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The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, is a peer-reviewed annual journal dedicated to the life, work, and legacy of visionary theatre artist Robert Wilson. Featuring scholarly essays, archival discoveries, artist reflections, and performance reviews, the journal offers global perspectives on Wilson’s groundbreaking influence across theatre, opera, and visual art. Robert Wilson | Photograph © Lucie Jansch Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Current Issue About & Submission Guidelines People Contact Curren Issue Inaugural Issue (vol. 1, no. 1) Viola Kántor “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Petra Egri The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Antal Bókay Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Sophia Cocozza Listening to Deafman Glanc Pia Kleber and Shiu Hei Larry Ng Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Markus Wessendorf Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Avraham Oz and Tal Itzhaki Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets Steve Earnest Robert Wilson and Norway Yoni Oppenheim Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Keren Cohen Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics John P. Bray They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Maria Shevtsova Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Konrad Kuhn Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson About & Submission Guideline About The Journal History and Mission Founded in 2025 by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, the Robert Wilson Yearbook is a peer-reviewed annual journal devoted to the study, documentation, and critical exploration of the life, work, and influence of Robert Wilson (1941–2025). Known for his radical reimagining of theatre, opera, performance, and visual art, Wilson’s practice shaped global performance aesthetics for more than half a century. The Yearbook publishes essays, archival research, artist reflections, performance documentation, and creative responses that illuminate Wilson’s artistry and legacy. By encouraging historical, theoretical, and practice-based approaches, the journal seeks to advance scholarship and foster interdisciplinary dialogue between theatre studies, performance studies, visual culture, and contemporary art. Our mission is to preserve, critique, and expand upon Wilson’s extraordinary body of work while providing a platform for new voices and perspectives shaped by his influence. The Yearbook is fully online, freely accessible, and committed to bridging academic rigor with artistic innovation. Submission Guidelines The editors of the Robert Wilson Yearbook welcome submissions for essays, archival interventions, and creative responses related to Robert Wilson’s life, work, collaborations, and legacy. Article Manuscripts Length: 6,000–8,000 words Style: Chicago Manual of Style, using footnotes Format: Microsoft Word (.docx) attachment Review: All submissions undergo double-blind peer review; please allow 3–4 months for a decision Images: Authors may submit up to 6 images (minimum 300 dpi). Captions must be included. Authors are responsible for securing all image permissions prior to submission. Bio: Include a short author biography (100–150 words) with your submission. Creative Contributions In recognition of Wilson’s multidisciplinary practice, the Yearbook also considers creative submissions—such as artist reflections, experimental writing, visual essays, or documentation of Wilson-inspired works. These should be accompanied by a 500-word critical framing statement. Performance Reviews We invite reviews of recent revivals, reinterpretations, or stagings of Wilson’s work worldwide, as well as works by artists explicitly engaging with his methods. Reviews should be 800–1,200 words. Please query the editors in advance at robertwilsonyearbook@gmail.com Book Reviews The Yearbook publishes reviews of monographs, edited volumes, and exhibition catalogues related to Robert Wilson, his collaborators, or fields directly informed by his practice. Reviews should not exceed 1,000 words. To propose a review, please contact robertwilsonyearbook@gmail.com Submission Process We accept submissions on a rolling basis. Queries are welcome at any time. Completed manuscripts should be submitted as email attachments to: robertwilsonyearbook@gmail.com People Editorial Board Markus Wessendorf Frank Hentschker Viola Kántor Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker Executive Director Gaurav Singh Nijjer Digital and Web Coordinator Contact Email robertwilsonyearbook@gmail.com

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Viola Kántor By Published on May 1, 2026 Download Article as PDF For decades, Robert Wilson’s work has received asymmetrical academic attention. It is striking that even though he is a prolific visual artist who works in various mediums such as drawing, painting, lithograph, photography, installation art, furniture/sculpture, and video , the visuality of his art has mainly been studied in relation to his theatre productions and directorial approach. To mention a few, Bonnie Marranca described Wilson’s theatre as “assemblage art” [1] in her seminal volume on The Theatre of Images . Stefan Brecht called his stagings the “theatre of visions,” [2] Laurence Shyer saw him as a “painter in the theatre,” [3] Arthur Holmberg quoted the director as saying, “I think with a pencil. This is my way of analyzing the play.” [4] The art world, galleries, collectors, biennales, and museums have also acknowledged and appreciated Wilson’s works of art and celebrated him with various prizes, such as the Golden Lion prize in sculpture for his installation Memory/Loss in the Venice Biennale in 1993. Literature on Wilson emphasizes his background in the plastic arts and mentions that he initially studied painting, graduated as an interior architect at Pratt Institute, worked as Paolo Soleri’s apprentice in 1966, [5] and created performances in his twenties that could be partly linked to John Cage’s and Merce Cunningham’s Events and partly to the Happenings. [6] Indeed, before turning to the proscenium theatre, Wilson considered painting his most important artistic field. According to an early interview, Wilson saw the precursor of his process in painting in the practice of Jackson Pollock, especially the abstract expressionist artist’s “physical involvement” [7] during making an allover picture. As Wilson described his creative method in 1965: “When I am painting, I let the paint take over. I paint from something . . . and that thing takes over. It is much more exciting than if I tried to do it intellectually. The response is emotional instead of rational.” [8] However, in 1966, Wilson gave up painting. This came from a creative crisis that led to a mental breakdown. [9] The artistic reason for this block was, as Wilson pointed out later, that he could not “capture on canvas the overlays of images, the multiple light pictures,” he was experiencing in his head at that time. [10] Nevertheless, Wilson has never stopped working as a visual artist. Drawing and his special medium furniture/sculpture have always been essential genres in his oeuvre, and installation art became one of the most significant art fields in his lifework by the early 1990s. In fact, his installation art has continued and expanded his originally studied crafts. Arthur Holmberg aptly observed that “[Wilson’s] installations are among his most important works. In a way he has come full circle. In theater, he discovered his signature. He was able to come back and work with static art. . . . He is one of the great contemporary installation artists.” [11] Furthermore, it is important to note that Wilson’s work demonstrates a reciprocal relationship between his theatre and installation art: not only has Wilson’s theatre influenced his installations, but his installation art practice has also created a space for experimentation that informs his theatrical works. Claire Bishop defines installation art “as a term that loosely refers to the type of art into which the viewer physically enters, and which is often described as ‘theatrical,’ ‘immersive,’ or ‘experiential.’” [12] According to Bishop, one of the main characteristics of installation art is that it engages the viewer as a physical presence in space and provides her with a complex somatic experience. The beholder perceives the work by calling into action all her senses: smell, touch, sound, and not only sight. In this paper, I argue that Robert Wilson structures the viewer’s experience in his immersive installations and museum interventions as a journey through space and time. But what kind of space do we enter, what kind of time do we exist in in a Wilson installation, and where does this journey take us? To answer the first question, we must examine Wilson’s installations within a historical context. As Bishop points out, the history of installation art typically starts with pioneers like El Lissitzky, Schwitters, and Duchamp. This history includes Minimal art and Kaprow's Happenings and Environments, culminating in fully evolved artworks in the 1970s and 1980s, with a flourishing in the 1990s. [13] However, Robert Wilson’s installations challenge this narrative, with their origins traced back to the re-evaluation of landscape concepts in twentieth-century American theatre and visual art. As several studies pointed out, [14] in search of a theatre without emotional interruption in the flow of the spectator’s experience, Gertrude Stein conceived the idea of landscape drama. According to her observation, in traditional theatre based on Aristotelian order, the viewer is exposed to an asynchrony between the perception of a given moment of the performance and the progressive development of the linear structure of the plot, forcing her attention to oscillate between the present and the future while becoming more familiar with the story of the unfolding drama. Stein called the tension this experience caused “nervousness.” [15] In her lecture “Plays,” Stein explained the genesis of landscape drama: “I felt that if a play was exactly like a landscape then there would be no difficulty about the emotion of a person looking on the play . . . because the landscape does not have to make acquaintance. You may have to make acquaintance with it, but it does not with you, it is there.” [16] For Stein, making acquaintance in the traditional post-Renaissance theatre means a certain “progressive familiarity” that evolves over time through the narrative and other discursive tools that create a plot and characters. [17] With other words, Stein wanted to create a theatre that resembled the continuous presence of experiencing a landscape, emphasizing spatial and temporal juxtaposition of visual and aural elements over linear narrativity. [18] This way, Stein connected theatre and landscape, referencing a practice that had, in fact, existed for centuries, as noted by Jane Palatini Bowers. This connection involved several concepts, particularly the idea of theatrum mundi (the theatre of the world) and the Italians’ development of the proscenium stage. This sixteenth-century innovation in theatre utilized the vanishing point perspective from landscape painting to create the dimensions of a spectacle. [19] Simultaneously, alongside Stein’s invention of landscape drama, painting also acquired a landscape-like spatial dimension by the mid-twentieth century. Arnold Aronson highlighted that these iconoclastic tendencies in the twentieth century plastic arts played a crucial role in inspiring the establishment of American avant-garde theatre. [20] He identified Marcel Duchamp as a key influence on American postwar theatre and noted two major pillars of the era’s theatrical aesthetics: the works of Gertrude Stein and John Cage. [21] He also found Allan Kaprow a significant figure in this artistic development who understood that Cubist collage had paved the way for the picture to infinity and saw Jackson Pollock as a direct precursor to his Happenings. [22] Indeed, Pollock opened the field for the younger generation, both metaphorically and literally. Rosalind E. Krauss pointed out that young artists in the 1960s utilized Pollock's shift from the traditional vertical axis of the picture plane to a horizontal dimension in their art as a starting point. [23] Krauss called these approaches strong “misreadings” – using the concept of the critic Harold Bloom—which were not misunderstandings but “ deep understandings,” [24] creative exploitation of the older artist’s ideas based on the “axial rotation of painting out of the vertical domain of the visual field . . . onto the horizontal vector,” which Krauss called formlessness. [25] Krauss also coined the term “horizontality as a medium,” [26] which is derived from Pollock's own statement about his art: he described placing the canvas on the floor as similar to the method used by the Indian sand painters of the West.” [27] Writing about the sweeping step in art when Jackson Pollock revolutionized painting by placing the canvas on the floor and dripping it with paint while being in his picture, Harold Rosenberg, theoretician of Abstract Expressionism, extended Pollock’s self-description of his creative activity. As Rosenberg stated: “the canvas began to appear . . . as an arena in which to act.” He went on, “the canvas was not a picture but an event.” [28] Rosenberg finally compared a painter to an actor and suggested spectators should think about art as action in terms of “its inception, duration, direction.” [29] The two tendencies, one in theatre and the other in plastic arts, seemed to overlap by mid-twentieth century. The formalist art historian, Clement Greenberg drew a parallel between action painters’ and Gertrude Stein’s sensibility in his essay “The Crisis of the Easel Picture.” He claimed that as “the ‘all-over’ painter renders every element and every area of the picture equivalent in accent and emphasis," [30] the same logic of equivalence can be applied to Stein's work as well. Where these two paths in art crossed each other, we can find the work of Robert Wilson. Theatre scholars note a strong connection between Wilson's theatre and Stein's landscape drama. While we know from Hans-Ties Lehmann that Wilson realized he could do theatre after reading Stein's The Making of Americans , [31] Sarah Bay-Cheng explicitly directs our attention to Stein’s immediate influence on Robert Wilson, [32] quoting his “Director’s Notes” written for the staging of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts produced in 1996 in Houston. Wilson noted, “In the early sixties I began to read Gertrude Stein’s work and also heard the recording of her speaking. That was actually before I began to work in the theater, and it changed my way of thinking forever. The mental space she created was something foreign and at the same time familiar. I felt a creative dialog with her, especially her notion of seeing a play as landscape. The architecture, the structure, the rhythms, the humor – they invited mental pictures.” [33] Examining Wilson’s early career, we can say that after giving up painting, the young Robert Wilson transposed the energy of the moving body from the process of action painting to theatre and, at the same time, replaced the canvas with a stage that became the space of a Steinian landscape. Wilson did not associate himself with the artistic trends of the 1960s, [34] but he too had his own “strong misreading” of Jackson Pollock’s invention. Wilson explained his transition from painting to theatre based on the Pollockian “physical involvement”: The entire body is involved. It’s the same thing in rock music. And it was necessary for me to go further than the painter to put on stage man and animal, poor and rich, child and old person, physically handicapped and normal person, the blind man who passes with his white cane, the deafmute, and even living animals and fake ones. The real problem is this: What can we do to make it possible for rich and poor, for antagonistic races, for those with unequally fortunate destinies to live together? [35] Nevertheless, Wilson remained a visual artist whose transition to theatre can be seen as a logical answer to the crisis of the easel picture. He left behind the tradition of the easel painting – which, as Greenberg defined, “cuts the illusion of a box-like cavity [36] into the wall behind it, and within this, as a unity, it organizes three-dimensional semblances” [37] – to create his multilayered images in the inverse form of the traditional easel picture: on the proscenium stage. Wilson replaced the materiality of the vertical picture plane and the fictionality of the picture space with the materiality of the stage space and the fictionality of the picture plane framed by the proscenium arch. At the end of the sixties, he left the world of plastic arts for a while; however, Wilson preserved pictorial quality even in the time-and-space structure of proscenium theatre. Wilson starts the design of every theatre piece with a series of drawings, the so-called visual book. His sketches, diagrams, and these visual books illustrate pictorially how Wilson sees the architecture of each scene of his stagings, the development of a play, and the skeleton of decisions in the Wilsonian visual dramaturgy. He is not a playwright ; Robert Wilson is a playdrawer . Observing Wilson's working method in theatre, Laurence Shyer noted that “Wilson’s designs are created on a flat plane with simple line drawings, and even in their final form retain something of their two-dimensional origins.” [38] Set designer Tom Kamm adds that in a Wilson production everything happens within the frame of a black box. He compares this to Wilson’s gallery drawings, where he masks the edges before drawing and then removes the mask to reveal a clean border. This approach is similar to how he frames the stage. [39] Wilson places into this frame his staged landscapes like paintings: Go [to my theatre] like you would go to a museum, like you would look at a painting. Appreciate the color of the apple, the line of the dress, the glow of the light… My opera is easier than Butterly . You don’t have to think about the story, because there isn’t any. You don’t have to listen to words, because words don’t mean anything. You just enjoy the scenery, the architectural arrangements in time and space, the music, the feelings they all evoke. Listen to the pictures. [40] Based on Wilson’s same instruction, Bay-Cheng points out that Wilson effectively illustrates how a Steinian landscape drama, devoid of plot, characters, and suspense, would appear. [41] Now that we have seen that Wilson’s theatre shares common qualities with Stein’s landscape drama, we must consider whether we can classify Wilson’s installations as landscape-like formations like his stage productions. As a start in answering this question, it is important to note that Wilson has some enigmatic phrases regarding his oeuvre which are recurring in his interviews in several variants. He frequently mentions that a common thread connects all his works, regardless of the medium. He stated: “I am not one to make distinctions between theatre, photography, architecture, or what is possible on the stage or in video, painting, dance, design, music, sculpture; it is all one in many ways.” [42] To understand the essence of this Wilsonian conundrum and to gain insight into the nature of Wilson's installations, we must consider what unifies the artworks across various mediums associated with Wilson. In his book Truth and Method , Hans-Georg Gadamer introduced the concept of play to understand the mode of being of artwork. [43] In this concept, the play’s subject is not the group of players or the audience but the play itself. The rules and regulations that prescribe how the playing field is filled determine the nature of the play. The play involves the creators, actors, and audience as a whole, all adhering to the rules of the play, whose “openness toward the spectator is part of the closedness of the play. The audience only completes what the play as such.” [44] What is also significant here is that Gadamer refers to the process by which “human play comes to its true consummation in being art” as transformation into structure . [45] Here, “structure” refers to “ergon” – not just “energeia” in the Aristotelian sense – which means work or, if we like, an opera. [46] Gadamer argues that transformation into structure elevates reality into truth through mimesis, which he understands as the recognition of “more than is already familiar.” [47] Gadamer applied this conceptualization to various art forms including drama based on Aristotelian order, painting, music, and architecture. Gadamer’s theory on the ontology of the artwork also serves as a common ground in illuminating the essence of postdramatic theatre, installation art, and other contemporary genres. Furthermore, based on Gadamer’s concept of play, we can compare the rules and regulations of the diverse genres Wilson uses. Undoubtedly, different rules may construct the plays of theatre pieces and installations of the same creator. However, if we identify the same structure in both genres within Wilson's work, we can also recognize the landscape quality in installations, regardless of the spectator's position. Hans-Thies Lehmann discusses the new status of text in postdramatic theatre in his article "From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy.” [48] He suggests that the term textual landscape [ Textlandshaft ] [49] should be used in this respect with which he refers to Gertrude Stein’s landscape drama and the various new ways of making theatre that are closely connected to the visual dimension of contemporary theatre productions. In his perspective, the stage can be viewed as a landscape that is closely linked to visual dramaturgy, a concept developed by Knut Ove Arntzen. Lehmann views visual dramaturgy as the counterpart to the textual landscape, representing the “other side” of it. He argues that it is not merely a visual practice (the Aristotelian “ opsis ”) that is separate from text; rather, it signifies an inherent connection to text, possessing its own spatial and architectural qualities, which Lehmann describes as postdramatic. Arntzen states that visual dramaturgy emphasizes the blending of various expressive elements, drawing our attention to the German term “ gleichberechtigt ,” [50] This term suggests that textual and visual components can exist independently yet still interact meaningfully with one another. Arntzen points out that “equivalence” in English can convey both a sense of fusion and independent existence, the German word “ gleichberechtigt /gleichgestellt ” implies a deeper intermingling of expressive forms where each component retains its own identity while contributing to a more complex outcome. Arntzen distinguishes scenographic theatre [51] as one in which the scenographer is the sole author, without referring to a drama text, exemplified by Robert Wilson’s early works. However, visual dramaturgy can be applied to Wilson’s later works, created after his silent operas, in the phases of his oeuvre where he deconstructs language, moves from semiotics to semantics, and confronts the classics—to use Arthur Holmberg’s periodization. [52] Wilson learned how to build a piece in a gleichberechtigt way, with equal emphases on the visual and auditory elements, not only directly from Gertrude Stein’s landscape drama concept but also through the influence of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who mediated Stein’s ideas to him. As mentioned, Wilson studied how to read Gertrude Stein’s text by listening to a recording. In an interview, the artist revealed that the American composer John Cage gave him this Stein recording. [53] Wilson recalled that watching Cage read “Lecture on Nothing” in the 1960s profoundly influenced him. Grateful after the performance, Wilson thanked Cage, and they talked about Stein as well. Wilson told the composer that he admired Stein’s writing but found it confusing. In response, Cage sent Wilson a recording of Stein reading her texts, which, as we saw, inspired Wilson's future stagings. [54] More importantly, after this encounter, the young Wilson saw a dance performance by the choreographer Merce Cunningham and John Cage. It was a shocking aesthetic experience for him, and it not only profoundly impacted his future working method but also inspired him to find his artistic tools to create worlds on stage based on equality. What captured Wilson’s attention in the Cunningham-Cage piece was that the music was separated from the dance, and the acoustic part was only paired with the dance on the opening night of the production. This was a stark contrast to what Wilson had seen in Broadway theatres and opera. He realized that music had its own structure and laws, while the choreography was entirely different and created independently. It was also fascinating for Wilson that when these two elements were combined, something new emerged that could not be experienced when they were seen or heard separately. The connections between music and dance were discovered purely by chance in the Cunningham-Cage piece. [55] It is important to note that Wilson has never incorporated aleatoric techniques in his operas; he has always constructed his works with precision, timed in seconds. However, in his compositions, he consistently applies the equivalent-based rules and regulations in sound and vision that he learned from Stein, Cage and Cunningham. As he recalled regarding Einstein on the Beach : In making Einstein, I thought about gestures and movements as something separate. And I thought about light again as something separate, then the décor, the environments, the painted drops, the furniture; and they all separate. And then you take all of these screens, visual images that are layered against each other and sometimes they don’t align either or sometimes they do. [56] According to Arntzen, the scope of Visual Dramaturgy, and the technique of gleichberechtigt visual-aural composition can be widened beyond the field of theatre. For instance, Visual Dramaturgy can be employed to analyze non-theatrical performances, such as historical re-enactments or non-theatrical events that turn spectacular. [57] Theoretically, the concept of the landscape play can be transposed from the proscenium theatre’s black box to the white cube of the gallery space. Here, the spectator can enter the landscape of an installation. Remarkably, the experience of entering a landscape is by no means new in the history of art, even though it first appeared in a fictive way. In 1763, Denis Diderot viewed the painting Landscape with Figures and Animals by Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg – who later became Garrick’s stage designer – at the Salon. Diderot’s enthusiastic critique described the composition as if he as beholder had entered the pastoral scene of the landscape. [58] The French philosopher later wrote several times about the experience of imaginative entry into vistas in his art critiques of landscape paintings. For instance, when contemplating the beauty of one of Vernet’s landscapes, he described the experience as follows: “The immobility of beings, the solitude of a place, its profound silence, all suspend time; time no longer exists, nothing measures it, man becomes as if eternal.” [59] In his book Absorption and Theatricality , Michael Fried discusses Diderot’s fictional entry into the two-dimensional landscape as the “pastoral concept” of mid-eighteenth-century French painting. The American art historian interpreted this conceptualization as one of the “absorptive” strategies of the anti-Rococo era, which reinforced Diderot’s idea of the fourth wall and, at the same time, helped Fried support his own critical aversion towards theatricality. As well-known, for Fried, the theatrical sensibility not only endangered the purity of autonomous modernist artwork but was eminently the “negation of art.” [60] Art critic and curator Robert Storr provided witty commentary on Fried’s critical remarks regarding minimalist art, which Fried referred to as “literalist art.” In Storr’s article on immersive installations titled “No Stage, No Actors, but It’s Theatre (and Arts),” [61] Storr points out that the assertions of Fried’s furious study on the new art of the 1960s were overall proper and, in contrast to Fried’s desire, beneficial to the emerging tendencies: “The insightfulness of his analysis is a happy by-product of the narrowness of his perspective. When formalist defenders of pure painting and sculpture named literalist art as the antithesis of all they held dear, they unexpectedly defined a broad new aesthetic of which installation has proven the most enduring and varied expression.” [62] In his essay, Storr distinguishes between the works of early “installation improvisers like Mr. Kaprow and his contemporaries” and the so-called “complete immersion environments.” In Storr’s view, the former pieces “alter the world we know rather than replace it with another”; meanwhile, the latter, immersive installations “strike out in another direction, shifting the focus from intervention in the here-and-now to aesthetically self-contained places apart.” [63] Storr includes the Golden Lion prize winner installation Memory/Loss by Robert Wilson in the latter group. Noah Khoshbin, curator of Robert Wilson’s Watermill Collection and co-curator of several Wilson exhibitions in the past twenty years, points out that in many ways, Wilson uses the same approach in a museum space as in theatre. [64] According to Khoshbin, in a Wilson exhibition or an installation, the visitor enters as if walking on stage. In theatre, the viewer looks through the proscenium arch like a window, a door, or a portal. In Khoshbin’s view, the same applies to Wilson’s museum or gallery exhibitions. The very first consideration in designing an exhibition is determining where visitors will enter. This is crucial because it significantly influences the audience's experience as they embark on a journey through the exhibition. As he said, [I]f Robert had the choice, there would only be one person allowed in at a time . . . no matter how large a space is, because that individual should be going on a journey. And to condense it to one word, you would say something like discovery. . . . Now, there's the frame of the door that you're entering in the gallery or museum . . . ; the works are then laid out in the same way as the elements in the theater. [65] According to Khoshbin, the installations blend auditory experiences and visual elements, similar to Wilson’s theatre, particularly in how light is framed. This integration allows viewers to actively engage in framing and interpreting the artworks or sculptures on display. The artworks placed within the architectural setting, enter into a dialogue with one another, taking into account the unique characteristics of the space of the gallery. This means that Robert Wilson's exhibitions and installations adhere to the same fundamental principles regarding their time-space structure as his theatrical pieces. Furthermore, not only do we find the same rules in Robert Wilson's works in the two fields, but they have also evolved reciprocally and simultaneously and even converged in the actual landscape of Haft Than Mountain in Shiraz in 1972. While some may classify the work I'm referring to as a 168-hour-long theatre piece, it can also be considered the proto-installation, or the ur -installation in the Wilson oeuvre: KA MOUNTAIN and GUARDenia Terrace: a story about a family and some people changing . The central theme of this work was the journey of an old man, to the extent that each actor played an old man at least once during the production. Wilson created a megastructure with twenty-four one-hour-long segments each day and assigned themes to each twenty-four–hour period: birth, separation, childhood, puberty, marriage, burial, and death. The continuous transformation of the visual elements in this enormous megastructure presented on the seven hills of Shiraz landscape evoked the development of human culture within the metaphorical framework of individual life's growth. The days’ color spectrum progressed from black/violet through cool gray-lime and gray-green, to gray-brown, and finally white, bringing to mind also the passage of solar time. Artworks cited cultural history. Each day featured a different landmark: Stonehenge, an obelisk, the Parthenon, the Arc de Triomphe, a pagoda, and the New York skyline. [66] One hundred core actors and hundreds of participants/audience members journeyed through the layered time and sky-high space of the landscape on Haft Than’s seven hills. As Laurence Shyer pointed out, Wilson is not merely a manipulator of time and space, but an artist genuinely concerned with basic human issues and faith of man. The journey is a central motif in the plays and operas of Robert Wilson and in them we travel with all with humanity through time and history, from life to death from apocalypse to rebirth. [67] Despite the activities in Ka Mountain 's megastructure, this work can be viewed as a proto- installation. The audience and players were visible from all angles, 360 degrees. More importantly, the frame, a constitutive part of every type of theatre, [68] disappeared: the viewer became immersed in the enclosed world of the work. The equal importance of the visual and auditory elements of the structure created an “audio-landscape” [69] similar to Wilson's theatre pieces. In 1976, Wilson developed another compositional tool in his work, Spaceman , which became a crucial instrument in his installation art and theatre. It structured the viewer’s experience by measuring space according to Wilson's concept of portrait, still life, and landscape. The first version of this artwork, presented in New York City at the Kitchen in January 1976, was a hybrid work of art combining video installation and performance. Its second version, displayed in 1984 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, was reduced to an installation in which previous human players were replaced by still figures. This experimental work raised questions about the perception of human culture, and it was initially conceived by Robert Wilson and his artist collaborator, Ralph Hilton, with whom Wilson first worked in 1975 on the production of The $ Value of Man . The original impetus of the video installation went back to Wilson’s work with disabled people in the 1960s. [70] In 1966–67, he worked at Goldwater Memorial Hospital. On his first day in the institution, he was taken into a ward with about fifty patients in iron lungs. The patients were lying in boxes supported by four legs, with only their heads protruding from the top. Each person had an artificial respirator, providing the necessary support for their breathing. As Wilson remembered: “My first impression was that this was the person of the future, that this was a spaceman. And no one could enter that space. That was his own space.” [71] He later began collaborating with Hilton to create a series of videotapes that explored the concept of a spaceman. They decided to showcase this work in New York, initially envisioning it as an ongoing project. This original project was planned as a series of walls that resembled a library where Wilson and Hilton could catalog various images related to the idea of a spaceman. Finally, they slightly altered this original concept. As Wilson recalled in connection with the Spaceman installation: “We divided the wall into three sections. And those three sections thought about the three traditional ways of looking at painting, which are portraits, still lives, and landscapes. And one could imagine that these are the three ways of measuring the space.” [72] Wilson often seeks assistance through gestures to clarify his concept of measuring space in terms of portrait, still life, and landscape. He indicates the size of a portrait by making a circular motion around his face and the scale of a still life by extending his arms, and he describes the landscape as if one steps back several blocks to view the horizon. [73] A member of Wilson’s early performance group, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, Cindy Lubar provided a description about the 1976 installation in her manuscript about Wilson’s and the Byrds’ activity in the 1970s. [74] According to her ekphrasis, visitors began their experience in a small entrance room with a “green thing” resembling the Loch Ness Monster. Its shiny skin reflected light from a plastic-draped TV screen marked “THERE,” with the well-known Wilson typograph from his 1974 theatre piece A Letter for Queen Victoria . The visitors then entered a rectangular main room featuring a tall, narrow performance space. Cushions lined the floor for seating. The space was divided into three sections: “Still Life,” “Landscape,” and “Portrait.” In “Still Life,” four creatures lay beneath a pale green table lit by bluish-green light. In the “Landscape” section, Ralph Hilton, as a spaceman in a silver space suit, floated above the monitors, while Wilson relaxed by a tilted telephone pole and Sue Sheehy fished from a paint can. An eight-foot fluorescent light cast an amber glow over a sand-covered floor. In the “Portrait” section, Christopher Knowles portrayed an old man typing on a character generator as three men in white recited lines from a “missile script” illuminated by pink bulbs. Various video sequences were projected simultaneously in the three sections and grouped on video monitors into close-ups, medium shots, and full shots. Dialogue and sound effects enhanced the performance, creating an otherworldly atmosphere. [75] Even though the work lacked live performance in its 1984 revival due to Ralph Hilton’s death, the installation’s original structure remained the same with its three sections of “Portrait,” “Still Life,” and “Landscape.” Still in 1976, Wilson used the same compositional concept in an event at the Whitney Museum of Art, where he performed a piece, DIA LOG , with Christopher Knowles and Lucinda Childs. Here again, the stage space was divided into the same three sections and Knowles typings were also displayed in a connected exhibition. [76] These works foreshadowed the composition of Wilson’s groundbreaking opera Einstein on the Beach that he created with Philip Glass. Wilson himself confirms it when he speaks about the opera: “I constructed the work like the three traditional ways of looking at painting which are the three different ways of measuring space, and that is in portraits, still lives and landscapes.” [77] Philip Glass revealed that although they wanted to avoid telling a story, naturally, they used different dramaturgical devices. For instance, the recurrence of the main pictorial motifs of the opera – Train, Trial, Field/Spaceship – “implied a kind of quasi-development.” [78] In this visual dramaturgy, the proportions of space played a crucial role. As Holmberg pointed out regarding Einstein on the Beach , the perception of depths for audience changed from close-up portraits in the Knee Plays (the Wilsonian pre -, and interludes ), through mid-shot still lives in the Train and Trail scenes, to the spaceship scenes viewed as long-shot landscapes in the opera. [79] It is important to note that with this concept of measuring space in these threefold categories, the original Wilsonian landscape concept does not disappear, it is enriched; the focus point of our gaze in it is directed by light and the changes in spatial proportions. Additionally, during the Spaceman exhibition in Amsterdam, Wilson explained his compositional trichotomy by aligning traditional fine art genres – portrait, still life, and landscape – with camera shot types: “close-up, mid-range, and far-away.” [80] This indicates that his compositional categories not only refer to the classifications of painting and his distinctive approach to spatial measurement but also draw from the fundamental types of settings commonly used in film and television. We can add that his compositional practice widens the examples that Helga Finter collected under the umbrella term of the “camera eye of the post-dramatic theatre.” [81] The space of his other installations and so-called museum interventions have been frequently structured along this trichotomy of the Wilsonian game. Museum interventions are artist-curated exhibitions working with an institution’s collection: extensions of artistic practice into the museum space. In Wilson, the interventions are not installations of artworks but works of installation art since the exhibition itself is the work, constituting an enclosed whole. [82] One of the clearest examples of how Robert Wilson adapted his compositional techniques to the gallery space was his 1993 show when he was invited to Rotterdam to guest-curate an exhibit based on the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum’s collection - after Harald Szeeman’s exhibition in 1989 and Peter Greenaway’s show in 1991. During the exhibition Portrait, Still Life, Landscape , the arrangement of selected objects and the gallery lighting were designed to enhance visitors’ awareness of shifts in their perception. In the first room, a storage-like space full of vases, furniture, and sculptures, viewers were encouraged to examine the artwork closely, like portraits. The second gallery featured ten small, stage-like rooms visitors could not enter; they could only see the scenes from the small cabinets’ entrance. In this “Still Life” section of the exhibition, theatrical lighting highlighted one object and one painting like actors in each room. In the third “Landscape” gallery, Degas’s sculpture of the Little Dancer among peaceful reptiles was placed in a vast, brightly lit space, limiting close viewing and allowing visitors to see the configuration of artworks only in relation to its surroundings. As Piet de Jonge, curator of Boymans Museum pointed out the central theme of the exhibition was this intentional shift in focus. He stated that Wilson not only playfully referenced classical painting genres through this arrangement but also the distance between the observer and the object was deliberately designed as “a distance to which the eye must adjust in the three different situations.” [83] In this exhibition-scale installation, not only has the beholder’s position in space shifted, but also her consciousness of time: awareness of the objects’ historicity, the timeless juxtaposition of artworks, and Wilson’s spiritual, personal statement balanced each other in the sections of Portrait, Still Life, and Landscape . The lighting of the exhibition resembled one of Wilson’s most significant early theatre productions. As the artist said to de Jonge: “This idea of three separate spaces could be very much related to The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud . The first act on the beach, the beach in bright daylight. The second act in a Victorian drawing room, grey. And in the third act in a cave, darker and with animals. And in some ways, these three spaces [in the museum] are part of this continuum.” [84] De Jonge linked the example of how light could create the dramaturgy of the Portrait, Still Life, Landscape exhibition to another Robert Wilson gallery show titled Robert Wilson Visions , held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1991. This earlier exhibition showcased the artist’s own artwork: drawings, objects, and furniture/sculptures. As de Jonge pointed out, “Wilson made a theatrical installation of his work” [85] at that exhibition. It was titled The Night Before the Day and was designed to take visitors on a journey through the passage of a day, like the Rotterdam show and the seven-day-long piece, KA MOUNTAIN . In Boston, the first room was bright and open, creating a sense of morning light. The second room, filled with Wilson's drawings, had a gray atmosphere, representing the afternoon. Finally, the third room was dark, evoking the feeling of night. [86] By examining additional representative museum works by Robert Wilson, we can now identify the type of time present in his installations. In 1991, Wilson’s first museum intervention was displayed at the Pompidou Center in Paris. In this exhibition titled Mr. Boyangles ’ Memory , Og Son of Fire,” he created an excavation site of artworks at the foot of a volcano, arranging his artworks amidst the Pompidou Collection's pieces, complementing or conflicting relationships between the works. He built a corridor among the pieces for the viewer to journey through the installation. The entrance was designed with a hanging uprooted tree, symbolizing the equal importance of the underground and above-ground worlds. Upon entering through the main door, visitors were greeted by a tranquil environment: a gently swaying curtain partially obstructed the view, and calming music played in the background. The main exhibition space resembled an uncovered excavation site, featuring scattered piles of earth and rocks, remnants of unidentifiable objects. Wilson’s furniture/sculptures were arranged throughout the room like found artifacts, with some pieces appearing partially buried. These works were displayed alongside pieces from Pompidou’s permanent collection. A painted highway did run diagonally through the gallery space, and two-thirds of the way through, a large painted Tyrannosaurus skeleton hung on a scrim above Wilson’s Overture Chair from his piece KA MOUNTAIN and GUARDenia Terrace , which was set in a pool of water. The back wall displayed a canvas of a snow-capped volcano beginning to erupt referencing the last scene of KA MOUNTAIN and the artist Paul Thek’s pyramid. In front of it, the Salome Room installation included thrones for Herod, Herodias, John the Baptist, and Salome. Various video monitors were scattered throughout the exhibit and placed among the furniture and sculptures. In 1995, in his installation H.G. , Wilson created the precursor to immersive theatre productions. The title referred to H.G. Wells, the science fiction writer, whose novel Time Machine was one hundred years old at that time. This exhibition in London allowed one spectator at a time to engage in time travel within an abandoned Elizabethan prison. The building itself became the main feature of the work. [87] Robert Wilson dramatically lit the existing architecture to enhance the grids, columns, walls, and doorways. Each room was filled with unearthly tableaux and was accompanied by Hans-Peter Kuhn’s soundscape. First, the audience members stepped into a striking Victorian dining room left untouched since the guests departed. Food was still on the table and the sound of a ticking clock filled the room. As one exited from this section, one passed a 100-year-old copy of “The Times” before descending into dark, expansive spaces. After this choreographed introduction, the audience was free to explore the other rooms of the building. Most tableaux were open for wandering, though a few were closed off. [88] Visitors were guided solely by sound and light as they navigated a disorienting network of chambers that evoked 1895. A landscape filled with hospital beds, a volley of golden arrows frozen above the ruins of an ancient temple, a pocket watch with an inscription, the sound of footsteps from above, and a mummy of a man lying on the floor all contributed to the sensation of being in a space that was full of time. Wilson's quotation technique was redefined in his installation at Villa Stuck in Munich in 1997. The artist recreated the artworks and personal photos of the house’s original owner, Art Nouveau painter Franz Stuck, in three dimensions. Visitors could explore the life and times of Franz Stuck as they moved through the museum’s rooms. Additionally, Wilson revised the iconography of the Stations of the Cross in Oberammergau with his 14 Stations installation in 2000, placing the scenes in fourteen houses inspired by Shaker style, filling them with figures resembling local people and dense networks of new signs and allusions that provided a mystical experience rather than the traditional narrative of Via Crucis . In 2013, the exhibition at the Louvre titled Living Rooms featured Wilson’s surroundings from The Watermill Center. He intervened Louvre’s collection not in the museum space but in his new artworks: he created video portraits of Lady Gaga based on the theme of death, recreating three paintings from the Louvre: the portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière by Ingres, Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat , and Andrea Solario's Head of Saint John the Baptist . In these Video Portraits, Wilson used light, color saturation, and technique of slow motion to re-create the original composition with Lady Gaga as protagonist. Robert Wilson, in an interview in connection with how he structures his works, said that he saw “space as a horizontal line and time as a vertical line.” [89] As we can see now, the horizontal line of space unfolds in the arrangement of the installation’s landscape, as Wilson says, “in a way, if we think about it and look at them long enough, the mental spaces become mental landscapes. [90] But what is vertical time, and how do we encounter it in Wilson's installations? In his interventions, Wilson disrupts the traditional rules of museum displays by challenging the norm of viewing artworks in their frames as independent worlds and reading the installation of the artworks as historical narrative. The sense of time for historical consciousness is horizontal, that is, linear: past events precede and determine the present. The vertical aspect of time in Wilson's installations can be described as “contemporaneous.” This contemporaneity involves two main elements: firstly, the simultaneity created by juxtaposing Wilson’s creations and the pieces of a museum collection, and secondly, the observer’s act of perceiving all components in the installation’s “here and now,” which brings out the true being of all the artworks in an absolute presence. This contemporary nature paradoxically includes its opposite, the heterochrony of diverse cultural layers. These layers, stemming from various visual and auditory elements of the works, are balanced within the installation and provide multiple associations for the viewer. In her article exploring the relationship between performance, performativity, and memory, Mieke Bal shares her experience with James Coleman’s installation, Photograph. [91] She notes that as viewers immerse themselves in the visual and auditory elements of the installation, which trigger their personal associations, they begin to adopt the role of a performer. Referring to Lehmann’s text “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy,” she points out what makes this experience operate: “Memory as stage director . This is what makes the viewer a performer. But the viewer can only be a performer if performance is taken, here, in the double theoretical sense. The viewer ‘plays’ the part scripted by the work, to the extent that he or she ‘acts,’ responding to the perlocutionary address of the work in the present of viewing.” [92] Memory and free associations also play a crucial role in experiencing Wilson's immersive exhibitions. In his audio-landscape installations, he stages a closed world built from tableaux, music, hums, words, and other auditive fragments. In his most important installation, "Memory/Loss," Wilson explicitly thematized the question of memory as a performative act of the beholder. In his essay “No Stage, No Actors, But It’s Theatre (and Art),” curator Robert Storr provided a captivating ekphrasis on the work; it is worth citing it in length: You walk into a room as big as an indoor tennis court. The walls are brick; the floor is a cracked sheet of mud. At the far end of the dim interior, a grilled window gives out onto another brick wall bathed in blue light. Midway a blindfolded man, head bowed, is buried up to his shoulders in the mud. As you approach him, his lifeless features and uncanny immobility become apparent, heightening awareness of your own body and those of other, shadowy spectators. Out of nowhere a voice, interrupted by screams, recites T. S. Eliot’s “Wasteland.” You are left to mill about in an elegant, antique Bedlam. [93] The installation was based on a letter Wilson received from Heiner Müller. In this letter, Müller described a Mongolian torture based on Tshinghis Aitmatov’s text, where a man’s hair was shaved, and the skin of a camel’s neck was tied to this man’s head. He was buried in the desert from the shoulders down, and he was experiencing an excruciating sensation while the camel’s skin on his head was drying. The man’s hair could not grow out only inward, resulting in memory loss. [94] This work, which also included an object from Tadeusz Kantor’s The Return of Odysseus , reflected that memory has always been a precondition of human act and continuity. As Heiner Müller wrote in his letter: “Without memory, there is no revolution.” Claire Bishop categorizes installation types based on the viewer's experience. The first model involves psychologically absorptive, dreamlike environments. The second is phenomenological, the third is based on Freud’s libidinal withdrawal and subjective disintegration, and the fourth type considers the activated viewer as the political subject of the genre. [95] Based on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams , Bishop considers Ilja Kabakov’s concept of “Total Installation” as the representative example of the psychologically absorbing type. [96] Kabakov views the viewer as the main actor in his installations. He compares his work to theatre, portraying the installation artist as a director, while the installation immerses and absorbs the viewer, evoking personal memories and associations. Kabakov suggests that installation art is the latest dominant trend in artistic forms and should be perceived as a kaleidoscope of innumerable “paintings.” [97] According to Bishop, this type of art offers immersive qualities akin to absorptive painting [98] and overturns traditional perspective by providing multiple viewpoints. [99] We can add that Wilson’s installations share the total characteristics of Kabakov’s and even uniquely surpass them. As we saw, the rules and regulations of the Wilsonian play are consistent in both his theatre and installation art. The only difference is the viewer's physical position within the play. In his immersive installations, the traditional division between the stage and the audience, marked by the proscenium arch, dissolves. Along the axis of the proscenium frame, they merge as a united space. This way, the viewer of the installation becomes the protagonist of the Wilsonian drama, which takes place in the museum locale. In a Wilson installation or a museum intervention, the artist designs the space’s entrance as the turning point, where the viewer can step through ‘the fourth wall’ and, thus, leave it behind. From that moment on, much like in Wilson’s theatre, where figures such as Freud, Stalin, Einstein, and Kafka journey through time and space, in Wilson’s installations, viewers are invited to embark on a journey, regardless of whether this journey is set up in a single gallery or multiple rooms of a museum. Noah Khoshbin adds that this experience arises from the interaction between the architecture of the gallery space and the displayed artworks, evoking unconscious or psychological responses from viewers. The main artistic aim is “to create an unfolding journey where [the viewers] see the relationships between different periods, cultures and mediums. These juxtapositions create a greater awareness of the space that they are in and the objects. Then, a question would be posed, “What is this? What am I witnessing here?”rather than trying to present a statement. And that’s what you see on the stage, as well.” [100] In Wilson’s installations, “memory as stage director ” is the primary operational device (in a Mieke Balian sense) that ultimately makes the viewer the work’s performer. This performance oscillates between the internal and the external worlds, for Robert Wilson’s concept of human perception unites the two realms. According to him, “one hears and sees with both external and internal eyes and ears all the time.” [101] In Wilson’s view, interior images blend with exterior images, resulting in a more unified perception of hearing and seeing through these “various screens.” For instance, the audience obviously experienced this during his twelve-hour play, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin , when most of the viewers “saw” images on stage that were not in the staging but were their imaginations’ creatures. [102] Wilson does not provide the spectators with a sharply articulated interpretation of the drama texts in his theatre. He intends to offer no single narrative or story in a play. Multiple stories exist in his stagings because everything is framed in his theatre, too, as a question: “What is it?” As he pointed out in a conversation with Umberto Eco, his responsibility as an artist both in his theatre and his visual art is to create and not to interpret; the artist allows the public the freedom to draw their own conclusion. [103] In Robert Wilson’s installation art and museum interventions, the viewer-protagonist experiences a journey through the Wilsonian memory-filled vertical time and the artist’s dreamscapes. She is invited to unite them with the inner visual and audio screens [104] of her memory and free associations. During this travel, the beholder encounters herself through the installation and, in a Platonic way, remembers a surplus she has never experienced before. As Gadamer says, “The work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that changes the person who experiences it.” [105] Endnotes [1] Bonnie Marranca, “A Letter for Queen Victoria Robert Wilson.” in The Theatre of Images, ed. Bonnie Marranca, (Baltimore and London, The John Hopkins University Press, 1977), 44. [2] Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (New York, Suhrkamp, 1978). [3] Laurence Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators (New York, Theatre Communications Group, 1989). [4] Arthur Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 77. [5] Trevor Fairbrother, Robert Wilson’s Visions (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1991), 110. [6] Maria Shevtsova, Robert Wilson ( London, Routledge, 2007), 7. [7] Michel Conil LaCoste, “Le Héritage de la Peinture dans “Le Regard du Suord” in Le Monde (Paris, June 10, 1971). English translation for Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds: Michel Conil LaCoste: The Heratige of Painting in Deafman Glance. In: Robert Wilson Papers, Box 222, Clipping Files, Clipping Binders 11/64-6/10/71, June 2, 1971-July 10, 1971, University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. [8] Gynter Quill, “Architecture, Film and Art Should Have a Place For Robert Wilson” in Waco Tribune Herald, (Waco, July 25, 1965) Robert Wilson Papers, Box 222, Clipping Files, Clipping Binders 11/64-6/10/71, November,1964-December 1969, University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. [9] Fairbrother, Robert Wilson’s Visions, 110. [10] Robert Wilson Archives, Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds Papers, Box BHB 30, Collaborations, British Columbia, Miscellaneous, BHSoB Unattributed “The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud” Manuscript , Undated, 27. [11] Katharina Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson: The Biography (Munich, Berlin, London, New York, Prestel, 2006), 223. [12] Claire Bishop, Installation Art. A Critical History, (2005, London, Tate Publishing), 6. [13] Bishop, Installation Art. A Critical History, 8. [14] See more: Elinor Fuchs, Another Version of Pastoral, in The Death of Character. Perspectives on Theater after Modernism ; (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1996); Arnold Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History (London and New York, Routledge, 2000); Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (London and New York, Routledge, 2006) [15] Cited by Aronson, in Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History, 26. [16] Ibid, 27. [17] Jane Palatini Bowers, “The Composition That All We Can See: Gertrude Stein’s Theater Landscapes” in Land/Scape/Theater, ed. Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri (Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 2002), 124. [18] As Stein says: “The landscape has its formation and be in relation one thing to the other thing (…) the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky and then any detail to any other detail . . . And of that relation I wanted to make a play and I did, a great number of plays.” Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History , 27. [19] Bowers, “The Composition That All We Can See: Gertrude Stein’s Theater Landscapes,” 122. [20] Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History , 2. [21] Ibid, 20. [22] Ibid, 108. [23] Rosalind E. Krauss, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture.” in Jackson Pollock: new approaches , ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 160. [24] Krauss, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” 161. [25] See more in: Rosalind E. Krauss, „The Optical Uncounscious” (Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1993). [26] Krauss, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,”170. [27] Cited by Krauss. Krauss, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” 167. [28] Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in ArtNEWS, December (1952), 22. [29] Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 23. [30] Clement Greenberg “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” in Art and Culture (Boston, Beacon Press, 1961), 156. [31] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 81. [32] Sarah Bay-Cheng, Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater (New York and London, Routledge, 2004), 135. [33] Cited by Bay-Cheng in Bay-Cheng, Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater, 135. [34] As Wilson recalled: „At the end of the Sixties the Whitney had a show Art Without Illusion bringing together artists from different fields and making whatever were their statement of the Sixties. It was actually at the time when I prepared my first King of Spain which was a direct contradiction of that statement.” In: Robert Wilson Archives, Production Manuscripts, Box 104, 1976. EOB, Press (1 of 4), Bob Wilson Talks to Maxiem de la Falaise. [35] Quill, “Architecture, Film and Art Should Have a Place For Robert Wilson.” [36] Italic by VK. [37] Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” 154. [38] Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, 165. [39] Ibid, 165. [40] Ibid, xiii. [41] Bay-Cheng, Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater, 134. [42] Robert L. Pincus, “Performed Portraits” in Robert Wilson: Time/Space ed. Franco Laera (Milano, Silvana Editoriale, 2012), 35. [43] Here, I would like to thank my advisor at Eötvös University, Budapest, the distinguished Hungarian art historian, András Rényi for drawing my attention to the importance of Gadamer’s concept of play in my interdisciplinary research. See more in Rényi András: Rembrandt. A képek színjátéka, 2023, L’Harmattan Kiadó, Budapest. In this book, Rényi provides a theoretical framework and in-depth hermeneutic study on Rembrandt’s “dramatology.” [44] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London and New York, Continuum, 2006), 109. [45] Ibid, 110. [46] Wilson often calls his theatre pieces operas, as the French did, stressing the meaning of “work.” [47] Gadamer, Truth and Method , 113. [48] Hans-Thies Lehmann, “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy” Performance Research, 2,1 (1997), 55-60. [49] Lehmann, “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy,” 59. [50] Amélie Bulandrova, “Visual Dramaturgy: Interview Knut Ove Arntzen,” Theatralia 23, 2 (2020), 167. [51] Bulandrova, “Visual Dramaturgy: Interview Knut Ove Arntzen,” 167. [52] Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson, 2. [53] A Conversation with Robert Wilson at the Territory Festival in Moscow in 2018. Robert Wilson Archives. [54] Ibid. [55] Ibid. [56] EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH – The Changing Image of Opera. A film by Mark Obenhaus, 1986 [57] Bulandrova, “Visual Dramaturgy: Interview Knut Ove Arntzen,” 166. [58] Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkely, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press, 1980), 119. [59] Cited by Fried. In: Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, 125. [60] See more: Michael Fried, „Art and Objecthood”, Art and Objecthood. Essays and Reviews , (Chicago and London, The Chicago University Press, 1998), 148-172. [61] Robert Storr, “No Stage, No Actors, But It’s Theater (and Art),” The New York Times , Accessed July 13, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/28/arts/art-architecture-no-stage-no-actors-but-it-s-theater-and-art.html [62] Storr. “No Stage, No Actors, But It’s Theater (and Art).” [63] Ibid. [64] Viola Kántor: Interview with Noah Khoshbin (April, 6, 2023, Unpublished) [65] Ibid. [66] Cindy Lubar Manuscript Chapter 5, Robert Wilson Papers, SERIES I, Box 15, Robert Wilson General Files, Robert Wilson Interviews, University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. [67] Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators, xii. [68] See more: Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History, 89. [69] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 91. [70] See more: Bill Simmer, “Robert Wilson and Therapy” The Drama Review: TDR , Vol. 20, No. 1, Theatre and Therapy (Mar. 1976), 99-110. [71] A Video Interview with Robert Wilson. The Luminous Images, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. A Film on an Exhibition of Video Installations by 22 Artists. Concept by Dorine Mignot. 1984. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbimu_J9TcI [72] Ibid. [73] Ibid. [74] Cindy Lubar Manuscript Chapter 11, 8-9, Robert Wilson Papers, SERIES I, Box 15, Robert Wilson General Files, Robert Wilson Interviews, University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. [75] Ibid, 9. [76] DIA LOG, Robert Wilson Archives, Production Manuscripts, Box 86, 1975. DL3, Programs [77] EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH – The Changing Image of Opera. A film by Mark Obenhaus, 1986. [78] Philip Glass, “Einstein on the Beach; Draft”, Chapter III, 48, Robert Wilson Archives, Production Manuscripts, Box 107, 1984.EOB, Book Draft Music by Philip Glass by Philip Glass. [79] Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson, 120. [80] Spaceman, Robert Wilson Archives, Production Photographs, PHO. 73.2. [81] Helga Finter, “Das Kameraauge des postmodernen Theaters“ Studien zur Äesthetik des Gegenwartstheaters , ed. Christian W. Thomsen, (Heidelberg, Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1985), 46-71. [82] See more about the differentiation between installation art and the installation of artworks in Bishop, Installation Art. A Critical History, 5. [83] Piet de Jonge, “Introduction to the Exhibition” Portrait, Still Life, Landscape , (Rotterdam, Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, 1993), no pagination. [84] Ibid. no pagination. [85] Ibid. no pagination. [86] See more: Trevor Fairbrother, “The Night before The Day,“ Robert Wilson’s Visions , ed. Trevor Fairbrother (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1991), 33-108. [87] Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Robert Wilson: Steel Velvet (Munich, Prestel, 1997), 28. [88] James Lingwood, “The Making of H.G.,” Accessed June 12, 2024. https://www.artangel.org.uk/hg/the-making-of-hg/ [89] “Robert Wilson: Memory Loss,” An Interview with Robert Wilson, Robert Wilson Archive, Production Manuscripts, Box 226, 1993. MLS Desing – Space Photos and Layouts. [90] Robert Wilson, “A Still Life Is a Real Life” Robert Wilson: Video Portraits (Dubai, Leila Heller Gallery, 2022). [91] Mieke Bal, “Memory Acts: Performing Subjectivity” Boijmans Bulletin vol. 1, no. 2, February, (2001), 8-18. [92] Bal, “Memory Acts: Performing Subjectivity,” 9. [93] Storr, “No Stage, No Actors, But It’s Theater (and Art).” [94] “Robert Wilson: Memory Loss,” An Interview with Robert Wilson, Robert Wilson Archive, Production Manuscripts, Box 226, 1993. MLS Desing – Space Photos and Layouts. [95] Bishop, Installation Art. A Critical History. [96] Ibid , 14. [97] Ibid, 17. [98] See also: Michael Fried’s model of Diderot’s critical practice. [99] Bishop, Installation Art. A Critical History, 17. [100] Kántor: Interview with Noah Khoshbin. [101] John Van Tao Sto, “Postmodernism in Sight and Sound: The Collaborative Works of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass”, Robert Wilson Papers, SERIES I, Box 15, Robert Wilson General Files, Robert Wilson Interviews, John Sto interviews with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. [102] Ibid. [103] Robert Wilson and Umberto Eco, “A Conversation” Performing Arts Journal , Jan., 1993, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), 89. Accessed October 12, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3245801 [104] See more about Wilson’s concept of inner and outer screens in human perception in Lubar’s manuscript. Robert Wilson Papers, SERIES I, Box 15, Robert Wilson General Files, Robert Wilson Interviews, University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. [105] Gadamer, Truth and Method, 103. About The Author(s) Viola Kántor is an art historian, art critic, and audiovisual media professional based in Budapest, Hungary. In 2023, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to conduct extensive research on her doctoral project concerning Robert Wilson's visual art at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and The Watermill Center, Long Island. Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Robert Wilson and Norway Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Listening to Deafman Glanc Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present.  Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. ISSN Number: 2376-4236 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Home Current Issue Archive About & Submission Guidelines Contact Past Issues Curren Issue Current Issue Volume 38 Issue 2 SPECIAL ISSUE INTRODUCTION 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” Khalid Y. Long and Le’Mil Eiland ARTICLE “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Isaiah Matthew Wooden ARTICLE Reflections on Fundamental Principles Jonathan Shandell ARTICLE An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision Kellen Hoxworth ARTICLE W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond Kirsten Lee ARTICLE It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Kristyl D. Tift ARTICLE Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green QUEER VOICES Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T Bess Rowen PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Wild Duck Alexander Miller PERFORMANCE REVIEW Picnic at Hanging Rock Bess Rowen PERFORMANCE REVIEW Last Call: A Play with Cocktails Daria Kerschenbaum PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Dinosaurs Dominic Finocchiaro BOOK REVIEW The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Emma Futhey BOOK REVIEW Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. L. Bailey McDaniel BOOK REVIEW The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Lynn Deboeck Past Issues Past Issues Volume 38 Volume 34 Volume 30 Volume 37 Volume 33 Volume 29 Volume 36 Volume 32 Volume 28 Volume 35 Volume 31 Volume 27 Curren Issue Current Issue 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Picnic at Hanging Rock The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T Last Call: A Play with Cocktails Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. Reflections on Fundamental Principles It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth The Wild Duck The Dinosaurs The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Past Issue Archive We are in the process of moving all past journal entries to the current websiite. Please bear with us as we make this transition. You can view all the past issues at www.jadt.commons.gc.cuny.edu . For any queries or clarifications, write to us at jadtjournal@gmail.com May 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 2 Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green May 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 2 “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Isaiah Matthew Wooden May 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 2 The Dinosaurs Dominic Finocchiaro May 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 2 Last Call: A Play with Cocktails Daria Kerschenbaum May 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 2 Picnic at Hanging Rock Bess Rowen May 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 2 The Wild Duck Alexander Miller May 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 2 The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Emma Futhey May 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 2 Reflections on Fundamental Principles Jonathan Shandell May 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 2 It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Kristyl D. Tift May 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 2 Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. L. Bailey McDaniel May 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 2 W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond Kirsten Lee May 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 2 An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision Kellen Hoxworth Load More Visit Old Website About & Submission Guideline About The Journal History and Mission Founded in 1989, JADT is a widely acclaimed peer-reviewed journal publishing thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas—past and present. The journal’s 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. JADT is fully online and freely accessible. Our aim is to promote research on theatre of the Americas and to encourage historical and theoretical approaches to plays, playwrights, performances, and popular theatre traditions. Studies of dramatic texts from a purely literary perspective are outside the scope of the journal. “I see American Drama and Theatre as a primary means of reflecting the excitement and progress of our language, our culture, our democracy, our social concerns and our historical roots as Americans. No better opportunity exists for understanding, or for contributing to our understanding, of our American world, past or present, than the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, as shown by the excellence of its past performance and the promise of its future.” – Walter Meserve Submission Guidelines The editors of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) are now accepting submissions for essays on any topics relating to theatre, drama, and popular entertainments of the Americas for consideration. Please submit completed manuscripts to jadtjournal@gmail.com . We accept submission on a rolling basis. Please email the editors with any inquiries. Article manuscripts should be 5,000 to 8,000 words in length and prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style using manual endnotes. Completed manuscripts should be submitted as Microsoft Word attachments via e-mail to jadtjournal@gmail.com . Articles will be peer reviewed, so please allow 3-4 months for a decision. If you are submitting images, please provide the images and captions with your submission. (Pleas e Note: Images should be at least 300dpi and authors are responsible for securing permissions prior to submission). Please include a short bio with your submission. Performance Reviews JADT publishes performance reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas. Single reviews are usually 800 to 1,200 words in length. We encourage authors to contact the editor in advance to propose a review at jadtperformancereviews@gmail.com Boo k Reviews JADT publishes book reviews of monographs published within the last two years. This list of recommended and nominated titles for review is refreshed annually. Reviews are usually 800 to 1000 words for a single review. To propose a book review in advance, please contact the editor at jadtbookreviews@gmail.com . Click here for the complete JADT Style Guide . View Past Issues People Editorial Board Benjamin Gillespie, Bess Rowen Co-Editors Stephanie Lim Book Review Editor Jennifer Joan Thompson Performance Review Editor Jordan Hardesty, Rani O'Brien Journal Assistants Vera Mowry Roberts, Walter Meserve Founding Editors Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Marvin Carlson Director of Publications Frank Hentschker Executive Director Gaurav Singh Nijjer Digital and Web Coordinator 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 James F. Wilson Stacy Wolf Contact Email jadtjournal@gmail.com

Home to theatre artists, scholars, students, performing arts managers, and the local and international performance communities, the Martin E. Segal Center at CUNY Graduate Center provides a supportive environment for conversation, open exchange, and the development of new ideas and new work. Upcoming Events Multiple Dates 10th International Segal Center Film Festival (Day 1) Thu, May 28 More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 1) Fri, May 29 More Info + RSVP Multiple Dates 10th International Segal Center Film Festival (Day 2) Sat, May 30 More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 2) Sat, May 30 More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 3) Sun, May 31 More Info + RSVP Multiple Dates 10th International Segal Center Film Festival (Day 3) Mon, Jun 01 More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 4) Mon, Jun 01 More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 4) Tue, Jun 02 More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 5) Wed, Jun 03 More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 6) Thu, Jun 04 More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 7) Fri, Jun 05 More Info + RSVP The Segal Center: Bridging the gap between the academic, local and global performing arts communities through dynamic public programs and digital initiatives that are free and open to all. Segal Film Festival on Theatre & Performance View Festival Lineup Welcome to The Segal Center The Segal Center bridges the gap between the academic and performing arts communities through dynamic public programs and digital initiatives that are free and open to all. Home to theatre artists, scholars, students, performing arts managers, and the local and international performance communities, the Segal Center provides a supportive environment for conversation, open exchange, and the development of new ideas and new work. Year round, the Center presents a wide variety of FREE public programs which feature leading national and international artists, scholars, and arts professionals in conversation about theatre and performance. Programs include staged readings to further the development of new and classic plays, festivals celebrating New York performance (PRELUDE) and international plays (PEN World Voices), screenings of performance works on film, artists in conversation, academic lecture series, televised seminars, symposia, and arts in education programs. In addition, the Center maintains its long-standing visiting-scholars-from-abroad program, publishes a series of highly regarded academic journals, as well as single volumes of importance (including plays in translation), all written and edited by renowned scholars. We livestream many of our events with Howlround . You can find the video archive here . IN MEMORIAM Martin E. Segal (1916-2012) Daniel Gerould (1928-2012) Explore our Work Events Sharings, discussions, readings and more, join our events in-person in New York or online via Howlround. Free entry! Festivals Our festivals provide a platform for artists, educators, cultural managers and others at the forefront of contemporary theatre practice. Research We support CUNY Graduate Center's top-ranked Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance in a myriad of ways. Archive Explore archival material, videos, interviews, essays, events and more from across 20 years of the Segal Center's history. Publications We support books, journals and other publications focused on contemporary theatre and performing arts. Get Involved We would love to hear from you and how you'd like to contribute to our work. Digital Initiatives Segal Talks Tune in to Segal Talks, featuring conversations with artists all around the world. Watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify Read More Howlround for India Watch a 24-hour onlin e marathon of COVID talks with artists honoring the Indian theatre community. Read More Segal Film Festival Watch films on theatre and performance from over 30 countries, at the Segal Film Festival. Read More NY Theatre Artists for Ukraine Watch a 12-hour online marathon of readings and conversations with 24 New York theatre institutions and Ukrainian artists. Read More

What's On Year round, the Center presents a wide variety of FREE public programs which feature leading national and international artists, scholars, researchers, arts managers and other stakeholders. Sharings, discussions, readings and more, join our events in-person in New York or online via Howlround. Free entry and open to all, always! Multiple Dates 10th International Segal Center Film Festival (Day 1) Thu, May 28 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center More info More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 1) Fri, May 29 Anthology Film Archives More info More Info + RSVP Multiple Dates 10th International Segal Center Film Festival (Day 2) Sat, May 30 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center More info More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 2) Sat, May 30 Anthology Film Archives More info More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 3) Sun, May 31 Anthology Film Archives More info More Info + RSVP Multiple Dates 10th International Segal Center Film Festival (Day 3) Mon, Jun 01 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center More info More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 4) Mon, Jun 01 Anthology Film Archives More info More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 4) Tue, Jun 02 Anthology Film Archives More info More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 5) Wed, Jun 03 Anthology Film Archives More info More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 6) Thu, Jun 04 Anthology Film Archives More info More Info + RSVP Screenings: 'Robert Wilson on Screen' at Anthology Film Archives (Day 7) Fri, Jun 05 Anthology Film Archives More info More Info + RSVP Past Events You can view an archive of our past events below Mon, May 18 World Voices: MARIUS VON MAYENBURG (Germany) / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details May 18, 2026, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA Join us for an evening with one of Germany's most celebrated playwrights, Marius von Mayenburg. +31 more Mon, May 18 World Voices: PENDA DIOUF (Senegal / France) / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details May 18, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA Join us for the reading of a work in progress of JULIUS by Penda Diouf, one France's most significant young playwrights. +38 more Sat, May 16 World Voices: JEAN-LUC LAGARCE (1957-1995) / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details May 16, 2026, 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA Join us for an evening celebrating the work of the late Jean-Luc Lagarce, one of France's most significant playwrights of the second half of the 20th century. +63 more Mon, May 11 World Voices: LISA WENTZ (Austria) / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details May 11, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA Join us for an evening with one of Europe's most interesting emerging playwrights. +21 more Mon, May 04 World Voices: VICKIE RAMIREZ, Tuscarora / CANADA / US / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details May 04, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA +22 more Thu, Apr 23 Book Celebration—CASSANDRA: A Dramatic Poem, by Lesya Ukrainka (1871 –1913) + 5:00 pm Talk by Seth Baumrin / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details Apr 23, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA +20 more Thu, Apr 23 Seth Baumrin: “The Kharkiv Dramaturgy - Fortitude and Democracy in Ukrainian Modern Theatre" / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details Apr 23, 2026, 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA +5 more Mon, Apr 20 Buenos Aires in New York, with Romina Paula's SOMBRAS, of course (Argentina) / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details Apr 20, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA Join us for an evening celebrating New York's artistic exchange, Buenos Aires in Translation, with Romina Paula, one of Argentina’s most celebrated playwrights, directors and filmmakers. +53 more Tue, Apr 07 VOICING INNOCENCE: Trauma, Memory, and Contemporary Opera in the Work of Kaija Saariaho / Skylight Room GC CUNY 9th Floor Details Apr 07, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM Skylight Room GC CUNY 9th Floor, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA A conversation with librettist and dramaturge Aleksi Barrière about the upcoming 2026 Metropolitan Opera US premiere of Innocence, the final opera by the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, Barrière's mother. +9 more Mon, Apr 06 LANCE HORNE's Sing with us! MONDAYS IN THE CLUB FREE / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details Apr 06, 2026, 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA A party around a piano. Curated chaos. A spontaneous cabaret. With Lance Horne behind the piano and a roster of co-hosts, surprise guests, and whoever’s in the audience that night, you never know what the evening could turn into. Anything can happen on a Monday! +60 more Sun, Mar 29 THE PELICOT TRIAL – TRIBUTE TO GISÈLE PELICOT a scenic oratorio by Milo Rau & Servane Dècle / Judson Memorial Church Details Mar 29, 2026, 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square S, New York, NY 10012, USA Wed, Mar 25 Wed., March 25, 2:00 pm Live Segal TALK with Milo Rau & Servane Dècle, Richard Schechner a.o. about THE PELICOT TRIAL / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details Mar 25, 2026, 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA +28 more Wed, Mar 25 Wed., March 25, 12:00 noon Live Segal Screening of Milo Rau Film THE NEW GOSPEL (2020) / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details Mar 25, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:50 PM Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, at 34 Street, New York City +1 more Thu, Mar 19 Book Celebration—Late Stage: Theatre, Aging, and the Legacy of Elinor Fuchs / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details Mar 19, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA 6:30PM Live / In Person | FREE and OPEN to the public. Join us for an evening of conversation, performance, and remembrance celebrating the release of Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging, edited by Benjamin Gillespie and Cindy Rosenthal with the late Elinor Fuchs. +95 more Mon, Mar 02 Book Celebration: Marc Robinson's American Performance in 1976 / Martin E. Segal Theater Center, New York Details Mar 02, 2026, 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM EST Martin E. Segal Theater Center, New York, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA Join us for an evening celebrating Marc Robinson's new book, American Performance in 1976, published by Cambridge University Press, 2025. +89 more Thu, Dec 18 Yousef Sweid & Isabella Sedlak's River and Sea / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details Dec 18, 2025, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM EST Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA Join us for an evening of live theatre with the Berlin Gorki Theater’s 60-minute performance Rivers and Seas, featuring Palestinian-Israeli actor Yousef Sweid, exploring life between different cultures and narratives. +109 more Mon, Dec 15 Book Celebration for Artistic Collaborators Karen Malpede & Penny Arcade / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details Dec 15, 2025, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM EST Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA +66 more Thu, Dec 04 Abhishek Majumdar (India) presents Behram Khan / Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Details Dec 04, 2025, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM EST Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA A New Play in Development with an Indian and Pakistani cast +112 more Load More Visit Archive

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 29 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Editorial Comment Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson INTRODUCTION Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Jose Fernandez ARTICLE Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland Stephen Hong Sohn ARTICLE August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. James M. Cherry BOOK REVIEW Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Raimondo Genna BOOK REVIEW Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Joanna Mansbridge BOOK REVIEW Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Natalie Tenner BOOK REVIEW 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. Peter Wood BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Bruce McConachie INTRODUCTION Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Clara Jean Wilch ARTICLE Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Lisa Jackson-Schebetta ARTICLE The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Milton Loayza ARTICLE Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Shelby Brewster ARTICLE Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Theresa J. May ARTICLE Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Catherine M. Young BOOK REVIEW The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. David Coley BOOK REVIEW Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Deric McNish BOOK REVIEW Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. Jennifer Joan Thompson BOOK REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

Emma Futhey Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Emma Futhey By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Editors Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, along with their contributors, collect eighty-nine women’s voices in The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism . Spanning works between third century BCE and 2020, the anthology introduces readers to a wide variety of cultural and historical backgrounds. The anthology came out of a working group session at the American Society of Theatre Research conference in 2018 and responds to questions concerning the effect of women’s writing on conceptions of drama and performance broadly; the ways the selected materials converse with or reframe scholars’ understanding of settled dramatic theory and criticism; and how these works “contribute to, or help us to revise, extant understandings of drama and performance in relationship to history and culture” (3). With materials including letters, scrapbooks, manifestos, interviews, speeches, plays, essays, and testimonies, the anthology successfully reshapes traditional understandings of what constitutes criticism and theory and highlights voices previously absent from the conversation. Burroughs and Gainor follow a familiar structure in the anthology. After the introduction, the selected materials are organized in a generally chronological order, beginning with St. Perpetua’s visions circa 203 CE and ending with excerpts from Indigenous Canadian playwright Émilie Monnet’s 2020 play Okinum . Every primary source material is paired with a short introductory essay by a contributing scholar, situating the source author in the dramatic criticism spectrum. The editors avoid grouping by country, nationality, genre, or historical period; rather, the excerpts flow into each other without labels imposed with academic hindsight. This is a strength of the anthology, as it brings women across different eras and countries into conversation with each other. Source authors are named where possible, but some are known only by “Anonymous.” Pseudonyms are also prevalent, particularly in the entries prior to 1900, which reminds us of how often women masked their creative and vivid interrogations of theatre and performance in maleness. One such case is Michael Field, the pseudonym of aunt and niece collaborators Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper better known for their poetry. Contributor Jill R. Ehnenn positions them within the closet drama tradition, with their perspective focused entirely on expressions of feeling. Ehnenn frames the selected prefaces as not just theatrical exercises for the mind but a “dedication to Dionysian passion” (148), with feeling and emotion resonating throughout the excerpted materials. The preface to The Tragic Mary draws attention to the known emotional qualities of Mary Queen of Scots, laying the groundwork for Field’s closet drama: “The wife of Darnley and of Bothwell will be various to various natures throughout the ages: for like Helen she never grows old; . . . It is therefore possible for a dramatist to … justify the version of her as it has come to himself” (151). In this, Field teases out a string of commonality across the anthology. Whether writing under pseudonyms, as anonymous authors, or under their own names, those included in the anthology strive to understand the hows and whys of theatre and performance’s impact in our lives. A significant highlight of the anthology is the presence of artists such as Rose Yuen Ow, a Chinese-American vaudeville performer, and Alice Childress, a Black American playwright and actress often in the shadows of Lorraine Hansberry and Adrienne Kennedy. Their voices, excerpted her in interviews and essays, bring attention to the multiplicity of experiences for women in twentieth-century American theatre. As introduced by Krystyn Moon, Ow was part of a performance tradition that normalized Chinese racial and gender stereotypes on stage, sometimes alienating the performers’ friends and family but also subverting their typecasting “with their use of contemporary dress, perfect English, modern dance moves, and witty repartee” (313). Having Rose Yuen Ow’s voice in interview form demonstrates the impact of the everyday working performer in the field and how the performer embodies theory without formal language or knowledge. While Ow made her career in vaudeville work despite the barriers and stereotypes working against her, Alice Childress pushed for a theatre and culture that broke down those barriers, particularly for the Black community. Childress, as contributing scholar Meenakshi Ponnuswami writes, emphasized “the artist’s responsibility to the community” and the need for a national Black theatre (287). Her selected writings voice the conflict many artists from marginalized communities face when working in the United States: a desire to create authentically, balanced with the economic realities of needing to live. In “But I Do My Thing,” Childress argues that “a black theater here and there does not signify ‘turning away’ from commercial television, motion picture, and theater markets of the U.S.A. It is one reaction to being turned away ” (294). Later, she states plainly that “a culture can be no better than the people from whom it springs,” which reflects struggles for equity in representation across all aspects of theatre in the U.S. (294). In Childress’s writing on entertainment, capital, and culture, Ow’s words reverberate: “Because Chinese were performing, so they came to support us. In Vancouver, even the Chinese consulate came. I got mad when they won’t sell me a ticket for them to sit downstairs” (317). Over sixty years on from Childress and Ow, theatre academia and practice alike still struggle with representation, inclusion, and who merits inclusion. Although the field has made moves to correct these imbalances, these efforts are still in nascent stages. In light of such imbalances, it is incredibly valuable to have the presence of theorists such as Amal Allana, Mojisola Adebayo, Spiderwomen Theatre, and Velina Hasu Houston, who engage readers in different theatrical traditions and the ways that colonialism and imperialism intersect with gender, sexuality, and performance. The paired essays highlight how Western views on dramatic theory and criticism often leave little room for Indigenous or intercultural perspectives. As Lindsay Lachance notes in her essay on Émilie Monnet, works from these thinkers help us “see how embodied knowledge, lived experiences, land-based work, and language revitalization influence both the structure and the content of a piece” (589). The included authors construct theories based not just on gender and sexuality but as opportunities to disentangle Western patriarchal thought and develop their own praxis. In the excerpts from matchabook , Velina Hasu Houston says “I have never sought to impose it upon the Western canon… Whether or not [it] is considered to be in any Western canon … it addresses aspects of history and identity to which an inquiring mind would want to be exposed” (564). Lachance’s and Houston’s remarks gesture at the overarching theme of the anthology: membership in the canon is perhaps not the issue. Reinserting these works back into the conversation exposes the field to perspectives that heighten the understanding of dramatic theory and criticism overall. As expansive and inclusive as it is, the collection favors Anglo-American perspectives. This is particularly evident in pre-nineteenth century pieces, though Burroughs and Gainor do note this limitation in their introduction. They understand that it would be impossible to have any sort of wide-ranging anthology that covered every iteration and voice in women’s theatre theory and criticism. In acknowledging this imperfection, they state that they “profoundly hope that [it] will prompt new or renewed attention to an even more expansive body of works by women and woman-identified authors worldwide” (3). While this is a promising invitation for scholars to engage further, it is an all-too-familiar sentiment which feels behind the times for 2024 and today. This does not take away from the anthology’s accomplishments, nor does it erase the diversity of scholars included as contributors. It is, however, a reminder of how far the field of theatre theory and criticism must go in how it defines theory and criticism and who they include in the conversation. The sheer amount of material in The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism is worth the investment. Burroughs and Gainor worked diligently to curate a collection reflective of women’s impact in theory and criticism, with a concerted effort towards recovered or underrepresented voices. Even with its limitations, the anthology should become a cornerstone for new visions of theatre theory and dramatic criticism. References Footnotes About The Author(s) EMMA FUTHEY is a Faculty Associate, Writing and Humanities, at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. She teaches introductory courses in the humanities and electives in performance and gender. Her current book project explores performances of womanhood in public spheres of influence in Antebellum Boston. She has presented her research on nineteenth and twentieth century theatre and gender at ASTR, MATC, ATHE, and American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). She received her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University and holds an MA in Theatre Education from Emerson College and a BA in Theatre Studies from the Pennsylvania State University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. 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Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF “The knowledge that you acquire here, you must bring back to the Black community to benefit that community.” —Stokely Carmichael When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1916 that Black drama could both “teach our people the meaning of their history and reveal the Negro to the white world as a human, feeling thing,” he was anticipating the pedagogical terrain I walk at William & Mary, where I teach a seminar on “August Wilson’s American Century Cycle.” 1 M ost students who take the seminar are non-Black, a demographic reality that reflects the institution rather than the course design. This composition does not diminish the value of student engagement; however, it shapes the work, demanding a pedagogy attentive to the difference between access to a tradition and belonging to it. In such instances, Wilson’s plays can create a necessary space for recognition, empathy, and the disruption of flattened understandings of Black life. Yet this possibility is not without its tensions. First, to “reveal the Negro to the white world as a human, feeling thing” is a noble goal with a measurable cost. As podcaster Deanté Kyle suggests, attempting to prove one ’s humanity to those committed to practicing inhumanity is often an act of depletion rather than transformation. 2 Stokely Carmichael made a similar intervention in his 1967 debate on “Black Power and the Future of Negro America,” reference d later in the essay. While acknowledging the intellectual genius of Du Bois, Carmichael argued that it is not the responsibility of Black Americans to persuade white audiences of their worth. 3 My experience as a Black woman teaching in a predominantly white context (PWI) confirms the tension. At times, this labor illuminates; at others, it simply drains, leaving the structure unchanged. Then, there are the rare but instructive occasions, as in my most recent offering of “Nommo Force: Black Acting Theory and Performance ” class, where I include at least one of the cycle plays, white students—despite lectures and advisory guardrails against cultural appropriation—mistakenly presumed that their creative and intellectual proximity gives them permission to inhabit Black inner life. This embodied trespassing, rather than witnessing, reveals both the reach and the boundary of Wilson’s vision in some settings. Theatre may beckon the heart toward empathy, recalling Bill Moyer’s discussion of his weeping at Fences , 4 but it cannot erase the miles of history, memory, and blood that determine who may speak from within a story and who should posture themselves to listen. As Wilson declared to the 1996 Theatre Communications Group (TCG) audience, “We cannot allow others to have authority over our cultural and spiritual products.” 5 Teaching in this context pulls my pedagogy in two directions at once, and each direction generates its own set of questions. In teaching Wilson in a collegiate setting, I began to question what it meant to steward his work in rooms where the responses Black Americans were making to individual and collective histories risked becoming a performance rather than a cultural inheritance. 6 Recalling a white female theatre major who had taken classes with other Black professors and was “so excited” to learn more about Black aesthetics from me, I was curious. Would she view this information as a gift or a credential? How, if at all, would this information position her to advance in a field that Black labor had helped build, but struggled to reap the benefits of? Would her cultural homework ultimately benefit Black people? If so, how? Yet, as Wilson once said, “…to celebrate and accept responsibility for one’s place in the world is all that can be asked of anyone,” 7 dwelling on the presence of white learners was incomplete without reckoning with the absence of Black students and the institutional forces behind it. 8 My questioning shifted not only from what white students would do with this knowledge, but also why there were not more Black students here to receive and celebrate it. In that absence is disinterest, but also the effects of curricular marginalization, recruitment gaps, skepticism about the usefulness of Africana Studies and theatre, and the long-standing devaluation of Black theatre as a site of intellectual and cultural inheritance. In my moment of pedagogical reckoning, Stokely Carmichael’s words in the opening epigraph arrived not simply as a political directive, but as an ancestral instruction: “The knowledge that you acquire here, you must bring back to the Black community to benefit that community.” 9 As I listened to his 1967 debate on “Black Power and the Future of Negro America” with Reverend Samuel Williams and Vincent Harding, I was reminded that Du Bois’ 1916 premise begins with the insistence that Black art must teach Black people “the meaning of their history.” The question became unavoidable: even as Black students can encounter their cultural inheritance in other disciplinary formations and wrestle with the political, emotional, and existential implications of Du Bois’ aim, their underrepresentation in Africana Studies and theatre courses reveals a disciplinary hierarchy. How, then, do I ensure that Wilson’s dramaturgical vision remains accessible as a form of knowledge and a site of performance? Sitting in this tension with these questions doesn’t break the work, but stretches it, revealing that one classroom alone cannot bear the full weight of the ancestral directive; another space had to be made. If Du Bois casts the function of Black drama as a dual project—one that instructs within the Black community and reveals to white audiences—my work must extend into a second site of practice. Drawing on the legacy of the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement, which were designed to cultivate political literacy, historical awareness, and collective agency, I developed a Freedom School Series on August Wilson’s American Century Cycle. I co-host this initiative through my own platform, Omiwerx, with The Village Initiative for Equity in Education, founded by Jacqueline Bridgeforth-Williams. It is free, and participating students, aged 11-18, receive a complete set of the American Century Cycle plays. We gather monthly in church and community spaces, studying Wilson’s cycle not as a curriculum but as a cultural inheritance, with each meeting serving as a rehearsal in collective study and shared memory. Offered for the first time in fall 2025, the series will culminate in a performance on Juneteenth 2026, followed by a public dialogue where participants share their voices, histories, and insights in a communal space. Teaching the cycle under the Freedom School model, the plays serve as mirrors, imparting what Wilson believes to be essential for Black Americans: who we are and what our history has been, and what our relationship to society is, so that we can find ways to alter that relationship and, more importantly, to alter the shared expectations of ourselves as a people. 10 In this framing, Wilson positions theatre as a site of knowledge transfer, a means of cultural exploration and grounding that can prepare students for the world beyond the theatre. In 1926, Du Bois insisted that a “real Negro theatre” must be about us, by us, for us, and near us. 11 A century later, as academic freedom narrows and Black cultural autonomy is cast as a threat rather than a right, teaching the cycle at a PWI (even with its tensions) and in a community-rooted Freedom School is not simply pedagogy; it is an act of ancestral fidelity and a performance of resistance. In both settings, I am not just teaching plays. I am tending a lineage and guarding the ground from which it grows. Wilson, like Du Bois, recognized that Black art is inherently bound to Black being, history, and struggle. Thus, through my Freedom School Series, the cycle becomes a form of propaganda for Black human flourishing, shaping the “spiritual temperament” essential for confronting, withstanding, and surviving anti-Blackness. 12 What follows interprets Du Bois’s four imperatives not as historical artifacts but as living methodologies for teaching the American Century Cycle in an age of democratic decline, expanding from pedagogies that invite white students to recognize the human depth they have been socially trained not to see, to practices in Black communities where Wilson’s drama operates as nourishment, lineage work, and a form of collective care. About Us: Centering Black Life in a Predominantly White Context If Black drama, as Du Bois argued, must “reveal Negro life as it is,” then teaching Wilson in an age of democratic decline is not merely a syllabus choice, it is an act of refusal against erasure and revisionist comfort. Since I first offered “August Wilson’s American Century Cycle” in 2012, 183 students have taken the course. The plays of the cycle have seen us through four presidential elections, political upheaval, racial reckonings, and pandemic grief. Each semester the course is offered, we confront how America rehearses its own amnesia. The erosion of democracy in 2025 is not theoretical for my students; it is unfolding in real time on their newsfeeds, in their families, and in the policies that govern their lives and education. At the time of this writing, the government has been shut down for 35 days. Across the country, the study of race, gender, and history is being reframed as divisive rather than foundational. The arts are being defunded. Books are being banned, and in Virginia, at least one play of the American Century Cycle, Fences , is on a list of challenged books in Loudon County Public Schools. 13 Universities are being conscripted into ideological battles that mistake compliance for patriotism and silence for neutrality. Against this backdrop, studying Wilson, playwright, prophet, and chronicler of the costs of forgetting, is a rehearsal for conscience, and an inquiry into what happens when a nation, its institutions, and citizens lose sight of their moral center. As authoritarian currents quietly advance, to teach “about us” in such times, and specifically to teach about Wilson’s warriors, is to affirm that the quest for knowledge itself is a form of protest, and that the classroom—like the theatre—must keep open the fragile space where human beings can still imagine their way toward freedom. Imagination is not ornamental, and cultivating it is an insurgent, sovereign, and necessary preparatory work for the pursuit of freedom. As Angela Davis reminds us in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle , drawing on the insights of Orlando Patterson, the very idea of freedom—so cherished in Western political thought, so often claimed as its inheritance—was first imagined by enslaved people. Before freedom could be enacted, it had to be envisioned. 14 By Us: Stewardship, Mutual Aid, and the Work of Returning Home If “about us” affirms the centrality of Black life in the study and making of American democracy, “by us” emphasizes reclaiming authorship (or ownership) of the institutions where that study takes place. Du Bois believed that only those who know “from birth and continual association just what it means to be Negro today” can create truthful art. As a Black woman, my teaching is rooted in both my lived experience and the ongoing effort to reshape the institutions through which that knowledge is taught. At W&M, “August Wilson’s American Century Cycle” is housed in Africana Studies, not as an afterthought but as a core part of the program. As a freshman writing seminar, it serves as one of several entry points to the Africana major. This structural choice matters: it asserts that Black dramatic art is central to the study of African-descended peoples, not just an add-on. Housing the course in Africana Studies also safeguards the integrity of its epistemic roots. In that space, Wilson’s plays are seen not just as repertoire or roles but as theory, philosophy, and a historical archive. This approach ensures that Black students experience the cycle as an inheritance, not just an elective, and that the course remains grounded in a tradition of knowledge-making rather than exercises in performance. However, even within Africana Studies at a PWI, I often feel the tension between preserving Wilson’s legacy and the conditions under which that preservation occurs. Wilson wrote about a community that mostly existed outside the academy, as well as the elite, regional, and predominantly white institutions in which his work was frequently developed and encountered. This tension, not incidental, is a constitutive feature of the American Century Cycle's dramaturgy and central to teaching it. Yet it is precisely the misalignment between Wilson’s dramaturgical commitments and the institutional conditions under which his work is most often taught that compelled me to develop this series, to relocate the plays within the Black social, vernacular, and spiritual ecosystems that shaped them. I extended my teaching of Wilson into the community through a Freedom School model, where these same plays are not studied for course credit, but within a familiar glow of fellowship, collective memory, and song. At the heart of Du Bois’s concept of “by us” is mutual aid, the oldest form of Black institutional practice. Mutual aid reminds us that Black survival has always depended on collective care, involving the pooling of resources, sharing of knowledge, and mutual support when formal systems fail to provide the critical assistance needed. It is both economic and spiritual, an ethic that links my teaching to the same communal networks that have long sustained Black art and life. Support for the 2025-2026 Freedom School Series was provided through the generosity of individuals and local organizations, such as Omiwerx, An Achievable Dream, The Links, Inc., Newport News (VA) Chapter, and Black-owned businesses like Resist Booksellers and Cory’s Southern Kitchen & Catering. This economic reciprocity—circulating the fruits of art back into the community that gave birth to it—is itself a Du Boisian practice. Local churches also play a vital role: Williamsburg Christian Church distributed copies of Wilson’s plays, while St. John’s Baptist Church hosts the monthly gatherings, connecting the series to the sacred heritage of the Black church as a place of education, performance, and prophecy. In this way, “by us” becomes more than just curricular facilitation and ownership; it transforms into an ecosystem of care where mutual aid, curricular reclamation, and spiritual fellowship converge. Together, these practices honor Du Bois’s call for art that reveals “The Souls of Black Folk” and Wilson’s insistence that we stand firm on the ground that made us, ensuring theatre remains accountable to the people whose stories gave it life. 15 For Us: Centering the Local Black Community In Du Bois’s third principle, the audience is important. The “real Negro theatre” must be “for us…the theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences.” In our Freedom School Series, many participating students are descendants of families displaced by the expansion of Colonial Williamsburg, which abutted university expansions. 16 We explore Wilson’s cycle alongside local Black history, guided by oral histories and walking tours through historic sites curated by Mrs. Bridgeforth-Williams, with the support of other members of the descendant community. These gatherings remind me that our work is not simply pedagogical but ancestral. Teaching “for us” steadies my spirit in a time of hyper-surveillance of faculty and renews my sense of accountability to those whose stories I carry. We do not view Wilson’s plays solely from a safe perspective of literary analysis; we see them as rituals, and our reading, teaching, and analysis as acts of remembering . Students are asked to consider the following questions: How do they see themselves building on the legacy of enslavement?   What new observations are they making about Black life in Williamsburg, and where can they intervene in addressing the most pressing issues facing their community?   How does their engagement with the American Century Cycle ignite the revolutionary spirit within and motivate them to challenge the forces aiming to oppress and dehumanize them?  How does the cycle motivate them to become students of history and their own “blood memories” so they can understand the story of America’s history correctly as the semi-quincentennial approaches, and uncover the stories of their mothers, fathers, and ancestors?  How are they defining, rethinking, and shaping their own ideas of freedom during this moment of national crisis? 17 The gatherings are intentionally intergenerational, with parents and grandparents seated behind and around middle and high school students, as well as members of the descendant community. Within that circle, knowledge isn’t just passed down but shared outward; the room acts as a rehearsal for collective memory. As Wilson instructs, we place culture before them so that: When [they] leave [their] parents' house, [they] are not in the world alone. [They] have something that is [theirs], [they] have a ground to stand on, and [they] have a viewpoint, and [they] have a way of proceeding in the world that has been developed by [their] ancestors. 18 These acts of remembering cannot remain abstract , especially within classrooms, removed from the communities whose stories we bear. Every revolution of consciousness must be grounded in the soil that bore both the wound and the witness. The question, then, is not only what we teach, but where we teach, and whose footsteps echo beneath our classrooms. Near Us: Place and Proximity Du Bois insisted that Black theatre must be near us, rooted in the communities where Black people live. After all, a theatre detached from Black people’s daily rhythms risks becoming a monument to itself in service of white needs, rather than a mirror for the Black community. 19 Teaching the American Century Cycle in Williamsburg—part of the trifecta of cities that make up the Birthplace of American Independence—means teaching within earshot of auction blocks, plantation fields, and the echoes of once-thriving Black communities displaced by urban renewal and gentrification. Wilson’s Hill District is not my classroom’s geography, but it is its mirror: a concentrated stage through which the wider Black American story refracts. Its specificity invites us to look closer to home, to see how the same forces at play in the American Century Cycle have and continue to shape Black life in Williamsburg and beyond. In a political climate where policy shifts will undoubtedly constrict Black enrollment at PWIs, I may never see any of these 11-18-year-olds at William & Mary. Thus, the prospect of teaching Black theatre in the richly diverse classrooms of my early career feels increasingly remote. In bringing the cycle near Black students , we fulfill Du Bois’s fourth principle in its fullest sense: art that not only remembers the people but returns to them. “About us” names the courage to study Black life as a form of cultural transmission, and an act of repair and protest in an age of democratic decline. “By us” affirms that such a study must be authored and governed by those who live its truths. “For us” extends the circle of learning to the communities that continue to bear both the burden and the beauty of those truths. “Near us,” in this instance, refers not to the Hill District itself, but to places closer to home, such as Williamsburg, where the same forces of urban renewal, exclusion, and resilience have shaped the landscape. Thus, the Freedom School Series on August Wilson’s American Century Cycle is a Du Boisian imperative enacted: teaching about us, by us, for us, and near us, where Wilson’s plays are not simply studied but engaged as inheritance, and where participants—including me—are strengthened to make our freedom mean something in this age of democratic decline. 20 A luta continua for all stewards of Black theatre pedagogy and production. These times are unprecedented for many of us, but not new. The cycle we face now is one that many of our ancestors recognized, resisted, and survived. In this repetition lies both a warning and the inheritance Wilson makes clear: the strategies for navigating this moment already exist in our collective memory. May Ògún continue to be the force and energetic link that bridges the distance between our visioning, our efforts, our accomplishments, and our survival. 21 References 1 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Drama Among Black Folk,” The Crisis 12.4 (August 1916), 171. 2 Deanté Kyle, “War on Drugs,” Episode 43, Grits & Eggs Podcast (25 December 2024), accessed 3 November 2025, https://youtu.be/R_XtX4f2Goc?si=EU5Dtf36LmT36eVr . 3 August Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” American Theatre (20 June 2016), accessed 3 November 2025, https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/06/20/the-ground-on-which-i-stand/ . 4 American Archive of Public Broadcasting, “August Wilson,” A World of Ideas, Episode 129 (20 October 1988), accessed 3 November 2025, https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-904f8e84cc . 5 August Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” American Theatre (20 June 2016), accessed 3 November 2025, https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/06/20/the-ground-on-which-i-stand/ . 6 While my Wilson seminar asks students to read, analyze, and write, the risks there tend to remain at the level of interpretation. Students may romanticize or misread Black life, but the encounter remains textual. In the acting studio, however, where students are asked to think about how to bring the language of Wilson and other writers of Black drama into the body through Nommo Force, those risks intensify for the reasons addressed above. 7 August Wilson, Two Trains Running , Plume (1992), back cover. 8 These students do not form a single uniform group. Some enroll out of genuine intellectual curiosity and a desire to engage deeply with Wilson’s vision. Others arrive because the course fits their schedule, satisfies a requirement, or has been misperceived as less demanding. And it is important to note that Black learners, too, may enter for these same reasons; neither earnestness nor convenience adheres neatly to racial lines. This mix of interest, necessity, and misconception creates a classroom where the effort to foster understanding is weighted and where cultural teaching necessarily extends beyond content mastery into questions of responsibility, extraction, and care. 9 Hezakya News & Film, “1967 Special Report: Stokely Carmichael Black Power Debate,” American Broadcasting Company (22 March 2025), accessed 1 November 2025, https://youtu.be/PtDup63f9t4?si=W8fdlRpc88aGTBZR . 10 Vera Sheppard, “August Wilson: an interview,” National Forum , 70.3 (Summer 1990), 7, accessed 1 November 2025, https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=0ad8c720-b1bf-31d3-b040-dcfffe9988dd . 11 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement,” The Crisis 32.3 (July 1926), 134. 12 August Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” American Theatre (20 June 2016), accessed 3 November 2025, AMERICAN THEATRE | The Ground on Which I Stand . 13 “PEN America Index of School Book Bans – Fall 2022,” accessed 2 November 2025, https://pen.org/book-bans/index-of-school-book-bans-2022/ . 14 Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Haymarket Books, 2016), 67. 15 George Plimpton, "August Wilson: The Art of Theater XIV."  The Paris Review (Winter 1999), 67-94, accessed 3 November, 2025, https://www.proquest.com/magazines/august-wilson-art-theater-xiv/docview/219435031/se-2 . 16 Zach Meredith, Urban Renewal in the Colonial Capital: Contextualizing the Williamsburg Redevelopment & Housing Authority, Undergraduate Honors Thesis, William & Mary (2019). 17 Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green, “Teaching Wilson for the Public Good,” keynote lecture, August Wilson Society Biennial Colloquium, University of Pittsburgh (4 April 2025). 18 Sheppard, Vera. “August Wilson: an interview,” National Forum , 70(3) (Summer 1990), 7., accessed 3 November 2025, https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=0ad8c720-b1bf-31d3-b040-dcfffe9988dd . 19 Dominic Taylor, “Don’t Call African American Theatre Black Theatre, It’s Like Calling a Dog a Cat,” The Massachusetts Review (September 2019), accessed 3 November 2025, https://www.massreview.org/node/10262 . 20 August Wilson, Gem of the Ocean , Theatre Communications Group (2003), 28. 21 Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green, “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 33.2 (April 29, 2021), accessed 3 November 2025, https://www.thesegalcenter.org/jadt/%E2%80%9C%C3%B2g%C3%BAn-y%C3%A8-mo-y%C3%A8!%E2%80%9D-pathways-for-institutionalizing-black-theater-pedagogy-and-production-at-historically-white-universities . Footnotes About The Author(s) Omiyemi (Artisia) Green is Professor of Theatre & Africana Studies at William & Mary. She holds an endowed professorship as a University Professor for Teaching Excellence and was recently designated the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Theatre & Performance. An artist-scholar with more than twenty years of higher education experience, her scholarship focuses on Black Theatre and African Diasporic performance. Her research has been presented internationally and published widely, and she is the founding editor-in-chief of  The Black Theatre Review , the only peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to African Diasporic theatrical scholarship. At William & Mary, she expanded Black theatre pedagogy and production, developed curricula, and directed stage and screen projects. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has held national leadership roles in the Black Theatre Network and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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. ISSN Number: 2376-1148 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Current Issue About & Submission Guidelines Resources People Contact Past Issues & Archive Curren Issue Current Issue Vol. 19, Spring 2026 Issue Edited by Katherine Hennessey Download Issue Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Amir al-Azraki Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Jovita Jacob Selwyn Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Deniz Başar Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Marina Johnson Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Marina Johnson Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Hadia Mousa Past Issue Curren Issue Past Issue Volume 19 Volume 16 Volume 18 Volume 15 Volume 17 Volume 14 Volume 1 to 13 Archive We are in the process of moving all past journal entries to the current websiite. Please bear with us as we make this transition. You can view all the past issues at https://arabstages.commons.gc.cuny.edu . For any queries or clarifications, write to us at t ed.ziter@nyu.edu Spring 2023 Volume 14 Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Edward Ziter Spring 2023 Volume 14 Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Suzi Elnaggar Spring 2023 Volume 14 Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber George Potter Spring 2023 Volume 14 Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Sami Ismat Load More About & Submission Guideline About The Journal 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 does not seek to be exclusive nor to promote any nationalist or religion-based agenda. In strictly geographical and political terms, the journal will be devoted to theatre and performance material from the member states of the League of Arab States, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, but also diasporic literature from around the globe created by former residents of those states or their descendants. Moreover, both the operative adjectives Arab and Islamic should be understood here to demarcate, primarily, a general cultural area of scholarly exploration and negotiation. Investigations of material from the many non-Arab and non-Muslim communities located within the Arab/Muslim world are welcomed by the journal. Subjects can be drawn from all areas of theatre activity as well as from performance work that lies outside the traditional European concept of theatre. The journal will welcome essays of a scholarly nature, which will be submitted to peer review, also reports on current productions, interviews, and translations of plays and theoretical statements, and reports, notices and announcements of current and future productions and festivals or other matters of potential general interest to the readership. 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. Submission Guidelines Articles, interviews, and play translations should normally fall between 4,000 and 8,000 words. Performance and book reviews should fall between 800 and 2,000 words. We are especially interested in the studies and reviews of recent or contemporary work. Proposals or articles may be submitted to our editors at t ed.ziter@nyu.edu . Please include the author’s full name, institutional affiliation (if relevant), telephone number, and Email address. Contributors are also asked to include a) a short biographical note (no longer than 250 words); b) relevant images for publication c) a document detailing each image’s caption and credit. View Formatting Guidelines Arab Stages is seeking a new Associate Editor to begin Spring 2027. For more information or to self-nominate, email ted.ziter@nyu.edu . View Past Issues Resources This section is under construction. For suggestions and contributions, kindly email t ed.ziter@nyu.edu Open Calls More information coming here soon. Events / Festivals Bankstown, Australia - Arab Theatre Studio (http://urbantheatre.com.au/current-projects/arabic-theatre-studio/) Al Ain, UAE - Arabian Shakespeare Festival (http://www.arabianshakespearefestival.org/About_ASF.html) Liverpool, UK - Liverpool Arab Arts Festival (http://www.arabartsfestival.com/) Cairo, Egypt - The Egyptian National Theatre Festival (http://www.cairoopera.org/) Baghdad, Iraq - Hawler International Theater Festival (https://hawlerinternationaltheaterfestival.wordpress.com/) Grants More information coming here soon. Research The International Federation for Theatre Research (http://www.firt-iftr.org/) International Centre for Theatre Research (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2011/08/peter-brooks-international-centre-of.html) Communities Brussels, Belgium - Young Arab Theatre Fund (http://www.annalindhfoundation.org/members/young-arab-theatre-fund) Chicago, Illinois USA - Silk Road Rising (http://www.silkroadrising.org/) New York, New York USA - Noor Theatre (http://noortheatre.org/) USA - Middle East American Initiative (http://www.larktheatre.org/who-we-are/programs/fellowships-and-residencies/middle-east-american-initiative/) San Francisco, California USA - Golden Thread Productions (http://www.goldenthread.org/) Beirut, Lebanon- Ashkal Alwan (http://ashkalalwan.org/) Beirut, Lebanon - Maqamat Dance Theatre (http://www.maqamat.org/) Algeria - Companie El Ajouad (http://www.elajouad.com/fr/accueil) United Kingdom - MENA Arts UK (https://www.menaarts.uk/) Films Arab Film Festival Australia (http://arabfilmfestival.com.au/) Aan Korb: BBC Arabic Film and Documentary Festival (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-26518011) Publishing Journal: Performing Islam (https://www.intellectbooks.com/performing-islam) Issued by Intellect Press UK in both print & digital Magazine: Brown Book (http://brownbook.me/) Published in Dubai Teaching Opportunities More information coming here soon. People Founding Editor Marvin Carlson Founders Marvin Carlson Frank Hentschker Editor Edward Ziter Associate Editor Katherine Hennessey Performance Reviews Co-Editors Aycan Akçamete Hala Baki Marjan Moosavi Malek Najjar Book Reviews Editor James Al-Shamma Managing Editors Jennifer Nan Dong Dominic Finocchiaro Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Marvin Carlson Director of Publications Frank Hentschker Executive Director Gaurav Singh Nijjer Web & Digital Producer Advisory Board Hadia Mousa Khalid Amin Dalia Basiouny Areeg Ibrahim Malek Najjar Sonali Pahwa Babak Rahimi Nada Saab Samer al-Saber Mohammed Jafar Yousefian Contact Email For any queries or clarifications, write to us at t ed.ziter@nyu.edu with the subject line Arab Stages . (Please note arabstages@gc.cuny.edu is no longer a functional email address. If you recently used this email address please resend your email to ted.ziter@nyu.edu .)

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 31 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Courtney Ferriter ARTICLE Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine ARTICLE “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Rosa Schneider ARTICLE Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Tison Pugh ARTICLE Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Alexis Riley BOOK REVIEW Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. Ariel Nereson BOOK REVIEW The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Carol Westcamp BOOK REVIEW Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Trevor Boffone BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler INTRODUCTION "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change Joanna Mansbridge ARTICLE The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Julia Rössler ARTICLE Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Konstantinos Blatanis ARTICLE Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Maureen McDonnell ARTICLE Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Nathalie Aghoro ARTICLE Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. DeRon S. Williams BOOK REVIEW Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. Javier Hurtado BOOK REVIEW The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Jennie Youssef BOOK REVIEW Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. Patrick McKelvey BOOK REVIEW A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Shane Strawbridge BOOK REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 36 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Meredith Conti ARTICLE Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline Cheryl Black ARTICLE More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined Christen Mandracchia ARTICLE The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Robert Thompson ARTICLE Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Lynn Deboeck BOOK REVIEW Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Erica Stevens Abbitt BOOK REVIEW Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Xiaoqiao Xu BOOK REVIEW Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Andrew Gibb BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Editorial Introduction Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Valerie Joyce ARTICLE Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban Danielle Rosvally ARTICLE “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Thomas H. Arthur ARTICLE Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Interview with James C. Nicola, Tanya Elder, and Diego Daniel Pardo INTERVIEW Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States L. Bailey McDaniel BOOK REVIEW Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Michael DeWhatley BOOK REVIEW Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Philip Wiles BOOK REVIEW Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Lucas Skjaret BOOK REVIEW Appropriate Alex Ferrone PERFORMANCE REVIEW Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month Bess Rowen PERFORMANCE REVIEW MáM Sean F. Edgecomb PERFORMANCE REVIEW Scene Partners Benjamin Gillespie PERFORMANCE REVIEW Oh, Mary! Philip Brankin PERFORMANCE REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 28 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Editorial Comment Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson EDITORIAL New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Michael Y. Bennett STATE OF THE FIELD Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Kevin Byrne STATE OF THE FIELD Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Jorge Huerta STATE OF THE FIELD Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Esther Kim Lee STATE OF THE FIELD Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Jordan Schildcrout STATE OF THE FIELD Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Maurya Wickstrom STATE OF THE FIELD Musical Theatre Studies Stacy Wolf STATE OF THE FIELD “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Thomas F. Connolly ARTICLE Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Peter Zazzali ARTICLE Performing Anti-slavery Heather S. Nathans BOOK REVIEW American Tragedian Karl Kippola BOOK REVIEW Murder Most Queer Laura Dorwart BOOK REVIEW The Captive Stage Beck Holden BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Iris Smith Fischer EDITORIAL Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters George Pate and Libby Ricardo ARTICLE Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio ARTICLE iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth ARTICLE Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' Vivian Appler ARTICLE This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Bradley Stephenson ARTICLE Blue-Collar Broadway David Bisaha BOOK REVIEW The New Humor in the Progressive Era Cheryl Black BOOK REVIEW Stages of Engagement Steve Earnest BOOK REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 35 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects Bennet Schaber ARTICLE The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Laurence Senelick ARTICLE Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage Raymond Saraceni ARTICLE “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community Russell Stone ARTICLE The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Cailyn Sales BOOK REVIEW Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Casey L. Berner BOOK REVIEW Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Dahye Lee BOOK REVIEW Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Rahul K Gairola BOOK REVIEW The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Sarah Courtis BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Becca Levy and Jared Rubin Sprowls ARTICLE The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Beth Wynstra, Mary Pinard ARTICLE From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater Dr. Kimmika L.H. Williams Witherspoon ARTICLE The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder ARTICLE Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Jackie Rosenfeld and Cade M.Sikora ARTICLE Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Jared Strange ARTICLE México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Jessica L. Peña Torres ARTICLE Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming L. Nicol Cabe ARTICLE Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Marissa Nicosia & Jack Isaac ARTICLE 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 Michael Osinski ARTICLE Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Mohamadreza Babaee ARTICLE Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Caitlin A.Kane INTERVIEW Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Drew Barker INTERVIEW (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond MK Lawson, Jessica Bashline INTERVIEW Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Talya Kingston INTERVIEW Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Ansley Valentine BOOK REVIEW The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Clay Sanderson BOOK REVIEW Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Jada M. Campbell BOOK REVIEW Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Jeanne Klein BOOK REVIEW Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. M. Landon BOOK REVIEW Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Rob Silverman Ascher BOOK REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 32 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Donatella Galella BOOK REVIEW Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Eleanor Russell BOOK REVIEW Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Susan C. W. Abbotson BOOK REVIEW Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Isaiah Matthew Wooden BOOK REVIEW Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Shauna Vey BOOK REVIEW Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Verna A. Foster ARTICLE Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Jessica Brater ARTICLE Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Seokhun Choi ARTICLE Issue 2 Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies Collin Vorbeck BOOK REVIEW The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl John Bray BOOK REVIEW A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor Amy B. Huang BOOK REVIEW The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Michael Valdez BOOK REVIEW Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas Jocelyn L. Buckner INTRODUCTION The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship Claudia Wilsch Case ARTICLE “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Sarah Alice Campbell ARTICLE Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Rachel E. Bauer and Kristen M. Kalz ARTICLE Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Arnab Banerji ARTICLE Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

Kristyl D. Tift Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Kristyl D. Tift By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF In “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926), W.E.B. Du Bois identifies what he called the “new stirrings” among young Black people of the time—“stirrings of the beginning of a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be, as though in this morning of group life we had awakened from some sleep that at once dimly mourns the past and dreams a splendid future.” 1 Du Bois’s valuation of joy, creativity, consciousness, and futurity echoes the creative vibrancy and urgency happening during the Harlem Renaissance. Believing in the potential of younger generations of Black folk to use Art to establish the humanity and brilliance of the “race,” Du Bois, here, expands his research as a sociologist of African American life and culture to activism. Manning Marable notes that, after publishing The Philadelphia Negro in 1899—a first-of-its-kind sociological study of Black Philadelphians living in the Seventh Ward between 1896 and 1897—Du Bois “was especially convinced that careful sociological measurement, combined with a proper cultural and historical understanding of a social group, could lead to the construction of a social agenda for reform.” 2 In the groundbreaking study, Du Bois determines the need for Black communal “reform” based on his observations of a large section of the population who had limited or no access to decent wages, jobs, food, housing, sanitary living conditions, and education. These bleak outcomes, which directly resulted from American slavery and the failed Reconstruction era, required interventions. In "The Talented Tenth" (1903), Du Bois proposed a solution: encourage the Black middle class to take responsibility for helping lower-class Blacks become upwardly mobile (through hiring Black labor, for example). He believed that a new generation of educated Black elites, a group he called The Talented Tenth, would lead the race to full civil rights. Du Bois imagined that 10% of African Americans who excelled academically, socially, economically, and artistically were the chosen ones whose collective intellectual contributions, cultural production, and leadership would function holistically as an armor of resistance to systemic racism in the U.S. Theoretically, the emergence and institutionalization of the “tenth” would help not only those less privileged to become liberated, but it would liberate the entire community. While this call to action was notable for its emphasis on the moral duty and obligation of the middle class, it ignored the alluring benefits and exclusionary politics of capitalism, which reinforced the very class hierarchies that Du Bois identified as obstacles to racial uplift in his early studies. As Marable writes, “The Talented Tenth theory was a strategy to win democracy for all Black Americans. The burden of struggle resided upon those of the race best prepared, educationally and economically, to lead that fight.” 3 The problem with this theory is that while the “burden” seems a light load to carry for those with class privilege, for racialized people the load is still quite heavy regardless of class, and the weight can breed self-righteousness, self-loathing, and resentment that only deepens intraracial divisions. The African American class conundrum is one that generations of playwrights have explored at length in the theatre, 4 including Richard Wesley, who, having studied under Owen Dodson at Howard University, began his professional career at New Lafayette Theatre in the early 1970s under the mentorship of Ed Bullins. A number of Wesley’s plays, including The Mighty Gents (1978) and The Talented Tenth (1989), document the promise and disillusionment of Black American dreams—not only because of White racism but, more remarkably, because of intraracial class breakdowns. His works magnify the elusive pleasures and lingering anxieties and regret often associated with performances of superiority and dominance. The Talented Tenth recognizes, as Du Bois himself eventually did, the inherent classist assumptions and practical limitations of Black elitism. In this essay, I am concerned with Du Bois’s shift from the individualized theory of the “tenth” to an institutional conceptualization of “Negro Art”. 5 Reading Wesley’s The Talented Tenth , set in the 1990s, I explore the playwright’s use of dreams and memories as reflections of and responses to Du Bois’s shifting ideas about what constitutes Black advocacy, activism, and excellence. 6 In The Talented Tenth , the curtain rises on a beach in Negril, Jamaica. Bernard, a man in his forties, stands off to the side as his wife, Pam, and their three friends, Marvin, Ron, and Rowena—all of whom are former Howard University classmates—relax in the sun. Bernard is daydreaming about his first job interview with Mr. Griggs, who is in his fifties and the owner of a radio station. The daydream, which is shown onstage, takes place in the 1960s. The dialogue begins easily, with the two connecting over a mutual acquaintance, before quickly shifting into more direct speech (similar to a grilling rather than an interview). Their exchange, thereafter, exemplifies the kind of miscommunication that can occur between those of differing generations; it also captures the tension of the nationwide racial and political upheaval of that turbulent time. Griggs—a World War II veteran-turned-businessman—has achieved success through hard work, whereas Bernard has only recently graduated from Howard and is at the start of his career in business. While Bernard aspires to Griggs’ level of success, the older man is grumpy and condescending with a temperament that suggests that whether or not the young man gets the job, achieving and maintaining a spot in the mythical “tenth” will not (and should not, according to Griggs) be easy. Griggs holds the keys to the metaphorical gate between Bernard and his first job, but it is important to note that, although respectful, Bernard is not docile (a fact that leads him and Griggs to disagree on the direction of the radio station in the years that follow). Bernard has an activist past, including participating in protests as a college student and embracing a pan-Africanist worldview, which was strengthened by his relationship with his then-girlfriend, Habiba. After graduation, the general expectation was for him to secure a “good” job and put his radicalism aside for the betterment of the race. By doing this, he sacrifices his dream for Du Bois’s dream, which, as Zachary R. Williams summarizes it, was for “college-educated blacks to become race men and women [and] lead the race to social equality.” 7 Bernard represents a new wave of young, educated Black people invested in individualism and capitalism. 8 To Griggs’ annoyance, the young man has his sights set on the fruits of his labor (i.e., “[making] lots of money” and spending it) rather than the labor necessary to make money that would serve the needs of the company and, proximally, the needs of the race. To Griggs, young people of Bernard’s generation have a “duty” and “responsibility” to suffer and struggle for the next generations, just as he has. He instructs: It’s the first seven generations after slavery that will suffer the most. They’re the ones who have nothing to look forward to except struggle. They’re the ones who have to bear the pain, make the sacrifices, and fight the battles that have to be fought and won. Your trouble will always come when you begin to think that you deserve a good time; when you begin to think the world is your oyster. You’re generation number six, Mr. Evans. Your grandchildren can have the good time. 9 Griggs articulates a logic and ethic not uncommon among his generation, for whom lifetimes of sacrifice have resulted in more freedoms for their children than they were afforded. This strategy is reminiscent of Robin D. G. Kelley’s “freedom dreaming,” 10 which is, essentially, imagining liberty and justice through a love for the collective that exists beyond the boundaries of what is possible realistically and politically. The discourse on Black freedom through acts of dreaming and speculation is not new in Black Studies, but scholars such as Jayna Brown, reading Frantz Fanon, have discussed such acts in the context of utopia. Brown defines Black utopia as “the moments when those of us untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress here on earth celebrate ourselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium.” 11 Embracing the present as a radical temporality, Brown writes, “In fact, I don’t think utopia needs hope at all. Hope yearns for a future. Instead, we dream in place, in situ, in medias res, in layers, in dimensional frequencies.” 12 It is within a dimensional frequency that nods toward the future but is situated in a past adjacent to the present that opposing Black male-centered utopic ideologies touch discursively in Bernard’s paradisaic dreamscape. Bernard and Griggs both have dreams rooted in economic success; however, Griggs’ dream is Blacker than it is green. Economics, for him, is a way to amass power that will inevitably advance Black people. Griggs is doggedly focused on racial uplift through ownership rather than what he reads as Bernard’s pursuit of economic gain for selfish reasons. This is a subtle yet important nuance: the men are similar, yet their generational positionalities leave them dreaming slightly different dreams, imagining slightly different realities, and pursuing those realities in slightly different ways. It is from this marginal difference that Griggs harshly scrutinizes Bernard. The tail end of the scene reveals Griggs’ paternalistic posturing for what it is: a performance meant to arouse obedience. The end of the scene is a reflective imagining, an annotation of sorts, in which Bernard tells Griggs that his words that day “frightened [him].” Griggs replies simply, “I know.” Then, Bernard admits, “I’ve been frightened ever since.” 13 The surrealism of this moment allows the two men to be honest, even vulnerable, with one another without being intimate or even present together. It is no coincidence that Bernard’s fear and Griggs’ intent are made evident in a daydream; it is a calmer frequency in which to tell the truth. Further, neither of them discusses affect or emotions in the realistic scenes between them that follow. Instead, those scenes are mostly centered on business discussions related to the radio station. As the scene shifts back to Bernard’s contemporary reality with his wife and friends on the beach, it is clear that he is at a crossroads directly shaped by his race, age, class, and gender. That first interview lingers in Bernard’s mind, and it is interesting that at a time and place when he should be relaxing and enjoying his money and leisure time, the memory of it haunts him. Bernard yearns for something missing or lost in his life—something reflective of the downside of assuming a class positionality “above” rather than “alongside” one’s people. Of the Bernards of the world who “now found themselves in their forties and successfully integrated into the American dream,” Wesley observes the material reality—the “spacious homes, the requisite expensive cars, overseas vacations, excellent pension packages, and political connections” 14 —that still leave them desiring something they relinquished to acquire the people, places, and things that keep them occupied, sedated, and blind to the needs of the collective. Wesley’s dramatic inquiry into what happened to the young activists of the 60s who shifted their talents in an alternative direction exposes a Talented Tenth whose roots in Black working-class communities were at best leggy. Reflecting on Du Bois’s idealistic dream of the “tenth” and his subsequent shift away from it, Wesley writes, “Realizing almost immediately how elitist this idea appeared, Du Bois abandoned it and never sought to promote it.” 15 This is a truth that, according to Joy James in Transcending the Talented Tenth (2013), is often underacknowledged. “Race memory,” James writes, “misleads as it fails to recall that the greatest promoter of black elite agency became, in time, its most severe critic.” 16 After the opening daydream ends, Wesley depicts this Du Boisian course correction through a sequence of stressful encounters that lead Bernard to a crisis point in his personal and professional lives. Bernard’s life has been an experiment in intraracial “double consciousness” which has manifested as class and color trouble. Understanding the complexities of double consciousness within the race, Wesley explores colorism in the love triangle between Bernard’s light-skinned wife, Pam, his dark-skinned former girlfriend, Habiba, and his dark-skinned mistress, Tanya. 17 Habiba is a memory that never materializes, yet she is very present. She represents a missed opportunity for Bernard to pursue a life and career path rooted in Black liberation and Black cultural practices of love and activism. He idealizes Habiba, lamenting what could have been had they not split up. Despite this, he applies principles of the Black Power Movement to his work at the radio station to positive effect. As Griggs’ partner, he does not have the power to make major decisions about the company’s direction, but he anticipates that his hard work over the years will lead Griggs to give him ownership of the company. Although it is never explicitly stated, ownership, to Bernard, is the consolation prize for carrying future generations on his shoulders. Griggs, however, intends to sell the company to a communications conglomerate called Pegasus International—a move which sparks frustration and resentment. Bernard believes this conglomerate will take advantage of his programming work in centering Black voices and music, which has, to this point, grown the station’s listenership. Although he has the option to continue as an employee, the buyout will likely disrupt the radio station's “controversial” aesthetic and other political elements that make it culturally Black. On top of this betrayal, his marriage to Pam and extramarital relationship with Tanya are crumbling under the weight of his ambition, apathy, and self-centeredness. Wesley’s play is Du Bois’s Talented Tenth theory in practice, and Bernard’s life is the foremost case study. The women in the play, especially Tanya and Pam, play supporting roles, representing Bernard’s desire and ambition. Wesley, highlighting their importance, gives them space to speak in monologues inserted between scenes or self-reflective moments within scenes; this is the only way their voices and perspectives are relayed without Bernard as their filter. When they speak, it becomes clear that they are successful, intelligent women defined by their proximity to a man and his dreams. Tanya, a journalist who graduated from Spelman College and Columbia University, grew up in a working-class family. While she fills the ever-present void of Habiba (in complexion only), it is clear by her incessant requests for Bernard to leave his wife that she is the anti-Habiba—she does not have the strength to leave him although she communicates a multitude of reasons why she should. Reading like Savannah in Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale , she considers herself to be a “woman of substance” rather than a “popular” woman (like Pam), which leads me to determine that Tanya is not fighting for Bernard, she is fighting against Pam—a placeholder for light-skinned women—who, in Tanya’s experience, have not had to be of substance to get the guy of their dreams. Patience, she believes, is the attribute that will make her the victor, overall; however, she does not factor in the other “other woman”—Habiba—as a potential obstacle. Pam, however, is well aware that Habiba (the memory of her) is both of their competition. Pam and Bernard’s marriage has always been more about optics than love. From a colorist perspective, she was the more pragmatic choice for a wife instead of a dark-skinned woman like Habiba or Tanya—a fact that Bernard never denies (because he cannot). Aesthetically, Pam exists in harmony with the quintessential picture of the African American family that he was sold; that is, the elitist imagining of Du Bois’s notion. In a conversation with Tanya, who is pressuring Bernard to decide between her and Pam, he reveals that his achievements—running a radio station, heading a household, being respected by his cadre of middle-class friends, and even having a loving girlfriend outside of his marriage—are unfulfilling. He admits, “Now, it’s all these years later and I’m scared and I’m angry because I want to change my life and do some things I’ve never had a chance to do. But, if I do I could hurt my wife and my children and everyone who depends on me, so I stay where I am and I dream. But I don’t dare act .” 18 Standing and dreaming alone while afraid is where we find Bernard at the beginning of the play and, although he appears in control, he remains in that state psychologically and emotionally. In this embodiment, he appears stuck in stillness on the sidelines as life moves around him; however, he has options. He can remain still or move forward, but he seems to be waiting for the right decision to occur to him or for someone else to make it for him. What is clear is that he is tired of gauging his choices by society’s metric. While Tanya’s concern is whether he loves her more than Pam, Bernard is on the precipice of making choices in his business and personal lives that put the security and respectability of those he is responsible for, even Tanya, at risk. As “talented” as he is, he is too human and too fallible to live up to unattainable standards. Thus, he stands and he dreams, evaluating his past in the present. The best decision eventually occurs to him. In fact, he divorces his wife and ends his relationship with Tanya. Some weight is lifted off of his shoulders, and he acts on his dreams by devising a plan to buy the radio station. In the final scene, parroting his interview with Griggs, Bernard interviews a “young man”—his son—“the seventh generation since slavery”—for a position at the station. The scene is similar to the first but, instead of completely reproducing the toxic dynamics between his younger self and Griggs, Bernard infuses hope in the conversation. Nearly verbatim, he repeats Griggs’ diatribe about generations, history, passivity, race, and struggle. As was his experience, the content of this monologue “scares” the young man. Then, Bernard follows up with a directive to dampen his son’s fear and help him take actionable steps forward—“Well, don’t be scared, young blood. Just be ready.” 19 This resolution is a full circle moment in which Bernard is now the empowered mentor; however, instead of playing Griggs’ role, he has taken the useful lessons he learned from him and adjusted them slightly, leaving room for a new generation to move. The Talented Tenth demonstrates how the theory that inspired it is handicapped by elitism and a lack of attention to the nuances of the intraracial politics that sometimes complicate Black American dreams. Be that as it may, a debt of gratitude is owed to W.E.B . Du Bois, the foremost Black intellectual of the twentieth century, for proposing an idea that has become a catalyst in dramatic narratives dating as far back as Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog (1938), Abram Hill's On Strivers Row (1939), and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959). It is difficult to imagine what the substance of Black Theatre would be without Du Bois’s polarizing concept. The Talented Tenth and contemporary plays that painstakingly scrutinize the inner workings and interpersonal impact of class on Black individuals and communities make clear that the discourse is as significant now as it was when Du Bois was most prolific. The Talented Tenth , as I read it, is more dream than theory. The century-old quandary of how best to cultivate and employ Black talent to elevate Black people is always already followed by unending ellipses that those of us within the collective, however privileged, must interpret and redefine as we progress between points along the margins of a surreal society…to the center…and back… References 1 W.E.B. Du Bois, Criteria of Negro Art (Crisis Publishing Company, 1926), 2. 2 Marable, Manning, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 26. 3 Emphasis mine. Marable, 51. 4 Dominique Morisseau’s Confederates (2022), Lynn Nottage’s Sweat (2017), Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop (2009), Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly (2008), Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman (2002), George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1986), Charlie L. Russell’s Five on the Black Hand Side (1973), Ed Bullins’s Clara’s Ole Man (1965), Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind (1955) are but a few plays featuring Black characters wrestling with intraracial class conflicts. 5 Du Bois proposed the “talented tenth” theory at the turn of the twentieth century (known as The Progressive Era) during which time social and political reform were on the rise, while his Negro Theatre concept was unveiled in The Crisis during the Harlem Renaissance. 6 The point of this essay, as in the play, is not to criticize Du Bois or his early notion, but to unpack a mindset in Black society that continues to hinder the racial progress that he and many other thought leaders since have only dreamed of. 7 Zachery R. Williams, In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926-1970, 1st ed (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 17. 8 In 2006, as a graduate student studying at The New School/Actors Studio Drama School, I published a passionate essay that evinced my concern about the state of Black Theatre in the hands of Generation X and cuspy Millennials like myself. What I observed was a desire by twentysomething artists of my generation to assimilate to White Theater standards rather than familiarizing themselves with, valuing, and performing essential plays in the Black theatrical canon. It is validating to read Wesley’s play and interview transcripts in which he discusses a similar social phenomenon among his generation. See Kristyl D. Tift, “Black Theatre in the Hands of Generation X” (Bronx: Black Masks, 2006). 9 Richard Wesley, The Richard Wesley Play Anthology ( Milwaukee: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books , 2015), 174. 10 See Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). 11 Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 1-2. 12 Jayna Brown, Black Utopias , 1. 13 Wesley, The Richard Wesley Play Anthology , 174. 14 Wesley, The Richard Wesley Play Anthology , 168-69. 15 Wesley, The Richard Wesley Play Anthology , 171-72. 16 Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth : Black Leaders and American Intellectuals (London: Routledge, 2013), 28: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315022383 . 17 For more on the function of colorism in The Talented Tenth ideology before and after Du Bois, see Ronald E. Hall’s “The Du Boisian Talented Tenth: Reviewing and Assessing Mulatto Colorism in the Post-Du Boisian Era” (78-95) in Journal of African American Studies 24, 1 (2020): https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-019-09457-3 . 18 Wesley, The Richard Wesley Play Anthology , 186. 19 Wesley, The Richard Wesley Play Anthology , 219. Footnotes About The Author(s) Kristyl D. Tift is a performing artist, writer, director, educator, and scholar. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema, Media Arts, and Theatre at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include African Diaspora theatre and film, queer-feminist performance, theatre for social change, and performance theory. Her essay “Making  Colors : A Black Queer Feminist Experiment in Solo Performance” is published in  Applied Theatre and Racial Justice: Care, Community, Change . An article in  Theatre History Studies  is forthcoming. Other publications include articles and book reviews in  the Black Theatre Review,   Frontiers ,  Theatre Journal,  and the  Journal of American Drama and Theatre . Tift’s book,  A Conditional Embrace: Black Queer Feminism in Performance , is in production with The Ohio State University Press. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 34 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. Hui Peng BOOK REVIEW The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. David Pellegrini BOOK REVIEW Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Jennifer-Scott Mobley BOOK REVIEW Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. Kristyl D. Tift BOOK REVIEW The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York Mia Levenson and Heather S. Nathans ARTICLE “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Dan Colson ARTICLE Theatre of Isolation Madeline Pages ARTICLE “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat Michael Y. Bennett ARTICLE “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Leticia L. Ridley ARTICLE Issue 2 Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress Devika Ranjan BOOK REVIEW The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Craig Quintero BOOK REVIEW Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration grace shinhae jun BOOK REVIEW Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Donatella Galella INTRODUCTION Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa INTERVIEW On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Christine Mok ARTICLE Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band Jennifer Goodlander ARTICLE The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Kristin Leahey with Joseph Ngo ARTICLE Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Roger Tang ARTICLE Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Jenna Gerdsen ARTICLE Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Baron Kelly INTERVIEW Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed kt shorb ARTICLE Dance Planets Al Evangelista ARTICLE Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Amy Mihyang Ginther ARTICLE Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Bindi Kang ARTICLE Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Daphne P. Lei ARTICLE Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Ariel Nereson ARTICLE Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 37 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 2 Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams EDITORIAL Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 Nic Barilar ARTICLE The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Donia Mounsef ARTICLE Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Pria Ruth Williams, Claire Syler, Amy Hughes, Karen Jean Martinson, David Bisaha ARTICLE Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship Rowan Jalso ARTICLE How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK Patrizia Paolini ARTICLE The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Benjamin Gillespie QUEER VOICES Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Benjamin Gillespie QUEER VOICES Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Megan Stahl BOOK REVIEW Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Samantha Briggs BOOK REVIEW Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Erika Guay BOOK REVIEW Fauci and Kramer Janet Werther PERFORMANCE REVIEW Our Town I. B. Hopkins PERFORMANCE REVIEW Frankenstein Melissa Sturges PERFORMANCE REVIEW Issue 1 Editorial Introduction Bess Rowen and Benjamin Gillespie EDITORIAL A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Catherine Heiner ARTICLE Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov Alisa Zhulina ARTICLE “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Thomas Keith ARTICLE Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” Allan Johnson ARTICLE “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein James F. Wilson QUEER VOICES Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames Bess Rowen QUEER VOICES The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Jane Barnette BOOK REVIEW Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Nicholas Orvis BOOK REVIEW Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Zach Dailey BOOK REVIEW Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas BOOK REVIEW Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. Kelly I. Aliano BOOK REVIEW New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 Stuart J. Hecht, (former) Editor in Chief, New England Theatre Journal NEW ENGLAND THEATRE JOURNAL New England Theatre in Review Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, (former) Editor, New England Theatre in Review NEW ENGLAND THEATRE REVIEW American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Stephen Kuehler Harvard University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 Steven Otfinoski Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Tom Grady. Bristol Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Paul E. Fallon. Cambridge, Massachusetts SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 Jan Mason Western Connecticut State University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Megan Grumbling University of New England, Southern Maine Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Steven Ofinoski Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Tom Grady Bristol Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Angela Sweigart-Gallagher St. Lawrence University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, emerita Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 33 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Dan Venning ARTICLE Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Eileen Curley ARTICLE Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Michael P. Jaros ARTICLE Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Stephanie Lim ARTICLE Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Dohyun Gracia Shin BOOK REVIEW Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Jaclyn I. Pryor BOOK REVIEW Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Shane Strawbridge BOOK REVIEW Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Vivian Appler BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans INTRODUCTION Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Heather S. Nathans PROLOGUE Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Baron Kelly ARTICLE Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Bernth Lindfors ARTICLE Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Elizabeth M. Cizmar ARTICLE 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Eric M. Glover ARTICLE A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Isaiah Matthew Wooden ARTICLE A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Khalid Y. Long ARTICLE Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Lisa B. Thompson ARTICLE Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Michelle Cowin Gibbs ARTICLE Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation Olga Sanchez Saltveit ARTICLE “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green ARTICLE Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Heather S. Nathans INTERVIEW Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Nicole Hodges Persley INTERVIEW 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. DeRon S. Williams BOOK REVIEW Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. Erith Jaffe-Berg BOOK REVIEW The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Jasmeene Francois BOOK REVIEW Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. Kaitlin Nabors BOOK REVIEW 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. Richard Hayes BOOK REVIEW Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Winners ERROL HILL AWARD WINNERS Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 30 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 May Irwin Franklin J. Lasik BOOK REVIEW American Musical Theater Eric M. Glover BOOK REVIEW Musical Theatre Books Curtis Russell BOOK REVIEW New York's Yiddish Theater Derek R. Munson BOOK REVIEW Chinese Looks Christine Mok BOOK REVIEW Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 Jeanne Klein ARTICLE The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project Paul Gagliardi ARTICLE On Bow and Exit Music Derek Miller ARTICLE Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Jordan Schildcrout ARTICLE Issue 2 Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Sharyn Emery BOOK REVIEW Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Eero Laine BOOK REVIEW Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Erin Rachel Kaplan BOOK REVIEW Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director Richard Jones BOOK REVIEW The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Kevin T. Browne BOOK REVIEW Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Kristin Moriah BOOK REVIEW Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Johan Callens, Guest Editor EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Claire Swyzen ARTICLE Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Christophe Collard ARTICLE Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances Ira S. Murfin ARTICLE #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Ellen Gillooly-Kress ARTICLE Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 27 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom Jordan Schildcrout ARTICE "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 Michelle Dvoskin ARTICLE James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus Michael Y. Bennett ARTICLE Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama Andrea Harris ARTICLE Issue 2 Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) Jonathan Chambers INTRODUCTION The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Brian Eugenio Herrera ARTICLE Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Kee-Yoon Nahm ARTICLE Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Bradley Stephenson ARTICLE Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Samuel Shanks ARTICLE Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Copy of Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 38 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 2 SPECIAL ISSUE INTRODUCTION 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” Khalid Y. Long and Le’Mil Eiland ARTICLE “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Isaiah Matthew Wooden ARTICLE Reflections on Fundamental Principles Jonathan Shandell ARTICLE An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision Kellen Hoxworth ARTICLE W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond Kirsten Lee ARTICLE It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Kristyl D. Tift ARTICLE Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green QUEER VOICES Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T Bess Rowen PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Wild Duck Alexander Miller PERFORMANCE REVIEW Picnic at Hanging Rock Bess Rowen PERFORMANCE REVIEW Last Call: A Play with Cocktails Daria Kerschenbaum PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Dinosaurs Dominic Finocchiaro BOOK REVIEW The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Emma Futhey BOOK REVIEW Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. L. Bailey McDaniel BOOK REVIEW The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Lynn Deboeck Issue 1 Introduction EDITORIAL Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale ARTICLE Teya Juarez “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya ARTICLE Jewel Pereyra What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre ARTICLE Heather S. Nathans, Javier Hurtado, Benny Sato Ambush, Henry Bial, Kristoffer Diaz, Kim Marra, Harvey Young "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana QUEER VOICES Alex Ferrone Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill QUEER VOICES Benjamin Gillespie Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman QUEER VOICES Jen-Scott Mobley and Maya E. Roth Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. BOOK REVIEW Lauren Friesen Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. BOOK REVIEW Henry Bial Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. BOOK REVIEW Eileen Curley Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. BOOK REVIEW Sierra Rosetta The Brothers Size PERFORMANCE REVIEW Isaiah Matthew Wooden Dead Outlaw PERFORMANCE REVIEW Elliot Lee 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival PERFORMANCE REVIEW Lindsey Mantoan ZAZ PERFORMANCE REVIEW William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 NEW ENGLAND THEATRE IN REVIEW Martha S. LoMonaco, Editor, New England Theatre in Review Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 NEW ENGLAND THEATRE IN REVIEW Paul E. Fallon Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 NEW ENGLAND THEATRE IN REVIEW Steven Otfinoski Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 NEW ENGLAND THEATRE IN REVIEW Karl G. Ruling Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage