By Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson | Volume 4 of Nehad Selaiha's analysis of Egyptian Theatre focuses on cultural relationships. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Selected Essays: Cultural Encounters 1 and 2 Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson Download PDF Volume 4 and Volume 5 Nehad Selaiha’s (1945-2017) Egyptian Theatre series tries the answer the following questions: What happens to plays when presented in cultural contexts other than their own, to dramatic texts in translation, or when adapted to suit a different culture? How are they approached by directors and perceived by spectators? What expectations do audiences bring to the, or to visiting performances in alien languages? How are these expectations formed? Through what agencies? And how do they affect reception? Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Ryan Donovan Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Ryan Donovan By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF “We need a young girl who is—what shall we say—chubby/fat/big. But a healthy version of a fat girl, because she is dancing her ass off for two hours.”—Bernard Telsey, casting director [1] Introduction Casting director Craig Burns worked on Broadway’s Hairspray (2002) from its first workshops, and it remains his favorite production because of the opportunity to cast people who “weren’t normally considered for leads in a show, and now all of a sudden these girls are getting a chance because we need a fat girl. There was so much joy in that.” [2] Katrina Rose Dideriksen was one such woman given the chance to play Hairspray ’s Tracy Turnblad on Broadway and on tour. She remembered feeling excited to play Tracy because she “is the ingénue, she wins the guy, she saves the day . . . she’s funny and she’s lovable and all those things, but in this very real-girl way.” Dideriksen then noticed a “weight clause” in her contract: “It was really this underlying pinch to realize that subconsciously I was being told I was still wrong for it, that there was something I had to fix. . . I don’t think they realized how hurtful, and how anti- Hairspray it really was for them to be like, ‘Lose 20 pounds.’” [3] Apart from a few roles (including Tracy), fat women are almost never cast in roles beyond the comedic sidekick or best friend in commercial theatre. The casting of Broadway musicals reproduces aesthetic values from the dominant culture, especially the notion that thin bodies—ones that conform to these values—are superior to other bodies, especially fat ones. [4] The aesthetic values placed on bodies are gendered, especially relative to size. Author Roxane Gay explains, “most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society.” [5] Society informs fat women that they are unfeminine and undesirable, which in turn determines everything from how fat women are represented to how and where they work. In her memoir, Lindy West notes the material effects of these values, writing, “As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and—the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on—my ability to be loved.” [6] When a fat female actor walks into an audition, these sociocultural strictures delimit her presence and reception there. While all actors are often told they aren’t the “right fit” because of their appearance, fat women confront a double standard: one actor I interviewed was bluntly told, “You’re not fat enough to be our fat girl.” [7] For fat women, the inability of the industry to think inclusively about body size proves a major barrier to employment. Fat is typically hurled as an insult rather than claimed as an identity position in the United States. It is something seen as needing to be eliminated, which sociologists Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves argue is due to the “fashion-beauty complex,” in which “advertisements remind us that unwieldy, loose, and jiggly fat must be tamed. The taut body . . . then becomes a reflection of moral fortitude, perseverance, and bodily mastery.” [8] Advertising exhorts women to be the right kind of consumers—purchasing products that help one achieve thinness. The word fat itself can be discomfiting, and in order to neutralize stigma associated with the word, fat studies scholars have reclaimed and repurposed fat . [9] Fat studies scholar Marilyn Wann explains, In fat studies, there is respect for the political project of reclaiming the word fat , both as the preferred neutral adjective (i.e., short/tall, young/old, fat/thin) and also as a term of political identity. . . Seemingly well-meaning euphemisms like “heavy,” “plump,” “husky,” and so forth put a falsely positive spin on a negative view of fatness. [10] Casting notices are rife with euphemisms to avoid saying fat , admitting the stigmatization of fatness while aiming not to offend. Hairspray star Marissa Jaret Winokur notes, “People don’t want to say the word ‘fat.’” She kept a record of the words used to avoid describing her as fat when she was starring in the musical on Broadway; these included “‘chubby,’ ‘hefty,’ ‘dumpling-shaped,’ [and] ‘dimple-kneed.’” [11] The disconnected, tentative relationship between language and fat corporeality is thus reproduced in theatre from casting to reception. Casting necessarily includes processes of disqualification, yet the lack of opportunities for fat actors reveals that size-based discrimination remains so widespread on Broadway that it is accepted as natural and, crucially, neutral. By examining casting practices, this article combats what theatre scholar Brian Eugenio Herrera terms the “mythos of casting,” namely the discourse around casting practices masking “how an actor’s labor is (and is not) valued as a commodity.” [12] To extend Herrera’s formulation, I suggest that the mythos of casting also masks how the actor’s body becomes a commodity in the theatrical marketplace. In the closed economy of Broadway musicals, this mythos provides cover for the operation of ideologies espousing bodily conformity (e.g., the plethora of articles about “Broadway Bodies” on Playbill.com ). [13] Musicals celebrate performative excess while disciplining other kinds of excess: differences of ability, gender, race, size, and sexuality. This essay centers on the casting, production, and reception of Hairspray in order to demonstrate how stigma determines how fatness has been employed in Broadway musicals since the 1980s. The aesthetics and politics of casting Tracy Turnblad provide a history of body shame and questionable labor practices spanning from the early 2000s to today. Musicals embody how and where Broadway (and, by extension, U.S. society) expects fat women to sound, to move, to behave, and to labor; class, gender, race, and sexuality further impact these expectations. Fat Stigma in/and Casting Broadway Musicals Dreamgirls and Hairspray are the only hit Broadway musicals of the past fifty years where fatness is sometimes a prerequisite for playing the female lead. Hairspray (2002) was the first Broadway musical to star a fat woman since Jennifer Holliday starred as Effie White in Dreamgirls (1981). Bonnie Milligan’s casting as Princess Pamela in Head Over Heels (2018) is arguably the first Broadway musical to star a fat woman in a role where the character’s size is not mentioned in the libretto, and the role could have gone to a traditional ingenue-type instead. [14] Milligan explains how Head Over Heels differs from previous treatments of fat female characters in musicals: “This world celebrates her! And it’s not just her. It’s everyone on stage who calls her beautiful. That’s part of the intention.” [15] Jeff Whitty conceived the role expressly for Milligan, who played Pamela in every iteration of the musical on its way to Broadway. [16] Milligan’s casting and Pamela’s narrative reflect contemporary attitudes toward body positivity just as Dreamgirls and Hairspray represent then-contemporary stances toward fat women. These roles (Effie White, Tracy Turnblad, and Princess Pamela) are unique because they give fat actors the chance to play a full range of emotions beyond self-deprecation. Fat women in Broadway musicals are always considered in terms of their bodies and fitness in very specific ways; being considered plus-sized isn’t usually a plus for women on Broadway. Sometimes the stigma is overt: casting notices for the 2016 City Center Encores! production of The Golden Apple repeatedly stated, “We are not looking for heavy character actresses.” [17] Discrimination in casting and enforcement of bodily norms exists in all arenas of theatre from amateur to professional. Men do not face the same kinds of body scrutiny—Nathan Lane has regularly played leading roles where the guy gets the girl during the time span covered by this article, and The Book of Mormon has regularly cast fat men in the leading roles of Elder Cunningham following original star Josh Gad. John Waters hoped the musical adaptation of his film Hairspray would be a hit because “there will be high school productions, and finally the fat girl and the drag queen will get the starring parts.” [18] Part of Hairspray ’s power comes from the fact that Tracy is portrayed as feminine and desirable while also being fat and being okay with that. Hairspray ’s onstage narrative intersects with offstage narratives of casting its Broadway production, a process that often made a spectacle of young women hoping, like Tracy, for a big break. Hairspray exemplifies Broadway’s ambivalence toward casting nonconforming bodies. Even ostensibly fat-positive musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray became complicit in labor practices contributing to fat stigma. Stigma has been grounded in bodily difference since, as sociologist Erving Goffman explains, ancient Greeks coined the term “to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier.” [19] Stigma rests on a paradox of visibility, because certain bodies become invisible due to the very visible attributes that stigmatize them—fat people may be stared at but not seen, or viewed as having uncontrollable appetites. The social psychology of stigma indicates that “‘visibility’ and ‘controllability’ are the most important dimensions of stigma for the experience of both the stigmatizer and the stigmatized person.” [20] In other words, fat people are perceived to have shirked the mandate of personal responsibility that undergirds neoliberal capitalism. [21] Weight is seen through a moralistic lens equating fatness with failure; this perceived failure being the inability to control behaviors and appetites or to conform to dominant aesthetic body standards. As theatre and fat studies specialist Jennifer-Scott Mobley summarizes, “Fat people go against our collective social, political, and economic ethos.” [22] This is despite the fact that “more than two-thirds of American women [were] classified as overweight or obese.” [23] Despite vague and indeterminate meanings of “overweight” and “obese” (and their pathological implications), the vast majority of American women inhabit nonconforming bodies. The systemic, structural nature of the value placed on the minority of conforming bodies becomes further clarified by the data. U.S. culture attends to bodies centrally through weight-based discourse. Fatness, according to American studies scholar Amy Erdman Farrell, has historically been used to determine who fits where in society, in which venues one is allowed to participate, and what kind of labor one’s body performs. [24] Many of the roots of contemporary fat stigmatization can be traced to the nineteenth century and the growing industrialization and urbanization of America, which changed the kinds of bodies capital needed for labor. Fatness went from being a sign of wealth to a sign of excess, self-indulgence, laziness, moral failure, and lower-class status. [25] Conceptions of ideal bodies increasingly tilted toward thinness during the twentieth century, to the point that what once was considered average is now considered fat, and weight loss carries its own kind of cultural capital. The growing power of the fit body as a physical and moral standard marked fat as other despite its statistical prevalence. In the U.S. workforce, fat women today face an additional economic burden simply from being fat in a society restricting their earning power—being just thirteen pounds “overweight” reduces a woman’s annual earnings by an average of $9,000. [26] At the same time that fat women in the early twenty-first century are more economically disadvantaged, the U.S. economy relies upon consumer spending on diet, exercise, and weight loss products devoted to eliminating fat, and “spending money on becoming thin is the perfect solution for both neoliberal subjectivity and neoliberal capitalism more broadly.” [27] This is on top of the wage penalty for being a woman, placing fat women in a catch-22. Farrell explains that thinness then becomes “a strategy [employed] to mitigate against the identity of ‘female,’ which poses so many risks of discrimination and inferior status.” [28] According to fat studies scholar Kathleen LeBesco, “a fat person’s only shot at citizenship comes if he or she gratefully consumes the panoply of diet and fitness products made available by industry and government.” [29] Thus, Tracy Turnblad is simultaneously a good consumer (of beauty products) and a failed one (by not only being fat but celebrating it). A “Big Girl Now”: Performing Tracy Turnblad Tracy stands out in a sea of theatrical representation that clearly articulates the devaluation of fat people and reveals uncomfortable truths about what kinds of bodies are valued in the U.S., where the fat body is actually the most common kind of body. The tendency to view fat people as somehow less-than is revealed by the number of leading roles continually cast with conforming bodies, even when the script or character description does not mention weight. Broadway has not cast a fat Annie Oakley or Eliza Doolittle—even though there is nothing about these roles inherently requiring a specific body type; to do so would be to concede that fat women can play and experience the full range of representation readily available to thin people. Broadway musicals thus admit, through exclusion, which bodies are valued as they attend to the imperatives of neoliberal consumption. That Hairspray is named after a beauty product makes it almost the perfect commodity, save for its body positivity. Hairspray deliberately subverts the gap between representation and reality. Filmmaker John Waters openly wanted “to make sure that Tracy will be fat, not just plump. When was the last time you saw two fat girls as stars of a Broadway musical who also get the guy?” [30] Waters based his 1987 film on a local Baltimore television show from his youth, though he noted, “The one thing that was pure fiction in [ Hairspray ] was the idea that a fat girl could have gotten on that show. A fat girl never would have gotten on ‘The Buddy Deane Show.’ Even in segregated Baltimore, a black girl would have had more chance.” [31] For Waters, Hairspray ’s fairy tale aspect was precisely why it was empowering: “It’s about the teenage white girl who gets a black guy. The fat girl gets a straight guy, and her mother’s a man who sings a love song to another man.” [32] Apart from Waters, Hairspray ’s creative team embraced Tracy’s fatness but also employed humor undermining its fat-positive stance; the film includes numerous jokes about the appetites of its fat women. As Edna sings in the show’s finale, “You can’t stop my happiness/’Cause I like the way I am/And you just can’t stop my knife and fork/When I see a Christmas ham.” [33] While Hairspray works hard to be in on the jokes, it also subtly subverts the identities it means to celebrate by laughing not only with but sometimes at its characters. Hairspray ’s setting in 1960s Baltimore speaks to social change and body image as mediated on television. When Tracy’s mother, Edna, hears of Tracy’s desire to dance on the local television station’s The Corny Collins Show , she says, “They don’t put people like us on TV—Except to be laughed at.” [34] Tracy breaks the mold of fat girl as doormat, victim, or comic relief as she is the musical’s self-possessed, exuberant, romantic leading lady who can “shake and shimmy” with the best of them. The plot centers around her drive to dance on Corny Collins and win the love of its resident heartthrob, Link Larkin—this musical is about casting, too. She remains acutely aware of how her desires are viewed; in “I Can Hear the Bells,’” she sings, “Everybody says/That a girl who looks like me/Can’t win his love/Well, just wait and see.” [35] Tracy ends up winning a place on the show when Collins spots her dancing at her sophomore hop. The show’s tongue-in-cheek tone extends to social issues like segregation. Paralleling Tracy’s ambition to dance on television is her drive to racially integrate the Collins show. She inspires a protest to integrate the program and goes to prison as a result. Tracy ultimately wins Link’s love, makes a jailbreak, and is crowned “Miss Teenage Hairspray 1962” as the Collins show is racially integrated in the musical’s finale. Fat, in Hairspray , is both specific and universal; its creators explain, “Tenacious Tracy Turnblad, lovable as she is, is fat, and all of us, lovable as we are, are somehow, metaphorically, fat.” They describe Tracy’s fatness as a metaphor for being “skinny, clumsy, new in town, female, foreign, black, Jewish, gay, naïve, brainy, too short, too tall, overeager, shy, poor, left-handed, over-freckled, pyrokinetic (like Carrie ), scissor-handed (like Edward ), or musical-comedy-loving.” [36] Tracy never lets dominant cultural views of fatness stop her and does not view herself as inferior—a new narrative for a fat female character in a Broadway musical. Such supreme self-esteem was certainly not represented in Dreamgirls ’s narrative arc; Effie had to admit “I Am Changing” to find success in a thinner body. Tracy’s narrative arc “implodes the myth of the unlovable fat woman” (as Head Over Heels too would go on to do) at the same time that, according to social psychologist JuliaGrace Jester, “it gives unrealistic representations of the ease with which Tracy is both accepted by others and how she accepts herself.” [37] The show functions as a fantasy for the very real reasons Jester critiques it: its alternative world of empowerment and wish fulfillment sidesteps actions toward real fat acceptance. Hairspray instead creates its own myths in which struggle and injustice are resolved through song, black people and white people are assimilated into a community through dance, and all are linked through being consumers (of music, television, and beauty products). Tracy uses her consumption of hairspray to break the rules of what 1960s white girls are supposed to look like, teasing and spraying her hair into a bouffant, while challenging how she was prohibited from moving by dancing with the black kids. Casting Hairspray for Broadway presented challenges, beginning with choosing the language used in the casting breakdowns. Despite Waters’s comfort with fat , the casting breakdown for Tracy scrupulously avoided using it. Telsey Casting decided on “heavyset” instead: [TRACY TURNBLAD] Female, Caucasian, 5’3” or shorter, to play high school age. Must be heavyset. Outgoing, unstoppable, goodhearted with a vibrant, lovable, spirited personality. Loves to dance. Becomes a teen heroine. Strong pop belt singer and great mover. LEAD. [38] Burns explains that the word choices were made “because . . . you don’t want to offend anybody in a breakdown.” He went on to add that initially they knew “you need a fat girl. It’s like, ‘that’s the role’ . . . But it was definitely set up at the beginning, that on the breakdown, that we would always use ‘heavyset.’” [39] Size was of course only one element under consideration for potential Tracys. Broadway actor Kathy Deitch was brought in to audition for Tracy several times over a period of four years, never getting cast because she read as “too sophisticated” for the role. She remembers, “Just because I’m chubby, everyone assumed that I would be Tracy.” [40] Being the right body “type” alone is not enough, though it helps the actor get an audition. The height requirement noted in the breakdown further limited the applicant pool, in addition to the specific 1960s-inflected vocal style and dance ability required. Winokur played Tracy in all of Hairspray ’s readings before she was contracted to originate the role on Broadway. Telsey Casting launched a national casting search in Baltimore to find unknowns to play Tracy while Winokur was rehearsing the role for the final reading in New York. [41] Burns notes this was not, as was reported, about replacing Winokur before the opening, but rather was about finding understudies and future replacements: “We knew we were going to need to start finding these girls, so I think it was about starting early.” [42] Casting replacements effectively began before the musical even opened in New York. When the production held auditions in New York the month after its Broadway opening, hundreds of hopefuls showed up, including many who saw playing Tracy as their chance to break through. “The role is something that I can play, because I can never be Eponine in Les Misérables . I’ve struggled with this for a long time, because on stage it doesn’t matter what you look like, but what you weigh,” relates Tracy-hopeful Lisette Valentine. [43] Casting director Bethany Berg notes, “These girls are real people; they’re what most of America looks like, and we’re looking for those people that are happy and confident.” [44] Berg’s language acknowledges fat women as real people as well as explicitly nods to what actual American bodies look like—implicitly admitting the composition of the musical’s audience. However, even when acknowledging the progressive elements of casting a fat female lead, the press was still unable to resist weight- and size-related puns and metaphors. The title of the article referenced above, for example, is “Sizing Them Up.” Despite (or perhaps because of) Hairspray ’s fat positivity, the press felt licensed to write numerous feature stories commenting on the body of the actor playing Tracy in addition to emphasizing her diet and exercise routine. Fat became a punchline for headline writers: a typical headline was Variety ’s “‘Hairspray’s’ Full-Figured Tony Tally.” To a degree, the production itself encouraged this kind of winking treatment; its advertising tagline was “Broadway’s Big Fat Musical Comedy Hit.” A New York Times feature on Winokur repeatedly made the point that she was breaking “conventional wisdom” about how fat women should act and what they should wear: “Heavyset women are expected to wear their clothes long and loose-fitting. Ms. Winokur likes her skirts short and her T-shirts tight.” [45] Winokur noted the significance of her opportunity as Tracy, saying, “Here I am, the young character actress . . . I’m the lead this time.” [46] She was positioned as transgressive for doing things considered normal by thin women. It was not just the press who focused on the body of the actors playing Tracy though; the production team had its eyes on those bodies as well. Winning the Role and Weighing In Hairspray stands out for its celebration of size, and yet its costume design and contractual weight clauses undermined its fat-positivity. [47] The show promoted fat acceptance as it simultaneously mandated weigh-ins for cast members, a practice much more common in ballet companies. The irony is that Tracy is essentially a dance lead—the show’s structure bears this out, as she is not even given the traditional leading lady spots for her songs (Maybelle sings both the eleven o’clock number and the act one finale). Dideriksen, initially a standby Tracy, discovered at her first backstage weigh-in that she was not alone in having her weight monitored; the actress regularly playing Tracy was also contractually obligated to maintain a certain weight, whereas Dideriksen was told to lose 20 pounds. A member of the production’s wardrobe team would round the scale’s number up or down accordingly out of kindness. She remembers the weigh-ins as “sending us into panics” over whether their contracts would be terminated if the scale moved in the wrong direction, even though both actors wore fat suits. [48] Burns said the fat suits were not an issue as far as he knew during the casting process: It didn’t really come up, because I think everybody just knew . . . You look at the costumes and they just want a certain shape. A girl could be heavy, but they might need padding somewhere else to just give that Tracy-kind-of-shape that [the creative team] wanted. So, it really wasn’t something that we said, “Oh, you’re gonna need to be padded,” it just went with the territory, and girls just accepted that. [49] Whether the young women cast as Tracy knew before they signed the contract does not mitigate the complexity of feelings stirred by being padded and/or weighed, the ambivalence of the simultaneous burden and privilege of playing Tracy, or the fact that many understood this was their only shot to play a lead. The use of fat suits emblematizes this ambivalence because fat suits exacerbate the bind of inhabiting a fat body: being perceived as excess and lack, simultaneously too much and not enough. Yet using fat suits is more complicated than simply exercising artistic license. The fat suit itself reinforces stigma because it can be put on and taken off at will, an act unavailable to the fat person perceived as morally suspect for their inability to take off the weight. [50] At the same time, it is the literal embodiment of the myth that inside every fat person is a thin person who is somehow more “real.” Fat suits, and fat itself, then are seen as a performative embodiment. If the creative team and producers were so invested in maintaining the weight of the actors playing Tracy, then why bother with fat suits at all? LAS VEGAS, NV – FEBRUARY 15: Actress Katrina Rose Dideriksen (L) as the character Tracy Turnblad and actor Harvey Fierstein as the character Edna Turnblad perform during the opening night of the Broadway musical “Hairspray” at the Luxor Hotel & Casino February 15, 2006 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) One plausible reason why the production used padding is because Tracy’s physicality was so demanding. Tracy dances so intensely throughout the show that the creative team was afraid actors would lose too much weight. The New York Post reported, “Winokur has lost weight—enough to send a frantic theater crew bringing candy and chocolate shakes to her dressing room. As the chunky star of ‘Hairspray’ . . . [Winokur] needs to stay plump to play the Ricki Lake role.” [51] The article’s headline, “Worth the Weight,” raises the question of what is worth the weight—Winokur? The chocolate shakes and candy? Starring on Broadway? The seesaw of being told to maintain your fitness while being “fed”? As the production was trying to fatten up its leading lady, it was also pressuring her to exercise and increase her stamina. For the creative team, Tracy’s weight was always a concern during casting. Employment law scholar and fat activist Sandra Solovay details stereotypes concerning fat people’s employability: “They are not fit so they should not be in any position that requires strength, speed, stamina, or other significant physical demands.” [52] In the New York Times , “Jack O’Brien, the director of ‘Hairspray,’ said he never doubted that Ms. Winokur was right for the role, only whether she had the stamina for it. ‘Did she have the chops to do eight shows a week?’” [53] Winokur had previously appeared on Broadway in a revival of Grease and regularly performed eight shows a week without apparent issue. Concerns about stamina and ability significantly contribute to fat stigma in general. On Broadway they added pressure to an already-tough job. Hairspray was the first time many actors playing Tracy were asked to carry a show, let alone a Broadway production, and they had more than their weight to worry about. Winokur was bluntly informed during the show’s Seattle tryout that she was “carrying a ten and a half million dollar show.” [54] Keala Settle explained the pressure of playing Tracy: Truth be told, every Tracy had that [pressure]. They went through the same thing . . . Each of us got shot out of a cannon, expected to become this torch for their company, and for everybody around them, producers. That’s what it was. I can’t even describe what that feels like or how to even deal with it because I didn’t deal with it so great. But if I was asked to live it again, you bet . . . I would do it again. [55] Some candidates for Tracy were sent to “Tracy Camp,” a training program for actors whom the creative team determined needed more vetting before being offered a contract. [56] Dideriksen went to “Tracy Camp” with no promise of future employment. [57] Burns notes “Tracy Camp” was borne out of practical considerations to keep the various productions up and running smoothly, because it was a struggle to cast the role. He explains, “They had to be really special, so we found them all but it wasn’t like we had twenty people in our back pocket that we could go to . . . We definitely had to go out there and train and find the really special ones.” [58] Yet “Tracy Camp” was arguably as much about seeing whether the fat women’s bodies were fit enough as it was teaching the role. Dideriksen describes her perspective on the process: It was really this challenge of feeling they needed this extra preparation, also worrying bigger girls weren’t as coordinated . . . that’s what it seemed like, because we had this extra week of dance that was just dance rehearsal, and a lot of talk about getting our stamina up, and how to last . . . It’s a lot of dancing and singing at the same time, it would be a lot for anyone, but they were especially concerned that this was supposed to be a bigger girl on top of it. [59] Burns backs up Dideriksen’s assessment of the particular demands of this role: “I remember Jerry Mitchell saying what the girls would have to . . . be really good at cardio to dance the show, and he was like, ‘I need you to do 45 minutes on the bike and then you’ll have a milkshake.’” [60] Kathy Brier, Broadway’s first replacement Tracy, told Newsday , “It’s a weird kind of a thing. You’re supposed to be this chubby girl, and yet the show is so active you have to train to be an athlete.” [61] Tracy had to be fit and fat in order to perform the role, which are not contradictory demands despite popular misconceptions including those of the musical’s creative team. As much as getting cast as Tracy was an opportunity, it often came with a price once the contract was over. Dideriksen played Tracy on Broadway and opposite Harvey Fierstein in Las Vegas but details how after she left the show, “There was this stigma of still seeing me having Tracy on my resumé.” [62] No actor who played Tracy during Hairspray ’s nearly eight-and-a-half year Broadway run has since appeared in another leading role on Broadway. [63] Winokur herself has maintained her celebrity status by becoming associated with weight loss. She was a contestant on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and hosted a cable television weight loss competition show called Dance Your Ass Off . In 2009, she wrote a blog series for People magazine titled “Calling in Fat,” aimed at taking readers along on her “weight loss journey.” [64] Winokur’s notion that one could “call in fat” to work emphasizes the relationship of fat stigma to labor issues. The inability to be cast in leading roles after playing Tracy exists for those who played the role on Broadway as well as actors who have played the role in regional theatres. Personal trainer Geoff Hemingway regularly trains performers, including a client who played Tracy: “When she started she was like, ‘I just played Tracy Turnblad in this regional production of Hairspray . That was my dream role, and now I’ve done it and I don’t want to be fat anymore.’ Since coming in to Mark Fisher [Fitness], she’s shed about fifty pounds and is now being seen for ingénue roles.” [65] Tracy, of course, is an ingénue role, but her fat body prevents her from being seen as such. This anecdote underlines the internalization of fat stigma within the industry and its relation to actors’ legitimate concerns regarding employability. Broadway Cares? The lack of fat actors cast in leading roles belies Broadway’s vision of itself as a fully inclusive institution, and the use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses has perpetuated fat stigma. Stated simply, if you are fat, you will rarely be considered for a leading role in a Broadway musical because of how your body looks—being fat means being seen for fewer roles, which translates into less work. Ethnographer D. Soyini Madison exhorts us to remember that the stakes of representation are not merely about who is seen: “representation has consequences: how people are represented is how they are treated.” [66] Casting contains the possibility to alter these consequences and make an immediate, visible impact because it reveals which bodies are considered fit for Broadway. [67] Casting directors can bring diverse, nonconforming bodies into auditions, but they are still bound to the small army of decision makers comprised of the creative team and multiple producers. Power over what and who makes it to the stage remains in the hands of those controlling the money. Commercial theatre’s profit motive materially effects the lives of all actors, especially fat actors who will not be considered or seen for leading roles—the highest paying ones. When asked whether he had been able to cast anyone who played Tracy in another leading role, Burns demurred: “That’s a good question. . .There have been other opportunities, but I don’t know. I still think it’s definitely a type, and it’s harder to find roles that are right for these girls.” [68] Finding the right roles proved tough not just for the Broadway Tracys but also the stars of Hairspray ’s film and television adaptations, Nikki Blonksy and Maddie Baillio respectively, who have worked sporadically in featured roles since playing Tracy. What would happen if fat women were recognized as deserving of the full range of representation given to women with conforming bodies? It might look something like Head Over Heels . During the show’s brief run, Milligan tweeted, “We are serving amazing body positivity at @HOHmusical, where I get to play the most beautiful girl in the land, who has a love story, and nothing about my weight!!” [69] Audience members would wait for Milligan at the stage door to tell her what seeing her onstage meant to them. She explains, It’s been really lovely meeting so many women who are moved and say, “Thank you! You don’t know what it means to have a big girl up there being joyful and pretty and dancing.” I understand how important and beautiful it is because I never saw that, so I’m happy to oblige. I don’t think we talk enough about size diversity in casting. I very much want to be a template. [70] Unlike Dreamgirls and Hairspray , Head Over Heels struggled to find an audience and closed after just 188 performances. The presence of a show like Head Over Heels on Broadway might seem to precipitate casting practices becoming more inclusive, yet Broadway’s recent history indicates that, despite economic imperatives to return investors’ money, the financial success of inclusively cast, albeit conflictedly-so, musicals does not automatically beget more inclusivity. If we recognize the twenty-one-year gap between Dreamgirls and Hairspray and the sixteen-year gap from Hairspray to Head Over Heels , then we must confront the fact that money must not be the sole concern: Dreamgirls and Hairspray were both long-running, award-winning, financially lucrative successes that proved stories about fat women starring fat women are viable money-makers. While Head Over Heels was a financial flop, it nevertheless marks important progress in the representation of fat women on Broadway. The presence of only these three roles, along with the handful of supporting roles in musicals like Escape to Margaritaville (2017) and Waitress (2015), demonstrates how fat stigma operates on Broadway from conception to casting. LeBesco explains, “the stigma attached to being fat is a control mechanism which supports a power structure of one group of people over another.” [71] By not casting fat women outside of prescribed roles, Broadway musicals enforce a system of gendered bodily norms that police how all women act, consume, and labor in the U.S. A few months before Dreamgirls opened, Bennett described his view of that musical’s central conflict in three questions summing up the lens through which Broadway, and arguably US society itself, continues to understand representation: “[I]t’s about, are you marketable? Is it saleable? Will it make money?” [72] Despite the smash hit status of Dreamgirls and Hairspray and the progress made by Head Over Heels , Broadway continues to say no to most fat women. References [1] Ira J. Bilowit, “Hairspray,” Back Stage , January 31, 2003. [2] Craig Burns (casting director), in discussion with the author, September 2017. [3] Katrina Rose Dideriksen (actor), in discussion with the author, April 2017. [4] The framing of bodies as either conforming or non-conforming is drawn from Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), and Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves, Framing Fat: Competing Constructions in Contemporary Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013). [5] Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 13. [6] Lindy West, Shrill (New York: Hachette Books, 2016), 67-68. [7] Dideriksen, discussion. [8] Kwan and Graves, Framing Fat , 28-29. [9] The interdisciplinary field of fat studies’ beginnings can be traced to the 1980s, though it emerged from movements for fat acceptance that began in the 1960s and 1970s. By the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars were publishing fat studies monographs and collections and Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society was established in 2012. Marilyn Wann, foreword to The Fat Studies Reader , edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: NYU Press, 2009), x-xi. [10] Ibid., xii. [11] Joe Dziemianowicz, “Baby, You’re a Big Curl Now,” New York Daily News , August 14, 2002. [12] Brian Eugenio Herrera, “The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. 2 (Spring 2015), available at http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/the-best-actor-for-the-role-or-the-mythos-of-casting-in-american-popular-performance/. [13] A prime example of this kind of article is Richard Patterson, “The Secrets to Broadway Bodies: How “Theatrical Ninjas” Stay Trim, Toned, and Tight for 8 Shows a Week,” Playbill.com, January 31, 2015, http://www.playbill.com/article/the-secrets-to-broadway-bodies-how-performers-stay-trim-toned-and-tight-com-340312. [14] Dreamgirls , Head Over Heels , and It Shoulda Been You (2015) could be considered ensemble musicals as opposed to Hairspray , in which Tracy is very clearly the leading lady. While Jennifer Holliday won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical, Jennifer Hudson won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing the same role in the film adaptation of Dreamgirls . [15] Bonnie Milligan, interview by Holly Rosen Fink, Women and Hollywood (blog), September 25, 2018, https://womenandhollywood.com/bonnie-milligan-talks-representation-female-empowerment-in-broadways-head-over-heels/. [16] Raven Snook, “Big, Blonde and Beautiful in Her Broadway Debut,” TDF Stages (blog), July 24, 2018, http://bway.ly/4o61zu/#https://www.tdf.org/stages/article/1960/big-blonde-and-beautiful-in-her-broadway-debut. [17] Michael Gioia, “Heavy Character Actress Need Not Apply? Women Get Real on Casting,” Playbill , August 25, 2016, http://www.playbill.com/article/heavy-character-actresses-need-not-apply-women-get-real-on-casting. [18] John Waters, “Finally, Footlights on the Fat Girls,” New York Times , August 11, 2002. Head Over Heels complements Waters’ ideas about casting and LGBTQ+ representation: it featured the first trans-woman, Peppermint, in a Broadway musical in addition to the fact that Pamela is fat and comes out as a lesbian in the musical, replete with a kiss. [19] Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 1. [20] John F. Dovidio, Brenda Major, and Jennifer Crocker, “Stigma: Introduction and Overview,” in The Social Psychology of Stigma , edited by Todd F. Heatherton, Robert E. Kleck, Michelle R. Hebl, and Jay G. Hill (New York: The Guildford Press, 2000), 6. [21] See also Jennifer Crocker and Diane M. Quinn, “Social Stigma and the Self: Meanings, Situations, and Self-esteem,” in Ibid . , 153-183. [22] Jennifer-Scott Mobley, Female Bodies on the American Stage: Enter Fat Actress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 24. [23] Deborah A. Christel and Susan C. Dunn, “Average American women’s clothing size: comparing National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys (1988-2010) to ASTM International Misses & Women’s Plus Size Clothing,” International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education 10, no. 2 (2017), 129. [24] Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 18. [25] Laura Fraser, “The Inner Corset: A Brief History of Fat in the United States,” in The Fat Studies Reader , edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 12. [26] Jennifer Bennett Shinall, “Occupational Characteristics and the Obesity Wage Penalty,” Vanderbilt Law and Economics Research Paper 16-12 (2015), available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2379575. [27] Julie Guthman, “Neoliberalism and the Constitution of Contemporary Bodies,” in The Fat Studies Reader , 193. [28] Farrell, Fat Shame , 115. [29] LeBesco, Revolting Bodies , 57. [30] Patrick Pacheco, “Water’s ‘Hairspray’ Is Beginning to Gel,” Newsday , December 20, 2001. [31] Chris Jones, “Welcome to the ‘60s,” Chicago Tribune , January 18, 2004. [32] Mark O’Donnell, Thomas Meehan, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman, Hairspray: The Roots (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2003), 12. [33] Mark O’Donnell, Thomas Meehan, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman, Hairspray: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Hit Broadway Musical (New York: Applause, 2002), 123. [34] Ibid., 14. [35] Ibid., 24-25. [36] O’Donnell et al., Hairspray: The Roots , 5. [37] JuliaGrace Jester, “Placing Fat Women Center Stage” in The Fat Studies Reader , 250. [38] Craig Burns, email message to the author, September 2017. [39] Burns, discussion. [40] Kathy Deitch (actor), in discussion with the author, April 2017. [41] “Spotlight: Hairspray ,” Variety , April 21-27, 2003. [42] Burns, discussion. [43] Elena Malykhina, “Sizing Them Up,” New York Newsday , September 23, 2002. [44] Ibid. [45] Robin Pogrebin, “Big Hair and Personality to Match; For a Young Actress’s Career, A Bouffant Moment in ‘Hairspray,’” New York Times , August 21, 2002. [46] Ibid. [47] Dideriksen, discussion. [48] Ibid. [49] Ibid. [50] Fat suits have been widely used in contemporary theatre, notably in musicals like Dreamgirls but also in plays like Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig (2004) and Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale (2012). [51] Farrah Weinstein, “Worth the Weight,” New York Post , August 8, 2002. [52] Sandra Solovay, J.D., Tipping the Scales of Social Justice: Fighting Weight-Based Discrimination (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 160-161. [53] Robin Pogrebin, “Big Hair and Personality to Match; For a Young Actress’s Career, A Bouffant Moment in ‘Hairspray,’” New York Times , August 21, 2002. [54] O’Donnell et al., Hairspray: The Roots , 39. [55] “Keala Settle,” Theater People 31, podcast audio, February 8, 2015, https://www.buzzsprout.com/19639.rss. [56] Hairspray was one of the first musicals to groom potential cast members this way, followed by Billy Elliott (2008), Jersey Boys (2005), and Hamilton (2015), among others. [57] Dideriksen, discussion. [58] Burns, discussion. [59] Dideriksen, discussion. [60] Burns, discussion. [61] Kathy Brier, interview by Gordon Cox, Newsday (New York), September 28, 2003. [62] Dideriksen, discussion. [63] Two exceptions are Tracy understudies Shoshana Bean and Donna Vivino, who went on to play or understudy Elphaba in Wicked . [64] Staff, “Marissa Jaret Winokur: I Had to Call in Fat,” People , August 25, 2009, available at http://people.com/bodies/marissa-jaret-winokur-i-had-to-call-in-fat/. [65] Patterson, “The Secrets to Broadway Bodies.” [66] D. Soyini Madison , Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2012), 4. [67] Scholars have largely studied casting’s power dynamics by focusing on race and ethnicity. See Brandi Wilkins Catanese, The Problem of the Color[Blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Donatella Galella, “Being in ‘The Room Where it Happens’: Hamilton , Obama, and Nationalist Neoliberal Multicultural Inclusion,” Theatre Survey 59, no. 3 (2018): 363-385; Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Looking at Hamilton from Inside the Broadway Bubble,” in Historians on Hamilton : How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past , edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018); and Angela C. Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). [68] Burns, discussion. [69] Milligan, Bonnie, Twitter Post, September 6, 2018, 1:18 pm, https://twitter.com/beltingbonnie/status/1037752011335376896?s=11. [70] Snook, “Big, Blonde and Beautiful.” [71] LeBesco, Revolting Bodies , 63. [72] Michael Bennett, interview with John Gruen, After Dark , (unpublished manuscript, October 2, 1981), MGZMT 3-1038, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Footnotes About The Author(s) RYAN DONOVAN received his PhD in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research on casting and identity examines the inclusion of stigmatized and non-normative bodies in contemporary Broadway musicals. Ryan is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre and the special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre (13.1) on dance and musical theatre. He would like to thank everyone he interviewed for this research. ryan-donovan.com Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Tamara L. Smith Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 3 Visit Journal Homepage “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour Tamara L. Smith By Published on November 16, 2014 Download Article as PDF Tamara L. Smith/ In the wake of the attacks of September 11, Americans of Middle Eastern heritage experienced a sudden and dramatic change in how their ethnicities were perceived. As comedian and activist Dean Obeidallah explained, “On September 10, I went to bed white, and woke up Arab.”[1] Once comfortable in their American identities, they now had to contend with new cultural forces that configured them as dangerous outsiders. In the months and years that followed, the supposed existence of a so-called “Axis of Evil” of dangerous, anti-American regimes became the justification for expanding military operations abroad, while domestically it fed into a growing Orientalist sentiment that continues to configure Americans of Middle Eastern descent as potentially dangerous outsiders. In 2005, a group of United States comedians of Middle Eastern heritage adopted the alarmist moniker as a tongue-in-cheek title for their stand-up comedy performances. Part commiseration and part public relations, the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour served both as an expression of solidarity between Middle Eastern-Americans and as an act of cultural diplomacy, recasting Middle Eastern ethnic identities as familiar, patriotic, and safe. In this article, I look back to a 2006 performance by the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour in Santa Ana, California, including sets by tour members Ahmed Ahmed, Maz Jobrani, and Aron Kader as well as their guest, New York Arab-American Comedy Festival founder Dean Obeidallah. Capturing a moment in which the performers were still reeling from their abrupt expulsion from mainstream American identity, the comics used the intimacy of stand-up comedy, the fluidity of their identities, and their ability to address a dual audience to reinsert themselves into what it means to be “American” in a post 9/11 world. Their performance of liminality is particularly prominent in their use of accents, which they deployed at turns to emphasize their simultaneous access to Middle Eastern and American identity positions, and to disrupt the distinctions between them. By creating a feeling of cross-border intimacy between themselves and their non-Middle Eastern audiences, and by positioning themselves as a friendly and authoritative intermediary, the comics lay the groundwork for a humanizing familiarity to develop. Once this relationship was established, the comics deployed comic inversions and juxtapositions to defuse the dominant culture’s fears of violence and fanaticism and disrupt stereotypes, while at the same time configuring themselves and others who shared their ethnicities as safe, good-humored, and—perhaps most importantly—American. Aron Kader, Maz Jobrani, and Ahmed Ahmed first came together at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, where they began staging “Arabian Nights” in 2000.[2] In 2005 they began touring to other venues, and decided to change their name to the edgier “Axis of Evil.”[3] While in interviews they cite factual accuracy as the primary motive for the name change (Jobrani, who was born in Iran, is ethnically Persian rather than Arab) the choice of this provocative, topical name was inescapably a political statement that marked the group’s comedy as a reaction to the pervasive hostility towards people of Middle Eastern descent in the United States following the terrorist attacks of September 11. With their tour performances selling out, the comics put on a promotional performance and invited television producers to come see their work. The result was a partnership with Levity Productions to film a one hour special for Comedy Central. In 2006, Arab-American comic and activist Dean Obeidallah joined them in Santa Ana to film the performance, which aired on Comedy Central on 10 March 2007.[4] Although this performance was recorded and distributed both on air and on DVD, it nonetheless operates primarily as an archive of a live performance rather than as a film. Some of the techniques used to record the performance—the use of close-ups, for example—are undoubtedly filmic, but the show itself was one of a series that played out in real time before substantial live audiences. The arrangement of the space serves as a visual cue that the performance operated primarily as a live theatrical event. The OC Pavilion Theatre in Santa Ana, CA is regularly used as a live performance venue, and features a raked auditorium with fixed seating and a raised not-quite-proscenium stage. Furthermore, since the television special came into being only after the tour had become successful, the live audiences must have been the ones that the comics had in mind when they devised their sets. Most importantly, the presence of an audience is central to understanding how this performance operated. The spectators’ responses and apparent demographics, as well as how the comics addressed and referred to them during their sets were key elements in how the comics intervened in the perception of their ethnicities. The version of the show that was recorded for Comedy Central is divided into four sets, each of which is about fifteen minutes long and is performed by a single comedian. Emphasizing the increased scrutiny that people of Middle Eastern heritage have experienced since the attacks of 9/11, each of the comics begins his set by entering the stage through an airport-style metal detector, and engages in a brief skit with an ignorant and obnoxious TSA agent, played by African-American actor and comedian Loni Love. During each of their sets, the comics address the same basic question: what is it like to be an American of Middle Eastern heritage in a post-9/11 world. There is, consequently, considerable overlap in the content of the sets, as each comic offers his own take on several subjects, including terrorism, the absurdity of racial stereotypes, frustration with negative media portrayals of the Middle East and its people, and the ubiquity of racial profiling at airport security. While all of the sets present variations of the same general theme, each of the comics has a unique style and presents his set with a slightly different focus. Throughout the performance, race remains in the foreground as all of the comics self-identify by ethnicity, and each asks at least one group within the audience to do the same. Opening the show is Dean Obeidallah, a half-Arab/half-Italian from New Jersey who identifies primarily as Palestinian. Performing his set with a quiet geniality, Obeidallah’s focus is on encouraging his audience to think critically about race, racism, and the erosion of civil liberties. The second comic to perform is Egyptian-born Arab, Ahmed Ahmed. Ahmed’s comedy is more acerbic and cutting than Obeidallah’s, and he skewers the racism of the TSA and Hollywood (including his own complicity as an actor) with unflinching directness. Aron Kader performs the third set. The American-born son of a Palestinian father and white Mormon mother, Kader’s comedy focuses on his simultaneous access to, and discomfort with, the two sides of his ethnic identity. Closing out the show is Iranian Maz Jobrani. Performing with a warm and easy affect, Jobrabni is a master of the ridiculous. His high energy comedy often hinges on proposing an absurd scenario, and then acting it out to highlight its impossibility, a technique he applies with equal abandon whether imitating a terrorist who (having dialed the wrong number) accidentally tips him off to an attack, or children playing hide and seek with a young Osama bin Laden. Although the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour was unquestionably intended to entertain, the comics have also expressed the hope that their performance would serve a larger, more progressive purpose. In a March 2007 interview with the New York Times, the comics explained that they saw their work as an extension of a tradition of minority comedy in the United States, by which Jewish, black, and LGBT comedians used their craft to fight discrimination.[5] Elaborating on their desire to address negative attitudes towards Americans of Middle Eastern heritage, Obeidallah remarked that “There’s a sense of activism [in the show.] We want to show the talent and try to do something for positive coverage in the mainstream media.”[6] Indeed, the desire to foster understanding and counter negative stereotypes was a pervasive theme during the 2006 performance. During a period when the dominant image of Middle Eastern men was, as it continues to be, that of the terrorist—a role both Jobrani and Ahmed have played in order to make a living as actors—the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour was, as Jobrani explained “about putting out the positive and expressing that we can come together and laugh.”[7] This desire to “come together and laugh” echoes what sociologist Muchait Bilici argues is the central project of contemporary Muslim ethnic comedy: the desire “to bridge the divide that separates Muslims from the rest of American society by reaffirming both sides’ common humanity.”[8] While Bilici frames this process as a multilateral exchange (and, indeed the comics’ subsequent tours to the Middle East have made explicit efforts towards this kind of mutual understanding) this particular performance is focused on one side of the equation: rehabilitating the image of Muslim and ethnically Middle Eastern-Americans in the eyes of the wider US population. As Obeidallah later explained in a 2010 interview: Of course if all you see on TV is that Muslims are dusty dudes walking around with AK47’s in some kind of formation, that’s what you are going to think of Muslims. But, if you are given competing examples, like Muslims who are nice and fluffy adorable comedians running around the country, bowling with people, then I think that will change what you are going to think of Muslims.[9] The comics in this performance are working towards the expressed aim of communicating what it is to be Arab/Persian/Muslim in a way that is intelligible and accessible to the wider American population. It is the humanity of Middle Eastern-Americans that has been called into question and that needs to be reaffirmed; consequently, it is the wider US community whose perceptions the comics are out to change. This focus on changing outsider perceptions does not, however, mean comics are dismissive of those members of the audience who do share their ethnic background. To some extent, the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour is at least partly concerned with engendering a feeling of shared experience and common identity among its Middle Eastern-American audience members. The comics frequently address the audience in a way that presupposes a shared heritage. At the beginning of the show, for example, Dean Obeidallah introduces the performance by saying: “Let me ask: how many people are of Middle Eastern heritage here tonight? [Most of the audience cheers].” Similarly, Jobrani begins his set with a chant of “doo du doo doo IRAN!” that would be immediately intelligible primarily to people familiar with Iranian soccer matches. Later, he addresses his Arab audience members with the comment “We [Arabs and Persians] are very similar [. . . ] I get stupid questions, I know you do too.” Clearly differentiating between Middle Eastern insiders and the wider dominant USA culture, these moments do privilege Middle Eastern audience members. But while this type of insider reference may mark a portion of the audience as “outsiders,” it does not seek to exclude them. Instead, the comics in this performance make specific and deliberate attempts to reach out to those audience members who do not identify as Arab or Persian Americans, inviting them to view the border between their identities and the performers’ as permeable. The comics make their comedy accessible to a wider audience by frequently framing their insider comments with explanations for outsiders. Jobrani, for example, explains that “doo du doo doo IRAN!” is shouted at soccer games, and Ahmed clarifies that “haraam” means “against God,” explanations that would be unnecessary when addressing an audience comprised entirely of insiders. By granting those audience members who do not share their insider knowledge access to these references, the comics invite their understanding and, by extension, empathy. At the same time, the comics use these moments to establish their role as emissaries, performing both their status as an insider who can speak with authority on behalf of their group, and their willingness to share their knowledge with those outside it. When the portion of the audience that does share the comics’ heritage laughs at these references, they signal their agreement with the perspective that the comics express, lending further weight to their claims. In effect, by addressing multiple audiences simultaneously and by alternating between inside references and outreach, the comics reinscribe “Middle Eastern-American” as a cohesive community, while at the same time rebranding it as open and accessible to outsiders. As Ahmed puts it when addressing the white people in the audience, “welcome to our meeting.” Dean Obeidallah makes use of his position as emissary in a bit he performs part way through his set, mocking a list of offensive comments people have made about his ethnicity. Speaking conversationally, Obeidallah sets up the bit by emphasizing that the stories he is about to tell are true. He explains, “I think the best way to explain what it’s like to be Arab-American now is to share with you some of the comments people have said to me about my own heritage to my face. And I’ve actually written them down in this notebook.” Pulling a notepad from his pocket, Obeidallah provides physical evidence that the material he is about to deliver comes from his own lived experience. As he flips through the notepad, he further emphasizes this point: “But these are actual—I’m not exaggerating—these are actual comments that people have said when I tell them I’m Arab.” Framing his narrative as an explanation for presumably sympathetic non-Middle Eastern audience members, Obeidallah positions them as allies. By laughing at the racist comments other people have made, these audience members perform their acceptance of this role. These invitations extended to the wider population are even more effective because they take place in a performative context that depends on creating a sense of personal connection between audience and performer. Folklorist Ian Brodie describes this aspect of stand-up in his 2008 article, “Stand-up Comedy as Genre of Intimacy.” Brodie theorizes that stand-up comedy is “predicated on the illusion of intimacy” between audience and performer, an illusion it cultivates in two ways. First, the performance’s use of artificial amplification allows the performer to speak in a natural, conversational tone. Second, the performers incorporate personal statements and descriptions of their lived experiences into the comic narrative, typically framing these revelations as true.[10] In this respect, stand-up comedy is predisposed towards fostering an illusion that the audience has come to know the performer personally. According to Brodie, the result of this illusion of intimacy is that stand-up takes on the folkloric character of legend: it becomes a dialogic, interpersonal mode of communication in which one party communicates a worldview through a story told as true, and the other is expected to signal their agreement (through laughter, in the case of comedy).[11] In this construction, the seemingly intimate nature of the performance encourages the audience to empathise with the performer, to embrace their perspective and to perform their assent through laughter. Having emphasized that he is about to share a personal narrative, Obeidallah deploys his lived experience in a dialogic format that encourages the audience to perform their agreement with his perspective. “Oh, you’re Arab,” he begins. “Wow, I love hummus.” After a brief pause, he continues, often using facial expressions of pain or embarrassment to signal the effect that these comments have had on him. “‘Oh, you’re Arab. Oooh-kay.’ Nothing more. ‘Oh, you’re Arab. But you seem so nice.’” Implicit in his narrative is the argument that these views of his ethnicity are both pervasive and so blatantly false as to be worthy of ridicule. He pauses briefly between each example, signaling to the audience that he expects them to signal their agreement through laughter. The segment operates dialogically, and its success depends on Obeidallah’s ability to effectively address his dual audience. For those audience members who share the comic’s Middle Eastern heritage, it serves as an act of solidarity as well as a cathartic repudiation of the ignorance of the wider US population. At the same time, their presence and laughter serve to confirm to those outsiders present that Obeidallah’s narrative represents a collective truth. For those audience members who do not share his identity position, the segment serves to model the rejection of these microagressions. Much as Obeidallah appeals to his dual audience in order to engender empathy, Kader deploys a similar technique to undermine a pervasive fear of Middle Eastern hostility by demonstrating a shared sense of humor. As Bilici notes, “humor usually stands for humanity. If someone has a sense of humor, then he is just like us: likeable.”[12] Thus, content aside, the mere act of appearing in a comedy show as a Muslim or Middle Eastern-American is an act of ethnic/religious rebranding. Kader acknowledges as much early in his set when he jokes, Usually Arabs don’t come to a comedy show. . . . In the past, Arabs would come to a comedy show but they’d sit in the back in the dark and go [folds arms and assumes an Arab accent and a serious tone] “yeah, that was good. That was funny; I like that. . . . You can almost hear me laugh. . . . Anyone who thinks Arabs don’t have a sense of humor I will kill you and burn your flag. We have a very good sense of humor.” Performing the humorless Arab in the context of his own comedy show, Kader creates comic dissonance that highlights the distance between the humorless stereotype and his own humorous reality. By laughing at the joke, the Middle Eastern members of the audience perform the falseness of the stereotype en masse, amplifying the dissonance that Kader created and engaging in their own act of collective outreach. The subtext of this joke goes beyond suggesting that Middle Easterners are human because they can laugh; like many moments in the show, it directly confronts the dominant culture’s fears that people of Middle Eastern extraction are religiously fanatical and violent. The Arab that Kader performs does not merely fail to laugh; he threatens violence, saying he will “kill you and burn your flag.” In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler theorizes that most comedy stems from what he terms “an aggressive-defensive tendency.” That is to say, most comedy is an expression—however indirect or subtle—of a desire to either exert one’s superiority over, or to defend oneself from, something or someone deemed threatening. Illustrating this second type, Koestler explains that “one of the typical situations in which laughter occurs is the sudden cessation of danger, real or imagined.”[13] In this vein, much of the comedy of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour stems from invoking the fear that people from the Middle East are dangerous, and rebranding them as safe and likeable. This particular thrust of rebranding comedy is especially prominent in Jobrani’s lovable Persian character, which uses comic incongruity to defuse fears of Iranian hostility. Describing Persians as a group, Jobrani smiles, leans backwards, and repeatedly opens his arms in a welcoming gesture. Adopting a Persian accent, he explains “Iranians don’t even say we’re Iranian. We say we’re Persian. You know, it sounds nicer, friendlier . . . I am not dangerous; I am Persian. I am Persian, like the cat. Meow!” This bit is not without irony: underlying the lovable Persian character is the implication that Iran, as a country, actually is dangerous (Jobrani describes Iran’s “peaceful nuclear program,” for example, as “first we blow you up, then we hug you”). But while the humor depends on an acknowledgement of Iran’s danger as a state, it contrasts this against the outgoing affability of Persians as a people, and suggests resistance to the country’s aggressive international stance. Later, Jobrani frames the perception that people from the Middle East are violent as the product of selective representations in popular media. “Just once,” he laments, I wish they would show us doing something positive. Just once, right? . . . Show us doing something good, like, you know, like baking a cookie or something. Right? ‘Cause I’ve been to Iran; we have cookies. Just once I want CNN to be like “now we’re going to go to Mohammad in Iran.” They go to some guy who’s like [switches to Middle Eastern accent] “Hello, I’m Mohammad. And I’m just baking a cookie. I swear to God, no bombs, no flags, nothing. Back to you Bob.” Recasting the supposedly violent Iranian as a nice guy who likes to bake, Jobrani sheds light on the discriminatory incompleteness of media portrayals, inviting the audience to repudiate it through recognition and laughter. At the same time, his comedy allows for a comedic release of tension for both those who have been afraid of Middle Eastern violence, and those who have been burdened with the stereotype. Addressing both sides of his audience simultaneously, Jobrani momentarily brings together his Middle Eastern and non-Middle Eastern spectators by undermining the power of the fear that separates them. Jobrani’s use of accents in this bit serves to further emphasize the ease with which he can slip between identity positions, a strategy that is particularly common among comics of Middle Eastern heritage. As Bilici notes, “These cultural entrepreneurs claim knowledge of both worlds: ethnic and mainstream,” an intermediary position Bilici claims is “best illustrated in their ability to go back and forth between accented and normal speech.”[14] Occupying a liminal space between minority and majoritarian culture, Bilici explains, the Muslim comic “stands uneasily on the fault line, yet by standing there he becomes a sort of stitch that holds together the two sides of the cultural rift.”[15] While I would question Bilici’s designation of an American accent as “normal speech,” he makes the apt observation that the fluid transition between deliberately accented English and their own habitual North American speech patterns serves to mark the comic as a go between with access to two distinct cultural identities. This function of the comic’s fluid use of accents is particularly apparent in the work of Maz Jobrani. Early in his set, after first introducing himself as “the Iranian of the group” in an American accent, Jobrani slips into a Persian accent to chant “Doo du doo doo IRAN!” By transitioning smoothly between American and Persian accents, and by first introducing his Persian accent in the context of an expression of national pride—a soccer chant—Jobrani establishes his insider status in both groups: he is proud of his Persian heritage, but this identity is in no way incompatible with his identity as an American. Later in his set, Jobrani does an extended bit in which he performs and describes the difference between Persian and Arab accents. Where his soccer chant seemed to be directed primarily to those audience members who shared his ethnic identity (and who would, therefore, be more likely to recognize and appreciate the chant), his discussion of different Middle Eastern accents is directed to both Middle Eastern and Non-Middle Eastern Americans. For the former, his gentle mockery of Persian and Arab accents makes an appeal to familiarity, confirming a shared cultural knowledge between Jobrani and those audience members already acquainted with the accents in question and the differences between the two. For those audience members who are less familiar with the accents, Jobrani’s description serves a different purpose: it positions Jobrani as an inside informant who can provide his non-Middle Eastern audience with access to unfamiliar cultural groups. But while the comics’ use of Arab and Persian accents does often work to establish their simultaneous access to and knowledge of multiple groups, the choice to use an accent that reads as foreign can also serve to differentiate between their own American identities and characters who cannot as easily lay claim to insider status in the United States—the foreigner, the recent immigrant, and the terrorist. Obeidallah and Kader, for example, each transition into Middle Eastern accents when representing their foreign or immigrant relatives. Obeidallah uses a Palestinian accent to perform his father as an innocent and befuddled immigrant who does not understand American idioms. When his Jersey friends ask his father “‘Yo, Mr. Obeidallah! What’s goin’ on? How you doin’? What’s goin’ on,” Dean Obeidallah explains, his father would reply, “I don’t know what is going on! My wife tells me nothing. Dean, what is it? Are things going down? Please somebody tell me what it is.” Similarly, when the elder Obeidallah takes communion at his wife’s Catholic church, he remarks that the wafer “needs more salt. . . . Why it does not taste better, I do not get. Ok? You can’t have like a nacho flavor, or a baklava, something fun for everybody?” By gently mocking his father’s bewilderment and pairing it with a foreign accent, Obeidallah contrasts his father’s status as an immigrant and outsider with his own insider status as a native-born American. Kader’s accented performance of his America-hating cousin serves a similar purpose. Adopting a thick Arab accent, Kader embarks on a monologue depicting his Jordanian cousin who complains continuously about “you son of a bitch bastard United States,” but who embraces Burger King and Starbucks. By positioning himself in contrast to his foreign cousin, Kader establishes himself and other Americans of Middle Eastern heritage as Americans first and foremost. In the middle of his cousin’s rant about American imperialism and his hopes for the empire’s collapse, Kader explains, he interrupted and said “Listen, Fayed, if America goes down, we’re taking Snickers and Coke and Pepsi and Twix—you know we’re not leaving a McNugget behind.” Here, Kader makes his Americanness and allegiance to American cultural interests explicit. Although Kader is critical of the United States’ tendency to “dominate with products,” he is nonetheless defensive in the face of his foreign cousin’s anti-American diatribe. Like Kader’s representation of his cousin, Ahmed’s performance of Arab speech patterns serves to underscore his own Americanness as well as his allegiance to the USA in its interests abroad. He claims to love watching news reports from the Middle East because all Middle Eastern people always start each sentence with [clicks tongue] ehhhhhhhhhhhhh. [Clicks tongue] Ehhhhhhhhhhhh [continues for three seconds, then begins speaking in a heavy Arab accent], The damned United States of America, they come into our country and they bomb our, ehhhhhhhhh. . . . [switching to North American accent] Just finish the sentence, Mustafa! Performing the resident of a Middle Eastern country as a bumbling half-wit who can barely speak (rather than an educated polyglot searching for the right words in his second language), Ahmed distances Americans of Middle Eastern descent from foreign Arabs and Muslims on the receiving end of United States military action. Ahmed’s self-identification as Egyptian at the beginning of his set softens the representation by implying an element of self-mockery, but by performing the foreign Arab as heavily accented and blundering, Ahmed implies that he has more in common, linguistically and culturally, with the Americans doing the bombing than the intellectually inferior, and potentially enemy, Arab “Mustafa.” While the performances of foreign relatives are mitigated by the performer’s affection—however frustrated—for the character he portrays, Ahmed’s performance seems less forgiving. In contrast to Kader and Obeidallah whose mockery can be characterized as the familial teasing of a specific relative’s quirks, Ahmed’s representation is targeted at a broad foreign type. In this respect, his portrayal of the foreign “Mustafa” has more in common with the other performers’ enactment of the terrorist archetype, and risks reinforcing prejudices against Middle Easterners abroad. In this respect, the comics tread a dangerous line between defusing and merely displacing such prejudices in their performances of Middle Eastern terrorists. In the course of the hour long show, each of the performers evokes the specter of Middle Eastern terrorism in two ways: commenting on the effects that Middle Eastern terrorism has had on them as Americans of Middle Eastern descent; and presenting stylized representations of terrorist figures. When performing a terrorist character, the comic almost invariably signals the transition from his own persona to the character by switching to a thick Middle Eastern accent. Ahmed, for example, uses an Arab accent to portray a terrorist, somewhere in the Middle East, who shares his name. Jobrani uses an Iranian accent to depict a terrorist who, having dialed the wrong number, tips him off to an impending attack in a midnight phone call. In his critique of the Patriot Act, Obeidallah imitates an Arab terrorist seeking information from an American library. In a thick accent, he asks the imagined librarian: “Do you have a book on, how you say, waging a Jihad against the infidel dog?” This exaggerated performance serves a dual function. On one level, by enacting the caricature of the Muslim as America-hating Jihadist, Obeidallah exposes the inherent contradiction of the stereotype used to justify the Patriot Act’s erosion of intellectual freedoms: Muslims are configured both as perpetual foreigners who cannot fully integrate into the culture of the United States, and as sneaky infiltrators who could pass unnoticed if not for government surveillance. But although Obeidallah is critical of the stereotype as a whole, by juxtaposing his own New Jersey speech patterns with implicitly foreign accent and phrasing (“how you say...”), he also highlights the distance between foreign terrorists and native-born Americans of Middle Eastern heritage. In sum, Obeidallah both calls the stereotype into question as incongruous, and illustrates that—even if it were an accurate representation of someone—it does not represent him. Moments such as these in which the comics use foreign-sounding accents to differentiate between the American of Middle Eastern heritage and the foreign terrorist are troubling: at the same time that they make Arab and Persian-Americans seem less threatening by emphasizing their Americanness, they run the risk of reinforcing prejudices directed at foreigners. But while such moments may be problematic, the comics counterbalance them with segments in which they deliberately question and destabilize the Orientalist assumptions that “foreign” accents can evoke. Obeidallah, for example, openly challenges the audience’s perception of Middle Eastern speech patterns, explaining to them that, “you’ve been conditioned by the media to be afraid of people with accents. And I can show you; I can say the same thing with or without a Middle Eastern accent; it can change the whole meaning.” He proceeds to illustrate his point by repeating the line “Hey, wait ‘till Friday night: we’ve been planning this for months. People will be talking about this for years,” first with an American accent and subsequently with an Arab accent. As the audience laughs, he reproaches them “Scary right? It’s scary because, sadly, you’re all racists.” While other moments in the show might use accents to differentiate between the Middle Eastern foreigner and the Middle Eastern American, Obeidallah’s commentary on how these accents are received calls on the audience to re-examine their assumptions. Jobrani executes a similar disruption through his imitation of his ethnically East Indian wife. Following this impersonation—of which a key feature is a heavy Indian accent—he reverts to his natural speaking voice and reveals that “she doesn’t sound like that. She was born here.” This is a moment of disruptive finesse. From the beginning of this bit, he was open that he was performing a stereotype—differentiating between East Indians and American Indians, he clarifies that his wife is “the computer kind” and not “the casino kind”—an example of his usual technique of repeating stereotypes so brazenly that they seem shockingly absurd. But his subsequent revelation that his wife does not, in fact, have a foreign accent packs a subtle double punch. On one hand, it marks the preceding imitation as a fabrication, reiterating that the generalization that Indians are good with computers is suspect. At the same time, the revelation also addresses those in the audience to whom the heavy accent seemed natural, and destabilizes the assumption that this woman who identifies as East Indian is necessarily foreign. This moment in which he reveals that he has been performing a stereotype rather than a person destabilizes every racial enactment he engages in throughout the set—from his wife, to the racist white Texan, to the generic Middle Eastern terrorist, to the lovable Persian—as well as those enacted by his fellow comedians in the rest of the show. In their 2006 performance in Santa Ana California, the comics of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour used their liminal positions and the intimacy of stand-up comedy to combat prejudice and create positive representations of people of Middle Eastern heritage in the United States. In their subsequent work, they have broadened their diplomatic mission, using the same techniques to foster mutual understanding between residents of both regions. In 2007, Jobrani, Ahmed, and Kader took the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour to the Middle East, performing twenty-seven shows in five countries. In the years since the tour disbanded, all of the comics have continued various acts of political and cultural outreach, both in the United States and abroad. In 2009 Ahmed founded Cross-Cultural Productions, with the expressed purpose of using comedy to create cross-cultural dialogue and understanding. For the company’s inaugural project, eleven American comedians—including Ahmed and Jobrani—went on a tour of the Middle East, a diplomatic project they chronicled in the 2010 film Just Like Us.[16] In 2012, Obeidallah and Kader also toured in the Middle East. Like Ahmed and Jobrani, their recent work has been characterized by a shift towards reciprocity. As Daily News Egypt reported when discussing Kader and Obeidallah’s visit to Egypt, “Building bridges is a two-way street. While these comedians are challenging the status quo of Middle Eastern misconceptions in America, they are also winning hearts and minds in the Middle East.”[17] Throughout this work, their dual identities as Middle Eastern-Americans have allowed them to serve as intermediaries. As Kader notes, “in America I feel obligated to inform an audience about the Middle East and there I am an American with an obligation to describe what Americans are feeling.”[18] In this sense, their work continues to depend on their liminal identities, and their ability to cross between a dominant culture and a feared Other through their simultaneous status as insider and outsider. This shift in the work of these comics is in keeping with changes in how United States audiences perceive the Middle East. In the years since they performed in Santa Ana, the political landscape has shifted somewhat, allowing a more nuanced popular view of the Middle East to emerge. Osama Bin Laden is dead. While the region remains unstable, the United States has withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. Hawkish representations of the terrorist threat, though still present, have consequently become less urgent and less monolithic in US media. At the same time, internal conflicts within Middle Eastern countries have changed how people within the United States see the citizens of those countries. Uprisings such as the protests following the disputed 2009 elections in Iran, the Egyptian revolution of 2011, and the ongoing civil war and humanitarian crisis in Syria have allowed a more nuanced image of their populations to emerge: although images of people in the Middle East as America-hating terrorists have by no means disappeared, they are now mitigated by narratives of the people of that region as human beings who can suffer and resist, and with whom dialogue is possible and desirable. In this sense, the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour stands as both a record of its historical moment, and as a starting point for the comedians’ future acts of cultural diplomacy. By destabilizing the border between Middle Eastern-American and broader USA identities, and by positioning themselves as emissaries who could bring the two groups together, the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour sought to improve perceptions of a mistrusted ethnic group through strategies that extend well beyond presenting positive images. This is not to say that the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour was entirely unproblematic: at times, it ran the risk of displacing problematic stereotypes onto a more distant foreign Other rather than disrupting them, and the comics’ insistence on their own patriotism had the potential to lend unintended support to the same national hegemony their comedy critiqued. Despite these pitfalls, however, the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour stands as an example of how stand-up comedy can be used as a response to prejudice, and points to its potential as a humanizing expression of multi-ethnic connectivity. Tamara Smith holds a PhD in Theatre History and Criticism from the University of Texas at Austin. An independent scholar whose research focuses on expressions of identity in popular performance, she has presented at SETC, MATC, ASTR and ATHE, and has published in JADT and Ecumenica. She currently lives in Halifax, Canada. [1] Maz Jobrani, et al., The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, directed by Michael Simon (Los Angeles, CA: Levity Entertainment Group, 2008), DVD. [2] Felicia R. Lee, “Comedians as Activists, Challenging Prejudice,” New York Times (via Maz Jobrani's Press Kit), 10 March 2007, B7. [3] Paul McLoughlin, “Home-Grown Comedy,” in Y: Pulse of the New Generation, 20 April 2010, 27. [4] Betsy Rothstein, “Laughing with the Axis of Evil,” The Hill (via Maz Jobrani's Press Kit). 2007;Lee, “Comedians as Activists,” B7. [5] Qtd. in Lee, “Comedians as Activists,” B7. [6] Qtd. in ibid. [7] Jobrani et al., “The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour.” [8] Mucahit Bilici, “Muslim Ethnic Comedy: Inversions of Islamophobia,” in Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend, ed. Andrew Shyrock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 196. [9] Natasha Baker. “The Muslims are Coming! U.S. Comedy Duo Combats Islamophobia.” Interview with Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah. Al Arabiya, 17 September 2013. [10] Ian Brodie, “Stand-up Comedy as a Genre of Intimacy,” Ethnologies 30, no. 2 (2008): 170. [11] Ibid., 162. [12] Bilici, “Muslim Ethnic Comedy,” 195. [13] Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Arkana, 1989), 54. [14] Bilici, “Muslim Ethnic Comedy,” 196. [15] Ibid. [16] Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada,“My Name is Ahmed Ahmed, and I am Just Like You.” Interview with Ahmed Ahmed, Magazine Intercultures, Centre for Intercultural Learning, http://www.international.gc.ca/cfsi-icse/cil-cai/magazine/v07n02/1-3-eng.asp (accessed 10 March 2014). [17] Sadia Ashraf. “Mideastern US Comedians Combat Politics with Humor,” Daily News Egypt, 9 April 2012, 3. [18] Ibid. “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with "The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour" by Tamara L. Smith ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 3 (Fall 2014) ©2014 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Table of Contents: Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre by Karen Bowdre History is Distance: Metaphor, Meaning, and Performance in Serenade/The Proposition by Ariel Nereson Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Histories, Futures, and Queer Lives by Vanessa Campagna “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with "The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour" by Tamara L. Smith www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2014 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre History is Distance: Metaphor, Meaning, and Performance in Serenade/The Proposition Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Histories, Futures, and Queer Lives “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Marvin Carlson, Safi Mahfouz, Robert Myers, Nada Saab | This collection contains four full-length works by Sa‘dallah Wannous, available in English for the first time. < 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 Four Plays from Syria: Sa‘dallah Wannous Marvin Carlson, Safi Mahfouz, Robert Myers, Nada Saab Download PDF Sa‘dallah Wannous, generally considered the leading Syrian dramatist of the twentieth century, was selected in 1996 by UNESCO and the International Institute of Theatre as the first Arab playwright to deliver the keynote speech on International Theatre Day. This collection contains four full-length works, available in English for the first time: Rituals of Signs and Transformations, The Evening Party for the Fifth of June, The Adventure of the Mamluk Jaber’s Head, and The Drunken Days. Together they represent almost thirty years of Wannous’s remarkable career, and indicate the range of his political, social, personal, and metatheatrical contributions to modern drama. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Alisa Zhulina Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov Alisa Zhulina By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Figure 1: Catherine Slade as Lolita in Lolita in the Garden. Courtesy of The Cuban Theater Digital Archive. “She is temperamental, changeable and unpredictable, and though she retains the limpidity of childhood, she has also preserved its mystery.” —Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome. “It’s not my fault.” — Alizée, “Moi…Lolita.” (1) Introduction On Halloween night in 1958, Vladimir Nabokov opened his front door to discover a schoolgirl trick-or-treating as Lolita.(2) Costumed by her parents, the nine-year-old was holding a tennis racket and a sign that read L-O-L-I-T-A.(3) Nabokov was horrified. Prior to granting Stanley Kubrick the rights to a film adaptation, Nabokov insisted: “It was perfectly all right for me to imagine a twelve-year-old Lolita. She existed only in my head. But to make a real twelve-year-old play such a part would be sinful and immoral, and I would never consent to it.”(4) Cast in the titular role at fourteen, Sue Lyon was fifteen when the film premiered in New York in 1962—still too young to be admitted to the theatre to watch herself on screen. Age was not Nabokov’s only concern. He also worried about how an actor would represent his heroine in performance. After all, popular culture had rendered his Lolita unrecognizable. The figure of the underage siren did not originate with the controversial novel.(5) Yet Lolita gave that myth its most enchanting and enduring name, inspiring several plays, a musical, a ballet, an opera, two films, and countless fashion trends that have little in common with the girl at the heart of the book— “beloved, irretrievable Dolly."(6) Despite Nabokov’s “antitheatrical prejudice,” it is in the theatre that some of the most incisive and moving responses to Nabokov’s novel can be found.(7) This article explores María Irene Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden (1977) and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1997) as dramatic works that challenge the Lolita myth of popular culture and represent girlhood as a tumultuous process of becoming an autonomous agent who embraces youthful desire and resists capitalist and patriarchal objectification. First, I will examine the cultural stereotype of Lolita, which is an amalgam of the fantasies of Humbert Humbert—the seductive narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita —and the distortions of popular culture. Then, I will show why Fornés and Vogel were fascinated by Nabokov’s novel, particularly its theatricality, and how they respond to Lolita and its afterlife by creating adolescent protagonists who are independent, courageous, with minds of their own. To fully appreciate Fornés’s and Vogel’s achievements in this area, it is important to spend some time with Nabokov’s novel and its ideas about theatre and acting. In a way, Fornés and Vogel were able to create their feminist versions of the teenage girl because they were attentive readers of Nabokov’s Lolita . While borrowing many elements of the novel, they amplified the voice that Nabokov silenced. The Challenges of Adapting Lolita to the Stage Nabokov distrusted theatre and embodied performance. Having written several plays, he preferred drama to a “performance-centered” model of theatre, which he associated with the loss of authorial control.(8) Lolita, My Love (1971)—the ill-fated musical by John Barry and Alan Jay Lerner—and Edward Albee’s Lolita (1981) were both excruciating flops. These stage versions attempt to adapt a novel that purposefully silences its heroine, so they end up with a two-dimensional Lolita, whose main dramatic purpose is to be the object of Humbert’s aesthetic appreciation and “foul lust.”(9) Even Nabokov’s own screenplay, which Kubrick could not use because it was “much too unwieldy” and would have taken “seven hours to run,” does not give us a deeper look into the young girl’s mind or character, though it does lift up some of her sass and wit, which the novel only hints at.(10) It is tempting to conclude then that Lolita is simply a book that resists theatrical adaptation. Nabokov has almost nothing positive to say about the art of theatre in Lolita , lumping it together with cinema and associating both with deceit, vulgar commercialism, and sexual exploitation. Clare Quilty, the “clearly guilty” character, for example, is both a hack playwright and pornographer. He first lures Dolly by casting her in his play The Enchanted Hunters and then tries to persuade her to perform in his blue films at Duk Duk Ranch. Despite Nabokov’s mistrust of mimetic theatre, theatre also figures as a space for self-determination and embodied knowledge in Lolita —his adolescent protagonist begins to develop her agency, voice, and defiance of Humbert while performing in theatre at school. Representing Girlhood in the Theatre While girlhood studies have evolved rapidly since the early 1990s, especially through their intersection with performance studies, little attention has been paid to the role that the Lolita myth has played in how girls perform their identities.(11) Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden and Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive are two salient examples of plays inspired by Lolita that spotlight the political and social agency of their female protagonists. While Nabokov’s concern about a real child embodying his female protagonist led him to draw a line between his novel and any kind of adaptation or riff on it in other media, Fornés and Vogel addressed their relationship with visual media head-on by carefully thinking through settings and stagings. In contrast to film, where the camera’s unforgiving demand for realism and close-ups motivates directors to cast underage actors in the role of Lolita, theatre can make do with actors of legal age who can play young. (12) Blanche Baker was twenty-five when Albee’s Lolita opened in New York in 1981, and Caitlin Cohn in her early twenties, when the York Theatre Company debuted a reworked version of the musical Lolita, My Love in New York in 2019.(13) Both performers appeared teen-like on stage. Neither of these conventional adaptations, however, made use of the recent trend that J. Ellen Gainor identifies in her incisive reassessment of Clare Barron’s Dance Nation (2018), namely of adult actors representing adolescence “even as they never try to mask their adulthood.”(14) According to Gainor, this “(re-)enactment of, yet also a distanced perspective on, adolescence may indicate that some broader cultural forces are at play—that we are in a moment of both retrospection and interrogation around girlhood, womanhood, and the relation between them."(15) Indeed, this cultural investigation into the relationship between girlhood and womanhood began during the postwar years (more on this later). Because Nabokov was attached to the idea of medium specificity and saw both theatrical and film adaptations of Lolita in the same light (namely, that they were art works in their own rights, far removed from his novel), he did not recognize the specific temporal potential of theatre to explore female adolescence. In the theatre, we can experience what Matthew Wagner calls “the weighting of the present with the past and the future.”(16) For example, Vogel created the role of Li’l Bit “as a character who is forty-something” who goes back in time to make sense of everything that has happened to her.(17) Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden is a children’s play and the titular role can be performed either by an adult or a child. Catherine Slade and Judy Vargas were double cast. In the production photos, Slade, who was in her twenties, appears more adultlike, while Vargas looks like a child (fig. 1 and fig. 2). If, as Adele Senior argues, “the appearance of children” in performance as “natal, biological and relational beings…demand ethical attention,” then this double-casting reveals Fornés’s awareness of the conditions of a child actor’s labor.(18) The burden of the play’s run does not fall on the shoulders of one child actor. By the time Fornés and Vogel sat down to write their plays, hurricane Lolita had already passed through the globe. Parents had stopped naming their daughters Lolita, so notorious had the novel become, and, in 1959, the citizens of Lolita, Texas, even floated the idea of changing their town’s name. Fornés and Vogel understood that they were dealing not just with Nabokov’s Lolita but with heavily mediatized versions of it (including abysmal attempts at putting the story onto the stage), and so they critically engaged with those transformations. Fornés had started to direct all of the premieres of her plays after 1973, and we can gather a lot of information about the production of Lolita in the Garden from its photos and unpublished script, even though a video recording is not available in the public domain. And, while there have been numerous productions of How I Learned to Drive , including a Broadway premiere in 2022, few directors have followed Vogel’s crucial stage directions that explore the relationship between theatre and other media. In fact, the central scene of How I Learned to Drive presents Vogel’s incisive commentary on the relationship between theatre and photography. It is important to note that Lolita in the Garden and How I Learned to Drive are not adaptations of Lolita in Linda Hutcheon’s definition of the term, namely they do not engage in “an extended intertextual engagement” with Nabokov’s novel.(19) Rather, featuring their own distinct characters and plots, these works respond to Lolita on a deeper level than more conventional adaptations precisely because they do not have to worry about fidelity to the original’s storyline. Each of these plays can be compared to a contrafact , a jazz composition consisting of an original melody superimposed on a recognizable harmonic structure or standard tune.(20) Suzan-Lori Parks once described her Red Letter plays ( In the Blood and Fucking A ) as contrafacts of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter : “Like a contrafact, if you know jazz. You take the chords, and you write your own melody.”(21) While Dolly’s voice is nearly absent from Nabokov’s Lolita , in the plays of Fornés and Vogel, the voice and agency of a young girl take center stage. Both dramatic works contrast the Lolita myth to a different vision of what it means to be a girl—idiosyncratic, defiant, self-determining. Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden is a theatrical attempt to give Nabokov’s heroine back her childhood. Vogel was in part inspired to write How I Learned to Drive as a response to Nabokov, calling her Pulitzer Prize-winning play “ Lolita from Lolita’s point of view.”(22) Both rely on their audiences being “haunted” by the preexisting text of Nabokov’s Lolita and by the cultural script of the Lolita myth.(23) “The Lolita Syndrome” The cultural stereotype of Lolita owes its iconography more to Bert Stern’s notorious poster for Kubrick’s film than to Nabokov’s novel. Stern’s photograph features a blonde fourteen-year-old Sue Lyon peeking over red heart-shaped sunglasses (found nowhere in the novel), with a cherry red lollipop between lips of the same hue. The provocative nature of the poster lies not only in its taunting tagline— “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita ?”—but also in the visual interplay between the signifiers for child and adult, a division that James Kincaid notes “has been at least for the past two hundred years heavily eroticized.”(24) This Lolita dominates visual media today as seen in the performances of pop stars like Katy Perry, Lana Del Rey, and Taylor Swift. Yet this cultural icon is far removed from Nabokov’s Dolly— an auburn-haired, freckled, sooty-lashed tomboy, who is a victim of abuse and rape, but who is also, in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s words, “an agent with sexual motives and motions of her own.”(25) The popularity of the Lolita myth was in part a response to the sweeping socioeconomic changes in the situation of men and women after the Second World War. According to Simone de Beauvoir, there is a historical reason for the “Lolita syndrome,” a term she uses for the invention of the “erotic hoyden” through the gamine charm of “Audrey Hepburn, Françoise Arnoul, Marina Vlady, Leslie Caron and Brigitte Bardot,” as well as dramatic characters such as the almost-eighteen-year-old Catherine from Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1955). Beauvoir argues that this “Lolita syndrome” emerged at a time when “social differences between the two sexes diminished” and consequently so did eroticism. (26) As Beauvoir notes, because the “adult woman now inhabits the same world as the man,” the attention of filmmakers, who were predominantly men, turn to the “child woman” who “moves in a universe which he cannot enter.”(27) The “age difference re-establishes between them the distance that seems necessary to desire,” so that “a new Eve” is created by fusing the “green fruit” with the “ femme fatale .”(28) In other words, while the growing economic empowerment of women dampens male desire, the girl-child possesses two interconnected features that attract male filmmakers and consumers. Her underaged status makes her an enticing taboo, while her economic dependency makes her accessible and vulnerable. In Lolita , Humbert is Dolly’s legal guardian and pays for her sexual favors. In How I Learned to Drive , Uncle Peck offers Li’l Bit free driving lessons during which he molests her. The mythmaking of Lolita also involves a fantasy of control and dominance: while the Lolita-figure of the popular imagination is “dangerous so long as she remains untamed,” she is open to “the male to domesticate her.”(29) Thus, she is, in many ways, a figure of conventional femininity. In Beauvoir’s reading, while aesthetically Brigitte Bardot might display many features of the “erotic hoyden,” her behavior on and off screen challenges that stereotype through her spontaneity, her freedom, her frank and earthy sexuality, and, most importantly, her refusal to be cast in one definitive type— “nothing can be read in Bardot’s face.”(30) Thus, the phenomenon of Bardot proves, as Tom Maguire argues in reference to HETPALEIS’s Hamilton Complex, that performance can “have efficacy in disrupting a heteronormative adult male gaze."(31) Even as Nabokov’s Lolita appeared during the postwar boom of the mischievous woman-child, its heroine resists the script of heteropatriarchy. Similarly, both Fornés and Vogel explore and ultimately reject the dominant culture’s desire for a compliant young girl molded by the demands of white heteropatriarchy when they give us their stage versions of Lolita—autonomous, queer, and—in Fornés’s case—also non-white. Before delving into my argument ( why these playwrights respond to Lolita and its influence on popular culture and why embodied performance is central to their responses), it is helpful to keep in mind two interconnected facts: the complex way that Nabokov constructs his adolescent protagonist in Lolita and the contradictory role that theatre plays in this construction. Dolly versus Lolita In American Sweethearts , Ilana Nash explains the popularity of the adolescent girl in terms of her being “a non-person constructed as a foil for adult men…who predominately controlled the production and circulation of popular culture during the twentieth century.”(32) This description of twentieth-century American culture at large also captures the oppressive and transactional relationship between Humbert and his stepdaughter. Nabokov’s Lolita poignantly captures the process of the marginalization and coercion of the adolescent girl, while the Lolita myth becomes an example of what Nash calls an “iconic abstraction representing dominant culture’s desires or nightmares.”(33) Both Beauvoir and Nash discuss this “Lolita” of the public imagination as a kind of abstraction. Indeed, the novel itself presents Lolita as such, when Humbert speaks of her as a figment of his imagination— his “own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita.”(34) In this way, the novelistic character Lolita and the pop-cultural figure Lolita can be analyzed as commodities in the Marxian sense of the term. A commodity, as Marx argues, is “an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind” and has “value only because abstract human labor is objectified or materialized in it.”(35) While Lolita is the commodity that satisfies the desires of adult men with significant capital in the novel, there also exists a “real girl” in the book who is performing all the sexual and emotional labor. It speaks to the unfortunate success of Humbert’s sly narrative voice that the name that stuck to his stepdaughter is not the one that she calls herself (Dolly) but rather the romantic moniker he chooses for her (“But in my arms she was always Lolita”).(36) In fact, Humbert is the only character in the novel who refers to her as Lolita, namely the figure of his poetic and erotic imagination. Dolly, by contrast, stands for the “real girl” who appears in the novel through glimpses and traces. Thus, when I refer to the main character of Lolita as Dolly, I join critics and scholars who use this name to describe the girl-child that exists outside of Humbert’s fantasies.(37) As Michael Wood suggests, this Dolly “is what a reading finds.”(38) In other words, the reader of Nabokov’s novel must resist Humbert’s seductive voice and solipsistic visions and search for signs of Dolly. “Only Words to Play With” T he combination of exposing the oppression of the adolescent girl while simultaneously revealing glimpses of her vibrant personality is one reason that, despite its disturbing content (“a pedophile’s playbook,” as one commentator dubbed it ), Lolita has found its main defenders among female readers, including Fornés and Vogel.(39) Indeed, girls and women have always been Lolita ’s most devoted readers, often identifying with its female protagonist, even as some worry that their enjoyment of the novel “makes them complicit” in its representation of coercion and violence.(40) To name a few recent examples, Kate Elizabeth Russell, author of the novel My Dark Vanessa (2020), in which an English teacher preys on his underage student by giving her a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita , spent her adolescence on an online message board dedicated to all things Lolita. In this early Internet community, Russell talked to girls of her age obsessed with the book and to older men who lurked in the comments. In Reading Lolita in Tehran , Azar Nafisi relates how her Iranian female students draw parallels between Dolly’s loss of freedom under Humbert’s abusive guardianship and their own lives under a repressive regime. Stockton reads Dolly as a queer, “quintessential not-yet-straight child,” who resists the heteronormative cultural script that Humbert tries to impose on her.(41) And Lena Dunham, the creator and star of the HBO hit show Girls (2012-2017), calls Lolita one of her favorite novels because of “how fully realized a character Lolita is, despite the fact that we are seeing her through the lens of her stalker.”(42) As many defenders of the novel have pointed out, Lolita ’s narrative architecture and moral puzzle reveal “the true nature of sexual crimes by men against girls and women: in patriarchy, they are silenced.”(43) The good reader should notice this silencing of Dolly’s voice, become appalled at Humbert’s actions (even if taken by his rhetoric at the beginning), and—as the fictional editor John Ray implores—hear “a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita” that Humbert’s “singing violin can conjure up.”(44) What all these moralistic readings of Lolita miss is the novel’s critique of the commodification of young girls in the sexual marketplace. It is not just a matter of condemning one fictional character named Humbert Humbert and becoming a better reader with a heightened capacity for empathy and a burning curiosity about the minds of others. When Nabokov writes that, when it comes to the book cover, there is “one subject” which he is “emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl,” he reveals that he understands that his novel exists in a marketplace where sex sells.(45) Thus, Nabokov’s Lolita focuses on Humbert’s crime of abusing and silencing Dolly. If Humbert stands for the figure of the artist, Lolita asks us: what should we do with the art of creators who have done horrific, unspeakable acts? A timely question. In order to pose this question, Nabokov shapes his novel around the glimpses and traces of Dolly, who struggles to be heard through Humbert’s domineering voice. It is not Nabokov’s intention to give us a nuanced portrayal of a teenage girl. Rather, we are meant to see through Humbert’s manipulation and miss Dolly in her absence. Given the novel’s focus on the absence of its young heroine, it becomes evident why adapting Lolita has been problematic and why Nabokov worried about the afterlife of his book. Since so little is known about Dolly, works that attempt a standard adaptation of the story, such as Albee’s play and Barry and Lerner’s musical, present a superficial Lolita, who is a cross between the fantasies of Humbert and the distortions of popular culture. If, while reading Nabokov’s novel, we can picture the kind of strong woman Dolly might have become had she survived, stage and film adaptations leave little to the imagination. Moreover, the embodied performance of an actor in the role of Lolita, whether on stage or on screen, risks falling into precisely the kind of commercial objectification and sexualization of the adolescent girl, even if played by an actor of legal age, that Nabokov’s novel explicitly denounces. One need only remember the many provocative magazine covers featuring fifteen-year-old Dominique Swain, promoting the release of Adrian Lyne’s controversial Lolita (1997). Throughout Lolita , Nabokov stresses that its story should only be represented in the textual universe of literature and through the novel’s specific reorganization of events, echoing the Russian Formalist notion of the inseparability of form and content.(46) “Idiot, triple idiot! I could have filmed her! I would have had her now with me, before my eyes, in the projection room of my pain and despair!” Humbert laments at one point.(47) His missed opportunity echoes the warning at the heart of Lolita —to transpose its story into visual media and/or embodied performance is to risk slipping into child pornography. Lolita thus depends on “dismediation,” a fruitful term that Martin Harries has coined to signify the “remediation through negation of another medium . ”(48) Nabokov constructs his novel through the dismediation of cinema, photography, theatre (which he often lumps with cinema), and other media that make possible the visual representation and exploitation of young girls. While attempting to control Lolita from spilling into other media, Nabokov explores the dangerous power of language to seduce his audience and the antidotal potential of language to unveil that rhetorical coercion. Literary scholars are thus more likely to argue that the girl-child in Lolita is just a figment of Nabokov’s imagination and that what the reader is engaged with is not real, but just a text,(49) or as Humbert puts it: “Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”(50) By contrast, theatre and performance studies scholars view texts (even closet dramas and impossible stage directions) as inherently virtual.(51) However problematic or dangerous a text is, it has the potential to be performed and corporealized in the theatre. A text, as John Muse puts it, has the “capacity to generate virtual violence.”(52) Figure 2: Judy Vargas as Lolita in Lolita in the Garden . Courtesy of The Fales Library & Special Collections. “The Theatre Had Taught Her That Trick” Nabokov maintained a lifelong interest in theatre and was aware of its virtuality. In fact, Lolita predicts the rise of virtual reality and the latter medium’s deep ties to theatre.(53) At its core, Lolita is a theatrical novel that interrogates the relationship between imagination, representation, and action. The reader witnesses Humbert go from daydreaming about Dolly to writing down his fantasy to finally enacting it, and this transition from thought to action is rendered in the novel through theatrical and cinematic metaphors. When Humbert reflects on how he managed to masturbate in Dolly’s presence, “with her legs across [his] lap” on the sofa, but without her (in his view) awareness of his onanistic endeavor, he compares the act to the theatrical performance of a magician, a comparison that moves from theatre to virtual reality to cinema: Absolutely no harm done. The conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady’s new white purse; and lo, the purse was intact. Thus had I delicately constructed my ignoble, ardent, sinful dream; and still Lolita was safe—and I was safe; What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness—indeed, no life of her own.(54) By the end of this attempt at justification, Humbert envisions his stepdaughter as a kind of free-floating, virtual avatar (what today we would call a hologram) that presumably has nothing to do with the girl-child Dolly. He goes on to mix theatrical and cinematic metaphors: “The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her. And nothing prevented me from repeating a performance that affected her as little as if she were a photographic image rippling upon a screen and I a humble hunchback abusing myself in the dark.”(55) Initially, the pairing of the words “repeating” and “performance” point to a theatrical performance, in which Humbert is an actor who “repeats” the same gestures in the presence of an untouched and unaware Dolly-the-spectator, who does not understand what she is seeing. But as the sentence continues and Humbert describes an adult movie theatre, in which he is watching Dolly on screen, it becomes clear that he has a very different kind of “performance” in mind and that Dolly cannot, in fact, be as unaffected by the proceedings as he wants the reader to believe. For whatever cinematic image to appear on a screen, a real person, in this case—a real child—would have to be filmed. Nabokov’s distrust of theatre and cinema is thus connected to his protective view of child and young adolescent actors. As Nicholas Ridout points out (following the work of Bert O. States), child actors pose a particular problem onstage because the audience often worries whether children can give “properly informed consent” and whether they will be “damaged by their appearance on stage.”(56) Such concerns presume childhood innocence— a social and historical construct that has played a significant role in the preservation of white heteropatriarchy, as Robin Bernstein has argued—and are fairly recent in theatre history.(57) As Kristen Hatch has shown in her study of Shirley Temple, from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, audiences took “pleasure in children’s performances” because they accepted childhood innocence as “inviolable.”(58) By the mid-twentieth century, this “inviolable innocence” of children gave way to Freud’s theory of sexuality and to the fear that children were “in danger of being corrupted through contact with the world of adults."(59) Indeed, Nabokov himself once admitted: “If I had a little girl I might want to ban the book, too. Certainly I wouldn’t let her read it.”(60) Despite Nabokov’s public pronouncements, his own novel, published during the mid-century cultural shift in views on childhood, challenges the many myths surrounding the abstract concept of childhood, including innocence, ignorance, and lack of agency. Dolly, as we find out, has explored her sexuality before Humbert and, as Stockton notes, is “queer herself, [s]exually schooled by ‘little Lesbians.’”(61) Nabokov’s paternal attitude toward child actors echoes his prohibitive position in regard to transposing his novel to the stage and to the screen. Although he eventually did allow other artists to adapt Lolita into other media, he considered those works to be artistic creations in their own rights, far removed from his novel. Thus, Nabokov thought Kubrick’s Lolita was excellent but “only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture [he] imagined.”(62) And just like the novel’s depictions of childhood are more complex than Nabokov’s public statements on the matter, so are the novel’s representations of popular culture more astute and realistic than Nabokov’s own expectations. In Lolita , popular culture has already invaded almost every aspect of the characters’ lives in post-war America. There is no going back. Visual media dominate. Humbert is not only an artist but also an adman who earns his living writing perfume advertisements.(63) Dolly is “to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster.”(64) Humbert reminds her of “some crooner or actor chap” on whom she “has a crush.”(65) He describes himself at one point as “a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood” and Charlotte, Dolly’s mother, as “a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich.”(66) Hollywood’s reach is everywhere in the novel as is its underbelly—the pornographic industry. The characters exist in a world of commodity fetishism where the “definite social relation between” people “assumes, here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”(67) Theatre is not immune to this type of commercialization and alienation. Upon closer examination, however, Nabokov’s attitude toward embodied performance in Lolita turns out to be deeply ambivalent. It is Dolly’s foray into acting, while rehearsing for Quilty’s play The Enchanted Hunters , that eventually leads to her escape. During one of her early attempts to stand up for herself, Humbert remarks: “It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick.”(68) “M imetic imagination,” as Maria Tatar notes, “is less about copying and representing than about making contact and participating”—exactly the kinds of activities a student would embrace in the theatre.(69) The theatre, as I have suggested earlier, has also provided fertile ground for feminist responses to Nabokov’s Lolita. Fornés and Vogel represent different visions of girlhood on stage by contrasting it to the Lolita myth of popular culture, the heteropatriarchal fantasy of the adolescent girl, which is influenced by Humbert’s solipsistic view of Dolly. And the tensions between imagination and action explored in Lolita are amplified on the stage. Fornés Gives Lolita Back Her Voice In the late spring and early summer of 1977, Fornés directed her “ theatre piece with music for children and adults,” Lolita in the Garden , with music by Richard Weinstock and with Catherine Slade and Judy Vargas in the title role at Intar 53 Theatre in New York.(70) This unpublished play features no Humbert character, spotlighting instead Lolita as a little girl. Fornés would represent child abuse in her later play The Conduct of Life (1985), in which a thirty-three-year-old lieutenant kidnaps, terrorizes, and repeatedly rapes a twelve-year-old girl named Nena. In Lolita in the Garden , the focus is on a girl-child before anything bad happens to her. Significantly, she is described as being eleven years old in Fornés’s script (Humbert meets Dolly when she is twelve). Fornés must have read Nabokov’s Lolita with great attention, as she borrows many elements from Lolita —the lyrical name, the fairytale leitmotifs, and the garden imagery—but repurposes them, like in a contrafact, for her own melody, one that reclaims her heroine’s autonomy.(71) The production toured New York in two versions, an English and Spanish one, thereby disposing of Humbert’s exoticizing tendency to call Dolly his “Carmencita”(72) and making Fornés’s fairytale accessible to Spanish-speaking children.(73) Moreover, by casting a young Brown and a young Black girl (Vargas and Slade respectively) in the title role, Fornés challenged the cultural myth of Lolita as “an expression of whiteness.”(74) As the Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic Robin Givhan explains, “Lolita” has always meant a very specific kind of femininity— “nubile” and white.(75) According to Givhan, Lolita “was not written within the context of what it meant to be a young black girl” because the “culture does not see black girls as having a fragile, dangerously irresistible beauty.”(76) Instead, the culture marginalizes and “oversexualize[s] black bodies.”(77) By contrast, Fornés centers the young girl of color as the main heroine of her fairytale as both vulnerable and learning to stand up for herself. The garden of the play’s title refers not only to the Garden of Eden, where innocence and temptation co-exist, but also to Charlotte’s garden where Humbert first lays eyes on Dolly. Moreover, the garden is an important metaphor for Dolly’s inner world, which Humbert admits remains inaccessible to him: “I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.”(78) It is this inner world of the child that Fornés’s theatre piece explores. And it is appropriate that music plays a crucial role in recovering the young girl’s voice. Toward the end of the novel, Humbert recalls an earlier episode, “soon after her disappearance,” when he looked down from a mountain and heard the “musical vibration” of children at play.(79) He realizes there and then that “the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from [his] side, but the absence of her voice from the concord.”(80) In Lolita in the Garden , the songs of children can now be heard loud and clear. Fornés not only gives Lolita back her childhood by writing a children’s piece in which she is the main speaking character, but also teaches her young spectators the importance of self-determinacy at a time when their parents and pedagogues are telling them what to do. The submission to parental authority is, of course, a necessary part of a child’s development, but it is also the same mechanism by which an abuser might manipulate a child (as Humbert does his stepdaughter). Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden is thus a lesson in how to think for oneself. And theatrical mimesis is a crucial step in this lesson. Set in a magical forest, populated by a talking tree, a flexible flower, and a poet-bear, the play begins with a fairy godmother named Hard granting three wishes to an eleven-year-old girl named Lolita, telling her that she can do whatever she wants and that she does not have to follow anyone’s orders. As Lolita puts it, “I want to do what I want. And I want no one to tell me what to do. And I don’t want to have to do what other people want.”(81) She also tries to stretch the definition of “three wishes,” asking Hard for “a magic prince in silver with rubies and diamonds,” “a white wedding dress so [she] can marry the prince,” and “three girlfriends who are very nice to [her] and don’t take [her] boyfriends away.”(82) But Hard reminds her that she has already used up all her three wishes when she asked for complete autonomy and rejects her desires for romantic clichés. Doing whatever she wants and not listening to anyone’s advice turns out to be a more difficult task than Fornés’s Lolita initially imagined. She learns many things the hard way—that gorging on an unlimited supply of candies, for example, makes her “feel sick and fat.”(83) And as Lolita continues to roam and play in the forest, she begins to want for someone to tell her what to do. In this way, according to Norma Ford, Lolita in the Garden is “an allegory for the responsibility that true freedom demands of us.”(84) It is difficult to gauge how aware the children in the audience were of Nabokov’s Lolita , but the adults in attendance would have picked up on the allusion. As Fornés’s Lolita learns the lesson about how to be a self-determining agent, she does so in a world marked by violence toward women. Echoes of Nabokov’s Lolita can still be heard and conjure up a sense of menace in Fornés’s contrafact, giving it a Brothers Grimm aesthetic. While Nabokov’s Lolita borrows fairytale elements from Alice in Wonderland , The Little Mermaid , and Sleeping Beauty among many others, to hint at how enchantment takes place on the level of language (the inattentive reader might fall under Humbert’s spell), Fornés restores all these magical elements in a fairytale written for children with a female adolescent at its center. When Bear asks Fornés’s Lolita “what” she is, she responds: “A child. I’m a girl.” “Ahhhh. What’s that?” asks the scared Bear. “A human being,” says Lolita.(85) This is a simple exchange but one that reminds us how invisible the humanity of young girls has been throughout the twentieth century. As Nash elucidates, the teen girl suffers a “double enforcement of oppressive representation:” “her femininity makes her more sexually objectified than teen boys in the same narratives, while her youth makes her more ignorant and diminished than grown women.”(86) By contrast, Fornés’s inclusive musical fairytale for the theatre represents the autonomy of the female adolescent by giving her back her voice and her childhood and by reminding the audience of the diversity of girls who can be the main character. Vogel’s Lolita Drives Away from the Dead-End Road Given that Vogel has mentioned on several occasions that How I Learned to Drive was in part inspired by Lolita , it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the connections between the two works aside from the occasional nod to Vogel’s interest in Nabokov’s novel. Vogel develops her own storyline and characters, so the relationship between the novel and the play may seem at first superficial. From Lolita Vogel borrows the car setting, the road motif, the subjects of pedophilia and incest, and the mixture of comedy and pathos. How I Learned to Drive follows the relationship between Li’l Bit and her aunt’s husband, Uncle Peck, from her pre-adolescent years all the way through adulthood. “I hope people are seeing the resonances,” Vogel stated in an interview with Charlie Rose, referring to the echoes between How I Learned to Drive and Lolita .(87) Vogel first read Lolita in high school and kept revisiting it during her student days at Cornell, where there had always been “a huge Nabokov presence,” as “he’d been on the faculty.”(88) While How I Learned to Drive stands on its own, there is another level to this play as a response to Nabokov’s Lolita and to the popular culture that has usurped Lolita into its apparatus of sexualizing children. First, How I Learned to Drive adopts a similar moral and temporal framework. Like Nabokov, Vogel seduces her audience by giving them a charming pedophile, one who might initially gain some of their sympathy, and by manipulating the chronology of the events in order to reveal the problem of succumbing to her seduction. Contrary to Nabokov’s modernist attachment to medium specificity, Vogel’s meticulous stage directions offer directors a roadmap for taking on the contemporary mediatized environment and for exploring theatre’s power in it. As a feminist, Vogel was unnerved by the fact that she felt sympathy for Humbert. Indeed, Vogel’s “relatively benign depiction” of Peck has garnered much attention.(89) Like Nabokov’s Lolita, How I Learned to Drive , in Vogel’s words, “dramatizes the gifts we receive from the people who hurt us.”(90) Like Humbert, Peck falls in love, and that love makes a moral demand on him. If Humbert’s gift to Dolly is “to make her live in the minds of later generations” by writing the manuscript that the reader allegedly holds, then Peck’s gift to Li’l Bit, while less artistic, is more life affirming.(91) By teaching Li’l Bit how to drive like a man (“with confidence—with aggression”(92), Peck not only saves her life, but also empowers her to “reject him and destroy him.”(93) Whether you feel (negative) empathy for Peck or not is ultimately a subjective experience. When How I Learned to Drive premiered in 1997 at the Vineyard Theatre, some critics praised its moral complexity, while others criticized Vogel for not villainizing Peck (David Morse).(94) But How I Learned to Drive is no melodrama. As Joanna Mansbridge has ably argued, Vogel’s play explores “the culture that created Peck.”(95) Significantly, Vogel makes Lil’ Bit the main narrator of How I Learned to Drive , explaining in an interview that, while she “wanted to explore the sadness of her Humbert Humbert in Peck, she didn’t want her Lolita to go down the same dead-end road.”(96) While Nabokov’s “pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly” dies in Gray Star, Alaska, Vogel’s Li’l Bit drives off toward an uncertain but hopeful future.(97) Referencing Cathy Caruth’s work on the delayed temporality of trauma, Ann Pellegrini argues that Vogel’s memory play reenacts “the belatedness of trauma” and the “revision” of memory through Li’l Bit’s use of “piecemeal” narration.(98) Li’l Bit goes back in time and revises the events of the past in order to gain control of them, transcend victimhood, and allow herself to heal. Graley Herren reads these “dramaturgical manipulations” of Li’l Bit as her “coping mechanism.”(99) But Li’l Bit’s narration has another function, beyond that of therapy, which align her with Humbert’s sly handling of words and his use of “retrospective verisimilitude.”(100) The play’s use of nonchronological narration forces the audience to consider at what point the relationship between the two characters becomes uncomfortable and painful for them to watch. As Vogel explains: If you look at the structure of my play, all I’m doing is asking how do you feel about this? We see a girl of seventeen and an older man in a car seat. You think you know how you feel about this relationship? Alright, fine. Now, let’s go back a year earlier. Do you still think you know what you feel about this situation? … The play is a reverse syllogism. It constantly pulls the rug out from under our emotional responses by going back earlier and earlier in time. [101] In this way, How I Learned to Drive is not simply “a drama about an individual family,” but “a way of looking on a microscopic level at how this culture sexualizes children.”(102) When How I Learned to Drive premiered in 1997, the sexualization of children in the media was at the forefront of legal and moral debates. The early nineties saw the scandal of Amy Elizabeth Fisher, branded by the media as “Long Island Lolita,” who, at the age of seventeen, shot and wounded her secret lover’s wife. The murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey took over the news cycle in late December of 1996. Beauty contest photos and videos of the little girl with bleached blonde hair and in full makeup, striking provocative poses, dominated TV screens. As Vogel reminds us, “JonBenét Ramsey was not a fluke.”(103) American consumer culture had been profiting from the sexualization of young girls for a long time, as the Calvin Klein jean ads, featuring fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields from the early 1980s, attest to. It is this mediatized environment (which had also co-opted Nabokov’s Lolita ) that Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive takes on. Vogel’s original script suggests “the notion of slides and projections, which were not used in the New York production of the play.”(104) Nor were any slides or projections employed in the Broadway premiere in the spring of 2022, which featured the original leads—Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse—and where changes in mood and in action were evoked through lighting and the reassembling of set pieces. In my discussion of the play, I look carefully at Vogel’s stage directions, arguing that her version engages in a critical intervention with visual media and that directors miss an important opportunity when they disregard them.(105) In what follows, I analyze Vogel’s stage directions by imagining what a potential production that heeded them could accomplish aesthetically and ethically. Vogel employs dismediation in the theatre—through the negation of pin-up photography—to confront mass culture’s sexualization of young girls. In a culture still dominated by gender violence, misogyny, and mass-produced images of stereotypical femininity, Vogel carves out a space of subversion, resistance, and escape (however temporary) where Li’l Bit can come into her own and write her story. It bears stressing that the role of Li’l Bit “was originally written as a character who is forty-something.”(106) Mary-Louise Parker was thirty-three when she debuted the role at the Vineyard Theatre. Thus, instead of a child actor posing for erotic photos, we witness an adult woman revisiting her past, as she looks back at the girl that she once was. If, as Paul Auslander suggests, “mediatization is a vehicle of the general code in a way that live performance is not (or is no longer),” then How I Learned to Drive acknowledges that both Li’l Bit’s coming of age and its own ontology as a theatrical work take place in a culture where mediatized representations predominate.(107) For example, during the driving lesson, when Peck instills in Li’l Bit the importance of driving aggressively, Vogel’s stage directions indicate that “ it would be nice to have slides of erotic photographs of women and cars ,” including one of “ Li’l Bit with a Bel Air .”(108) Accustomed to screens, the audience’s attention might be split between the images on the slides and the two actors onstage. Yet this set-up aptly reflects the mediatized culture in which young girls grow up. During the photo shoot, which is the central scene of the play, the Playboy aesthetic predominates at the start. Peck takes pictures of the “ nervous but curious thirteen-year-old ” Li’l Bit with a Leica camera, while “ something like Roy Orbison ” plays in the background.(109) Yet even as Peck objectifies Li’l Bit, she pushes back and he, along with the audience, begins to see her in a different light, as a unique, irreplaceable, singular human being. In other words, she resists becoming a commodity. As Peck instructs his niece on how to move her body and what poses to strike, Vogel’s directions recommend that there “ be a slide montage of actual shots of the actor playing Li’l Bit—interspersed with other models à la Playboy, Calvin Klein and Victoriana/ Lewis Carroll’s Alice Liddell .”(110) Unlike Nabokov’s Lolita , How I Learned to Drive does not posit that it is “immune from contamination by, and ontologically different from mediatized forms.”(111) Rather, by recognizing that theatre is a medium among other media and by privileging some mediatized forms over others, Vogel can influence which images of Li’l Bit are aesthetically and ethically effective and which ones are not. When Peck asks Li’l Bit to “arch [her] back” and “throw [her] head back,” the audience sees a “Playboy model in this pose,” and not the actor playing Li’l Bit. Likewise, when Peck asks Li’l Bit to put her hand on her cheek and move her hair back, “[ a ] nother classic Playboy or Vargas ” appears.(112) Evidently, Playboy and Vargas have shaped Peck’s imagination and how he views Li’l Bit. But Li’l Bit does not remain an object of this mass-produced fantasy: she resists it, becoming, to borrow Pellegrini’s turn of phrase, an “active, unruly subject of desire.”(113) When Peck calls Li’l Bit “beautiful,” she looks back at him “ a bit defiantly ” and reminds him that “Aunt Mary is beautiful.”(114) And Li’l Bit rejects Peck’s idea of creating a portfolio of her photos and sending them to Playboy when she turns eighteen. She refuses to become another commodity on the sexual marketplace. Most importantly, interspersed among all the pin-ups are the aleatory photos of Li’l Bit that Peck takes during the shoot in real time. For example, after Peck says “I love you” to Li’l Bit, the directions read: “ Li’l Bit opens her eyes; she is startled. Peck captures the shot. On the screen we see right through her .”(115) There are thus two kinds of images being contrasted in this pivotal scene. There are the sexualized pin-up photos of “aesthetic consumerism,” to which Susan Sontag claims “everyone is now addicted,” and the photos of Li’l Bit that reveal what Roland Barthes calls in Camera Lucida , “ the impossible science of the unique being .”(116) By giving space and time to both kinds of images onstage and by projecting them alongside two unique human beings as they navigate their transgressive relationship, Vogel paradoxically achieves more artistic control over the representations of her characters and the meaning of her play than Nabokov did when he tried to prohibit any visual representation and embodiment of his heroine. And while Vogel dismediates pin-up photography, she allows for photos, in which we see the mature actor playing a teenage Li’l Bit, to supplement the performance of her two actors. Not only is thirteen-year-old Li’l Bit’s wish that her erotic photos never see the light of day respected, but also the photos that we do see projected onstage—that of an older actor performing the memory of the teenage version of her character—serve as a reminder of the passage of time. In this scene, theatre and photography are engaged not so much in competition as in a symbiotic relationship that shines light on Li’l Bit’s mortality. Indeed, as Barthes points out, photography and theatre have much in common, “by way of a singular intermediary”— “by way of Death.”(117) The “first actors,” Barthes reminds us, “separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead.”(118) According to Barthes, there are, thus, two kinds of punctums . There is the “unexpected flash” of detail that “sometimes crosses” the field of a photograph.(119) And then there is “Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been’), its pure representation.”(120) It is this punctum , as a trace of time and a reminder of mortality, that is amplified in the palimpsest photo shoot scene. In a way, these projected photos of the older actor posing as a teenager also function as “surrogation,” which Joseph Roach describes as the “three-sided relationship of memory, performance, and substitution.”(121) Although there are no roles for child actors in Drive , Vogel “strongly recommend[s] casting a young woman who is ‘of legal age,’ that is, twenty-one to twenty-five years old who can look as close to eleven as possible” for the role of the Teenage Greek Chorus.(122) “If the actor is too young,” Vogel explains, “the audience may feel uncomfortable.”(123) The youthful appearance and the young-sounding voice of the Teenage Greek Chorus are necessary for the scene in which the first episode of molestation occurs. In 1962, when Peck holds eleven-year-old Li’l Bit in his lap and shows her how to drive for the first time, the thirty- or forty-something-year-old actor playing Li’l Bit performs the physical actions, while the Teenage Greek Chorus speaks all the lines, standing “apart on stage.”(124) After Peck and the Teenage Greek Chorus exit, Li’l Bit faces the audience and says: “That day was the last day I lived in my body.”(125) This separation of body and voice represents, in David Savran’s words, “the radical alienation from self that results from having been molested.”(126) In this way, Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive creatively employs exactly what Nabokov’s Lolita displays anxiety about—embodied performance—in order to both stage Li’l Bit’s sexual trauma and help her transcend it. Conclusion In the fall of 1959, almost a year after the infamous Halloween episode, Nabokov visited Paris where he witnessed yet another Lolita cosplay. This time it was the twenty-nine-year-old wife of French author Alain Robbe-Grillet—Catherine—who “had dressed herself à la gamine.”(127)Nabokov was not horrified. He was delighted by the “petite, pretty wife, a young actress” who “continued [her] performance the next day” when the two writers met again for lunch.(128) Both men found it hilarious when, after serving everyone else alcohol, the waiter asked Catherine if she would like a Coca-Cola.(129) Reminiscing about this “very funny” episode, Nabokov assumed that the young woman was “pretending to be Lolita” in his “honor.”(130) Perhaps. Or, there might have been something else at play. The Robbe-Grillets were in a consensual sadomasochistic relationship, in which Catherine was the submissive. She enjoyed being “mistaken for a teenager” and being “refused admission to a film for 18.”(131) In any event, Nabokov clearly did not have a problem with age play between consenting adults, even if it involved elements borrowed and repurposed from his novel. On some level, he must have known that, just as Dolly runs away from Humbert and Quilty, so too would his Lolita escape his authorial control. What he opposed was that Lolita contribute to the kind of commodification of young girls that his novel both documents and resists. Despite Nabokov’s admonition, throughout the years, book covers for Lolita have gotten more risqué. And the name of his beloved nymphet has become associated with exactly the kind of exploitation his novel condemns, such as Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous Lolita Express plane. Amid all the misreadings and misappropriations of Nabokov’s Lolita , Fornés and Vogel have stood out as the novel’s most conscientious readers. Their theatrical responses challenge the pervasive Lolita myth of popular culture, explore the relationship between girlhood and womanhood, and present their audiences with alternative versions of the adolescent girl. Fornés’s non-white Lolita is curious, brave, and autonomous. Vogel’s Li’l Bit is witty, resilient, and not defined by her sexual trauma. Many of these characteristics can already be detected in Nabokov’s Dolly, whose fictional fate is that of the deceased muse who will “live in the minds of later generations” in the manuscript written by “HH.”(132) The artist in Nabokov’s literary universe is almost exclusively male.(133) Unless, of course, she is Vivian Darkbloom— the anagram of the author’s own name. By contrast, the protagonists of Fornés and Vogel are unmistakably artistic, writing and making sense of their pasts, presents, and futures. They give us an unforgettable portrait of the artist as a young girl. Still, Fornés and Vogel share Nabokov’s anxiety about representing youthful desire on stage. Although both playwrights show adolescence to be a time of chaos and confusion instead of “an idyll of childhood,” they are aware of the danger of their female protagonists becoming mere “objects of male desire” and capitalist consumption.(134) Reception, after all, is challenging to control. Fornés circumvents the issue by placing her heroine (who can be played by an adult or a child) into the protective environment of a theatre play for children, from which Humbert Humbert has been expelled. The erotic awakening of her Lolita is relatively tame. Vogel assigns an adult to play Li’l Bit at different stages of her life and relies on a childlike voice of another adult to communicate her protagonist’s youngest age. In the twenty-first century, however, there has been “a growing interest in children as both performers and performance makers of experimental work.”(135) Many of these performances are meant to make audiences deeply unconformable and to encourage them to think about the adult-child dynamic (136) The performance of girlhood in the theatre will always be ridden with anxieties and risks. Silencing girls, however, is no longer an ethically viable option. In their Lolita -inspired plays, Fornés and Vogel found several ways that embodied performance could channel the agency of girls during the messy, painful, exhilarating experience of growing up. There are still more to discover. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (1959), trans. Bernard Fretchman (London: First Four Square Edition, 1962), 20. Alizée, “Moi…Lolita” [“Me… Lolita”], Gourmandises (2000). Produced by Polydor. I’d like to thank Gwendolyn Alker for bringing my attention to Fornés’s unpublished script for Lolita in the Garden and for helping me locate a copy. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 373-74. Quoted in Graham Vickers, Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again (Chicago: Chicago Review Press , 2008), 131. Take, for example, Frank Wedekind’s Lulu, who is about fifteen years of age. See S. E. Jackson, “Whose Lulu Is It Anyway? Performing through Dramaturgies of Excess,” Theatre Journal 72, no. 1 (2020): 21-7. Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita ,” in The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated , edited with preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York: Vintage, 1991), 311-16, quote on 316. For more on Gothic Lolita fashion, see Michelle Liu Carriger, “‘Maiden’s Armor’: Global Gothic Lolita Fashion Communities and Technologies of Girly Counteridentity,” Theatre Survey 60, no. 1 (2019): 122-46. The article points out that, while the Japanese “lolita practitioners eschew all connections to Lolita , Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel,” it is possible to “consider the coincidence of the name as an example of what Anan calls ‘imaginative reconfiguration’” (131). Jonas A. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Siggy Frank, Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination (New York: Cambridge University, 2012), 47. See also Vladimir Nabokov, “Playwriting,” in The Man from the USSR and Other Plays with Two Essays on the Drama , introductions and translations by Dmitri Nabokov (San Diego: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1984), 315-22. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 283. Vladimir Nabokov, Foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay (New York: Vintage, 1997), x-xi. For a survey on the recent scholarship exploring the intersections of girlhood studies and performance studies, see the special issue of Theatre Survey edited by Marlis Schweitzer. Marlis Schweitzer, “From the Editor,” Theatre Survey 60, no. 1 (2019): 1-5. Kubrick cast Sue Lyon when she was fourteen. And Dominique Swain was fifteen at the start of filming for Adrian Lyne’s Lolita (1997). Both films had to change many elements of the novel. As Louis Menand puts it, “you cannot film this story accurately and stay out of prison.” See Louis Menand, “Just Like a Woman: Adrian Lyne’s Lolita Stops Way Short of Pedophilic Perversity,” Slate , August 5, 1998, available at https://slate.com/culture/1998/08/just-like-a-woman.html . For more on the York Theatre Company’s production, see Alisa Zhulina “Teaching Lolita in the Department of Drama,” in Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era , ed. Elena Rakhimova-Sommers (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021), 73-91, at 80-81. When the musical was first tried out in Philadelphia in 1971, Annette Ferra was fifteen. When it was tried out again in Boston, she was replaced by thirteen-year-old Denise Nickerson. Both failed to gain audiences and were heavily criticized by the public and the critics. The age of the performers might have had something to do with the commercial failure. The seventies, after all, witnessed second-wave feminism, which brought attention to issues of sexuality and legal equality. J. Ellen Gainor, “ Dance Nation and Its Representational Challenges,” Modern Drama 63, no. 2 (2020): 173-96, quote on 178. Gainor, “ Dance Nation ,” 178. Matthew Wagner, Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time (New York: Routledge, 2012), 13. Paula Vogel, How I Learned Drive (1997), in The Mammary Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998), 1-92, quote on 6. Adele Senior, “Beginners On Stage: Arendt, Natality and the Appearance of Children in Contemporary Performance,” Theatre Research International 41, no. 1 (2016): 70-84, quote on 81. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 8. Barry Kernfeld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz , 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Suzan-Lori Parks, “On What Inspired the Red Letter Plays,” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdaEk3FMRxI . Paula Vogel, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose , June 19, 1997, available at https://charlierose.com/videos/5709 . Here I am thinking of Marvin Carlson’s definition of “haunting” as it relates to the text: “Indeed, in the relationship between the preexisting dramatic text and its enactment onstage we can already speak of one kind of ‘haunting’ that lies close to the structure of the theatrical experience, in which the physical embodiment of an action that is witnessed in the theatre is an important sense haunted by a preexisting text…” Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 16. James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: 2009), 120. Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot , 8. “Love can resist familiarity; eroticism cannot.” Ibid., 14. Beauvoir elaborates: “In an age when woman drives a car and speculates on the stock exchange, an age in which she unceremoniously displays her nudity on public beaches, any attempt to revive the vamp and her mystery was out of the question” (10). Ibid. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 8 and 34. According to Beauvoir, Bardot’s performance on screen “assert[s] that one is man’s fellow and equal” and “recognize[s] that between the woman and him there is mutual desire and pleasure” (30). Thus, there is an important difference between the reception of Bardot in France and America. Beauvoir elaborates: “In France, there is still a great deal of emphasis, officially, on women’s dependence upon men. The Americans, who are actually far from having achieved sexual equality in all spheres, but who grant it theoretically, have seen nothing scandalous in the emancipation symbolized by BB. But it is, more than anything else, her frankness that disturbs most of the public and that delights the Americans” (58). Tom Maguire, “Watching Girls Watching: HETPALEIS’s Hamilton Complex ,” Diversity, Representation, and Culture in TYA (ASSITEJ: Cape Town, South Africa, 2021), 46-57. Online. Ilana Nash, American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 3. This collective imagination has been challenged in the twenty-first century with the emergence of plays centered around girlhood by dramatists like Clare Barron, Sarah DeLappe, Julia Jarcho, Ruby Rae Spiegel, and others. See Zhulina, “Teaching Lolita ,” 84. Nash, American Sweethearts , 2. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 62. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , vol.1 (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes, with introduction by Ernest Mandel (New York: Penguin, 1990), 125 and 129. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 9. This is even true of the author of Lolita himself. Both Nabokov and his wife, Véra, referred to the female protagonist as Lolita no doubt because of how famous that name had become. See, for example, Julian W. Connolly, “Who Was Dolly Haze?” A Reader’s Guide to Nabokov’s Lolita (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 53-66 and Elizabeth Sweeney, “Lolita I Presume; On a Character Entitled ‘Lolita.’” Miranda 3 (2010): 1-12. Interestingly, in Nabokov’s screenplay, the female protagonist is called exclusively “Lolita” by everyone. This could be because, in an audiovisual genre like film, referring to the character by different names would be confusing for the audience. I prefer to use the name “Dolly” because this is how the heroine signs her first name (first in a letter from camp and then in her last letter to Humbert). Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 117. Laura Lippman, “Watching the Detective,” Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , ed. Jenny Minton Quigley (New York: Vintage, 2021), 69-81, quote on 80. Sarah Herbold, “‘Dolorès Disparue’: Reading Misogyny in Lolita ,” Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita , ed. Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008), 134-40, quote on 134. Stockton, The Queer Child , 121. Lena Dunham, “My 10 Favorite Books: Lena Dunham,” New York Times , January 8, 2016, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/08/t-magazine/lena-dunham-book-list.html . Andre Dubus III, “ Lolita , Chamonix, France, 2018,” in Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , ed. Jenny Minton Quigley (New York: Vintage, 2021), 119-34, quote on 132. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 5. Vladimir Nabokov , Selected Letters, 1940-1977 , ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt, 1989), 250. For more on Russian Formalism, see Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays , 2nd ed., trans. and intro Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, with a new intro Gary Saul Morson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2012). Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 231. Martin Harries, “Theater After Film, or Dismediation,” ELH 83, no. 2 (2016): 345-62, quote on 351. Harries discusses dismediation in the context of postwar theatre, which he argues shaped itself through “the dismediation of cinema” by scrutinizing the cinematic spectator, critiquing “mass culture as an unprecedented tool for the production of docile subjects,” and exposing the interpellation of the cinematic apparatus (351) and (354-58). “ Lolita is an incantation, but its conjuring never moves from word to flesh; the brilliance and tragedy of language is that it is only language and therefore useless.” Eric Naiman, Nabokov, Perversely (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 44. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 32. The tension between text and its corporealization through performance is “at the center of contemporary theatre theory.” See Gerald Rabkin, “Is There a Text on This Stage?: Theatre/Authorship/Interpretation,” Performing Arts Journal 9, no. 2/3 (1985): 142-59, quote on 143. See also Daniel Sack, Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (New York: Routledge, 2017). John H. Muse, “Virtual Theatre, Virtual Spectatorship: On Jonathan Ball’s Clockfire ,” Theater 48, no. 1 (2018): 79-90, quote on 85. The earliest use of the phrase “virtual reality” can be found in Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double , trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 49. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 62. Ibid. Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 100. For example, as Robin Bernstein has argued, in the context of American racial projects, the performance of childhood innocence became a “crucial but naturalized element of contests over race and rights.” Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University, 2011), 2. Kristen Hatch, Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 16. Compare this to the position of colonial Calvinists who thought that children were “ inherently sinful and sexual” and that they had to be taught to reign in their “damnable impulses.” Bernstein, Racial Innocence , 4. Hatch, Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood , 16 and 9. Stacy Schiff, “Véra and Lo,” in Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , ed. Jenny Minton Quigley (New York: Vintage, 2021), 15-31, quote on 28. Schiff is careful to point out, however, that Nabokov said this during a book party in London when he and his publisher feared prosecution. In addition, throughout his life, Nabokov said many contradictory things about the novel and whether children should read it. Stockton, The Queer Child , 121. For the quoted material, see Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita , 133. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions [1973] (New York: Vintage, 1990), 140. When speculating about how Kubrick’s film would turn out, Nabokov said: “It may turn out to be a lovely morning mist as perceived through mosquito netting, or it may turn out to be the swerves of a scenic drive as felt by the horizontal passenger of an ambulance” (14). Nabokov did not expect Kubrick’s adaptation to be faithful to his original. For an excellent analysis of Humbert as such an ad man, see Jacob Emery, “Humbert Humbert as Mad Man: Art and Advertising in Lolita ,” Studies in the Novel 51, no. 4 (2019): 546-68. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 148. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 39 and 37. Marx, Capital , vol. 1, 165. Ibid., 219. Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 13. María Irene Fornés, Lolita in the Garden materials, box 6, folder 7. The Fales Library, New York, NY. Fornés was familiar with Nabokov’s Lolita . Her partner, Susan Sontag, introduced Nabokov in 1964 at his reading at the 92nd Street Y. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 242 and 280. Elisa De La Roche, Teatro Hispano!: Three Major New York Companies (New York: Garland, 1995), 39. Robin Givhan, “Fashion’s Lolita : Fragile, Subversive, and a Paean to White Femininity,” Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , ed. Jenny Minton Quigley (New York: Vintage, 2021), 146-51, quote on 150. Givhan, “Fashion’s Lolita ,” 146. Givhan elaborates further: “Lolita was never a part of me mostly because she was not portrayed as black or brown—like me. She was pale with knobby knees and rosebud lips. She was a character as disconnected from me as Snow White” (149-50). Ibid., 150. Ibid. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 284. Ibid., 308. Ibid. María Irene Fornés, Lolita in the Garden , 3 . Unpublished script courtesy of Katie Gamelli. Fornés, Lolita in the Garden , 4. Ibid., 12. Norma Ford, Notes , Cuban Theater Digital Archive, available at http://ctda.library.miami.edu/writtenwork/1610 . Fornés, Lolita in the Garden , 20. Nash, American Sweethearts, 3. Vogel, Interview with Charlie Rose. Andrea Simakis, “Playwright Paula Vogel Aimed to Write a Reverse Lolita with How I Learned to Drive ,” Cleveland , May 10, 2017, available at https://www.cleveland.com/onstage/2017/03/playwright_paula_vogel_aimed_t.html . Vogel also includes a passage from Lolita in her play Hot ’n’ Throbbing (1995/2000). Graley Herren, “Narrating, Witnessing, and Healing Trauma in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive ,” Modern Drama 53, no. 1 (2010): 103-14, quote on 103. Vogel, interview by Holmberg. In her review of Mark Brokaw’s production at the Vineyard Theatre, Jill Dolan writes that How I Learned to Drive is about “how our growth is built on loss.” Jill Dolan, review of How I Learned to Drive , Theatre Journal 50, no.1 (1998): 127-28, quote on 128. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 309. Vogel, Drive , 50. Vogel, interview by Holmberg. Joanna Mansbridge, Paula Vogel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 123-45, especially 144-45. Ibid., 145. Simakis, “Playwright Paula Vogel.” Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 316. Ann Pellegrini, “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive ,” Critical Theory and Performance , rev. and enlarged ed., ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 413-31, quote on 416 and 415. Herren, “Narrating, Witnessing,” 108. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 71. Vogel, interview by Holmberg. Ibid. Ibid. Paula Vogel, “Notes on the New York Production,” How I Learned to Drive (New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1998), 7. Here I am inspired by Marvin Carlson’s idea that theater practitioners “have long developed their work with an intuitive understanding” of “the concept of supplement,” privileging neither performance nor the written text. This particular “text-performance dynamic” encourages “an adjustment of perception in both directions.” Marvin Carlson, “Theatrical Performance: Illustration, Translation, Fulfillment, or Supplement?” Theatre Journal 37, no.1 (1985): 5-11, quote on 11. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 6. Paul Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture , 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 5. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 46. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 62. Auslander, Liveness, 5. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 63. Pellegrini, “Staging Sexual Injury,” 422. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 63. Ibid., 66. Susan Sontag, On Photography (1970, (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 24. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang, 2010), 71. Barthes, Camera Lucida , 31. Ibid. Ibid., 96 Ibid. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University, 1996), 2. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 4. Ibid. Compare this to Jennifer Haley, author of The Nether (2013), who recommends that a “prepubescent girl” play the nine-year-old Iris. Citing Bert O. States, Haley explains that the “child actor takes the audience out of the play,” so that the “audience is assured nothing awful will be enacted upon the child.” Presumably this happens because, taken out of the play, the audience knows that there are laws in place that would protect the child actor. Jennifer Haley, The Nether (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 74. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 88. Ibid., 90. David Savran, “Driving Ms. Vogel,” American Theatre 15, no. 8 (1998): 16-19 and 96-106, quote on 17. Nabokov, Strong Opinions , 224. Ibid., 224. Ibid. Ibid. David Sexton, “Newlight on Dark Secrets,” The Standard , April 5, 2012, available at https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/celebrity-news/newlight-on-dark-secrets-7383257.html . Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 306. See Alisa Zhulina, “Queen Sacrifice: The Feminine Figure of Power and Nabokov’s Strategy of Loss,” in Nabokov’s Women: The Silent Sisterhood of Textual Nomads , ed. Elena Rakhimova-Sommers ( Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 19-36. Maguire, “Watching Girls Watching,” online. Senior, “Beginners on Stage,” 21. For a survey of such recent works see Senior, “Beginners on Stage,” 71-72. For example, the Swiss theatre director Milo Rau cast children and teenagers between the ages of eight and thirteen in his Five Easy Pieces (2016) to enact the story of Belgian serial killer Marc Dutroux, who raped, tortured, and killed children and young girls. Bibliography Alizée, “Moi…Lolita” [“Me… Lolita”]. Gourmandises. London: Polydor Records, 2000. Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double . Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture . 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Barish, Jonas A. The Antitheatrical Prejudice . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . New York: Hill & Wang, 2010. Beauvoir, Simone de. Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (1959). Translated by Bernard Fretchman. London: First Square Edition, 1962. Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights . New York: New York University, 2011. Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. ---. “Theatrical Performance: Illustration, Translation, Fulfillment, or Supplement?” Theatre Journal 37, no.1 (1985): 5-11. Carriger, Michelle Liu. “‘Maiden’s Armor’: Global Gothic Lolita Fashion Communities and Technologies of Girly Counteridentity,” Theatre Survey 60, no. 1 (2019): 122-46. Connolly, Julian W. “Who Was Dolly Haze?” In A Reader’s Guide to Nabokov’s Lolita , 53-66. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009. Dolan, Jill. Review of How I Learned to Drive . Theatre Journal 50, no.1 (1998): 127-28. Dubus, Andre III. “ Lolita , Chamonix, France, 2018.” In Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, 119-34. New York: Vintage, 2021. Dunham, Lena. “My 10 Favorite Books: Lena Dunham.” New York Times , January 8, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/08/t-magazine/lena-dunham-book-list.html . Emery, Jacob. “Humbert Humbert as Mad Man: Art and Advertising in Lolita ,” Studies in the Novel 51, no. 4 (2019): 546-68. Ford, Norma. Notes . Cuban Theater Digital Archive. https://ctda.library.miami.edu/writtenwork/1610 . Fornés, María Irene. Lolita in the Garden. Unpublished script courtesy of Katie Gamelli. --. Lolita in the Garden materials. Box 6, folder 7. The Fales Library, New York, NY. Frank, Siggy. Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination . New York: Cambridge University, 2012. Gainor, Ellen J. “ Dance Nation and Its Representational Challenges,” Modern Drama 63, no. 2 (2020): 173-96. Givhan, Robin. “Fashion’s Lolita : Fragile, Subversive, and a Paean to White Femininity.” In Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, 146-51. New York: Vintage, 2021. Haley, Jennifer. The Nether . Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Harries, Martin. “Theater After Film, or Dismediation.” ELH 83, no. 2 (2016): 345-62. Hatch, Kristen. Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014. Herbold, Sarah. “‘Dolorès Disparue’: Reading Misogyny in Lolita .” In Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita , edited by Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment, 134-40. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008. Herren, Graley. “Narrating, Witnessing, and Healing Trauma in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive .” Modern Drama 53, no. 1 (2010): 103-14. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation . Hoboken: CRC Press, 2006. Jackson, S. E. “Whose Lulu Is It Anyway? Performing through Dramaturgies of Excess,” Theatre Journal 72, no. 1 (2020): 21-7. Kernfeld, Barry, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz . 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Kincaid, James R. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture . New York: Routledge, 1992. Lemon, Lee T and Marion J. Reis, eds. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays . 2nd ed. Translated by and introduction by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. With a new introduction by Gary Saul Morson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2012. Lippman, Laura. “Watching the Detective.” In Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, 69-81. New York: Vintage, 2021. Maguire, Tom. “Watching Girls Watching: HETPALEIS’s Hamilton Complex .” Diversity, Representation, and Culture in TYA. ASSITEJ: Cape Town, South Africa, 2021. 46-57. Mansbridge, Joanna. Paula Vogel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , vol.1 (1867). Translated by Ben Fowkes. Introduction by Ernest Mandel. New York: Penguin, 1990. Menand, Louis. “Just Like a Woman.” Slate, August 5, 1998. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/1998/08/just_like_a_woman.html . Muse, John H. “Virtual Theatre, Virtual Spectatorship: On Jonathan Ball’s Clockfire .” Theater 48, no. 1 (2018): 79-90. Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita . Revised and updated edition. Edited by Alfred Appel Jr. New York: Vintage International, 1991. ---. Lolita: A Screenplay . New York: Vintage, 1997. ---. “Playwriting.” In The Man from the USSR and Other Plays with Two Essays on the Drama , introductions and translations by Dmitri Nabokov, 315-22. San Diego: Bruccoli Clark, 1984. ---. Selected Letters, 1940-1977 . Edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew Joseph Bruccoli. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989. ---. Strong Opinions (1973). New York: Vintage, 1990. Naiman, Eric. Nabokov, Perversely . Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 2010. Nash, Ilana. American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Parks, Suzan-Lori. “On What Inspired the Red Letter Plays.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdaEk3FMRxI . Pellegrini, Ann. “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive .” In Critical Theory and Performance , revised and enlarged edition, edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, 413-31. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Rabkin, Gerald. “Is There a Text on This Stage?: Theatre/Authorship/Interpretation.” Performing Arts Journal 9, no. 2/3 (1985): 142-59. Ridout, Nicholas. Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Roach, Joseph R. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance . New York: Columbia University, 1996. Roche, Elisa de la. Teatro Hispano!: Three Major New York Companies . New York: Garland, 1995. Sack, Daniel. Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage . New York: Routledge, 2017. Savran, David. “Driving Ms. Vogel.” American Theatre 15, no. 8 (1998): 16-19 and 96-106. Senior, Adele. “Beginners On Stage: Arendt, Natality and the Appearance of Children in Contemporary Performance.” Theatre Research International 41, no. 1 (2016): 70-84. Sexton, David. “Newlight on Dark Secrets.” The Standard , April 5, 2012. https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/celebrity-news/newlight-on-dark-secrets-7383257.html . Schiff, Stacy. “Véra and Lo.” In Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, 15-31. New York: Vintage, 2021. Schweitzer, Marlis. “From the Editor.” Theatre Survey 60, no. 1 (2019): 1-5. Simakis, Andrea. “Playwright Paula Vogel Aimed to Write a Reverse Lolita with How I Learned to Drive .” Cleveland , May 10, 2017. https://www.cleveland.com/onstage/2017/03/playwright_paula_vogel_aimed_t.html Sontag, Susan. On Photography (1977). New York: Anchor Books, 1990. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century . Durham, NC: 2009. Sweeney, Elizabeth. “Lolita, I Presume; On a Character Entitled ‘Lolita’.” Miranda 3 (2010): 1- 12. Tatar, Maria. Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood . New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Vickers, Graham. Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008. Vogel, Paula. How I Learned to Drive. Revised Edition. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1998. ---. How I Learned to Drive (1997). In The Mammary Plays , 1-92. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998. ---. Interview by Arthur Holmberg. “Through the Eyes of Lolita.” American Repertory Theater, November 17, 2009. https://americanrepertorytheater.org/media/through-the-eyes-of-lolita/ . ---. Interview by Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose , June 19, 1997. https://charlierose.com/videos/5709 . Wagner, Matthew. Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time. New York: Routledge, 2012. Wood, Michael. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction . London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. Zhulina, Alisa. “Queen Sacrifice: The Feminine Figure of Power and Nabokov’s Strategy of Loss.” In Nabokov’s Women: The Silent Sisterhood of Textual Nomads , edited by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers , 19-36. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. ---. “Teaching Lolita in the Department of Drama.” In Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era, edited by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, 73-91. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. Footnotes About The Author(s) ALISA ZHULINA is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of Drama at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. She is the author of Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Her articles and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in MLN , Modern Drama , Modernism/modernity , Theatre Journal , Theatre Survey , Performance Research , and several edited volumes. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Pidikwe by Caroline Monnet at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Featuring indigenous women of various generations, Pidikwe integrates traditional and contemporary dance in an audiovisual whirlwind that straddles the border between film and performance, somewhere between the past and the future.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Pidikwe At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Caroline Monnet Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 12pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Canada Language No Dialogue Running Time 10 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film Featuring indigenous women of various generations, Pidikwe integrates traditional and contemporary dance in an audiovisual whirlwind that straddles the border between film and performance, somewhere between the past and the future. About The Artist(s) Caroline Monnet is an award winning multidisciplinary artist based in Montréal. Her work has been programmed extensively in Festivals and Museums around the world, including Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance, Berlinale, Göteborg and Rotterdam, as well as the Whitney Biennale, Frankfurt Kunsthalle, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National Gallery of Canada. She was selected for the Cannes Festival’s Cinéfondation residency in Paris. She received the Sundance Institute's Merata Mita Fellowship and was named compagne des Arts et des Lettres du Québec. Get in touch with the artist(s) coco.monnet@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.instagram.com/coco.monnet/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Stephen Kuehler Harvard University Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Stephen Kuehler Harvard University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Ben Levi Ross as Nick in Gatsby at American Repertory Theater. Photo: Julietta Cervantes. The Half-God of Rainfall Inua Ellams (8 - 24 Sept.)  Real Women Have Curves Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez (music and lyrics), Lisa Loomer (book) (8 Dec.–21 Jan.)  Becoming a Man P. Carl (16 Feb. - 10 Mar.)  Gatsby Florence Welch (music and lyrics), Thomas Bartlett (music), Martyna Majok (book) (23 May - 3 Aug.)  In its third post-pandemic season, the American Repertory Theater signaled that it was looking confidently toward the future. On November 17, the company announced that its proposed “Center for Creativity and Performance” in the Allston section of Boston (across the Charles River from Harvard’s main campus) had received formal approval from the city. The new theatre complex, which would replace the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge as the A.R.T.’s home upon its projected opening in 2026, was described as a model of sustainable design for cultural buildings. Meanwhile, at the Loeb, the A.R.T. presented a season of four shows (down from its pre-COVID norm of five or six) with its now-familiar mix of cultural diversity, gender non-conformity, and Broadway ambition. In The Half-God of Rainfall, Nigerian playwright Inua Ellams wedded three pantheons: the West African spirits called orishas , the Greek gods of Mt. Olympus, and the superstars of the National Basketball Association. The deities clash when Zeus rapes a Nigerian girl, Modúpé, who is under the protection of the river orisha Oshun. Modúpé gives birth to Zeus’s son, a half-god named Demi, whose divinity reveals itself in his extraordinary skill on the basketball court. Although she is mortal, Modúpé defeats Zeus in an epic battle; her victory inaugurates a feminist utopia, with the Black orishas ascendant and the white European gods crushed. As dramatic as all this sounds, the play is more a declaimed recitation than an acted-out story; the characters simply narrate most of their actions in the third person. Stacey Derosier’s lighting and Tal Yarden’s projections supplied the theatricality that this mythic spectacle needed. The next production, Real Women Have Curves , used the format of a traditional book musical to examine contemporary concerns about immigration, xenophobia, generational conflict, and body positivity. Based on a play and film, the show centers on Ana, an 18-year-old Mexican American woman whose family runs a small sewing factory in East Los Angeles. Ana has been accepted into Columbia University, but she is conflicted about pursuing her educational dreams when the family business needs her help. She’s also vexed by her mother’s criticisms of her weight, although the young man she is dating assures her that she is beautiful. Offsetting Ana’s personal struggles are larger social and political problems, such as anti-Hispanic bias and the predicament of undocumented immigrants. One such migrant, a worker in the clothing factory, is caught in a raid and deported; her plight renews Ana’s determination to study law and fight for immigrants' rights. Lisa Loomer’s book sets up these multiple conflicts and issues broadly, simply, and efficiently, allowing plenty of room for tuneful ballads and comic numbers in a Latin pop style flavored with salsa and mariachi rhythms. However, the multiplicity of issues prevents the musical from having a clear thematic center; even body affirmation, which gives the show its title and title song, turns out to be a minor concern for the show as a whole. Nevertheless, the production benefited from strong, appealing performances by the whole ensemble, especially Lucy Godínez as Ana, Florencia Cuenca as her sister Estela, and Justina Machado as their mother Carmen. The show that followed Real Women , P. Carl’s autobiographical play Becoming a Man , also focused on the struggle to affirm what’s real in matters of body and gender. After decades of living as female, including a lesbian marriage, Carl makes the transition to masculinity—a rocky process that he presents as both harrowing and exhilarating. Most difficult of all is negotiating the effects of the change on his relationship with Lynette, his wife, as she grapples with the new realities of her spouse’s body and self-presentation. Carl’s jubilant, self-absorbed embrace of his male identity makes him somewhat oblivious to Lynette’s pain, leading to raw confrontations between them that are the most compelling and affecting moments in the play. The work’s non-chronological structure reflected the erratic process of transitions both in gender and in relationships; even the physical staging, with sets by Emmie Finckel and video by Brittany Bland, was characterized by fluidity and motion. Ambitious, pretentious, rich, good-looking, and doomed—these adjectives for the title character of The Great Gatsby might also describe Gatsby , the musical version that capped the A.R.T.’s 2023-24 season. Mimi Lien’s imposing set—a junkyard piled with the mangled corpses of luxury cars, from which gleaming Art Deco stairways and platforms emerged—captured the sense of an opulent era that was headed for disaster. The same pessimism, but not the same panache, characterized the pop-opera score by Florence Welch and Thomas Bartlett. Except for a couple of numbers that had compelling shape and character, the music was a tedious stream of semi-songs, one much like the others. Although the leading performers—especially Isaac Powell as Gatsby, Charlotte MacInnes as Daisy, Solea Pfeiffer as Myrtle, and Adam Grupper as Wolfsheim—sang attractively and with conviction, their occasional incandescence couldn’t lighten the prevailing gloom, or make it feel truly tragic. In its glumness, one could argue that the show was echoing the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, who doesn’t glorify the Jazz Age but rather regrets being seduced by its hollow glamor. But Nick responds to his disenchantment with the world of Gatsby by writing an elegy for it in lyrical prose. The bitter taste of disillusionment was all that Welch and Bartlett’s Gatsby had to offer, and there was nothing elegiac about it. Nevertheless, as Nick observes: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” The A.R.T. seems to believe in that future too: as Gatsby continued a healthy summer run, with many shows sold out, Playbill.com reported that the company was considering a Broadway opening. At the same time, the organization announced that its next season would once again offer five shows, including world-premiere commissions by tap choreographer Ayodele Casel and playwright Kate Hamill (adapting Homer’s Odyssey , no less). The A.R.T. appears to be gathering energy for solid achievement in its final years at its Cambridge house, as it prepares to follow the green light of a gleaming new home across the river. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Stephen Kuehler is a librarian at Harvard University, serving as the Harvard Library’s main research contact for performing arts, especially for students and faculty in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Media. Steve received his master’s degree in theater history from Tufts University, and he also holds degrees in philosophy, theology, and library science. As a member of the Theater Library Association, Steve was a co-organizer of TLA’s 2011 symposium “Holding Up the Mirror,” which focused on the interplay of authenticity and adaptation in contemporary Shakespearean performance. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 16 Fall 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: The Tutor By Hala Baki, California Polytechnic State University Published: November 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF The Tutor by Torange Yeghiazarian. Cast, Left-to-Right: Lawrence Radecker (Kayvon), Debórah Elizer (Azar) & Maya Nazzal (Baran). Photo by Lois Tema. THE TUTOR. By Torange Yeghiazarian. Directed by Sahar Assaf. New Conservatory Theatre Center, San Francisco. 5 May 2024. Reviewed by Hala Baki, California Polytechnic State University In this refreshingly raw three-hander, playwright Torange Yeghiazarian challenges American audiences — including those who may identify as Iranian— to acknowledge their deeply problematic biases about Iranian culture, sexualities, and women. The Tutor , which was commissioned by San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre Center in association with Golden Thread Productions and directed by Sahar Assaf, takes a magnifying lens to prejudice and vulnerability in the diaspora. Through a painfully dramatic love triangle, it demonstrates the costs that people must pay for revealing and owning their truth to others. The Tutor follows the story of Baran, a young Iranian woman recently immigrated to the United States amidst the Woman, Life, Freedom protest movement in Iran in 2022. Her home away from home is defined by two people: her arranged Iranian-American husband Kayvon, 25 years her senior; and Azar, an Iranian-American woman who is Kayvon’s lifelong friend. This relationship triangles when Kayvon asks Azar to become Baran’s tutor upon her arrival and help her settle into her new life. Little did anyone know that the two women would end up falling madly in love, complicating the threesome’s relationship along with a dash of bad luck and worse choices. The play contained several excellent moments of emotional tension, helped by Assaf’s masterful staging. From the beginning, the newlyweds Baran (Maya Nazzal) and Kayvon (Lawrence Radecker) crack the facade of a picture-perfect couple with their backgammon competitiveness laced with hints of sexual dissatisfaction. They dance around each other in their own home, staged intimately in the round at the Walker Theater with a backgammon board patterned on the floor. The actors frequently break through the. Thus, from the beginning, The Tutor implicates the audience as participants in the intimacy of the space and its unfolding drama. The first scene hints at the intense cat and mouse game to come, punctuated at the end with the shocking discovery of Kayvon’s mother dead on the floor of her room next door. The following scene complicates the situation by revealing the affair between Baran and Azar (Debórah Eliezer) as well as its unexpected connection to the mother’s death— at the deceased woman’s memorial, no less. The scene opens on the modular set transformed into the home’s kitchen. The space teems with unspoken tension as Baran busies herself with preparing food for mourners and Azar nervously fidgets nearby. Just when the silent and heavy air becomes unbearable, the two snap into action. They berate one another for their conduct after the mother’s death and ultimately let their pent-up sexual frustration result in oral sex under the kitchen table. Of course, Kayvon walks into the room just then, and the women tactfully play off the tableau as a “dropped spoon” scenario. The whiplash of emotion and tone in this scene, from heated pain and frustration to sitcom-style humor and back, does not always flow smoothly or land on its mark. However, it does force the audience to sit in the discomfort of the situation, not quite sure how or with whom to sympathize. The more successful examples of this delicate balance are in the penultimate scenes of the play, where truths finally come out and the characters must face each other’s violations head on. Kayvon grapples with the affair between his queer wife and best friend, as well as his retaliatory one-night stand with Azar. Azar feels torn between her lover and her best friend, as well as the guilt implicating her in Kayvon’s mother’s death and Baran’s heartbreak. Meanwhile, Baran struggles with the betrayal she feels from both and the unraveling life she has barely started making for herself as a recent immigrant in the US. All of this complexity manifests with beautiful and volatile staging that leaves the audience feeling like an intruding guest witnessing some sacred reckoning, wishing to disappear into their seats instead. All three characters, like backgammon players, navigate their love triangle disaster with calculated strategy, tactics, and a dash of helplessness in the face of chance. Baran is viewed as a pawn in the game by the other two, who are more interested in competing with each other than facing their own poor judgments. These diasporic individuals project their prejudices and political lenses onto Baran, pigeonholing her as an impressionable young Iranian woman who is confused and in need of rescuing by older, more “liberated” Iranians. Yet Baran ultimately takes matters into her own hands and frees herself of both of their grips. Her actions assert that she is neither victim nor pawn and that she is comfortable enough with her own vulnerability to burn familiar bridges and boldly seek the unknown. In doing so, she disrupts the others’ outdated expectations of Iranian culture and gender norms, as well as any romanticized notions they may have had about rebellious Iranian youth. The Tutor challenges audiences to disrupt similar biases within themselves. It displays the diversity of the global Iranian population and their worldviews, especially as it pertains to the ideas of freedom and owning one’s truth in the face of judgment or suppression. The production’s dramaturgical note, penned by the playwright, brings direct attention to the little-known activist history of the Iranian diaspora from the days of the 1979 Revolution to the Woman, Life, Freedom uprisings. It particularly highlights the progressive Iranian American community in Berkeley, CA that serves as the inspiration for the characters of Kayvon and Azar. Yeghiazarian thus draws attention to the disconnect and misconceptions that can exist both within and between global communities. Through painfully raw emotion and discomforting intimacy, The Tutor draws audiences into a heated game in which, arguably, everyone ends up a loser. It’s an example of diasporic theater that takes for granted the ignorance and biases of its audiences, whether or not they share the playwright or characters’ cultural background. It strategically plays with them, pushing them to consider how one’s path can be determined by a combination of fate and agency. In some ways, this idea is a quintessentially immigrant one in that all who seek a new start, or some form of liberation, have to contend with both of these factors. Regardless of how they relate to the play, The Tutor reminds audiences to be self-critical and aware lest they themselves make a move that can cost them the game. PHOTOS The Tutor by Torange Yeghiazarian. Cast, Left-to-Right: Maya Nazzal (Baran) & Lawrence Radecker (Kayvon). Photo by Lois Tema. The Tutor by Torange Yeghiazarian. Cast, Left-to-Right: Debórah Elizer (Azar) & Maya Nazzal (Baran). Photo by Lois Tema. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Hala Baki (she/her) is a lecturer in the Theatre and Dance Department at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She earned her PhD in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include Arab and MENA American theater, conditions of theatrical production, and diaspora theories. She has presented her work at IFTR, ASTR, and ATHE, and has published in Modern Drama , Theatre Journal , Theatre Topics , and Asian Theatre Journal. She co-edited The Vagrant Trilogy: Three Plays by Mona Mansour (Methuen Drama) and authored a chapter in the volume Arabs, Politics, and Performance (Routledge). She is also a director and dramaturg whose recent credits include Raeda Taha’s Where Can I find Someone Like You, Ali? (2024), Yussef El Guindi’s Wife of Headless Man Investigates Her Own Disappearance (2023), Mona Mansour’s unseen (OSF 2022), the devised ensemble play Writer’s Block (2021), and Kareem Fahmy’s American Fast (2021). Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents An Interview with the Iraqi-born British playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak by Hadeel Abelhameed Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi Performance Review: The Tutor Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. Review: PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Natalie Tenner Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Natalie Tenner By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being . Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Although Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being serves as an introductory text, its usefulness is not in the structured and fixed definitions and equations a novice might desire, but instead in the illustration of the disagreements and instability that necessarily come with an interdisciplinary approach. The twelve essays utilize a range of methodologies as well as different writing styles that model the variety of ways cognitive science and affect theory can be applied to performance studies. The book is clearer in its use of cognitive science than in affect theory, in that the authors often explicitly state which aspects of cognitive theory they are employing while the inclusion of affect theory is subtler. This illustrates accurately the disagreements still surrounding how to define and use affect, and how affect, emotion, and feelings differ. The elements of cognitive science appear more consistently throughout the work, although not without some variation, and many of the essays provide examples of applying popular cognitive science approaches such as mirror neurons, conceptual metaphor theory, embodied cognition, and distributed cognition. In the introduction to the first section, “Dances with Science”, Evelyn B. Tribble and John Sutton suggest some of the difficulties of interdisciplinary work but also introduce commonly used aspects of cognitive science in the study of performance. The essays that follow outline different ways of structuring this cross-disciplinary dance. Matthew Reason and his co-authors describe an empirical study to determine a spectator’s response to watching dance. The chapter focuses mostly on the collaboration of artists and neuroscientists, highlighting the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach, but also the challenges. Anna Furse also writes on dance, and though she suggests that empirical analysis is forthcoming, the essay itself focuses on a theoretical concept of historical identity located within the body. She describes her plans to retrace her steps, both figuratively and choreographically, with her partner Esther Linley, in order to determine “what happens in the act of retrieving a forgotten or atrophied learnt embodied action, that also carries with it emotional significance?” (57). In the section’s final chapter, Erin Hood discusses the difficulty of representing pain and understanding it in others. Using the performance piece Sssshh…Succour, in which the solo performer cuts herself in a methodological fashion, Hood introduces a theme that is repeated in later essays in this book, that the presence of the body onstage reminds the spectator that the body is not separate from cognition and affect, but instead they are essentially connected. The next section, introduced by Amy Cook, focuses on embodied cognition in more traditional performances. Cook provides the first extended introduction to affect theory in this section and also introduces metaphor and conceptual blending theory as a way of relating text and cognition. Affect theory is an important concept for the first essay in this section, in which Natalie Bainter considers the many blushing faces in Thomas Heywood’s play, A Woman Killed with Kindness. The blush helps to illustrate that affect is not simply an individual bodily response, but is relational. John Lutterbie suggests in his essay that language is a dynamic system and that gesture, instead of supporting language, helps create and shape it. Language is not, then, created simply in one’s mind, but instead is embodied. Naomi Rokonitz continues to examine this relationship between text and body by considering the dying bodies in Wit and 33 Variations. Though the protagonists in both plays cultivate their minds more than their bodies, it is their bodies that we see fall apart and suffer. Again, the body on stage provides an affective experience that leads to empathy. In the third section, “The Multimodal Actor,” Rhonda Blair provides an overview of cognitive science history and two different approaches to affect theory. These essays consider the embodied cognition of the actor. Neal Utterback considers the relationship between gesture and memory. He provides an example of an empirical study and concludes “Clearly gestures are valuable tools for actors. … Gestures have a profound effect on our ability to memorise text and construct meaning” (155). Martin Welton, like Furse, gives an early overview of a performance as experiment before it has been completed. He also makes use of affect and another recurring idea, James Gibson’s “affordances”, to discuss the relationship between cognition and the feeling of one’s feet on the ground. Gabriele Sofia finishes out this section by describing the benefit performance studies can provide to cognitive scientists. She discusses the “performative body schema” actors must create, based off of their individual body schemas, and relates this to a benefit seen in Parkinson’s disease patients who attended theatre workshops. Sofia suggests that “theatre’s peculiar strength lies in providing another reality that makes it possible to work on the ability of creating relationships” (179). In the final section, Bruce McConachie suggests that actors and spectators, like children in a sandbox, have an active relationship with each other as well as with the environment that affords them opportunities. The essays that follow in this section discuss interactive performance, which relies on the active cooperation of the spectators. The first two articles discuss the solo audience experience of the production Rotating in a Room of Images.Josephine Machon examines her experience based on the cognitive idea of synaesthesia, in which multiple senses are stimulated simultaneously from one trigger. Machon describes her experience of the immersive theatrical performance as (syn)aesthetic, as being both cerebral and corporeal. Adam Alston’s analysis of the same performance looks at it instead through the lens of risk perception, affect, and emotion, and suggests that “[w]hen considered as an affective presence, my relationship to risk was political given the influence it exerted; it controlled as much as spurred on thought and action”(227). The final essay of the collection describes the effects interactive and immersive performance had on autistic children who participated in Imaging Autism. Melissa Trimingham suggests that the children’s opportunities to touch and interact with objects, costumes, and set pieces allow them a momentary participation in a world in which “objects are steeped in meanings” which “seems to pass autistic people by” (232). Nicola Shaughnessy introduces this book by discussing the performance Schrödinger, which provides an entry point into her discussion of “intermediary spaces” (19), which is where the many disciplines in this text come together. As in the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, the essays in this book can “exist in simultaneous multiple states” (2): as studies of science and performance, as examples of cognitive and affective theories, as empirical approaches and personal journeys. The variety of approaches and topics provide multiple entry points for those interested in applying cognitive theories to their work and for those who are looking for solid examples of the relevancy of cognitive and affect theories to performance studies. References Footnotes About The Author(s) NATALIE TENNER University of Mary Washington Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Craig Quintero Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Craig Quintero By Published on May 20, 2022 Download Article as PDF The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness. Yuko Kurahashi. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Books, 2020; Pp. 240. Yuko Kurahashi’s The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness presents the first comprehensive analysis of Ping Chong’s five-decade long theatre career in which, according to Kurahashi, Chong “has created the largest and most complex body of work of any Asian American artist” (5). Kurahashi defines Chong as an “avant-garde artist who is also Asian American” instead of an “Asian American avant-garde artist” in order to highlight that his work extends beyond issues of Asian American identity and focuses on broader global concerns of displaced communities, marginalization, and racial and economic injustice (5). Kurahashi’s study traces the evolution of Chong’s performances from his early abstract productions to his multi-media performances, historical projects, and community-based oral histories, while also detailing the manner in which “the trajectory of his life and experiences underpin” his art (173). In Chapter 1, “Transpacific Journey of Two Opera Artists,” Kurahashi introduces the broader cultural and political landscape that Chong was born into in 1946 in Toronto, noting seminal moments that led to the massive influx of Chinese immigrants to North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the discriminatory laws enacted by America and Canada to stem this flow. Chong’s parents were both Cantonese Opera artists (his father was a director and his mother was a performer) who first made their way from Guangzhou, China, to San Francisco in the 1930s with a traveling Cantonese Opera company, before moving to Canada and finally settling in New York in 1947. Kurahashi emphasizes the impact that being raised in an immigrant household had on Chong, with issues of “isolation, loneliness, and the struggle of self-identity” recurring in his work as he grapples with being a “culturally hyphenated man” in America (11). Chapter 2 details Chong’s formative collaborative relationship with Meredith Monk that began after he completed his undergraduate degree in film at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He joined the Meredith Monk Dance Company in 1972, and later that year, Chong and Monk collaborated on the dance Paris. This collaboration provided the foundation for Chong’s early performances that emphasized abstraction, non-linear or non-existent narratives, tableau, music, dance, voice-overs, “framing” by constructing faux proscenium arches, projections, “bricolage” (a technique inspired by Joseph Cornell’s artwork in which Chong juxtaposed unassociated objects onstage to create new meaning), incorporation of movement styles inspired by Japanese Noh and other Asian performance traditions, and use of language as a “medium” instead of an “instrument of communication” (35-41). Kurahashi reads these early experiments as Chong’s attempt to “integrate a multiplicity of stage elements to provoke the audience to look at the work and their world anew” (42). Chapters 3-10 introduce Chong’s major performances from 1975-2017. Kurahashi presents his works chronologically, while also dividing the performances into thematic “categories” including fear of the unknown (Chapter 3), myths (Chapter 4), modern dystopia (Chapter 5), revisionary history of East-West relations (Chapter 6), staging voices in the community (Chapter 7), memories and stories of local communities (Chapter 8), puppet theatre (Chapter 9), and collaborating with educational institutions (Chapter 10). In each chapter, Kurahashi presents “mini-reviews” of 2-5 performances in which she briefly describes the design (set, costumes, props, music, etc.) and images from the works, while also providing her interpretation of the performances’ meaning. Kurahashi’s brief analysis often relies on piecing together published reviews, resulting in a fragmented description that is difficult to visualize. Black and white rehearsal and production photographs are important additions to the book, providing readers with a clearer understanding of the performance aesthetics. Kurahashi’s analysis is most insightful in Chapters 6, 7, and 8. In Chapter 6, she critiques Chong’s “departure from the abstract and allegorical works he completed in the 1970s and 1980s” as he shifts to “historical works which focus on cultural collisions and encounters” in The East/West Quartet (82). Kurahashi describes this series as an attempt to “bring to light history which would otherwise disappear” (86). Each of the four performances addresses specific cultural and political junctures of contestation: Deshima (1990) portrays Japanese and Western colonialism from the sixteenth through twentieth century (82), Chinoiserie (1995) illustrates the manner in which Western powers attempted to assert financial and political control over China (84), After Sorrow (1997) depicts Chinese and Vietnamese culture through a poetic combination of music, dance, text, and projections (85), and Pojagi (1999) demonstrates the impact colonizers had on Korea which culminated in the division of the country during the Korean War (85). Chapters 7 and 8 are dedicated to Chong’s ongoing collaborative, community-based oral history series, Undesirable Elements (1992–present). Chong initially designed the series as a creative space for displaced people to share their personal narratives before expanding the emphasis to encompass people who he describes as having experienced “otherness beyond the boundaries of the transit” (101). For the series, Chong and his creative team visit a host community, interview local residents, select the participants for the production, conduct more in-depth interviews, refine the “scripts,” then rehearse what Chong describes as a “seated opera for the spoken word” (99). Foregoing the elaborate theatrical design of his earlier works, the Undesirable Elements series requires minimal scenery, with performers seated in a semi-circle facing the audience and reading from their scripts (100). These performances provide a public space for marginalized people to share their memories of the past and dreams for the future (110). Chong has developed over forty productions with diverse communities in cities including Berlin, Tokyo, Rotterdam, Seattle, and New York. In the book’s final chapter, “Future: ALAXSXA/ALASKA and Beyond—Quest for Identity, Otherness, and Humanity,” Kurahashi describes one of Chong’s most recent works, ALAXSXA/ALASKA, which addresses environmental and political concerns of Alaska’s Indigenous people before addressing trends in Chong’s ongoing work. In this closing analysis and throughout the book, I found myself longing for more interviews with Chong and his collaborators, more details about his creative process (how does Chong structure his interview process and textual revisions?), and clearer descriptions of Chong’s performances instead of lengthy interpretations of their meaning. Nevertheless, The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness will serve as a useful introductory resource for scholars and classrooms, helping to deepen critical understanding about one of the most important and, unfortunately, overlooked theatre artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Craig Quintero Grinnell College Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 22, 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Power, Shame, Vanity and Opportunism – Productions of the 63rd Berliner Theatertreffen Published: July 15, 2026 Download Article as PDF By Steve Earnest Image Credits: Article Featured Image: Cast of Wallenstein . Photo credit: Armin Smailovic At the audience talkback following the nominated production Three Times Left is Right , Vincent Koch, a member of the Theatertreffen jury noted that one of the key elements involved in this year’s final show selection had to do with each work’s provocative quality – it’s ability to provoke the audience through the theatrical process. Given the increasing worldwide polarization in political positions, a great many of the works considered not only the nature of world politics but also many of the byproducts of that ongoing dialectic. It may be said that “the politics of war” was a theme of this year’s festival – not only traditional war between nations or regions but wars in the bedroom and war against oneself. As is always the case at the festival each May, many unique production approaches were seen and many great seasoned and new theatre figures displayed some of the highest-level work in Europe. Sadly, Florentina’s Holzinger’s A Year Without Summer could not be presented during the festival dates as it had been previously scheduled to tour to Australia during May 2026. The work was rescheduled to appear in October 2026 at the Volksbühne. Also, given the early starting dates of the festival it was not possible to review productions of The Leopard or Mephisto . A total of seven of the works of the 63 rd Berliner Theatertreffen will be considered in this article. Admittedly, hearing that The Glass Menagerie was selected as one of the “Ten Remarkable Productions” was something that did not excite me. Having seen the production in the USA various times in both professional as well as amateur settings, it only conjured images of Tom and Amanda sparring in a typical box set with Laura presented as someone with various deficiencies. From the outset it was clear that this would not be the case with this production from Theater Basel. Director Jan Woodcock-Stewart focused on the fragile structure of the family and especially the roles of women in the work. Many metaphors were created with regard to the scenic elements utilized in the first half of the play – the layout consisted of several loosely defined performance areas: a long winding upstage walkway used for all entrances and exits, a small office and computer area for Laura (the production was not at all tied to the 1930’s) and a family gathering area, loosely defined by contemporary power plates, vibrating cushions typically used for exercise. For several of the scenes the actors stood on the vibrating plates and delivered their lines – creating a metaphor for the “shaky ground” on which each was standing. To further enhance the metaphor, coins had to be inserted by Tom into the power plates in order for them to keep working. Laura’s peculiar nature was defined in numerous ways, but none more striking than her online vocal lessons with a female teacher of heavy metal screaming. The hilarity of these scenes cannot be overstated. The inclusion of this element paid huge dividends later in the production, particularly in the scene when Tom and Amanda were discussing Laura’s “peculiar nature” while she was running around the room in headphones screaming heavy metal lyrics. Antionette Ullrich’s performance as Laura was highly physical and worked against the notion of her being crippled physically, but rather socially. The menagerie itself was striking, and Laura used a hand-held camera to focus on the collection of glass horse figures as all were horses except for the one unicorn that was later broken. As Amanda, Hilke Altefrohne gave a much younger take on the role than one might typically see. At one point a microphone appeared, and she sang the sexy disco song “Rescue Me,” as her desperate financial situation became increasingly apparent. The visit of Jim, the “gentleman caller” was marked by an incredible scenic change. An enormous realistic/dream set was lowered onto the stage to symbolize Amanda’s ideal dinner night. Dark green in color, the unit set was only used in that scene and marked a clear break from the fragmented world previously established to define the dysfunctional, fragmented life of the trio. As Laura had been forced into what appeared to be the costume of a whore, Amanda had arranged a beautiful table for dinner; Jim arrived on a motorcycle and wore a flashy motorcycle outfit. However, before coming face to face with Jim, Laura ripped off the dress in favor of a baggy sweatshirt and more traditional house clothing. Led by Tom, played by Jan Bluthardt, the family sang grace by rote and the scene followed with the table being vibrated by the same power plates used in the early scenes. The entire dinner became a physical fiasco due to the vibrating table and the resultant spillages and even breakages of plates and glasses. As is often the case, the Jim and Laura scene was one of the play’s highlights – Julian Anatol Schneider’s portrayal of Jim was marvelously understated. As he left, so did the marvelous set and thus Amanda’s dream was ended. In the end Tom screamed “Laura – blow out the candle’s!” nearly ten times before she did it, leaving the audience somewhat unsettled. Amanda, Jim (Julian Anatol Schneider) and Tom in the Gentleman Caller scene. Photo Credit: Lucia Hunziker The production received a mixed reaction to those in attendance that evening, with some audience members loudly booing the directorial interpretation of the work. It should be noted that there was an equally loud group who stood and cheered the approach and the bold choices made by Woodcock-Stewart and her production team. The young British director is noted for her refusal to simply retell works in their traditional form but to find new methods of storytelling that reenvision stories for a contemporary world. The Glass Menagerie was a prime example of this directorial process. Hilke Altefrohne as Amanda with Tom (Jan Bluthardt) and Laura (Antionette Ullrich). Stading on vibrating cushions. Photo Credit: Lucia Hunziker Presented at the Hans Otto Theatre in Potsdam, Serotinin was based on the novel by Michel Houellebecq and was presented as a monodrama by the actor Guido Lambrecht. Directed and designed by veteran Sebastian Hartmann, the work was presented on the small Probebühne stage in Potsdam on a single white set. The nearly five hour work was characterized by moments of stillness, silence and thought – an endless stream of consciousness monologue presented by Lambrecht who fared very well given the Herculean task of telling the story of his life, his parents, of the new generation, and key elements of his own personal struggles that reflect many of the struggles of western society. Embodying the character of Florent-Claude Labrouste, Lambrecht tells the story as someone whose life is near its end. Rendered impotent by prescription drugs, he relives many of his failed relationships both with women and with others though his sad and uneventful life. Lambrecht’s performance was extremely filmic, and an argument could be made for this work to be presented in that medium. As a theatre work, it was somewhat tedious, and the absence of any subtitles made it difficult to follow the entire story with complete accuracy. Because of the relative stasis of the work which included very little movement and really no scenic variety whatsoever, it made the work stand apart from the entire slate of other performances. The work seemed a curious selection when compared with the other, highly developed gesamtuntwerk -like productions of the 2026 Theatertreffen. However, there is a history there - Serotonin was not the first of Houellenbercq’s novels to be staged as a theatrical work; The Elementary Particles was staged by Schauspielhaus Zurich in 2004 and invited to the 2005 Theatertreffen. The writer maintains a strong presence among the European public and his works continue to speak to the contemporary public in a relevant way. Guido Lambrecht in Serotonin . Photo Credit: Thomas M. Jauk Another solo work, Fräulein Else , was presented by Volkstheater Wien, directed by Leonie Böhm and performed by Julia Riedler. Much shorter than Serotonin , Riedler’s performance lasted a mere hour and a half – still quite a feat as a solo work. The work was adapted from Arthur Schnitlzer’s controversial novel of the same name, written in 1924, that involved Else’s father, deeply in debt and a deal that is brokered to resolve the debt. An elderly art deal named Dorsay agreed to resolve the debt provided that Else exposes herself naked to him for a quarter of an hour. Böhm and Riedler adapted the work as an inner monologue that explored both the comical as well as the more serious and even shameful nature of the situation. Apparently, Dorsay had observed the young Else since she was thirteen years old and had always been a “fan.” She describes in detail the meeting between them as he asks her to sit on his knee, fondling her and calling her names like “dear child” and “desirable creature.” Throughout the work Riedler remained in constant dialogue with the audience, actually asking questions and receiving answers, which guaranteed each performance to be slightly different based on the responses given. On the night I saw the production she asked the audience whether she should expose herself or not, to which the majority shouted “nein!” But she told them she would only say yes after she had the bank transfer in hand and had taken a very strong tranquilizer. Her strip show was a little spectacular. Julia Riedler in Fr ä ulein Else. Photo Credit: Marcel Urlaub Presented on the main stage of the Berliner Ensemble, Fräulein Else began with Riedler in the audience trying to make her way onto the stage while stopping to flirt with and ask questions of many of the (particularly) male audience members. Obviously, a seasoned actress in improvisation the journey to the stage took nearly a quarter hour, and when she finally arrived on stage her narrative discussion of the story began. Within the context of the work, she investigated areas of power, male dominance, humiliation and shame. Utilizing only a large mountable chandelier she once rode up on the device that was lifted to a great height in the theatre. Soon after her decent she began to take off her clothes and appeared naked on stage for the required quarter of an hour, discussing the nature of what it felt like to be naked in front of others in such a voyeuristic situation. Riedler’s great skill as a comedic actress was certainly the highlight of the show; she had the audience up dancing in the aisles and even doing “the wave.” Riedler also pointed out the fourteen naked female statues that were a part of the interior architecture of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm and managed to throw an insult out to the former leader, Bertolt Brecht, who was well known as a womanizer (in her words). Schiller’s epic Wallenstein trilogy was presented by the Munich Kammerspiele as “A Slaughter in Seven Courses.” Staged by resident director Jan-Christoph Gockel, the seven-and-a-half-hour spectacle included nearly everything one could imagine from a theatrical performance. Power, betrayal and opportunity dominated the work which spanned decades but in fact considered many different times and places all united by the landscape of war. In the original, the character of Albrecht von Wallenstein was in fact, a mercenary, a loyal subject (but basically a businessman) who profits from war. Gockel introduced the parallel story of Vladimir Putin’s contemporary associate Yevgeny Prigozhin, a mercenary who supplied the Russian army with food during the early years of the war in the Ukraine. A huge Putin loyalist, Prigozhin had worked his way up from the position of a menial worker to Putin’s lead chef. To illustrate that conceptual idea, the first major scene of the play, nearly one hour in length, consisted of a huge kitchen area, populated by nearly one dozen chefs and cooks, all contributing to the creation of a magnificent feast. Entitled “Cooking is War,” an onstage camera crew (popular with many productions at this year’s TT) captured all of the slicing, dicing, mixing, straining and other duties associated with food preparation. The extensive detail of the cooking session featured no actual stage dialog, instead the soundscape consisted of the sounds created by the chopping, mixing and casual unscripted conversation of the onstage workforce. The cameras allowed for the action to be seen from many angles as projected onto the three onstage screens. Samuel Koch and Katharina Bach in Wallenstein. Photo credit: Armin Smailovic Portrayed by paraplegic actor Samuel Koch, the character of Wallenstein became a puppet – both literally and figuratively. Two incredible elements contributed to this idea – a miniature puppet of Koch’s character that was skillfully manipulated by actor and puppeteer Michael Pietsch and an amazing electric “wheelchair/throne” that turned the character of Wallenstein into something of a monster puppet (i.e. a monster truck). Though a loyal ally to the emperor, Wallenstein made enough mistakes (a parallel to the story of Prigozhin) that he was eventually assassinated. The funeral scene (as it may be called) took place on a large green screen as Wallenstein’s (Prigozhin’s) span of life was chronicled through a series of images that illustrated the incredible damage to the war effort (Ukraine) that he helped orchestrate as a supportive ally. The powerful ending revealed one of Wallenstein’s greatest epiphanies – that man is greater than war. Katharina Bach’s performance as Illo was one of the true highlights of the festival. Playing the part of a male associate of Wallenstein, Bach donned a male muscle shirt and even exposed a long penis at one point – cutting it off and flinging it into an onstage mess of residual effects. Later in the play Illo went hunting for the severed penis and, in a hilarious video assisted scene, found the object among the aisles of the audience and Illo arrived to try and revive the penis, offering “chest pumps,” as well as mouth to mouth resuscitation. The incredibly funny scene was just one of many from a production that created an incredible balance of serious as well as comedic scenes. Wallenstein included a total of 5 pauses – three were 30 minutes in length and the other two were about 10 minutes each. Two of the lengthier breaks were themed as audience members were fed the Russian soup dish soljanka during one of the breaks and another consisted of a Russian “kitsch,” a dance party with techno music as audience members were invited onstage to dance with the cast members. Following the dance party break, certain selected audience members were given scripts to read selections from Sergei Okunev’s writings about the lives of mercenaries. Based on a concept from playwright/director Heiner Müller, the use of audience members led to several very comedic moments but also some extremely profound and meaningful scenes. The audience members were joined onstage by many of the cast members, who lightly coached the chosen spectators, all of whom were seated on a very wide table situated downstage. Wallenstein featured a great deal of audience interaction, which helped to alleviate any issues caused by the production’s length. In so many ways, Wallenstein was the most complete and stylistically solid production of the 2026 Theatertreffen. Paulina Alpen as Thomas Melle. Photo Credit: Julian Baumann Die Welt im Rucken (The World at My Back) chronicles the life and experiences of Thomas Melle, who suffered from extreme bipolarism. Initially a successful playwright and novelist, Melle’s mental condition led him to sell off his prized library, live in a drunken stupor, engage in sexual fantasies, and be confined to a psychiatric hospital after numerous arrests, several of which were violent in nature. The stage version of the novel, produced by Schauspiel Stuttgart under the direction of Lucia Bihler and Gwendolyne Melchinger featured a cast of seven – Paulina Alpen as Thomas Melle flanked by a company of six doppelgangers; all were dressed in the same costume but only Alpen’s role saw many visual changes as far as costumes as properties were concerned. The doppelganger’s served as a chorus for the work. A complicated theatrical performance, the play began with an overview of Melle’s condition: the loss of his library, his criminal undertakings and other activities considered to be a part of the large “elephant in the room” of Melle’s life and career. The staging and performance of the work were exceptional. By developing the Melle novel into a Greek style chorus the work was one of the most celebrated of the Theatertreffen. The choral aspect of the work included many physical feats (trampolines as well as choreography) but also the repetition of key sections of text were an important element of the performance. Cast of Die Welt im Rucken. Photo Credit: Julian Baumann Perhaps the strongest element of Die Welt im Rucken was the scenery, designed by Paula Wellmann. The striking pink curtains served as an enveloping scenic element to frame the action within a particular world. Once Melle’s condition reached a certain point, the curtains were dropped and formed a physical barrier for the action. Additional platforms and other scenic elements, including flying equipment, accentuated the play’s action. The stunning curtain drop and later use of the fallen curtains to provide a scenic space was an ingenious invention. The space was utilized to provide a universal setting for many of Melle’s both lived and internal events that defied the necessity of a literal place. Wellmann was able to construct a literal “mental landscape” that supported Melle’s journey. Carl Zuckmayer’s The Captain of Köpenick is a standard German farce and is typically known by all German readers of literature and theatre. As presented by Staatstheater Cottbus, It was very much a performance about the work and not a play of the performance itself. The work was presented as something of a puppet show in a confined environment that allowed the performers a frontal space defined by their ability to communicate in a parallel environment – very close to visually resembling a large puppet stage. The cartoon like element of the production – seen in many previous Theatertreffen finalists – has been a popular format for productions in Germany and offers directors and production teams the ability to experiment with stylistic choices in a formalized structure. Entrances and exits were often made from below, as characters were able to simply “pop up” from below. Music was utilized throughout and there were many scenes that had the feel of a Berlin cabaret, and most of the 8-person cast played at least one musical instrument. The text itself was altered greatly, and long sections of narration were interpolated into the work. For example, a section was included from Zuckmayer’s personal writings regarding his travels from Germany to France during the war years. Additionally, there was a long discussion of the Berlin transit system as Sebastian Hartmann’s concept took into the consideration the village of Köpenick itself, Cast of The Captain of Köpenick . Photo Credit: Bernd Schönberger Studio Julian Hetzel presented Three Times Left is Right , an autobiographical work based on the lives of a real couple – an undisclosed husband and wife from Vienna – who were portrayed by Belgian actors Kristien De Proost and Josse De Pauw. As the actors, acting as narrators in the beginning noted, the couple was exceedingly happy and loving and, in the end, had only one major difference – their political views. The work began in direct address – the preshow video listed the numerous elements of the play that some audience members might find offensive. These included: abusive language, hate speech, homophobic references, physical violence, toxic masculinity and basically any possible element that could offend anyone. As Kristen and Josse took the stage (they used their own names) they spoke the entire performance in direct address to the audience. While they were clearly in love physically, as they displayed throughout the production, their political views were polar; Josse was a left-wing liberal but Kristen was a well-educated right-wing writer and scholar. The production balanced their views and conversations until the point that Kristen decided to cut open Jesse’s belly and pull up his intestines and other internal organs, including his liver. The production, which has now played in not only Germany but Belgium, Holland and Switzerland, has opened a true dialog about the nature of political polarization, especially among individual households. The political bent of the work was clearly neutral, and kudos to the production team for creating a work that allowed a space for reflection, decision making, comedic reaction and ultimate choice. Julian Hetzel’s team created a work that served as a forum for both political and social discussion and did so through a medium that generated both comedic as well as serious face to face discussions. Kristien De Proost and Josse De Pauw in Three Times Left is Right. Photo Credit: Nurith Wagner-Strauss Three Times Left is Right was presented in the rather astonishing Hebbel Theater, a space I had never visited before. The beautiful theatre space was in the area of Hallesches Tor, a major area of the former East Berlin and the theatre obviously held a major position in the community there. With almost all seats in the theatre being less than 50 meters from the downstage center area, the theatre had one of the most intimate feelings of any major theatre I visited in Berlin over the past 30 years. Interior of the Hebbel Theater, Berlin. The 2026 Theatertreffen marked the 7 th straight year that the judges utilized a minimum of 50% female quota as far as directors are concerned. However, after extensive meetings and consideration, that quota will be abandoned for the 2027 and 2028 festivals, and productions will be selected solely based on merit rather than the gender of the director. It was noted that the process is completely fluid and would be revisited each year to make sure that all elements of inclusion were considered. At the end of the day, the works are consistently stellar and continue to provide evidence that the Germanic Theatre system (including Germany, Austria, Switzerland and all related countries in the region) is the strongest among the theatre producing countries of the world. References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University . He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review of 'In The Heights' at the Teatro Variedades Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Spring in Europe – Beyond the Theatertreffen Power, Shame, Vanity and Opportunism – Productions of the 63rd Berliner Theatertreffen “The more I give to thee, the more I have…” 15th edition of the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova Finding Lear’s Shadow: Compagnia de' Colombari's King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival Robert Wilson Beneath a Cabbage Leaf: 7 Solitudes at the Nacionalinis Kauno Dramos Teatras NE:BITEF 2025: The Festival that Refused to Disappear Displacing the Orient: Postcolonial Negotiations in Purcărete's Adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights Staging Tradition, Testing Form: The Second Showcase of the National Theatre of Sofia Poetics of the Unfulfilled: The Seagull at the Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre, Veles, North Macedonia Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Adam Pelty Image Credits: Article Spain doesn’t just welcome you; it grabs you by the collar, spins you into its whirlwind of color and sound, and dares you to keep up. Madrid sprawls with boulevards and architectural flourishes so magnificent they seem to wink at you, as if to say, “Yes, we are this fabulous, and no, you can’t afford any of it.” Then there is Seville, in the South, the sultry heart of Andalusia, where history lingers like the scent of orange blossoms, and the air is thick with the strum of distant guitars and the echo of heels striking cobblestone. I made off to Spain to fling myself into Flamenco, the raw, guttural, earth-shaking duende that dominates the south—Cádiz, Granada, Jerez de la Frontera, and most potently, Seville. It isn’t just performed, it’s exorcised from the very depths of the soul, a deeply rooted cultural institution that demands a level of commitment bordering on religious devotion. You don’t just dabble in Flamenco. You either give yourself over to its unrelenting demands—its passion, its virtuosity—or you get the hell off the tablao . Madrid, though? Madrid is the glam showbiz cousin. Yes, there’s incredible Flamenco, but there’s also a staggering volume of musical theatre, opera, and contemporary dance. Now, I realize this is the kind of thing one should know—like knowing that water is wet or that Andrew Lloyd Webber is inescapable. Yet, up until six months ago, I had absolutely no idea that Madrid was the second-most prolific hub of Broadway-style musical theatre in Europe, just behind London’s West End. As my car sped from the airport to the hotel, I was blindsided by the sheer number of marquee lights blinking seductively from the streets— Book of Mormon, Phantom, Titanic, Come From Away, Aladdin —alongside original Spanish productions that are boldly redefining what theatre can be. Madrid, it turns out, is a city that breathes performance. Every street corner hums with its rhythm, every theatre pulses with an audience hungry for spectacle. It’s dazzling. The Spanish approach to musical theatre is something truly special, much like a beautifully executed Flamenco performance. It’s all about vulnerability, strength, emotional availability, and a vivid freedom to express very specific intentions with no apologies. This spirit is deeply etched into Flamenco, but it was equally palpable in the Spanish productions of The Book of Mormon and Gypsy that I caught—both of which left me giddy and a little emotional about my industry, which was frankly surprising. These Spanish performers have more than competence—they’ve got soul. The technical aspects of their craft seem effortless, leaving the crucial part—the emotion—free to roam. There is fearlessness. No slick Broadway airs here; I felt invited to experience something raw and genuine. Compared to some recent Broadway shows, Some Like It Hot and & Juliet come to mind (both excellent productions when I saw them), which can sometimes feel like they “insist upon themselves” (to steal Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy line), these Spanish performances feel like a true invitation to connect. In shows like these, the pressure to impress takes a backseat to the vital act of sharing a story. Watching Broadway performances, I can’t help but feel there’s certain theatrical gymnastics happening back home—impressive, sure, but does it invite me in? Or am I just a spectator, watching the finalists flex their muscles for the judges? Musical theatre performers, like athletes, generate explosive and brilliant energy. Yet, inevitably, it’s about connection. When it works, the audience becomes part of the experience. So let’s talk Flamenco. Over six weeks in Andalusia, I saw lots of it, from the caves of Granada to the more slick and professional stages of Seville—it’s all utterly mesmerizing. And yet, beneath the swirling skirts and searing wails, there’s a rhythm, a structure, a sacred ritual. Flamenco is part storytelling, part catharsis, part sanctioned public outburst. It is what you would get if tap dancing and an existential crisis had a baby and raised it on Spanish wine and heartache. The commitment required is absolute. And let’s be real: only a select few are graced by the diodes del baile with the innate ability to fully embody this art. The tablao —that hallowed ground of Flamenco—follows a time-honored pattern, a method of learned and studied laws that have been passed down by the greats for the last two hundred years. The artists drift in and out of work like wandering minstrels, the finest among them tearing across Spain in a week, paid per gig, living for the moment, for the music, for the duende. One performance in Seville, an electrifying display of artistry and mastery, was notable. At its heart was a Seville-based dancer, Juan Fernandez, possessing the magnetism of a movie star and the skill of a seasoned maestro. Of all the Flamenco performances I witnessed over my time in Spain, this one stood apart—raw, precise, and transcendent. Seville based flamenco dancer, Juan Fernandez The lights came up on three singers and a guitarist, seated in a circle of chairs facing outward—one even turned upstage. Shadows and rich hues painted the stage, smoke billowing through the air. Then, the dancers emerged—two tall, striking figures in silhouette, male and female, like the Flamenco gods you see on tourist posters and souvenir magnets. As the lights rose, their feet took focus—cracking the floor with impossible speed, like rhythmic lightning. Technically masterful, magnetic, dangerous. They moved with the kind of chemistry you only see in a Fellini film—seductive, electric, larger than life. For one hour, six geniuses set the stage on fire. The lead singer—formidable, fifty-something, owned the stage with nothing but her voice and the guitarist at her side. They sparred, teased, played—like two actors improvising the scene of their lives. Passion, argument, seduction. I found myself thinking, ‘And the Tony Award goes to…’. Each performer took their turn like some divine emissary of chaos, conjuring entire universes in ten-minute bursts—erotic, combative, mournful, and laced with sharp wit, it could slice through the air itself. The tocaor (the guitarist) weaved a spell that bound them all together—first as a collective, then in electrifying solos. Watching them, you got the distinct impression that if the room were to spontaneously combust, they would simply weave the flames into the rhythm, stomping out embers in a frenzy of duende-fueled ecstasy. Now to Madrid. The Spanish Book of Mormon —an absolute joy. While the Madrid production might feel more intimate than the Broadway original, it’s more than welcome. All the desired spectacle is in place; the comedy is in crisp-top shape and the performers look to be having the time of their lives. My first thought as I took my seat: Do the Spanish even have Mormons? Will they grasp what South Park maestros Matt Stone and Trey Parker are skewering? Spain does have a notable Jehovah’s Witness presence—door-to-door evangelists, strict doctrines, globe-trotting missionaries—so, in theory, the joke should land. But will it land with the full, glorious thud of satire intended? The answer is yes, absolutely. Alexandre Ars, towering at six-foot-six, owned the role of Elder Price. His presence is magnetic, commanding the stage with grace, intent, and emotional availability. He made space for me, for the audience, and his performance had a warmth I can’t quite describe. Alejandro Mesa, playing Elder Cunningham, was a masterclass in physical comedy—nuanced, sweet, and hilariously real. Their chemistry was undeniable, even if my lousy Spanish didn’t catch every line. The African cast was spectacular—versatile and hilariously funny. Aisha Fay as Nabulungi was perfectly matched with Mesa’s antics, delivering a clear and powerful performance. Yet, there were moments where things didn’t quite land. Nil Carbonell’s Elder McKinley felt… overdone. A bit too broad, too lecherous, lacking that necessary subtlety. The male ensemble of missionaries, too, seemed to fall into the trap of generalization. They were all “gay” in the same way, and it felt like a one-size-fits-all performance rather than the more layered, repressed pseudo-theologians the characters are meant to represent. Still, these flaws didn’t dampen the fun. The production, fresh since 2023, is irreverent, joyous in it’s naughtiness, and a spectacular showcase of talent. I attended opening night of Gypsy , directed by Antonio Banderas, and sat right behind the magnetic movie star now director at Teatro Nuevo Apolo. He developed this production at the Soho Caixabank Theatre in Málaga, a venue quickly becoming a hub for creative innovation with considerable help from him. Banderas is a force, thrusting Spain further into the global musical theatre spotlight—and it’s incredibly exciting. The most important thing I can say about this Gypsy is that it pushes boundaries. Banderas takes this traditional title and introduces contemporary impulses that breathe new life into it. The show’s concept is intimate yet theatrical, blending emotional depth with spectacle. Banderas’s vision emphasizes a deep exploration of the themes of ambition, reflecting on what he describes as “the pathology of success.” His intensity permeates the production, which feels distinctly Spanish in moments—and why not? He’s speaking to a Spanish audience. His success shines brightest when his leading lady, a fiercely talented and committed Marta Ribera, shares dramatic moments with her co-stars, especially with the patiently seductive Carlos Seguí as Herbie. Their scenes, especially their final confrontation, are beautifully staged, full of subtlety and fire, given an extra kick by Banderas’ conceptual flair. Lydia Fairén and Laia Prats bring fierce energy to the roles of Louise and June, electrifying the stage. These triple threats are allowed to transcend the original era and become 2025 versions of their historic characters. It is a departure from the 1930s vaudeville style, but it worked. Banderas, however, undeniably provides the heartbeat of this production. He pushes the boundaries with quirky, contemporary touches—like the expanded “Let Me Entertain You” sequence in Act Two, which is re-imagined with Louise headlining a Liza Minnelli-like extravaganza. In this extended section, ensemble members morph into inflated Emcee-like roles. It’s funny, albeit a bit indulgent, and I assume culturally significant. However, with the costume design, I was reminded of another iconic musical with a titular emcee that shall remain nameless. Some choices left me scratching my head. The set, a massive silver veil wrapping the entire proscenium, including the orchestra on a second level, is a big choice. The projections onto this luminescent shower curtain were often dazzling, but the reason for this bold choice escaped me. The costumes, mostly veering off-period, seemed intentionally conceptual, were often dazzling, but didn’t always land. Here’s my take: Mama Rose stays rooted in the vaudeville era, costumed impeccably for that period. The world around her is a cacophony of her present and future, something she refuses to step into. The orchestra, under the direction of Maestro Arturo Díez Boscovich, played this magnificent score on opening night with sublime splendor. Lush, vibrant, and perfectly executed, the music nearly carried the whole production on its own. The overture was stunning, adding beautifully to Banderas’ vision. Yet, in an ironic twist, the overture was overshadowed by choreography that felt more suited to a modern-day show choir than this iconic musical. As much as I wanted to love the choreography, it just didn’t quite hit the mark. At times, it felt too contemporary and abstract for a piece so deeply rooted in its historical context. Aside from the strangely jejune overture, poor Tulsa, played by the talented Aarón Cobos, could’ve used more help in telling the broader story in his iconic number, “All I Need is the Girl.” This is a vital emotional crescendo for Louise as well as Tulsa, but it falls flat. There’s a lack of that delicate push and pull where one character’s brilliance enhances the narrative journey of another. It’s a missed opportunity. Despite all this, the evening reminded me of the true purpose of musical theatre. It’s not just about spectacle or skill (of which there is an abundance) or making ‘correct’ choices; it’s about emotion, vulnerability, and connection. And when it’s done right, that’s the magic we all feel in the theatre—whether we understand every word. That’s what is happening here and thriving. In short, Banderas’ Gypsy is a bold experiment that captures the essence of why we love theatre—its energy, its emotion, and its unpredictability. I had my quibbles, but there is no doubt that this is a thrilling time to be a part of Madrid’s artistic landscape, and the Spanish, recently with lots of help from Banderas, are most definitely leading the charge. Spain, in all its theatrical, passionate, unapologetically expressive glory, has left its mark on me. From the raw, soul-shaking power of Flamenco in Seville to the dazzling musical theatre of Madrid, this country doesn’t just perform—it lives, breathes, and bleeds artistry. Whether it’s a single guitarist commanding a room with aching melodies or an entire ensemble pouring their hearts into a Broadway-caliber production, Spanish performers remind me why we tell stories in the first place—to connect, to reveal, to transcend. Here, theatre isn’t just entertainment; it’s an extension of life itself. And if there’s one thing Spain has taught me, it’s that art should never just be observed—it should be felt, fought for, and flung into with reckless, wholehearted abandon. Some notes on Spain’s Acting Scene Madrid. The pulsing heart of Spanish theater, where the scent of churros and chocolate mingles with the glitz and glamour of world-class theatr e . The industry here is a passionate, unpredictable beast—brimming with opportunity, yes, but riddled with instability. Performers leap from stage to screen, juggling Shakespeare, Almodóvar-style melodrama, and the occasional detergent commercial just to keep the lights on. From what I’ve gathered through old-school research and conversations with actors, Madrid’s acting schools aren’t just institutions; they’re artistic battlegrounds where actors are sculpted, shattered, and reborn. Whether you want to master classical theatre, embody raw emotional realism, conquer the screen, or defy gravity, there’s a training ground tailored to your brand of artistry. Incidentally, if you’re interested in studying performance in Spain and you are not fluent in the language—or the many dialects—of the Iberian Peninsula, I suggest diving into those language apps posthaste. And then take a formal course. While the British may revel in the elegance of their native tongue, the Spanish-trained actor is also a virtuoso of vocal expression, wielding their language with astonishing precision and power. Formal Acting Schools & Conservatories in Madrid: A Theatrical Wonderland From hallowed conservatories to avant-garde training grounds, Madrid boasts institutions that turn hopeful performers into genuine stars—sometimes with a bit of existential suffering thrown in for good measure. The competition is fierce, but it feels less overwrought and populated, more specific and focused, filled with those who truly belong, who are ‘Initiate’— in an environment where only the committed, the obsessive, and perhaps the unhinged survive. RESAD: The Shakespearean Boot Camp of Spain https://www.resad.es/ Let’s start with the Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático (RESAD), Spain’s version of Juilliard or RADA, where the walls ooze history, and you can practically hear the echoes of centuries of Spanish theatre legends yelling about fate and honor. This is where actors go to be properly forged in the fires of theatrical rigor, emerging with a predilection for declaiming Lorca monologues while sipping overpriced café con leche. RESAD specializes in classical and contemporary theatre, ensuring students can handle everything from Shakespearean soliloquies to brooding avant-garde absurdism. The facilities match the intensity: multiple theaters, both indoor and outdoor, providing full-fledged performance spaces rather than just a dusty black box with a broken spotlight. The library is legendary, filled with plays, historical texts, and possibly a few haunted scripts. It is a place of discipline, tradition, and, if you make it through, prestige. While it’s best known for its rigorous classical theatre training, it also offers a specialization in Musical Theatre. This is where the academically inclined Ariana DeBose wannabe goes, where you’ll analyze the historical evolution of musical theatre in the morning and belt out a Sondheim ballad in the afternoon. Cristina Rota: The Rebel’s Playground https://escuelacristinarota.com/ If RESAD is the polished grand dame of Spanish theatre training, then the Escuela de Interpretación de Cristina Rota is the rebellious rock star in ripped jeans and a leather jacket. Known for its intensive Meisner-based training, this school pushes actors toward emotional authenticity, raw vulnerability, and the occasional existential meltdown. Forget the grandiosity of RESAD—Escuela de Interpretación de Cristina Rota is raw, intimate, and probably smells a bit like sweat and ambition. This place isn’t about fancy buildings; it’s about emotion, technique, and stripping your soul bare in front of your classmates. Minimalist black box theaters, because who needs elaborate sets when you ARE the drama? Cristina Rota’s alumni list reads like the Spanish version of an indie film festival lineup—including Paco León, who became a household name for his comedic genius, and Juan Diego Botto, who juggles theatre, film, and social activism. And then there’s Penélope Cruz who graced the halls of this institution before charming the world with her undeniable talent and Pedro Almodóvar-approved magnetism. Instituto del Cine Madrid: The Hollywood Gateway https://www.institutodelcine.es/ For those who prefer the buzz of film sets over the scent of dusty velvet curtains, the Instituto del Cine Madrid is your best bet. Specializing in screen acting, camera techniques, and making sure you don’t awkwardly blink at the wrong moment, this school prepares actors for the wild world of film and television. Who trained here? Many of the actors working in Spain’s booming Netflix and HBO España productions have passed through its doors, and while they may not yet be household names internationally, they are steadily climbing the ladder of cinematic fame. The school’s real strength is industry connections, making it a top choice for anyone on the film and television trajectory. Juan Carlos Corazza: The Mind-Bending Masterclass https://estudiodeactuacion.com/en/home/ If you’re looking for something a little more esoteric, a little more soul-searching, and potentially life-altering, welcome to the Juan Carlos Corazza Studio . This isn’t just actor training; this is an odyssey into your own psyche. It’s a Stanislavski-Meisner-movement-infused pilgrimage, and those who survive it emerge as acting titans with an almost eerie emotional depth. Javier Bardem, Spain’s finest growling, brooding, scene-stealing Oscar winner trained here. If it worked for him, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us mere mortals. Musical Theatre Training Musical Theatre is an industry that’s exploded in recent years, with Madrid establishing itself as the Broadway of the Spanish-speaking world, producing everything from Sondheim to original Spanish-language mega-musicals. But where do these triple-threats-in-the-making hone their craft? Let’s dive into the musical theatre training grounds of Madrid—places where singers become storytellers, dancers learn to act, and actors learn, well, to count to eight. Escuela de Teatro Musical Memory: The Broadway Bootcamp https://www.escolamemory.cat/ca/ If RESAD is the hallowed temple of theatre, Escuela de Teatro Musical Memory is the sweaty, fosse-walking rehearsal studio where the magic actually happens. This school is entirely devoted to musical theatre, meaning you won’t have to sit through a lecture on 17th-century Spanish drama before launching into a full-throated rendition of "Defying Gravity." Here, it’s all about technique: voice, movement, acting, and most importantly, stamina—because if you can’t belt through an eight-minute dance number, are you even a musical theatre performer? The school’s facilities are state-of-the-art, with professional dance studios, recording spaces, and performance venues that make it feel more like a working theatre than an educational institution. The training is full-throttle, preparing students for the grueling reality of eight-shows-a-week contracts. Scaena: The Contemporary Powerhouse https://scaenaartesescenicas.com/ Scaena , founded by the illustrious Carmen Roche, is another serious contender in Madrid’s musical theatre scene. With a faculty stacked with industry professionals and a curriculum that blends classical technique with contemporary performance skills, this is where you go if you want to be employable in both West Side Story and whatever avant-garde, genre-bending musical is about to take over the industry next. Scaena is known for its holistic approach—training students not just in singing, dancing, and acting, but also in the business side of theatre. Graduates have gone on to perform on Madrid’s biggest stages and, in some cases, taken their talents international. If you’re looking for a well-rounded, forward-thinking approach to musical theatre training, Scaena is a solid bet. SOM Academy: The Industry Pipeline https://somescuelademusicales.com/ The new kid on the block but already making waves, SOM Academy is the brainchild of Stage Entertainment, the production company behind Spain’s biggest commercial musical theatre hits. If you want direct access to industry professionals and a training program designed with actual casting needs in mind, this is the place to be. SOM Academy is less about academia and more about real-world training. Students work with active directors, choreographers, and vocal coaches currently employed in Madrid’s theatre scene, meaning your final showcase could literally be an audition for your first professional gig. The school’s facilities include recording studios, full-scale rehearsal spaces, and performance venues that mimic the conditions of actual commercial productions. Since it’s directly connected to Madrid’s most successful theatre productions, the alumni list is growing fast, with many graduates booking ensemble and lead roles straight out of training. It’s the ultimate fast-track for those looking to go from student to working professional with as little downtime as possible. La vida del actor para mí Let’s consider the life and times of the Spanish actor—that bohemian struggle between artistry and financial ruin, between thunderous ovations (mercifully, the Spanish don’t stand up after every performance) and standing in line for unemployment benefits. And what better way to explore it than by comparing two of the world’s great theatrical cities: Madrid and New York. The city’s musical theater scene has been the subject of some dramatic exposés—tales of grueling schedules, low pay, no vacations or sick leave, and the kind of exhaustion that turns jazz hands into trembling claws. These conditions have fueled a surge in union activism, as actors demand to be treated as professionals rather than disposable props. Sound familiar? It should—to anyone who knows the history of Actors’ Equity Association in America. Speaking of America, New York actors navigate a world just as cutthroat but armed with a powerful shield: the union. And unlike Spain, where performers are still fighting for basic protections, New York has its fortresses—Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA), and a network of contracts designed to ensure actors aren’t working themselves to death for the price of a subway swipe. Broadway performers are still flogging themselves nightly—belting, leaping, and sweating their way through eight-show weeks—but at least there are structured breaks, minimum salaries, and a health plan that doesn’t require one to barter a kidney. And since the COVID era, the old adage “the show must go on”—once a rallying cry for actors to struggle through sickness and like it—has given way to a new mantra: “Stay home and keep your coughs to yourself.” Swings and understudies now step in all the time, proving that the industry can, in fact, survive without forcing its performers to push through pneumonia for the sake of a matinee crowd. Progress? Perhaps. But whether in Madrid or New York, the hustle remains eternal, the struggle is real, and the show, as ever, must go on. Now the money—because as much as we like to pretend it’s all about the art, passion doesn’t pay the bills—Madrid actors face a salary roulette that makes the stock market look stable. One source pegs the average annual salary at a respectable €56,779 (roughly $59,500.00), while another (Glassdoor) suggests it’s closer to €15,000 ($15,730). That’s a discrepancy so vast; it’s like comparing a West End leading role to playing “weeping willow on the left” in the school play. Meanwhile, in New York, a Broadway actor under union contract starts at around $2,034 per week—if they can land a full-year contract, that’s over $100,000 annually. Just breaking poverty in New York, but still… Off-Broadway? Less predictable. Indie films, immersive theater, TV guest spots, experimental performance art in a Brooklyn warehouse? Welcome to the hustle. Let’s break it down even more. According to a report from El País in October 2024, ensemble members, replacements, and understudies in Madrid’s musical theater scene earn a base salary of €2,556 gross per month . After social security and a moderate income tax rate (~15%), the net monthly salary could be around €1,900–€2,050, or €475 - €513 per week. That’s what I made in 1992 in Chicago. I’m sure working through the economics of it, considering a lower ticket price, FREE health insurance and $3 copa de Rioja ($18 in New York), etc, might soften these horrifying stats, but still. Quaint hobby is, indeed, how one might categorize a career as a performer nowadays. For context, ensemble members in the Broadway production of “The Book of Mormon” have been reported to earn approximately $2,095 per week, the current minimum weekly salary for a member of the actors’ union (AEA). And then there’s the challenge of work itself. Madrid’s performers talk of brutal rehearsal hours, minimal breaks, and an industry that expects them to power through illness like some kind of method-acting exercise in suffering. New York, at least in the unionized world, has mandated breaks, sick leave, and some attempt at humane working conditions. But make no mistake—whether it’s Broadway, Off-Broadway, or grinding out guest spots on Law & Order, New York actors are still running a constant marathon of auditions, callbacks, side jobs, the ever-present spectre of the two-week notice, and competition that feels like Squid Games . Home life is farther away from work as well… who can afford to live in Manhattan? The 475 square foot, two-bedroom apartment I rented on 51st and 9th, a few blocks from Broadway’s theatre district from 1995 - 2010 for an average $1600.00 during that time goes for $7000 per month in 2025. I have no discernible words for that preposterous fact. And yet, despite the odds, they persist. Because for the true actor, the show really must go on—even if it means doing it for exposure, a travel stipend, or the occasional free drink at an industry mixer. References References About the author(s) Adam Pelty is a nationally recognized performer, director, and choreographer. He created the original choreography for The Scarlet Pimpernel on Broadway and received the IRNE Award for choreography for his work on Billy Elliot - the Musical at the Ogunquit Playhouse. His Broadway acting credits include Cyrano: The Musical, Steel Pier, A Christmas Carol, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Titanic . As a director and choreographer, he has worked regionally at theaters such as North Shore Music Theatre, The Fulton Theatre, Argyle Theatre, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Capital Repertory Theatre, and Porchlight Music Theatre. Pelty has served on the faculties of Interlochen Center for the Arts, Ithaca College, AMDA, and NYU. Currently, he is Professor of Musical Theatre and Dance at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Hillary Patingre Pelty. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Johan Callens, Guest Editor Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Johan Callens, Guest Editor By Published on May 30, 2018 Download Article as PDF For a good understanding, the Spring 2018 American Theatre and Drama Society issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre is best considered as an initiative that follows up the BELSPO sponsored international research project, “Literature and Media Innovation: The Question of Genre Transformations.” Running from 2012-2017, it brought together six research teams, four of which hailed from Belgian institutions—two Flemish (KULeuven & VUB) and two Walloon ones (Louvain-la-Neuve and Liège)—besides one from Canada (UQAM) and one from the US (OSU). [1] Among the many genres analyzed and fields explored in light of the increasing mediatization of the arts and society at large, theatre and performance fell to the Center for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC) at the Free University of Brussels. On March 17, 2016, this Center organized a conference already devoted to the theme of the present journal issue, even if the ATDS contributions zoom-in on specifically American inflections of the topic. Still, in a globalized world, the mobility and mixed roots of artists, besides the constant need to find sponsors, renders the characterization of projects in national terms perhaps questionable and their mediaturgical interests seldom exclusive. As Jacob Gallagher-Ross, one of the speakers at the Belgian conference, in the meantime has argued, it is somewhat ironical that the first installment of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s media-enabled Life and Times project, “singing the sorrows and pleasures of a very American childhood, was featured in Berlin’s Theatertreffen festival as one of the ten best German productions of the year.” [2] Aside from the ironies of international funding, and scholarship, we may add, I here want to mention, as a preliminary, some of the more general issues that the March 2016 VUB conference tackled. [3] Thus, Matthew Cornish (Ohio U) dealt with the reliance on diagrammatic scripts by the English-German theatre collective Gob Squad to support their improvised encounters with people on the streets, synchronously relayed into heavily mediatized stage productions. Bernadette Cochrane (U of Queensland) discussed the destabilization of the spatio-temporal locators of productions and audiences in global but not necessarily democratizing “livecasts,” whether from New York’s Metropolitan Opera or London’s National Theatre. Dries Vandorpe (UGent) returned to mediaturgical theatre’s related deconstruction of the vexed ontological distinction between live and techno-mediated performance on the grounds of diverse arguments (spatiotemporal co-presence and spectatorial agency, affective impact and authenticity, contingency and risk, unicity and variability…)—arguments all flawed because of logically defective classification systems. With the aid of some intermedial choreographic work by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, I myself queried the reciprocity between technology’s invitation to appropriation and adaptations’ increasing hybridization because of that very technology, a process challenging the logical discreteness, self-presence or self-sufficiency, as well as hierarchical character of generic, media, and gender identities, both, much like traditional authorship, making for an empowering yet disenfranchising exclusiveness. [4] The themes of the Brussels conference and present ATDS issue also adhere closely to the remit of the doctoral project conducted by CLIC member Claire Swyzen, here represented by an essay on the Hungarian-American Edit Kaldor and New Yorker Annie Dorsen. Kaldor’s Or Press Escape (2002) and Web of Trust (2016) are shown to open up the theatre stage to the social media, converting it into a more apparently than actually co-authored media-activist site, joining physically present and tele-present audience members. As a result, the authorship here already signaled towards Michel Foucault’s more discursive author function. Dorsen’s Hello Hi There (2010) in fact consisted of a staged conversation between two chatbots mouthing text bits partly culled by computer algorithms from an interview between Foucault and Noam Chomsky on whether language creates consciousness or vice versa. [5] As indicated by Dorsen’s post-human talk show, whose textual database was expanded with material from the Western humanist tradition, the scope of Swyzen’s research and of postdramatic mediaturgies obviously exceeds the American context, reaching out to the very processes of cognition. The term and concept of the “postdramatic” were nevertheless popularized by German scholars like Gerda Poschmann and Hans-Thies Lehmann who theorized the notion with the aid of the varied theatre practice in Germany and surrounding countries during the late 20th century. [6] As recently as 2015, Marvin Carlson still argued the relative absence of postdramatic theatre from the North American mainstream, despite important contributions from experimentalists like the Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson. [7] On both sides of the Atlantic, however, there have been misconceptions regarding the precise nature of the postdramatic, leading to confusions with collective, interdisciplinary, and devised theatre productions. [8] After all, these just as easily allow for the contribution of independently active playwrights with a lingering dramatic bent as for the more broadly defined writing integral to postdramatic mediaturgies. Central features of postdramatic theatre are the reconfiguration, if not abandonment, of Aristotelian dramatic concepts and traditional theatrical notions such as character, action and plot, proscenium stage and set, normative temporality and spatiality, etc. As a corollary, conventional drama’s underlying mimetic premise is challenged, too, though illusionistic effects, whether aestheticizing, activist, or media-critical, remain common, as Swyzen demonstrates with regard to Kaldor’s Web of Trust . These illusionistic effects are also hard to resist, as when critics interpreted the fragmentation of Spalding Gray’s recollections in India and After (America) (1979) as reflections of his cultural alienation and psychological breakdown, as argued by Ira S. Murfin in his contribution to the present ATDS issue. Mimesis possibly survives the postdramatic mediaturgical turn in the guise of reenactments which problematize any arguable paradigm shift, insofar as the “post-dramatic” signals both continuities and discontinuities. Reenactments therefore could be said to limit dramatic theatre’s creation of a “fictive cosmos” [9] to the overt recreation of a “reality,” whether artistic or not, often with the help of advanced technology, as in the scrupulously reproduced everyday speech, at times verging on uncanny nonsense, in the productions of Nature Theater of Oklahoma. This invites comparison with what Dorsen calls the occasional “near-sense” of the chatbots’ dialogue foregrounding the thingness and materiality of language, undermining dramatic theater’s logocentrism as well as infusing postdramatic theatre like Dorsen’s with an unexpected lyricism. As Gallagher-Ross argued at the Brussels conference and in his subsequently published study on Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage (2018), the technology-based practice of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, besides documenting an extant reality, touches on the very processes of perception and thought, struggling to achieve verbal expression prior to any artificially imposed aesthetic or (post)dramatic form, given that in the different installments of their epic Life and Times they also experiment with extant genres and media forms. Reenactments do not, for that matter, automatically reclaim realist art’s function as illusionistic slice of life. To the extent that this function indeed depends on maintaining the fourth wall, it actually staves off everyday reality to the benefit of some Platonist ideal controlled by the dramatist. Gallagher-Ross traces the roots of America’s theaters of the everyday, like that of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, to American Transcendentalism but this democratic homebred tradition represented by Emerson and Thoreau, revalorizes the aesthetic value of daily life as personally experienced. Quite surprisingly, a similar impulse may be at work in Kaldor’s work, insofar as it seems to share characteristics with the Slow Media movement, as argued by Swyzen. This reflective, contemplative impulse should be distinguished from European idealist aesthetics permeating the continental dramatic tradition via Hegel’s abstract moralism up to the late 19th century and beyond, which is not to say, as Gallagher-Ross argues, that there is no ethical-critical dimension to an enhanced awareness of our everyday experiences, be they technological or not. [10] In Swimming to Cambodia (1985), one of Spalding Gray’s “talk performances” discussed in the present JADT issue by Murfin, the manner in which Gray incessantly and obstinately pursues an idealized yet heavily mediatized “Perfect Moment” makes him oblivious to the everyday beauty Emerson advocated. On Karon Beach in the Gulf of Siam Gray apparently found his “Shangri-La,” evocative both of perfect Kodachrome color spreads for luxury resorts and of Robert Wilson’s mediaturgical theatre of images. [11] Emerson is explicitly referenced by Gray when he mentions his own studies at Emerson College and in his moment of “Cosmic Consciousness” echoes the philosopher’s famous “transparent eye-ball”-passage from his essay on “Nature.” The eventual shift to a non-contigent idealism making timeless abstraction of the evanescent everyday could be seen as evidence of Murfin’s claim that Gray’s early talk performances solidified in later productions under the influence of the very technologies he initially played off to preserve his monologues’ freshness. Put differently, Gray’s talk performances, as here argued, moved away from a more postdramatic authorship deflected by “intermedial contingency,” to a more self-authored dramatic literary model. Lehmann in this regard speaks of realist drama’s and the dramatic form’s “catharsis” of the real, [12] supplementing tragedy’s much debated abreaction of pity and fear (or the negative features of these emotions) in the course of a dramatic action thereby completed and closed off. Postdramatic theatre, by contrast, tends to reduce the dramatist’s control, it opens up the stage to the everyday, and redistributes authorial power. This happened partly under the influence of technology, partly by promoting the performer-audience relation or so-called theatron axis, [13] thus releasing a social activist potential in the joint “creation” of text and performance. What is eventually lost in terms of illusionistic representation, aesthetic pleasure and entertainment value may be gained in terms of political awareness, as the physical embodiment and exposure of, and to the mediation returns a sense of agency in a mediascape obfuscating its operations, material and immaterial, for whatever reasons (sheer complexity, profit, ideology…). The media’s prominence in contemporary dramaturgies has led Bonnie Marranca to coin the term “mediaturgy” for those productions where the technology is integral to the composition of the theatrical performance rather than a surface phenomenon. [14] Cases in point she provided at the time were Super Vision (2005-2006) by The Builders Association and Firefall (2007-2009) by John Jesurun. This is one of the reasons why the Brussels conference on postdramatic mediaturgies featured Shannon Jackson (UC Berkeley) as keynote speaker, with a talk on “The Relational Construction of Form and Authorship in Cross-Arts Collaboration.” In that talk, she explored a variety of institutional settings—museums, theaters, festivals, installations—and considered how conceptions of form and authorial signature change accordingly. Depending, in part, upon the curatorial conventions of the venue, a performer may be a collaborator, a subordinate, or a form of material. Similarly, moving work across institutional venues may shift the stance taken towards artistic contributions, whether by the artists-creators or spectators-consumers. Work discussed included that of The Builders Association, on which Jackson and Marianne Weems published the first lavishly illustrated monograph, and which Marranca deemed exemplary of postdramatic mediaturgies. [15] That Weems, the director of The Builders Association, together with several company members, should have co-authored this critical-genetic study which is partly archive, partly (auto)biography, marks the extent of her creative practice and possibly the postdramatic remediation of a retrograde seeming, paper-based platform, all too easily lending itself to linear single-authored stories. [16] The meticulous crediting of each and every one involved in each of the Builders Association productions is further evidence of the dispersion of traditional authorship, which may well have been the default of theatrical creation. To quote from the book’s intro: “Early pieces such as Master Builder , Imperial Motel (Faust) , and JUMP CUT (Faust) restaged and rearranged classic tales across unorthodox architectural assemblies of screens and bodies, a practice of postdramatic retelling to which The Builders returned in their recent restaging of House/Divided .” [17] The epilogue, too, in a conversation between Weems and Eleanor Bishop, extensively dwells on the mediaturgical aspect of The Builders Association’s work at large, more in particular the prominence of computer-aided media design as dramaturgy and the medial creation of meaning and implementation of media-related ideas, like the networked constitution of self by such a mediascape. [18] Thus the media become material and metaphor. This reciprocity gets reflected in Jackson’s critical vocabulary when she speaks of the company’s “theatrical operating systems” and “storyboard” phases—terms derived from computer science and cinema to designate the mediaturgical postdramatic (re)assembly process, “that may or may not be post-narrative as well.” [19] The resulting “smart” productions are directly addressed to a “smart” audience perhaps too much at ease with “smart” technologies [20] to fully fathom or question their implications. Hence these technologies have become the means and object of theatricalization, as in Super Vision , dealing with the economics and politics of “dataveillance,” or Continuous City (2007-2010), exploring global social networking technologies and their impact on how we inhabit local geographies. John Jesurun, that other exemplar of postdramatic mediaturgies Marranca singled out, has been at the center of the scholarship which Christophe Collard generated in the context of the inter-university research project on genre transformations and the new media. Like the predoctoral work of Swyzen, some of his wide-ranging postdoctoral work is here sampled, albeit with a more programmatic contribution in which Jesurun’s “ecological,” i.e. organic and holistic interrelational interpretation of the mediaturgical concept allows for a brief survey of his creative output. In the course of his playwriting career, Jesurun has collaborated with Weems’s Builders Association, as well as with Ron Vawter, founding member of the Wooster Group, on scripts that were subsequently produced by other companies, too. [21] But Jesurun is also reputed to reduce his live performers to language-machines, as here argued by Collard. This again attests to the lingering tension between the loosening and tightening of authorial control, equally evident in Dorsen’s algorithmic theater, where the options for the chatbots’ conversation in Hello Hi There have been preprogrammed and are thus contained by Dorsen and her collaborator, the chatbot designer Robby Garner. Even in Kaldor’s Web of Trust , the seemingly co-authored protocol in retrospect was prescripted, as Swyzen discovered. Whereas Kaldor herself may have obfuscated the “rehearsal” of the protocol for her Web of Trust prior to its live performance, Gray’s critics were the ones who tended to miss or neglect the reliance on media of reproduction in his low-tech monologues. [22] At first sight, his early “talk performances” seem diametrically opposed to Dorsen’s chatbot and Kaldor’s computer desktop performances. Yet Murfin in his discussion of Gray’s monologues demonstrates their postdramatic mediaturgical stance by foregrounding his deliberate extemporaneous use of language as material and process rather than narrative content, in reaction to medial fixity and dramatic linearity. This resonates with the aleatory artistic tradition in which Dorsen also inscribes her work partly because of the manner in which freedom is generated by constraints, just as for Jesurun language provides an enabling limit for his performers and technology, even if he opposes his actors’ improvisation. Contrary to his later reputation as unassisted “solo” performer, Gray’s monologues were heavily determined by media objects. During the creation and performance of his early work these were used as found or documentary material triggering improvisation rather than as support of a fixed script, whether the taped interviews with family members, slides, and vinyl recording of The Cocktail Party in Rumstick Road (1977), a dictionary in India and After (America) (1979), or his journal entries on a West Coast tour, framed by contemporaneous newspaper, magazine and book excerpts in The Great Crossing (1980). However, Gray’s reliance on the same media (writing, print, audio and video recordings) for the development and circulation of his monologues, in a sort of feedback loop fixed them, whereas the human recall and extemporization earlier on made for fragmentation and discontinuity, at the expense of an authoritative voice and story. What may have accelerated this process, Murfin argues, is the artist’s need for a commodifiable format or comedy act. By doing without the diary entries in Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk (1980) Gray very much resolved the dilemma in favor of the dramatic lineage and replication, but at the expense of intermedial contingency. Gray’s autobiographical talk performances, dependent on predominantly analogue media, form a radical contrast with the collective identity performance of in-groups by means of social media and the web, dealt with by Ellen Gillooly-Kress. This hybridized live and digital identity construction through visual signposts, insiders’ language and performative gestures, rather than solidify in the course of time, as argued by Murfin for Gray, keeps changing, as the markers of identity are appropriated by opposite parties, like anti-fascists and white supremacists. The hazards of the social media are indeed such that any meme can be co-opted and abused in ideological conflicts. This recalls Roland Barthes’s claim that the only way to outwit myths is to remythify them in turn, the more since myths in his definition exchange a physical reality with a pseudo-reality, much like the internet may be said to do. The partly arbitrary choice of a meme as vehicle for a new ideological content also fits Barthes’s myths, though in both kinds of appropriation, the original content is still needed as support of the new signification. [23] The initiative for these appropriated identity memes and their ideological reinscription may have been taken by individuals or be limited to the policy-makers of the ingroup. Yet, the memes’ viral spread on the social media and imageboard websites like 4chan and Reddit collectivizes authorship, short of exploding it altogether. Through its antagonistic rhetoric, making for a war-like scenario, the digital and discursive performance, when picked up by the traditional media, also risks spilling over from the internet back into the physical world and actual violence. This was the case with #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS , an unmoderated live stream participatory performance, set up by Nastja Säde Rönkkö, Luke Turner, and Shia LaBeouf on the occasion of Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017. Apart from traveling from New York to Albuquerque, Liverpool and Nantes, this installation and its reception provide a more disconcerting, inflammable hybridized “theater of the everyday” unlike those with which I started this introduction, in a space where physical and digital identity formations merge to end up forming what Gillooly-Kress calls a “hypermediated haunted stage” with all too dangerous consequences. By way of conclusion, I want to thank Cheryl Black and Dorothy Chansky, the former and current ATDS Presidents, for offering another forum next to the 2016 VUB conference platform; the ATDS members who submitted their work to this Spring issue of the JADT ; and last but not least, the ATDS members who acted as anonymous peer-reviewers. All generously contributed to the scholarship here presented, offering what I hope is an exciting and thought-provoking sample of American postdramatic mediaturgies in which authorship is variously modulated along different spectra, operating between the human and the non-human, the analogue and the digital, the individual and the collective, the distributed and the delegated. References [1] For a brief presentation of the overall project see Jan Baetens, Johan Callens, Michel Delville, Heidi Peeters, Myriam Watthee-Delmotte, Robyn Warhol, and Bertrand Gervais, “Literature and Media Innovation: A Brief Research Update on a Genre/Medium Project,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 64, no. 4 (2014): 485-492. [2] Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 152, original emphasis. [3] The VUB theatre conference program can be found online at http://www.vub.ac.be/en/events/2016/mediations-of-authorship-in-postdramatic-mediaturgies-conference . The March 17 event was matched the following day by a second series of talks, presented at Leuven University (UCL) under the title, “Intermediality, or, the Delicate Art of World-Layering” dealing with non-dramatic genres. See http://research.vub.ac.be/sites/default/files/uploads/clic-cri_confer_flyer_final.pdf . [4] Johan Callens,”Rosas: Reappropriation as Afterlife,” in Routledge Companion to Adaptation Studies , eds. Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts (London: Routledge, 2018), 117-127. [5] The Chomsky-Foucault debate was moderated by Fons Elders and broadcast in 1971 by Dutch television as part of a series. Elders first included the transcript in a collection of three interviews he edited, Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind (London: Souvenir Press, 1974). He reprinted it separately as Human Nature: Justice vs Power. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate (London: Souvenir Press, 2011), though by then A.I. Davidson had already released the text in Foucault and His Interlocutors (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1997), 107-145. Elders’s 2011 edition consists of an introduction, followed by the two-part transcript. The first part tackles the question of human nature, knowledge, and science, the second deals more with politics. [6] See Gerda Poschmann, Der nicht mehr dramatische Theatertext. Aktuelle Bühnenstücke und ihre dramaturgische Analyse (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997) and Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. and introd. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006). [7] Marvin Carlson, “Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance,” Brazilian Review of Presence Studies / Revista Brasileira de Etudos da Prescença 5, No. 3 (Sept.- Dec. 2015), 579. [8] Carlson, “Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance,” 582. [9] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theater , 22. [10] The gap between European idealism and Emerson’s Transcendentalism is somewhat diminished in his theory of visuality, holding that sight, like language, is a way of inhabiting a visual field and integrating its objects, at the cost of distorting both by the idealizing operations of language and perspective, the visual distortions of the one and the other’s fixations by figures of speech and generic conventions, and we might add medium specificities. See Branka Arsić, On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 55, 68, as discussed by Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday , 50-51, 68. [11] See Johan Callens, “Auto/Biography in American Performance,” in Auto/Biography and Mediation , ed. Alfred Hornung (Heidelberg: Winter Universitätsverlag, 2010), 287-303. [12] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 2006: 43; rptd by Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday , 18. [13] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 128. [14] Bonnie Marranca, “Performance as Design: The Mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall ,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 96 (2010), 16. [15] See also chapter 5, “Tech Support: Labor in the Global Theatres of The Builders Association and Rimini Protokoll,” of Jackson’s Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London: Routledge, 2011), 144-181. [16] In fact, Weems has always combined creative with critical work, whether as a founding member of the V-Girls and Builders Association or as dramaturg for the Wooster Group, also co-directing Art Matters and lecturing at different universities. [17] Shannon Jackson and Marianne Weems, The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 2015), 3. [18] Jackson and Weems, The Builders Association , xiii, 384-385. [19] Jackson and Weems, The Builders Association , 17. [20] Jackson and Weems, The Builders Association , 8, 393. [21] Faust/How I Rose , which The Builders Association used for Imperial Motel (Faust) (1996) and JUMP CUT (Faust) (1997-1998), received major runs at the National Theater of Mexico, while his Philoktetes , after featuring in Philoktetes Variations , as directed by Jan Ritsema in 1994, was revived in October 2007 by Jesurun himself at the SoHo Rep with a cast featuring Will Badgett (Odysseus), Louis Cancelmi (Philoktetes), and Jason Lew (Neoptolemus). See Johan Callens, “The Builders Association: S/he Do the Police in Different Voices,” in The Wooster Group and Its Traditions , ed. and introd. Johan Callens, Dramaturgies Series: Texts, Cultures, and Performances vol. 13 (Brussels & Bern: Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes-Peter Lang, 2004), 247-261; Johan Callens, “The Volatile Value of Suffering: Jan Ritsema’s PhiloktetesVariations,” in The Trojan Wars and the Making of the Modern World , ed. and introd. Adam J. Goldwyn, Studia Graeca Upsaliensia vol. 22 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2015), 223-244. 2015; and Christophe Collard, “Processual Passing: Ron Vawter Performs Philoktetes,” Somatechnics 3, No.1 (2013), 119-132. [22] See also Claire Swyzen, “‘The world as a list of items’: Database Dramaturgy in Low-Tech Theatre by Tim Etchells and De Tijd, Using Textual Data by Etchells, Handke and Shakespeare.” etum: E-Journal for Theatre and Media 2, No. 2 (2015), 59–84, accessed May 15, 2018, https://cris.vub.be/en/searchall.html?searchall=swyzen , for an interpretation of one British and two Flemish low-tech postdramatic mediaturgical productions: Broadcast/Looping Pieces (2014), Peter Handke en de wolf (2005) and Elk wat wils. Iets van Shakespeare (2007). [23] Roland Barthes, “Le mythe, aujourd’hui,”Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 191-247; “Myth Today,” Mythologies , ed. and trans. Annette Lavers, Noonday Press (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 109-164. Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Trevor Boffone Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Trevor Boffone By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism . Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Patricia Ybarra’s Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism rightly notes that the emergence of Latinx theatre in the 1960s and 70s paralleled the rise of neoliberalism in the Americas. From the beginnings of El Teatro Campesino’s and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre’s agit-prop theatremaking to the contemporary advocacy work of the Latinx Theatre Commons, neoliberal practices have been a staple of the United States’ domestic and foreign policies. Rather than primarily being in conversation with scholarship, Ybarra instead engages with Latinx playwrights themselves, thus viewing them as theorists. In this way, Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman serves as the point of departure from which Ybarra meditates on the effects of neoliberalism in the United States. With this in mind, Latinx Theater offers an exciting example of the possibilities of critical theatre scholarship that, put simply, takes the field to new heights. Ybarra situates Latinx theatre in the times of neoliberalism as a “transnational, post-nationalist, and (mostly) post-cultural nationalist perspective aware of its own historicity” (4). Rather than concentrate on the origins of neoliberalism, the book focuses on Latinx plays written from 1992 to the present in which the playwrights react to a world where neoliberal economic practices are the norm and have seemingly always been around. Post-1992, Latinx playwrights speak about economic transnational capitalism in a less optimistic and post-revolutionary way. Nevertheless, they still use methods that harken back to the early days of Chicanx and Latinx theatre. As Latinx theatre artists responded to the political moment in the 1960s and 70s, their strategies were decidedly anti-capitalist and anti-assimilationist as they used theatre performance to protest against marginalization of the Latinx community in the United States. The playwrights in Latinx Theater build upon this legacy by critiquing neoliberal capitalism as a system of violence. Neoliberalism was not as legible then as it is now, giving contemporary playwrights space to theorize their economic, political, and social relationships to the Americas. As such, these playwrights tackle the agents and fallouts of neoliberalism such as NAFTA, forced migrations, starvation in post-Soviet Cuba, feminicide, and narcotrafficking. These challenging human conditions encourage Latinx theatre artists to criticize the US’s socio-political climate by rendering the effects of economic violence visible. The introduction offers a tight yet comprehensive overview of neoliberalism that will be of use to any scholar doing work in contemporary cultural studies. Ybarra defines neoliberalism as “a political and economic philosophy whose proponents espouse free markets and privatization of state enterprises as the mode by which prosperity and democracy are best reached” (x). In light of the history of neoliberal economic practices, Ybarra demonstrates how Latinx theatre and performance form an ideal site from which to engage in political critique. From here, the book is organized into four well-balanced chapters that each examines a unique historical and sociopolitical circumstance resultant from neoliberalism in the Americas. Chapter one explores how Latinx playwrights such as Cherríe Moraga, Michael John Garcés, and Luis Valdez utilize indigeneity, cosmology, and identity to comment on NAFTA. Considering plays including Moraga’s Giving Up the Ghost , Garcés’s points of departure , and Valdez’s Mummified Deer , Ybarra complicates the intersections of theatre practices and indigenous practices in the Americas by examining the exoticization of indigeneity in Latinx theatre. In chapter two, Ybarra investigates the 1994 Balseros Crisis—when thousands of Cubans left the island on rafts due to the country’s poor economic conditions—through Eduardo Machado’s Kissing Fidel , Caridad Svich’s Prodigal Kiss , and Nilo Cruz’s A Bicycle Country . These plays shed light on the ways in which national narratives of progress are rendered inept by the lived realities of Cuba’s Special Period after the fall of the Soviet Union. Drawing from exile and migrant narratives, the works of Machado, Svich, and Cruz model new travelogues that are in constant motion and reveal new approaches to waiting that are not necessarily about outlasting Fidel Castro. Chapter three analyzes plays that represent feminicide in the Americas, primarily in Juárez, Mexico, from 1993 to the present. Contrary to other chapters’ focus on U.S.-based playwriting, this chapter focuses on Latinx plays (ex. Coco Fusco’s The Incredible Disappearing Woman and Marisela Treviño Orta’s Braided Sorrow ) in conversation with Mexican plays presented in the United States (ex. Humberto López’s Mujeres de Arena and Cristina Michaus’s Women of Ciudad Juárez ). Ybarra examines the limits of dramaturgical strategies to understand feminicides as crimes that can be solved. Instead, the frequent dramatization of these violent crimes only reiterates that these crimes are continual under neoliberalism. The final chapter stays in the same geographic zone but shifts the focus to narcotrafficking and the subsequent physical and economic violence that it produces. As opposed to filmic representation of narco-realism, Latinx performance uses heightened theatricality to demonstrate effectively the intersections of economics, masculinity, and violence. Plays in this chapter include Tanya Saracho’s El Nogalar , Octavio Solis’s Santos y Santos , and Matthew Paul Olmos’s so go the ghosts of méxico, part 1 . Since many of the Chicanx and Mexican-American plays in this chapter were written in response to Mexico’s narco period under President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), they speak to how the Mexican state inflicted violence in Mexico. Ybarra then concludes by shedding light on the stakes of using theatre and performance as a framework to understand neoliberalism in the Hemispheric Americas. By exploring how Latinx playwrights have theorized neoliberalism since 1992, Ybarra offers a much-needed study that truly explains why theatre matters. As opposed to the predominant mode of scholarship that looks at Latinx theatre as a branch of social change, Ybarra illuminates how Latinx playwrights are the theorists themselves. Although neoliberal capitalism seems like an unavoidable systemic condition, Latinx theatremakers have cultivated productive dramatizations that illuminate its practices and help redress its violent acts. References Footnotes About The Author(s) TREVOR BOFFONE University of Houston Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jasmeene Francois Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Jasmeene Francois By Published on April 8, 2021 Download Article as PDF The Theatre of August Wilson . Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224 . In The Theatre of August Wilson , Alan Nadel critically analyzes the dramatic texts of August Wilson’s cycle of ten plays about African American life in the 20th century in relation to the concept of property rights and the law. In this first comprehensive companion to Wilson’s full cycle, Nadel continues his sustained scholarship and editorial contributions demonstrated in May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson (1994) and August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth Century Cycle (2010). The chapters in his latest study ground Nadel’s argument that “America has always suffered from a profound confusion of human rights and property rights” (2). Beyond presenting an accessible, nuanced study of Wilson’s drama, this volume serves to “underscore… the dimensions of privilege that have transparently enveloped America during what has been called the ‘The American Century’” (2). Nadel argues that throughout American history, law has been an instrument of privilege rather than justice and that the injustices suffered led African Americans to create artistic sites of innovation such as the blues—and Wilson’s theatre. The blues, Nadel claims, provided Wilson an “entry to this history” and serves a “psychic tableau of disrupted dreams and displaced passions…” (2). Nadel begins his valuable analysis with a brief biography of August Wilson (1945-2005), illuminating aspects of Wilson’s life as key to his multifaceted drama. Chapter one, “Becoming August Wilson,” highlights Wilson’s childhood as Fredrick Kittel and his transformation to working playwright; here, Nadel weaves in Wilson’s own words from personal interviews. Interestingly, he focuses on the playwright’s relationships with his parents, his Pittsburgh neighborhood, and his education, connecting these relationships with Wilson’s early career as a writer. Especially notable to Wilson’s artistry is his introduction to and love for the blues. The second part of the biography focuses on Wilson’s career in Minneapolis, his work at the O’Neill Theater Center (with Lloyd Richards) and then on Broadway. In chapter two, “History and/as Performance: The Drama of African American History,” Nadel argues that history is performative and that “History” creates rather than “describes events.” The production of narratives gets deemed factual through the method of performing them. Writing without jargon, he uses the example of a witness to an accident to explain his argument: the witness’s viewpoint is told and recorded and thus becomes part of the historical record. He connects this argument with Wilson’s work with characters such as Troy from Fences who “articulates his own version of history” in Nadel’s reading (19). In a sense, Wilson’s work “engages with history” through characters and by dramatizing the blues (19). The chapters are structured thematically using one or two plays as case study. Chapters three through nine each open with a different play’s production history and plot summary before developing analysis. This structure orients readers who may be curious about the development of specific plays in Wilson’s cycle, as well as those seeking to contextualize the plots. Chapter Three, for example, examines how history and elements of the blues are captured through dramatic structure and characters, using Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom . This chapter in particular considers the entirety of the cycle and its relationship to music. In thinking about the blues, Nadel sees the ten plays as “ten cuts on an album surveying the twentieth century African American blues” (38). Shifting back to Ma Rainy , set in the 1920s, Nadel argues that the play provides an introduction to American history and a decade when blues were central to Black life. Nadel emphasizes that Wilson’s work could be read as musical compositions and orchestrations: thus, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom becomes a “paradigmatic play in Wilson’s canon” (42). Chapter 4 provides a critical analysis of law and property in Gem of the Ocean and Jitney . The chapter considers how Gem of the Ocean , set in the 1910s, begins the Wilson cycle and introduces how capitalism creates the world of Wilson’s plays. Connecting it to Jitney , Wilson’s first piece written for the cycle (set in the 1970s in a black-owned unlicensed taxi service), Nadel examines how characters navigate in that very system where black communities are disenfranchised. Chapter Five examines property in Fences , set in the 1950s, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone , set in 1911. Nadel focuses on the fence as the “idea of property” (68). He argues that the “act of naming” in Fences enacts “fence building”, connecting with the idea of property within the United States (68). Later chapters continue to consider property and the law as they provide critical companions to specific Wilson plays, including: Two Trains Running , Seven Guitars , King Hedley II and Radio Golf . This compelling volume also includes contributions from scholars Donald E. Pease and Harry Elam Jr. who further critical analysis of Seven Guitars and King Hedley II . An Americanist, Pease’s chapter extends focus on the significance of the blues, giving a brief historical context of the genre, as well as interview material on Wilson’s approach to music. While Nadel examines the dramatic texts, Elam Jr’s chapter considers performance of these texts as theatre. Elam’s chapter analyzes director Bartlett Sher’s production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in its 2009 revival on Broadway and Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s staging of Jitney for Broadway premiere in 2017. Elam’s chapter aims to situate these signal performances within the cultural and political context of their times of production, decades after Wilson wrote the plays. These valuable and insightful additions deepen our understanding of Wilson’s contributions to theatre and American history. In The Theatre of August Wilson , Nadel masterfully weaves theory and history with a thorough analysis of Wilson’s dramatic texts. Fittingly, he provides ample analysis of the blues as a storytelling device while the book’s unique lens considers the plays in relation to how law and property are portrayed. The monograph is useful for scholars from varying disciplines and theater practitioners seeking critical analysis of August Wilson’s cycle plays. Beyond connecting plays across the cycle, Nadel also gives specific evidence of how the plays speak to law and property rights, slavery and the forces of capitalism in America, and the incorporation of the blues by Wilson to illuminate the African American experience and creativity through the 20th century. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JASMEENE FRANCOIS Graduate Center, CUNY Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 18, Fall, 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Report from London (December 2022) Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF By Dan Venning Image Credits: Article My last theatre-going trips to London were in 2018 and 2019, before the COVID pandemic swept across the globe, shuttered theatres, and transformed theatre-going after the world began to reopen. In the reports I wrote for European Stages after those trips, I identified several major trends that ran through many of the productions I saw. In 2018, numerous productions engaged, in one way or another, with the global #MeToo movement, acknowledging the assaults and microaggressions faced by women and AFAB (assigned-female-at-birth) people. At the end of 2019, only a few months before the pandemic struck, Britain was gearing up for a national snap election that was, in some respects, a sort of second referendum on Brexit. In this particular moment, many of the productions I saw dealt with Britain’s place (often as a former imperial power) in global politics, or the marginalized people within British society. In December 2022, I once again spent nearly a month in London, taking twenty students from Union College in Schenectady, NY to see shows across the city. As in my previous trip, I selected shows eclectically to show my students just some of the many sorts of theatrical productions available in London: West End musicals ( Cabaret ), works at the National ( Hex and Othello ), shows in Shakespeare’s Globe’s indoor candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse ( Hakawatis and Henry V ), new works ( My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican, Baghdaddy at the Royal Court, The Doctor and Orlando on the West End), and long-running mainstays ( The Woman in Black and Heathers ). In addition to the productions I saw with my students, I separately attended As You Like It at the new @sohoplace theatre; my first West End panto, Mother Goose ; the long-running & Juliet on the West End in advance of its Broadway transfer; and A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida, which had sold tickets so quickly that I could not book for my large student group. While my previous London reports consisted of similarly diverse shows, in this iteration, I found few thematic links running through the content or staging of these works. If there was a link between these shows, it was the truism that artists and audiences are rediscovering how to engage with theatre in the post-COVID landscape. Indeed, COVID continued (and continues) to affect how theatre is made and seen. About half of the audience members were masked at every performance (I was always masked). Several members of my term abroad contracted COVID while in London and had to quarantine for five days and miss performances. I had booked tickets to Tammy Faye at the Almeida, a new musical (with music by Elton John, lyrics by Jake Shears, and book by James Graham, featuring superstar Andrew Rannels among others, based on the life of evangelist Tammy Faye Messner), but several performances, including ours, were cancelled due to illnesses in the cast. I booked another show to make up for the cancellation: the solo piece One Night Stand with E.V. Crowe and friends at the Royal Court… and then that was also cancelled due to illness (thankfully Orlando , which I booked at that point, was not cancelled!). And yet throughout the theatres, there was palpable joy—even in the grimmest productions—that artists and audiences were once again able to come together in the same space. Because I found few concrete links beyond the ways COVID continues to inflect theatre-going, I discuss the productions irrespective of the order in which I saw them, but in ways that allow me to draw links between particular shows. Both the first ( Cabaret , 1 December 2022) and final ( A Streetcar Named Desire , 23 December 2022) productions I saw were directed by Rebecca Frecknall, Associate Director for the Almeida Theatre. Frecknall is an unabashedly feminist director who reimagines classic dramatic works—often American—for the contemporary stage and her work desperately needs to be seen on major stages in the United States. Her Summer and Smoke in 2018 was haunting in its simplicity and Patsy Ferran justifiably won the Olivier for her luminous performance; unfortunately Frecknall’s 2019 The Duchess of Malfi featuring Lydia Wilson was less so, sapping the play of its disturbing power in a bland, ultramodern staging that seemed to focus more on the men than the titular Dutchess. I’m glad to say that both of her productions I saw in 2022 were stellar. Cabaret was staged at the Playhouse Theatre on the West End, which was rechristened The Kit Kat Club. Audience members entered through the stage door and wound their way through the basement halls of the theatre, as if we were entering the venue depicted in the show. Stickers were placed over our cell phone lenses to prevent photographs and everyone was given a shot of vodka. Cast members of various genders dressed in vaguely BDSM sexual garb made eyes with us and danced provocatively. Three separate bars were set up in each lobby level and a half hour before curtain an elaborately staged dance number by the “boys and girls” of the Kit Kat Club was executed on the bar of the main lobby (Julia Cheng’s choreography was impressive throughout the show, but particularly here). The show had swept the 2022 Olivier Awards but by the time I saw it all the stars who had won acting awards had rotated out. The Emcee was played by understudy Matthew Gent at this performance and Sally Bowles by swing/alternate Emily Benjamin (both of whom would take over the roles as main cast in 2023), yet this cast was spectacular. Of particular note were Michelle Bishop as Frӓulein Kost (and the Kit Kat girl Fritzie), Vivien Parry as Frӓulein Schneider, and Benjamin as Sally Bowles. Parry seemed to channel the spirit of Lotte Lenya with her rendition of “So What” and Bishop, under Frecknall’s direction, brought genuine pathos to the role of Kost. As a prostitute at the bottom of the social hierarchy, we could understand how Kost would embrace Naziism to find anyone she could denigrate in response to the way society had rejected her. At the end of the show, Benjamin’s rendition of “Cabaret” was among the strongest musical numbers I’ve seen live, surpassing, to my mind, recordings of Liza Minelli: the upbeat lyrics paired with her personal despair had much of the audience in tears. Sid Sagar as Cliff Bradshaw was less successful, but this may be because he seemed to have been directed to be emotionless throughout, preventing any sort of audience empathy with the character who was the analogue of Christopher Isherwood, the queer author of the stories on which the musical is based. Tom Scutt’s stage was almost in the round and his costumes implicated the audience in the rise of fascism that Kander, Ebb, and Masteroff’s show depicts. The Emcee rose from the stage gleefully with a tiny party hat for “Wilkommen” as everyone reveled together in the celebration we were attending; by “Money” he was dressed in a neo-fascist demonic outfit, and at the end of the show he and the boys and girls of the Kit Kat Club wore simple, sexless brown outfits, evoking Hitler’s brownshirts a century ago in the 1920s. Yet in the final moments as they marched in a circle carrying suitcases, Isabella Byrd’s lighting turned the set to a stark gray, making them look like photos of men and women with suitcases on their way to trains to concentration camps. Collaboration would save no one. Thankfully, Frecknall’s production (with original star Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee) is transferring to Broadway in 2024, when the August Wilson Theatre will temporarily become the Kit Kat Club. Cabaret . Photo: Marc Brenner. Of all the shows I saw in London, Frecknall’s version of A Streetcar Named Desire was the strongest—easily the best Tennessee Williams I have ever seen—despite the fact that it was in previews with the actor playing Blanche holding her script throughout. The production sold out within hours of tickets going on sale, but Lydia Wilson, who had been cast as Blanche, dropped out of the production for health reasons two weeks before performances began. The first week of performances were cancelled and Wilson was replaced by Patsy Ferran, who had been such a revelation as Alma in Summer and Smoke four years earlier. On the preview I attended, after barely two weeks of rehearsal, Ferran carried her script, occasionally glancing quickly at it at the beginning of each scene, but never looking at it again. Also at the performance I attended on 23 December, Frecknall herself stepped into the role of Eunice (without a script). Seeing her onstage in her own production was a marvelous experience. Madeleine Girling’s set was a nearly bare square with a few scattered props (and periodic rain effects) and Frecknall’s production raced through the words at the beginning of Williams’s script at lightning pace so that the action could effectively open with Blanche’s arrival in New Orleans. Yet this production was less about the conflict between Blanche and Stanley than about toxic masculinity and patriarchal abuse. Blanche was certainly traumatized, but never for a moment portrayed as “crazy,” and Stanley’s violence towards her throughout the play had little to do with any hatred for her per se. Instead, Stanley wanted complete control over his victimized wife Stella—and his clearest path to getting this, as for any abuser, was to isolate Stella from anyone with whom she could find mutual love or care, particularly her sister. The actor who played Stanley, Paul Mescal, was not a hulking brute but appeared to be an attractive, soulful, young husband with a somewhat silly mullet. Yet in spite of this physical attractiveness, Mescal played Stanley as a profoundly ugly man on the inside: consumed with jealousy, self-pity, and white male rage, taking out his anger most clearly on his abused wife, her sister, and his supposed “friend” Mitch. In this color-conscious production, Stella was played by the British-Indian-Singaporean actor Anjana Vasan (so she and Blanche were clearly not full biological siblings, but loved one another no less) and Mitch by Black actor Dwane Walcott. Walcott’s scenes with Blanche and Stanley took on particular resonances—as Stanley viciously notes that Mitch will never achieve his own career successes, or when Blanche asks Mitch if he has been on the titular streetcar and Mitch does not respond. One of many revelations was that Frecknall’s production made it seem as if Mitch must have always been written for a Black actor. Her feminist version of A Streetcar Named Desire (which won an Olivier for Best Revival, and for which Vasan and Mescal also took home Oliviers), even in previews and with Ferran holding her book-in-hand, will make it hard for me to read or see Williams’s play in the same light again. A Streetcar Named Desire . Photo: Marc Brenner. Nearly as successful were two new adaptations of older works: Robert Icke’s The Doctor and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s My Neighbour Totoro . Icke, the former Associate Director for the Almeida (the position Frecknall now holds) created this production at that theatre before it transferred to the West End where I saw it on 8 December 2022. Like his earlier revelatory adaptations Oresteia and Hamlet , The Doctor has since been presented at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The Doctor is Icke’s loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s play Professor Bernhardi , a work about anti-Semitism in early twentieth-century Europe. While holding fast to most of the events in Schnitzler’s plot—which hinges on a leading doctor’s refusal to admit a priest to deliver last rights to a young girl dying of a botched abortion and the ways in which that Jewish doctor is punished by society—Icke’s adaptation is strikingly contemporary, engaging with identity and perception in today’s world. His script notes that “Actors’ identities should be carefully considered in the casting of the play. In all sections except for [an onstage debate], each actor’s identity should be directly dissonant with their character’s in at least one way […] the acting should hold the mystery until the play reveals it. The idea is that the audience are made to re-consider characters (and events) as they learn more about who the characters are” (viii). For example, when a priest (who we later learn is Black) enters in Act I, the stage direction reads “ The FATHER is played by a white actor .” Hardiman, a particularly chauvinistic white male doctor, was played by the female Afro-Jamaican actor Naomi Wirthner. The central character, Dr. Ruth Wolff, was played by Juliet Stevenson, an actress who does not “look Jewish” at all. Wolff claims to see only talent and facts, never race or sex, and the audience is forced to engage with what actually not seeing these palpable facts about identity would feel like. In one particularly affecting moment, Ruth’s neighbor Sami, played by cis woman actor Matilda Tucker, is revealed to be a trans girl who appears masculine to most people who can see her within the world of the play. We periodically see flashbacks to Ruth’s conversations with her deceased partner Charlie, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, the disease Ruth seeks to cure. Charlie was played by the Black woman actor Juliet Garricks, but Icke never lets us learn Charlie's “actual” gender or race within the world of the play. Hildegard Bechtler’s simple and evocative set and costumes (the set was simply a slowly rotating white room) contributed to all these effects. Icke’s challenging production forced audiences to engage with what they can, cannot, or will not see. The Doctor . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The RSC’s My Neighbour Totoro (7 December 2022) was another stellar adaptation. It won Olivier awards for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play as well as for Phelim McDermott’s direction, Joe Hisaishi’s music as orchestrated and arranged by Will Stuart, Jessica Hung and Han Yun’s lighting design, Tony Gayle’s sound design, Tom Pye’s set design, and Kimie Nakano’s costume design. Also certainly deserving of an award—although an Olivier category does not exist—were Bail Twist’s puppet designs, which were created by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, Significant Object, and Twist’s own Tandem Otter Productions. The production was a faithful adaptation by Tom Morton-Smith of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 Studio Ghibli animated film My Neighbor Totoro , about two sisters who move with their father to the rural Japanese countryside in 1955 so that they can be closer to their mother who is in a specialized hospital. In the countryside, the sisters—Mei, aged four, and Satsuki, aged ten—discover mythical creatures from Japanese folklore, including soot spirits, “Totoros” (kind and intelligent furry forest creatures varying in size from tiny to immense), and a giant cat that is also a bus in which the creatures ride. The sisters see tiny sprouts grow into giant trees overnight. Miyazaki’s masterful animated film is a paean to childhood, Japanese folk culture, and imagination, made even more powerful through Hisaishi’s unforgettable score. A cartoon, with all its impossible magic and music, was brought to life onstage through astounding performances by an entirely Asian cast, including twenty puppeteers in Bunraku-style black outfits, singer Ai Ninomiya, and the award-winning designers. Adult actors Mei Mac (Mei), Ami Okumura Jones (Satsuki), and Nino Furuhata (Kanta, a young neighbor boy) empathetically played young children in a way that contributed to the affective power of the production. During the curtain call, the puppeteers swiftly demonstrated how they had manipulated some of the puppets, from the hand-and-rod chickens to the immense King Totoro and Cat-Bus. Notably, production press photos never show the Totoros; they have to be seen to be believed (the production is being revived in 2023 in London and I have no doubt it will tour worldwide considering its success there). My Neighbour Totoro . Photo: Manuel Harlan. Coincidentally, another production I attended was also an adaptation of a film released in 1988: Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s Heathers , based on the cult film written by Daniel Waters and directed by Michael Lehmann (13 December 2022). The musical adaptation of Heathers has similarly achieved cult status with young musical theatre aficionados, despite never having been staged on Broadway. It opened off-Broadway in 2014 at New World Stages, then premiered in the UK (with a few rewritten songs) at the off-West End venue The Other Palace in 2018, transferred to the West End later that year, transferred back to The Other Palace after the pandemic in 2021, and closed in 2023. All of these productions were directed by Andy Fickman. Heathers is set in Westerberg High School in the 1980s and centers on Veronica, a girl who manages to gain acceptance from the popular clique of Heather Chandler, Heather McNamara, and Heather Duke, at the cost of her friendship with the unpopular Martha Dunnstock. Veronica begins a relationship with a new boy at school, the soulful outsider J.D., who reveals himself as a full-fledged sociopath, poisoning the lead Heather and murdering two jocks who try to sexually assault Veronica. Veronica goes along at first—penning a fake suicide note from Heather Chandler that takes the school by storm and later helping to stage the killings of Ram and Kurt as a murder-suicide as if the two were closeted gay lovers. But when J.D. decides to blow up the entire school, Veronica finally takes the initiative and stops his murderous rampage. At the off-West End Other Palace, Fickman’s production as designed by David Shields lacked any technical spectacle but the energetic performances by young actors Erin Caldwell (Veronica), Nathanael Landskroner (J.D.) and Maddison Firth (Heather Chandler) brought the mostly young audience to their feet. O’Keefe and Murphy’s songs from the show are superb, particularly Veronica’s joyously sexual “Dead Girl Walking,” Kurt and Ram’s Dads’ “My Dead Gay Son,” J.D.’s “Our Love is God,” the Heathers’ show stopping poppy “Candy Store,” and the eleven o’clock number “Seventeen,” an ode to high school life. While Heathers had a significant run on- and off- the West End, it pales in comparison to The Woman in Black , which opened in London in 1989 (only one year after the original films of Heathers and My Neighbor Totoro were released), closing in March 2023 after running thirty-three years on the West End. Scores of actors have played the roles of Arthur Kipps and the young unnamed Actor who endeavors to bring Kipps to life (as well as the uncredited ghost role) and playwright Stephen Mallatratt died in 2004 less than halfway through the show’s immensely long run (Dame Susan Hill, from whose 1983 novel Mallatratt adapted the play, is still alive and still writing). I was especially glad to see the show on 6 December 2022 only months before it ended its historic run. It has made its way into numerous British school curriculums and part of the audience was filled with teenagers in school uniforms who had been bussed in to see the show on the West End. Robin Herford’s production, simply designed by Michael Holt, takes place “in this Theatre in the early 1950s” and begins when Arthur Kipps (Julian Forsyth, when I saw it) attempts, poorly, to tell his haunted ghost story for the stage. With a few simple props, the young Actor (Matthew Spencer) takes on the role of the young Kipps, while Kipps himself plays every other character (save the ghost) from his past. Through the power of the imagination, affecting performances, one uncredited woman actor, and a few carefully placed jump scares facilitated by Kevin Sleep’s lighting design and Sebastian Frost’s sound design, the audience is transported from a bare stage into a small seaside town and its haunted house on the moors. Rumors abound of ghosts in London’s theatres—including the murdered actor William Terriss at the Adelphi and the 18 th Century “Man in Gray” at Drury Lane—and if such ghosts do exist, I expect the Fortune Theatre will be a stage haunted by The Woman in Black for some time to come. The Woman in Black . Photo: Mark Douet. In contrast to the simplistic power of imagination celebrated in that show, Hex at the National Theatre (5 December 2022) demonstrated the ways in which spectacle—and powerful performances—cannot save a thoroughly misconceived production. Staged in the National’s massive Olivier Theatre, with its marvelous gigantic drum revolve stage, Hex , a musical adaptation of the Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, is obviously a pet project for Rufus Norris, the artistic director and chief executive of the National. Norris, who directed the production, also wrote the lyrics and developed the concept along with Katrina Lindsay. The convoluted book for Hex is by Tanya Ronder and music is by Jim Fortune. Lindsay’s set and costume designs are spectacular, including a castle that descends from the upstage wall, three flying fairies who deliver their performances while suspended midair, and numerous other delightfully staged creations, including bumblingly misogynistic princes who wish to wake the sleeping beauty, a chorus of poisonous thorns, and many more fantastical effects. The plot centers on the “low” Fairy (the marvelous singer Lisa Lambe), who loses her powers after accidentally “hexing” the young princess Rose (Rosie Graham) and putting her into a sleep until she can find a true love’s kiss. Fairy wants to regain her powers and join the effervescent “High Fairies” (Kate Parr, Olivia Saunders, and Rumi Sutton), so seeks a prince to undo the curse; she finds him in Bert (Michael Elcock), the half-human son of Queenie (another superb singer, Victoria Hamilton-Barritt), an ogress who has turned vegetarian in order to resist her urges to consume human flesh. After a convoluted plot that also involves generations of stewards named Smith and Smith-Smith (Michael Matus), Fairy sneakily preventing Queenie from eating her grandchildren (Rose and Bert’s children Duncan and Dyllis), and much more, Fairy succeeds and is elevated to “high fairy” status—renouncing her lifelong goal only seconds later to rejoin her earthbound friends. Tone shifts abound—the show was billed for ages eight and up, but in addition to fairy-tale hijinks it includes a baby-eating ogress, graphic descriptions of animal slaughter, and a “comic” song from the princes about sexual coercion. Even worse is the music: Fortune’s tunes and Norris’s lyrics are sometimes earworms precisely because of their banality (Bert cannot stop singing about his name in “Prince Bert,” impressively and athletically choreographed by Jade Hackett; Rose and Bert’s romantic duet “Hello” consists mainly of the words “Hi, Hi, Hello”). Of the twenty-eight songs, eight are reprises (with one song reprised twice). Hex aspired to be a creative retelling of fairy tales along the lines of Sondheim’s Into the Woods , instead it demonstrated what happens when an artistic director of a major theatre is too enamored of his own project. Hex . Photo: Johan Persson. The other production I saw at the National, Clint Dyer’s staging of Othello (16 December 2022), was far more successful. Othello is a deeply troubling play, written by a white man over four hundred years ago but engaging with the charged issues of racism and spousal abuse and murder. Probably my favorite analyses of this play come from the Black British actor Hugh Quarshie (see “Is Othello a Racist Play on YouTube).and Ayanna Thompson’s new intersectional feminist introduction to Arden revised edition (2016)both of which acknowledge the ways in which the play remains strikingly painful today, especially for Black or woman/AFAB readers and audiences. Dyer’s production, in the National’s smaller proscenium Lyttelton Theatre, with a set designed by Chloe Lamford that looked like some sort of public forum, began with a stagehand sweeping the stage as images were projected on the upstage wall showing the long and troubling production history of this play. In Dyer’s production, almost every character, from ensemble members to Cassio (Rory Fleck Byrne), Bianca (Kirsty J Curtis), Montano (Garteth Kennerley), or the Duke of Venice (Martin Marquez) was also credited as “System”—in other words, these people were part of a system of oppression that would lead to Othello and Desdemona’s deaths. Only three characters were not also listed as “System”: Othello (Giles Terera), the Black man oppressed by systemic racism, Desdemona (Rosy McEwen), his white wife who rejects the system to love a Black man, and Iago (Paul Hilton, who was as superb in this as he had been in the benevolent roles of Walter and Morgan in The Inheritance ), who manipulated the system to destroy Othello and Desdemona. Notably, during the trial in Act I, Iago sat to the side alongside Roderigo/System (Jack Bardoe), making a noose out of a long rope. Iago and Roderigo assumed that the trial would be perfunctory and Othello would be executed—and they might have been right, had the Turkish invasion of Cyprus not required Othello’s military leadership. But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the production was how Dyer conceived of the role of Emilia/System (Tanya Franks): throughout the production, one of her arms was in a cast and she had a massive black eye. She was obviously being abused by her husband Iago, yet no one commented or even subtly acknowledged this fact. Dyer effectively communicated that systems encourage horrific cruelties (towards women by men, towards Black people by white society) and react violently not to abuse but instead to those who dare to oppose these oppressions. Othello . Photo: Myah Jeffers. Another successful and contemporary staging of a Shakespearean play was Josie Rourke’s gorgeous intersectional production of As You Like It (15 December 2022), the second play to be staged at the new @sohoplace theatre, an ultramodern complex that is London’s first purpose-built West End theatre to open in fifty years. Staged in the round, Robert Jones’s set consisted mainly of a large piano center stage where Michael Bruce played underscoring for the action and accompaniment to the songs (Bruce also composed all the music) throughout the show. When the characters entered Arden, leaves fell from above, covering the stage in an autumnal tapestry. At that point, Jones and Poppy Hall’s Elizabethan-style costumes gave way to more contemporary, rustic attire. Particularly noteworthy was the casting: Leah Harvey (a Black nonbinary female-presenting actor who uses they/them pronouns) played Rosalind—and Harvey was not the only nonbinary actor in the cast: Cal Watson (they/them) played Le Beau and the second de Bois brother. Several of the actors and their characters were deaf, including Rose Ayling-Ellis, who played Celia, and Gabriella Leon, who played Audrey. These identities mattered in the play: Celia and Audrey communicated using a mixture of British Sign Language (BSL) and sign-mime, and most of the characters communicated with them in this way. But the vicious Duke Frederick (Tom Edden) refused to communicate with his daughter in sign, forcing her to lip read and to speak orally to him. Duke Frederick also used his daughter’s disability against her: turning his back to her as he spoke in anger, so that she could not read his lips and understand what he was saying. The play’s scenes of reconciliation and love at the end were particularly moving because of these intersectional identities. Instead of returning in “women’s weeds,” Harvey’s Rosalind simply walked offstage and back on, and then Alfred Enoch’s Orlando recognized them. Ben Wiggins’s Oliver demonstrated his reformation by struggling to learn BSL so that he could communicate with Celia, with whom he had fallen in love. In fact, the American actor Martha Plimpton, always excellent in Shakespeare, despite a solid performance as a female Jacques, with the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech, was one of the least compelling parts of the production. Rourke’s staging demonstrated that Shakespeare’s fictionalized Forest of Arden can allow us to imagine and visualize a world where everyone can be celebrated, no matter their race, gender identity or expression, or disabilities. As You Like It . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The same day I saw Othello at the National in the evening (16 December 2022), I had also attended a matinee of Henry V at the nearby Shakespeare’s Globe, meaning that I saw three Shakespearean productions in London within two days. Unfortunately, Holly Race Roughan’s staging of Henry V was the least inspiring of any of the productions I saw during my time in London, including the misconceived Hex . Roughan had a clear concept: that war and power could corrupt even the most well-intentioned leader and that brutally violent men can come to be revered as heroes. Over the course of the play, her Henry (Oliver Johnstone) transformed from an optimistic, well-intentioned ruler to a dangerous psychopath, raging at his people, ordering executions without a second thought, and killing the Dauphin at Agincourt in retribution for the insult that helped spark his war. Henry’s scene with Katherine had not a single spark of romance, but was the culmination of his violence as he demanded her hand in an overtly political marriage, and then the play ended with the scene (usually much earlier in the play; Act 3, scene 4) between Katherine and Alice (Eleanor Henderson) as Katherine began to learn English in preparation for her forced marriage. Perplexingly, this was followed by an epilogue where the actress who had played Katherine, Joséphine Callies, transformed into a modern immigrant, responding to a British naturalization exam; perhaps a comment, albeit unrelated to the earlier action of this production, on the fact that England, which had once had imperialist dreams of conquering foreign lands, after Brexit now places major barriers against Europeans who wish to become British citizens. While Roughan’s concept was clear, everyone spoke Shakespeare’s verse excellently, and the production was one of the best lit I’ve seen in the indoor Wanamaker Playhouse (designer Moi Tran’s metallic upstage wall reflected the candlelight that serves to light productions at this indoor recreation of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars playhouse), little else made sense. Except for Johnstone as Henry, the nine remaining cast members played all the other roles in the play, often with only the smallest costume or accent change meant to indicate a change in character. However, sometimes this convention wasn’t followed: an actor removing a coat might mean a change in character, or simply that character removing their coat. Even for a Shakespeare scholar, it was often unclear to whom Henry was speaking; I could tell that my fellow audience members were totally befuddled. This is the sort of misconceived production that sadly leads modern audiences to feel that they “just don’t understand” (or like) Shakespeare. Henry V . Photo: Johan Persson. Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights , a new play by Shakespeare’s Globe writer-in-residence Hannah Khalil, which I had seen two days earlier at the Wanamaker (14 December 2022) was far more successful. A testament to women’s empowerment, storytelling, and collaborative creation, the play follows five women (Wahida the Dancer, played by Houda Echouafini; Fatah the Young, played by Alaa Habib; Zuya the Warrior, played by Laura Hanna; Akila the Writer, played by Nadi Kemp-Sayfi; and Naha the Wise, played by Roann Hassani McCloskey) who are imprisoned and awaiting their marriage to, sexual assault by, and subsequent execution at the orders of the unseen King, who is currently married to (the also unseen) Scheherazade. In contrast to the original version of the tale, it is not Scheherazade but these women who come up with the stories that Scheherazade will tell her husband, saving all their lives. The play includes riffs on classic stories from the 1001 Nights along with new tales, as if they are stories from these women’s lives, or ones told to them by their mothers, sisters, cousins, or female friends. At one point, they argue about a story that Zuya tells, which metaphorically depicts male violence and women cleverly overcoming it: Akila realizes that it will enrage the King and might lead to everyone’s death, and that this is not the moment to share that particular tale. The women argue about self-censoring, but ultimately agree with Akila that “there is a power in words. Stories. They must be told in the right way and at the right time” (61). The five very different women, placed in the same dire situation, forge close relationships, and earn their freedom, but, as they leave after 1001 nights, they vow to find some way to free Scheherazade (who had shared their stories) from her vicious husband. The moving play, presented with an Arab cast, was aided by the material conditions of the Wanamaker playhouse, where the candlelight (actors had to hold light sources at the same time as playing their roles) enhanced the sense that Rosa Maggiora’s set was indeed a dank prison room, one of the many sorts of cages (metaphorical or literal) throughout history from which women have had to escape. Hakawatis . Photo: Ellie Kurttz. Like Hakawatis, Baghdaddy at the Royal Court (8 December 2022) was a new feminist Arab play—but in every other respect the works could not have been more different. Written by Jasmine Naziha Jones, who also performed the central character, Darlee, a second-generation British-Iraqi girl from age eight to twenty, the play, which is dedicated to Jones’s father, delves into the relationship between Darlee and her Iraqi Dad as the girl comes of age during wars between the West and Iraq. The expressionist play was staged by Milli Bhatia on a set of stairs designed by Moi Tran—similar in some respects to Chloe Lamford’s set for Othello —and also featured a chorus of “Quareens”—“spiritual companions from another dimension,” two female and one male, helping Darlee “reconcile her childhood memories with Dad’s story” as an immigrant (2). Part clown show and part fictionalized reconstruction of a traumatic childhood, the show built up to two monologues: Darlee’s railing against a so-called democratic Western society that has never fully accepted her and Dad’s lament for his family who died in the Iraq war after he came to the UK. The play—and Jones’s performance as a fictionalized version of her younger self—was deeply painful but felt only half-formed, perhaps as do any of our half-remembered recollections of childhood. Baghdaddy . Photo: Helen Murray. Orlando (17 December 2022), as adapted by Neil Bartlett from Virginia Woolf’s novel and staged by Michael Grandage at the Garrick Theatre on the West End, featuring the nonbinary actor Emma Corrin as its titular immortal gender-defying character, was another sort of coming-of-age story. Of course, Orlando comes into his/her/their own over the course of centuries (and also it’s no coincidence that Orlando shares the same name as one of the romantic leads in the gender-bending As You Like It ). Excepting Corrin and Deborah Findlay, who played Mrs Grimditch, a very long-serving confidant to Orlando and the audience, the remaining cast (consisting of one man and eight women or nonbinary performers) all played both a chorus of Virginia Woolfs and Orlando’s many, many loves. When Orlando appears, the audience briefly sees him frontally naked (Corrin wore a prosthetic penis for this moment) and when Orlando transforms into a woman, she is once again naked (although this time only seen from the waist up). The play was a celebration of transformation and potentiality, ending by acknowledging that Orlando might thrive in the world today (or an approaching future, signified by an intensely bright door at the top of Peter McKintosh’s set that Orlando passed through at the end of the play) in a more accepting world that Woolf herself, who committed suicide in 1941, could only dimly imagine. The play was especially moving to my students on the mini-term, several of whom are trans and/or nonbinary; one said she was going to get a tattoo of that bright door that signified the possibilities of the future if we are willing to “try courage” (78). Orlando . Photo: Marc Brenner. Less successful in its feminism but still a delightful spectacle onstage was the jukebox musical & Juliet (20 December 2022), directed by Luke Sheppard with a book by David West Read and featuring over two decades of pop songs written by Max Martin. It’s hard to believe that Martin wrote so many of the best-known hits for artists including Bon Jovi, The Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, Britney Spears, Robyn, Kelly Clarkson, Kesha, Justin Timberlake, Demi Lovato, Katy Perry, The Weeknd, and more. The show bills itself as a feminist revision of Romeo and Juliet , in which Anne Hathaway, in a frame story, accuses Shakespeare of not giving his doomed heroine enough of a voice or agency and imagines a new ending in which Juliet doesn’t kill herself after awakening to find Romeo poisoned. Taking off from that premise, Juliet (still played, when I saw it years after it opened on the West End, by Olivier-winning Miriam-Teak Lee) goes on an adventure across Europe, along with her friends including the trans character May (now played by nonbinary actor Joe Foster). The show is raucously self-aware (a jukebox sat visibly near the center of Soutra Gilmour’s set and the spectacularly lit titles that descended from the flyspace at the opening, interval, and close resembled nothing more than a West End/Broadway marquee) and builds to Juliet’s rendition of Katy Perry’s “Roar,” which indeed stopped the show for at least a minute of applause after Lee’s performance of the song. The show has since transferred to Broadway, where Justin David Sullivan, the nonbinary actor who played May, declined to be considered for Tonys since the awards continue to require actors be nominated in binary gender categories for men and women. Thankfully, the production has fixed its original gaffe of casting a cis man as a trans character (Arun Blair-Mangat originated the role of May on the West End), but the supposed feminism continues to ring a bit hollow even as Anne, Juliet, and her friends sing about women’s empowerment. Perhaps this is because all of the authors and the director of the show were men: as noted in Hamilton (another musical created almost entirely by men that was intended to reimagine the past more inclusively), “who tells your story” matters and it’s too bad that the producers of & Juliet didn’t find a woman to write the book or direct. Just as much frothy fun, but with a lot less pretense, were two holiday shows I saw towards the end of my trip. Who’s Holiday! at the tiny Southwark Playhouse (19 December 2022) was a solo holiday drag show which was the final work to which I brought my students. Written in 2017 by Matthew Lombardo in the comic verse of Dr. Seuss, the play imagines Cindy Lou Who from How the Grinch Stole Christmas! all grown up, bleached blonde, hard drinking, foul mouthed in rhyme, having escaped a relationship with the Grinch, and planning a Christmas celebration despite constant cancellations from her friends. The play is thoroughly dirty and definitely not for the young children who might still read Dr. Seuss. But, as directed by Kirk Jameson, it is perfect for camp as performed by Miz Cracker, an American drag queen who gained fame on the television show Ru Paul’s Drag Race , and in the end Who’s Holiday! still celebrates the joy and spirit of Christmas every bit as much as its less transgressive source material. Who’s Holiday!. Photo: Mark Senior. My first West End panto was equally delightful, if far more spectacular. Jonathan Harvey’s Mother Goose , directed by Cal McCrystal at the Duke of York’s Theatre (20 December 2022), the same theatre where I had seen The Doctor a few weeks earlier, featured stand-up comedian John Bishop as Vic Goose and the legendary Sir Ian McKellen in drag as Mother Goose (the panto Dame), using wit and constant references to contemporary British politics to facing down holiday financial struggles from exorbitant energy bills. Their struggles are abated by the arrival of a goose (Anna-Jane Casey) who starts laying golden eggs and gives Mother Goose the chance to achieve her dreams of stardom. The songs, dances, and audience participation were all delightful—when one nearby audience member heard that Mother Goose was my first panto, she let me know she had been to hundreds and that this was among the very best she’d ever seen. Yet no one was enjoying themselves more than Sir Ian, obviously gleeful at the chance to ham it up in the sort of work he had adored in his youth. As he delivered key lines from Gandalf in Lord of the Rings or Portia’s “The quality of mercy” speech in the tenor of Mother Goose, his wry smile was infectious and had the audience grinning just as much as he was. On our feet at the end, we were all celebrating the holiday spirit together again, in the theatre. Mother Goose . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The holiday spirit that suffused Mother Goose and Who’s Holiday! in some ways ran through all these productions, even the darkest like Othello, Henry V, The Doctor , and A Streetcar Named Desire , since we were, once again, able to be in London’s excellent theatres together. COVID will remain part of our world for some time to come: many audience members remain masked, theatres have to cancel performances and hire more understudies (or even have the director go on for a role in a pinch!), and more. This is probably a good thing: it has led to conversations about how the arts can be safer and more equitable for everyone. I expect to return to London at the end of 2025 and I am excited to discover what will suffuse the city’s theatrical scene then, when it will have been half a decade since the height of the pandemic. References References About the author(s) Dan Venning is an associate professor in the department of Theatre & Dance at Union College (Schenectady, NY), where he also teaches in the English department and the interdisciplinary programs in American Studies and Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies. He has published numerous chapters in scholarly edited collections, book reviews, and performance reviews in a broad range of scholarly journals, including several overviews of theatre in London for European Stages . He is currently working on a book about Shakespearean performance and nation-building. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Report from London (December 2022) Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 “Regietheater:” two cases The Grec Festival 2023 The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Report from Germany Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder By Published on May 6, 2023 Download Article as PDF On a mild day in June 2020, four actors, each in their own car, paraded through the small, rural college town of Sewanee, Tennessee. Similar to the pageant wagons of medieval times, the goal was to bring theatre to the people all while offering entertainment, enlightenment, and an opportunity for fellowship. The production: The Front Porch Plays , an evening of socially-distanced, Covid-safe, micro-theatre. Actor Virginia Craighill performs for community members. Made popular in Spain, micro-theatre aims to create intimate theatrical experiences by performing short-form theatre to small audiences. Developed in response to the financial crisis in Spain, micro-theatre became a way to produce new theatre at a time when the arts were underfunded. Productions are produced quickly, with minimal financial investment, making them affordable for artists who want to create theatre that is accessible. The Front Porch Plays was also created in response to a crisis: the Covid pandemic. Theatre has always been a communal event: it is both created and consumed together. As it became clear that the country’s three-week social experiment in isolation in the spring of 2020 was going to extend through the summer I began to explore ways to tell stories which allowed for human interaction while also maintaining social distancing. Inspired by the innovative work being done by arts organizations forced to pivot away from their traditional programming, The Front Porch Plays was born. My interest in site-specific theatre makes me look at my surroundings through a different lens. I see possibility in unlikely places. I’ve hosted new work in kitchens, art galleries, and even a freight elevator. However, because of the pandemic indoor spaces were off-limits. Social distancing would require more space. Luckily, our town, which sits on the Cumberland Plateau provided the perfect setting. Like so many theatre artists, I found myself feeling an enormous sense of loss as our new reality became apparent. A world-premiere production of a new play, two years in the making, was shut down eight days into rehearsal while other projects I had planned were put on hold. In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote monologues for two theatre companies that were pivoting to online programming. These events offered me the opportunity to write while contributing to the theatre community that had been decimated. With those two pieces as my foundation, I began writing additional monologues. My hope was to create a short collection of monologues that worked in conversation with one another. Monologues can be deceptive in their simplicity; however, a well-written monologue not only tells a story, but it has a clear objective and is active. Each character I created wanted something very specific: a mother who wanted to pass down her cast iron skillet; a teenager who wanted the freedom to watch a comet she would only see once in her lifetime; a man who wanted to connect with his neighbor. While none of the monologues explicitly mentioned the pandemic, the subtext of each piece informed the audience that these were people unable to move freely in the world, who were trying to make connections with others despite barriers. Once I had several monologues to choose from, I settled on four that I knew I could cast from within my community. The goal was to make the event long enough to feel fulfilling while keeping it short enough to perform multiple times a night for multiple groups of people. We began by rehearsing over Zoom and then gathered outdoors to run the show. To help with transitions we added a guitar player. The monologues, when presented together, ran approximately 12 minutes in total. Because we are a small town, I was able to create a route each night that required only a three to five-minute drive between each stop. We limited ourselves to five performances each night which meant that with performance and travel time, I was only asking for 90 minutes of commitment from the actors. The show was billed as “socially distanced micro-theatre from the safety of your front porch.” Hosts were asked to limit guests to ten. This made it easier to social distance, but in the spirit of micro-theatre, it also created a more intimate experience. Word spread quickly as community members, eager for something to look forward to, signed up. Guests waited; some gathered on their front porches, others in lawn chairs in their yards, and they cheered when we arrived. The project was so popular that we added a second weekend of performances. Community members waiting for the arrival of the Front Porch Plays . The audience was asked to social-distance and limit their group to 10 people. The response from the community was overwhelming. One audience member wrote, “We would like to thank you so much for your efforts in providing a really special experience this past weekend! It was such fun, and really perfection! We continue to marvel at how the community comes together and shares their many gifts with others!” Another responded by saying, “This was such a gift. It was a reminder of the outside world, a way to enter another world, and a way to be (safely) in community.” Once I knew the project was possible, I created a “how to” guide to walk people through the entire process and offered it to theatres royalty-free as long as their performances were free of charge. The project was quickly picked up by the Nomad Theatre, based in Indiana. Rather than charging admission, they chose to accept donations. On their first day of performances, they raised more than $1300 which was then split between organizations that support Black and LGBTQ+ communities. According to producer Connie Blick, “Each and every one of us felt alive again, being able to be creative and share our talents in front of an audience.” Theatre artists have always responded in times of crisis. It is the way we make sense of the world around us. At a time when we were otherwise isolated from one another, theatre once again offered a way to examine the human condition while creating connection and community. Actor Jim Crawford performs his monologue for community members in Sewanee, TN. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ELYZABETH GREGORY WILDER is currently the Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence at Sewanee: The University of the South. Her work has been produced, developed, and commissioned by the Royal Court, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Denver Center Theatre, New Conservatory Theatre, Arden Theatre, Cleveland Play House, Geva Theatre, Sloan Foundation, and Pioneer Theatre, among others. Elyzabeth is a graduate of NYU and an alum of Youngblood. www.wilderwriting.net Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution:

Caitlin A.Kane Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Caitlin A.Kane By Published on May 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF Leigh Fondakowski (they/she) has dedicated nearly 25 years to creating theatre from narrative interviews and archival research. In works including The Laramie Project, The People’s Temple, I Think I Like Girls, and Spill, Fondakowski uses the words of real people to create nuanced portraits of communities in crisis and to illuminate difficult moments in U.S. history. In 2018, they were commissioned to craft a podcast about women’s liberation in honor of the 19th Amendment centennial. That commission led to Feminist Files , [i] an audio theatre series about the “nerdy revolutionaries” (including Dr. Bernice “Bunny” Sandler, Pauli Murray, Edith Green, and Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink) who started the “academic sex revolution” by clandestinely passing the legislation that we now know as Title IX. Although the commission for that work came before the pandemic began, Fondakowski’s research and creative process were undeniably affected and constrained by pandemic-era shutdowns and by rising awareness of the need for more accessible approaches to producing and presenting theatre. In this conversation, conducted via Zoom in November 2022, Fondakowski and I discuss how these forces shaped their development of a hybrid podcast-theatre form that blends Fondakowski’s first-person narrative, recorded interviews with relatives of those who led the fight for gender equity in academia, and performances of edited archival materials. Podcasts and other audio forms, we both agree, have great potential for theatre artists interested in exploring experimental and unconventional dramatic forms and for creating more accessible theatrical works. Caitlin Kane: Can you describe Feminist Files for those who have not yet heard it? Leigh Fondakowski: Feminist Files is a ten-part narrative audio series that tells the secret origin story of Title IX. It covers the years of 1969-1976, tracing how this group of women in Washington went behind the scenes to create legislation that has had an amazing impact. CK: In the series, you describe those women as “nerdy revolutionaries,” and it is such an apt descriptor. LF: Right, there are a lot of cliches about women’s libbers from that period: bra-burning, protests in the streets, all that kind of stuff. That did happen. The radical lesbians were really at the forefront, but the women [whose stories we tell in the series] were not doing that. These were women who were focused on legislative change. The thing that I love about the [timing of this project] – it’s tragic in a way – but Feminist Files was released on the 50th anniversary of Title IX in June [2022], and the day after that, Roe was overturned. So, in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX pass, and in 1973, Roe is instated. Half a century later, Title IX is the last one standing. It is incredible in terms of the arc of history. CK: It makes the series even more urgent at this moment. There is a lot that we can learn about the legislative side of activism from the women whose stories you tell. LF: Right. I think my biggest discovery was realizing the intricacies and the convergence of different people’s work that went into [passing Title IX]. I never really thought about how the sausage gets made. CK: How did you become interested in the stories of this group of feminist activists and the history of Title IX? LF: The project has a bit of a history. I was approached by this media company called Frequency Machine – a young startup co-founded by two women. They wanted to do something for the centennial of the 19th Amendment, so they approached me with this outline they had created for a women’s series, right? I wish I could show you this document. Each episode was an epic chunk of women’s liberation from 1910 to the present. So, I was like, I’ll take this, and I’ll see what I can find. I knew Title IX could be one of the episodes, so I sat down to talk with Rora [Brodwin, another playwright who had previously written a solo show about her Great-Aunt Bunny Sandler, the “godmother of Title IX”], and I realized the series could tell Rora’s story and the story of Title IX. Then, I went to the Schlesinger Library and was convinced that it could be the whole series because I found all this material there. There was so much material, and there were so many parts to the story that I was discovering. So, I went back to [Frequency Machine], and I pitched it. The producers had a background in reality television, so we had to learn how to talk to one another, how to find a common language. I had to learn to speak in TV dramatic logic, which I’m still learning. It took a lot to convince them that there would be enough drama in it because this is not true crime, you know. I told them, “We’re gonna use oral history, but we’re gonna have an actor perform it.” And they were like, “Why are we gonna have an actor perform it? Can’t we just use the real audio of it?” But Bunny Sandler isn’t an actor, so the real audio doesn’t quite have that dramatic energy. I said, “I’m gonna adapt it to my style.” It was a long process of me convincing them this could be dramatic enough, which it turns out it absolutely is. In the end, I think maybe [the producers] were beaten down by my endlessly returning to this pitch! They also gave me the freedom to create something they didn’t entirely understand at first, which is a rare opportunity as an artist, to be trusted in that way. So, the origin story of it was that it was supposed to be this gigantic women’s history. From a hundred years of women’s history, I homed in on Title IX. CK: The audio theatre form that you developed for this project blends the dramatic forms that you use in your interview- and archival-based plays with a more conventional podcast structure. Can you describe how this developmental process built on the processes that you’ve used in the theatre? LF: What’s interesting about it for me as a writer is I really hear text musically when I’m playwriting, both when there’s pre-existing text and when I’m making the text up. In a way, it was like a long rehearsal process. I could live with these recordings and edit from these recordings. Instead of saying to the actor, “Cut that line” or “change this around,” I could just do that with their voice. It did give me the thought that, in the future, when I’m playwriting from big source material again, I’ll have actors record the read-throughs of the whole play so that I have that audio and can play with that audio as I’m playwriting. This form also frees you from having to worry about bodies and space. You create an image world for each episode –you can really focus on voices and story. CK: What do you see as the possibilities for this form looking forward? LF: I think that it’s an underexplored form. I mean, it’s interesting to see what’s happening in the theatre, right? Audible is putting plays on tape… LA Theater Works has been doing it forever, but I think people are more open to audio now, and Hollywood has jumped on the bandwagon because it’s a proof of concept, right? They don’t have to invest in developing a TV series. It can be a podcast first, and then, they can decide they want to make it into a TV series. But there are also people who – instead of selling their intellectual property to someone in Hollywood – they are making an audio version where they have more control and can play with form. It has been called the Wild West because it doesn’t have a lot of rules. SAG and Equity don’t know what to do with it. It’s not governed by any of that stuff, so people are still just exploring. I think it’s a truly experimental landscape right now. It’s also just a different form, right? When [the producers] were giving me notes, they were saying that I needed to imagine someone doing their laundry, being on the treadmill, or cleaning their house. So, we’ve lowered the artistic bar, but it’s also universal. Everybody can access it. It’s not expensive, so in terms of what you were saying earlier– CK: In terms of what the COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated for us as theatre-makers– LF: Right, we still have an issue in the theatre of affordability and accessibility: how much money is spent to make the thing, who gets to watch it, and who are the gatekeepers. In this podcast world, you still have some constraints, but anybody can make a podcast, and most people can access it. CK: You are somewhat present in your theatrical work as an interviewer or narrator figure, but in Feminist Files, you play a much more substantive role. What was it like to be that present as the host and narrator of this series? How did it feel to put yourself into the work in that way? LF: I’ve always resisted that, but in this form, it felt like an inevitability because I’m the one finding this stuff, and I’m trying to recreate this experience for the listener of going on this journey [as a researcher]. Before I found the oral history transcript [in Bunny Sandler’s files at the Schlesinger Library], Rora [Brodwin] had already told me most of Bunny’s history and her own story of sexual assault, including her going into the Title IX office that her great-aunt had created and not being able to tell her great-aunt about that experience. So, that was a narrative arc, right? Then, some of the most moving experiences for me were finding Pauli [Murray’s] journal, realizing that I was working beneath her portrait [in the archive], and Rora introducing me to her as a figure in history. I thought Rora was going to be able to thread all those other elements in. I spent an unbelievable number of hours putting [Rora and Bunny’s] voices together, so they were telling the story together. I thought it was just gonna be the two of them talking to each other because they couldn’t talk to each other in real life anymore, but there was too much that needed to be filled in. I needed to talk people through and give context. I would also say that Sarah Lambert [my co-producer] had a lot to do with it because she is the standard bearer for artistic integrity. So, when Sarah was encouraging me to put myself forward, I knew I had to pay attention. She had never said that in any other process. And, of course, Sarah fact-checked everything to within an inch of its life, so I always felt confident in everything we were saying, you know? And then I had to learn how to direct myself narrating, which was a process. CK: Right – I can imagine how different that felt from working in a theatre with actors, particularly amidst the pandemic. Can you describe your directorial process? How did you do the recordings? Was the whole process done via Zoom? LF: Yeah, [the actors] would set up recording studios, most of the time in their closets, and then they would record, and I would direct via Zoom, but I didn’t have a live feed to the recording because they were sent these kits with SIM cards, so it was nerve-wracking. I could hear how they were sounding over Zoom, and I could hear when they messed up a line, but I couldn’t hear the quality of the recording until they sent us the files, so some of the editing was based on the takes and how they sounded. It was a very different process than when you’re building work in a room with actors. CK: Did you do all the editing yourself, or did you do a rough edit and then have audio engineers who cleaned things up? LF: I did all the editing. I’m trying to think of how many passes on average, but we did a pass, and then, [the producers] would give notes, and then, we’d do another pass, and they would give notes. As it came more into form, they had more and more to say about it. In the beginning, they didn’t know what it was going to be, so they didn’t have much to say, but as it began to take shape, they wanted to weigh in more and more. Then it went to the sound person, Gary [Grundei], and he would edit based on sound, which was such an important element. So, there were probably three to five editing passes for each episode. CK: You mentioned that the process of creating this felt like being in twelve straight weeks of tech. LF: It really did. After I would make the final layout of the words, it would go to an engineer who does a pause pass, which is like a pacing pass. Then, it went to Gary for sound design again, and it came back to me, and I would usually edit out large swaths of the text based on Gary’s work. CK: He does beautiful work, recreating the sounds of the archive for instance, which is both such a quiet space and a space that really comes alive in this podcast. Given how effective this form was in activating this period of feminist history and the capaciousness of the title, Feminist Files, I wonder if there is any plan for additional seasons or episodes? LF: I wanted to call it The Consequential Feminist. CK: What happened to that title? LF: That title never made it out of committee! CK: That’s too bad! LF: I know. I wanted it to be called The Consequential Feminist. I really fought for that title. I think that’s why you hear the term so often in the series. The producers were a bit wary of Feminist Files, too. They wanted to shorten it to be F Files. Because feminism is a “bad” word – people recoil and don’t want to pay attention to feminism. The producers were feminists themselves but having worked in Hollywood for as long as they had, and experienced the sexism and misogyny of the industry, they felt people would be afraid of the word. CK: That’s disheartening. Do you know what the response has been to the project, given the title you chose? LF: It has a steady following but not gigantic because they are a young startup without a big marketing budget. We’re hoping that we’ll be nominated for a GLAAD Award so it can gain some traction. It’s had a steady following, but I only know that from hearing from people that they’re listening to it and enjoying it. CK: If it gets a more robust response, do you think there will be other iterations of the project? LF: That was the idea. The idea was that it could be anthologized, that we’d go back to the archives. I don’t think they’re gonna let me do it, but the story that I want to do next is one I came across accidentally in my research. Somebody left in the scanner a membership card for women in the KKK. It was just sitting there, and Teddy [one of the archivists] said, “Oh, they’ve left this in here.” We were both looking at it and looking at each other, and she said, “Yep, that archive is here.” I mean, that’s a whole different story. We tend to think of the history of mobilization on the left, but I don’t think we think of the history of mobilization on the right. CK: It would be a hard story to sit with for a long time, and you’d have to find an entry point for yourself and audiences, to help them find their way into that story and recognize it as part of our history that we need to grapple with. This project centers on a more uplifting narrative, but it was crafted at a difficult time. You began researching Feminist Files before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the recording and editing of the project was completed in 2020. What was it like to be working on it in the early months of the pandemic? LF: Well, as you know, it was a very scary and isolating time. Once we figured out the mechanics of how to send people the [recording] kits, and I started directing those recordings, though, it was like, “Oh, I’m back in my world.” Being able to spend those hours with Mercedes [Hererro], who is a longtime collaborator of mine, getting to be in the room with Ronald Peet, having conversations with Margo Hall about Black Lives Matter and her life – it was like air in a world without air, you know? And in the end, the producers and I did find a common language and we became strong collaborators, we trusted each other. They were able to get Jodie Foster on board to play Bunny, which shows how much they believed in this project. Getting to work with Jodie [Foster], with that high calibre of an actor… I got off that Zoom call, and I was dancing around the living room. It was lifesaving to have something big to focus on and to be able to connect artistically with people to create it. As a director, working with actors is the whole game, right? Without having that contact, you can think about the projects you want to make and read plays and do other things, but that engagement is where the creative flow really happens. [At the beginning of the pandemic], it felt like that was gone, and it would never be back. But then, it was right there. I could connect with these actors. It was amazing. The decision to have them break character from time to time to have conversations with me was me trying to capture that feeling of creating something together. We’re discovering something together. We’re in community, which is how the women in the story were also in community. I was trying to mirror that. It was a gift. References [i] Fondakowski, Leigh. Feminist Files. Accessed November 10, 2022. https://feminist-files.sounder.fm . Footnotes About The Author(s) CAITLIN KANE (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Dramatic Criticism at Kent State University and a freelance dramaturg, director, and intimacy director. Their research and creative practice sit at the intersection of theatre and social change and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies and center on queer and feminist approaches to staging history. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch The Books of Jacob by Krzysztof Garbaczewski at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. La MaMa and CultureHub in association with the Polish Cultural Institute New York present The Books of Jacob by Dream Adoption Society, a digital laboratory led by Krzysztof Garbaczewski. The Books of Jacob is inspired by Olga Tokarczuk's Nobel prize-winning novel of the same name which explores the historical events surrounding Jacob Frank, a man who claimed to be the reincarnation of Sabbatai Zevi. In front of a live audience, Garbaczewski creates a hybrid theatre and virtual reality experience that delves into the ideas and relevance of Jacob's transformative religious movement in 18th Century Europe. The Books of Jacob is produced within CultureHub and La MaMa’s Experiments in Digital Storytelling program, which incubates story-driven artworks that push the boundaries of artistic forms. Experiments in Digital Storytelling is made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Radio Drama Network. Additional support for Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s fellowship in Experiments in Digital Storytelling is provided by TMU and Polish Cultural Institute New York. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Books of Jacob At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Krzysztof Garbaczewski Theater, Film, Multimedia, Performance Art This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 54 minutes Year of Release 2023 La MaMa and CultureHub in association with the Polish Cultural Institute New York present The Books of Jacob by Dream Adoption Society, a digital laboratory led by Krzysztof Garbaczewski. The Books of Jacob is inspired by Olga Tokarczuk's Nobel prize-winning novel of the same name which explores the historical events surrounding Jacob Frank, a man who claimed to be the reincarnation of Sabbatai Zevi. In front of a live audience, Garbaczewski creates a hybrid theatre and virtual reality experience that delves into the ideas and relevance of Jacob's transformative religious movement in 18th Century Europe. The Books of Jacob is produced within CultureHub and La MaMa’s Experiments in Digital Storytelling program, which incubates story-driven artworks that push the boundaries of artistic forms. Experiments in Digital Storytelling is made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Radio Drama Network. Additional support for Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s fellowship in Experiments in Digital Storytelling is provided by TMU and Polish Cultural Institute New York. CREATIVE TEAM Performers – Danusia Trevino, Anna Podolak, Ola Rudnicka Adaptation – Rébecca Pierrot Costume Design – Monika Palikot, Sławomir Blaszewski Music: Jan Duszyński Avatars – Anastasiia Vorobiova Set Design – Bettina Katja Lange, Krzysztof Garbaczewski Set Coordinator – Piotr Gawelko Director, VR Design – Krzysztof Garbaczewski CULTUREHUB DeAndra Anthony – Technical Director Mattie Barber-Bockelman – Producing Director Sangmin Chae – Creative Technologist Billy Clark – Artistic Director Evan Anderson – Lighting Consultant Live Park NY – Audio About The Artist(s) Krzysztof Garbaczewski (born February 24, 1983 in Bialystok, Poland) is a Polish theatre director, stage designer and digital artist. He creates interdisciplinary performances, theatrical installations combining performance, visual arts and virtual reality. Get in touch with the artist(s) krzysztof.garbaczewski@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.culturehub.org/the-books-of-jacob dreamadoptionsociety.com Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Ariel Nereson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Ariel Nereson By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF In fall 2021, after three semesters of Zoom instruction, I returned to the classroom to teach my Advanced Dramaturgy course for graduate and advanced undergraduate students at the University at Buffalo – SUNY (State University of New York). As a practicing choreographer and dramaturg, I teach across dance and theatre undergraduate and graduate curricula, and many of my courses focus on composition through both textual and kinesthetic modes. As I continue learning, developing, and implementing antiracist and culturally responsive teaching practices, I connect these principles to how I generally teach script and movement analysis via a method that emphasizes the imbrication of form, content, and means of production. [1] I offer here a reflection on teaching an Asian American dramaturgies unit within my Advanced Dramaturgy course in order to practice critical self-reflection; model the composition of this unit and acknowledge its limits and affordances; and advocate for the use of theoretical contributions like Dorinne Kondo’s “reparative creativity” as pedagogical tools. I am chagrined to admit that though I taught this course previously in 2015, it took the anti-Asian violence in the US during the COVID–19 pandemic for me to incorporate and name Asian American dramaturgies in the course. I shared this with my students as evidence of my complicity with racism and its impacts on my pedagogy (was it the prevalence of the model minority myth that led to the absence of Asian Americanist critique in my 2015 syllabus?) and to model solidarity and justice as pedagogical tactics in need of constant energy and commitment. I share it here to practice accountability as a white educator. Kondo’s reparative creativity, a theory of performance’s worldmaking capacities toward liberation, is developed through her own artistic practice as both a dramaturg and playwright. In Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity , Kondo includes a variety of writings, from reflections on her experiences as a spectator and artist, to scholarly analyses of racial capitalism, to her full-length play Seamless . Thinking across these modes allows students to integrate script analysis with sociocultural structural analysis, to understand stakes as not only present in a script as a matter of dramatic structure but also vital to our decisions about season selection, marketing and promotion, educational programming, and audience outreach—to the myriad ways that performance functions as worldmaking. Kondo’s work has inspired this special issue of JADT , the summer 2022 Association for Theater in Higher Education (ATHE) conference theme, and my own research on racialization and embodiment. I wanted to give students this concept as one of their theoretical tools to think and make with as dramaturgs. Part of my responsibility as an educator, as I have learned from Felicia Rose Chavez’s teachings on antiracism in the creative classroom, is to clarify and name explicitly for my students that we are tracing power dynamics and their impacts on the historical development of dramatic theatre as we move amongst units. [2] While in this reflection I single out our unit on Asian American dramaturgies, I want to clarify that my approach to structuring the syllabus names each unit out of a desire to counter what Kondo characterizes as “power-evasive liberalism” and its “cousins,” “humanist multiculturalism” and color blindness. [3] My approach may, at first glance, appear as cultural tourism, where we spend a couple of weeks on each identity category and leave whiteness unmarked. [4] Instead, our class analyzed racialization as a project of all production, for example how Lisa Kron, Jeanine Tesori, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home engages with whiteness. This structure intends to counter a traditional drama pedagogy in higher education wherein, as Kondo writes, “the majority of plays are white but rarely marked as such.” [5] My goals for our collective thinking through this unit were threefold: to introduce more contemporary Asian American playwrights to myself and my students, to model some kinds of research that a dramaturg working on a production of a particular text might need to do, and to locate theatrical production in a vibrant practice of Asian Americanist critique. Our contemporary Asian American dramaturgies unit comprised four sessions addressing the following materials: Lauren Yee’s 2008 play Ching Chong Chinaman ; Kat Chow’s journalism on the history of “Ching Chong” as a racial slur; Faedra Chatard Carpenter’s chapter “Reading and (re)directing racial scripts” in our textbook, The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy ; selections from Cathy Park Hong’s 2020 memoir Minor Feelings ; Kondo’s play Seamless and her chapter “Racial Affect and Affective Violence”; and Donatella Galella’s essay “Feeling Yellow: Responding to Contemporary Yellowface in Musical Performance.” [6] As a way of establishing the experiential knowledge in the room, I asked students to reflect individually, by writing, on two sets of questions: What do you “know” about Asian Americans? How do you know it? What stereotypes have you encountered? How have you participated in stereotyping? [7] Can you name an Asian American playwright? Have you seen an Asian American playwright’s work produced? If so, who, where, and when? Have you encountered Asian American characters onstage? If so, who, where, and when? Students were given the choice regarding the first cluster of questions as to how much of their individual reflection they wanted to share in the group discussion. I also participated in the reflection and sharing. No students in this course self-identified as Asian American. Had this been otherwise, I would rethink this exercise – not eliminate it, but consider possible harms to Asian American folks in the room and reconsider the format given my own whiteness and its impacts. I did instruct students that if they wanted to share with the group, they needed to share through “I” statements. I emphasized that while in their personal reflections racial slurs may be part of their experience of Asian American stereotyping, we would not voice those slurs in our group discussion, a continuation of a class policy we had used all semester based on Koritha Mitchell’s teachings about discursive violence. [8] I found that the first set of questions produced predictable responses in the sense that racialized minoritarian identities are perpetuated through resilient stereotypes, here of Asian Americans as the “model minority,” as non-conforming to white US American ideals of masculinity and femininity, as linguistically “other,” and as pursuing academic achievement no matter the cost. Students had quite a bit to say in response to this first set of questions, which made the relatively short discussion of the second set of questions stand out. In our brief discussion of the second set of questions, two concerns for me as the instructor emerged: the first was a general conflation of Asian with Asian American. [9] Given the paucity of Asian American representation on US stages, I wasn’t exactly surprised that my students listed any Asian character they had encountered in a US production. The vast majority of characters on this list were defined through the violence of colonial encounter and compulsory heterosexuality, such as King Mongkut from The King and I and Kim from Miss Saigon . My second concern resulted from the dominance of male playwrights on the students’ lists: David Henry Hwang and Qui Nguyen were the two most frequently cited playwrights. One student mentioned Young Jean Lee, but otherwise female Asian American playwrights were not represented. Through this discussion, I realized that I had organized our Asian American dramaturgies unit without consciously attending to gender dynamics, so my selections provided a serendipitous, but nonetheless necessary, corrective that, in the future, I would be more intentional about framing. Rather than giving a sequential account of how these four sessions went, I want to emphasize some unexpected, rich, and welcome connections that emerged through the confluence of these readings. I firstly note that these authors, while all identifying as female, represent a range of Asian American identities (with the exception of Carpenter) that are taken up in their respective texts, including Chinese American, Japanese American, and Korean American communities. This turned out to be a particularly needed intervention into the generalization of “Asians” that students had experienced. The pairing of the two dramas—Yee’s Ching Chong Chinaman and Kondo’s Seamless —demonstrated the breadth of dramatic possibility that Asian American dramaturgies explore, and both plays read wonderfully on the page. Yee’s play is a laugh-out-loud comedy, filled with linguistic and physical humor, that moves at a rapid clip through the Wong family’s expert assimilation into US American tropes of “Chineseness.” Kondo’s play, a family drama, proceeds at a steady, more meditative pace, and takes up painful histories of Japanese American incarceration, as it stages the lead character’s confrontations with familial and national pasts. While Yee’s play is more realistic, both texts incorporate stylistic tactics of realism and non-realism and allowed for comparison with other texts throughout the syllabus. I felt it was important to begin this unit with a comedy in order to continue our discussions of the importance of affirming the right of minoritarian actors to have fun onstage, to appear and labor without the necessity of staging trauma. Both of these plays open with the staging of a family portrait (another connection to previous texts in our course like Fun Home ). In Yee’s comedy, the Wongs are attempting their annual Christmas card portrait as they deliver rapid-fire dialogue satirizing the US cultural hegemony of Christmas. The characters freely stereotype Chinese Americans, white Americans, and Christians in hyperbolic prose; the scene ends with a camera flash, directly preceded by patriarch Ed Wong’s line, a cue to racial alienation: “Everyone open their eyes nice and wide now.” [10] Kondo’s play likewise stages a family portrait that ends with a camera flash. Unlike Yee, Kondo opens with direct address to the audience, as the characters introduce themselves and provide a running commentary on each other’s characterizations. Characters occasionally share sentences, each speaking a fragment, in contrast to Yee’s realistic dialogue. The scene ends: KEN: Because you see. MASAKO: We’re a very. BEN: Happy. DIANE: Family. [11] Paying attention to the opening beat of a script is standard script analysis training for the dramaturg. Comparing Kondo and Yee countered the collapsing of distinct Asian American identities into a homogenous group as we traced how these playwrights depart in their dramatic structures following their shared set-up in order to articulate differential experiences of US racial projects. Another serendipitous cluster of inquiry emerged around critical race theory and affect theory as tools the dramaturg might bring to bear on structures of composition and representation. Our initial discussions about Asian American stereotypes on- and offstage were paired with discussion of Faedra Chatard Carpenter’s chapter “Reading and (re)directing racial scripts.” In this essay, Carpenter introduces the term “racial scripts” to indicate the interconnectedness of racial projects, i.e., plays ostensibly “about” race, with racial projects , i.e., the systemic distribution of resources according to racialized hierarchies of identity as defined by critical race theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant. [12] Carpenter’s work affirms Kondo’s dramaturgical approach wherein “Instead of asking what race is , I ask what work it is doing, when, for whom?” [13] Carpenter’s account of dramaturging Kwame Kwei-Armah’s 2012 production of Matthew Lopez’s The Whipping Man at Center Stage in Baltimore compellingly models how the dramaturg navigates both kinds of racial projects. This reading became critically important to how our Asian American dramaturgies unit unfolded because Carpenter’s terminology of racial scripts allowed our class to reflect back on our initial discussions about stereotypes and characterization, to see how systemic critique is often pushed aside in favor of psychological critique (particularly in the US American theatre and its obsession with psychological realism), and to acknowledge how an incessant focus on individualized racial identity avoids recognizing the structural workings of racial projects. A second cluster of ideas around feeling was another example of an effective, though accidental, compositional choice for our unit. I included, respectively, Donatella Galella’s essay “Feeling Yellow” in order to tie back to our previous unit on musical theatre, Dorinne Kondo’s “Racial Affect and Affective Violence” because of its readability and complexity, and selections from Cathy Park Hong’s memoir Minor Feelings to engage with contemporary Asian Americanist critique written for a general audience. These readings shared an investment in feeling, or affect, as evidence of racial projects and formed a primer in affect theory for our class that was sited in the seats of the theatre. They also share a grounded, first-person address that is integrated with textual analysis and cultural critique. Our discussion of these texts emphasized another of the course’s through-lines: that artists are not geniuses whose creative production is somehow above or below the political and the social. We are responsible for our content and to our audiences. I’d like to offer a teaching tool related to sharing dense scholarly texts. For Galella’s essay, I asked students to prepare a 3-2-1 assignment: identify 3 main points, choose 2 significant quotations, and propose 1 question to the class based on the insights of the reading. [14] Shared with permission, here are a few of their insights: There is a lot of hidden emotional labor that we ask of people…amplified through the work of marginalized groups—white folk need to take on educating themselves, rather than asking those within the group to explain. Why has it taken this long for creators, designers, and writers to notice the problem in this industry? It seems like all of a sudden every regional theatre developed a “new plan of action” for equal opportunity and diversity on stage, which is fantastic, but it seems like they are only doing it because everyone else is. Commonly selected quotes included: “A theory of feeling yellow makes visible how white supremacy preserves pleasure for the privileged in order to preserve hierarchy” and “While quiet dissent may not move the majority, loud laughter moves the minoritized. Racialized representation can make the spectator of color painfully conscious of racism even in anticipation of a performance.” [15] When I reviewed the students’ 3-2-1s, I observed that moving from Carpenter to Galella, as we moved through the plays, helped students identify connecting personal responses to dramatic material to structural critiques of US culture as dramaturgical work. We turned this theoretical discussion toward the concrete realities of season selection at our institution. Season selection was happening concurrently with our course and discussing a hypothetical season proposal that included both Kondo’s and Yee’s plays made space for students to be self-reflective, in terms of considering their roles and investments in our department, and also to engage in institutional critique, particularly of the commonplace, incorrect, and violent excuse of not selecting particular texts because “we don’t have the actors for that.” [16] Students noted the reappearance of this logic in our discussions, as we had previously analyzed texts that called for primarily Black and African diasporic casts and primarily Indigenous casts, in relation to the demands placed on minoritarian playwrights if they wish to see their plays regularly produced. Rather than lumping together racialized “others” through our course units, we used our tools from this unit’s authors, particularly those of systemic critique, to understand these plays as being in a relation of solidarity within racial projects that structure performance-making in North America. In this way Drew Hayden Taylor’s Berlin Blues and Yee’s Ching Chong Chinamen are similar not because they are comedies centered on people belonging to particular minoritarian identities written by playwrights belonging to these communities (and thus checking a set of diversity boxes) but because they are composed, produced, and received in a white supremacist theatrical environment that seeks to constrain their meanings. As I prepared this reflection for publication in early 2022, the Public Theater in New York produced Out of Time , a monologue project “written by five Asian American playwrights for Asian American actors over age 60.” [17] Days later, an Asian American performer who was headed to the Public to perform as part of a Lion Dance program before the first preview of Lloyd Suh’s drama The Chinese Lady was assaulted in a public act of anti-Asian violence. [18] This assault was a material consequence of anti-Asian racism experienced simultaneously with increased visibility for Asian American theatrical production within white cultural hegemony. This concurrence, as both a contemporary outcome of white supremacy and as related to long histories of violence against racialized “others” in the US, reflects the urgent stakes of the classic dramaturgical question “why this play now?” Asking this question of each play on our syllabus and in our season points to the necessity of centering minoritarian artistic production as an ethical pedagogical and dramaturgical practice. How does this play serve our students, our audience, and our worldmaking, be they harms or reparations? Kondo’s reparative creativity, as well as its intersection with other theoretical tools like critical race theory and affect theory, gives students language with which to answer these questions. I hope that readers who do not already engage with Asian Americanist dramaturgies will incorporate these readings into not only their own courses (and they certainly resonate beyond the dramaturgy classroom) but also the systems we teach with and inside of, like auditions, admissions, casting, season selection, internship placement, hiring, and guest artist residencies, among others. References [1] This tripartite focus (form, content, means of production) is inspired by the “grid of politicality” theorized by Ana Vujanovi´c, after Randy Martin, as the multidimensional space where we might register the politics of performance. For this theorization, see Vujanovi´c, “Notes on the Politicality of Contemporary Dance,” in Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity: Current Perspectives on Politics and Communities in the Arts, Vol. 1 , ed. Stefan Hölscher and Gerald Siegmund (Zurich: Diaphenes, 2013), 181-191. [2] In her book The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), Chavez writes, “It’s our responsibility as workshop leaders to verbalize our anti-racist agenda for them [students], in clear, unapologetic language, language that opens doors instead of closes them” (24). [3] Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 131. [4] I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewer who encouraged me to better clarify the structure of the course and the possible reading of cultural tourism. [5] Kondo, Worldmaking , 169. [6] Faedra Chatard Carpenter, “Reading and (Re)directing Racial Scripts On and Beyond the Stage” in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy , ed. Magda Romanska (London: Routledge, 2015), 145-150; Kat Chow, “How ‘Ching Chong’ Became the Go-To Slur for Mocking East Asians,” Code Switch , New York Public Radio, NPR, New York, NY: WNYC, 14 July 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/07/14/330769890/how-ching-chong-became-the-go-to-slur-for-mocking-east-asians (accessed 18 August 2021); Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings (New York: One World, 2020); Donatella Galella, “Feeling Yellow: Responding to Contemporary Yellowface in Musical Performance,” The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 32, no. 2 (2018): 67-77; Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity ; Lauren Yee, Ching Chong Chinaman (New York: Samuel French Acting Edition, 2011). [7] The emphasis on stereotyping in this set of questions relates to a broader throughline in the course about how identity-based stereotyping impacts dramaturgy as both composition and representation, and builds on prior discussion in the course about gender stereotypes in musical theatre and colonial stereotypes about Indigenous peoples in a previous unit on Indigenous dramaturgies and comedy. [8] Mitchell’s ideas and policies about discursive violence in the classroom are also available as a podcast at http://www.korithamitchell.com/teaching-and-the-n-word/. [9] I thank Donatella Galella for drawing my attention to Lisa Lowe’s formulation of “forever foreigners” to characterize this common racist experience ( Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996]). [10] Ching Chong Chinaman , 8. [11] Worldmaking , 242. [12] Carpenter, “Reading and (Re)directing,” 145-146. [13] Kondo, 169. [14] This tactic revises a popular K-12 teaching strategy wherein at the end of a class, students complete an exit ticket and identify 3 things they learned, select 2 things they want to learn more about, and formulate 1 question. [15] Galella, “Feeling Yellow,” 71, 73. [16] In future iterations of this course, I plan to include additional reading around the casting conversation, including the work of Brian Eugenio Herrera in his essay “‘But Do We Have the Actors for That?’: Some Principles of Practice for Staging Latinx Plays in a University Theatre Context,” Theatre Topics 27, no. 1 (2017): 23-35. [17] Matt Stevens, “Shared Stories in Asian American Voices,” New York Times , 20 February 2022, AR9. [18] Leah Putnam, “Asian American Artist Attacked During Commute to Perform at The Public,” Playbill , 25 February 2022, https://www.playbill.com/article/asian-american-artist-attacked-during-commute-to-perform-at-the-public. Readers can find ways to take action against anti-Asian violence at www.StopAAPIHate.org. Footnotes About The Author(s) Ariel Nereson is Assistant Professor of Dance Studies and Director of Graduate Dance at the University at Buffalo – SUNY. She is the author of Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past (University of Michigan Press, 2022). A recent Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, she researches racialization, embodiment, and movement-based performance. She is also a choreographer and dramaturg. I thank Donatella Galella and the anonymous peer reviewers for their generous challenges and affirmations provided in their feedback. I thank my students for being in conversation with me and for understanding our classroom as a space of worldmaking. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread by Jean-Baptiste Mathieu at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Constantly pushing the limits of the body and the laws of physics, tightrope walking is about navigating between acrobatic elegance and the earth's gravitational pull. The artist must master the skillful technique that enables them to move forward as if dancing, without losing their balance. It's a fascinating circus art, both for the performer and the audience.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Jean-Baptiste Mathieu Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Friday May 16th at 7:10pm and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Germany Language French Running Time 52 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film Constantly pushing the limits of the body and the laws of physics, tightrope walking is about navigating between acrobatic elegance and the earth's gravitational pull. The artist must master the skillful technique that enables them to move forward as if dancing, without losing their balance. It's a fascinating circus art, both for the performer and the audience. About The Artist(s) Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga was seven years old when she witnessed a tightrope walker crossing between two buildings — a moment of pure fascination that sparked a true calling. Now a star in her field, she is one of the rare women to perform more than 30 meters above the ground on a 300-meter-long wire. Tatiana lives with her three-year-old daughter and the artists from her company in a village nestled at the foot of the Cévennes mountains. The film follows their preparations for a spectacular challenge: crossing the Saint-Denis Canal toward the Stade de France. The feat Tatiana is about to accomplish is a technical, artistic, and human endeavor. Around her, an entire team is mobilized. In Saint-Denis, her partner and technical director Jan Naets is assisted by five riggers. For three days, he oversees the setup of a complex installation and trains those who will ensure the wire’s stability from the ground. Balancing grace and calculated risk, Tatiana captures everyone's attention. Each performance is an aerial and choreographic adventure, accompanied live by musicians playing melodies and rhythms that strike the perfect chord. It’s an undertaking that couldn’t happen without the help of many volunteers who take part in stabilizing the wire — a delicate operation requiring constant adaptability. Get in touch with the artist(s) cie@ciebasinga.com and follow them on social media https://www.jeanbaptistemathieu.fr/films-documentaires/decouverte-passions/tatiana-funambule-des-cevennes-au-stade-de-france https://www.facebook.com/CieBasinga/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse