to contribute to the gradual unraveling of the sadomasochistic roles that Martha and George have assumed in their marital games, yet it would be more accurate to observe that they underscore the paradoxical and chimerical intransigence of these positions while also admitting the masochist’s latent power. This theme continues as George refuses to step out of his masochistic role—or in other words, he insists that the game continue despite the fact that doing so might compel Martha to cuckold him—and this refusal ironically highlights his agency in the game through his insistent and unwavering passivity. Indeed, when Martha tries to shock him with her adulterous liaison—“Never mind that. I said I was necking with one of the guests”—George encourages her, “Good . . . good. You go right on” (270). As the scene continues, he soon tells her with a touch of exasperation: “Lord, Martha, if you want the boy that much . . . have him . . . but do it honestly, will you? Don’t cover it over with all this . . . all this . . . footwork” (272). George insists on his masochism in this scene, insists that his wife cuckold him, and in so doing, asserts the agency latent in passivity by ascribing this agency to his wife’s staged desires. In such moments, sadomasochism undercuts the presumed telos of ludology in the victory/defeat dyad, for George’s victory over Martha would arise in his refusal to abandon his status as masochist, thus compelling her to remain in her sadistic and cuckolding role despite her hesitance to assert her dominance to this degree. For Martha, any ostensible victory over George by cuckolding him would entail a latent acknowledgment of the force of his passivity, and for George, his erotic defeat through his wife’s betrayal would entail the cuckold’s ultimate victory in the pleasure of abjection. The fluctuating erotics of cuckoldry are further confused by George’s expressed desire not to be cuckolded, evident when he recognizes Nick as a threat and cautions him, “You realize, of course, that I’ve been drawing you out on this stuff, not because I’m interested in your terrible lifehood, but only because you represent a direct and pertinent threat to my lifehood, and I want to get the goods on you” (228). In her reading of the play’s homosocial dynamics, Clare Virginia Eby proposes that Albee “shows how competitive masculinity sustains marriage,” further positing that the playwright depicts the manner in which “homosocial rivalry serves to underwrite heterosexual stability.” [24] George seeks to preserve the sanctity of his union with Martha while simultaneously pushing her to cuckold him through his insistent masochistic posturing. The games of “Humiliate the Host,” “Hump the Hostess,” and “Get the Guests” would appear to necessitate varying strategies to achieve their eponymous objectives, but Martha and George’s sadomasochistic marriage effectively responds to the shifting ludic engagements of the evening, for it is the very adaptability of the sadomasochistic dyad that proves its utility in each round of their evening of games. The play’s façade of sadist versus masochist cracks further at numerous points, as Martha and George expose the contradictions inherent in the sadomasochistic dyad. In a striking exchange, George acquiesces to his masochistic role as Martha confesses her exhaustion with sadism: GEORGE : You can sit there in that chair of yours, you can sit there with the gin running out of your mouth, and you can humiliate me, you can tear me apart . . . ALL NIGHT . . . and that’s perfectly all right . . . that’s OK. . . . MARTHA : YOU CAN STAND IT! GEORGE : I CANNOT STAND IT! MARTHA : YOU CAN STAND IT!! YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!! (A silence) GEORGE ( Quietly ): That is a desperately sick lie. MARTHA : DON’T YOU KNOW IT, EVEN YET? GEORGE ( Shaking his head ): Oh . . . Martha. MARTHA : My arm has gotten tired whipping you. (257-58) In many ways, this scene represents the critical crux of interpreting Martha and George’s sadomasochistic relationship, and thus of interpreting the play as a whole: is Martha correct that George married her precisely for her sadistic talents, of which even she has grown tired, or is he correct that such an allegation is a “desperately sick lie”? It is noteworthy that these lines come shortly after a moment of domestic harmony between the two, when Martha compliments George: “It’s the most . . . life you’ve shown in a long time,” to which he genially replies, “You bring out the best in me, baby” (256). In this moment of concord, masochist and sadist agree on their mutually satisfying relationship, yet such a moment cannot last given the pressures of their relationship based on the pleasure of conflict. As Martha and George’s games entangle Honey and Nick, the audience witnesses the interpretive disarray created by sadomasochism, for this young couple can neither comprehend nor meaningfully participate in their hosts’ ludic pastimes. Nick disavows any masochistic tendencies in himself, declaring to George that “I just don’t see why you feel you have to subject other people to it” (215). He also states that “flagellation isn’t my idea of a good time,” although he concurs when George suggests that he “can admire a good flagellator . . . a real pro” (215). Honey and Nick denounce the games their hosts are playing: “I don’t like these games,” Honey intones, with Nick agreeing, “Yeah. . . . I think maybe we’ve had enough of games, now” (249). Significantly, Nick understands that any games he plays with George and Martha are unwinnable, that their ludic structures preclude meaningful intervention by outside agents. When George demands Nick’s response to his mock declension of “good, better, best, bested,” Nick explicates his host’s rhetorical trap: “All right . . . what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it’s funny so you can contradict me and say it’s sad? Or do you want me to say it’s sad so you can turn around and say no, it’s funny. You can play that damn little game any way you want to, you know!” (175). As a ludic experience, sadomasochism establishes a framework that obscures rather than enlightens, and although Nick stumbles upon this truth early in the storyline, he is unable to extricate his wife and himself from the evening’s dark play. George, speaking with feigned awe, approves of Nick’s perceptiveness—“Very good! Very good!” (175)—yet Nick’s comprehension of the game’s traps does not allow him to participate in it and simply emphasizes his role as a bystander ensnared in events beyond his ken. One of the chief tactics in this sadomasochistic game that further destabilizes the identities of its players arises in its allegorical registers, for both the audience and Honey and Nick must pierce through the veil of Martha and George’s blurred accounts of their desires and their lives. In this vein, when George plays “Get the Guests,” he attacks Honey and Nick with an allegorical account of their marriage—“Well, it’s an allegory, really—probably—but it can be read as straight, cozy prose . . . and it’s all about a nice young couple who come out of the Middle-west. It’s a bucolic you see” (250)—as he proceeds to describe Honey and Nick’s marriage and its discontents. According to the stage directions, George ends this part of the game “ abruptly and with some disgust ,” as he concludes, “And that’s how you play Get the Guests” (254). In its doubling of storylines, allegory surrounds a deeper truth with an outer fictional layer, but George ultimately strips the outer layer from the inner, revealing the couple’s humiliating secrets inside. Allegory aligns with ludic sadomasochism in this exchange, for the positions of sadist and masochist establish an interpretative valence for the game that are then radically deconstructed as the game evolves. As allegory encourages interpreters to digest the narrative before them, it also corrupts the potential of interpretation, for the poles of interpretation inevitably shift, and often they do so in light of the savage strategies of the game afoot. As Albee’s conjoining of ludonarrative sadomasochism with allegory corrupts the antagonistic positionality of characters as players, so too does his storyline obscure essential players from view, cloaking their significance to the game’s play and resolution. In particular, the allegorical surface of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? obscures the role of Martha’s father as the instigator of the play’s dysfunctional games. This man, never depicted onstage, lurks in the background of Martha and George’s marriage, with the couple both haunted by his influence and employing him as a totemic weapon. Owing to these inescapable and tortuous family dynamics, they act as children perpetually stunted by living in this man’s shadow, such as when Martha says, “I’m firsty,” with the stage direction stressing that she is “ Imitating a tiny child ” (164). George plays along, calling her his “little yum yum” (213) and suggesting that he will make “a gweat big dwink” for her, his “little mommy” (185). With the epithet “little mommy,” George creates the paradox of an infant parent, one who ostensibly bore him yet who remains preternaturally young and dependent on him for nurturing. Contrasted with these images of Martha and George as developmentally crippled, Martha’s father represents the player who cannot be played against, the character absent from the narrative yet critical to its narrative structure, for his actions have sparked the play’s plot. Martha and George’s marriage and even George’s career have been ordered to his measure; likewise, Martha and George would not have met Honey and Nick if not for his intervention, as George reminds his wife: “If your father didn’t set up these goddamn Saturday night orgies all the time” (158). In defending her invitation to Honey and Nick despite the lateness of the hour, Martha avers, “Because Daddy said we should be nice to them, that’s way,” as she then repeats this rationale in quick succession (160). Enhancing this theme, Albee establishes Martha’s father as an allegorical representation of an arbitrary and callous deity, not just her father but The Father. George states sardonically, “He’s a god, we all know that” (170). In Martha’s account of her father—“Jesus, I admired that guy! I worshipped him . . . I absolutely worshipped him. I still do” (206)—Albee deploys the ambiguity between “Jesus” as a mild exclamation and as a direct address, allowing the conflation between her human father and the Christian deity to deepen the play’s allegorical consideration both of intergenerational and of marital family dynamics. And thus a key critical crux in interpreting Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? emerges in the meaning of a character who shapes the plot but who cannot be held accountable for his actions, who eludes the binary both of antagonist and protagonist and of sadist and masochist while sparking the antagonism that necessitates some sort of resolution. Although one might presume the father/Father corresponds with the sadist—and in Albee’s play it is Martha’s father whose psychic force traumatizes the couple—Deleuze details how this father figure embodies masochistic desire: So when we are told that the character who does the beating in masochism is the father, we are entitled to ask: Who in reality is being beaten? Where is the father hidden? Could it not be in the person who is being beaten? . . . What the subject atones for is his resemblance to the father and the father’s likeness in him: the formula of masochism is the humiliated father.[25] Aligning Martha’s father with George admits a perverse logic to the psychosexual dynamics unfolding throughout this torturous evening: Martha avenges herself against the patriarchal authority that controlled her life to the extent of annulling her first marriage and “revirginizing” her, and George allows himself to be humiliated in the effort to humiliate the father who orchestrated his humiliation. Such an interpretation gives psychological clarity to a play whose fraught emotional dynamics have long enthralled viewers, yet the shifting tides of sadomasochism complicate even this logic. As the poles of sadist and masochist inevitably shift, so too must any allegorical vision of Martha’s father as the antagonist of their marital game. This dynamic is evident in the fact that, as much as Martha’s father stands as the narrative’s invisible character, the omnipotent father who haunts and directs the players’ actions, George reveals that this figure can also be strategically deployed in his games with Martha. To invoke the father is to invoke his uncontestable authority, as in George’s cool reply to Martha’s request for a “big sloppy kiss”: GEORGE ( Too matter-of-fact ): Well, dear, if I kissed you I’d get all excited . . . I’d get beside myself, and I’d take you, by force, right here on the living room rug, and then our little guests would walk in, and . . . well, just think what your father would say about that . (164) George evades Martha’s demands for affection, and even in this early moment of the play, destabilizes the sadomasochistic binary upon which their relationship is presumably established. The father/Father is thus a conscriptable character within their antagonistically ludic marriage, one who may be deployed to advance their individual strategies while standing removed from the play at hand. For a drama with only four characters, it is striking that two additional absent fathers contribute to its plotline, with George’s and Honey’s fathers similarly entering the narrative as spectral figures whose influence cannot be evaded. George tells Nick of an incident in which a boy—presumably George himself—accidentally killed his father, with George recalling the aftermath of the fatal car accident: “And in the hospital, when he was conscious and out of danger, and when they told him that his father was dead, he began to laugh, I have been told, and his laughter grew and he would not stop” (218). George escapes his father’s influence by this man’s untimely death, with his hysterical laughter indicating his liberation from this patriarchal regime and an incipient panic induced by this newfound freedom. Nick says of Honey’s father that he “was a man of the Lord, and he was very rich,” detailing this man’s rise to fame and his accumulation of wealth: “He spent God’s money . . . and he saved his own” (226). In these paternal storylines, the fathers direct their children’s and their in-laws’ lives, constraining their choices and identities, such that the father must be surpassed in the quest for self-determination. The marital game, Albee suggests, cannot be played only by wife and husband, for they are ensnared in erotic rituals established by the preceding desires of the patriarchy. The childlessness of both couples then emerges as a definitive rebuff of patriarchy’s claim to futurity, with the children forever scarred by the previous generation ending this game that cannot be won. As Lee Edelman provocatively argues, “The Child . . . marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism.” [26] Within the fictions of Albee’s play, the couples’ joint childlessness represents an anti-erotic strategy in the overarching sadomasochistic game that constitutes the American family, as they deny the Father’s power by cutting off the roots of social reproduction. The play’s final game—“Bringing Up Baby”—thus illuminates the potential of a ludic escape from the ruts of familial disharmony. Whereas Martha and George’s sadomasochistic games allow for some ambiguity in its strategies, the game concerning their phantom child requires their mutual and strict adherence to its rules. This child symbolizes both the pleasure and the hollowness of their marriage, yet many viewers have expressed disbelief over this aspect of Albee’s play, such that he defended his choice, declaring that “it always struck me as very odd that an audience would be unwilling to believe that a highly educated, sensitive, and intelligent couple, who were terribly good at playing reality and fantasy games, wouldn’t have the education, the sensitivity, and the intelligence to create a realistic symbol for themselves. To use as they saw fit.” [27] The phantom child imbues their marriage with meaning as it also establishes rules for their interactions. By mentioning the child to Honey and Nick, Martha corrupts the game, piquing George’s anger: “I mean, you can make your own rules . . . you can go around like a hopped-up Arab, slashing away at everything in sight, scarring up half the world if you want to. But somebody else try it . . . no sir!” (257). And whereas sexuality provokes eddies of humiliation and desire in their marital games that prove mutually satisfying, if also fraught, Martha appears truly to torment George by suggesting that he is not the father of their phantom child. “He’s not completely sure it’s his own kid,” she impugns, as George replies in shock, “My god, you’re a wicked woman” (202). Even within the realm of fantasy, in which George could be envisioned if not as a virile lover then at least as a genial father, Martha portrays him as impotent to the point that he could not ejaculate the phantom seed of a nonexistent child. The promise of anti-futurity, registered in the refusal to cede to the Father’s authoritarian impulses, entails the end of Martha and George’s game. Some critics have viewed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as ultimately conservative in its sexual politics, as evident in Rachel Blau Duplessis’s observation that in the play’s conclusion, “the humiliated, weak, unsuccessful man is shown to be stronger than the brutal, emasculating woman. The family problems are solved not by investigating their ultimate source . . . but by regulating family relations in a highly normative manner.” [28] From another perspective, however, their sadomasochistic marriage fractures the meaning of traditional gender roles, and through their nonexistent offspring, they have radically reformulated the meaning of family and of narrative closure. Complementing this sadomasochistic reading of the play, it is worthwhile to note that George repeatedly refers to Martha’s and his phantom child as a “little bugger” (201, 210), with this deft allusion to sodomy further highlighting the fruitlessness of their marriage. Indeed, several critics have viewed Albee’s play as a queer allegory. Richard Schechner excoriates it as “perverse and dangerous,” declaring that its theme of “sexual perversity [is] there only to titillate an impotent and homosexual theatre and audience.” [29] Sky Gilbert avows that George is a “gay man . . . with certain obvious, stereotypical gay characteristics” and that Martha “is really a part for a drag queen.” [30] John Clum acknowledges the potential for this queer allegory but argues in contrast, “In a way, it’s a good thing for gay men that [Albee] didn’t [write queer scenes]; for a gay Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would also be antigay.” [31] These various, contradictory readings testify to the protean force of a queer subtext in Albee’s play, one that corresponds well with its themes of sadomasochism and anti-futurity that, to some degree, transcend the genders of the roles. For in the end, Martha and George’s childlessness is the only effective strategy available to them in their jointly sadomasochistic struggle against the Father, a battle that has left them emotionally hollowed yet capable still of feeling, a condition aptly encapsulated in Martha’s assessment of their icy tears: “I cry alllll the time; but deep inside, so no one can see me. I cry all the time. And Georgie cries all the time, too. We both cry all the time, and then, what do we do, we cry, and we take our tears, and we put ’em in the ice box, in the goddamn ice trays (Begins to laugh) until they’re frozen” (273). The play’s conclusion may suggest a slight thaw in their frozen interiors, but the sadomasochistic strains of their marriage and their family hinders any such interpretations from fully recuperating their lives into the range of the heteronormative. Within Albee’s ludonarrative assessment of the American family and its discontents, the pleasure of Martha and George’s marriage arises in their games, as Martha divulges in a rare statement of her affection for her husband: “who keeps learning the games we play as quickly as I can change the rules; who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy, and yes I do wish to be happy. George and Martha: sad, sad, sad” (277). This enigmatic dynamic, evident in the shifting poles of sadist and masochist that embody a core logic that simultaneously falters in its enunciation and enactment, leaves Nick and Honey unsure of how to interpret a marital game that they uncomfortably observe but cannot decipher: “Hell, I don’t know when you people are lying, or what,” Nick resignedly declares (283). The ultimate game against the Father, Martha and George’s sadomasochistic rituals allow them the pleasure of a game that can never be declared, such that it must end when the one inviolate rule is crossed, as George tells Martha: “You broke our rule, baby. You mentioned him . . . you mentioned him to someone else” (307). As Jesper Juul posits of games and their rules, “rules can cue the player into imagining a world,” an apt assessment of the ways in which Martha and George’s rules animate their marriage. [32] Within the rule structure they have created, to speak of the game is to destroy it, yet it is only through speech that Martha and George can enact their rage against an exterior force that has corrupted the very core of their being. Within this instance of sadomasochistic ludonarrativity, the enemy within is the enemy without, with Martha and George striking blindly at themselves, at their guests, and at Martha’s father, playing a marital game that undulates in its play and strategies yet builds to a climax of a child who will never be born, and thus of a Father who cannot initiate another round of the game against Himself through his children. Ludonarrative Theatre and the Masochistic Audience As Martha and George’s marriage demonstrates, sadomasochism illuminates the ways in which hostile play diffuses other, often more threatening acts of violence, providing a release mechanism through the ludic structures implicated by desire. On a narrative level, these dynamics affect the development of the play’s characters, and on a metanarrative level, they affect the play’s audiences as well. Certainly, Albee envisioned Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as ensnaring the audience to the point that they are actively involved in the psychological carnage depicted on stage. In an interview with Matthew Roudané, Albee detailed how conflict and aggression stand at the heart of the dramatic experience: “All drama goes for blood in one way or another. . . . Sometimes the act of aggression is direct or indirect, but it is always an act of aggression. And this is why I try very hard to involve the audience. . . . I want the audience to participate in the dramatic experience. . . . If the drama succeeds, the audience is bloodied .” [33] Following this compelling image of a bloodied audience, Albee proceeded to explain how viewers must participate in the theatrical experience: If audiences approach the theatre . . . and are willing to participate; if they are willing to have the status quo assaulted; if they are willing to understand that the theatre is a live and dangerous experience—and therefore a life-giving force —then perhaps they are approaching the theatre in an ideal state and that’s the audience I wish I were writing for.[34] Theatre as a “live and dangerous experience” entails the dissolution of the border between stage and seats, the eradication of the safe space of viewing through the crumbling of the “fourth wall” that never existed except in the imagination of performers and viewers who desired it. An art form that bloodies, Albee’s ludic theatre positions the audience as the masochist to the narrative’s unfolding, enduring the discomforting storyline for the sake of the ultimate edification of its experience. And further aligned with masochism, playgoers initiate the sadomasochistic scripts of the theatre by purchasing their tickets, proving both their power within its commercial economy while also submitting to the powerlessness of their positions in their darkened seats. What sadomasochism shares with Albee’s sense of ludonarrative drama is the possibility for a safe space that feels unsafe, for the heady illusion of danger that unfolds within an ultimately protected milieu. Numerous theorists have demarcated play’s mercurial flirtations with danger, such as in Clifford Geertz’s classic study of Balinese cockfights, in which the illicit nature of this play, coupled with its potential to reopen and exacerbate latent hostilities, underscores the fact that games cannot always be marshaled into pre-authorized temporal and spatial boundaries. [35] So too with sadomasochism, in its erotic, its narrative, and its ludonarrative incarnations: it is only “play,” yet it is play that allows conflicts to be waged between partners that destabilize their relative positions to each other. The sadist, the masochist, and the complementary roles they inhabit inevitably bleed out from any attempt to cordon “play” from the reality of the ludonarrative event, and any observer of these interactions must likely become implicated as well, for there is no safety in simply observing, as Honey and Nick demonstrate in their blindsided reactions to Martha and George’s vicious games. And from this vantage point, sadomasochism serves as a particularly apt hermeneutic for thinking through ludonarratology’s structures and secrets. Games require players, objectives, and rules governing their interaction, with narratives similarly necessitating characters pursuing an objective while observing various strictures (whether those of realism or fantasy or any other genre). Sadomasochism tweaks these paradigms and reminds players and interpreters alike that structures hide secrets. A sadomasochistic permutation of ludonarrativity may, in many instances, be designed to withhold pertinent structural information—missing characters, undeclared rules, self-destructive strategies—that undermine the promise of the text’s telos. The game ends, as all games and all texts must, but only through the dissolution of key elements in light of the oscillating enactment of desires that plague a plot with aporias that ironically grant it its foundational meaning. For George and Martha, this aporia coheres in the image of the Father, yet the play of sadomasochistic ludonarrativity cannot be delimited to this one invisible antagonist. As it breaks the borders between characters and their desires, between audience and the perceived events, the game brews a heady concoction of desires that enable the players’ identities to fracture and to unite against an Other with whom one could not otherwise contend, for both Albee’s savaged characters and his bloodied audiences. References [1] Astrid Ensslin, Literary Gaming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 6. [2] Sebastian Domsch, Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 27. [3] Lynda Davey, “Communication and the Game of Theatre,” Poetics 13 (1984): 5-15, at 10. For Bruss’s foundational study, see “The Game of Literature and Some Literary Games,” New Literary History 9.1 (1977): 153-72. [4] Tom Bishop, “Shakespeare’s Theater Games,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40.1 (2010): 65-88, at 67. Bishop offers a strong reading of Shakespeare as a ludologist. [5] Aristotle, Poetics I , trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 20. [6] Joel Weinsheimer, “Theory of Character: Emma ,” Poetics Today 1 (1979): 185-211, at 195. [7] Baruch Hochman, Character in Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 51. [8] Ronald Jacobs, “The Narrative Integration of Personal and Collective Identity in Social Movements,” Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations , ed. Melanie Green, Jeffrey Strange, and Timothy Brock (Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), 205-28, at 216. [9] James Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), 29, and Living to Tell about It (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 20. [10] Brian Richardson, “Beyond Poststructuralism: Theory of Character, the Personae of Modern Drama, and the Antinomies of Critical Theory,” Modern Drama 40 (1997): 86-99, at 95. [11] Thomas Malaby, “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games,” Games and Culture 2.2 (2007): 95-113, at 102. [12] Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs , in Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 141-293, at 271. [13] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , in Masochism 7-138, at 130-31. It should be mentioned that Deleuze argues against the possibility of sadomasochism, deriding it as “pseudomasochism” (124) and as a “semiological howler” (134). [14] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , 109. [15] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , 22. [16] Richard Schechner, “Playing,” Play and Culture 1 (1988): 3-19, at 14. [17] Richard Schechner, “Playing,” 12-13. [18] Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in The Collected Plays of Edward Albee, 1958-1965 (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007), 149-311; cited parenthetically, with all italics and capital letters in the original. [19] C. W. Bigsby, “ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee’s Morality Play,” Journal of American Studies 1.2 (1967): 257-68, at 261. [20] Walter A. Davis, Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 214. [21] Philip C. Kolin, ed., Conversations with Edward Albee (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 187. [22] Kamal Bhasin, “Women, Identity, and Sexuality: An Interview with Edward Albee,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (1995): 18-40, at 23. [23] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , 71. [24] Clare Virginia Eby, “Fun and Games with George and Nick: Competitive Masculinity in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ” Modern Drama 40.5 (2007): 601-18, at 614. [25] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , 60. [26] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 21. [27] William Flanagan, “The Art of the Theatre IV: Edward Albee: An Interview,” Paris Review 10 (1966): 92-121, at 111; italics in original. [28] Rachel Blau Duplessis, “In the Bosom of the Family: Contradiction and Resolution in Edward Albee,” Minnesota Review 8 (1977): 133-45, at 137. [29] Richard Schechner, “Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?” Tulane Drama Review 7.3 (1963): 7-10, at 8-9. [30] Sky Gilbert, “Closet Plays: An Exclusive Dramaturgy at Work,” Canadian Theatre Review 59 (Summer 1989): 55-58, at 57-58. [31] John Clum, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 189. [32] Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 196. [33] Edward Albee, quoted in Matthew Roudané, “ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? : Toward the Marrow,” The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee , ed. Stephen Bottoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 39-58, at 51; italics in original. [34] Edward Albee, quoted in Matthew Roudané, “ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ,” 51. [35] As Geertz notes, “Fighting cocks . . . is like playing with fire only not getting burned. You activate village and kin group rivalries and hostilities, but in ‘play’ form, coming dangerously and entrancingly close to the expression of open and direct interpersonal and intergroup aggression (something which, again, almost never happens in the normal course of ordinary life), but not quite, because, after all, it is ‘only a cockfight’” ( The Interpretation of Cultures [New York: Basic Books, 1973], 440). Footnotes About The Author(s) TISON PUGH is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Central Florida. His recent books include The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom , Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon , and Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies . Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lauren Friesen Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Lauren Friesen By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage is a book that would have been helpful a century ago but could not have been written then; it would have prepared everyone for the winds of change that began then and continue today. This volume avoids prior emphases on form and structure and instead focuses on diverse methodologies and aesthetics. It provides hindsight into where playwriting has been and, more importantly, makes suggestions, even offering practical exercises as a guide to the current situation and the future of the craft. Every chapter in this landmark publication explores alternatives to Aristotelian structuralism, first articulated in Aristole’s Poetics (ca. 330 BCE). The essays have been carefully and logically selected to outline alternatives to a linear structure with its unities, singular plot line, and heroic characters. Sara Freeman’s 2023 publication Playwriting, Dramaturgy and Space begins the quest for a new direction . Decentered Playwriting takes that quest for new perspectives and presents them in full bloom. Philosophers have observed that space and time are the two constants in human experience, and playwrights have often structured their works according to time sequence (i.e., Hamlet occurs during nine months in his life). Decentered Playwriting begins with Sarah Johnson’s chapter “Playwrights as Architects of Third Space: The Dramaturgy of Japanese Traditional Performing Arts.” Johnson’s suggestion is to lay aside, for the time being, the narrative of time and explore the possibilities of space. With that declarative beginning, the following three chapters examine playwriting on “nothingness,” praxis, and hip-hop. Few playwriting guides of the past have availed themselves of philosophical foundations for dramaturgical analysis, but these chapters wrestle with the philosophical roots of Sartre, Kant, and Paul Butler, respectively. Decentering Playwriting takes another leap by advocating alternatives to the well-made play, the epic sagas of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett’s existential wanderings. There is, instead, a vigorous emphasis on giving a listening ear to the people, issues, and connections that form the web of a playwright’s immediate social and cultural life. The book outlines how theatre can and should focus on contemporary themes rather than myths, on the daily lives of people rather than heroes, on stories about supportive relationships instead of linear plot lines, and on valuing interconnectedness over stock characters. Characters that emerge from a variety of cultural contexts, including Indian, Hawaiian, Indigenous, African, Filipino, and others, are explored throughout the book. Decentered Playwriting has sixteen chapters that present a meaningful guide to fresh writing methods with pedagogical techniques that often focus on emotional memory of cultural expressions and the ingredients for attentive relationships. This guide emphasizes the connection each writer has with their own family, local identifiers, animal interactions, local rituals, and the interactions with the wider community. Instead of exploring the universal, this study challenges playwrights to fully examine the particular, beginning with the self in community. Faculty, students, and theatres seeking approaches that reflect contemporary social and artistic sensibilities will be interested in what this text explores. Each chapter forwards a unique voice for a new aesthetic and its cultural context. Essayists of Native American, African, Indian, Cuban, LGBTQ, and other identities are included. In addition, unique and constructive methods are also represented, such as the archeology of identity or the analyzing of human experience as one dimension of a community eco-system rather than the solitary hero or victim narrative. Chantal Bilodeau’s chapter titled “Decentering Humans” offers a challenge to seasoned and aspiring playwrights: “Every play should aspire to fundamentally change our relationships to the world and to each other, and to ‘dethrone’ the human species while emphasizing that despite growing uncertainty, safety and connection are still possible” (81). According to Bilodeau, plays can present how humans are entwined with all of creation where everything is dependent on others for their existence and well-being. This interconnectedness is vital in character development to shift each one past a stereotype or two-dimensional portrait. Each chapter provides an array of options for interpersonal analysis and collaborative methods for devising scripts for stage performances. This is especially true in Oluwatoyin Olokodana-James’s chapter, in which the community as author is valued above the individual talent. The process is presented as a shared venture instead of assuming that a play is the expression of the solitary voice who is bringing the latest tablets from a mountain peak to an eager audience. This new trend might be viewed as a modern variation on the playwriting processes at the Globe in London (see Gary Taylor, “Why Did Shakespeare Collaborate?,” Shakespeare Survey , vol. 67, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 1-17). This book picks the ripe fruit for an epic theatre that is not bound by traditional rules for the stage. Brecht’s alienation effect ( verfremdungseffekt ) once served as an alternative to the well-structured play, but the chapters in this volume move beyond Brecht. Authors here instead explore how characters have meaning not because they present the alienation dynamic but because they do the opposite: illustrate the social fabric of their relationships. Diane Clancy describes how the character’s identity “aligns with the fabric of your own being” (163). The emphasis in each chapter is on new concepts and methods that focus on liberation, personal integrity, and communal experience for devising new work. Although each chapter presents new and creative playwriting approaches, the careful reader will note that Wole Soyinka, Paula Vogel, María Irene Fornés, Augusto Boal, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, and C. C. Mehta have paved the way for the current climate where the voices of Decentered Playwriting ’s authors will now be heard and absorbed. They also laid the groundwork for jettisoning colonial perspectives, moving away from Western styles, and incorporating marginalized communities. Every chapter deconstructs those previous norms and advocates a performative nature that emerges from those that previously had no voice. In summary, this contribution to the field of playwriting is a significant and practical development. If Decentering Playwriting had been available during my teaching years, I would have clung to it as a lifeboat that is headed to a new land. References Footnotes About The Author(s) LAUREN FRIESEN is the David M. French Professor Emeritus of Theatre at the University of Michigan. He is Past Chair of the Kennedy Center’s National Playwriting Program. He recently published Theatre and Aesthetics: Performance and Transformation. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. 2024. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Frank Hentschker, Yu Chien Liu | Capturing 10 years of the contemporary performances and conversations of the Segal Center's PRELUDE festival. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the link: http://www.tcg.org/Store/ProductDetail/6110895 To view this publication online for free, visit the link: https://www.scribd.com/doc/283453685/Ten-Years-PRELUDE Ten Years PRELUDE Frank Hentschker, Yu Chien Liu Download PDF Edited by Frank Hentschker Designed and Design Concept by Yu Chien Liu For over 10 years the annual Prelude Festival, held at The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, has been a force in New York theatre and performance – a free, three-day festival that celebrates artistic and academic exchange in the heart of the city. This book represents ten years (2003-2013) of unlimited creativity, discourse and exchange within an academic setting. The artists of Prelude – pioneers in their field – demonstrate that theatre and performance continue to matter – and that New York City is still at the forefront of the form. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

NEEDY LOVER | ASHIL LEE + PHOEBE BROOKS | PAUL LAZAR + JERRY LIEBLICH / THIRD EAR presents Plays in Process at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Plays in Process NEEDY LOVER | ASHIL LEE + PHOEBE BROOKS | PAUL LAZAR + JERRY LIEBLICH / THIRD EAR 1:30-3 pm Saturday, October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that portable is a breeding ground for lobsters. ROOTING FOR YOU Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. Rooting for You! blurb: "It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization." THE BARBARIANS The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. LOBSTER Special Thanks: Meghan Finn, Johnny G. Lloyd, and The Tank; Erin Courtney, Zayd Dohrn, Thomas Bradshaw, and Northwestern University. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed or presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and a co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com. Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group, TAG, and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed) Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez. He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover and Mozart in the Jungle. Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido. In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Paul E. Fallon. Cambridge, Massachusetts Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Paul E. Fallon. Cambridge, Massachusetts By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Jay Eddy in Boston Playwrights' Theatre Driving in Circles. Photo: Scornavacca Photography. The 2023-2024 Boston theatre season opened on a down note. After forty years, struggling through the pandemic and refocusing its mission to portray underrepresented voices, New Rep closed. Fortunately, theatre is regenerative, and newer companies are emerging. This compendium provides a snapshot of five of Boston’s independent theatre companies and highlights a representative production from their season. Moonbox Productions Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Sweeney Todd Music and Lyrics by  Stephen Sondheim , Book by  Hugh Wheeler (13 Oct. -5 Nov.) Legally Blonde Music and Lyrics by Laurence O'Keefe and Nell Benjamin, Book by Heather Hach (8 Dec. -31 Dec. ) The Manic Monologues Zachary Burton and Elisa Hofmeister (16 Feb. -25 Feb.) Mermaid Hour David Valdes (26 Apr. -19 May) Boston New Works Festival 2024 (22 Jun.-24 Jun.) Moonbox Productions’ dual vision is to create exceptional theatre using local talent and connect audiences with extraordinary service organizations. Since 2011, Moonbox has staged over twenty productions, each highlighting a local non-profit. Their range is astounding, from mainstage musicals featuring large casts, live orchestras, elaborate sets, exquisite costumes, and exuberant choreography to black box intimacy where actors in street clothes on a bare stage reveal unadorned trials of the human condition. Mermaid Hour fused Moonbox’s range in a gorgeous production of an intimate drama. The arresting set featured bands of fabric swirling in a vortex of sea greens and blues toward the stage floor, where a curvilinear counter, a plinth, and a few stools anchored the unfolding family trials. Vi, a twelve-year-old trans girl, pushes every limit of her age and identity. But the play focuses on her working-class parents, struggling to do right by a child far beyond expectation. Director Bridget Kathleen O’Leary kept the family interactions tight—actors faced each other more than the audience—mirroring the circular set and reinforcing their private struggles. Speakeasy Stage Company Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 POTUS Selina Fillinger (15 Sep. -15 Oct.) The Band’s Visit Music and Lyrics by  David Yazbek , Book by  Itamar Moses (10 Nov.- 17 Dec. ), co-production with The Huntington A Case for the Existence of God Samuel D. Hunter (26 Jan. -18 Feb.) Cost of Living Martina Majok (8 Mar.-30 Mar.) A Strange Loop Michael R. Jackson (26 Apr. - 25 May) Speakeasy’s thirty-third season continued the company’s tradition of reinterpreting recent Broadway successes for a Boston audience. Their exquisite production of the 2022 New York Drama Critic Award-winning, A Case for the Existence of God , portrayed two earnest though flawed men struggling to navigate a world littered with obstacles. Can God exist within a mortgage broker’s cubicle in Twin Falls, Idaho? The two men never left their chairs in the harshly lit, tightly bound set. Quick blackouts indicated passing time and place. They moved closer as each man’s shrinking opportunity drew him to the unlikely other. Under Melinda Lopez’s understated direction, every element shrank until the set literally burst apart, and a case was made for the existence of God. Lyric Stage Boston, Massachusetts 2023-24 Assassins Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, Book by John Weidman (15 Sep.-15 Oct.) The Game’s Afoot Ken Ludwig (10 Nov. -17 Dec. ) Trouble in Mind Alice Childress (12 Jan.-4 Feb.) Thirst Ronán Noone (23 Feb.-17 Mar.) The Drowsy Chaperone Music & Lyrics by Lisa Lambert & Greg Morrison, Book by Bob Martin & Don McKellar (5 Apr.-12 May) Yellow Face , David Henry Hwang (31 May-23 Jun.) Artistic Director Courtney O’Connor celebrated Lyric Stage Boston’s 50th season with a full season of theatrical variety. In honor of the anniversary, the Lyric’s lobby was redecorated with custom wallpaper featuring scenes from notable productions. The Drowsy Chaperone highlighted what this little theatre company does best: make big stage musicals sparkle in an intimate setting. A curmudgeonly theater maven, in the present, spins his angst and his turntable through the prism of a 1920’s-era musical that comes to life in his grungy apartment. Paul Melendy, as Man-in-the-Chair, perfectly maneuvered the transitions from exuberant production numbers to narrative commentary. Each of the fifteen musical characters is a cliché, but the clichés clicked magnificently. The energy whirling around the 244-seat theater saturated the audience with everything we love about musical theatre. Delightful costumes, especially the four-tier swimming suit that unraveled heroine Janet during “Show Off.” Abundant tricks: tap dancing, roller skating, ridiculous incognitos. Impeccable comic timing: I guffawed until my belly ached. Central Square Theater Cambridge, Massachusetts 2023-24 Angels in America, Part 2: Perestroika Tony Kushner (7 Sep. -8 Oct.) The Rocky Horror Show Richard O’Brien (28 Oct.-3 Dec.) Machine Learning Francisco Mendoza (25 Jan.-25 Feb.) Beyond Words Laura Maria Censabella (14 Mar.-14 Apr.) next to normal Brian Yorkey (30 May-23 Jun.) Central Square Theater (CST), under the consistent leadership of Executive Director Catherine Carr Kelly and Artistic Director Lee Mikeska Gardner, continued its focus on exploring social justice, science, and gender politics through theatre by producing five plays with unique perspectives. Beyond Words is a new play, produced in conjunction with Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, that tracks Dr. Irene Pepperberg and her work with Alex, an African Grey parrot, whom she prompts to meaningful communication and problem-solving. Smooth transitions and clever theatrical devices kept the audience engaged in the predictable, happy plot. Shyster scientists fixated on studying apes turn into them. Hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak no-evil muses create a Greek chorus of nay-sayers slow to appreciate Dr. Pepperberg’s remarkable science. A tennis match where Irene served up her findings was particularly satisfying. Boston Playwrights’ Theatre Boston, Massachusetts 2023-24 Fringe Festival 2023-2024 Isabelle Sanatdar Stevens, Brandon Zang, Tina Esper, and Maggie Kearnan (22 Sep. -14 Oct. ) Mr. Parent Melinda Lopez and Maurice Emmanuel Parent (10 Oct. -22 Oct.) Kill The Magistrate Abbey Fenbert (4 Dec.) Driving in Circles Jay Eddy (21 Mar. -6 Apr.) Boston Theater Marathon (5 May) Hoops Eliana Pipes (21 May) Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (BPT) has traditionally produced new plays written by students in Boston University’s MFA in Playwriting Program. This season, Artistic Director Megan Sandberg-Zakian expanded BPT’s focus by representing a wider range of the BU community. She grouped several plays by existing students into the Fringe Festivaland then offered full productions of new work by alumn i and faculty. The result was more opportunities for more voices. Driving in Circles is a new play by BU alum Jay Eddy. Writer, singer, and actor Eddy told their personal story of abuse and healing with more vitality than pathos. The pace was frantic as stand-up comedy. Two backup musicians anchored the action at keyboard and drums, while Jay was everywhere: center stage, in the audience, and bouncing off the highway that curved up and away along the rear wall. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Paul E. Fallon is an architect who spent over thirty years designing housing and healthcare facilities. A commitment to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake became the focus of his first book, Architecture by Moonlight . In 2015-2016, Paul bicycled through each of the 48 contiguous states and asked everyone he met the same question. How Will We Live Tomorrow? became his second book. Returning to Cambridge, MA, Paul continues to write blog essays, plays, and NETIR articles about Boston-area theatre companies. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Martha S. LoMonaco, Editor, New England Theatre in Review Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Martha S. LoMonaco, Editor, New England Theatre in Review By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Welcome to the new incarnation of New England Theatre in Review , the performance review section of the late lamented New England Theatre Journal which ceased publication last year. The kind editors of JADT made space for us last fall when I had a section brimming with news on the New England theatre scene but no place to publish it, and they further offered us a continuing gig in subsequent Fall issues. This issue features three articles that provide thoughtful interrogations of political theatre in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts; highlight noteworthy productions at five small independent theatres of Greater Boston; and provide a window into Long Wharf Theater’s self-reinvention: Long Wharf abandoned its physical theatre space two years ago and is now peripatetically performing in and around New Haven, Connecticut, in hopes of reaching new audiences and new theatrical possibilities. All three give insights into how American regional theatre is thriving post-pandemic, beyond the boundaries of New York City, and in addressing the needs and entertainment desires of their local communities. Since Long Wharf is now straying a bit beyond New England’s boundaries—its 2025-26 theatre season opens with a co-production exclusively performed in New York City—I’m wondering if future issues of NETIR might take a similar tactic. I invite readers to consider writing about performance that has some base in New England—perhaps it originated there or is about some area or personality associated with or inspired by New England—but you may have seen elsewhere. Or you want to profile a particular production, series of related productions, or theatre within the six New England states that is doing noteworthy work that demands to be documented. Please send your suggestions for articles to me at: unit12msl@yahoo.com . References Footnotes About The Author(s) MARTHA S. LOMONACO is a theatre director, dramaturg, historian, and writer. She is Professor Emerita of Theatre and American Studies at Fairfield University, where she was resident director and ran the theatre program for thirty-four years. She is the author of two monographs Every Week, A Broadway Revue: The Tamiment Playhouse, 1921-1960 and Summer Stock: An American Theatrical Phenomenon and an edited collection, Theatre Exhibitions , volume thirty-three of Performing Arts Resources . She has been editor of New England Theatre in Review since 2010. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Richard Jones Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director Richard Jones By Published on May 27, 2018 Download Article as PDF Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director . Natka Bianchini. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Pp. 204. To discuss the production history of Samuel Beckett’s work in the US is inevitably to begin with Alan Schneider. Schneider directed the American premiere of all twelve of Beckett’s major works, from the Miami opening of Waiting for Godot in 1956 to Catastrophe and What Where in New York in 1983; five of these ( Happy Days , Not I , Ohio Impromptu , Rockaby , and What Where ) were world premieres. He also directed the aptly titled Film , whose collaboration occasioned Beckett’s only visit to the US. In Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America , Natka Bianchini examines the growing relationship between Beckett and Schneider, and charts the development of Beckett’s American productions. Bianchini’s introductory chapter makes two crucial points. First, Beckett scholarship, even of his work for the theatre, has concentrated rightly or wrongly on dramatic texts rather than on theatrical productions; this book seeks to balance those scales at least a little. Secondly, for production histories to be any more than cursory, we need more than production reviews. Luckily, both Beckett and Schneider were avid letter-writers, and Bianchini benefited enormously from “Schneider’s inveterate saving of his notebooks, letters, and theatrical ephemera” (8). Indeed, the geographical distance between the two men contributed to more detailed and thoughtful correspondence between them than would have occurred had they been able to communicate more freely and informally. It should come as no surprise that the period from 1956-71, described by Bianchini as one of “resistance to and uncertainty about Beckett’s work” (14), and encompassing the American premieres of Waiting for Godot , Endgame , Krapp’s Last Tape , and Happy Days , should receive three of the five numbered chapters and nearly half of the book’s total text. The first post-introductory chapter draws its title from one of the most misguided promotional campaigns in theatre history: producer Michael Myerberg’s attempt to capitalize on the star quality of Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell by hyping Waiting for Godot as “The Laugh Sensation of Two Continents.” The out-of-town opening at the Coconut Grove in Miami appropriately receives more attention here than does any other collaboration between Beckett and Schneider, despite its failure in virtually every sense of that term. It was the first time the two had worked together, and it was clear that Schneider had attempted to stage the play Beckett wrote, while Lahr saw the play as a star vehicle, and Myerberg was more interested in placating his star than in supporting the authority of his director. The subsequent two chapters, more traditionally titled “Finding a Home Off-Broadway” and “A Series of Firsts,” trace simultaneously the growing if perhaps grudging acceptance by the New York establishment of Beckett as a writer of stature and the burgeoning professional relationship between Beckett and Schneider. Perhaps of particular significance is the 1958 letter from Beckett to Schneider about a change in the “business” of Endgame . Although Schneider had convinced designer David Hays to simplify the set and resisted the producers’ attempts to “gag it up” (50), he did, in the final tableau, burden Clov with skis, a climbing rope, a backpack, and an oar—none of which appear in Beckett’s stage directions. Beckett, hearing of the change, wrote “I’m told Clov carries skis…I think I understand your idea, but I feel this is wrong, stylistically…Load him down with as much as you like with shabby banal things…but not skis” (51). One wonders if even such an apparently insignificant departure would have been tolerated in another director. Unfortunately, no correspondence remains from the next few months, so whether Schneider apologized for the change, or whether he removed the skis for the end of the run, is unknown. The next two chapters, “New York and Beyond” and “American Zenith,” discuss both revivals of earlier works and the premieres of Beckett’s later plays, including four world premieres. Beckett was now firmly established to the point of having February 16, 1984 declared “Samuel Beckett Day” in Manhattan in ceremonies attended by not only New York’s mayor Ed Koch but both New York US Senators, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Alfonse M. D’Amato. By this time, Beckett’s plays were more likely to be produced off-Broadway or outside New York altogether in the burgeoning regional theatre scene, at academic conferences, and on university campuses. The book concludes with an excellent if brief assessment of Schneider’s legacy. Wondering why Schneider is not more highlighted in lists of significant American directors, Bianchini muses that perhaps he was devalued for “slavishly following an author’s text without contributing his own artistic vision” (148). She points out, aptly, that “regardless of the level of detail in Beckett’s stage directions, there is still work to be done in mediating the text” (150). Bianchini ultimately argues that Schneider as a Beckett director should be viewed precisely the way that Billie Whitelaw is perceived as a Beckett actor, as an example of how “ interpretation of the author’s text can be both visionary, and, simultaneously, truthful to the author’s intent” (149). One could certainly find fault with some details of this book: a couple of grammatical errors made it into print, some points are merely repeated without expansion, the index could be more comprehensive, and a chronology would be useful. Bianchini sides with Schneider in all disputes except those with Beckett himself, and she accuses those who discount or argue with Schneider of “bias” (7) or even “duplicity” (24). But these are quibbles. This book is a readable, often fascinating work that relies on a host of source material never before brought together: the notes and bibliography total more than a quarter of the book’s length. Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America will be of enormous assistance to those who wish to better understand either of its central characters, or the American theatre especially in the period from 1956-71, or indeed the relationship between playwright and director in the theatrical process. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Richard Jones Stephen F. Austin State 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 Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

George Potter Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 2 Visit Journal Homepage Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances George Potter By Published on May 29, 2014 Download Article as PDF In summer 2002, the paths of war crisscrossed American public discourse. The war in Afghanistan had continued for over half a year, and the Bush Administration was beginning to lay the groundwork of lies and misinformation that would form the justification for invading Iraq. Meanwhile, Naomi Wallace led a group of six playwrights, along with Kia Corthron, Tony Kushner, Robert O’Hara, Lisa Schlesinger, and Betty Shamieh into occupied Palestine to meet with theater artists there and learn about the conditions under which Palestinian artists and people worked and lived during the Second Intifada. The following year, American Theatre published a series of responses from the playwrights, remarkable in the different ways in which they constructed the narratives of their contacts with occupied Palestine. Tony Kushner, for one, filtered the experience through an analysis of his Jewish American identity, with considerable attention to the copy of Gershom Scholem’s letters that he carried with him, concluding, “Because I went with a diverse group of people, I saw things I might have missed, and because I am a Jew I think I saw things others didn’t see.”1 Similarly, in a comparison of human rights abuses against Palestinians and his own African American experience, Robert O’Hara wrote the word “I” fifty-one times in responding to the conditions of Palestinians.2 And Palestinian American Betty Shamieh created parallel narratives between her own life growing up in America and the life she didn’t feel she would be strong enough to endure had her parents stayed in Ramallah.3 This is not to say that any of these are invalid responses. Personal responses to traumatic conditions are greatly varied in form and substance. However, they are a stark contrast to the closing narrative in the article, that by Naomi Wallace. She is the only one of the writers to use an Arabic word, referencing the debka, a traditional dance; the only one to draw from the literary heritage of Palestine, quoting now-deceased poet Mahmoud Darwish; and one of only two, alongside Lisa Schlesinger, to quote someone that the group encountered, providing the words of a twelve-year-old girl who told Wallace, “Yes, I throw stones at tanks. But I would rather play . . . When I grow up, I want to be a doctor.” Perhaps this is why Wallace wrote not only of her reaction as an American, but her obligation as an American: To visit the Occupied Territories, the West Bank and Gaza as theatre writers is not simply an exercise in forging links between ourselves and the Palestinians. Rather, it is to realize that we, as Americans, are, on an intensely intimate level, already fused, through the overt involvement of our government, with the history of these people . . . We are not, I thank the gods, only ourselves and our own personal experience. We are also what happens to one another.4 There is much to commend such a statement, both in its departure from the inward focused statements of Wallace’s fellow travelers—and the inward focused writing of much American theater—and in her commitment to making Americans aware of their role in perpetuating the occupation, and all of its itinerant conditions, of Palestine. Additionally, the idea that “We are also what happens to one another” would also seem like a modus operandi for the playwright, whose oeuvre stretches not just from performances around the world, but also to the American-Mexican border to the wars in Iraq and Palestine and to the struggle of union organizers. As such, Wallace’s work, particularly The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East—and the ideas that support it—serves as a strong example of what it means to be a meaningfully transnational artist. This analysis will thus begin with an examination of the deployment of the term “transnational,” as well as an exploration of how this concept is deployed in explorations of contemporary theater productions. This transnational frame will then illuminate how Wallace’s practice of theater moves beyond notions of international economic movement toward an argument for an intimate understanding of a diverse range of lives, and a personal contact—both in artistic and activist engagements—between those lives. In its most basic sense, the term “transnational” is not the subject of much debate. As Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden write, “the transnational can be understood as the global forces that link people or institutions across nations. Key to transnationalism is the recognition of the decline of national sovereignty as a regulatory force in global coexistence.”5 While this would imply that one aspect of transnationalism is the various multinational systems of economic, political, and communicative arrangements that make up the contemporary era, John Carlos Rowe also notes that the concept of transnationalism has come to include “a critical view of historically specific late modern or postmodern practices of globalizing production, marketing, distribution, and consumption for neocolonial ends.”6 Thus, the transnational consists of both the multinational influences on contemporary life and the multinational resistances to those influences. In the realm of the arts, much early scholarship on transnationalism came from the field of film studies, which existed at the intersection of both the economic and political debates over influences of transnationalism. As Ezra and Rowden write, “Cinema has from its inception been transnational, circulating more or less freely across borders and utilizing international personnel. This practice has continued from the era of Chaplin, Hitchcock, and Fritz Lang up to contemporary directors like Ang Lee, Mira Nair, and Alfonso Cuarón.”7 However, in the modern era, this movement of capital and labor has been expedited and expanded, and alongside it has developed an alternative cinema—by artists such as Ken Loach, Zhangke Zia, and Jafar Panahi—that explore the political, economic, and cultural impacts of such movements. Theater, however, as an embodied art form, does not transport with the expediency of a DVD, and discussions of transnationalism have taken on a different shape in theater studies, focusing more on the latter question of representational concerns. To the extent that structural elements have been discussed, they have tended to focus on international lines of influence on contemporary artists. The collection Not the Other Avant-Garde, for example, argues for a decentering of the avant-garde outside of the European experience, claiming that “the first- and second-wave avant-gardes (pre- and post-World War II) were always already a transnational phenomenon, and that the performative gestures of these avant-gardes were culturally hybrid forms that emanated simultaneously from a wide diversity of sources rather than from a European center.”8 In the same collection, Marvin Carlson advocates for the necessity of understanding the indigenous influence on Middle Eastern theater, rather than merely looking for European influences.9 All of this is, undoubtedly, important scholarship. However, none of it asks what it means to think across borders, rather than to merely be influenced by multiple traditions. There is, then, very little attempt to use theater, as Yan Haiping argues for in her discussion of Asian theater, to explore how “globalization dictated by capital can be traced and contextualized through the various social formations of the human lives that it changes and interconnects and how those specific social beings actively inhabit the present global change that not only conditions their functions but also threatens to overdetermine the very constitution of their existence and signification.”10 While there is some theater work that attempts to do this, the nature of live performance, and the economics of performance, often do not allow critiques of transnational economics to function transnationally. Thus, when the Young Vic staged Clare Bayley’s The Container, a play about refugees attempting to smuggle themselves into Britain, the performance occurred inside a shipping container on a street in London. However, while this content presented a critique of those abandoned by the international flow of capital, in form, the work still presented a British writer, theater, and cast discussing issues of British concern in front of a predominantly British audience.11 Meanwhile, many works that travel internationally with international casts often replicate the economic paradigms that The Container interrogates. Thus, most critical discussions of the transnational content of theater have tended to merely use the term as a means of discussing cross-border content. In this context, Sara L. Warner has discussed Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus as a transnational work because it deals with the cross-border transport—both past and present, alive and dead—of Saartjie Baartman’s (“The Hottentot Venus”) body.12 Similarly, Jerry Wasserman writes of the Canadian play Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil as “transnational agitprop” because of the diasporic nature of the stars and its engagement with the American influence on Canadian culture.13 These works, of course, contain transnational content, as well as critiques of transnational exploitation, but there is nothing particularly transnational about their form or the audiences that they perform before, although Ali and Ali did at least go on the road, with a variable script. In the end, though, if critiques of local political and economic policies are to significantly involve the effects of those policies on distant peoples, there must be some way for theater to meaningfully contact the people discussed. This challenge returns this discussion to Naomi Wallace, an artist whose work has attempted to overcome physical and mental borders. Years before the previously discussed trip to Palestine, she crafted what remains her most famous play, In the Heart of America, the story of a white American and a Palestinian American soldier during the first Gulf War, which touches on issues of race, class, and sexuality not often mixed on American stages, where Palestinian bodies are rarely present in any form. However, this play remains within the bounds of those works discussed above that exist as transnational merely in their content. More recently, her play Twenty-One Positions, a Cartographic Dream of the Middle East involved working with Jewish and Palestinian artists to construct “a kind of Brechtian musical about the illegal Wall,” as Wallace explains it, thereby moving toward a more transnational process to match the content of the work.14 However, it is in a work between the two of these, the lesser known The Fever Chart, that Wallace has embodied the idea of critical transnationality in artistic production. In terms of content, The Fever Chart represents a true attempt to think across the fault lines of occupation in the Middle East. Consisting of three “visions,” the work has two short plays about Palestinian-Israeli relations, and one monologue by an Iraqi man about the devastation in his country. Thus, like In the Heart of America, it is a rare American work that juxtaposes Palestinian and Iraqi conditions of occupation. In fact, in this way its ideology—though not its representations of Israelis—stands much closer to theater found in the Arab world than North America, where Palestinian and Iraqi issues have historically been severed from one another. Perhaps this is why it is one of the few plays about the “war on terror” to have been performed in both Cairo and New York, as well as London. As such, the work, and the artist, who splits her time between America and Britain, and traveled to Egypt for the Cairo production, exemplifies the idea of a personalized transnational critique that knows the spaces in which those forgotten by occupation and globalization exist, and the production history of The Fever Chart demonstrates the challenges of trying to communicate such knowledge. One of the visions in The Fever Chart, “Between This Breath and You,” tells the seemingly impossible story of an Israeli woman that has been given the lungs of a Palestinian youth killed by an Israeli soldier. However, though Wallace’s play speaks to a seemingly impossible coming together of her characters, the play was based on an actual event, as Nehad Selaiha noted in her review of the Cairo performance. In fact, The Guardian, whose story on the event was projected between segments of the Cairo production, quoted the Arab family involved as stating “that peace and a desire to alleviate the suffering of others was uppermost in their minds. But looking exhausted and still stunned by the twin demands of Ahmed's death and the Israeli embrace, they also speak of their decision as an act of resistance.”15 [caption id="attachment_1128" align="alignleft" width="606"] Figure 1., Mourid (Basil Daoud) Sami (Hassan Kreidly), and Tanya (Amina Khalil) in Between this Breath and You at the AUC. Courtesy of Frank Bradley.