Kate Valk of The Wooster Group talks about the Group’s latest work, including their new production of Richard Foreman’s 1988 play Symphony of Rats. PRELUDE Festival 2023 ARTIST TALK Kate Valk and The Wooster Group Discussion, Theater English 60 minutes 2:00PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Kate Valk of The Wooster Group talks about the Group’s latest work, including their new production of Richard Foreman’s 1988 play Symphony of Rats. Content / Trigger Description: Kate Valk Kate Valk joined The Wooster Group in 1979. Since then, she has performed and/or acted as dramaturg in all of the Group’s theater and media works. As a director, Valk has created three productions with The Wooster Group, all record album interpretations: Early Shaker Spirituals (2014); The B-Side: "Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons" (2017); and Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (2022-23). She is currently co-directing with LeCompte the Group’s new version of Symphony of Rats, based on Richard Foreman’s 1988 play. Valk founded the Summer Institute, a free three-week workshop for public high school students now in its 27th year. The Wooster Group The Wooster Group is a company of artists who make new work for theater and media. Since its formation in 1975, the Group has been led by director Elizabeth LeCompte. The Performing Garage, located at 33 Wooster Street in lower Manhattan, is the Group’s permanent home. The Group has created over 40 theater productions, and more than 25 works for dance, radio, film and video. Its projects have pioneered new artistic practices, notably through the use of video and sound technology in live performance. The Group has developed methods of composition that incorporate non-dramatic texts, autobiography, and documentary materials along with new readings of classic dramatic works. LeCompte's first compositions were based on Spalding Gray’s personal history (the “Three Places In Rhode Island” trilogy.) In 1980, LeCompte and Gray formally founded The Wooster Group, along with Ron Vawter, Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, Kate Valk, and Peyton Smith. Since then, the Group has sustained a full-time working company with an evolving core membership, joined by dozens of artistic associates including performers, composers, choreographers, and filmmakers who work on a project-basis. In addition to creating and producing its own work, the company hosts visiting artists at The Performing Garage and conducts a free summer performance intensive, the Summer Institute, for New York City high school students. This fall and winter, The Wooster Group will perform two new works at The Performing Garage: "Symphony of Rats" in November and "Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me" in January. www.thewoostergroup.org https://thewoostergroup.org/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

an in-process performance of Michael McClure's absurdist anti war"gargoyle cartoon." Directed by Dan Safer. With Tony Torn as "Spider Rabbit", and Lee Ann Brown as "A Vision." PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Spider Rabbit Dan Safer/Tony Torn Theater, Multimedia English 45m 7:30PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All an in-process performance of Michael McClure's absurdist anti war"gargoyle cartoon." Directed by Dan Safer. With Tony Torn as "Spider Rabbit", and Lee Ann Brown as "A Vision." Content / Trigger Description: Grand-guignol style cartoon violence Dan Safer is the Artistic Director of dance/theater company Witness Relocation (www.witnessrelocation.org ) and has directed/ choreographed all of their shows, ranging from fully scripted plays (including world premieres by Chuck Mee, and an English language premiere by Toshiki Okada) to original dance/theater pieces, to many things in between, all over the place, from the back rooms of bars in NYC to Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris to a giant leaky warehouse at a dance festival in Poland where a light fell off the grid halfway thru a show and almost killed him. WR is a resident company at LaMama in NYC. Dan recently choreographed “Jedermann”, at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. His work has been at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace, Les Subsistances (Lyon, France), and many other places. In 2011, he choreographed Stravinsky's RITE OF SPRING for Philadelphia Orchestra with Obie-winners Ridge Theater. Artforum Magazine called him "pure expressionistic danger" and Time Out NY called him "a purveyor of lo-fi mayhem.” He has choreographed plays, fashion shows, operas, music videos, films, flash mobs and more, got kicked out of high school for a year, used to be a go-go dancer, and once choreographed the Queen of Thailand’s Birthday Party. Tony Torn is an actor and director with over a hundred professional credits in film, television and theater since 1985. Recently he was featured on stage in Bedlam's FALL RIVER FISHING, Mabou Mines' MUD/DROWNING and DOM JUAN at Bard's Fisher Center. Tony is known for working extensively with experimental theater makers Reza Abdoh and Richard Foreman, as the founding director for Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, playing Rusty Trawler in Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Broadway opposite Emilia Clark, and creating and starring in Ubu Sings Ubu with Dan Safer. He manages Torn Page, a private event space named in honor of his parents Rip Torn and Geraldine Page. @dansafer, @t0nyt0rn Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

New York City’s performance world has always been advanced by independent creators pushing the boundaries of how, where and for whom we generate live-art experiences. This panel begins with a series of brief manifestos delivered by artists and makers fueling the next chapter of this story, followed by a moderated conversation. Curated and moderated by Jess Applebaum and Nic Benacerraf PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Future Visions: Provocations for the Next Performance Ecosystem Edge Effect Discussion English 90 minutes 7:00PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All New York City’s performance world has always been advanced by independent creators pushing the boundaries of how, where and for whom we generate live-art experiences. This panel begins with a series of brief manifestos delivered by artists and makers fueling the next chapter of this story, followed by a moderated conversation. Curated and moderated by Jess Applebaum and Nic Benacerraf of Edge Effect Content / Trigger Description: Edge Effect is a “think and do tank” that creates participatory experiences for individuals to share knowledge across personal, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. Each project unites a polydisciplinary coalition of humanitarians in the creation of works that address the harmful aspects of our profit-driven culture. EE’s process is deeply rooted in the edge-blurring practices of devised theater, which fosters consensual collaboration, a generous and joyful workspace, critical self-awareness, and healing through antiracist and anti-patriarchal action. The resulting collaborations take shape as live performances, broadly construed: immersive theater, hoax storefronts, dramatic concerts and lectures, and more—all designed to live at the intersection of analysis, enigma, spectacle, and delight. Jess Applebaum (she/her) is a dramaturg, community engagement coordinator, and public scholar whose 20-plus years of practice are rooted at the intersections of contemporary performance and social action. As a dramaturg, Jess works collaboratively with performance makers, academics, and activists to develop and facilitate creative processes. She believes that bodies perform knowledge, that process activates collective power, and that, together, they can inspire new pedagogical and civic practices. Jess is a founding partner of Edge Effect Media Group and an almost founding member of One Year Lease Theatre Company (OYL). Beyond these two companies, her artistic relationships include working with Panoply Performance Lab, composer/performance team Nathan Davis and Sylvia Milo, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat (KPB), directors Ashley Tata, Anna Brenner, and Simón Hanukai and choreographer Jody Oberfelder. Service to the community includes The Off-Off Community Dish, Brooklyn Commune, VP of Advocacy for LMDA, and conference committee member for CARPA8: Dramaturgies of Artistic Research at Uniarts Helsinki, which took place in 2023. Jess holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University, a MA in Performance Studies from NYU and has a PhD in the works from CUNY Graduate Center where she was a PublicsLab Fellow. Her scholarship on dramaturgy has been presented at the Prague Quadrenille’s special convening Devising Dramaturgy in 2014 and the conference Alternative Dramaturgies held in Tangiers, Morocco. Nic Benacerraf (he/they) is a space-maker. As a director, scenographer, and scholar of live performance, he engineers consent-based systems and environments for genuine human encounters in theaters, galleries, concert halls, and streets. Nic is Founding Partner of Edge Effect Media Group, a polydisciplinary research and performance lab. For over a decade he was Founding co-Artistic Director of The Assembly, a Brooklyn-based theater collective dedicated to building slow-cooked works about pressing social issues. Nic’s scholarship uses dramaturgical strategies to unmask the field of Public Relations as the most efficacious genre of performance ever invented, and as the propaganda arm of the “capitalist, imperialist, white-supremacist patriarchy” (bell hooks). Currently, Nic teaches Directing at the Brown University / Trinity Rep MFA program. Nic received an MFA in Scenic Design from CalArts, and he is completing his PhD in Theatre & Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center. Images of his design work can be found at http://www.nicbenacerraf.com/. Ianthe Demos is the Artistic Director and a founding member of OYL, established in 2001. Ianthe’s work has received two Drama Desk nominations in NYC and a Stage Award in Edinburgh. Her directing work with OYL includes Kissing the Floor by Ellen McLaughlin, pool (no water) by Mark Ravenhill, PEMDAS by Kevin Armento, and Balls by Bryony Lavery and Kevin Armento among others. Ianthe is a full-time professor in the International Performance Ensemble at PACE University and runs OYL’s acclaimed Summer International Program in Greece, Japan, and India. Ianthe has worked extensively in the arts management field managing dance companies on the international circuit as part of Selby Artists Management. Ianthe is currently working on a new adaptation of Medea by Meropi Papastergiou, a production of Ellen McLaughlin’s Oedipus, and a new work entitled WAKE written by Leon Ingulsrud and Brooke Shilling. Jesse Cameron Alick is a dramaturg, producer, poet, playwright, essayist, artistic researcher, and science fiction expert. Jesse has been working in the nonprofit theater world for over 20 years, starting out as Artistic Director and Producer at a small independent theater company for 10 years and eventually working at the Public Theater for over a decade, in the final years as Company Dramaturg. Jesse is currently the Associate Artistic Director at The Vineyard and an active freelance dramaturg at various off-Broadway theaters in NYC, nationwide and internationally. Jesse studied writing with Adrienne Kennedy and has taught theater courses, lectured at classes, and mentored students at a myriad of programs, currently teaching at NYU. Chie Morita (森田千恵 | she/her) is a consultant, creative producer, and consummate tinkerer dedicated to retraining our inherited habits and engineering empowering new systems in the arts. She is a Co-Founder + Partner of FORGE, a boutique consultancy devoted to helping artists and organizations forge a path toward success. By leveraging the potential of proactive planning, holistic mentorship, and collaborative asking, Chie seeks to free makers (and herself) from historical hindrances, socialized stereotypes, and negative self-stories. In New York, she has worked with Tony-Award-winning Broadway Producer Joey Parnes (on A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, End of the Rainbow), institutions including The Public Theater, Third Rail Projects, The Musical Theater Factory, The New York Neo-Futurists (who, under her care, were awarded three Drama Desk nominations), TriBeCa Venue Town Stages (where she created, curated, and managed the Sokoloff Arts Fellowship Program), brands including The Macallan and Art Beyond The Glass, and such independent makers and ensembles as Heather Christian and the Arbornauts, Dylan Marron, Edge Effect, Empowered Artist Collective, Statera Arts Mentorship: NYC, UglyRhino, and Fresh Ground Pepper. Alongside her work with FORGE, she proudly mentors young makers through We Are Queens, and her alma mater, Northern Arizona University, and serves as a collaborating producer with the Wonderland Historical Society in New Orleans. Ximena Garnica is a New York City-based, Colombian-born immigrant working as a multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, director, curator, designer, and teacher. With her partner, Japanese artist Shige Moriya, Garnica is the co-founder and co-artistic director of the arts entity called LEIMAY, which means “a moment of light in the darkness” or “a moment of transition” in Japanese. Part of their work is created with the LEIMAY Ensemble, and their embodied practice LUDUS transmits the lineage of butoh dance and experimental visual and performing arts. They are invested in the entanglement from which culture and art emerge, and they value relationality, collaboration, and resource-sharing as primary to their praxis. Their multidisciplinary works include dance, theater, sculpture, video, film, mixed media, and light installations, photography, training projects, stage performances, and publications. Their works have been presented at US venues such as BAM Fisher, the Brooklyn Museum, the Japan Society, the Watermill Center, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and internationally in Japan, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Mexico, and Colombia. They have maintained collaborations with renowned artists (Robert Wilson and Ko Murobushi) and they have received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, NPN, NYSCA, and NEFA, among others. They were nominated for Herb Alpert and United States Artists awards. They have been reviewed in The New York Times, TDR/The Theater Drama Review, The New Yorker, and Hyperallergic, among others. They are part of the theater faculty at MIT and was recently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California Riverside. Their writing has been published by Routledge. Garnica is an advocate of affordable live-work spaces. Their activism was instrumental in effecting changes at the New York state level to protect live-work spaces in New York City. More recently, Garnica, through LEIMAY, co-founded the Cultural Solidarity Fund, which has provided over $1 million in $500 relief microgrants to NYC artists and cultural workers affected by COVID-19. With her partner, they continue multiple organizing efforts to sustain what they call the “entanglement,” a loose knot, cluster, or constellation of relationalities—an intention to live a life in poetry. Beto O’Byrne hails from East Texas and is the co-founder of Radical Evolution, a multi-ethnic, multi-disciplinary performance collective based in Brooklyn, NY. The author of 20 plays, screenplays, and original TV pilots, his works have been produced in and developed in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, and San Antonio. O’Byrne is an advocate and organizer interested in creating solidarity between labor, arts, and antiracist/anticapitalist movements. In addition to his theatre work, O'Byrne is the creator of the political punk rock outfit, A Revolutionary Chorus, and the World of Kir, a high fantasy creative writing project. Radical Evolution is a multiethnic producing collective committed to creating artistic events that seek to understand the complexities of the mixed-identity existence in the 21st Century. We believe that visibility and representation for the fastest-growing demographic in our nation - those who identify as more than one race or ethnicity - is crucial to live performance. We incorporate people from a variety of backgrounds into our creative process, with a focus on people of color, to seed the field of experimental and collaboratively created theatre with practitioners that celebrate the intersectionality of perspectives and aesthetics of the city around us. Through this approach, we work to assert a vision for cultural and social equity in our field, city, and nation. Marisol Rosa-Shapiro / Marisol Soledad is a cultural worker, theater artist, educator, facilitator, and curator. Her acting and directing work have appeared on stages across the USA, in Philadelphia, NYC, Seattle, Boston, Miami, Maine, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Alaska. Marisol has worked as a teaching artist for many theaters, arts education initiatives, and community-based organizations across the country. She is a tenured teaching artist at the New Victory Theater in NYC where she developed The Seven Ravens Project as part of the LabWorks program for new works, and made her Off-Broadway directorial debut with Spellbound Theater’s Wink in the spring of 2023. As a member of TYA/USA’s BIPOCin TYA Advisory Board, Marisol co-facilitated spaces for members of the global majority working in TYA and supported the creation of TYA/USA’s Anti-Racist and Anti-Oppressive Futures guide for the field. She has also served as Director of Community Engagement for Shakespeare in Clark Park, and as Community Coordinator for Theatre Horizon's production of Town. Marisol is a volunteer performer, educator, and board secretary for Clowns Without Borders USA, who help build resilience through laughter with people experiencing displacement due to natural and human-made disaster across the globe. In recent years, she has been selected as a Colleen Toohey Porter Fellow with TYA/USA, a Jim Rye Fellow with International Performing Arts for Youth (IPAY), a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership Institute Fellow, and a Target Margin Theater Institute Fellow. Her work has received support from the Network of EnsembleTheatres, Cannonball Festival, Philadelphia’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation and Marrazzo Family Foundation, and Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture. Marisol is a graduate of Princeton University and of Helikos International School for Theatre Creation in Florence, Italy. She was born and raised in NYC, where she continues to create and teach. She currently resides in Philadelphia. Photo credits: Jess Applebaum. Photo courtesy of the artist. Nic Benacerraf. Photo courtesy of the artist. Ianthe Demos. Photo courtesy of the artist. Jesse Cameron Alick. Photo courtesy of the artist. Chie Morita: credit Taylor Cooley_Katie LaMark. Ximena Garnica. Photo courtesy of the artist. Beto O’Byrne. Photo courtesy of the artist. Marisol Rosa-Shapiro / Marisol Soledad. Photo courtesy of the artist. www.edgeeffectmedia.org IG: @edge.effect.media Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

I make performances for different media: film, video, the written word, the street, the stage, museums, closets, in and out of a movie screen. Today I feel overwhelmed by all the movies that are out there. "We're supposed to spend more time with each other not watching screens. Why should I make more screen-things?" More about Fritz Donnelly: http://www.tothehills.com. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE FRITZ: Play Time Fritz Donnelly English 5:30PM EST Tuesday, October 17, 2023 137 West 42nd Street, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Play Time! A Participatory Performance by Fritz Donnelly 5:30pm at Anita’s Way 137 W 42nd Street Followed by Q and A with Frank Hentschker, Sophi Kravitz, Anita Durst, and @Funwithfritz Content / Trigger Description: About Fritz: I make performances for different media: film, video, the written word, the street, the stage, museums, closets, in and out of a movie screen. Today I feel overwhelmed by all the movies that are out there. "We're supposed to spend more time with each other not watching screens. Why should I make more screen-things?" More about Fritz Donnelly: http://www.tothehills.com . About Anita’s Way: This permanent public plaza accommodates artists and audiences in the center of New York City. The passageway between the Condè Nast building on 4 Times Square and Bank of America located at One Bryant Park was named after founder and principal of chashama, Anita Durst. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Join us for a captivating Sound Journey with antique Himalayan Singing Bowls at the Prelude 2023 festival. For a transcendent hour, allow the resonances of these age-old instruments to transport you beyond the confines of time. As each note reverberates, it melds quantum vibrations with ageless wisdom, steering your mind into a serene observational state, untouched by barriers. The intricate harmonies, underpinned by the principles of psychoacoustics, aid in releasing tension, submerging you into the labyrinth of the subconscious mind and the expansive realm of creativity. This meticulously crafted sound odyssey guarantees profound relaxation and treasured moments of clarity and unity, irrespective of your meditation experience. Dive in, resonate, and find yourself anew in this symphony of rejuvenating vibrations. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Sound Ceremony Guy Yair Beider Music, Other English 90 minutes 2:00PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Join us for a captivating Sound Journey with antique Himalayan Singing Bowls at the Prelude 2023 festival. For a transcendent hour, allow the resonances of these age-old instruments to transport you beyond the confines of time. As each note reverberates, it melds quantum vibrations with ageless wisdom, steering your mind into a serene observational state, untouched by barriers. The intricate harmonies, underpinned by the principles of psychoacoustics, aid in releasing tension, submerging you into the labyrinth of the subconscious mind and the expansive realm of creativity. This meticulously crafted sound odyssey guarantees profound relaxation and treasured moments of clarity and unity, irrespective of your meditation experience. Dive in, resonate, and find yourself anew in this symphony of rejuvenating vibrations. Content / Trigger Description: Guy Yair Beider is an accomplished sound meditation facilitator, sound wellness arts educator, and Himalayan singing bowls expert. With a passion for promoting healthy sonic nourishment and facilitating mindful and safe sonic journeys, Guy has extensive knowledge of working with sound, drawing on research in psychology, musicology, and psychoacoustics. In the pursuit of sonic aesthetics, Guy meticulously hand-picked every single instrument to unveil its beauty to his audience. This quest for perfection has spanned nearly a decade and has taken Guy as far as India, Nepal, and Tibet, where he tested thousands of singing bowls, attentively listening to and learning from the ancient wisdom imbued in these antique masterpieces. Since 2010, Guy has facilitated hundreds of meditations in a range of settings, including yoga studios, martial art schools, rehabilitation centers, nursing homes, churches, synagogues, schools, businesses, private circles, medicinal plant ceremonies, and various organizations for people with special needs, PTSD, and AA groups. In 2015, Guy founded the internationally recognized Bells of Bliss project. In 2020, Guy introduced a unique method for educating sound therapy practitioners and meditation teachers, which was launched through the online Sound Medicine Academy. https://www.guybeider.com/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

What is the role of academia in the new landscape of theater and performance after Black Live Matters, We See You W.A.T., The Time of Corona and the Climate Catastrophe in a radically changing political landscape? Should academia mirror, theorize, reflect and document — or influence, shape and actively participate in the change we want to see? PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Academia and NYC Performance Tomi M Tsunoda, Daniel Irizarry, Solana Chehtman, Alexis Jemal, and Sylvaine Guyot 4:30PM EST Monday, October 16, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All What is the role of academia in the new landscape of theater and performance after Black Live Matters, We See You W.A.T., The Time of Corona and the Climate Catastrophe in a radically changing political landscape? Should academia mirror, theorize, reflect and document — or influence, shape and actively participate in the change we want to see? Featuring Tomi M Tsunoda , Daniel Irizarry , Solana Chehtman, Alexis Jemal, and Sylvaine Guyot. Content / Trigger Description: Tomi Tsunoda has spent most of her career as a director, deviser, designer, and producer of independent performance, developing sustainable systems for performing artists to self-produce work outside of institutional contexts. This included the creation of Breedingground Productions, which shepherded more than 200 projects over the course of ten years. She is one of 17 artists worldwide who are certified in all levels and disciplines to teach Soundpainting, the universal sign language for live composition created by jazz composer Walter Thompson. Her current projects combine both practical and critical work in dramaturgy, progressive arts pedagogy, fiber art, literary non-fiction, eco-philosophy, and facilitation, putting these fields into conversation as a way to address sustainable practice and systemic change. Tomi is currently serving as Chair of Undergraduate Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, having previously served as Director for Playwrights Horizons Theater School, Head of the Theater Program at NYU Abu Dhabi, Education Director for the Powerhouse Training Program at Vassar College, and as faculty and guest artist at several additional schools and conservatories. Daniel Irizarry is a Puerto Rican born International Experimental Theatre director, actor/performer and educator based in NYC. His work embraces highly stylized visceral acting, pataphysics, a celebration of GERMS & consensual audience participation. He is the Artistic Director of One-Eighth Theater and full time Lecturer at MIT Music & Theatre Arts. In his most recent work, he directed and performed the final project for the historic closing of the New Ohio Theatre titled, ‘Ultra Left Violence’ written by Robert Lyons. Other notable credits directed and performed; The Maids by Jose Rivera (New York Times Critics pick); UBU by Adam Szymkowicz (Time Out NY Critics pick), world premiere of Busu by Mishima at Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival, YOVO by Robert Lyons in NYC, Poland, Cuba, South Korea & My Onliness by Robert Lyons at New Ohio Theatre in NYC (One of the best performances Off-Broadway in 2022 by Theatermania and nominated for a 2023 HOLA award for best Outstanding performance by a lead actor. Over his career he has directed, performed and taught in Turkey, India, Germany, Japan, Lithuania, Italy, Romania, UK, Colombia, among others. Most notably at: Folkwang University in Germany, Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey and Seoul Institute of the Arts in South Korea. He holds an MFA in Acting from Columbia University, a BA in Drama at The Universidad de Puerto Rico where he has returned to teach at both. Solana Chehtman is a cultural producer and engagement curator born in Buenos Aires and based in New York City since 2012. She is currently the Director of Artist Programs at Joan Mitchell Foundation, where she supports artists with unrestricted funding and professional development through the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, as well as in their long term career stewardship via the Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) program. In the past decade, Solana has partnered with a wide range of cultural organizations across the performing and visual arts to create new opportunities for artists and avenues for public participation in the arts. Prior to joining the Foundation, she served as inaugural Director of Creative Practice and Social Impact at The Shed, and as Vice President of Public Engagement at Friends of the High Line. Solana received a BA in international studies at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, and holds an EdM in education policy from Teachers College, Columbia University. She was an adjunct Professor at the MA in Arts Administration at Baruch College, City University of New York between 2018 and 2021. Alexis Jemal, LCSW, LCADC, MA, JD, PhD, associate professor at Silberman School of Social Work-Hunter College, is a critical-radical so(ul)cial worker (practitioner, scholar, researcher, educator), social entrepreneur, and artivist who specializes in racial justice, radical healing, wellness, and liberation. Dr. Jemal grounds her research and scholarship in her Critical Transformative Potential Framework that develops critical consciousness and taps into radical imagination to convert consciousness into action that heals and transforms people, relationships, and environments to support everyone’s humanity to the fullest extent possible. This framework guides the development and implementation of multi-(from the molecular to the macro) level, holistic, socio-cultural, psychosocial, bio-behavioral health interventions that incorporate clinical practice, advocacy, and community and cultural organizing. She teaches courses at the master’s level in clinical practice, critical social work practice, and human behavior, and at the doctoral level in arts-based, participatory action, intervention research and public scholarship. Sylvaine Guyot is Professor of French Literature, Thought & Culture at NYU, New York, since 2021. At Harvard University, Guyot acted as the Chair for TDM Theater, Dance & Media next to her tenure at the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures. As a theatre director, she co-founded La Troupe (Harvard) and Le Théâtre de l’homme qui marche (Paris, France). She is currently developing a lecture-performance on understudied early modern female writing. Her research interests focus on seventeenth-century tragedy and spectacle culture, the history of the body and emotions, the politics of performing arts, and the formation of cultural institutions. Publications include Racine et le corps tragique (PUF, 2014) and Databases, Revenues, and Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793 (MIT Press, 2021). She is a coleader of the Comédie-Française Registers Project. She has also published articles on contemporary docu-plays that tell the stories of the under- and unrepresented. Photo credits: Tomi Tsunoda. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Daniel Irizarry. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Solana Chehtman. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Alexis Jemal. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Two actors work their way through an old melodrama. It's not going very well. They can't figure out what works and what doesn't. They burrow further and further in. They recreate and destroy. They rehearse again. A new work emerges from the old. But is it any better? PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE What a World! What a World! Ilana Khanin & Eric Marlin Theater English 50 minutes 3:00PM EST Saturday, October 21, 2023 Theaterlab, West 36th Street, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Two actors work their way through an old melodrama. It's not going very well. They can't figure out what works and what doesn't. They burrow further and further in. They recreate and destroy. They rehearse again. A new work emerges from the old. But is it any better? Theaterlab 357 W 36th St. 3rd Floor New York, NY 10018 Funding has been made possible by The Puffin Foundation, Ltd. Content / Trigger Description: Ilana Khanin (she/her) is a theatre director based between New York and Toronto. Her work has been developed and presented at Ars Nova ANT Fest, HERE, New Ohio’s Ice Factory, Governors Island, Joust Theater Co, The Tank, The Brick, Primary Stages, Theaterlab, Judson, Dixon Place, Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival, Atlantic Stage 2, Center at West Park. She has worked for Lila Neugebauer, Lee Sunday Evans, Annie-B Parson, Meghan Finn and Daniel Fish, at venues including BAM, Old Vic, Deutsches Theater, LaMaMa, Bushwick Starr, and Clubbed Thumb. Upcoming residency at Baryshnikov Arts, supported by the Canada Council. Former Artist-in-Residence at Montclair State University/ New Works Initiative. BFA and MA: NYU; PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, researching the intersection of art and crypto technologies, with the support of the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. ilanakhanin.com Eric Marlin (he/him/his) has been produced and developed by the Public Theater, Theatertreffen Stückemarkt, Ars Nova's ANT Fest, the Civilians, Dutch Kills Theater Company, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, The Tank, Dixon Place, Samuel French, HOT! Festival, Exquisite Corpse Company, and PTP/NYC. Winner of the Samuel French OOB Short Play Festival. Finalist for SPACE at Ryder Farm, the Jewish Plays Project, FMM Fellowship for Works in Heightened Language, and two-time finalist for the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference. Former member of the Civilians' R&D Group and resident artist at Montclair's New Works Initiative. He has worked as a producer and stage manager for the Bushwick Starr, New Georges, WP Theater, Red Bull Theatre, CTown, PTP/NYC, Public Theater, New Ohio Ice Factory Festival, and PRELUDE. MFA: Iowa Playwrights Workshop. BA: Bennington College. Nia Farrell (she/they) is a writer, performer, and Mundane Afrofuturist. On stage and screen, they specialize in ritual-based work that celebrates the dreams of Blk communities and offers paths to actualizing those dreams. Since graduating from NYU (Tisch Drama; ETW), she’s collaborated with and/or presented work at National Black Theatre ("Beauty in the Abyss"), Soho Rep ("A Map to Nowhere things are"), Ars Nova ("Dreams in Blk Major;" "What A World! What A World!"), Theater Mitu, Second Stage Theater, Williamstown Theatre Festival, PlayCo, New Ohio Theatre, and more. They also make work alongside Talia Paulette Oliveras as “Ta-Nia” (a theatre-making duo dedicated to creating unapologetically Blk spaces of liberation) and Nine Muses Entertainment (founded by Bryce Dallas Howard) as the Director of Development & Production. Learn more at niafarrell.com Annie Hoeg is a theater maker living in Brooklyn. Select performance credits include: Marta Nesspek Presents… (23.5°Tilt); three sisters i never had (Healthy Oyster Collective); We Need Your Listening (Ice Factory); Hartwell: Church of God…and I Was Unbecoming Then (ANT Fest); Slow Field (Theaterlab); Ancient Greek Corn (HERE); Science Park; and The Loon (Abrons/JACK). Film: Ranch Water and K2tog. Wardrobe credits include Atlantic Theater Company, Papermill Playhouse, Playwrights Horizons, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, The Public, Clubbed Thumb, Classic Stage Company and The Transport Group. BFA: NYU Luke Daniel White is a Brooklyn-based dramaturg with a focus on new work development. He has collaborated on various productions, readings, and workshops seen at Ars Nova, Dutch Kills Theater Company, The Tank, South Coast Repertory, Cleveland Play House, and the FSU/Asolo Rep Conservatory. A reader for Playwrights Realm, New Harmony Project, Jewish Plays Project, and Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Recent M.F.A. graduate in Dramaturgy from the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop. He proudly co-facilitates a monthly virtual playwrights workshop for his fellow recent graduates, cheekily named the Iowa River Rejects. lukedanielwhite.com for more. www.theaterlabnyc.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

721 Decatur Community Garden, 11233 Brooklyn, NY PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE AUTUMN Prelude in the Garden: Study for Prophecy for 22nd Century Petra Zanki Dance Company Dance 45-60 minutes 5:00PM EST Friday, October 27, 2023 721 Decatur Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11233, USA Free Entry, Open to All 721 Decatur Community Garden, 11233 Brooklyn, NY RAIN DATE: Sat. Oct 28 at 3:00 PM. In case of rain, this event will happen on Saturday 10/28 at 3:00 pm Concept: Petra Zanki Choreography: Petra Zanki in co-creation with dancers Dance interpretation: Isabelle Goodman , Luyan Li – Lili , Evelyn Tejeda . Original music composed and live performed by: Stanford Reid , SoulCODE , and Nico Tower . A garden, a countryside within a city, a train away from New York concrete, an opportunity to reconnect and gather. With ourselves, and between ourselves. That’s it, it’s ok. I can breathe. Blending different genres and styles, Zanki combines themes of art and healing with music and dance to explore the kinds of communities we want to envision in a post-Pandemic world. Working in co-creation with three New York musicians and three dancers, in the garden, Petra creates three choreographic solos using Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons violin concerti as an inspiration. Each dancer together with one musician enters in dialogue with one part as an inspiration for their own contemporary version of, this time, Fall. How do dance, ambient, Hip hop, rhythm & jazz, and sound healing connect to Fall, and all of them to me and me to you? Expect soul healing, magic, and joy. Content / Trigger Description: Photo Credit: Tanya Nowossjolova @nowossjolka Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

A play with music that follows a group of immigrant women working at a Chinatown garment factory. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Sweatshop Melody Nancy Ma Theater English 30 min 4:30PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All A play with music that follows a group of immigrant women working at a Chinatown garment factory. Content / Trigger Description: Nancy Ma is a Chinese American actor, writer, and filmmaker based in New York City. She recently directed her first documentary short, 有一天你不在 One Day You Are Not Here, about intergenerational care through her relationship with her father. Her solo show about growing up in Chinatown, Home, has been performed at schools and festivals around the country. As an actor, Nancy has been seen in Memorial (Pan Asian Rep), The Joy Luck Club (Sierra Madre Playhouse), Three Little Girls Down a Well (The Public), Hacks (HBO), Barry (HBO). Nancy’s writing has been supported by The New Harmony Project, Asian American Arts Alliance, The Latino Theater Company, Fresh Ground Pepper, WhoHaHa. Nancy currently facilitates storytelling with The Moth and Young Storytellers. Her work and her life focus on finding the funny, intimate and redemptive in forgotten places. www.littlemoisttugboat.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

EYO is a traditional festival performance, arranged and choreographed by Taiwo Aloba. EYO is a theatrical work incorporating multiple artistic mediums and elevated by the element of live singing and dance. Audience members will be immersed in an environment of symphonic Yoruba traditional music and movements. The EYO festival is a cultural symbolism that is well inculcated in the traditions and values of the people of Lagos. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE EYO Taiwo Aloba Theater, Dance, Performance Art Yorùbá 90 minutes 3:00PM EST Sunday, October 15, 2023 Culture Lab LIC, 46th Avenue, Queens, NY, USA Reserve Seats EYO is a traditional festival performance, arranged and choreographed by Taiwo Aloba. EYO is a theatrical work incorporating multiple artistic mediums and elevated by the element of live singing and dance. Audience members will be immersed in an environment of symphonic Yoruba traditional music and movements. The EYO festival is a cultural symbolism that is well inculcated in the traditions and values of the people of Lagos. This project was developed as a part of Culture Lab LIC's 2023 Emergence Artist Residency. This project is supported by funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, Statewide Community Regrants Program (formerly the Decentralization program) with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and administered by Flushing Town Hall. Content / Trigger Description: Fog Taiwo Aloba is a New York-based multi-disciplinary artist originally from Nigeria. She was educated at Lagos State University in Lagos, New York Film Academy in New York, and Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, New Hampshire. She is a member of the Dramatist Guild and a USRSA Certified Run Streaker. Culture Lab LIC is a 501(c)(3) formed to be the arts and culture umbrella for Western Queens. We present local, national, and international art of all genres, while supporting New York artists and other nonprofits by providing space, resources and a sense of community. Operating out of a 12,000 square foot converted warehouse, Culture Lab LIC hosts two fine art galleries, an 80 seat theater, classroom space, an 18,000 square foot outdoor venue, and a robust residency program. Culture Lab LIC is dedicated to upholding, equity, diversity and inclusion across all our platforms. www.TaiwoAloba.com , @modelvoss, www.culturelablic.org , @culturelablic Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

No Visa Productions presents: Fire / Escape Written / Directed / Produced by Michal Gamily Co written by Lizi Sagie Composed and sound designed by John Sully Dramaturg: Begum Inal Performers: Marina Celander, Michal Gamily, Onni Johnson, Valois Mickens, John Sully, Jane Catherine Shaw, Marybeth Ward, George Drance Fire / Escape is a play about hummus, impossible love, and a donkey, using elements of a Greek tragedy such as: a chorus, and three goddesses of faith who are embroidering the narrative — literally and figuratively. It is a story about an emergency, a wakeup call, happening during a global emergency. The play tells the story of M, an actress and single mother, during the first few months of Covid as she is trying to adjust to the new reality in her beloved abandoned city. M starts making homemade hummus, and selling it from her fire escape. Simultaneously, she is trying to find a way to help "Him”, who has gotten stuck far away from his home, just as his health is declining. Her ongoing efforts to help reflect the nature of their troubled, unbalanced relationship throughout the years, and take M on a journey down memory lane, and self reckoning. Sirens are present throughout as a character song cycle to address the nostalgic quality of the story. There are stories within stories and repeating melodies, and rhythms, presented in different musical contexts. There are references throughout the story to classical film and plays. Fire / Escape is a play designated to be performed outdoors on a fire escape of a multi-story building. It was written based on the limitations, obstacles, and advantages of the specific structure. Fire / Escape is presented in association with Rod Rodgers Dance Company, and La MaMa ETC, with support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center. Fire / Escape is a part of the Segal Center's Prelude Festival 2023 PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Fire / Escape (Work In Progress) Michal Gamily/ No Visa Production Theater English, Arabic 60 minutes 5:30PM EST Saturday, October 21, 2023 La MaMa ETC 74a E 4th Street New York, NY 10003 United States Register for Free / Donate (Please note this is a work in progress / performed rehearsal) No Visa Productions presents: Fire / Escape Written / Directed / Produced by Michal Gamily Co written by Lizi Sagie Composed and sound designed by John Sully Dramaturg: Begum Inal Performers: Marina Celander, Michal Gamily, Onni Johnson, Valois Mickens, John Sully, Jane Catherine Shaw, Marybeth Ward, George Drance Fire / Escape is a play about hummus, impossible love, and a donkey, using elements of a Greek tragedy such as: a chorus, and three goddesses of faith who are embroidering the narrative — literally and figuratively. It is a story about an emergency, a wakeup call, happening during a global emergency. The play tells the story of M, an actress and single mother, during the first few months of Covid as she is trying to adjust to the new reality in her beloved abandoned city. M starts making homemade hummus, and selling it from her fire escape. Simultaneously, she is trying to find a way to help "Him”, who has gotten stuck far away from his home, just as his health is declining. Her ongoing efforts to help reflect the nature of their troubled, unbalanced relationship throughout the years, and take M on a journey down memory lane, and self reckoning. Sirens are present throughout as a character song cycle to address the nostalgic quality of the story. There are stories within stories and repeating melodies, and rhythms, presented in different musical contexts. There are references throughout the story to classical film and plays. Fire / Escape is a play designated to be performed outdoors on a fire escape of a multi-story building. It was written based on the limitations, obstacles, and advantages of the specific structure. Fire / Escape is presented in association with Rod Rodgers Dance Company, and La MaMa ETC, with support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center. Fire / Escape is a part of the Segal Center's Prelude Festival 2023 No Visa Production in association with Rod Rodgers Dance Company and La MaMa ETC. LMCC grant Content / Trigger Description: No Visa Productions presents: Fire / Escape Written / Directed / Produced by Michal Gamily Co written by Lizi Sagie Composed and sound designed by John Sully Dramaturg: Begum Inal Performers: Marina Celander, Michal Gamily, Onni Johnson, Valois Mickens, John Sully, Jane Catherine Shaw, Marybeth Ward, George Drance Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Richard Maxwell will present excerpts form a new work in development, titled CODA (working title). Presented with James Moore Andie Tanning Gillian Walsh Luke Wyatt PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Richard Maxwell and New York City Players Richard Maxwell and New York City Players Discussion, Theater English 45 minutes 7:00PM EST Thursday, October 12, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Richard Maxwell will present excerpts form a new work in development, titled CODA (working title). Presented with James Moore Andie Tanning Gillian Walsh Luke Wyatt Content / Trigger Description: Richard Maxwell is an American experimental theater director and playwright in New York City. He is the artistic director of the New York City Players. New York City Players (NYCP) is a theater company founded in 1999 by Artistic Director Richard Maxwell. Maxwell is a playwright who creates narrative-driven works that incorporate the repetition and artificiality of the theater. https://www.nycplayers.org/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Time is running out the Human kind before the earth goes into full self sedation. The trees have always been the guardians of the earth, but they now must conserve their strength to save themselves. Who will save the human kind from self destruction and all that is in their path? Is there someone, something that can speak for the trees, who speak for all things that inhabit this planet? PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Mud & Blood Maya Sharpe Theater, Music English 1 hour 8:00PM EST Monday, October 16, 2023 The Brick, 579 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Time is running out the Human kind before the earth goes into full self sedation. The trees have always been the guardians of the earth, but they now must conserve their strength to save themselves. Who will save the human kind from self destruction and all that is in their path? Is there someone, something that can speak for the trees, who speak for all things that inhabit this planet? produced by The Brick Content / Trigger Description: Musician. Storyteller. Filmmaker. Maya Sharpe is multi-passionate maker and thinker. Maya's passion lies in exploring simplicity in humanity through composition. Using this tool to demonstrate there is more of a connection and love between everything than the politically derived disconnect and hatred. http://www.mayasharpe.com/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Instagram (A Performance) is 40-minute text about collective self-regard, written and directed by Aaron Landsman, performed by a different actor each showing. This Prelude showing will be performed by April Matthis. The piece is an extended riff on how caught up we are in each others’ image diaries, and in our own self-reflections; on how even the most cynical or circumspect of us get wrapped up in how we show our feeds to our followers. Performers receive an orientation shortly before they perform - the script includes both words to say and simple scores for movement and gesture. The piece is rendered as a litany of single photos, one per page. The joy in this piece is watching accomplished performers respond to and embody text in the moment, in the complicated way we often respond to our friends’ feeds. It is also an invitation for audience members to create for themselves the images they are hearing aloud - an imaginative act akin to reading - and to think about the moments in their lives that escape our lenses, that may be embodied and rendered more strongly as memory alone. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Instagram: A Performance Aaron Landsman Theater, Performance Art English 35-40 MInutes 3:30PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Instagram (A Performance) is 40-minute text about collective self-regard, written and directed by Aaron Landsman, performed by a different actor each showing. This Prelude showing will be performed by April Matthis. The piece is an extended riff on how caught up we are in each others’ image diaries, and in our own self-reflections; on how even the most cynical or circumspect of us get wrapped up in how we show our feeds to our followers. Performers receive an orientation shortly before they perform - the script includes both words to say and simple scores for movement and gesture. The piece is rendered as a litany of single photos, one per page. The joy in this piece is watching accomplished performers respond to and embody text in the moment, in the complicated way we often respond to our friends’ feeds. It is also an invitation for audience members to create for themselves the images they are hearing aloud - an imaginative act akin to reading - and to think about the moments in their lives that escape our lenses, that may be embodied and rendered more strongly as memory alone. Will be presented by Abrons Arts Center in June 2024 Content / Trigger Description: Aaron Landsman is a theater artist, researcher and teacher. His performance works have been presented by many venues in New York, including The Chocolate Factory, Abrons Arts Center, The Foundry Theatre, HERE and PS 122. His work has also been staged in Phoenix, Houston, Keene, San Francisco and other US cities, as well as in The Netherlands, Norway, Morocco, the UK and Serbia. He started the working group Perfect City, based at Abrons, which creates pathways through art for communities to envision more equitable cities, designed for the people who live here. His book The City We Make Together, co-authored with Mallory Catlett, came out with the University of Iowa Press in 2022. He has performed with Elevator Repair Service Theater, Tim Etchells, Tory Vazquez and Andrea Kleine, among other folks. He is a recent Creative Capital grantee, Guggenheim Fellow and ASU Gammage Residency Artist, and Perfect City's work is supported by The Artist Employment Program of Creatives Rebuild NY. He teaches part-time at Princeton. @thinaar (IG and Twitter); http://www.thinaar.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

open dance figure indexes a series of performances staged in proximity to the polluted terrain of the Newtown Creek, iteratively attempting to map the network of channels and conduits through which dance steps flow. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE open dance figure Josie Bettman Dance English 20 minutes 3:00PM EST Sunday, October 15, 2023 Plank Road Public Shoreline, 58th Road, Maspeth, Queens, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All open dance figure indexes a series of performances staged in proximity to the polluted terrain of the Newtown Creek, iteratively attempting to map the network of channels and conduits through which dance steps flow. Content / Trigger Description: Josie Bettman is a choreographer and performing artist who practices dance-making as a mode of both self-generation and interpersonal relation. Since 2019, she has developed a series of solo performances in an 8x10ft room that visualize transformation through extremes of scale, repetition, and effort, performing these solos at venues such as Bronx Academy of Art and Dance; Junior High, Los Angeles; The Living Gallery, Bushwick; and ING Studio, Ridgewood. She co-directs SECT, inc. with Lavinia E. Bruce, premiering a debut ensemble piece at Pageant in March 2023, and has collaborated as a performer in works by Phoebe Berglund, Milka Djordevich, Amelia Heintzelman/Leah Fournier, and Anna-Thérèse Witenberg. https://www.josiebettman.com/ongoing Photo by Zhi Wei Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

This event will take place in the Art History Screening Room in GC CUNY from Wednesday, October 11 to Saturday, October 14, everyday from 3pm to 8:30pm EST. Imagine that the American Theater is dead, or Downtown at any rate is dead, or both, or maybe no one can find the body but it's probably dead, anyway there was definitely a crime, or series of crimes; the place is a mess, and someone has watered down the whisky. You are a detective, or a prime witness, or a culprit, or all of the above, and you have been invited to contribute to one of those great evidence or murder boards/crazy walls they have on cop shows...sometimes in the stationhouse, sometimes in the serial killer lair... bring your questions, your theories, your schemes, your accusations, your confessions, your factoids, your manias; bring your hard won diagnosis, bring your intricately worked out solutions. We will supply: index cards, felt tips, crayons, red string. PRELUDE Festival 2023 INTERVIEWS Murder Room - Day 1 Anne Washburn, Many Others including, perhaps, yourself. Theater, Discussion, Multimedia, Other English 5 min - 55 min, your choice. 3:00PM to 8:30PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Sign Up to Contribute This event will take place in the Art History Screening Room in GC CUNY from Wednesday, October 11 to Saturday, October 14, everyday from 3pm to 8:30pm EST. Imagine that the American Theater is dead, or Downtown at any rate is dead, or both, or maybe no one can find the body but it's probably dead, anyway there was definitely a crime, or series of crimes; the place is a mess, and someone has watered down the whisky. You are a detective, or a prime witness, or a culprit, or all of the above, and you have been invited to contribute to one of those great evidence or murder boards/crazy walls they have on cop shows...sometimes in the stationhouse, sometimes in the serial killer lair... bring your questions, your theories, your schemes, your accusations, your confessions, your factoids, your manias; bring your hard won diagnosis, bring your intricately worked out solutions. We will supply: index cards, felt tips, crayons, red string. This room has received material support from Playwrights Horizons, and New Georges, with numerous numerous contributors throughout the field. Content / Trigger Description: Anne Washburn is a playwright whose works include 10 out of 12, Antlia Pneumatica, Apparition, The Communist Dracula Pageant, A Devil At Noon, I Have Loved Strangers, The Internationalist, The Ladies, Little Bunny Foo Foo, Mr. Burns, Shipwreck, The Small, and transadaptations of Euripides' Orestes & Iphigenia in Aulis. Her work has premiered with 13P, Actors Theater of Louisville, the Almeida, American Repertory Theatre, Cherry Lane Theatre, Classic Stage Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Civilians, Dixon Place, Ensemble Studio Theater, The Folger, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep, Two River Theater Company, Vineyard Theater and Woolly Mammoth. Other contributors include: playwrights, box office personnel, artistic directors, literary managers, actors, designers, program directors, development directors, producers, interns, audience members, stage managers, directors. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

By Jalila Baccar, Fadhel Jaïbi, Marvin Carlson, Nabil Cherni | A collection of recent work by Tunisian playwright and actress Jalila Baccar and director co-author Fadhel Jaibi, capturing the complexity and depth of grand themes prevalent in Arab societies. < 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 The Trilogy of Future Memory Jalila Baccar, Fadhel Jaïbi, Marvin Carlson, Nabil Cherni Download PDF Edited by Marvin Carlson Translations by Marvin Carlson and Nabil Cherni. Tunisian playwright and actress Jalila Baccar and director co-author Fadhel Jaïbi are two of the most important voices in contemporary Arab theater. No theatre artists were more closely involved with the ongoing events of the Arab Spring nor more astute critics of the constantly shifting political scene and their plays are enormously helpful in understanding the cross-currents of a country like Tunisia at the opening of the twenty-first century. Baccar’s roles, acting and theatrical narratives, co-created by her director and husband Fadhel Jaïbi, are extremely intricate, psychologically multi-layered, and have the uncanny ability to capture the complexity and depth of grand themes prevalent in Arab societies. Baccar has performed in over twenty of her plays, including major theatrical productions that have been staged worldwide by Jaïbi: Junun (Dementia, 2009) at the Edinburgh Festival, Khamsoun (Captive Bodies, 2006) – the first Arab play to be performed at the Théâtre de L’Odéon in Paris, and Araberlin (2002), among many others. Together they founded Tunisia’s first private theatre company, Le Nouveau Théâtre in 1976, as well as (in 1994) Familia Productions, instrumental in modernizing Tunisian theatre and engaging it in contemporary political concerns. This collection of their recent work, The Trilogy of Future Memory, includes Khamsoun (2006), translated by Nabil Cherni, and Amnesia (2010), and Tsunami(2013) translated and Marvin Carlson who has also provided an introduction. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Jordan Schildcrout Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Jordan Schildcrout By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF From 1969 to 1974, after the premiere of Mart Crowley’s landmark gay play The Boys in the Band (1968) and before the establishment of an organized gay theatre movement with companies such as Doric Wilson’s TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence), there flourished a subgenre of plays that can best be described as gay erotic theatre. While stopping short of performing sex acts on stage, these plays featured copious nudity, erotic situations, and forthright depictions of gay desire. In the early years of gay liberation, such plays pushed at the boundaries between the “legitimate” theatre and pornography, and in the process created the most exuberant and affirming depictions of same-sex sexuality heretofore seen in the American theatre. Some of these works were extremely popular with gay audiences, but almost all were dismissed by mainstream critics, never published, and rarely revived. The most widely seen of these plays was Tubstrip (1973), written and directed by Jerry Douglas, whose career in the early 1970s was situated squarely at the intersection of legitimate theatre and pornography. An analysis of Tubstrip and its groundbreaking production history can illuminate an important but often overlooked chapter in the development of gay theatre in America. Tubstrip (which can be read “tub strip” or “tubs trip”) is a risqué farce set in a gay bathhouse, written by “A. J. Kronengold” and directed by “Doug Richards,” both pseudonyms for a single person: Jerry Douglas, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama who later became a popular and award-winning director of pornographic films. Infused with a post-Stonewall sense of gay identity and sexuality, the play ran for 140 performances off-Broadway in 1973, then toured to eight cities over nine months, and opened on Broadway for a five-week run in 1974. By the producer’s own estimate, Tubstrip played approximately 500 performances to an audience of 50,000. This article argues that this remarkably successful play is emblematic of a significant moment in gay culture, when the fall of stage censorship and the rise of the sexual revolution and gay liberation created an unprecedented surge of gay erotic theatre, beginning with Gus Weill’s Geese (1969) and David Gaard’s And Puppy Dog Tails (1969), and reaching its pinnacle with Jerry Douglas’s bathhouse comedy. [1] During the early years of gay liberation, other forms of queer theatre included elements of gay eroticism: Charles Ludlam’s Bluebeard (1970) and Andy Warhol’s Pork (1971) reveled in carnivalesque excess and carried the critical imprimatur of hip theatrical art, and British imports such as Butley (1972) and Find Your Way Home (1973) depicted gay relationships with the bleakness seemingly expected in “serious drama” of the era. In contrast, gay erotic theatre often appropriated light middlebrow genres, such as romantic comedy and farce, to create fantasies of same-sex romance and sexuality. To varying degrees, Tubstrip and its ilk imagined the possibility of a happy homosexual and a healthy sexuality based on mutual desire, liberated from the guilt and shame of the closet. Critics of these plays, however, often saw only lewdness and exploitative sensationalism, which, they argued, did not belong in the legitimate theatre. The plays of gay erotic theatre may have appealed primarily to gay men who aspired to see their identities and desires, long closeted, finally reflected and affirmed in the culture. Audiences, however, were not exclusively gay, and the battles fought over sexuality and legitimacy in the theatre had repercussions beyond this subculture of gay men who, while marginalized, had a degree of cultural and economic power denied to women and other minority groups. An examination of the “homosexploitation” plays of gay erotic theatre can further illuminate the ethos of the bourgeoning gay sexual culture, providing an opportunity not just to indulge in nostalgia for the liberation era, but to reflect on how our experiences and fantasies of sex and romance are constructed in our own cultural moment. Tubstrip and other “sex positive” plays of gay erotic theatre invite the audience to find pleasure in theatrical depictions of sexual liberation, which is itself an act of liberation. Frank Queerism: The Intersection of Gay Theatre and Pornography The 1960s witnessed the emergence of what we now call “gay theater,” with gay theatre artists—informed by a contemporary understanding of gay cultural identity—creating representations of gay lives, often (but not exclusively) for an audience presumed to be gay. Most historians trace the genre to the seminal work of off-off-Broadway playwrights like Robert Patrick, Doric Wilson, and Lanford Wilson at the Caffe Cino, and then recognize the crossover commercial success of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968) as a crucial turning point. While the plays of gay erotic theatre must be understood in relation to these previous gay plays, broader changes in gay sexual culture also influenced their production and reception. Gay erotic theatre thrived for many of the same reasons as the pornographic cinema of the era, as described by historian Whitney Strub: A confluence of forces, including gay activism and its push for increased visibility, the rapidly diminishing scope of obscenity laws (historically disproportionately aimed at queer expression), the market demands of a gay consumer base, and the broader spirit of sexual revolution, all worked in tandem to open a new space for gay erotic expression. [2] While many regarded pornography as both a cause and symptom of the urban decay of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Strub argues that the supposed “decline” of the city provided increased freedom for queer people, who were now less subject to such surveillance and control. . . . As the straight, white middle class fled for suburbs specifically designed for procreative heterosexual families, urban opportunities beckoned for gay communities. [3] The 1969 Stonewall Riots helped to create a more visible political movement for LGBT people at the same time that changes in censorship laws created opportunities for a more visible sexual culture, both gay and straight, on both stage and screen. However, as Elizabeth Wollman notes, “Many members of the commercial theatre industry worried” that sexually explicit theatre productions like Oh! Calcutta! (1969) and Che! (1969) “were not terribly distinct from the live sex shows and pornographic films that had begun to proliferate in New York City.” [4] Scholars such as Thomas Waugh have discussed the history of post-World War II gay pornographic films as a progression from beefcake models posing in pouches to softcore gay erotica with full nudity to hardcore narrative feature films with performers engaging in sex acts. [5] The emergence of hardcore cinema in the early 1970s precipitated the trend of “porno chic,” which Jennifer C. Nash describes as the “mainstreaming” of pornography, with “elaborately plotted, narrative-driven feature-length films that consciously effaced the boundary between the pornographic and the mainstream,” playing in “regular” movie theatres, reviewed by mainstream critics, and attended by millions of men and women. [6] One of the earliest entries in this phenomenon was the feature length hardcore gay film Boys in the Sand (1971), directed by Wakefield Poole, a former Broadway dancer. The film became an unprecedented commercial success and made a star out of blond and handsome Casey Donovan. [7] While occasionally intersecting with porno chic, the gay erotic theatre produced between 1969 and 1974 is most comparable to softcore erotica, which did not depict explicit sex acts. Richard Dyer, writing in 1985, endeavored to distinguish between pornography and erotica for gay men, although these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, and at other times have simply marked cultural privilege, with “erotica” being what Ellen Willis called a euphemism for “classy porn.” [8] Dyer creates a distinction by asserting that pornography “is supposed to have an effect that is registered in the spectator’s body,” and this goal dictates the structural form of the genre, since “the desire that drives the porn narrative forward is the desire to come, to have an orgasm.” Pornography, then, is characterized by the way in which its form follows its presumed function, to stimulate not just arousal but physical orgasm. Of course, it’s impossible to determine exactly how a work of art functions in different circumstances with different audiences, but Dyer’s point about narrative structure still holds: the dramatic narratives of gay erotic theatre, while they might arouse, are not structured to bring the audience to orgasm. Instead, erotic theatre places emphasis on the psychological, social, and aesthetic aspects of sex. Nevertheless, productions that offered gay eroticism for a paying audience were often accused of pornographic “gaysploitation.” [9] In a 1977 article titled “Theatre: Gays in the Marketplace vs. Gays for Themselves,” Don Shewey criticized plays, often by straight playwrights, that “exploit gay characters and gay themes for sensationalism or cheap comedy” like Norman Is That You? (1970) and Steambath (1970). [10] But he recognized that this sort of exploitation was different from what he called “semiporno gay celebrations like David Gaard’s And Puppy Dog Tails , A. J. Kronengold’s Tubstrip , and Gus Weill’s Geese ,” which he saw as emerging from “the nascent gay activist movement and an increasingly public gay populace.” [11] Jerry Douglas recalls that the first play he saw containing nudity and homosexuality was Geese by Gus Weill, produced at the Players Theatre in January 1969. [12] Consisting of two one-act plays—the first with a male couple, the second with a female couple— Geese broke new ground in the depiction of sexuality, with one outraged critic proclaiming the plays to be “shockers even by today’s permissive standards. The dialog is raw and unfettered, and there is emphasis on nudity, including homosexual and lesbian lovemaking.” [13] Both plays juxtapose the newfound pure love of a young same-sex couple with the bitter relationships and hypocritical sexual mores of their parents’ generation. [14] Critics accused Geese of engaging in “fast-buck-ism” and “frank queerism,” [15] risking “the reinstitution of stage censorship in New York,” [16] and performing “a faggot propaganda piece” [17] for an audience of “prurient peeping Toms” [18] and “flagrant pederasts.” [19] Gay erotic theatre aggravated the anxiety, always present in the professional theatre, over whether theatre aspires to the “higher values” of art or functions as a commercial product in a marketplace. Were plays such as Geese a) sincerely pursuing the cause of sexual liberation or b) offering cheap thrills in hopes of making a profit? The answer, of course, often seemed to be c) both. Wollman asserts that for every radical committed to using stage nudity toward social change, there were two or three entrepreneurs who were just as interested in the money that could be made by hiring young, good-looking people to show a little skin. . . . Most ended up with feet in both camps. [20] For example, the program bio of one of the actors in Geese states, with a combination of conviction and nonchalance, “Nudity or homosexuality, or whatever, is a product of life and it’s about time it got on the stage.” [21] Not all theatre artists shared this perspective, as evidenced by an actor’s departure from Robert M. Lane’s Foreplay (1970), which prompted the Variety front-page headline, “Won’t Depict A Nude Homo, Actor Quits.” [22] When industry papers featured banner headlines such as “NY LEGIT GOING SEX-HAPPY” and “NUDITY SELLS TIX?” in 1969, [23] the underlying consternation was the difficulty of objectively distinguishing between theatrical art and exploitative sensationalism in plays as varied as Marat/Sade , The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , Fortune and Men’s Eyes , Oh! Calcutta! , Paradise Now , Scuba Duba , and Geese . As British critic John Elsom argued in 1974, “One man’s decadence is another man’s sexual enlightenment.” [24] Despite negative reviews, Geese was commercially successful, playing off-Broadway for 336 performances through November 1969 (and thus during the Stonewall Riots in June), with subsequent productions in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Geese was inevitably mentioned as a point of comparison when David Gaard’s play And Puppy Dog Tails opened off-Broadway in September 1969. In this domestic comedy, John lives with his lover, a Southerner named Carey-Lee, but his head is turned by a visit from his straight friend Bud, a Navy man with whom he “fooled around” in his adolescence. [25] Forced to choose between the closeted sexuality of his macho buddy and a loving gay relationship with Carey-Lee, John chooses the latter. Most critics derided the play as nothing more than a poor excuse to get “a glimpse of male musculature and—briefly—male genitals” [26] and “a crudely devised apology for the right to be gay.” [27] Newsday worried that The Boys in the Band had created “an epidemic” of imitators, [28] while Variety registered homophobic horror over “a rising tide of limpwrist-oriented plays.” [29] Nevertheless, and despite not liking the play, Clive Barnes of the New York Times acknowledged that And Puppy Dog Tails was doing something new, which was reflected in the review’s slightly ironic subheader: “Homosexuals Depicted As Happy, A Novelty.” He wrote, “While we have had scenes before of homosexual sex and even declarations of homosexual love, this is the first play in my experience to show demonstrations of homosexual affection.” [30] He then parenthetically confesses that he found such displays of affection “embarrassing” because of his own “hang-ups.” But the necessity of such displays is precisely the point of And Puppy Dog Tails . Indeed, the play is not primarily concerned with the supposed battle between hetero and homo, as certain critics thought, but in the divide between a homosexual culture that eroticizes straightness as a masculine ideal and a gay culture that valorizes a romantic relationship based on mutual desire. Just as John does not need a straight lover, perhaps Gaard’s play did not need the approval of straight critics. And Puppy Dog Tails recouped its cost during previews and ran for 141 performances. Geese and And Puppy Dog Tails set the stage for Jerry Douglas’s entrance into the production of gay erotic theatre. Douglas studied playwriting and directing at the Yale School of Drama before moving to New York in 1960, and he spent the decade writing off-Broadway musicals, directing plays, and serving as the casting director for the Coconut Grove Playhouse. In 1970, he had his first experience directing a play containing nudity, Gerry Raad’s Circle in the Water , which dealt with repressed homosexuality and sadism amongst cadets in a military academy. Later that same year, he directed his own play Score , an example of “bisexual chic” avant la lettre , about a sophisticated married couple who compete with each other in seduction, battling for the greatest number of conquests—including those with partners of the same sex. [31] The production, which featured Sylvester Stallone in a supporting role, was dismissed as “one of the rash of sexploitation shows which have followed the easing of stage restrictions here” [32] and closed after 23 performances. [33] Jerry Douglas’s next endeavor was writing and directing the hardcore feature film The Back Row (1973), starring Casey Donovan as a New Yorker who attracts the attention of George Payne, a sexual neophyte from Wyoming who has just arrived at Port Authority. The film shows Payne learning “how to be gay,” including a meta-cinematic scene in which Payne, having followed Donovan into an adult movie theatre, watches the action on screen and imagines himself and Donovan taking the place of the actors. The scene encapsulates the ethos behind much of Douglas’s work: pornography has a pedagogical function, instructing gay men on how to fulfill their desires, not just as a technical matter of physical positions, but by diminishing the inhibitions created by a homophobic society and liberating their erotic imaginations. Douglas used the pseudonym “Doug Richards” for The Back Row , hoping to keep his career in porn separate from his legitimate theatre career, but the film became one of his most critically acclaimed and commercially successful creations. Jeffrey Escoffier lists The Back Row , which was filmed on location in New York City, as the first of the “homorealist” porn films, which “created a synthesis of a documentary-like view (in this case focusing on the gay sexual subculture) and the more psychopolitical themes of sexual liberation,” using “actual locations where public sex took place.” [34] Douglas’s next work continued his exploration of the gay subculture in one of the emblematic locales of sexual liberation: the bathhouse. The Boys in the Baths: Sexual Exuberance and Romantic Longing in Tubstrip Jerry Douglas recalls that producer Ken Gaston approached him with the initial idea for Tubstrip : “I want you to write a play about the baths, and I want it to be a love story.” Gay bathhouses like New York’s Continental and Everard Baths—colloquially knows as “the tubs”—occupied a unique position in urban gay life, which many remember as a sexual utopia. [35] In the documentary Gay Sex in the ’70s , activist and author Arnie Kantrowitz recalls: You could do everything. . . . You could eat in the restaurant, you could go swimming in the pool, you could have a massage—to orgasm if you preferred, you could dance on their dance floor, and you could have more sex than most people would consider having in a year. [36] But Kantrowitz also emphasizes that “Even during the days of the most advanced and reckless promiscuity, it was still a search for someone,” and he met his long-term romantic partner at the baths. This combination of sexual exuberance and romantic longing informs both the dramaturgy and ethos of Tubstrip . The play takes place in the central lounge of a popular New York City bathhouse, but the establishment is sparsely attended this particular Tuesday evening because “there isn’t a self-respecting faggot in this city who isn’t home watching the Academy Awards” (16). [37] Although it will eventually crescendo into the frenzy of farce, Tubstrip begins with a pensive silence, as the young attendant Brian, the play’s main character, sits alone in a suspended bamboo cage chair “in a fetal position. . . his thoughts a thousand miles away” (2)—an image used in much of the publicity for the show [Figure 1]. The opening tableau hints at the journey to come, with Brian leaving the nest of his egg-shaped chair and metaphorically taking flight—but toward what? Brian’s appearance is contrasted with the entrance of a patron named Darryl, emerging naked from the pool (installed below stage level, in the orchestra pit), splashing the audience in the front row. Before the first word is spoken, Douglas’s staging juxtaposes above and below, air and water, the mind and the body, the romantic and the erotic, and (as Darryl tries to gain Brian’s attention by arranging himself in sexually provocative poses) the desired and the desiring. Figure 1. Poster for 1973 off-Broadway production of Tubstrip at the Players Theatre, featuring Larry Gilman as Brian. Used with permission of Jerry Douglas, from his personal collection. Each of Tubstrip ’s nine characters comes to this bathhouse with his individual sexual and romantic desires, and the play culminates in the formation of different kinds of relationships. The denizens include Richie, a romantic and naïve young man who is searching for his lover Darryl, who has surreptitiously come to the baths in search of sexual variety; Andy, a witty black queen infatuated with Brian; Tony, a sadist, and his lover Kevin, a masochist; Dusty, a sweet-natured hustler; Wally, a middle-aged skin-flick mogul searching for new talent; and Bob, a Viet Nam veteran who knew Brian in high school. The stage is filled with young and attractive actors, almost all of whom, at one point or another, will be naked. Even 59-year-old Wally, although never naked, was actually played by a 26-year-old actor (Jake Everett) who shaved his hair and constructed a “fat suit” for the role. The play presents a fantasy version of a bathhouse; yet, even as it celebrates sexual liberation, Tubstrip dramatizes many of the tensions evident in the emerging gay sexual culture, between sex and romance, promiscuity and monogamy, sadomasochism and consent, competition and community. As Kevin Winkler has noted, the bathhouse was a theatrical space, not just for professional entertainers like Bette Midler, who famously got her start performing at the Continental Baths, but for the men cruising and engaging in sex. [I]t was always showtime. You just had to find your follow spot, be it in the steam room, the showers, the orgy room, or take your act on the road through the winding hallways. If your act flopped once, you could try it out again right down the hall, altering a bit of business, tightening up your dialogue (or maybe you preferred pantomime), and experimenting with a different characterization. [38] Much of the comedy of Tubstrip comes from an awareness of the theatricality involved both in the presentation of self and the pursuit of sexual fantasy at the baths. The bathhouse, like the playhouse, is a location in which people might wear masks and play roles, but it is also ultimately a place where truths are revealed, and by the end of Tubstrip , many of the characters see each other—and themselves—with greater honesty and clarity. Over the course of its twenty-one months of performances, advertisements for Tubstrip proclaimed that it was “Better Than a Trip to the Baths” (indicating erotic pleasure) and “Better Than The Boys in the Band ” (indicating theatrical legitimacy). The latter boast hints at the extent to which early gay liberation theatre artists were performing in the shadow of Mart Crowley’s hit play—and also reacting against it. [39] The Boys in the Band presented an ensemble of gay characters—including the bitter host Michael, the “fairy” Emory, the token African American Bernard, and the hustler known only as Cowboy—gathered for a birthday party that implodes in a swirl of alcohol, verbal attacks, and manipulative games. In Act II, characters play a game in which they phone their high school crushes and relive their rejection, while Alan, the play’s supposed straight man, denies his homosexuality and flees the party. As J. Todd Ormsbee observes, “The target of Michael’s party game is the failure of gay love, its pain and humiliation, perhaps its impossibility.” [40] The central plot of Douglas’s Tubstrip reverses this dynamic. We learn that Brian, as a gawky high school freshman, had a crush on the macho heterosexual athlete Bob. While he was at war, Bob received letters from Brian, which piqued his sexual interest in a kid he barely remembered. Now Bob, entering the bathhouse in full Green Beret uniform, has come searching for Brian, and he is impressed to find that the “short, skinny, uncoordinated” freshman (89) has grown into a desirable young man. The act one curtain falls on Bob passionately kissing Brian, which Douglas recalls was “daring” for the time. Tubstrip would seem to enact a homosexual wish fulfillment: the handsome straight prince desires the gay boy who was once an ugly duckling. Imagine how different Crowley’s play would be if “nelly” Emory’s high school crush confessed that he desired him in return. But Douglas goes a step further: once Brian learns that Bob is married, closeted, and won’t commit to more than a secret weekend fling with him, he rejects Bob—and also quits his job at the bathhouse. Instead, Brian leaves with the monogamously inclined Richie, who has just broken up with his lover. Throughout the play, the flirtation between Brian and Richie has been boyish and playful, as opposed to a “heavy cruise,” most evident in their second act water fight in the pool. Rather than consummating an affair with the “stud” of his adolescent fantasies, Brian chooses the naïve and sincere young man who perhaps reminds him of himself as that awkward, yearning freshman. The contrast between physical pleasures and emotional fulfillment was also evident in the casting of the roles of Bob and Richie, with Brian rejecting the character often played by porn stars (such as Jim Cassidy) in favor of the character played by actors (such as Tom Van Stitzel) who won critical praise for giving nuanced performances. Hinting at a life of domestic happiness, Brian and Richie discuss cooking breakfast for each other as they head out into the sunrise. The bathhouse functions in a manner similar to the Shakespearean forest where erotic desire is unleashed and lovers, liberated from social restraints, can meet their proper match. But in order to maintain that romance, the lovers must then leave the forest behind and return to the “civilized” world. (Wally, as the play’s most erudite character, makes this connection, ironically extoling the “midsummer madness” that exists at the baths all year round.) The central plot of Brian and Richie valorizes traditional notions of romantic fidelity, which necessitates leaving the bathhouse, but Tubstrip does not condemn characters who remain and seek what we might now call a “no strings attached” hook-up. Bob and Darryl, as the lovers rejected by Brian and Richie, respectively, are quite clear about their longing for purely sexual adventure and variety, and the play ends with them following each other into the steam room. They, too, can have their desires fulfilled at the bathhouse, and the play does not disparage them for doing so. The character most pulled by the tension between sexual exuberance and romantic longing is Andy, described by critics as “a chatty flirt” and “a black queen” who has some of the play’s best comic lines. Contemporaneous accounts of the baths illustrate the ethnic diversity of the patrons, but Andy is the sole person of color on stage, potentially putting him in the same tokenistic position as Bernard in The Boys in the Band . At the start of the play, Andy endures a couple of racist zingers from his friend Wally, but in contrast to The Boys in the Band , in which the racial disparagement of Bernard grows uglier as the play goes on, Tubstrip shows Andy and Wally moving toward deeper friendship and mutual support. While given to incisive “reads” and witty rejoinders, Andy is not a neutered commentator, but very much part of the sexual action of the bathhouse. His romantic pursuit of Brian and his flirtations with other patrons are often played for comedy, but they are also rooted in his genuine need for affirmation in a community that too often leaves gay black men out of its romantic and erotic fantasies. Most memorably, when Andy feels he is not getting enough attention, he emerges wearing an enormous Afro wig. According to Douglas, Walter Holiday, the actor who played Andy in every performance of Tubstrip , contributed a great deal to the creation of his character, including this visual assertion of Black Power and Angela Davis fabulousness. Andy is dejected when he does not end up with Brian at the end of the play, but his friend Wally assures him that someday he, too, will find love. In a final gesture of bold self-assertion, Andy removes his towel and nakedly strides into the steam room once again. The possibility of having both sexual variety and romantic fulfillment is realized in the sadomasochistic couple of Tony and Kevin, who also provide some of the play’s most sexually explicit sequences. Douglas recalls that one of the greatest laughs of the evening came when Tony, entering in conservative business attire, whips off his Brooks Brothers suit in one swift flourish to reveal the leather harness underneath. Tony then proceeds to unpack his attaché case, which contains a number of increasingly outrageous sex toys, from cock rings and handcuffs to chocolate syrup and bananas. His “pretty-boy” lover, Kevin, soon joins him, and the script shows them as an affectionate and caring couple who enjoy playing the roles of an abusive master and humiliated slave. In this, the play participates in the debate among early gay liberationists over the psychological and political ramifications of S&M, siding with Lyn Rosen’s defense of sadomasochism: Too may people confuse S&M with bad relationships in which one person dominates another or treats another badly. S&M is a sexual act in which both partners treat each other well. [41] Many of the play’s characters do not understand this distinction and show concern over the abuse Tony heaps on Kevin, including handcuffing him naked and face down on the pool table. Good-hearted Richie attempts to “rescue” him from this humiliation, but is taken aback when Kevin exclaims, “Look, prick, you do your thing, let me do mine. Now, fuck off ” (76). Later, when Kevin easily slips out of his predicament without a key, Richie is upset to learn that the cuffs weren’t actually locked. Kevin explains, as though it should be obvious, “Suppose there was a fire—” (82). [42] The joke points to Douglas’s metatheatrical understanding of S&M as a sexual act , complete with its own costumes, props, lines (“Yes, sir !”) and roles, enacted with the consent of all the performers. Yet Tubstrip also pushes at the limits of sadomasochism when the couple involves a non-consenting participant, the hustler Dusty. Unlike the sex worker known only as “Cowboy” in The Boys in the Band , Dusty has a name and his own desires, and the audience even learns a bit about his sexual journey. [43] When Wally, one of his clients, spots him in the bathhouse and snarkily berates him for previously passing himself off as straight, Dusty replies with simple sincerity, “I never lied to you. Things change” (45), indicating his growth into gay self-acceptance. [44] He initially agrees to a threesome with Tony and Kevin, but when Tony tries to pierce Dusty’s nipple without his consent, a violent fight and then a chase through the bathhouse ensues. While played for farce, this situation also involves a touch of Ortonesque menace, which only abates when Brian, in his authoritative role as bathhouse attendant, puts a stop to the fight and banishes Tony and Kevin from the premises. In a further show of ambivalence about Tony’s sadism, the play reveals him to be Wally’s psychoanalyst, a member of a profession that, in its role of arbiter of “sanity” and “normalcy,” had a history of causing great harm to homosexuals. Nevertheless, the play ultimately shows Dusty to be unharmed, and Tony and Kevin return to their affectionate and mutually supportive romantic relationship. At the age of 59, Wally is older than any character in The Boys in the Band , a play that paints a grim picture of gay men clinging to youth. Wally takes a more philosophical perspective on his status as “dirty old man,” since, as he explains, “there’s always someone a little older, a little dirtier” (79). Wally is comic because of his grand duchess affectations, and the play creates some farcical bits out of the other characters avoiding Wally sexually, such as when four men come running out of the steam room as soon as Wally goes in (51). One way that Wally deals with this rejection is by retreating into his profession as a pornographer, imagining the world as if it were a movie, commenting on the action around him by proclaiming, “It’ll make a gorgeous film” (28). When he learns that Brian’s high school crush has come to find him, Wally becomes effusive with purple prose: “Childhood Sweethearts—doing it with jock straps and football helmets! Separated by cruel fate—reunited by a twist of circumstance! Love conquers all!” (63). He’s excited by watching and creating fantasies, and his role as voyeur puts him in the same position as the audience. Wally is not “matched” with anyone at the end of the play, but he is not alone, in part because he is reunited with Veronica, his cat who happens to be in heat and has been lost in the bathhouse, adding to the farcical shenanigans. [45] Moreover, while his bitchy barbs might indicate his frustration with the sexual competition of the bathhouse, he ultimately achieves a sense of community, exchanging friendship with characters like Andy and Dusty, whom he previously disparaged. In Wally, we see that the bathhouse can facilitate not just sexual encounters, but also friendship and a larger experience of community. The play’s function as “community portrait” is reflected in the photograph featured in the center of the off-Broadway program, showing all nine men (and one cat) as an affectionate ensemble [Figure 2]. Figure 2. Centerfold photo from program for 1973 off-Broadway production of Tubstrip. Back Row: Jamey Gillis (Tony), Jake Everett (Wally) and Veronica, Larry Gilman (Brian), Tony Origlio (Richie), Richard Rheem (Kevin); Front Row: Bob Balhatchet (Darryl), Walter Holiday (Andy), Jim Tate / Dean Tait (Dusty), Richard Livert (Bob). Photo: Christopher Studios. Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. When Time Magazine reviewed The Boys in the Band , they highlighted its depiction of “rejection, humiliation, and loneliness,” [46] which were presumed to be the lot of all homosexuals, in part because Crowley’s characters assert such generalizations (e.g., “Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse”). Tubstrip makes no such generalizations, in part because the greater amount of queer representation post- Boys relieves it of the burden of representing all homosexuals. Instead, Jerry Douglas’s play creates a fantasy in which characters connect—as sexual partners, as romantic lovers, as friends, and as a community. The play does not dwell on the trauma of the closet, no one agonizes over what “made them” gay, no one is forced to pretend to be straight, no one drowns himself in alcohol, and even the characters who do light drugs (pot and poppers) seem motivated by sexual enhancement rather than self-destruction. Like Geese and And Puppy Dog Tails , Tubstrip depicts gay love, sex, and affection (which can be intertwined or not, depending on your desire) as exciting, fulfilling, and achievable. While this might be a sentimental fantasy, it’s a fantasy that proved immensely popular with gay audiences—and affronted many mainstream critics. Tubstrip on Stage: Audiences, Critics, and the Road to Legitimacy Tubstrip began performances at the 199-seat Brecht Theatre in the Mercer Arts Center on 17 May 1973. Suggesting the play’s location at the intersection of legitimate theatre and gay sexual culture, the cover of the program featured a drawing of two nearly naked blond boys, smiling and lounging in relaxed poses. Inside were advertisements for the boutique sex shop the Pleasure Chest, “metal inhalers” (for amyl nitrite), nude male photography, and hardcore pornography. Posters and flyers for the show did not include the words “gay” or “homosexual,” instead borrowing a phrase from pornographic cinema and touting the play’s “all male cast.” In gay magazines, advertisements for the play appeared next to those for porn films and bathhouses. These marketing tactics drew an audience, allowing the production to recoup its investment within five weeks. It played for a total of 100 performances, before the 103-year old Broadway Central Hotel, which housed the Mercer Arts Center, collapsed, leaving Tubstrip temporarily homeless. [47] The production reopened less than two weeks later at the Players Theatre, running for 40 more performances, from 14 August to 16 September, but never officially opening to the mainstream press. Instead, the producers took advantage of the fact that gay culture had grown more self-sufficient since the days of Geese and And Puppy Dog Tails , with a marked increase in gay-owned publications, bars, shops, and restaurants. Most writers invited from gay publications like The Advocate , Gay Scene , Michael’s Thing , and Where It’s At enjoyed the nudity and eroticism of Tubstrip, yet even when photos of semi-naked actors accompanied their reviews, they tended to focus on the overall quality of the play, particularly its wit and comic structure, as well as what they saw as its liberationist ethos. Lee Barton of the Advocate saw it as a welcome departure from “what’s been passing for gay theatre” and plays that “exploit, degrade, insult, or distort what it’s like to be gay.” He praised Tubstrip as “funny, sexy, [and] important,” but wondered whether mainstream critics could “tolerate anything gay that is so open and healthy.” [48] In his diary, Donald Vining was effusive about the play and highlighted the sense of recognition experienced by a gay audience member, describing the set as “a wonderful evocation of the Continental Baths.” I was so glad I had recently been there so that the hanging basket chair, the pool table, the steam room doors, and the mattresses on the floor all had meaning. I said to Ken, “They’ve got everything but the swimming pool” and lo and behold two actors emerged naked and wet from some kind of tub at the front of the stage. . . . We had nine naked men, eight of them quite attractive, and lots of hilarious lines. The play would be of no interest to anyone not a homosexual but it is actually very well crafted, the several plots skillfully managed, the laughs beautifully built up to, the characters nicely differentiated, and everything highly professional. . . . I found the whole thing a hoot and my sentimental nature was pleased when the two romantics, disappointed in their lovers for different reasons, found each other at the end. [49] Vito Russo, however, wrote that he was “more furious” at plays like Tubstrip than at Boys in the Band “because they pretend to be a product of our liberated culture” but actually just “exploit the situation to make a buck” from members of the gay community who will “pay any price” to see nudity on stage. [50] But Vining’s response indicates that Russo misjudged the desire of the ticket-buying gay audience. The nudity is one element of the larger theatrical fantasy, which also includes the pleasure of seeing one’s world represented, of being an insider who understands the meaning of that world, and of seeing gay romance and eroticism validated in a manner still rare in mainstream culture. The marketing of Tubstrip may have exploited sexuality in order to sell tickets, but the play itself offered much more to audience members like Vining, who saw no conflict between the erotic and the legitimate theatre. Indeed, he found pleasure in seeing the erotic within the legitimate. In a rare move for a sexually explicit gay play, Tubstrip then hit the road, travelling to eight cities over nine months in 1974. Jerry Douglas was with the production for the entire tour, making revisions to the script and rehearsing new actors, since only two actors remained constant through the entire run: comic duo Walter Holiday (Andy) and Jake Everett (Wally). The stops for the first leg of the tour were Boston (4 weeks), Washington, DC (5 weeks), Philadelphia (2 weeks), Toronto (3 weeks), Detroit (1 week), and Chicago (5 weeks). The only hint of trouble came in Detroit, where residents of the hotel in which the theatre was located covered up the poster, and the Free Press sounded alarm bells about the possibility of obscenity. [51] In general, critics who liked the play tended to downplay the significance of the nudity, while negative reviews accused the play of “homosexploitation.” [52] A common theme was determining whether the play could appeal to “open-minded straights” or was strictly for “a specialized audience.” [53] In Washington and Philadelphia, critics highlighted the “newness” of Tubstrip and discussed it as a first. Washington’s NBC station announced, “This may be our first ‘X’ rated theater review. . . so if you’re under 17, please go to bed. Gay theatre has come to town,” [54] while a local magazine expressed the hope that Tubstrip would encourage more gay theatre, since “there is a large gay community and others in the Washington area who no doubt would support quality productions.” [55] The critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer regarded Tubstrip as a sex comedy, one of many that have been produced off-Broadway but the first of its kind to reach Philadelphia. . . the tour being something of an event in the history of gay liberation. . . asserting as it does not the sickness but the validity of homosexual affection and homoerotic appeal. [56] The show won praise as “a comic statement about love” [57] and “an outrageously witty farce,” [58] and even the critics who panned the play grudgingly acknowledged that it “seems to please its special audience” [59] who “responded with great relish” [60] and “seemed to love every minute of Tubstrip , which must mean something.” [61] When the production reached Los Angeles, Tubstrip transformed from a successful play into a cultural phenomenon. Casey Donovan, star of the porn films Boys in the Sand and The Back Row , as well as the recently released film version of Score (1974), joined the cast in the lead role of Brian—but he used his “legitimate” name, Calvin Culver. Like Jerry Douglas, Culver worked both in the legitimate theatre and in hardcore pornography, known by different names in each realm. But Tubstrip , existing at this particular moment of gay liberation and porno chic, blurred the lines between these realms. Advertisements for Tubstrip promoted their star as “Calvin (Casey Donovan) Culver,” literally inserting the pornographic into the legitimate. Douglas recalls that the goal was for Culver to achieve respectability as an actor while not neglecting Donovan’s porno fan base, and Culver told the San Francisco Examiner , “I’m not the least bit ashamed of those films I made, but I hope my career will take off now in a more serious and legitimate direction.” [62] Having a celebrity in the show created more publicity for Tubstrip than ever before. Culver appeared on front covers and in photo spreads in magazines, the show scheduled “meet the cast” parties with local bars and bathhouses, famous actors including Shelley Winters and Larry Kert ( West Side Story , Company ) came to the show, Reverend Troy Perry of the gay-affirming Metropolitan Community Church attended three times, and the company appeared in the 1974 Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade. Douglas remembers, “There were gaggles of fans at the stage door every night. And Cal signed every autograph that was asked of him.” The production was enormously successful over the 11-week run in Los Angeles, but the new casting seems to have altered the critical reception of the play. Unlike actors who previously played Brian, 30-year-old Culver was no moony-eyed youth gazing into the romantic distance; in promotional photos, Culver glares directly at the viewer in a sexual come-on [Figure 3]. His co-star Jim Cassidy, newly cast in the role of Bob, was also a porn performer but had little acting experience, which seemed to contribute to the perception among some critics that the show was merely an opportunity to see porn stars in the flesh, with one review noting that some audience members “literally oohed and aahed when [Cassidy] stripped.” [63] For the first time, some expressed disappointment that the actor playing Brian did not engage in full-frontal nudity, since that was now the expectation with Culver in the role. Figure 3. Advertisement for 1974 touring production of Tubstrip in Los Angeles, featuring Calvin (Casey Donovan) Culver as Brian. Used with permission of Jerry Douglas, from his personal collection. Tubstrip concluded its tour with a seven-week run in San Francisco, where the city’s two major newspapers savaged the play, but the local gay press celebrated it as an exemplar of gay liberation and a “positive statement” that successfully captured gay life. One headline announced “No Suicides in This Homosexual Play,” [64] and one writer quipped, “When is the last time you walked out of a play or film about gays and felt good?” [65] Jerry Douglas (still operating under the name Doug Richards) had a more public profile in San Francisco, giving a press conference with Culver. Perhaps with an eye toward the planned Broadway production, Douglas asserted that, though a “gay play,” Tubstrip was not “about homosexuality” and appealed to a broad audience: It’s interesting the same pattern in every city we’ve played; the first week we get the dirty old men with binoculars in the front row, the second week we get the younger gay set, and by the third week it’s 50-50 mixed straight and gay. [66] After successfully running for over 400 performances off-Broadway and around the country, Tubstrip would now test its ability to reach a diverse audience in the commercial center of the American theatre. Tubstrip opened on 31 October 1974 at Broadway’s Mayfair Theatre (previously known as Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe) under what was known as a “middle theatre contract.” [67] For the first time, Jerry Douglas used his own name as the director (but not as the playwright), and Calvin Culver no longer had Casey Donovan splitting his name in two. But Tubstrip ’s desire for success on Broadway was a bit like Brian’s desire for heterosexual Bob: the big guy might be open to a fling, but he wasn’t about to make a commitment. New York critics took pains to warn heterosexual audiences that this play was not for them, up to and including dialogue that “might be virtually a foreign language.” [68] Mel Gussow in the New York Times was especially dismissive, and the Associated Press critic acknowledged that while the play might have “a nationwide gay housekeeping seal of approval,” he felt like a “straight intruder.” [69] In a positive review that praised “a uniformly superb cast,” Debbi Wasserman of Show Business attempted to dismantle the homo-hetero divide imagined by her fellow critics by redrawing the lines: “ Tubstrip is not for everyone, but it comes pretty close. It’s not for the prejudiced puritan, but it is for the romantic.” [70] Tubstrip had found extraordinary success as a gay play for primarily gay audiences, a reciprocal relationship based on mutual desire, but the straight trade of Broadway refused to see it as legitimate, and the production closed after 37 performances. [71] Tubstrip had a return engagement in Washington, DC, in January 1975, and has not been produced since. [72] Two months after Tubstrip closed, another comedy set in a gay bathhouse found greater success on Broadway. The Ritz by Terrence McNally had started at the Yale Rep with the title The Tubs . On the way to Broadway, the play not only changed its name (to avoid confusion with Douglas’s play), but also changed the sexual desires of its main character. In New Haven, the play concerned a married sanitation engineer from Ohio who has come to the baths to have a gay affair. In New York, the play concerned a married sanitation engineer from Ohio who has come to the baths unwittingly, and the greatest source of comedy is this straight man’s confusion and embarrassment when faced with the gay goings-on of the kooky patrons. In a stage direction regarding the “men endlessly prowling the corridors” of the bathhouse as though they are “on a treadmill,” McNally indicates that “Even though they never speak, these various patrons must become specific.” [73] But the playwright does not bother to make them specific, and they function as little more than part of the scenery for a comedy about straight people. Reconstructed to cater to non-gay audiences, The Ritz ran for 400 performances and won a Tony Award for Rita Moreno. Interestingly, Larry Gilman, who had first played Brian the attendant in the off-Broadway production of Tubstrip , was hired as a replacement in the role of an attendant in The Ritz , and Culver, performing as Casey Donovan, starred opposite Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn in a short-lived 1983 revival. After making the bisexual porn film Both Ways , Jerry Douglas spent the next chapter of his career working as a writer and editor in pornographic publishing. He returned to pornographic cinema in 1989 and steadily produced a series of popular and highly regarded films—including More of a Man (1991), Flesh & Blood (1996), Dream Team (1998), and Buckleroos (2004)—that won numerous industry awards for best picture, best screenplay, and best direction. The sexual exuberance and romantic longing that inform Tubstrip are evident in many of Douglas’s films, which have maintained their popularity in a way that his theatrical works have not. In the midst of gay liberation and looking ahead to the future, the actor John Bruce Deaven, who played Dusty and served as Equity Deputy, kept a record of Tubstrip ’s production history. He completed the document in 1975 with a fantasy—clearly inspired by the Sondheim musical Follies (1971)—that on 4 July 2001: Tubstrip casts from all the years (thousands) reunite at broken down Mayfair Theater in New York prior to the day it is torn down. All wear “year” they were in Tubstrip and what part! [74] This “reunion,” of course, never occurred, and many of the men involved in Tubstrip did not live to see 2001. Although largely forgotten, plays like Geese , And Puppy Dog Tails , and Tubstrip are significant for their role in opening the theatre as a venue for the expression of gay romantic and sexual desire. What was once condemned as “homosexploitation” has persisted in one form or another for over 40 years, often at the intersection of legitimate theatre and pornography, from staples of the “purple circuit” like Robert Patrick’s T-Shirts (1979), with porn star Jack Wrangler in the original production, and the erotic plays of Cal Yeomans and Robert Chesley; through a resurgence in the mid-1990s with works like David Dillon’s ensemble comedy Party (1995), Ronnie Larsen’s Making Porn (1996), and Robert Coles’s Cute Boys in their Underpants… series; to the long-running musical revue Naked Boys Singing (1999), the meta-pornography of Thomas Bradshaw’s Intimacy (2014), and the ménage à trois soap opera Afterglow (2017). By engaging in cultural battles with the theatrical establishment and critical gate-keepers, the erotic theatre of the gay liberation era also helped to create a cultural landscape where later Broadway plays as esteemed as Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1982), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993), Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), and Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out (2002), all featuring nudity and/or depictions of gay sex, could be seen as legitimate. Gay sexuality in the 21 st century is quite different than it was in the era of sexual liberation. The AIDS crisis, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and the use of apps like Grindr as a tool for meeting sexual partners have radically changed the ways that queer men experience their sexuality. The internet has facilitated renewed interest in “vintage” porn from the era of gay liberation, with films of 1970s restored, rereleased, and posted by aficionados on video sharing websites. These “classics,” along with contemporary documentaries about Gay Sex in the 70s and porn stars like Jack Wrangler and Peter Berlin, offer the viewer a nostalgic fantasy of an era of gay sexual abandon. It’s more difficult for “vintage” plays to maintain a place in the culture, particularly when critical disdain caused them to go unpublished. Yet revisiting erotic plays of the gay liberation era can do more than offer the pleasures of nostalgia. They illuminate how our experiences and fantasies of sex and romance are constructed by our changing social realities, allowing us to reflect more clearly on how we experience desire in our current moment—and to imagine ways in which we might experience it in the future. Acknowledgements: This scholarship would not have been possible without the generous friendship and well-preserved personal archive of Jerry Douglas. I’m indebted to David Román and Michael C. Oliveira at the University of Southern California, and grateful for the insights and contributions of Kevin Lustik, Stan Richardson, Richard Sacks, Paula Shaw, David Zellnik, and the peer reviewers and editors of JADT . References [1] Other plays in this subgenre, containing nudity and depicting gay relationships, often structured as romances and informed by the ethos of gay liberation, include: War Games (1969) by Neal Weaver, Foreplay (1970) by Robert Lane, Score (1970) by Jerry Douglas, Georgie Porgie (1968/1971) by George Birimisa, Minus One (1971) by Lawrence Parke, Brussels Sprouts (1972) by Larry Kardish, Mercy Drop (1973) by Robert Patrick, and Stand by Your Beds, Boys (1974) by John Allison and Ray Scantlin. Beginning in 1969 in Los Angeles, the SPREE (Society of Pat Rocco Enlightened Enthusiasts) Theatre Company staged performances of original gay plays, often comedies containing nudity, with titles like The Casting Couch and The Love Thief. While not necessarily featuring romantic relationships or liberationist ideologies, Sal Mineo’s 1969 revival of Fortune and Men’s Eyes by John Herbert and Jerry Douglas’s 1970 staging of Circle in the Water by Gerry Raad also featured nudity and homosexuality. [2] Whitney Strub, “Hey Look Me Over: The Films of Pat Rocco,” UCLA Film and Television Archive, https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/collections/inthelife/history/hey-look-me-over-films-pat-rocco . Accessed 8 September 2017. [3] Whitney Strub, “From Porno Chic to Porno Bleak: Representing the Urban Crisis in 1970s American Pornography,” Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 40. [4] Elizabeth Wollman, Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2. [5] Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 269-273. [6] Jennifer C. Nash, “Desiring Desiree,” Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s, eds. Carolyn Bronstein and Whitney Strub (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 86. Among the most famous (heterosexual) films associated with porno chic are Deep Throat (1972) and Behind the Green Door (1972). [7] Along with Poole and Douglas, another theatre artist who created gay porn in the early liberation era is counter-culture playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie, who wrote and directed the hardcore film American Cream (1972) under the name Rob Simple. [8] Richard Dyer, “Gay Male Porn: Coming To Terms,” Jump Cut 30 (March 1985), 27-29. [9] The term echoes the more prevalent phenomenon of “blaxploitation,” which functioned under a very different set of circumstances in regard to class, gender, cultural power, and, obviously, race. But both terms point to the concurrent burgeoning of previously underrepresented or disempowered voices in American culture. For more on instances of crossover between these cultural trends, see Joe Wlodarz, “Beyond the Black Macho: Queer Blaxploitation,” The Velvet Light Trap 53 (Spring 2004), 10-25. [10] Don Shewey, “Theatre: Gays in the Marketplace vs. Gays for Themselves,” in Lavender Culture, Revised Edition, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 236. [11] Shewey, 243. Shewey mentions these three erotic plays in the same context as Jonathan Ned Katz’s activist documentary play Coming Out (1972), as coming from and speaking to the gay community. [12] Personal interview with Jerry Douglas, 23 January 2017. All subsequent references to Douglas’s memories or assessments of the past come from this interview. [13] Richard Hummler, “Off Broadway Reviews,” Variety, 29 January 1969, 75. [14] My description of the play is based on contemporaneous reviews and articles, since an exhaustive search has yet to turn up a copy of the script. [15] “Off-B’way Geese Plugs Nudity, Frank Queerism,” Variety, 22 January 1969, 57. [16] Hummler. [17] “Sex Downtown: An Off-Broadway Review,” Screw, 7 March 1969, n.p. [18] William Glover, “Review,” AP Service, 12 January 1969, clipping. [19] John Simon, “Theatre Chronicle,” Hudson Review, Spring 1969, 102. [20] Wollman, 14. Wollman also notes the “relative tameness” with which adult musicals depicted gay sexuality compared to straight sexuality (52). The “straight plays” of gay erotic theatre were much bolder. [21] Dan Halleck, Geese Theatre Program, Players Theatre (New York, 1969), 2. [22] “Won’t Depict A Nude Homo, Actor Quits,” Variety, 25 November 1970, 1. Robert Jundelin’s departure caused a delay in the Broadway opening of the production, which received mixed-to-negative reviews and closed after 38 performances. [23] Richard Hummler, “NY Legit Going Sex-Happy: Off-B’way Porny May Reach B’way” Variety, 21 May 1969, 1, 70; Charlotte Harmon, “Nudity Sells Tix?: Bare Facts Still Not Totally Clear,” Backstage, 7 February 1969, 28. [24] John Elsom, Erotic Theatre (New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1974), 2. [25] David Gaard, And Puppy Dog Tails, manuscript, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. [26] Walter Kerr, “For Homos and Heteros Alike, A Swindle,” New York Times, 26 October 1969, D3. [27] Daphne Kraft, “Off-Broadway: Puppy Dog Tails,” Newark Evening News, 20 October 1969, 16. [28] George Oppenheimer, “And Puppy Dog Tails, Or How to Make Boys,” Newsday, 20 October 1969, n.p. [29] Richard Hummler, “Off-Broadway Reviews: And Puppy Dog Tails,” Variety, 29 October 1969, 70. [30] Clive Barnes, “Theater: And Puppy Dog Tails Opens,” New York Times, 20 October 1969, 60. [31] It’s important to note that male playwrights, directors, and producers created the lesbian eroticism seen in both Geese and Score. Women generally have had less cultural power than men, so the history of lesbian eroticism created by lesbians in the theatre had a very different path, which was also informed by arguments in feminism throughout the 1970s and 1980s over sexual representation, with different camps described as “anti-pornography” and “pro-sex.” Lesbian theatre scholars like Jill Dolan, Sue-Ellen Case, and Kate Davy have celebrated the eroticism in the groundbreaking plays of Split Britches and Holly Hughes at the WOW Café in the 1980s, as well as the plays of the Five Lesbian Brothers produced off-Broadway in the 1990s. More recently, lesbian eroticism has been seen on Broadway in productions of Paula Vogel’s Indecent and the musical Fun Home, adapted for the stage by Lisa Kron from Alison Bechdel’s memoir. See Jill Dolan, “The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Pornography and Performance,” Theatre Journal 39:2 (May 1987), 156-174; Sue-Ellen Case, Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance (New York: Routledge, 1996); Kate Davy, Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Café Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). [32] Dick Bruckenfeld, “Review,” Village Voice, 5 November 1970, 49. [33] Score was more successful in Radley Metzger’s 1974 film version, for which Douglas wrote the screenplay. The film, featuring Casey Donovan, was financially successful, leading the producers to take a full-page ad in Variety announcing “Score Scores at the Box Office,” 28 August 1974, 23. [34] Jeffrey Escoffier, “Sex in the Seventies: Gay Porn Cinema as an Archive for the History of American Sexuality,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26.1 (January 2017), 91-92. [35] Leo Bersani, however, does not. He describes the gay bathhouse as “one of the most ruthlessly ranked, hierarchized, and competitive environments imaginable.” Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (Winter 1987), 206. [36] Gay Sex in the ’70s, directed by Joseph Lovett, Lovett Productions/Frameline, 2005. [37] Citations refer to the manuscript available in the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive at the University of Southern California, currently the only accessible version of the play. However, the archived version is an early draft, not reflecting changes made over the course of rehearsing and performing the play, which appear in the final version in Jerry Douglas’s possession. While all textual citations are for the archived earlier version, this essay will also reference plot details that exist only in the final version of the script. [38] Kevin Winkler, “The Divine Mr. K.: Reclaiming My ‘Unruly’ Past with Bette Midler and the Baths,” Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater, ed. Robin Bernstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 69. [39] Although Douglas’s play expresses a very different perspective on gay identity and sexuality, he remembers finding Crowley’s play “brilliant” when we saw the original production. For a production history of the play and analysis of its complicated cultural impact, see James Wilson, “‘Who Does She Hope to Be?’: Celluloid Ghosts, Queer Utopias, and The Boys on Stage,” Matt Bell, ed., The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016). [40] J. Todd Ormsbee, “The Tragedy and Hope of Love Between Gay Men: The Boys in the Band and the Emotionality of Gay Love in the 1960s and 70s,” The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics, ed. Matt Bell (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 282. [41] Lyn Rosen, “Forum on Sadomasochism,” Lavender Culture, Revised Edition, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 88. [42] Sadly, on 25 May 1977, the Everard Baths was destroyed in a fire that killed nine people. Laurie Johnston, “9 Killed in Bath Fire Identified by Friends,” New York Times, 27 May 1977, 17. [43] For more on the “object-ification” of the Cowboy, see Matthew Tinkcom, “‘A Credit to the Homosexual’: The Boys in the Band and the Appearances of Queer Debt,” The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics, ed. Matt Bell (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 261-263. [44] Dusty was initially played by Dean Tait, a professional body builder who was also in Circle in the Water. Tait was featured in beefcake photo spreads promoting Tubstrip, and he would later appear in Jerry Douglas’s film Both Ways (1975) and the popular erotic musical revue Let My People Come on Broadway in 1976. [45] The production used a live cat on stage. Douglas recalls that when the production toured, “In every city we went to we got a different one, a baby kitten, and left the old cat behind.” [46] “New Plays: The Boys in the Band,” Time, 26 April 1968, 97. [47] The collapse occurred on 3 August 1973, at 5:10pm, when the play was not in performance, and most people were able to evacuate the building, used primarily as a welfare hotel, before it fell. Because the performance complex was on the east side of the structure, the theatres were not severely damaged, and the production’s cast and crew, after obtaining a court order, were allowed to rescue the set and props from the space. Newspapers reported the deaths of four people and the injury of a dozen more in the collapse. Murray Schumach, “Broadway Central Hotel Collapses,” New York Times, 4 August 1973, 1; Fred Ferretti, “Two More Bodies Found in Rubble,” New York Times, 11 August 1973, 23. [48] Lee Barton, “Tubstrip’s a Grand Hotel with Steam,” The Advocate, 20 June 1973, n.p. [49] Donald Vining, A Gay Diary: Volume Four, 1967-1975 (New York: The Pepys Press, 1983), 324-325. [50] Vito Russo, “Tubshit: A Parade of Tight Asses,” Gay, 18 June 1973, 14. [51] Chuck Thurston, “Staid Hotel Preparing For Gay Play,” Detroit Free Press, 24 March 1974, 8-D. [52] Lawrence DeVine, “Tubstrip: A Play for Posterity?” Detroit Free Press, 28 March 1974, 9-C. [53] Louise Lague, “It’s a Steam Bath, and the Gays Have It,” Washington Star-News, 5 February 1974, C-3. [54] Lou Robinson, “Review: Tubstrip [Transcript]” WRC-TV 4 (NBC), n.d. [55] Teddy Vaughn, Memo Magazine [typed advance copy, no title/date], collection of Jerry Douglas. [56] William B. Collins, “Tubstrip Made For Gay Audience,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 February 1974, 15. [57] Lague. [58] Vaughn. [59] Richard Christiansen “Tubstrip is Soggy,” Chicago Daily News, 10 April 1974, n.p. [60] David McCaughna, “Tubstrip Cashes in on Gay Mannerisms,” Toronto Citizen, 15-28 March 1974, 13. [61] Gregory Glover, “Tubstrip Sequel to Boys in the Band,” Toronto Sun, 8 March 1974, 24. [62] Jeanne Miller, “Gay Theatre that Draws Straight Voyeurs,” San Francisco Examiner, 16 August 1974, 29. [63] “Rub a Dub Dub, All Men in a Tubstrip,” UCLA Summer Bruin, 5 July 1974, 7. [64] Anitra Earle, “No Suicides in This Homosexual Play: The Porno Film Star of Tubstrip,” San Francisco Chronicle, 20 August 1974, 43. [65] Pola Del Vecchio, “Stepping Out,” Kalendar, 30 August 1974, 5. [66] Donald McLean, “Meet Calvin Culver,” Bay Area Reporter 4:17, n.p. Clipping, Jerry Douglas personal collection. [67] The goal of this contract, offered by the League of Broadway Theaters, was to bring plays from off-Broadway to Broadway, allowing lower production costs but also restricting capacity to 300-800 seats—not the full Broadway house. Industry commentators seem to have made no distinction over this contract, with both Variety and Otis Guernsey categorizing Tubstrip as a Broadway play. See Stewart W. Little, “The Lively Arts: Upward Mobility in the Theatre,” New York Magazine, 11 May 1970, 47. [68] Madd. “Review: Tubstrip,” Variety, 6 November 1974, 62. [69] William Glover, “Theater,” Associated Press, 1 November 1974, clipping, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. [70] Debbi Wasserman, “Review: Tubstrip,” Show Business, 7 November 1974, 6. [71] Most sources (including Theatre World, Otis Guernsey’s Best Plays of 1974-1975, the Internet Broadway Database, and the Playbill Vault) incorrectly state that the play ran between 22 and 25 performances, listing October 29 as the date of the first preview. However, advertisements and “Theater Directory” listings in the New York Times show that Tubstrip had its first preview on October 18, opened on October 31, and closed on November 17. The timeline created by the actor John Bruce Deaven (who also served as Equity Deputy for the production) corroborates these dates. [72] In 1975, Ken Gaston produced and took credit for writing the script of Hustlers, another play by “A. J. Kronengold,” which performed in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. Jerry Douglas had nothing to do with this production. David Richards, “The Producer, And Playwright, Is Hustling, Too,” Washington Star-News, 22 January 1975, C1/C3. [73] Terrence McNally, The Ritz and Other Plays (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1976), 6. [74] John Bruce Deaven, "History of Tubstrip," unpublished personal document, 1975, collection of Jerry Douglas. Footnotes About The Author(s) Jordan Schildcrout is Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance at Purchase College, SUNY. He is the author of Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater (University of Michigan Press), “Drama and the New Sexualities”(Oxford Handbook of American Drama), and “Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s boom” (JADT). His article “Envisioning Queer Liberation: The Performance of Communal Visibility in Doric Wilson’s Street Theater” will appear in Modern Drama (Spring 2018). 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 May Irwin American Musical Theater Musical Theatre Books New York's Yiddish Theater Chinese Looks Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project On Bow and Exit Music Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Unbound by John English / Tom Garner at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. Discrimination, body shaming & violence. This is ballet in 2024. But a group of defiant dancers, survivors of industry abuse, want to form a radical, diverse company that opens its doors to others who have also suffered abuse, and gives these talented, traumatized survivors a chance to fight back, on stage. They find a run-down studio, and Chase Johnsey, a gender-fluid dance insurgent, to direct them. But, they have no money, no reputation, and Chase has never directed before. The dancers are brave, but young and deeply fragile. They must confront their traumas and find belief if they are ever to retake the stage. It is a journey of pain, hope, and above all resistance -to fight for justice, change lives, and create groundbreaking, liberated ballet- one choreographed step at a time. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Unbound John English / Tom Garner At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 30, at 12:00 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country Spain Language Catalan, English Running Time 91 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film Discrimination, body shaming & violence. This is ballet in 2024. But a group of defiant dancers, survivors of industry abuse, want to form a radical, diverse company that opens its doors to others who have also suffered abuse, and gives these talented, traumatized survivors a chance to fight back, on stage. They find a run-down studio, and Chase Johnsey, a gender-fluid dance insurgent, to direct them. But, they have no money, no reputation, and Chase has never directed before. The dancers are brave, but young and deeply fragile. They must confront their traumas and find belief if they are ever to retake the stage. It is a journey of pain, hope, and above all resistance -to fight for justice, change lives, and create groundbreaking, liberated ballet- one choreographed step at a time. Director: John English, Tom Garner Script: John English Photography: Tom Garner Editing: John English, Tom Garner Sound: 114 Studio Production: Sara Gibbings Co-production: Troy TV / 3Cat About The Artist(s) John English John English is the co-founder of OTOXO Productions, an award winning production company, based in Barcelona. We create character focused, narrative driven docs to raise the sound of unheard voices & shed a light on unseen faces. He has created documentaries for broadcasters and platforms both in Spain & internationally, on channels & platforms such as The Guardian, TV3, El Pais, GuideDoc, BTV & ZOOMIN. Their films have picked up prizes in festivals across the globe. Also, through OTOXO’s unique ‘INto INdustry’ programme John heads up a team that give young, creative individuals a combination of rigorous training & professional filmmaking opportunities, & help them become industry professionals in their own right. John’s specific focus on the programme is in directing narrative and character development. Beyond directing, he is also a producer and story consultant, currently working with directors such as Carina Haouchine on her debut feature doc – Session Zero, and Priya Woods on her upcoming feature doc Still, Life, which has also been selected at DOCs Barcelona 2024, for the development pitch. Tom Garner Tom is the co-founder of OTOXO Productions, a production company based in Barcelona. Beyond directing, he is also the producer on a number of shorts, such as FLAMENCO IKIGAI with director Emanuel Massa, a winner at Halicarnassus film festival and RIDERS UNITING, with director Will Roberts, which featured in Huck Magazine. His feature documentary UNBOUND (2024) co-directed with John English is selected by DocsBarcelona International Documentary Film Festival. Get in touch with the artist(s) info@otoxoproductions.com and follow them on social media https://www.otoxoproductions.com/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

DeRon S. Williams Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. DeRon S. Williams By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches . Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer’s Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches is an exceptional addition to the field as it turns the spotlight on “Black/African ritual, processes, and methodologies to acting” (1). Rather than focusing on situating black performers in traditional acting methodologies, Luckett and Shaffer engage performance pedagogy that goes beyond the Euro-American canon through a series of ten essays, which provide a wide array of viewpoints on actor training grounded in Afrocentrism. They conclude with thoughtful commentary from notable practitioners who present insights on working with performers of color and/or performance texts/modes rooted in black culture. In the introduction, Luckett and Shaffer grapple with the origins of theatre and performance practices. They acknowledge that most U.S. acting programs operate from the perspective that theatre started with the Greeks; however, they point to evidence suggesting that many humans on the continent of Africa participated in theatrically driven rituals earlier. They then emphasize the book’s overall purpose, which is to: “1) honor and rightfully identify Blacks as central co-creators of acting and directing theory by filling the perceived void of Black acting theorists, 2) uplift, honor, and provide culturally relevant frameworks for Black people who are pursuing careers in acting, 3) provide diverse methodologies for actors and teachers of all races and cultures to utilize, and 4) provide diverse methodologies for actors and practitioners’ labor in social justice issues and activism” (2). Luckett and Shaffer subsequently chart the book’s overall structure of “Offerings” instead of chapters, as they feel “this term is more appropriate to our alignment with Black/African customs and culture, as the notion of giving is innately in the ‘fiber of our being’” (5). The first section of the book, “Methods of Social Activism,” concentrates on approaches that motivate societal change with and in largely black/African American communities with primary emphasis on women and at-risk/underserved youth. Luckett and Shaffer begin by sharing their experiences working with the Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble of Atlanta and the “Hendricks Method.” This approach manifests social activism and engages spirituality, devising, and hyper-ego, a concept that encourages fearlessness and “getting someone to believe they are ‘the shit’” (31). Offering two, authored by Cristal Chanelle Truscott, outlines “SoulWork,” which uses neo-spiritual or a cappella musicals as “an aesthetic tool for creating space and experience” (39). Individuals looking to establish ensembles or create communal performances would find Truscott’s approach highly useful, as it “shifts actors’ focus away from ‘me’ to ‘ours’ and rescues the audience relationship from ‘them’ to ‘all of us’” (39). Rhodessa Jones’s essay traces her work with the Medea Project, a teaching methodology that focuses on empowering incarcerated women of color. Through an arts-based approach to reducing recidivism, the Project “utilizes self-exploration techniques on an ensemble comprised of inmates, as well as community and professional actresses who stage material derived from the prisoners’ own stories” (51). Similarly, Lisa Biggs introduces readers to “Art Saves Lives,” an improvisational practice cemented in black feminism. Although she does not discuss processes or techniques, Biggs does highlight how the actress-playwright-teacher Rebecca Rice “practiced improvisation as sacred play to affirm Black women’s right to respect and to a future” (73). While the work of social activism is necessary, the offerings included in the second section, “Methods of Intervention,” target the core issue of most acting programs by emphasizing the necessity to locate plays in a cultural context in the rehearsal room. Justin Emeka’s essay is a real standout in the volume because it considers casting actors of color in classic white plays, concentrating heavily on the works of William Shakespeare. He lays out examples of how many people ignore race and its relation to the classics, and he contends that acknowledging race can augment audiences’ understandings of productions. Of all the essays in the volume, Tawnya Pettiford-Wates’s is the most enlightening, suggesting that traditional acting classrooms have alienated actors of color in their development and training. In recapping her personal training experience in Stanislavski, Chekhov, and Grotowski, Pettiford-Wates explains how this Eurocentric pedagogy has prepared her physical body but disenfranchised her spirit and soul as a black actor. For example, traditional analysis failed to connect her to the culturally steeped characters in for colored girls…. Considering this, she presents a series of useful exercises she calls Ritual Performance Drama “as an alternative methodology that directly addresses the specific needs of the black performing artist in studying the dramatic form and developing into self-actualized and empowered creative artists” (108). The work of Chinesha D. Sibley concentrates on Afrocentric approaches to directing new theatrical works where the playwright’s voice remains dominant while also honoring the interconnections between the playwright, actor, and director. She explains interconnectivity through the process of recalling culturally specific experiences and “embracing the physical and psychological traits of a people” (132) within the text and performance. “Methods of Cultural Plurality,” the final section of full essays, explores how individuals can be co-constructors of theatrical performances using techniques rooted in an Afrocentric perspective. Unlike most of the other offerings, Daniel Banks provides concrete exercises that readers can follow to develop stories and performances. Additionally, he examines Hip Hop as a globalized art form of social justice and provides a pedagogical framework through his work with the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative. Kadogo Mojo’s work is both an Afro-centric and trans-global directing methodology, linking the performance stylings of black Americans and the aboriginal people of Australia. The process formerly known as Kadogo Mojo combines “anthropology, dance, poetry, music, theatre, travel and cultural encounters” (169). Although Mojo’s essay is interesting, it simply chronicles her inspirational working modes. The section’s final offering authored by Kashi Johnson and Daphnie Sicre discusses the difficulties black students face on predominately white campuses and the ways in which they have cultivated the students’ “interest in creating an inclusive, productive pedagogical space” to develop performance techniques that “engage and empower Black students” (184). Like Banks, Johnson and Sicre bring together the traditions of Theatre of the Oppressed with the cultural aspects of Hip Hop theatre. Luckett and Shaffer conclude the book with short writings from distinguished black directors, including Tommie “Tonea” Stewart, Paul Carter Harrison, Tim Bond, Walter Dallas, Judyie Al-Bilali, Sheldon Epps, and Talvin Wilks. This unique group of practitioners offers insights on working with Afrocentric plays; personal experiences navigating the American theatre; and rituals, processes, and methods rooted in an African sensibility. An introduction to acting methodologies rooted in Afrocentrism, Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches samples multiple approaches and foregrounds a necessary pedagogical and theoretical framework for academics and practitioners. The inclusion of additional acting exercises would have made the book even more user-friendly within acting classrooms. Still, just like the prevalence of Eurocentric acting methods, the offerings in this book can—and should—be explored by individuals from all backgrounds and cultures, especially those marginalized groups such as Latinx people who have experienced similar structural oppressions in American theatre training. The text is ultimately an excellent resource to better enfranchise performers of color, particularly those who work at Predominantly White Institutions. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DERON S. WILLIAMS Eastern Connecticut State University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Kristyl D. Tift 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 It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Kristyl D. Tift By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF In “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926), W.E.B. Du Bois identifies what he called the “new stirrings” among young Black people of the time—“stirrings of the beginning of a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be, as though in this morning of group life we had awakened from some sleep that at once dimly mourns the past and dreams a splendid future.” 1 Du Bois’s valuation of joy, creativity, consciousness, and futurity echoes the creative vibrancy and urgency happening during the Harlem Renaissance. Believing in the potential of younger generations of Black folk to use Art to establish the humanity and brilliance of the “race,” Du Bois, here, expands his research as a sociologist of African American life and culture to activism. Manning Marable notes that, after publishing The Philadelphia Negro in 1899—a first-of-its-kind sociological study of Black Philadelphians living in the Seventh Ward between 1896 and 1897—Du Bois “was especially convinced that careful sociological measurement, combined with a proper cultural and historical understanding of a social group, could lead to the construction of a social agenda for reform.” 2 In the groundbreaking study, Du Bois determines the need for Black communal “reform” based on his observations of a large section of the population who had limited or no access to decent wages, jobs, food, housing, sanitary living conditions, and education. These bleak outcomes, which directly resulted from American slavery and the failed Reconstruction era, required interventions. In "The Talented Tenth" (1903), Du Bois proposed a solution: encourage the Black middle class to take responsibility for helping lower-class Blacks become upwardly mobile (through hiring Black labor, for example). He believed that a new generation of educated Black elites, a group he called The Talented Tenth, would lead the race to full civil rights. Du Bois imagined that 10% of African Americans who excelled academically, socially, economically, and artistically were the chosen ones whose collective intellectual contributions, cultural production, and leadership would function holistically as an armor of resistance to systemic racism in the U.S. Theoretically, the emergence and institutionalization of the “tenth” would help not only those less privileged to become liberated, but it would liberate the entire community. While this call to action was notable for its emphasis on the moral duty and obligation of the middle class, it ignored the alluring benefits and exclusionary politics of capitalism, which reinforced the very class hierarchies that Du Bois identified as obstacles to racial uplift in his early studies. As Marable writes, “The Talented Tenth theory was a strategy to win democracy for all Black Americans. The burden of struggle resided upon those of the race best prepared, educationally and economically, to lead that fight.” 3 The problem with this theory is that while the “burden” seems a light load to carry for those with class privilege, for racialized people the load is still quite heavy regardless of class, and the weight can breed self-righteousness, self-loathing, and resentment that only deepens intraracial divisions. The African American class conundrum is one that generations of playwrights have explored at length in the theatre, 4 including Richard Wesley, who, having studied under Owen Dodson at Howard University, began his professional career at New Lafayette Theatre in the early 1970s under the mentorship of Ed Bullins. A number of Wesley’s plays, including The Mighty Gents (1978) and The Talented Tenth (1989), document the promise and disillusionment of Black American dreams—not only because of White racism but, more remarkably, because of intraracial class breakdowns. His works magnify the elusive pleasures and lingering anxieties and regret often associated with performances of superiority and dominance. The Talented Tenth recognizes, as Du Bois himself eventually did, the inherent classist assumptions and practical limitations of Black elitism. In this essay, I am concerned with Du Bois’s shift from the individualized theory of the “tenth” to an institutional conceptualization of “Negro Art”. 5 Reading Wesley’s The Talented Tenth , set in the 1990s, I explore the playwright’s use of dreams and memories as reflections of and responses to Du Bois’s shifting ideas about what constitutes Black advocacy, activism, and excellence. 6 In The Talented Tenth , the curtain rises on a beach in Negril, Jamaica. Bernard, a man in his forties, stands off to the side as his wife, Pam, and their three friends, Marvin, Ron, and Rowena—all of whom are former Howard University classmates—relax in the sun. Bernard is daydreaming about his first job interview with Mr. Griggs, who is in his fifties and the owner of a radio station. The daydream, which is shown onstage, takes place in the 1960s. The dialogue begins easily, with the two connecting over a mutual acquaintance, before quickly shifting into more direct speech (similar to a grilling rather than an interview). Their exchange, thereafter, exemplifies the kind of miscommunication that can occur between those of differing generations; it also captures the tension of the nationwide racial and political upheaval of that turbulent time. Griggs—a World War II veteran-turned-businessman—has achieved success through hard work, whereas Bernard has only recently graduated from Howard and is at the start of his career in business. While Bernard aspires to Griggs’ level of success, the older man is grumpy and condescending with a temperament that suggests that whether or not the young man gets the job, achieving and maintaining a spot in the mythical “tenth” will not (and should not, according to Griggs) be easy. Griggs holds the keys to the metaphorical gate between Bernard and his first job, but it is important to note that, although respectful, Bernard is not docile (a fact that leads him and Griggs to disagree on the direction of the radio station in the years that follow). Bernard has an activist past, including participating in protests as a college student and embracing a pan-Africanist worldview, which was strengthened by his relationship with his then-girlfriend, Habiba. After graduation, the general expectation was for him to secure a “good” job and put his radicalism aside for the betterment of the race. By doing this, he sacrifices his dream for Du Bois’s dream, which, as Zachary R. Williams summarizes it, was for “college-educated blacks to become race men and women [and] lead the race to social equality.” 7 Bernard represents a new wave of young, educated Black people invested in individualism and capitalism. 8 To Griggs’ annoyance, the young man has his sights set on the fruits of his labor (i.e., “[making] lots of money” and spending it) rather than the labor necessary to make money that would serve the needs of the company and, proximally, the needs of the race. To Griggs, young people of Bernard’s generation have a “duty” and “responsibility” to suffer and struggle for the next generations, just as he has. He instructs: It’s the first seven generations after slavery that will suffer the most. They’re the ones who have nothing to look forward to except struggle. They’re the ones who have to bear the pain, make the sacrifices, and fight the battles that have to be fought and won. Your trouble will always come when you begin to think that you deserve a good time; when you begin to think the world is your oyster. You’re generation number six, Mr. Evans. Your grandchildren can have the good time. 9 Griggs articulates a logic and ethic not uncommon among his generation, for whom lifetimes of sacrifice have resulted in more freedoms for their children than they were afforded. This strategy is reminiscent of Robin D. G. Kelley’s “freedom dreaming,” 10 which is, essentially, imagining liberty and justice through a love for the collective that exists beyond the boundaries of what is possible realistically and politically. The discourse on Black freedom through acts of dreaming and speculation is not new in Black Studies, but scholars such as Jayna Brown, reading Frantz Fanon, have discussed such acts in the context of utopia. Brown defines Black utopia as “the moments when those of us untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress here on earth celebrate ourselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium.” 11 Embracing the present as a radical temporality, Brown writes, “In fact, I don’t think utopia needs hope at all. Hope yearns for a future. Instead, we dream in place, in situ, in medias res, in layers, in dimensional frequencies.” 12 It is within a dimensional frequency that nods toward the future but is situated in a past adjacent to the present that opposing Black male-centered utopic ideologies touch discursively in Bernard’s paradisaic dreamscape. Bernard and Griggs both have dreams rooted in economic success; however, Griggs’ dream is Blacker than it is green. Economics, for him, is a way to amass power that will inevitably advance Black people. Griggs is doggedly focused on racial uplift through ownership rather than what he reads as Bernard’s pursuit of economic gain for selfish reasons. This is a subtle yet important nuance: the men are similar, yet their generational positionalities leave them dreaming slightly different dreams, imagining slightly different realities, and pursuing those realities in slightly different ways. It is from this marginal difference that Griggs harshly scrutinizes Bernard. The tail end of the scene reveals Griggs’ paternalistic posturing for what it is: a performance meant to arouse obedience. The end of the scene is a reflective imagining, an annotation of sorts, in which Bernard tells Griggs that his words that day “frightened [him].” Griggs replies simply, “I know.” Then, Bernard admits, “I’ve been frightened ever since.” 13 The surrealism of this moment allows the two men to be honest, even vulnerable, with one another without being intimate or even present together. It is no coincidence that Bernard’s fear and Griggs’ intent are made evident in a daydream; it is a calmer frequency in which to tell the truth. Further, neither of them discusses affect or emotions in the realistic scenes between them that follow. Instead, those scenes are mostly centered on business discussions related to the radio station. As the scene shifts back to Bernard’s contemporary reality with his wife and friends on the beach, it is clear that he is at a crossroads directly shaped by his race, age, class, and gender. That first interview lingers in Bernard’s mind, and it is interesting that at a time and place when he should be relaxing and enjoying his money and leisure time, the memory of it haunts him. Bernard yearns for something missing or lost in his life—something reflective of the downside of assuming a class positionality “above” rather than “alongside” one’s people. Of the Bernards of the world who “now found themselves in their forties and successfully integrated into the American dream,” Wesley observes the material reality—the “spacious homes, the requisite expensive cars, overseas vacations, excellent pension packages, and political connections” 14 —that still leave them desiring something they relinquished to acquire the people, places, and things that keep them occupied, sedated, and blind to the needs of the collective. Wesley’s dramatic inquiry into what happened to the young activists of the 60s who shifted their talents in an alternative direction exposes a Talented Tenth whose roots in Black working-class communities were at best leggy. Reflecting on Du Bois’s idealistic dream of the “tenth” and his subsequent shift away from it, Wesley writes, “Realizing almost immediately how elitist this idea appeared, Du Bois abandoned it and never sought to promote it.” 15 This is a truth that, according to Joy James in Transcending the Talented Tenth (2013), is often underacknowledged. “Race memory,” James writes, “misleads as it fails to recall that the greatest promoter of black elite agency became, in time, its most severe critic.” 16 After the opening daydream ends, Wesley depicts this Du Boisian course correction through a sequence of stressful encounters that lead Bernard to a crisis point in his personal and professional lives. Bernard’s life has been an experiment in intraracial “double consciousness” which has manifested as class and color trouble. Understanding the complexities of double consciousness within the race, Wesley explores colorism in the love triangle between Bernard’s light-skinned wife, Pam, his dark-skinned former girlfriend, Habiba, and his dark-skinned mistress, Tanya. 17 Habiba is a memory that never materializes, yet she is very present. She represents a missed opportunity for Bernard to pursue a life and career path rooted in Black liberation and Black cultural practices of love and activism. He idealizes Habiba, lamenting what could have been had they not split up. Despite this, he applies principles of the Black Power Movement to his work at the radio station to positive effect. As Griggs’ partner, he does not have the power to make major decisions about the company’s direction, but he anticipates that his hard work over the years will lead Griggs to give him ownership of the company. Although it is never explicitly stated, ownership, to Bernard, is the consolation prize for carrying future generations on his shoulders. Griggs, however, intends to sell the company to a communications conglomerate called Pegasus International—a move which sparks frustration and resentment. Bernard believes this conglomerate will take advantage of his programming work in centering Black voices and music, which has, to this point, grown the station’s listenership. Although he has the option to continue as an employee, the buyout will likely disrupt the radio station's “controversial” aesthetic and other political elements that make it culturally Black. On top of this betrayal, his marriage to Pam and extramarital relationship with Tanya are crumbling under the weight of his ambition, apathy, and self-centeredness. Wesley’s play is Du Bois’s Talented Tenth theory in practice, and Bernard’s life is the foremost case study. The women in the play, especially Tanya and Pam, play supporting roles, representing Bernard’s desire and ambition. Wesley, highlighting their importance, gives them space to speak in monologues inserted between scenes or self-reflective moments within scenes; this is the only way their voices and perspectives are relayed without Bernard as their filter. When they speak, it becomes clear that they are successful, intelligent women defined by their proximity to a man and his dreams. Tanya, a journalist who graduated from Spelman College and Columbia University, grew up in a working-class family. While she fills the ever-present void of Habiba (in complexion only), it is clear by her incessant requests for Bernard to leave his wife that she is the anti-Habiba—she does not have the strength to leave him although she communicates a multitude of reasons why she should. Reading like Savannah in Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale , she considers herself to be a “woman of substance” rather than a “popular” woman (like Pam), which leads me to determine that Tanya is not fighting for Bernard, she is fighting against Pam—a placeholder for light-skinned women—who, in Tanya’s experience, have not had to be of substance to get the guy of their dreams. Patience, she believes, is the attribute that will make her the victor, overall; however, she does not factor in the other “other woman”—Habiba—as a potential obstacle. Pam, however, is well aware that Habiba (the memory of her) is both of their competition. Pam and Bernard’s marriage has always been more about optics than love. From a colorist perspective, she was the more pragmatic choice for a wife instead of a dark-skinned woman like Habiba or Tanya—a fact that Bernard never denies (because he cannot). Aesthetically, Pam exists in harmony with the quintessential picture of the African American family that he was sold; that is, the elitist imagining of Du Bois’s notion. In a conversation with Tanya, who is pressuring Bernard to decide between her and Pam, he reveals that his achievements—running a radio station, heading a household, being respected by his cadre of middle-class friends, and even having a loving girlfriend outside of his marriage—are unfulfilling. He admits, “Now, it’s all these years later and I’m scared and I’m angry because I want to change my life and do some things I’ve never had a chance to do. But, if I do I could hurt my wife and my children and everyone who depends on me, so I stay where I am and I dream. But I don’t dare act .” 18 Standing and dreaming alone while afraid is where we find Bernard at the beginning of the play and, although he appears in control, he remains in that state psychologically and emotionally. In this embodiment, he appears stuck in stillness on the sidelines as life moves around him; however, he has options. He can remain still or move forward, but he seems to be waiting for the right decision to occur to him or for someone else to make it for him. What is clear is that he is tired of gauging his choices by society’s metric. While Tanya’s concern is whether he loves her more than Pam, Bernard is on the precipice of making choices in his business and personal lives that put the security and respectability of those he is responsible for, even Tanya, at risk. As “talented” as he is, he is too human and too fallible to live up to unattainable standards. Thus, he stands and he dreams, evaluating his past in the present. The best decision eventually occurs to him. In fact, he divorces his wife and ends his relationship with Tanya. Some weight is lifted off of his shoulders, and he acts on his dreams by devising a plan to buy the radio station. In the final scene, parroting his interview with Griggs, Bernard interviews a “young man”—his son—“the seventh generation since slavery”—for a position at the station. The scene is similar to the first but, instead of completely reproducing the toxic dynamics between his younger self and Griggs, Bernard infuses hope in the conversation. Nearly verbatim, he repeats Griggs’ diatribe about generations, history, passivity, race, and struggle. As was his experience, the content of this monologue “scares” the young man. Then, Bernard follows up with a directive to dampen his son’s fear and help him take actionable steps forward—“Well, don’t be scared, young blood. Just be ready.” 19 This resolution is a full circle moment in which Bernard is now the empowered mentor; however, instead of playing Griggs’ role, he has taken the useful lessons he learned from him and adjusted them slightly, leaving room for a new generation to move. The Talented Tenth demonstrates how the theory that inspired it is handicapped by elitism and a lack of attention to the nuances of the intraracial politics that sometimes complicate Black American dreams. Be that as it may, a debt of gratitude is owed to W.E.B . Du Bois, the foremost Black intellectual of the twentieth century, for proposing an idea that has become a catalyst in dramatic narratives dating as far back as Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog (1938), Abram Hill's On Strivers Row (1939), and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959). It is difficult to imagine what the substance of Black Theatre would be without Du Bois’s polarizing concept. The Talented Tenth and contemporary plays that painstakingly scrutinize the inner workings and interpersonal impact of class on Black individuals and communities make clear that the discourse is as significant now as it was when Du Bois was most prolific. The Talented Tenth , as I read it, is more dream than theory. The century-old quandary of how best to cultivate and employ Black talent to elevate Black people is always already followed by unending ellipses that those of us within the collective, however privileged, must interpret and redefine as we progress between points along the margins of a surreal society…to the center…and back… References 1 W.E.B. Du Bois, Criteria of Negro Art (Crisis Publishing Company, 1926), 2. 2 Marable, Manning, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 26. 3 Emphasis mine. Marable, 51. 4 Dominique Morisseau’s Confederates (2022), Lynn Nottage’s Sweat (2017), Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop (2009), Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly (2008), Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman (2002), George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1986), Charlie L. Russell’s Five on the Black Hand Side (1973), Ed Bullins’s Clara’s Ole Man (1965), Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind (1955) are but a few plays featuring Black characters wrestling with intraracial class conflicts. 5 Du Bois proposed the “talented tenth” theory at the turn of the twentieth century (known as The Progressive Era) during which time social and political reform were on the rise, while his Negro Theatre concept was unveiled in The Crisis during the Harlem Renaissance. 6 The point of this essay, as in the play, is not to criticize Du Bois or his early notion, but to unpack a mindset in Black society that continues to hinder the racial progress that he and many other thought leaders since have only dreamed of. 7 Zachery R. Williams, In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926-1970, 1st ed (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 17. 8 In 2006, as a graduate student studying at The New School/Actors Studio Drama School, I published a passionate essay that evinced my concern about the state of Black Theatre in the hands of Generation X and cuspy Millennials like myself. What I observed was a desire by twentysomething artists of my generation to assimilate to White Theater standards rather than familiarizing themselves with, valuing, and performing essential plays in the Black theatrical canon. It is validating to read Wesley’s play and interview transcripts in which he discusses a similar social phenomenon among his generation. See Kristyl D. Tift, “Black Theatre in the Hands of Generation X” (Bronx: Black Masks, 2006). 9 Richard Wesley, The Richard Wesley Play Anthology ( Milwaukee: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books , 2015), 174. 10 See Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). 11 Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 1-2. 12 Jayna Brown, Black Utopias , 1. 13 Wesley, The Richard Wesley Play Anthology , 174. 14 Wesley, The Richard Wesley Play Anthology , 168-69. 15 Wesley, The Richard Wesley Play Anthology , 171-72. 16 Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth : Black Leaders and American Intellectuals (London: Routledge, 2013), 28: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315022383 . 17 For more on the function of colorism in The Talented Tenth ideology before and after Du Bois, see Ronald E. Hall’s “The Du Boisian Talented Tenth: Reviewing and Assessing Mulatto Colorism in the Post-Du Boisian Era” (78-95) in Journal of African American Studies 24, 1 (2020): https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-019-09457-3 . 18 Wesley, The Richard Wesley Play Anthology , 186. 19 Wesley, The Richard Wesley Play Anthology , 219. Footnotes About The Author(s) Kristyl D. Tift is a performing artist, writer, director, educator, and scholar. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema, Media Arts, and Theatre at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include African Diaspora theatre and film, queer-feminist performance, theatre for social change, and performance theory. Her essay “Making  Colors : A Black Queer Feminist Experiment in Solo Performance” is published in  Applied Theatre and Racial Justice: Care, Community, Change . An article in  Theatre History Studies  is forthcoming. Other publications include articles and book reviews in  the Black Theatre Review,   Frontiers ,  Theatre Journal,  and the  Journal of American Drama and Theatre . Tift’s book,  A Conditional Embrace: Black Queer Feminism in Performance , is in production with The Ohio State University Press. 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.