Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 15 Spring 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre By Bart Pitchford Published: June 15, 2024 Download Article as PDF In May 2016 the town of Saraqb, Syria lay in ruins from constant bombing by the Syrian regime. Buildings toppled and reduced to rocks were unrecognizable for the structures they once were. This town which lay about an hour south of Aleppo and twenty minutes east of Idlib was caught in between factions of ISIS and Jabat al Nusra (1) who fought for superiority of the region. From the top of one building that still stood, Mohammed from amateur theatre makers Youth Group of Saraqb gave me a tour of the area over Skype (2). He pointed out the building where he and his family lived before the war and each building they moved to throughout the violent conflict. From the mediated perspective it seemed like the building Mohammed was broadcasting from was the only building standing in the entire neighborhood. As he stood on the roof talking about the progression of Assad’s bombing campaign on Saraqb, regime planes flew overhead. Mohammed did not flinch because he knew the planes were on the way to Aleppo. At this point Mohammed was able to distinguish between bombing raids meant for Saraqb and those meant for another city. Amid so much trauma and destruction, resilience and survival are tightly bound to the present. The ability to continue existence in such a perilous and uncertain environment relies heavily on desire. For Youth Group of Saraqb, to move from moment to moment in their city required them to develop tactics for existence that responded to the fluidity of the situation. Rather than simply reacting to anything lacking in their lives like security or food, The Youth Group of Saraqb interacted with their current social and political environment to create unexpected modes of resistance that inverted the climate of violence and poverty in which they lived. Instead of feeding the endless war the Youth Group of Saraqb created theatre. While their will to live may speak to a larger hope at play, the tactics of simply making it through each day were produced through desire. Play from Saraqb Youth Group, 2015. Printed with permission of photographer. In this article I explore two case studies where desire produces and is produced by the theatrical moments in the work of displaced Syrians—theatre in education practice in a refugee camp and an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with a cast of Syrian children both in and outside Syria. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of desiring-production as a positive and primordial drive necessary for the survival of humans, I contend that amid unspeakable violence and trauma the artists discussed below carved alternative paths or ‘desire lines’ to their own survival through the act of theatrical creation. Countering an epistemological regime from Plato to Lacan that viewed desire as a “lack of the real object,” Deleuze and Guattari understood desire as a drive whose subject is real but not fixed. Desire does not develop because of the object that is missing. Rather, the object is a by-product of the flights of desire. Put simply, desire in humans exists, not because of unfulfilled needs, but rather because of human existence. Taken this way, it is desire that generates needs and not the converse. In addition to desiring-production, I intertwine a concept that arose from the physical geography field of study. French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, in his 1959 work “The Poetics of Space” spoke of “ Les chemins du désir ,” (desire paths). Over time, scholars in in the world of landscape architecture have morphed the terminology into desire lines. According to Urban Studies scholars, Naomi Smith and Peter Walters, desire lines are literally, “the grassy or muddy path inscribed in space where people have created their own route outside of those prescribed by abstract place makers” (Smith 8). Desire lines occur when people improvise movement from point A to point B ignoring, or in some cases subverting sanctioned pathways. Throughout this paper I refer to the tactics used by the artists as improvisatory because they are reacting to conditions by developing new and unsanctioned paths around official rules or obstacles. Like the Youth Group of Saraqb, the other examples I cite in this article inverted their circumstances to enact resilience, resistance, or joy in the present moment with little regard for any future impact. The first of the two case studies concerns the brave work of a camp resident using theatre to teach feminist thought in a Syrian camp in Jordan named Azraq. This teacher, Zabeida, constructs dramatic scenes based on internationally renowned women leaders from around the world throughout history, to provide alternative visions of womanhood that rival the early marriage model prevalent throughout the displaced population. She asked that I not use her name out of concern that camp officials would remove her from working if they discovered the lessons she taught. For that reason, I am using the pseudonym “Zabeida” in this article. Zabeida’s desire to teach combined with the Jordanian government’s refusal to allow displaced Syrians employment in the formal education system created the conditions which allowed Zabeida to design her own curriculum. By diagnosing her circumstances, Zabeida realized that her position in the informal NGO education system gave her freedom that was not possible in the state-run system which maintained a strict curriculum and did not allow displaced Syrians to teach. Working through the more liberal development system allowed Zabeida to address topics considered too controversial for Jordanian schools like sexual assault and female empowerment. For the second case study, I enter the digital space between Amman, Jordan and Homs, Syria where I examine an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that made use of unregulated video conferencing in order to perform a play with children on both sides of the border. Young actors at a recovery facility in Amman and in sieged area outside Homs used Skype to connect two locations through a single performance, while evading detection by the Syrian authorities. The lines of communication that enabled this production transgressed space regulated by the Syrian government. Desire, as a reaction force does not adhere to established pathways. It creates shortcuts outside, and often counter to, regulations governing private and public space. Romeo and Juliet Separated by War used satellite connections secured illegally by Free Syrian Army forces to house the video feed. This performance, which placed the actors in Syria at risk, also allowed them to reconnect with the world outside of Homs. Both programs discussed in these case studies formed through improvisation based on the desire to reestablish a sense of stability and belonging. Desire is fluid and unstable. It operates as a tactic from points of opportunity and then moves as quickly as it arrived. Neither Zubeida’s program nor the production of Romeo and Juliet were sanctioned or connected to official systems. They both grew organically from momentary conditions. The characteristics of desire open possibilities for the contestation of power precisely because it appears in unpredictable ways and spaces. Desire leaves traces that can point the way toward new forms of social interaction. The artists in this chapter answer to and produce new circumstances. Finding Crevices in the Map to Teach Feminism The ability to “make do” by finding the small tactical spaces in which to operate is driven by desire. As an affect, desire has a powerful potential to focus our attention on an immediate object. While the object of a specific desire may simply be a target of opportunity that produces desire by its presence and accessibility, sometimes the object of desire has been long sought and remained dormant only because there was no possibility for fulfilling it. 43-year-old teacher, Zabeida had long wanted to change the power dynamics between men and women in rural Syria. Zabeida fled from Dara’a with her husband and children during the war. First, she lived in Za’atari camp, but after two years her family was resettled into the desert camp in Azraq. Once in Azraq, Zabeida used her experience as an English teacher prior to the war to secure employment with Relief International’s remedial education program. Through her work as a teaching assistant in the camp, Zabeida drew from her experiences as a child bride to encourage her female teenage students to find their own power. The desire for independence and equality Zabeida had buried for decades now fueled her class curriculum. I met Zabeida in 2016 while conducting field research for my dissertation, Hela L’Wein: Performing Nationalisms, Citizenship, and Belonging in Displaced Syrian Communities . During the five-month period that I was in Jordan, I had the opportunity to meet and work with several different organizations and individuals working with displaced Syrians in Amman, Za’atari, Zarqa, and Azraq. Although I was only able to travel to Azraq for one day, it was incredibly instructive to see the stark differences between the camps in Za’atari and Azraq. Za’atari formed organically with little government oversight initially. By the time I went to Za’atari it was Jordan’s 4th largest city complete with a shopping area jokingly named Sham Elysees. Azraq, on the other hand, was conceptualized by UNHCR and the Jordanian government. It was a sprawling camp laid in grid squares with fences dividing sectors. In comparison to the frenetic energy of Za’atari, Azraq felt like a sterile suburban town. Prior to my visit in 2016 some of the key issues facing the residents of the camps were sanitation, education, and early marriage. While there were organizations working with the Jordanian government to teach traditional school curricula, many children were ineligible for these programs. According to Ministry of Education law, any child who had not attended school for three or more years, was not allowed to return. The ministry was concerned that children this far behind would not be at the same level as children their age. Additionally, the age discrepancy for children in this situation would be too great for them to be in class with children on their academic level. In other words, the ministry worried about putting thirteen-year-old children in the same class as ten-year-old children. To provide some form of curriculum to children unable to attend school, several international NGOs created a “life skills” curriculum to address areas of concern. Life skills, according to UNHCR, consisted of teaching proper hygiene with a strong focus on hand washing and personal cleanliness, conflict mitigation, professional development, and strategies to combat sexual violence. This last subject, sexual violence, was perhaps the most contentious because part of the curriculum addressed early marriage. Life skills instruction fell underneath UNICEF’s “Makani” program. Makani, which is Arabic for “my space,” provided a comprehensive learning space for children and teenagers. In the varied areas of the Makani program, students had access to support services, skills building programs, psychosocial support, on-site water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), and educational support ( UNICEF ). One of the primary organizations UNICEF tasked with maintaining Makani sites in Azraq and Zaatari was Relief International. Part of Relief International’s mandate was to provide “non-formal” education classes to students who were not allowed to attend the official Jordanian schools because of the amount of time they had been out of school. The “Drop Out” programs led by UNICEF aimed to prevent Syrian children from falling out of the educational system entirely. In coordination with the Ministry of Education, the non-formal education programs conducted by Relief International and other similar organizations, would allow graduating students to receive a tenth-grade equivalency rating in Jordan. This at least allowed the student to participate in vocational training and enter the work force. Additionally, Relief International operated a remedial education curriculum that provided extra education opportunities to students who were allowed to attend official Jordanian schools but struggled maintaining grade level standards. Relief International’s responsibilities primarily included space administration, program assessment, and training teachers in the specific curriculum (3). Neither Relief International, nor the other organizations administering remedial or non-formal education programs, were allowed to determine the specific curriculum or provide the teachers. The Ministry of Education in Jordan demanded that all classroom instruction level decisions remain in their purview. While there were likely other factors influencing the ministry’s control over traditional school curriculum, fear of job loss amongst Jordanian teachers was a primary driver. Like the anti-immigrant rhetoric seen in the United States, many Jordanian employment sectors, including education, worried that Syrian immigrants would displace Jordanian workers. In response to populist anger by Jordanian citizens over the influx of displaced Syrians and Iraqis, the government established migrant work laws that prevented noncitizens from holding certain employment positions. The “Closed Professions List” limited the ability of both migrants and Palestinian permanent residents from obtaining employment in jobs where Jordanian citizens preferred to work. The list, which the Ministry of Labor published in October 2016, named teaching amongst other high skilled professions such as banking, engineering, and business professional ( Briggs 14 ). This meant that no Syrian teacher residing in Jordan could teach without receiving express permission from the Ministry of Labor, which was only given in extreme circumstances. No matter how desperate the need or qualified the teacher, Syrians were not to be employed in this capacity, even in the camps. The inability to employ Syrian teachers in camp education programs weighed heavily on the international NGOs working in the education field. Although the Ministry of Education claimed to hire enough teachers, with enrollment sizes reaching 1000 students per space for primary and secondary levels, classrooms often went long periods without official instructors. According to Danijel Cuturic, Relief International’s Jordanian country office director, while there were many dedicated teachers working at the schools, it was common for several teachers to simply not show up at all. In order to ensure that the classroom had at least one instructor present, Relief International paied qualified Syrian teachers a small stipend to work as “volunteers.” While this circumvention allowed Relief International to place Syrian teachers in the classrooms, they were not allowed to pay the same salary to the volunteers as the Jordanian teachers received. Furthermore, Relief International could not remove any Jordanian teacher for failure to attend or accomplish educational benchmarks. This task, like hiring, fell exclusively to the Ministry of Education. Despite the inequality in pay, many of the volunteers appreciated the opportunity to teach the Syrian children. Not only did their positions allow them to earn a small amount of money, but they enjoyed feeling productive and needed. In some situations, the volunteers filling in for ghost teachers were able to treat the classroom as their own, adjusting the curriculum delivery method to suit their personal style of instruction (4). This was the situation for Zabeida. Her experience as an English teacher prior to the war qualified her to volunteer for Relief International as a remedial education assistant. According to several staff members at the Relief International Makani, Zabeida was one of their most successful teachers. As an English and History teacher, she regularly used theatre as an integral part of her pedagogy. For example, Zabeida recalled to me that back in Dara’a she regularly taught Shakespeare’s history plays as a way access European history and create links to Syrian history. In some class exercises she had students take on the characters of Henry V or Richard III to explore ideas of patriotism or political corruption. Zabeida intersected her belief in the tenets of Islam with a quiet fierce feminism that grew from her life experiences. At the age of 14, Zabeida’s father arranged for her to marry an older man in neighboring town. Although she dreamed of attending university and becoming a teacher, she followed her father’s instruction to marry. Early marriage in the southern province of Dara’a, was a common practice. Zabeida’s options, therefore, were limited both by the culture in which she grew up and her belief in the importance of respecting her family at all costs. Nevertheless, Zabeida successfully pleaded with her husband to let her finish school. In the first several years of marriage, while finishing school, Zabeida also gave birth to their first two children. In all, Zabeida and her husband eventually had seven children, all of whom fled to Jordan with them. Despite maintaining her duties as a wife in a conservative Syrian family, Zabeida continued her education eventually earning her bachelor’s and teaching certificate before becoming an English literature teacher at secondary level in Dara’a. Shakespeare, Zabeida insists, was her inspiration for continuing to teach and for incorporating theatre into her pedagogy. Due to her experience as a young mother, Zabeida makes women’s issues, particularly early marriage a primary focus in her classes with teenage girls. Despite being allowed to continue her education and eventually work as a teacher, Zabeida’s marriage, especially in earlier years was difficult. “At fourteen,” Zabeida offers, “I was not old enough to be a mother. No young girl is. She should be allowed to finish her education” ( Zabeida ). In fact, part of the reason that Zabeida believes she was able to complete her school was that her husband had another wife, and so he was not at the house much of the time. Zabeida’s theatre in education practice, I contend, is indeed a tactical strategy that uses the map of humanitarian assistance to empower a new generation of Syrian women with values that extend beyond the duties of motherhood. In one exercise, Zabeida assigns her students powerful historical women to research. Examples of figures Zabeida mentioned are: Oprah, Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth II, and Queen Zenobia (5). After a period of research, her students must craft a monologue or scene where the historical person is interviewed on camera by other girls in the class. Dressed in costumes that draw form their research, the girls answer questions related the history of the character. For instance, in one video, the student playing Queen Zenobia sits in a chair that has been decorated to look like a throne. Wearing flowing fabric covered with a layer of green chiffon, the student assumes an air of confidence and authority. Out of the frame, a person posing as a reporter asks her questions about her life as the queen of Palmyra: “How did you feel when your husband Odaenathus was murdered,” and “How did it feel to be in charge of everyone, even the men?” ( Zabeida ). Through this exercise, Zabeida hoped that her students would learn that women can have power and accomplish similar goals as men. Historical knowledge and generalized empowerment were not the only messages that Zabeida included in this lesson, however. In addition to the historically based questions, she also encouraged the students to ask the characters about more personal quotidian issues. For example, in the same scene where the student acted as Queen Zenobia, one question the reporter posed was about how the Palmyrenes viewed menstruation and how did they maintain hygiene during this time every month. In the Cleopatra scene, the student playing Cleopatra talked about how using make-up helped her feel powerful. Many of these questions would be considered taboo to discuss in public areas such as a school. Indeed, Zabeida claimed that many of the girls in the camp were not being taught about these issues at home. Perhaps the most daring scene that Zabeida shared with me was a video of a student who researched Oprah Winfrey. Zabeida explained that she and her students admire Oprah for her independence, intelligence, and charitable works. Many of the questions the reporter asked Oprah centered on questions about creating her own show, acting, living as a single woman without children. The most revealing moment occurred, however, when the reporter asked the student playing Oprah about her life before becoming a talk show host. Without trepidation, the young student playing Oprah recounted the poverty that Winfrey endured as a child, including having to wear burlap sacks for clothing. She also discussed, in character, being raped by men from her family and being pregnant at a young age but losing the child. She completed her scene by recognizing that even in the worst circumstances, a woman can use her intelligence and education to improve her life without the need for a husband. As theatrical practice in general, the scenes Zabeida asks her students to play seem tame. Theatre in Education texts are filled with examples of this type, where scene work intersects with history to open up previously unexplored questions about historical figures. When placed in the cautious camp environment, however, Zabeida’s pedagogy is not only tactical, it is subversive. While she recognized the danger of teaching material that questioned societal norms, Zabeida also understood that the change she sought for young Syrian women required a high level of risk. Because of the anxious nature of a refugee camp, organizations providing support services to the residents often refrain from approaching any subject that may seem sensitive or political in nature. While this sort of careful posture is prudent in many cases, it can also inadvertently strengthen certain forms of oppression. In both Zaatari and Azraq, discussions around normative gender roles was certainly one area that required organizations to be hyperattentive to cultural sensitivities. To their credit, organizations such as Relief International certainly did attempt repeatedly to open the debate over early marriage. In fact, the same day that I interviewed Zabeida, Relief International held a family day that included a skit about the danger of early marriage followed by testimony of several Syrian women who were married early. At the same time, discussions about feminine hygiene, sex before marriage, and rape were anathema to the patriarchal ethos and thus considered appropriate only between a mother and her daughters. For Zabeida to tackle such issues in the confines of the classroom, stretched the limits of propriety in Azraq. If officials outside of Relief International discovered the content of some of her lessons, she could have been forbidden from teaching in the future. Even worse, she may have been threatened from more socially conservative figures within the camp. Taken as a subversive action, Zabeida’s classroom scene exercise reconfigures the geography of patriarchy at play in the camp space of Azraq. The map of propriety for Azraq consists primarily of structures conceived, built, and institutionalized by the male dominated culture of southern Syria negotiating its own marginalization with the neoliberal powers of Western development organizations. Men must first approve any space displaced women might claim for security or growth. That does not mean that Syrian women in the camp are resigning themselves to the control of either the patriarchal or neoliberal forces. It is to say that women who wish to push against these boundaries must do so from temporary niches recessed within the corners and shadows of Azraq. Even as Zabeida uses a space provided by a Western organization, controlled by the Government of Jordan, and only with the permission of her husband, she inscribes in that space a politics of desire that generates a new understanding of gender roles in a traditionally conservative society. She plants seeds of feminist empowerment in a patriarchal landscape that will trace her presence and make visible a path for young Syrian women to follow. Virtual Desire Lines In Azraq, Zabeida marked a space in between the cultural patriarchy, governmental authority, and international development regime where young women could explore feminist topics in safety. Her use of theatre in education relies on the immediacy and instability of desire. Zabeida created lines of desire through her physical presence interacting with feminist tactical opportunities. Similarly, the second case study, Romeo and Juliet Separated By War , relies on the improvisatory nature of desire, but explores the transgression of authorized space through virtual lines of desire. With the help of satellite equipment stolen from the regime by the Free Syrian Army providing bandwidth for Skype communications, young actors under siege in the suburban area, al-Waer, that lies just to the east of Homs, Syria were able to perform a play with young actors displaced in Amman, Jordan. Driven by the desire to touch even if digitally, their homeland, several children living in a recovery facility in Amman rehearsed an adapted version of Romeo and Juliet. At the same time, another group of children, driven by the desire to imagine an existence outside of the violence and war surrounding them, secretly rehearsed in an apartment in al-Waer. Eventually the two casts met through a combination of computers, cameras, and screens. Their rehearsals and performances opened momentary pathways through borders and conflict zones allowing the children to make a unified plea for the violence and killing to stop. Souriyat Across Borders is a hospice for war wounded Syrians who are recovering from severe injuries suffered as a result of the war. The nonprofit center was founded and continues to be run exclusively by Syrian women who were themselves displaced to Jordan. Located near the University of Jordan in Amman, Souriyat houses Syrians of all ages with physically debilitating injuries. The older residents staying in the hospice have a decidedly pro-revolution political affiliation. In fact, many of the audience members present for the performances of Romeo and Juliet arrived at Souriyat after being injured in skirmishes with the Syrian Army or al-Dawlah al-Islamïyah (Islamic State). At the same time there were children living in Souriyat who fell victim to the barrage of barrel bombs dropped from the Syrian and Russian planes. For example, the eleven-year-old boy who played Romeo lost the full use of his right leg when he ran to escape a falling bomb. Image of children in Homs performing Romeo and Juliet Separated by War with children in Amman over Skype, 2015. Still taken from video by Nawar Bulbul. Syrian actor and director Nawar Bulbul, who is more widely known for his work in Middle Eastern Ramadan dramas like Bab al Hara or films like Demashq Tatakallam developed the idea in 2013 after completing his notable project Shakespeare in Zaatari (6). Bulbul, who is from a notable theatre and opera family in Homs, Syria (7), chose to work at Souriyat for this production because UNHCR and the Jordanian government prohibited him from continuing to work with the children in Zaatari because he was not a licensed NGO. Still wanting to work with Syrian children, Bulbul approached Souriyat with his idea for producing Romeo and Juliet over Skype with children in Homs. Considering that one of Souriyat’s primary focuses is on the children wounded in the Syrian war, the board allowed Bulbul and the actors to use the roof of the facility which had a large empty storage room. Bulbul worked to secure a performance space and adapt the script while Abu Ameen, a drama teacher and pro-revolution activist, worked with his teenaged students to make masks and develop rules to maintain their anonymity. Most of the young cast lived in Homs, but Abu Ameen fled Homs which was under the occupation of the governmental forces to the Free Syrian controlled suburban enclave al-Waer. By January of 2015, the regime forces in Syria had taken control of the entire city of Homs. Serving as the heart of the revolution, Homs had initially resisted attempts by the military to quell the 2011 marches. Because of their resiliency, citizens in Homs gave life to the revolution after the protests temporarily died out in Dara’a. But with Hezbollah reinforcing the Syrian military, the Free Syrian Army were forced to evacuate Homs in May 2014 ( Zuhur ; Sherlock and Samman ). While the most vocal and known activists moved with the Free Syrian army to al-Waer, other anti-Regime citizens remained in Homs living under a cloud of suspicion from Syrian intelligence. The Syrian regime forced people remaining in the city to sign a declaration of loyalty to President Bashar al Assad. Although many people signed it, they remained silently hopeful that the revolution would succeed. This included the parents of the children participating in Romeo and Juliet. Any activity deemed subversive likely would be met with prison, torture, and possibly death. The regime intelligence apparatus likely would have considered any theatre potentially subversive. But performing theatre over the internet in collaboration with Ameen and Bulbul, who were considered dissidents, would certainly have registered as an act of treason against the regime. Nevertheless, the parents allowed their children to make the treacherous journey from Homs across oppositional lines to al-Waer five times per week for four months ( Ameen ). Over those four months, Ameen and Bulbul rehearsed Romeo and Juliet with both groups of children. In the mornings, Bulbul traveled to the Souriyat building and rehearsed with the Amman group for three hours. Working in a small activity room with speckled brown concrete floors and white walls lined with the children’s artwork, the cast in Amman traded positions reading the lines played by the actors in al-Waer. Then between noon and three in the afternoon, Ameen brought the children to his temporary apartment for rehearsal. The timing varied daily in order to avoid creating a predictable pattern of movement that could make capturing them easier. Returning home from Souriyat, Bulbul waited for an email from Ameem to say that the children were ready. Then Bulbul would call Ameen on Skype for the group to begin rehearsal. While Bulbul directed, Ameen took notes and read the Amman casts’ roles. After two months of meeting in this way, Bulbul and French scenographer, Jean Yves Bizien, cleared the rooftop of Souriyat, and multimedia designer, Hassan Muhra, completed the Skype projection installment. This allowed the two casts to rehearse together for the first time. Until this point, the children in Amman and Homs had not met each other. The first meeting, which Muhra captured on video, was a moment of joy for both those in Amman and al-Waer. Bulbul had the children standing in a group behind him in Amman, while in al-Waer Ameen kept the children out of camera frame. After a few minutes of adjusting the camera image so that it was clear, and ensuring that the sound preferences were all correct, Ameen instructed the children in al-Waer to enter the frame. As soon as the two groups saw each other they both giggled coyly. Ameen noted that the children in Syria desperately wanted to make this connection with other Syrian children living outside of the war. At the same time, Bulbul explained that seeing the children in Syria for the first time, reminded the children in Amman that they were still connected to the country. The giggling, Bulbul speculated, was a combination of the children processing these complex emotions bound up with the romantic connotations at play in Romeo and Juliet. After a few moments of feigned embarrassment, the children composed themselves and Bulbul introduced the actors from Amman. Ameen followed by introducing the actors in the al Waer apartment. For two months following this initial introduction, the children forged a virtual bond necessary for the performance and psychological benefit of each. The ability for the children to meet and perform Romeo and Juliet relied on a confluence of tactics and technologies that created enough space for the project to exist temporarily and then leave traces in the act of its disappearance. In a physical way, the Syrians involved in creating Romeo and Juliet located pockets in the crevices of the map, from which they could contest power. In al-Waer, just outside of Homs, under the protection of the Free Syrian Army, Ameen and the children worked from a private apartment. The regime, however, continued advancing towards this suburban enclave from its regained position in Homs. This meant that during rehearsals and performances the group endured regular shelling from mortar rounds and barrel bombs. In a particularly tense moment during the first performance, when the siege was audible in the background, the internet connection severed leaving the audience in Amman to wonder if the apartment in al-Waer had been struck. Adding to the already perilous situation of producing a play while under bombardment, the four children participating lived in a regime held neighborhood in Homs. As mentioned earlier, regime forces captured Homs a few months prior to the beginning of rehearsals. For four months, five days per week, Ameen drove through the front line between opposition and regime forces in order to pick the children up for rehearsals. Describing his drive back from Homs, Ameen noted that there was one road on which he had to travel where the regime forces positioned snipers on the rooftops. Both entering and exiting the area on this road, Ameen recalls having to drive quickly in a specific lane because it created a difficult angle for the snipers attempting to shoot. Additionally, he varied the days and times of the rehearsals, some days picking the children up at 2pm, then the next day at 5pm. In this manner he avoided predictability making it more difficult to become a target ( Ameen ). During a documentary produced by Arte TV called Jordan: Romeo and Juliet, Love at War , Ameen drove a reporter through the streets of al-Waer after dropping the children off following rehearsal. The landscape was littered with debris from the war, crumbling buildings that the Syrian forces destroyed, and charred automobiles parked wherever they had been when the fighting began. Ameen, acknowledged the risk he and the children took by performing this play on the internet. At the same time, he argues that to be silent in the face of oppression would be the same as agreeing with Assad’s brutality. The children’s parents, according to Ameen, agreed and were excited that their children were working with him and Bulbul. Of course, both Bulbul and Ameen admit that at the time of the play, all involved still believed that the revolution would be successful. Russia had not yet committed its full presence and the Free Syrian Army still held major areas in the south and east including Dara’a, Idlib, and Aleppo ( ARTE GEIE ). The apartment they rehearsed and performed in did not belong to Ameen, nor anyone else involved in the play. Its owner had allowed Ameen to live there with his family so that he could escape Homs when the regime took control. Prior to living in the apartment, Ameen moved seven other times to escape the regime forces who actively looked for him. In the camera frame, two rooms were visible. The room where the actors performed looked to be a small living room. In some of the videos and images a couch and other furniture was visible. The room in the background, which was separated from the living room by standard double door frame passage, was an office. During the performance, however, Ameen converted this room into audience seating. On the frame over the doorway, he and the children crafted a brick façade that mimicked Bizien’s scenography in Amman. Meanwhile, in Jordan, Bulbul and the children carved out space on the roof of a private building so that they would not have to worry about being censored by Jordanian authorities for presenting potentially political material. When Bulbul began working on the adaptation for Romeo and Juliet , he intended for it to be performed in Zaatari. When those plans were scuttled by UNHCR and camp authorities, he searched for another space. There are performance spaces in Amman belonging to the Ministry of Culture that Bulbul could have used. In fact, a friend of Bulbul’s from the High Institute of Dramatic Art in Damascus, managed one of these spaces. But using a government owned space meant exposing the show to the eye of the Jordanian censors. While the play was not explicitly political, at least not in a manner that would cause concern to the government, Bulbul’s experience with censors in Syria followed by his recent run in with Jordanian authorities in Zaatari meant that he was overly cautious in the way he viewed access to the work. Moreover, even if the Jordanian authorities did not attempt to censor the play, there was always the risk that Syrian intelligence would create problems for the production if it were held in a public location. According to Bulbul, following the media coverage of Shakespeare in Zaatari he felt certain that Syrian intelligence was surveilling him in Amman. He did not want to risk them creating a conflict that would derail the performance or harm the children. For that reason, he sought a place that had controlled access. This would be a tactic Bulbul repeated for his next play Love Boat (2016) which was performed in the French Institute in Amman. The spatial tactics Bulbul and Ameen employed linked separate spaces while evading the official flow of power. For Bulbul and the cast in Amman, the ability to operate in a space outside Jordanian authority meant that a performance absent government intrusion was possible. For Ameen and the cast in Homs, moving in the shadows and working from the apartment reduced their risk of imprisonment, torture, or death. In Syria’s current state of exception, the regime heavily regulates the landscape. Even though the group was in al-Waer this space was not entirely safe from the state. As Giorgio Agamben notes, in the state of exception there is no space free from government intrusion ( Agamben ). It is quite literally a matter of one’s life that under the suspension of the rule of law, those seeking to subvert an oppressive state create their own map of shadows with trajectories that travelled in between them. Ameen’s use of satellite communications in order to generate anti-regime theatre is, by itself a production of desire that uses the structures and geographies of the powerful tactically to reach beyond the map of the Syrian revolution into the international sphere. Ameen, operated from space within the Syrian borders. Although the Free Syrian Army defended this position from the Syrian regime, under the logic of the nation-state, it still belonged to the government. Using defense terminology, the land under Free Syrian Army Control was occupied by illegal opposition forces. Al-Waer, the area from where Ameen broadcast Romeo and Juliet was cordoned off on all sides by regime forces (ACAPS). The only option for the children in Homs and Ameen to connect with anyone outside of the nation’s border, was through the internet. Even with proxy servers, using the regime’s infrastructure to propagate anti-regime material meant both being in regime-controlled areas and risking detection due to the surveillance of online traffic by the Ministry of Information. Using satellite communications, therefore, was the group’s only alternative. Furthermore, the technology required for this communication, although currently in the possession of the Free Syrian Army, originally belonged to the regime. Members of the Syrian Army took the equipment when they defected to the Free Syrian Army once Assad began assaulting civilians. Romeo and Juliet , therefore, relied on equipment purchased by the regime in order to cross regime-controlled territory into Jordanian communication space. This re-appropriation of equipment is commonplace in insurgency situations where the oppositional forces requisition regime equipment for operational communication. What is most extraordinary about this tactical use of regime technology is that it was employed in service of theatre as a revolutionary apparatus. In insurgencies communications are an essential element to the success of operations. The Free Syrian Army, as the primary insurgency force in this area, recognized the political value in this theatrical project, and enabled it through use of critical satellite resources. The Tactics of Desire Beyond its own cartographic inversion, Romeo and Juliet Separated by War circulates within a larger milieu of work that argues effectively for the revolutionary value of theatre. That the Free Syrian Army in al-Waer saw it as important, underscores the ability theatre has in crafting scenarios that imagine life inside and beyond the revolution. One production alone did not create this understanding though. Romeo and Juliet Separated by War must be viewed in concert with other anti-regime productions such as Shakespeare in Zaatari and Love Boat. These works must also be coupled with the activist performances by artists such as the late May Skaff who helped lead the effort to collect over 300 artist and scholar signatures on the “Milk Statement,” which responded to the initial crisis in Dara’a by demanding that humanitarian aid supplies be delivered to those under siege in the southern Syrian province ( Ziter "Clowns" 140, 45 ). Even more important is to place these performances besides others that have yet to be told. All these individual performers and groups are led by desire to produce. In one example, Zabeida’s revolution applied broadly to an oppressive patriarchy rather than to a dictatorial regime or failed international humanitarian response. Zabeida working in Azraq wanted to show the teenage girls in her class that they did not have to accept the role of caretaker assigned to them by the male dominated culture. Through performance she created a vocabulary for the girls to find value in their intellectual capacity. In the other example, the children in Homs and Amman, along with Ameen and Bulbul, operated within and counter to physical and technological limitations. Both groups needed to connect—Homs with those outside Syria and Amman, those within. Furthermore, they had a drive to scream to the world about the violence occurring in Syria. The desire to produce for both groups mentioned in this article worked instinctually to push life forward despite desperate circumstances. Although each of their desires manifested in some sort of cultural product, neither the product, nor accumulation of any object, was the focus of their desires. For Zabeida, desire produced an opportunity to teach young women about their value. This need to teach for Zabeida recurrently appeared in her life as a displaced Syrian in both Azraq and Zaatari. Of course, in Azraq it led her to seek a volunteer position in teaching with Relief International. Prior to this experience, however, Zabeida lived in Zaatari with her family. While there she adopted five siblings whose parents were killed during the war in Syria ( IRC ). Likewise, Bulbul, Ameen, and the children of Romeo and Juliet Separated By War wanted to connect with each other and remember what it was like to play and enjoy life as Syrians. The children in Homs needed to imagine a life outside of the daily bombardments and violence. The children in Amman needed to know that Syria still existed. Neither Zabeida’s theatre in education practice nor Romeo and Juliet Separated By War originated in a desire aimed at an object or accumulation. These moments of performance were born from desire. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Jabhat al Nusra was the name for an Al Qaeda affiliated militia in Syria that was active in the war. In late 2016 this militia changed in name to As Jabhat Fatah al Sham. Although Mohammed publicly posts anti-regime skits on Facebook regularly, I am using only his first name out of respect for his safety. According to the 2017 Terms of Reference for Service Contracting, the NGO Questscope was given sole teacher training responsibility for the Drop Out program. A ghost teacher is a teacher that is on the official record for the Ministry of Education as teaching at a specific school, is being paid for this position, but does not actually report to work. This is often used as a method for ministry officials to provide a salary to relatives or friends. Palmyrene queen in from 240 – 274 AD. Shakespeare in Zaatari was Nawar Bulbul’s first creation with displaced Syrian children in Jordan. This play included over 100 children in Zaatari Refugee Camp performing an altered version of King Lear . It was first performed on March 27, 2014. See: Pitchford, Gerald Barton. 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"Reading Two Greek Refugee Plays in the Season of the Syrian Refugee Crisis." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 33.1 (2018): 9-29. Print. Ziter, Edward. "Clowns of the Revolution: The Malas Twins and Syrian Oppositional Performance." Theatre Research International 38.2 (2013): 137. Print. Ziter, Edward Blaise. "The Syria Trojan Women: Rethinking the Public with Therapeutic Theater." Communication and the Public 2.2 (2017): 177-90. Print. Zuhur, Sherifa. "The Syrian Opposition: Salafi and Nationalist Jihadism and Populist Idealism." Contemporary Review of the Middle East 2.1-2 (2015): 143-63. Print. References About The Author(s) Bart Pitchford is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Directing at the University of Montevallo. In 2019, He graduated with his PhD in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin. Bart’s scholarly focus is on Syrian theatre after the 2011 revolution, particularly the work of Nawar Bulbul. Bart also writes about the intersection of theatre, war, and the military. Some of Bart’s invited speaker engagements include Howlround Military and the Arts Convergence, Great River Shakespeare Theatre Festival, and Texas Creative Forces Arts and Military Conference. Bart’s publications include multiple essays and articles in American Theatre Magazine, Theatre Topics, and chapters in the books Performance in Militarized Cultures (2017) and Arabs, Politics, and Performance (Expected Publication in 2022) . Bart is also a cofounding member of the Middle Eastern Theatre focus group at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Previous Next Attribution:

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 17 Spring 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre By Tiran Manucharya Published: May 12, 2025 Download Article as PDF Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre . By Amina ElHalawani. London and New York: Routledge, 2024; pp. 170 + x. Reviewed by Tiran Manucharyan Amina ElHalawani’s monograph Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre is a detailed study of the transformative potential of theatre in the political development of a country through the examples of intersections between theatre and politics in Egyptian and Irish contexts. Clearly, an essential inspiration for the author is the unique place of the play Waiting for Godot (1952) by the Irish-born playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-1959) in Egyptian theatre tradition. A notable example of Beckett’s influence in Egypt is the frequent comparison, including by ElHalawani, of one of the country’s most influential plays, The Farfurs (1964, Al-Farafir ) by Yusuf Idris (1927-1991), with Beckett’s masterpiece. References to Beckettian characters and scenes are abundant in the work of many of Idris’s compatriots of his time, some of whose work is incorporated into ElHalawani’s study. Today, too, Beckett’s work continues to speak to issues within Egyptian society, evidenced by the periodic revisits to his plays on Egyptian stages. The 2015 production of Waiting for Godot , directed by Ahmed Sobhi, or the 2024 production of Endgame (1957), directed by El-Saeed Qabil, both on the stage of Cairo’s E-Taliaa Theatre, are only a couple of such examples. This significant and ongoing influence of Beckett on Egyptian theatre indicates that the topic of ElHalawani’s monograph has the potential to make a timely and pertinent contribution to the study of Egyptian theatre. ElHalawani’s take on Beckett’s work is in line with the almost canonized perception of it among Egyptian playwrights and directors, interpreting Waiting for Godot as a play that turns theatre into “the arena in which rebellion is not only suggested but performed” (90). In this stance, the author is inspired by the highly prominent Egyptian playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim’s (1898-1987) experiments with the Theatre of the Absurd, in which life is depicted “as constant struggle” (75), and Michael Y. Bennett’s reading of Waiting for Godot as “a recast myth of Sisyphus” (76). Building on this standpoint, ElHalawani’s book narrates a convincing history of direct and indirect dialogue between the Irish and Egyptian theatres of rebellion. The monograph incorporates comparative analyses of the work of a handful of Egyptian and Irish playwrights. Egyptian theatre is represented with plays by Tawfiq al-Hakim, Mikhail Roman (1924-1973), Yusuf Idris, and Salah Abdul-Saboor (1931-1981), and Irish theatre with those by Brian Friel (1929-2015), Frank McGuinness (b. 1953), Christina Reid (1942-2015), and Samuel Beckett. Given the significant development and influence of Beckett’s work beyond Irish shores, the inclusion of his work in the scope of a book, which discusses specific national theatres, with a stress on the word ‘national’, is a bold decision by ElHalawani. Yet this is well argued: it is an attempt “to complicate the relation between the centre and periphery exactly through such ambiguous figures [i.e. Beckett and William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)]” (11). The study strongly emphasises the belief in theatre’s potential to “effect change” (5). As ElHalawani clarifies, her book “presents a gesture of reading global modernist texts in local contexts, which gives way to new approaches of understanding complex moments of social change entangled within global histories of colonialism and decolonization” (12). The book opens with the story of the Irish playwright and theatre manager Lady Augusta Gregory’s (1852-1932) visit to Cairo, and her acquaintance with and admiration for the Egyptian nationalist Ahmed ʿUrabi, the leader of the 1879-1882 revolt in Egypt against the political leadership of Egypt and British and French control of the country. As the author states, Lady Gregory and Yeats’ project of national theatre has been inspirational for similar endeavors among Egyptian cultural practitioners. In her introduction, the author specifically mentions the most prominent examples of such attempts in Egyptian theatre, undertaken by al-Hakim and Idris. She highlights al-Hakim’s emphasis on how indigenous Egyptian cultural forms were redefined by modernist cultural movements of the time. At almost fifty pages, Chapter One is the longest chapter of the book and makes up one third of it. Such length is necessary to provide the reader with the socio-political context to justify the comparative discussion of Irish and Egyptian theatres. Here, ElHalawani elaborates further on the development of cultural nationalism in Irish cultural production and Yeats’ involvement in it. The author stresses the difference between colonialist nationalism, which looks at “local cultures [of those colonized] as unworthy, primitive and backward”, and the nationalism of liberation movements, which attempt “to reassert themselves and the right of their nations to self-government” (23). In her analyses, ElHalawani incorporates references to and discussions of a wide range of examples from Egyptian and Irish literature, music, and theatre, placing the developments in theatre within the framework of the wider socio-political context and trends in the cultural production of the two nations. Among others, one of the most interesting sections in this chapter is that concerned with the involvement of women practitioners in the theatre scenes in Egypt and Ireland. The section starts by reflecting on the Egyptian playwright and director Laila Soliman’s (b. 1981) 2016 play Zig Zag , which returns to the attack carried out by the British army on an Egyptian village called Nazlit al-Shubak in 1919 and to the stories of the women raped by British soldiers during this attack. ElHalawani interrogates the absence of these women’s stories from Egyptian nationalist discourse—and their availability only in the archives of the British Foreign Office—as underscoring “issues of women’s rights and citizenship” (39). The author draws a parallel with the Irish director and playwright Louise Lowe’s 2011 play Laundry which revisits the infamous Magdalene Laundries, focusing on “the violence and oppression the women and children [in them] went through not only at the hands of the British Empire but even more painfully under the rule of the Irish Free State” (39). As she suggests, the disappearance of women’s narratives and names from the canonical narratives in history “brings to the forefront the question of the missing female names from the theatre canon itself” (41). The next three chapters analyze the key texts chosen by the author for her study. Chapter Three focuses on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , al-Hakim’s Fate of a Cockroach (1965, Masir Sursar ) and Roman’s The New Arrival (1965, Al-Wafid ). Through this selection of plays, the author aims to investigate the Egyptian playwrights’ interpretation of Beckettian absurdist tradition. According to ElHalawani, the Egyptian writers approached the Theatre of the Absurd as a mode that allowed them to perform rebellion in an era of gradually growing disillusionment during the 1960s, which contrasted to the atmosphere of euphoria and hope that the 1952 revolution brought to Egypt in the previous decade. The overarching argument that ElHalawani develops is that the shared “sense of despair in an existing world order” in these plays does not equate to “a despair in life itself” and does not deny “the possibility for man to give it new form.” Moreover, according to ElHalawani, interpreting them as performances of rebellion inside the theatre suggests that “a sense of contagious collectivity pushes for a new world order to be negotiated” (90). In Chapter Three, the discussion is driven by ElHalawani’s attention to the self-reflexive quality of Idris’s The Farfurs , Friel’s Faith Healer (1980), and McGuinness’ Carthaginians (1988). The self-referential quality of these plays, as ElHalawani explains, allows her “to examine the vision of three overtly committed writers concerning [the] transformative nature of the performative act and the different ways in which it can be achieved” (92). Engaging with Idris’s masterpiece, ElHalawani revisits one of the central, almost eternal, questions in Egyptian theatre, which concerns its form and content: what makes theatre Egyptian? This question has long perturbed Egyptian theatre circles, most prominently since the 1960s thanks to al-Hakim’s and Idris’s preoccupations, but arguably since its beginnings in the second half of the nineteenth century. As ElHalawani concludes, Idris’s play is in fact “a complex hybridity” that is “inspired by Western theories of theatre without denying its own authenticity as an Egyptian play” (94). ElHalawani’s conclusion regarding its content follows the same logic, suggesting that in it “the local is made global and then is reduced back to its specificity” (100). What unites these plays, according to the author, is that, through their self-reflexive essence, they enabled the playwrights to reflect on how they saw the role and the responsibility of theatre “to react to the past and present” and to “shape the future” (116). In Chapter Four, engaging with Reid’s Did You Hear the One About the Irishman…? (1985), Abdul-Saboor’s Musafir Layl (1969, Night Traveller ), and Beckett’s Catastrophe (1982), ElHalawani investigates “the correlational dynamics involved in performing oppression and revolt”, considering theatre’s power to turn its audiences into “a communal force” (119). The author argues that in these plays the playwrights are united in prioritizing “a more politically active audience” (121). As she explains, through their liminal quality and by breaking boundaries these plays bring reality and imagination together, turning theatre into “a space in which transformations are possible and where people can redeem their agency”. She goes on to conclude that the outcome is the transformation of theatre into “an interactive endeavour,” which empowers “the audience’s agency both in the theatre and in the public sphere” (137). As well as being a thorough study of the key texts from Irish and Egyptian theatre traditions, ElHalawani’s monograph is a rare example of scholarly writing with an engaging narration. This is enriched by the author’s inclusion of various theatre-related anecdotes, such as Lady Gregory’s above-mentioned encounter with ʿUrabi or Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s (in power 1954-1970) involvement in a school production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar . Thus, a valuable addition to the scholarship for researchers and students engaged with theatre, comparative literature, and the intersections between arts and politics, ElHalawani’s book can also attract readers curious about Irish and Egyptian theatres and the role of theatre in the resistance movements of the two nations. Lastly, the appendix of the book provides those who teach or study Egyptian theatre in English with much anticipated first translations of Idris’s opening remarks to The Farfurs and al-Hakim’s introduction to his Qalibu-na al-masrahi (1967, Our Form of Theatre ), a book in which the playwright manifested his vision of how a truly Egyptian theatre could develop. As a final note, I would like to highlight the recently rekindled encouraging interest of English language publishers in Egyptian and Arab theatre in general. One hopes this will result in additional publications on the subject, since—despite its not very long documented history—theatre in the Arabic language has produced a huge number of brilliant texts, many of which may help us to make sense of some of the crises we witness today, not only in the region but also beyond it. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Tiran Manucharyan is a Lecturer in Arabic at the School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews. Tiran holds a PhD in Arabic from the same university. His thesis looked at politically and socially engaged Egyptian theatre in the second half of the 20th and in the early 21st century. Published in 2024, his first monograph, titled Of Kings and Clowns: Leadership in Contemporary Egyptian Theatre since 1967 , builds on his PhD thesis, focusing on the work of the Egyptian playwrights Yusuf Idris, Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny, Lenin El-Ramly, and Fathia El-ʿAssal. Tiran is currently working on a British Academy-funded project devoted to the work of late-twentieth-century Egyptian women playwrights. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents O Lord! By Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour Review: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Patrizia Paolini Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK Patrizia Paolini By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF In April 2023, my work became the object of censorship—both indirectly and a posteriori . The precipitating incident involved a late middle-aged male performer appearing in a vest, a pair of cowboy boots, and a slightly grubby yet arguably innocuous pair of Y-fronts. The body reveal of such a character had been carefully constructed. It was informed by an aesthetic I share with my ensemble Jesus Paolini Park (JPP), and which makes satirical and critical reference to the biased perception of female versus male and young versus senior bodies. I am a theatre and live performance practitioner who has been based in the UK since 1997. Since 2016, my practice has been linked to Hoxton Hall, an original music hall in the East End of London. At Hoxton Hall, JPP and I developed Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret , a “deconstructed cabaret” and the focus of my doctoral research on “Post-Variety & Cabaret,” a theoretical, self-made term describing what I do: a form between genres. Extracts from that work, including the “Y-fronts,” were chosen by the artist and producer Margot Przymierska for inclusion in a programme designed to animate an evening in April 2023 at the Polish Cultural Institute in London. The adverse reaction of The Polish Cultural Institute (“a part of Polish diplomatic mission, dedicated to nurturing and promoting cultural ties between the United Kingdom and Poland”) to the material contrasted strongly with Margot’s judgment and with the work’s reception at numerous showings in Hoxton Hall. It was described by the event’s organizers as “obscene.” It was claimed, by the same organizers, that it had triggered a “recurring nightmare.” The sight of a mature male in Y-fronts was labelled as indecent. As a consequence, Margot was banned from the Institute and her fee significantly reduced. The ramifications of this night, a detailed account of which appears in Cabaret and Decency: How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped By Censorship have not just landed me in the thick of a continually evolving debate on censorship and propelled me into wider-ranging research on the correlation between contemporary censorship and the perennial “high versus low” cultural divide in the UK,(1) but have also caused me to reflect on how the experience may resonate globally, more particularly with the readership of JADT , as well as with the wider theatrical community of the U.S. Philip Fisher’s remark that “excessive behaviour [in the U.S.] is likely to be mirrored by equivalent extremists [in the UK] before too long” prompts the question as to whether the two countries could be mirroring each other, and therefore potentially learning from each other.(2) As Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “global cultural flows” has taught us, the phenomenon of globalization means that theories and ideas are spreading worldwide, from one place to another, with ease.(3) We are both countries where free expression is supposed to be enshrined in law. As a slew of recent articles in the British press point out, in both countries, censorship is creeping in and disturbing arts and artists, causing them to wonder how, or if, to act.(4) What, if anything, can the U.S. learn from the UK? Perhaps the relevance and potential usefulness of my own experience for the American artistic community is to be found in the insights that my reflection offers and the ensuing conversations that were held, rather than in a particular strategy or solution that should be immediately adopted by artists and scholars in the U.S. Any reaction to censorship, it could be argued, is particular to the context and may be dependent on a specific funding situation. Can we afford, in other words, to speak out? As Nicholas Serota told the Financial Times , “the role of Arts Council England is to act as a protector of artistic freedom, and if we don’t have that freedom, then we move towards living in a country where liberty of both thought and voice is constrained,”(5) adding that “we see plenty of places – look at the US now – where direct funding can be withdrawn as a result of a change of government.”(6) The unexpected reaction to what I call “the Y-fronts episode” has led me, both as a researcher and practitioner, to reflect on the current dynamics of censorship in all societies and how: “What we believe about censorship often reveals how we understand society and the self.”(7) In this regard, it would be useful to summarize at the outset the salient aspects of contemporary censorship discourse centered around New Censorship Theory (NCT). In Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After , Matthew Bunn offers a critical analysis of NCT. Emerging in the latest decades of the twentieth century, NCT’s central objective has been “to recast censorship from a negative, repressive force, concerned only with prohibiting, silencing, and erasing, to a productive force that creates new forms of discourse, new forms of communication, and new genres of speech.”(8) Bunn argues that in this way the controlling effect of censorship [conceived to prevent offences] has been shifted from state control of production and distribution [of speech], onto self-censorship and its dependence on the “market.” It is my hope that by raising questions and offering reflections, the conversations that follow with fellow practitioners and professionals will draw attention to the current censorship discourse and its significance to practitioners and the wider sector. The interviewees introduced below were each asked about censorship as part of the process of my questioning about what actually happened on that April evening in 2023.(9) TESTIMONIES The interviewees responded identically to two aspects of the subject.(10) Firstly, the word “censorship” itself provoked a whole series of hesitations: “Oh! Umm…”, “Oh, dear!”, “Umm!”, “Well... in which sense?”, “Really?”, “Hemm!” and “What do you mean?” This unanimous reaction to the term suggests censorship is not an appealing subject for discussion. Secondly, none of the interviewees were familiar with NCT. Both these reactions seem to indicate that arts professionals in the UK are reluctant to engage with notions of contemporary censorship. While leaving it to the reader to consider the questions that could follow on from this initial observation, it seems significant to note that, before proceeding with the interviews, I received the distinct impression that censorship was not their favourite subject. Interviewees were all asked identical questions. Rather than transcribe the full interview of each interviewee, I report each interviewee’s most distinctive approach to the issue. I have grouped together those who shared the same approach and highlighted similar and contrasting views. Benevolent Approach Expressed no concerns about censorship. John Callaghan British musician, writer, and performance artist. PATRIZIA: Have you ever been censored? JOHN: I don't think my stuff is susceptible to censorship, particularly because…I'm not swearing. I'm not attacking any particular government. I'm just being me.(11) Kieron Jecchinis Classically trained English actor. Graduated from Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1979. Film: Full Metal Jacket (1987). Theatre: West End. Member of JPP ensemble, played Y-front character. PATRIZIA: What do you think about censorship? KIERON: When I go and see some theatre I just find it so refreshing. You just think. Oh, ****. They can say that! And to be able to say that…it's just so affirming. PATRIZIA: …And the Y-Fronts? You’ve become a recurring nightmare to some staff. KIERON: I think there must have been some misunderstanding between the Institute and Margot.(12) Sarcastic Approach Approached the conversation with sarcasm. Margot Przymierska Performer, writer, facilitator and creative producer born in Białystok (Poland) and based in London (UK). Producer of PolBud Cabaret, commissioned by Polish Cultural Institute, leading up to the indirect and a posteriori censorship April 2023 . PATRIZIA: Do you think it makes sense to implement censorship in whatever capacity? MARGOT: …it makes complete sense to have censorship if you want to own the narrative or perspective on a particular thing. And if you want to silence the artist, maybe all the voices that disagree with your point of view. So it's a very useful tool. And, less sarcastically, MARGOT: I think if you want to have censorship, you have to put in place a clear mechanism. As Margot, was the direct recipient of the Y-fronts a posteriori censorship, our conversation expanded: PATRIZIA: What do you think about how the Polish Cultural Institute treated you? MARGOT: A real exercise of power and authority…they needed to appear like they're taking the complaints from the audience members seriously and they have to show to them that they have punished the person who's responsible … They told me – “You breached the contract…if I went to you and I've ordered something and you gave me a different product, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on. We would then refer to that contract. Like we didn't order this.” – Yeah, but, I don't make sausages in Tesco.(13) You cannot order something off the shelf because it doesn't exist. I'm making it fresh, fresh performance and it's not as finite as a sausage.(14) Reactionary Approach Strongly disapprove of censorship. Claire and Roland Muldoon Artists, entrepreneurs, partners in work and in life. Core members of CAST (Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre), UK counterculture and alternative comedy pioneers. PATRIZIA: NCT sees censorship as a positive tool to be used in society, as it facilitates the best way of expressing something without offending anyone… CLAIRE (in a gentle yet direct manner): It can hurt…It hurts people who are the right people to hurt. It is important to express what has to be expressed. ROLAND: I can't imagine it [NCT] working, really. Referring to their long career: PATRIZIA: So, you really were quite troublemakers? ROLAND and CLAIR (finishing each other’s sentence): Oh yeah, usually yeah. Performing, I mean, what else is there? Otherwise there is no point … that's the function (of performing) otherwise…You know, it turns into Hollywood.(15) Subtle, Necessary Approach The following interviewees are both heads of arts and cultural organizations. Stuart Cox Current director of Hoxton Hall, the music hall in Shoreditch, London, originated in 1838, and which has hosted my work since 2016 . PATRIZIA: Since state censorship had been abolished (in the UK), in 1968, who should decide how to control expression these days? STUART: You have to do it….Or the audience will let you know…the artist has to be cautious and question very honestly what might be the impact of their work. PATRIZIA: How do you approach circumstances related to censorship in your role as chief director of Hoxton Hall? STUART: … that basically is my role, in every aspect. So like you know … Do I pay this person this amount of money? What's the impact of that? Do I take this piece on? What's the impact of that? I'm looking at this piece and I see something that had caused me a worry about whether that is right…I have to really think about the decision around things, and that includes why you're telling a person they can't do that at this stage and just be very…true to who you are and those decisions…And I think I would hope that always when I'm facing those decisions, I try to do it with thought. And consider everyone in that process. Inspired by the Muldoon’s opposing view, I say: PATRIZIA: Maybe, rightly or wrongly, I'm sure, it may happen that there may be the need to…or maybe the feeling that it would be right… like we need and want to “break” something. They, the artist wants to do something that…it is a risk because it could…in fact, offend somebody, because it may be important to do so… STUART: You know, I get what you're saying. But…I still think that you have to kind of talk to everyone. You kind of like involve the artists themselves in this conversation…There has to be, I think…to move on something in the centre…and then make the kind of decision about that … In a positive way…(16) Karena Johnson Former Artistic Director and CEO of Hoxton Hall. Since 2022 Head of Creative Collaboration & Learning at the Barbican.(17) PATRIZIA: What’s your thought about current censorship? KARENA: I think it's a tricky time … the Internet and all that … although we might be in a live performance space, actually we still work within a digital landscape and the digital world allows you to say anything you want uncensored. And so the idea that you can behave as you would digitally in real life is not really … A tenable thing to do. PATRIZIA: Did you ever have to enforce censorship? KARENA: I think no, I've never really had to censor anything. Because, I think the work finds the audience that it speaks to… no one is going to come and pitch me something that’s going to be, like racist or sexist or homophobic, because all the organisations I've ever worked in are very clear about that and my politics have aligned very clearly with those institutions. However, it's only in bigger institutions … It's because of visibility. It has other things to deal with like, you know, like funders, like sponsors, like patrons ... Yeah. And I think that conversation, comes up when you have to deal with the bigger institutions... PATRIZIA: Who exercises control, censorship these days? Institutions or culture itself? KARENA: Yeah … big institutions, maybe are controlling or looking after or leading their culture, having different level of responsibility than you do when you've got a fringe venue … Also, I think that there's a very big difference between what an institution and what and artist might think is censorship or not. Is censorship saying you can't do that thing? Maybe, … or … It's not for me. I would say that's just a choice. But for the individual artist … [it] is important … that nobody should ever say no, and that if you're saying no, it's censorship. But I don't think that is actually censorship.(18) Within the industry, Cox’s and Johnson’s professional roles differ from the other interviewees (all artists), in that they operate in a realm between artists and institutions. This seems to influence their similar approach to censorship. To counterbalance the Cox-Johnson approach, we’ll look at another professional in a leading role at a cultural organization: Will Gompertz. The former artistic director of the Barbican Cantre and a former BBC arts editor clarifies his position on censorship by identifying “cancel culture as the greatest challenge facing the arts.”(19) In an interview in Prospect magazine, he responds to the question “What is the greatest challenge facing the arts industry today?” by saying: … it has to be cancel culture. The purpose of the arts is to question, challenge, reflect and enlighten. Great art reveals a truth, and debate and disagreement about the nature of that truth is a function of art. But such is the rallying power of social media, debate is being stifled by self-censorship and fear of disagreeing with the prevailing orthodoxy. Previous generations have fought hard for free speech; so must we.(20) Gompertz held his position as director of the Barbican Centre, from 2021 to autumn 2023. His appointment and resignation were surrounded by controversy. The beginning of his time at the Barbican, when the Centre was dealing with serious accusations of racism within the organization coincided with the need of a “long journey of cultural change at the Barbican”(21) as indicated by The City.(22) Dex reports: “The Centre’s director of Arts and Learning, former Tate and BBC man Will Gompertz, has been hastily elevated to ‘joint interim managing director’”, which lead to Gompertz’s final appointment as artistic director. Shortly before his departure, the Barbican cancelled Resolve Collective’s exhibition in the wake of “anti-Palestinian censorship.”(23) As reported, collective artist Yto Barrada’s statement, “We cannot take seriously a public institution that does not hold a space for free thinking and debate, however challenging it might feel to some staff, board members, or anxious politicians,”(24) indicates the complexity of the event. In a joint statement with Claire Spencer, Gompertz said: “During the run of their exhibition, Resolve Collective and their collaborators have been subject to a number of unacceptable experiences...…we are taking this situation extremely seriously and are currently working with the broader Barbican team to understand the details of what happened.”(25) A few months later Will Gompertz left the Barbican Centre for a much less prestigious position. Official declarations on the reasons for his sudden departure are unavailable. Gompertz’s relevance to this observation is his clear position on censorship, as reported by Prospect in 2023, a position not commonly shared or expressed by people of his profile. Coincidently, Will Gompertz, with the aim of making the Barbican a more inclusive and diverse center for art, education and enterprise, created the position of Head of Creative Collaboration & Learning at the Barbican to which the last interviewee, Karena Johnson, was appointed. Conclusion By bringing together the interviewees’ testimonies, this piece has raised several questions. On the one hand, we have The Muldoons encouraging a self-censorship that aims to protect the “trouble making” nature of the material; “otherwise there is no point.” On the other hand, we have Cox insisting on the importance of self-censorship as a way of being in control of the impact of what the practitioner says, in respect of all involved. Consequently, self-censorship could promote or have an adverse effect on what would be expected to be a controlled outcome. Is it possible, then, contra NCT, that what is called self-censorship could promote unwanted reactions? As a practitioner, it seems necessary to remark on the noticeable division between the Cox-Johnson approach and that of the other interviewees. The preoccupations and responsibilities of heads of arts and culture organizations seem closely correlated with the person in charge of these organizations. Gompertz’s case is a good example of the complexity of control at that level. The Y-fronts episode has unveiled artists’ inability to predict all possible reactions to their work. Also, applying self-censorship could paralyse the artist’s practice altogether if all possible offences should be considered by the artist. The vivid testimony of the final interviewee would perfectly elucidate my thinking. Factual Approach Ridiculusmus A multi award-winning theatre company led by David Woods and Jon Haynes that has been producing seriously funny theatre since 1992. PATRIZIA: What do you think about the Y-fronts episode? And what about censorship currently defined by NCT? JON: It makes me think about a walkabout act David and I did in Dublin in the 1990s. I think he’d nicked the idea from somewhere else. We walked through the streets following each other, joined by a rope tied in a noose around each of our necks. It seemed to be going well. Then a woman sidled up to me and said, “I find what you’re doing offensive because my brother committed suicide the other week.” How could you have applied NCT to that? Just not to have done the act, I suppose. One has to go about one’s practice under the assumption that with anything you do there is always going to be someone somewhere who will find what you do offensive (“And not in a good way,” as the saying goes). But then, following on from that, there will always be someone somewhere who finds the watered down, safe and possibly more insipid version of your original (or nicked) idea offensive as well. Which means that in the end you’re frozen and can’t do anything.(26) References Patrizia Paolini, “How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped by Censorship,” Comedy Studies 16, no. 1 (2025): 118-133. Philip Fisher, “Censorship Rears its Ugly Head”, British Theatre Guide , February 17, 2023, accessed June 4, 2025. https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/features/censorship-rears-its-ugly-head-592 . Arjun Appadurai. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2-3 (1990): 296. Natasha Tripney, “Cancel Cultures: Theatre Censorship Around the World”, The Stage , March 8, 2024, accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.thestage.co.uk/long-reads/cancel-cultures-theatre-censorship-around-the-world ; Lyn Gardner, “How Will Artistic Freedom Endure as Political Tides Shift?” The Stage , April 28, 2025, accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/how-will-artistic-freedom-endure-as-political-tides-shift-arts-council-lyn-gardner ; Kate Maltby, “Artistic Freedom in our Theatres is Being Lost to Fear and Self-Censorship,”’ The Guardian , October 12, 2024 accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/12/artistic-freedom-in-theatres-lost-to-fear-self-censorship . Arts Council England is a UK government-funded body. Founded in 1994, it is dedicated to promoting the performing, visual and literary arts in England. Nicholas Serota, quoted in Franklin Nelson, “Axing Arts Quangos Risks ‘Liberty of Thought’ Says Nicholas Serota,” Financial Times , April 18, 2025, accessed June 4, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/4229bcfe-80a4-4a62-b5f8-ec8f11d99976 . Matthew Bunn, “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After,” History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015): 29. Bunn, “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After,” 26. The interviews were conducted in accordance with the ethical requirements put in place by the University of Kent. The interviews included in this essay were conducted with ethical approval through the University of Kent, UK. Each participant provided written consent for their names and interview contributions to be published in this essay. John Callaghan, interview by Patrizia Paolini, August 27, 2024 Kieron Jecchinis, interview by Patrizia Paolini, December 7, 2023 A renowned UK superstore. Margot Przymierska, interview by Patrizia Paolini, October 8, 2023. Claire and Roland Muldoon, interview by Patrizia Paolini, August 28, 2024. Stuart Cox, interview by Patrizia Paolini, November 3, 2023. The Barbican Centre is a performing arts centre in the Barbican Estate of the City of London. It is owned, funded, and managed by the City of London Corporation. Karena Johnson, interview by Patrizia Paolini, February 2, 2024. Harriet Sherwood, “Will Gompertz to Become Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum,” Guardian , August 4, 2023, accessed November 20, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/04/will-gompertz-to-become-director-of-sir-john-soanes-museum . Prospect Team, “Will Gompertz: Cancel Culture is Stifling the Arts,” Prospect , May 10, 2023, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/music/61326/will-gompertz-barbican-cancel-culture-arts . Robert Dex, “Racism Row at the Barbican - How Did It Start and What Happens Next?,” Evening Standard , November 15, 2021, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/racism-row-barbican-centre-what-happens-next-b966025.html . The City of London Corporation is the governing body of the Square Mile, dedicated to a vibrant and thriving City. The Barbican Centre is in part of this governing body. Garreth Harris. 2023. “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of 'Anti-Palestinian Censorship' Row,” The Art Magazine , June 23, 2023, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Lanre Bakare, “Two Artists Withdraw Work from Barbican Show in Row Over Gaza Talk,” Guardian, March 8, 2024, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/mar/08/two-artists-withdraw-work-from-barbican-show-in-row-over-gaza-talk . Garreth Harris, “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of ‘Anti-Palestinian Censorship’ Row,” The Art Magazine , June 23, 2023, accessed November 18, 2024, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Ridiculusmus, Jon Haynes, and David Woods, interview by Patrizia Paolini, November 28, 2023. Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2-3 (1990): 295–310. Bakare, Lanre. “Two Artists Withdraw Work from Barbican Show in Row Over Gaza Talk.” Guardian , 8 March 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/mar/08/two-artists-withdraw-work-from-barbican-show-in-row-over-gaza-talk . Bunn, Matthew. “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After.” History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015): 25-44. Callaghan, John. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 27 August 2024. Cox, Stuart. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 3 November 2023. Dex, Robert. “Racism Row at the Barbican - How Did It Start and What Happens Next?’. Evening Standard , 15 November 2021. https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/racism-row-barbican-centre-what-happens-next-b966025.html . Fisher, Philip. “Censorship Rears its Ugly Head.” British Theatre Guide . 17 February 2023. https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/features/censorship-rears-its-ugly-head-592 . Gardner, Lyn. “How will artistic freedom endure as political tides shift?” The Stage . 28th April 2025. https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/how-will-artistic-freedom-endure-as-political-tides-shift-arts-council-lyn-gardner . Harris, Garreth. “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of ‘Anti-Palestinian Censorship’ Row.” The Art Magazine , 23 June 2023. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Jecchinis, Kieron. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 7 December 2023. Johnson, Karena. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 2 February 2024. Itzin, Catherine. “CAST (Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre).” In Stages in the Revolution , Routledge, 1980 Maltby, Kate. “Artistic freedom in our theatres is being lost to fear and self-censorship”. The Guardian . 12th October 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/12/artistic-freedom-in-theatres-lost-to-fear-self-censorship . Muldoon, Claire, and Roland Muldoon. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 28 August 2024. Nelson, Franklin. “Axing Arts Quangos Risks ‘Liberty of Thought’ Says Nicholas Serota.” Financial Times , 18 April 2025. https://www.ft.com/content/4229bcfe-80a4-4a62-b5f8-ec8f11d99976 . Paolini, Patrizia. “Cabaret and Decency: How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped by Censorship.” Comedy Studies 16 (2024): 118-133. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2040610X.2024.2404298?src= Prospect Team. “Will Gompertz: Cancel Culture is Stifling the Arts.” Prospect , 10 May 2023. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/music/61326/will-gompertz-barbican-cancel-culture-arts . Przymierska, Margot. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 8 October 2023. Ridiculusmus, Jon Haynes, and David Woods. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 28 November 2023. Sherwood, Harriet. “Will Gompertz to Become Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum.” Guardian, 4 August 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/04/will-gompertz-to-become-director-of-sir-john-soanes-museum . Tripney, Natasha. “Cancel Cultures: Theatre Censorship Around the World.” The Stage , 8 March 2024. https://www.thestage.co.uk/long-reads/cancel-cultures-theatre-censorship-around-the-world . Footnotes About The Author(s) PATRIZIA PAOLINI (she/her) is a theatre maker and live performance practitioner with over twenty-five years’ experience. Currently, she is working on a practice-based research PhD project, ‘Post Variety & Cabaret,’ at The University of Kent. Her broad career includes many original productions and collaborations. Since 1999, she has been an associate of Ridiculusmus, the award-winning theatre company that has produced, among other acclaimed works, The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland . Since 2016, her deconstructed cabaret, Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret, has been regularly programmed at Hoxton Hall, London. Her practice is the invaluable, rich terrain, base of her research which focuses on popular performance, the ‘high - low’ cultural divide, and social class dominance’s dynamics. 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 Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 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. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Michael Y. Bennett Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat Michael Y. Bennett By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Edward Albee’s 2002 play, The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? (Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy) , centers around Martin—a very successful, 50-year-old Pritzker Prize-winning architect—and how his family (i.e., his wife of many years, Stevie, and his gay, teenage son, Billy) and his best friend, Ross, react to the fact that Martin has been having an affair with a goat named Sylvia. In short, Ross turns on and betrays the confidence of Martin, Billy is beyond embarrassed and angry, and the once-playful-and-witty Stevie, ultimately, kills Sylvia, dragging the dead, bloody goat across the stage at the end of the play in a scene befitting of Greek tragedy. With these three characters vying for Martin’s attention, this play contemplates the fact that one cannot look in two different directions at once. Humans have stereoscopic vision: we have two eyes, but we can only see one image. Love is being seen, and that is why it is so significant that the moment, according to Martin, when Martin locks eyes with Sylvia is the moment that he knew he was in love with her. And the moment their eyes locked, nobody else (neither his wife, nor his son, nor the familial unit as a whole) could be seen. So, too, in Jesus’s telling of the parable, “A Certain Man had Two Sons,” more commonly known as “The Prodigal Son,” the elder son does not feel seen. The elder son realizes that he is not being seen or heard not just in the moment when his father would not answer his question, but the elder son realizes then, too, the fact that he never was seen during all of his years of being a good son and responsible person. Unlike the other parables of Jesus (which are, largely, didactic ), and unlike the other plays of Albee (which are, largely, tragicomic ), I argue that both “A Certain Man had Two Sons” and The Goat are, ultimately, tragic parables , as love and attention can be focused on a single entity, with everyone and everything else left to fall, unloved and unseen, by the wayside. The following four ideas open up Edward Albee’s The Goat to a biblical reading: 1) the name “Jesus” and “Jesus Christ” are uttered numerous times in the play; 2) Martin’s best friend, Ross, is called “Judas”; 3) John Kuhn suggests that there is a “ leitmotif of religious imagery” [1] in this play; and 4) in his earlier play, Tiny Alice (1964), Albee critiques the illogical nature of the Catholic Church. Furthermore, Kuhn has called the baby-on-the-lap story in this play, a “parable.” [2] However, the baby-on-the-lap story is not just a parable; I argue that the play as a whole, is the parable. I am referring to the the most complete and complex of Jesus’s parables: “The Prodigal Son,” or as biblical scholars call it by its first line, “A Certain Man had Two Sons.” POOF! And then it hits you: Billy, the son, is not a reference, necessarily, to a “Billy goat,” but to the prodigal, “Billy the Kid.” In Albee’s retelling of the parable, all of the characters in the play vie for the father’s (Martin’s) love, a goat/kid is sacrificed, and the father has two “kids.” Albee’s play, then, is a modern adaptation of “The Prodigal Son,” or, rather, Albee’s play is A Certain Man had Two “Kids,” where the focus remains on the impossibility of loving two things at once. In short, both Albee’s The Goat and Jesus’s telling of “A Certain Man had Two Sons” are cautionary damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t tragic parables , where the only learning that occurs is to try to avoid that which cannot be avoided: both trying to love two things at once and loving just one thing, yields tragedy. Current Scholarship on The Goat The Goat premiered on Broadway on March 10, 2002, directed by David Esbjornson and led, most notably, by Bill Pullman (Martin). The play immediately garnered a tremendously positive critical response, racking up major nominations (e.g., a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize) and receiving major awards (e.g., 2002 Tony Award for Best Play and 2002 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play). European (Vienna’s English Theatre, 2003) and UK (Almeida Theatre, 2004) premieres quickly followed, directed by such notable directors as Pam McKinnon and Anthony Page, respectively. While The Goat is over fifteen years old, the field has yet to fully coalesce around a single, central issue involving Albee’s play. Although, in part, because of the title and subtitle (and its call to understand tragedy), scholarship has revolved around two general concerns: the relationship between animals and humans and the nature of different theatrical genres. Deborah Bailin examines the relationship between humans and animals in Seascape (1975) and The Goat to show that what is at stake in this ambiguous relationship is what it means to be human. [3] Brenda Murphy also discusses the relationship between humans and animals in relation to Seascape and The Goat to demonstrate the ways in which anthropomorphism allows The Goat to reverse generic expectations. [4] Tony Stafford deals with genre in invoking the American Pastoral tradition with a nod to the relationship between animals and humans. [5] In “Getting Albee’s Goat: ‘Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy,’” Kuhn argues that, with The Goat , “Albee’s definition of tragedy reaches an intricate fullness.” [6] I, too, make this argument, but Kuhn and I argue it in different ways. Kuhn carefully shows how The Goat fits within the model of Aristotelian tragedy. Kuhn makes seven key points: 1) “Calamity couples with heroic achievement in a tragedy”; 2) Martin is a falling hero whose behavior threatens the heroic acts of a lifetime; 3) the play is a “double tragedy” for both Martin and Stevie; 4) Martin and Stevie’s hubris was “blinding pride”; 5) the play has a classic structure; 6) Albee clearly had the ancient tragedies in mind as he references the “Eumenides” and includes phrases like “tragic farce” and “flaw,” and Martin the hero is always onstage; and 7) “The play generates intellectual and moral insight.” [7] Kuhn further argues that “Philosophically, the Absurd is that existential disconnect between cause and effect which both Stevie and Martin describe: ‘nothing has anything to do with anything.’” [8] Elsewhere I have suggested that the plays of the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd” are ethical parables that guide the viewer to make meaning of his or her own life, which, I later call “absurd tragicomedy.” [9] Kuhn and I have different takes on the absurd in Albee’s early, “most substantial tragedies,” as Kuhn calls them. [10] In The Zoo Story , even though it seems irrational to Peter, Jerry makes sense of his murder-suicide. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) George and Martha are in an absurd situation: they want children, but the world will not give them children. But the play is not (solely) tragic as George and Martha, ultimately, make sense out of their situation and realize that they have each other and that that might be enough. Here, I disagree with Kuhn and want to elaborate on my previous observations. I argue that The Goat is a tragic parable because Albee created a situation, too absurd , too hopeless, out of which meaning cannot be made , moving beyond contradictions that can be resolved, and, thus, the characters live with an unresolved tragic situation. Just like at the end of “The Prodigal Son”—when the father’s answer to his elder son does not rectify the feelings of unequal treatment—in The Goat , the situation cannot be resolved, even with the death of Sylvia. Albee’s play is not only a commentary on social mores and contemporary views of sexuality and the limits of those views, but The Goat also forces us to re-evaluate the parable, which is possibly the most influential piece of short literature in the Western world. But while this article will spend some time re-interpreting this biblical parable, it does so to help us understand, not necessarily “The Prodigal Son,” but to further illuminate Albee’s tragic parable in The Goat and his conception of tragedy. Shedding light on how the parable is tragic reveals how Albee similarly sees the story as tragedy in The Goat . “The Prodigal Son,” or The Elder Brother: Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy In Interpreting the Parables , Craig L. Blomberg summarizes the three main approaches scholars have used in analyzing the parable of “The Prodigal Son” or “A Certain Man Had Two Sons.” First, there are those—especially Wilcock and Arndt—that argue that there is one point coming out of the parable: sinners should repent regardless of the gravity of their sins. Second, scholars such as Danker and Talbert understand the end of the parable as an argument that one needs to celebrate the salvation of others. Third, in what Blomberg contends is the most common interpretation, Thielicke, Schweizer, and Marshall suggest that the parable speaks to the power of the father’s love and patience for both sons. [11] Brad H. Young, in The Parables: Jewish Tradition and Christian Interpretation , reads the parable as a “crisis of broken relationships”: By dramatizing a family tragedy the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) focuses on the crisis of broken relationships between a human being and God. A person living without God is like the younger son running away to a far country. But the elder brother living at home with his father is no better off. He is much like a religious person who misunderstands the divine nature and lacks a meaningful relationship with God. The elder son does not show love for his father and struggles, perhaps unsuccessfully, to forgive his brother. He cannot share the joy of his father over the return of the runaway. [12] Young is right that this is indeed “a crisis of broken relationships,” but he places the blame on the wrong family member. He assumes that it is the elder brother who “misunderstands the divine nature.” However, is it not the father who grants the prodigal son his request, symbolically creating two “dead” beings? As David Wenham argues in The Parables of Jesus: Their Art and Use , since the son is “dead” and has lost his “sonship,” the prodigal son’s return is a rebirth: he is “born again,” which accounts for the joy at the return of the prodigal son. [13] What neither Wenham nor Young consider is that the return of the son is also the return of the father. [14] Because the allocation of a person’s belongings is usually saved for after his death—thus, the father commits a symbolic suicide [15] —the return of one’s progeny re-establishes the father as a father. The father, to use Wenham’s language, is symbolically “born again,” as well. The rebirth of the father solves the connective problem between the first and second parts of the parable and provides a cause and effect. The father symbolically declares himself “dead” when he gives away half of his goods and dies not just for his younger son, but for his elder son, as well. As the elder son explains, “Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment; and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends” (Luke 15:29). His father, in other words, was no father to him. The play on words with “kid” furthers this idea. In other words, thou never gavest me, not just a goat to eat, but you never gave me a brother to love and enjoy with my friends. The elder son did not know love from his own father, so how, in turn, can the father expect the elder son to love his younger brother, a “dead” son ? The elder son certainly did not bask in his father’s love, but in his father’s “commandments.” The rebirth of the father, with the return of the prodigal son, transformed the father from a law-abiding (or, rather, commandment-abiding) Pharisee to an open-armed and loving Christian. The key to this lies in the father’s symbolic “death” and “rebirth.” One wonders what exactly transpired during the father’s “death.” The elder son suggests that the father set up a series of commandments to be obeyed (“thy commandments”). The death of the fatherly impulse—the impulse to nurture—resulted in the birth of a Pharisaic being. Diverging from Young, then, this would suggest that it was the father who “[misunderstood] the divine nature.” The elder son, then, merely mirrors what he had seen and experienced. The parable raises the question of how one should rectify a bad situation. The standard interpretation of the parable’s answer to this question is through compassion and forgiveness. [16] However, the ending—the elder son’s silence—suggests that compassion and forgiveness do not solve all problems, and in cases such as this, create others. Forgiveness is not the be-all and end-all and responsibility is the foundation on which Christianity is built. In other words, forgiveness is a patch, but responsibility builds solid foundations. The younger son is irresponsible in kind with his youth. The father lacks foresight and, in turn, irresponsibly bestows enormous wealth upon a youth; he enables his son to become a profligate. Symbolically, both father and son become “dead” through the father’s bequeathment of his son’s inheritance. The prodigal son should have contrasted his father; instead, he mirrored him. When the younger son leaves, the father’s actions only confirm his own irresponsibility. If one chooses to be a father, he must accept the responsibility of nurturing his offspring, which the father never does. He never rewards the elder son for his good behavior. “The Prodigal Son” is a cautionary and tragic parable. The father’s irresponsibility causes two deaths: the prodigal son is reborn as a profligate and the father is reborn as a Pharisee. It took the younger son’s “rebirth” to jolt the father into responsibility. It is the younger son who first acts responsibly when he finds himself out of options and goes home and repent. The father simultaneously 1) greets the rebirth of his younger son through repentance and 2) is reborn himself by changing from a Pharisee to a loving Christian. The tale is cautionary in that because the father was not always ready to greet God (or the second coming—the rebirth—of his “son”), his elder son is affected by the father’s Pharisaic ways and may never be able to forgive first and experience the same rebirth that his younger brother and father experienced. Though both prodigal son and father are “born again,” the elder brother remains the parable’s lingering casualty because he has yet to be reborn. From Absurdity to Tragedy: Billy Goats, or Martin’s Two kids, or “Getting one’s goat” There are a number of possible allegorical readings of The Goat : one such possible reading being that, like Judas, Ross betrays of Martin’s confidence and friendship; Sylvia represents Jesus, as she dies for man’s (Martin’s) sins at the end of the play; and Stevie, similar to Pontius Pilate, crucifies Sylvia (Jesus). Of course, there is also a potential non-biblical allegorical reading which equates the forbidden love of a goat with a man’s once forbidden love of another man. As interesting as these allegorical readings are, they do little to help us better understand the play and, more specifically, understand tragedy, which is invoked in the subtitle of Albee’s play (i.e., Who is Sylvia? or [Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy] ). Instead, I suggest that the intellectual thrust of The Goat and “A Certain Man had Two Sons” are similar, and that the nature of these plays is tragic. The Goat starts out, in typical Albee fashion, with a series of relatively mundane questions which are only answered by a roundabout and circuitous dialogue. And, of course, much like many of his plays, it takes place in “ A living room .” [17] Why is the living room significant here? I have recently argued that Albee comes from a line of great American living room tragedians (e.g., Hellmann, O’Neill, Miller, Williams, etc.), with Albee’s innovation being that he introduced the tragicomic worldview to this classic living room tragedy particularly in his 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [18] If we think back to this play, the talk and ethos of the living room in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is clearly tragicomic, much like the dialogue and ethos of this living room in The Goat . Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is sort of a reversal of the Oedipal complex, where the “son” is killed off by the father, in order for him to sleep with/love the mother. This death of the “son” allows George and Martha to produce happiness, or at the very least, a new world that is based on reality. In Albee’s plays, sacrifice—especially with religious overtones—is prominent, which produces an effect of absurd tragicomedy . In The Zoo Story (1958) Jerry is a Jesus-like savior who runs into the knife, killing himself to wake Peter up from his bourgeois illusion of comfort, hoping to yield enough knowledge and awareness in Peter for him to live a better and more meaningful life. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the “son,” or the “kid”—like Jesus—is sacrificed and dies for the sins of George and Martha, allowing for the rebirth, not of the son, but their marriage and life together. While there is pain from the sacrifice, it is for their souls, as there is now hope for salvation, or at least, for saving and/or salva(ging) their marriage. The end is painful, and Martha is scared and experiences emotional pain, but the sun is also rising, and it is both literally and figuratively a new day for George and Martha. The tragicomic ethos that has produces both laughter and pain throughout the night appropriately produces a bittersweet ending: sad, uncertain, but also filled with new possibilities. In contrast, in having sexual intercourse with Sylvia, it is not Martin who dies—his wife, Stevie, mentions numerous times how she is going to kill him—but his sexual death is accompanied by Sylvia’s actual death at the hands of Stevie. The bloody stage at the end of the play is more typical of a Greek tragedy. Here, Stevie kills off the “kid” to attempt to save/salvage her own marriage, but with this animal sacrifice, everyone involved loses innocence, and all are irrevocably changed, but unlike George and Martha and Nick and Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Peter in The Story , without any redemption or hope of a better future. Martin’s Death and Rebirth Martin first becomes a father through a sexual death with Stevie. Billy is the resulting son, the kid, who is at the pivotal age of seventeen—the last year before adulthood and, presumably, leaving for college. Billy, his kid, is not “prodigal” in the traditional sense of the word as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary : he is neither “extravagant; recklessly wasteful of one’s property or means” nor a “reckless or wayward person; a returned wanderer.” But Martin, and certainly Ross, approach Billy’s homosexuality with a mindset from another era, believing that he may grow out of his sexuality: ROSS: Passing phase. Have you had the old serious talk?MARTIN: The “You’ll get over it once you meet the right girl” lecture? Nah, I’m too smart for that, so’s he, so’s Billy. I told him to be sure. Says he’s sure; love it, he says. [19] There is an implication here that Billy is having sex, and a lot of it. Here, Billy is at fault for the two maxims—“nothing to excess” and “surety brings ruin”—that follow the famous inscription, “Know thyself” at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. But, here, Billy does know himself. Apollo is the judge and features prominently in the Eumenides and within one page of the first mention of “Eumenides,” Albee riffs on the famous inscription at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, “Know thyself”: ROSS: OK? Ready? Ready Martin; here we go; just…be yourself.MARTIN: Really?ROSS ( A tiny bit testy ): Well, no; maybe not. Put on your public face. [20] This has the same tenor as a famous Jewish joke: A man goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doctor, I am so unhappy, I just do not know what to do. Can you give me some advice?” The doctor replies: “Just be yourself. Unless you’re a schmuck, though, then be someone else.” In the Eumenides , Orestes is being driven mad and wants the agony to stop: “I sing this song over the sacrificial victim, a frenzied, wild, song, injurious to the phrên , the hymn of the Furies [Erinyes], a spell to bind the phrenes , a song not tuned to the lyre, a song that withers mortals. Relentless destiny spun out our fate…” [21] Unlike Orestes, though, Martin does not want it to stop, and in many ways, the agony only really starts for Martin at the end of the play when Sylvia becomes the “sacrificial victim.” But with the death of the “kid,” Billy, the other kid in the play, no longer has competition and Martin is, in a sense, reborn as a father who can focus his attention on his single son. But the tragedy is two-fold: Martin appears to be a broken man and there needs to be a “sacrificial victim” for Martin to become a better father. In The Goat , the murder of Sylvia is tragic, and the tragedy of the act breeds further unhappiness for everyone. Nothing is going to improve, and every character is worse off. Unlike the deaths of the other so-called children in Albee’s plays, namely the “son” in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and “the baby” in The Play About the Baby (2000) which bring an end to illusions that obscure reality, Sylvia’s death in The Goat does not accomplish anything but death. There are loose ends, though: how will Martin, Stevie, and Billy function afterwards? But unlike in The Zoo Story , Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , or The Play About the Baby , neither the characters nor the audience learn anything from the death of Sylvia, and, thus, Sylvia’s death is meaningless. To Albee, it seems as though suffering can make sense, but only if it yields a newfound rationality to approaching life and the world. While the ending of The Goat provides no way to grow or learn from the tragedy—which makes the play is a tragic parable—for much of the play, Martin is simultaneously the most logical and most illogical character. Architecture happens, initially, by imagining the immaterial in one’s head, before transforming the immaterial to a material reality; builders and construction workers deal in the material, but Martin deals in the immaterial. Martin’s status as the youngest Pritzker Prize winner ever, indicates that Martin is something of a precocious genius. Martin’s youth (i.e., for a Pritzker Prize winner and for someone who thinks they may have Alzheimer’s), and his naiveté about his situation with Sylvia suggest that Martin is immature for his age. An immature male who deals in immaterial realities, however, describes most teenage boys, like Martin’s son, Billy, and Ross’s son, Todd, but does not often describe a 50-year-old man at the height of his career. Prior to the unraveling of the familial unit, Martin appears able to logically compartmentalize and understand all of the love and affection that he can dole out. This ability to bracket one’s emotions in a logical manner is a sign of nuanced thinking and maturity. Martin sees no contradiction in loving both Stevie and Sylvia. For Martin Stevie and Sylvia are not mutually exclusive lovers, not because he is polyamorous, but because Stevie and Sylvia are not in competition with one another. Each of his two lovers provides entirely different sorts of affection and worth. Stevie is a traditional spouse in that she is Martin’s best friend and lover. As Martin quips in a backhand compliment, Martin does not replace Stevie with someone else: STEVIE ( Quite matter-of-fact ): If you are seeing that woman, I think we’d better talk about it.MARTIN: ( Stops. Long pause; matter-of-fact ) If I were …we would .STEVIE ( As offhand as possible ): If not the dominatrix, then some blonde half your age, some…chippie, as they used to call them…MARTIN: …or, worst of all, someone just like you? As bright; as resourceful; as intrepid; …merely…new? [22] Sylvia is not a replacement; she supplements what Stevie does provide. Stevie gives Martin all the love, support, and intellectual stimulation that Martin needs. Sylvia, however, satisfies Martin’s love of female goats. Stevie will never be able to offer Martin what Sylvia provides; as Stevie rightfully observes later, “But I’m a human being; I have only two breasts; I walk upright; I give milk only on special occasions; I use the toilet.” [23] And the tragedy is Stevie is right. Though Martin believes that he and Sylvia fell in love with one another when they first locked eyes (“…and there she was, looking at me with those eyes…” [24] ), Martin and Sylvia are unable to lock eyes during their intimate acts. Martin is oddly correct when he says to Ross, “I’m seeing her.” [25] Sylvia, however, does not see Martin or any of this intimacy; Martin only sees the intimacy and not Sylvia. [26] While Martin believes that he and Sylvia are consensual partners—because Sylvia supposedly backs up into him, and not vice versa—during sexual intercourse, Martin (literally) can see only Sylvia’s backside, as she faces the opposite direction. The tragedy is that while everyone is jealous of Sylvia, Sylvia cannot even appreciate the love; she has no idea what love even is. This only adds insult to injury. Everyone is jealous of a goat, a being that cannot even process (or see) what she has. Conclusion In “A Certain Man had Two Sons,” Jesus tells a parable of the ultimate display of forgiveness through a father’s deep love of his son. Albee creates a parable that displays the capacity to immensely love, not just humans but any two beings who feel mutually seen by one another. But Martin misreads or, like a Greek tragic hero, blind himself to the situation: Martin never considers the base and simple emotion of jealousy. It is important that Billy is an only child, as until now, he has been the sole object of parental attention. But now there is another “kid” in the house, and everyone is jealous. Stevie is jealous of Sylvia. Billy is jealous of Sylvia. Even Ross may be jealous of Sylvia (since he loses his best friend because of her). Martin may be the smartest guy in the room, but he misses the most basic things (e.g., he forgets the name of his best friend’s son; he never even sat in the chair sitting right in his living room, etc.). So, too, our “certain man” justifies giving his younger son his inheritance and shows mercy is mercy by forgiving his son and welcoming him with open arms, but just like Martin, he never accounts for jealousy. The “certain man” of the parable cannot seem to fathom why his elder son is not excited by his brother’s return despite his failure to address the concerns of his elder. And the elder brother cannot imagine why the father does not understand his feelings because he twice asks why he has not been rewarded. And this is the tragedy of both parables: a display of love and attention begets jealousy. The greatest joy on earth, love, cannot exist without enacting pain on someone else, and this is the greatest tragedy of all: free love is never free. References [1] John Kuhn, “Getting Albee’s Goat: ‘Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy,’” American Drama 13, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 5. [2] Ibid. [3] Deborah Bailin, “Our Kind: Albee’s Animals in Seascape and The Goat: Or, Who is Sylvia?,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 18, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 5. [4] Brenda Murphy, “Who is Sylvia?: Anthropomorphism and Genre Expectation,” in Edward Albee and Absurdism, ed., Michael Y. Bennett (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 174-185. [5] Tony Jason Stafford “Edward Albee and the American Pastoral Tradition,” in Edward Albee and Absurdism, ed. Michael Y. Bennett (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 95-110. [6] Kuhn, “Getting Albee’s Goat,” 2. [7] Ibid., 3-29. [8] Ibid., 25. [9] See Michael Y. Bennett, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Michael Y. Bennett, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). [10] Kuhn, “Getting Albee’s Goat,” 1. [11] Michael Wilcock, The Savior of the World: The Message of Luke’s Gospel (Leicester and Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 149-57; William F. Arndt, The Gospel According to St. Luke (St. Louis: Concordia, 1956), 350. Craig L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (WestPoint, InterVarsity Press, 2012), 172; Frederick W. Danker, Jesus and the New Age: A Commentary on St. Luke’s Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 275; Charles H. Talbert, Reading Luke (New York: Crossroads, 1982), 147; Blomberg 172-3; Helmut Thielicke, The Waiting Father (London: J. Clarke; New York: Harper Bros., 1959), 17-40; Eduard Schweizer, The Good News According to Luke (Atlanta: John Knox; London: SPCK, 1984), 247-8; Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke (Exeter: Paternoster; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 604; Blomberg 173. Working from the scholarship of Cadoux (A. T. Cadoux, The Parables of Jesus: their Art and Use [London: J. Clarke, 1930; New York: Macmillan, 1931], 123.) and Stock (Alex Stock, “Das Gleichnis vom verlorenen Sohn,” Ethische Predigt und Alltagverhalten, ed. Franz Kamphaus and Rolf Zerfass (München: Kaiser; Mainz: Grünewald, 1977), 82-6.), Blomberg argues that the parable makes a separate point with each character: 1) With the “prodigal son,” one can always return home and repent one’s sins, 2) The father is like God in that he forgives anyone as long as they are willing to accept it, 3) The older brother should have rejoiced in his brother’s “reinstatement.” Those “who claim to be God’s people” should take joy in the fact that God extends his grace to the “undeserving” (174). As Blomberg argues, parables, and this one in particular, have allegorical meanings. The characters are allegorical in that “each character clearly stands for someone other than himself” (Blomberg 175). [12] Brad H. Young, The Parables: Jewish Tradition and Christian Interpretation (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, LLC, 1998), 130. [13] David Wenham, The Parables of Jesus (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1989), 111. [14] This surface-level reading which poses the question: “Should children be given their inheritance when they are young?”—opens the story and leads us to deeper meanings. First, this question works as extended metaphor: it is a question of what a parent owes a child, when a parent owes a child, what a child deserves from a parent, and when a child deserves something from a parent. With this request, a practically impossible situation arises for both the son and the father. The exchange of money is possible. What is impossible is that the father can no longer give his son something when he dies. This is also a reversal of expectations and a paradox, at least in our culture. Fathers usually give to their sons (money, wisdom, love, etc., which is not to say that the sons do not return love to their parents); there is an implied hierarchy. Therefore, when the father gives half of what he has to his son, part of him will no longer exist after that he gives the money away. The balance of capital changes the balance of power. It also changes the burden of responsibility. The father can no longer be financially responsible for his son. This practical quandary raises an ontological quandary. In the end, the father decides to throw a feast for his returned son. This is when his other son gets angry: “Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment; and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends” (Luke 15:29). The father has been thrown into an impossible situation; how do you please one son while not offending the other, or how do you shower one child with affection when there is another child waiting to receive an equal amount of affection? How can a father be a loving parent and please two children at once? This question, like in many parables, is never answered. We are left with the moral injunction to forgive those who have sinned, but the question of how to love is still left up to the reader. The reader must decide how the father should act in this case, or how they should act with their children. [15] Bernard Brandon Scott argues that “The son’s division of the property kills the father” (Hear then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989], 111). Again, I see it more as a suicide since, although the idea was planted in his head by the son, it was the father who carried out and executed the plan. [16] In suggesting that “A Certain Man had Two Sons” is a tragic parable, I am not arguing the parable does not praise forgiveness: one only has to look to “The Unmerciful Servant” (Matthew 18:21-35) and “The Two Debtors” (Luke 7:41-43). What I am arguing is that in “The Prodigal Son,” Jesus says that forgiveness is necessary, but that responsibility is mandatory. If the father was responsible, neither son nor father would have been “dead.” And, maybe more importantly, the elder son would not have adopted the Pharisaic nature of the father. Though, of course, “The Prodigal Son” is closely aligned, thematically, with “The Unmerciful Servant” and “The Two Debtors,” this new reading also aligns “The Prodigal Son” with “The Ten Virgins” (Matthew 25:1-13), “The Faithful and Unfaithful Steward” (Luke 12:42-48; Matthew 24:45-51), and “The Householder and the Thief” (Matthew 24:43-44; Luke 12:39-40). These three parables focus on how one must be ready and responsible, so that one will be able to be judged well when God comes at his unexpected hour. [17] Edward Albee, “The Goat: or, Who is Sylvia? (Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy)” in The Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1978-2003 (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2005), 538. [18] Michael Y. Bennett, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (London: Routledge, 2018). [19] Albee, “The Goat,” 551. [20] Albee, “The Goat,” 552. [21] Aeschylus, Eumenides, trans. Hebert Weir, rev. Cynthia Bannon, rev. Gregory Nagy, n.d., https://uh.edu/~cldue/texts/eumenides.html. [22] Albee, “The Goat,” 546. [23] Albee, “The Goat,” 575. [24] Albee, “The Goat,” 568. [25] Albee, “The Goat,” 568. [26] This does raise the question of whether or not Martin rapes Sylvia, as consent, for numerous reasons, is impossible to obtain from a goat. While it may be pertinent to some readings of the play, this question is beyond the scope of this essay. Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Sergi Belbel, Lluisa Cunielle, Pau Miro, Marion Peter Holt, Sharon G. Feldman | A Collection of New Works by Catalan Playwrights < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Barcelona Plays Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Sergi Belbel, Lluisa Cunielle, Pau Miro, Marion Peter Holt, Sharon G. Feldman Download PDF A Collection of New Works by Catalan Playwrights Barcelona’s theatre has experienced a remarkable renaissance in the years since the end of the Franco dictatorship. First, performance groups such as La Fura dels Baus, Els Joglars, Dagoll-Dagom, and la Cubana flourished with distinctive productions in which spectacle and movement predominated. In 1976, the Teatre Lluire began to set new production standards with a repertory or international plays. Soon the Catalan language, suppressed for more than three decades, became the vehicle of expression for new playwrights who challenged the performance groups with a “teatre de text”. The new plays in this collection represent outstanding playwrights of three generations. Benet i Jornet won his first drama award in 1963, when he was only twenty-three years old, and in recent decades he has become Catalonia’s leading exponent of thematically challenging and structurally inventive theatre. His plays have been performed internationally and translated into fourteen languages, including Korean and Arabic. Sergi Belbel and Lluïsa Cunillé arrived on the scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with distinctive and provocative dramatic voices. The actor-director-playwright Pau Miró is a member of yet another generation that is now attracting favorable critical attention. This collection includes: Josep M. Benet i Jornet: Salamander Sergi Belbel: Strangers Lluisa Cunielle: Barcelona, Map of Shadows Pau Miro: It's Raining In Barcelona Translated and Edited by Marion Peter Holt & Sharon G. Feldman Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage (W)here comes the sun? Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF By Tamás Jászay Image Credits: Article It's almost a family atmosphere: we spectators, barely a hundred of us, sit around the empty space. Office lights hang high above, from which a cheap paper screen is lowered from time to time, projecting still or moving images. This projection is one of the essential elements of this refreshed, dusted-down, updated Ibsen production, Solness , which premiered on the studio stage of the Örkény István Theatre in Budapest in autumn 2022 and, due to great interest, has been performed at the Szkéné Theatre from February 2024. On the screen, we see the building plans of the master builder and his student, which were never realised, and which are commented on with admiration or hatred. The shadows of the characters projected sharply onto the screen inadvertently add comments and stories to the projected images. If you happen to be sitting on the other side of the screen, you can see the images indelibly projected onto the desperate, pleading, explaining faces, not just their shadows. The screen becomes a time gate. Plans that never materialize transport us to an imagined, idealized futur e, but as we approach the finale, the canvas also becomes a powerful means of bringing the past to life. Suddenly we are watching a family home video, a private documentary of the past half century; the period when Pál Mácsai, playing Solness, became one of Hungary's best known and most admired actors. We peek, we peep into his life, as we have done so many times during the performance, and the (self-)ironic audio commentary is provided at this point by the video's protagonist, Mácsai-Solness himself. Finally, the screen is the "protagonist" in the bombastic finale: we see a projection of Hilde Wangel, who entered previously Solness's ordered yet infinitely lonely life, taken by the master builder as a vampire. From the short introduction, it is clear that Solness , directed by Ildikó Gáspár, plays with different stakes than the usual interpretations of Ibsen's late drama. The director can do all this here and now because the theatrical reception of Solness , written in 1892, is negligible in Hungary. This is worth emphasizing because Henrik Ibsen is clearly the most Hungarian of the Nordic playwrights. The climaxes of his extensive oeuvre are an inescapable cornerstone of the Hungarian repertoire: A Doll's House , Hedda Gabler , The Wild Duck , and even Peer Gynt , which focuses on the totality of the world rather than on a family, regularly appear on stages in Budapest and the provinces. The Master Builder Solness , considered by many to be one of the finest achievements of Ibsen’s oeuvre, is a rare visitor to our region. Yet the first Hungarian-language premiere was already in 1905, relatively early on: part of the ars poetica of the very first Hungarian independent theatre group, the Thália Society, was to introduce contemporary foreign drama to Hungarian audiences. However, theatre memory records fewer than ten (!) Hungarian-language Solness performances in the more than a hundred years that followed, and none of these became canon-shaping performances. In this way, Ildikó Gáspár's production stands lonely in Hungarian theatre history, while loneliness is a prominent theme of the production. Solness. Photo © Judit Horvath This is by no means an over-interpretation: the performance plays with the thematization and problematization of the relationship between the dramatic text written by Ibsen, translated into Hungarian and shortened by the director herself, the reality/present time of the theatrical performance and the reality off stage. We are a long way from, say, Shakespeare's meta-theatre: here, the speech about the theatre does not become a stand-alone (performable) insertion. Instead, from the first to the last moment of the performance, the theatre as a phenomenon becomes an integral part of the plot written by Ibsen. This Solness speaks about the theatre as a political institution, about the perceived or real conflicts between the different generations that run the institution, about the challenges of maintaining the influence acquired in cultural life, about the proper management of a common legacy. It speaks about the Örkény István Theatre itself, its current and renewed artistic leadership, and the chances of young theatre-makers in an unsupportive environment. And it does all this while telling the story of Ibsen's master builder Solness virtually in full. In this sense, the performance is therapy. The psychologizing of Ibsen, of the family, is somewhat relegated to the background in order to make the spectator realize that it is possible, even necessary, to reflect on certain traumas of the community space through the tools of the theatre. Readers who have not seen the show might have reason to believe that Solness in Budapest is a show for gossip-hungry "experts" who are sensitive to the internal affairs of the theatre world, but they could not be more wrong. Since the context around the performance is as important as the text of the performance in this case, some further information needs to be shared before I get to the performance itself. The director Ildikó Gáspár has evolved from a successful and remarkable dramaturg and translator into a director known mainly in Hungary, but also in German and Scandinavian-speaking countries over the last decade. In her performances, she analyses classical and contemporary dramatic texts with both insight and sensitivity, leads her actors in an inspiring way, and always with a highly emphatic and meticulously elaborated visual and musical world. It is difficult to find a common denominator between the two dozen productions of her directing career that began in 2011. Regardless of the period of the drama and its author, the problem-sensitive interpretation of the text, always carefully crafted to bring it as close as possible to the viewer of the present day, is a characteristic of each of her productions. Ildikó Gáspár is a founding member of the Örkény István Theatre, which opened in downtown Budapest in 2005. She became a key member of the theatre as a dramaturg and made her debut as a director here. Örkény's situation is unique in many respects: of all the municipal theatres in Hungary with a permanent company, repertoire and venue, we can think of no other theatre that has undergone such a significant change in profile in such a short space of time. The theatre, which for decades until the early 2000s presented solely comedy and cabaret, has now become one of the capital's most important theatres, with a highly successful ensemble working with the best directors to build a profile that is mainly, but not exclusively, prose drama. The first 'master builder' of the Örkény's image is the actor-director Pál Mácsai, who has been the theatre's director since its foundation. Pál Mácsai in 2025 will hand over his position to Máté Gáspár after 20 years of management. The latter name is familiar to many in the context of another memorable ensemble: it was he who, together with Árpád Schilling, laid the foundations for the international success story of the Krétakör Theatre as manager in the early 2000s. Alongside Máté Gáspár, Csaba Polgár, the theatre's leading male actor, will take over the artistic directorship of the Örkény Theatre from January 2025. The same Csaba Polgár who plays Ragnar, the dreaded adversary of Mácsai's title character in Solness . Ragnar's mother, Bertha Brovik (originally a male character) is played by Judit Pogány. The actress has been a major figure in Hungarian theatre and film since the 1970s and 1980s. And although she turned 80 in 2024, she is still performing in ten different productions at the Örkény Theatre. They are joined by the fourth generation: as the haunting Hilde Wangel, we see Mária Szaplonczay, who graduated from the University of Theatre and Film in 2024. Ildikó Gáspár's direction does not directly talk about this system of relations, which may seem complicated at first sight and not necessarily transparent to the outsider. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that the above-mentioned relationships are evident to the regular theatregoer in Hungary even if they are not stated. Having mentioned before projection and the different layers projected onto the screen, by bringing these relations (theatrical and generational) into play, it is as if a new filter has been added to Ibsen's drama, showing more and different aspects of the familiar story. Let's return to the starting point. We, the audience, sit around an empty office or living space. In the first few minutes, we see the same brief scene play out four times in quick succession between Ragnar and his mother Bertha, and Ragnar's fiancée Frida. The old Brovik is not feeling well, and the young people, at first gently, then increasingly irritated and impatient, want to send her home, which the old woman clearly takes as an attack: she accuses the youngsters of wanting to get rid of her for good. The playful yet nervous opening (with an annoying background noise coming from the invisible speakers: like the sound of blood pounding in your ears in a particularly tense situation) identifies and sets the main theme of the performance: the communication gap between young and old. There is, of course, no small amount of didacticism in the way Ibsen arranges his formula: Solness, at the height of his career, has once pushed Brovik from her position, and now his daily life is filled with the dread of his disciple, Brovik's son Ragnar, rebelling against him. The performance does not support the latter, however: Ragnar probably 'just' wants to work, has a family and a decent living, and does not seem to be a man with world- conquering ambitions. But then, it's not him who's important here, but Solness himself: the performance seems to take place 'inside his head', where dreams, desires, memories, visions and hallucinations are lined up in a whimsical order. Solness is the center of the universe he creates and sustains: he is the sun (cf. sol), which shines in solitude (cf. soleness). Everyone is dependent on him: old Brovik, Solness's predecessor; her son Ragnar, Solness's disciple; Frida, Ragnar's fiancée, Solness's employee and lover; Aline, Solness's wife, with whom he has never been able to come to terms with the tragedy of their loss of their children. The family doctor circulates as a lonely satellite around them. And then the asteroid Hilde Wangel unexpectedly strikes, upsetting the delicate balance. The emphasis is on making the relationships between the characters as clear as possible: this is helped by the layout of the space. The actors sit between us, next to us: when they enter a scene, they speak from an intermediate position that subtly blurs the boundaries between stage and auditorium and then return to that position at the end of the scene. We sometimes feel as if we could be the characters ourselves, if only because the problems succinctly expressed are a strong reminder of our own concerns and questions. Apart from Bertha Brovik, who only appears at the beginning of the performance, all the characters are present in the space throughout. As is often the case with Ibsen, two characters usually share their thoughts about a third. The pair then almost provocatively stand in front of the 'object' of their conversation, while (s)he listens to them with silent attention. It is worthwhile for the viewer to observe the actors who are not acting, their expressions, their gazes, to discover their small reactions to what they see and hear: it is as if they were voyeurs, like us. The performance plays with this too: the family friend, a doctor, takes (seemingly) random shots with his old camera and flash. He is the one who, already in Ibsen, Solness accuses of secretly watching his every move. Solness. Photo © Judit Horvath The creation and maintenance of an everyday atmosphere is an integral part of Luca Szabados' simple(seemingly) visual world. Solness and his successor Ragnar wear the same black leather jacket: who is copying or imitating whom, who is adapting to whom, or whether it is the 'uniform' of the architect's office, is left unclear. The basic color of the other characters' costumes is brown or drape, all of them earthy - a nice rhyme with the constant, desperate preoccupation of Solness's wife Aline with her potted houseplants. The only one who stands out is Hilde Wangel, who unexpectedly enters: a slightly worn white ballet skirt, which soon turns out to be a wedding dress, peeks out from under a bright red hoodie covering her upper body. Let's take a close look at Hilde's arrival! This is one of the first episodes where the story is emphatically out of its original flow, and the viewer becomes suspicious. There is something unrealistic and erotically exhilarating about the meeting of the grey-haired Solness and the brash young Hilde. The girl no one expects, but who is known to almost everyone in one way or another, claims and demands to be a fairytale creature: ten years to the day before, Solness promised her a kingdom, and she has come to make that promise a reality. Throughout the performance, the strictly cut text follows Ibsen's original drama, but here it is enriched with a new element. When Hilde begins to talk about Solness kissing her several times when she was twelve, the architect goes into a fit of rage. He shoves her out of the room; while looking the mute spectators in their eyes, he explains that everything the girl says is a lie: he certainly doesn't kiss children. Suddenly Hilde reappears in the space, but by then everything has changed: Solness' carefully constructed statue has been destroyed in an instant. And the sensitive viewer is left with a vivid reminder of the way in which Hungarian public discourse has (not) dealt with #metoo issues - both in and outside the theatre. A typical he said/she said situation: the performance does not clearly state who is right, i.e. what really happened between the two. The scene written by Ibsen remains intact, but thanks to the sensitive dramaturgical and directorial intervention, it is enriched with a new, touchingly contemporary layer. (And we realize too that in the late 19th century, it was not shocking for an older man to have an intimate relationship with a child. In the 2020s it is impossible to ignore it.) Solness-Mácsai is aware of us, the audience, from the very first scenes, and while we know, in the spirit of the theatrical pact, that his utterances to us are not those of the actor but of the character, the dissonance of the boundary crossing is felt early on. When Solness says he is lucky, Mácsai could say the same. Or when he gazes dreamily at the women in the audience and then admits to the doctor that he has had many women in his life, whose "line" is that? The profile of the successful master builder is not only embossed on his portrait but is inseparable from the profile of the successful actor, director, theatre manager. And when he begins to speak condemningly of the young people who are demanding space for themselves at all costs (he even gets one of the spectators out of his seat), one cannot help thinking that Solness-Mácsai is (perhaps) talking about himself. For example, that in Hungary theatre directors are not appointed for a few years, but often for decades. Consequently, entire generations are left out of the theatre cycle without having gained any experience of leadership and without realizing their own vision of how a theatre or ensemble should operate. Before anyone gets the wrong idea, this is not an accusation against Mácsai, who has built one of the country's most high-quality theatres, but merely an outline of the context. Mácsai Pál’s Solness is an acting masterpiece. He portrays a burnt-out, tired, cynical and self-reflective character who, despite his achievements and successes, lives on his enduring charm even after the age of sixty. He talks to everyone in a slightly condescending, lecturing way. He knows a lot and has seen a lot, which is why he is acutely aware that his time is coming to an end. The scapegoating, which has probably been going on for some time, has had a reassuring result: young people are to blame for everything. Solness's world is bewilderingly round: just as he got rid of Brovik, the new generation will want to get rid of him. A man of this type needs a 'court' that fears and adores him, and whose members are all weaker than he is. His narcissism knows no bounds: he even teaches the audience a song about himself. The old and sickly Brovik (Judit Pogány) is no longer a real opponent, just a toothless lion. His son Ragnar (Csaba Polgár) seems to be a more difficult case, but Solness is probably overthinking things: Ragnar does want a place for himself, but not against Solness, rather just beside him. Ragnar's fiancée Frida (Emőke Zsigmond) is impressed by Solness's interest and affection, but he sees her as a disposable object, a tool. Solness's wife Aline (Gabriella Hámori) seems to be a confused, introverted, lonely figure, but she sees and senses everything that happens around her. The loss of his children is the great tragedy of her life, which she tries in vain to explain away as God's will, but in reality, she blames herself. At the moment of the children's death, the relationship between Aline and Solness is at a standstill, and they are unable to move on from there: they have nothing more to say to each other. The doctor (Sándor Terhes) observes and registers: Solness considers him both his confidant and his enemy, sent by Aline to kill him. Young people are dangerous, Solness repeats again and again, and the most beautiful illustration of the theme is the intrusion of Hilde Wangel (Mária Szaplonczay) and her attempt to break the equilibrium. Yet she does nothing but take seriously an irresponsible statement, a promise made to a child ten years earlier. In his eyes, Solness is a hero, whom he endows with supernatural powers and from whom he expects to enliven his own ordinary, boring life. But Hilde can not only be a new beginning for Solness's empty marriage, she can also replace his dead children. Solness, a great manipulator, effectively involves his wife, Aline, in this game, who takes care of the girl immediately after Hilde's arrival and puts her in one of the old children’s rooms. In the first half of the hundred-minute performance, the sensitive relations of the Solness- universe are sharply depicted, before the focus narrows to the internal conflicts of the Solness-Mácsai figure and Solness's relationship with Hilde. The home video, mentioned at the beginning of the text, thus becomes a memorable inset to the performance. Selections from the video archive of the Mácsai family show Pál Mácsai's parents, his brother and, of course, himself as a child and young adult. And so we arrive at the spring of 1994, when Pál Mácsai recited the poem Highly Esteemed Overlords by the 19th century revolutionary poet Sándor Petőfi in front of 10,000 people in the Budapest Sports Hall. It is without exaggeration that this is the emblematic material of the Hungarian- language YouTube, which has more than one and a half million views, and Mácsai adds a self-deprecating audio commentary to his own recital from 30 years earlier. Hilde literally walks into the picture: she clicks repeatedly, the recording stops, starts again, while she re-enacts Mácsai's (Solness’s?) striking gestures in front of the screen. In the finale, when Solness, who has a fear of heights, climbs to the roof of the house to place the wreath, against the strong protests of her relatives and Hilde's insistence, the girl and the master builder are also placed in the center. The video spins again: climbing a ladder to the rooftop above Budapest, Hilde in her wedding dress and (Solness-)Mácsai, wearing a costume and make-up clearly evoking Bela Lugosi's iconic Dracula. The old master, terrified of the power of youth, yet morbidly attracted to it, sucking the blood of youth and drawing strength from it, reaches the top - but at what cost? The sun, known to have a harmful effect on vampires, shines over the rooftops at dawn, and the cast choruses the re-envisioned Beatles song—here comes the sun... Solness. Photo © Judit Horvath References References About the author(s) Tamás Jászay (45), theatre critic, editor, university lecturer, curator. Since 2003 he's been working as a freelance theatre critic: in the last 20 years he published more than 1200 articles (mostly reviews) in more than 20 magazines all around the world. Since 2008 he is co-editor, since 2021 editor-in-chief of the well-renowned critical portal, Revizor ( www.revizoronline.com ). Between 2009 and 2016 he was working as the co-president of the Hungarian Theatre Critics' Association. In 2013 he defended his PhD thesis on the history of Krétakör Theatre (Chalk Circle Theatre). He regularly works as a curator too: Hungarian Showcase (Budapest, 2013), Szene Ungarn (Vienna, 2013), THEALTER Festival (Szeged, since 2014), dunaPart (Budapest, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2023). Since 2015 he's been teaching at Szeged University, since 2019 as an assistant professor. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum By Amir al-Azraki Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF Arab Stages, ISSN: 2376-1148, Vol. 19 (Spring 2026), pp. 1-26 Abstract: This article repositions Mesopotamian ritual and dramatic practices within a broader cross‑cultural history of ancient performance, challenging theatre historiographies that have traditionally marginalized non‑Greek traditions. Instead of seeking to establish beginnings or precedence, the study examines Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian performance forms as complex and historically situated practices that combine ritual action, mythic narration, embodied movement, and structured dialogue. Drawing on linguistic evidence, ritual sequences, archaeological contexts, and a substantial body of Iraqi scholarship rarely acknowledged in Western discourse, the article reinterprets the Akitu festival, the Sacred Marriage, the Descent of Inanna, city laments, and Sumerian disputation poems ( adamin and tesitu ) as examples of organized performative expression shaped by distinct social, political, and religious environments. Particular emphasis is given to the dramaturgical sophistication of the disputation poems, which function as competitive and adjudicated verbal contests and display striking affinities with contemporary modes of agonistic expression. By foregrounding interconnection, mutual influence, and the plurality of ancient performative traditions, the study argues for a more inclusive and intercultural theatre historiography. This approach positions Mesopotamian performance within a continuum rather than a linear narrative of development and underscores how ancient societies used embodied and communal practices to negotiate meaning, authority, and identity, demonstrating that theatricality has emerged through multiple overlapping cultural trajectories. Keywords: Mesopotamian performance, Sumerian disputations , Akitu Festival , Sacred Marriage , Inanna/Ishtar, Ritual drama, Theatre historiography Introduction The theatrical traditions of Mesopotamia—the ensemble of ritual-dramatic and festival performances attested in Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian contexts from the late fourth to early first millennia BCE—constituted a sophisticated performative culture. These traditions included impersonation and role-taking in ritual dramas, structured dialogues and disputations, lamentations with choral leadership, sacred-marriage enactments, and mythic re-enactments. They were performed in designated spaces (temple courts, processional routes, and festival houses), using codified movements, costumes, and props. Yet early 20th-century scholarship made few references to Mesopotamian drama and theatre, often dismissing the culture as "pre-theatrical." In 1925, for example, German Assyriologist and ancient Near Eastern religions expert Alfred Jeremias asserted that the development of myth into drama is only evident in traces within the Sumerian-Babylonian cultural cycle. [i] His limited examples included Chaldean festival performances, in which the myth of the dragon fight was enacted comedically; Assyrian festival plays, in which the king assumed the role of the dragon-slayer; and an Assyrian-Babylonian dialogue between a master and his servant, referred to as the “Dialogue of Pessimism.” [ii] Moreover, conventional theatre historiographies credited ancient Greece as the birthplace of drama, largely overlooking the possibility that theatre existed in other ancient cultures. This marginalization or ignorance of Mesopotamian theatrical traditions, despite their ritualistic origins that parallel those of Greek theatre, reflected a Eurocentric bias that historically prioritized Greek theatre as a source and a foundational model. This bias not only shaped and distorted European scholarship on ancient theatre traditions, but also influenced scholarly discourse in Iraq, where a majority of Iraqi theatre scholars—especially those educated in Western institutions during the mid-twentieth century—embraced Eurocentric historiography with little critique. Modern Iraqi theatre was founded by scholars and Christian clergy trained in the West, such as Sami Abdul Hamid, Haqi al-Shibli, Ibrahim Jalal, and Hanna Habash, whose reliance on European models for teaching, translation, and production practices often reinforced colonial frameworks, even as a smaller group of voices pressed for recognition of indigenous traditions. As Khalid Amine points out, colonialism fostered divided loyalties and contributed to epistemic violence, a “Eurocentric eclipse, if not exclusion, of other peoples’ performance traditions” within theatre studies: “Borrowing western historiographical models without critiquing their claim of universality and exclusivist tropes,” Amine argues, “amounts to a new kind of colonialism.” [iii] Other obstacles have also contributed to gaps in scholarly understanding of Mesopotamian theatre traditions. One such obstacle is disciplinary compartment-alization: the archaeologists and field epigraphers who recover and publish sites, and the philologists and linguists who edit and translate cuneiform sources, are rarely in dialogue with theatre historians and performance theorists. Another obstacle is that the field of Mesopotamian studies is vast, and scholarly focus has often been on other aspects of the culture, such as religion, politics, and social structures, leaving the performative dimensions of Mesopotamian material underexplored. Political instability, and destruction due to wars, invasions, and natural disasters, has further complicated the study of Mesopotamian theatre, posing significant obstacles to archaeological efforts. The volatile political climate has made it difficult for scholars to access important sites and artifacts that could provide crucial insights into ancient performance practices. Moreover, under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi government's nationalist agenda influenced how Mesopotamian heritage was presented and researched, sidelining certain aspects of cultural history, including theatre. Even today, financial, logistical, and security challenges continue to limit archaeological work on Mesopotamian heritage. Former Minister of Culture, Tourism, and Antiquities Dr. al-Hamdani indicates that Iraq is currently home to approximately 15,000 archaeological sites, of which less than 2% have been excavated, and with the potential for additional discoveries in the future. [iv] Promising sites for further exploration include some documented yet still under-analyzed ceremonial structures: the bit akitu at Babylon, the Eanna precinct at Uruk, and the Ekur temple complex at Nippur. While well known in Mesopotamian studies, these sites have not yet been systematically examined through the lens of theatre and performance history. Future research that integrates archaeological, philological, and performance-theoretical methods could reframe them as central nodes in the history of ancient theatre, rather than as ancillary ritual space. Yet it would be misleading to suggest that scholarship on these issues is completely absent. A substantial body of research has traced Near Eastern mythic and ritual continuities into Greek literature [v] and has examined performance elements within Sumerian and Akkadian texts. Moreover, a number of Iraqi historians, archeologists, and theatre scholars, utilizing evidence from early twentieth-century Western archaeologists and historians, have long argued for the significance of Mesopotamian theatre. [vi] Among the most significant contributions are those of Awni Karomi, Fawzi Rashid, and Mohammed Sabri, whose works remain untranslated into English but collectively advance an important counter-narrative. Karomi argues that ancient Iraq possessed dedicated performance spaces, most notably the Bayt al-Tamthil (“House of Performance”) at Uruk, which he reads as evidence for a theatrical tradition structurally distinct from temple ritual. [vii] Rashid postulates that theatre existed in ancient Iraq prior to Greece, proposing that the Descent of Inanna reflects an early performative tradition necessitated by limited literacy and the need to integrate myth with communal life, and citing 1967 excavations at Uruk as material evidence of ritual spaces potentially linked to dramatized representations of the underworld. [viii] Sabri goes further by theorizing the Babylonian theatre as an indigenous innovation predating Hellenistic influence, describing it as a multifunctional structure for ritual, spectacle, and athletic display. [ix] While these works constitute a crucial foundation for any inquiry into Mesopotamian performance, my approach diverges in both scope and intention. Unlike Karomi, Rashid, and Sabri, whose studies sought to challenge the aforementioned Eurocentric bias by demonstrating that theatre existed in Mesopotamia prior to ancient Greece, I am not concerned with questions of origins or precedence. Rather, I aim here to reframe Mesopotamian theatre traditions within a cross-cultural continuum of ritual and performative expression that emphasizes interconnected developments, reciprocal influences, and shared performative vocabularies across ancient civilizations. I examine Mesopotamian theatrical traditions as a historically specific constellation of practices that can be usefully studied through the lens of more recent advances in performance and theatre history, particularly cross-cultural approaches that situate ancient performance within interconnected ritual and cultural systems, and that highlight the emergence of performance traditions as a widespread and multifaceted human phenomenon rather than as the innovation of any single civilization. By illuminating the significance of underrecognized research, including Iraqi scholarship, on Mesopotamian theatrical traditions, and by interrogating the intersections of Sumerian dispute texts, ritual enactments, linguistic and architectural evidence, this article provides new and innovative observations, such as the striking parallels between Sumerian disputation poems and contemporary battle rap, which highlight unexpected continuities in performative traditions and underscore the enduring relevance of Mesopotamian cultural legacies. Linguistic Evidence for Mesopotamian Theatre Traditions Lexical evidence preserved in the Assyrian-English-Assyrian Dictionary suggests the presence of organized performance practices in ancient Mesopotamia. [x] A cluster of terms relating to performative activity including epšētu (n. act), epāšu (v. perform), mašālu (v. mime), mēlulu (actor or player), riqdu (dance and dancing), aluzinnu (clown/jester), [xi] mupaggianu (n. mimic), and gendered performers such as mummillu (actor) and mummiltu (actress or dancing-girl), may indicate that performance was recognized as a distinct form of social and ritual behavior, potentially extending beyond entertainment into broader religious and communal contexts. Terminology associated with material culture and performance settings further supports this interpretation, as terms such as kuzippu, nalbašu, talbuštu, and tēdiqu (costume), kutmu (mask), šumaku (prop), duʾu and hutû (platform), and lulīmu and mardītu (stage) imply designated performance environments. Likewise, taklimtu (drama and spectacle), alongside distinctions between dabūbu (dialogue), and dāgilu (spectator), suggest formalized presentation and performer–audience interaction. The distribution of these terms across general lexical compilations, rather than within single literary or ritual texts, suggests that performance-related vocabulary formed part of wider linguistic usage. Although such evidence cannot confirm the existence of theatre in the modern sense, it supports the hypothesis that Mesopotamian societies maintained structured performative traditions involving specialized performers, audiences, spatial organization, and staged or ritualized presentation. One possible contextual illustration of the broader semantic and cultural range of performance-related terminology may be found in literary and theological interpretations of the goddess Inanna–Ishtar. R. Harris has drawn attention to the significance of play ( mēlulu ) within the characterization of the goddess, suggesting that playful and performative elements formed part of her divine persona across multiple spheres of activity. The interrelationship between play, performance, and ritual underscores the goddess’s multifaceted role in transcending social norms and reasserting divine order. As Harris notes, “Play ( melulu ) is an integral part of Inanna-Ishtar's personality. She is ‘the player ( mummiltu ) par excellence.’ The semantic range of the Akkadian word for play includes dancing and acting and […] involves the arena of war, for her playground was the battleground.” Harris quotes, among other things, a text in which the phrase “the play of Ishtar” is used as a euphemism for “battle,” and also highlights the connection between “play” and the carnivalesque elements of the festival of Ishtar. [xii] Moreover, play and performance are framed as vital elements of Mesopotamian ritual, as evidenced by the presence of portable stages, referred to as littum riqdi . [xiii] These platforms were used during performances that had religious, ceremonial, and possibly theatrical functions, reinforcing the idea that the act of performance was central to religious worship and social rituals. The littum riqdi suggest that these performances were more than artistic expressions; they were instruments for enacting divine narratives, involving both gods and humans in the broader cosmological drama. Another word that relates to theatre props is melammu , masks, which were associated with gods, royals, or demons (see Image 1). A.L. Oppenheim explores the Akkadian concept of melammu , traditionally understood as a supernatural aura, and argues that it also refers to physical masks used in religious performances. He associates melammu with ritual practices in which priests donned masks to embody divine or demonic beings during ceremonies, including instances where priests wore these masks in cultural theatrical representations before the worshippers of Ishtar. [xiv] Thus, melammu not only signified divine radiance but also played a key role in theatrical and ritualistic performances in Akkadian culture. Image 1: Clay mask of the demon Huwawa [Humbaba]. Old Babylonian period (c. 1800–1600 BCE), from Sippar (Abu Habba), Iraq. British Museum, Museum No. 1883, 0118, AH.2598. Credit: ©Trustees of the British Museum Shared under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license , no changes made to image. Oppenheim mentions different types of masks, including lion masks ( zumar labbi ) and fish masks ( zumar nune ), used by priests in ritual performances. He references Akkadian texts describing how specific priests, particularly the kurgarru and assinnu , wore masks as part of ceremonial and theatrical enactments. For example, in the Ishtar festival in Uruk, priests appeared as "lion-men" (i.e., wearing lion masks) in ritual performances. Moreover, he notes that some priests, such as those involved in exorcisms or magical rites, donned masks to embody supernatural beings, likely to intimidate spirits or symbolize divine presence. Oppenheim connects these masked performances to broader Mesopotamian religious practices, arguing that the masks served not only as disguises but also as tools to invoke divine power and create awe in ceremonial contexts. [xv] Performance of Rituals and Myths The roots of Mesopotamian drama trace back to early agrarian and pastoral communities of the Neolithic and Ubaid periods, where ritual practices were intertwined with hunting, herding, and the first stages of organized agriculture. In these early communities, ritual performance provided a medium for engaging with deities, ancestors, and non-human forces. Through song, dance, masking, and procession, participants enacted relationships with the natural and divine worlds. Rather than representing a linear evolution from ‘animism’ to more advanced forms, these practices reveal layered cosmologies in which new political and theological emphases (such as royal ideology) were grafted onto longstanding performative grammars. As Mesopotamian urban life developed, anthropomorphism took center stage, and rituals evolved. By the second millennium, kings and community representatives acted in these dramas, with love and marriage symbolizing the bond between the people and the fertility powers, strengthening social and psychological ties. [xvi] The history of Mesopotamian performances reveals how older traditions persisted while being reinterpreted to meet new political and religious needs. Fertility rites, lamentations, and mythic reenactments continued to coexist, but rulers and temple elites adapted these forms strategically to assert authority, consolidate communal identity, and dramatize cosmic order. For Thorkild Jacobsen, this shift mirrors a broader transformation in Mesopotamian religion from a nature-based system to one dominated by political forces, moving from democratic pluralism to monarchies and, eventually, exclusive nationalist ideologies. [xvii] In this sense, dramatic expression developed not through linear evolution but through the appropriation and exploitation of existing practices to serve changing cultural and political agendas. A parallel can be observed in fifth-century Greece, where inherited ritual and mythic frameworks were re-purposed to sustain civic ideology. This framing emphasizes continuity and adaptation, situating Mesopotamian theatre within a dynamic continuum of performance responsive to specific historical conditions. As we shall see in the following sub-sections, examples of this adaptive process are found in Babylon’s Akitu festival, where the king ritually embodied Marduk to dramatize divine victory and legitimize his own rule, and in the Sacred Marriage rite, where older fertility rituals were re-staged to anchor royal authority in cosmic order. Similarly, Battle Drama reconfigured inherited mythic motifs into a political performance celebrating the birth of the nation. These cases provide insight into the cultural fabric of Mesopotamian society, and illustrate how Mesopotamian drama appropriated existing ritual forms to serve shifting cultural and political agendas. Enuma Elish and the Akitu Festival Enuma Elish (also known as The Seven Tablets of Creation ) is the Babylonian creation myth, the title of which is derived from the opening lines of the piece, “When on High.” Composed in Akkadian during the late second millennium BCE and preserved most fully on seven tablets from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, Enuma Elish was ritually performed at the Akitu festival. The Akitu , the origins of which go back to the third millennium BCE in Sumerian cities such as Ur and Lagash before becoming central in Babylon, functioned as both a religious and political spectacle. [xviii] In the third millennium BCE, Sumerian Akitu -type festivals were often celebrated twice yearly, at both the spring and autumn equinoxes. By the first millennium BCE, however, the Babylonian Akitu had become standardized as a spring festival in the month of Nisan (the start of the Babylonian New Year), when the Enuma Elish was performed. [xix] The myth tells the story of the great god Marduk's victory over the forces of chaos and his establishment of order at the creation of the world. Marduk, the chief god of the city of Babylon, defeats the elder goddess Tiamat and brings order to chaos, and thus becomes the Lord of the gods of Heaven and Earth. In analyzing elements of cultic drama at Akitu festival, Erich Ebeling asserts that “the events were not only pantomimically represented but also made comprehensible to the devout audience through a more or less detailed dialogue between the main characters and the chorus.” [xx] Although the evidence is fragmentary, a number of scholars have proposed reconstructions in which the Enuma Elish and related mythological narratives were integrated into cultic performances during the Akitu festival. Ritual texts and later scholarly interpretations suggest that these narratives were not confined to silent symbolic action but may have involved structured spoken exchange and ritualized dialogue. On the basis of fragmentary ritual texts, Ebeling argued that elements of the creation myth were enacted within a cultic drama, involving verbal interaction between principal divine figures and a group of priests functioning in a chorus-like role, rather than through pantomime alone. [xxi] Within this framework, mythic events were made intelligible to participants and observers through a combination of recitation, lamentation, and symbolic ritual action. Descriptions of the Babylonian Akitu festival emphasize its visual and performative dimensions; as Lauren Ristvet notes, “the resulting spectacle was imposing, colourful and even comic.” [xxii] Lexical and ritual references, including terms such as littum riqdi , further suggest that these performances could unfold in temple courtyards and along processional routes rather than in a single fixed space. As the Akitu was a civic-religious festival central to urban life, such ritual performances likely addressed a broader public audience, including priests, officials, and assembled citizens. While these reconstructions remain necessarily speculative, they support the interpretation of the Enuma Elish as functioning within a large-scale public ritual framework that combined “demonstrative and performative acts” with formal recitation and symbolic enactment. [xxiii] The drama begins when Belet‑ili, dispatched by Marduk's consort Zarpanitum, embarks on a frantic search for the god. Along the way, she encounters a priest from Borsippa, who joins the search as rumors spread of Marduk’s vanishing. Meanwhile, the citizens of Babylon, fearing the loss of their divine protector, cry out for Marduk’s return, praying to Shamash and Sin (gods of the sun and moon, respectively) for intervention. The turning point occurs when Marduk’s lifeless body is discovered at the Bab Ka-bu-rat gate, with a goddess mourning by his side. The nature of his death remains unclear, but symbolic rituals suggest the involvement of chaotic forces. This revelation triggers civil unrest in Babylon, with rebellion and grief overtaking the city. Marduk’s death is reported to Zarpanitum, whose intense mourning underscores the tragedy. In response, rituals are performed to restore Marduk’s strength and to petition Shamash and Sin for his return. Although the Akitu festival unfolds through a sequence of ritual actions that parallel themes of crisis and restoration found in the Enuma Elish , these actions are best understood as cultic ritual rather than theatrical drama. [xxiv] The king was ritually identified with Marduk, although only at specific points within this sequence, rather than across the entire narrative arc. The disappearance, mourning, and symbolic endangerment of Marduk belonged primarily to the mythic and liturgical register of the festival and were articulated through recitation, lamentation, and ritual gesture, not through direct enactment by the king. The king did participate explicitly in the ritual, however, most notably on the fifth day of the Akitu, when he underwent the well-attested humiliation rite before the statue of Marduk in the Esagila. During this rite, the high priest would remove the king’s regalia, strike his cheek, and compel a declaration of innocence; the king’s ability to shed tears functioned as a divinely evaluated sign of Marduk’s continued favor: “if the tears flow, Bel is friendly; if no tears appear, Bel is angry.” [xxv] This moment does not dramatize a mythic battle or represent Marduk’s combat with chaotic forces but instead ritually enacts the king’s submission to divine authority at a moment of cosmic uncertainty, establishing the conditions for the subsequent restoration of order. Later in the festival, particularly during the procession to and from the Akitu house and the ritual “taking of the hand of Bel” (Days 8–11), the king appeared in a restored and legitimized role that reflected Marduk’s reassertion of cosmic and political order. These actions aligned the king symbolically with Marduk’s victory over chaos, yet they remained ritual affirmations rather than mimetic reenactments of combat with figures such as Kingu or Tiamat. The king’s role was thus episodic and symbolic, embedded within a broader sequence of cultic actions rather than constituting a continuous dramatization of the creation myth. Early claims that the Akitu festival involved a dramatized representation of Marduk’s death and restoration derive largely from the interpretive framework of the early twentieth-century Myth–Ritual School. Within this paradigm, cultic action was assumed to function as a ritual reenactment of mythic narrative, and the Babylonian New Year was accordingly reconstructed as a dramatic performance of Enuma Elish . The most influential formulation of this view appears in the work of Svend Aage Pallis, who argued that the Akitu festival as a whole was “represented dramatically,” with priestly personnel, processions, and symbolic acts rendering the myth present through ritual performance rather than through narrative recitation alone. [xxvi] Pallis’s reconstruction drew attention to the festival’s ordered sequence, embodied actions, and public intelligibility, and for much of the twentieth century it provided the standard point of departure for discussions of Akitu ritual form. Subsequent scholarship, however, has increasingly qualified these claims. The evidence for the staging of the Akitu ritual remains fragmentary and largely indirect. The primary sources consist of Seleucid-period cuneiform ritual instructions, references to the recitation of Enuma Elish , and associated liturgical prayers, all of which prescribe ritual actions (such as the humiliation of the king, the removal and restoration of regalia, and the procession of divine statues between cultic spaces), without supplying stage directions or narrative cues sufficient to support a mimetic dramatization of myth. Archaeological evidence, including the Processional Way and the Akitu house outside Babylon’s walls, confirms the existence of architectural settings designed for movement and public ritual visibility, but it does not preserve evidence for dramatic props, costuming, or enacted divine combat. Later Assyriological scholarship has rejected interpretations of the Akitu as theatrical re-enactment, viewing its rites instead as symbolic affirmations of divine and political order. This position was later synthesized and reframed by Jonathan Z. Smith, who emphasized the festival’s function as a historically contingent ritual of cosmic and political rectification. [xxvii] Within this framework, the description of the Akitu as a “performance” refers to the bodily, public enactment of symbolic gestures, movements, and speech acts, rather than to theatrical drama in the modern sense. Sacred Marriage The Sacred Marriage appeared in the third millennium BCE as a Sumerian cultic rite through which the king enacted a bond with Inanna to secure fertility and well‑being. [xxviii] Public elements (offerings, processions, ritual purification, and adornment) preceded a private union enacted by the king and a designated priestess representing the goddess. The ceremony was accompanied by a love‑song repertoire whose dialogic and lyrical form indicates performed speech and song, rather than silent recitation. [xxix] Comparative evidence indicates that the hieros gamos functioned as ritual drama, staged by kings, priests, and cult personnel (singers, dancers, musicians) and articulated through processions, spoken exchanges, and chorus‑like refrains. [xxx] Within the Sumerian corpus, the Sacred Marriage is likewise voiced and embodied: organized love‑song cycles (marked by performative rubrics such as balbale , tigi , kungar ) present dialogues/monologues with responsorial refrains, embedded in a sequenced choreography—processional approach, ritual bathing and adornment, bed preparation, and the king’s escorted entry to the goddess’s inner space (often at Eanna)—after which the festival reopens, to banqueting, music, and public rejoicing. [xxxi] Read together, these sources warrant interpreting the Sacred Marriage as efficacious ritual performance: codified actions, roles, and sounds whose enactment renews agricultural abundance and confirms kingship in the public, cultic sphere. This framing helps clarify how later scholars have interpreted the rite’s evolution. Thorkild Jacobsen argues that this Sacred Marriage Drama was an early immersive ritual which later developed into a highly structured performance, reflecting broader shifts in Mesopotamian society. To describe the later iterations of the Sacred Marriage as a “performance,” however, is not to suggest that it lost its ritual efficacy or became aesthetic spectacle alone. The hymns, processions, and liturgies continued to be understood as acts that ensured fertility, divine favor, and cosmic balance. What changed was not the belief in efficacy but the mode of enactment: from a participatory rite in which participants embodied Inanna and her spouse Dumuzi, to a temple-centered performance where king and priestess acted as representatives of the gods. Like the Dionysian plays in classical Greece, which invoked a god and effected catharsis through language and ritual action, later iterations of the Sacred Marriage retained a performative force that linked the community to divine powers. The distinction, therefore, is not between “real” ritual and “aesthetic” performance, but between different ways of staging divine presence. As Richard Schechner has argued, performance is best understood as a continuum that encompasses ritual, play, and theatre, all grounded in what he calls “restored behavior,” that is, twice‑behaved, rehearsed actions that can be replayed and recombined across ritual and performance. [xxxii] From this perspective, the Sacred Marriage was not “mere ritual” or “mere theatre,” but a hybrid enactment whose force lay in both efficacy and representation. As Mesopotamian society became increasingly urbanized and politically stratified, religious thought shifted toward more anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine. Gods that had once been experienced through diffuse forces and direct embodiment were now imagined as distinct personified beings, often organized into divine “families.” Yet this was not a clean break. Traces of earlier animistic traditions persisted in healing rites, local practices, and temple ceremonies, and elements of direct divine embodiment remained possible within the liminal space of ritual. By the third millennium BCE Sacred Marriage ceremonies became increasingly institutionalized under temple authority and within temple settings, accompanied by formalized hymns, musicians, and priestly oversight, thus aligning religious performance with emerging urban political structures. By the first millennium BCE, earlier fertility enactments had developed into new forms such as the Battle Drama, which Jacobsen describes as a “political drama celebrating and reaffirming the birth of the nation as a divine achievement.” [xxxiii] Surviving hymns and liturgies from the Sacred Marriage provide glimpses of these performances: songs of Inanna’s desire for Dumuzi, ritual dialogues between king and priestess, and choruses that integrated the wider community into the drama’s effects. Descent of Inanna into the Underworld The Descent of Inanna into the Underworld is a Sumerian myth that narrates the descent of the goddess Inanna (Ishtar, in Akkadian) into the Underworld to overthrow its ruler, her sister Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Dead. However, following the removal of her adornments, Inanna perishes, and her corpse is suspended on a nail. The god Enki restores Inanna to life, but she must deliver another living human in exchange for her freedom. She selects Dumuzi, her spouse, who is abruptly transported to the Underworld. In response to the pleas of Dumuzi's sister, Geshtinanna, his circumstances are somewhat ameliorated: he is permitted to remain in the Underworld for only a portion of the year, with his sister assuming his role for the remaining duration. Iraqi historian and archaeologist Fawzi Rashid argues that theatre existed in Iraq before the Greeks, using the myth of Inanna’s Descent as evidence. He suggests that, given the limited literacy in ancient Mesopotamia, the myth must have been performed, rather than merely read, in order to engage the public and to connect everyday life with religious teaching, thereby increasing social cohesion. [xxxiv] Indeed, the mythic text contains dialogic exchanges, role substitutions, and ritual laments that are inherently performative in structure and would lend themselves to live enactment. To further support his argument, Rashid refers to archaeological findings in Uruk in 1967, where excavations uncovered a structure with three concentric stone walls, which he proposes may have symbolized the entrance to the underworld in a public performance. [xxxv] Additionally, as Karomi notes, the Bayt al-Tamthīl (“House of Performance”) at Uruk, though situated near the temple of Inanna, is architecturally distinct from the cultic precinct, indicating a space deliberately demarcated for communal gathering and spectacle (hence its name), rather than exclusively for worship. [xxxvi] Similarly, the Babylonian theatre associated with Nebuchadnezzar II offered a large, multifunctional arena used for ritual dramas, athletic events, and mythological reenactments during civic festivals such as the Akitu . While these are structurally distinct from Athenian theatres, they nonetheless represent performance spaces—arenas intentionally structured to accommodate audiences and enactments—which substantiates the claim that Mesopotamian culture embedded performance within both civic and sacred life. As many scholars have noted, narrative and mythic performance forms occur in virtually every ancient culture, from Egypt to Anatolia and beyond. To avoid conflating these diverse traditions, this study uses the term “theatre” in a specific sense: not merely the existence of story or ritual, but the development of architecturally or socially demarcated spaces where communal enactments were staged before an audience. This distinction allows us to separate general ritual or narrative expression (practices shared widely across ancient societies) from the more focused phenomenon of theatre, where myth, ritual, and spectacle intersect in settings designed for spectatorship. In this light, Mesopotamian examples such as the Bayt al-Tamthil or the Babylonian theatre can be considered “theatrical,” while also acknowledging that their forms and functions differed from the later Athenian model. To further support his argument that theatre existed in Mesopotamia before the Greeks, Rashid also outlines potential connections between the myth of Inanna’s descent to the underworld and early Greek plays such as Aeschylus’ Oresteia . His analysis suggests that recurring motifs shared by Inanna’s Descent and The Oresteia , such as neglect, substitution, divine intervention, and sibling loyalty, may point to thematic continuities or indirect cultural echoes from Mesopotamian traditions, raising the possibility that Greek tragedy was shaped in part by earlier Near Eastern performance forms. [xxxvii] Nonetheless, while the parallels with The Oresteia are suggestive, the Eleusinian Mysteries (and their mythic focus on Demeter and Persephone) provide a far more convincing and historically grounded analogue to Inanna’s Descent , since they ritualized the katabasis motif within a performative cultic context rather than a later dramatic retelling. Recited and ritually enacted during the Mysteries, the Hymn to Demeter staged the cycle of loss, katabasis , and renewal in a manner strikingly parallel to the Sumerian narrative: both traditions employ ritual substitution, seasonal suffering, and the cyclical return of fertility. As Walter Burkert has shown, the Mysteries drew on a repertoire of descent motifs that circulated across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, with katabatic themes functioning not only as mythic narratives but as ritual dramas of transformation enacted before communities. [xxxviii] Burkert emphasizes that antiquity itself recognized these resonances, with Greek tragedy (such as the choral invocations in Seven Against Thebes ) reflecting patterns known from Mesopotamian ritual laments and healing ceremonies. [xxxix] From this perspective, the Demeter/Persephone cycle offers a closer and more productive comparative frame than sibling motifs alone, since its ritualized performance within the Eleusinian Mysteries directly parallels the communal dramatization of cosmic order, divine suffering, and seasonal renewal found in Inanna’s Descent . Epic of Gilgamesh The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of world literature, survives in multiple languages and recensions because it developed over nearly two millennia across different Mesopotamian cultural and linguistic contexts. Originating in the late third millennium BCE as independent Sumerian poems about the hero “Bilgamesh” (later known as Gilgamesh), these narratives were later synthesized into an Akkadian epic during the Old Babylonian period and subsequently adapted into Hurrian and Hittite translations in Anatolia. The best-known form, the Standard Babylonian version edited by Sin-leqi-unninni (ca. 1300–1000 BCE), represents a deliberate literary reworking of earlier material that shaped the epic’s theological and philosophical emphases. Scribal copying, translation, and editorial revision across centuries produced the textual plurality evident today, preserved in hundreds of fragmentary tablets from Nippur, Ur, and Nineveh. This complex transmission history explains why Gilgamesh reaches us in divergent forms that reflect the evolving linguistic, religious, and intellectual traditions of the ancient Near East. The epic follows Gilgamesh, a powerful yet tyrannical ruler, whose friendship with the wild man Enkidu transforms him through shared adventures: most notably their defeat of Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest, and the slaying of the Bull of Heaven sent by the goddess Ishtar. When Enkidu dies as divine punishment, Gilgamesh is overcome by grief and fear of mortality, prompting a quest for eternal life that leads him to the immortal flood survivor Utnapishtim. Ultimately, he learns that immortality is reserved for the gods and that human meaning lies in wisdom, compassion, and the lasting works of civilization. Across its many recensions and translations, the epic reflects evolving Mesopotamian conceptions of kingship, friendship, mortality, and the search for understanding in the face of death. Image 2: Relief, Gilgamesh and Enkidu slaying Humbaba at the Cedar Forest . Photo credit: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, via Wikimedia Commons. Shared under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license , no changes made to image. The Epic of Gilgamesh was not only transmitted through written tablets but also rooted in the ritual and performative culture of ancient Mesopotamia. While there is no textual evidence for formal or Western-style stage dramatizations of the epic, the ritual contexts of Mesopotamian festivals (particularly the Babylonian Akitu ) suggest that mythic narratives were embodied symbolically through processional and ceremonial performance. As Judith E. Filitz argues, the Akitu ritual demonstrates how ancient ceremonies could occupy a liminal space “between ritual and theater,” combining corporality, multi-sensual ostentation, event, and representation within a religious framework. [xl] Such performative qualities help explain how mythic stories could be enacted through gesture, music, or costume as part of communal expressions of cosmic renewal. Professional singers ( kalu ) and lamentation priests ( naru ) likewise performed mythological and royal compositions in temple settings, emphasizing the oral and performative dimensions of Mesopotamian literature. Iconographic scenes of Gilgamesh wrestling a lion (emblems of divine kingship and cosmic order) echo this tradition, showing how the epic’s imagery participated in a broader culture of ritual performance rather than in Western-style theatrical dramatization. Mohammed Sabri argues that artifacts such as cylinder seals, clay tablets, and carved stone figures further illustrate the theatricality of these performances. [xli] This argument highlights the performative dimension of Mesopotamian myth, in which artistic representations of figures such as Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and Humbaba convey movement, gesture, and symbolic embodiment (see Image 2). Cylinder seals frequently depict scenes that correspond to episodes from Gilgamesh (most notably the hero’s combat with the monstrous guardian or the divine bull)—compositions that evoke ritualized struggle, rather than static illustration. While none of these objects can be shown to represent actors or staged performances, their iconography (muscular confrontation, divine insignia, and recurring motifs of heroism) suggests that Mesopotamian art visualized mythic action as part of a broader ceremonial and religious aesthetic. The existence of terracotta masks of Humbaba, such as those discovered at sites like Sippar and Nippur, further supports the idea that ritual impersonation and embodiment played a role in Mesopotamian religious practice. In this sense, Sabri’s notion of “theatricality” captures the experiential quality of these representations: they translate myth into embodied form, revealing a ritual imagination that predates but anticipates later traditions of performative storytelling. The epic’s moral and theological dimensions cannot be attributed to the early Sumerian religious framework nor to any single belief system, however. Much of the material known to us has been transmitted through later Akkadian, Babylonian, and even Hittite versions, reflecting centuries of adaptation across Mesopotamian and Anatolian cultures. Its exploration of human defiance against divine limits, the pursuit of immortality, and the redemptive power of friendship and loss reflects a dynamic dialogue between changing cultural values rather than a static doctrine. Its enduring themes transcended local religious orthodoxy, allowing Gilgamesh to remain a living and evolving part of the Mesopotamian ritual and cultural imagination. Adamin/Tesitu : Sumerian Battle Rap Certain Sumerian-language literary texts preserved in Old Babylonian manuscripts were composed and transmitted with performance in mind. As Paul Delnero observes, a key distinguishing feature of these texts is their likely intended use for performance. This is demonstrated by the presence of “performative rubrics and subscripts in the texts themselves,” “a highly syllabic orthography to indicate how the words in the text were to be pronounced during performance,” and an “Old Babylonian liturgical source which includes musical glosses.” [xlii] Oral recitation was a pervasive feature of ancient textual culture: apart from administrative or inventory lists, nearly all Mesopotamian compositions were read aloud to listeners. Yet, as Delnero’s analysis makes clear, the Sumerian disputation poems differ from ordinary oral reading in their formal design and explicit performative cues. Their alternating dialogue structure, ritual refrains, and notations referring specifically to a-da-min-se, “the performance of a disputation,” reveal that these were not simply pedagogical recitations but dramatized enactments, probably staged within temple-schools ( edubba ) or at cultic festivals. In this sense, they represent a specialized form of performance that bridges the worlds of ritual, education, and theatrical expression, embodying a more deliberate and structured dramatization than other texts examined here. While reading about early Sumerian literature and theatrical practices in ancient Iraq, I was struck by a fascinating performative tradition that resonates with what in modern terms is known as battle rap, a genre where performers engage in verbal duels, trading boasts and insults in rhythmic, improvisational exchange. This is not to suggest that such forms are uniquely modern; on the contrary, the art of competitive verbal performance appears across a wide range of ancient and contemporary cultures. From the Sumerian adamin and tesitu disputations to the Greek agon , the Arabic munafarat and naqaʾid , Norse flyting , and West African griot rivalries, verbal contest has long served as both entertainment and a test of intellect, memory, and creativity. The analogy to battle rap is therefore not meant flippantly, but rather to illuminate the enduring human impulse to dramatize competition through public poetic exchange, a performative continuity that bridges ancient Mesopotamia and the modern stage. The Sumerian genre of "dispute" ( adamin; tesitu in Akkadian), studied in the edubba (the Sumerian tablet-house or school, dating back to before 2000 BC), shares striking similarities with battle rap. Tesitu was performative, burlesque, and often described as "contests (between) two" or "contests in speech"—that is, disputation poems, meant to be performed in communal occasional and festivals. Enrique Jiménez notes that external evidence for such performances, while limited, does exist: two Ur III documents mention deliveries “for the performance of a disputation” ( a-da-min aka ) and “for a disputation” ( a-da-min-se ). These documents probably refer to the enactment of a disputation performed in the context of a cultic or festival event. [xliii] From the first half of the second millennium BC, eight fascinating Sumerian disputation poems emerge, each with a notably theatrical flair. In these dramatic verbal duels or dialogic drama, two rivals face off in a battle of words, each striving to prove their superiority. The structure of these contests echoes the format of a stage performance, with carefully crafted exchanges designed to showcase wit and rhetoric, and with a judge (a god, like Enlil or Enki, or a human authority figure, such as king or a schoolmaster) delivering a final verdict on the contest. The participants often represent contrasting elements of the world, creating vivid and symbolic characters: the Tree squaring off against the Reed, or the Hoe battling the Plow, each antagonist embodying its own essence in the contest. These verbal sparring matches extend beyond the agricultural sphere, with dramatic confrontations between metals (Precious Metal vs. Copper), seasons (Summer vs. Winter), and even professions (Farmer vs. Shepherd). Some disputes involve more complex roles, such as school personnel and graduates, or animals (Bird vs. Fish). At times, the poems present unexpected pairings, such as a crop plant confronting a Ewe, in a clash of categories. Adil Hashim, professor of ancient Iraqi history, postulates that ancient Iraqi society was marked by significant ethnic diversity, with the indigenous Sumerians alongside the Semitic peoples who migrated from neighboring regions. Over time, these groups merged to form a unified culture. However, Hashim argues that conflicts and differences occasionally emerged, both between and within these groups. These societal tensions, such as the clash between urban and nomadic lifestyles or class and profession divisions, were often symbolically represented in Mesopotamian literature, especially in the form of debates/ adamin . [xliv] One particularly striking example presents a showdown between two city lords, Enmerkar and Ensuhkešdanna, where the entire city becomes a stage for their intellectual and political contest. Claus Wilcke examines the theatrical dimensions of this poem, arguing that it blends elements of epic narration with dramatic performance. He identifies four internal textual features that point toward performative enactment, each observable within the text itself. First, the repeated use of demonstratives and deictic pronouns. For example, when the narrator commands, “ Let him come here! ” or says, “ There he stands before the gate of Aratta! ” the phrases function like stage directions, orienting audience and performers in space. Second, the ergative marking of animals (e.g., “The ox drives the plow,” “The lion seizes the prey”) may signal that these actions were represented mimetically by human actors. Third, the absence of a dominant central character allows fluid shifts in voice and perspective, supporting multiple speakers or roles. Finally, rapid scene and character changes (e.g., moving from Enmerkar’s city to Ensuhkešdanna’s court and back again) suggest a performative sequencing of acts. [xlv] Taken together, these textual markers lend credence to Wilcke’s claim that Enmerkar and Ensuhkešdanna was not simply recited but staged, as a kind of civic or ritual performance. Another example is a verbal duel between school staff and graduates, where two characters take turns delivering speeches in which they boast of their virtues while hurling insults, often escalating into harsh and abusive exchanges. This exchange was meant not only to display rhetorical skill but also to entertain and amuse, perhaps as a way to offer relief from the otherwise monotonous routine of classroom life. These compositions were invented by Sumerian scribes, who would compose, copy, and have them read by students. [xlvi] Among the well-known disputations are those between school graduates named Enkita and Enkihegal, in one case, and Enkimansi and Girnishag, in another. To illustrate the performative dynamics of Sumerian disputation poetry, the following example pairs a passage from Enkita and Enkihegal with a rap-like reinterpretation that reimagines its rhythm and verbal combativeness in a modern idiom. Formal translation of the Sumerian text: You have a harp, but know no music, You who are the ‘water boy’ of your colleagues. Your throat can’t sound a note, You stutter your Sumerian, can’t make a straight speech, Can’t sing a hymn, can’t open your mouth— And you are an accomplished fellow! [xlvii] My “rap-ified” translation: You got a harp, but no music to show, Water boy to your crew, that's all you know, Your throat can’t hit a note, you’re fallin' apart, Stutterin' in Sumerian, can't even start, You can’t sing a hymn, can't open your mouth, When you try to speak, all we hear is a drought, And you call yourself accomplished, man, what a sight! Similarly, battle rap operates as an agonistic performance form, structured around confrontational verbal exchanges in which two or more MCs, typically from the African-American community, assert dominance through verbal dexterity, creative wordplay, and strategic insult. Just as tesitu was designed to entertain and display rhetorical prowess, battle rap serves a similar purpose in contemporary culture, providing a space for performers to showcase their linguistic skills, often pushing the boundaries of humor and aggression. Both forms, in their respective eras, seem to recognize the power of words not only to challenge and insult but also to entertain and bond the participants and the audience through a shared appreciation of verbal artistry. More importantly, tesitu can be seen as both entertainment and social criticism. School sketches often depict exaggerated characters like the complacent professor, obsequious students, and bullying teachers, figures that serve as satire rather than reality. [xlviii] This satirical tone suggests that tesitu was not just about competition, but also a critique of societal norms and the power dynamics within education. Similarly, battle rap today uses sharp wordplay and insults to address issues like inequality and identity, offering both entertainment and social commentary. Both tesitu and battle rap employ exaggeration and humor to critique societal flaws, using verbal contests as a form of both performance and social reflection. The comparison to modern battle rap is not meant to suggest a direct historical lineage but to serve as a heuristic analogy for understanding the performative nature of Sumerian disputation poetry. Both forms rely on competitive verbal display, improvisation, audience response, and performative embodiment, core elements that precede and anticipate later theatrical traditions. In the context of a pre-Greek performance culture, adamin and tesitu can be viewed as proto-theatrical genres, in which social, political, and ritual tensions are dramatized through staged verbal contest rather than narrative representation. The analogy to rap performance thus tries to sharpen my central argument: that ancient Mesopotamian literature possessed a developed sense of performative competition, role-play, and audience engagement that laid the cultural groundwork for theatrical expression. The Lamentation Over the Destruction of Ur The Lamentation Over the Destruction of Ur is an ancient Sumerian poem that mournfully describes the destruction of the city of Ur, lamenting the fall of its civilization and blaming the gods, particularly Enlil, for the devastation, with the goddess Ningal often depicted as weeping and pleading for mercy on behalf of her people. It is considered a prime example of a "city lament" from ancient Mesopotamia, detailing the city's desolation and the suffering of its inhabitants after the catastrophic event. As John Jacobs explains, the Sumerian city laments were “historically embedded texts, designed for repeated performance at a specific time and place,” to ritually reenact the death and the rebirth “not only of the city per se but also of the house/temple-city-universe.” [xlix] Through this performative lamentation, the city itself becomes a speaking, suffering figure: “over the course of the evolution of the genre… the personified city comes to lament its own fall.” [l] Moreover, as Mary R. Bachvarova argues, key motifs first expressed in Mesopotamian city laments were later adapted in the Iliad , where earlier versions of Troy’s destruction were absorbed into its epic narrative. [li] The Lamentation, a 435-line Sumerian text drenched in sorrow and divine anguish, illuminates the ritual roots of performative expression, where religious practice and dramatic storytelling intersect. Composed in response to the fall of Ur (c. 2000 BCE, with the lament composed shortly thereafter), the work extends beyond literary lament to a ceremonial act of grief and supplication, belonging to a ritual performance tradition: Sumerian lamentation priests ( gala ) chanted such compositions aloud within temple contexts, employing formal vocal techniques, and likely accompanied by ritual instruments, alongside communal participation. The lament’s structure (with its alternating voices, refrains, and responsive cadence) suggests a choral mode of delivery that guided collective emotion, akin to the Greek chorus. While the text does not explicitly record gestures, ritual mourning practices in Mesopotamia included weeping, raising hands in prayer, and prostration, widely attested in liturgical sources and visual depictions of lament rituals. [lii] Thus, the text’s vivid imagery and emotive language would not have remained confined to the page; it functioned as an embodied, communal expression of grief before the gods, where speech, voice, and gesture merged into a sacred performance. In many ways, The Lamentation echoes the hallmarks of Greek tragedy. The heightened emotional intensity of the dialogue, the deep sense of divine justice, and the human suffering that results from it resonate with the works of Sophocles and Euripides. As Edith Hall observes, the Greek vision of suffering was one element within a wider cultural sensibility shared across the eastern Mediterranean, where diverse ethnic and linguistic groups interacted two and a half millennia ago. In this context, Greek tragic poetry, with its themes of divine wrath and human vulnerability, shows clear affinities (e.g., tone and content) with older traditions, including Mesopotamian literature such as Gilgamesh as well as the Old Testament. [liii] Just as in Greek plays, the gods here are active participants in the drama, not distant figures, and the cosmic consequences of their actions unfold before a suffering human populace. Yvonne Rosengarten has argued that The Lamentation is not merely a religious or liturgical piece, but rather an early form of drama, akin to Greek tragedy. She highlights several key aspects that suggest the text was intended for performance, rather than just recitation (the latter implies the oral and often solemn and formulaic delivery of text, while the former suggests a more embodied and communal act, involving stylized vocal delivery, emotional expression, musical elements, and ritual staging within a sacred setting). These aspects include the text’s vivid emotional content, the use of choral lamentation and the use of the chorus to guide the audience’s response, and the central role of the goddess Ningal, who interacts with the divine in a manner similar to a theatrical protagonist. The text's emotional range and repetitive and symbolic language, along with musical accompaniment, further support the idea of a staged event. Ultimately, Rosengarten proposes that The Lamentation should be seen as an early form of religious theatre, possibly performed in Sumerian temples, and predating Greek tragedy. This challenges the traditional view of the text as solely a religious document and invites consideration of the dramatic and performative elements in early Mesopotamian culture. [liv] Karomi, who directed a staging of The Lamentation in 1974 at the Academy of Arts Theatre in Baghdad, highlights the enduring power of the ancient text in performance: the production, he said, “proved its performative potential—which knows no limits—and affirmed that its philosophical idea remains relevant to this day”—no mean feat for a text written in 3000 BCE. [lv] In these ancient lines, one does not merely encounter expressions of grief over the fall of a city; rather, one witnesses the emergence of a dramatic tradition. The Lamentation shows how early Mesopotamian communities used embodied, communal performance to stage crisis, mourning, and renewal—practices that resonate with, but are not reducible to, later Mediterranean forms. Architectural Evidence of Mesopotamian Theatres Iraqi scholars have proposed that the Bayt al-Tamthil at Uruk, the Akitu House, and other urban venues reflect early Mesopotamian performance architectures. As already noted, the city of Uruk reveals evidence of a dedicated performance space in the vicinity of Inanna’s temple that functioned independently of religious drama. Moreover, while the extant theatre at Babylon is Hellenistic in date, some scholars read it as a hybrid structure layered onto long-standing local performance traditions rather than a purely exogenous import. Theatre professor Mohammed Sabri takes the argument a step further, arguing that the Babylonian theatre was not built under Alexander the Great, nor was it a replica of Greek or Roman theatres. Instead, according to Sabri, it was an independent and innovative Mesopotamian structure, designed for religious rituals, performances, and athletic events. [lvi] The site under discussion lies within the ruins of Babylon, roughly 85 kilometers south of modern Baghdad. Excavations led by Robert Koldewey between 1899 and 1917 uncovered the remains of a Hellenistic-style theatre near the Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate. Stratigraphic and architectural evidence identified the building as a Seleucid or early Parthian construction, dating between the mid-2 nd and early 1 st centuries BCE, [lvii] and later investigations confirmed that assessment: the Nebuchadnezzar-stamped bricks should not be taken as evidence that the building dates to the sixth century BCE. As Olof Pedersén explains, the theatre “was constructed in the south-western part of the Homera hills, which … consisted of fills from the demolition of the ziggurat before its planned rebuilding … where a Greek theatre was constructed on part of the fill.” [lviii] Yet these findings may indicate that the theatre at Babylon was a cultural hybrid, reflecting both Hellenistic architectural forms and the needs and traditions of the local Babylonian community. Nevertheless, Mohammed Sabri’s interpretation provides a postcolonial rereading of this evidence. He acknowledges the Hellenistic form of the extant structure but emphasizes the continuities with indigenous Mesopotamian performance practices that pre-dated Greek colonization. Thus, the Seleucid theatre did not appear ex nihilo ; rather, it was superimposed upon an existing local tradition of ritual and communal gathering, transforming the space into a hybrid arena that merged Greek theatrical conventions with Babylonian ceremonial functions. Such a synthesis aligns with broader cultural patterns of the Hellenistic Near East, where Greek civic architecture often absorbed and recontextualized native symbolic forms. Sabri’s argument thus reframes Babylon’s theatre not as a Greek import but as an instance of cultural adaptation, expanding the discussion of ancient performance beyond a Eurocentric narrative of Greek origin to a more intercultural history of theatricality in Mesopotamia. Conclusion Before Athens institutionalized theatre in the 5 th century BCE, Mesopotamian societies had cultivated rich performative traditions that intertwined ritual, myth, and dramatic spectacle. These traditions, embodied in the Akitu festival, the Sacred Marriage, The Descent of Inanna , the Sumerian disputations, and The Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur , demonstrate a deep awareness of performance as both sacred act and communal expression. Figures such as Ebeling, Karomi, Rashid, and Sabri have each illuminated different facets of this performative world, from the ritual re-enactments of cosmic renewal to the architectural and linguistic traces of dramatic practice. Together, they reveal a culture in which performance was not peripheral to social or religious life, but central to the articulation of cosmic order, kingship, and identity. The purpose of this study is not to replace one narrative of origin with another, nor to position Mesopotamia as a rival to Greece or any other ancient culture. Rather, this paper argues for the recognition of Mesopotamian performance traditions as part of a broader, interwoven history of theatricality that spanned multiple ancient civilizations. When viewed through this wider lens, the dramatic and ritual performances of Mesopotamia, Greece, and elsewhere in the ancient world appear not as competing beginnings, but as parallel articulations of the same human impulse to perform meaning into being. Recognizing Mesopotamian drama, therefore, expands the frame of theatre historiography. It invites us to move beyond linear genealogies and toward a more plural and dialogic understanding of performance history; one that acknowledges exchange, convergence, and independent innovation. As archaeological discoveries continue and collaborations between theatre historians, archaeologists, and philologists deepen, further evidence may emerge to clarify how these early practices intersected across regions. In this broader vision, the Mesopotamian contribution to theatre history lies not in claiming primacy, but in demonstrating that the performative imagination (ritualized, communal, and creative) has always been a shared human inheritance, reframed here as one that transcends civilizational boundaries. From this perspective, re-centering Mesopotamia within this interconnected landscape may enrich our understanding of world theatre as a complex, evolving network of traditions rather than a single, Western-centered lineage. Performance, as these early cultures reveal, has never belonged to one civilization alone; it has always been a dialogue among many voices, each shaping the art of theatre in its own time and form. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [i] Alfred Jeremias, Babylonische Dichtungen, Epen und Legenden (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1925), 30. [ii] The “Dialogue of Pessimism,” a Babylonian poem dating from around 1000 BCE, is often interpreted as both an existential reflection and a comedic satire targeting social hierarchies and the educational system. Franz Marius Theodor de Liagre Böhl suggests that the Master-Slave Dialogue may have functioned as a form of ritual comedy performed during the Babylonian New Year Festival, akin to the Roman Saturnalia. This reversal of roles, where the slave assumes the position of the master, points to a theatrical performance infused with satirical commentary. See Franz Marius Theodor de Liagre Böhl, Anthropologie réligieuse , ed. C. J. Bleeker (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 47–48; “Dialogue of Pessimism,” Electronic Babylonian Library , Corpus L II.4 (Standard Babylonian recension), trans. Benjamin Read Foster, https://www.ebl.lmu.de/corpus/L/2/4/SB/ . [iii] Khalid Amine, “Decolonizing Theatre History in the Arab World,” Horizons/Théâtre 12 (2018): 10-25, at 12. [iv] Abdul Ameer al-Hamdani, “Iraq’s Heritage: An Update,” online lecture, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, 6 January 2021, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDrca7zbGH0 . [v] Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age , trans. Margaret E. Pinder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Martin L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). [vi] Awni Karomi, “Utruha fil Masrah al-Iraqi al-Qadeem” [A Thesis on Ancient Iraqi Theatre], al-Aqlam , no. 6 (March 1979): 3–7. [vii] Karomi, “Utruha fil Masrah,” 5. [viii] Fawzi Rashid, “al-Masrah Babili wa Lais Ighriqiyan” [Theatre Is Babylonian, Not Greek], al-Mawrid 16, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 66–67. [ix] Mohammed Sabri, “al-Masrah al-Babily: Tarikhuhu, Tirazuhu wa Khasa’isuhu” [Babylonian Theatre: History, Design, and Features], Al-Academy , no. 74 (February 2016): 74–75. [x] I do not claim expertise in the languages of ancient Mesopotamia, but I have consulted Simo Parpola, ed., Assyrian-English-Assyrian Dictionary: Cuneiform Edition (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press/Eisenbrauns, 2023), 4, 11, 25, 30, 33–34, 37, 41, 80, 82, 94, 96, 101, 121–22. [xi] For more on this term, see Maddelena Rumor, who points out that the aluzinnu was a Mesopotamian comic performer (an early jester) whose role centered on parody, mockery, and boastful incompetence. He appears in temple and court contexts, performing songs, dances, humorous recitations, and satirical impersonations of experts such as healers, diviners, and scholars. Rumor further postulates that this figure is directly connected to the Greek ἀλαζών ( alazôn ), noting that the Greek term has no convincing Greek etymology and closely matches the phonetic shape and comic function of aluzinnu . She argues that both characters share the same defining traits—exaggeration, deception, and comic pretension—and that the Greek braggart likely reflects a cultural and linguistic borrowing from the earlier Mesopotamian tradition. Maddalena Rumor, “There’s No Fool Like an Old Fool: The Mesopotamian Aluzinnu and Its Relationship to the Greek Alazôn ,” KASKAL 14 (2017): 187–207. [xii] Rivkah Harris, “Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and a Coincidence of Opposites,” History of Religions 30, no. 3 (1991): 261–78, at 274. [xiii] Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, “An Oration on Babylon,” Altorientalische Forschungen 18, no. 1 (1991): 9-22, at 19–20. [xiv] Adolf Leo Oppenheim, “Akkadian pul(u)ḫ(t)u and melammu ,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 63, no. 1 (1943): 31–34. [xv] Oppenheim, “Akkadian pul(u)ḫ(t)u and melammu ,” 31–34. [xvi] Thorkild Jacobsen, “Religious Drama in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Unity and Diversity: Essays in the History, Literature and Religion of the Ancient Near East , ed. Hans Goedicke and J. J. M. Roberts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 76–77. [xvii] Jacobsen, “Religious Drama,” 77. [xviii] Wilfred George Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013), 3–6; Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others , rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xvii–xviii; Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 167–77. [xix] E. A. Speiser, “The Creation Epic,” in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament , edited by James B. Pritchard, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 60. [xx] Erich Ebeling, Tod und Leben nach den Vorstellungen der Babylonier , Part I: Texts (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1931), 41. [xxi] Ebeling, Tod und Leben , 41. [xxii] Lauren Ristvet, “Between Ritual and Theatre: Political Performance in Seleucid Babylonia,” World Archaeology 46, no. 2 (2014): 264. [xxiii] Sam Mirelman, “The Babylonian Akitu Festival and the Ritual Humiliation of the King,” ANE Today 10, no. 9 (September 2022), https://anetoday.org/mirelamn-ritual-humiliation-king/ . [xxiv] By “ritual” and “theatrical performance” I refer to analytical aspects of the same Akitu festival sequence, not to separate events. Following Richard Schechner, ritual and theatre may be understood as points on a continuum of performance rather than mutually exclusive categories; see Richard Schechner, Performance Theory , rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 70–74. The Akitu is fundamentally a cultic rite of renewal characterized by fixed procedures and ritual efficacy, while also exhibiting embodied, demonstrative, and public dimensions that can be described analytically as performative, rather than theatrical in the modern sense. [xxv] Jonathan Zittell Smith, “A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams,” History of Religions 16 (1976): 1–17, at 3. [xxvi] Svend Aage Pallis, The Babylonian Akitu Festival (Copenhagen: Hovedkommissionær A. F. Høst, 1926), 253–65. [xxvii] Smith, “A Pearl,” 6–8. [xxviii] Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite: Aspects of Faith, Myth, and Ritual in Ancient Sumer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 49–50. [xxix] Kramer, Sacred Marriage Rite , 63–66, 67–78. [xxx] Inge Nielsen, Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama: A Study in Regional Development and Religious Interchange Between East and West in Antiquity (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2002), 39–41. [xxxi] Pirjo Lapinkivi, The Sumerian Sacred Marriage in the Light of Comparative Evidence (Helsinki: Neo‑Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2004), 30–47 (for the performative rubrics balbale , tigi , and kungar ; and for alternating voices and responsorial refrains), 92–106, 151–66 (for ritual sequencing: the processional approach; bathing/adornment; the nuptial bed; Ninšubur’s escort into the goddess’s inner space at Eanna), 185–206 (for the post‑union banquet, music, rejoicing); cf. Inge Nielsen, Cultic Theatres , 39–41 (for processions, spoken exchanges, chorus‑like refrains; and the roles of kings, priests, and cult personnel), 52–53 (for the major processions, including the city‑to‑ Bīt Akītu route). [xxxii] Schechner, Performance Theory , 324. [xxxiii] Jacobsen, “Religious Drama,” 77. [xxxiv] Rashid, “al-Masrah Babili,” 66. [xxxv] Ibid. [xxxvi] Karomi, “Utruha fil Masrah,” 5. [xxxvii] Rashid, “al-Masrah Babili,” 71–72. [xxxviii] Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 68. [xxxix] Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 109–10. [xl] Judith E. Filitz, “At the Threshold of Ritual and Theater: Another Means of Looking at a Mesopotamian Ritual,” in Teaching Morality in Antiquity: Wisdom Texts, Oral Traditions, and Images of Virtue , ed. T. M. Oshima and Susanne Kohlhaas (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 233–34, 241–44. [xli] Mohammed Sabri, al-Masrah al-Iraqi al-Qadim [The Iraqi Ancient Theatre] (Baghdad: Dar al-Arif, 1991), 38. [xlii] Paul Delnero, “Translating the Untranslatable: The Role of Akkadian in the Sumerian Liturgical Corpus,” plenary talk presented at the American Oriental Society Annual Meeting, Portland, 18 March 2013, 8. [xliii] Enrique Jiménez, The Babylonian Disputation Poems: With Editions of the Series of the Poplar, Palm and Vine, the Series of the Spider, and the Story of the Poor, Forlorn Wren (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 15–16. [xliv] Adil Hashim, personal interview, 18 March 2025. [xlv] Claus Wilcke, The Sumerian Poem Enmerkar and En-suḫkeš-ana: Epic, Play, or? Stage Craft at the Turn from the Third to the Second Millennium B.C. (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2012), 18–33. [xlvi] Christopher J. Lucas, “The Scribal Tablet-House in Ancient Mesopotamia,” History of Education Quarterly 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1979): 305–32. [xlvii] Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 222–23. [xlviii] Cyril John Gadd, Teachers and Students in the Oldest Schools (London: University of London, 1956), 36. [xlix] John Jacobs, “The City Lament Genre in the Ancient Near East,” in City Lament: Commemorating Destruction in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond , ed. Ann Suter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 16, 19. [l] Jacobs, “The City Lament Genre,” 30–31. [li] Mary Rosalie Bachvarova, “The Destroyed City in Ancient World History: From Agade to Troy,” in City Lament: Commemorating Destruction in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond , ed. Ann Suter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 36–78. [lii] Mark E. Cohen, Balag Compositions: Sumerian Lamentation Liturgies of the Second and First Millennium B.C. (Malibu, CA: Undena Publications, 1974), 5–7; “The Lament for Sumer and Ur,” Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), University of Oxford, text no. c.2.2.3, https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section2/tr223.htm . [liii] Edith Hall, Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10. [liv] Yvonne Rosengarten, “Au sujet d'un théâtre religieux sumérien,” Revue de l'Histoire des Religions 145 (1968): 117–60. [lv] Karomi, “Utruha fil Masrah,” 5. [lvi] Sabri, “al-Masrah al-Babily,” 74. [lvii] Daniel Thomas Potts, “The politai and the bīt tāmārtu : The Seleucid and Parthian Theatres of the Greek Citizens of Babylon,” in Babylon: Wissenskultur in Orient und Okzident , ed. Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum et al. (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2011), 244. [lviii] Olof Pedersén, Babylon: The Great City (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2005), 158. References About The Author(s) Amir Al‑Azraki is an Arab‑Canadian playwright, literary translator, and theatre scholar whose work explores war, exile, and identity. A practitioner of the Theatre of the Oppressed, he collaborates with artists, educators, students, and equity‑seeking communities to foster dialogue and social change. His plays have been staged internationally, and his translations have introduced contemporary Iraqi drama and Arabic poetry to English‑language audiences. Al‑Azraki is co‑author of Theatre in Iraq under Occupation, 2003–2011 and co-translator/co-editor of Contemporary Plays from Iraq . He is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Studies in Islamic and Arab Cultures at Renison University College. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' 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. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. 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. 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Watch Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths by Catappum! Collective at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. The Catappum Collective retraces the steps of Benjamim de Oliveira, revisiting the places where he lived, performed, and left his legacy. The journey began in Pará de Minas and Belo Horizonte—his hometown and starting point—where the group interviewed local artists, accessed historical documents, and delved into the memory of our Black clown’s presence. In São Paulo, the collective visited the Museum of Circus Memory and explored key moments in Benjamim’s path to success. As the first clown to record a music album in Brazil, he made history in the capital through performances filled with chulas and lundus, playing a pioneering role in the evolution of Brazilian entertainment. The journey continued to Rio de Janeiro, a historic site of Black resistance and home to the region known as Little Africa. It was there that Benjamim found support and cultural vitality during the formative years of his artistic rise.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Catappum! Collective Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the short films selection) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Brazil Language Brazilian Portuguese Running Time 36:17 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film The Catappum Collective retraces the steps of Benjamim de Oliveira, revisiting the places where he lived, performed, and left his legacy. The journey began in Pará de Minas and Belo Horizonte—his hometown and starting point—where the group interviewed local artists, accessed historical documents, and delved into the memory of our Black clown’s presence. In São Paulo, the collective visited the Museum of Circus Memory and explored key moments in Benjamim’s path to success. As the first clown to record a music album in Brazil, he made history in the capital through performances filled with chulas and lundus, playing a pioneering role in the evolution of Brazilian entertainment. The journey continued to Rio de Janeiro, a historic site of Black resistance and home to the region known as Little Africa. It was there that Benjamim found support and cultural vitality during the formative years of his artistic rise. About The Artist(s) Group, Collective, or Production Resume The Catappum Collective began its research in 2015. In 2019, they premiered their first show, also titled Catappum. Between 2019 and 2023, they performed in more than 50 neighborhoods across all five regions of São Paulo and its countryside, reaching nearly 10,000 people from various social classes and age groups. From 2020 to 2022, the group took part in several in-person and online festivals, including the 2nd Festejo Raízes do Riso, the 2nd Saruê International Circus Festival, two editions of the Brincando no Parque Festival, the 3rd Dona Ruth Black Theater Festival of São Paulo, the 6th São Paulo International Circus Festival, and the Preta Leste Festival in Itaquera. In 2022, they were awarded funding through the 6th Circus Promotion Program, during which they held 12 performances of Catappum for over 3,000 people. They also offered workshops on Black comic traditions, engaging both artists and audiences in discussions about laughter, comedic expression, and racism through conversation circles. Also in 2022, the collective published an article titled “Black Popular Cultures in the Media” in Folha de São Paulo. That same year, they taught in the Humor course at SP Escola de Teatro, the institution where the collective’s founders were previously trained. Additionally, they participated in Brazil’s 1st Black Circus Research Symposium, contributing to the panel on Black Clowning, Circus, and Education. In 2023, they performed at SESC Registro – SP with a double feature: the Catappum show and the storytelling piece Pulú, the Little Black Boy Who Jumped Far, which was also written by the collective. That same year, they inaugurated the noon programming slot at Grande Lona do Mundo do Circo in Parque da Juventude (formerly Carandiru), presenting Catappum. Still in 2023, they were selected in the 42nd edition of the Theater Promotion Program for the City of São Paulo, which enabled them to create the group’s second show, Na Lona de Benjamim, a tribute to Benjamin de Oliveira, the great Black clown and circus artist of the early 20th century. In 2024, the Catappum Collective received the Picadeiro Trophy from the State Government in the category of Best Clown Show for their work Catappum. Get in touch with the artist(s) contatocatappum@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.instagram.com/cata.ppum/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 14 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Sonali Pahwa Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Zeina Salame Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Marjan Moosavi Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Sami Ismat Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Samer Al-Saber Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Areeg Ibrahim Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Marina Johnson Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Tiran Manucharyan Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly Iman Ezzeldin Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Katherine Hennessey Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Edward Ziter Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Sami Ismat Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Sonja Arsham Kuftinec Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Areeg Ibrahim Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Suzi Elnaggar “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Matthew Randle-Bent Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber George Potter Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Suzi Elnaggar Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Hassan Hajiyah Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 20, Spring 2025 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Steve Earnest Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Adam Pelty Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Steve Earnest Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Steve Earnest The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Marvin Carlson Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Marvin Carlson Mary Said What She Said Alex Lefevre The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Thomas Irmer Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit Dan Poston The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Steve Earnest Image Credits: Article Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025: Konfrontacje Festival 2025, The Cyrkulacje Festival of Circus Arts and If I Had A Gun I’d Take Them All Down in Lublin and AlphaGo_Lee. Theory of Sacrifice at Studio Theatre and Waiting for Godot at the National Theatre Warsaw. AlphaGo_Lee at Studio Theater, Warsaw. Photo by Natalia Korczakowska Located in eastern Poland, just 100 KM or so from the Ukrainian border is the city of Lublin. The city has a strong legacy of support for people of the Jewish faith as well as being a regional leader in artistic production. The Konfrontacje Festival began as a film/theatre/arts festival in the 1970’s and has now risen to the point of being a major arts festival that attracts numerous art forms, but primarily live performance. Held in Lublin every October, the festival features the work of Polish and international artists and presents the best new trends in European theatre. The Aerial sculpture “The Grodzka Street Man” in Lublin, Poland 2025 Festival centered on Janusz Oprynski, a celebrated Polish director, writer and theatre artist whose work has been featured at the Provisorium Theatre in Lublin for 50 years. Like Grotowski, Oprynski’s production style focused on experimental and “poor” theatre with radical confrontations of political systems. Eventually known for his staging of novels, Oprynski’s best known works include Ferdydurke (from Witold Gombrowicz), The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot (Dostoyevsky), The Kindly Ones (Jonathan Little) and Ice by Jacek Dukaj. Co-founder and artistic director of the Konfrontacje Festival, Oprynski has received numerous European awards for his work including the Konrad Swinarski Award as well as a special award for artistic merit by the City of Lublin in 2025. The Lublin Centre for Culture presented the Theatr Provisorium production of Oprynski’s Ward 6 on the festival’s opening night. Like many of his previous works, Ward 6 featured something of a library setting. Oprynski’s work has been characterized by an “addiction to books” as the post show discussion revealed, but the work itself considered the nature of mental hospitals and the nature of rights and freedoms that had been taken away from (historically) Polish citizens who found themselves imprisoned by Russians into these confined situations. The performance was based on Chekhov's famous short story, "Room No. 6" which was very important for Polish people fighting for freedom for many years and showed how the "abnormal society" locked normal people in hospital. Set in the land of Ulro, (borrowed from Blake) or the land of spiritual suffering, the characters of Ward 6, named only as Mr. G and Dr. R were inhabitants of the land of Ulro, where they suffer for their individuality. They were guarded by Mr. N and spent their whole lives in passionate reading; making their world is a great theater of imagination, a theater of reading books. "By eating books," they swallow the "bitter wisdom" that makes them poignantly lonely. It was Oprynski’s belief that the abnormal society fears such people and locks them up in hospitals and prisons. The performance featured extremely minimalist or “poor” theatre techniques, but the nature of the space allowed for numerous possibilities. The use of projections created a huge library of books on the white paper strips that dangled from the ceiling. Physical books were also included in piles all around the stage as the actors made reference to them throughout. Oprynski noted in the post show discussion that his was a “theatre of books” and that there were both good and bad books in the world. He noted how the works of Dostoyevsky had both been an inspiration for him but also had haunted him for his entire adult life. Janusz Oprynski on the set of Ward 6 post-performance. Photo: Steve Earnest If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down was presented in a smaller studio space at the Lublin Centre for culture and relied only on a video background for its scenic elements. The one-man show was directed by Paul Bargetto and performed and co-conceived by Michael Rubenfeld. Rubenfeld offered the following summary of the plot: “ The play follows the character Time, a Kyiv-based narrator who guides the audience through the city’s streets, weaving together contemporary wartime reality with a century of political violence, memory, and resistance. As spectators walk alongside him, Kyiv becomes both stage and character—a living archive where fences, boulevards, and monuments summon stories of empire, occupation, and the city’s continual fight for self-determination. The frame is intimate and conversational, collapsing the distance between past and present: every location contains a hidden rupture, every building holds the echo of a struggle. At the center of the historical thread is Dmitry Bogrov, a young Jewish Ukrainian anarchist who, in 1911, assassinated Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin at the Kyiv Opera House. The play reconstructs Bogrov’s world—his radicalization, his ideological turmoil, his entanglement with the Okhrana secret police, and his profound loneliness. As the narrator retraces Bogrov’s final movements through the city, the story reveals a man pulled between ideals of justice and the brutal realities of revolutionary violence, culminating in the chaotic moment of the assassination and his swift execution. Running parallel to Bogrov’s story is the narrator’s own life, marked by activism, disillusionment, flight, and return. He recounts encounters with political art movements, the Euromaidan revolution, the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine, and the personal cost of resistance—including the loss, exile, and moral ambiguity that accompany armed struggle. Contemporary Kyiv appears simultaneously ordinary and surreal: a place with street musicians and gardens, yet also a place where journalists are assassinated, dissidents are hunted, and air-raid sirens punctuate daily life. Throughout, the play interrogates the ethics of violence, the meaning of freedom, and the weight of memory. It juxtaposes Bogrov’s anarchist dreams with modern Ukraine’s ongoing fight against Russian aggression, questioning what—if anything—political murder can achieve. The piece ends not with resolution but with solidarity: a collective gesture of singing, looking into one another’s eyes, and recognizing shared vulnerability. In this final moment, the audience stands in the city as it is now—scarred, defiant, and alive—asked to consider their own place in history’s ever-tightening circles.” (Michael Rubenfeld) Michael Rubenfeld in If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down. Photo: Paul Bargetto. The production was inspired by the true story of Dmitry Bogrov (1887–1911) – a Ukrainian-Jewish lawyer, double agent, and revolutionary who, in 1911, assassinated Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin (1862–1911) at the Kyiv Opera House. Bogrov was arrested, tried, and executed shortly thereafter. Michael Rubenfeld in If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down. Photo: Paul Bargetto. Through innovative use of video and sound design, the performance immersed the audience in both historical and contemporary Kyiv; retracing the path that led the young Bogrov to his final act, while at the same time reflecting the author’s personal experiences of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Rubenfeld’s epic nearly two-hour monologue performance was extraordinary. As he led the audience on the journey through space and time of the play’s story his delivery was both informative from a reporter’s standpoint, but also highly personal as one who was invested in the story as an actual participant. Given the nature of the works travel (primarily a walking tour) through the streets of Kyiv, the camera work and Rubenfeld’s careful stage placement blended incredibly well. The resultant cinematic journey allowed the audience to experience the story in real time. Rubenfeld’s personal connection to the material was dynamic, personal and highly moving. If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down was a relevant and compelling performance, especially considering the nature of world events in 2025 when it was presented. Michael Rubenfeld in If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down. Photo: Paul Bargetto. Sponsored by the European Capital of Culture Lublin 2029 and the Adam Mickiewicz Foundation of Poland, our group consisted of numerous theatre scholars, producers and other artistic personnel from New York, Chicago, South Carolina and California and engaged in many events related to the history of Lublin but especially of the historically Jewish nature of the city. Many of the areas that we toured and the sites that were visited are featured in the 2024 movie A Real Pain . The study tour was arranged and coordinated by Tomek Smolarski on behalf of the European Capital of Culture Lublin 2029 and included the numerous performances but also visits to various sites in Lublin as well as neighboring cities like Kazimierz Dolny a medieval settlement with an important Jewish History. The event also included access to several additional performance events. One of these was the Cyrkulacje Festival presented at the Centre for the Meeting of Cultures in Lublin from October 4-10, 2025. Two works were available to be seen by our group – a work by Common Ground and Diaries in Motion, a physical theatre work by a group of young women from numerous European countries. The Cyrkulacje Festival brought together artists living in or originating from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine, and Slovakia. The festival is defined by diversity — of styles, aesthetics, and creative voices. The festival is built on exchange and dialogue, creating space for discovery, curiosity, and artistic circulation (yes, that’s where the name comes from!). The festival also hosts discussions, artist talks, and meetings with the jury. These encounters allow audiences to better understand the creative process and offer artists a chance to hear from their audience — and from each other. The program features both full-length productions and short-form pieces. From intimate solos to large-scale ensemble works, the festival showcases the depth and variety of the region’s circus voices. Since its beginnings in 2013, Cyrkulacje has helped contemporary circus artists grow, connect, and take the next steps in their careers. It’s a platform for experimentation, development, and recognition — a space that encourages originality, celebrates craftsmanship, and supports ambitious work. As part of the festival certain participants receive main prizes and special awards, including Best Trick, Audience Award, Media Award, Youth Award, and Partner Engagement Prizes. In 2019, Cyrkulacje was awarded the EFFE Label – a mark of excellence granted by the European Festivals Association. This recognition places Cyrkulacje among Europe’s most innovative and artistically significant cultural festivals. Stunt work with wooden blocks by the members of Common Ground. Photo: Steve Earnest Common Ground is a physical theatre artist collective based in Belgium with members from across Europe, North America and Asia. Performers include Andreas Bartl, Lisa Rinne, Emma Laule, Marius Pohlmann, Evertian Mercier and Zinzi Oegema. The group features immensely skilled physical artists in the areas of trapeze, human stunt work, devised work with physical objects, gymnastics and other related activities. Their hour-long exhibition (not given a specific title for the festival) included the use of numerous hollow wooden squares of various sizes that were carefully designed to create immense stage pictures while supporting (at times) a sizeable amount of weight. The artists manipulated the stage area with long poles, ropes and pulleys to form trapeze areas, climbing areas and shapes and carefully configured areas for the achievement of human stunts. Stunt work with poles and wooden shapes by Common Ground performer. Photo: Steve Earnest Diaries in Motion was produced by Daniel Burow with direction and artistic coaching by Christine Dissmann and Stacy Clark . Four artists from circus schools in Berlin, Montpellier, and Kyiv ( Lera Kutsenko, Daniela Levina, Alina Scharbl, Daria Ilnytska) attempt to answer these questions through the language of contemporary circus . The ninety-minute performance really had no story but certainly aimed toward meaning as the performers took the audience on a moving journey through “dreams and struggle, led by the desire for freedom,” as stated in the program. According to the production team the work aimed to tell the story of a generation forced to stand up for its most essential values - a performance that tells a tale of transformation from isolation and constraints to rebellion and collective strength. The four female artists were all highly trained acrobatic artists capable in the areas of floor work including German wheels and other rolling devices, flying work with a lyra, silks and other aerial devices in addition to any other related physical performance related elements including general stage movement and delivery of occasional lines of text. The nature of the work was based in strong athleticism and skill and the main goal, in addition to the potential story aimed at by the tone and nature of the background music, was the pure display of learned skill in the various disciplines. The performers measured up to the highest of world standards with their abilities in these areas and the sold-out audience witnessed breathtaking feats of physical work that can be achieved by only a small percentage of the world population and the highly athletic nature of the event appealed to both lovers of performance works as well as those more interested in sports and the display of highly skilled athletes. The blending of these two worlds was what characterized Diaries in Motion . Diaries in Motion Performers. Photo: Steve Earnest Diaries in Motion performers on a lyra. Photo: Steve Earnest The city of Warsaw is something to behold for all lovers of European travel and the National Theatre firmly represents the Polish nation’s desire to present theatrical art at the highest world level. The Royal Palace of Science and Culture include numerous theatre spaces with one company named, the Studio Theater. However, some confusion exists at times because the National Theatre of Poland, about fifteen minutes away by car or train, also has a Studio Theater. Both companies are included in the following section. AlphaGo_Lee at Studio Theater, Warsaw. Photo by Natalia Korczakowska Located in the beautiful Palace of Culture and Science in the city center of Warsaw AlphaGo_Lee : Theory of Sacrifice was presented at the Studio Theater. Directed by the company’s Artistic Director Natalia Korczakowska, the work considered a popular Korean board game – AlphaGo and dealt with the actual historical story of the 2016 match between Korean Go master Lee Sodal and the computer program itself in an AI format. The event, which took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, represented the fight between humanity (represented by Lee) and Artificial Intelligence, as represented by the AlphaGo game. The stage production detailed the events of the actual historical occurrence of the event, which was organized by Google and streamed live to the very large Chinese market who wanted to witness the ultimate battle between humanity and AI. The work is based on research by Natalia Korczakowska, who visited Seoul, Tokyo, and London, meeting with Go experts such as Prof. Chihyung Jeon (KAIST), Prof. Chihyung Nam (Myongji University), and members of the Korean Baduk Association. Their insights inform the production’s symbolic texture, embedding the Korean perspective at its core. Lee Sedol’s philosophical reflections—his belief that Go is an art form created from nothing by two human minds—resonate as the emotional heart of the piece. Korczakowska’s incredible conceptual approach was supplemented by lighting and live video by Rafal Paradowski, animation by Marcin Kitty Kosakowski, choreography by Sung Im Her, spacial arrangement and costumes by Marek Adamski and music by Marcin Lenarczyk and Dominik Ossowski. The production featured the use of an onstage camera crew that captured the scenes using 2 – 4 onstage cameras from various angles with the camera feed then projected onto numerous screens in live time. The lighting, sound and staging all contributed to an extremely well realized visual mise en scene that very capably revealed both very intimate scenes in addition to very high energy dance and public scenes that really stretched the nature of the performance. The stage itself became a monumental gaming space where the characters’ lives became the source of the game. Behind the scenes power plays by the leaders of Google DeepMind (based in London) were contrasted with bursts of dance, technological imagery and humans grappling with the depth and power of artificial intelligence. Intense dance scenes in AlphaGo_Lee . Photo by Natalia Korczakowska Presented at the Studio Theatre of the National Theatre of Warsaw, Waiting for Godot was presented in the Studio Space of the National Theatre Warsaw. The production played to sold out audiences for nearly three years and featured numerous well renowned Polish actors, many known for their numerous film and television credits, in addition to their stage credits in major Polish theatre companies. The work was directed by Piotr Cieplak with scenic, lighting and costume design by Andrzej Witkowski . The Studio Theatre of the National Theatre has a specific (and quite unusual) physical layout. Consisting of a 300-seat frontal view theatre that seemed to be designed with the Elizabethan theatre in mind, it had doors on either side of the backstage wall and a rather large discovery space in the middle. The discovery space was quite large in both size and depth, and several scenes were realized in that area, though the effect was not always successful as the concept of place was not clearly designated in the work. In addition, a stage left door, just past the entry area for audience members, was a part of the physical space but was used at numerous times in the production. This spacial arrangement was curious as it blurred the concept of place, awkwardly blending the practical nature of the exit with the world of the play. Mariusz Benoit (Estragon), Jerzy Radziwiłowicz (Vladimir), Bartłomiej Bobrowski (Lucky), Cezary Kosiński (Pozzo). Phot. Marta Ankiersztejn So many elements of this performance were surprising, and the work took on an usually serious tone with very little comic action. From the outset Estragon’s struggle to take off the boot seem a bit disingenuous and unrealized. The actors seemed to stand outside of their roles and comment on them in quasi-Brechtian fashion, which given the background of director Cieplak, would offer some explanation for the stylistic choices made. Mariusz Benoit and Jerzy Radziwilowicz seemed oddly cast in the roles as the as their performances were very dry and highly understated. Pozzo and Lucky (Cezary Kosinski and Bartlomiej Bobrowski, respectively) did little to rescue the dryness of the production’s tone. Anytime I see Waiting for Godot , it is with the intent that I am seeing an amazing universal work that, at its center, speaks so clearly to so many areas of the human experience and condition. I was incredibly hopeful but not completely satisfied in the overall achievement of this production. Sadly, I feel that much of the difficulty of the production came from the unusual and rigidly defined nature of the Studio Theatre space. Mariusz Benoit (Estragon), Jerzy Radziwiłowicz (Vladimir), Bartłomiej Bobrowski (Lucky), Cezary Kosiński (Pozzo). Phot. Marta Ankiersztejn The study tour curated by Smolarski was incredibly stimulating and included numerous theatrical and historical events worthy of a much longer and more detailed report. This rather short overview just manages to offer a partial view of the highly invigorating and varied nature of the arts scene in just two of Poland’s important centers for the arts and the brief nature of the trip (only 6 days) only allowed for a short glimpse into the incredibly diverse and highly supported work that happens in Poland. The country clearly prioritizes the arts and that spirit permeates all work that is both produced or presented there. References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University . He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Reas by Lola Arias at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Yoseli has a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on her back and has always wanted to travel, but she was arrested at the airport for drug trafficking. Nacho is a trans man who was arrested for swindling and started a rock band in jail. Gentle or rough, blonde or shaved, cis or trans, long-term inmates or newly admitted: in this hybrid musical, they all re-enact their lives in a Buenos Aires prison.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Reas At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Lola Arias Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue, NY 10003) on Sunday May 18th at 3pm. RSVP Please note this film has a ticketed entry and is being screened at Anthology Film Archive. Click on the button above to visit the AFA website to reserve your seats. Country Argentina, Germany, Switzerland Language Spanish Running Time 82 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film Yoseli has a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on her back and has always wanted to travel, but she was arrested at the airport for drug trafficking. Nacho is a trans man who was arrested for swindling and started a rock band in jail. Gentle or rough, blonde or shaved, cis or trans, long-term inmates or newly admitted: in this hybrid musical, they all re-enact their lives in a Buenos Aires prison. About The Artist(s) Lola Arias is a writer, theatre and film director and performer. She collaborates with people from different backgrounds (war veterans, former communists, Bulgarian children, etc.) in theatre, literature, music, film and art projects. Her productions play with the overlap zones between reality and fiction. Get in touch with the artist(s) N/A and follow them on social media @gema.films, @madavenuepr Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 22, 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Published: July 15, 2026 Download Article as PDF By Steve Earnest Image Credits: Article The Summer 2026 edition features productions from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Germany, Portugal, Lithuania and Romania and considers a variety of approaches from both new and established directors. Numerous works from some of Europe’s most respected companies as well as several new and relatively unknown theatre producers are considered, and many great photographs help to tell the story of these fantastic productions. Julian Hetzel’s Three Times Left is Right made its way throughout Europe in Summer 2026 – appearing at Berlin’s Theatertreffen but also in Düsselldorf, Switzerland and the Netherlands. One of Robert Wilson’s final productions, Seven Solitudes , also gets an early review in this issue, and special thanks to Tomek Smoliarski for his assistance in the translation of the review. Of special note in this issue is the work of editorial board member Professor Kalina Stefanova who spearheaded five of the articles featured here. Having access to these Eastern European productions satisfies the mission of European Stages to the highest level, as western European productions are sometimes featured more prominently. Our goal is to continue to find a balance that includes as many European countries as possible. Many thanks to all of the authors from around the world who contributed these works during the summer months in order that we at European Stages can continue to investigate and provide content to the international scholarly community in the area of theatre and performance. Their dedication to the mission and support of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center is greatly appreciated. References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University . He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review of 'In The Heights' at the Teatro Variedades Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Spring in Europe – Beyond the Theatertreffen Power, Shame, Vanity and Opportunism – Productions of the 63rd Berliner Theatertreffen “The more I give to thee, the more I have…” 15th edition of the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova Finding Lear’s Shadow: Compagnia de' Colombari's King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival Robert Wilson Beneath a Cabbage Leaf: 7 Solitudes at the Nacionalinis Kauno Dramos Teatras NE:BITEF 2025: The Festival that Refused to Disappear Displacing the Orient: Postcolonial Negotiations in Purcărete's Adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights Staging Tradition, Testing Form: The Second Showcase of the National Theatre of Sofia Poetics of the Unfulfilled: The Seagull at the Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre, Veles, North Macedonia Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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Watch PACI by JULIETTE ROUDET at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Choreographer and film director, Juliette Roudet returns to the Island Corsica after a long absence. She wants to question her estranged uncles about events in the past but when that doesn't work, she tries to find the truth through dance. . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents PACI At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by JULIETTE ROUDET Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film Program) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country France Language French Running Time 33 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film Choreographer and film director, Juliette Roudet returns to the Island Corsica after a long absence. She wants to question her estranged uncles about events in the past but when that doesn't work, she tries to find the truth through dance. About The Artist(s) Juliette Roudet is a versatile artist. Trained at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, she was quick to seek out other avenues of interpretation and creation. She was admitted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique de Paris (CNSAD), and has since performed under the direction of David Bobée, Jean Bellorini, Pierre Rigal, Laurent Laffargue, Caroline Marcadé... Since 2016, she has been teaching at the CNSAD and working with numerous artists and directors as a choreographer. In cinema and television, she has appeared in films by Alain Tasma, Manuel Flèche, Gérard Mordillat, Jérôme Cornuau and Ionut Teianu. In 2024, with “Paci”, she signed her first documentary film. Get in touch with the artist(s) dmorel@tsproductions.net and follow them on social media ✨https://www.instagram.com/julietteroudet/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Dominic Finocchiaro  Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Dinosaurs Dominic Finocchiaro By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF April Mathis, Kathleen Chalfant, and Elizabeth Marvel, photo by Julieta Cervantes The Dinosaurs By Jacob Perkins Directed by Les Waters Playwrights Horizons New York, NY February 19, 2025 Reviewed by Dominic Finocchiaro If the ever-present countdown clock in Oedipus was the defining image on Broadway this past season, a much more inefficacious timekeeper demanded attention Off-Broadway: the cheap, broken wall-clock that hung on the wall in Les Waters’s premiere production of Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs at Playwrights Horizons. The piece of scenery, easy to disregard in its anonymity, managed, in its inutility, to hold within itself the very dramaturgical structure undergirding the production. The world presented to audiences on the Judith O. Rubin Theater stage was one in which time was not linear but broken open and palimpsestic, containing both past and future in the eternal here and now that is the life of the addict in recovery. Perkins’s play is an addiction recovery play, a genre highly present onstage recently in the form of Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir , Joe White’s Blackout Songs , and Sean Daniels’s The White Chip, among others. However, it is perhaps more useful to place Perkins’s play in conversation with Annie Baker’s Infinite Life and its abiding interest in formally exploring the liminal spaces of recovery (from illness in Baker’s play) and the ways that such spaces fracture and distort one’s experience of time. The Dinosaurs follows the Saturday Survivors, a weekly AA support group for women, as they prepare for and undertake one of their meetings. The women (portrayed by Kathleen Chalfant, Elizabeth Marvel, April Mathis, Mallory Portnoy, and Maria Elena Ramirez) are of various ages and ethnicities, similar only in their addiction. A newcomer to the meeting, Reyna, or Buddy (Keilly McQuail), arrives briefly at the top of the play before quickly skittering off (although she will reappear later). Everything is set-up for a hyper-naturalist, minimalist, real-time drama to unfold. dots’s design further established this expectation in the audience: their set was perfectly banal, painstaking in its recreation of the anonymous, threadbare, and utilitarian nature of the rooms in which AA meetings are often held. The folding chairs were mismatched, and stray items were neatly lined up against the back wall—a period painting (whose subject cheekily evokes The Dinosaurs ’s origin as a Clubbed Thumb prompt about The Decameron) , exercise mats, cardboard boxes—as if to showcase the various and random usages that the room was in service to. And let’s not forget that broken clock. Perkins’s characterizations, like the set, are relatively sparse on the page, underscoring the importance of anonymity to the addict in recovery; although every addict’s story is different in its details, at their core they are all the same, and to engage meaningfully in the work of recovery is to throw off the uniqueness of the individual self and accept being one of many. The women all have names that start with the letter J, further signaling this lack of individuality. Waters and the ensemble offset this sense of anonymity somewhat through the specificity of their work, but the sparseness of Perkins’s text resists too much actorly embellishment. Indeed, the performances that seemed to push hardest against this simplicity of characterization are the ones that risked dissonance vis-a-vis the larger vision of the production. Perhaps the most unadorned—and strongest—performance was Mathis’s as the gentle, conciliatory Jane; in giving over to the text completely, Mathis exuded a quiet but resounding presence that reverberated in its utter simplicity and helped ground the production. Maria Elena Ramirez and Elizabeth Marvel, photo by Julieta Cervantes The Dinosaurs was the first production in Playwrights Horizons’s new Unplugged program, which aims to promote new plays in simple realizations with low-production values, focusing on the creativity of the work itself rather than the spectacle afforded by large design budgets. A one-location play set at an AA meeting is a smart choice for such a program, but the fact that Waters was directing gave audiences a hint that the realm of pure naturalism was not this play’s likely home. Waters’s oeuvre is perhaps most striking in his productions’ ability to manifest psychogeography, to create haunted, liminal atmospheres so rich in emotion and memory that they become another character in themselves—his recent, deeply moving (and deeply underappreciated) staging of Eliya Smith’s Grief Camp at the Atlantic was a prime example of these tendencies. For Waters, a room is never just a room—certainly not a room with as much embedded memory as one that has housed a support group for over fifty years. What audiences came to realize, little by little, in Waters’s production was that what they were witnessing was not a single meeting, but in fact fragments of many meetings over many years. The first significant evidence of this (besides the broken clock) was the reappearance of Reyna during the group’s three-minute silent meditation and the asynchronous conversation she had with Jane that went unacknowledged by the other women. Another example was Joan’s (Marvel) days of sobriety ricocheting from forty-five days to twenty-seven to ten to five to one to thirteen years, all in the span of a single minute. Later, Jolly (Chalfant) vanished from the stage without fuss and was spoken of in fond remembrances by Joan, mourning her passing. This was a world in which time is a tenuous, fragile thing that is as uncertain as each character’s hard-fought sobriety. Time in this room, then, was a purgatorial time that flattened. If, as Thornton Wilder writes in his essay “Some Thoughts on Playwriting,” theatrical time is always now, then so is it the case in recovery, with its emphasis on living in the moment and on being in “the present tense,” as Perkins’s characters often reiterate. Recovery is anti-teleological, the inherently cyclical time of eternal return—every day is a new day, but every day is also the same struggle, and the women in the play must, as they cheerily invoke, “keep on coming back” to this same room. What Perkins and Waters attempted to do, therefore, was to give to such an experience a theatrical form attuned to its psychological truth; while a more linear structure that moved towards a climactic resolution would be false for the addict in recovery, the production’s dreamlike distortions of time recreated the addict in recovery’s ongoing relationship with their own addictions. It is a relationship whose routines are so repetitive that they blur together into an endlessly occurring, singular present. Although the play refuses dramatic resolution, Perkins does offer audiences something to grasp onto at work’s end. Reyna returns after having been integrated into the group. Chalfant then arrives back on stage, only this time, she is a new character. The eldest member of the group now embodies the newbie, and Reyna has moved from newbie to welcoming veteran. The names and roles have changed, but the cycle continues in the empty room. The two women then left to meet the others at a nearby diner, and the audience was left with the room itself, in a silence that screamed. The room will be there after these specific women have gone, and it will continue to hold their love, their care and generosity for each other. Waters succeeded at creating another of his haunted spaces, the ghosts that inhabited it not fearsome but friendly, guides rather than demons. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DOMINIC FINOCCHIARO is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on late 20 th  and 21 st  century anglophone plays and playwrights, with a particular emphasis on queer theatre. As a playwright, his work has been developed and produced nationwide, including at Clubbed Thumb, the Kennedy Center, the New Group, and the Roundabout Theatre. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction By Edward Ziter Published: May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution:

Amy Mihyang Ginther Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Amy Mihyang Ginther By Published on May 19, 2022 Download Article as PDF “I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.”—Saidiya Hartman [1] Using theatre to generate empathy for characters and narratives has been a longstanding goal in Eurocentric drama and a strong argument for this medium to be a tool for larger social change. In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, sparked largely by the unjust deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, theatre makers are exploring alternative ways to represent Black, brown and other historically excluded narratives, which are too often exploited as trauma porn. In this essay, I offer dramaturgy of deprivation, or 없다, as an alternative to dramaturgy of empathy. I contextualize this concept theoretically and practically, and use examples from my own practice to illustrate how 없다 is potentially effective in dramatizing narratives from my own positionalities as an Asian American and as a transracially adopted person from South Korea. Critique of trauma porn and sentimentalized narratives While white representation is afforded abundance and complexity, “ethnic and racial others live in an economy of narrative scarcity.” [2] Theatre has long had the power to disrupt this scarcity but often only in the form of providing the previously invisiblized or marginalized narrative for an audience to elicit empathy. Performance studies scholar/ethnographic theatre maker Nikki Yeboah asks in our current moment, “is empathy enough, or does our work reify power more than disrupt it?” [3] Particularly in relation to Black and brown suffering, how can we dramatize characters’ experiences in ways that do not re-traumatize people of color or leave white audiences feeling passively satisfied for having empathy, therefore perpetuating the white and colonial gaze of surveillance, voyeurism, fetishism, and possession, [4] something Yeboah critiques as “not an inherently radical act”? [5] Theorists from Black and decolonial studies indicate that highlighting the historiographical absence of people or obfuscation of narratives illustrates how forces such as white supremacy and colonialism have dehumanized or invisiblized them. Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino argue that metaphoricity is a crucial part of Black enslaved identity and that its “political indecipherability … exemplifies the violence of slavery itself.” [6] If “what slavery-as-metaphor offers is an opening to tarry with unknowing, to increase frustration,” [7] then what impacts can this type of depiction have on a theatre audience? Can frustration and unknowing provoke stronger actions that will result in social justice after the performance? Yeboah argues for dramaturgy that leaves the audience with the kind of frustration Garba and Sorentino refer to because “collective action requires agitation. Collective action is fueled by feelings of unrest, anger, and dissatisfaction so strong that they cannot be contained. It emerges out of turbulence. It draws strength from a people unsettled.” [8] Saidiya Hartman seems to agree: “the loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none. To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited.” [9] Hartman’s idea of narrative restraint as a way to “respect the limits of what cannot be known” [10] contrasts with the dramatic urge to present such narratives with explicit specificity and detail for contemporary white audiences as a way to compensate for their invisibilization. Although greater representation and embodiment of these stories and characters are still important, is there a dramaturgical alternative that complicates these depictions and denies audiences satisfaction? These questions inspire me to think about the Korean verb 없다, which roughly translates to “there are none; (to be) lacking; (to be) nonexistent,” [11] not dissimilar to faltar in Spanish. [12] How do we create dramatic experiences of loss or absence for an audience so they feel the grief and rage needed to take action towards a more just world, instead of feeling passively good about themselves for empathizing with victims/survivors of oppression? Rather than working to perform and prove my humanity for the audience, how can I compel them to feel the irreconcilable loss of self and/or history so we can be inspired to make collective change? Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview and Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop are excellent recent examples that engage with more complex representations around racialized trauma. As an audience member, I felt the unrest, anger, and hunger that Yeboah and Hartman hope to evoke in their work; both shows created strong desire within me to experience their characters and narratives more fully, and I felt a renewed urgency to fight for them offstage. In the next section, I will argue that the uniqueness of transracially adopted Asian American identity is suited for 없다 and provide examples from my own work. Racist Love : Asian American and adopted Korean representation This essay takes inspiration from a performative response on Zoom that I gave to Leslie Bow’s working introduction to her book, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy . [13] Bow argues that the US’s racialized relationship with Asian American identity can be illustrated through its abstracted affection or desire for nonhuman proxies (such as objects) and that this partly stems from a “deliberate absence of Asian people.” [14] This resonated with me as both an Asian American and a person who was transracially adopted from South Korea. “Transracial” does not mean white women trying to pass as Black or brown. In this context, it means being adopted into a family whose race differs from theirs (often Black/brown folks being adopted by white folks), and it has been an established term in adoption studies for decades. [15] Directly following the Korean War in the 1950s, a time when the US was strengthening its anti-Asian immigration policies, [16] adoptions from countries like South Korea increased. I argue that this is because US society and its adoption industrial complex viewed adopted children as dehumanized objects that allowed them to project the same kind of abstracted affection and longing that Bow highlights. White US families often adopted South Korean children because they were deemed acceptable as a model minority [17] in ways that are consistent with Bow’s assertions that the US looks “outward to Asia for its ‘bit’ of the other, for the object that makes satisfaction possible while imperfectly concealing racial anxiety.” [18] The larger AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) immigrant community often fails to be in solidarity with transracially adopted people from Korea [19] (who make up 10% of the Korean-US diaspora) while their white parents disregard their racial identity often with the intention to assimilate them. [20] Because “adoption is a series of transactions—legal, social, and financial [and] … those with the most power get to define the terms and create the policies and practices that most benefit them,” [21] white parents as major actors in these transactions tend to further objectify adopted people as nonhumans. The Korean government and its counterparts in countries like the US that make up the adoption industrial complex commodify adopted people; they were a literal export, because “US adoptive laws were designed in the context of free market capitalism and based on children as property.” [22] Agencies duplicated, interchanged, and manipulated our records to make us more marketable/adoptable. I was one of likely thousands of adopted people whose status was changed to orphan on my paperwork, a lie to appease the US government’s scant overseas adoption policies at the time. Instead of wanting to prove my humanity as an Asian American and transracially adopted person, my impulse was to move in another direction: to depict myself as literal Asian objects. Utilizing the Zoom format, I used Snapchat filters that stir Western desire such as food, toys, and appropriative clothing/costume. I leaned into my own objectification and used filters that intentionally obscured most of my face in the hopes that the audience would strain to see more of my personhood and be present to this less comfortable sensation. Fig. 1. Screenshots of Ginther (taken by the author) during her Zoom performance, using Snapchat filters. Clockwise from left to right: 1. As a dumpling, 2. As an old-fashioned Orientalist doll, 3. As a Geisha in full makeup, 4. As a boba tea. As I presented using a boba tea filter, for example, I talked about how experts estimate that South Korea made somewhere between 15-20 million dollars a year at the height of Korean adoption. [23] Using my own birth year, 1983, and adjusting for inflation and the pricing for my favorite bubble tea place in Santa Cruz, I shared with the audience that I cost about 1,315 boba teas. I hoped that in highlighting the loss of my story and personhood through anti-Asian American racism and the international adoption industrial complex that I would generate hunger, agitation, and unrest in ways that Yeboah and Hartman imagined. Attendees described my performance as “playful,” “incisive,” and “disorienting.” Another reflected, “Mainstream representations of ‘Asian-ness,’ like dumplings, ‘Geisha’ makeup, and boba tea, seen all together in aggregate made for a compelling visual argument of how we consume and project, literally on our faces, cultural iconography and object.” These responses suggest that I effectively performed alienation and objectification. My work: between and No Danger of Winning My first solo show, between , explored Korean adopted identity through multiple characters that centered my search for my first family. [24] Many adoption narratives use reunion as a form of climax, [25] but I intentionally deprived the audience of this dramatic moment, telling them: There was no grand moment that led me to my family in Korea.Perhaps that’s what you were hoping to find here.Meeting my family in Korea did not complete me.Reunions are not ends. They are middles. [26] I did not consciously know it at the time, but I was exploring ways we can withhold representation from audiences for sociopolitical reasons. I remarked that I had intentionally resisted this type of resolution scene because “I think this dilutes the complexity and richness of the experience that the continuously progressing relationship demands and deserves.” [27] In addition to depriving my audience of a realistic depiction of my reunion, I realized that my inability to “authentically” portray a Korean woman also deprived Korean audience members in Seoul of the ethno-national identity that was taken from me through the trauma of my transnational adoption. This is particularly important because transracially adopted people “are seen as suspect in their communities of origin or seen as not authentic,” [28] so a more supposedly “accurate” depiction potentially misses an opportunity to convey a more complex truth. I reflected: I want the audience to fully believe that I am this Korean mother before them, but I have accepted the fact that, to a Korean-fluent audience, there really is no amount of voice work I can do to achieve this. … you’re not the only one to intimate that part of what is moving about this performance of Ki-Bum is how hard and perhaps how imperfectly I, as an adoptee, am trying to portray this character to audiences here in South Korea. [29] Being unable to achieve this character’s accent with believable mimesis originally felt like a failure in my performance. With between , I am interested in the impact of my inability to fully embody Koreanness for Korean audience members. In feeling deprived of this more authentic portrayal, perhaps they will be moved to support policies such as family preservation so as to not perpetuate this discomfort they feel. The theory I cite in this essay, my previous work like between , and pieces like A Strange Loop and Fairview have inspired the ways I am writing and dramaturging my current project, the book for No Danger of Winning , a verbatim musical based on my interviews with ten former contestants of color who were eliminated on The Bachelor/ette . It is a meta-musical where a character, Joy, based on me as the playwright, navigates the complex ethics of trying to represent the people she interviews in ways that are more humanizing than the reality television depictions. In some ways, she is exploring the same questions as this essay through a more dramatic, embodied medium. Originally, one of our major dramaturgical goals was to humanize the contestants in ways that the reality TV did not and to illuminate the ways they suffered as a result. When one Black audience member commented at our first workshop reading, “I don’t need an entire musical to tell me that these reality shows are racist,” [30] it became clear to me, the composer (Thomas Hodges), and our developmental director (Lisa Marie Rollins) that providing literal/mimetic depictions of the characters’ experiences simply to replace the racist televised versions was not sufficient representation. The musical needed to disrupt the conditioned white gaze of the audience. After six Asian/Asian American women were killed in a mass shooting in Atlanta in March 2021, the stakes of representation and its deadly consequences resonated with me in a deeply personal way, adding to the heightened despair and fear so many of us in the AAPI community were feeling since the pandemic and its racist consequences emerged. [31] I wanted to depict the way this event shifted my (Joy’s) making of our musical—but how? How can I represent the responses of my Asian American and transracially adopted Asian communities through my theatre making in ways that do not reify trauma or leave a white audience feeling sated with their empathy for us? There is a moment where my character, Joy, seeks comfort after the tragic news by having an intimate and romantic moment with the presumed Asian male contestant she interviewed from The Bachelorette. I offer this staging as a possibility of something because the scenario of two Asian people experiencing romantic love does not happen often on The Bachelor/ette . However, it becomes increasingly apparent through his lines that this Asian actor is actually playing Joy’s white boyfriend; along with Joy, the audience experiences this possibility of romantic love dissolve. No matter how much agency Joy has as a playwright, she is unable to generate this narrative in her real life. Using this reveal, I aim for the audience to feel deprived of what a romantic love story between Joy and an Asian American partner may look like and the ways whiteness can feel insufficient in supporting partners of color during/after racist trauma. Conclusion Adopted writer Mary Kim Arnold reminds us: “being visible is not the same as being seen.” [32] Too often, audiences leave shows “feeling good about feeling bad” [33] for a character of color who experienced oppression or trauma as part of the dramatic narrative. While representation is important, and this may be arguably better than continuing to exclude these narratives from our canon, I believe there are ways we can reimagine dramaturgy that can move audiences beyond a passive experience of empathy that does little to change power dynamics and the world at large. In my theatre making, I aspire to deprive the audience of my full personhood and its related narratives in an effort to generate feelings and experiences of irreconcilable loss: a traded commodity through cute Snapchat filters; a yearned-for reunion scene; an “authentic” Korean character; or a loving, healing, romantic relationship between two Asian Americans. I dream of emancipatory ways Korean adopted people and other people of color will be seen onstage. Perhaps one of the ways to do this is to deprive an audience of what could have been, to compel them to experience our grief, our losses, our irreconcilability, so they rage with us, fight for us, and do something in the world that generates actual justice. References [1] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 11. [2] Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 203. [3] Nikki Owusu Yeboah, “‘I know how it is when nobody sees you’: Oral-History Performance Methods for Staging Trauma,” Text and Performance Quarterly 40, no. 2 (2020): 132. [4] Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2003), 6. [5] Yeboah, “Oral History Performance Methods,” 149. [6] Tapji Garba and Sara‐Maria Sorentino, “Slavery Is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,’” Antipode 52, no. 3 (2020): 776. [7] Garba and Sorentino, 777. [8] Yeboah, “Oral History Performance Methods,” 46. [9] Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 8. Hartman’s essay is known for laying the foundations of critical fabulation, the praxis of filling in the gaps of historical data with creative, semi-fictive accounts, particularly in relation to Black trauma in the US. This is already being referenced in dramaturgical processes in productions. See Calley N. Anderson and Holly L. Derr, “Using Critical Fabulation for History-Based Playwriting,” Howlround, 3 March 2021, https://howlround.com/using-critical-fabulation-history-based-playwriting. [10] Hartman, 4. [11] “Google Translate,” Google, https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=%EC%97%86%EB%8B%A4&op=translate. [12] “Google Translate,” Google, https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=faltar%20&op=translate. [13] Bow’s remarks and my response to them were part of the Writing for Living: Helene Moglen Conference in Feminism and the Humanities, sponsored by University of California: Santa Cruz, 2021. [14] Leslie Bow, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 10. [15] For more on this, see: JaeRan Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption: Historical Legacies, Current Issues, and Future Challenges,” in The Complexities of Race: Identity, Power, and Justice in an Evolving America , ed. Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 104-125; Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Andy Marra, “An Open Letter: Why Co-opting ‘Transracial’ in the Case of Rachel Dolezal is Problematic,” Medium, 16 June 2015, https://medium.com/@Andy_Marra/an-open-letter-why-co-opting-transracial-in-the-case-of-rachel-dolezal-is-problematic-249f79f6d83c. [16] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 109. [17] Kim, Adopted Territory , 28. [18] Leslie Bow, “Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy” (presentation, Writing for Living: Helene Moglen Conference in Feminism and the Humanities, Santa Cruz, CA, 19-20 February 2021). Bow said this as part of the draft she presented at the conference. It was later deleted for the final version of her book’s introduction. [19] Kim Park Nelson, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 96. [20] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 110. [21] Ibid., 104. [22] Ibid., 112-113. [23] Kim, Adopted Territory , 33. [24] I wrote between as part of my undergraduate thesis at Hofstra University in 2005. Its World Premiere was at the Edinburgh Fringe (Gilded Balloon) in 2006. Because of its themes and production locations, audiences were predominantly white and/or had some personal/professional interest in adoption. There were more Korean attendees when the show premiered in Seoul in 2011, but still many white audience members because the show was co-produced by an expat theatre company. [25] Family reunion is commonly used to resolve many media narratives in general that are not adoption related, spanning from Finding Nemo to Avengers: Endgame . One adoption-focused example of reunion being used as a resolution is the Netflix documentary, Found (2021). [26] Amy Mihyang Ginther, between (unpublished script, Club After Mainstage, Seoul, 9-17 April 2011). [27] tammy ko Robinson, “Korean Adoptee Explores Roots In One-Woman Show,” Imperial Family Companies, October 2011, https://charactermedia.com/october-issue-korean-adoptee-explores-roots-in-one-woman-show-2/. [28] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 115. [29] Robinson, “Korean Adoptee.” [30] No Danger of Winning talkback , book by Amy Mihyang Ginther, music and lyrics by Thomas Hodges, Shetler Studios, New York, 11 July 2019. [31] Anti-Asian racism, violence, and xenophobia has a long history in the US; this has intensified significantly since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. [32] Mary-Kim Arnold, Litany for the Long Moment (Buffalo, NY: Essay Press, 2018), 29. [33] This phrases references Lisa Nakumura, “Feeling Good about Feeling Bad: Virtuous Virtual Reality and the Automation of Racial Empathy,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 47-64. This piece critiques the goal of empathy in virtual reality (VR) documentary work specifically, and is impacting my current VR project, Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산), which is about my illegal abortion in South Korea. Details about this are beyond the scope of this essay, but I anticipate publication about it in the future, along with its VR release in exhibition space. Footnotes About The Author(s) Amy Mihyang Ginther (she/they) is currently an assistant professor within the Department of Performance, Play & Design at UC Santa Cruz. She is a queer, transracially adopted theatre maker and accent designer who publishes and performs around themes of identity, embodied trauma, power, and representation. Ginther’s edited volume, Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and decolonial actor training , is due 2023 (Routledge) and she is currently working on a musical, No Danger of Winning . Ginther is a Master Teacher of Acting and Singing with Archetypes, and is a certified teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork and Tectonic Theater Project’s Moment Work™ devising method. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Alex Ferrone Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Appropriate Alex Ferrone By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Corey Stoll in Appropriate. Credit: Joan Marcus. Appropriate By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Directed by Lila Neugebauer Helen Hayes Theatre New York, NY November 30, 2023 Reviewed by Alex Ferrone A prolonged blackout opens Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate , so it is through sound—the tremulous hum of “ a billion cicadas ”—that the audience first encounters the yet unseen world on stage. In Lila Neugebauer’s production at the Hayes Theatre, the play’s first time on Broadway, ten years after regional co-premieres in Louisville and Chicago, sound designers Bray Poor and Will Pickens immersed the audience in a surround-sound cicada song that seemed almost to overwhelm the senses. I say senses (plural) because the soundscape’s penetrative quality was intended to exceed audition: as Jacobs-Jenkins explains in the stage directions of the play’s prologue, the sound “ sweeps the theater […] over and beyond the stage – washing itself over the walls and the floors, baptizing the aisles and the seats, forcing itself into every inch of every space, every nook, every pocket, hiding place and pore until this incessant chatter is touching you. It is touching you .” We were thus meant to feel the sound on our bodies, on our skin. When the lights finally came up on the meticulously cluttered interior of an old two-story Arkansas plantation house, designed by the collective Dots, the play’s premise was deceptively familiar: the semi-estranged family of a dead white patriarch reunites to auction off the property and divide the assets, but their long festering resentments soon dominate the proceedings and cause irreparable fissures. Appropriate knowingly riffs on the American tradition of the family reunion play, inviting easy comparisons to plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Buried Child , and August: Osage County —a tradition Jacobs-Jenkins admires and also problematizes for its racial exclusivity. “No one ever talks about Raisin in the Sun as a family drama,” he told Diep Tran in the December 2023 issue of Playbill : “It’s always ‘a social allegory about race and class.’” Jacobs-Jenkins expressed a similar misgiving in American Theatre nine years earlier, the first time Appropriate was mounted in New York in an off-Broadway production at the Signature Center: “there were a lot of triggers for me in hearing people list and describe the ‘great American family dramas.’ I’d look around and be like, ‘There’s no people of color on these lists.’ […] Who has access to this idea of ‘family’ as a universal theme?” Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Corey Stoll in Appropriate . Credit: Joan Marcus. Of course, the Lafayette family drama was front and center at the Hayes Theatre for Appropriate ’s almost three-hour runtime. The cast, led by an indomitable Sarah Paulson, traded endless verbal (and eventually physical) assaults as they aired their grievances and exposed each other’s indiscretions. Supporting performances were uniformly excellent: Corey Stoll, as the absent, entitled son for whom care entails merely signing checks, and Nathalie Gold, as his apprehensive wife who struggles as an outsider in the family, were standouts; so was Michael Esper, as the prodigal son whose serial transgressions alienate those close to him; Elle Fanning was especially memorable as his suspiciously young girlfriend, whose new-age spiritualist word salad was a consistent source of humor. But the evening belonged to Paulson: she gave an astonishing performance as the eldest daughter Toni, at times beset with exhaustion, at others ferociously stalking the stage, her fierce commitment to her family barely concealing both vulnerability and venom. If there is familiarity here, soon comes the curveball, a series of disturbing discoveries as the family sorts through Daddy’s things: first, an album of lynching photos; then, jars of “weird stuff” that resembles human remains; finally, a Klan hood over the head of the youngest grandchild, which, when I saw the show, drew the night’s loudest combination of belly laughs and horrified gasps. It is a rupture the family is determined to avoid, as they downplay and outright deny Daddy’s obvious involvement in anti-Black violence. But their insistence on centering themselves, on claiming victimhood at each other’s hands, wilfully sidelines the Black victims of racist violence whose traces continue to crop up on the family estate. And so the photo album shifts signification, no longer a physical record of heinous racist violence but a commodity worth “hundreds of thousands of dollars” whose sale would enact yet another indignity on the murdered Black people among its pages. While the family cannot fathom calling Daddy an outright racist (gasp!), daughter-in-law Rachael points out that the Antebellum South is “the soil upon which his worldview was fashioned.” This mention of soil is no coincidence, for the vast property includes two burial grounds: one, a cemetery for generations of the Lafayette family; the other, the unmarked graves of generations of enslaved people who worked on the plantation. Even unseen, they are nevertheless there. And so we return to the cicadas, whose characteristic life cycle confines them to the soil for thirteen years at a time. In Appropriate , the cicadas never left, their low thrum pulsating through the theatre for the full length of the show. (In the text, Jacobs-Jenkins specifies that they “ fade to a place just beyond us but never disappear ,” and, sure enough, the stage directions that end each scene reinvoke their continuous presence.) It is an unnerving element of the sound design, something the audience acclimates to, often drowned out by the onstage histrionics, but never absent—an ongoingness that recalls Christina Sharpe’s figuration of “antiblackness as total climate” in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Ultimately, little is resolved by the end of the play. Instead, Jacobs-Jenkins pulls another narrative trick (and maybe exacts some revenge) by absenting the Lafayette family altogether: generations whoosh by (“ it is some day – any day – tomorrow – thirteen years from now – twenty-six years from now. It is the future. It is the present. It is any present. Is the past – any past – now ”), and, in a stunning coup de théâtre , the house falls apart before our eyes. Jane Cox’s dazzling lighting produced a cinematic timelapse as shelves collapsed and windows shattered and a chandelier swung from a rope. Finally, a colossal tree grew from the ground, its wide trunk and full branches stretching out of view, high up into the fly space—radical growth after so much decay. Neugebauer’s final image departed from the text, but it was perhaps in direct conversation with the titles of the play’s three acts, not reproduced in the Playbill. Where Act II, “Walpurgisnacht,” gestures to paganism and witchcraft (and surely to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , another “family drama” in its own way), Acts I and III, titled “The Book of Revelations” and “The Book of Genesis,” take us from the end of the world back to the beginning, to the garden and the great flood, to regeneration. The production’s final scene, with its spectacular collapse and its magnificent tree growing through (or perhaps from) the ruins, beautifully captured the extent to which Appropriate is not really about the Lafayettes at all: it’s about the house and about the land on which it stands and eventually falls. It’s about the soil. Sarah Paulson in Appropriate . Credit: Joan Marcus. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Alex Ferrone (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of English in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at l’Université de Montréal, where he teaches dramatic literature, theatre history, and performance studies. He is the author of Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London (Springer, 2021), and his articles and reviews have been published in Theatre Survey , Theatre Journal , and Comparative Drama . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Resilience by Juan David Padilla Vega at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Globally renowned drag, circus, performance, and dance artists share their personal stories of resilience through captivating manifestos. From a French aerialist’s life-saving journey of gender euphoria through circus to a Canadian dancer’s defiant resistance against shadeism, and a Colombian queer refugee artist’s poignant revelation of silenced asylum struggles, these inspiring artists come together to share stories that not only positively transformed their lives but also greatly impacted their communities. Blending documentary and art film, 'Resilience' captures vibrant performance manifestos born from a shared creation residency. Through visceral movement and powerful words, the film invites viewers to contemplate the beauty of human strength.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Resilience At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Juan David Padilla Vega Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Thursday May 15th at 1pm and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Canada, Colombia Language Spanish, English, French Running Time 70 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film Globally renowned drag, circus, performance, and dance artists share their personal stories of resilience through captivating manifestos. From a French aerialist’s life-saving journey of gender euphoria through circus to a Canadian dancer’s defiant resistance against shadeism, and a Colombian queer refugee artist’s poignant revelation of silenced asylum struggles, these inspiring artists come together to share stories that not only positively transformed their lives but also greatly impacted their communities. Blending documentary and art film, 'Resilience' captures vibrant performance manifestos born from a shared creation residency. Through visceral movement and powerful words, the film invites viewers to contemplate the beauty of human strength. About The Artist(s) Juan David Padilla Vega is a Canadian-Colombian transdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose versatile portfolio spans film, photography, and video installations intertwined with performing arts such as circus, dance, drag, and music. Based in Montreal, his artistic practice explores the challenges faced by visible and invisible minorities, the emergence of new diasporas, self-exploration through inherited memories, and human movement. Among his most notable works is Resilience, a project supported by the Canada Council for the Arts (CAC) and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ). Initially conceived as a social art initiative, it evolved into his first experimental documentary feature, which had its world premiere at Montreal's International Festival of Films on Art (Le FIFA) in 2025. His latest project, the multimedia installation Titre de Voyage, debuted as a solo exhibition at the Council for the Arts in Montreal and was later showcased at the Maison de la culture Claude-Léveillée during the Festival LatinArte, as well as on St-Hubert Street for Latin American Heritage Month, reaching an audience of 38,000 spectators. Additional highlights include Betty Garcés, the Voice of the Pacific Littoral, a documentary short about Afro-Colombian opera singer Betty Garcés, and Nostos, Urniator & Dor, a multimedia art installation presented at Cali’s International Dance Biennale and the Teatro Colón Bogotá. Get in touch with the artist(s) distributionresilience@gmail.com and follow them on social media SOCIAL MEDIA PRODUCTION COMPANY Insondable Studio IG: @insondablestudio Urniator Studio IG: @UrniatorStudio FB: https://www.facebook.com/urniatorstudio SOCIAL MEDIA DIRECTOR Juan David Padilla Vega IG: @juandavidpadillavega FB: https://www.facebook.com/juandavidpadillavega LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-david-padilla-vega-4b5b301a2/ SOCIAL MEDIA PRODUCER Philippe-Alexandre Jacques IG: @paj_philippe FB: https://www.facebook.com/philippe.jacques.505 SOCIAL MEDIA DISTRIBUTOR Lucía González García IG: @luciagoga FB: https://www.facebook.com/achsoluciag/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luciagonzalezg/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Benjamin Gillespie Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Scene Partners Benjamin Gillespie By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Eric Berryman, Kristen Sieh, Carmen M. Herlihy, and Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners. Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre Scene Partners By John J. Caswell, Jr. Directed by Rachel Chavkin Vineyard Theatre New York, NY November 8, 2023 Reviewed by Benjamin Gillespie Scene Partners , written by playwright John J. Caswell, Jr. (author of the critically acclaimed play Wet Brain ), is a non-linear exploration of memory and trauma that riffs on both the hopes and fears of its aging protagonist, Meryl Kowalski. Developed during the COVID-19 pandemic (while Caswell was in residence at the Vineyard Theatre), and directed by Rachel Chavkin, the play centers on the journey of 75-year-old Meryl, who attempts to become a Hollywood movie star as a septuagenarian—an unlikely feat considering the movie industry’s notoriously ageist reputation, especially toward older actresses. Over the course of the play, Meryl travels from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, finds an agent, and ends up in the starring role of a movie about her own life. Embodied by a (then) 75-year-old Dianne Wiest, actress and character are the same age, significant for a play that, in many ways, is about the resilience of aging. Wiest brought a wisdom and strength to the role that helped to center a purposefully fragmented, though often perplexing, production which celebrated the possibility of an artistic third act for its determined heroine. Meryl’s backstory is told piecemeal to set up the play’s present tense in 1985. Meryl was born around 1910 in Los Angeles. At a young age, her parents separated, and she lived with her insensitive mother who relocated them to Wisconsin, where her mother then remarried. As we come to find out, Meryl’s stepfather repeatedly raped her as a child, but neither her mother nor stepsister, Charlize (played as an adult by Johanna Day), acknowledged this pattern of sexual abuse. Around 1930, Meryl married another abuser named Stanley Kowalski (“I know what you’re thinking” Meryl says. “I have no idea who’s responsible for feeding the details of my life to Mr. Williams for his little play! But my Stanley, he was so much worse, in every possible way”). Her ungrateful daughter, Flora (played by Kristen Sieh), is a drug addict dependent on her mother’s support to survive. The play begins just after the death of her husband (“that motherfucker!” she exclaims), at which point Meryl has had enough and decides to head west to become a Hollywood film star. But this is only the backstory, with the action of the play taking place in the present tense of 1985, but also (at least partially) in Meryl’s imagination. Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners . Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre. The play presents the often painful, albeit revelatory, journey of a woman trying to process a lifetime of hardship in order to discover herself for the first time after spending three quarters of her life in abusive relationships. The fragmented reality of her mind (and consequently, the play) often leaves audiences with more questions than answers. But in a way, this is the point. The poetic, dream-like world of Scene Partners is contrasted by the harsh realism of Meryl’s life; anchored by the strength and tenacity of its aging central character, played expertly be Wiest, Meryl is akin to the great female roles of Tennessee Williams (who, as mentioned above, is directly evoked in the play several times). Deciding whether what’s happening in front of us is “real” or not misses the point: the focus here is rather for audiences to see Meryl telling her own story in the way that she (finally) wants and gets to tell it. But memory is a funny thing, and Meryl’s is as fragmented as it comes, not only blocking out experiences of trauma but also facing an unnamed neurological disorder that suggests she is losing cerebral control. “Is this like a memory play?” asks one of her acting classmates who Meryl recruits to act in her life story. “Do you want realism or should it be more like whoa! ?” “All of the above” answers her director/acting teacher. “It’s a work in progress” Meryl replies. Work in progress is an apt description for the play and production as it often loses its footing in between worlds, sometimes taking on the air of a rehearsal. But this does not detract too much from the beauty of Wiest’s performance or the stylish and dynamic staging by Chavkin, supported by a superb design team. The fragmentation of the play was emphasized through the innovative scenic and video designs by Riccardo Hernández and David Bengali, respectively, who utilized shifting screens and projections to illustrate the fluidity of Meryl’s memories. The use of large, moving screens not only bifurcated scenes but also served as a visual metaphor for Meryl’s fragmented, layered remembrances. However, while visually striking, this design choice occasionally created navigational challenges for the actors: on the night I saw the performance, one moving screen ran into Wiest mid-scene, though the seasoned stage actress hardly flinched and kept going without missing a beat. Eric Berryman, Kristen Sieh, Carmen M. Herlihy , and Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners . Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre. Scene Partners seems to be a memory play, but not a traditional one: the world is split between “real” (or perhaps more appropriately live ) performance sequences along with pre-filmed screen performances. Sections of the play are created with projected films on the large screens that shift in and out of frame to represent different environments on Meryl’s journey. In fact, the production opened with an enormous projection of Wiest’s face on screen introducing herself, reassuring audiences, “This is exactly how it happened!” But we are never sure if the play is supposed to be perceived as being composed in the present tense, or if this is a more traditional memory play. “My life starts now!” she says. And perhaps it is through Meryl’s newfound artistic license that we should understand it all. The facial projection of Meryl shifts to black as words populated the screen with character names, like a script being written in real time, which is then read in voiceover as changes and corrections happened “live” in front of us. A sudden crash brings the lights up on Weist as Meryl descending from the heavens in a white chair before getting stuck in what seems like a chairlift (from where, no one knows) so that Wiest’s body could only be seen from the waist down. Stuck halfway between a dream and reality, in hindsight, this signaled where we would remain for the entire play. We later find out this process of getting stuck is a recurring dream Meryl has that she is performing for the film, but perhaps also dreaming. Half the fun of Scene Partners is putting together who is really there and who is only imagined by Meryl. In fact, the generic title of the play is a reference to metatheatrical roleplay, as we never fully understand when characters are just roles inside Meryl’s head or if they are actually there. The audience’s collective logic is often challenged when characters appear and disappear at pivotal moments in the production—is that really her sister in the interview scene or a figment of Meryl’s imagination?—not dissimilar to Florian Zeller’s award-winning play The Father . One thing is sure: Meryl is hellbent on being a great actress, but the trauma of sexual and physical abuse from the men in her past haunts her throughout the play. Again, Scene Partners is highly metatheatrical, beginning with Meryl’s first entrance, reminiscent of Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days (a role Wiest played at Theatre for a New Audience in 2017). This initial scene sets the tone for a production that constantly questions the boundaries between reality and fiction. The play-within-a-play and film-within-a-play structure allows for a complex narrative that keeps the audience questioning what is real and what is imagined throughout. Indeed, Caswell’s directive in the script that “people and things should seem to suddenly materialize and vanish” adds to this sense of disorientation and surrealism. Determined to tell her story on her own terms, Meryl faces ageism and skepticism on her journey to Hollywood from those around her. She is told by all (including her daughter and would-be agent) that she will only play old women in stereotypical roles. “I have been acting all my life. It’s time to get paid for it!” she replies. “There’s a market for durability. I’ll play a queen! Those roles are mine!” After receiving a suggestion to improve on her acting from her agent, Meryl enrolls in acting classes where her teacher “discovers” her and decides to help her develop a series of monologues that will be the basis for her life story in a series of films, each representing a different decade in her life. “I’m a maximalist at heart!” she says, which could also be a mantra for the expressionistic approach to Caswell’s writing, which created mixed reactions from viewers. Scene Partners is a compelling exploration of a woman’s struggle to reclaim her own narrative and identity against the backdrop of Hollywood’s unforgiving landscape, and society more broadly. A rich and multi-layered theatrical experience, the play is a significant contribution to contemporary theatre focusing on age and aging outside of the typical narratives of decline we see so often in mainstream culture. While the production was, at times, a little wayward, Wiest’s portrayal of Meryl was both poignant and powerful, capturing the character’s complexity and depth, her humor and kindness, but also her confusion and sadness. Her interactions with other characters, including her abusive deceased husband Stanley (who keeps returning in Meryl’s nightmares) and her over-the-top acting teacher-cum-director, highlight the various challenges she faces with unwavering resolve. Performance Review: Scene Partners © 2024 by Benjamin Gillespie is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International References Footnotes About The Author(s) Benjamin Gillespie (PhD) is Doctoral Lecturer in Communication, Gender Studies, and Theatre at Baruch College, City University of New York. His essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review , and a wide range of scholarly anthologies. He is currently editing two volumes: Split Britches: Fifty Years On and Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging , both to be published by the University of Michigan Press. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.