[/caption] In Wallace’s play, however, the seemingly impossible moves to another level, when the father (Mourid) of the dead boy (Ahmed) meets the woman (Tanya) who has his son’s lungs inside her in the waiting room of a clinic in West Jerusalem. There, Mourid mysteriously unravels details of Ahmed’s life beside what he knows of Tanya’s life, asking her, “How often do you stay behind to lock up? To play with the stethoscope? To talk with a patient after hours, pretending you can be of service?”16 Mourid then explains that Israeli soldiers had made his son clean dirt from their tanks with a broom because children had been throwing dirt. Then, they shot him in the back of the head and the pelvis, saying Ahmed had been carrying a gun.17 There are many ways to write about the occupation of Palestine, and many plays have been written on the violence inherent in occupation. Few have shaped as intimate a metaphor as having an Israeli living through the air drawn through the lungs of a Palestinian killed by the Israeli military; few are willing to write that an Israeli lives through drawing breath from a Palestinian. Even fewer would have such a character look into the eyes of the father of him who gives her breath to live. However, this intimacy, the speaking of the child’s death, is broken when Mourid tries to explain to Tanya that his son’s lungs were transplanted inside of her, an idea that Tanya works hard to reject. Thus, Mourid explains to her the situation in detail: The donor organs had to be transplanted within six hours after being removed. While you were under general anesthesia, the surgeon made an incision across your chest, beneath the breast area and removed your lungs. Then the surgeon placed the new lungs into your empty chest cavity and connected the pulmonary artery of the new lungs into your vessels and airway. Drainage tubes were inserted to drain air, fluid and blood out of your chest for several days to allow the lungs to reexpand. With oxygen. Sweet, cold oxygen. And here you are, beautiful Tanya. (Beat) My son is inside you.18 Initially, Tanya responds to this story with outright denial, and, as Mourid continues to insist that it is Ahmed’s lungs inside Tanya, she turns to revulsion, spitting on him, and later telling him, “Had your son’s lungs been inside me, I am sure, absolutely sure, that I would have rejected them.”19 Finally, she attempts to disgust Mourid, declaring, “When I laugh, your son laughs. When I sing, your son sings . . . But that would also mean your son was present last night . . . I picked a stranger up after work. A sweet, eager young man. He fucked me so hard I thought he’d break me in half,” continuing on after Mourid tries to interrupt her, “Don’t worry. Things went smoothly. Your son gave me good air when I sucked cock. Good Jewish cock.”20 In this way, Tanya attempts to invert the intimacy expressed by Mourid, using the fact of Ahmed’s lungs not to show the closeness of their lives, but to try to sicken and repel Mourid. Just as the bullet from the Israeli soldier took the beauty of Ahmed’s life to try to stop Palestinian resistance, so too does Tanya try to use the beauty of the gift she was given to try to end Mourid’s words. In the end, though, just as the Israeli state has not been able to expel all the Palestinian bodies from its system, no matter how many have been killed, Tanya learns that she must also depend on Mourid to learn to breathe again after an asthma attack: [MOURID:] You must slow your breath down. Let it gather its force again. Like this. (Mourid breathes in a long, slow breath.) As though the air has become fluid and you are drinking it in. (Mourid breathes in again, demonstrating.) TANYA: I can’t. (Beat) I can’t. . . . TANYA: Mourid Kamal. Why do you want to help me? MOURID: Because you are. My son. (TANYA looks at Mourid. Mourid raises his head slightly; Tanya copies him. It is clear that he is leading this breathing lesson.)21 The remarkable aspect of the work is that Wallace understands at once the power dynamic in play in the Israeli occupation of Palestine,22 but, at the same time, that on either side of that dynamic are human beings intimately related to one another, at the most intrinsic of levels. Thus, while Tanya is dependent on Mourid in order to draw breaths, it is her choice—and for five years, she lived without any awareness of him. Mourid understands what is necessary for him and Tanya to live peacefully together, but Tanya alone is the one responsible for choosing to overcome her biases, to set her structured power aside, and to choose to allow Mourid to help her to breathe, to live.23 And until she chooses to risk her own self, she has no hope of healing herself. This sort of intimacy between the occupier and the occupied is at the heart of all the other visions within The Fever Chart. In “Retreating World,” an older piece from Wallace repackaged in the triptych, an Iraqi man delivers a monologue that weaves his love of books, his hobby of raising pigeons, and the devastation that war and sanctions—the play is set in 2000—have left behind in his nation. Thus, early on, his advice on raising pigeons dovetails into the state of Iraq after nearly a decade of sanctions: “Never name a pigeon after a member of your family or a dear friend. (Beat) For two reasons: pigeons have short lives—and when a pigeon named after an uncle dies, this can be disconcerting. And second: these times are dangerous for pigeons—they can be caught and eaten.”24 This style of mixing the intimacy of books and birds from his personal life, with the violence unleashed on an entire nation continues throughout the play, such as when Ali begins to speak of the Gulf War, saying, We hid in bunkers for most of those weeks. Cursing Saddam when our captain was out. Cursing the Brits and the Yanks the rest of the time. And I missed my birds. But birds were prohibited in the bunkers. Prohibited. Prohibited by the laws of nations as were the fuel-air explosive bombs, the napalm—Shhh!—the cluster and antipersonnel weapons. Prohibited, as were the BLU-82 bombs, a fifteen-thousand-pound device—Shut up!—capable of incinerating every living thing, flying or grounded, within hundreds of yards . . . And me, I missed my birds. The way they looked at me, their eyes little pieces of peace sailing my way.25 Similarly, after Ali eats part of one of his books, he declares, Books can also, in extreme times, be used as sustenance. But such eating makes for a parched throat. Many mornings I wake and I am thirsty. I turn on the taps but there is no running water. A once-modern city of three million people, with no running water for years now. The toilets are dry because we have no sanitation. Sewage pools in the street. When we wish to relieve ourselves, we squat beside the dogs. At night, we turn on the lights to read the books we have forgotten we have sold, but there is no electricity.26 [caption id="attachment_1127" align="alignnone" width="606"] Figure 2., Waleed Hamad as Ali in The Retreating World at the AUC. Courtesy of Frank Bradley.[/caption] What these passages reveal is how deep into the intimate corners of individual lives political and economic devastation can reach. The last section particularly underscores this idea, as Baghdad had once been one of the major centers of Middle Eastern arts and culture, with a remarkably high literacy rate, before the wars with the United States began.27 And though the sanctions regime and wars have weakened the Iraqi educational system, UNICEF still estimated total adult literacy between 2003 and 2008 at 74 percent.28 Thus, being forced to eat a book in a culture that values literature so much, and for a man who loves books so profoundly, becomes a stark marker of the degree to which Iraqi society, down to the most personal levels, had been undercut by the sanctions during the nineties. For Ali, the violence and devastation, and not the artifacts of a life he had once known, have become the normative structures. Perhaps this makes sense, as he continues to explain that when his unit of soldiers tried to surrender to the Americans in 1991, the U.S. unit fired an anti-tank missile at a single man, a friend of the narrator: “Out of hundreds, thousands in that week, a handful of us survived. I lived. Funny. That I am still here. The dead are dead. The living, we are the ghosts. We no longer say good-bye to one another. With the pencils we do not have we write our names so the future will know we were here. So that the past will know we are coming.”29 As Ali moves into the heart of his trauma, even the memories of the books and birds from better days disappear from his monologue, replaced only by violence and loss, by the devastation that has steadily pushed all other beauties out of his life, by the death of the man he had earlier described by saying, “If love is in pieces, then he was a piece of love.”30 A piece of love, turned to pieces of human devastation by the violence of war. Too often, discussions of war violence are separated from a direct understanding of what that violence entails. The number of bodies are given in an abstract frame, one that does not see the inability to feed or educate one’s children any longer, the inability to bring a glass of water to an ailing parent, the inability to walk down the road beside one’s lover, the inability to love. In “The Retreating World,” Wallace brings such personal details painfully close to her audience, staging the destruction brought by large weapons on the smallest, most private level. And the play also ends in a moment of intimacy, when Ali picks up a bucket and holds it up for the audience, declaring, “These are the bones of those who have died, from the avenue of palms, from the land of dates. I have come here to give them to you for safekeeping. (Beat) Catch them. If you can.”31 As he lifts the bucket out over the audience, they are not met with bones of dead Iraqis, but “hundreds of white feathers.”32 Thus, instead of fully horrifying an audience that helped construct Iraqi suffering, he, like Mourid, provides a gift of beauty, a moment to breathe and hope together, to know that the space between the lives of the oppressor and the oppressed is thinner than the space between feathers falling from the sky. And this also holds true in the third, and most dreamlike, vision in The Fever Chart, “A State of Innocence.” This final, though typically first performed, vision tells the story of an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian woman meeting in a zoo in Rafah, a city in the Gaza Strip, alongside the architect of the zoo. As with “Between This Breath and You,” “A State of Innocence” tells the story of a meeting between two intimately related people from either side of the Israeli occupation. And, once again, it begins with tension between the two parties, brought by their preconceptions of one another: YUVAL (Threatening): [ . . . ] Are you a terrorist? UM HISHAM (Playfully): Paletinorist. Terrestinian. Palerrorist. I was born in the country of Terrorist. I commit terrible acts of Palestinianism. I eat liberty from a bowl on the Wall. Fanatic. Security. Democracy. YUVAL: Don’t get playful with me. You want to throw me in the sea. UM HISHAM: I just might. But I can’t get to the sea. Seventeen and a half checkpoints keep me from it.33 [caption id="attachment_1126" align="alignnone" width="606"] Figure 3., Yuval (Ahmed Omar) crawling to Hisham (Amira Gabr) in A State of Innocence at the AUC. Courtesy of Frank Bradley.][/caption] Set in the middle of the Second Intifada, the play begins with the tension between the people on either side of the occupation, tensions that cause a young soldier to believe that even a middle-aged mother is a threat to him because she is Palestinian. However, the structure of occupied violence returns when Um Hisham explains to Yuval how she knows who he is, telling him that soldiers in his unit beat her husband because they could not find weapons in Um Hisham’s house. Yuval stopped the beating, and, to thank him, Um Hisham made him a cup of tea. However, as he put the cup of tea to his lips, a single bullet from a sniper pierced his head. When he dropped to his knees, he looked to Um Hisham and said, “Hold me,” which she did, telling him in the zoo, “Three minutes. It took you three minutes to die. Everything I have despised, for decades—the uniform, the power, the brutality, the inhumanity—and I held it in my arms. I held you, Yuval. (Beat) But it should have been your mother. We should hold our own children when they die.”34 Um Hisham continues to explain that because Yuval died in her house, the Israeli military bulldozed the house and arrested her husband, and that the zoo they are in is the one that lives on in their minds, where she can visit Yuval as she visits her daughter. This dream-like aspect was underscored in the Egyptian production, which used a minimalist set, with only a few stairs and wooden latticework behind the characters to emphasize the unreal world they were in, as well as the openness of the possibilities before them in such a space. In this way, “A State of Innocence” also explores the closeness between the occupier and the occupied, and how their lives, and deaths, are inextricably linked to one another and are even tied together after death. And, as with the other plays, it provides an image of the oppressed providing comfort to the oppressor, showing humanity in spite of the occupation; in this play, though, the Israeli soldier had also shown a moment of compassion to Um Hisham, a moment that would cost him his life, as crossing the borders of political divide, sadly, too often does. However, as Wallace writes, it is only in those moments of crossing, in the creative transgressions, in the most intimate forms of transnational community that a better world can be imagined, that that vision can exist, in the mind, on stage, or in life. The inverse of this is an idea that Wallace understands when she states, “What could be more intimate or personal than the fact that we get up in the morning, kiss our loved ones, go to work, come home, pay our taxes—and those taxes from our daily labor are used to kill you and you and you, and I never saw your face nor knew your name.”35 If the violence of occupation is formed from the product of our daily lives, the resistance to such violence needs to take an equally personal form. Unfortunately, writing such visions comes with its own cost as well. As Wallace has revealed about attempts to stage her collaborative work Twenty-One Positions, a Cartographic Dream of the Middle East, “before Lisa, Abed [the co-writers], and I had set foot in the Guthrie Theatre, the dramaturg there accused us of writing in a way that supported terrorism.” According to Wallace, “The conversation about Israel and Palestine is the most censored conversation in the U.S. today. And it’s not an easy conversation to have in Britain either.”36 Furthermore, The Jewish Chronicle, writing of the British production of The Fever Chart, ended with the note that “plays about this conflict have to deliver more than a depiction of mutual suffering.”37 And, as with the Guthrie’s decision to forego a production of Twenty-One Positions, most non-academic theaters avoid Wallace’s work, just as the American press largely chooses to ignore the few productions of her work that are mounted. However, it is not in the West alone that this conversation has met challenges. When The Fever Chart was first performed at the American University in Cairo, as Wallace and director Frank Bradley took the stage for the post-show QA, four of the actors in the play came to the front of the stage and rejected the play for, as they saw it, equating the oppressor with the oppressed and creating lives in a vacuum, finally stating “no coexistence without preceding existence.”38 Interestingly, the critical responses to the performance took a decidedly different tone. Joseph Fahim stated, “The four actors’ statement and the criticism Wallace was bombarded with reflects an intolerance for any work that portrays the ‘enemy’ in a non-barbaric light. The Israeli characters never appear sympathetic, and that’s one of the very few dramatic flaws of the play. Wallace doesn’t offer any kind of resolution, or ‘reconciliation,’ for her characters, which renders the actors’ statement all the more puzzling.”39 Meanwhile, Nehad Selaiha noted, “That some of the audience found it hard to swallow such a message is, perhaps, understandable and could be predicted. One wonders if there ever will come a time when such brave plays would be properly appreciated . . . They [Wallace, Bradley, and the AUC] gave me a taste of real political theatre as I understand it: challenging, disorienting and thought provoking.”40 It would also seem strange that, given the AUC’s upper-class demographic, the students did not have a problem with their university training the heirs to Egypt’s political and economic elite who remain complicit in the occupation. Ironically, though, equating the roles of occupier and occupied is how the one published Western critical response to Wallace’s play positions the work. In the article, “Enough! Women Playwrights Confront the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Amelia Howe Kritzer surveys female responses to Israeli occupation in the wake of the controversy over Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, and positions The Fever Chart as an alternative to “the tone of anger and impatience common to other plays about the conflict.”41 For Kritzer, the majority of plays about Palestine create a “pattern of emphasizing the viewpoint and experience of one side [that] limits their potential for bridging the deep divisions between Palestinians and Israelis,” while Wallace’s work “feature[s] a trio of characters, a choice that undermines the either/or pattern of the binary opposition between Palestinian and Israeli positions.”42 While I agree that Wallace’s work contains an uncommonly humanistic approach to the issue, assuming that Wallace does not take sides requires Kritzer to consistently erase Arab subject positions in her analysis. Thus, she does not note the disproportionate number of dead Palestinians versus dead Israelis, including two Palestinian children, in Wallace’s play, an imbalance that mirrors the actual occupation. Additionally, by focusing on Palestine and ignoring the Iraqi segment, Kritzer avoids Wallace’s implication of the structural and American-funded nature of violence and occupation in the Middle East, an erasure amplified by her consistent references to “conflict,” rather than the more accurate and specific terms “occupation,” “apartheid,” and “settler-colonialism.”43 Finally, she writes of British and American productions of Wallace’s work, ignoring that it played in Cairo before New York and ignoring the different resonances in the productions. In this way, she creates an argument for a “balanced” understanding of the “conflict” that obscures the reality of Wallace’s writing, how it has been performed, and Palestinian life under occupation. Instead of replicating similar rhetorical choices, The Fever Chart always maintains a clear structure of understanding the difference between occupier and occupied, while, at the same time, showing the intimate connections between human beings on either side of that line. True, this may be hard for many to view, but, at the same time, it is impossible to end oppressive political and economic structures without understanding that the ideological failures that create them are human. Just as suffering should not be disembodied, neither should the structures that create oppression. They are equally human, and must be understood as such. And this humanity must be understood in dialogues that move across borders both ideologically and physically. At one point in “Between This Breath and You,” Mourid tells Tanya, “Did you know, Tanya—may I call you Tanya?—that wind has no sound? What makes the sound are the things it touches—branch, cliff, roof. All that rushing is the contact between one thing and another. Without that meeting point between two worlds, the harshest wind is silent.”44 So too are abstract forms of political resistance, those that do not understand the intimate details of the lives they mean to help, equally voiceless. True, in the contact that creates voice, there is friction, and there are moments of tension. However, in the silencings of the Guthrie, of state and public censorship, of those who would not see those whom they oppose (or, in some cases, support) as human, there is also no chance for progress, for a better means of living together. It is only when transnational humanism risks the pain of intimacy and the burns of friction that it will have a voice, a hope, and a possibility for a better world. ------------ George Potter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Valparaiso University. His research focuses on visual culture and national narratives in Jordan. A United States Fulbright grant and a Taft Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Cincinnati funded his study of theater about the “war on terror” in Cairo, London, and New York. His research and translations have appeared in a number of journals and edited collections, including Arizona Quarterly and Proteus: A Journal of Ideas ------------ [1] Kia Corthron, et. al., “On the Road to Palestine,” American Theatre (July/August 2003), 31. [2] Ibid. [3] Ibid., 71. [4] Ibid. [5] Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds., Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2. [6] Qtd. in James M. Harding and John Rouse, eds., Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundation of Avant-Garde Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 31. [7] Ezra and Rowden, Transnational Cinema, 2. [8] Harding and Rouse, Not the Other Avant-Garde, 15. [9] Marvin Carlson, “Avant Garde Drama in the Middle East,” in ibid., 125-44. [10]Yan Haiping. “Other Transnationals: An Introductory Essay,” Modern Drama 48, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 226. [11] Stephen Moss, “The Container’s Captive Audience,” The Guardian 7 July 2009. [12] Sara L. Warner, “Suzan-Lori Parks’s Drama of Disinternment: A Transnational Exploration of Venus,” Theatre Journal 60, no. 2 (May 2008):181. [13] Jerry Wasserman, “Bombing (on) the Border: Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil as Transnational Agitprop,” Modern Drama 51, no.1 (Spring 2008): 126-44. [14] Naomi Wallace, “On Writing as Transgression,” American Theatre (January 2008), 100. [15] Qtd. in Nehad Selaiha. “Politics Centre-Stage,” Al-Ahram Weekly (20 Mar. 2008), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/889/cu2.htm (accessed 5 May 2010). [16] Naomi Wallace, The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East (New York: TCG, 2009), 37. [17] Ibid. [18] Ibid., 45. [19] Ibid., 46. [20] Ibid., 50. [21] Ibid., 52-3. [22] A brief and accessible overview of the conditions in occupied Palestine can be found in the film Occupation 101 (Dir. Omeish, Abdallah, and Sufyan Omeish, DVD, YouTube, and Vimeo). [23] Similarly, Ali Abunimah has noted that economic exploitation was built into the Oslo process, which allows Israel to control Palestinian imports and exports and divert development into international industrial zones that export the profit. See Ali Abunimah, “Economic Exploitation of Palestinians Flourishes under Occupation,” Al-Jazeera English 13 September 2012, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/20129128052624254.html, (accessed 8 February 2014). [24] Wallace, Fever, 58. [25] Ibid., 61. [26] Ibid., 64. [27] “In 1989, school enrollment in Iraq was higher than the average rate for all developing countries.” (PBS. “Iraq—Truth and Lies in Baghdad. Facts and Stats,” Frontline World (November 2002), http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq/facts.html, (accessed 3 September 2010). [28] Ibid. [29] Wallace, Fever, 66. [30] Ibid., 62. [31] Ibid., 67. [32] Ibid., 68. [33] Ibid., 9. [34] Ibid., 23. [35] Wallace, “On Writing,” 102. [36] The production would eventually be staged at Fordham University, instead of the Guthrie. Qtd. in Claire MacDonald, “Intimate Histories,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Arts 28, no. 3 (2006): 100. [37] John Nathan. “Review: The Fever Chart,” Rev., The Fever Chart, 18 March 2010, The Jewish Chronicle Online, http://www.thejc.com/arts/theatre-reviews/29596/review-the-fever-chart, (accessed 5 May 2010). [38] Frank Bradley, dir. The Fever Chart, writ. Naomi Wallace, perf. Falaki Theatre, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, 17 March 2008, Undistributed DVD. Also Personal Interview, 26 October 2008. [39] Joseph Fahim, “Visions of War, Loss and Humanity,” The Daily News Egypt (17 March 2008), http://www.dailystaregypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=12524 (accessed 5 May 2010). [40] Selaiha, “Politics Centre-Stage.” [41] Amelia Howe Kritzer, “Enough! Women Playwrights Confront the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Theatre Journal 62, no. 4 (December 2010): 624. [42] Ibid. [43] Part 2, Article 7, of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2002) defines apartheid as inhumane acts of a character similar to crimes against humanity “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Even a cursory knowledge of the Israeli occupation would make clear that this is a more appropriate term than “conflict,” which implies a balanced struggle. See “Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” United Nations, 2002, http://legal.un.org/icc/statute/romefra.htm (accessed 7 August 2013). [44] Wallace, Fever, 34. ----------- The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014) Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Guest Editor: Cheryl Black (University of Missouri) With the ATDS Editorial Board: Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University) Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg Circulation Manager: Janet Werther Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue The Border that Beckons and Mocks: Conrad, Failure, and Irony in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Brothers Size Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF The Brothers Size By Tarell Alvin McCraney Co-Directed by Tarell Alvin McCraney and Bijan Sheibani The Shed (Co-Produced with the Geffen Playhouse) New York, NY September 6, 2025 Reviewed by Isaiah Matthew Wooden In the nearly two decades since Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size debuted Off-Broadway as a part of the third Under the Radar Festival, the evocative three-hander has garnered considerable praise for its trenchant, poetic dramatization of some of the lasting questions shaping the lives and relationships of Black men in the United States. Audiences and critics alike have found much to admire in McCraney’s shrewd fusion of ancient tales drawn from Yoruba cosmology with given circumstances and dramaturgical devices of his own making that invite reflection on such themes as brotherhood, masculinity, vulnerability, love, and freedom. No doubt adding to the play’s appeal are the rich opportunities it affords the actors portraying its central trio—Ogun Size; his younger brother, Oshoosi Size; and Oshoosi’s close friend and former cellmate, Elegba—to flex an extraordinary range of performance muscles. The play’s return to New York City in 2025 in a co-production by The Shed and the Geffen Playhouse reaffirmed its status as one of the most compelling and resonant dramas to spotlight and interrogate the intricacies of the inner lives and social worlds of Black men. Co-Directed by Bijan Sheibani and McCraney, and featuring three actors who have achieved notoriety for their stage and screen work, André Holland (Ogun Size), Alani iLongwe (Oshoosi Size), and Malcolm Mays (Elegba), this revival was remarkably elegant in its simplicity, relying mostly on the physical and vocal agility of its performers to bring expressive clarity to the details of their respective characters’ at once mythic and mundane journeys. The integration of live music by Munir Zakee and choreography by Juel D. Lane enhanced the overall rhythm of the performance while also reinforcing the sense of call-and-response that McCraney’s striking incorporation of spoken stage directions aims to evoke. Suzu Sakai’s spare set design, which was anchored by an improvised circle marked out with a white, chalk-like substance in a clear nod to the symbolic spaces central to various syncretic spiritual traditions of the African diaspora, further bolstered the production’s invitation to audience members to embrace their roles as co-creators of the storytelling. This necessarily created space for some of the play’s more distinct features, including its setting in a fictional town in the Deep South at some point in the “distant present,” to accrue fresh significance, while also allowing Holland, iLongwe, and Mays to embody their characters with incredible specificity and vitality. André Holland (Ogun Size). The Brothers Size , The Shed, New York, August 30-September 28, 2025. Photo: Marc J. Franklin. Courtesy The Shed. Given Holland’s longstanding connection to The Brothers Size and to McCraney’s work more broadly—he played Elegba in the 2009 staging of the play co-produced by The Public Theater and the McCarter Theatre Center, and also starred in the McCraney-penned films Moonlight (2016) and High Flying Bird (2019)—it was especially moving to witness the layered complexity he brought to his portrayal of the elder Size brother. While Oshoosi often admonishes Ogun for moving through life with unnecessary hardness, Holland was deliberate about endowing the character with charm and tenderness. His insistence on surfacing the character’s multidimensionality made moments like his recollection of the suffering endured by his former lover, Oya, or his account of always getting blamed for Oshoosi’s troubled behavior during their youth, reverberate long after the action had shifted focus elsewhere. The sensitivity of Holland’s performance came into sharpest focus in what remains one of The Brothers Sizes’s most touching and restorative scenes. When Oshoosi yet again finds himself teetering on the brink of captivity by a criminal legal system that views all young Black male life as fungible, the elder Size brother commands that his sibling flee their distressed hometown as soon and as fast as possible. The boom and quake in Holland’s voice as Ogun vowed to deny his younger brother up to three times when the Law came looking for him, deepened the emotional intensity of the duo’s final embrace and, in so doing, further distinguished Holland as one of the most dynamic interpreters of McCraney’s sublime language. iLongwe and Mays likewise proved adept at surfacing the idiosyncrasies and subtleties of McCraney’s dramaturgy. The tremendous energy and vigor of iLongwe’s Oshoosi served to punctuate how the character’s relentless yearnings to make freedom mean something often complicated his everyday life. Indeed, while Oshoosi’s articulated aims to acquire a car and find a woman registered as pretty straightforward, at least at first blush, iLongwe’s nimble portrayal called attention to the ways they were symptomatic of his much larger aspirations to imagine and enact possibilities unencumbered by carceral and other oppressive logics. This accounted for the powerful hold that Mays’s spry and clever Elegba seemed to maintain over Oshoosi’s life. Much like the orisha of the same name, Elegba often appears at key moments of decision-making in the play, reminding Oshoosi of the beauty and power inherent in choices. Mays’s portrayal of Elegba as simultaneously sweet and crafty amplified his allure for Oshoosi while shedding light on why Ogun remained so deeply suspicious of the pair’s friendship. Malcolm Mays (Elegba), Alani iLongwe (Oshoosi Size), and André Holland (Ogun Size). The Brothers Size , The Shed, New York, August 30 – September 28, 2025. Photo: Marc J. Franklin. Courtesy The Shed. The minor script revisions McCraney made for the production underscored the crucial role that love—familial, platonic, erotic, and otherwise—can play in sustaining the bonds between Black men. These updates, paired with McCraney and Sheibani’s sleek staging, Adam Honoré’s subdued lighting, and Dede Ayite’s practical costumes, not only sharpened the overall storytelling but also accentuated the play’s enduring emotional and thematic resonances. Simultaneously and significantly, they enabled the production to make a persuasive case for why The Brothers Size ’s stirring explorations of Black men’s interiorities and vulnerabilities marks it as a singular and transformative work of twenty-first-century theatre. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ISAIAH MATTHEW WOODEN is a scholar-artist, writer, and Associate Professor and Chair of Theater at Swarthmore College. He is the author of  Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture  (2025) and co-editor of  August Wilson in Context  (2025),  Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration  (2020), and “Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now,” a special section of  Theatre History Studies  (2024). Additionally, he served as the volume editor for the Methuen student edition of  A Raisin in the Sun  by Lorraine Hansberry (2025). Wooden’s articles and essays on contemporary art, drama, and performance have appeared in numerous scholarly and popular publications. As a director and dramaturg, he has collaborated on projects in venues ranging from the Uganda National Theatre to the Kennedy Center, including works by Lorraine Hansberry, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Lynn Nottage, and Robert O’Hara. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jared Strange Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Jared Strange By Published on May 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF For most Americans, the mere mention of “the DMV” summons nightmares of bureaucratic deadlock. For residents of the DC-Maryland-Virginia metropolitan area such as myself, it means something like home—though living a few Metro stops away from the seat of the federal government means deadlock is never far from mind. Apart from residing in the shadow of the Capitol, our DMV is characterized by a curiously disconnected sense of place. For my part, much of that has to do with the University of Maryland, my institutional home in a DC pseudo-suburb otherwise known for housing the local IKEA. Some of it has to do with the peculiarities of the District, which has outgrown its exclusively federal designation and stubbornly progressed through stages of self-rule, though not to the point where it is always clear who is in charge. As in most places, the pandemic affected this DMV in unique ways, and as in most places, theatre artists responded in turn. One of the signature issues artists faced was how to meet people where they are—a troublesome prospect in the DMV even before the advent of the pandemic. In the autumn of 2019, a group of artists came together at the urging of playwrights Jennifer Barclay and Tim J. Lord to address that challenge by leveraging the area’s significant but disparate new play development faculties. The new collective, later to be known as District Dramatists, gathered under auspicious signs at the REACH, a sparkling new space at the Kennedy Center. Optimism ran high, though the challenge of serving artists through decentralized leadership without overburdening volunteers quickly proved an obstacle. The arrival of lockdown, coupled with the furlough of our Kennedy Center advocates, brought that obstacle into especially stark relief, and ended our experiment prematurely. The dissolution of District Dramatists foreshadowed aspects of new play development, and our very artform itself, that would demand consideration over the coming years: the dynamics of space in the time of social distancing and the material needs of artists in a time of social reckoning. Unsurprisingly, the opportunities and limitations of digital space were a significant factor in navigating the first two years of the pandemic. The University of Maryland became a trailblazer in this regard when it transitioned an in-person production of Qui Nguyen’s D&D-centric play She Kills Monsters to the Zoom room under the guidance of media specialist and digital champion Jared Mezzocchi and co-director Lisa Nathans. The move quickly established and tested the rules of Zoom theatre. Over time, many artists adopted similar models, producing everything from daring new works such as FakeFriends’ Circle Jerk to small companies such as Theatre in Quarantine. The DMV also became a hive for new play development programming that sought to recreate the rehearsal space in the Zoom room, often with mixed results. In my own developmental work with Rorschach Theatre Company and UMD’s Fearless New Play Festival, I found myself contending with both the actual expectations of the Zoom rehearsal space and the imagined expectations of the “real” rehearsal space. Crucially, the shift online did suggest positive adaptations for “post-COVID” development, which has so far included making readings on Zoom, solely or in a hybrid format, something like the norm, and allowing artists to participate in initial developmental work from afar. To what degree these accessible arrangements will become standard remains to be seen. While online spaces should continue to bolster new play development through mixed modes of production, other projects speak to the enduring power of the physical. After having its original season stymied, Rorschach Theatre Company, under the leadership of co-artistic directors Randy Baker and Jenny McConnell Frederick, joined with associate artists to develop an immersive, site-specific, mail-in project titled Psychogeographies . Now in its third iteration, Psychogeographies tells epic stories of science-fiction and fantasy through boxes of letters and artifacts mailed out to subscribers monthly. Subscribers are then invited to explore the contents of each box at a corresponding location in the DMV. Each story beat draws inspiration from the location, evoking both its geographical particulars and the power dynamics that have shaped and reshaped that geography over time. The story concludes with a live, immersive performance at a venue in DC, echoing Rorschach’s long-running commitment to exploring the way space informs narrative and experience. While criss-crossing the DMV via bike, train, and car for the project’s second installment, Chemical Exile , I became especially mindful of how embracing location as the primary connective thread of a narrative resonates both with the histories of each site and the renewed appreciation for public spaces that emerged during the early days of the pandemic, when there was hardly anywhere else to go. It helped that Chemical Exile , co-developed with associate artists Kylos Brannon, Doug Robinson, Shayla Roland, and Jonelle Walker, centered on a scientist who returns to the United States to find her material world an eerie mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The resulting sense of disorientation chimed with my efforts to grasp the region’s unique terrain and refined my attention to the ways many residents—particularly Black residents, like the play’s heroine—have had to grapple with the forces of gentrification transforming their homes into places that are strange and even hostile. As I alluded in my review of the piece for Washington City Paper , one of the challenges of “bingeing” Chemical Exile in one day—which, to be very clear, is not what Rorschach recommends—is that it made my transition from a self-driven, exploratory process into a delimited immersive performance especially jarring. Even in a space as beautifully rendered by Rorschach’s cadre of set designers (Nadir Bey, Sarah Beth Hall, and Grace Trudeau), I found myself longing for the freedom to explore the tension between the real world and the play’s world on my own. Thankfully, even as the District returns to something like the old “normal,” Baker and Frederick remain committed to producing new iterations of the project and introducing new audiences to the area’s psychogeography. For all the technological innovations and spatial rearrangements that the pandemic has forced new playmakers to adopt, one of the most significant pushes has been to empower audience members and theatre-makers who are often excluded from the head table. For my part, that push is most evident in education. When the pandemic set in, my chief side-gig at The National Theatre in DC shifted online, leading to an expansive website project aimed at documenting the institution’s history, a significant portion of which has been taken up by hosting pre-Broadway tryouts for future classics such as Fiddler on the Roof and M. Butterfly , and integrating them with DC-area high school curricula. More significant, however, was my time as a teaching artist with Young Playwrights’ Theater, an organization that specializes in in-school and after-school playwriting classes for students of all ages, including adults. One of my assignments was at Chelsea School, a small campus stuffed into a commercial building near the Mall at Prince George’s Plaza in Hyattsville, Maryland. The school specializes in helping students with language and learning difficulties, many of whom benefit from a suite of Google tools that include screen-readers and other language-processing technologies. In recognition of their needs, Young Playwrights’ Theater brought me on with license to riff on their usual curricula alongside my Chelsea co-teacher, who just so happened to be the school’s director. I initially took my freedom to experiment as an exciting opportunity to decenter the individual writing in our course and adopt something closer to a devised or writers’ room model. Instead of beginning with Freytag’s pyramid, I urged the students to build worlds based on the stories that moved them, taking note of everything from themes to characters to settings. Instead of drafting dialogue, I encouraged them to fill a Google Slides document with notes, images, ideas, or anything that would evoke what their collective imagination conjured. I wanted to prove that they already knew what made a good story and that we could create one of our own if we worked together. The actual writing would come later in the form of individual monologues set in the world of their design. As it happened, the plan for what we would produce changed over the course of the semester to eventually become a play that was conceived by the group, drafted by me, and presented semi-privately in the classroom. Nearly all those changes were programmatically driven; for example, the initial plan to rotate in new groups was discarded, meaning I effectively had to extend my curriculum by half a semester. Even with that shift in mind, progress was slow-going and sometimes frustrating, though that had more to do with larger issues than with the students. The two groups, one made up of middle-school girls and one of the high-school boys, were like any random sample of teenagers: active and engaged somedays, moody and distant others; some of them eager to bring the text to their feet, others petrified of making a fool of themselves. It was only later that I learned their teachers had brought me and a litany of other arts partners into their classrooms because the effects of pandemic pivots, staff departures, and the usual pressures of adolescent life had simply worn everybody out. My role as a teaching artist had less to do with generating new scripts or even helping the students advance their language facilities (a task I was not suited for on my own) and more to do with helping them release some of the steam that had built up during the past two years of their young lives spent tossing and turning on the waves of unrest. What I had treated as a pedagogical sandbox was really a chance to engage with one of the core values of storytelling: imagining other worlds that help us handle this one. Bearing that in mind, I think we can be happy with the results, even if I still came away with a long list of things to try differently next time. For example, I would take greater initiative to educate myself about pedagogical approaches suited to the environment, rather than referring solely to my already over-worked co-teacher. I also would not be so quick to shove the building blocks of dramatic action and character development to the back; if anything, understanding that a story depends much more on what a character does than what they say could be especially helpful to students for whom language is often a barrier. While my experience at Chelsea was immensely informative, it was also a prime reminder that meeting people where they are often has less to do with “producing” art than connecting with someone else’s reality. In that sense, it highlighted all the ways in which space can, and should, shape new play development. The screen-reading technology that helps some students process text is like the Zoom technology that kept professional read-throughs together: it’s a way to help bridge the gap of access and expand the reach of our room. Chelsea itself, shunted into an office floor above a clinic and a gym, illustrates how young people who are already on the fringes can be pushed even further from the center by physical and institutional architecture. My very presence, summoned by an exhausted administration’s cry for help, proves that no matter the method, what so often dictates the development of new stories is what the participants bring with them. Art does not arise out of a vacuum: it arises out of human beings meeting each other where they are. For all the ways that our new technologies and our old streets have changed new play development, that fact is effectively the same. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JARED STRANGE , Ph.D., MFA, is the Education Programs Manager at The National Theatre, as well as a writer, dramaturg, educator, and scholar based in Washington, DC. His scholarship and reviews can be found in Theatre Research International , Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , Comparative Drama , Theatre Journal , American Theatre magazine, 3Views on Theater , Washington City Paper , and DC Theater Arts . His plays have been workshopped and produced at the MeetFactory in Prague, DC Source Festival, Rorschach Theatre Company, WildWind Performance Lab, Bath Fringe Festival, Dayton Playhouse FutureFest, and the William Inge Theatre Festival. As a dramaturg, Jared specializes in new play development, audience engagement, and education. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh By Sonali Pahwa Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF Adam Ashraf Elsayigh. On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh By Sonali Pahwa Sonali Pahwa: I proposed to interview you as part of this series to highlight the diasporic expansion of theatre about Egypt and by Egyptians since 2011. Unlike so many Egyptian artists who went into exile after the counter-revolution and return of military rule, I believe you have a longer diasporic history? Adam Ashraf Elsayigh: Yes, I wanted to offer an initial disclaimer when you reached out to me about being part of an Egyptian playwright series because, as you know, I grew up in Dubai. Egypt is a host of contradictions to me. I moved to Dubai as a toddler really, and only came back to Egypt as a teenager, which happened to coincide with the most tumultuous years, 2011-2014. I always felt a dual identity as someone raised in a hyper-American milieu. My parents are very Egyptian, and we spoke Arabic at home, but also when I moved to the US for graduate school, I realized I fit in here more than anywhere else I’d been before. I contend with this duality when I write plays about Egypt. I’ve always had a Western influence and felt cognizant that I told stories of my version of Egypt, which is a fairly upper middle-class one. I don’t think most Egyptians would see their version of their homeland reflected in it. For a long time, I felt a certain shame around that, but I’ve come to own it as a lens over time. This is my version of Egypt. However, the audience for my theatre is not primarily Egyptian. SP: Many Egyptian friends of mine are now in diaspora and have different versions of Egypt based on when they left and under what circumstances. But they are still in community with other Egyptians, through social media, the written word, or performance. This is why I wonder if the Egyptian diaspora has become the key site of cultural production about Egypt. Elsayigh: That makes sense to me. Still, when my New York dramaturg friend Salma Zohdi reached out about getting the rights to make a play about (imprisoned Egyptian revolutionary) Alaa Abdel Fattah my first impulse was to say no. I had been a 13-year-old in the Cairo suburbs, and I was not active in the protests in 2011. In fact, my form of rebellion was to tell my parents that I didn’t care about politics even though we were living through a revolution. I thought I was not the person to tell Alaa’s story. Salma was a bit older during the revolution and was very active in the streets, besides being friends with Alaa’s family, and she had a different perspective. She said I could see what needed to be centered and explained for an American audience. “You have an understanding of that world and can see it through a Western perspective,” she said, “and that has value.” That conversation was a little over a year ago. In the meantime, we got the rights to work on Alaa: A Family Trilogy and began to develop its world. We did interviews with folks who were in Egypt during the revolution, some who were politically active and some who were not. Some are now in diaspora or spent time in prison. Having all these conversations and different levels of access, while thinking about my positionality with respect to the people I interviewed, has made it incredibly gratifying to write the story. Now I am more comfortable being part of an Egyptian playwright series than I would have been a year or two ago. SP: That brings me to the question of how you use theatre as a means of place-making and spatial representation. Your first play, Drowning in Cairo , gave me such a vivid sense of Cairo when I knew it. I first went to live there months after the Queen Boat incident in 2001, around which this play is built. How do you construct worlds in your theatre? Elsayigh: I had never really seen the kind of queer Egyptian world that Drowning in Cairo depicts. My parents would speak about social class and gender in very specific ways - their thoughts on this or that neighborhood, what we can say in front of people, what is haram or ‘eib. Being surrounded by that helped me depict homophobic society not as an obvious antagonist, but a nuanced world that fractures and triangulates with the queer world. The throuple at the play’s center (Moody, Khalid, and Taha) themselves embody that triangulation. Each of them is a composite of types I knew, with social class being a key element of each type. Moody and Khalid are upper class men, and Taha is the upwardly mobile son of a domestic worker, but also often their friend and lover. I’ve never seen an Egyptian play or television show that wasn’t primarily melodrama, where people actually sound like they do in life. In writing Drowning , I was interested in how naturalistic theatre could get at a deeper truth about class and gender in this society particularly with respect to the spaces we do not talk about. I think the play is also an attempt at an epic that wants to capture modern Egypt. But I don’t think it quite lands on that front. Most of the theatre I create is a historical counter-narrative. I’m interested in people reading my plays and thinking, “I didn’t know this lens or story existed” as opposed to the current state narrative which hegemonically wants to be the only one that gets to tell the story of modern Egypt. SP: I have been to my share of Egyptian theatre, and you are right that social class is rarely staged in its natural complexity. Class conflict is often metaphorical and reconciled in a happy ending in plays. What do you think naturalistic theatre can show about social class that is so hard to talk about? Elsayigh: When I first moved to the US, I was struck by how people do not talk about social class. Of course, that doesn’t mean they aren’t thinking about it, or that it doesn’t exist. In cities like New York or San Francisco, you have public transit and literally rub shoulders with people, but otherwise I feel like it’s easy to live in a bubble. Where I grew up in Dubai, class is racialized and that is a whole other thing. But Cairo is not like that. Many middle- and upper-middle-class people live in buildings where someone living in the basement picks up their trash. You know their kids, or if there is a death in their family. I remember playing with our maid’s kids on visits to Egypt every summer. Till, around when I was 7, my dad told us we shouldn’t do that anymore. That class education probably happened more subtly or organically for kids who grew up in Cairo continuously, but it had to be explicitly coded for me as someone who was always somewhat on the outside. I always found it fascinating how these spaces blurred. I don’t know how to dramatize someone who is working class and remains within that identity in an Egyptian context, and I’d seen Egyptian soaps do it badly enough times that I knew I didn't want to do the same. That said, I did want to write about class, and how it intersects with queerness, in Egypt. As a teenager in Egypt, I befriended a number of gay men who’d grown up fairly working class and yet had ambitions of upward mobility (which was more possible in the past than now, both in Egypt and the US). I think that’s not untethered from their queerness. And I was interested in that kind of character and how language is part of their class identity. The reception to Drowning in Cairo in the US, particularly pertaining to this issue of class, has been somewhat preposterous. Audiences have asked me or talked about the character of Taha - the maid’s son who becomes the two other men’s friend and confidante - as if servants are entirely foreign to this culture. But middle-class Americans do have babysitters and other caretakers! And I do think this speaks to how Americans often create a layer of alienation between themselves and work depicting words outside the United States; even though I do believe the worlds I depict are not indifferent from the worlds I inhabit here in the United States. I do think audiences who create that layer of alienation often miss the point. SP: Indeed. Arab theatre in the US is so often predicated on national exchange – Algerian or Palestinian troupes performing at the Kennedy Center – that diasporic theatre can be difficult to categorize. Elsayigh: There was a time I tried to mold myself into “an Arab artist” - just not one who lives there. That crystallized for me when I moved to New York as an international student and it became evident this place was home. I quickly started to feel the city was home after moving to New York as an international student, so I’m conscious of not having the same positionality as a visiting artist. But I also am not second-generation; I don’t relate to Egyptian Americans. I have an immigrant sensibility; more likely to relate to a Peruvian who immigrated at the age of 18 than an Arab American born here. SP: Diaspora really is its own cultural category. Are you familiar with earlier generations of diasporic Egyptians who wrote in English, like Ahdaf Soueif, or Waguih Ghali who wrote Beer in the Snooker Club ? Elsayigh: Ahdaf Soueif is actually one of the three protagonists of Alaa: A Family Trilogy [she is Alaa’s aunt]. I don’t know about Waguih Ghali. SP: They headline a small but significant genre of Egyptian literature in English. English lets writers do certain things, and dramatic characters too. You have a scene in Drowning in Cairo where the three characters are in jail after a party on the Queen Boat is raided by police, and they speak in English because they don’t want others to understand them. As someone who also grew up bilingual, I am curious about how English lets you and your characters navigate class lines. Elsayigh: There have been many drafts of Drowning in Cairo with different proportions of Arabic and English. I wrote the first draft naturalistically - meaning as I think the scene would have actually happened - and it came out to 50-50 Arabic and English. To be clear, I write the Arabic in Franco-Arab script because I am an embarrassment! Eventually, I wrote a 100% Arabic variant; and another that’s 95% English for American audiences. But never a 100% one. There will never be a fully English one. I refuse. When it gets published, I think it will be the 95% English draft where you can comfortably dispense with supertitles and not be disrupted by the Arabic. You will follow the story and you’ll be fine. That was when I first moved here. I first wrote that 95% English draft very reluctantly because theatre institutions told me a play that’s 30% in Arabic (or rather, not in English) wouldn’t not have a life in the US. It infuriated me. German theatres program non-German language plays with subtitles all the time. But my opinions on dramatic language have dramatically changed over time. I’m more open to making things as easy as possible for American audiences; because they are primed to “other” people, to look for the things that separate them from the character. There’s an impulse to dehumanize… and I try to not give it a chance in my work. My upcoming trilogy about the family of political activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, for instance, is entirely in contemporary American English. I think it’s essential because it’s a political epic with so many layers of alienation already. We don’t need language to be another layer. SP: One reason I interpreted for the use of English in Drowning in Cairo was that it offers a language of queerness outside the derogatory terms for gay men in Egyptian Arabic. Your characters mention those terms but end up calling themselves gay or bisexual in English. Elsayigh: The language of Drowning in Cairo is actually on the more family-friendly side for my plays. When you get to plays that have more intimacy or are more graphic, there are no words that don’t feel derogatory for certain things in the Arabic language. Obviously that itself can be a source of drama; that question of how to create a localized vernacular in a queer community. And there’s, of course, the critique that it gets Westernized and that that’s a form of imperialism. But resisting can be hard when it’s the default, or only, language you have. SP: I feel like in theatre you can do a kind of partial translation, where your characters speak in mixed language and talk about navigating language while they are doing so themselves. Elsayigh: I enjoy when there are no supertitles and audiences accept that certain things will just wash over them. It’s incredibly liberating. Sometimes you are in a country where you don’t speak the language, but you want to go to the theatre anyway. You know you are only going to get what you get. You figure some things out and get an experience that’s unique to you. SP: I wanted to talk about the dramatization of masculinity in Drowning in Cairo . You have some very interesting characters who struggle with the version of masculinity they have inherited, like the police general’s son Khalid. He is gay and hates his father, but ends up as a police general too. What cinematic and theatrical canons do you draw upon when you write about masculinity? Elsayigh: I never think about my gender performance today. But growing up in Egypt, the concept of masculinity was a force that was so constant and so explicit. Even in middle school, boys would talk about how to look and act; or conversations about posture and what posture is “concerning” (read: effeminate). I did grow up with an idea of masculinity as something you have to perform correctly . It really does feel like a form of drag, or a very wild bit that we've all just agreed to keep doing. The character Khalid (in Drowning ) comes out of that. There is a silly Egyptian soap opera Al-Kabeer, with Ahmed Mekki, that stages masculinity through twin boys who were separated at birth. One stayed with his father in an Egyptian village and the other grows up in the US with his American mother. I don’t think it’s what they meant to make, but it’s a campy satire of a femme gay man and a hypermasculine one next to each other. Obviously, no one talks about it in those terms, but it is deeply about masculinity. SP: So much canonical Egyptian drama is written by male playwrights who do not discuss masculinity explicitly in their work. I often found that women writers were more reflexive about gender performance. Elsayigh: The obsession with masculinity is alive as ever. This is more performance studies than theatre, but the performance of masculinity is more pronounced than ever in today’s Egypt, given the police, or rather, military state. I am in online groups where some days, the moderators will notify people to delete gay dating apps from their phone because police are stopping men downtown! I mean, they literally stop you, look at you and what you are wearing and decide on that basis to look through your phone! SP: Can I now ask you about your script in progress about activist Alaa Abdel Fattah? Elsayigh: Alaa: A Family Trilogy is still a first draft, but yes, of course. The trilogy was commissioned by Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco, which also did the world premiere of Drowning in Cairo , directed by Sahar Assaf. My friend who brilliantly dramaturged that production, Salma Zohdi, came to us with the idea, and the connection with Alaa’s family. The play would not have happened without them. It's a complex play: lots of interviews, hundreds of hours of writing. This piece combines me dramatizing an Egyptian political story with my practice in verbatim theatre and theatre of the real, which have always been passions of mine but distinct from playwriting. This play is documentary but not verbatim – I wanted the liberty of imagining scenes and mixing it with a memory play. These parts of my practice have been quite distinct, so I brought them together with some trepidation. But it's paid off. I think it's truly the closest I've ever come to the ethos I explicated earlier: theatre as counter-history. Salma has been part of this journey and process from day one, building the story and conducting interviews. Working with her and Sahar has been a dream. People say American theatre is a playwright’s theatre, but I do better in collaborative settings. I love co-writing things! SP: What appealed to you about this idea for a play when Salma brought it to you? Elsayigh: I think I have a complicated relationship to what it means to be political and Egyptian, and being political in relation to being Egyptian. My family was the type who were very much with the revolution when it was happening but went back to business as usual when it wasn’t. I’ve always thought that there’s a play there, and that I’d one day interview them about that moment of shift; how they went from being out in the streets every day to reverting to being pro-regime so suddenly. From a character perspective, it’s wild to me. I was writing Drowning in Cairo when the Mashrou’ Leila concert happened in Cairo where Sara Hegazi held the rainbow flag and queer people were arrested. I thought it was absurd that my little student play written at NYU Abu Dhabi could get me into any kind of trouble, but somehow it became political. When I mentioned the play on my website six months after graduating college… I won’t get into details but let’s just say it caught the wrong eyes. It turns out, one can be a national threat in a Bushwick sublet on a student visa… There has always been the question of where I get the authority to be political. I am told that I speak from privilege because I don't live in Egypt. "You're not here, why does any of this matter to you?" Which is funny because when I am in Egypt, I'm told I can't talk openly there. Okay, then who can? It seems like the answer is no one, which is the point. So when this play came to me, my first reaction was a sense of inadequacy. My first thought was that I am not the person to write it. All I knew about Alaa was that he is an activist who rose to prominence in the revolution and comes from a family of dissidents and is now imprisoned; and that his father (Ahmed Seif) was a lawyer for the Queen Boat accused. As I delved deeper into Alaa's story, especially his hundred-day hunger strike, I just... struggled to think how to depict such an act... and the rationale behind it, in a context where it feels like all hope feels futile. The futility of fighting against what felt like an inevitable and discouraging system made me ask myself, why we are undertaking this endeavor in the first place? SP: I guess because you have the space to do it? You might not feel a clear authority to tell the story, but you do have the space. Elsayigh: But the question is: What does it mean to have hope when there's no reason to have hope? Why is anyone doing this when you're dealing with a military regime that won’t respond to anything? The White House won’t issue a statement either. But you still want to do something. Once I spoke to Alaa’s family and heard their stories, I started to get the answer, and it became obvious that I had to write it. SP: For many Egyptian friends of my generation, which is older than yours, Alaa has been an enduring symbol of political activism who represents a continuity to the struggle for rights. While others have been silenced and jailed, he has maintained a public voice even from prison. Elsayigh: Yes, it is important to note that Alaa is not the only activist doing things – other people are active. But they are being actively silenced. So Alaa’s existence is itself a counter-history. When I first came to the play, I thought it would be a prison drama with him at the center. I was incredibly inspired by plays that came out of military resurgences in Argentina and South Africa, like the documentary theatre of Yael Farber. The first few interviews we did were with people who had been in prison with him or around the same time. Then I met Alaa’s mother (Laila Soueif), his sister, Mona, and his aunt, Ahdaf Soueif, and decided the play was really about the legacy and lineage of that family. Because the answer to my question was there. SP: How interesting that you have given the counter-history a differently gendered focus. Of course, this family has a well-known history of activism, but the women are not always at the center of its public historical narrative. Elsayigh: One criticism (and self-criticism) I have had for a lot of my pieces is that they are often only about men. With this play, I was conscious I don’t have a direct line to Alaa - I have never spoken to him and, unfortunately, don’t know if I ever will. But I did hear and witness the stories and stories of these three women from his life. Even though these women have been dissidents since the 1970s, and been incarcerated, the men get jailed for longer because of the public perception of men versus women’s incarceration in a patriarchal society. Many of the crimes for which Alaa was sentenced were because he went to the street to take care of Mona, or Mona was hunger striking first. But the public narrative doesn’t care. From the women in his family, there is also a sense that Alaa is experiencing things that they have not. The women may not be at the center of the public historical narrative but, in this case, they are very much at the heart of the counter-narrative. The play’s director, who is Peruvian, said that by virtue of them having this positionality, the women also have the onus of being generational storytellers who pass down memories. I get chills just thinking about some of the stories they have told me. Laila told me, for instance, that she and [Ahmed] Seif decided to conceive Mona when he was about to go to jail because they wanted to ensure the family line would be continued. That story is now at the start of the play. SP: I am curious about how this play might fashion an audience of its own, which includes those of us who care deeply about Egypt but do not live there at present. I’m also interested in how Golden Thread Productions, the director, and you as the playwright, conceive of the potential audience of the play as not just diasporic but transnational. Elsayigh: I think Alaa would hate to be spoken of as a phenomenon, but he is a transnational phenomenon. I was fascinated that during COP27 in Egypt last year, there was a campaign where celebrities like Emma Thompson and Mark Ruffalo read pieces of his writing from his 2021 anthology, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. There are so many political prisoners under dictatorships across the world, and years ago, I did wonder about the extent of his reach. I do feel in some ways both grateful for and humbled by my work being in proximity to, or a part of, that cause. But it does say a lot about a story’s singular power to create counter-history and for social change. Salma, the dramaturg, came to Columbia to study theatre in 2013 after the coup. She said that all her friends who worked in the NGO field were worried that there would be no story of the 2011 revolution. Just a few months in, they were already forgetting what happened the previous month because there was a constant stream of new protests and new violations by the regime. Mona tweeted 150 times a day so there would be an archive to go back to, but now most people have deleted their tweets or made their Twitter accounts private out of fear. There is no public archive. In Egyptian schools, children are taught that the 2011 revolution was a success and brought Sisi to power. Counter-history sounds like a lofty idea, but history is literally being erased every day in Egypt. Al-Ahram’s news articles about Alaa have been deleted from their archive, for instance. There is a small international intelligentsia who know about Alaa and tweet #FreeAlaa whenever there is a UN summit. But I hope the average person will learn more about him as a result of this play, and there will be a broader base of people who bear witness to the life of his family. There are families like this in many parts of the world, so audiences may sense proximity and hear resonances with their own lives. SP: I also hope the play enters curricula on transnational political theatre in the US. We teach plays by Griselda Gambaro and Yael Farber, but Egyptian drama is less well known. Elsayigh: I do want the story to be as global as possible. The director is from Peru and knows what a military dictatorship is like. She can also relate to the story of criminal justice. Alaa: A Family Trilogy has an ensemble cast of 10. If it ends up being two Black people and a South Asian person and two Latino people, that's great. None of us is Alaa, but we are all performing on his behalf. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Sonali Pahwa, University Of Minnesota My ethnographic research on stage, street, and digital performance focuses on youth culture in the Arab world. My first book Theatres of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt (Northwestern University Press, 2020) examined the cultural politics of identity in Egyptian underground theatre , before and after 2011. A second project on digital performance began with articles on Egyptian bloggers who talked about self, sexuality, and revolutionary politics, a Saudi beauty YouTuber, and an Egyptian hijab influencer on Instagram. I studied the algorithmic, technological, and bodily strategies they used to assemble signature embodiments, developing a methodological toolkit for performance ethnography on digital platforms. My current research centers on digital entrepreneurs in Dubai - including those marketed as icons of modern Emirati identity and others who embody third-culture cosmopolitanism in an immigrant-majority nation. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson | Nehad Selaiha chronicles the rise of the Free Theatre Movement in Egypt in the late 1980s. < 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 Selected Essays: New Directions Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson Download PDF In this book, Nehad Selaiha (1945-2017), a distinguished scholar and prominent critic, chronicles the rise of the Free Theatre Movement in Egypt in the late 1980s and traces its stormy course and many battles as well as the artistic development of the young independent troupes and artists who have made it a reality against great odds. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Elliot Lee Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Dead Outlaw Elliot Lee By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Left to right: Thom Sesma, Andrew Durand, Dashiell Eaves. Photo: Matthew Murphy. Dead Outlaw By David Yazbek, Eric Della Penna, and Itamar Moses Directed by David Cromer The Audible Theater New York, NY April 13, 2024 Reviewed by Elliot Lee The first song in Dead Outlaw, a new musical by David Yazbek, Eric Della Penna, and Itamar Moses, prepares its audience to make peace with the inevitable: “Your mama’s dead / Your daddy’s dead / Your brother’s dead / And so are you,” the singers wail. “Balzac is dead / Tupac is dead / Anne Frank is dead / And so are you!” Directed by David Cromer at the Audible Theater, the musical recounts the life of nineteenth-century outlaw Elmer McCurdy, narrated through gritty country rock played by an onstage band. Halfway through the musical, McCurdy dies. The rest of the show traces his afterlife, from the coroner’s office to the discovery of his shriveled, orange spray-painted remains among the décor of a defunct rollercoaster ride. In the first half of the play, Andrew Durand gallivanted around an ever-shifting wooden frame, evocative of a barn strewn with fairy lights. As the titular outlaw, Durand executed impressive feats of vocal and physical prowess, climbing, pushing, and hanging upside down from various parts of the frame while singing. After his character’s death, Durand spent the rest of the show standing stock-still, carted around in an uncovered coffin as other characters sold and mistreated his dead body. The story transforms from an outlaw tale into an unsettling exposé of how entertainment immortalizes, profits, and desecrates memory. On Audible Theater’s stage, Dead Outlaw ’s message about exploiting the dead became a self-referential jab at the popularity of biographical musicals on and off Broadway. Biographical musicals take inspiration from historical figures, tracing a life from childhood until death. Dead Outlaw falls into this genre but takes it one step further into McCurdy’s afterlife. However, while biographical musicals tend to be linear, Dead Outlaw is more experimental in structure. In form, it is a concept musical, a genre stitching together songs driven by theme and character. Specifically, Dead Outlaw ’s vignettes are tied together by McCurdy’s physical body, initially offering snapshots from his life, and later, depicting the various people and places his corpse encounters. At the Audible Theater, the absurdity of these vignettes brought the audience into a more self-conscious relationship with McCurdy, transforming him from a character into a symbol. Dead Outlaw ’s concept musical form allowed it to subvert expectations of the biographical musical as well as (metatheatrically) question commercial theatre’s obsession with dead people’s lives. Dead Outlaw thus exposed the exploitative nature inherent in a genre that profits from history. “Now I’m an entrepreneur . . . Death is a business to me!” While other biographical musicals pick and choose from scattered life events to create a palatable narrative, Dead Outlaw does not build McCurdy up as a hero or a villain. Instead, the production made McCurdy realistically mediocre, in personality and in outlaw work. In the character’s short life, Cromer created equally arresting vignettes of magic and despondency. In one moment, McCurdy twirled his first love under glittering fairy lights. In the next scene, drums echoed the familiar rhythms of McCurdy downing drinks at the bar. Not only was McCurdy abrasive, racist, and flighty, but he also proved to be an incompetent outlaw in Cromer’s well-timed comedic sequences. In one sequence, McCurdy and an army friend hatched a plan to steal from townsfolk, only to be arrested before committing a single crime. In another, McCurdy sang a stirring number about robbing a train carrying a royalty payment to the Osage nation, only to end up on the wrong train. Dead Outlaw also critiques a theme often at the heart of the biographical musical genre: legacy (one famous example is Hamilton ’s titular character, obsessed with the legacy of his political work to the point of neglecting his familial responsibilities). As an ambitious young man, McCurdy is no exception, but Dead Outlaw ’s story extends beyond his life to show the disturbing consequences of legacy through the ordeals of his corpse. After cycling through various professions in a Pippin -esque pursuit of purpose, McCurdy finally achieves fame upon dying. When nobody retrieved his corpse, the coroners displayed him as an attraction, singing, “See the dead outlaw! ... Something from nothing at all!” Crowds spin McCurdy’s deeds into grand tales of cowboy daring in show-stopping ensemble numbers, admiring him as a relic of a bygone West. Once on display, McCurdy’s body mummified in the heat of the coroner’s office, staged through a sequence in which Durand contorted inside his coffin. Exploited, sold, and paraded around the stage in pastiches of sideshow grit and glamour, McCurdy’s corpse was passed from owner to owner. Lastly, rotting away as a beachside attraction, staff wired shut McCurdy’s jaw, silencing Durand for the remaining half hour of the show. Dead Outlaw tells the story of McCurdy getting the legacy he wanted and the grim consequences of being remembered forever. This message was most effective when stark shifts in design and impressive physical acting allowed the show’s dark irony to give way to a total confrontation with the abject. For example, when McCurdy’s mummy was forgotten in a storage facility, Durand stood in an entirely dark theatre for an uncomfortable minute of total silence. Sitting with Durand in the darkness elicited both uncomfortable laughter and sobbing from the audience. These moments served as a reminder of the cadaverous quality that could elude any living, breathing portrayal: decay, evoking both repulsion and recognition. Through these moments of theatricalized abjection, McCurdy’s corpse physicalized the desecration of memory. The production turned the horrific implications of legacy into something tangible and vile. Dead Outlaw ’s concept musical form allowed it not simply to criticize its own genre, but also its audience. Concept musicals can use the affective delight of song and dance against the audience before implicating them in their uncritical enjoyment of the material. As audiences clapped along to country rock, they realized too late that the musical in front of them was the latest in McCurdy’s tortures. By encouraging musical biographies to be retold, the audience became complicit in keeping McCurdy’s legacy alive. Dead Outlaw thus makes itself the biographical musical to end biographical musicals. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ELLIOT LEE (he/him) is pursuing his M.F.A. in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama. He holds a B.A. in English from Princeton University. His work focuses on experimental musical theater and portrayals of violence in performance. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Benjamin Gillespie 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 Scene Partners Benjamin Gillespie By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Eric Berryman, Kristen Sieh, Carmen M. Herlihy, and Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners. Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre Scene Partners By John J. Caswell, Jr. Directed by Rachel Chavkin Vineyard Theatre New York, NY November 8, 2023 Reviewed by Benjamin Gillespie Scene Partners , written by playwright John J. Caswell, Jr. (author of the critically acclaimed play Wet Brain ), is a non-linear exploration of memory and trauma that riffs on both the hopes and fears of its aging protagonist, Meryl Kowalski. Developed during the COVID-19 pandemic (while Caswell was in residence at the Vineyard Theatre), and directed by Rachel Chavkin, the play centers on the journey of 75-year-old Meryl, who attempts to become a Hollywood movie star as a septuagenarian—an unlikely feat considering the movie industry’s notoriously ageist reputation, especially toward older actresses. Over the course of the play, Meryl travels from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, finds an agent, and ends up in the starring role of a movie about her own life. Embodied by a (then) 75-year-old Dianne Wiest, actress and character are the same age, significant for a play that, in many ways, is about the resilience of aging. Wiest brought a wisdom and strength to the role that helped to center a purposefully fragmented, though often perplexing, production which celebrated the possibility of an artistic third act for its determined heroine. Meryl’s backstory is told piecemeal to set up the play’s present tense in 1985. Meryl was born around 1910 in Los Angeles. At a young age, her parents separated, and she lived with her insensitive mother who relocated them to Wisconsin, where her mother then remarried. As we come to find out, Meryl’s stepfather repeatedly raped her as a child, but neither her mother nor stepsister, Charlize (played as an adult by Johanna Day), acknowledged this pattern of sexual abuse. Around 1930, Meryl married another abuser named Stanley Kowalski (“I know what you’re thinking” Meryl says. “I have no idea who’s responsible for feeding the details of my life to Mr. Williams for his little play! But my Stanley, he was so much worse, in every possible way”). Her ungrateful daughter, Flora (played by Kristen Sieh), is a drug addict dependent on her mother’s support to survive. The play begins just after the death of her husband (“that motherfucker!” she exclaims), at which point Meryl has had enough and decides to head west to become a Hollywood film star. But this is only the backstory, with the action of the play taking place in the present tense of 1985, but also (at least partially) in Meryl’s imagination. Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners . Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre. The play presents the often painful, albeit revelatory, journey of a woman trying to process a lifetime of hardship in order to discover herself for the first time after spending three quarters of her life in abusive relationships. The fragmented reality of her mind (and consequently, the play) often leaves audiences with more questions than answers. But in a way, this is the point. The poetic, dream-like world of Scene Partners is contrasted by the harsh realism of Meryl’s life; anchored by the strength and tenacity of its aging central character, played expertly be Wiest, Meryl is akin to the great female roles of Tennessee Williams (who, as mentioned above, is directly evoked in the play several times). Deciding whether what’s happening in front of us is “real” or not misses the point: the focus here is rather for audiences to see Meryl telling her own story in the way that she (finally) wants and gets to tell it. But memory is a funny thing, and Meryl’s is as fragmented as it comes, not only blocking out experiences of trauma but also facing an unnamed neurological disorder that suggests she is losing cerebral control. “Is this like a memory play?” asks one of her acting classmates who Meryl recruits to act in her life story. “Do you want realism or should it be more like whoa! ?” “All of the above” answers her director/acting teacher. “It’s a work in progress” Meryl replies. Work in progress is an apt description for the play and production as it often loses its footing in between worlds, sometimes taking on the air of a rehearsal. But this does not detract too much from the beauty of Wiest’s performance or the stylish and dynamic staging by Chavkin, supported by a superb design team. The fragmentation of the play was emphasized through the innovative scenic and video designs by Riccardo Hernández and David Bengali, respectively, who utilized shifting screens and projections to illustrate the fluidity of Meryl’s memories. The use of large, moving screens not only bifurcated scenes but also served as a visual metaphor for Meryl’s fragmented, layered remembrances. However, while visually striking, this design choice occasionally created navigational challenges for the actors: on the night I saw the performance, one moving screen ran into Wiest mid-scene, though the seasoned stage actress hardly flinched and kept going without missing a beat. Eric Berryman, Kristen Sieh, Carmen M. Herlihy , and Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners . Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre. Scene Partners seems to be a memory play, but not a traditional one: the world is split between “real” (or perhaps more appropriately live ) performance sequences along with pre-filmed screen performances. Sections of the play are created with projected films on the large screens that shift in and out of frame to represent different environments on Meryl’s journey. In fact, the production opened with an enormous projection of Wiest’s face on screen introducing herself, reassuring audiences, “This is exactly how it happened!” But we are never sure if the play is supposed to be perceived as being composed in the present tense, or if this is a more traditional memory play. “My life starts now!” she says. And perhaps it is through Meryl’s newfound artistic license that we should understand it all. The facial projection of Meryl shifts to black as words populated the screen with character names, like a script being written in real time, which is then read in voiceover as changes and corrections happened “live” in front of us. A sudden crash brings the lights up on Weist as Meryl descending from the heavens in a white chair before getting stuck in what seems like a chairlift (from where, no one knows) so that Wiest’s body could only be seen from the waist down. Stuck halfway between a dream and reality, in hindsight, this signaled where we would remain for the entire play. We later find out this process of getting stuck is a recurring dream Meryl has that she is performing for the film, but perhaps also dreaming. Half the fun of Scene Partners is putting together who is really there and who is only imagined by Meryl. In fact, the generic title of the play is a reference to metatheatrical roleplay, as we never fully understand when characters are just roles inside Meryl’s head or if they are actually there. The audience’s collective logic is often challenged when characters appear and disappear at pivotal moments in the production—is that really her sister in the interview scene or a figment of Meryl’s imagination?—not dissimilar to Florian Zeller’s award-winning play The Father . One thing is sure: Meryl is hellbent on being a great actress, but the trauma of sexual and physical abuse from the men in her past haunts her throughout the play. Again, Scene Partners is highly metatheatrical, beginning with Meryl’s first entrance, reminiscent of Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days (a role Wiest played at Theatre for a New Audience in 2017). This initial scene sets the tone for a production that constantly questions the boundaries between reality and fiction. The play-within-a-play and film-within-a-play structure allows for a complex narrative that keeps the audience questioning what is real and what is imagined throughout. Indeed, Caswell’s directive in the script that “people and things should seem to suddenly materialize and vanish” adds to this sense of disorientation and surrealism. Determined to tell her story on her own terms, Meryl faces ageism and skepticism on her journey to Hollywood from those around her. She is told by all (including her daughter and would-be agent) that she will only play old women in stereotypical roles. “I have been acting all my life. It’s time to get paid for it!” she replies. “There’s a market for durability. I’ll play a queen! Those roles are mine!” After receiving a suggestion to improve on her acting from her agent, Meryl enrolls in acting classes where her teacher “discovers” her and decides to help her develop a series of monologues that will be the basis for her life story in a series of films, each representing a different decade in her life. “I’m a maximalist at heart!” she says, which could also be a mantra for the expressionistic approach to Caswell’s writing, which created mixed reactions from viewers. Scene Partners is a compelling exploration of a woman’s struggle to reclaim her own narrative and identity against the backdrop of Hollywood’s unforgiving landscape, and society more broadly. A rich and multi-layered theatrical experience, the play is a significant contribution to contemporary theatre focusing on age and aging outside of the typical narratives of decline we see so often in mainstream culture. While the production was, at times, a little wayward, Wiest’s portrayal of Meryl was both poignant and powerful, capturing the character’s complexity and depth, her humor and kindness, but also her confusion and sadness. Her interactions with other characters, including her abusive deceased husband Stanley (who keeps returning in Meryl’s nightmares) and her over-the-top acting teacher-cum-director, highlight the various challenges she faces with unwavering resolve. Performance Review: Scene Partners © 2024 by Benjamin Gillespie is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International References Footnotes About The Author(s) Benjamin Gillespie (PhD) is Doctoral Lecturer in Communication, Gender Studies, and Theatre at Baruch College, City University of New York. His essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review , and a wide range of scholarly anthologies. He is currently editing two volumes: Split Britches: Fifty Years On and Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging , both to be published by the University of Michigan Press. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction 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.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 16 Fall 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil By Kari Barclay Published: November 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil. Edited by Chris White. London: Methuen Drama, 2022; pp. 280 + xvi. This collection features six plays by the Palestinian-Irish writer Hannah Khalil, framed with supporting material by editor Chris White and Khalil herself. The plays, Plan D, Scenes from 76* Years, A Negotiation, A Museum in Baghdad, Last of the Pearl Fishers, and Hakawatis , experiment with forms ranging from naturalistic drama to solo performance to kaleidoscopic vignettes to a radio play. One of a few collections of Arab diasporic drama by a single author, the book shows the playwright’s range and how her work has shifted based on changing contexts. Alongside recent collections of plays by Mona Mansour, Heather Raffo, and Yussef El Guindi, Hannah Khalil adds a thematically rich and carefully crafted contribution to an emerging canon of published works by MENA playwrights. Chris White’s introduction situates each of Khalil’s plays in the context of Khalil’s biography and frames her work as intersectional feminist interventions, presenting “women telling stories the way they want to, ‘free as birds’” (xvi). A forward by actor and producer Alia Alzougbi similarly connects Khalil’s work with matrilineal storytelling traditions across generations of Arab women. Indeed, Khalil’s work often present Arab women protagonists trying to navigate the specifically gendered dimensions of colonization, warfare, and sexual violence and to survive through storytelling. Khalil herself adds intros and outros to every play in the collection, revealing how she developed each play and how responses to one production often led to the next. The book’s first play, Plan D, depicts a family of farmers fleeing violence when military bombardment leaves a crater on their land. The title alludes to Plan Dalet, the Zionist military campaign of 1948 that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and killed numerous others leading up to the founding of the state of Israel, but Khalil avoids temporal or geographic landmarks. Instead, she is deliberately “non-specific” and lets the play resonate with various audience experiences (4). As Khalil emphasizes, the play’s first production at London’s Tristan Bates Theatre led audience members, both Palestinians and others, to confide in her their stories of war and displacement. These stories emerging from Plan D led directly to Khalil’s next play, Scenes from 76* Years. This series of interwoven vignettes depicts—among other scenes—women defiantly picnicking in front of IDF soldiers, a man returning to see his pre-Nakba home and discover its new settler inhabitant, and an Israeli activist teenager telling her family about her decision to reject university and join in Palestinian struggle. Khalil fragments these stories, and some of the most poignant scenes are wordless stage pictures of Palestinians waiting at checkpoints. Past and present collide, as Palestinian life continues in stops and starts. The title’s “years” reference the time elapsed since 1948, and its asterisk indicates that artists should update its title to reflect the ongoing count of years passed since the Nakba. The next two plays in the collection, A Negotiation and A Museum in Baghdad, are companion pieces reflecting on museums and colonial plunder. The first is a short solo play about an Iraqi English woman who comes face-to-face with the Mask of Warka, one of the earliest representations of the human face, in the British Museum. As she experiences wonder and gratitude that Britain has kept it “safe,” her father feels sorrow that his daughter overlooks its expropriation. The daughter starts to wonder if she, like the mask, has been removed from her Iraqi context. With its focus and scale, the play is one of the strongest in the collection and uses one person’s encounter to unpack conflicting interpretations of “ tarath ” [sic]—heritage (122). A Museum in Baghdad continues this reflection by focusing on two figures—Gertrude Bell, a real-life British archaeologist involved in founding the Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in 1926, and Ghalia Hussein, a fictional Iraqi archeologist trying to reopen the museum in 2006 following looting during the Iraq War. Co-commissioned by the Royal Lyceum Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, the play imaginatively collides timescales. Despite its high-stakes context, the play often leaves its characters’ tough decisions up to the flip of a coin tossed by Abu Zemen, a kind of Father Time figure. Although sometimes caught up in its ideas, the play spotlights women trying to preserve heritage as regimes rise and fall “through the hubris and mismanagement of men” (170). In Last of the Pearl Fishers, Khalil effectively uses the radio play format, which serves her writing style of quick jumps across space and time. Commissioned by BBC 4, this radio play is set in a community of wealthy ex-pats in Dubai, where Khalil grew up. The play follows Lillian, a white-collar English housewife, as she searches for her Filipina maid Celeste, who has disappeared without a trace. Khalil creates similar whodunnit structure to that found in Susan Glaspell’s 1916 classic Trifles, as gendered objects reveal clues to the mystery. However, instead of merely highlighting gendered solidarity, the play exposes Lillian’s inability to understand Celeste’s position. Through Lillian’s search, we witness the inequities of migrant labor in the UAE and the legal structures that uphold them. The final play, Hakawatis: The Women of the Arabian Nights, is a playful subversion of 1001 Nights. Leaving Scheherazade and King Shahryar offstage, the play imagines the king’s other would-be wives awaiting their execution and spinning stories to help Scheherazade hold Shahryar off. The play’s title refers to the Arab tradition of oral storytelling, and here women continue that tradition as a part of their survival. With stories ranging from dark to uproarious, Hakawatis is excellent, and it self-referentially comments on theater as a space of hope for women to build community, escape violence, and fight for their communities. Demonstrating range in form and content as well as insights from the playwright, Hannah Khalil: Plays of Arabic Heritage offers a beautifully intimate reading experience where one gets glimpses into a playwright’s journey and her artistic decision-making. Foregrounding stories about Palestine in Plan D and Scenes from 76* Years, the collection offers much-needed representation to complement anthologies such as Stories Under Occupation and Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora . Meanwhile, Khalil’s work models coalitional thinking with other struggles in the Arab world and depicts women, like Khalil herself, trying to navigate injustice with humor, care, and a belief in power of artistic imagination. The book will be of great service to scholars and artists interested in Khalil’s work, Palestinian and MENA diasporic drama, and plays that use history to explore our unwieldy present. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Kari Barclay (they/them) is a writer, director, and researcher who serves as Assistant Professor of Theater at Oberlin College. Their scholarship on theater, sexuality, and politics has been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, among other journals. Their book Directing Desire, out from Palgrave Macmillan in 2023, charts the history and politics of intimacy choreography and consent in contemporary U.S. theater. kari-barclay.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 An Interview with the Iraqi-born British playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak by Hadeel Abelhameed Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi Performance Review: The Tutor Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. Review: PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Alfred Farag, Gamal Maqsoud, Lenin El-Ramly, Marvin Carlson | Contains the first English translation of short plays by leading Egyptian playwrights. < 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 Contemporary Theatre in Egypt Alfred Farag, Gamal Maqsoud, Lenin El-Ramly, Marvin Carlson Download PDF Edited by Marvin Carlson This volume includes the proceedings of a symposium on this subject, held at the CUNY Graduate Center in February of 1999, along with the first English translations of three short plays by leading Egyptian playwrights who spoke at the symposium: Alfred Farag’s The Last Walk (1998); Gamal Maqsoud’s The Absent One (1968); and Lenin El-Ramly’s The Nightmare (1999). This volume also contains a bibliography of English translations and secondary articles on the theatre in Egypt from 1955 to 1999. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Jenna Gerdsen Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Jenna Gerdsen By Published on May 23, 2022 Download Article as PDF When I left Hawaiʻi for college on the continent, I was in for quite a shock. As a mixed Asian woman born and raised in Hawaiʻi, I was used to being a part of a dominant majority. When I arrived in Washington, I lost the comforts that came with being a part of a majority and was eager to find an Asian community. I hesitantly joined the Asian American Student Association. Though I had never identified as Asian American, I assumed the group could replicate some of the comforts of home. Yet I did not feel at ease. I felt distant from the other students. My Hawaiian Pidgin and love for Hawaiian plate lunches set me apart. When someone suggested I check out the Hawaiʻi Club, I began to realize that Asianness looked and sounded differently outside of Hawaiʻi. I share this personal anecdote to illustrate that stories have triggered discussions around categorical schemas, representation, and historical fissures between Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. In The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University, Mark Chiang asserts Blu’s Hanging, the controversial novel by popular Japanese writer Lois-Ann Yamanaka, challenged fundamental assumptions of Asian American Studies and demanded new theorizations of Asian American cultural politics. [1] At the 1998 Association for Asian American Studies conference, Yamanaka received a fiction award, but a motion to revoke the award was initiated due her stereotypical depictions of Filipinos. The novel demonstrated the dominance of East Asians in Hawaiʻi and the prevalence of an ethnic hierarchy. In Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi, Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura assert that East Asians of Hawaiʻi often use “Local,” the pan-ethnic label unique to Hawaiʻi, to build a Pan-Asian nationhood and obscure Native Hawaiian history. [2] In less dramatic fashion, plays by Asian and Hawaiian playwrights of Hawaiʻi have reignited the urgency to reconceptualize Asian Americanness. Eager to assimilate in the continent, I turned to Esther Kim Lee’s A History of Asian American Theatre . Before reading her work, I assumed that theatre of Hawaiʻi would be a part of her study. I learned that merging theatre of Hawaiʻi with Asian American theatre comes with complications, just like my attempts to blend in at student gatherings. Lee made the strategic decision to limit her foundational study to the continent. She stated, In my view the inclusion of Hawaiʻi would necessitate a shift in the paradigm of Asian American theatre history, and the nature of this shift would hinge on whether Asian American theatre is considered as part of the larger Asian diaspora of theatre. Indeed, as Josephine Lee points out, the inclusion of Hawaiʻi in Asian American theatre history would “illuminate the fault lines” in how we, as theatre historians, have imagined Asian American culture. [3] Just as I was surprised that Esther Kim Lee’s study on Asian American theatre excluded theatre of Hawaiʻi, undergraduate students are often disappointed when Asian American theatre classes do not include Pacific Islander theatre. For instructors of Asian American theatre, the question becomes how to represent equitably both Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders without making them a monolith. Pedagogy should follow the recommendations of scholars such as J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Lisa Kahaleole Hall who argue that the label “Asian American Pacific Islander” privileges the experiences of Asian Americans over Pacific Islanders. [4] Despite its use in social justice conversations, “inclusion” in this context is an act of settler colonialism. The absorption of the Hawaiian Islands within the US empire and Americanist scholarship has obscured the identities, cultures, and histories of the various peoples of Hawaiʻi. Due to the illegal overthrow of Queen Lili’uokalani that led to the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands in 1898, Hawaiʻi has long been associated with the United States, been regarded as a strategic military base, and been a profitable appendage to the empire. The Hawaiian Islands have also been an appendage in a scholastic context. Information regarding theatre in Hawaiʻi has historically been included within Asian American theatre. The inclusion of theatre of Hawaiʻi in Asian American theatre demonstrates that the United States has played a large role in how we have come to understand Asianness. In the early 1960s, the label and genre “Asian American” were created as a way to assert that Asians have been essential members of the United States and replace the problematic descriptor of “Oriental,” which reduced Asians to foreign objects. [5] While many Asians of the continent were determined to demonstrate a sense of belonging in the United States, other Asians in Hawaiʻi were determined to demonstrate a sense of alienation from the United States. Plays written by Asians from Hawaiʻi that explore the realities of living in Hawaiʻi should be separate from but in conversation with Asian American theatre. My work is a direct response to Lee, and is also informed by the dissertations of Hawaiʻi-based scholars and theatre practitioners Tammy Haili’ōpua Baker, Sammie Choy, and Stefani Overman-Tsai that call for theatre of Hawaiʻi to be recognized as its own form and examined outside of an Asian Americanist lens. [6] I interviewed Asian and Hawaiian theatre artists and educators born and raised in Hawaiʻi to determine why theatre of Hawaiʻi should be studied separately from Asian American theatre. I concluded that it is debatable whether Hawaiʻi can be considered a part of the larger Asian diaspora considering its indigenous history and cross-racial alliances developed on sugarcane and pineapple plantations. I assert that dramatic literature of Hawaiʻi, particularly the work of Hawaiian-Samoan playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, makes these fissures visible and audible. Her large body of work dramatizes interracial alliances and conflicts of Hawaiʻi. This essay features an excerpt of an interview I conducted with Kneubuhl on July 22, 2019. Our conversation about her work and its categorization demonstrates that the foundations and future of Asian American theatre rest on and are guided by understanding the nuances of Asian and Pacific Islander identities. I use my conversation with Kneubuhl to claim that it is possible and necessary to separate Asian American and Pacific Islander dramaturgies while still keeping them in conversation. Because some of Kneubuhl’s work has represented both Hawaiians and Asian settlers and their alliances and conflicts, her work has been categorized under several labels, including Asian American theatre and Pacific Islander theatre. In our conversation, Kneubuhl revealed that she embraces all of the labels assigned to her work because that allows her to more accurately characterize individual plays. Kneubuhl’s body of work resists exclusive characterization because each play’s themes, setting, and characters vary greatly. With Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in both Hawaiian culture studies and theatre, Kneubuhl bridges Hawai‘i state archives, community theatre, and the Hawaiian Renaissance movement. Kneubuhl’s work has been locally, nationally, and internationally recognized. She won the Hawai‘i Award for Literature, and her plays have been commissioned and performed in Hawai‘i, the continental United States, Asia, and Britain. When Kneubuhl emerged as one of Hawai‘i’s representative playwrights during the 1980s and 90s, she was one of the only Native Hawaiian playwrights active in Hawai‘i’s theatre scene. Today, she continues to represent Native Hawaiians and produces work that teaches Hawaiian history and celebrates Hawaiian culture from a Hawaiian perspective and advocates for Hawaiian sovereignty. Kneubuhl has been a major contributor to the repertoire of Kumu Kahua Theatre, the institutional home of Local theatre. The genre demonstrates how those who identify as Locals, a wide umbrella term unique to Hawai‘i that includes Native Hawaiians and other ethnic immigrant groups who descended from sugarcane and pineapple plantation workers, regard themselves vis-à-vis Hawai‘i’s plantations. Her work is informed and inspired by both the Hawaiian Renaissance movement and the plurality of Local culture. Inspired by those in the Hawaiian community who were reclaiming and reviving Hawaiian culture during the early 1970s, several of Kneubuhl’s plays retell Hawaiian women’s history through a contemporary, retrospective lens. Kneubuhl’s highly regarded historical pageant play January 1893 replays the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and allowed the Honolulu community to revisit a pivotal moment in Hawai‘i’s history. Written, produced, directed, and sponsored by Hawaiian activists and artists, January 1893 represented the mission of the Hawaiian Renaissance to revive Hawaiian history and culture on a state and national level. The play debuted in 1993 to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the overthrow. Staged as an elaborate parade, January 1893 is still considered to be one of the most theatrically ambitious nonprofessional productions ever staged in Hawai‘i. January 1893 was performed on and around the grounds of ‘Iolani Palace, the home of the Hawaiian monarchy and the site of Lili’uokalani’s house arrest after the overthrow. As an anniversary event, the production exemplified all that remained after the annexation: ignorance and amnesia around the event, a pan-ethnic solidarity between Hawaiians and other ethnic groups in Hawai‘i, and a desire to reinstall a sovereign Hawaiian monarchy. The production reinforced the bonds between Hawaiians and other ethnic groups formed during the early days of Hawai‘i’s plantations, and rallied people in support of Hawaiian sovereignty. The play is an act of redress that fortifies Hawai‘i’s history as a legitimate, sovereign nation and challenges hegemonic interpretations of Hawai‘i’s history that characterize US imperialism as a positive force that shaped Hawai‘i into a utopic multicultural paradise. [7] Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl was one of the very first people I interviewed. Her words guided my research and offer tremendous insight for instructors and students who are eager to engage with both Asian American and Pacific Islander theatre. JG: How did you find your way to theatre? VNK: The Hawaiian Renaissance. At the time people were really interested in Hawaiian history and culture. We were attracted to the theatre because it allowed us to express who we are and where we came from in different ways. When hula and all kinds of traditional Hawaiian practices made a huge comeback, there were better plays and bigger audiences. Theatre, performance, history, and the street all came together for me. In the ’80s I participated in and wrote some of the early living history theatre in Honolulu. Now that performance type has really taken off in Hawai‘i. There’s all kinds of places and groups that are doing living histories now. When we started, a lot of academic historians were frowning on what we were doing. But the truth was that living history got people interested in Hawaiian history, in their personal history. People in Hawaiʻi need to be more aware of the colonial history. I don’t think enough people know. JG : Can you tell me about your involvement with Kumu Kahua Theatre? VNK: . I was in the right place at the right time. Kumu Kahua was new and I was new. They were hungry for scripts. I invested myself in Kumu Kahua because I really wanted to produce things that were written locally. Kumu Kahua didn’t always produce Local theatre because there just weren’t enough scripts. Sometimes they did Asian American plays that were written by Asian people who aren’t from Hawaiʻi. I was invested in a kind of theatre that was by and for the Local community and didn’t reflect the larger American theatre, popular theatre scene. I was hungry for things that reflected who I am and where I came from. I am still supportive of and invested in giving voice to our island stories or things that are relevant to our island communities. Now, there’s a whole bunch of young people and a much larger community that is invested in Local theatre. Other theatres are now just starting to do productions that have Local themes and are looking for really good locally written plays. There’s so many more people interested in our theatre. It is really rewarding to see that. JG : What would you call what you write? Would you call that Local theatre or Hawaiian theatre? VNK: People used to call my work Asian American theatre because when I started writing there was no Pacific Island theatre. I was really conflicted about that. You want people to read your plays and that was all that mattered to me. I wanted my plays out there. Some of my plays could be called Hawaiian theatre, but some are not. I’ve never quibbled over labels. I want the freedom to write whatever really touches and interests me and whatever I feel passionate about. I like to think of myself as a Pacific Island writer. Some of my plays could be categorized as Hawaiian theatre and some of them could be Local theatre and some could be neither. JG : I’ve seen your plays in anthologies by women of color. But I’ve also seen them in postcolonial anthologies. The label I’ve seen most often is either Asian American or Hawaiian. VNK : I think that people in academia need categories. Labels make it easier for them to teach. But as a writer, you’re not sitting at home thinking, “Am I a Hawaiian writer or am I a Local writer?” You’re just writing. You’re writing what comes into your head. And so I just kind of leave the labels to other people. I’ll just write the plays and they decide what they are. JG : How would you define Local theatre? VNK : That’s hard because Local theatre includes Hawaiian theatre, but Hawaiian theatre doesn’t necessarily include Local theatre. I guess you could say Hawaiian theatre is anything that has Hawaiian characters or Hawaiian issues as its main theme. Local theatre includes Asian and Asian American theatre. But out of all the labels out there, I like Pacific Island theatre the most because it’s so inclusive. Labels are hard because there’s always something left out and there’s always a gray area. It is really tricky because all these questions have come up for me for a long time. And so what I’m trying to do is not necessarily make hard and fast boundaries between things because that’s just impossible. JG: So would you say there are multiple, overlapping genres at play here? VNK: Yeah. The Local, Hawaiian, and Western. They overlap. They are not really separate from each other. I do think that there are certain kinds of colonial undertones and attitudes and certain dynamics that play out between the three. Colonialism permeated the arts in Hawaiʻi. When I was first involved with Kumu Kahua, I was just starting out in theatre. I remember I was at a party and I was talking to this woman. I said I was a theatre major, and she goes, “Oh, have you been in plays?” I said, “I’ve been in a few Kumu Kahua plays.” She looked at me and she said, “No, I mean, a real play.” Theatre in Hawaiʻi is something really special. But the problem is people have a certain idea of what Hawaiʻi is. I don’t think our island theatre really fits into that. [8] When we look at Hawaiʻi, particularly its contemporary theatre scene, we see insightful tensions that arise from the distinct yet overlapping categorical schemas of “Asian American,” “Asian,” “Pacific Islander,” “Local,” and “Hawaiian.” Kneubuhl’s remarks echo J. Kehaulani Kauanui’s essay “Asian American Studies and the ‘Pacific question’” that calls upon Asian American Studies to actively engage Indigenous and Pacific Islander Studies rather than passively absorb Hawaiian and Pacific Islander history and culture into Asian American culture. [9] Kneubuhl’s embrace of the label “Pacific writer” signifies the ongoing transpacific turn of Asian American Studies and a way to recognize holistically the many voices that make up Asian and Pacific diasporas. Decentering the United States highlights the inherent liminality and multidimensionality of Asian identities and cultures that exist across the Pacific. A transpacific, rather than a US-centric approach, can help us understand how theatre of Hawaiʻi and Asian American theatre are related but distinct from each other. Transpacific Studies, which draws from Asian American Studies, Asian Studies, Indigenous Studies, Pacific Island Studies, and American Studies, illuminates the flow in peoples, cultures, capital, ideas, and labor across the Pacific. [10] Theatre of Hawaiʻi and Asian American theatre are distinct representations of the people, cultures, and histories of the Pacific that directly inform each other and provide a model on how the field of Asian American Studies can produce new theorizations on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Kneubuhl’s work is a model for how to create equitable representation out of tremendous cultural plurality. References Footnotes [1] Mark Chiang, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University (New York: New York University Press, 2009). [2] Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds. Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). [3] Esther Kim Lee, A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3. [4] Lisa Kahaleole Hall, “Navigating Our Own ‘Sea of Islands’: Remapping a Theoretical Space for Hawaiian Women and Indigenous Feminism,” Wicazo Sa Review 24 no. 2 (2009): 15–38; Kauanui, J. Kehaulani, “Where are Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders in Higher Education?” Diverse: Issues in Higher Education , 7 September 2008. [5] Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989). [6] Tammy Haili’ōpua Baker, “The Development and Function of Hana Keaka (Hawaiian Medium Theatre): A Tool for Empowering the Kānaka Maoli Consciousness” (Dissertation, University of Waikato, 2019); Sammie L. Choy, “Staging Identity: The Intercultural Theater of Hawai‘i” (Dissertation, University of Hawai‘i, 2016); Stefani Overman-Tsai, “Localizing the Islands: Theaters of Place and Culture in Hawaii’s Drama” (Dissertation, University of Hawai‘i, 2015). [7] Craig Howes, “Introduction,” in Hawai’i Nei: Island Plays (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002); Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, January 1893 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Press, 1993). [8] Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, interview by Jenna Gerdsen, June 2019. [9] J. Kehaulani Kauanui, “Asian American Studies and the ‘Pacific question,’” in Asian American Studies After Critical Mass , ed. Kent A. Ono (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 121-143. [10] Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014). About The Author(s) Jenna Gerdsen is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Theatre at Florida State University. She is an emerging scholar whose work examines the racial formation of contemporary theatre of Hawai‘i and investigates how settler colonialism and immigration shape this theatre tradition vis-à-vis Indigenous and Asian American cultural production. Her research was featured in the curated panel “New Directions in Theatre and Performance” at the 2021 American Society for Theatre Research conference. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson | A stimulating eyewitness account of modern Egyptian drama by Nehad Selaiha. < 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 Selected Essays: Plays and Playwrights Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson Download PDF At once personal and scholarly, analytical and reflective, The Egyptian Theatre: Plays and Playwrights provides a stimulating eyewitness account of modern Egyptian drama, seen in its relation to Egyptian reality at different historical moments on the one hand, and to the art of making theatre on the other. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Watch Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) by Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. This documentary video follows the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)”, a new work by Thailand’s most sought-after director, Wichaya ARTAMAT, which was staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023 as an international coproduction with sound designer ARAKI Masamitsu and dramaturge TSUKAHARA Yuya.  In the new work, Artamat examines his relationship with “props as metaphors,” reconsidering upon reflection that he may have been prone to mistreating them, while also looking back on his previous stage works in conjunction with the political history of Thailand. His playful yet subversive approach to directing suggests ways of asking questions in order to overcome harsh and unreasonable situations: not only in regard to the Thai government, but also any individual or wider society that is unwittingly subsumed by larger authoritarian structures.  *This video was produced for the Japan Foundation’s International Creations in Performing Arts 2023 and consists mainly of the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)” staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023, culminating in the performances, as well as interviews with the participating artists. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre Theater, Documentary This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Thailand and Japan Language Thai, Japanese Running Time 55 minutes Year of Release 2024 This documentary video follows the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)”, a new work by Thailand’s most sought-after director, Wichaya ARTAMAT, which was staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023 as an international coproduction with sound designer ARAKI Masamitsu and dramaturge TSUKAHARA Yuya.  In the new work, Artamat examines his relationship with “props as metaphors,” reconsidering upon reflection that he may have been prone to mistreating them, while also looking back on his previous stage works in conjunction with the political history of Thailand. His playful yet subversive approach to directing suggests ways of asking questions in order to overcome harsh and unreasonable situations: not only in regard to the Thai government, but also any individual or wider society that is unwittingly subsumed by larger authoritarian structures.  *This video was produced for the Japan Foundation’s International Creations in Performing Arts 2023 and consists mainly of the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)” staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023, culminating in the performances, as well as interviews with the participating artists. Co-Produced by Kyoto Experiment, The Japan Foundation and For What Theatre Supported by The Saison Foundation (International Project Support Program / Kyoto Experiment × For What Theatre Juggle & Hide [Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director]) About The Artist(s) Wichaya Artamat is a co-founding member of For What Theatre. He was long captivated by performances since when he was still studying Film. He started working in theater as a project coordinator for Bangkok Theatre Festival 2008. He joined the New Theatre Society in 2009, during which he grew to become a director recognized for various experimental forms and unconventional theatrical approaches. Hailed as ‘one of the most promising contemporary theater creators of Southeast Asia,’ Wichaya is especially interested in exploring how society remembers and unremembers its history through certain calendar days. He co-founded For What Theatre in 2015 and is also a member of Sudvisai Club and Collective Thai Scripts. Since the European premiere of his most prominent work ‘This Song Father Used to Sing (Three Days in May)” at Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2019, Wichaya has been extensively touring and creating in Europe, Asia, and beyond. Get in touch with the artist(s) forwhattheatre@gmail.com and follow them on social media http://www.facebook.com/theatreforwhat, http://www.instagram.com/forwhattheatre/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou