Karina Gutiérrez Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Karina Gutiérrez By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. The precarious era of Argentina’s dictatorship (1976-1982) stifled political resistance and artistic expression. However, the years following the administrative regimes of Jorge Rafael Videla, Emilio Massera, and Leopoldo Galtieri prompted many people in the newly democratic Argentina to reflect upon and recoup their national identities. Noe Montez’s Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina considers (re)emerging individual and collective memory narratives and their effects on judicial policies in Argentina’s transitional postdictatorship period. Drawing on contemporary research in memory studies and theatre history, Montez recounts the momentous artistic reactions to policies implemented by the administrations of Carlos Menem, Néstor Carlos Kirchner Jr., and Cristina Kirchner. In so doing, Montez’s text contributes to a growing repertoire of Argentine works in the field of performance studies. As Montez himself rightly notes, the vast majority of scholarship on theatrical responses to the dictatorship tends to focus on the oeuvres of more internationally renowned playwrights such as Ricardo Bartis, Griselda Gambaro, and Eduardo Pavlovsky, whose works were staged during or directly following the dictatorship. Instead, Montez charts the trajectory of emerging directors, playwrights, actors, designers, and companies that flourished in Buenos Aires during this transitional era. Montez divides his book into four chapters, arranged chronologically to highlight theatrical productions that reacted to each administration’s approach to transitional justice and contributed to collective memory. Chapter one explores “disconstructive resistances,” a term that is never fully unpacked but appears to refer to the disjuncture between collective memory narratives and state-sanctioned memory narratives constructed and propagated by the Menem administration’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings held from 1989 to 1999. Each of the four plays that Montez examines in this chapter considers the limitations of state-sanctioned narratives of impunity, to say nothing of clemency and amnesty policies, directed toward those in office accused of human rights violations. Montez devotes a substantial amount of space to key performance groups and playwrights including El Periférico de Objetos, Javier Daulte, Marcelo Bertuccio, and Luis Cano. He describes their use of multimedia and avant-garde artistic practices to advance their political agendas; by exposing the artifice of authorized modes of remembrance, these artists resisted the Menem administration’s politics of erasure. The second chapter centers on how Teatroxlaindentidad , a long-running Buenos Aires-based theatre festival created to raise awareness about the hundreds of children kidnapped during the dictatorship, collaborated with artists to promote public access to declassified archives. Montez notes that works by Patricia Zangaro, Hector Levy-Daniel, and Mariana Eva Perez demonstrate the value of historical archives for the construction of personal and national identities. However, Montez adds a further dimension: he studies how institutional support from non-theatrical entities impacts an organization’s overall creative output and longevity. He offers as an example Teatroxlaindentidad’ s partnership with the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The partnership is notable because the goals of the latter imposed significant restraints on the artistic visions of the former, specifically in the earliest years of this alliance. Indeed, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other stakeholders limited commissioned work in the festival’s line-up to those who spoke directly to reuniting kidnapped children with their next of kin through genetic testing. In the second half of the book, Montez attempts to capture the ideological dissonance of various agents staking claims to history. Chapter three, “Reparation, Commemoration, and Memory Construction in the Postdictatorship Generation,” looks at the importance of self-archiving or self-reflexive personal testimony as a means of talking back to state-appointed sites of memory. Of particular interest are those testimonies that “talk back” to sites established during the Néstor and Cristina Kirchner administrations (2003-2007 and 2007-2015, respectively). Montez delineates the social divide between those who favored the Kirchner administrations’ memorialization efforts and those who did not. Meanwhile, in the final chapter, Montez explores four theatrical performances produced alongside Christina Kirchner’s rebranding of the Malvinas War (also known as the Falklands War). Montez describes how the Kirchner administration sought to recast this national defeat as a point of nationalistic remembrance, shaping memory narratives of the war and the people of Malvinas. While works by Patricio Adadi, Mariana Mazover, and Lisandro Fiks critiqued Kirchner’s commemoration, Julio Cardoso’s vision fell in line with the administration’s memorialization efforts as he opted to honor veterans as heroes. The differing reactions to the Malvinas War demonstrate how acts of remembrance can be linked to acts of erasure in a variety of contradictory ways. Though Montez does not explicitly make this point, one can surmise that the opposing artistic treatments of the Falkland Islands mirror the contradictory socio-political views of these territories today. Montez’s illustration of performance and social engagement in postdictatorship Argentina highlights the nation’s vibrant and tenacious theatre scene. More importantly, his book draws attention to Argentina’s artistic agents—long neglected by U.S. scholars and theatre audiences—who are determined to grapple with identity, social justice, and individual/collective memory. Montez weaves pertinent historical content with play descriptions for what is, overall, an assessment of current artistic measures that seek to reify or contest dominant memory narratives. Scholars of Latinx theatre and performance, specifically those who concentrate on politics, will value Montez’s timely study of artistic mobilization in postdictatorship Argentina. I would, however, recommend this book be read in conjunction with texts by Diana Taylor and Jean Graham-Jones; though often cited, reading their respective theories on performance and activism firsthand may deepen understanding of Montez’s argument. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina contributes to the growing archive of memory studies and, more importantly, to nuancing the fledgling U.S. awareness of Latin American performance and performance studies scholarship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. References Footnotes About The Author(s) KARINA GUTIÉRREZ Stanford University Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky 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: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. 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 15 Spring 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey By Malek Najjar Published: June 15, 2024 Download Article as PDF Photo courtesy of Malek Najjar When asked by Arab Stages Book Review Editor George Potter about five books that shaped my thinking about Arab American drama, I immediately thought about the fact that there were no full-length books available about the genre when I began my doctoral dissertation on the topic. As a matter of fact, the very reason I focused my attention upon this bourgeoning theatre form was because of the paucity of information available up to that time. We must remember that, although the first Arab American play, Ameen F. Rihani’s Wajdah , was written in 1909, prior to that point, the entire history of Arab American drama consisted of one-off productions and publications. Like other immigrant communities, our theatre was not considered legitimate because it had no major playwrights with large bodies of work, it had no Broadway productions, it had no anthologies of plays, and it had no major prizes associated with it. Instead, Arab Americans have been creating theatre independently, and with little or no means of production, since the first recorded Arab American theatrical group, the Syrian Youth Society, staged the play Andromak in 1896.(1) The early plays by Kahlil Gibran, Mikhail Naimy, and Ameen F. Rihani were published in Arab American newspapers, but were never staged in their lifetimes. This might have prompted Edward W. Said to lament to Gregory Orfalea that, in terms of Arab Americans having any influence on the dominant culture, “the Arab American simply plays a very tiny, marginal, unimportant role.”(2) Said’s words rang true in his lifetime, but the burgeoning of this artform over the past decades has proven that this situation has changed over time. No serious discussion of Arab American history, arts, or letters can begin without mentioning Edward W. Said’s seminal work. Even though his book Orientalism is, of course, a masterwork, his essays “The Arab Portrayed,” which appeared in the 1970 book The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective , edited by the late Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, and his “Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Volume” of Orientalism were the foundation for my study of Arab American drama. In “The Arab Portrayed,” Said crystalized the very notions I had been wrestling with my entire life as an Arab American as I watched Arabs being perniciously misrepresented in films by filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis, and John Frankenheimer (to name only a few). In the films I watched by these directors, Arabs were always portrayed as evil, violent, terroristic, stupid, sex-crazed, and sadistic. This contrasted greatly from the films I grew up watching at home starring Omar Sharif, Fairuz, Farid Al Atrash, Faten Hamamah, and others. The Arabs I knew watching my parents’ VHS tapes sang, danced, played musical instruments, loved, laughed, cried, and mourned. By contrast, the Arabs in the movie theatres were Nazi collaborators, ruthless terrorists, vile letches, and scimitar-wielding villains worthy only of a brutal death. Said’s essay begins with the two offensive caricatures of Arabs he encountered: the stupid and offensive Arab with their hands above their heads in a gesture of surrender, or the treacherous, sex-mad Arab intent on violating Western women and killing Western men. Said attributes these to British and French colonialist writings and the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War coverage, which pitted white Europeans facing off against a horde of native savages. He wrote, “As an intelligible unit in the mind, the Arab has been reduced to pure antagonism to Israel. The sheer mass of his numbers—against which, it seems, any injustice counts for very little—has been abstracted into unitary order, the better to deal with the uncomfortable moral demands his history and actuality might make.”(3) He continues by stating that the sympathy one might feel for Africans or Vietnamese, Balkan nationals or Irish nationalists, simply cannot be extended to the Palestinian Arabs. “In the mind’s syntax, then, the Arab, if thought of singly, is a creature without dimension. His history is obscure, for it is written neither in terms of institutions the Americans can recognize nor in a language he can read… What is most telling about Western consciousness of the Arab is how few ordinary categories of human existence seem applicable to him. Suffering and injustice, it seems, can never be his lot.”(4) Said critiques scholars such as I.F. Stone, Theodore Draper, Joel Carmichael, Michael Walzer and Martin Peretz. In works like these, Said, states, “It is no accident, I think, that in America the representation of the Arab in accounts of the modern Near East relies so heavily on a simple, though to my mind seriously defective and malicious, conception of fact.”(5) Said also blames “regional studies” programs that also diminish Arabs into factual statistics, rigid categories, and psychological conditions. Said ends his essay with the following notice: “There are signs, however, that with much of the Third World, the Arab has now fully recognized this as his predicament: he is demanding of the West, and of Israel, the right to reoccupy his place in history and actuality.”(6) In his “Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition” of Orientalism , Said, speaks both of his advancing age and “diminutions in expectations,” and his faith in emancipation and enlightenment. He wrote, “My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that ‘our’ East, ‘our’ Orient becomes ‘ours’ to possess and direct.”(7) This radical notion of unmaking history and rewriting it melded perfectly with what I observed in Arab American dramas that recast and restaged the Middle East from our Arab American point of view, not the point of view of those outside of our community who wished to distort and misrepresent us. Given the horrors of the American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan at the time, Said’s essay was a reminder that, for as much progress as we have made in this country, we were still basically viewed the same by the hegemonic powers that governed our nation. Said also wrote, “Therefore, it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones, based on mutual hostility, that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long.”(8) The plays and playwrights I read, studied, and witnessed, were the ones subverting stereotypes by providing the American theatre with fully dimensional Arab and Arab American characters who were not, by any means, perfect, but were just as fallible and wonderful as any humans might be. That humanism is what Said valued most in his essay when he wrote, “humanism is the only, and I would go so far as to say, the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”(9) That was what I saw in these plays—resistance against the inhumane films major filmmakers created that disfigured our Arab and Arab American histories. In my desire to piece together this lost history, I turned not to books but to essays. The first important essay I found was by Ala Fa’ik, titled “Issues of Identity: In Theater of Immigrant Community” found in Ernest N. McCarus’s book The Development of Arab American Identity (1994). Here, Fa’ik explores how Arab American theatre has shaped the identity of Arab Americans. He examines “theater of different types: plays in Arabic by and for Arab-Americans, bilingual productions for wider audiences of both Arab-Americans and non-Arab-Americans, and professional productions in English for the general U.S. public.” (10) For Fa’ik, the roots of Arab American theatre grew from Arab communities grappling with how to preserve their cultural heritage, such as the plays that were staged by the early Arab American immigrants. Although he cites the fact that there were some Arab American theatre troupes that preceded the 1970s, in this essay Fa’ik focuses upon the plays produced in the 1970s and the 1980s. He cites that Arab Americans came to the United States for many reasons: the pursuit of a better life and the flight from political persecution and war. Arab immigrants who settled in larger U.S. cities, therefore, also fulfilled the cultural needs of these communities by creating cultural and entertainment events. The amateur groups, mainly concentrated in urban centers like Detroit, Chicago, San Diego, and Los Angeles, presented plays in Arabic with various Arabic dialects, but in Fa’ik’s opinion, despite the commercial success these productions achieved, they were artistically lacking. Some of the plays which dramatized life in the United States were based on assumptions and misunderstandings which, in Fa’ik’s opinion, “perpetuates ignorance and misinformation.” (11) Fa’ik’s article introduced me to the various amateur theatre groups that had been creating theatre of all sorts: political plays, social commentary plays, social justice plays, children’s theatre, and his own playwriting. In his summary he wrote, A study of the Arab-American theatrical movement does not reveal a high literary and artistically enduring quality right now, but it mostly does reveal attitudes, values, ideals, and aspirations of immigrants developing a community. It brings to light a new dimension to understanding the growth and development of the self-identity of an immigrant community in the United States. As a theater practitioner and scholar, I find the movement of evolving cultural character material of great value to be recorded and studied further… Arab-Americans in their developing theater are bringing their past and their values to the U.S. culture of which they are now a part while at the same time they struggle to maintain their own identity and to define for themselves what that identity is. To be an Arab-American, say these plays, is to be both Arab and American and, for the time being at least, to be neither. (12) Fa’ik’s essay provided a template for me, as an Arab American scholar and practitioner myself, for how to move forward in the discussion of these disparate works of art created by this vibrant artistic community. Unlike Fa’ik, I was writing in a time when there was a larger body of works by extremely accomplished playwrights like Betty Shamieh, Yussef El Guindi, Leila Buck, and Jamil Khoury. What was most exciting for me was recording the progression of Arab American theatre from the chamber plays of Gibran, Naimy, and Rihani, to the semi-professional work of S.K. Hershewe, to the amateur productions of the playwrights Husam Zoro, Hammam Shafie, and Fareed Al-Oboudi. What was also evident was the reflection of these works on the various “waves” of Arab American immigration from the early first-generation Syrian-Lebanese playwrights, to the plays of the first-generation playwrights in the 1970s and 1980s, to the second-generation Arab American plays of the 1990s and 2000s. I saw a longer trajectory of Arab American plays that was overlooked by Fa’ik, and one I wanted to explore in greater depth with my book-length project. Another important essay that was published by Dalia Basiouny and Marvin Carlson titled “Current Trends in Arab-American Performance,” was published in the 2009 edited volume Performance, Exile and ‘America’ , edited by Silvija Jestrovic and Yana Meerzon. The essay begins with the history of Arab migration to the United States, the development of distinct immigrant communities, and the early theatre offerings they presented. The essay then turns to the post-9/11 situation and Arab American artists’ response to negative media portrayals, the wars in Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan, and the need to express hybrid identities. They note that the majority of the artists creating work during this time were women, saying: “Thus, even on this most basic level, current Arab-American theatre and performance is working to present a more accurate picture of Arab-American culture by contradicting the standard Western stereotype, according to which Arab women are widely if not universally oppressed and not allowed any voice or outlet for expression within Arabic culture.” (13) The article discusses several Arab American artists and groups including Yussef El Guindi, NIBRAS, and the Arab-American Comedy Festival, but the focus is primarily on women artists including Faiza Shereen, Etel Adnan, Heather Raffo, Betty Shamieh, Leila Buck, Elmaz Abi Nader, Soha Al Jurf, Rania Khalil, Kathryn Haddad, Lena Rizkallah, and Maysoon Zayid. “The majority of the plays and performances of these artists deal in one way or another with the negotiations of being Arab in America today,” they write. (14) The authors examine plays like Shamieh’s Roar, Khalil’s Flag Piece , Rizkallah’s Layla’s Sahra , and Haddad’s With Love from Ramallah . They also focus attention on female solo performances such as Al Jurf’s Pressing Beyond In Between , Buck’s ISite , Abi Nader’s Country of My Origin , and Raffo’s Nine Parts of Desire as works of “autobiographical solo performances.” They define this genre as, “a particularly popular medium for women theatre and performance artists, particularly for the exploration of the forces that encourage or discourage the formation of identity.” (15) They conclude the article by stating that these varied performances are making a significant contribution to American theatre, utilizing theatre to explore the tensions and identity formations of the Arab American community in the United States. “Their work has a therapeutic and educative dimension for themselves and their community,” they write, “but it has even more widespread therapeutic and educative work to do in the American culture within which it is created.” (16) This final statement is one that landed most with me as I immersed myself in Arab American theatre and performance. While first-generation Arab audiences are drawn predominantly to plays and performances in Arabic that primarily feature humor and music, such as the works of Dearborn theatre makers Najee Mondalek’s AJYAL Theatrical Group , second-generation Arab Americans gravitate more toward the English-language productions of these second-and-third generation playwrights and performers of Arab descent. However, the largest audiences for Arab American plays and performers are actually non-Arabs. For them the plays are translations of the Arab experiences through the lens of Americans of Arab descent. That speaks directly to what Basiouny and Carlson refer to as the “therapeutic and educative work” in the American culture. Another important scholar, Jack G. Shaheen, provided two major resources for my understanding about Arab and Arab American representation in his books Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People and Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11. Shaheen was a vociferous advocate for Arab and Arab American representation, especially when it came to Hollywood filmmaking. In his seminal book Reel Bad Arabs , he critiques nine-hundred films by major Hollywood directors, screenwriters, and producers that malign and misrepresent Arabs and Arab Americans. The introduction to this incredible study focuses on what Shaheen called “The New Anti-Semitism.” He explains, “I call it ‘new’ not because stereotypical screen Arabs are new (they aren’t) or because anti-Semitism against Jews is dead (it isn’t). I use the word ‘new’ because many of the anti-Semitic films directed against Arabs were released in the last third of the twentieth century, at a time when Hollywood was steadily and increasingly eliminating stereotypical portraits of other groups.” (17) For Shaheen, malicious stereotypical portrayal of Arabs on screen was not just an aesthetic matter—it had real-world implications in the way Arabs were treated in society and in world affairs. What I appreciated most was that Shaheen was not calling for a blanket approach that would only praise Arabs onscreen. To the contrary. He wrote, “I am not saying an Arab should never be portrayed as the villain. What I am saying is that almost all Hollywood depictions of Arabs are bad ones. This is a grave injustice. Repetitious and negative images of the reel Arab literally sustain adverse portraits across generations. The fact is that for more than a century, producers have tarred an entire group of people with the same sinister brush.” (18) He breaks down the categories of the “reel” Hollywood Arabs into villains, sheiks, maidens, Egyptians, Palestinians, and gratuitous scenes and slurs. Like Said before him, Shaheen traces the beginnings of the pernicious stereotypes of Arabs in the media to the conflict between Israel and the Arab countries dating back to the late 1940s. The anti-Arab sentiment only grew over the successive decades and, by the time he wrote the book Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11 , Shaheen writes, “Today, the stereotype’s power to inflict damage on innocent people is much greater than before 9/11. During times of armed conflict, stereotyping meets the least resistance; its mendacity most convincingly masquerades as truth, and it is most vigorously defended and justified as truth. Arabs have been so demonized that it has become impossible for some world citizens to believe they are real people; they are perceived only as the enemy, as terrorists, as the ‘other.’” (19) In that book, he also challenges other stereotypes such as “Arab=Muslim”, Post-9/11 images, “Reel Bad Omnipresent Arabs”, and “Reel Political Implications.” He likens these films to the German propaganda of the 1930s, furthering governmental strategies to enforce stereotypes in an attempt to influence foreign policies. One of the most impactful chapters in this book is one titled “Real Solutions” whereby Shaheen calls upon us in the Arab American community to eradicate these stereotypes by breaking into the industry and becoming a key part of the production of these films, to major and excel in media studies, and to learn more about Arab American plays, to create documentaries that focus on Arab lives, and to hold an “Arab American Entertainment Summit” where creatives can gather to “recognize, contest, and correct images of the reel evil ‘others’” of Hollywood films. (20) Shaheen ends this book on a hopeful note, stating: “Change will come—one summit, one college film course, one character, one movie, one TV show, and one courageous imagemaker at a time… Keep the faith: New films will lead the way, illustrating that regardless of color, creed, or culture, we are bound together.”(21) Shaheen’s optimism inspired me, yet, after struggling as an out-of-work director in Los Angeles for years, I must say that my own experience proved otherwise. I hope this brief essay about the scholars and essays that shaped my understanding about Arab American theatre, film, and performances has been helpful. All our scholarship lies on the shoulders of those Arab Americans before us who took the time and effort to document the important and creative work artists in our community have been creating for over a century. Scholars like Edward. W. Said, Ala Fa’ik, Marvin Carlson, Dalia Basiouny, and Jack G. Shaheen are but a few of those who have guided my path as I’ve attempted to analyze, understand, and disseminate the works of these extraordinary individuals. Over time, I’ve had the opportunity to publish manuscripts, anthologies, journal articles, and play reviews as well as teach classes and direct plays to educate and enlighten others to the powerful and impactful work that is consistently produced in this country. Other incredible scholars are now adding to the understanding of Arab American theatre including Roaa Ali, Evelyn Alsultany, Dina Amin, Hala Baki, Waleed F. Mahdi, Somaya Sami Sabry, and others. Before I wrote my book, someone asked me “is there such a thing as Arab American drama?” My hope is that our collective works can prove once and for all that this question is ridiculous. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes 1. Michael W. Suleiman, The Arab-American Experience in the United States and Canada: a Classified, Annotated Bibliography (Ann Arbor, MI: Pierian Press), 488. 2. Quoted in Gregory Orfalea, The Arab Americans: A History (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press), 175. 3.Edward W. Said, “The Arab Portrayed,” in The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of 1967: An Arab Perspective . ed. 1970. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), 3. 4. Said, “The Arab Portrayed,” 4. 5. Said, “The Arab Portrayed,”, 8. 6. Said, “The Arab Portrayed,”9. 7. Edward W. Said, “Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition,” in Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), xviii. 8. Said, “Preface,” xxiv. 9. Said, “Preface,” xxix. 10. Ala Fa’ik, “Issues of Identity: In Theater of Immigrant Community” in The Development of Arab-American Identity, ed. Ernest McCarus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 107. 11. Fa’ik, “Issues of Identity,” 111. 12. Fa’ik, “Issues of Identity,” 117-118. 13. Dalia Basiouny and Marvin Carlson, “Current Trends in Arab-American Performance,” in Performance, Exile and ‘America’, ed. Silvija Jestrovic and Yana Meerzon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 209-210. 14. Basiouny and Carlson, “Current Trends,” 211. 15. Basiouny and Carlson, “Current Trends,”213. 16. Basiouny and Carlson, “Current Trends,” “Current Trends,”219. 17. Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (New York: Olive Branch Press), 6. 18. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs , 11. 19. Jack G. Shaheen, Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11 (Northampton: Olive Branch Press), XII. 20. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs , 77. 21. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs , 89 References About The Author(s) Malek Najjar is a Professor of Theatre Arts with the University of Oregon. He is the author of Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures and Creators and Arab American Drama, Film and Performance: A Critical Study, 1908 to the Present. He edited Heather Raffo’s Iraq Plays: The Things That Can’t Be Said, The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi , and Four Arab American Plays: Works by Leila Buck, Jamil Khoury, Yussef El Guindi, and Lameece Issaq & Jacob Kader . He is co-editor of Mona Mansour: The Vagrant Trilogy (with Hala Baki) and Six Plays of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (with Jamil Khoury and Corey Pond). He has directed mainstage productions with Silk Road Rising, Golden Thread Productions, and New Arab American Theatre Works. Malek is currently working with Hala Baki on the edited volume The Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi . 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 Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Previous Next Attribution:

Madeline Pages Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage Theatre of Isolation Madeline Pages By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Conceiving of a theatre of isolation presents the performance scholar with a conundrum akin to a tree falling in a secluded forest. As it is so often distinguished by the presence of the group, of collective and communal exchange, the theatre as an art form seems diametrically opposed to isolation—physical, social, mental, emotional, spiritual. How can theatre relate to the world while maintaining a state of isolation from it? And where does isolation lead if and when it ends? I offer theatre of isolation as a category of performance that engages with these questions and one that implies a tension between the social engagement of theatre, which is often thought of as having a social function, and social isolation. In 2020, theatre artists were living in that tension. I believe their work proved theatre and isolation can coexist. I also believe theatre of isolation is not a temporally bounded category but one we can use to see this coexistence of socially engaged art with isolation in the work of theatre makers from other times. The 1970s in the US was an era of aftermath. American society faced as one (though by disparate means and with differing attitudes) the shock of the Vietnam War as it was witnessed on television, national financial decline, and the continued, violent subjugation of marginalized people. The political struggles of the 1960s, in a sense, continued through the 1970s, prolonged and deepened without relief as one decade spilled into the next. Given this climate, a desire for isolation or at least the expression of that desire in art, strikes me as unsurprising. For this essay, I have chosen to look at three artists, Adrienne Kennedy, Peter Schumann, and Jack Smith, whose theatre from the 1970s is isolated from the dominant culture—white, male, heterosexual, conservative, capitalist—of the time. Isolation of this type may be reflected in physical space, and I pay close attention to both real and imaginary architectures of isolation. However, my analysis is more broadly concerned with social isolation—how it happens, what it looks and feels like, and its effect on artistic expression. The result of this isolation is not necessarily an increased understanding of the self, of one’s identity, but a kind of solace that primes the individual for the monumental task of breaking new ground and resisting oppression. Such a claim is not new. Theatre of isolation can be classified alongside the antisocial and the anti-relational in performance studies, particularly as such terms are debated among scholars of queer studies. [1] However, I wish to distinguish isolation from the antisocial and align my analysis with the asocial as theorized by Summer Kim Lee in “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality.” The asocial, according to Lee, complicates and expands the state of antisociality of the subject, as a momentary choice to resist the social in order to “shift and reconstellate one’s relations to . . . the socialities with which one is entangled,” rather than deny or resist relationality completely. [2] “Staying in” is what Lee calls the performance of asociality in which the subject chooses to be alone rather than be out with others. In Lee’s formulation, to have the need and desire for time away from others, from an outside . . . does not hold up a depoliticized fantasy of autonomy. . . . Rather, it points toward the desire to want to relate, to show up for another, but when one is ready, and in ways that alter the horizon of what constitutes the social, and the political projects, collectivities, affiliations, and models of care borne out of it. [3] “Staying in,” then, is a self-reflexive performance of asociality, an enactment of “the ambivalent and rich aspects of solitude” for the purposes of protection and preservation, but also preparation for political and social engagement. Particularly for individuals who identify with a minority group—Lee speaks specifically to the effects for Asian American people—staying in offers “sustained and sustaining ways . . . of moving through a world that is messy, damaging, hurtful, and exhausting.” [4] Staying in appears to be the antidote to the psychic exhaustion caused by the normalization of oppression, but does not preclude political engagement or outward expression, as in forms of public art. Lee further argues that staying in is in fact “enfolded within . . . acts and desires of going out” to participate in “radical, collective, organized action [that has heretofore characterized minoritarian political critique] within the social worlds in which we live.” [5] Such collective actions have been inherited by contemporary culture through glorified histories of the protests and insurgency of the 1960s. From that decade’s legacy emerged a “compulsory sociability,” the belief that “one’s political investments and acts of solidarity must be located in the realm of the social.” [6] As Lee conceives it, staying in as a mode of performance rejects the assumption of compulsory sociability but not the collective pursuit of social justice. [7] Staying in inverts the common conception of the antisocial or isolated individual as outside —outside of the world, disengaged, or perhaps a mere spectator. Instead, the individual staying in is staying inside , and by choice. What defines an “insider” is not, as the prevailing use of term implies, the power of being part of the majority but isolation from the outside world while one remains within it. Furthermore, this kind of social isolation is personal, and consciously undertaken; from it one can derive some agency, defining one’s own terms of engagement. This unconventional inside/outside dichotomy becomes important for what follows. I am, as the three artists I will discuss in depth here are, always keeping an eye on the outside context as I delve into solitary spaces of imagination and creative practice. This outside, on the macro level, is the US in the 1970s. The dominant scholarly narratives of American culture in the 1970s, and particularly those narratives that focus on the theatre of the era, provide contradictory summaries of the artistic landscape: it is sometimes monopolized by the echoes of Tom Wolfe’s 1976 essay on “The Me Decade” and the nihilistic glamour of Andy Warhol, or, conversely, by artists characterized as community-oriented survivors scraping by in the middle of a national financial crisis. Hillary Miller argues that these analyses submerge “very necessary labors of institutionalization . . . in histories of downtown theatre that focus on the 1970s political separatism on the one hand, and myopic investigations of the self and identity on the other.” [8] Marc Robinson prefers to look at the American art world in the 1970s as in transition, in flux and unfixed, a decade of indeterminacy, which is a description that this essay may heighten and, hopefully, expand by offering up a possible explanation for that instability (at least for the artists I hone in on). [9] I argue that the lack of fixity stems from, as this brief summary of seventies historiography suggests, a conflict between the solitary and the collective. Therefore, my own research on the decade is caught somewhere in the middle of the academic fray, seeking to spotlight what Will Kaufman claims are the concerns of the decade’s drama with “social exclusion, isolation, and exhaustion,” while denying any notion that isolation as aesthetic counteracts activism and community solidarity. [10] Adrienne Kennedy, Peter Schumann, and Jack Smith are three markedly different artists, and their individual experiences of social isolation cannot be conflated. Whereas Schumann, as I will discuss in detail later on, isolates himself by choice, Kennedy’s (and Smith’s, to a certain extent) isolation begins as the result of exclusion. What I believe these artists have in common (other than being contemporaries) is that the theatre of isolation mirrors the social isolation of the artist, which I will argue further in what follows. All three have received, and continue to receive, no shortage of attention, making them familiar to many readers. This allows me to focus on my point of contact: the theme and aesthetics of isolation within their theatre. I adopt Lee’s approach to how individual artistic works both reflect, and are aesthetically influenced by, the artist’s state of isolation, physical or otherwise, from the social world. In the sense that all three were working in the American Northeast in the 1970s, the scope of this essay is narrow and reveals my own blind spots as a scholar. This essay is not intended to be an encompassing study. It wants conversation: conversation with Lee and other queer theorists and historians, with other artists, and with present and future performance and criticism. I address this essay to future works in particular, in the hopes that the category of theatre of isolation will be a useful tool for the theatre of the present. “I always just could very easily become a character in the movies or in a book.”[11] Adrienne Kennedy seems to stand alone in scholarship. On the surface she may be an odd choice for this essay, given that she appears to be very much a part of the scene in the seventies. She was involved with the playwrights’ coalitions New York Theatre Strategy (NYTS) and the Women’s Theatre Council (WTC) and her plays were performed at major downtown theatre hubs like The Public and La Mama. However, she continues to be treated at least from a historical perspective as constantly new and emerging, or else already dead and being revived, in spite of the actual trajectory of her career as a playwright. Though already the winner of an Obie, in the late 1970s she was, as alluded to by Miller, still a new artist to the likes of Joe Papp, who produced the premiere of A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White in his New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976. Stephen J. Bottoms, on the other hand, chooses to mention only the revivals of her work, which seems to devalue the new plays she wrote in the seventies. In overviews of women playwrights and feminist theatre, such as Brenda Murphy’s essay for The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature , Kennedy is little more than a footnote: her name introduces the “explosion of playwriting in the 1970s that accompanied the second-wave feminist movement,” but none of her plays are mentioned. [12] Then there are the places Kennedy is not named at all: in James Smethurst’s 2005 book on the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, Jack Kerouac’s name pops up five times and Kennedy’s does not appear once. She is rarely counted among members of the BAM, though she was in conversation with the movement’s leading artists. At the same time, her race and gender have contributed to her elision from other histories of New York theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. [13] Kennedy’s resistance to grouping, her lack of “group-ness,” at a time when groups, collectives, and movements appear to be the central critical-historical focus, may in part explain the scholarly tendency to read her plays as self-contained or autobiographical. Kimberly W. Benston, for example, writes that “autobiography . . . is the very signature of Adrienne Kennedy’s impossible though endless quest for a clarifying and stabilizing source.” [14] Kennedy is thus placed in a room of her own, unsurprising for a writer whose introspective style of drama abounds with isolated rooms, frames, and other physical spaces as recurring metaphors. [15] Thus, Kennedy’s particular theatre of isolation is characterized by the isolation chamber of the imagination, i.e. the funnyhouse. Beginning with Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Kennedy devises the “funnyhouse” as a psychological isolation chamber where characters that look and sound very much like their author grappling with the mystery of the self. In Funnyhouse , the self is subsequently broken up into multiple, “ideal selves,” from Patrice Lumumba to Jesus. In her later works, the “funnyhouse” is given different names (the sleep deprivation chamber, for example), yet its structure persists as indicative of the same interior: that of the writer’s mind. Luckily, we have snippets of the writer’s mind for comparison: that is, Kennedy’s prose texts, such as People Who Led to My Plays , which give context to the sense of isolation in plays like Funnyhouse . There is a potential danger, however, in reading Kennedy as self-contained if it means downplaying the influence of outside sources. As suggested by the epigraph to this section, as well as the subject matter of People Who Led to My Plays , the books, movies, and other media Kennedy consumed are inseparable from her imagination and the spaces in her plays. Particularly in her plays from the 1970s, Kennedy is mining the American media, and showing onstage the complex relationship between the media and Black people. An Evening with Dead Essex (1973), for example, was the result of an obsession in the early 1970s with the way news reports depicted Mark Essex, the Black nationalist who killed nine people in two attacks in New Orleans in December 1972 and January 1973. “I feel like Mark Essex,” she told Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck in a 1990 interview, carrying her own “tremendous rage against American society.” On the one hand, as an African American she was forced to be bicultural, to read white culture as fluently as Black, despite being violently written out of that culture. Benston remarks, “Much like her heroines, Kennedy’s work seems driven by a search for an incandescent touchstone of self-reference, some primal image, story, or scene, that would heal the self’s constitution as wound or lack, its entrapment in dramas scripted from elsewhere.” [16] On the other hand, Kennedy says, “I think that as a black person in America, you almost have to force yourself on society.” [17] Kennedy’s books and movies, and even the true story of Essex, are the “dramas scripted from elsewhere,” and Benston interprets them as a trap of false identity. But it is perhaps this sense of falseness, when Kennedy wrestles with it in her plays, which is most illuminating of how the outside world operates against her and other Black people, particularly women. In A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White , the Kennedy funnyhouse transforms into the silver screen of Golden Age Hollywood cinema, more enthralling to Kennedy and exclusive of her conception of self than any other “drama scripted from elsewhere.” In the play’s opening speech the audience is told that Clara plays “a bit role,” standing outside the frame and the action between characters representing cinema stars Marlon Brando, Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Jean Peters, Montgomery Clift, and Shelley Winters. [18] Even when Clara steps into the scene, her “lines” are read by one of these white Hollywood icons and she is separated from both the movie world and her own life as her diary entries, recounting her family’s history and present relationships, are read aloud and subsumed within their reenactment of famous films. The black and white movie scenes are juxtaposed with scenes of Clara’s parents and husband, who “all look like [black and white] photographs” she keeps of them. The play is always attempting to fit these two spaces, the screen and picture frame, together, but regularly fails. For example, the hospital bedroom of Clara’s brother, in which she and her mother discuss her happiness or lack thereof, is at odds with the bedroom in which the characters of Marlon Brando and Jean Peters perform the teach-me-to-read scene from the film Viva Zapata , the one in “constant twilight” while Brando and Peters “star in dazzling wedding night light.” [19] The simultaneity of these contrasting scenes heightens the disconnection between Clara’s life and that of the movies, as well as between mother and daughter in their conversation, as mother insists that her pregnant daughter is unhappy without a settled domestic life while daughter cites her professional successes as a playwright as cause for great happiness. It is significant that when Clara speaks, she is almost always talking about herself as a playwright. This choice leads easily to a feminist interpretation of the play as dramatization of the difficulties of being a woman—read mother and sexual object—and an artist at once. It is twice as difficult for a Black woman, with the models of womanhood forced upon her by white culture. As Deborah R. Geis argues, “Tension between immersion and angry confrontation of the Hollywood world experienced by Clara in this play embodies the ambivalent spectatorial status of the African American woman whose subjectivity risks being undermined by her identification with an exclusionary cultural apparatus.” [20] The struggle for self-definition with these slippery models, which promise “fulfillment and female power” [21] but fail to address its limitations, then becomes a central concern of the play. I’m not entirely convinced, however, that it is Clara who is experiencing the tension Geis describes. As Clara says, her image as spectator comes not from her but from her husband Eddie: “Eddie says . . . that my diaries make me a spectator watching my life like watching a black and white movie.” [22] For Clara, writing is both her dream and her way of understanding her reality. Through writing she copes with family traumas such as her brother’s hospitalization, her parents’ divorce, her own divorce, and a miscarriage, on top of daily experiences of a racist and segregated society. Her life as such does not fit into the movie scenes—she cannot watch herself there. Instead, she must write her life in, and direct the stars from the wings in how to insert the language of her life into their filmography. The cohesion Clara and Winters achieve in the final moments of the play suggests that such a writing is possible to an extent. It is successful, however, only in the sense that each woman’s end is equally evocative of a desperate situation. In these last moments, Clara and Winters speak simultaneously of the possibility of Clara’s brother’s death. Then, when it is revealed that her brother will not die, Clara describes almost falling down the front steps of the hospital, her crying mother in her arms, in a scene of family sorrow-tinged relief (her brother will live but paralyzed and with brain damage). Simultaneously, Winters drowns as at the end of the film A Place in the Sun . Both Clara and Winters, in their separate worlds, are drowning. Clara’s writing and orchestration of the film stars and Kennedy’s writing of Clara are also united, in their exemplification of what Margo Natalie Crawford calls “black public interiority.” Black public interiority, a similar contradiction to my theatre of isolation that Crawford explains, caught the BAM between viewing introversion as elitism and “constantly performing ways in which the personal could be collective and inner mental space could be shared as people deconditioned their minds together.” [23] As a playwright in the 1970s, Kennedy was accused of such elitist introversion and yet her plays so powerfully publicize, in the act of performance, inner mental space. She engaged with the BAM principles and with white culture though neither of them would have her. In both cases she appears superficially as a spectator, as Eddie calls Clara, when in truth she was inside it all, constructing a funnyhouse to contain and showcase the complexities of that insider state. “[Art] needs to be EVERYWHERE because it is the INSIDE of the WORLD.”[24] It is difficult to argue that any period in the history of Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre is asocial in Lee’s sense, a respite from direct engagement, when their reputation is so closely linked to political protest and other forms of activism. The 1970s, however, saw a break in the company and, perhaps, a moment of redefining what it means for the Theatre’s art to be “ inside of the world.” In 1970, Schumann moved from New York City to the small town of Plainfield, Vermont and, as company founder and linchpin, essentially reconstituted Bread and Puppet as a solo project. Schumann had become increasingly critical of the audiences and politics of the city where his company’s homemade bread and giant carnivalesque puppets had commanded street actions of the Resistance Movement of the 1960s. [25] “We the Schumanns,” he wrote at the time, “are ready for a bigger slower style of motion, air breathing and vegetable growing included.” [26] Many of his collaborators, all but two of whom he left behind in New York, perceived the move as “copping out.” In their eyes, Schumann was abandoning the collective spirit that had defined Bread and Puppet since 1961 in order to join the well-to-do intellectuals and resort entrepreneurs migrating to Vermont for a taste of the majority white wilderness. [27] But as an artist Schumann had “outgrown the addressive-moralistic mode” that defined his street theatre of the 1960s. [28] At Cate Farm, the location of the Goddard College artist’s residency Schumann had secured in Vermont, he could develop a new, personal style. The Bread and Puppet Theatre of the Vermont days, as I will argue, exhibits an isolation through disillusionment—the disillusionment Schumann had with the forms of political activism that consumed him in the 1960s. Schumann’s move to rural Vermont would have a profound influence on his work up to the present day. As an out-of-towner and an immigrant to the US, Schumann was unlikely to find communion in Plainfield. The Cate Farm period can be defined by distance from the audience, from coherent narrative and authorial power, and from the crowd . Lee notes that isolation “dynamically affords one the time and space needed to evade forms of sociability that late liberalism and subsequent formations of political resistance demand.” [29] The isolation Schumann experienced afforded him the time and space to reevaluate his performance practices, which in the early Vermont days he tailored to his new circumstances. When there was an audience, it was made up of small-town Vermonters and students, and some of the Goddard performance experiments he conducted with student volunteers had no audience at all. This was a far cry from the socially, racially, and generationally diverse crowds in the streets of New York, an audience who Schumann saw as ideal for political theatre. [30] For the Plainfield audience, Schumann eschewed direct address and adopted the more traditional staging of the elevated proscenium, restoring a physical distance between audience and performance. He no longer saw the need for the conscious, aggressive alienation of the audience that characterized his New York street agitations. He wasn’t making theatre for his audience anymore but for himself and alienation could be achieved simply by embracing the isolated place he already inhabited as an immigrant to rural America. The first of the proscenium performances at Cate Farm were the five Grey Lady Cantatas ( Grey Lady Cantatas II-VI, 1970–1975). In these Cantatas , Schumann had a new preoccupation, which is encapsulated in the image of the Grey Lady puppet crying a crystal tear in Grey Lady Cantata II (1971): an individual—or The Individual—as the central subject in a story of suffering. Grey Lady Cantata II consists of a series of tableaus featuring an increasingly isolated Grey Lady figure, whose life is made barren by the removal of all other people and objects until finally she dies. The Grey Lady, as well as most of the other performers, are large-scale puppets that completely obscure their human puppeteers. The few human performers, in turn, imitate the cold puppets, with grey-painted faces and the stiffness of automatons. The grotesque and opulent style of the puppets, the puppet-like acting style of the humans, and the use of marionette-type mechanization for removing props and changing scenery de-emphasize the presence and power of human authors or performers and prevent the audience from fully identifying with the suffering being. Furthermore, Schumann wrote no dialogue which might have humanized the Grey Lady puppet or provided some authorial insight. “The story is definitely the audiences’ job, not ours,” wrote Schumann: “We have no free delivery of interpretations, librettos, symbols, special philosophies. We have a physical fitness apparatus of colors and other wonders of perception. Audience does the sport, the skis and knapsacks of theatre.” [31] Grey Ladies (the name given to American Red Cross volunteers who provided non-medical care, particularly during World War II) and other references to war might easily be connected with the many works of Schumann’s that were explicitly anti-Vietnam War. However, as Schumann explains, that’s a story for the audience to write. Stefan Brecht, a prolific chronicler of Bread and Puppet’s history, speculates that the obscurity of Grey Lady Cantata II was a device ensuring the “privacy” Schumann had desired when he left New York. [32] Although Schumann’s work had always attempted to preclude audience identification and pacification, the plight of the Grey Lady strikes a more introspective, unprecedented note than other of his works—and seems to reflect the artist’s own state of mind. [33] In the evolution of Schumann’s theatre, Cate Farm was a period of transition between the agitprop street theatre and the contemplative, moralistic tone and style that would distinguish his work from the late 1970s on. After moving again in 1974, this time to Dopp Farm in the even more rural Vermont town of Glover, Schumann would actually return to much of what characterized his earliest works: the movement of parades, marches, and circuses; “gigantic language” and spectacle; and, most importantly, subject matter that responded in the form of direct address to global politics. While at Goddard College, however, Schumann seemed to abandon his social activism for a time in favor of introspection. Schumann’s preference for The Individual as subject connects to what Brecht describes as presentation of a representation, without exhortation, a quiet succession of images without a transparent director’s note. However, Grey Lady Cantata II presents the extreme of individuality as source for great suffering and suggests the individual’s need for the collective. The crowd was still Schumann’s purported enemy and the perceived enemy of all individual thought and artistic freedom, but such a production suggests that he harbored a desire to embrace relation and collectivity if for no other reason than that it was a necessary tool in the fight for the good of society. Schumann was clearly troubled by the tension between denouncing the crowd and identifying individuality as sickening and deadly. He hungered for some other way, some middle ground. When he moved to Glover, he disbanded the Vermont Bread and Puppet that had formed around him in Plainfield and also turned away from the obscuring style of the Grey Lady Cantatas. It seems that what Schumann took away from his early years in Vermont and the intense isolation in the work of that period was the energy to reenter the fight for good in earnest. The early Dopp Farm period began with a series of morality plays, but shortly thereafter the enormous Domestic Resurrection Circuses—arguably the most iconic performances in the company’s history—blossomed. The influence of Scott Nearing, the philosopher of capitalist secessionism and “living the good life” who inspired the American back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s (and who happened to be Schumann’s relative by marriage), in the Circuses and other post- Grey Lady works is evident. Schumann’s work in the late 1970s cried out for the “decent life” to abide by what he understood as the values of good and addressed a “universal” neighborhood as audience-recipients. The fact that Schumann’s morally didactic theatre emerges after the reserved Grey Lady Cantatas recalls Lee’s definition of asociality as a means of taking stock of political projects and perhaps altering one’s plan of engagement. In a 1994 interview with John Bell for Theater magazine, Schumann acknowledged the dangers of the ecological romanticism that attracts many people to isolated green places like his farm in Vermont: the evils of capitalism had to take thematic precedence, he said, though he lamented that this world is not a place in which his work could be focused on the idyllic setting. [34] At the time of the interview it had been almost twenty five years since Schumann moved to Vermont, and in the intervening decades, he had eschewed the aesthetics of solitude and suffering in productions like Grey Lady Cantata II for community-oriented spectacles imbued with his utopian ideals. There is irony in fighting mass systems of oppression from such a place of solitude atop a misty green mountain, but from Schumann’s perspective, he was back in the mud. “I want to be uncommercial film personified.”[35] Wading through secondary source material on Smith, I feel acutely the struggle to understand the introverted Jack Smith and to interpret his enigmatic theatre. With little surviving film documentation of Smith’s performances to go on, the archive of Smith’s theatre feels like a load of conflicting gossip and indecisive speculation. John Matturri and Rachel Joseph both describe the material elements of Smith’s performances—the “homeless objects” or “glittering junk”—as emblematic of the inherent impossibility of fixity. Smith’s orientalist aesthetic (“Egyptiana”), remarked on by Michael Moon, Marc Siegal, and Juan Suárez and compared by Dominic Johnson with Sun Ra’s “intergalactic esoterica,” is either camp or an authentic belief based in Maria Montez monotheism. [36] Matturri recalls Smith’s “generous acceptance . . . of collaborative input” and the audience’s “relaxed receptive attention” at performances in spite of their length, frequent interruptions, and arbitrary conclusion, which are at odds with the stories (which I will discuss further on) about Smith’s verbal abuse of spectators. [37] These and other writings on Smith seem to depict a different version of the artist. However, it is José Esteban Muñoz’s formulation of the artist as “the exemplary figure of the queer utopian artist and thinker who seeks solitariness yet calls for a queer collectivity” that seems the truest, and his conception of Smith’s theatre as utopian stands as a direct challenge to the inclusion of Smith in an anti-relationist archive of gay male artists. [38] Muñoz acknowledges two sides of Smith, the solitary and the collective, that are so often kept apart, yet are very clearly both present in his oeuvre. Smith’s infamous filmography of the 1960s captures the crazed, queer collective and Susan Sontag called Flaming Creatures “a lovely specimen of . . . ‘pop art,’” lumping Smith in with a whole art movement addressing the American culture of the day. [39] The theatrical performances he began in the 1970s, many of which were one man shows, represent the other, solitary side of Smith. These intensely lonely performances of the 1970s are Smith’s theatre of isolation, but even as they capture Smith’s increasing personal and creative isolation, at their heart is the anti-capitalist utopia Smith dreamed of for all people like him. [40] Smith spoke distastefully and fearfully in interviews of the archive (specifically, the Anthology Film Archives) as the “vault.” The vault was unyielding, petrifying, and antithetical to Smith’s preferred venue in the 1970s: his own apartment. In 1970, Smith announced that he would open his living space in downtown Manhattan to audiences for free shows. J. Hoberman described the “Plaster Foundation” (as Smith’s home performance venue was called) as squalid, with a gaping hole in its ceiling and an accumulation of junk and debris on the floor, to which Smith lovingly tended in the performance series “Plaster Foundation of Atlantis.” Over the rubble Smith hung fairy lights, placed cardboard palm trees, and constructed an artificial lagoon complete with a waterfall. In other words, he built Atlantis, which mythic paradise featured prominently in his imaginative writings and performances, out of a dilapidated East Village apartment. The Plaster Foundation was both the precursor to and the absolute antithesis of Andy Warhol’s Factory, which promised consumerist glamor where the Foundation spat on it. Warhol may have been an “insider” in the eyes of the broader public, but Smith was tuned in to the ugly truths of the system that produced it and he dug into them on his stage. Smith’s style of performance crumbles like the ceiling of his apartment and is as inhospitable to the audience as a junkyard. Performances were held late at night and often began hours after their expected start time. Much of what audiences watched, which may or may not have been part of the intended performance, was the arrangement of the set and other anti-theatrical antics such as Smith pretending to vacuum up the mountains of cement and plaster for hours on end. The action was frequently interrupted by further fussing with sets and costumes and the script was liable to be spontaneously rewritten by Smith mid-speech. Some Plaster Foundation visitors like Richard Foreman read this as evidence that Smith’s imagination and editorial eye were always one step ahead of the audience. The fussing and adjusting was performance, striving for and failing at perfection in front of the audience. In such performances as The Secret of Rented Island (1976) (of which only a slideshow and audio recording remains), an adaptation/queering of Ibsen’s Ghosts , Smith carries the script in his hand as he interacts with a supporting cast of costume pieces and stuffed animals each representing an alternating set of characters. Script and inanimate actors, which “moved in and out of and were often simultaneously both within and outside of various roles,” [41] disrupt the interchange of character and performance, thereby exposing Smith as himself, alone and potentially vulnerable. The irony of Smith inviting audiences into his home was that he seemed to want nothing more than to be left alone. If no one showed up to his place for a performance, those who knew him have said Smith would go on without an audience. These may have been the greatest performances he ever gave, as he was purportedly paranoid and plagued by anxiety in the presence of others—and by their mere existence in his psychic universe. He was known to abuse audiences, calling them “sofa-roosting cabbages,” and sometimes he failed to show up for a performance in the hopes that the audience would leave him alone. [42] He was both pathologically afraid of others’ criticism and persecution and assured of their duplicity: his living space featured a “hate wall,” upon which he “scrawled animosities towards friends and supporters.” Performances like What’s Underground About Marshmallows? featured nefarious figures inspired by Smith’s personal enemies, such as film critic Jonas Mekas. Smith viewed Mekas, among others, as a capitalist vampire whose motivations were antithetical to Smith’s own mission to construct an uncommercial utopia, and he believed that it was because of his foes that he was forced to “live in squalor all day long, playing hide-and-seek with others.” [43] Dominic Johnson sees in the first-hand accounts of Smith’s performance space echoes of Anthony Vidler’s critical writings on the “architectural uncanny” that “conspicuously renders architectures to be no longer homely.” Furthermore, “in Smith’s domestic performances . . . the nostalgic associations that lived spaces may garner are pitted against the threatening or subversive oppositional structures that often encroach upon them. The set of processes by which architectures become strange are deployed as a neat proxy . . . for the ways in which they approximate other social and cultural tendencies towards estrangement.” [44] Johnson identifies sexual difference as one of these so-called “social and cultural tendencies towards estrangement,” thereby comparing Smith’s space to the estrangement he experienced as a queer person in a heteronormative society. I agree with Johnson’s comparison and see the uncanny space also as definitive for Smith’s particular theatre of isolation. In contrast to the worlds in his films, which were built by way of the accumulation of writhing bodies, the transition to these home performances in the 1970s shifts settings to a one-man island. Even surrounded by audience members, it is difficult to imagine how anyone else could have authentically reached Smith’s Atlantis. The only extant and complete reconstruction of a Smith performance that I know of is a recording of Ron Vawter’s ROY COHN/JACK SMITH , as performed at The Kitchen in New York in 1993. In the production, Vawter parrots the voice of the real Jack Smith, coming through a neon yellow earbud connecting tape-deck to Vawter’s ear, as he recites the lines from Marshmallows, which premiered in the last year of the queer 1970s: 1981, the year the first positive cases of AIDS were reported in the US. Smith ominously foreshadowed the next decade of queer history and both his and Vawter’s deaths due to complications of AIDS, with the line “they love dead queers here.” [45] Wearing him in performance like an ill-fitting shirt, Vawter pulls Smith out of the closet and refashions him as a tragic hero of the queer underground. In fact, Vawter described his portrayal of Smith as “homosexual ‘closet’-performance,” and when one considers Smith’s relationship in regard to performance space, the invocation of the closet seems apt. [46] In a sense, Smith’s theatrical performances of the 1970s were staged within his own personal closet-space, but rather than being a hiding place, it becomes legible to other queer people like Vawter. In Marshmallows , Smith says the “worst of all” is that nobody thinks he is acting. The solution is to “go back into the vault.” [47] However, Smith could not hide from Vawter and his reading of Marshmallows as an overtly political, liberatory performance. Smith’s films were far more successful, at least in terms of making him a known entity, than his solo theatrical performances. His move to a more solitary artistic medium and to the role of “lone lunatic” is perhaps what led to Smith’s failure in the society of the straight and normal . The theatrical performances are, in my opinion, his most radical attempts at what Muñoz identifies as escape through “refusal of a dominant order and its systematic violence,” precisely because they were so much a product of Smith’s personal cosmology. [48] Not only did he play himself, but he enacted his personal brand of queer utopia. His performance of self was so convincing to him that living in the real world became untenable. The failure to transform the real world into one’s fantasy, argues Muñoz, is the typical plight of the queer utopian. However, something of that desire lives on in Vawter’s performance and casts Smith as an icon of collective queer world-makers. Conclusion Jack Smith, the anxiety-riddled queer filmmaker-turned-performer, tried to build utopia in the trash heap of capitalist society. Peter Schumann, an immigrant who got his start in agitprop avant-garde performance, took his puppets out into rural America when the social and political pressures of the New York art scene became too great. Adrienne Kennedy, a Black woman playwright in the overwhelmingly white commercial theatre, gave audiences rare glimpses into a fractured mind simultaneously inside and excluded from society. I have described the theatre of these three artists, in terms of its aesthetic as well as the process of its creation, as a product and a reflection of social isolation of the mind and/or body—and particularly the mind and/or body of the artist. I have tried to demonstrate, however, by tracing the trajectory of each theatre maker beyond their theatre of the 1970s, that this isolation was not an escape route but a troubled state of being at the heart of the social and political issues of the decade and a means of reinscribing one’s relationship to the collective. The plays and performances that I have examined operate on the artistic insights of the individuated while speaking to the issues of the collective. Theatre of isolation is not theatre that speaks only to itself. Categorizing such diverse works as A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White , Grey Lady Cantata II , or What’s Underground About Marshmallows? as theatre of isolation allows scholars to question how these works go beyond isolation and how they might draw individuals together and, as Lee says, “alter the horizon of what constitutes the social.” [49] For the theatre of Kennedy, Schumann, and Smith, the 1970s was an era of isolation, but what happens at the end of, or after, an era? One could turn to these three artists again, and examine Kennedy’s Sleep Deprivation Chamber , Schumann’s Domestic Resurrection Circuses, or Smith’s tragic death and status as queer icon for a few examples of going out, again. “After” is the topic for a different essay and for another time. [50] However, thinking about theatre of isolation in the past is unavoidably connected to thinking about isolation in the present. When theatre artists who have been working in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic no longer need to do so, how we will think about what has been created during this time and how “after” art will be changed by it are questions that are sure to consume the historian. Beyond theorizing the screen or Zoom as a medium—or perhaps as a way to fold those elements in with other considerations—we might look at today’s theatre of isolation as not merely constitutive of social distance. How have perspectives on society and community been changed? By making aesthetic connections to antecedents like Kennedy, Schumann, and Smith, we might find examples of where theatre might go from here. References [1] I’m thinking especially of Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Robert L. Caserio, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean, all of whom participated in a panel on the “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” at the 2005 MLA Annual Convention, as well as scholars, like Tavia Nyong’o, who have written about punk aesthetics through the lens of queer studies. [2] Summer Kim Lee. “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality,” Social Text 37, no. 1 (1 March 2019): 27. [3] Ibid., 31. [4] Ibid., 28. [5] Ibid., 31-32. [6] Ibid., 30. [7] Ibid., 33. [8] Hillary Miller, Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 15. [9] From a lecture in Robinson’s course “American Performance in the 1970s,” at Yale University. [10] Will Kaufman, American Culture in the 1970s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 72. [11] Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, “Adrienne Kennedy: An Interview.” Edited by the authors in Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9. [12] Brenda Murphy, “American Women Playwrights.” In Dale M. Bauer, ed., The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 2012). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Barbara Ann Teer and the other “warrior mothers” of the Black Arts Movement are not even named, though their work has been reclaimed in other recent scholarship. See La Donna L. Forsgren, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press: 2018). [13] I have not been able to track down concrete sources, but Kennedy’s exclusion from BAM scholarship could be connected to her lack of interest in the movement’s organizing structures, or to her work not being considered (by BAM members) to reflect the movement’s values. In the Forward to The Alexander Plays , Alisa Solomon writes, “During the 1960s and 1970s, many within the activist African American community insisted that [didactic, militant plays about race were] what their playwrights should have been writing. In those years Kennedy was criticized by activists for not working hard enough in the movement. . . . They objected to her characters, who were confused about their identity and place in the world, and who did not proclaim an uncomplicated pride in being black” (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, xii). Claudia Barnett cites Solomon, as well as scholars who argue against the use of a feminist label for Kennedy’s works, in support of her argument that Kennedy defies expectations and stereotypes connected to Blackness and/or womanhood. See Claudia Barnett, “‘This Fundamental Challenge to Identity’: Reproduction and Representation in the Drama of Adrienne Kennedy” Theatre Journal 48, no.2 (1996): 141–155. [14] Kimberly W. Benston, “Locating Adrienne Kennedy Prefacing the Subject.” In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 115. [15] bell hooks makes an explicit connection between Kennedy and Virginia Woolf, reading Kennedy’s prose as a celebration of women’s confessional writing akin to A Room of One’s Own . See bell hooks, “Critical Reflections: Adrienne Kennedy, the Writer, the Work.” In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 180. [16] Benston, “Locating Adrienne Kennedy,” 115. [17] Bryant-Jackson and Overbeck, “Adrienne Kennedy: An Interview,” 7. [18] Quotations from A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White come from: Adrienne Kennedy, Adrienne Kennedy in One Act (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 81. [19] Ibid., 92. [20] Deborah R. Geis, “‘A Spectator Watching My Life’: Adrienne Kennedy’s A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White .” In In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 171. [21] Ibid., 173. [22] Kennedy, Adrienne Kennedy in One Act , 99. [23] Margo Natalie Crawford, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First Century Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 169. [24] From “The WHY CHEAP ART? Manifesto,” Bread & Puppet, Glover, VT, 1984. [25] Silvia D. Spitta,“Revisiting the Sixties and Refusing Trash: Preamble to and Interview with Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet Theater,” boundary 2 36, no. 1 (1 February 2009): 110. [26] Here, Schumann presumably uses the royal first-person plural, as he did not initially relocate his family. But the plural “Schumanns” could also be read as his referring to his whole “company” with his own name. Quote from Bread and Rosebuds by Peter Schumann, 25 April 1970. In Stefan Brecht, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre, vol. 2 (London: Methuen, 1988), 18. [27] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 12. As of 2020, Vermont is 94.3% white—one of the top three whitest states in the country. [28] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 15. [29] Lee, “Staying In,” 33. [30] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 48. [31] Schumann quotes from an unpublished mss., “possibly an intra-company summation, dated Cate Farm, March 9, ’72.” In Brecht, 175. [32] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 180. [33] Spitta, “Revisiting the Sixties,” 116. [34] John Bell, “Uprising of the Beast: An Interview with Peter Schumann,” Theater 25, no. 1 (1 February 1994): 42. [35] From dialogue of Jack Smith’s performance What’s Underground about Marshmallows? . Quotes taken from performance recreation by Ron Vawter, as part of his piece ROY COHN/JACK SMITH, as recorded in: Jill Godmilow, dir., Ron Vawter Performs Jack Smith: What’s Underground About Marshmallows? (1993). [36] Dominic Johnson, “Jack Smith’s Rehearsals for the Destruction of Atlantis: ‘Exotic’ Ritual and Apocalyptic Tone.” Contemporary Theatre Review 19, no. 2 (1 May 2009): 177. [37] John Matturri, “Jack Smith: Notes on Homeless Objects,” Criticism 56, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 281. [38] Judith Halberstam identifies this archive, in her short forum response “The Politics of Negativity in Recent Queer Theory” as including the likes of, “in no particular order, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Bette Midler, Andy Warhol, Henry James, Jean Genet, Broadway musicals, Marcel Proust, Alfred Hitchcock, Oscar Wilde, Jack Smith, Judy Garland, and Kiki and Herb.” In PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 2006): 823–4. [39] Quotes from Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation pulled from: Douglas Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 132. [40] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009) , 170. [41] Matturri, “Jack Smith,” 284 [42] From the documentary Jack Smith and The Destruction of Atlantis (2006), directed by Mary Jordan. [43] Godmilow, Ron Vawter Performs , 1993. [44] Johnson, “Jack Smith’s Rehearsals,” 169. [45] Here, I suggest the “queer seventies,” in the U.S., as beginning in 1969, with the Stonewall Riots in New York’s Greenwich Village, and the ending with the first reports of AIDS cases in 1981. [46] Godmilow, Ron Vawter Performs , 1993. [47] Ibid., 1993. [48] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia , 172. [49] Lee, “Staying In,” 31. [50] In addition to Lee’s discussion of what happens “after,” Joshua Chambers-Letson’s recent book After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York University Press, 2018) is dedicated to the question this essay does not answer. Footnotes About The Author(s) Madeline Pages is a dramaturg and MFA Candidate at the former the Yale School of Drama. She is currently partnering with the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) to conduct research and performance experiments around the history of astronomy, astrophysics, and human space travel. She is also collaborating on a new opera I AM ALAN TURING , composed by Matthew Suttor and inspired by the life and writings of mathematician Alan Turing. 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 Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Dominic Finocchiaro  Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Dinosaurs Dominic Finocchiaro By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF April Mathis, Kathleen Chalfant, and Elizabeth Marvel, photo by Julieta Cervantes The Dinosaurs By Jacob Perkins Directed by Les Waters Playwrights Horizons New York, NY February 19, 2025 Reviewed by Dominic Finocchiaro If the ever-present countdown clock in Oedipus was the defining image on Broadway this past season, a much more inefficacious timekeeper demanded attention Off-Broadway: the cheap, broken wall-clock that hung on the wall in Les Waters’s premiere production of Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs at Playwrights Horizons. The piece of scenery, easy to disregard in its anonymity, managed, in its inutility, to hold within itself the very dramaturgical structure undergirding the production. The world presented to audiences on the Judith O. Rubin Theater stage was one in which time was not linear but broken open and palimpsestic, containing both past and future in the eternal here and now that is the life of the addict in recovery. Perkins’s play is an addiction recovery play, a genre highly present onstage recently in the form of Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir , Joe White’s Blackout Songs , and Sean Daniels’s The White Chip, among others. However, it is perhaps more useful to place Perkins’s play in conversation with Annie Baker’s Infinite Life and its abiding interest in formally exploring the liminal spaces of recovery (from illness in Baker’s play) and the ways that such spaces fracture and distort one’s experience of time. The Dinosaurs follows the Saturday Survivors, a weekly AA support group for women, as they prepare for and undertake one of their meetings. The women (portrayed by Kathleen Chalfant, Elizabeth Marvel, April Mathis, Mallory Portnoy, and Maria Elena Ramirez) are of various ages and ethnicities, similar only in their addiction. A newcomer to the meeting, Reyna, or Buddy (Keilly McQuail), arrives briefly at the top of the play before quickly skittering off (although she will reappear later). Everything is set-up for a hyper-naturalist, minimalist, real-time drama to unfold. dots’s design further established this expectation in the audience: their set was perfectly banal, painstaking in its recreation of the anonymous, threadbare, and utilitarian nature of the rooms in which AA meetings are often held. The folding chairs were mismatched, and stray items were neatly lined up against the back wall—a period painting (whose subject cheekily evokes The Dinosaurs ’s origin as a Clubbed Thumb prompt about The Decameron) , exercise mats, cardboard boxes—as if to showcase the various and random usages that the room was in service to. And let’s not forget that broken clock. Perkins’s characterizations, like the set, are relatively sparse on the page, underscoring the importance of anonymity to the addict in recovery; although every addict’s story is different in its details, at their core they are all the same, and to engage meaningfully in the work of recovery is to throw off the uniqueness of the individual self and accept being one of many. The women all have names that start with the letter J, further signaling this lack of individuality. Waters and the ensemble offset this sense of anonymity somewhat through the specificity of their work, but the sparseness of Perkins’s text resists too much actorly embellishment. Indeed, the performances that seemed to push hardest against this simplicity of characterization are the ones that risked dissonance vis-a-vis the larger vision of the production. Perhaps the most unadorned—and strongest—performance was Mathis’s as the gentle, conciliatory Jane; in giving over to the text completely, Mathis exuded a quiet but resounding presence that reverberated in its utter simplicity and helped ground the production. Maria Elena Ramirez and Elizabeth Marvel, photo by Julieta Cervantes The Dinosaurs was the first production in Playwrights Horizons’s new Unplugged program, which aims to promote new plays in simple realizations with low-production values, focusing on the creativity of the work itself rather than the spectacle afforded by large design budgets. A one-location play set at an AA meeting is a smart choice for such a program, but the fact that Waters was directing gave audiences a hint that the realm of pure naturalism was not this play’s likely home. Waters’s oeuvre is perhaps most striking in his productions’ ability to manifest psychogeography, to create haunted, liminal atmospheres so rich in emotion and memory that they become another character in themselves—his recent, deeply moving (and deeply underappreciated) staging of Eliya Smith’s Grief Camp at the Atlantic was a prime example of these tendencies. For Waters, a room is never just a room—certainly not a room with as much embedded memory as one that has housed a support group for over fifty years. What audiences came to realize, little by little, in Waters’s production was that what they were witnessing was not a single meeting, but in fact fragments of many meetings over many years. The first significant evidence of this (besides the broken clock) was the reappearance of Reyna during the group’s three-minute silent meditation and the asynchronous conversation she had with Jane that went unacknowledged by the other women. Another example was Joan’s (Marvel) days of sobriety ricocheting from forty-five days to twenty-seven to ten to five to one to thirteen years, all in the span of a single minute. Later, Jolly (Chalfant) vanished from the stage without fuss and was spoken of in fond remembrances by Joan, mourning her passing. This was a world in which time is a tenuous, fragile thing that is as uncertain as each character’s hard-fought sobriety. Time in this room, then, was a purgatorial time that flattened. If, as Thornton Wilder writes in his essay “Some Thoughts on Playwriting,” theatrical time is always now, then so is it the case in recovery, with its emphasis on living in the moment and on being in “the present tense,” as Perkins’s characters often reiterate. Recovery is anti-teleological, the inherently cyclical time of eternal return—every day is a new day, but every day is also the same struggle, and the women in the play must, as they cheerily invoke, “keep on coming back” to this same room. What Perkins and Waters attempted to do, therefore, was to give to such an experience a theatrical form attuned to its psychological truth; while a more linear structure that moved towards a climactic resolution would be false for the addict in recovery, the production’s dreamlike distortions of time recreated the addict in recovery’s ongoing relationship with their own addictions. It is a relationship whose routines are so repetitive that they blur together into an endlessly occurring, singular present. Although the play refuses dramatic resolution, Perkins does offer audiences something to grasp onto at work’s end. Reyna returns after having been integrated into the group. Chalfant then arrives back on stage, only this time, she is a new character. The eldest member of the group now embodies the newbie, and Reyna has moved from newbie to welcoming veteran. The names and roles have changed, but the cycle continues in the empty room. The two women then left to meet the others at a nearby diner, and the audience was left with the room itself, in a silence that screamed. The room will be there after these specific women have gone, and it will continue to hold their love, their care and generosity for each other. Waters succeeded at creating another of his haunted spaces, the ghosts that inhabited it not fearsome but friendly, guides rather than demons. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DOMINIC FINOCCHIARO is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on late 20 th  and 21 st  century anglophone plays and playwrights, with a particular emphasis on queer theatre. As a playwright, his work has been developed and produced nationwide, including at Clubbed Thumb, the Kennedy Center, the New Group, and the Roundabout 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Nicholas Orvis 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 Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Nicholas Orvis By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF PLAYING REAL: MIMESIS, MEDIA, AND MISCHIEF. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Lindsay Brandon Hunter’s Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief offers valuable insights into the practices and problems of mediatized performances that play with and against conventional notions of “the real.” Hunter wisely eschews both the well-trod liveness debates of Performance Studies and, more challengingly, the many anxieties attendant on media’s increasingly destabilized relationship to reality. Instead, she embraces these performances’ playful construction of the real as a means to make mischief—particularly, mischief with the dominant paradigms within which such performances exist. The book proves a fruitful contribution to interdisciplinary theater and performance studies, applying its analysis in equal measure to the fields of broadcast theater (such as the well-known NT Live), reality television programming, and alternate reality games (ARGs). Each of these fields, as Hunter discusses, is “tethered in some way to an imaginary of the real” (xvii-xviii). Her six core chapters are neatly divided into three pairs, one for each of the creative fields under discussion, and move from performances with which theater scholars are likely to be familiar (broadcast performances in chapter one, the Wooster Group’s 2007 Hamlet in chapter two) through a deeply theatrical slice of television (reality television in chapter three and particularly “scripted reality” in chapter four) and, then, into the growing critical terrain exploring intersections of theater, performance, and game-playing (through the particular lens of ARGs in chapters five and six). Each set of chapters offers a helpfully polyvalent reading on its source material, with the initial chapters in each pair (one, three, and five) doing the work of theorizing a medium’s relationship to the real while the subsequent chapters (two, four, and six) offer deep dives into case studies that provide nuance which complicates the previous discussion. Hunter’s writing displays an impressive command of the existing scholarly literature of what might be considered three distinct fields, in particular, drawing upon the work of Sarah Bay-Cheng and Philip Auslander, to consider these mediatized performances as not distanced from, but rather engaged in the construction of, reality. Hunter offers fruitful provocations in her close readings and theorizing. She begins by examining the ways broadcast theater, beginning with the 1964 Electronovision capture of Richard Burton’s Hamlet , have striven to “translate” the supposedly ineluctable liveness of theater to the cinema or television screen—and in so doing, she proposes, have revealed “liveness to be less theater’s ontology than its brand ” (12, original emphasis). It’s the brand of a certain kind of theater, at the very least: the well-funded, nationally acclaimed, artistically conservative institutions that can afford to finance these undertakings, such as the National Theatre in London or New York’s Metropolitan Opera. As Hunter rightly observes, these organizations are engaged not only in transmitting their performances but to didactic work that, by dictating the viewer’s focus, enforces “a particular skill of ‘reading’ theater” in accordance with the directors’ and producers’ intentions (18). Hunter suggests that through such direction, this broadcast work has the potential to disrupt, or at least inflect, the dominant norms of theatergoing (19). I wonder, however, whether in practice such disruption will come to pass or whether this medium will remain the province of artistically conservative (sometimes conservational) institutions—the ones most consistently able to muster the funds needed to create the broadcasts discussed. While Hunter’s second chapter focuses on the Wooster Group’s remixing of that 1964 Hamlet , the third and fourth chapters expand her horizons dramatically, taking in the realm of reality TV with a focus on the performance of romantic love. Hunter skillfully weaves together existing analyses and critiques from the field of media studies with her own theater-grounded theorizing; of particular note is her explication of “unreceived acting,” an inversion of Michael Kirby’s theory of “received acting” articulated in “On Acting and Not Acting.” Reality TV performers, Hunter suggests, may be read by their audiences as specifically not acting—even when their performances are clearly embedded in the histrionic conventions of reality television (53-54). This concept offers, I think, a useful way of reading not only reality TV performances but other performance approaches broadcast on social media platforms or live-streaming sites such as Twitch, as well. Hunter’s final chapters tackle alternate reality games. These games—often lengthy explorations of another world—offer exciting ground for a performance scholar, and Hunter adroitly brings both performance theorists and some notables of game studies (particularly Jane McGonigal) to bear on these performative acts of play. McGonigal’s own World Without Oil seems to offer a hopeful case study in chapter five, suggesting that ARGs can help players engage critically with the world around them. Unfortunately, this optimism is immediately undercut by chapter six’s dissection of a (somewhat sinister) 2010 game encouraging players to embrace surveillance technology when it’s in the “right hands,” Conspiracy for Good —an ARG funded in part by Nokia and featuring its then-new image recognition technology. The dichotomy of chapters five and six points to an unresolved tension in Hunter’s monograph: although she consistently returns to an optimistic view of the “mischief” these performances create, there seems to be almost as much evidence in favor of such disruption serving ill ends. Hunter acknowledges these concerns briefly in her epilogue, and it’s fair to say that this volume—begun before both the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic—is an opening salvo in the discussion of this mischief’s role in contemporary society rather than a final statement. Ultimately, Playing Real is a well-researched and valuable monograph, skillfully speaking across multiple fields to consider the ways we use theatrical artifice not only to tell stories about our reality but to construct and play with it, as well. Playing Real will be of greatest interest to researchers in performance and media studies, yet scholars—or classrooms—examining broadcast theater, intermedial theater, reality television, or ARGs will find it valuable. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) NICHOLAS ORVIS (he/him) is a doctoral candidate at the School of Drama at Yale. From 2014-2019 he was Literary Associate and Resident Dramaturg at Premiere Stages at Kean University. Other dramaturgical work includes Yale Repertory Theater, Portland Stage Company, the Tank, and the Yale Cabaret. He is a former managing editor of Theater magazine, and his critical writing has appeared in Theater , 3Views on Theatre , and HowlRound . He co-produces (with Percival Hornak) Dungeons + Drama Nerds , an ongoing podcast. His research interests include game-based performances, immersive theater, and early modern European drama. 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.

By Frank Hentschker | A snapshot of the vibrant New York dance scene, through their manifestos. < 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 DANCE New York: Performed Manifestos Frank Hentschker Download PDF A celebration of the vibrant New York dance scene. New York choreographers and dancers present their manifestos, statements of why they do what they do and how they do it. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

By Ernesto Caballero, Guillem Clua, Cristina Colmena, Mar Gómez Glez, Borja Ortiz de Gondra, Alfredo Sanzol, Emilio Williams | This selection of plays offers insight into the evolution of Spanish art and culture in the context of the country’s current situation. < 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 New Plays from Spain Ernesto Caballero, Guillem Clua, Cristina Colmena, Mar Gómez Glez, Borja Ortiz de Gondra, Alfredo Sanzol, Emilio Williams Download PDF Eight Works by Seven Playwrights Spanish theatre has experienced a remarkable renaissance in recent years. On the occasion of the 2013 PEN World Voices Festival in New York, eight plays by seven Spanish playwrights were brought together by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, the Spanish Consulate in New York, Fundación Autor, and the Instituto Cervantes for a two-day festival of readings and discussion at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The Graduate Center, CUNY. Representing the most innovative and respected voices working in contemporary Spanish theatre, this selection of plays offers insight into the evolution of Spanish art and culture in the context of the country’s current situation. This anthology, published on the occasion of these readings, brings together the voices of Ernesto Caballero, Guillem Clua, Cristina Colmena, Mar Gómez Glez, Borja Ortiz de Gondra, Alfredo Sanzol, and Emilio Williams. Presented together, these plays represent the rich and varied landscape of contemporary Spanish theatre. Three of the eight plays included in this volume appear in both Spanish and English, and may therefore serve as a study in translation for artists, scholars, and translators. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Top of Page Curators' Note Program Prelude 2024 Schedule Prelude 2024 Team TheaterListingsNYC ASAP15 PRELUDE FESTIVAL 2024 October 16-19 The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York Curator Note Program Prelude 2024 Team PRELUDE 2024 Between the Scenes The 21st annual PRELUDE Festival, curated by Jess Barbagallo and John Hoobyar in alignment with “Not a Luxury,” a collaboration between ASAP-15 and the Park Avenue Armory, will feature works-in-process, critical conversations, and new theater and performance scholarship. As a featured program of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, PRELUDE presents a unique snapshot of the contemporary New York experimental theater. By merging the critical with the creative, PRELUDE provides a space for artists to share and discover emerging practices in form, craft, and technology. Since 2003, The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center has presented the PRELUDE Festival (see past editions) A note from the curators A renaissance, albeit on a dime. With new performance spaces in New York proliferating despite the interminable precarity of arts and culture funding, it can feel more challenging than ever to be in the know on all the performances happening in the city on any given night. The scene, if there ever was one, has splintered into silos within silos, with performance diets increasingly dictated by the algorithm of one’s Instagram feed. Prelude 2024: Between the Scenes looks towards possible connections in this seemingly diffuse landscape by bringing into conversation and programming together artists working in different corners, edges, and centers of said scene. A series of dialogues seed new relationships and activate old ones within this year’s cohort. ‘Group Dates’ present structured conversations and interviews between featured artists. ‘The School of New York: New Leaders and the Artists They Serve in Dialogue,’ moderated by critic Helen Shaw, brings artists and artistic directors together to discuss ideas and solutions for the quandaries currently facing our field. ‘Precarious Luxuries: improvisation, performance, and planning for the unplanned,’ the keynote event of the ASAP/15 conference, presented in alignment with Prelude, addresses the stakes and strategies of improvisational practice, a prominent mode of making among this year’s Prelude cohort. The conversations continue in a launch event for Julia Jarcho’s newly published ‘Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism’ and in artist talks through the program. Prelude 2024: Between the Scenes also seeks to cultivate excitement for those more subtle moments and minor benchmarks in an artist’s life and practice. While some of this year’s artists invite audiences into the very beginning of new collaborations, others come with teasers of works to be presented later this fall, and still others activate their archives to dig deeper into the traces of past performances. Again, the between. Jess Barbagallo & John Hoobyar Prelude 2024 Co-Curators John Hoobyar Jess Barbagallo Program Button HONORING PAULA COURT Prelude 2024 Opening Ceremony 4pm October 16, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall Lobby SEE MORE Button SKELETON ARCHITECTURE Skeleton Architecture 6:30pm October 16, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button DANCERS 4 PALESTINE + THEATER WORKERS FOR A CEASEFIRE Building Cultural Power through Organizing 3pm October 17, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button LÉOH HAILU-GHERMAY Legally Bald 5:30pm October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button AMANDA HOROWITZ Bad Stars 7pm October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button ASHIL LEE, LÉOH HAILU-GHERMAY, AMANDA HOROWITZ + S T A R R BUSBY Group Date: a conversation 4:30pm October 18, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button MORIAH EVANS Sharing 7pm October 18, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button JULIA JARCHO Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism 3pm October 19, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button LUCIANA ACHUGAR The Pleasure Practice 6pm October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button RIVEN RATANAVANH Ornamentalism 4:30pm October 16, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button SHONNI ENELOW + DAVID LEVINE David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: WTF 6:30pm October 16, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button NOELLE GHOUSSAINI A shadow of light: a ritual gathering 4pm October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button LESLIE CUYJET, FRANCESCA D'UVA, MORIAH EVANS + KATIANA GONÇALES RANGEL Group Date: a conversation 6pm October 17, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button TINA SATTER / HALF STRADDLE PETRA 8pm October 18, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button MORGAN BASSICHIS, FREEDOME BRADLEY-BALLENTINE, ENVER CHAKARTASH, WILL DAVIS, CALEB HAMMONS, JILL RAFSON, TINA SATTER + TYLER THOMAS The School of New York: New Leaders and the Artists They Serve in Dialogue 5pm October 18, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button FRANCESCA D'UVA An Hour With Francesca D’Uva 8pm October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button S T A R R BUSBY Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part II 4pm October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button WASEEM ALZER, AYA AZIZ + SARAH BITAR The Arab in Theatre: A Conversation 5pm October 16, 2024 Elebash Recital Halll SEE MORE Button KATIANA GONÇALES RANGEL + KATIE BROOK Nannies of New York City 8pm October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button NILE HARRIS, ALEX TATARSKY, ANH VO + ETHAN PHILBRICK Precarious Luxuries: improvisations, performance, and planning for the unplanned 4:30pm October 17, 2024 Proshansky Auditorium SEE MORE Button S T A R R BUSBY Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part I 6pm October 17, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall Lobby SEE MORE Button [CANCELLED] HOLLAND ANDREWS + YUNIYA EDI KWON [CANCELLED] How does it feel to look at nothing (excerpt) 4pm October 18, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button LESLIE CUYJET + KAREN KANDEL Going Beige 5:30pm October 18, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Button NEEDY LOVER | ASHIL LEE + PHOEBE BROOKS | PAUL LAZAR + JERRY LIEBLICH / THIRD EAR Plays in Process 1:30 pm October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre SEE MORE Button NIALL N JONES - *• AsTheyWriistBroke •* - 5pm October 19, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall SEE MORE Conversations Schedule WEDS, OCT 16 4:00-4:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Lobby Prelude 2024 Opening Ceremony, honoring Paula Court with the 2024 Franky Award 4:30-5:50pm @ The Segal Theatre Riven Ratanavanh, Ornamentalism 5:00-5:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Waseem Alzer, Aya Aziz, Sarah Bitar, The Arab in Theatre: A Conversation 6:30-7:20pm @ The Segal Theatre Skeleton Architecture 6:30-7:20pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Shonni Enelow + David Levine, David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: WTF 8:00-8:50pm @ The Segal Theatre Katiana Gonçales Rangel + Katie Brook, Nannies of New York City FRI, OCT 18 [CANCELLED] 4:00-4:50pm @ The Segal Theatre [CANCELLED] Holland Andrews + yuniya edi kwon, How does it feel to look at nothing (excerpt) 4:30-5:20pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Group Date: a conversation with Léoh Hailu-Ghermay, Ashil Lee, Amanda Horowitz, S T A R R busby 5:00-6:30pm @ The Segal Theatre The School of New York: New Leaders and the Artists They Serve in Dialogue, moderated by Helen Shaw 5:00-6:20pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Leslie Cuyjet + Karen Kandel, Going Beige 7:00-7:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Moriah Evans, Sharing 8:00-8:50pm @ The Segal Theatre Francesca D'Uva, An Evening with Francesca D'Uva THURS, OCT 17 3:00-3:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Building Cultural Power through Organizing: Dancers 4 Palestine & Theater Workers for a Ceasefire 4:00-4:50pm @ The Segal Theatre Noelle Ghoussaini, A shadow of light: a ritual gathering 4:30-6:00pm @ Proshansky Auditorium Ethan Philbrick, Nile Harris, Alex Tatarsky, Anh Vo, Precarious Luxuries: improvisations, performance, and planning for the unplanned 5:30-6:20pm @ The Segal Theatre Léoh Hailu-Ghermay, Legally Bald 6:00-8:00pm @ Elebash Recital Hall lobby S T A R R busby, Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part I 6:00-6:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Group Date: a conversation with Moriah Evans, Katiana Gonçales Rangel, Leslie Cuyjet, Francesca D'Uva 7:00-7:50pm @ The Segal Theatre Amanda Horowitz, Bad Stars 8:00-8:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Tina Satter, PETRA SAT, OCT 19 1:30-3:00pm @ The Segal Theatre Plays in Process: works by Needy Lover, Ashil Lee, Jerry Lieblich 3:00-3:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Julia Jarcho, Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism 4:00-4:50pm @ The Segal Theatre S T A R R busby, Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part II 5:00-5:50pm @ Elebash Recital Hall Niall Jones, - *• AsTheyWriistBroke •* - 6:00-8:00pm @ The Segal Theatre luciana achugar, The Pleasure Practice 9:00pm: Prelude Festival Party at The Tank! Prelude 2024 Team Jess Barbagallo Co-Curator John Hoobyar Co-Curator and Senior Producer Camilo Ramirez , Production Assistant Randi Rivera Technical Director Indigo Sparks Producer Robin Schatell/Mov!ng Culture Projects Associate Producer Frank Hentschker Executive Director and Director of Programs, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Niyoosha Ahmadikhoo Next Generation Fellow, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Nurit Chinn Marketing Communications Manager, Prelude 2024; Next Generation Fellow, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Gaurav Singh Nijjer, Digital and Web Producer, Martin E. Segal Theater Center Announcing TheaterListingsNYC.com The Martin E. Segal Center is proud to announce the launch of TheaterListingsNYC.com, a new initiative of the Center to collect and share theater and performance listings in one place for New York audiences. Please visit the site to see listings of upcoming performances throughout the city. Explore ASAP/15: Not a Luxury Prelude 2024: Between the Scenes is presented in alignment with ASAP/15: Not a Luxury, a collaboration between ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and the Park Avenue Armory. Read More

Watch QUEENDOM by Agniia Galdanova at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Like a young David Bowie from another planet, the whole world is one giant catwalk for intrepid 21-year-old queer artist Gena. She grew up in the far reaches of Russia, in a town built on top of an old gulag camp. Today, she stages her radical performances in supermarkets, metro stations and in the middle of Moscow streets in an alternative protest against the way LGBTQ+ people are treated in Putin’s extremely conservative Russia. People shout at her, and Gena calmly responds. With never-failing support from her grandmother, she acts out all the creatures that live inside her through her spectacular costumes, which she often makes out of tape and junk. Agniia Galdanova’s beautiful and atmospheric film is not so much a portrait as it is a direct cinematic extension of Gena’s inner universe. In other words, a film in the field between art and activism, between documentary and science fiction, and between an old and a young Russia. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents QUEENDOM At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Agniia Galdanova Documentary, Performance Art This film will be screened in-person on May 16th About The Film Country United States / France Language Russian, English Running Time 98 minutes Year of Release 2023 Like a young David Bowie from another planet, the whole world is one giant catwalk for intrepid 21-year-old queer artist Gena. She grew up in the far reaches of Russia, in a town built on top of an old gulag camp. Today, she stages her radical performances in supermarkets, metro stations and in the middle of Moscow streets in an alternative protest against the way LGBTQ+ people are treated in Putin’s extremely conservative Russia. People shout at her, and Gena calmly responds. With never-failing support from her grandmother, she acts out all the creatures that live inside her through her spectacular costumes, which she often makes out of tape and junk. Agniia Galdanova’s beautiful and atmospheric film is not so much a portrait as it is a direct cinematic extension of Gena’s inner universe. In other words, a film in the field between art and activism, between documentary and science fiction, and between an old and a young Russia. In press notes About The Artist(s) in press notes Get in touch with the artist(s) igormyakotin@gmail.com and follow them on social media 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

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF By Gergana Traikova Image Credits: Article In the course of the last decade, the tandem of Veselka Kuncheva, director, and Marieta Golomehova, set designer, managed to develop their special creative process and make a name as theatre-makers with a distinctive style characterized by deep symbolism, visual richness, and a combination of puppets, live actors, multimedia elements and music. Other features of their works are a dark aesthetics and experimental approach, where text seems to lose its primary importance and give way to the visual. In 2019 Kuncheva said in an interview “...I realized at some point that we start serving the text, and there is much more to theatre than just text. That is why my way of working is almost upside down - I accept the text only as one of the instruments of theatre. For me, the main thing in theatre is what we call life." ( Kultura newspaper: Issue 9 (2982), November 2021) The tandem’s performances have invariably been receiving predominantly rave reviews . Almost every year they have been awarded the main theatre awards Ikar and Askeer , thus cementing their status as leading figures of the Bulgarian theatre. However, behind the adulation and accolades there are issues that rarely get raised publicly. Recently, the tandem’s work has begun to follow one and the same, familiar pattern: repetitive visual elements with an emphasis on darkness and smoke. In almost every performance Kuncheva develops a similar idea, placing in the center a human being who is afraid, or corrupted by society, or possessed by their own demons. Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson I have been observing the tandem’s work for ten years now and, during the first three of them I was not only impressed but truly enchanted by the visuality of their theatre and the richness of stage means of expression. In the summer of 2016, I had the opportunity to attend the rehearsals of the Queen of Spades by Pushkin, at the State Puppet Theatre of Plovdiv, and I kept a diary about the work process. I remember the rapture of the rehearsal atmosphere and Kuncheva's mastery of creating a team, her ability to challenge the actors every day with new tasks for creative experiments. A year later, though, I remember the premiere of Demon Life, based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Demons at the State Puppet Theatre of Stara Zagora, as a moment of sobering down of my enthusiasm. The performance looked like a sequel to Queen of Spades: with the same approach, similar mise-en-scène and subject matter, albeit in a new visual form. With each subsequent performance of Kuncheva, the repetitive elements became more noticeable to me. Many would call it a style, but where does a style and creative language end, and uniformity and predictability begin? The newest work of Kuncheva and Golomehova, The Little Prince at the Youth Theatre “Nikolai Binev,” represents a slight departure from their otherwise typical dark aesthetics. Although the production is aimed at a children's audience, smoke and repetitive mechanical movements again take center stage, creating a feeling of depression. The plot of Saint-Exupéry's story is nearly entirely followed, with its key moments, like the Little Prince’s encounters with the Fox, the Rose and his travels through the wondrous planets, but they seem to remain on the surface, deprived of the depth and philosophical message of the original work. Repetitive elements, such as mass dance scenes, which have no clear connection to the plot or characters but are intended to summarize the previous scenes, deepen a sense of disjointedness and a lack of original directorial ideas for presenting Saint-Exupéry’s work. The theme of the individual and society – a Kuncheva favorite – creeps in here as well, but it does not bring anything new or different from her previous performances. Loud music, dancing and smoke once again dominate the stage space, making the transitions between scenes mechanical and devoid of emotional fluidity. The cast of The Little Prince is undoubtedly trying with utmost dedication to accomplish the tasks set by the director. Especially Kuncho Kanev, in the role of the Pilot, builds up a brilliant and complete character who goes deftly from the very striving for life and the steadfastness, through childish naivety, to the touching love for the world around him. The appearance of the actress Anna-Valeria Gostanyan is very impressive too; she plays the part of the Serpent, twisting around a descending spiral. It is a truly acrobatic moment where the airiness and beauty of the movement stand out against the repetitive mass dance scenes. Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson It should be noted that Kuncheva and Polina Hristova, the authors of the dramatization, have managed to introduce some humor through several comic scenes that illustrate the absurdity of the world we live in. For example, the scene with the stargazers who count stars on an exaggeratedly large abacus in order to own, sell and earn money for more stars; or the geographer, who strongly resembles a bureaucrat from a government office refusing assistance because of a missing document. Although these moments capture the meaninglessness of the modern world, they also highlight the main problem in Kuncheva's work : lack of a clearly identified central idea that would unify the scenes and result in an overall integrity of the production. The visually appealing sets created by Marieta Golomehova manage to take the viewer briefly into the magical world of the story, transporting them through the stars and universes and introducing them to the whimsical characters. Golomehova incorporates spirals and rounded elements throughout the set design: from the descending spirals around which the planets are located, to a massive spiral platform in the center of the stage around which all the journeys of the Little Prince take place. Ultimately, though, despite the visually impressiveness of the production, it remains empty in terms of content. There is something of this combination in the previous production of the tandem: The Portrait of Dorian Gray at the Racho Stoyanov Theatre in Gabrovo. There, the fragmentary nature of the structure is taken to an extreme: the scenes often end upbruptly, as if literally cut off . This is sometimes rather confusing and makes it difficult to follow the overall storyline. The production follows the main thread of the novel, where Dorian Gray, obsessed with his beauty, sells his soul to preserve his youth while his portrait ages. Although the atmosphere of mysticism and decadence around the character are conveyed, the emphasis again falls mainly on the visual side and mass scenes. The idea of a tableau-vivant in which Basil (Dimo Dimov) models the actors' bodies in front of a translucent fabric, creating works of art, is impressive. A visually strong moment is also the coming to life of the portrait that finally swallows Dorian. Unfortunately, though, Blagovest Mitsev, in the role of Dorian Gray, fails to achieve anything memorable, playing as if one note almost through the entire performance. This contrasts strongly with Tsveti Peniashki, who demonstrates impressive vocal and acting skills in the part of Sir Henry Wotton. Penyashki manages to create a multi-layered character, while Mitsev seems to fail to capture the complexity of his character, and his achievements remain only on the level of plasticity. In The Portrait of Dorian Gray there again are dance scenes and mass scenes, in which the actors repeat movements and lines that have no essential meaning to the plot, except to re-emphasize the theme of aimlessness of existence. As in other recent productions of the tandem there is a combination of costumes inspired by a concrete era and rather neutral materials, such as elastics, nets, nylon and fabric. So the production has impressive plastic scenes, yet features the familiar flaws: excessive focus on the visual side at the expense of content. In 2016 the theatre critic Veneta Doycheva wrote in her review of Kuncheva’s Escapes performance, "If there is something that could be desired, it is towards the purely dramatic side of the performance. Individual etudes quickly exhaust their internal charge and do not trespass into a more generalized level of meaning. Many of the scenes get stuck in repetition and fail to develop the literal saturation of gesture or movement in a new plane. The metaphorical key is laid bare, and instead of poetry, the image acquires only technical dimensions." (HOMO LUDENS 19/2016) No doubt, the productions of Kuncheva and Golomehova represent a well-balanced hybridity between elements of dramatic theatre, puppetry, musical theatre and acrobatics. However, a major problem remains the very telling of a story. Attempts at creating a poetical atmosphere often turn into a maelstrom of repetitions which bring about stasis and cyclicity in the dialogue. What Doycheva underlined in 2016 has, alas, worsened now, and the repetition unfolds on two levels: first, in the repetition of scenes within one and the same production and, second, in their transfer from one production to another. An example of this can be seen in the repetitive lines and mechanical movements of the nobles in Dorian Gray , the nobles in The Queen of Spades , the controlled figures in The Last Man (2019) and the collective images of society in Momo (2014), Don Quixote (2022) and The Little Prince . Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson Actually, the repeated mise-en-scène, themes and means of expression in Kuncheva's work began after her production I, Sisyphus (2013), which is still running. In it, the main artistic element is the multiplication of the actor's face by means of puppets made from a plaster cast of his face. It is nearly in the same way that the collective image of the Gray people in Momo is built up. In Fear (2014), another production of Kuncheva (co-authored with Ina Bozhidarova), the same technique is used to present the fears of the main character. In The Queen of Spades , the repetition comes in the form of a dress made of multiple baby dolls, and in The Last Man , based on Orwell's 1984 (2019), there are busts again with plaster casts of the face of one of the actors in order to stress the lack of individuality. While the multiplication of faces gradually receded in the tandem's collaborative work, the "dancing woman," or an ensemble of "dancing women." remains a constant element in their performances. This motif appears in various forms: from the ballerina in Fear , through the Countess and Lisa in The Queen of Spades , Mary Magdalene in The Last Temptation (2017), the Dulcineas in Don Quixote (2022), Sybil in The Portrait of Dorian Gray (2024) to Roses in The Little Prince (2024). Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson In light of these observations, a question arises: does Kuncheva's focus on visual elements, at the expense of dramaturgy and analysis, contribute to the repetitiveness in her performances? In her interview at the Kultura newspaper, she reportss that she bases her approach on the personal experiences, skills, and perspectives of the actors. From my observations during the rehearsal process of Queen of Spades , I can add that she provides actors with the freedom and time to express themselves through a series of tasks related to the materials to be used in the performance (such as wire mesh, rubber bands, foam, etc.) and the themes and subthemes of the literary works. However, the freedom offered in the laboratory process seems not to have a significant impact on the final result, as it is often suppressed by already established visual images. This leads to a disconnection between content and form, resulting in performances that resemble scattered thoughts, devoid of a unifying overarching idea. The distinctive artistic approach of Kuncheva’s tandem with Golomehova is undoubtedly an important part of the contemporary Bulgarian theatre, but perhaps the time has come for a change: for an escape from the familiar dark narrative, for researching new themes, for challenging themselves. After all, the biggest challenge for an established artist is not to stay in the comfort zone, but to find new ways to inspire and be inspired. The human beings’ biggest battle is with themselves, as Kuncheva herself emphasizes in almost every work of hers. References References About the author(s) Gergana Traykova is completing her Ph.D. studies at the Department of Theatre Studies, NATFA "Krastyo Sarafov" in Sofia, Bulgaria. Her writings have been published in national theatre journals in Bulgaria, including KuklArt, Artizanin , and Stranitsa . She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Theatre Studies and Theatre Management at NATFA "Krastyo Sarafov", followed by a Master’s in Puppet Theatre Directing. In 2021, she directed her thesis production, an original dramatization of Margarit Minkov's tale Merry Tickling Laughter at the State Puppet Theatre "Georgi Mitev" in Yambol, Bulgaria. Currently she is the dramaturg of the Drama and Puppet Theatre – Vratsa, Bulgaria. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Heather S. Nathans Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF During the fall of 2020 I had the privilege of interviewing a group of groundbreaking scholars in Black Theatre: Harry Elam, Jr., E. Patrick Johnson, David Krasner, Bernth Lindfors, Sandra Richards, Sandra Shannon, and Harvey Young . Asking each of these distinguished colleagues the same four questions, I invited them to share their insights into the current state of the field, describe important milestones they have marked, and suggest those that have yet to be documented. What a gift it was to spend time with these generous colleagues and to hear their perspectives on the state of Black Theatre and Performance. The essay below represents a synthesis of roughly eight hours of live interviews as well as written responses to my questions. Additionally, in some instances, the interviewees mentioned works by rising generations of scholars and I reached out to those colleagues for their thoughts. I have included the comments of those who were able to respond in a concluding section entitled “Afterviews,” featuring Julius Fleming, La Donna Forsgren, Donatella Galella, Douglas A. Jones, Jr. , and Adrienne C. Macki. Certain themes echo throughout the comments below: The need to embrace Black Theatre as a site of both joy and resistance; the need to explore and document uncharted histories that lie outside traditional definitions or sites of “theatre,” and the opportunities to create more intersectional narratives of Black theatremakers. I offer my thanks to everyone involved for making the time to share their insights and for laying out a number of pathways and challenges for students and scholars studying Black Theatre’s past, present, and future. What critical junctures in the field of Black Theatre have yet to be marked? David Krasner began with a call to expand and complicate the Black Theatre canon by delving back into the archives for long-forgotten or lost works: “Scholars need to consider what they do with the scripts that never received production—for example, the Black radical left works of the 1930s that often got buried or went unperformed due to political pressure.” Krasner cited earlier manuscript versions of Theodore Ward’s The Big White Fog or of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto that reveal the extent to which authors had to compromise their original visions. He asks, “What might an exploration of these texts reveal about the ongoing political discourses of this formative era in Black theatre and performance? Artists of the 1960s often critiqued what they imagined as the timidity of earlier generations, without grasping the levels of censorship those earlier playwrights faced on a daily basis.” He also pointed researchers towards Bert Williams and George Walker’s unproduced play, Just Like White Folks , which they could never get produced. Krasner describes Black artists walking, “a razor’s edge of how far you can push things – what you can say and what you can’t.” He invites scholars to explore, “what did artists want to say and how did they get their messages across despite the restrictions they faced?” As he notes, “Errol Hill and Jim Hatch really set the trend of exploring what performers had to do to get audiences and how they worked the system.” Bernth Lindfors emphasized the new directions that the field of Black Theatre Studies has taken since he first began his research into nineteenth-century Black star Ira Aldridge many years ago. Lindfors honors Errol Hill’s emphasis on the experience of Black actors beyond the US. He hails it as “essential in imagining the impact of Black performance outside the minstrel traditions and legal restrictions that hampered its growth in the US throughout the nineteenth century. Yet Aldridge continues to dominate the scholarly imagination, and in many ways, valorizes the narrative of exceptionalism so often attached to Black performers.” Just as Krasner urges research into less-familiar texts, Lindfors encourages scholars to explore the stories of lesser-known Black artists (as he has done in his most recent study, The Theatrical Career of Samuel Morgan Smith ), declaring, “Populating the history of Black theatre with their stories not only reveals the number of Black artists who managed to establish successful careers in a white-dominated industry. It can reveal patterns of collaboration and legacies of interracial performance traditions as well.” E. Patrick Johnson laughingly notes that he gives the “answer people would expect” about the critical junctures still to be marked in the field: the influence of LGBTQIA+ artists in Black theatre, as well as the impact of Black women and feminist interventions in Black theatre history. And, he adds, “Black queer theatre history has yet to be told in its fullness,” underscoring the importance of recognizing artists who either self-identified as queer or who likely were (such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston). Johnson pays tribute to the “plethora of Black queer artists producing work during the 1980s that we lost to AIDS, including Marlon Riggs, or the artists whose work explicitly explored the Black queer experience of that time, including the Pomo Afro Homos theatre troupe (1990-1995).” He also notes that Lorraine Hansberry’s queer identity had only been “celebrated very recently.” Sandra Shannon suggests that scholars of Black theatre are beginning to see the fruits of decades of labor and documentation, but that, “the inflection point we see at the moment – with the combination of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, the murder of so many Black Americans, will inevitably transform our future scholarship on Black theatre in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.” She adds that, “the moment we’re in has put race relations front and center and has dispelled any illusions about what Obama’s election accomplished.” She stresses the need to see the “big picture” on confronting systemic racism through Black theatre. Shannon wryly acknowledges the irony that, “Black artists have always used moments like this to create revolutions,” suggesting that “We may even see the creation of a new cycle series,” (referencing August Wilson’s 10-play history of Black America). Sandra Richards invites scholars of Black Theatre in the Americas to rethink their chronologies, asking, “Where do we start? With Yoruba traditions? With the Middle Passage, to put it on the slave ship as various African aesthetics merged into new genres, all marked by trauma?” Richards asks, “where do we learn what Black is?” She looks to colleagues like Kathy Perkins who have helped to make visible the histories of production at HBCUs, or institutions like the University of Iowa, that contributed to the training of Black theatre artists (particularly designers, who are so often overlooked in chronicles of Black theatre history). Richards reminds contemporary Black artists and scholars that they, “may be following in someone’s footsteps and not realize it,” simply because that history remains undocumented. For her, that lack of historical context robs contemporary scholars and artists of a crucial sense of heritage—of a “family tree” that confers an important sense of belonging . Harry Elam, Jr. ’s comments echo Richards’s call to remember the “family tree,” as he observes, “Are we in a critical juncture now ? There is a tendency to focus on the contemporary in Black Theatre, rather than looking back . We have to mark our history.” Elam points to the rise of “neo-slave plays,” including those by Suzan-Lori Parks, Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, and Jeremy O. Harris, and the ways in which they, “look back at history as a way to reckon with it.” He ponders what scholars might take away from this irreverent approach to playing with history. Like Shannon, Elam also questions how the pandemic crisis will impact opportunities for new Black playwrights to make their mark, asking, “How will rising authors get seen” when theatre makers often privilege the more familiar and established Black writers? Harvey Young argues, “More attention could and should be paid to intersectionality, specifically Blackness and latinidad as well as Blackness and transgender identity. Although there have been important early studies in performance studies and communication studies—such as E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón Rivera-Servera’s terrific edited collection Blacktino Queer Performance and C. Riley Snorton’s stellar monograph Black on Both Sides , there needs to be more scholarship in those disciplines and also an equivalent set of smart, sophisticated writings that specifically center theatre. Furthermore, gender and sexuality, when indexed by race, should not be assumed (as topics) to exist primarily in the disciplines of performance studies or American Studies.” Young notes that, “It is difficult to conceive of latinidad without Blackness or African diasporic presence. This is increasingly apparent in the writings of mainstream authors (such as Junot Diaz). We need to more fully interrogate how and why scholarship on latinidad sometimes seems to deliberately erase or render invisible Blackness even as it offers nuanced, sophisticated ways of considering performances of whiteness and/or indigeneity. Certainly, the similarities of Blackness and Brownness is hinted at in Jose Esteban Munoz’s posthumously published Sense of Brown —in which Munoz (thanks to the keen editorial work of Joshua Chambers Letson and Tavia Nyong’o) links the affective resonance of being and feeling Black and Brown. Blackness and Brownness influence and build upon one another. It might be helpful to think of Blackness and Brownness as twins, perhaps fraternal, which influence and inspire one another with shared roots (and occasionally overlapping diasporic routes). Of course, there are myriad examples in which Blackness is Brownness, co-existing and overlapping within the same body.” How might we document the ways that Black theatre scholars and artists are remapping the field? How have you experienced shifts in the profession? Krasner highlights efforts to shift scholarly attention away from, “familiar urban centers towards less familiar regions such as St. Louis or Seattle that provided homes to active Black theatre artists and companies. By focusing on the performers, designers, dancers, and crew who made those regional theatres possible, contemporary researchers can illuminate rich histories that lie beyond the familiar Broadway-oriented narratives.” As he observes, “There are pockets of local Black theatre history that reveal wonderful acts of resistance and wonderful work.” Lindfors echoes Krasner’s suggestion to look beyond the familiar US circuits, but he directs attention, “beyond the borders of North America to a focus on Black mobility as a productive line of inquiry.” He points to recent studies such as Bill Egan’s African American Entertainers in Australia and New Zealand and Kathleen Chater’s Henry Box Brown: From Slavery to Show Business that looks at the experience of a Black American entertainer in Victorian England. In addition to telling the histories of Black artists in cities beyond familiar urban theatre centers, Johnson argues that, “there is so much Black theatre happening in informal spaces, not on formal stages,” and he highlights the recent scholarship of Koritha Mitchell and Julius Fleming that invites readers to frame alternate spaces for Black theatre. Richards sees Black Theatre becoming, “more inclusive as queer studies and explorations of trans and non-binary identities” intersect with current scholarship. She points to the work of E. Patrick Johnson and a generation of rising scholars who have expanded the parameters of Black theatre studies. She also stresses the expansion of research around Afro-Latinx intersections, Diasporic Studies, and Gender Studies, and their exciting potential to shape future research in the field of Black Theatre. Musing on the terminology that will emerge to define the new directions in the field, she queries, “ Is diaspora the correct term for a new generation?” Shannon points to the work of scholars like Harvey Young, Tavia Nyong’o, Jonathan Shandell, Donatella Galella, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., Koritha Mitchell, La Donna Forsgren, Nicole Hodges Persley, Sandra Mayo, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Adrienne Macki, and Brandi Catanese as part of a critical reimagining of Black theatre history, illuminating the milieu and context of Black dramas. Shannon sees these scholars delving into the histories of the communities that inspire Black theatre and how theatre in turn serves and supports these communities, “these scholars are taking the primacy off the stage and focusing on theatre as an ecosystem.” Like Krasner and Johnson, Shannon also points to the need to document theatre work being done at all levels in the Black community. With the passion that marks her Wilson scholarship, she exclaims, “I want to understand it all!” Like Shannon, Elam salutes Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Harvey Young, and other Black Theatre scholars, “who are changing what we look at.” He also praised editors such as LeAnn Fields of the University of Michigan Press for making books on Black Theatre Studies visible across the profession, and credits Fields, along with Colbert, Young, and others with expanding definitions of Black Theatre beyond the stage to encompass broader definitions of performance. Elam notes particularly the need to look at failures as well as successes in telling the histories of Black Theatre: “Think about things that didn’t work. What reverberations did they create? When we don’t look at failures, we erase histories and we erase legacies of repetition and cycles of learning. Don’t imagine these things never happened. Tell their stories.” As Elam argues, scholars can look at histories of failed attempts to understand how Black Theatre emerged in its present forms. Young points to the opportunities offered by new technologies to document Black Theatre histories: “What is needed is a digital mapping project to better identify and chart the nodal networks of influence and inspiration to reveal how structures (archives, institutes, centers, funding initiatives) have been created to preserve the history and bolster the future possibilities of Black performance.” He adds that achieving a critical mass will prove as important as any new technologies: “A small number of people in the academy research and work specifically in Black theatre. This paucity means that single individuals build entire branches, whole genres, of study. While it is a testament to their rigor that a handful of names have become synonymous with the objects of their study (Sandra G. Shannon’s work on August Wilson’s dramaturgy is a clear example), it is important for collectives to form to engage future researchers in an effort to further these explorations (the August Wilson Society, co-founded by Professor Shannon is a prime example). Each one, Bring one. The work that Monica White Ndounou has done with her Craft Institute, in partnership with Dartmouth College, has helped to brings artists and scholars into conversation with the aim of impacting professional theatre and the academy. It is meaningful that Brandi Wilkins Catanese and thereafter La Donna Forsgren, as editors of Theatre Survey , will frame the conversations on theatre studies through the year 2024.” What and whose legacies have we begun to recognize and where does vital work remain to be done? Like Johnson, Krasner emphasizes the opportunity for researchers to explore and elevate “community” theatre histories in reclaiming legacies of Black theatre and performance. Asking how scholars can uncover the “invisible traditions people come from,” he described not only the community-based performance histories, “but early traveling circuits, Black gay cabarets, and the lives of those artists who had to stay invisible in order to stay safe.” As he argues, “You have to piece the stories together and use your imagination to think about what they went through.” He adds that historians need to, “think about where they see themselves in the story.” Johnson asks, “How do we document informal spaces where Black performance happens?” For Johnson, oral histories, rudimentary recordings, playbills, photos can start to fill in histories, but for pieces created in “non-traditional” spaces, documentation remains a significant issue. Johnson salutes contemporary social media for, “supporting documentation and distribution,” yet he expressed a significant concern about the urgent need to create an archive (and he is part of a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Grant to develop a Black Arts Archives). For Johnson, “If the works are not documented, how do we provide evidence they occurred?” Lindfors invites scholars to “trace the histories of artists such as Dusé Mohamed Ali, editor of The African Times and Orient Review and The Comet , as well as an actor, playwright, activist, and theatre critic (who once interviewed Oscar Wilde). While much has been written about Ali in the context of literary and political histories, few have focused on his contributions to African theatre. What might a study of Ali’s theatre career reveal about the development of British Black Theatre history and historiography?” Shannon ’s role as President of the August Wilson Society offers her unique insights into the curation of Black theatre histories. She hopes to continue to document the impact of the “Wilsonian Warriors” – the artists, directors, designers, and other theatre-makers whose collaborations with Wilson continue to ripple across the field and to inspire rising generations. Richards recalls her own start in the field of Black Theatre when she had to seek out colleagues like Margaret Wilkerson after graduate school because neither her undergraduate nor her graduate program offered courses in Black or African American theatre and there was “no one else” to offer her guidance. She marks the shift in the profession that has brought Black Theatre into a sharper focus alongside Performance Studies in ways that have, “created more breathing space and more intellectual opportunities.” She also hails, “the push towards Black Theatre of the Americas ,” that she sees emerging across the field. She named colleagues including Douglas A. Jones Jr., La Donna Forsgren, and Koritha Mitchell among those doing exciting work to push the field into new conversations. Young points to developing areas in Black Theatre scholarship, “There has been a considerable effort over the past two decades to spotlight and recognize the work of Black women theatre makers. We are all indebted to the editorial work (as well as to the professional practice) of Kathy Perkins, whose anthologies have made it easier to access the writings of Black women dramatists. Koritha Mitchell’s spotlighting of women writers will inspire a new generation of researchers to consider Black women’s theatrical and performance literature. In addition, recent explorations into the life and theatre of Lorraine Hansberry, by Soyica Diggs Colbert and Imani Perry, are cementing Hansberry’s place within the canon of internationally significant playwrights.” However, he adds, “there is much to be done with regard to exploring Blackness within national theatre cultures. Significant research needs to be done on Black Canadian theatre. The critical study of performance by underrepresented groups (with the possible exception of First Nations theatre) in Canada remains at a nascent stage. Maureen Moynagh’s important edited collection, African-Canadian Theatre , helpfully charts the landscape. There is an emerging body of critical scholarship on contemporary Black British theatre but the volume of work does not compare with that centering African American theatre. However, Lynette Goddard has been an enviably effective champion of this necessary work and alongside other scholars, such as Deidre Osbourne and Mary F. Brewer, has created an impressively substantial critical core. In addition to continued exploration of the Caribbean influence inherent in the works of Lloyd Richards, Trey Anthony, and Winsome Pinnock among others, it is helpful to spotlight the ongoing theatre in the Caribbean, including but not limited to Jamaica.” Have you uncovered a milestone from the past whose impact scholars have yet to realize? In thinking about milestones, legacies, and the call to think about where he sees himself in the stories he explores, Krasner acknowledges his privilege in being a “Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” who feels the responsibility to bear witness to the racism he saw growing up and that he sees around him still. He argues that “scholars can connect to those who can no longer speak for themselves,” and they can honor the artists, “who refused to run away” from overwhelming racism and discrimination. Citing Ada Overton Walker, Krasner hails her bravery: “How good, how brave, how savvy, and how determined she must have been to succeed.” As he contends, “Performance can find the cracks in the walls. You can burn a manuscript, but performance finds a way.” Lindfors describes the moments that Errol Hill reached out to him with encouragement to keep going in his quest to document Ira Aldridge’s career. He mentioned one moment in particular when Errol was terribly ill, yet took the time to reach out and inspire him. He asks, “How can we offer the same generosity, support, and validation to the scholars of today? And can we bear in mind how meaningful it is to have our scholarly ‘heroes’ recognize our work?” Elam echoes Lindfors’s gratitude to the researchers and artists who paved the way for contemporary scholars, including Errol Hill (whom he described as an inspirational “model of rigor”). Hill was renowned as both a scholar and an artist, enjoying a career as a playwright, performer, and director, and Elam recognizes the importance of “ making theatre as well as studying it.” He asks, “Are we creating opportunities for these rising scholars to do work in labs that will help them understand their subjects in new ways?” He stresses the vital relationship of theory to practice as critical in thinking about and with Black Theatre. Elam also envisions a field which honors its past and nurtures its future – underscoring the importance of making those support networks visible so that new generations of scholars never feel isolated. Johnson salutes another group of “heroes,” shifting his lens towards the “unsung heroes in the curation of Black performance who were critical to making sure that the history of Black Theatre happens .” He also looks ahead to the “next frontier” in Black theatre – exploring the impact of sexuality gender and mapping the “whole genealogy of Black theatre made possible by artists like George C. Wolfe, Robert O’Hara, and Michael R. Jackson.” As Johnson notes, “We’re now seeing lots of Black queer artists creating – so many people whose work grew out of the art created in backyards, community centers, churches, and other spaces where Black artists found space and voice.” Shannon declares, “Black theatre has the potential to heal – how can we use Black theatre to show the way forward in this moment?” She invites colleagues to take advantage of this, “call to arms moment,” arguing that “subversive acts are necessary to deal with hegemonic structures.” She cites the current moment as, “particularly ripe for Black women who have become heroines and who are establishing their legacies.” Like Richards, she also reminds contemporary scholars to pay attention to the power of HBCUs, and to “reach up to claim and tout the value of these institutions.” Richards points to the COVID-19 crisis and the many other challenges shaping the professoriate as the next milestone to mark in the field of Black Theatre. She asks, “Where are we going after the pandemic when professional opportunities will have shrunk, but the need to do and to document Black Theatre will not?” Afterviews Each of the scholars I interviewed mentioned a number of newer voices that have begun to shape discourses on Black Theatre. The “ Afterviews ” below showcase some of their responses to the question: “Where do you think the field of Black Theatre is headed in the future?” Julius Fleming: “What will Blackness be?” “What will blackness be?” As I reflect upon the futures of Black Theatre and Performance Studies, this prescient question from literary and performance theorist Fred Moten looms. An aesthetic and political tradition, black theatre and performance has allowed us to probe what blackness is and what blackness might be. Because the construction of the modern world relies on the extraction and abstraction of black bodies, the critical attention that Black Theatre and Performance Studies pays to the body will be vital to understanding, critiquing, and reconfiguring the known world and its futures—and to discovering new worlds and otherwise possibilities. From expanding uses of digital technologies within live theatre to staging plays that spotlight the State’s uneven, race-based practices of State care in the wake of natural disaster, black theatre and performance consistently engages the most innovative tools and pressing social concerns that animate the “now.” And the concerns of the “now,” we know, are the animate legacies of various pasts and the building blocks of times that are yet-to-come. In this sense, what excites me most about the future of Black Theatre and Performance Studies is that it will become an even more radical and robust enterprise, one that expands what we know and how we know it. Mirroring the nature of its object of study (i.e., performance), the field will remain unruly and innovative—on the run as it were. And yet, it will continue to negotiate the structural threat of disappearance and ephemerality ignited by the harrowing rise of increasingly anti-intellectual societies. But whatever the nature of those times that are yet-to-come, Black Theatre and Performance will be a site to which we can continue to turn to understand what blackness is and might be, which is also to say what the world is and might be. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. “ “Hurston’s Call” Two recent publications explore theatrical practices that emerged from the sociality of everyday black persons that pay little to no regard for how such practices comported with mainstream tastes or courted sanction from black elites and other bourgeois gatekeepers. These books—Chinua Thelwell’s Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond (UMass) and Rashida Shaw McMahon’s The Black Circuit: Race, Performance, and Spectatorship (Routledge)—offer exemplary historiographies of how Black performance cultures are often at their most inventive and nourishing when they refuse to organize themselves around the white gaze. Thelwell’s examination of Black minstrels forging Black diasporic networks of care across continents and Shaw McMahon’s of thriving African American theatre makers outside and against majoritarian institutions reveal the importance of studying Black performance that traffics in (sociocultural) politics that easily offends prevailing critical opinion. In “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), Zora Neale Hurston called on critics to carry out these very sorts of investigations—our sensibilities be damned! For a host of intellectual and institutional reasons, Black Theatre and Performance Studies has generally pursed tacks more in line with W.E.B. Du Bois’s cultural theories. But Thelwell’s and Shaw McMahon’s fantastic new books show the importance of decentering Du Boisean frameworks for those thinkers like Hurston formulated. Such an approach recovers undertheorized Black performance genealogies and, accordingly, helps redress several of the class, political, and regional biases that continue to organize our field. Heeding Hurston’s call is both urgent and necessary: my hope is that it will shape methodologies and archival priorities in Black Theatre and Performance Studies for decades to come. Adrienne C. Macki: “Clarion Call” Certainly, the Black Lives Matter movement has prompted important global conversations. Black Theatre and Performance will continue to build upon that momentum as it remains at the forefront of this clarion call to promote a more inclusive space advancing diverse, underrepresented, and often disenfranchised perspectives. Of course, this is a divisive time, but I am interested in choosing to embrace radical optimism and recognize Black Theatre and Performance’s labor to mobilize audiences. I have long been interested in activist community-based theatres that employ theatre as a transformative space to promote conversation, healing, equity, and action. Simultaneously, white institutions, white leadership, and white audiences must listen and be vigilant while working towards understanding as well as acknowledging their privilege. Such steps are necessary to topple white supremacy. It sounds simplistic, but I am taking seriously the need for radical change and I am thinking about what concrete actions would look like on a practical level. Towards that end, the recent institutional practice of circulating statements that “we stand in solidarity…” is insufficient; it pays lip service to issues of equity that have plagued the field for far too long. It is high time for theatre organizations and allies to implement real change. Action is imperative to dismantle anti-black racism. Silence is complicit. Accordingly, in this context, Black Theatre and Performance has the potential to cultivate tangible opportunities for communities to rebuild, reconnect, and reimagine equity and inclusion. Likewise, the field may assume an explicit and central role in guiding academic, community, and professional theatres. Donatella Galella: “Read, Cite, and Commit” Black scholars are doing brilliant work in the field of Black Theatre and Performance, and all of us should engage with it. A lot of current scholarship carefully considers affect to understand Black spectatorship and survival. La Donna S. Forsgren’s award-winning essay on The Wiz reveals the pleasures of queer Black feminist viewing practices. Ashon Crawley reminds us of the importance of Black joy in a context that spectacularizes trauma. To identify and navigate “know-your-place aggression,” Koritha Mitchell encourages us to center on Black success and frame white violence as a reaction. At the same time, anger can be useful, as Nikki Yeboah cites Audre Lorde and offers her play The M(O)thers , which encourages audiences to link personal stories of Black mothers to larger patterns of police anti-Blackness and to propel anti-racist action. Black creativity as research also emerges in new scholarship that challenges the normative academic book structure of analyzing one case study per chapter with allegedly objective distance. In Ezili’s Mirrors , Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley follows the lwa to sing multi-voiced Black girl ways of knowing. E. Patrick Johnson similarly follows Miss B., playing with meanings of honeypot and presenting oral histories of same-gender-loving Black women in the U.S. South. This is but a fraction of the exciting work that will shape the future of the field. I am eager to learn more, and I hope that more scholars will read, cite, and commit to radical Black politics from reparations to prison abolition. La Donna Forsgren: “Agitate for Change” While the need to produce life-sustaining art may seem especially urgent during the Black Lives Matter movement of today, the reality is that creating and disseminating Black art has always been vital to our survival as a people. As such, I am cautiously optimistic about the future of black theatre and performance. I envision the rising generation of Black theatre artists creating new works and manifestos that speak to the needs of our community. Manifestos such as “We See You, White American Theatre”—incited by the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests—have created space for critical thought and action to obliterate systemic racism from our professional and university stages. I envision rising scholars also attending to the material realities of what it means to be Black in America and amplifying works produced at historically black theatres, many of which will not survive years of scarce funding compounded further by the financial devastation of a global pandemic. Despite my optimistic vision, I also understand that systemic racism intrenches every aspect of our society. To revolutionize our field, we must agitate for change beyond the appearance of inclusivity. History has shown that granting a select few Black artists and scholars “a seat at the table” does not change the nature of the table. If we do not take action now, this newfound interest in Black art and scholarship will slip through the cracks of history as a passing “trend,” going gently into that good night. I want scholars to reconsider what constitutes the “archive” and reclaim heretofore marginalized works of Black women and LGBTQ+ members of our community. I want historically Black theatres to sustain the next generation of artists and thrive. I want Black artists and their allies to use this moment to dismantle all oppressive behaviors and practices of the past and envision a new, truly equitable future. If we can do this; I envision another great era of Black cultural flowering. BIOS: Harry J. Elam, Jr , currently the President of Occidental College, is the author and co-editor of seven books, including the award-winning The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (University of Michigan Press, 2006), and dozens of journal articles and book chapters. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. The Association for Theatre in Higher Education awarded him its highest recognition, the Distinguished Scholar Award, and he is the recipient of the Career Achievement Award from the American Society for Theatre Research. Elam has also directed professionally for more than 25 years, including Tod, the Boy, for the Oakland Ensemble Company, and Blues for an Alabama Sky for Theaterworks in Palo Alto, winner of Drama-Logue Awards for Best Production, Best Design, Best Ensemble Cast and Best Direction. He also has directed several of August Wilson’s plays, including Radio Golf, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Fences . Julius B. Fleming, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he specializes in African American literary and cultural production and black performance studies. Fleming is currently completing his first book manuscript, entitled “Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Refusal to Wait for Freedom,” under contract with New York University Press. He is also beginning work on a second book project that explores the new geographies of colonial expansion and their impact on Afro-diasporic literary and cultural production. Having served as Associate Editor of Callaloo and Black Perspectives , the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, his work appears and is forthcoming in American Literature , American Literary History , South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo , The James Baldwin Review , and The Southern Quarterly . La Donna L. Forsgren is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre; concurrent faculty in the Gender Studies Program; and affiliate faculty in the Department of Africana Studies. She currently serves as Vice President/Conference Planner for the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Her first book, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement, investigates the works and careers of Martie Evans-Charles, J.E. Franklin, Sonia Sanchez, and Barbara Ann Teer (Northwestern University Press 2018). Her second book, Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance (Northwestern University Press 2020) explores the art and activism of pioneering black women intellectuals of the 1960-1970s . She has contributed articles to journals such as Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Continuum, and Callaloo, as well as book chapters in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (Routledge, 2019), Teaching Critical Performance Theory in Today’s Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities (Routledge, 2020), The Great North American Stage Directors (Bloomsbury Methuen, forthcoming), and Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current book project explores queer black feminist spectatorship in contemporary musical theatre. Donatella Galella is an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside. She researches how systemic racism shapes contemporary American theatre from the ways white institutions capitalize on blackness to the persistence of yellowface in musicals. Her book America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage was an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and a Finalist for the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Patrick Johnson is is Dean of the School of Communication and Annenberg University Professor at Northwestern University. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Johnson’s work has greatly impacted African American Studies, Performance Studies, and Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is the author of several books, including Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003); Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008); Black. Queer. Southern. Women.—An Oral History (2018); Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women (2019), in addition to a number of edited and co-edited collections, essays, and plays. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, where he is also Assistant Dean of Humanities. He is the author of The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Michigan 2014); co-editor of the essay collection Race and Performance after Repetition (Duke 2020); editor of the special issue of Modern Drama 62.4 “Slavery’s Reinventions” (Winter 2019). He is currently writing a book on black minstrelsy and its role in the production of African American literary modernism; an essay from that project appears in Theatre Journal 73.2 (2021). David Krasner has taught acting, directing, and theatre history for 40 years. He is currently Chair of Theatre at Five Towns College in Long Island, New York, where he oversees the BFA Program in Musical Theatre, Acting, and Design/Tech. He is the author and editor of eleven books, three dozen articles, and over sixty book and performance reviews, ranging from theatre history, dramatic literature, a two-volume history of modern drama, acting, theatre and philosophy, theatre in theory, and a two-volume history of African American Theatre. He has twice received the Errol Hill Award from the American Society for Theatre Research for the best work on African American Theatre, and in 2008 he received the Betty Jean Jones Award for the best teacher of American theatre and drama. He has served, and continues to serve, on a dozen editorial advisory boards, including Stanislavsky Studies, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, African American Review , and Theatre Annual . He has been the co-editor of the University of Michigan Press’s series Theater: Theory / Text / Performance since 2006. Bernth Lindfors, Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote biographies of Ira Aldridge and Samuel Morgan Smith after retiring from teaching in 2003. His earlier theatrical research focused on works by African playwrights such as Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Hubert Ogunde and Mbongeni Ngema, most of whom wrote their plays in English. He also published two books that dealt with African entertainers who performed in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Indiana University Press, 1999) and Early African Entertainments Abroad: From the Hottentot Venus to Africa’s First Olympians (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). Adrienne C. Macki is an Associate Professor in Dramatic Arts, Faculty in the Institute for Africana Studies, and American Studies Program at the University of Connecticut. She teaches courses in gender and performance, Black theatre, African American women playwrights, sports and performance, and introduction to theatre. She enjoys developing new work for young audiences and has authored numerous articles and essays. Her book, Harlem’s Theaters: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939 (Northwestern UP, 2015) received the 2016 Errol Hill Award, Honorable Mention, for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). She has served on the boards of the American Theatre and Drama Society, the Black Theatre Network, and on the Executive Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research. Adrienne received her B.A. in Theatre from Middlebury College, Masters in Theatre Education from Emerson College, and Ph.D. in Drama from Tufts University. Sandra Richards is Professor Emerita at Northwestern University. Her research specialties include African American, African, African Diaspora, and American theatre and drama, she has authored Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre of Femi Osofisan and numerous articles on a range of black dramatists. Richards is co-editor (with Sandra Shannon) of the MLA Handbook of Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson . She was also part of the editorial term of Kathy A. Perkins, Renee Alexander Craft, and Thomas F. DeFrantz that produced The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (2018). From 2001-2004, she held the Leon Forrest Professorship of African American Studies that supported research and publication on issues of cultural tourism to slave sites throughout the Black Atlantic. In 2007 ATHE recognized her as an Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education, while ASTR honored her with its Outstanding Scholar award in 2017. Sandra G. Shannon is Professor Emerita of African American Literature in the Department of English at Howard University, is widely considered the leading authority on playwright August Wilson and a major scholar in the field of African American drama. She is the author of two book-length studies, numerous essays, and chapters on African American literature, in general, and, more specifically, on August Wilson and his American Century Cycle plays. She has also served as Editor and Co-editor of four essay collections. Dr. Shannon is a Founder member of the August Wilson Society, and, since 2006, has served as its President. She is a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre–so honored in 2018 for being a “distinguished achiever in professional and educational theatre.” She was elected by this body to serve as its next Dean (beginning in 2022). In 2018, Dr. Shannon was awarded the prestigious Winona Fletcher Award from the Black Theatre Network for her “academic excellence in theatre scholarship.” Dr. Shannon is currently Artist-in-Residence at Pittsburgh, PA’s August Wilson African American Cultural Center where she serves as a chief consultant for the Center’s forthcoming state-of-the-art interactive exhibit, August Wilson: A Writer’s Landscape. (For a complete list of her publications see: https://works.bepress.com/sandra-shannon/ . Harvey Young is Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University. His research on the performance and experience of race has been widely published in academic journals, profiled in the New Yorker , the Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education . As a commentator on popular culture, he has appeared on CNN, 20/20, and Good Morning America as well as within the pages of the New York Times , Vanity Fair and People . He has published seven books, including Embodying Black Experience , winner of “Book of the Year” awards from the National Communication Association and the American Society for Theatre Research. His forthcoming edited collection (with Megan Geigner) Theatre After Empire will be published in 2021. He is Immediate Past President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and has served as Trustee/Board Member of the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago, American Society for Theatre Research, Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra and Yale Club of Chicago. References Footnotes About The Author(s) HEATHER S. NATHANS Professor, Tufts University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Joanna Mansbridge Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Joanna Mansbridge By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre . By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. In 1996, John Guare summed up the aesthetic battle in American theatre as “the war against the kitchen sink.” Although the phrase “kitchen sink drama,” in a British theatrical context, signifies a postwar turn toward gritty social realism, in American theatre, this same phrase carries with it vaguely derogatory connotations. The dominance of realism and the thematic emphasis on family in American drama has been pointed out often and emphatically. And while feminist scholars have ably deconstructed realism for its associations with a masculinist representational system, what has been consistently overlooked is the very labor signified by the kitchen sink. As Dorothy Chansky brilliantly demonstrates in Kitchen Sink Realisms , that infamous sink and the domestic labor for which it acts as a metonym have been used as theatrical material throughout the twentieth century, and its continued relevance – as both dramatic theme and stage action – suggests its enduring importance as a topic of social debate. Moreover, realism, Chansky reminds us, is itself a variable and varied form (hence the realisms in her title), shaped by (and shaping) specific socio-economic pressures. Chansky’s impeccably researched and engagingly written study examines theatrical representations of domestic work in twentieth century American drama, contributing an invaluable perspective to sociological questions surrounding feminized labor and theatrical debates regarding realism. Chansky is broadly concerned with reevaluating how the modern American theatre has negotiated the enduring question: Who is responsible for cleaning, cooking, and running the home? This question was posed differently in the 1920 than it was in the 1980s. However, Chansky underlines the structural issue that makes this a particularly persistent debate: “While the representations changed […] the central issue has not: American society offers no practical and affordable way for most adults to combine gainful employment with child rearing and housekeeping” (60). Indeed. Chansky states her goal thusly: “My project here is to examine the multiple ways in which a too-often belittled but perennially popular realm of American theatre can be fruitfully and seriously reassessed” (77). Organized chronologically into seven chapters and an Introduction, the book covers the timespan between 1918 and 2005, the end of World War I and the dawn of the digital era. While the study overall has a chronological structure, Chansky productively complements that linearity by linking the plays thematically as well. Each chapter provides incisive close readings, as well as thick descriptions of the surrounding conditions of production and reception, incorporating relevant and often fascinating historical materials that give the plays a vivid context. Bringing some plays out of obscurity, Chansky points to their popularity in the original context, and their significance as forums for public debates around “woman’s work.” These debates were especially lively, not surprisingly, during periods when women were either gaining employment in greater numbers or marrying in fewer (such as the 1920s and 30s and the 1980s). As Chansky points out, “Domestic labor had not always been portrayed in American drama as a potential trap. Nor had it been something to avoid onstage and hand off to invisible help” (80). Domestic labor, in fact, was staged as pure spectacle in James A. Herne’s hit of 1893, Shore Acres , in which a full act was “devoted to the preparation and consuming of an anniversary dinner” (80). Chansky’s focus on food, cleaning, and domestic labor sheds new light on changing gender roles over the past century, as well as on issues relating to social class, immigration, ethnic identity, and assimilation in the US. In Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cooke’s Tickless Time (1918), for example, Annie, a first generation Irish servant (played in the original production by Edna St. Vincent Millay), accommodates the WASP couple she works for by adapting “ethnic” meals, like spaghetti, for a “modern” middle-class American palette (94). Incorporating data about the number and national origin of immigrant servants in this period adds a rich sociological understanding of this and other plays. Chansky astutely situates references to food and the people who prepare it, instructing contemporary readers about the meaning of these references to early twentieth century audiences. The author also sharpens how we might think about these audiences in the early years of legitimate American theatre. She writes, “theatregoers who read criticism by critics understanding themselves as specialists became, in turn, a cohort who saw theatregoing and drama as salutary and important, even when scripts or genres might suggest otherwise” (84-85). While each chapter offers crucial insights and intelligent reinterpretations, it is the last two chapters, “Prisoners of Total Blame, 1963-1990” and “The Clean House, or Change” that make this study seem especially urgent. The penultimate chapter covers feminism’s second wave and its aftermath in the Reagan era, when debates around family values and women’s new role in the public sphere were hotly contested. Adding to ongoing discussions of canonical plays such as Sam Shepard’s True West (1980) and Marsha Norman’s ‘night Mother (1984), Chansky reframes them from the standpoint of the domestic spaces and laborers depicted in these plays. Pointing out that critics often ignore or are baffled by the Mom character in True West , who enters after the brothers’ climatic fight (and into the decimated kitchen that results), unaffected by the disaster she comes home to find, Chansky succinctly summarizes her appearance on the scene: “While the brothers remain deadlocked in a stranglehold as the lights go down, Mom has shown that she is able to leave, come back, and leave again, as if in some kind of existentially realist fort da maneuver” (455). Sharp (re)readings such as these abound in Kitchen Sink Realisms . The final chapter outlines five post-Nannygate cultural phenomena that shaped American cultural attitudes toward domestic life and plays that dealt with it: the economic prosperity of the Clinton years; the rise in immigrants from Asia and Latin America; a decline in the two-parent family; a “no-turning-back presence of women of all classes in the workforces”; and lastly, a consumerism retooled “as a form of self-improvement or activism” (486-87). From within this context, Chansky looks at three works produced in 2003: Joan Holden’s Nickel and Dimed , a Brechtian play inspired by journalist Barbara Ehrenreich’s exposé of working class poverty; Lisa Loomer’s Living Out , which looks at the relationship between a privileged yuppie mother and her Latina nanny; and Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s through-composed musical set in 1963, Caroline, or Change (2003), which Chansky pithily describes as a work that “portrays tension within a maid/mistress household, the difference between the households of the two, and how historic distance can deflect assessment of present-day problems” (504). Chansky concludes her study with Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House (2005), a play focusing on the relationship between an upper-class white woman and her Brazilian maid, Ana, who is depressed and refuses to clean. This perceptive comedy brings kitchen sink realisms, as a genre, into an age of globalization. While the second-wave feminist struggle for the right to participate equally in the public sphere has largely been achieved, this seismic shift has resulted in a need for imported domestic care. What was once a local division of labor among the predominately white middle classes has now become global division of labor between a developed world in need of domestic laborers and developing world in need of better economic opportunities and living conditions. So just what does a kitchen sink signify onstage? How does it communicate gender, class, ethnicity, and Americanness? And how do these codes of social identity relate to broader public debates around the value of domestic work, the changing demands of the marketplace, and the erosion of “the good life”? The answers to these questions vary vastly, it turns out, depending on the historical context. Whereas in the early twentieth century, a clean kitchen with a live-in servant cooking the meals signified middle class-ness, in the late twentieth century, it might suggest a global division of feminized labor. Chansky’s nuanced, rigorously contextualized readings of both canonical and non-canonical plays provide a rich resource not only for theatre scholars, but also for Americanists interested in adding to their understanding of the social texture of the twentieth century. This immensely satisfying study will be of great value to those working in theatre history, feminist theory and theatre, and American studies, and is equally suitable for upper class undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars. Impressive in both its historical scope and interpretive depth, Kitchen Sink Realisms is an important contribution to scholarship in American drama. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JOANNA MANSBRIDGE Bilkent University Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

grace shinhae jun 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 Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration grace shinhae jun By Published on May 20, 2022 Download Article as PDF Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration. SanSan Kwan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021; Pp. 136. SanSan Kwan’s Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration contributes a timely analysis of Asian American performance to the fields of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, fields in which the voices of Asian American scholars are needed. Love Dances studies in great depth a series of duet collaborations that center intercultural connection, grief, loss, and impossibility. Kwan’s personal experiences of love and loss, her own duet performances, and her reflections on her late husband serve as entry points to her observant and philosophical examinations of intercultural collaborations. Kwan situates her work among scholarship that questions the ethics and politics of intercultural performances. How do intercultural collaborations, she asks, heal the harmful effects of Orientalism and colonialism; lead to vulnerability and love in the presence of radical differences; and generate powerful connections in the face of losses in translations, refusals, and grief? While dance scholarship has identified the ways Asian aesthetics have been historically appropriated in Euro-American concert dance, Kwan also outlines the history of interculturalism in theatre that emerged from appropriation and exploitation. Kwan turns to theories of “new interculturalism” that better “tease out the complexities across multiculturalism, postcolonialism, ethnic and racial difference, intraculturalism, and interculturalism” (9). She looks to the duets not for what they represent but for what happens in the process of intercultural exchange and centering the emphasis on relationality. She looks at the dance collaborations as a means to discuss the themes of love, loss, vulnerability, refusal, third spaces, and pedagogy, finding that they provide something embodied and intimate that other expressive mediums cannot. The book features Kwan’s detailed descriptions and thoughtful reflections on a progressive series of intriguing intercultural duet performances. In Chapter 1, “Talking,” Kwan analyzes the performance Pichet Klunchun and Myself between classical Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun and French choreographer Jérôme Bel. She argues that the performance, despite being an intercultural collaboration, reinforces and reproduces Orientalist logics. She is wary of its mostly verbal exchange, with occasional dance demonstrations, as it retains power dynamics and reveals where intercultural collaboration potentially fails. Reading Klunchun as the East and therefore the keeper of tradition and Bel as the West and therefore representative of individual innovation, Kwan shows the inequities that can arise in an intercultural exchange. However, Kwan notes that this failure also provides a pedagogical opportunity to delve into histories of racialized oppression and colonialism. In the second chapter, “Mourning,” Kwan analyzes two different duet collaborations: Flash and Simulacrum. In Flash, African American hip hop choreographer Rennie Harris and Japanese American butoh-based interdisciplinary dancer Michael Sakamoto both practice movement forms stemming from histories of racial and social violence and trauma, yet their intercultural textual and movement collaboration provides strategies for healing trauma and creating cross-cultural empathy. Harris resists intimacy initially in the creative process, but Sakamoto’s hospitality and generosity and Harris’s reciprocity transformed the rehearsal space into a space of truth devoted to surviving anti-Black racism and post-incarceration Japanese American life. In Simulacrum, Kwan explores the potential for empathy. In her analysis, she delineates the ways that care and vulnerability emerge in the process of cross-cultural collaboration between Argentinian contemporary and kabuki dancer Daniel Proietto and Japanese Flamenco dancer Kojima Shoji. Both the Flash and Simulacrum duets are predicated on themes of mourning, rendering loss as absence that can also be generative. “Commiseration,” for Kwan, “is a practice of mutual empathy” (62). Through empathy, the artists show that we can have a meaningful connection to another’s cultural-corporeal history, even if we cannot fully inhabit it. In the final chapter “Loving,” Kwan turns to Vietnamese French choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh who duets with Japanese butoh artist Kasai Akira in Spiel and with Japanese butoh-informed dancer Otake Eiko in Talking Duet. Restating her interest in Leo Cabranes-Grant’s concept of intercultural encounter as an “engine of emergence” and not solely a point of contact and meeting, Kwan looks to these duets as forms of pedagogy. These textual and movement performances create third spaces to encounter alterity and otherness and reveal the incommensurabilities and impossibilities of intercultural encounters. Spiel and Talking Duet expand on the prior chapters’ text and movement analysis by centering improvisational performance. Improvisation, she argues, demands interlocutors to be receptive, responsive, “submissive but also sovereign” in ways that deepen the intercultural collaboration (104). Improvisation becomes the method of vulnerability, openness, and willingness to change. Kwan concludes this highly original and compelling study by questioning what unites collaborators even when their intercultural encounters fall short. For Kwan, the collaborative process across and between cultures bears potentiality, the practice of empathy, and the act of loving. She grounds the significance of these intercultural encounters as models of how to love, and co-create, even in the face of misunderstandings and loss. Love is a guiding principle and a necessary condition for ethical intercultural exchange, and for Kwan love does not exist without loss. Ultimately love offers opportunities to begin again and again. Love Dances contributes significant insight to Dance, Theatre, and Performance Studies from the poignant perspective of a performer and a scholar. Accessible and nuanced, Love Dances is a necessary text for practitioners looking to collaborate ethically across cultural, racial, social, and gendered spaces. 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 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.

Thomas H. Arthur 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 “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Thomas H. Arthur By Published on June 6, 2024 Download Article as PDF Color him black And count the bruises He was tough and slender Chiseled in bronze He died too young And he smiled too little But his dreams were the dreams of a man. --Sydney Hibbert (1986) This article investigates the career of Jamaican American theatre practitioner, Sydney Hibbert (1932-1990), who worked in Jamaica, London and the United States as an actor, teacher, and poet, and wrote meaningfully about these experiences. (1) Hibbert emerged from a colonized place and culture and was, in many ways, a postcolonial subject who negotiated the differing and often conflicting demands of values and structures created by the British, while also struggling to maintain his identity or connection with his home culture and sense of self. Educated in Kingston and London, he returned home in 1965 and, with other Jamaican students who had studied in London, attempted to establish an indigenous theatre for popular audiences of Black Jamaicans. At first this initiative failed, and Hibbert turned to the American Black Power Movement in Harlem for inspiration. Moving to New York to teach at the Harlem School of the Arts, he found frustration and rejection in the theatre world. When his agent suggested he get rid of his Jamaican accent, he refused. His struggles to preserve his Jamaican identity and find a voice among African American people reveal the challenges and complexity of postcolonial experience. Nevertheless, he managed to have a substantial career as a teacher and performer in the United States and helped start the National Black Theatre Festival of the North Carolina Black Repertory Company that exposed audiences to Black classics and new works. Hibbert was sometimes disillusioned but never idle in his pursuit of artistic accomplishment along with racial justice. (2) Black Jamaicans and the Colonial System Hibbert’s Jamaican, enslaved roots helped shape his personality and professional ambitions. Columbus landed in Jamaica on his second voyage in 1494, an arrival that was a disaster for Jamaican residents who were killed, sent to Spain as slaves, or became slaves in their native land. (3) In 1645, England captured Jamaica from the Spaniards, and in 1670, the slave trading Royal Africa Company was formed using Jamaica as its chief market and a center of their activities in the West Indies. (4) Between 1647 and 1838, British settlers imported between one and two million slaves from West Africa for plantations and estates that produced sugar, cocoa, indigo, and later coffee, with tens of thousands dying on the passage to the Caribbean. (5) Many Black Jamaicans inherited their surnames from plantation owners such as the English merchant Thomas Hibbert who immigrated to Kingston in 1734. The Hibbert family subsequently held interests in sixty estates and controlled almost half of the Jamaican slave trade. They profited from British colonialism’s triangular trade routes which began in the mother country with sugar and rum transported to Africa that was exchanged for slaves transported to the Caribbean, after which the ships were reloaded with sugar for a passage home to England. (6) By virtue of his surname, Hibbert was metaphorically part of this triangle of people, culture, and influence. Along with slavery and trade, the British brought their theatre culture, which became part of the Jamaican heritage. The first professional company to perform on the island presented John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera in 1733 . (7) Throughout the Pre-Emancipation period, whites-only audiences were exposed to Shakespeare plays, farces and melodramas performed by European and American professional companies. (8) In 1775, the Old American Company—the first fully professional theatre group to perform in North America—staged Shakespeare’s Romeo and Julie t. In 1807, the British Parliament abolished the slave trade, and in 1834, slavery in Jamaica, but this had little cultural effect. Even after Kingston’s formerly whites-only theatres began admitting patrons on segregated and then mixed-color bases, these audiences still saw standard classics and a few current English-originated works. (9) For instance, in 1912 the new Ward Theatre opened with Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance . (10) Later, in 1941, under the aegis of the Little Theatre Movement, the Ward Theatre became the home of Boxing Day pantomimes that grew popular for a wide audience, although according to one observer, there were a “token few” black performers—the musicians and a school teacher—in the first Jack and the Beanstalk performance. (11) The next decades saw the “Jamaicanizing” of the British pantomime. (12) Perhaps more significant in the history of Jamaican theatre is the body of African-Caribbean musical and performance traditions associated with folklore, religious rituals and seasonal festivals. (13) These enactments involved storytelling, idiomatic speech, movement, gesture, personification, choreography, audience participation, and pantomime. There are parallels between the techniques of this informal theatre and formal drama which the colonial system defined as “real theatre.” The folk theatre went underground during colonialism, but re-emerged in the 1940s, forming the essential basis, sources, and techniques for a new generation of playwrights and actors seeking to define their Jamaican identity and create an indigenous theatre. Sydney Hibbert (b. 1932) grew up during the early decolonization period when Jamaicans gained universal suffrage in 1944 and full independence in 1962. (14) He had sharp words for Black voting rights: “Universal Adult ‘Sufferage’ (sic), Man to man wid’ a(n) equal X! Count the papers and forget them. Keep some pedigree and class!” (15) He became interested in theatre through a small role in a secondary school production of The Pirates of Penzance which, even though its distinctly British character had nothing to do with his own life experience, settled his goal of acting as his future occupation. “You enter into another world” doing theatre, “you’re the center of that world” he later recalled. “I knew I was always going to do this.” (16) The contrast between the world of Pirates and his own could not have been sharper. He was raised with two siblings by a widowed mother in the “lanes” (back alleys) of the Cross Roads section of Kingston with sanitary conditions so bad that residents petitioned the town council to build sewers. (17) He described it as “a heaven and a hell—a home and a prison.” (18) In a poem entitled “Actor Boy” he writes, “Boy, you come from Cross Roads/ Mek some money man!” Shame at the end of my smile/ Screaming inside my head like voices, Run, boy, run! There’s no inheritance here…” (19) A poem “Morning Call” reflects Hibbert’s disillusionment with the school curriculum: “Hiding inside the sounds change/ London bridge is falling down, Falling down… And the Lane is paved with gold, But the gingerbread houses are scarce/ And Red Riding Hood never plays here.” (20) Opportunities for education were limited because grammar schools charged fees, but Hibbert received a scholarship intended for disadvantaged Black youth at Excelsior College, recently founded by young educator A. Wesley Powell. (21) When Hibbert attended the school, it had outstanding music, speech and drama programs including performance opportunities at the Ward Theatre. While Hibbert was a student. one of Excelsior’s most famous graduates, Louise Bennett (Coverley) taught there from 1946-48. (22) Coverley, who as a student had written poetry in Jamaican patois, became a national icon in theatre, radio and TV, and champion of Jamaican folklore and indigenous literature. Later in his own poetry, Hibbert referred to “Miss Lou” in explaining his use of poetic dialect. After graduation from secondary school, he explored his interest in theatre by attending classes at the private Continental Academy, which offered tutoring in music, dance and drama. During this period, he supported himself with a low-paying civil service position in the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands. (23) Because of its colonial past Jamaica was believed to have a racial blending that created a homogeneous creole multi-racism. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Jamaica in June 1965 and was impressed that so many different nationalities seemed to be combined into one Jamaican identity. (24) However, recent studies indicate that “shadeism,” or colorism, was an open secret in Kingston. In “Examining Race in Jamaica,” Monique Kelly finds that both race category and skin color affected opportunities for schooling and access to household amenities. (25) As another researcher describes it, children acquired a sense of social differences based on skin color at home or in school. Sydney’s dark skin complexion was less desirable than lighter mixed-race skin, so he was considered to be lower class. In a poem describing his childhood, he wrote “your father is not backra (white)/ not even high brown skin.” (26) Perhaps the most important Black influencer in Hibbert’s early life was Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). (27) Garvey established the “Universal Negro Improvement Association” (UNIA) in Kingston in 1914, aiming to achieve Black nationalism through the celebration of African history and culture with a Back-to-Africa message. In 1916, he moved to Harlem, New York where UNIA eventually established 700 branches in thirty-eight states, spreading to more than forty countries in Africa, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. (28) Garvey was deported from the US for possible fraud and lived in Kingston 1927-1935 where he continued to articulate ideas of Black pride and racial success. Though Hibbert was too young to understand Garvey’s message in the 1930s, when his body was brought back for burial at the National Heroes Park in 1964, Jamaica boiled with debates over Garvey’s significance and concepts of Jamaican nationhood. (29) Living in Harlem became a goal and when Hibbert finally moved there, he heard Garvey’s ideas reechoed by Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. Playing ‘the Outsider’ in London Seeking to better themselves in London with professional qualifications was standard practice for Commonwealth citizens. In 1962, Hibbert received a bursary scholarship to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal Academy of Drama (RADA). At the Guildhall, one of his most important roles was in John Gay’s Polly , a classic play rife with racial satire against the British planters and colonization. The actor was likely cast for his Jamaican identity since the story takes place in the West Indies. Instead of white men wearing black makeup, Hibbert was playing a main role as a Black actor in his own skin without makeup. He received critical acclaim for his interpretation of “Cawwawkee,” the West Indian prince who in the story eventually marries Polly. According to historian Richard Dryden, this ballad opera (a sequel to The Beggar’s Opera ) “condemns the British planter, the British soldier, the British slave trade, the transportation of British criminals, and the pirate,” thus labeling all characters as being either fools or knaves except for the heroine, Polly, and the native Indians.” (30) The West Indians were the “good guys” and the white British merchants and planters the “bad guys,” setting up a racial role inversion within a safe, comedic format. Gay’s Polly has been understood as both a superficial satire and/or an early radical anti-colonial statement. Hibbert’s Shakespearean roles also fall into the outsider category, from the title part in Othello, to Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , to Feste in Twelfth Night . Othello the Moor is a Black man in a white Venetian society. Oberon is the king of the fairies and a magical being, outside ordinary human limitations. Feste is a licensed fool, free to observe and comment on the foibles of the play’s authority figures. All three characters were thought suitable for a Black actor. Hibbert received Guildhall’s characterization prize for his Feste, interpreted with humor, satire and menace, in the Shakespeare 400th anniversary celebrations. (31) His success with Shakespearean roles demonstrates his ability to “mimic the colonizer” while still honoring his love of Shakespearian language. When he returned to Kingston in August 1965, he was celebrated in the press, and promoted to the Ministry of Development and Welfare. (32) In the 1970s, Hibbert used his London training at the Colorado and Alabama Shakespeare Festivals. (33) At Colorado, his Othello moved critic J. H. Crouch to compare his portrayal with actors like “the sun-tanned Walter Huston, a liver-lipped Lawrence Olivier and a magnificently bullish Paul Robeson.” The critic wrote, “I had contemplated Othello as an exotic, a stranger, a pantaloon, a victim, a fool, even a black hero in a white melodrama, but he had not been prepared for “the pagan gentility, the curtailed, then unleashed barbarousness of Sidney Hibbert’s Othello.” Kari Howard notes, “The actor was devoted to the detail of character construction— from modest storytelling, through quiet authority, through steely authority through laughing security through rational security, through genuine dilemma, through a disintegration of personality which commands the trance (the most real I have seen).” (34) Hibbard later played Othello at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, where a critic commended the contrast between the actor’s soft-spoken delivery at the beginning and tension of a man maddened by jealousy at the end of the play. (35) Creating Jamaican-centered Theatre Returning to Kingston in August 1965, Hibbert was caught up in the attempts to identify and define indigenous Caribbean culture. His first Kingston project was 1865—A Ballad for Rebellion , written by Jamaican playwright and novelist Sylvia Wynter who had returned from London to teach at the University of West Indies and form “a truly indigenous theatre.” (36) In an interview, she explained the problem: local drama needed more serious audiences than pantomime attendees, as well as fresh, realistic scripts by West Indies playwrights. In addition, new professional standards should be developed. Wynter and her then husband Jan Carew wanted to establish The Jamaican Folk Theatre, starting with a production of her script A Child is Born . (37) This was delayed because the Ministry of Development commissioned her to write an epic historical drama about the Morant Bay Rebellion.” (38) After a year’s intensive research, it was ready in October 1965. Directed by Jamaican Lloyd Reckord, with Hibbert as his assistant and production manager, it featured over a hundred players. Reviewer Norman Rae described it as an elaborate production that ran three and a half hours and contained much “speechifying,” while missing opportunities for dramatic expression. He thought that the basic concept of the play was confused with no point of view and stereotyped character development. (39) It is difficult to assess the impact of this event, already highly politicized because the “Tercentenary of English Colonization” celebrated in 1955 was followed by “Emancipation Day” in 1965. (40) Ballad may not have been an artistic success, but Wynter’s approach to rewriting history more inclusively, from the Jamaican people’s viewpoint, marked a fundamental step in decolonizing the story. (41) Almost all local working Black actors were involved and thereby exposed to her humanization of the Black characters and the shift in collective memory. This predates Wynter’s theoretical writings, but reveals the germinal stages of her decolonial thinking. One concrete result of the performance was that the Ministry of Development promised to commission new West Indian scripts at future festivals. Within a month, Hibbert led a group of young theatre practitioners (five of whom had been in Ballad ) in establishing a new theatre company that aimed to attract audiences “beyond the Europhile elite.” (42) They selected the name “Theatre 77” reflecting their goal, “to establish a fully professional theatre company in twelve years: sixty-five plus twelve makes seventy-seven.” (43) They could not agree on any Jamaican scripts for their first performances, so they chose Edward Albee’s Zoo Story and Miss Julie by August Strindberg. According to company member Yvonne Jones (Brewster), they reasoned that both plays concern the struggle between the “haves and have nots, between the lower classes and those they serve.” Social inequality was “examined so brutally by both playwrights,” they believed that “audiences would see the parallels with their own society, which would make the double bill a sure winner.” (44) Without financial backing or public relations experience, the group nevertheless pushed forward arranging for performances in the Old Library/Dramatic theatre at the University of West Indies Mona campus. Hibbert directed Miss Julie , performed in Zoo Story , and was the producer and stage manager. The review by Harry Milner (a lead actor in Ballad ), published two days after the opening, was mixed: entitled “Promising Start” he praised some acting, but found the production “a bit melodramatic, old-fashioned, and slow.” (45) The show closed early, and the company was left with a large debt in part because of expensive programs ordered by Hibbert. Brewster later wrote that “we all were to blame for the fiasco” due to “over-optimistic audience projections, inflated egos, and a complete absence of financial and logistic planning.” (46) The group soon acquired a new performance space, “The Barn,” and staged the British playwright Roger Milner’s comedy How’s the World Treating You with Hibbert in the lead role. Norman Rae’s review was positive and Hibbert received special praise for his deadpan comedic delivery. (47) Still, the script was not written by a Jamaican and did not deal with the island’s political and social concerns. The company attempted to remedy this by next presenting recital/performances by four Jamaican writers, On the Off Beat , along with Afro-American Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes’s jazz poem Ask Your Mama . (48) These pieces, billed as happenings with the audience bringing their own cushions to sit on the floor, were directed by George Carter, already one of Jamaica’s most established theatre practitioners. (49) Still seeking subjects more relevant to their audience’s lives, the company began to hold improvisational “devising workshops” that were recorded, transcribed with scenes marked for further workshopping. These innovative activities led to Trevor Rhone’s first play Look Two in 1967. During this time, Hibbert was working with the Jamaica Festival Office as a theatre lecturer and drama tutor. (50) Theatre 77, now renamed The Barn Theatre, endured for forty years becoming an important chapter in Jamaican theatre history. Encountering Black Power in America By early 1968, Hibbert had been transferred to the Jamaican Embassy in Washington, D. C. as the cultural attaché, but he soon abandoned the Civil Service to move to Harlem. It was in Washington that Hibbert first encountered the South African playwright Athol Fugard whose work was so important to him in future years. Hibbert studied after hours at the Stage Studio, a method acting school founded by Louise Brandwen (1932-1974), a Russian-born émigré who had trained at the Moscow Art Theatre and worked with Lee Strasberg in Los Angeles. At the Stage Studio, he studied the Stella Adler technique and the teachings of Grotowski, Artaud, and Meyerhold. He was now cast in Blood Knot , one of Fugard’s first plays written as a statement against the South African racial laws. (51) The play premiered in Johannesburg on October 23, 1961, after which it was banned in the city. The American premier of Blood Knot opened Off-Broadway with James Earl Jones playing Zacharias in 1964. (52) The plot concerns two half-brothers who share the same Black mother, but one of them passes for white while the other cannot. In the Stage Studio production Hibbert, a Black Jamaican, played the darker-skinned brother Zach. This was an especially compelling story given the young actor’s experience of racism and shadeism. The significance of Fugard’s influence on Hibbert’s career cannot be overstated. He played a variety of parts created by many playwrights, but often returned to Fugard’s plays and Blood Knot . At Illinois State University in 1970, his training included non-traditional reverse casting such as a class in which white students worked on Black playwright Ron Milner’s Who’s Got His Own while Black students performed Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf . Milner’s play had been a great success at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem in 1967 and represented the trend among the Black Arts Movement’s cultural nationalists to create “Black theatre for the advancement of Black people.” (53) Hibbert also arranged a staged reading of Fugard’s Blood Knot in which he played Zachariah with a white faculty member playing his lighter-skinned brother. In 1982 Hibbert played Zachariah again at California’s South Coast Repertory Second Stage, and in 1986 he played the teacher/servant, “Sam,” in Fugard’s anti-apartheid Master Harold, and the Boys . (54) Los Angeles Times critic Lawrence Christon calls Hibbert a “forceful, compelling figure” in a Master Harold review. (55) The Santa Ana Orange County Register ’s reviewer, Jeff Rubio, focuses on the relationship between the actor’s work, playwright Fugard and South Africa. “The playwright brings apartheid into focus,” writes Rubio, “Fugard demands an identification that is beyond most performers, but Hibbert disappears into Sam.” (56) In 1987 while teaching at the North Carolina School for the Arts, Hibbert played Zachariah again in the university production of Blood Knot , receiving stellar reviews. (57) Studying Fugard, playing his roles, and thinking about racism was becoming a central concern in Hibbert’s lifework. Hibbert was drawn to Harlem in his quest to perform plays written by Black writers about their own identity. Earlier Afro-Caribbeans had been key figures in the international Harlem Renaissance. (58) In the late 1960s Harlem was alive with militant activist ferment due to the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement and assassination of Malcolm X. Black culture was fostered by the New Lafayette Theatre, the short-lived Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, the New Heritage Repertory Theatre, Harlem Dance Theatre, the journal Umbra and the Harlem School of the Arts among others. (59) Hibbert wrote a short prose piece, “Harlem Adagio: Part of a Symphony for Black Men Uptown,” which describes the urban scene. At first, the mood of the essay is upbeat: “at the New Lafayette, there were sold-out houses of people wearing dashikis and afros you couldn’t see around!” Hibbert noticed “Black men were looking each other squarely in the eyes for the first time in their generation’s memory. Malcolm’s words were pouring out of the most unlikely mouths in word-for-word accurate quotes; Stokely Carmichael was upfronting it all over the university campuses; and the Panthers were going to lead this revolution to kingdom come.” (60) Yet Broadway was still difficult for Black actors except for superstars, and local roles were not easy to win for a newly emigrated West Indian actor. (61) After Hibbert’s fifth unsuccessful audition in one day, ranging from Equity Principals Only to Off-Off-Broadway, his agent, who had previously respected Hibbert’s Jamaican identity, urged him to lose his Caribbean accent, something the actor refused to do. His desire to keep his linguistic culture alive was certainly influenced by Louise Bennett-Coverley who, as aforementioned, had taught in Hibbert’s secondary school. In his poem “For Those in Exile,” he wrote, “Talk bad-talk with pride/ For Louise is dictionary now!” (62) At the end of “Harlem Adagio” Hibbert talks about fighting poverty, dodging bill collectors and disrespect, and becomes furious, “Jesus Christ! I gon’ kill somebody if this go on much longer…DAMN!” (63) But then Hibbert was hired as the director of the drama workshop at the Harlem School of the Arts (HAS). After his experience in Jamaica both teaching and working with cultural development, this position was a perfect fit. The school was founded in 1964 by singer Dorothy Maynor, and offered children and adults opportunities to study music, visual arts, and theatre. She wanted children to be exposed to beauty within their community and to develop their talents from an early age. Maynor selected teachers who, like Hibbert, were professional but also adaptable to people coping with deep poverty and racial prejudice. (64) HAS hired five theatre faculty and inaugurated a new performance space in a converted garage in 1969. They presented Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo that told the story of Patrice Lumumba's rise to power and assassination in 1961. Césaire, poet, writer and political figure from Martinique had been one of the founders of the French literary movement Négritude . Césaire advocated for acceptance of blackness in order to free or decolonize the mind. For his part, Hibbert directed a Nigerian play Akowawe with Afolabi Ajayi and the Moari-Moayo [Mbari Mbayo] Players, which included African music and lyrics in English, Swahili, and Yoruba. (65) Variant spellings of Yoruba names have obscured its relationship with the Mbari Mbayo clubs founded by Yoruban playwright Duro Adipo in Nigeria. Adipo’s theatre company produced performances heavily infused with Yoruba rituals, poetry, dance and theatre using authentic, historical instruments. (66) These two events show how Hibbert and the Harlem School of the Arts were instrumental in bringing contemporary pan-African culture to local audiences. Hibbert’s book of poetry, Anansi and Muntu , published in 1986, grew from free-form lyrics performed with musicians in Harlem and Los Angeles in the 1970s. (67) The explosive mid-1970s reception of Jamaican singer-songwriter Bob Marley may have bolstered the appeal of Hibbert’s performance pieces. (68) But the actor’s work had roots in the jazz poetry performed at Theatre 77 in Kingston, particularly Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama—Twelve moods for Jazz , which derived from the Harlem Renaissance. Hibbert writes that “Beyond the meaning of Caribbean words and their color is the rhythm of the language,” a kind of music. (69) He hoped to communicate, “clearly and succinctly, in short staccato sentences” pulsing “like the real jazz” with the “shouts of gospel” when it was “newborn, warm and supine, splendidly cathartic and holy.” (70) An especially notable poem, “A Requiem,” commemorates Paul Robeson’s death in January 1976. It begins, “Paul Robeson left today/With dignity,” and ends “Maybe you and I, small dedication/ Living best the Force we know/For another unsung prophet/ In this Black race, against Time.” Hibbert may have attended Robeson’s funeral held in Harlem at the AME Zion Church and was deeply moved by his life struggles. Another section, Somewhere a Third World, contains poems on South Africa. “Bloodbath: for Six High School Students Shot in Soweto,” decries police brutality in the Soweto riots that protested using only English or Afrikaans in all schools. From the Black point of view, this was the language of oppression. Hibbert writes, “Robbery of a people’s native right/Their chess game of securities and power/ And the UN didn’t even notice/ Black blood dripping/Between the fingers of corporate handshakes….” (71) In a section on going home, he reflects on his exile and identity: “ We climbed over fences to larger fields/And schoolhouse places relearning/Three-hundred years’ curriculum of self. And Britons, never, never, never shall be slaves.” (72) When Hibbert revisited his mother’s house after her death in 1984 he wrote, “Dreams come solid, incessant/ Through long nights remembering/ Where I keep my pain locked up/ Hollowing out my chest.” (73) Anansi and Muntu is a journal defining his Jamaican birthright and identity in the wider international world. Teaching a Postcolonial discourse for future generations Hibbert had personal experience of cultural imperialism in British control of educational curricula as a strategy for handling colonized subjugated people. Sub-par education for African Americans was also a significant problem in the United States. While earning a graduate teaching degree at Illinois State University, he directed the Black Fine Arts Festival. In an interview he said, “We have temporarily lost track of our true cultural heritage and one of the functions of this festival will be to help us reunite this lost past with our present.” (74) He displays a Postcolonial awareness of the need to educate and excavate the African American cultural heritage as an independent story that contradicts the traditional colonial narrative. Hibbert’s teaching embodied these principles in the 1970s. His first full-time teaching job was head of the newly formed Drama department at Rutgers University, Livingston campus. This was six years after the riots in Newark, New Jersey when Black protestors took to the streets to stand against the discrimination, lack of representation and working opportunities in the city. (75) Though Rutgers had created new departments and curricula “to serve the needs of the multi-ethnic community,” Hibbert observed that Blacks had little place or input in a white power structure, which seemed to be less concerned with issues than appearances. (76) While at Rutgers, Hibbert ventured into the American South, lured by a visiting artist opportunity to play “King Lear” at a Virginia university. In this setting Hibbert experimented with delivering his lines in the rhythm and patterns of Jamaican patois (patwa). By this time a formidable teacher, white student cast members remember him “beating a drum and leading us around the room to changing rhythms while vocalizing to the movements.” (77) Rehearsals ended in discussions of how each actor’s movement synched with the lines. “It was an amazing piece of work,” writes the costumer. “Sydney would be speaking quietly and then, suddenly near the end of the play, would burst into an eloquent fury, ripping off the clothing I had put on his back.” (78) In 1983, Hibbert joined the faculty of the North Carolina School for the Arts in Winston-Salem. (79) As one of only three Black NCSA faculty members, Hibbert believed that minority students should be taught survival skills because they would go into the drama world as pioneers. (80) His efforts to get Black actors cast in the same roles as Whites were termed “heroic” in a Winston-Salem newspaper. (81) Hibbert’s approach to teaching was shown in a workshop he offered using an integrated approach to drama, dance, movement, music, poetry, and dramatic literature, while his “Putting Your Best Voice Forward” class dealt with voice production and speech as applied to the “extension of personality.” (82) Hibbert also worked with the Winston-Salem based North Carolina Black Repertory Company, the first showcase for Black theatre professionals in the state and one of the first in the nation. (83) Founded in 1979 by entrepreneur/performer Larry Leon Hamlin and fueled by the same forces that had motivated Hibbert to travel from Jamaica to the United States, the missions of the organization were to “engage, enrich and entertain” with innovative programming of a high quality that “resonates across the community and challenges social perceptions,” to expose “diverse audiences to Black classics,” as well as to develop and produce new works.” (84) Of special importance to Hibbert, the company sought to sustain Black theatre internationally and provide a space in which theatre professionals could earn a living through their craft. (85) Hibbert brought broad experience to the NCBRC and the first Black Theatre Festival, where he performed well-received pieces from Anansi and Muntu and was a guest artist at an “Evening of Aesthetic Ambience,” organized to recognize officers and board members. (86) In the first year of the National Black Theatre Festival that established it as a national force, Hibbert was a special consultant to Hamlin, the artistic director of the company, helping to organize events and influencing the productions of Fugard’s The Island and Sizwe Bansi is Dead . (87) He was in contact with Maya Angelou, his previous director who became the first national chairperson for the Festival. In recognition of his work, Angelou presented him with the 1989 Conference Award for Outstanding Service. (88) After Hibbert’s death in 1990, commemorative articles refer to his accomplishments as an actor, director, writer, and theatrical entrepreneur. (89) His evocative poetry and prose as well as his “exuberance, and demanding nature as a teacher” are noted. (90) Students remember Hibbert’s voice carrying “the heavy flavor of his native accent” combined with his “rich sense of humor” reflecting “the joy he took in life” and “in the practice of his life’s work.” (91) Hamlin summarized Hibbert’s contributions saying, “Sydney believed that no matter the amount of adversity, there was always a way to overcome that. Not only could one dream the impossible dream, but one could make that dream a reality” adding, “One of the things I most liked about him was that his growing up in Jamaica had a lot to do with who he was and how he saw things.” (92) Sydney Hibbert, a man who grew from a rigid colonial education and culture as a child to a postcolonial theatre professional pushed against the racial and cultural barriers of his day, may have longed for respect for his homeland, his home culture, and himself. A choice to earn that respect for self and nation by showing the colonizer’s culture, writ large, that he could accomplish significant things on the field that those colonizers had created, is understandable. His experience surely led him to realize the value of teaching a younger generation to do better and his own Black students to be more empowered and aware. His anti-colonialist drive emerged in his powerful performances of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, now re-envisioned, as much as in roles in Fugard’s plays that brought social and racial inequities and questions about humanity to the fore. The battle that Theatre 77/Barn colleagues fought at home and in Britain, he fought in the United States. Hibbert’s choice, however, seems to have meant walking a lonely path in a culture or society where he may never have felt completely at ease. In his poetry, he displayed a sense of anger and displacement or, as Homi Bhabha has termed it, “unhomeliness.” (93) Hibbert moved from Kingston, Jamaica, to London, to Washington, D. C., Harlem, Los Angeles, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, but he never have found a physical space or social reality that was compatible with his Jamaican identity. As African American journalist Sam Fulwood III writes, animosity often clouds relationships between Caribbean immigrants and native-born African Americans citizens because of competition for jobs and differences in their dealings with whites.(94) In Hibbert’s lifetime people of West Indian descent, a minority within a minority, occupied lofty positions in American life and culture, including former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, Harvard historical/cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson, Caribbean American writer Jamaica Kincaid, and entertainer Harry Belafonte among others. Though Hibbert’s career and life accomplishments are less well-known, attention is merited because of the breadth and quality of his work as well as his passion for changing the racial discourse in Jamaica and the United States. In an age of reclaiming the histories of People of Color and seeking to understand the experiences of people growing up in a colonial setting, this work reconstructs the life of a “Caribbean soul” who successfully negotiated the changes from Jamaican colonial life to a decolonized life in the United States. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Sydney Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu: A Caribbean Soul in Exile , (Rural Hill, NC: Independent Publishing Company, 1986), 44. See also, Gerald McDermott, Anansi the Spider: a tale from the Ashanti , (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1972). Anansi is a folktale character in the shape of a spider, often considered a god of all knowledge and stories, a trickster, one of the most important characters of Caribbean folklore and the genesis of the later Brer Rabbit in the American South. Muntu embraces living and dead, ancestors and deified ancestors. The author wishes to thank Dennis C. Beck, Professor of Theatre: Theatre History/Dramatic Literature at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA and Kathleen Giles Arthur, Professor emerita of Art History, for their invaluable assistance and editorial comments. For general history, see Clinton V. Black, The History of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Longman Publishing & Collins Educational Press,1958); Errol G. Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre , (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Philip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett, The Story of the Jamaican People (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Rundle Publishers,1998); Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 77-98. Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 116-127. Rachel Manley, Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood, (Key Porter Books, 2009), Prologue xi. For specific information on slavery and the processing of sugar see “Sugar’s Revolution” in Ada Ferrar, Cuba: An American History , (New York: Scribner, 2021), 69 -77. Ferrar, Cuba pp. 73-74. Marlis Schweitzer calls these theatrical gatherings “sites that facilitated collective alignment with the “ideals and aesthetics of the ‘mother country,’” as quoted in Susan Valladares’ The Review of English Studies , Vol. 73, no. 309, April 2022, 322. Hill, Jamaican Stage , p. 237, n. 2, also credits Richardson Wright, Revels in Jamaica, 1682-1838 , (New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1937). By the early nineteenth century, segregation had become commonplace in the Kingston Theatre, though not many years later the “caste system,” white sailors and educated blacks, was “overriding racial lines.” Hill, Jamaican Stage , 36-37. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggests in Racism Without Racists , “Since theatre is based in storytelling” and “its ability to lie in the realm of the given,” it can “help [spectators] make sense of the world but in ways that reinforce the status quo,” in Rowman & Littlefield, sixth edition, 96. Hundreds of people saw costumes that were identical to those used earlier at London's Savoy Theatre, in https://old.jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/story0010.html . Yvonne Brewster, Vaulting Ambition: Jamaica’s Barn Theatre, 1966-2005, (Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2017), 23. Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century , (Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2011), 55-78. Hill, Jamaican Stage , 272-289. On folk elements (dance and music) in African-Caribbean plays, see Osita Okagbue, Culture and Identity in African and Caribbean Theatre , (London: Adonis and Abbey Publishers, 2009), 191-201. Sherlock and Bennett, in Jamaican People , p. 368, hypothesize that rejection of Nazism at the end of World War II influenced Britain’s abandonment of concepts of Empire and trusteeship. “Echoes Still Heard,” Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 16. He played on the spelling of suffrage to change its meaning to suffering. “Wid a(n) X” show the lines are written in Jamaican patois. Lil Thompson, “Sydney Hibbert: The Discipline Pays Off,” Winston-Salem Journal , July 31, 1986, 26. They lived at 4 Hart Lane behind Lismore Street, running off of Old Hope Rd. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1934-06-05/page-5/ Hibbert, “The Lane, Tempo Mystique,” Anansi and Muntu , 9. Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” Anansi and Muntu , 13. Hibbert, “Morning Call,” Anansi and Muntu , 12. Black, History of Jamaica , 137-140; A. Wesley Powell, The Excelsior-EXED Story , (Kingston: The Methodist Church in the Caribbean and Americas, Jamaica District), 1989. Powell, 27-28, 41-47. Louise Bennett was awarded a British Council scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London, and returned to teach at Excelsior 1946-48. By writing in dialect, Bennett-Coverley was following in the footsteps of Jamaican poet Claude McKay. “Local Dramatist Returns,” https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-08-04/page-6/ https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-133/out-of-many . King said, “Here you have people from many national backgrounds: Chinese, Indians, so-called Negroes, and you can just go down the line, Europeans, and people from many, many nations. Do you know they all live there and they have a motto in Jamaica, “Out of many people, one people.” And they say, “Here in Jamaica we are not Chinese, we are not Japanese, we are not Indians, we are not Negroes, we are not Englishmen, we are not Canadians. But we are all one big family of Jamaicans.” Monique D.D. Kelly, “Examining Race in Jamaica: How Racial Category and Skin Color Structure Social Inequality,” The Journal of Race and Social Problems , Vol. 18 (2020), 300-312. Hertice Altink, Public Secrets: Race and Skin Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica , (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” 13. The term “high-brown” was used in Harlem in the 1920s and found in Black women’s face powder sold as “High Brown” by the Overton-Hygienic Company, Chicago. Sherlock and Bennet, Jamaican People , 292-315, 362-63. Rupert Lewis, “Jamaican Black Power in the 1960s,” in Black Power in the Caribbean , ed., Kate Quinn, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 55-56. Rex Nettleford, Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica , (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 19-37. Robert G. Dryden, “John Gay's Polly: Unmasking Pirates and Fortune Hunters in the West Indies,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , Vol. 34, No. 4, (2001), 539-557. Stoney Lloyd, “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner , August 4, 1965, 6. Besides those listed above, he played in the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman and Patrick Hamilton’s psychological drama The Duke in Darkness , and four separate characters in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood . He produced Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and Chekov’s Uncle Vanya , which placed on the honor list of productions in the Student Repertory Theatre. “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner. August 4, 1965, 7-8. Hibbert took acting classes from Kingston teacher, Violette de Barovier Riel at her Continental Academy workshop and acted with the Repertory Players, Caribbean Thespians, and the Coke Drama Group. He was married and his wife joined him. Gleaner , August 10, 1963, 19 and Gleaner, August 15, 1965, 20. He portrayed what one reviewer called an elegant Thane of Cawdor in Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Carol McGinnis Kay, “The Alabama Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 30, No. 2 (1979), 205-208. J. H. Crouch, “The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 21 (1970), 465-467. This critic used racial stereotypes that would be considered inappropriate today. Kari Howard, Kaleidoscope , “Drama Review: Othello a Mellow Fellow,” September 29, 1983, University of North Carolina at Asheville, 7. “First Novel Wins Acclaim,” Daily Gleaner , August 9, 1962, p. 24. See Imani D. Owens, “Toward a Truly Indigenous Theatre: Sylvia Wynter Adapts Federico García Lorca,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , 4:1 (2017), 49-67. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1962-11-25/page-9/ The Morant Bay Rebellion broke out on October 11, 1865, when several hundred black people raided the police station and stole weapons stored there. Two planters were killed, and several others were threatened. With the disturbances spreading, the Jamaican authorities put down the rebellion so brutally that direct rule from London was established, which ended representative government in the island for decades. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-17/page-18/ ; https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-26/page-18/ Veronica M. Gregg, “Commemorations in Jamaica: A Brief History of Conflicts.” Caribbean Quarterly 56, no. 1/2 (2010): 23–67, especially 28-29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654952 . Carole Boyce Davies, “From Masquerade to Maskarade,” in Sylvia Winter, On Being Human as Praxis , ed. Katherine McKittrick, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 203-225 https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-02/page-7/ ; Members who had been involved in Ballad were Sydney Hibbert, Billy Woung, Trevor Rhone, Grace Lannaman, and Munair Zacca. Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre , 90-94; Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 16-20. Sydney was fresh from acting and management training in London. Trevor Rhone and Yvonne Brewster had studied at the Rose Bruford College in Kent. Rhone became a well-known playwright and was presented with the Institute of Jamaica Musgrave Gold Medal. Brewster founded the Talawa Theatre Company, London and, after a long career acting, directing and producing was awarded an Order of the British Empire. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 16-17. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-06/page-17/ ; As Brewster tells the story, there was no review. For the post mortem, see Trevor Rhone, Bellas Gate Boy , (Oxford, England: MacMillan Caribbean Writers, 2008), 29-32. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 17-19. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-07-20/page-26/ Daily Gleaner, “Merry-go-round,” June 14, 1966, Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 33. George Carter had been a pioneer theatre director and lighting designer in Kingston since the 1940s. He was lighting designer for the musicals, pageants, dance and pantomimes in the Little Theatre Movement. In 1961 he received an Arts Council award to study in London at Sadler Wells Ballet and the Shakespeare Memorial theatre at Stratford. Hibbert’s post-Theatre 77 lecturing and teaching activities in Jamaica were extensive, as documented in Daily Gleaner, “Trends in Theatre,” October 06, 1965, 26; “New Slants to Known History,” October 14, 1965; “Drama workshop opens today,” April 25, 1966, 16; “Jamaica Festival Kingston and Saint Andrew Training courses,” April 26, 1966, 5; “Continental Academy Drama Course,” April 8, 1967, 18; “Festival Seminar, Drama Seminars,” April 25-29,” 1967, 26; May 11, 1967, 26. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2416/the-art-of-theatre-no-8-athol-fugard It toured to Cape town and other locations until June 1962. Soon after the show closed, laws were passed prohibiting racially mixed casts or audiences in South Africa. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095512988 and https://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/ fugard.html/. The Blood Knot starring J. D. Cannon as Morris and James Earl Jones as Zachariah at the Cricket Theatre in 1964, as noted in “Blood Knot' Lists American Premiere,” New York Times , Friday, January 31, 1964, 16. Milner's most significant contribution to African-American letters was Black Drama Anthology (1972), the earliest and most respected anthology of Black plays. It included works by Milner, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Langston Hughes https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100158957 ) Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Hibbert honored by LA drama critics,” March 27, 1986, A-12. The Drama-Logue newspaper, a weekly west-coast theatre trade publication, gave Drama-Logue Theatre Critics Awards for theatre work done in Los Angeles and Southern California. See https://www.abouttheartists.com/award_groups/184-drama-logue-awards/year/1988 . Lawrence Christon in “Stage Review: Playwright as Exorcist in Master Harold and the Boys ' South Coast Repertory,” Los Angeles Times May 25, 1985, in https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-05-25 -ca-25 15632-story.html. Jeff Rubio, Santa Ana Orange County Register, May 24, 1985, 148. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A6. The Jamaican poet Claude McKay (1890-1948) settled in New York City in 1914 and wrote about Black life in Jamaica and challenges faced by Black Americans, often in the influential Pearson’s Magazine and Liberator . Marcus Garvey, founder of the UNIA, had lived in Harlem from 1916 until 1924. See the excellent film with photos and interviews by the Community Works N.Y.C. and the New Heritage Theatre Group, ( https://www.harlem-is.org/videos ) at https://youtu.be/vGG0LMPlf_Y Hibbert describes the whole Harlem scene, Ananzi , 30-31. See also James E. Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s , (Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement , Vernon D. Mitchell, Cynthia Davis, editors (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). African-Americans Pearl Bailey ( Hello Dolly ) and James Earl Jones ( The Great White Hope) were playing starring roles on Broadway, but the Caribbean American Repertory Theatre (CART) was only founded in 1975. See Olivier Stephenson, Visions and Voices (Leeds: Peepal Press, 2013), and http://southernworldartsnews.blogspot.com/2015/03/caribbean-playwrights-converse-and.html Hibbert, Ananzi , 49. Bennett-Coverley brought recognition to the Jamaican Creole dialect through her poetry and Jamaica Radio series “Mis Lou’s Views” that ran 1965-1982. Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 29-34. He was divorced from his first wife and married Jamaican Claire Gutzmore in Manhattan in 1969. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1969-06-02/page-4/ and https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/903708390:61406?tid=&pid=&queryId=df594283-1d04-45d8-83aa-de0675f898fa&_phsrc=SVt1380&_phstart=successSource . William F. Rogers, Jr., “The Establishment of the Harlem School of the Arts,” Black Music Research Journal , Vol. 8 (1988), 223-236. Negro Digest (later Black World), Vol. 18, August 1969, 50. Spelled two different ways in the same article. See Genevieve Fabre, “A Checklist of Plays, Pageants, Rituals and Musicals by Afro-American authors performed in the United States 1960-1973,” Black World/ Negro Digest, April 1974, 95. Afolabi Ajayi is recorded a as Nigerian recipient of a scholarship to Pomona College where he graduated in 1964; he was deceased by 1975. See https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDAAU440.pdf Okeke-Agulu, Chika. “Rethinking Mbari Mbayo: Osogbo Workshops in the 1960s, Nigeria.” In African Art and Agency in the Workshop , edited by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Forster, 154–79. Indiana University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gh6fp.11 . This is a new discovery that needs to be explored. Reported in “Studies in Caribbean and South American Literature: An Annual Annotated Bibliography, 1989.” Callaloo 13, no. 3 (1990): 564. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931339 . Anansi “is the ‘spiderman’ in Caribbean folktales who “survives by adopting a role” and “guarding his sense of humor that pricks pretension—especially his own,” whereas, “Muntu,” the Bantu word for soul, spirit or otherness, goes with Anansi on his journeys providing stability, an unshakable inner identity. He sees two worlds, past and present clearly though he often chooses to remain quiet and detached,” in Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction.” The actor’s pointed observations are a long way from the “One Love!” sensibilities in Marley’s work. For more on Marley, see Timothy White, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000) and Roger Steffens, So Many Things to Say; the Oral History of Bob Marley , (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction,” p. x. Hibbert aspires to “taste, philosophize, and one day even write the answers clearly, succinctly in short staccato sentences” that will be “hailed as a new style,” pulsing “like the real jazz,” blooming with “the colors and textures of the blues,” and mounting “crescendos like the shouts of gospel when it was just newborn, warm and supine, splendidly cathartic and holy, in “Harlem Adagio,” Anansi, 29. Hibbert, “Bloodbath,” Anansi , 61. Hibbert, “For Those in Exile,” Anansi, 49. Hibbert, “Visit ’84,” Anansi , 53. “The Black Fine Arts Festival,” Illinois State University, The Vidette , Vol. 82, n. 54, April 17, 1970. The theme was “The Meaning of Blackness,” with films and prominent lecturers; The Vidette Vol. 83, no.47, March 9, 1971; Vol. 84, n.39, February 8, 1972; The Vidette , Vol. 84, n. 55, March 21, 1972. The unrest from July 12-17, 1967 “came during a period when racial tensions were exploding into violent conflagrations across the country.” Over several days in Newark, “twenty-seven people were killed — many of them black residents, as well as a white firefighter and a white police detective — and more than 700 were injured,” Rick Rojas and Khorri Atkinson, “Fifty Years After the Uprising: Five Days of Unrest That Shaped, and Haunted, Newark,” New York Times, July 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/nyregion/newark-riots-50-years.html Daily Gleaner , “Jamaican Dramatist Returns for a Visit,” May 23, 1973, 5. On the Rutgers/Livingston situation, see Paul G.E. Clemens, “The Early Years of Livingston College, 1964–1973: Revisiting The “College of Good Intentions” in The Journal of The Rutgers University Libraries , Vol. 6-7, 71-114, in http://dx.doi.org/10.14713/jrul.v68i2.1987 . Pat Woodson, “Hibbert Accepts Lead—First Reading Inspires Cast,” The Breeze , September 24, 1974, pp. 3, 6; Jeffrey Alan Dailey, Communication with author, August 2, 2021. Pat Woodson, “Lear Costume Designs,” The Breeze , October 11, 1974, 3; Pamela Johnson, Communication with author, September 30, 2021. According to the Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, B10, Hibbert had already lectured and done university-level workshops on the Los Angeles, Northridge and Pomona California State University campuses while performing in Southern California in the 1980s. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Winston-Salem Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A-6. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984,16, and Glenda E. Gill, “Schertzer racially biased,” in “Forum,” Chronicle , Thursday, January 21, 1988, A-5. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984, 16; Winston-Salem Journal , December 22, 1985, 40. These organizations included The Flonnie Anderson Theatrical Association and Nell Lite Productions, see Felecia Piggot McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company —Twenty-five Marvtastic Years, (Greensboro: Open Hand Publishing, LLC,2005) 22. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory , 5, “The black self-affirmation fueled by the Civil Rights Movement carried over to the Black Powers Movement and, consequently, to its cultural wing – the Black Arts Movement.” https://www.ncblackrep.org/about-us/html . Winston-Salem Chronicle “Looking Back on 1986,” “Sydney Hibbert performs a mixture of humor and pathos in his Anansi and Muntu ,” Feb. 5, 1987, C-4; McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory, 41, 61; Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Can We Talk?” September 24, 1987, A-8. McMillan, 61; The Island and Sizwi Banzi is Dead written by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona were originally performed in 1972 in Cape town, South Africa. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company , 46-50. Other celebrities were Oprah Winfrey, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, and Roscoe Lee Brown. Mabel Robinson, former NCBR Artistic Director, Winston-Salem Chronicle, December 6, 1990, B-9; Winston-Salem Chronicle , January 10, 1991, A-8. Daily Gleaner , Tuesday, January 15, 1991, 27. Patricia Smith Deering, “Renowned local dramatist remembered,” Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, 25. John Hoeffel, “Drama Professor Sydney Hibbert Dies of Cancer,” Winston-Salem Journal, November 30, 1990, 12; Nathan Ross Freeman wrote and directed a play based on Hibbert, Your Side Mine , that was performed at the Montage Showcase Ensemble in November 1997. See https://www.greensboro.com/ensemble-gives-playwrights-a-chance/article_68b7d190-97d4-5e5b-b6ea-891a97f0c19f.html . Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text , 31/32 (1992), 141-153. Hibbert experienced the “unhomeliness” in the sense of his exile and itinerant life style. Though he became a US citizen in 1978, he was constantly moving from the East to West Coasts. In “Sermon in a Dream-Mass: Port Elizabeth, South Africa,” the lanes of Kingston where he grew up haunted his imagination becoming metaphors for danger and death. Sam Fulwood III, “U.S. Blacks: A Divided Experience,” November 25,1995, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-11-25-mn-6855-story.html . Footnotes Sydney Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu: A Caribbean Soul in Exile , (Rural Hill, NC: Independent Publishing Company, 1986), 44. See also, Gerald McDermott, Anansi the Spider: a tale from the Ashanti , (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1972). Anansi is a folktale character in the shape of a spider, often considered a god of all knowledge and stories, a trickster, one of the most important characters of Caribbean folklore and the genesis of the later Brer Rabbit in the American South. Muntu embraces living and dead, ancestors and deified ancestors. The author wishes to thank Dennis C. Beck, Professor of Theatre: Theatre History/Dramatic Literature at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA and Kathleen Giles Arthur, Professor emerita of Art History, for their invaluable assistance and editorial comments. For general history, see Clinton V. Black, The History of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Longman Publishing & Collins Educational Press,1958); Errol G. Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre , (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Philip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett, The Story of the Jamaican People (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Rundle Publishers,1998); Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 77-98. Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 116-127. Rachel Manley, Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood, (Key Porter Books, 2009), Prologue xi. For specific information on slavery and the processing of sugar see “Sugar’s Revolution” in Ada Ferrar, Cuba: An American History , (New York: Scribner, 2021), 69 -77. Ferrar, Cuba pp. 73-74. Marlis Schweitzer calls these theatrical gatherings “sites that facilitated collective alignment with the “ideals and aesthetics of the ‘mother country,’” as quoted in Susan Valladares’ The Review of English Studies , Vol. 73, no. 309, April 2022, 322. Hill, Jamaican Stage , p. 237, n. 2, also credits Richardson Wright, Revels in Jamaica, 1682-1838 , (New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1937). By the early nineteenth century, segregation had become commonplace in the Kingston Theatre, though not many years later the “caste system,” white sailors and educated blacks, was “overriding racial lines.” Hill, Jamaican Stage , 36-37. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggests in Racism Without Racists , “Since theatre is based in storytelling” and “its ability to lie in the realm of the given,” it can “help [spectators] make sense of the world but in ways that reinforce the status quo,” in Rowman & Littlefield, sixth edition, 96. Hundreds of people saw costumes that were identical to those used earlier at London's Savoy Theatre, in https://old.jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/story0010.html . Yvonne Brewster, Vaulting Ambition: Jamaica’s Barn Theatre, 1966-2005, (Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2017), 23. Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century , (Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2011), 55-78. Hill, Jamaican Stage , 272-289. On folk elements (dance and music) in African-Caribbean plays, see Osita Okagbue, Culture and Identity in African and Caribbean Theatre , (London: Adonis and Abbey Publishers, 2009), 191-201. Sherlock and Bennett, in Jamaican People , p. 368, hypothesize that rejection of Nazism at the end of World War II influenced Britain’s abandonment of concepts of Empire and trusteeship. “Echoes Still Heard,” Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 16. He played on the spelling of suffrage to change its meaning to suffering. “Wid a(n) X” show the lines are written in Jamaican patois. Lil Thompson, “Sydney Hibbert: The Discipline Pays Off,” Winston-Salem Journal , July 31, 1986, 26. They lived at 4 Hart Lane behind Lismore Street, running off of Old Hope Rd. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1934-06-05/page-5/ Hibbert, “The Lane, Tempo Mystique,” Anansi and Muntu , 9. Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” Anansi and Muntu , 13. Hibbert, “Morning Call,” Anansi and Muntu , 12. Black, History of Jamaica , 137-140; A. Wesley Powell, The Excelsior-EXED Story , (Kingston: The Methodist Church in the Caribbean and Americas, Jamaica District), 1989. Powell, 27-28, 41-47. Louise Bennett was awarded a British Council scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London, and returned to teach at Excelsior 1946-48. By writing in dialect, Bennett-Coverley was following in the footsteps of Jamaican poet Claude McKay. “Local Dramatist Returns,” https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-08-04/page-6/ https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-133/out-of-many . King said, “Here you have people from many national backgrounds: Chinese, Indians, so-called Negroes, and you can just go down the line, Europeans, and people from many, many nations. Do you know they all live there and they have a motto in Jamaica, “Out of many people, one people.” And they say, “Here in Jamaica we are not Chinese, we are not Japanese, we are not Indians, we are not Negroes, we are not Englishmen, we are not Canadians. But we are all one big family of Jamaicans.” Monique D.D. Kelly, “Examining Race in Jamaica: How Racial Category and Skin Color Structure Social Inequality,” The Journal of Race and Social Problems , Vol. 18 (2020), 300-312. Hertice Altink, Public Secrets: Race and Skin Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica , (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” 13. The term “high-brown” was used in Harlem in the 1920s and found in Black women’s face powder sold as “High Brown” by the Overton-Hygienic Company, Chicago. Sherlock and Bennet, Jamaican People , 292-315, 362-63. Rupert Lewis, “Jamaican Black Power in the 1960s,” in Black Power in the Caribbean , ed., Kate Quinn, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 55-56. Rex Nettleford, Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica , (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 19-37. Robert G. Dryden, “John Gay's Polly: Unmasking Pirates and Fortune Hunters in the West Indies,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , Vol. 34, No. 4, (2001), 539-557. Stoney Lloyd, “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner , August 4, 1965, 6. Besides those listed above, he played in the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman and Patrick Hamilton’s psychological drama The Duke in Darkness , and four separate characters in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood . He produced Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and Chekov’s Uncle Vanya , which placed on the honor list of productions in the Student Repertory Theatre. “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner. August 4, 1965, 7-8. Hibbert took acting classes from Kingston teacher, Violette de Barovier Riel at her Continental Academy workshop and acted with the Repertory Players, Caribbean Thespians, and the Coke Drama Group. He was married and his wife joined him. Gleaner , August 10, 1963, 19 and Gleaner, August 15, 1965, 20. He portrayed what one reviewer called an elegant Thane of Cawdor in Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Carol McGinnis Kay, “The Alabama Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 30, No. 2 (1979), 205-208. J. H. Crouch, “The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 21 (1970), 465-467. This critic used racial stereotypes that would be considered inappropriate today. Kari Howard, Kaleidoscope , “Drama Review: Othello a Mellow Fellow,” September 29, 1983, University of North Carolina at Asheville, 7. “First Novel Wins Acclaim,” Daily Gleaner , August 9, 1962, p. 24. See Imani D. Owens, “Toward a Truly Indigenous Theatre: Sylvia Wynter Adapts Federico García Lorca,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , 4:1 (2017), 49-67. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1962-11-25/page-9/ The Morant Bay Rebellion broke out on October 11, 1865, when several hundred black people raided the police station and stole weapons stored there. Two planters were killed, and several others were threatened. With the disturbances spreading, the Jamaican authorities put down the rebellion so brutally that direct rule from London was established, which ended representative government in the island for decades. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-17/page-18/ ; https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-26/page-18/ Veronica M. Gregg, “Commemorations in Jamaica: A Brief History of Conflicts.” Caribbean Quarterly 56, no. 1/2 (2010): 23–67, especially 28-29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654952 . Carole Boyce Davies, “From Masquerade to Maskarade,” in Sylvia Winter, On Being Human as Praxis , ed. Katherine McKittrick, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 203-225 https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-02/page-7/ ; Members who had been involved in Ballad were Sydney Hibbert, Billy Woung, Trevor Rhone, Grace Lannaman, and Munair Zacca. Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre , 90-94; Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 16-20. Sydney was fresh from acting and management training in London. Trevor Rhone and Yvonne Brewster had studied at the Rose Bruford College in Kent. Rhone became a well-known playwright and was presented with the Institute of Jamaica Musgrave Gold Medal. Brewster founded the Talawa Theatre Company, London and, after a long career acting, directing and producing was awarded an Order of the British Empire. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 16-17. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-06/page-17/ ; As Brewster tells the story, there was no review. For the post mortem, see Trevor Rhone, Bellas Gate Boy , (Oxford, England: MacMillan Caribbean Writers, 2008), 29-32. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 17-19. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-07-20/page-26/ Daily Gleaner, “Merry-go-round,” June 14, 1966, Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 33. George Carter had been a pioneer theatre director and lighting designer in Kingston since the 1940s. He was lighting designer for the musicals, pageants, dance and pantomimes in the Little Theatre Movement. In 1961 he received an Arts Council award to study in London at Sadler Wells Ballet and the Shakespeare Memorial theatre at Stratford. Hibbert’s post-Theatre 77 lecturing and teaching activities in Jamaica were extensive, as documented in Daily Gleaner, “Trends in Theatre,” October 06, 1965, 26; “New Slants to Known History,” October 14, 1965; “Drama workshop opens today,” April 25, 1966, 16; “Jamaica Festival Kingston and Saint Andrew Training courses,” April 26, 1966, 5; “Continental Academy Drama Course,” April 8, 1967, 18; “Festival Seminar, Drama Seminars,” April 25-29,” 1967, 26; May 11, 1967, 26. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2416/the-art-of-theatre-no-8-athol-fugard It toured to Cape town and other locations until June 1962. Soon after the show closed, laws were passed prohibiting racially mixed casts or audiences in South Africa. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095512988 and https://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/ fugard.html/. The Blood Knot starring J. D. Cannon as Morris and James Earl Jones as Zachariah at the Cricket Theatre in 1964, as noted in “Blood Knot' Lists American Premiere,” New York Times , Friday, January 31, 1964, 16. Milner's most significant contribution to African-American letters was Black Drama Anthology (1972), the earliest and most respected anthology of Black plays. It included works by Milner, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Langston Hughes https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100158957 ) Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Hibbert honored by LA drama critics,” March 27, 1986, A-12. The Drama-Logue newspaper, a weekly west-coast theatre trade publication, gave Drama-Logue Theatre Critics Awards for theatre work done in Los Angeles and Southern California. See https://www.abouttheartists.com/award_groups/184-drama-logue-awards/year/1988 . Lawrence Christon in “Stage Review: Playwright as Exorcist in Master Harold and the Boys ' South Coast Repertory,” Los Angeles Times May 25, 1985, in https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-05-25 -ca-25 15632-story.html. Jeff Rubio, Santa Ana Orange County Register, May 24, 1985, 148. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A6. The Jamaican poet Claude McKay (1890-1948) settled in New York City in 1914 and wrote about Black life in Jamaica and challenges faced by Black Americans, often in the influential Pearson’s Magazine and Liberator . Marcus Garvey, founder of the UNIA, had lived in Harlem from 1916 until 1924. See the excellent film with photos and interviews by the Community Works N.Y.C. and the New Heritage Theatre Group, ( https://www.harlem-is.org/videos ) at https://youtu.be/vGG0LMPlf_Y Hibbert describes the whole Harlem scene, Ananzi , 30-31. See also James E. Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s , (Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement , Vernon D. Mitchell, Cynthia Davis, editors (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). African-Americans Pearl Bailey ( Hello Dolly ) and James Earl Jones ( The Great White Hope) were playing starring roles on Broadway, but the Caribbean American Repertory Theatre (CART) was only founded in 1975. See Olivier Stephenson, Visions and Voices (Leeds: Peepal Press, 2013), and http://southernworldartsnews.blogspot.com/2015/03/caribbean-playwrights-converse-and.html Hibbert, Ananzi , 49. Bennett-Coverley brought recognition to the Jamaican Creole dialect through her poetry and Jamaica Radio series “Mis Lou’s Views” that ran 1965-1982. Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 29-34. He was divorced from his first wife and married Jamaican Claire Gutzmore in Manhattan in 1969. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1969-06-02/page-4/ and https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/903708390:61406?tid=&pid=&queryId=df594283-1d04-45d8-83aa-de0675f898fa&_phsrc=SVt1380&_phstart=successSource . William F. Rogers, Jr., “The Establishment of the Harlem School of the Arts,” Black Music Research Journal , Vol. 8 (1988), 223-236. Negro Digest (later Black World), Vol. 18, August 1969, 50. Spelled two different ways in the same article. See Genevieve Fabre, “A Checklist of Plays, Pageants, Rituals and Musicals by Afro-American authors performed in the United States 1960-1973,” Black World/ Negro Digest, April 1974, 95. Afolabi Ajayi is recorded a as Nigerian recipient of a scholarship to Pomona College where he graduated in 1964; he was deceased by 1975. See https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDAAU440.pdf Okeke-Agulu, Chika. “Rethinking Mbari Mbayo: Osogbo Workshops in the 1960s, Nigeria.” In African Art and Agency in the Workshop , edited by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Forster, 154–79. Indiana University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gh6fp.11 . This is a new discovery that needs to be explored. Reported in “Studies in Caribbean and South American Literature: An Annual Annotated Bibliography, 1989.” Callaloo 13, no. 3 (1990): 564. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931339 . Anansi “is the ‘spiderman’ in Caribbean folktales who “survives by adopting a role” and “guarding his sense of humor that pricks pretension—especially his own,” whereas, “Muntu,” the Bantu word for soul, spirit or otherness, goes with Anansi on his journeys providing stability, an unshakable inner identity. He sees two worlds, past and present clearly though he often chooses to remain quiet and detached,” in Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction.” The actor’s pointed observations are a long way from the “One Love!” sensibilities in Marley’s work. For more on Marley, see Timothy White, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000) and Roger Steffens, So Many Things to Say; the Oral History of Bob Marley , (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction,” p. x. Hibbert aspires to “taste, philosophize, and one day even write the answers clearly, succinctly in short staccato sentences” that will be “hailed as a new style,” pulsing “like the real jazz,” blooming with “the colors and textures of the blues,” and mounting “crescendos like the shouts of gospel when it was just newborn, warm and supine, splendidly cathartic and holy, in “Harlem Adagio,” Anansi, 29. Hibbert, “Bloodbath,” Anansi , 61. Hibbert, “For Those in Exile,” Anansi, 49. Hibbert, “Visit ’84,” Anansi , 53. “The Black Fine Arts Festival,” Illinois State University, The Vidette , Vol. 82, n. 54, April 17, 1970. The theme was “The Meaning of Blackness,” with films and prominent lecturers; The Vidette Vol. 83, no.47, March 9, 1971; Vol. 84, n.39, February 8, 1972; The Vidette , Vol. 84, n. 55, March 21, 1972. The unrest from July 12-17, 1967 “came during a period when racial tensions were exploding into violent conflagrations across the country.” Over several days in Newark, “twenty-seven people were killed — many of them black residents, as well as a white firefighter and a white police detective — and more than 700 were injured,” Rick Rojas and Khorri Atkinson, “Fifty Years After the Uprising: Five Days of Unrest That Shaped, and Haunted, Newark,” New York Times, July 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/nyregion/newark-riots-50-years.html Daily Gleaner , “Jamaican Dramatist Returns for a Visit,” May 23, 1973, 5. On the Rutgers/Livingston situation, see Paul G.E. Clemens, “The Early Years of Livingston College, 1964–1973: Revisiting The “College of Good Intentions” in The Journal of The Rutgers University Libraries , Vol. 6-7, 71-114, in http://dx.doi.org/10.14713/jrul.v68i2.1987 . Pat Woodson, “Hibbert Accepts Lead—First Reading Inspires Cast,” The Breeze , September 24, 1974, pp. 3, 6; Jeffrey Alan Dailey, Communication with author, August 2, 2021. Pat Woodson, “Lear Costume Designs,” The Breeze , October 11, 1974, 3; Pamela Johnson, Communication with author, September 30, 2021. According to the Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, B10, Hibbert had already lectured and done university-level workshops on the Los Angeles, Northridge and Pomona California State University campuses while performing in Southern California in the 1980s. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Winston-Salem Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A-6. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984,16, and Glenda E. Gill, “Schertzer racially biased,” in “Forum,” Chronicle , Thursday, January 21, 1988, A-5. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984, 16; Winston-Salem Journal , December 22, 1985, 40. These organizations included The Flonnie Anderson Theatrical Association and Nell Lite Productions, see Felecia Piggot McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company —Twenty-five Marvtastic Years, (Greensboro: Open Hand Publishing, LLC,2005) 22. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory , 5, “The black self-affirmation fueled by the Civil Rights Movement carried over to the Black Powers Movement and, consequently, to its cultural wing – the Black Arts Movement.” https://www.ncblackrep.org/about-us/html . Winston-Salem Chronicle “Looking Back on 1986,” “Sydney Hibbert performs a mixture of humor and pathos in his Anansi and Muntu ,” Feb. 5, 1987, C-4; McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory, 41, 61; Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Can We Talk?” September 24, 1987, A-8. McMillan, 61; The Island and Sizwi Banzi is Dead written by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona were originally performed in 1972 in Cape town, South Africa. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company , 46-50. Other celebrities were Oprah Winfrey, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, and Roscoe Lee Brown. Mabel Robinson, former NCBR Artistic Director, Winston-Salem Chronicle, December 6, 1990, B-9; Winston-Salem Chronicle , January 10, 1991, A-8. Daily Gleaner , Tuesday, January 15, 1991, 27. Patricia Smith Deering, “Renowned local dramatist remembered,” Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, 25. John Hoeffel, “Drama Professor Sydney Hibbert Dies of Cancer,” Winston-Salem Journal, November 30, 1990, 12; Nathan Ross Freeman wrote and directed a play based on Hibbert, Your Side Mine , that was performed at the Montage Showcase Ensemble in November 1997. See https://www.greensboro.com/ensemble-gives-playwrights-a-chance/article_68b7d190-97d4-5e5b-b6ea-891a97f0c19f.html . Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text , 31/32 (1992), 141-153. Hibbert experienced the “unhomeliness” in the sense of his exile and itinerant life style. Though he became a US citizen in 1978, he was constantly moving from the East to West Coasts. In “Sermon in a Dream-Mass: Port Elizabeth, South Africa,” the lanes of Kingston where he grew up haunted his imagination becoming metaphors for danger and death. Sam Fulwood III, “U.S. Blacks: A Divided Experience,” November 25,1995, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-11-25-mn-6855-story.html . About The Author(s) Thomas Arthur received his PhD in American Studies from Indiana University and is a Professor Emeritus of Theatre at James Madison University (JMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He has written extensively on theatre performance and film practitioners and co-authored See You at the Movies , a book on Melvyn Douglas’s acting and political activities. Arthur has led acting workshops internationally, including in the townships of South Africa as apartheid ended. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch In-I In Motion by Juliette Binoche at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. In 2007, French actress Juliette Binoche and British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan stepped away from their established careers to embark on a bold artistic experiment. Over six months, they co-created In-I, an intense, boundary-pushing performance they would go on to stage 100 times around the world. Today, Juliette Binoche returns to that intimate journey. From the first spark of inspiration to the final applause, she retraces the emotional and creative arc of a singular collaboration. Drawing on dozens of hours of previously unseen footage, she reflects, as a filmmaker, on the nature of artistic creation, the vulnerability and exhilaration of taking risks, and the personal transformation they demand. . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents In-I In Motion At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Juliette Binoche Screening Information RSVP Country France Language French, English Running Time 125 minutes Year of Release 2026 About The Film About The Retrospective In 2007, French actress Juliette Binoche and British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan stepped away from their established careers to embark on a bold artistic experiment. Over six months, they co-created In-I, an intense, boundary-pushing performance they would go on to stage 100 times around the world. Today, Juliette Binoche returns to that intimate journey. From the first spark of inspiration to the final applause, she retraces the emotional and creative arc of a singular collaboration. Drawing on dozens of hours of previously unseen footage, she reflects, as a filmmaker, on the nature of artistic creation, the vulnerability and exhilaration of taking risks, and the personal transformation they demand. About The Artist(s) Juliette Binoche was born in Paris. She loves travelling like someone who might have come from the four corners of the earth. In her blood run Polish, Brazilian and Flemish platelets. As a child, she loved making things, crafting, tinkering even. She brought her hands together, believed in the happiness of living, in saving snails, in warming up cold dolls. And then, to play was to escape. Escape from the loneliness of boarding schools, from recurring nightmares, creating moments of joy in playgrounds, in the pitch-black night of dormitories. At the age of four, she preferred whispering games to sleep. Her fragmented family brought her closer to angels. High up in the sky, like Dumbo, she no doubt chose her father and mother, who bathed in the world of the arts. With them, she lived at the heart of creative love. Her father’s theatrical tours awakened in her the desire for itinerant sharing. As a teenager, her cheeks aflame, Juliette had a band of friends with whom she performed theatre in the countryside with her mother: Jean-Philippe, Francine, Florence and Isabelle. But life meant she had to leave behind the valleys of Loir-et-Cher, the fruit trees, and the long evenings under immense sunsets. The nostalgia of that countryside, with its nourishing quality, became a touchstone throughout her life. Moving to Paris, baccalauréat in hand, she began theatre classes with Jean-Pierre Martino at 17 and Véra Gregh at 18. They helped her break down her will, to make room for silence, for another kind of openness. Casting after casting, hoping to fulfil her dream of becoming an actress, she was chosen to play her first major role in Rendez-vous by André Téchiné — a provocative, solitary film. The Cannes Festival became the palace of her public consecration, where the spiral of her life took flight. Her instinctive path through global creation has given Juliette Binoche a singular aura among filmmakers of a borderless constellation: Michael Haneke (Austria), David Cronenberg and Abel Ferrara (United States), Olivier Assayas, Leos Carax and Claire Denis (France), Amos Gitaï (Israel), Naomi Kawase and Hirokazu Kore-eda (Japan), Krzysztof Kieślowski (Poland), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Trân Anh Hùng (Vietnam), Abbas Kiarostami (Iran)… Crowned with the most prestigious awards (Academy Awards, BAFTA, César, Best Actress prizes at Cannes, Berlin and Venice…), Juliette Binoche does not, however, seek virtuosity. She prefers a mysterious link between her inner world and the desire to give of herself, perhaps encouraged, as Louis Malle noted after Damage, by “the love affair between her and the camera, a presence and an intensity that are staggering.” The great range of her performances in Bruno Dumont’s films — from austerity (Camille Claudel, 1915) to burlesque (Slack Bay) — illustrates her taste for freedom and her courage in constantly questioning herself in the fire of her performances. She seemed destined for an uncompromising auteur cinema when Jean-Luc Godard spotted her in 1984 for Hail Mary, but Juliette Binoche was unafraid to venture elsewhere: Godzilla by Gareth Edwards or Ghost in the Shell by Rupert Sanders, which she says she chose as a wink to her children. The success of Anthony Minghella’s nine-Oscar-winning The English Patient, along with Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat, established Juliette Binoche as a truly international actress, recognised worldwide. Yet her need for renewal in her creations always drives her further towards freedom. Her shifts and turns make her elusive. She takes her destiny into her own hands in cinema as well as theatre (Andrei Konchalovsky, Ivo Van Hove, Wajdi Mouawad), devotes herself to music (It’s Worth Living with Alexandre Tharaud), to poetry as to painting (Portraits In-Eyes, published by Place des Victoires), to dance (In-I with Akram Khan) and, most recently, to directing her first documentary film In-I In Motion (2025). Get in touch with the artist(s) tiphaine@miaoproductions.fr and follow them on social media N/A Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here In-I In Motion Juliette Binoche His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua MONK IN PIECES BILLY SHEBAR JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã FIREBIRD Irina Patkanian/Marion Schoevaert Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Ewa The Last lesson Andrea Mura & Federico Savonitto Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Watch MONK IN PIECES by BILLY SHEBAR at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Meredith Monk – composer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist – is one of the great artistic pioneers of our time, yet her profound cultural influence is largely unrecognized. With Monk’s music at its center, and featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces is a mosaic that mirrors the structure of Monk’s own work, and illuminates her wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery. As a female artist in the male-dominated downtown arts scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, Monk had to fight for recognition and resources. Early reviews in The New York Times were vicious and sexist: “A disgrace to the name of dancing,” wrote one critic, and “so earnestly strange in a talented little-girl way,” wrote another. Yet as her celebrated contemporary, Philip Glass, says, “she, among all of us, was – and still is – the uniquely gifted one.” In the film’s final chapters, Monk faces mortality. We see her warily entrust her masterpiece, ATLAS, to director Yuval Sharon and singer Joanna Lynn-Jacobs for a new production at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For 60 years, Monk has directed and performed in all of her music theater works; now she must learn to let go. What will happen to such singular work after she is gone? . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents MONK IN PIECES At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by BILLY SHEBAR Screening Information RSVP Country USA/GERMANY/FRANCE Language English Running Time 95 mins. minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film About The Retrospective Meredith Monk – composer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist – is one of the great artistic pioneers of our time, yet her profound cultural influence is largely unrecognized. With Monk’s music at its center, and featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces is a mosaic that mirrors the structure of Monk’s own work, and illuminates her wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery. As a female artist in the male-dominated downtown arts scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, Monk had to fight for recognition and resources. Early reviews in The New York Times were vicious and sexist: “A disgrace to the name of dancing,” wrote one critic, and “so earnestly strange in a talented little-girl way,” wrote another. Yet as her celebrated contemporary, Philip Glass, says, “she, among all of us, was – and still is – the uniquely gifted one.” In the film’s final chapters, Monk faces mortality. We see her warily entrust her masterpiece, ATLAS, to director Yuval Sharon and singer Joanna Lynn-Jacobs for a new production at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For 60 years, Monk has directed and performed in all of her music theater works; now she must learn to let go. What will happen to such singular work after she is gone? About The Artist(s) Billy Shebar is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker known for High Noon on the Waterfront (2022), with John Turturro and Edward Norton, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and was broadcast on TCM and HBO; and Dark Matter (2007), starring Meryl Streep, which won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance. He collaborated with animator Bill Plympton on The New York Times viral web series Trump Bites (2018-2020) and with animator Yoni Goodman on the three-part crime series Doctor’s Orders (2021). Get in touch with the artist(s) shebar@110thstreet.com and follow them on social media https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/monk-in-pieces,https://monkinpieces.com/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here MONK IN PIECES BILLY SHEBAR JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã FIREBIRD Irina Patkanian/Marion Schoevaert Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Ewa The Last lesson Andrea Mura & Federico Savonitto Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua

Watch FIREBIRD by Irina Patkanian/Marion Schoevaert at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. FAIRY-DOC, in stop motion animation Once upon a time, there was a Firebird, who was caught and caged by the Father of the Motherland. To free herself, she laid him the egg of immortality from his seed. She lost her feathers and hid deep in the woods, weaving lace from snowflakes. Once upon today, the Father of the Motherland saw her lace on TikTok and waged a war to find and marry her. Dancing at the wedding, Lacemaker turned back into the firebird and burned the citadel down. . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents FIREBIRD At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Irina Patkanian/Marion Schoevaert Screening Information RSVP Country USA - UKRAINE Language English Running Time 23 minutes Year of Release 2026 About The Film About The Retrospective FAIRY-DOC, in stop motion animation Once upon a time, there was a Firebird, who was caught and caged by the Father of the Motherland. To free herself, she laid him the egg of immortality from his seed. She lost her feathers and hid deep in the woods, weaving lace from snowflakes. Once upon today, the Father of the Motherland saw her lace on TikTok and waged a war to find and marry her. Dancing at the wedding, Lacemaker turned back into the firebird and burned the citadel down. About The Artist(s) Irina Patkanian is an award-winning filmmaker, a Fulbright scholar, Professor of Film and Media Arts at Brooklyn College/CUNY, and the co-founder of In Parentheses, Inc. Irina Patkanian makes hybrid (fiction/nonfiction) films questioning history with poetry, memory with animation, performance with behavior. Irina’s films have screened at 150+ film festivals worldwide, incl. DOC NYC, Ann Arbor, STARZ Denver, Palm Springs, Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and many others, winning 20+ awards. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from NYSCA, NYFA, Made in New York, Tow, Blaustein, Troy and Jerome Foundations; as well as artist residencies at the Obermann Center, MacDowell, the Millay Arts, Ucross Foundation and the Art Studios of Key West. Marion Schoevaert has been developing her own style of physical theater for 25 years in New York, Seoul and France. She has directed, produced and choreographed more than twenty theater shows, operas and shadow plays, blending dance-theater, rhythmic text and live music. She works with artists from all disciplines and genres: painting, video, jazz, tango, hip hop, sports, martial arts, propaganda, graffiti, etc. to create visceral and raw emotional response from both actors and audiences. Marion Schoevaert has created illustrations for 33 Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. She has produced the successful Koltès New York Festival (7 plays) in New York and has directed a North Korean mass dance propaganda play with 2 orchestras and 100 actors, blending North and South Korean texts, music and style together. She has created 3 theatre companies in New York, Seoul and France. Get in touch with the artist(s) irinapatkanian@gmail.com and follow them on social media www.inparentheses.org/firebird Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here FIREBIRD Irina Patkanian/Marion Schoevaert Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Ewa The Last lesson Andrea Mura & Federico Savonitto Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã

Watch Ewa The Last lesson by Andrea Mura & Federico Savonitto at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. After sixty years of theatrical and performative research, Ewa Benesz decides to leave Italy and return to Lublin, the city she fled in the 1980s during Polish martial law. The advancement of age forces her to discontinue her workshops, which involve people from all over the world. Ewa Benesz must say goodbye to her students, some of whom have maintained a relationship with her that has lasted for decades. Ewa's theatrical practice and research draw from a tradition and methodology that can only be transmitted personally, so there is a strong risk that her knowledge will be lost forever. In her return to Poland, Ewa confronts the silent weight of a life spent away from home, in a journey that is simultaneously an ending and a return to her origins. Polish actress, holds a BA from the University of Lublin and a diploma of the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. She worked in the Instytut Aktora -Teatr Laboratorium managed by Jerzy Grotowski in Poland and she met Peter Brook. After fled the country due to the Martial Laws she collaborated with Rena Mirecka in the paratheatrical projects until 1996 – carried out in Europe, Israel and America. Since 1997 she has conducted her peculiar paratheatrical and theatrical workshops. She lives in the Sardinian mountains, where she conducts a practical research inspired by the ancient Sanskrit Vedic texts and cosmogonist myths.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Ewa The Last lesson At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Andrea Mura & Federico Savonitto Screening Information RSVP Country Italy, Poland Language italian, polish Running Time 67 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film About The Retrospective After sixty years of theatrical and performative research, Ewa Benesz decides to leave Italy and return to Lublin, the city she fled in the 1980s during Polish martial law. The advancement of age forces her to discontinue her workshops, which involve people from all over the world. Ewa Benesz must say goodbye to her students, some of whom have maintained a relationship with her that has lasted for decades. Ewa's theatrical practice and research draw from a tradition and methodology that can only be transmitted personally, so there is a strong risk that her knowledge will be lost forever. In her return to Poland, Ewa confronts the silent weight of a life spent away from home, in a journey that is simultaneously an ending and a return to her origins. Polish actress, holds a BA from the University of Lublin and a diploma of the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. She worked in the Instytut Aktora -Teatr Laboratorium managed by Jerzy Grotowski in Poland and she met Peter Brook. After fled the country due to the Martial Laws she collaborated with Rena Mirecka in the paratheatrical projects until 1996 – carried out in Europe, Israel and America. Since 1997 she has conducted her peculiar paratheatrical and theatrical workshops. She lives in the Sardinian mountains, where she conducts a practical research inspired by the ancient Sanskrit Vedic texts and cosmogonist myths. About The Artist(s) Andrea Mura Italian director and producer with a background in Philosophy and a diploma from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. His documentary work, with works such as “Nodas” (2015) and “Transumanze” (2021), explores the dialogue between memory, popular traditions and contemporaneity. His films have gained recognition at numerous international festivals, including RAI Film Festival (Bristol), Primed (Marseille), See You Sound (Turin), Visioni Italiane (Bologna) and DocuMed (Tunis). As a producer, he has collaborated on Ginko Film projects, including François Xavier Destors and Alfonso Pinto's “Toxicily” (France-Italy, 2023) and Giulia Camba's “Oplà” (Italy, 2024). Since 2014, he has shared the artistic direction of the Sole Luna Doc Film Festival in Palermo with Chiara Andrich. Federico Savonitto Documentary director. A graduate of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, he has long held the position of teaching tutor at the CSC - Sede Sicilia, taught filmmaking, and made several documentaries such as La fine che non ho fatto (2011), La città sconosciuta (2013), Pellegrino (2017), In un futuro aprile (2019), Not Available - It's about Yann Keller (2022), An Invisible Enemy (2022) The Secret Plan (2024) that participated and won awards at several international festivals, such as Biografilm Festival, Giornate degli Autori, DOK Leipzig, Locarno Film Festival, Listapad, DOC- Cévennes, Festival dei Popoli, Trieste Film Festival, Trento Film Festival, Ortigia Film Festival, Asolo Art Film Festival. Get in touch with the artist(s) info@ginkofilm.it and follow them on social media https://www.ginkofilm.it/en/film/the-last-lesson/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here Ewa The Last lesson Andrea Mura & Federico Savonitto Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir

Book Reviews Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Writing, Acting, and Directing Book Reviews By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF Susan Kattwinkel, Editor Acting in the Academy By Peter Zazzali Reviewed by Jennifer Joan Thompson Directing Shakespeare in America By Charles Ney Reviewed by Deric McNish Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines By Jessica Silsby Brater Reviewed by Catherine M. Young The Theatre of David Henry Hwang By Esther Kim Lee Reviewed by David Coley If you know of a publication appropriate for review, please send the information to current book review editor Susan Kattwinkel at kattwinkels@cofc.edu . A list of books received can be found at www.susankattwinkel.com . 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 Acting in the Academy The Theatre of David Henry Hwang Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Directing Shakespeare in America Writing, Acting, and Directing Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.