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Kristin Leahey with Joseph Ngo Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Kristin Leahey with Joseph Ngo By Published on May 23, 2022 Download Article as PDF When Lauren Yee approaches a new play, she considers the historical events she wants to address in her work. Yee contemplates, “What are the moments and people that have been forgotten?” Yee gathers copious research and identifies the primary icons of these periods. She then disregards these surrogates of the times: her plays are not historical renderings of the lives of the famous or infamous, such as Mao Zedong or Pol Pot. Her plays are stories of the people whose narratives have often been omitted from the archive and whose lives have been marginalized. She probes histories of Asians and Asian Americans. As a writer, she acknowledges their communities by conceiving plays based on the lives of fictional individuals from the communities themselves. By reclaiming history, Yee constructs main characters in the form of common people who refuse to accept their plights and choose instead to challenge overwhelming obstacles in order to construct divergent futures for themselves and subsequent generations. Ultimately, through contemporary dialogue, Yee explores paradigms of largely forgotten pasts, such as the Tiananmen Square Massacre in The Great Leap and the Cambodian genocide in Cambodian Rock Band . In this article, I, one of Yee’s primary dramaturgs, will share the dramaturgical processes for the development, production, and audience and community engagement for two of her most produced works, which both premiered in 2018: The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band . Additionally, Joseph (Joe) Ngo, an actor with whom Yee collaborates, contributes thoughts in the form of an interview I conducted with him over the past several months. Ngo reflects on his dramaturgical contributions as an actor and Cambodian American in the new play development process. By performing an analysis of these plays and sharing specifics of their development trajectories, I provide access to the dramaturgy of one of our most influential twenty-first century writers, unpack why these works about Asians and Asian Americans are so widely produced at PWIs (primarily white institutions, i.e., US regional theatres and off-Broadway institutions), and describe how Yee’s work and playmaking processes add to the discourse on Asian American dramaturgies. Figure 1. Joseph Steven Yang, Linden Tailor, Bob Ari, and Keiko Green in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and Seattle Rep co-production of The Great Leap (2018). Photo by AdamVisCom. The Great Leap In Yee’s works, fathers are often protagonists, which is true, too, of the The Great Leap . Set in 1989, The Great Leap follows Manford, a Chinese American high school student from San Francisco, as he plays in an exhibition game in Beijing against the Chinese men’s national basketball team. Over the course of the play, the audience discovers that Manford’s father Wen Chang—a devoted, ranking member of the Communist Party—is the Chinese team’s coach. Manford’s mother, Zhang Li, rebelled against the Party after the Cultural Revolution, and she miraculously defected to the United States early in her pregnancy. Wen Chang refused to join her at first and was subsequently unable to because of immigration laws in China and the US. Ultimately, Wen Chang defies the Party and protects his son, who has been unknowingly photographed with the student protestors in Tiananmen Square. He then allows Manford, a member of the University of San Francisco team, to take the last shot in the game, which enables the Americans to win, displeasing the Party. In his final monologue, delivered as a fax to his son, who has hopefully returned safely to California, Wen Chang states: “they are dealing with their most immediate threats. soon they will get to me. they suspect, i suppose, that i will not run.” [1] Wen Chang is the character in the play who experiences the greatest transformation and moves to action from stasis. As her dramaturg on the play from 2016 to its New York opening in June 2018 at the Atlantic Theatre Company, I discussed with Yee some of the variations of the title of the play in connection to who the protagonist of the play is: Manford at the Line , Manford at the Line or The Great Leap , and eventually, simply, The Great Leap , after the 2017 Denver Center for the Performing Arts Colorado New Play Summit Workshop. During the workshop, Wen Chang was played by Francis Jue who, like Ngo, serves as a consistent inspiration for Yee. With Jue, there was casual conversation about identifying the main character: Manford or Wen Chang. Manford was onstage throughout most of the play, and he traversed both of the play’s settings of the Bay Area and Beijing. But Manford didn’t change. Although he is the youngest character (and might be, therefore, most likely to change), his motivations are consistent: to discover his family, to reach his goals, and to honor basketball—the sport he loves. By contrast, Wen Chang renounces communism and looks to the US democracy as a place for his son to find a better life. He writes, “and if i have done my job properly, you are on your flight now, minor injuries, back to a country that will hopefully see you for the man you are. either way, my story ends here. and yours is still to begin.” [2] Wen Chang regrets the loss of his individualism, particularly the loss of his life with his family, for his belief and love of the Communist Party. In the end, retaining Manford’s name in the title didn’t make sense for either the rhythm or the meaning of the play, as he ultimately isn’t the protagonist. Additionally, Yee wanted to capitalize on the witticism of the title The Great Leap : it simultaneously alludes to the sport of basketball and the 1958–1962 economic and social campaign by the Communist Party to industrialize an agrarian economy, which led to famine, brutalization, and the deaths of 45 million people. Using The Great Leap as the title was a linguistically sophisticated, though controversial, play on words. In addition to the process of deciding the title, we practiced sensitive research in the form of primary source interviews. Yee and I conducted a number of anonymous interviews with Chinese expatriates living in Seattle and Denver. They informed our work, in terms of everyday life, competitive sports, and education in Communist China from the 1970s onward. One source said that a colleague, also Chinese and working in the US, asked them, after I initially contacted them, without their having made any public mention of working on the show, what they were doing working on a piece with this title. A different source stated that the closer you traveled to Beijing, the more you must omit about the protests to the point of pretending they never happened. One interviewee claimed that they knew the identity and narrative of the man in the “tank man” photo and that this was common knowledge in certain circles, but was unwilling to share more information. This image serves as the culminating moment in Yee’s play because is the surrogate for the Tiananmen Square Massacre for the West, while it remains unknown in much of Communist China. In her foundational work On Photography , Susan Sontag writes that “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.” [3] Yee further moves audiences to empathy, or a form of “participation” with an iconic photograph by transforming Wen Chang into “tank man.” In The Great Leap , audiences hear Wen Chang describe himself as the figure in the photo while he changes his clothes, and then they see him against the backdrop of the famous image. At this moment, every audience I have seen the play with across the country gasps. This final scene of Wen Chang’s journey is connected to grief, as it epitomizes the affect of much of Wen Chang’s journey in The Great Leap . In The Melancholy of Race , Anne Anlin Cheng writes about the transformative act of moving from “grief to grievance, from suffering injury to speaking out against that injury.” [4] Cheng describes a “racial grief” elicited from a a history of indifference, social injustice, and psychological or even physical injury. Applying theory from Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” Cheng explores a type of grief—melancholy—which I argue Wen Chang exudes throughout the play. Melancholy is a condition of “endless self-impoverishment” or the tendency to remain in an interminable state of mourning. [5] Wen Chang’s melancholia is an example of racial abjection experienced by Asian Americans that Yee imprints on the characters of Wen Chang and Manford because they both live in a liminal space between belonging and being ostracized by the US. A scene that conveys Wen Chang’s immense grief is “letter 3/pick and roll: 1971.” Wen Chang writes: “and her absence was noted in my dossier, ensuring that i would never leave this country. every year i applied for a visa, and every year, like the movement of a clock: denied. i was the pick. and she was the roll. and together we could have done so much. but she could not be patient and i was too much so.” [6] In the co-world premiere productions in Denver and Seattle (at Seattle Repertory Theatre) in 2018, not seeing Zhang Li onstage made the character omnipresent and became a significant production choice. The everlasting emotional and geographic separation between the couple spurred Wen Chang’s grief and eventually this melancholy is compounded when he learns that Zhang Li died from cancer just before the beginning of the play. Both Manford and Wen Chang mourn her loss throughout the narrative and seek “grievance,” as Cheng defines it, at different points on their journeys. The characters are called to action; they express and enact a search for voice, justice, and change through “grievance,” or overcoming their grief. Manford fights to join the University of San Francisco team immediately after the funeral of his mother, creating an impetus to live through grief and demonstrate his grievance by making the team. He expresses his anger for the death of his mother through his system-defying actions. He’s angry at the US health care system for not providing proper care for his mother. He’s angry that because she was a poor immigrant, she was forced to take taxing, manual labor-intensive jobs to survive that ultimately accelerated her death. Wen Chang expresses his grievance through protest and joins the students in Tiananmen Square. Yee intentionally bookends The Great Leap with these men, first Manford and then Wen Chang, essentially wearing the same costume: a white button-down collar shirt and black pants. In their matching attire, Manford restlessly insists on joining the basketball team, and Wen Chang protests for change in Tiananmen Square. Off-Broadway and regional audiences around the country experienced The Great Leap as it became one of the most-produced plays in the US, and Yee became the second most-produced playwright in 2020. [7] While working at one of the PWIs that premiered the play—Seattle Rep (as the Director of New Works)—I heard what was attracting many theatres to the work: it has a cast of four or fewer; it is a comedy; it is a father-son story; it is about a historical period and creates an iconic image; it is extremely well-written; it is ostensibly linear with flashbacks that are easy to follow; and it includes a popular sport in it, but doesn’t require a set with a full court. Because of these features, the primarily white audiences and subscribers of these theatres, also found this play interesting. However, unsurprisingly, many were shocked by the vulgarity of the language (i.e., “all right, you masturbating horsefuckers: i know you’re tired. i know you’re still jetlagged from last night. i know you’d rather be jerking off into a nice hot bowl of noodles than sitting in traffic this early in the morning.”) [8] which theatres such as Seattle Rep and Denver Center for the Performing Arts anticipated by sharing content warnings in advance through pre-show emails, on the show’s webpage, and in the program. In my dramaturgy, I learned that an inspiration for the play was Larry Yee’s (Lauren Yee’s father) investment in basketball. In the early 1980s, Larry Yee played on a team representing San Francisco in these types of exhibition games throughout China. He noted that the Chinese players from these very competitive teams were extremely tall, often at least 7 feet. In the play, they become coach Wen Chang’s “Tall Trees.” [9] I added images of Larry Yee (who is 6 feet) to the lobby display. I attended all the previews in Denver and Seattle, and I led talkbacks in both cities, where the director and the entire company were completely different. In every location, diverse audiences of white, Asian American, and other people of color seemed enthralled by the play’s climatic game in Beijing. They seemed equally captivated by the narrative of Manford and Wen Chang finding each other on the court and a history that is still forbidden in part of the world. In Denver, watching the first readings, sitting next to Lauren Yee, hearing her laugh along with the audience, then experiencing their immediate standing ovation, the company knew we had created a unique work. Fig. 2. Brooke Ishibashi, Joe Ngo, Jane Lui, Raymond Lee and Abraham Kim in South Coast Repertory’s world premiere production of Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee. Photo by Jordan Kubat/SCR. Cambodian Rock Band The band Dengue Fever and actor Joe Ngo brought a formidable dramaturgical voice to the development of Cambodian Rock Band , a 2015 commission from South Coast Repertory Theatre in Southern California. Yee partially developed the work at Seattle Repertory Theatre during a closed workshop, curated by me and performed with Ngo, where Yee learned that Ngo’s Cambodian parents survived the regime of the Khmer Rouge and the genocidal forced labor camps of the late 1970s. Ngo said in our interview: I think it came as [a] surprise to Lauren to discover that I was actually Cambodian-Chinese. When in the room, during the feedback session, I mentioned how much it meant to see that Lauren was aiming to tell a story so close to my family experience. For a play that Lauren had admittedly shelved for some time, it was as if in me she had found a match to light her dynamite, or perhaps vice versa and upon this discovery of my family history, Lauren had found a source. After that we headed to the Thai restaurant across the street for dinner, and [for] at least an hour … I shared my family stories… As someone who doesn’t believe in fate, it is rather difficult to swallow all the fantastical, it seems, coincidences that ended up making Cambodian Rock Band : the two looming the largest being Lauren and my meeting and the fact that Lauren realized that’d she wanted to have a band onstage and that I play the electric guitar. [10] Ngo describes his initial work as always aimed at authenticity in building the voices for the characters and advocating for that work beyond the page. Because he is one of Yee’s primary partners for Cambodian Rock Band , his personal family history added layers of anecdotal dramaturgy. He contributed family stories and song choices. For instance, his parents crossed the Thai border twice under extreme duress, which the character Chum describes. Ngo’s mother, who is based in Los Angeles, served as the language coach for the South Coast Repertory production. As the city Battambang is a setting in the play, Ngo suggested “Champa Battambang” in honor of his parents’ birthplace. While the cadence and style of Yee’s language is ultimately hers, it was his enactment of his father, uncles, and other Khmer community members that led Yee to solidify his portrayal of Chum. Ngo articulates, “In building the life journey of my character Chum, I consider this a transformation of grief to grievance; reflecting on the challenges, pain, loss, and grief my family endured and overcame and my subsequent embodiment of their grievance through my own performance.” [11] For the premiere at South Coast Rep in 2018, Yee, Ngo, the rest of the originating acting company, lauded director Chay Yew, and resident dramaturg and current Director of New Works Andy Knight thoroughly examined the historical context of the play’s world. In Cambodian Rock Band , Yee reminds audiences of the history of the genocide and how the US strategically ignored its existence. In A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson describes this “imperial amnesia,” [12] which led the US government to ignore reports of the killing fields and refugee accounts of the death camps. Under the Nixon Administration, in March of 1969, the US attempted to bomb North Vietnamese trade routes in Cambodia, resulting in the deaths of 100,000 Cambodian civilians. This action further fueled pro-communist factions, such as the Khmer Rouge, in Cambodia. Following the devastating loss of the American War in Vietnam and hundreds of thousands of American lives, the US found no imperialistic value in Cambodia or interest in continued involvement in another Southeast Asian conflict. Western media largely neglected to cover the genocide, as the Watergate scandal dominated headlines. Yee informs audiences of this omitted history through flashbacks with Chum, the character that links the two historical worlds of the play and the band, and with monologues delivered by characters such as Duch, who have a wry sense of humor: genocide genocide genocide. boo.(DUCH clicks off the slides)you think of everything that came after, once the shit hit the fan. the khmer rouge, pol pot, and two million dead. [13] Thus far, Cambodian Rock Band has been produced by PWIs with predominantly white audiences. Minneapolis’ Jungle Theater, in collaboration with Theater Mu, the second largest Asian American theater in the country, will coproduce the play this June and July. Having performed the show more than a hundred times, Ngo described how shocked audiences seem by the genocide: It’s odd to say, but more often than not, it seemed as if audiences weren’t prepared to see the brutality of the Khmer Rouge enacted onstage (which, to be honest, is only half as bad as most of the cruelty documented) and so, the general feeling I so often was able to discern from audiences was one of disbelief. It was not surprising to me that whenever our cast participated in talkbacks, we’d receive fewer questions and more of what seemed like condolences for what had happened, expressions of helplessness, statements that affirmed that older audiences “just didn’t know this was happening, Cambodia was a blackzone,” refutations from other older (typically white) folks asserting that our country just chose to turn a blind eye to the damage that it caused…all of it in a restrained cacophony cloaked in civility. The expression of disbelief indicated to me that they felt some amount of shame or guilt of responsibility (whether acknowledged or not). [14] Ngo shares his family’s story through not only Yee’s play but also extensive audience outreach. For Cambodian Rock Band , Yee and her team of artists launched Herculean efforts to promote and encourage Cambodians and other Asian and Asian Americans to attend the show because of the work’s subject matter. Yee and the cast created and sold tee-shirts. Also, Yee attended as many of the shows as possible, facilitated community engagement events, hosted Asian American nights, worked with student groups from local colleges and universities, emceed music nights with members of the cast playing songs from the show’s Dengue Fever catalog, and participated in massive press campaigns. Ngo contends that the attraction for audiences with Cambodian Rock Band is the rock music, the interpretation of story connected to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the intrigue of how the seemingly unrelated items are tied. What audiences—Asian and Asian American but truly all diverse audiences—receive is a deeper understanding of a culture, people, and history through this theatrical platform, which ends with a celebration of their humanity. Ngo says, “I believe we achieved something special when we had younger audiences at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and they, too, danced in the aisles, celebrated, and seemed to deeply absorb all the rawness of the characters, having survived their youth. And, with arms flailing and sweaty, they would then hug each other and cry, seeming to feel the immediate understanding of just having survived themselves.” [15] Dramaturgy is not a delicate art for a Lauren Yee play. When Yee writes, she mouths her characters’ words. She bangs on her computer keys with a ruthlessness. She becomes consumed by her subjects, reading an excess of texts, then putting them aside to structure the building blocks of her plays. With superpower speed, she writes 200 to 400 pages in a week and just as easily slashes pages upon pages of dialogue. She requires the same ferocity and fight in her collaborators, which Ngo and I can confirm. Audiences will often find a narrator in conflict with the past and a geopolitical power struggling to draw a map of their own future. She examines epic, world-building and (hopefully) change-for-the better historical moments, but always from the perspective of an ordinary person. References [1] Lauren Yee, The Great Leap (unpublished final manuscript, 2018), 112. [2] Ibid., 112. [3] Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Classics, 2008), 7. [4] Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3. [5] Ibid., 8. [6] Ibid., 84. [7] Diep Tran, “The Top 10* Most-Produced Plays of the 2019-20 Season,” American Theatre Magazine , 18 September 2019, https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/09/18/the-top-10-most-produced-plays-of-the-2019-20-season/. [8] Yee, Great Leap , 68. [9] Ibid., 88. [10] Joseph Ngo, interview with Kristin Leahey, 3 January 2022. [11] Ibid. [12] Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 176. [13] Lauren Yee, Cambodian Rock Band (unpublished final manuscript, 2018), 7. [14] Ngo, interview with Kristen Leahey, 3 January 2022. [15] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) Kristin Leahey served as the Director of New Works at Seattle Repertory Theatre, and prior to that post, as the Literary Manager at Washington D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, among other places. She has freelanced as an artist nationally and internationally. Her publications include articles in Theatre Topics , Theatre History , and Theatre Studies . Leahey is an Assistant Professor at Boston University. Joe Ngo is an Obie Award-winning actor, who has worked at South Coast Repertory, La Jolla Playhouse, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and off-Broadway at the Signature Theatre in New York City. As a writer, his work has been primarily geared toward solo performance and audio narratives with pieces such as Words, Words . Joe is a graduate of the University of Washington, Seattle’s MFA/PATP, and is based in Los Angeles. 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.

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

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.

Mia Levenson and Heather S. Nathans 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 The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York Mia Levenson and Heather S. Nathans By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF It began, as it so often does, with a passing remark. Journalist Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underground , which offers a colorful and anecdote-driven account of nineteenth-century urban life, makes a fleeting reference to the gruesome 1891 Jack the Ripper style killing of a woman known to her compatriots as “Shakespeare.” According to popular legend, she had been famous in the city’s seamiest neighborhoods for her drunken recitations of the major female roles from Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice . [1] Who was this woman who performed Shakespeare’s most notable female roles of Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and Portia on the margins of American society—presumably for an audience as intoxicated and destitute as herself? Her moniker of “Shakespeare”—as well as her supposed murderer, the notorious Jack the Ripper—have helped to hold her place in the headlines and in history, [2] when tens of thousands of other impoverished women in New York have vanished from the record books—if, indeed, their names were ever known to any beyond their immediate circles. Her story invites historians to consider how apparently isolated incidents become history, and the ways in which archives can perform for researchers. In drunkenly declaiming passages from the Bard, Mrs. Shakespeare, also known as Carrie Brown, did no more than Edmund Kean, Junius Brutus Booth, and other male performers before her. Her association with Shakespeare’s work somehow tinged her demise with an additional touch of pathos. Here was a woman who supposedly mastered the poetry of the Bard, yet who, according to contemporary accounts, had fallen into a life of petty crime and debauchery. The manner of her murder, which echoed the sensational killings in London’s Whitechapel district only three years before, also became inextricably intertwined with her putative link to the sex workers and other women targeted by Jack the Ripper. Many US newspapers mentioned the “low” women or “drunkards” questioned in connection with her death, and the police investigation of her murder revealed anew the scabrous underbelly of New York’s most poverty-stricken areas. According to one newspaper, “the habitués of Water Street (the neighborhood of the murder) turned out in force [at the inquest].” [3] Amongst the many rumors circulating around the identity of her killer, ultimately a penniless Algerian immigrant, Ameer Ben Ali, stood accused of her murder. Would-be observers thronged the trial (supposedly hundreds of men and only five women) whom the court turned away from the “strangest criminal trial America has yet produced.” [4] But the performances around Mrs. extended beyond her penchant for the Bard. Her killing inspired its own series of performances. Only days after the murder, wax stagings depicting the grisly scene appeared in multiple city dime museums. Authors churned out pulp fiction, comic book style stories of that fateful night. The trial for her murder, meticulously recorded in newspapers around the country, revived “Shakespeare” for another role. Since police never caught the original London Ripper, the public craved a reason for his senseless crimes. Thus, crowds greeted the American trial with eager expectation, imagining it as an opportunity to mete out justice, bring calm to the chaos created by Mrs. Shakespeare’s murder, and to resolve the troubling questions about urban poverty exposed by her killing. But the trial soon degenerated into a racist spectacle when police charged Ben Ali with her murder and newspapers across the country vilified him as a Moor and an “Arab,” heaping religious and ethnic slurs on his head. Descriptions of Ben Ali’s ethnic and racial otherness echoed the speculation in London that their Ripper was a foreign Jew. [5] The spectacle of “Shakespeare’s” murder continues today, through internet forums run and inhabited by “Ripperologists,” amateur true crime investigators who scrutinize the details of her murder for evidence that Jack the Ripper killed her, or one of the many suspects responsible for grotesque crimes during the Ripper’s heyday. Across space and time, “Shakespeare” finds a theatrical afterlife as her body was produced, performed, and transformed for its audience. [6] This essay explores the spectacular print, stage, and public performances around Mrs. Shakespeare’s murder. Her case offers opportunities to unravel a complex tangle of questions: How did the identities of working woman, actress, and alcoholic play out alongside familiar nineteenth-century notions about gender roles and middle-class respectability? How did race, racial science, and racism intersect with the ways in which the trial unspooled for public consumption, so that it became a kind of parodied Othello with a Moorish assailant attacking this unlikely Desdemona? How does her connection with the mythological Jack the Ripper continue to produce new and eager spectators in the digital age? Theatrically speaking, the rhetoric around Mrs. Shakespeare’s murder sits at the tipping point in a genre shift from melodrama towards realism. Newspapers told her story using the familiar sentimental tropes of melodrama, particularly with its emphasis on transgression, redemption, and retribution. Melodrama framed addiction and poverty as evidence of moral weakness, while offering temperance, prosperity, and respectability as rewards for aspiring to white middle class values. [7] The tableaux—as part of the milieu of nineteenth-century family friendly entertainment—continued this narrative. In the hands of museum managers, the scene of her grotesque murder became representative of the seedy underbelly of New York City, a place for onlookers to gaze in wonder and repulsion. As the murder trial reshaped the theatrical performance, Shakespeare’s body shifted from a focus of pity to a site of empirical analysis. The influence of nineteenth-century forensic scientists Alphonse Bertillon and Cesare Lombroso legitimated criminology as a science, one that focused on the born criminal and bolstered racist theories about criminal appearance and behavior. That changing discourse extricated her murder from a romanticized narrative and resituated it in late nineteenth-century (racial) science. If mid-century melodramas had offered faith and compliance as “cures” for social ills, the emerging scientific language of realism and naturalism turned audiences’ attention towards new problems and new potential “solutions,” albeit based in racist and nativist assumptions of criminality that would imprison Ameer Ben Ali for eleven years before he was pardoned, released, and allowed to return to Algiers. [8] More than a century after her murder, modern day investigators figuratively exhumed “Shakespeare’s” body—sutured to the cultural mythology of Jack the Ripper—into the “annals of true crime” and “the imagination of modern horror.” [9] On internet forums such as “Jack the Ripper Forums”(jtrforums.com) [10] and “Case Book: Jack the Ripper” (casebook.org), self-identified Ripperologists share primary evidence material, revel in her autopsy, and speculate as to the murderer’s true identity, extending and expanding the spectacle of Carrie Brown’s brutal homicide. In her exploration of the true crime media genre, Jean Murley describes the emergence of modern true crime in the mid-twentieth century as “a new way of narrating and understanding murder—one more sensitive to context, more psychologically sophisticated, more willing to make conjectures about the unknown thoughts and motivations of killers.” [11] Internet communities formed around Jack the Ripper have democratized the discourse around “Shakespeare.” Any forum member can create threads, post evidence, share their research (both the highs and lows) and theorize about her murder while interacting with and sustaining the Ripperologist community. Her association with the cultural icon has enabled the spectacle of her murder to move into the twenty-first century—as of 20 December 2021, the most recent post on jtrforums.com about Carrie Brown had been made just a day earlier. In writing this essay, we acknowledge that we are contributing to the continued speculation and spectacle around “Shakespeare” and her gruesome demise. Yet, the speculation and spectacle become proof of how her theatrical afterlife moves through different mediums and genres (now into theatre history and performance studies). By examining the ways in which her performances have reverberated in popular culture, we explore how historical moments are shaped and reformed through theatrical interpretations. We use the name “Shakespeare” to invoke a character, a cultivated stage presence for the lower millions of the city, whether created by herself or bestowed upon her by others. We use the name “Carrie Brown,” the name identified in the press, to indicate the person, whose murder and subsequent undoubtedly impact her living descendants to this day. “Death lies on her like an untimely frost” Asbury’s fleeting mention of “Shakespeare’s” murder in Gangs of New York describes a horrific slaying that took place sometime on the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s own death. Reconstructing the circumstances around “Shakespeare’s” murder proves no easy task. Its sensationalism means that details vary among different accounts. What is known is that on 25 April 1891, police announced the murder of a woman the night before at the East River Hotel in the city’s Fourth Ward. [12] Newspapers from New York to Omaha reported that the victim had been strangled, stabbed, and then disemboweled. [13] Identical crosses were carved into the flesh of her back and on the wall. [14] She was naked except for an apron and another unnamed article of clothing that were both wrapped around her head so tightly the coroner had to cut them off. [15] Some of the garments found in the room were recognized as those worn by prisoners at Blackwell’s Island, suggesting that she had recently been released from one of her many terms of imprisonment for drunkenness, vagrancy, and other petty crimes. [16] Who launched the rumor that linked her murder with Jack the Ripper remains unknown, but early reports from the New York Herald and Evening World connected the crime to the London killer based on the body’s mutilated state and the marks on the wall. [17] Fig 1. John Jacob Riis, c. 1895. “A Fourth Ward Colony,” image owned by the Museum of the City of New York ( https://collections.mcny.org/ ). The murder immediately caused a sensation. The coroner’s delay in coming to the hotel allowed “curious crowds” to gather outside in hopes of getting a glimpse of the horrid scene. When the coroner finally arrived, enough people had assembled that the police had to physically push them back as the coroner brought down Carrie Brown’s body in a pine coffin and made his way to the morgue for examination. [18] There, the autopsy became its own spectacle. Conducted by Deputy Coroner Dr. William T. Jenkins, its audience included a group of seven doctors from Bellevue Hospital as well as a reporter from The Evening World . [19] The examiners posited strangulation as the cause of death, with the mutilation following. The details are horrifying. The body showed multiple cuts in addition to the cross-like etching on her back and parts of the intestines were missing. In a shockingly clinical tone, the newspaper noted that “the left ovary . . . was completely torn away.” The Evening World also felt compelled to remark that “there was no evidences [ sic ] of wounds or injuries on the breast.” [20] As Karen Halttunen notes, this kind of “sexual autopsy” circulated in the public sphere had become more and more pervasive since the mid-1830s (particularly after the notorious 1836 murder of New York prostitute Helen Jewett and escalating after the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888). [21] The public’s appetite for intimate and gory details grew as well. Halttunen chronicles the perceived escalation in “sexual narratives of murder . . . popular tales . . . extensively explored issues of sexual nature, development, and impulse, and attributed significant causal power to sexuality .” [22] Yet, these highly sexualized, clinical, and often grotesque accounts of female murder victims (which often included descriptions of sexual assault, sexual promiscuity, or failed abortions) were frequently juxtaposed with familiar tropes of fallen women whose romantic disappointments, innocence, or temporary lapses in judgement had led them into sin and thus to a violent end. For example, George Ellington’s 1869 study The Women of New York: Or, The Underworld of the Great City offers a chapter entitled “Women of Pleasure” that describes how a “nice girl” might have found herself stranded as a sex worker in an urban slum: Heartsick and utterly miserable, she left her home and entered on a life of sin in the metropolis. At first she was happy. She made plenty of money and gratified a long-cherished ambition to dress well. The gay society she was in pleased her. . . . But soon the taste for all these things began to fail. . . . And not knowing what this want was, she plunged wildly into dissipation. . . . And then she went down rapidly. All self-respect was lost. She was found drunk on the street, and taken to the station-house, and sent to the island. [23] Two decades later, these same tales about women’s descent into the dark side of city life persisted. The New York Herald made a similar claim about Mrs. Shakespeare herself, saying that after her husband died she, came to New York to dissipate [her money]. . . . She attracted a great deal of attention at once from the dissolute people she chose to associate with because of her superior intelligence. She was fairly good-looking, exceedingly vivacious, and spent her money with a free hand as long as it lasted. . . . When the woman’s money was spent, she went headlong into the gutter, and for many years she had revolved around the boozing dives, the Island [prison] and public institutions [workhouses]. [24] The paper’s account sets up the now-familiar tale of the innocent woman, led astray by her foolish choice to leave the safe shelter of a peaceful domestic setting for the unbridled license of the city and its anonymous encounters with strangers. Fig 2. An article on the slums of New York published weeks before Carrie Brown’s murder: “New York’s Inferno Explored by the Booths. Commissioner Ballington Booth and Mrs. Booth, of the Salvation,” New York Herald (New York, New York), no. 74, 15 March 1891. Relatively little seemed known of Mrs. Shakespeare at the time of her death. Rumors swirled through newspapers that she claimed at various points to have been an actress in Britain and the wife (or mistress) of a Broadway businessman. According to one witness, “Shakespeare” boasted that she received an allowance of thirty dollars a month from a wealthy Broadway man who had threatened to “have her mouth stopped” because she had become a liability. Another witness claimed that “Shakespeare” had been living with an Italian at the lodging house of “One-eyed Tony” and had had an argument with this man shortly before her death. [25] Soon after her murder, other narratives began to come out, claiming that she was Carrie Brown (possibly born in Liverpool as Caroline Montgomery) and that she had been a sea captain’s wife in Salem, Massachusetts. [26] Stories emerged about her marriage to Captain Charles Brown (who had abandoned her or whom she had deserted, depending on the storyteller). Some tales alleged that Brown had died and left her a wealthy woman, but that she had squandered her fortune. Others said she had been in service but dismissed for “riotous living.” By the time of her murder, she had supposedly been arrested at least twenty-eight times for drunkenness. [27] The coroner’s report supposedly confirmed her intemperate habit: the state of her kidneys and liver showed that she likely suffered from alcoholism. According to an officer who had detained her numerous times, she once told him, “I could have been one of the finest ladies in the world instead of what I am, and I suppose I’ll be a tramp until I die.” [28] Modern day amateur genealogical investigations of Brown’s life suggest that she was indeed born in Liverpool around 1834 as Ellen Caroline Montgomery. Census data puts her in the US by 1860, suggesting that if she had been an actress in England, she had immigrated to America comparatively early in her career, since she appears established in New England by age twenty-six. [29] To date, we have been unable to locate evidence of her work onstage in the US or England under variations of her maiden or married name. One contemporary account referred to her as a “failed” actress, so she may have either spread the story of her time in the theatre herself or made an abortive attempt at a career (and possibly under a different name). There is some circumstantial evidence that she knew a brief period of domestic stability in Salem, MA, married to one Captain Charles Brown. She had at least two children: Mary Ella Brown (born when Carrie was roughly twenty years old) and Charles E. Brown (born when Carrie was about twenty-three). The only widely-known photograph (supposedly) taken of her in life shows a modest-looking woman, apparently dressed in mourning—or at least in a very dark dress—with her hair covered by a white cap and wearing a white apron. She is posed against an ivy-covered balustrade with a rustic scene painted in the background. A sketch of her in profile appeared in W. B. Lawson’s sensational dime novel Jack the Ripper in New York in 1891. The face in the profile bears some resemblance to the photograph and is noteworthy for its demure appearance. [30] Despite these respectable, well-groomed images, it appears that by the time of her murder (at around age fifty-seven) she lived as a sex worker in New York City, far away from either her home in England or her family in Massachusetts. [31] Fig 3. Image reported to be of Carrie Brown (also known as Ellen Caroline Montgomery) that is widely circulated on Ripperology websites. It can also be found on FindaGrave.com , which sources some biographical information from casebook.org and jtrforums.com . Members continue to leave virtual “flowers” for her at https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/89386829/carrie-brown . “When beggars die, there are no comets seen” The grisly circumstances of her death led many at the time (and since) to speculate that the notorious Jack the Ripper, whose 1888 crime spree in London’s Whitechapel district had left a series of unsolved murders and terror behind, had come to New York. [32] Officials in charge of the case fueled these rumors. Before Brown’s murder, New York City police Inspector Thomas Byrnes had taunted his London counterparts with their inability to solve the Ripper case. Based on the circumstances surrounding her death, some New Yorkers imagined that the Ripper had taken Byrnes’s “dare” and crossed the Atlantic to continue his crime spree in America. Investigators heightened public curiosity by refusing to deny the possibility that she might have been murdered by the Ripper. When asked if he believed that “Jack the Ripper” had killed “Shakespeare,” the lead coroner on the case responded, “I believe this case is the same as those of London. . . . I do not see any reason to suppose that the crime may not have been committed by the fiend of London.” [33] After Ben Ali’s conviction, Byrnes reveled in his success, even claiming that he had “documentary evidence” that Ben Ali lived in London during the time of the Ripper murders: “I do not say that he is the London Ripper, but this has a tendency to indicate that he may be.” [34] Indeed, within one week of her untimely death the association between “Shakespeare” and Jack the Ripper would be cemented in the public imagination. On 29 April 1891, Doris’s Eighth Avenue Museum publicized an exhibit featuring, “a wax group representing the murder of Carrie Brown by Jack, the Ripper.” [35] An advertisement announced that the tableaux would present “The Tragedy Just as It Occurred” with the “Lifelike figure of Carrie Brown, known as Shakespeare, also Frenchy the supposed murderer, in the act,” and “the very room furniture.” [36] As the New York Herald reported, “The enterprise shown by Manager Doris is, perhaps praiseworthy, but the subject appeals rather to the morbid or perverted taste, and it is doubtful if the expense incurred in the affair will be offset by corresponding box office returns.” [37] Despite the Herald’s skepticism, the exhibit ran for months, drawing horrified spectators to this terrifying effigy of Mrs. Shakespeare’s final performance. Mark Sandberg has described these kinds of wax effigies as modeling cautionary tales for women through their “pedagogical bodies,” and indeed, tableaux of wax figures depicting the dire fates that awaited those who strayed from paths of rectitude were popular among both middle-class and working-class theatre managers. [38] Doris’s Museum featured a veritable buffet of these pedagogical bodies alongside Mrs. Shakespeare’s. A 13 September 1891 advertisement promises spectators tableaux of the “History of Crime,” including scenes of robbery and murder and “The Drunkard’s home,” described as a “scene of dirt and squalor.” In “The Drunkard’s Home,” the advertisement notes that, “Father, mother, and children are drunk,” and the paper guarantees that, “One look at this scene is worth more to the youth of this city than a score of temperance lectures.” [39] Spectators might stroll from their viewing of the “History of Crime” and “The Drunkard’s Home” past one labeled “Jack the Ripper and his victim, Old Shakespeare.” [40] Fig 4. The Evening World (New York), 29 April 1891, BASEBALL EXTRA, 3. We want to acknowledge that we first found this image digging through jtrforums.com . Doris’s Museum also helped spectators to draw contrasts between the “normal” and what lay beyond. In addition to his standard fare of enfreaked bodies (such as Maury the human pin cushion and Congo, the leopard man), Doris’s Museum featured fat shows and beauty contests – thus opening a forum for audiences to gauge appropriate vs. freakish female appearances. His space also became home to actress Fanny Herring, known as the Sarah Bernhardt of the Bowery. Herring had begun by performing with the likes of Edwin Booth and had been known for her breeches roles but ended her career as one of Doris’s resident actors. [41] In fact, this Bernhardt of the Bowery shared a stage with the Shakespeare of the Bowery—Herring appeared in shows at Doris’s Museum while the Mrs. Shakespeare murder effigies were still on display. [42] Andrea Dennett’s study of American dime museums characterizes John B. Doris’s downtown locale as a particularly lively specimen of the genre. By the end of the nineteenth-century, the Fourth Ward where Shakespeare/Brown enjoyed her final “performance” had become one of the most noisome and crime-ridden parts of the city. Observers described it as “the only rival of the Sixth (5 Points) in its triple distinction of filth, poverty, and vice.” And another observer noted, “Generally speaking, Water Street was a thoroughfare of vice and iniquity to challenge the imagination of the most graphic Victorian preacher.” [43] It proved the site of multiple murders, including those chronicled in Gangs of New York , and the showdowns between thugs with vivid nicknames such as Patsy the Butcher and Slobbery Jim. [44] As Dennett notes, the dense concentration of saloons and brothels in New York’s lower wards made such areas ripe for the kinds of spectacles Doris had on offer. [45] Yet by the late nineteenth century these crime and disease-ridden streets had also become a perverse kind of attraction for elite white spectators. The craze for “slumming” began in England, but had recently caught on in New York, and one city paper described it as a “fashionable form of dissipation,” through which wealthy citizens could experience the novelty of poverty, drug abuse, and alcoholism for an evening, before returning to the safety of their everyday lives. Fig 5. Cover of W. B. Lawson’s “Jack the Ripper in New York; Or, Piping a Terrible Mystery.” Image available through “Casebook,” a site dedicated to collecting “Ripperology.” View the dime novel in its entirety at “Jack the Ripper in New York; Or, Piping a Terrible Mystery,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, https://www.casebook.org/ripper_media/rps.dime1.html (accessed 22 October 2021). This same spectacle of poverty appears in Lawson’s 1891 novel about Carrie Brown’s murder. Jack the Ripper in New York uses the narrator as a vehicle to bring the reader into the seedy slums of the Fourth Ward. In lurid detail, the story follows a detective who is looking for “Shakespeare” when she is killed and then proceeds to investigate her murder. While the white upper class could visit the Fourth Ward as tourists, Lawson brought the slums into the home, illustrating the streets Carrie Brown frequented as places where “crime and sin flaunt their ugly heads,” and “debauchery runs riot,” describing it as a “hell-hole that will ever remain a black spot on a fair city.” Brown herself is described as merely “one of the great class of unfortunates to be met with in this Whitechapel of Gotham.” [46] Although the novel concocts and hypothesizes a number of suspects drawn from press reports and the author’s imagination, the story leads the audience to familiar conclusions: invoking the Ripper murders through the comparison to Whitechapel and implying that the perpetrator is a dubious, dark-skinned foreigner. [47] “Blood Will Tell” Ameer Ben Ali was not considered a murder suspect at the time of his arrest on Friday 24 April 1891, the night following the killing. According to the police, Ben Ali was the cousin of the man last seen with Carrie Brown as she entered the East River Hotel on that fateful night, and it was that man whom the police considered the primary suspect for her murder. [48] According to witnesses, the unknown man (who signed his name “C. Knick”) had a “small light brown mustache and light brown hair. [49] By contrast, Ben Ali—also known under the aliases George Frank, George François, and George Francis, but familiarly called “Frenchy”—was “a dark complexioned man with a black mustache and black hair.” [50] Unable to locate “C. Knick” a week into the murder investigation, the police changed their story. On 1 May, the Herald reported that police believed that Ben Ali, who had remained in police custody, was actually the man they had been looking for all along. While Carrie Brown had entered the hotel with a blond, fair-skinned man, Ben Ali also had a room at the hotel that night, across the hall from Brown’s. Although not noted in the original report, detectives claimed they had found blood in Ben Ali’s room and on his person, which they sampled and sent to microscopists for analysis. [51] Ben Ali found himself in a dangerous position. He had difficulty speaking English and his cousin, an early suspect, had been arrested but released since he had a “fair reputation” and had an alibi, unlike Ali who possessed “a savage disposition.” [52] The phrases used to describe Ali offer an eerie echo of those used in London in the 1880s to characterize Jack the Ripper. London police initially grabbed a number of Jewish men for the Ripper murders. They—like Ali—had “dark complexions, black hair . . . and heavy foreign accents.” [53] As Sara Blair points out, in Ripper narratives, Jack the Ripper became “representative of a deviant civic agency whose virulent corruption threatens the purity of native ‘Anglo-Saxon’ institutions and character.” [54] Noted cultural historian Sander L. Gilman theorizes that the image of the Ripper as a Jewish “ritual butcher,” or a shochet , arose from Anglo-Saxon conspiracies about Jews as sexually mutilated and diseased. [55] Not only did the United States import the Ripper sensation; it imported the xenophobic rhetoric along with it. Upon the New York Police Department’s proclamation that they had the Ripper in custody, the Herald remarked, “It is soothing to national pride to believe that we can catch our ‘Rippers’ on this side of the ocean.” [56] The Patriot in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania even dubbed Ben Ali, “The New York Ripper.” [57] Ameer Ben Ali’s conviction of second-degree murder on Independence Day of that year allayed the anxieties of white Americans, and further cemented the dogma of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Criminal profiles of Jack the Ripper festered with more than just malignant fears of violent immigrants. The rising field of criminology infused descriptions of the Ripper with scientifically supported racist understandings of the natural born criminal. The history of scientific criminology begins with Belgian statistician Lambert Quetelet, who in 1835 developed a statistical method to calculate the qualities of the “average man” (including body mass index, etc.) This “average man” was based on white-European notions of intellectual and physical capabilities. In the 1880s, French police officer Alphonse Bertillon applied Quetelet’s ideas to criminal investigations. Using eleven key physical measurements, he created an identification and categorization system for known criminals in Paris . Historians also credit him with creating the modern-day concept of a mugshot, using a face front-on and a profile view to give clear images of the skull. [58] In England, the search for the “criminal type”—that is, the biologically-determined criminal—was spearheaded by scientists such as Francis Galton (the cousin of Charles Darwin and the leader of the turn of the century eugenics movement) and Havelock Ellis, whose 1890 book, The Criminal , brought the theories of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso to English readers. Lombroso’s foundational text, Criminal Man (1877), used ancient theories of physiognomy combined with contemporary phrenology to explain behavior and personality types through skull measurements and facial features. “In general,” Lombroso argues, “born criminals have projecting ears, thick hair, a thin beard, projecting frontal eminences, enormous jaws, a square and projecting chin, large cheek-bones, and frequent gesticulation. It is, in short, a type resembling the Mongolian, or sometimes the Negroid.” [59] The Herald ’s description of Ben Ali certainly echoes this racist phenotype: “Nothing certainly in his physiognomy, his history, so far as it is known, or his characteristics makes it at all improbable that he would commit even such a horrible crime as this.” [60] The trial theatricalized the racist science undergirding early criminology, with newspapers paying close attention to Ben Ali’s appearance and behavior. Various papers described him as having a “small head” with a “sharp projection” in the back, a “long and thin” nose, and a “weak” chin. A lawyer for the prosecution insisted, “Ben Ali is an ignorant Arab, an Arab of the lowest type, ‘as low in the scale of intelligence as a fellah of the Egyptian rice fields, or a sikh or se poy soldier [ sic ]’.” In a dramatic finale, Ben Ali closed the trial with a passionate defense of his innocence, “The long, stoop shouldered, brown man raised himself as high as he could in his chair. A torrent of words broke from him. He threw his head far back and looked upward while he threw his long arms swiftly aloft and then crossed them on his gaunt breast.” [61] Accompanying these descriptions of his theatrical gestures are several sketches of these de facto tableaux vivants. Fig 6. “‘I Implore God!’ Cries Ben Ali,” New York Herald, 3 July 1891, 3. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of the medical gaze, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr coined the term “diagnostic gaze,” to describe how in the late-nineteenth century, scientific developments and theatrical innovation were encouraging audiences to focus on biological and psychological reasons for behavior, both onstage and off. [62] This anatomization of both spectator and performance coincided with the rising of the naturalist theatrical genre. In his manifesto on naturalism, playwright Émile Zola stated that, “Naturalism, in letters, is equally a return to nature and to man; it is direct observation, exact anatomy, the acceptance and depiction of what is .” [63] Thus, in the trial reports, the cloaking of racist discourse in scientific language (and influenced by scientific rhetoric) presented to an audience a definitive claim of “what is”: that Ameer Ben Ali was biologically predetermined to be Jack the Ripper. The seeming obsession with Ben Ali’s appearance points to this diagnostic gaze at work. It also appears in a spectacularly theatrical moment of the trial. On the second day of the trial, 1 July 1891, “two blue print photographs” of Carrie Brown’s mutilated corpse were shown to the courtroom. The autopsy photographs displayed the body of a relatively slender woman with her organs (intestines) protruding from a gash several inches long just below her abdomen, down her thigh, and around to her buttocks. [64] Rather than noting what the images depicted, court writers paid particular attention to Ben Ali’s gaze as he looked at them. The Herald observed, When the pictures came into Lawyer House’s hands Frenchy gazed at them with much interest. His forehead was lined with many wrinkles and his eyes showed intense speculation as he gazed—but that was all. Not one sign was there upon him of fear or remorse. If the man be a criminal he has a most marvelous faculty of self-control. [65] Patricia Cline Cohen notes that early colonists tried suspected murders by having them touch the corpse and if it “bled fresh blood,” that proved the suspect guilty. [66] In her extensive study of the 1836 murder of Helen Jewett, she remarks how the gaze had flipped; juries no longer focused on the murdered corpse but rather, scrutinized the suspect’s reaction as reflective of guilt. Towards the end of the century, the influence of criminal anthropology dictated that a suspect’s appearance reflected not only his propensity to commit crime, but his biological predisposition to criminal behavior. Without the man who was last seen with Carrie Brown, a witness to the murder, or a strong motive for Ameer Ben Ali, the prosecution rested its case on circumstantial forensic evidence. Prominent physicians Dr. Austin Flint, Dr. Cyrus Edson, and Dr. Henry Formad testified that amongst twenty specimens sampled from the crime scene and from Ben Ali’s person, all of them contained mammalian blood. Several specimens (including that from under Ameer Ben Ali’s nails, the sleeve of his shirt, and the sheet from Room 31) showed bile mixed in the blood that contained matter that examiners speculated to be the contents of Carrie Brown’s small intestine. [67] According to witnesses, she had eaten nothing for days before her murder until that night when a friend gave her corned beef sandwiches, cabbage, and some cheese. [68] Her last meal, according to the microscopists’ findings (summarized by Dr. Flint in the New York Medical Journal ), explained the presence of “partially digested muscular tissue” and “the hard residue of spiral and other vegetable cells” in the blood-bile admixture. [69] During the trial, the physicians’ testimony became a live-action scientific serial. Both Dr. Formad and Dr. Flint were given writing utensils and blackboards to use on the stand, with Dr. Flint drawing out diagrams of intestinal fluid cells to show the jury how to recognize them under a microscope. While the invention of the microscope dates back to the Renaissance, the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed major developments in technology as well as increasing medical specialization and the subsequent rise of microbiology, which made microscopy a prestigious science. As the diagnostic gaze in the theatre invited audiences to gaze inward, the microscope allowed spectators to go even further. However, the novel technology made the science out of reach for the average audience member. [70] During the trial, however, the inner life of “Shakespeare’s” cells and viscera were presented for lay spectatorship to prove that Ben Ali’s criminality was surely more than skin deep. Ultimately, Dr. Formad’s insistence that he would “stake his life” on the fact that the blood on Ali’s garments and on Carrie Brown’s bed were the same proved “the strongest thing said against Frenchy’s innocence.” [71] According to Dr. Flint, the case marked the first time a guilty verdict resulted from circumstantial blood evidence. [72] However, The Medical and Surgical Reporter later disputed the validity of this claim, arguing that “it would seem a little hazardous to convict a man on the microscopically established identity of minute collections of blood and intestinal matter” and that “at present there seems to be a feeling that the accused was made a scape-goat for the reputation of the Police Department.” [73] As a lawyer present at the sentencing pointed out, “the Police Department was on trial just as much as the prisoner was—that they stood or fell in popular estimation by reason of the verdict this jury should find.” [74] The eagerness of the New York police to prove themselves over their London counterparts amidst an increasing reliability on racist criminology enabled them to pin the gruesome crime on an innocent man. [75] In a surprising twist, Ameer Ben Ali received a pardon for Carrie Brown’s murder in 1902. Affidavits submitted by reporters Jacob Riis and Robert Butler claimed that when they had initially viewed the crime scene, they did not note any blood stains in Ben Ali’s room that the police officers swore were there. Furthermore, the key to Carrie Brown’s room—which had yet to be located by the time of the trial—was reportedly found in Jersey City in 1901, left behind by a Swedish boarder whose whereabouts were unknown. [76] The sensationalism of the story, bolstered by invocations of Jack the Ripper, nationalist pride, and racist/nativist notions of criminality, pushed the conviction of a man that would be overturned eleven years later. “She should have died hereafter” As Ben Ali’s trial and eventual pardon suggest, the fetishized afterlife of Brown/“Shakespeare” exposed the systemic racism that pervaded the growing field of medical criminology. To some observers, Ben Ali’s humiliation, terror, and abuse at the hands of the New York police must have seemed justified by the new “science” that supposedly gave credence to long-held prejudices. In Ben Ali’s story, Brown/Shakespeare’s body becomes the accusing prop—like Desdemona in Othello . After Ameer Ben Ali’s release, “Old Shakespeare” all but disappeared from popular culture. [77] In the contemporary era, she has found new resonance as the archive continues to perform her afterlife. Susan Stabile argues that museums such as Kimball’s, Barnum’s, and others juxtaposed sensationalism with “disciplinary systems of decorum, law, and order,” which “both perform and undermine heteronormative fictions of white womanhood.” [78] By the standards of her day, Shakespeare’s/Brown’s transgressions against the respectable middle-class female behaviors of her era appeared legion: She left her home and children to strike out on her own; she consumed alcohol; she refused to be rehabilitated into a temperance/Christian culture; she claimed to have been an actress; and she used her sexuality for profit as a sex worker. The relentless post-mortem re-norming of every transgressive aspect of Mrs. Shakespeare’s/Carrie Brown’s career appears in each of the spectacles constructed around her murder. It appears in the fixed tableaux at Doris’s Museum that erased her identity and subsumed it under the pseudonym of “Shakespeare” and tucked the tale of her life behind Jack the Ripper’s legend. The re-norming surfaces in each newspaper report that re-dissected her body for the public gaze, just as it was anatomized on the autopsy table. It creeps through the moralizing tone of the trial testimony and pulp fiction accounts that hold her up as a cautionary tale of how far a once-respectable woman might fall. For subsequent generations of archivists, her body performs as a puzzle to Ripperologists debating the Ripper’s identity. Ironically, both Brown and Ben Ali become supporting characters in these dramas, rather than central figures—and like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they “go to’t” [79] —their deaths moved offstage and attributed largely to their own faults and follies. On websites such as casebook.org (self-described as “the world’s largest public repository of Ripper-related information” [80] ) and jtrforums.com (“Ripperology For The 21st Century” [81] ), Ripperologists act as detectives, sharing and scrutinizing all bits of evidence regarding Carrie Brown’s murder. While their stated purpose is a gathering of primary evidence to deduce if Ameer Ben Ali or some other suspect could be Jack the Ripper, these forums serve another function. True crime can be found on a number of mediums, but on the internet, “true crime offers opportunities for audience-producer interactivity that changes the relationship between the consumer and the content.” [82] In Cornel Sandvoss’s illumination of performance in fandom, he observes that while fans are “consumers of (mediated) performances,” they are also performers “as others acknowledge their consumption.” [83] In the mediated universe of Ripperologists forums, their communal identification as Ripperologists performs and consumes their extensively curated collections of Ripper-related artifacts and information. It is through this medium that Carrie Brown/ “Shakespeare” again becomes a spectacle. In a way, these forums present a new kind of dime museum where the users are both the managers of the museum and the spectators. In the anatomical dime museums of the nineteenth century, “the boundaries between graphic sex education and pornography were blurred” as the public vied for any glimpse of the hidden body. [84] Similarly, as Jean Murley explains, “True crime is obsessed with full-on visual body horror.” [85] One notable interaction appears on the thread, “Photographs of Carrie Brown,” started on casebook.org in February 2003. Users shared their excitement over finding Brown’s autopsy photographs. Questions about the wounds and their similarity to other Ripper victims abounded, culminating in the final post of the thread, where a user posted a gruesome analysis of the photographs, linking the placement of the body and its wounds to various sexual positions. [86] Other less graphic posts include speculating where the East River Hotel would be located today, sorting fact from fiction in Brown’s case, and supporting the genealogical research being done by one of her descendants. [87] The extensive amount of time that regular users will spend interacting with other Ripperologists has cultivated a niche community. [88] While true crime enthusiasts are rigid about sticking to “just the facts,” there are moments in the threads where a user will comment on how long it had been since they had seen another user or to compliment someone on their writing (always Ripper-related, however). [89] New users are welcomed gracefully into the community, simply by announcing their interest in the Ripper. Sleuthing through primary source material that is posted in these online niches, Ripper enthusiasts recreate, reproduce, and recirculate knowledge about and through Carrie Brown. However, unlike other media such as novels, magazines, blogs, and podcasts that invoke Brown’s presence (through her deceased and mutilated form), these forums are not meant for mass consumption. Forums shape and sustain communities that are peripheral to Carrie Brown herself, yet are deeply invested in her presence. Critical analysis of her autopsy photographs imagines her body as a route to a different and novel answer to who Jack the Ripper might have been. Along the way, the community is maintained around the spectacle and speculation of Brown’s body. [90] References [1] Herbert Asbury, Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underground , 43. There actually seem to have been two women in the Bowery known locally as “Shakespeare,” which can make untangling the tale of the murdered “Shakespeare” even more challenging. Several sources also said that she had a second name, Jeff Davis, whose origins only the New York Times reports: her support for the “lost cause.” However, this would seemingly contradict another rumor that her supposed husband was in the Union navy during the Civil War. “Byrnes Says He Has a Clue,” New York Times , 26 April 1891, 2. [2] The Albany Law Journal waggishly (and callously) suggested that “Old Shakespeare” had not been murdered by Jack the Ripper, but by Bacon’s ghost. Albany Law Journal , 9 May 1891. [3] Troy Weekly Times, 14 May 1891. [4] New York Herald , 30 June 1891. [5] Ali (also known as George Frank), was referred to in some reports as “Frenchy” and in others as an “Arab.” It is not within the scope of this essay to unpack the racism and emerging eugenics in the press’s treatment of Ali, whom some papers labeled a “creature of strange and unnatural desires,” and as “little above a monkey in intellect,” but it certainly merits further exploration. According to the Wheeling Register (West VA) on 3 July 1891, Ali claimed, “By the garment of Allah, I am innocent.” The New York Tribune reported that he spoke Arabic at his trial and questioned why he had taken his oath on the Bible rather than the Koran (see 4 July 1891). Also see the Star and Herald (Panama), 16 May 1891 and the New York Herald , 30 June 1891. There was also speculation about his religion—primarily because of his tattoo of a cross: “‘Frenchy’s’ behavior since his arrest has shown that he is not a Moslem [ sic ], for he doesn’t pray at the rising and going down of the sun. Besides, a Moslem would not have a cross about him.” “Is it the Same ‘Frenchy’,” New York Herald, 4 May 1891, 4. Comparatively new (and untested) forensic methods were used to link Ali to the crime scene, including traces of blood and bodily fluids from the victim. [6] The term, “theatrical afterlife,” is drawn from Mechele Leon’s Molière, the French Revolution, & the Theatrical Afterlife (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), which explores the ways that Molière’s work echoed in the years following his death. Similarly, we use “theatrical afterlife” here to denote how Carrie Brown/Shakespeare’s murder reverberated across popular and theatrical culture. [7] Scholarly discussions about the histories and legacies of US melodrama have continued to shift over the last half-century. Foundational studies in the field include David Grimsted’s 1968, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theatre and Culture, 1800–1850 ; Bruce McConachie’s 1992 Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 ; Jeffrey D. Mason’s 1993 Melodrama and the Myth of America ; and Rosemarie K. Bank’s 1977 Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 . More recent studies include John Frick’s 2003, Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America ; Amy Hughes’s 2012 Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America ; Jeffrey H. Richards and Heather S. Nathans, eds. 2014, The Oxford Handbook of American Drama (which contains several chapters on melodrama, including those by Scott C. Martin, Amelia Howe Kritzer, Mark Mullen, and Mark Hodin); as well as recent works by John L. Brooke, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., Sarah Meer, Laura Mielke, Tavia Nyong’o, and others who have offered works that link the melodrama form to specific political issues in nineteenth-century America. [8] Ariela J. Gross further explains how eugenics, when it emerged in the late nineteenth-century, brought with it the empirical language about how racial science could enshrine white citizenship into law. Near Eastern and North African immigrants would be caught in the midst of this racist legal conundrum, with how to classify their whiteness debated heavily within state and federal court systems. This would begin to be litigated several years after Ben Ali’s trial but was firmly cemented in American consciousness by the time he was released. See Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 230–5. For evidence of Ben Ali’s pardon, release, and departure from the US, see “‘Frenchy’ Pardoned,” Daily People (New York, New York), 17 April 1902, 3; “Departure Of ‘Frenchy.’ to Bring an Action for Damages Against the State,” Daily People (New York, New York) 25 April 1902, 2. [9] Jane Caputi, “The New Founding Fathers: The Lore and Lure of the Serial Killer in Contemporary Culture,” Journal of American Culture 13, no. 3 (1990): 3. [10] Jtrforums.com is currently in a state of transition (the tribulations of digital archives!) and threads referenced in this essay are in the process of being archived. The site’s previous administrator is also uploading much of the research shared on the forum to CarrieBrown.net, although as of 22 October 2021, it is still very much a work in progress. [11] Jean Murley, The Rise of True Crime: 20th-Century Murder and American Popular Culture (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2008), 2. [12] Boston Herald, 25 May 1891. [13] The Patriot (Harrisburg, PA), 27 April 1891. British newspapers also picked up news of the murder, some reporting it only days after the fact. See Reynold’s Newspaper (London), 26 April 1891 and the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle , 2 May 1891. [14] “Ghastly Butchery by a New York Jack the Ripper’” New York Herald , 25 April 1891, 3. [15] New York Herald , 30 June 1891. The New York paper People complained bitterly that Shakespeare’s murder was yet another demonstration of police incompetence since they seemed unable to track down her killer. People , 26 April 1891. “Murder in the Second Degree,” New York Herald , 4 July 1891, 3. [16] “Ghastly Butchery by a New York Jack the Ripper’” New York Herald , 3. [17] New York Herald , 25 April 1891, 3; The Evening World , 25 April 1891, 1. [18] “Ghastly Butchery by a New York Jack the Ripper’” New York Herald , 3. [19] Other newspapers record an account of the autopsy, but The Evening World ’s account is the most complete, as well as the most clinical in its language. [20] The Evening World , 25 April 1891, 1. [21] Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 192. For more on the notorious Jewett case, see Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1999). [22] Halttunen, Murder Most Foul , 181. Italics original. [23] George Ellington, The Women of New York: Or, the Under-World of the Great City (New York: The New York Book Company, 1869), 295. [24] New York Herald , 26 April 1891, 17. [25] Ibid. [26] Some papers initially claimed that the “real” Carrie Brown had not been murdered and that the victim was an unknown woman. This story faded quickly however. [27] Omaha World Herald , 26 April 1891. Note that the paper has several misstatements about the case, including the location of the crime and the names of the initial suspects. They also claim that her husband’s first name was James, not Charles, and that she had two daughters, not a daughter and a son (though it should be noted that one of her daughters might have died). [28] Omaha World Herald , 26 April 1891. Mrs. Shakespeare may have been working as a sex worker during this time and it was also tacitly acknowledged (though not stated explicitly in the various newspaper reports we have reviewed) that there may also have been evidence of sexual activity. The coroner’s report also showed that she was anemic and that was reported in the paper, along with the physical evidence of her alcoholism, see New York Herald , 30 June 1891. [29] Note that this site offers census data as well as grave site location information for Brown: “Carrie ‘Old Shakespeare’ Brown,” Find a Grave, http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=89386829 (accessed 22 October 2021). [30] Of her appearance, the narrator notes “Ordinarily I would pass her without much notice.” W. B. Lawton, Jack the Ripper in New York , 1891, 2. See cover image below. [31] Note that her body was returned to her remaining family in Salem on 15 May 1891, according to the Star and Herald (Panama), 16 May 1891. [32] Indeed, the largest cache of present day information on Brown survives on websites devoted to Jack the Ripper that mention Brown’s killing as an attempt to place the Ripper in the US. [33] “Many Arrests: But No Identification of ‘Jack the Ripper,’” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle , 25 April 1891, 8. Italics added. [34] “Frenchy Found Guilty,” Pittsburgh Dispatch , 4 July 1891, 6. [35] George C. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage , vol. 14: 1888–1891 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 687. [36] Tableaux Advertisement, The Evening World , 29 April 1891, BASEBALL EXTRA, 3. Obviously, the furniture was probably not authentic and was likely to be a reproduction. The titillation of the crime scene also found its way into the theatre. One theatre in Pittsburgh restaged a popular show, advertising that the scenery had been altered to look like the East River Hotel and replicated the murder. See New York Herald , 3 May 1891, 10. [37] Odell, Annals of the New York Stage , vol. 14, 687. The wax tableaux were also available at the Gaiety Museum and the Eden Musée in New York City starting the week of 3 May 1891. See Odell, 739–740 and New York Herald , 3 May 1891, 10. One commentator in the Pennsylvania-based newspaper the Patriot wrote, “The morbid curiosity of the people was never more fully or disgustingly illustrated than in the announcement of a New York museum manager that all the details of the recent ‘Ripper’ tragedy will be re-reproduced [ sic ] in wax for the edification of his patrons. The person who can find any gratification in such a sight most assuredly has a peculiar twist in his mental structure.” Patriot , 27 April 1891, 4. [38] Quoted in Stabile, “Still(ed) Lives,” Journal of Material Culture 14, no. 2, 375. [39] New York Herald , 13 September 1891. For more on this topic, see John Frick, Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) . [40] Note that the tableaux retained that label even after Ameer Ben Ali’s trial and conviction for the murder. [41] Andrea Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 60. [42] It might be interesting to explore Herring’s career juxtaposed against Brown’s “performance” for Bowery audiences. Herring was roughly the same age as Brown (Herring was born in England in 1834), and Herring was described as “hoydenish” and became known for her success in breeches roles. [43] Michael Batterberry and Ariane Batterberry, On the Town in New York: The Landmark History of Eating, Drinking and Entertainments (New York: Routledge, 1998), 104. [44] Ibid., 106. [45] Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America , 61. Interestingly, Dennett adds that sites like Doris’s were often interspersed with dime museums that featured anatomical or medical exhibits, which were, in fact, thinly veiled quack clinics for patrons suffering from syphilis. [46] W. B. Lawson, “Jack the Ripper in New York; Or, Piping a Terrible Mystery,” in Log Cabin Library no. 115 (1891): 2. [47] For more on how crime fiction positioned race in its narratives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Maureen T. Reddy’s Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). [48] “New York’s ‘Ripper’ Known to the Police,” New York Herald , 26 April 1891, 17. [49] “Ghastly Butchery by a New York Jack the Ripper’,” New York Herald, 25 April 1891, 3. Some other reports have his name as “C. Niclo” or “C. Nichols.” [50] The “Ripper” Left a Fairly Plain Trail,” New York Herald, 27 April 1891, 3. [51] Ameer Ben Ali claimed that the blood found on his shirt and stockings was menstrual blood from a sex worker he had visited. The expert physicians who analyzed the blood testified that there were no epithelial cells found in the blood samples from his person, indicating that it was not menstrual blood. See Austin Flint, “Some Medico-Legal Points in the ‘Frenchy’ Murder Trial,” New York Medical Journal 54 (July 1891): 39–41. [52] “Is This New York’s ‘Jack the Ripper?’” New York Herald , 1 May 1891, 3. [53] L. Perry Curtis, Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 30. [54] Sara Blair, “Henry James, Jack the Ripper, and the Cosmopolitan Jew: Staging Authorship in ‘The Tragic Muse,’” ELH 63, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 490. [55] Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body , (New York: Routledge, 2009), 490–2. [56] “Not the Same ‘Ripper,’” New York Herald , 1 May 1891, 6. [57] The Patriot , Harrisburg, PA, 15 May 1891, 1. [58] Nicole Hahn Rafter explores the impact of European innovations in scientific criminology on American criminal anthropologists, including the adoption of Bertillon’s methodologies in the United States. See Nicole Hahn Rafter, “Criminal Anthropology: Its Reception in the United States and the Nature of Its Appeal,” in Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective ,” eds. Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell, 159–82 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). [59] Havelock Ellis, The Criminal (New York: Scribner & Welford, 1890), 84. Interest in phrenology in the mid-nineteenth century drove a demand for lecturing on criminality by displaying skulls from the cadavers of executed criminals, see Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 25. [60] “Is This New York’s ‘Jack the Ripper?’” New York Herald , 1 May 1891, 3. [61] “Implore God!’ Cries Ben Ali,” New York Herald , 3 July 1891, 3. [62] Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, “The Diagnostic Gaze: Nineteenth-Century Contexts for Medicine and Performance,” in Performance and the Medical Body , eds. Alex Mermikides and Gianna Bouchard (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 37-8. [63] Emile Zola, “Naturalism in the Theatre,” in Documents of Modern Literary Realism , ed. George J. Becker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 201. Italics added. [64] Autopsy photos from the New York City Municipal Archives (see below). [65] “Blood Stains May Prove Frenchy Guilty,” New York Herald , 1 July 1891, 3. The supposed images of her autopsy have circulated around internet forums See “Carrie Brown a.k.a. ‘Old Shakespeare,’” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, https://www.casebook.org/victims/carrie.html(accessed 22 October 2021). [66] Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett, 13. Interestingly, William Shakespeare invokes the same method in Richard III when Henry VI’s wounds supposedly reopen and bleed as his coffin is carried past Richard. [67] A definitive test for distinguishing human from animal blood would not be found until 1901. See “A New Forensic Method of Differentiating Human and Animal Blood,” Journal of the American Medical Association 36, no. 16 (20 April 1901): 1118. [68] Reports also note that roundworm eggs were found, which are not uncommon in people living in extreme-poverty and have poor hygiene practices, although this went unremarked. [69] Austin Flint, “Some Medico-Legal Points in the ‘Frenchy’ Murder Trial,” New York Medical Journal 54 (July 1891): 40. [70] For more about naturalistic theatre and microscopy, see Kari Nixon, “Seeing Things: The Dilemma of Visual Subjectivity at the Dawn of the Bacteriological Age in Strindberg’s The Father ,” Configurations 24, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 25-52. [71] “Frenchy Breaks Down and Weeps” New York Herald, 2 July 1891, 3. [72] Flint, “Some Medico-Legal Points,” 40. [73] “The Medico-Legal Aspect of the Jack-The-Ripper Case,” The Medical and Surgical Reporter, 15 August 1891 65: 279. [74] “‘I Implore God!’ Cries Ben Ali,” New York Herald , 3 July 1891, 3. [75] Ameer Ben Ali’s case is discussed in Yale Law Professor Edwin M. Bouchard’s Convicting the Innocent: Errors of Criminal Justice (New Haven: Yale University, 1932). [76] New Evidence for “Frenchy,” Daily People (New York), 24 May 1901, 3. [77] Two books in the 1930s reference her murder. The first is Edwin M. Bouchard’s Convicting the Innocent: Errors of Criminal Justice (1932) and the other is Alexander Woollcott’s short story “It May Be Human Gore: V MURDER FOR PUBLICITY” in his 1934 collection While Rome Burns . The short story recounts Old Shakespeare’s murder and the subsequent trial. Leaning heavily on the sensationalism of the story, Woollcott describes Brown as a “raffish sexagenarian prostitute” and a “dilapidated and jocular hag.” “The Frenchy case, famous in its day forty years ago but since largely forgotten,” Wollcott writes, “should, it seems to me, have a prominent place in American murder annals, if only for the felicitous proper names, ideal for melodrama, which were involved in it.” For more see, Alexander Woollcott, While Rome Burns (New York: The Viking Press, 1934), 220–3. A book has also recently come out that reexamines the case in detail and disagrees with Bouchard’s perspective that Ameer Ben Ali was innocent. Curiously, the author does not consider the racial dynamics at play and the rise of racist criminology in his argument. See George R. Dekle, Sr., The East River Ripper: The Mysterious 1891 Murder of Old Shakespeare (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2021). [78] Stabile, “Still(ed) Lives,” 375. [79] William Shakespeare, Hamlet , V, ii. [80] “Casebook: Jack the Ripper,” https://www.casebook.org/index.html (accessed 21 October 2021). [81] “Jack the Ripper Forums – Ripperology for the 21 st Century Statistics,” http://jtrforums.com (accessed 21 October 2021). See 10n. [82] Murley, The Rise of True Crime , 133. [83] Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 45. [84] Dennett, Weird and Wonderful , 64. [85] Murley, The Rise of True Crime , 5. [86] On Tuesday November 29, 2005 at 6:48pm, an unregistered guest (that is, not an official member of the forum) with the username sickard posted this explicit and graphic message that will not be reproduced here to a casebook.org thread discussing the wounds seen on the autopsy photographs. See “Photographs of Carrie Brown,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, https://www.casebook.org/forum/messages/4921/5374.html (accessed 21 October 2021). [87] Key examples of interesting threads about Carrie Brown include (but are certainly not limited to) a dissection started in 2016 about where exactly the hotel she was murdered in was located (“Carrie Brown Murder in the New York Times,” Jack the Ripper Forums, https://www.jtrforums.com/forum/the-victims/other-possible-victims/carrie-brown/27051-carrie-brown-murder-in-the-new-york-times?t=26525 [accessed 6 June 2021].), a “Shooting the Breeze Thread” from July 2020 to casually discuss aspects of her murder (“Carrie Brown: Shooting the Breeze Thread,” Jack the Ripper Forums, https://www.jtrforums.com/forum/the-victims/other-possible-victims/carrie-brown/34855-carrie-brown-shooting-the-breeze-thread?t=34156 [accessed 6 June 2021].), a thread from 2008 that questions whether or not she was a victim of Jack the Ripper where the original poster notes that they had made a separate post to acknowledge the anniversary of her death, but felt it inappropriate to begin the discussion there (“Was Carrie Brown A Ripper Victim?,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, https://forum.casebook.org/forum/ripper-discussions/victims/non-canonical-victims/carrie-brown/726-was-carrie-brown-a-ripper-victim [accessed 22 October 2021].), and a 2011 thread that begins with parsing through the contradictory details of Brown’s biography before moving to a discussion of the location of her grave in Salem, Massachusetts (and how several commenters had visited and been told to leave). A supposed descendant of hers interrupts the chat to state that he has no issue with anyone visiting the cemetery where she’s buried (“Carrie Brown: UK Background,” Jack the Ripper Forums, https://www.jtrforums.com/forum/the-victims/other-possible-victims/carrie-brown/12639-carrie-brown-uk-background/page2 [accessed 6 June 2021].). Interesting to note, there is some, although not complete, overlap between users of the forums. See 10n. [88] There’s also been a recent migration of jtrforums.com members to a private Facebook group called, “The Carrie Brown File.” See 10n. [89] In this thread from 2003, a forum user, Tom Wescott, writes of how he is happy to see a fellow user and even reveals that he knows about the other user’s work outside of the forum (although, still Ripper-related). (“Photographs of Carrie Brown,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, https://www.casebook.org/forum/messages/4921/5374.html [accessed 22 October 2021].). In a 2014 thread, a user asks if a frequent poster, Wolf Vanderlinden, is still working on his book about Carrie Brown and congratulates him for a “well done” article in a Ripperologist magazine (“Forthcoming book?”, Casebook: Jack the Ripper, https://www.casebook.org/forum/messages/4921/12087.html [accessed 22 October 2021,].). [90] It is interesting to note that the theatre is tangential to the work of Ripperologists, as this recent thread on Ameer Ben Ali’s attending a minstrel show during his time at the Matteawan State Insane Hospital demonstrates (“Ali at a Minstrel Show at Matteawan,” Jack the Ripper Forums, https://www.jtrforums.com/forum/the-victims/other-possible-victims/carrie-brown/576659-ali-at-a-minstrel-show-at-matteawan [accessed 6 June 2021].). See 10n. Footnotes About The Author(s) Mia Levenson is a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts University. Her research lies in the intersection of biomedical science, race, and performance, and her dissertation will explore the proliferation of eugenic science in American popular performances of the early 20th century. You can find her work in Theatre Journal , as well as two forthcoming anthologies. Heather S. Nathans is a professor in the Tufts University Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and is the Alice and Nathan Gantcher Professor in Judaic Studies. Her publications include: Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson (2003); Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787-1861 (2009); and Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (2017). She is also the editor of the Studies in Theatre History and Culture series with the University of Iowa Press. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 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.

Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen 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 Editorial Introduction Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen By Published on June 6, 2024 Download Article as PDF We are honored and delighted to be the incoming co-editors of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . We have a long connection to the journal through our mutual alma mater at The Graduate Center, CUNY where the journal is housed at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and supported by the work of students in the PhD Program in Theatre and Performance. We would like to thank James F. Wilson and Naomi Stubbs for more than a decade of stewardship of the journal and for their editorial guidance and labor to keep the journal positioned at the forefront of issues facing American theatre. We will do our utmost to not only continue, but also build upon their legacy and those that came before them. The journal’s association with the American Theatre & Drama Society is also significant as we are both active members of the society and strongly believe in its mission. We are also grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers who make scholarly publication possible. The field of drama, theatre, and performance in the Americas continues to expand in scope, form, style, representation, and content. We are deeply invested in continuing to support work that covers the entirety of the Americas while exploring intersectional issues of identity and history within this vast geographic area and ensuring diversity in both authorship and subjects covered in the journal. We welcome articles with a primary basis in history and/or theory that explore issues of identity across race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and age. JADT's publication schedule consists of two issues per year: one general issue co-edited by us, and another special themed issue curated by a guest editor. We will continue with this model moving forward. We accept articles on a continuous basis and encourage authors to reach out to us with ideas for articles in advance. All full-length articles go through the traditional peer review process. We remain committed to keeping the journal open access and digitized through the generous work of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center directed by Frank Hentschker. In addition to submitting articles, we hope you will support the journal by reading it as we welcome feedback from all sources. This issue features the first collection of articles, interviews, and reviews that have fallen entirely under our purview. We begin with Valerie Joyce’s analysis of Rags , a short-lived Broadway musical meant to be a successor to Fiddler on the Roof . By looking at the way choreography tells the story of immigrants, assimilation, and acculturation, Joyce makes a case for the importance of choreography in the process of creating audience empathy for immigrant characters, which is clearly an important topic to this day. Next, we move to Danielle Rosvally’s exploration of TikTok as an important digital archive of performance, particularly of performances during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rosvally likens the proposed bans and restrictions of TikTok to theatre fires and other major losses of archival information in the pre-digital age, deftly weaving this digital performance archive together with more traditional brick and mortar theaters of the past and present. The following article, by Thomas Arthur, chronicles Jamaican actor Sidney Hibbert’s life in terms of his post-colonial experiences performing in a variety of different national contexts. This microhistory both highlights and contextualizes Hibbert’s extraordinary abilities among the transitional period of history his life spanned. Our final article is a roundtable conversation between Jim Nicola, Tanya Elder, and Daniel Diego Pardo about the archival materials left by noted theatre critic, translator, and historian Michael Feingold who died in 2022. Nicola, Elder, and Pardo discuss and work through a small sliver of the material left in boxes after Feingold’s death. In doing so, they peer into Feingold’s legacy and uncover often-overlooked pieces of queer history he engaged in, the backstory of downtown theatre, and the founding of yale/theatre which later became Theater magazine. The issue also features four book reviews that mark the end of Maya Roth’s tenure as our book review editor. We thank her for her years of service and careful curation of the book review section. We are also delighted to feature our first collection of performance reviews in this issue. Performance reviews will continue to be a feature of the journal going forward, and we are happy that this section will continue to support our mission of spotlighting performance throughout the Americas. We hope our readers enjoy all of the excellent contributions in this issue and we welcome submissions of articles, interviews, book reviews, and performance reviews. Reach out to us at jadtjournal@gmail.com . This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. 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 . Bess Rowen (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She is also affiliate faculty for both Gender & Women's Studies and Irish Studies. She is a member of Actors' Equity and an intimacy choreographer. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021) focuses on affective stage directions. Her next book project looks at the theatrical archetype of the “mean teenage girl.” Other recent work can be found in Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders & Sexualities , Theatre Survey , and The Eugene O'Neill Review , among other publications. She also serves as the LGBTQ+ Focus Group Representative at ATHE and as the 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.

Dohyun Gracia Shin Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii Dohyun Gracia Shin By Published on January 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft presents an ambitious compilation of interviews with twenty-seven contemporary women stage directors, while archiving and reflecting on relatively underrepresented women stage directors in the US and the UK. Tracing the past two decades, Marty notes that few published books focus on female stage directors. She points to two volumes by Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow as rare examples. Marty distinguishes her project by focusing on mid-career women stage directors—who she argues are not featured enough by Fliotsos and Vierow. This volume provides readers the rare chance to hear disparate, highly-active women directors’ reflecting in their own words about their experiences, insights, styles, labors, and vision. Based on her experience working both as a theatre researcher and practitioner (dramaturg/director), Marty also provides a window on the contemporary theatre industry, opening far beyond how gender intersects with artistic lives. What makes this book unique in structure is that Marty directs, in effect, her book. Interview-based books deploying question-and-answer structures often feature a handful of interviewees in a chapter or section. Instead, she divides chapters, as if splitting beats, and places quotes and excerpts from her interviewees in each chapter according to its theme, as if casting speakers in dynamic dialogue. She aligns thematic chapters like scenes that build into a larger narrative: this journey of women directors pursuing their careers begins with incubating projects and concludes with each director’s own vision of today’s theatre. Although the book’s organizational structure does not provide a clear, holistic profile of each individual director, as Marty acknowledges in the introduction (9), this thematic approach instead distinctly guides readers to respect a director’s role and labor. Marty also provides a series of inspiring models, amplifying the influence of women directors working at an array of theatre venues in the US and UK. In the first two chapters, Marty sheds light on the directors’ incubating process. Chapter 1 opens by laying out how individual directors choose a particular piece of work. For example, Lear deBessonet, the founding director of the Public Theater’s Public Works project, explains that she stages classics since “no one is the authority” (24) which thereby opens up collective imagination. Marty also considers how varied directors and artistic directors actually scaffold their work: finding their niche, planning seasons, choosing collaborators, and mounting their plays in a theater. Chapter 2 demonstrates her subjects’ labor of engaging with scripts and ideas prior to rehearsals. She emphasizes each director’s signature style of analyzing the play, for instance. Further, she expands our grasp of the directorial role by examining how her subjects collaborate with playwrights, play multiple roles besides that of a director, prepare for rehearsals, and communicate with audiences. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on how these directors shape performances, starting from conceptualization of the visual and acoustic, and then moving into the rehearsal room, and, ultimately, the stage. Chapter 3 highlights how the chosen directors envision theatrical worlds visually and acoustically, collaborating with designers. Here, Marty approaches relationships between directing and designing theatre horizontally. Inspired by her subjects, she analyzes spectacle and sound beyond servers of directorial messages, conveying a comprehensive picture of the theatrical process to readers. In Rachel Chavkin’s words, it is a director’s process of “discovering the world with designers and actors” (99).True to the volume’s subtitle, Chapter 4 presents a “conversation on craft,” guided by these leading directors’ invaluable experiences and advice on the rehearsal process. Using quotes, Marty covers the practical process of rehearsal: casting actors, setting the tone for rehearsals, empowering actors, shaping the process, and using research in rehearsals. For instance, Maria Aberg, who is known for “her innovative, feminist productions of Shakespeare and other classics at the Royal Shakespeare Company” (2), introduces points she considers in the casting process when she changes the gender of a character. Readers will find many gems and tips. In the final chapters, Contemporary Women Stage Directors focuses on how each of these experienced directors develop their careers and navigate the US and UK theatre scenes. Chapter 5 considers how the directors sustain their projects, dealing with concerns such as “financial security, community, quality of life, and relationships” (159). Pursuing the theme of work-life balance, Marty places quotes from Leah Gardiner, Kimberly Senior, and Lucy Kerbel together to cover issues such as motherhood, labor and pressure. In particular, Kerbel explains that “the loop of visibility” (190) exposes directors to critics’ attention which sustains their projects. She elaborates on gendered inequality in the field by mentioning how maternity leave easily drops women directors from that loop. If Chapter 5 extensively covers their individual lives and career arcs, Chapter 6 specifically focuses on their diverse experience with systemic challenges tied to their gender, racial and/or ethnic identities in the theatre industry. The 6th chapter analyzes obstacles and disparities in the field through her array of case studies, integrating an intersectional perspective. For instance. Leah Gardiner, Paulette Randall, and KJ Sanchez tell their stories of experiencing misogyny and racism in the field. Importantly, Marty pays attention to how these women directors navigate systemic obstacles. For example, Roxana Silbert and Nadia Fall emphasize that diversity opens up more diversity and brings an alternative gaze to the field, which is dominated by white male directors. Marty concludes her book with the directors’ insight on theatre today and their expectations as working professionals. In the conclusion, Marty summarizes her interview research in two categories: what she did not find and what she did. What is notable here is her picture of a director as a relationship builder. Marty explains that “the director’s role is to build and facilitate relationships , specifically (1) between a play and an audience and (2) among members of the collaborative team” (288). Likewise, Marty, as the director of this book, builds a relationship between these women directors and her contemporary readers. She creates a bridge for these mid-stream women directors —who struggle for their comparatively underrepresented stories and insights to be heard— bringing their voices and methods as accomplished practitioners to readers, both artists and scholars. By providing many substantial examples of brilliant, motivating women stage directors from the US and UK in the early 21st century, this significant study will benefit theatre researchers and our future generation of women (and other) theater directors, artistic directors and, one hopes, producers. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DOHYUN GRACIA SHIN The Graduate Center, CUNY 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 Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202 Twenty-First Century American Playwrights Encounters on Contested Lands and Provocative Eloquence Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jenna Gerdsen 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 Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Jenna Gerdsen By Published on May 23, 2022 Download Article as PDF When I left Hawaiʻi for college on the continent, I was in for quite a shock. As a mixed Asian woman born and raised in Hawaiʻi, I was used to being a part of a dominant majority. When I arrived in Washington, I lost the comforts that came with being a part of a majority and was eager to find an Asian community. I hesitantly joined the Asian American Student Association. Though I had never identified as Asian American, I assumed the group could replicate some of the comforts of home. Yet I did not feel at ease. I felt distant from the other students. My Hawaiian Pidgin and love for Hawaiian plate lunches set me apart. When someone suggested I check out the Hawaiʻi Club, I began to realize that Asianness looked and sounded differently outside of Hawaiʻi. I share this personal anecdote to illustrate that stories have triggered discussions around categorical schemas, representation, and historical fissures between Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. In The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University, Mark Chiang asserts Blu’s Hanging, the controversial novel by popular Japanese writer Lois-Ann Yamanaka, challenged fundamental assumptions of Asian American Studies and demanded new theorizations of Asian American cultural politics. [1] At the 1998 Association for Asian American Studies conference, Yamanaka received a fiction award, but a motion to revoke the award was initiated due her stereotypical depictions of Filipinos. The novel demonstrated the dominance of East Asians in Hawaiʻi and the prevalence of an ethnic hierarchy. In Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi, Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura assert that East Asians of Hawaiʻi often use “Local,” the pan-ethnic label unique to Hawaiʻi, to build a Pan-Asian nationhood and obscure Native Hawaiian history. [2] In less dramatic fashion, plays by Asian and Hawaiian playwrights of Hawaiʻi have reignited the urgency to reconceptualize Asian Americanness. Eager to assimilate in the continent, I turned to Esther Kim Lee’s A History of Asian American Theatre . Before reading her work, I assumed that theatre of Hawaiʻi would be a part of her study. I learned that merging theatre of Hawaiʻi with Asian American theatre comes with complications, just like my attempts to blend in at student gatherings. Lee made the strategic decision to limit her foundational study to the continent. She stated, In my view the inclusion of Hawaiʻi would necessitate a shift in the paradigm of Asian American theatre history, and the nature of this shift would hinge on whether Asian American theatre is considered as part of the larger Asian diaspora of theatre. Indeed, as Josephine Lee points out, the inclusion of Hawaiʻi in Asian American theatre history would “illuminate the fault lines” in how we, as theatre historians, have imagined Asian American culture. [3] Just as I was surprised that Esther Kim Lee’s study on Asian American theatre excluded theatre of Hawaiʻi, undergraduate students are often disappointed when Asian American theatre classes do not include Pacific Islander theatre. For instructors of Asian American theatre, the question becomes how to represent equitably both Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders without making them a monolith. Pedagogy should follow the recommendations of scholars such as J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Lisa Kahaleole Hall who argue that the label “Asian American Pacific Islander” privileges the experiences of Asian Americans over Pacific Islanders. [4] Despite its use in social justice conversations, “inclusion” in this context is an act of settler colonialism. The absorption of the Hawaiian Islands within the US empire and Americanist scholarship has obscured the identities, cultures, and histories of the various peoples of Hawaiʻi. Due to the illegal overthrow of Queen Lili’uokalani that led to the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands in 1898, Hawaiʻi has long been associated with the United States, been regarded as a strategic military base, and been a profitable appendage to the empire. The Hawaiian Islands have also been an appendage in a scholastic context. Information regarding theatre in Hawaiʻi has historically been included within Asian American theatre. The inclusion of theatre of Hawaiʻi in Asian American theatre demonstrates that the United States has played a large role in how we have come to understand Asianness. In the early 1960s, the label and genre “Asian American” were created as a way to assert that Asians have been essential members of the United States and replace the problematic descriptor of “Oriental,” which reduced Asians to foreign objects. [5] While many Asians of the continent were determined to demonstrate a sense of belonging in the United States, other Asians in Hawaiʻi were determined to demonstrate a sense of alienation from the United States. Plays written by Asians from Hawaiʻi that explore the realities of living in Hawaiʻi should be separate from but in conversation with Asian American theatre. My work is a direct response to Lee, and is also informed by the dissertations of Hawaiʻi-based scholars and theatre practitioners Tammy Haili’ōpua Baker, Sammie Choy, and Stefani Overman-Tsai that call for theatre of Hawaiʻi to be recognized as its own form and examined outside of an Asian Americanist lens. [6] I interviewed Asian and Hawaiian theatre artists and educators born and raised in Hawaiʻi to determine why theatre of Hawaiʻi should be studied separately from Asian American theatre. I concluded that it is debatable whether Hawaiʻi can be considered a part of the larger Asian diaspora considering its indigenous history and cross-racial alliances developed on sugarcane and pineapple plantations. I assert that dramatic literature of Hawaiʻi, particularly the work of Hawaiian-Samoan playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, makes these fissures visible and audible. Her large body of work dramatizes interracial alliances and conflicts of Hawaiʻi. This essay features an excerpt of an interview I conducted with Kneubuhl on July 22, 2019. Our conversation about her work and its categorization demonstrates that the foundations and future of Asian American theatre rest on and are guided by understanding the nuances of Asian and Pacific Islander identities. I use my conversation with Kneubuhl to claim that it is possible and necessary to separate Asian American and Pacific Islander dramaturgies while still keeping them in conversation. Because some of Kneubuhl’s work has represented both Hawaiians and Asian settlers and their alliances and conflicts, her work has been categorized under several labels, including Asian American theatre and Pacific Islander theatre. In our conversation, Kneubuhl revealed that she embraces all of the labels assigned to her work because that allows her to more accurately characterize individual plays. Kneubuhl’s body of work resists exclusive characterization because each play’s themes, setting, and characters vary greatly. With Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in both Hawaiian culture studies and theatre, Kneubuhl bridges Hawai‘i state archives, community theatre, and the Hawaiian Renaissance movement. Kneubuhl’s work has been locally, nationally, and internationally recognized. She won the Hawai‘i Award for Literature, and her plays have been commissioned and performed in Hawai‘i, the continental United States, Asia, and Britain. When Kneubuhl emerged as one of Hawai‘i’s representative playwrights during the 1980s and 90s, she was one of the only Native Hawaiian playwrights active in Hawai‘i’s theatre scene. Today, she continues to represent Native Hawaiians and produces work that teaches Hawaiian history and celebrates Hawaiian culture from a Hawaiian perspective and advocates for Hawaiian sovereignty. Kneubuhl has been a major contributor to the repertoire of Kumu Kahua Theatre, the institutional home of Local theatre. The genre demonstrates how those who identify as Locals, a wide umbrella term unique to Hawai‘i that includes Native Hawaiians and other ethnic immigrant groups who descended from sugarcane and pineapple plantation workers, regard themselves vis-à-vis Hawai‘i’s plantations. Her work is informed and inspired by both the Hawaiian Renaissance movement and the plurality of Local culture. Inspired by those in the Hawaiian community who were reclaiming and reviving Hawaiian culture during the early 1970s, several of Kneubuhl’s plays retell Hawaiian women’s history through a contemporary, retrospective lens. Kneubuhl’s highly regarded historical pageant play January 1893 replays the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and allowed the Honolulu community to revisit a pivotal moment in Hawai‘i’s history. Written, produced, directed, and sponsored by Hawaiian activists and artists, January 1893 represented the mission of the Hawaiian Renaissance to revive Hawaiian history and culture on a state and national level. The play debuted in 1993 to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the overthrow. Staged as an elaborate parade, January 1893 is still considered to be one of the most theatrically ambitious nonprofessional productions ever staged in Hawai‘i. January 1893 was performed on and around the grounds of ‘Iolani Palace, the home of the Hawaiian monarchy and the site of Lili’uokalani’s house arrest after the overthrow. As an anniversary event, the production exemplified all that remained after the annexation: ignorance and amnesia around the event, a pan-ethnic solidarity between Hawaiians and other ethnic groups in Hawai‘i, and a desire to reinstall a sovereign Hawaiian monarchy. The production reinforced the bonds between Hawaiians and other ethnic groups formed during the early days of Hawai‘i’s plantations, and rallied people in support of Hawaiian sovereignty. The play is an act of redress that fortifies Hawai‘i’s history as a legitimate, sovereign nation and challenges hegemonic interpretations of Hawai‘i’s history that characterize US imperialism as a positive force that shaped Hawai‘i into a utopic multicultural paradise. [7] Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl was one of the very first people I interviewed. Her words guided my research and offer tremendous insight for instructors and students who are eager to engage with both Asian American and Pacific Islander theatre. JG: How did you find your way to theatre? VNK: The Hawaiian Renaissance. At the time people were really interested in Hawaiian history and culture. We were attracted to the theatre because it allowed us to express who we are and where we came from in different ways. When hula and all kinds of traditional Hawaiian practices made a huge comeback, there were better plays and bigger audiences. Theatre, performance, history, and the street all came together for me. In the ’80s I participated in and wrote some of the early living history theatre in Honolulu. Now that performance type has really taken off in Hawai‘i. There’s all kinds of places and groups that are doing living histories now. When we started, a lot of academic historians were frowning on what we were doing. But the truth was that living history got people interested in Hawaiian history, in their personal history. People in Hawaiʻi need to be more aware of the colonial history. I don’t think enough people know. JG : Can you tell me about your involvement with Kumu Kahua Theatre? VNK: . I was in the right place at the right time. Kumu Kahua was new and I was new. They were hungry for scripts. I invested myself in Kumu Kahua because I really wanted to produce things that were written locally. Kumu Kahua didn’t always produce Local theatre because there just weren’t enough scripts. Sometimes they did Asian American plays that were written by Asian people who aren’t from Hawaiʻi. I was invested in a kind of theatre that was by and for the Local community and didn’t reflect the larger American theatre, popular theatre scene. I was hungry for things that reflected who I am and where I came from. I am still supportive of and invested in giving voice to our island stories or things that are relevant to our island communities. Now, there’s a whole bunch of young people and a much larger community that is invested in Local theatre. Other theatres are now just starting to do productions that have Local themes and are looking for really good locally written plays. There’s so many more people interested in our theatre. It is really rewarding to see that. JG : What would you call what you write? Would you call that Local theatre or Hawaiian theatre? VNK: People used to call my work Asian American theatre because when I started writing there was no Pacific Island theatre. I was really conflicted about that. You want people to read your plays and that was all that mattered to me. I wanted my plays out there. Some of my plays could be called Hawaiian theatre, but some are not. I’ve never quibbled over labels. I want the freedom to write whatever really touches and interests me and whatever I feel passionate about. I like to think of myself as a Pacific Island writer. Some of my plays could be categorized as Hawaiian theatre and some of them could be Local theatre and some could be neither. JG : I’ve seen your plays in anthologies by women of color. But I’ve also seen them in postcolonial anthologies. The label I’ve seen most often is either Asian American or Hawaiian. VNK : I think that people in academia need categories. Labels make it easier for them to teach. But as a writer, you’re not sitting at home thinking, “Am I a Hawaiian writer or am I a Local writer?” You’re just writing. You’re writing what comes into your head. And so I just kind of leave the labels to other people. I’ll just write the plays and they decide what they are. JG : How would you define Local theatre? VNK : That’s hard because Local theatre includes Hawaiian theatre, but Hawaiian theatre doesn’t necessarily include Local theatre. I guess you could say Hawaiian theatre is anything that has Hawaiian characters or Hawaiian issues as its main theme. Local theatre includes Asian and Asian American theatre. But out of all the labels out there, I like Pacific Island theatre the most because it’s so inclusive. Labels are hard because there’s always something left out and there’s always a gray area. It is really tricky because all these questions have come up for me for a long time. And so what I’m trying to do is not necessarily make hard and fast boundaries between things because that’s just impossible. JG: So would you say there are multiple, overlapping genres at play here? VNK: Yeah. The Local, Hawaiian, and Western. They overlap. They are not really separate from each other. I do think that there are certain kinds of colonial undertones and attitudes and certain dynamics that play out between the three. Colonialism permeated the arts in Hawaiʻi. When I was first involved with Kumu Kahua, I was just starting out in theatre. I remember I was at a party and I was talking to this woman. I said I was a theatre major, and she goes, “Oh, have you been in plays?” I said, “I’ve been in a few Kumu Kahua plays.” She looked at me and she said, “No, I mean, a real play.” Theatre in Hawaiʻi is something really special. But the problem is people have a certain idea of what Hawaiʻi is. I don’t think our island theatre really fits into that. [8] When we look at Hawaiʻi, particularly its contemporary theatre scene, we see insightful tensions that arise from the distinct yet overlapping categorical schemas of “Asian American,” “Asian,” “Pacific Islander,” “Local,” and “Hawaiian.” Kneubuhl’s remarks echo J. Kehaulani Kauanui’s essay “Asian American Studies and the ‘Pacific question’” that calls upon Asian American Studies to actively engage Indigenous and Pacific Islander Studies rather than passively absorb Hawaiian and Pacific Islander history and culture into Asian American culture. [9] Kneubuhl’s embrace of the label “Pacific writer” signifies the ongoing transpacific turn of Asian American Studies and a way to recognize holistically the many voices that make up Asian and Pacific diasporas. Decentering the United States highlights the inherent liminality and multidimensionality of Asian identities and cultures that exist across the Pacific. A transpacific, rather than a US-centric approach, can help us understand how theatre of Hawaiʻi and Asian American theatre are related but distinct from each other. Transpacific Studies, which draws from Asian American Studies, Asian Studies, Indigenous Studies, Pacific Island Studies, and American Studies, illuminates the flow in peoples, cultures, capital, ideas, and labor across the Pacific. [10] Theatre of Hawaiʻi and Asian American theatre are distinct representations of the people, cultures, and histories of the Pacific that directly inform each other and provide a model on how the field of Asian American Studies can produce new theorizations on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Kneubuhl’s work is a model for how to create equitable representation out of tremendous cultural plurality. References Footnotes [1] Mark Chiang, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University (New York: New York University Press, 2009). [2] Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds. Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). [3] Esther Kim Lee, A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3. [4] Lisa Kahaleole Hall, “Navigating Our Own ‘Sea of Islands’: Remapping a Theoretical Space for Hawaiian Women and Indigenous Feminism,” Wicazo Sa Review 24 no. 2 (2009): 15–38; Kauanui, J. Kehaulani, “Where are Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders in Higher Education?” Diverse: Issues in Higher Education , 7 September 2008. [5] Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989). [6] Tammy Haili’ōpua Baker, “The Development and Function of Hana Keaka (Hawaiian Medium Theatre): A Tool for Empowering the Kānaka Maoli Consciousness” (Dissertation, University of Waikato, 2019); Sammie L. Choy, “Staging Identity: The Intercultural Theater of Hawai‘i” (Dissertation, University of Hawai‘i, 2016); Stefani Overman-Tsai, “Localizing the Islands: Theaters of Place and Culture in Hawaii’s Drama” (Dissertation, University of Hawai‘i, 2015). [7] Craig Howes, “Introduction,” in Hawai’i Nei: Island Plays (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002); Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, January 1893 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Press, 1993). [8] Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, interview by Jenna Gerdsen, June 2019. [9] J. Kehaulani Kauanui, “Asian American Studies and the ‘Pacific question,’” in Asian American Studies After Critical Mass , ed. Kent A. Ono (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 121-143. [10] Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014). About The Author(s) Jenna Gerdsen is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Theatre at Florida State University. She is an emerging scholar whose work examines the racial formation of contemporary theatre of Hawai‘i and investigates how settler colonialism and immigration shape this theatre tradition vis-à-vis Indigenous and Asian American cultural production. Her research was featured in the curated panel “New Directions in Theatre and Performance” at the 2021 American Society for Theatre Research conference. 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.

Jordan Schildcrout Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Jordan Schildcrout By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF I consider it a sign of the vibrancy of queer theatre scholarship that publications over the past few years contain a greater variety of subjects, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives than ever before. I would hope for no less from a field that celebrates transgression, categorical slippage, intersectionality, and the inability to follow a single “straight and narrow” path. At the most recent ATHE Conference , I attended a panel where scholars—many of them involved in the creation of the LGBTQ Focus Group 20 years earlier—spoke about the field’s early years, when pursing queer theatre scholarship could endanger one’s career and reputation. Since the emergence of seminal works such as “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians” (1987) by Kaier Curtin and The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988) by Jill Dolan, much has changed for LGBTQ people in America. Even though such work now has a more esteemed position in the academy, new queer theatre scholarship at its best continues to be bold—and maybe even a little dangerous. I still remember the thrill of being a college student and, on a trip to New York City, purchasing Curtin’s book on “the emergence of lesbians and gay men on the American stage” from a gay bookstore. Along with books like John Clum’s Acting Gay (1992), it allowed me to understand a history of the representation of my own cultural identity. Later, as a graduate student, I acquired theoretical frameworks for comprehending various relationships between gender, sexuality, performance, and society from books by scholars like Dolan , Sue-Ellen Case , Judith Butler , and Peggy Phelan . I remain drawn to scholarship that creates insightful readings of plays and performances, grounded in historical context and activated by original theoretical perspectives. So my bookshelf has been happily full of late, with a number of excellent volumes published over the past five years that enrich the field of queer theatre and performance scholarship. One key goal continues to be the preservation and illumination of what might be deemed the heyday of queer theatre from the 1960s through the 1980s. Kate Davy’s Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers (2011) is an excellent historical analysis of the seminal dyke theatre, the WOW Café, and it now has the perfect companion in the recently released Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café Theater , edited by Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jill Dolan. Robert Schanke, whose previous books include excellent anthologies of queer theatre history co-edited with Kim Marra, also celebrates the life and work of a pioneer in Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans (2011). The revolutionary fervor of that era can feel distant as LGBTQ cultural and political goals seem to move toward the mainstream and the “normal.” In opposition to that trend, Sara Warner’s Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure (2012) focuses on anti-normative plays and performances, celebrating the gleefully subversive. The interrogation of homonormativity, which informs my my own study of “ negative representations ,” is a major strain in queer theatre scholarship, evident most recently in Jacob Juntunen’s Mainstream AIDS Theatre, the Media, and Gay Civil Rights: Making the Radical Palatable (2016). While anti-normativity leads some queer scholars to look primarily at alternative systems of theatrical production, others dive into the mainstream, offering queer readings of popular culture. Broadway plays and musicals have been rich subjects for scholars like D.A. Miller , David Savran , and David Roman , and now Stacy Wolf has made a significant addition to the field with Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011). Brian Eugenio Herrera, in Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (2015), brings a critically astute and refreshingly queer perspective to his examination of mainstream cultural representations. José Esteban Muñoz, whose passing was a great loss to our community, helped bring greater interdisciplinarity and intersectionality to performance scholarship . It’s heartening that these goals are pursued by an increasing number of scholars, including Ramón Rivera-Servera, author of Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics (2012) and co-editor with E. Patrick Johnson of important contributions to black and Latino/a queer performance scholarship: solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays (2013) and the forthcoming Blacktino Queer Performance (2016). I’m also a fan of James Wilson’s Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies (2011), an impressively researched look at queer performance in the Harlem Renaissance, as well as Marlon M. Bailey’s Butch Queens in Pumps (2013), an ethnography based on Bailey’s own experiences with contemporary African-American ballroom culture in Detroit. If recent journal articles and conference presentations are any indication, then theatre and performance scholarship is trending toward a firmer commitment to exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and other identities. As we cultivate greater diversity in the systems that produce theatre and performance—and in the systems that produce theatre and performance scholars—I look forward to the publication of more books that represent a wide range of perspectives on a variety of different kinds of queer performance, particularly those focusing on trans* artists and representations. With all these exciting books published over the past five years, perhaps the most notable trend is the changing position of books in our culture. The gay bookstore where I bought that copy of “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians” ? It closed years ago . The Internet has now become a dynamic site for those writing about queer theatre and performance, potentially engaging with a broader and more diverse readership. I enjoy both new and old media and believe they can intersect in productive ways, which is why I’ve bookmarked Jill Dolan’s blog and have a copy of the published collection of her blog articles, The Feminist Spectator in Action (2013), on my shelf. Now that the Journal of American Drama and Theatre has “gone electric,” I’m looking forward to having another online source for articles and book reviews on queer theatre scholarship. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Jordan Schildcrout is an Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater (University of Michigan Press). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue American Tragedian Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Performing Anti-slavery The Captive Stage Musical Theatre Studies Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Murder Most Queer New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Eileen Curley Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Eileen Curley By Published on December 11, 2020 Download Article as PDF In 1901, David Belasco sued Harrison Grey Fiske and Minnie Maddern Fiske over the Manhattan Theatre’s production of Mrs. Burton Harrison’s play, The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch. Harrison, an established novelist and essayist by 1901, had worked with Belasco in the 1880s on amateur and professional productions of her plays, and she consulted with him on this play as well. After publishing a successful short story by the same title, Harrison revised the script and shopped it around, quickly reaching an agreement with Belasco’s rivals, the Fiskes, after months of dallying by Belasco. Shortly before the Fiskes’ production was to open, Belasco sued, arguing that he was “the sole and exclusive owner and proprietor of the play.” [1] The injunction to stop the production simultaneously seeks to disrupt the Fiskes’ production and undermines Harrison’s authorial power. Belasco claimed that the idea was his and the script was his property, even though Harrison wrote it, but instead of simply and easily disproving these claims, materials produced by the Fiskes, Harrison, and their lawyer speak at length and rather defensively about the nature of collaborative writing. These extant archival documents suggest that they feared Belasco might have a case for unremunerated collaboration, and they focus on what was then, and still sometimes is, a hazy area of copyright law. The dynamics in the case also speak to the nature of theatrical collaboration between playwrights and producers and competition between producers. Woven amid these legal and theatrical concerns is the familiar story of a woman’s labor being co-opted by a man and a woman’s capacity for professionalism being questioned by all around her. At base, Belasco claimed a woman’s work as his own and appears so confident in his right to her labor that he sued. Profit distribution from a collaboration is a legal matter, but the erasure of women’s voices from collaborations was and is so routine that this case was not immediately thrown out despite the glaring lack of a contract between the pair. Accordingly, this article analyzes the legal implications of this play’s collaborative writing and revision process, while situating that process and the resulting lawsuit in the competitive world of early twentieth-century New York producers and exploring the impact of these production conditions on aspiring female playwrights. The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch’s Ongoing Evolution through Collaboration The archival materials and press at the time often describe Harrison as an amateur playwright, but by the turn of the century, Constance Cary Harrison’s writing career seemed decidedly no longer amateurish; writing under the name Mrs. Burton Harrison, she had established herself as a novelist and essayist, publishing novels, memoirs, advice books, short stories, and columns on contemporary society. Harrison had been publishing for over two decades and was working with the agent Alice Kauser when she began work on The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch at the turn of the twentieth century. Harrison published three different versions of The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch : as a short story in Smart Set magazine in March 1901, as a play which was first produced by the Fiskes in November 1901 and also published later that year, and as a short novella in the Novelettes De Luxe series in 1903; Daniel Frohman also later produced the story as a silent film in 1914. Thus, while the papers may have credited Kauser, “the introducer of unknown playwrights,” as having launched Harrison’s career, [2] it is difficult to conceive of an author with more than 15 published novels or short story collections as an amateur. Certainly, she had not had many plays professionally produced, but the rhetorical use of “amateur” in this case seem designed to disempower her when used by Belasco, to play up her feminine naiveté for benefit when employed by the Harrisons and the Fiskes, and to gender and exploit the situation for good press by the newspapers. Harrison had worked with David Belasco in the past, notably in the 1880s when she translated a number of plays, including short French comedies for amateur productions and an adaptation of a Scribe play that was produced by amateurs and professionals under the title A Russian Honeymoon . These plays were also produced under Belasco’s guidance; Harrison, notably, is the uncontested author. At the time, Belasco had recently arrived back to New York from California and was working as the stage manager at the Madison Square Theatre. Belasco assisted Harrison and the amateurs mounting these and numerous other plays at the Madison Square, which rented its facilities to amateur theatrical groups with some regularity. Belasco and Franklin Sargent also directed the professional debut of A Russian Honeymoon in April 1883, and Harrison speaks positively enough about their working relationship on this show in her 1911 memoir, Recollections Grave and Gay . She acknowledges that “largest portion of our success was owing to his training and extraordinary skill in devising pictures and effects from material that lent itself readily to lovely grouping and vivid color.” [3] Clearly, she also credits her own writing here as giving him a good foundation. The overall style of this sweeping memoir renders it difficult to tell whether there was lingering resentment ten years after the lawsuit or if she just chose to focus elsewhere; regardless, Minnie Maddern Fiske warrants a longer and much more obviously glowing recollection. [4] After their successful collaborations in the 1880s, it is perhaps no surprise that in 1900, when Harrison began working on The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch , she once again turned to Belasco as she and so many others had done, looking for his assistance with staging and plot development, as well as potential production opportunities. The ensuing work resulted in the lawsuit. Some elements are clear: the two did communicate and collaborate on the drafting of an early version of the play. Belasco did work with Harrison on the script in the spring of 1900, at the Harrison’s house on East 29 th Street in New York, before the short story version was published in 1901. Harrison communicated with Belasco repeatedly, and yet she did not always incorporate his suggestions. Belasco seems to have been a much more reluctant communicator, particularly throughout 1901. Indeed, Belasco’s interactions with the script seem to have stopped in 1900, and there is little disagreement that the script, as it stood at that time, had some significant weaknesses. Letters submitted to the court from both Harrison and Belasco reveal that she attempted to contact Belasco repeatedly between the spring of 1900 and the fall of 1901 to make progress, set a contract, and get her draft manuscripts returned. Her husband, the lawyer Burton N. Harrison, also began contacting Belasco in summer 1901. Throughout, Belasco would occasionally reply directly or via his business manager, Benjamin Roeder, but significantly fewer responses from Belasco and Roeder were submitted into evidence. The extant evidence, while contradictory and at times subject to spin and to charges of being fabricated or heavily edited by Belasco, shows that the pair worked together on a script with the unwritten understanding that Belasco might produce it in the future. There was, however, no contractual agreement to do so. As the months passed in 1900 and early 1901 with no contact from Belasco, Harrison seemed to realize that she needed to finish the play, fully sever ties with Belasco, and get him to return her manuscript. Indeed, the Harrisons sent a significant number of requests to Belasco and Roeder requesting the return of various manuscripts that Harrison sent for his perusal, including but not limited to The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch . In part, the success of the short story sparked her renewed attempts to contact Belasco, attempts which appear to increase with frequency in the spring and summer of 1901. His silence clearly aggravated her, and she seemed to be demurring by claiming that she wanted to work on it, even though she still had a copy. [5] Underneath her feigned desire to just finish the project, Harrison seems, at long last, to have realized the danger that Belasco presented to her intellectual property. In May 1901, Harrison lacked any concrete commitment from Belasco. Her agent, Alice Kauser, sent the script to the Fiskes, who worked with Harrison to revise it and finally offered her a contract in October 1901. It appears that the review, acceptance, and offer process transpired quite quickly, despite the play needing and receiving revisions. Kauser confirmed receipt of the play from Harrison on the 15 th of May and Harrison Grey Fiske replied to her on the 18 th with his critique. [6] He asked to keep the manuscript to show it to Minnie Maddern Fiske, who then decided to work with Harrison throughout the summer on revising the piece before putting the script under contract, just as Belasco had done in early 1900, minus the contract. [7] The letter announcing the contract for the now revised play contract is dated 12 October 1901, two days before rehearsals began and approximately six weeks before the show opened. [8] In the intervening months between first reading and opening night, the Fiskes and Harrison continued working together on the script. When advance press for the production appeared in the papers in late October, Belasco contacted Harrison Grey Fiske, claimed ownership that he could not prove, and requested an injunction against the production, suing the Fiskes – but notably not Harrison. The Fiskes, in their amended answer to the injunction, also clearly saw that Belasco’s complaint – be it ownership, contractual, or collaborative – was with Harrison: “Constance C. Harrison is a necessary party defendant for the complete determination of the questions involved in this action.” [9] This curious decision is never addressed by Belasco in extant documents. By arguing that he owned the piece, Belasco logically would have sued the Fiskes for producing it without his approval. Given his ongoing producers’ battle with the Fiskes and others, one reasonable interpretation for why he was going after the Fiskes is that, financially, he could wound the Fiskes by interrupting rehearsals and obtain royalties from their production if it continued under an agreement. Indeed, Harrison Grey Fiske estimates the amounts the company spent preparing the production to be “about sixteen hundred dollars ($1600) a week” in salaries for the 51 company members, $8,000 in scenic and costume investiture, and “the gross expenses per week of the company and the Manhattan Theatre aggregated nearly $5,000.” [10] Yet, the omission of Harrison from the injunction also suggests that Belasco did not give credence to her work or input, a perception reinforced by his discussion of her throughout his affidavit as an employee in need of his supervision rather than as a creator or equal: “Mrs. Harrison immediately took a fancy to the story and told me that she would be able, under my supervision and in collaboration with me, to make a good play out of it.” [11] Indeed, his argument that the play was his own idea and property relies upon his presentation of Harrison as little more than someone who “molded these ideas of mine into shape and wrote out the dialogue under my supervision;” [12] the gendered bias towards and discounting of her skills is necessarily intertwined with his refusal to grant her ownership of her ideas, much less active participation in the creation of the script. Responses to the suit counter this perception thoroughly – with the Fiskes, Harrison, her husband, and Charles Lydecker, the Fiskes’ lawyer, giving Harrison credit for her work; yet, they, too, traffic in gendered perceptions of her naivete to make their case. While Belasco ultimately withdrew the suit after the Fiskes’ production had opened under a cloud of ironically profitable publicity, this overall timeline is vital for establishing that there were at least two collaborative writing relationships which produced this play, and that reality becomes a key point in the legal case. Harrison and the Fiskes worked on the piece for at least four months in 1901, through visits and letters, prior to contracting the piece for production in October. They also continued working on the piece during rehearsals. This method of writing paralleled how Harrison had been interacting with Belasco in the spring of 1900, including uncontracted jointly undertaken revision work, but the key difference is that Belasco never signed a contract with Harrison, despite communications between Roeder and the Harrisons about a potential contract. Manuscripts and Authorial Control At the time of the Belasco suit, copyright and theatrical law in the United States was still governed by the Copyright Act of 1790 and being solidified through court cases, but the type of collaboration which produces theatrical scripts was not well addressed by this law; the US legal system is still grappling with theatrical collaboration in its various permutations. Indeed, in 2012, Ryan J. Richardson remarked that “[a] few notable scholars in the legal community, however, have alleged a more systemic problem-the inability of American copyright law to adequately reward and protect the uniquely collaborative expression that is live theatre.” [13] Richardson traces through how writing and production collaborations present conundrums which parallel some of those raised in this case. Throughout her affidavit, [14] Harrison argues for ideas that Douglas Nevin also notes are the cornerstones of contemporary and historical copyright law – originality and creativity, [15] treating collaboration as merely part of the single author’s creative process. Belasco chose to focus on contracts and ownership – despite having no supporting material to suggest a claim to ownership nor any signed agreement with Harrison which permitted him to produce her play. Seemingly, the Fiskes and Harrisons feared there was sufficient grey area on the nature of collaboration and its impact on authorship – and by extension, on ownership – that they created a substantial counter-argument to this point. Indeed, Harrison may have potentially created an ownership conundrum by providing Belasco with manuscript copies of her plays. The volume and intensity of documentation about the physical manuscript suggests a deep concern regarding physical control of the manuscript versions, for a variety of possible reasons. As Derek Miller discusses, in this period where nuances of copyright law were still being actively developed in the courts, “[m]anuscripts – or in later decades, scripts printed for private use – remained important for controlling uncertain rights, particularly for playwrights whose work was valuable on both sides of the Atlantic.” [16] Belasco’s injunction notice was delivered to the Fiskes, informing them that “on the hearing of the motion for an injunction in this action, we will hand up to the court the original manuscript of ‘The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch,’” [17] which certainly seems to validate the Harrisons’ concerns. Further, the Complaint notes that the play has not yet been published or performed in public, [18] relying upon nineteenth-century notions that publication, performance, and copyright were means by which ownership could be established. [19] By submitting an original manuscript of the still unpublished text, he could argue ownership of the play. The copyright registration process at the time also complicated matters; as per typical process, Harrison sent in the title page on 8 October 1901 to copyright the title, but two copies of the script, published by the printer CG Burgoyne, were not submitted until 26 November 1901, which was the day after the show opened. [20] The title, thus, was the only part of the play that was under copyright when the injunction was issued, although Belasco seems unaware of this as the 8 November 1901 Complaint argues that “said play and title are original and […] no other play has been written or produced having said title”; [21] the play was still being revised. As will be discussed later, this timing may well have given Harrison and the Fiskes sufficient warning to alter any elements they may have attributed to Belasco. The materials also include extensive discussion of the typist, which Belasco submitted as part of an argument that since he paid to have the piece typed, he owned it. [22] Harrison does not dispute the copy of Harrison’s letter that Belasco submitted into evidence detailing these arrangements, so it is clear that the script was typed and that Belasco paid for it. Harrison’s letter reveals that she asked the typist to charge Belasco for the “Hatch” script and charge Harrison for typing another of her scripts, “His Better Half;” she also asked the typist whether the original copies of the last acts had been sent to Belasco or not because they had not been returned to her. [23] Belasco argues that this payment clearly indicates his ownership of the manuscript. Meanwhile, Harrison claims that: “Belasco expressed an eager desire to have the work of typing this play, so as it had been then finished in a rough way, done in a hurry, so as to enable him to take it with him on the voyage to Europe, sailing at the end of March [1900] – and so he requested me to send it to his typewriters (as he called them) who, he said, were very familiar with that kind of work.” She also remarks that she usually uses the “typewriters down town employed by my husband” for her own work and that she had not sent the text to them because it was not yet ready. [24] The posturing by both here is clear: Harrison is laying the groundwork to argue that the script wasn’t finished, as she does throughout her affidavit, and that it was only typed because Belasco demanded it before leaving for Europe. Belasco, meanwhile, is claiming that the fact that he paid for the Hatch script and Harrison paid for the other script clearly indicates perceived ownership of the individual scripts on the part of both parties. A third interpretation, however, is possible, when the typing note is read alongside another letter Harrison wrote to Belasco, submitted by Belasco as Exhibit 3: “Here is ‘Mrs. Hatch,’ and I send her to you with a goodspeed for her, and for you, upon your voyage!” She also included “His Better Half,” the other play that was typed. And, Harrison continues, “My husband thinks you had better send me a memorandum about the play to-morrow, so that we can look over it, before I sign anything.” [25] Harrison does not dispute this letter, either, but she also does not directly reference it in her affidavit. She does, however, acknowledge that she and her husband met with Roeder in April 1900 to discuss terms, but no contract was ever signed. Given that Harrison clearly assumed that Belasco would be producing her play at some point in the future, his decision to pay for the typing seems, perhaps, logical for a future producer who wished a copy of the play to continue their collaborative writing. The sheer number of times Harrison points out that this March 1900 encounter was the last active engagement between the two about the script suggests a strategy to establish a collaborative relationship that failed and was never solidified under contract. After all, by mid-May 1901, the Fiskes had a version of The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch , and Harrison may have been feeling pressure to get revisions fully underway to ready the script for possible production by them and to be clearly and fully in control of her work, physically and intellectually. Throughout the court documents, reference is made to how much work the May script needed, which may again have been a legal maneuver as well as a statement of fact. Harrison admits, for instance, in a 23 May 1901 letter that the play “is deficient in the elements of success in its present form,” [26] and her husband notes on 4 October 1901 that “the play was left unfinished a year ago last spring.” [27] The latter, presumably, is an attempt to discredit any claim Belasco may have made by establishing the length of time that had passed since his active participation in the collaboration. This 23 May letter, however, is peculiarly timed and indicative of some of the documentation challenges in this case. The Fiskes expressed interest in the script a week prior to when Harrison pleaded “I can’t bear to lose that I have already done, and I therefore appeal to your kindness to send me back your copy of the play, also my two other plays “Bitter Sweet” and “His Better Half,” which I asked you to read.” [28] On the surface, she writes in a manner which exploits numerous gendered tropes, undermining her own “deficient” work and fawning over Belasco who has his “hands full of important and successful ventures.” Given that the Fiskes are now working with her on the script and considering a production of it, however, it seems clear that Harrison’s desire to “make it better for my own satisfaction, if with no other result” is overt gendered cover for her real intent: to have the script produced by the Fiskes with no intervention by Belasco and to get the manuscript returned. Harrison claims in her affidavit that this letter was written in 1900, which does not make sense since it clearly mentions that she has “now waited for a whole year with patience and courtesy,” which correctly dates the letter as 1901. She also accuses him of changing her words in a letter submitted into evidence to be “projected collaboration” instead of “proposed collaboration,” but does not take issue with the rest of the language in the letter, leading readers to assume her date of 1900 is perhaps a typo or perhaps an attempt to obfuscate the timing of her relationship with the Fiskes. [29] Devaluing Women’s Labor Belasco’s reputation for suing competitors and being generally obstreperous was well known publicly and professionally at this point. This characterization seems to have to been accepted by all involved in this case from the very start, except for Mrs. Harrison, who appears naïve throughout the extant documents, though she is presumably playing at that gendered obliviousness by the time of the 23 May 1901 letter discussed just above. Jeannette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic and publisher of Harrison’s work, told her that she was “having the same experience with Mr. Belasco that many others have had.” [30] Her husband reports that he “was apprehensive” about Harrison’s initial contact with Belasco, “warning her of his reputation of unscrupulous dealing and for general inveracity.” Yet, Harrison reportedly “replied by reminding [him] that she had seen much of him long ago, had put him under obligations in her dealings then with him, had received repeated expressions of his gratitude, adding that she did not think he would act towards her otherwise than uprightly and with consideration.” As he notes, “[t]his sequel tells its own story.” [31] Throughout the legal materials, the Fiskes and Burton N. Harrison appear to be carefully, though not overtly, pointing towards Constance Harrison’s naiveté in dealing with Belasco. The narrative suggests that Harrison still chose to view him as the younger man who had been so helpful early on in her career; she is depicted as a trusting and ultimately exploited amateur female playwright. Clearly, other producers were willing to work with her, but it is unclear whether she was meek and trusting, or whether the legal documents wished to depict her as meek and trusting in order to play upon the judge’s sympathies. After all, it seems entirely reasonable that Harrison went to Belasco in hopes of getting her play produced by him because of their past connection; he was now in a position to make her a successful playwright. During the whole Mrs. Hatch episode, she sent him two other plays and also some sketches, about which she asked: “Can you suggest to me how I can get them produced in vaudeville or otherwise without my name? I should be so glad of an opportunity to see them played.” [32] Such decisions may reflect a calculated agency and desire to expand her writing career into the professional theatre, but they also can play into the narrative the Harrisons and the Fiskes created. This manipulation of her gendered position of power, or lack thereof, also extends into some of Belasco’s more problematic claims and her defense against them. He argued that one of the reasons why he supposedly worked with Harrison was her class and gender: “Being a society woman, familiar with the ways of society, that fact was one of the considerations that influenced me to give her the work.” [33] In doing so, Belasco could have capitalized on contemporary trends to appeal to audiences by employing society women, a strategy successfully deployed by his competitor Augustin Daly. Author’s Rights, Contracts, and Co-Authorship Belasco’s ownership concerns form the starting point for Charles Lydecker’s arguments in his “Memo in Opposition to Motion for Injunction,” which include four main points about authors’ rights and co-authorship, which he details in varying degrees and supports with citations to case law and practice. First, he notes that authors should be able to benefit from their work; he also points out that Belasco admitted that Harrison contacted him to ask for advice, implying that she was the author. For Lydecker, “[t]he turning point in all cases rests upon the rights of the author. If Mrs. Harrison is the author of the play, the right on injunction rests with her.” [34] The issue, then, becomes one of authorship and authors’ rights. The parties do not appear to be at odds on this particular point. Lydecker expands upon the issues of manuscript possession and authorship in a structured counterargument which begins with an acknowledgement that rights can be assigned by the author to another party, as in the case of Harrison granting production rights to the Fiskes. Here, Belasco is called out for clearly understanding that this is how rights work and for having no contracts to support his claims. Indeed, Lydecker notes that Belasco’s professed desire “to make arrangements to bring out the play in 1902 is a subterfuge and shows abandonment;” [35] by claiming that future plans should prohibit the Fiskes from producing the play immediately, Belasco reveals an acceptance that Harrison is the author, a desire to relate to the play as a producer in the future, and a general goal to prevent the Fiskes from profiting off of the piece. Nothing would prevent Belasco from obtaining the rights to produce the show later; indeed, he did so in 1903, where Alice Kauser reported that it “played the first week to very large business. They are going to continue it for this week (the second week) and may be for a third week if the popularity of the play continues on.” [36] Lydecker and Fiske both argue that Belasco’s failure to obtain any kind of contract with Harrison at any point during 1900 or 1901 as a key element of his lack of standing in the case. Belasco’s arguments conveniently skate past any acknowledgement that there is no signed paperwork, but they do provide another fascinating window into the complex performance of gender which floats just beneath the surface of the case. Ironically, Belasco appears to grant Harrison more agency to enter into a contract than anyone on her side of the courtroom, even though he is simultaneously trying to claim that she couldn’t possibly have written the piece herself. In some documents, Belasco claims that the Harrisons were stalling on writing an agreement, [37] but he also attests that Constance Harrison, Belasco and Benjamin Roeder, his business manager, came to terms on a contract on their own, in the Harrison’s house, while Burton Harrison was in another room. [38] The Harrisons staunchly deny his claim that they were to draw up the contract and even moreso vociferously contest that Constance had negotiated a contract without her husband’s input. [39] Extant letters from Harrison’s agent about her publishing support the Harrisons’ claim that Burton handled her contractual matters. For instance, all correspondence about the production contract was between Burton, the Fiskes, and her agent Kauser, even though later letters about the weekly grosses are addressed to Constance. This arrangement enables the defense to present an image of Mrs. Harrison as a woman unschooled in business matters, but it also undercuts the logic of Belasco’s claims. Societal expectations may well have provided a convenient defense, no matter any degree of guilt, and the Fiskes and the Harrisons appear to have exploited these social constructs when convenient. Ultimately, Lydecker argues for the same interpretation of the relationship between contract and copyright law as the Second Circuit eventually does in 1991 in Childress v. Taylor, 945 F.2d 500, 502 (2d. Cir. 1991), which notes that “In the absence of a contract, the copyright remains with the one or more persons who created copyrightable material.” [40] Lydecker notes early in the memo that “[n]o facts alleged sustain the claim that the plaintiff is an assignee of the author’s property” [41] and then returns to this point later while remarking that the contemporary case law supports the notion “that copyright vests in the employer only by agreement.” [42] Recall that at the time of the suit, Harrison had filed the title with the copyright office on 8 October 1901, [43] but the script was not submitted until after the injunction was filed and the show opened. Thus, Harrison was left to prove that she was the sole author of the piece. The legal precedents regarding joint authorship, working relationships, and collaboration are the areas which may have provided the most potential for Belasco to have a winnable argument, even if his affidavit does not make these points particularly clearly or effectively. While it should be noted that Belasco claimed full ownership rather than joint authorship, a detail which perhaps speaks more to his intention to shut down the production and a general megalomania, the case still raises numerous issues with regards to how authorship and collaboration are defined, and thus rewarded, through copyright protections and ensuing potential profitability. Lydecker establishes that if the piece were “the joint product of the minds of the plaintiff and Mrs. Harrison,” then “under a proper agreement,” the two would be legally bound to provide rights to both authors. [44] Belasco, again, has no such proof of such an agreement, but their collaboration certainly was treated as a potential problem due to this concept of “joint product.” This notion of co-authorship gets expanded further in Lydecker’s final point, which quite extensively cites case law for the various nuances of his arguments about authorship, ownership, and injunctions. After acknowledging that there was a collaboration, he argues based on contemporary understanding of copyright that “[t]o constitute joint ownership there must be a common design.” [45] Joint authorship requiring intent to create a joint work remains a hallmark of US copyright law through much of the twentieth century, though it gradually becomes complicated by questions about the degree of contribution, “work for hire” rights, and related concerns, [46] many of which are visible in this case as well. Lydecker continues by expanding on the notion of “common design,” citing a case between Levi and Rutley, wherein a playwright hired to write a play retained authorship rights. [47] This explication quite clearly responds to Belasco’s claim that Harrison worked for him. [48] Harrison’s presumption that she could receive feedback from Belasco without incorporating all of it casts further doubt on Belasco’s claims that she was working for him, rather than he providing advice to her; he did not control the content. Belasco’s own claims that he hired Harrison to write for him also undermine any potential argument about joint authorship, based on the case law Lydecker raises as well as simple logic. Harrison quite clearly believed their collaboration to be one where Belasco was to help her with her writing, presuming that Belasco would then produce the play; the Amended Answer from the Fiskes notes that Harrison was willing to pay Belasco for any consulting expenses incurred. [49] A contract to that effect might well have helped Belasco, insofar as it would have proved that Harrison had agreed to write jointly with him or for him, while also clarifying whether he had the rights to produce the play. The Confusion of Collaborative Writing Processes In addition to the confusion about establishing theatrical rights at a time when the legal systems are still responding to production developments, [50] the theatrical scripts under consideration did not come into existence in a clean process, a reality which underpins much of the legal consternation and debate around collaboration in this case. The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch followed standard procedures then as now as ever in a collaborative art: Harrison brainstormed, wrote, and revised over the course of many months with input from a wide variety of parties including potential producers, and by the time the Fiskes offered her a contract in October 1901, none of these collaborators made any claims for co-authorship. As was normal for their publishing relationship, Harrison received input from her agent, Alice Kauser, throughout the process. She also consulted her lawyer husband, Burton N. Harrison, for advice on the legal aspects of the play. Furthermore, as Fiske and Harrison both note in their affidavits, a stage manager would often provide advice to a playwright in advance of staging a play; indeed, that is how Belasco and Harrison had worked in the 1880s on plays that were considered her works, despite his input and assistance. Harrison’s correspondence archive at the NYPL does contain numerous exchanges with producers about a wide variety of her works, including The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch . [51] Kauser notes that when she sent the play to her agent in London – after the Fiskes’ production was already running – the response was positive but included a request for a happy ending and a different title. [52] And, given the collaborative work that occurred with the Fiskes both before and after their contract had been signed, it appears that pre-emptive work on a rough script was the norm. For instance, Fiske’s first reply about the play expressed some interest but noted specific revisions that would need to be made, namely that “the predominating motive of the play as found in its leading character would require, it seems to me, some relief in the amplification of the subordinate interests as they are at present. The element of maternal love is dwelt upon so continuously now that it may be monotonous.” [53] Likewise, a 1902 letter from William H. Kendal, wherein he declines to produce the play in London, also offers feedback to Harrison, suggesting that she “[reconstruct] the play giving equal prominence & interest to the man” and noting that he would look at it again if those changes were made. This letter, notably, was written after the play had already been successfully produced in New York; such notes speak both to the collaborative nature of the profession and the assumption that texts can always be updated as needed for successful production. [54] Harrison’s engagement in a collaborative writing process is not cast as any critique on her skills; indeed, the normalcy of such an approach appears to be a given. Yet, much of the discussion of the process and her naivete enables the defense to cast Belasco as a bully and her as the innocent victim. Harrison Grey Fiske, in particular, points towards Harrison’s unimpeachable moral character and naivete as a woman while taking numerous opportunities to insult Belasco as he explains the collaborative writing process. The amended answer to the injunction moves quickly from a statement of facts into a barbed gauntlet “deny[ing] on information and belief that the plaintiff [Belasco] is an author and writer of plays,” though Fiske does “admit that plaintiff has been manager of various dramatic enterprises.” [55] The slights appear throughout the affidavit, too, where Harrison Grey Fiske depicts Belasco as an unskilled man who takes credit for others’ work: “I know Mr. Belasco’s capabilities and limitations with respect to play writing, and that I know how he engages people to write plays for him and then presents them to the public as his own.” [56] This line of defense calls into question Belasco’s veracity, but it also enables Fiske to imply, throughout, that Belasco assumed he could manipulate Harrison in this fashion as well. Fiske demotes Belasco, claiming he only “rendered her certain aid and assistance as a dramatic manager and as a stage manager.” Further, he argued that Harrison was “a woman of social position and high personal character” whereas “Belasco’s claims to authorship [have] frequently been questioned in the press and through legal proceedings.” [57] Harrison’s accomplished writing career is overshadowed by her class and gender here, rhetorically, to simultaneously attack Belasco and gain the sympathies of the court. Collaboration and U.S Law While plays are often the result of this type of collaborative process, collaboration resides, then and now, in a vague legal territory, particularly as pertains to this case. Indeed, the state of current case law and legislation underscores how dependent the parties in Belasco v. Fiske were on their own argumentation and evidence. Nevin, in his argument that current copyright law should be expanded to better accommodate theatrical production processes, notes that “copyright law lacks a proper mechanism to acknowledge the single most defining characteristic of the form—collaboration.” [58] Richardson concurs, describing “a more systemic problem–the inability of American copyright law to adequately reward and protect the uniquely collaborative expression that is live theatre.” [59] He notes, however, that proposed current solutions in legal discussions insufficiently address the concerns of theatrical collaboration because of their attempts at universality and that they may indeed hinder creativity. [60] Protections afforded through joint authorship were added to the 1976 Copyright act as a result of “a series of notable cases n156 following the enactment of the Copyright Act of 1909, which conspicuously contained no express provisions governing joint authorship.” [61] In their defense documents, thus, Harrison and the Fiskes addressed legal debates which the courts still have yet to fully resolve. Additionally, Anne Ruggles Gere’s assessment of collaborative writing in women’s groups at the end of the nineteenth century provides another potential, and gendered, avenue for considering Harrison’s approaches to collaboration and concerns about the intersection between collaboration and authorship. As copyright law was being solidified, women’s groups, Gere argues, were working in various ways which “resisted dominant concepts of intellectual property and authorship. Collaboration played a major role in writing.” [62] The processes of sharing, receiving feedback, adapting texts from other sources, and generally collaborating on writing products parallels the processes used in theatrical script development. Harrison’s prior theatrical experiences included developing scripts with a group of amateur performers and, notably, Belasco; those productions appear to followed some of the models of collaborative development that Gere discusses. Many of her scripts, including The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch , draw on or overtly adapt other texts in a manner which, while legal at the time, reveals a more fluid approach to writing, authorship, and ownership than the law would eventually settle upon. Gere argues that the clubwomen were subverting norms through a variety of literacy activities including collaborative writing and adaptation, [63] and while Harrison is not obviously working with a club, Gere’s presentation of alternate views of authorship and the impact of collaboration thereon provide another potential avenue for understanding Harrison’s focus on collaboration in her affidavit. These practices question the fixed nature of authorship and textual development that copyright law relies upon for clarity. 6[64] Little in Lydecker’s memo directly cites case law specifically about collaboration, but the avenue that he took – the need to establish authorship and the nature of the rights granted to authors – may well have inspired Harrison to expend a great deal of time in her affidavit discussing their collaboration and possibly make some late changes to the text. Taken as a whole, the defense materials reveal concerns that Belasco would and could argue collaboration and thus, perhaps, joint authorship as a means of arguing co-ownership. Interestingly, Belasco only raises collaboration twice – once while describing the initial idea for the project and later while discussing the work that they did on the piece. Harrison, conversely, discusses the nature of collaboration endlessly in her affidavit, directly countering the belittling presumptions in Belasco’s affidavit by keeping the focus on her authorial power, positioning Belasco as her assistant at times and as a potential producer at others. She explains “I said to him that I had sent for him because I thought he could, and perhaps would, assist me by collaborating and staging and bringing out the play I might write.” [65] Throughout, the dispute again comes down to contracts and input on the script. Harrison points out that “[i]t is not true that, at that interview or at any time, an arrangement for collaboration with him was suggested, except as I have here above stated – collaboration with him having been suggested only as part of a suggested entire arrangement which included staging and production by him.” [66] Collaborative Writing Processes Harrison’s assessment of Belasco’s contributions to the piece as a means of collaboration form the bulk of her counter-argument and shed further light on the collaborative writing process. Belasco claims in his affidavit that “I would sometimes remain at her house from six to seven hours collaborating with her.” [67] In addition to denying the length and number of times they met, Harrison pointed out the many months between his departure for Europe in March 1900 and the suit in October 1901, “during all of which time he had utterly failed and neglected to do anything whatever in the way of collaborating.” [68] She defines collaborating as having a “share or participation in the creation of the story or in the design or plot or general structure or construction of the play,” and goes on to classify Belasco’s involvement with the script as akin to that of a stage manager. [69] While demoting Belasco here, she also neglects to mention in this section that the input he seems to have given her was quite similar in type and perhaps scope as the input given by the Fiskes. She further remarks that he had “the opportunity” to collaborate on the script since he had requested the typed version in March 1900, but that he had chosen not to do so. [70] Indeed, their descriptions of the collaborative process they used provide a fascinating look into how they both viewed each other and the work. Belasco, throughout his affidavit, discusses how he “gave her the story and the plot” and similarly dictated other elements. [71] The notes on the script which he submitted are, indeed, quite dictatorial in their presentation: the pages are merely new pieces of text with no context or elaboration. Minnie Maddern Fiske, by contrast, explained and contextualized her suggestions and requests in the extant notes. Both Belasco and Harrison acknowledge sessions where lines were read. Belasco claimed he would read the lines and Harrison would take notes. Harrison, however, describes these meetings in a way that can best be described as a thinly veiled excoriation of his talents: though it is true that, whilst I wrote he sometimes walked about the room and pulled his hair in apparent excitement, sometimes with his hands before him and trembling, as he said, in a low and agitated voice, in real or assumed emotion over what I had read him. “Ther-rills (thrills) – ther-rills, I can see the audience in their ther-rills” – and though it is true that I remember, he once sat at my desk and did the dumbshow of the “business” he said would be appropriate for the detective […] As to Mr. Belasco’s speaking a “dialogue,” he always was difficult and slow of utterance – appeared to be unable to articulate except with effort and very tediously, and in mere explosives.[72] Where neither side disputes that work was completed on the play with both parties in attendance at Mrs. Harrison’s house, the challenge then becomes establishing degree of collaboration, which even the courts still struggle to determine. Curiously, Harrison appears to have been proactively asking about collaboration – seemingly before the lawsuit even occurred. The archive includes a tantalizingly incomplete letter to Harrison which was clearly written in response to Harrison reaching out to ask if the illegibly named correspondent remembered exchanging letters about the play and about collaboration. The letter’s author replies to her inquiry: “So – my recollection of that correspondence upon matters dramatic is extremely vague. However, your statement of it seems entirely accurate. I think you wanted to know out my experience what the relations and TERMS were between collaborating dramatists, and I was obliged to confess that what should have been my experience was lodged in the bosom of THE CENTURY COMPANY who had made all the arrangements.” The letter writer continues: “I do not remember that you mentioned the name of the play, for, it seemed quite fresh to my recollection when I saw the story in the ‘The Smart Set;’” [73] the short story version of The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch appeared in March 1901. While the letter writer claims to be unsure of many details, if we trust that that the conversation occurred, as implied, before the publication of the short story, then Harrison was asking about how collaborations worked in the spring of 1901 or in 1900 – long before the lawsuit and before the Fiskes became involved. Whatever sparked the original conversation, the inquiry which prompted this particular reply seemingly was meant to establish a defense – Harrison wanted to know if her correspondent had kept any of their initial set of letters, presumably to use them at trial. Tests of Originality and Plot Machinations In this particular case, the multiple collaborations may have enabled Harrison to better prepare to counter Belasco’s claims of originality, which may well have been problematic and hard to disprove legally. Originality is a key component of United States copyright law since the Copyright Act of 1790, which drew on similar ideas in English law. Belasco’s main points of contention in his often-rambling affidavit are that the plot and the storyline were his original idea and that he hired Harrison to write that particular story with significant oversight and supervision by him. Harrison claims that the story is her version of a Sardou play, Seraphine , where a father is reunited with his daughter. [74] While establishing provenance is impossible, it should be noted that some in the press claimed a third source, as they saw the story as a loose adaptation of the hit East Lynne . [75] The storyline draws on popular narratives of the time, no matter the initial inspiration. The plot, in brief, concerns a young married woman who learns that her husband is having an affair; she leaves him and has a short dalliance with a male friend in retribution, is sued for divorce and loses; she moves to California, leaving behind her young daughter, and sets up shop making lampshades as Mrs. Marian Hatch. Just as her new love interest proposes, Mrs. Marian Hatch learns of her daughter’s upcoming marriage, and so she sells everything, spurns her suitor, and moves back to NY to see her daughter, pretending to be a stitcher working on her daughter’s wedding dress to gain access. She continues to nobly suffer in silence, and after the daughter returns from her honeymoon, she learns the true identity of the stitcher, just in time for her long-lost mother to die of a weak heart. The short story was published during Harrison’s period of work with Belasco, providing Belasco with the plot and dialogue to compare to the draft manuscript which he had in his possession. What should have helped him potentially prove part of his case, however, also gave Harrison and the Fiskes a clear roadmap of what they might want to change. And changes, they made. While early drafts of the play have not been located, the major differences between the play and the short story appear to have been written in collaboration with the Fiskes rather than with Belasco. And, the substantive nature of those alterations between short story and play may well have undercut any claim of joint authorship of the play that Belasco might have made. Numerous major and minor changes were made during the process of adaptation from short story to play, and little of Belasco’s input seems to have survived the revision process, which may well have continued after the injunction was filed. Extant correspondence about the revisions is generally brief and undated, limiting our ability to parse which changes might have been happening when. Additionally, numerous short undated letters from the Fiskes request her presence at the theatre and notify her of their visits to her house, some specifically mentioning the play and others simply confirming times and dates. [76] Quite a few letters between Harrison and the Fiskes discuss the play and its development, in particular the last act, which is significantly changed from the short story version, as well as the Paul & Lina scene, the Paul & Marian scene, and Mrs. Hatch’s character. Paul Trevor, Mrs. Hatch’s love interest, is an entirely new character for the play, and the plot alterations necessary to accommodate him were quite substantial; this love interest permits Mrs. Hatch to be more sympathetic, perhaps accounting for the character imperfections which Burton Harrison recommended so that the judge’s decision is believable. Belasco and Harrison had considered making Mrs. Hatch purely innocent, but Burton Harrison objected because a judge would never have taken away an innocent society woman’s child. Harrison followed this advice, telling Belasco: “my husband says our latest scheme to make Marion innocent, except of rash impulse, has simply robbed the play of all of its strength, and made it a tissue of improbabilities. He says no judge or referee in New York would ever have condemned a woman upon such a letter […] the matter of innocence simply takes the backbone out of the play, and makes it inverterbrate.” [77] Yet, given that the Fiskes and Harrisons had nearly a month between the notice of the lawsuit and opening night, it is possible that some of the minor details that survived the short story-to-play revision process were cut, just in case. Indeed, Belasco’s complaint gave them a map of potential changes to make by submitting a typed copy of feedback on the first three acts with his affidavit as Exhibit 13; the press also ran the contents of the suit in great detail, with at least one paper reprinting the letters entered in as exhibits. [78] Remarkably few of those suggestions were in the final version of the play, perhaps because of artistic differences, but perhaps to assist with the defense. Numerous minor differences exist between the play and Belasco’s notes – instead of Adrian’s parents visiting, it’s his sister; when the lawyer enters, Mrs. Hatch says “I haven’t forgotten you” rather than Belasco’s suggested “Yes… I remembered you;” a boy is replaced by a telephone; etc. In one noticeably awkward substitution, a young boy at a May festival who had a balloon in the short story was instead given a toy boat in the play and told, “Hold fast Johnny boy. If Bobby gets it away from you, you’re gone.” The short story version was “Take care Johnny boy. […] Hold very fast to your string. If it gets away from you, you’re gone.” Belasco wrote a whole bit about balloons going up, one child losing one and crying, and Mrs. Hatch talking to the child, saying, “You can get another! My balloon went up, long ago; and I couldn’t!” None of that remains – balloons aren’t mentioned at all. [79] Johnny’s illogical need to hang onto his boat rather than his balloon seems to suggest the Fiskes and Harrison either were not quite so innocently being attacked by Belasco or were unsure of their legal standing and decided to make sure that play was sufficiently different to withstand scrutiny. One tantalizingly unclear letter from Minnie Maddern Fiske to Harrison suggests that they might have been editing out parts which might give Belasco grounds to argue for collaboration, unless, of course, they were worried about the critics. Fiske writes, “Do you not think it would be well to cut, in Gladys’ 2 nd Act scene – all reference to her mother so that the nasty and unfriendly ones won’t have a chance to say that we are forcing a situation!” [80] In the published version of the script, Gladys remarks periodically about her mother (Mrs. Hatch) in Act 2, but there’s only a brief reference to the off-stage Mrs. Lorimer, who is introduced as far more of the stereotypical social-climbing wicked stepmother in the short story pages which parallel Act 2. Belasco’s script notes, meanwhile, advise that an abbreviated version of the short story’s stern conversation between Mrs. Lorimer and Gladys remain, complete with the carriage arriving upstage. [81] Whether or not the Fiskes and Harrison are guiltless in this endeavor or simply covering their bases is unclear, muddied by the paper trail and the long-standing animosity between the producers. The Fiskes do seem to have been playing a little fast and loose with the truth at times, for Harrison Grey Fiske’s affidavit implies a distant, past, notion that “a collaboration with Mr. Belasco and a production of the play by him was once contemplated” [82] and he tells the press “I knew that in some sort of a way Mr. Belasco had known of the writing of the play.” [83] Yet, Minnie Maddern Fiske’s correspondence suggests that she knows the backstory and its implications. She tells Harrison in an 8 th September 1901 letter “Do not let Mr. Belasco know that I wish to present the play. The little man would hold to it with his last gasp if he thought that. I shall be so glad when it shall be finally in our hands.” [84] Whether Fiske expects a competitive battle from Belasco or whether she understands that Harrison had been working with him and was attempting to extricate herself from that relationship is unclear. Belasco was at a serious disadvantage while building his lawsuit because he did not have access to this latest version of the script, nor did he appear to know that Harrison had been working with the Fiskes since May. He reportedly told her – in July 1901 — that he wouldn’t be able to produce the show in the 1901-1902 season; [85] this document’s authenticity is questioned by Harrison, who denies ever receiving it. [86] Regardless, it still does not constitute a contractual agreement to produce the play, and in reality, by July she was already substantially revising the play based upon suggestions from the Fiskes; accordingly a whole section of Belasco’s argument falls apart. [87] His silence and failure to obtain a written contract enabled her to go elsewhere with the script, be it due to busyness or a devaluation of Harrison’s work until it was deemed stage-worthy by a competitor. He was fond of suing his competition, so it simply may be that he had no legal case and was on a deadline; he had less than a month to shut down the production, so ownership was the only logical power play that might result in a production delay and payout. Whether Harrison and the Fiskes would have been able to make a case about theatre’s collaborative writing history not constituting ownership, authorship, or joint authorship remains unknowable. The Predatory Producer and the Female Playwright The difficulties of establishing the extent of a collaboration, and thus of being able to make a case for joint authorship, rest in part on intent, as Lydecker discusses, and in part on contributions to outcome, which has become a foundation for modern legal interpretations. While the law was not settled then (or now), [88] all sides spent a significant amount of time presenting the case for their contributions to the piece in a messy and protracted collaborative process – Belasco claiming ideas and inspiration, Harrison denying his input was used in the piece, and Fiske and the Harrisons both, seemingly, working to remove any remnants of Belasco’s imprint on the piece. Layered atop this was Belasco’s bravado and the willingness of the entire defense team to cast Constance Harrison as a somewhat gullible woman for their benefit. In the end, the suit was dropped, without clear explanation, but the extensive legal archive and press coverage certainly suggest that all parties were concerned that Belasco might well have had a case despite not having a written contract with Harrison and that the rhetorical positioning of Harrison as a naïve and manipulated woman might not have been sufficient as a defense. The complexities and legal uncertainty surrounding extent of and intent to collaborate continue to appear in contemporary case law. The playwriting process of the early nineteenth century, particularly when a predatory producer encounters a female “amateur” playwright with enough skill to write a hit and a willingness to trust him despite others’ concerns, was a messy enough collaboration that the law may have granted Belasco some compensation for his input, if the script sufficiently resembled the earlier version. One wonders if Belasco’s obviously thin evidence was taken seriously simply because Harrison was a woman and “amateur” playwright and Belasco was granted immediate authority and credence as a professional man. While the case is rooted in the competitive turn-of-the-twentieth century world of producers who were fighting to establish themselves and resist the Syndicate, the implications of this case and the historical outcomes for women and their labor remain all too familiar. The legal system still grapples with defining collaboration, but women’s contributions to work products are ignored or undermined with the same unquestioned ease seen in Belasco’s affidavit. Harrison, doubly challenged as a woman and a wrongly perceived amateur author, spends years trying to work collaboratively with Belasco in a playwright-producer relationship. Belasco, who cannot be bothered to reply to her letters despite their working relationship, appears in his affidavit to be incapable of imagining that a woman would collaborate with him rather than work for him. Harrison’s capacity to function in a professional realm without male input is quite obvious in her archive – Harrison, Minnie Maddern Fiske, and Kauser are the three women who make this production happen through negotiation and collaboration. And yet, throughout the legal and press archives, Harrison’s skills and professional capacity are constantly questioned. A century later, women’s voices in collaborative work are still continually ignored, discredited, and questioned. Actual amateurs are systematically exploited for their labor through an industry that relies on underpaid positions, while experienced women are presumed amateurish, their work products and ideas claimed and turned into profit opportunities by men. That the law struggles to define collaboration reflects the messiness of creative processes; that teams still erase women’s contributions to collaborations is symptomatic of a pernicious societal ill that led Belasco and Harrison to court. References [1] Abram J. Dittenhoefer, et. al., Complaint Belasco v. Fiske . Para 4. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 9. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [2] Mary A. Worley, “Alice Kauser, Playwright, A Woman of Ideas,” Los Angeles Herald , 8 Feb 1903, 7. See also “Interview with Alice Kauser, 1904” excerpted from “Alice Kauser: A Chat with the Woman who Presides over the Largest Play Business in the World,” New York Dramatic Mirror , 31 December 1904, in Theatre in the United States: A Documentary History. Volume 1: 1750-1915 Theatre in the Colonies and the United States , ed. Barry B. Witham (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 188. [3] Mrs. Burton Harrison, Recollections Grave and Gay , (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 333. [4] Harrison, Recollections , 325-327. [5] “Exhibit 11.” Copy of Letter from Constance Cary Harrison to David Belasco, 23 May 1901. In Affidavit of David Belasco . Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 9. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [6] See, Letter from Alice Kauser to Mrs. Burton Harrison, 15 May 1901; Alice Kauser to Mrs. Burton Harrison, 17 May 1901; Letter from Harrison Grey Fiske to Alice Kauser, 18 May 1901; among others, in: Mrs. Burton Harrison, Correspondence re Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch, 8-MWEZ x n.c. 19,567 [Cage], Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. [7] See, among others, Letter from Minnie Maddern Fiske to Constance Cary Harrison, 8 September 1901. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [8] Letter from Alice Kauser to Mr. Burton Harrison, 12 October 1901. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [9] Amended Answer , 2/3 Dec. 1901, Para. 11. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 7. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [10] Affidavit of Harrison Grey Fiske , 15 Dec. 1901. Para. 26. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 7. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [11] Affidavit of David Belasco , 8 Nov. 1901. Para. 4. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 9. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [12] Affidavit of David Belasco , Para. 8. [13] Ryan J. Richardson, “The Art of Making Art: A Narrative of Collaboration in American Theatre and a Response to Calls for Change to the Copyright Act of 1976,” Cumberland Law Review , 2011/2012. 42 Cumb. L. Rev. 489. Lexis-Nexis Academic. 492. [14] It also should be reiterated that her husband was an experienced lawyer by the time of the suit. [15] Douglas M. Nevin, “No Business like Show Business: Copyright Law, the Theatre Industry, and the Dilemma of Rewarding Collaboration,” Emory Law Journal , Summer 2004: 53.3, 1537. [16] Derek Miller, Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1790-1911 . (Cambridge University Press: New York, 2018), 195. [17] Injunction . 6 November 1901. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 6. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [18] Dittenhoefer, et. al., Complaint Belasco v. Fiske , Para 10. [19] See Miller, Copyright and the Value of Performance, 195-235, for an in-depth discussion of the intellectual traditions surrounding manuscripts, copyright performances, and related ways of establishing ownership in the nineteenth century. [20] Library of Congress, United States Copyright Office. Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States, 1870-1916. Vol. 2. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918), 2448. Copyright number 48453. Issued October 8 1901, 2c Nov 26 1901. D: 935. [21] Dittenhoefer, et. al., Complaint Belasco v. Fiske , Para 10. [22] Whether or not he did submit the manuscript to the court is unclear. The draft script is in neither Lydecker’s nor Harrison’s files on the case. [23] “Exhibit 4.” Copy of Letter from Mrs. B. Harrison to Mr. Nash, 2 April. Affidavit of David Belasco . [24] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 38. 13 November 1901. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 8. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [25] “Exhibit 3.” Copy of Letter from Constance Cary Harrison to David Belasco, Sunday. Affidavit of David Belasco . [26] “Exhibit 11.” Affidavit of David Belasco . [27] “Exhibit X.” Copy of Letter from Burton N. Harrison to David Belasco, 4 October 1901. In Affidavit of Burton N. Harrison . 13 November 1901. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 6. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [28] “Exhibit 11.” Affidavit of David Belasco . [29] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 44. [30] Letter from Jeannette L. Gilder to Mrs. Burton Harrison, 10 October 1901. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [31] Affidavit of Burton N. Harrison , 13 November 1901, Para 5. [32] “Exhibit 1,” Copy of letter from Constance Cary Harrison to David Belasco, Wednesday. Affidavit of David Belasco . [33] Affidavit of David Belasco , Para. 8. [34] Charles Lydecker, Memo. in Opposition to Motion for Injunction , 15 Nov. 1901, Part 1. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 7. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [35] Lydecker, Memo. , Part 2. [36] Letter from Alice Kauser to Constance Cary Harrison, 14 September 1903. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [37] Affidavit of David Belasco , Paras. 12-21. [38] Affidavit of David Belasco , Paras. 13-14. [39] Affidavit of Burton N. Harrison , Paras. 6-10; Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Paras. 47-53. [40] Qtd. In Richardson, “The Art of Making Art,” 517. [41] Lydecker, Memo. , Part 2. [42] Lydecker, Memo. , Part 4. [43] United States Copyright Office, Catalogue of Title Entries of Books and Other Articles , Fourth Quarter 1901, Volume 29 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 1470. [44] Lydecker, Memo., Part 3. [45] Lydecker, Memo. , Part 4. [46] For a general assessment of the complications and history of notions of joint authorship in US Copyright law, see Edward Valachovic, “The Contribution Requirement to a Joint Work under the Copyright Act,” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review , 12.1 (1992): 199-219. [47] Lydecker, Memo. , Part 4. He cites Levi v. Rutley, Law Reports 6 C.P., 523, Smith J. Later cases and updates to the copyright law on joint authorship move towards a clearer definition of “work for hire” rights residing with the employer. [48] Again, these are issues with which contemporary copyright cases still grapple, though Richardson notes that work-for-hire has generally been settled as inapplicable now for contemporary production conditions: “Courts, more or less, have embraced this narrow definition of authorship, holding that because playwrights and composers initiate (and occasionally complete) the vast majority of their work before a producer is solicited to fund a production, they are considered “independent contractors” and are not subject to the work-for-hire doctrine.” Richardson, “The Art of Making Art,” 510. [49] While this claim is made in the Amended Answer , Para. 10, Harrison herself avoids explicitly mentioning remuneration in her affidavit. [50] See Miller throughout. [51] See Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [52] Letter from Alice Kauser to Constance Cary Harrison, 10 December 1901. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [53] Letter from Harrison Grey Fiske to Alice Kauser, 18 May 1901. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [54] Letter from William H. Kendal to Mr. Day, 1 July 1902. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [55] Amended Answer , Para 2. [56] Affidavit of Harrison Grey Fiske, Para 20. [57] Amended Answer , Para 4. [58] Nevin, “No Business like Show Business,” 1534. [59] Richardson, “The Art of Making Art,” 492. [60] Richardson, “The Art of Making Art,” 493 [61] Richardson, “The Art of Making Art,” 508. [62] Anne Ruggles Gere, “Common Properties of Pleasure: Texts in Nineteenth Century Women’s Clubs,” in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature , eds. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 391. [63] Gere, “Common Properties of Pleasure,” 397-399. [64] For a general assessment of the historical development and complications of collaborative work, see Peter Jaszi, “On the Author Effect: Contemporary Copyright and Collective Creativity,” in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature , eds. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 29-56. [65] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 10. [66] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 16. The lack of an agreement on collaboration also appears in Para. 45, where she also accuses him of changing her words in a letter submitted into evidence to be “projected collaboration” instead of “proposed collaboration.” [67] Affidavit of David Belasco , Para. 8. [68] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 20. [69] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 28. [70] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 41. [71] Affidavit of David Belasco , Para. 7. [72] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Paras. 29-31. [73] Letter from Unknown Author to Constance Cary Harrison, [1901]. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [74] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 7. [75] See, for example, J. Ranken Towse, “The Drama,” The Critic 40 no. 1 (January 1902): 39-40; “The Stage,” Town Talk 11 no. 575, (5 September 1903): 21. [76] See Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [77] “Exhibit 2.” Copy of letter from Constance Cary Harrison to David Belasco, Thursday Evening, Affidavit of David Belasco . [78] Clipping. Robinson Locke Scrapbook. Volume 203 Reel 18, page 61. Robinson Locke collection, NAFR+. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. [79] Mrs. Burton Harrison, The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch (New York: C.G. Burgoyne, 1901): 22; Mrs. Burton Harrison, “The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch,” The Smart Set (March 1901): 14; “Exhibit 13.” Note 2, Affidavit of David Belasco . [80] Letter from Minnie Maddern Fiske to Constance Cary Harrison, undated. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [81] Harrison, Unwelcome , 32-33; Harrison, “Unwelcome,” 25-37. “Exhibit 13.” Note 7, Affidavit of David Belasco . [82] Affidavit of Harrison Grey Fiske , Para. 11. [83] Clipping. Robinson Locke Scrapbook. Volume 203 Reel 18, page 61. BRTC. [84] Letter from Minnie Maddern Fiske to Constance Cary Harrison, 8 September 1901. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [85] “Exhibit 12.” Copy of letter from David Belasco to Constance Cary Harrison, 15 July 1901. Affidavit of David Belasco . [86] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison . Para. 56 [87] Affidavit of David Belasco , Paras. 29-31. See also Abram J. Dittenhoefer, Complaint Belasco v. Fiske , Para. 9. [88] The current standard is that “the independent contributions of each putative joint author must be independently copyrightable; it is not enough that only the finished product be copyrightable.” Richardson, “The Art of Making Art,” 516. Footnotes About The Author(s) DR EILEEN CURLEY is Chair and Associate Professor of English at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she teaches a wide range of theatre and drama courses. She is also the Editor in Chief of USITT’s quarterly journal Theatre Design & Technology. Her research on nineteenth-century amateur theatre has appeared in Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Popular Entertainment Studies, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Symposium, Performing Arts Resources, and edited collections. Dr. Curley has also designed props, scenery, or projections for more than 50 productions in Indiana, New York, and Iowa. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Theatre History, Theory, and Literature from Indiana University and a B.A. in Theatre from Grinnell College. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202 Twenty-First Century American Playwrights Encounters on Contested Lands and Provocative Eloquence Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lucas Skjaret 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 Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Lucas Skjaret By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF ANOTHER DAY'S BEGUN: THORNTON WILDER'S OUR TOWN IN THE 21ST CENTURY. Howard Sherman. London: Methuen Drama/Bloomsbury Publishing Place, 2021; Pp. 268. Another Day’s Begun, Howard Sherman’s first full-length book, centers theatre-makers and how they approached Our Town from 2002 to 2019. Sherman is known for his work with the American Theatre Wing, which co-produces the Tony Awards, and his numerous high-profile administrative positions with significant arts organizations, leading to his large social media presence and frequent writing about the industry. His pulse on the American theatre zeitgeist situates his approach to exploring a play such as Our Town . Scholars consider Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as seminal within the American literary and dramatic canon—and Sherman argues effectively for its legacy. Having opened on Broadway in 1938, it explores themes of American life and mortality in the bucolic, fictional New England town of Grover’s Corners from 1901 to 1913. The play ends with Wilder’s spin on the dance macabre ; we learn about the fates of the townsfolk, following Emily as she reflects upon her life as a departed soul. The play was revolutionary for many reasons, as Sherman argues, particularly its infamous opening stage direction: “No curtain. No scenery.” Besides using a bare stage and mimed properties, Our Town is recognized for its narrator-turned-psychopomp, The Stage Manager. Since its premiere, numerous high schools, community theatres, professional producing houses, universities, and audition rooms have visited Grover’s Corners. While Sherman is not a conventional scholar, Another Day’s Begun presents a robust examination of the continued influence of Our Town on storytellers across mediums and genres. Sherman divides his book into two main sections: the history of Our Town , and then a series of interviews with artists who have worked on productions since 2000. Chapter 1, “Building Grover’s Corners,” chronicles the play's development and original reception. Sherman’s writing balances clarity with curation, connecting the play to Wilder’s life and the historical context in which the thrice Pulitzer prize-winning dramatist wrote. The chapter emphasizes the play’s early impact in the United States and abroad post-World War II, noting that it was the first American play produced in Berlin after the war’s end in 1946. Sherman explains the Department of State pushed to produce American plays “vigorously” in both Germany and Japan during the war, with the Army negotiating directly with playwrights rather than through their agents. He quotes Variety describing this move to use “theatre as a means of bringing democracy to presumably truth-starved German teen-agers.” (15) Sherman considers the play’s life from mid-20th century into the 21st century. Chapter 2, “Expanding Grover’s Corners,” analyzes the play’s impact on a much broader scale. Sherman explores its cultural legacy through numerous adaptations, parodies, derivative stories, and references that spread across almost every storytelling medium. While Sherman includes aesthetically similar adaptations (such as the television musical version starring Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra in 1955) and other more robust re-imaginings — including ballet and opera adaptations — he argues for Our Town’s strong influence in popular culture. One example is his analysis of sitcoms such as Cheers , The Nanny , and Growing Pains , which included diegetic performances of Our Town . Sherman notes that these popular citations require the audience’s knowledge to make sense. He cites contemporary references too, like Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s television hit Riverdale, whose first episode has a “decidedly Wilderian feel” and how, in a later episode Veronica Lodge, a character, mutters, “I feel like I am wandering through the lost epilogue of Our Town’ ” as a “throwaway aside.” (40) Sherman smartly traces changing receptions of the play and does not shy away from negative responses, presenting a healthy balancing of perspectives on Wilder’s seminal work. Chapter 2 evidences the ubiquity of Our Town in creative output since its premiere. The book's primary contribution to scholarship sharpens in its second half, titled “ Our Town : Production Oral Histories 2002-19.” Here, Sherman archives interviews with artists who have worked on the play since the turn of the millennium. While he conducted most interviews, the author also includes artist statements transcribed from a 2006 video interview with Paul Newman, who played The Stage Manager in 2002 at Westport Country Playhouse (251). These oral histories, which serve almost as case studies, begin with David Cromer’s groundbreaking 2002 production. Despite its “utter simplicity and lack of artifice,” signaled by having actors wear contemporary street clothes, Cromer carried out a “ coup de théâtre ” on the audience: the Stage Manager, played by Cromer himself, revealed a detailed vintage kitchen with real bacon cooking and full period-specific costuming for Mr. and Mrs. Webb as their daughter, now deceased, visits this memory. (46) Another notable production discussed is Michel Hausmann’s interpretation at Miami New Drama, which incorporated Spanish, English, and Creole – the “three dominant languages of the city.” (167) The book’s strength derives from this variety of focal productions; from professional to educational productions to more avant-garde interpretations, Sherman ensures a diverse portfolio of perspectives. Having interviewed many theatre-makers over his career, Sherman knows to allow the artists to speak directly to readers about their experiences and approaches to Our Town . These interviews are not only archival but insightful about the craft of theatre-making. Sheryl Kaller, who directed Deaf West and Pasadena Playhouse’s 2017 production, for instance, which centered American Sign Language (ASL) and English, noted that their costume design was period-appropriate but “stayed in hues of blue, gray, and white,” a color palette designed to make the actors’ signing more visible. (198) The interviews reflect on disparate practices and contexts of production; readers directly observe how artists of differing backgrounds, resources, and notoriety discuss their artistic approaches to Wilder’s (nearly) century-old play. In his “Epilogue: 11 O’clock in Grover’s Corners,” Sherman summarizes his experiences of researching and writing the book. Beyond words that often came up in the interviews—universal, mundane, favorite, White, greatest, cheesy, and sacred— he was most surprised by how many interviewees confessed they never read it until they worked on it. Our Town, he argues, has thus “permeated the collective consciousness” of American theater and served as a conduit for American cultures. (247) Howard Sherman’s debut publication is well-researched and well-structured. For those who teach American drama, Wilder, or Our Town , the book has pullable sections that one can assign to add context and perspective to a play that many students might see as antiquated, or unrelatable. Another Day’s Begun provides the perfect dramaturgical companion for any director, scholar, or producer about to visit Grover’s Corners. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Sherman, Howard. Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century. London: Methuen Drama/Bloomsbury Publishing Place, 2021. Footnotes About The Author(s) Lucas Skjaret (he/him) is a third-year MFA Theatre Directing candidate originally from Minnesota. Before his journey south, he worked as a director, costume designer, dramaturg, and teaching artist in the Twin Cities. At Baylor University, he directed Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker; Sam Shepard’s 4-H Club ; Under the Compass Rose , a devised piece; and Men’s Intuition by Itamar Moses. Additionally, he directed the staged reading of Joseph Tully’s new play Mythos of Autumn and co-directed the workshop concert of Favor: The Musical. In Minnesota, Lucas was the founder and artistic director of Market Garden Theatre, in which he directed Another Revolution , My Barking Dog , On The Exhale , and Public Exposure , as well as curated and directed their new works festival, Fresh Roots. He also worked with companies such as Lyric Arts Main Street Stage, Freshwater Theatre, History Theatre, Walking Shadow Theatr Company, Little Lifeboats, The Children's Theatre Company, Park Square Theatre, Artistry, Teater Neuf in Oslo Norway, and others. Lucas received his double B.A. in Theatre Arts and Scandinavian Studies from The University of North Dakota and studied at The University of Oslo’s Ibsen Centre. Lucas is an alumnus of the Directors Lab North in Toronto, Canada and the Kennedy Center Directing Intensive. He has also studied actor pedagogy at The Stella Adler Studio in New York City as well as intimacy direction with Tonia Sima and Theatrical Intimacy Education. As scholar, he has presented work at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, The Comparative Drama Conference, and MidAmerica Theatre Conference, where he also serves as the graduate student representative for the Playwrighting Symposium. His writing has been published in the Texas Theatre Journal and The Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal . His scholarship focuses on exploring performance as identity, translation & adaptation theory, directing practices, arts pedagogy, and Nordic dramatic literature. Lucas is a proud associate member of The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. 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.

David Pellegrini 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 The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. David Pellegrini By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF In 2019, the Langham Court Theatre in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada inaugurated the Risk Theatre Modern Tragedy Competition, awarding top prize ($8,000 Canadian) to In Bloom by Brooklyn-based playwright Gabriel Jason Dean. Selected from 182 new play submissions from 11 countries, In Bloom focuses on a “well-intentioned, but ultimately reckless documentary filmmaker in Afghanistan” whose actions led to the death of an Afghan boy—a tragedy he lies about in his award-winning memoir. This 21st century competition for tragic playwriting began as a partnership with classicist Edwin Wong, who lays out a blueprint for playwrights (and the competition’s rules) in The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Wong exalts three golden eras—ancient Greece; the English Renaissance; and German Romanticism—noting that after Eugene O’Neill, whom he cites as the last “true” tragedian in the Aeschylean tradition, tragic art largely vanished. That tradition is premised on a fairly simple formula, albeit with myriad variations: each dramatic action is also a gambling act involving varying degrees of unforeseen or unexpected risks. Wong’s goal with this book, like the contest, is to revivify this tragic principle for our contemporary age in which “low-probability, high consequence events lie in wait” (xxv). Although tragedy may have trafficked in uncertainty since its inception, Wong emphasizes the moral exigencies of examining the upside and downside values of risk and unintended consequences in an era in which there is an over-reliance on technology, nuclear energy, and the variabilities of global economic exchange. Wong’s overall argument in The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy is erudite, elucidated with extensive passages from canonical and lesser-known works and a wide range of theoretical citations. He is partial to the troika, apropos of ancient trilogies, and efficient in outlining the tripartite structure by which characters confront temptation, make wagers, and cast dice. In the first three chapters, Wong elaborates on the gambling metaphor and constructs a lexicon of qualifying terms. His first major categorization is premised on “tempo”; specifically whether the three gambling acts are presented gradually over the course of a play; backloaded, in which time lapses between wager and die-cast to build suspense; or frontloaded, in which the wager occurs early with the bulk of action depicting the ensuing chaos. Nestled within these categories is the frequency of the wager, e.g., standalone, if it occurs once as in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus; parallel-motion, in which several characters confront multiple risk events as demonstrated by O’Neill’s Strange Interlude; or perpetual-motion, whereby one wager generates subsequent wagers as in the Oresteia. Together, these first three chapters become a kind of periaktoi, the ancient, multi-surfaced scene-changing device conjectured by Vitruvius, underpinning Wong’s structural analysis. This first section grounds the third, “A Poetics of Tragedy: How to Write Risk Theatre,” providing playwrights with a comprehensive, formal analysis of the genre and a toolbox of dramaturgical strategies from which to choose. These “commonplaces” include the following features: a range of heroic types all driven by “white-hot” passions and best represented by elites since they have the most to lose; the interference of unreliable confidantes and meddlers; and dangerous, unstable environs, including, if necessary, the supernatural. As a writer, Wong’s associative style is entertaining, tempering what might appear to be an overly schematic approach. Moreover, when employing a wide range of ideas from social theory to the physical sciences to elucidate his foundational metaphor, Wong manages some impressive hypothetical risk-taking of his own. This audacity emerges most clearly in the book’s second and fourth sections in which Wong expounds on the philosophy of tragedy and galvanizes his case about risk theatre’s relevancy to modernity, respectively. For example, Wong poses an original paradigm (“the myth of the price you pay”) in which he traces how tragedy developed as a counter-force to the commodification of life via labor, when the psychic and existential dimensions of humanity such as camaraderie, desire, and honor became objects for philosophical contemplation. Tragedy, therefore, emerged when it became necessary to demonstrate that “what is worth possessing cannot be monetized” (107). Relatedly, Wong’s paradigm of “counter-monetization,” refers to the human costs of the wager depicted in tragedy—its irrevocability, gravity, and frequent culmination in death and destruction. The final, equally compelling strand of his argument surveys the time-bound parameters of tragic theories from the French Academy through Hegel and Nietzsche to arrive at our own “risk age,” in which “the scale of technology to do good or to do evil has increased, and continues to increase, by powers of ten” (262). There is much to admire in Wong’s argument, and it is remarkable how much the language of so many tragedies explicitly allude to gambling, economic costs, and risk-related values, both monetary and existential. Still, there are numerous counter-arguments advanced in the seemingly inexhaustible body of tragic theory that are noticeably absent or side-stepped in this study. For example, Wong’s opinion that the best tragic heroes come from a nobler breed legitimates the aristocratic bias rebuffed by practitioner/theorists from Lessing to Miller. Also, since he devalues the artificiality of the deus ex machina, Sophocles fares far better than Euripides, even though scholars have long argued that the latter’s subversion of tragic structure served to critique Attic social hypocrisies and cosmological fallacies. Further, feminist scholars will certainly reject the phallocentrism and linearity of what is, at base, a reformulation of Aristotelian and neoclassical models; it is noteworthy that Wong does not discuss any plays written by women. Relatedly, although Wong’s aim to rejuvenate tragic theatre is valiant, some consideration of film and, especially, any number of episodic television programs that veer towards tragedy would perfectly illustrate his parallel- and perpetual-motion categories since the cliff-hanger is predicated on temptation, wagers, and risks—and sometimes all three at once. Still, the fact that there were over three-hundred entries in the Langham Court Theatre competition in its first two years and that the top prizewinners, including most of the nine runners-up, are American suggests that risk theatre may well be a fitting response to an era in which the United States confronts improbable, (perhaps) unforeseeable, and oftentimes catastrophic events. References Footnotes About The Author(s) David Pellegrini Eastern Connecticut State University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 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.

Heather S. Nathans Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF In 1986, during my first year at Dartmouth College, I had the good fortune to take a seminar on Black Theatre with Professor Errol Hill (1921-2003).[1] More than thirty years later I still count myself lucky to have had my introduction to the history of Black Theatre under Errol's guidance. His rigorous scholarship and penetrating questions helped to set the standards for my own further explorations of Black Theatre History over the coming years, and I still remember our final chat many years later at a 2002 ASTR conference when he was asking me about the progress of my new book on slavery and US theatre. Errol would have been 100 years old this year. A century after his birth, he still stands as one of the giants in the field of Black Theatre scholarship. His landmark History of African American Theatre with Jim Hatch (1929-2020), his work as a playwright, his foundational study, Shakespeare in Sable, his pioneering book, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900, his many edited collections of plays by Black dramatists, as well as his monumental Theatre Collection, now housed at Dartmouth College—all of these contributions have shaped the development of the field in innumerable ways for thousands of scholars and students who never had the chance to meet him. For those who did have the chance to work with him, his mentorship proved equally invaluable—generous and exacting in equal measure. The award that bears his name with the American Society for Theatre Research has recognized more than thirty outstanding works in Black Theatre since its launch in 1997. (The list of those winners is included in the Book Review section of this issue and can also be found on the ASTR website at astr.org.) What I miss most—even thirty-five years after our first encounter in Hanover, NH—is the bellow of laughter that would erupt from this most dignified and handsome of men, transforming him into a joyous figure always ready to welcome new colleagues to the field. I spoke recently with his wife, Grace Hope Hill—his partner in his life, his research, his theatrical productions, and over many years of travel and adventure. I said how much I still missed his laugh. Grace exclaimed, “His laugh was so loud.” She also shared a story of Errol’s early days that links to so many of the themes shared in this issue about the need to support and document Black Theatre. In the 1950s, the University of the West Indies in Jamaica received a 300£ donation from a British bookstore owner (at Foyles Bookshop) and Errol, then serving as a “Drama Tutor” in the program, headed out into communities across Jamaica to develop new works by regional authors. As Grace recalls, “He helped with the writing, directing, and acting… We worked with very limited funds and did everything ourselves. Errol was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” That statement sums up Errol’s contribution to Black Theatre Studies so beautifully – for both those who knew him and those who never had the chance to meet him, “He was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” Help us celebrate Errol’s legacy in this issue dedicated to Black Theatre. Honor the innumerable artists and scholars who have created and documented the field of Black Theatre for more than two centuries of passionate work and those who are propelling it forward into the future. Ronald N. Sherr, "Errol G. Hill," oil on panel, Dartmouth College [1] For more on Errol’s extraordinary career, including his time with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Yale University, Dartmouth College, as a professional actor and playwright, and as an accomplished scholar, see the link to his papers now housed at Dartmouth College: https://archives-manuscripts.dartmouth.edu/agents/people/1185. by Heather S. Nathans Tufts University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative The Theatre of August Wilson Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Introduction to “Milestones in Black Theatre” Interviews and Afterviews on "Milestones in Black Theatre" Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Re-Imagining America and Theater: Race, Representation, and Form Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction to “Milestones in Black Theatre” Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF This special issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre was initially envisioned as a celebration of the inimitable Errol Hill’s contributions to Black Theatre in American history. Hill's centennial asks us to reflect on the long history of American performance and the impact of Black lives on the American theater. Errol Hill did not revise American theater history by making it more “inclusive.” He challenged the systemic racism of American theater by providing evidence of a thriving Black arts practice that helped to shape the foundations of American theatrical traditions from musical theater to dance. However, when colleagues from the American Theatre and Drama Society, the Black Theatre Association, and the Black Theatre Network began developing this issue, we were all reeling from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. We did not have the theater to help us process this international trauma and loss. Theaters around the world were shuttered indefinitely due to pandemic lockdowns and quarantines. ATHE’s 2020 conference was supposed to take place in Detroit, Michigan, one of the country’s most densely populated Black cities. Instead that summer found us mourning and grappling with death and darkness via Zoom. Facing our limitations, fragilities, anger, and discontents, we attempted to make sense of what we were experiencing as a collective of theater-makers while paying close attention to the racially specific atrocities the pandemic and perpetual climate of anti-blackness did to our Black and Brown colleagues and friends. While we formulated this issue, we watched the ongoing international public protests in response to the murder of George Floyd. The daily theatrical loop of trauma and death streaming onto our phones, tablets, televisions, and Zoom screens felt unbearable. By August of 2020, an unconscionable number of Americans had lost their lives to COVID-19 with those numbers disproportionately representing deaths in Black and Brown communities. At the same time, international audiences witnessed the unrelenting barrage of anti-Black deaths including Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain. As every day seemed to bring a deluge of fresh pain or disaster, colleagues from across ATDS, BTA, and BTN came together to support a group of scholars whose work documents Black Theatre’s histories of resistance, pride, courage, and triumph. Working on this special issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre celebrating "Milestones in Black Theatre" has opened up opportunities to reimagine the parameters of the field. It has also highlighted the inadequacy of one journal issue to represent all of the extraordinary accomplishments and developments in Black Theatre Studies. Rather than curating a more traditional journal format with four or five articles, we deliberately broke open the structure to encourage short thought pieces, manifestos, explorations of new work, interviews, roundtable discussions, and reimaginings of familiar material. We also sought to represent a broad swath of scholars in Black Theatre -- both well-established voices and those newer to the conversation. Additionally, we developed a Spotify playlist to accompany the issue (available at: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6GVG9zV2bK1JC9Xn1kzhS6?si=9ea0067b0eb1409d). This playlist invites readers into a sonic landscape as an alternate methodology and archive. It asks how we can think through milestones and approaches in new and unfamiliar ways? We hope that it will inspire you to add songs or to curate your own lists around your research. We launch the issue with a series of interviews from award-winning scholars and leaders, including Harry Elam, David Krasner, E. Patrick Johnson, Bernth Lindfors, Sandra Richards, Sandra Shannon, and Harvey Young. Their numerous contributions to Black Theatre Studies adorn many of our bookshelves and grace our syllabi. Each of these scholars in turn hailed a host of new voices—marking the rise of successive generations in the field and those are included in a section entitled “Afterviews.” A cluster of articles from Elizabeth Cizmar, Baron Kelly, Khalid Long, and Nathaniel Nesmith offers new insights into histories of Black artists, including Glenda Dickerson, Earle Hyman, Elaine Jackson, Ernie McLintock, Frederick O’Neal. A pair of short essays by Michelle Cowin Gibbs and Eric Glover presents contrasting interpretations of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s The Mule Bone. Two manifesto-style pieces from Omiyemi Green and Lisa Thompson confront assumptions about career trajectories in Black Theatre and the academy, Black Theatre pedagogy, and the particular challenges Black women have faced in the field. Another cluster of essays by Bernth Lindfors, Olga Sanchez Saltveit, and Isaiah Wooden prompts readers to expand their theoretical and methodological lenses, including rethinking familiar documentary sources, boundaries between Black and Latinx theater, and how scholars can mine the archive for previously undiscovered treasures. We close the articles section with a roundtable discussion that reflects on the role of the artist-scholar in the current moment. It looks back on the legacy of earlier artist-scholars, including Errol Hill, and it also asks how contemporary artist-scholars imagine their legacies. We invite readers to envision new possibilities that will not be measured only against what we have now. The issue closes with a special selection of book reviews focusing on new directions in Black Theatre, compiled by JADT Book Review Editor Maya Roth, as well as a list of the Errol Hill Award-winning books and articles over the past twenty-three years. The Errol Hill Award, launched in 1997, recognizes, “outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, as demonstrated in the form of a published book-length project (monograph or essay collection) or scholarly article” (astr.org). We hope that this special issue will prompt debate and will also invite those just beginning their work in Black Theatre into the field. We also hope that it will serve as a useful benchmark for the historical moment in which we find ourselves. Nicole Hodges Persley, Associate Professor, University of Kansas Heather S. Nathans, Professor, Tufts University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative The Theatre of August Wilson Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Introduction to “Milestones in Black Theatre” Interviews and Afterviews on "Milestones in Black Theatre" Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Re-Imagining America and Theater: Race, Representation, and Form Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Elizabeth M. Cizmar Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Elizabeth M. Cizmar By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF by Elizabeth M. Cizmar The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Ernie McClintock (1937–2003), director, acting teacher, and producer, grounded his work in the Black Power concepts of self-determination and community, but in pursuing a more inclusive theatre company, he departed from common practices of the Black Arts Movement. This departure can be attributed to his queer positionality, which has left him on the fringes of Black Arts Movement scholarship. McClintock founded four institutions: in Harlem, the Afro-American Studio for Acting Speech (est. 1966), the 127th Street Repertory Ensemble (est. 1973), and the Jazz Theatre of Harlem (est. 1986); and in Richmond, Virginia, the Jazz Actors Theatre (est. 1991). A landmark Black theatre institution, the 127th Street Repertory Ensemble ran from 1973 to 1986, demonstrating that the spirit and work of the Black Arts Movement extended well beyond 1975, the generally accepted end date of the movement. Over more than four decades in socially and politically charged environments, McClintock established actor training rooted in Afrocentricity,[1] teaching Jazz Acting in the classroom and the rehearsal hall, which he considered an important training ground for actors. In this article, I argue that McClintock’s theatre subverted two established norms: the English repertory model and the male-dominated, heteronormative representations of the Black Arts Movement. McClintock’s legacy challenges assumptions that the Black Arts Movement was broadly misogynist and homophobic. Therefore, my work is in conversation with scholars who aim to dispel such assumptions including La Donna Forsgren, Khalid Yaya Long, Mike Sell, and James Smethurst. In the early 1980s, McClintock continued to produce Black revolutionary drama, such as Amiri Baraka’s one acts, while incorporating queer, womanist, and Afro-Caribbean voices into his seasons. The trilogy of plays performed in 1982, a pinnacle season for McClintock, exhibits progressive inclusion while upholding Black Power’s principles of self-determination and community. The 127th Street Rep wanted to represent what Paul Carter Harrison calls the “kaleidoscope” of African diasporic memory.[2] By bringing queer, Afro-Caribbean, and womanist voices together into one space, McClintock’s theatre displayed a rich variety of Blackness. Black revolutionary drama stood side by side in his classroom and in his season planning with these more diverse voices, demonstrating that there was room for inclusive practices in the Black Power movement. These inclusive practices relate to his versatile season selection programming but also extended to his casting practices. McClintock employed actors from a variety of backgrounds and identities who were often left on the fringes of the Black Theatre Movement including queer artists, immigrants, and Harlem residents who, prior to joining McClintock’s company, broke the law to make ends meet. Rather than approaching his company as a monolithic representation of Blackness, he invited each actor to leverage who they were as individuals while simultaneously acknowledged overlaps of experience within the “kaleidoscope”. His productions answered the movement’s call to establish institutions outside the white gaze and use theatre as a mode of social change in Black communities. However, as an openly gay man, whose long-term partner, Ronald Walker, was also his technical director, McClintock stood as an outlier in the movement. Marc Primus, historian and co-founder of the Afro-American Studio, noted in an interview that he, Walker, and McClintock were “twice-marginalized” for being Black and gay.[3] Ernie McClintock’s legacy provides a history of early Black queer activism in the theatre within a movement that was not known for embracing the LGBTQIA+ community. Although homophobic attitudes were common in the Black Power movement, as they were across the United States, McClintock’s career and biography, relationships with other artists, acting technique, and groundbreaking productions dispel notions of monolithic homophobia in Harlem in the 1960s. The 1982 season emblematizes McClintock’s Afrocentric aesthetic, leveraging and revising the repertory model as a pathway for inclusion. McClintock made subversive choices, amplifying voices often left out of the Black Arts Movement, including Afro-Caribbean, Black womanist, and queer Black masculine ones. This essay uses the 127th Street Repertory Ensemble’s 1982 season to analyze how jazz aesthetics upended the English repertory model. This season included Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967), Ntozake Shange’s Spell #7 (1979), and Peter Shaffer’s Equus (1973). “We Respectfully Challenge You”: Subverting the English Repertory Model Jazz Acting, a technique and directorial strategy, affords performers the opportunity to consider shared experiences while also celebrating individuality. William J. Harris identifies the jazz aesthetic as “a procedure that uses jazz variations as paradigms for the conversions of white poetic and social ideas into black ones,”[4] disrupting hegemonic structures and promoting Black modes of expression. Just as the jazz aesthetic converted white ideas, McClintock subverted the English repertory model, which allowed him to emphasize multiple Black perspectives in a given season, transforming a white institution into a Black one. Developed in the early twentieth century, repertory theatre is defined as “plays in rotation . . . offered to the public on a regularly changing basis.”[5] A company will typically perform a different play each night, supplemented by premieres of new plays. Repertory theatres in Europe and the United States did not typically produce plays by Black playwrights. Figure 1: 127th Street Repertory Ensemble’s 1982 season poster Source: Errol Hill Collection, Dartmouth College The plays produced at the 127th Street Rep over twelve seasons[6] were discordant with white narratives; the 1982 season featured Afro-Caribbean, womanist, and queer voices. These representations were uncommon in both the white Western theatrical tradition and the Black Theatre Movement. Equus, for example, was written by a British playwright, but McClintock revised the story to center on Black queer sexuality in the US. Although other companies produced Walcott’s dream play and Shange’s homage to Black city life, it was rare to have all these voices represented under one roof, tying together themes of dreams, desperation, and desire (see figure 1). In publicity materials, McClintock states: We present theatre that is INTRIGUING, STIMULATING, PROVOCATIVE, RELEVANT, and TRUTHFUL. The same as most Black theatres. But, our way of presenting is the big difference. We give you BEAUTY, STYLE, DARING, SURPRISES, CONTROVERSY, SENSUALITY along with high artistic standards. In other words, our theatre is IMMEDIATE, TODAY, VITAL, VIVID, AND VIRILE. We respectfully challenge you to three (3) daring adult evenings of dreams, desperation and desire.[7] The plays from the period traditionally understood to frame the Black Arts Movement, 1965–1975, embraced a Black revolutionary philosophy advanced by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal. Amiri Baraka’s The Revolutionary Theatre, published in 1965, foregrounds both the aesthetic and the tangible, calling for artists of African descent to come together and create art that connects to a Black cultural, spiritual, and historical dimension and works to destroy “the white thing.”[8] Neal famously quotes Don L. Lee, saying, “[w]e must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane [sic], and other perpetuators of evil. It’s time for Du Bois, Nat Turner, and Kwame Nkrumah…” A hypermasculine attitude began to overshadow the revolutionary acts of these artists, and much of the literature and theatre of the Black Arts Movement included homophobic slurs and violence against women.[9] Whatever the levels of misogyny and homophobia within in the movement, it is irrefutable that queer plays were largely absent from other well-known Black Theatre Movement institutions such as the New Lafayette Theatre, the New Federal Theatre, and the Negro Ensemble Company. McClintock’s queer positionality provided a unique vantage point to create space for Black actors of various backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations. The 1982 theatre season drew crowds to the Renny Theatre in Harlem, earning the ensemble nineteen AUDELCO[10] nominations (see figure 2). Dreams, Desperation, and Desire in Harlem Dream on Monkey Mountain takes place on a nameless Caribbean island where Makak, a prisoner, has been conditioned by colonizers to disparage his race. In the end, he beheads a white apparition that has been haunting him and frees himself from his infatuation with whiteness. Dream’s inclusion challenged monolithic notions of Black identity, but McClintock’s inclusive practices did not stop at play selection; they also extended to the makeup of his ensemble. McClintock’s production included Afro-Caribbean actors, who were not typically hired in peer institutions. Figure 2: 127th Street Repertory Ensemble’s 1982 AUDELCO Award nominations Source: Errol Hill Collection, Dartmouth College Lola Louis, an actor from the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, earned several AUDELCO nominations during her tenure at the 127th Street Rep, including best actress for Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1957). In an interview, Louis emphasized that other directors did not typically include Caribbean plays in their seasons, let alone cast Caribbean actors. For Dream, McClintock asked Louis to devise a silent character so her perspective could be included in the story, which was written as an all-male cast. To prepare, Louis implemented Jazz Acting character observations, walking the streets of Harlem and observing homeless folks. She described the character she developed as constantly in motion, “fishing through things and looking at people.”[11] The audience recognized this character as belonging to Harlem, although the play was rooted in West Indian culture. To incorporate a female character on the margins of society further complicated and enriched Walcott’s play, and, for McClintock, was part of the “kaleidoscope” of his Harlem community. McClintock’s unorthodox vision of Dream yielded praise from the critics. Lionel Mitchell’s NY Amsterdam review stated, “‘Dream on Monkey Mountain’ reveals a fine rep company.”[12] He goes on to say that the ensemble is “an excellent group that has done a tremendous amount of homework, and who, despite slim grants and money problems, persists in doing some of the best theatre going!”[13] Mitchell’s review and the praise he received from critics and audiences demonstrated the success of McClintock’s directorial aesthetic. McClintock chose a play that provided an Afro-Caribbean perspective, cast actors not typically hired, and devised an additional character who was an outlier in society. By casting an immigrant actor to play a devised homeless character, McClintock instituted the inclusive practice of considering actors and figures typically left on the margins of society. His eccentric practices paid off, earning the 127th Street Repertory Ensemble five AUDELCO nominations, including a nomination for Lola Louis for Best Supporting Actress. Womanist poet-playwright Ntozake Shange describes her play Spell #7, which focuses on Black women’s experiences, as “in the throes of pain and sensation experienced by my characters responding to the involuntary constriction of their humanity.”[14] Shange’s piece centers on a group of nine young actors, dancer-singers, and writers guided by a magician in coming to terms with their identities in a white supremacist society and embracing the richness of their Blackness. During the height of the Black Theatre Movement, women playwrights were largely left out of neighboring theatres, but from his early days of teaching in 1966, McClintock saw immense value in bringing a womanist perspective to the Harlem theatre community. One of the most memorable aspects of McClintock’s production of Spell #7 is its focus on Black women’s relationship to beauty. In reaction against the trend of processed hair in the 1940s and 1950s, the 1960s saw a reawakening of Africanity as many women and men celebrated their African roots, fashioning dashikis and Pan-African styles along with natural Afros and textured hair. Shange explores this dilemma of beauty as it relates to Black authenticity and femininity. Yusef A. Salaam acknowledged this in his review: “an antidote which says that the African woman/African nation must look in the mirror and start liking what she/it sees.”[15] Jazz Acting asks actors to integrate their lived experiences into character creation so the performers enriched their characters with their own experiences as Black women. McClintock’s experience as both a queer man and a proponent of Black nationalism living in a white supremacist system helped him straddle these binaries. Trust is an essential component of Jazz Acting. Members of the ensemble must trust each other if they are to feel safe to bring their own lived experiences to their art. McClintock’s breathing and articulation exercises were designed not merely to teach actors how to project on stage but also to help them develop the self-confidence to access their individual voices. Bolanyle Edwards, who portrayed maxine in Spell #7, explained that voice training “was part of his technique to loosen up the articulators and to breathe. It’s getting in touch with who you are.”[16] This approach countered commonly held ideas about what constituted “a good voice.” McClintock states, “Contrary to the beliefs of some, it is not ‘white’ or ‘European’ to speak well. At the same time, the Black idiom should be used as much as possible but the actor must theatricalize his vocal efforts.”[17] In McClintock’s production, the actors focused on finding rhythm and tempo from a place of individual truth to theatricalize vocal expression. As the third play in rep, McClintock’s production of Equus revised a white European play to tell a story of Black queer sexuality. The Black Theatre Movement offered a paucity of plays exploring Black queer sexuality, so McClintock reimagined Shaffer’s Broadway hit with a dual focus on the Black Power principles of self-determination and community. Equus became a story about Black repressed sexuality and, in certain moments, showed audiences the beauty of male queer sexuality and the inner struggle of a gay teenage boy in a fundamentalist household. The actors executed this vision through both ensemble work and self-expression. The bold choice to bring this taboo subject matter about a marginalized group to the stage astonished audiences, and theatre patrons made the pilgrimage to Harlem to witness Gregory Wallace play Alan Strang and see the six nearly naked Black men who played the ensemble of horses. Part of the production’s depth is attributed to the absence of a Black buck stereotype,[18] a stereotype that suggests Black men are barbaric, aggressive, and feral. As Cornel West explains, “White fear of Black sexuality is a basic ingredient of white racism.”[19] Instead, McClintock understood the relationship between Alan and his favorite horse, Nugget (played by Jerome Preston Bates), as a tragedy of repression and oppression interspersed with moments of reverence for the Black body. In an important departure from the Broadway version and in a move crucial to subverting the Black buck stereotype, the horses did not wear masks. By unmasking the horses and providing space for the actors’ self-expression, McClintock created nuance and humanity instead of a one-dimensional stereotype of sexual aggression. The staging of the production reflected jazz aesthetics by converting “white poetic and social ideas into black ones.”[20] An essential component of jazz is the work of creation, and this directorial style brought this into every aspect of the theatre. McClintock’s actors recall that this creative experimentation with the work never stopped, even in production. For example, in a rehearsal one week prior to opening, McClintock blasted jazz music to create a sexually charged environment.[21] The director also staged Equus in a way that maintained focus on the ensemble, having all the actors sit on the edge of the stage in plain sight of the audience.[22] This staging emphasized the collective rather than the individual, standing in opposition to the star-centric productions on Broadway.[23] McClintock’s aesthetic valued process over product, a stark contrast to commercial theatre that uses rigid blocking to ensure theatre goers have the same performance night after night. Conclusion The 127th Street Repertory Ensemble’s productions in the early 1980s reveal that McClintock’s play selection and directorial approach modeled a more inclusive theatrical enterprise. Inclusion extended to Black women, queer folks, and Afro-Caribbean identities. Through jazz aesthetics and the revision of the English repertory model into a Black repertory theatre, McClintock brought together three plays representing three distinct Black perspectives while still remaining firmly rooted in Black nationalist precepts of self-determination and community. McClintock revolutionized the model to present a multiplicity of identities and challenged the actors to navigate the nuances of those identities through the practice of Jazz Acting. By featuring Dream on Monkey Mountain, Spell #7, and Equus, McClintock expanded the possibilities of Black theatre and welcomed marginalized voices, offering artists and educators a model for our own artistic and pedagogical practices [1] Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, rev. and exp. ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), xiii. Afrocentricity is defined as placing African ideals at the center of any study of African culture and behavior, situating Africans as subjects rather than objects of human history. [2] Paul Carter Harrison, Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 7. [3] Marc Primus, Interview by Elizabeth Cizmar, August 25, 2015. [4] William J. Harris, The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 13. [5] George Rowell and Anthony Jackson, The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1. [6] Ernie McClintock Resume. 2000. Box 53, Folder 11. Barksdale Theatre Records, 1945–2006 (bulk 1954–2004). Accession 41088, Business Records Collection, The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia. [7] Publicity materials from the Private Collection of Geno Brantley. [8] Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” Drama Review 4, no. 12. (Summer 1968): 30, doi: 10.2307/1144377. [9] Scholars such as La Donna Forsgren have uncovered the critical contributions women made to the Black Arts Movement. Women such as Sonia Sanchez, Barbara Ann Teer, J. E. Franklin, Martie Evans-Charles, and others advanced Black feminist and womanist perspectives within the Black Nationalist movement. See In Search of Our Warrior Mothers and Sistuhs in the Struggle. [10] Vivian Robinson established the AUDELCO organization in 1973 to support the performing arts in Black communities, with annual awards acknowledging excellence in Black theatre. AUDELCO has continued to produce an annual award show in Harlem to honor African American achievements in theatre. McClintock was a co-organizer of the first AUDELCO ceremony, held at the Afro-American Studio for Speech Acting. For more information, see www.audelco.org . [11] Lola Louis, Interview by Elizabeth Cizmar, September 2, 2015. [12] Lionel Mitchell, “Dream on Monkey Mountain Reveals Fine Rep Company,” NY Amsterdam, July 24, 1982, 36. [13] Mitchell, “Monkey Mountain,” 36. [14] Ntozake Shange, Three Pieces (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 69. [15] Yusef A. Salaam, “Spell #7: Antidote for Abuse of Black Image,” NY Amsterdam, July 3, 1982, 34. [16] Bolanyle Edwards, Interview by Elizabeth Cizmar, August 25, 2015. [17] Ernie McClintock, “Perspective on Black Acting,” Black World May 1974, 79–85. [18] Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks (New York: Continuum, 2001), 10. Donald Bogle traces stereotypes from their inception to contemporary manifestations. Bogle argues that Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation cemented this stereotype in the social conscience. [19] Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 86. [20] Harris, Poetry and Poetics, 13. [21] Gregory Wallace, Interview by Elizabeth Cizmar, September 16, 2015. [22] Abiola Sinclair, “McClintock’s ‘Equus’ in Theatrical ‘Mane-Stream,’” NY Amsterdam, August 7, 1982, 50. [23] John Gruen, “Equus Makes a Star,” New York Times, October 27, 1974, 1. Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble” by Elizabeth M. Cizmar “Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth” by Baron Kelly “A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson's Black Feminist Intervention” by Khalid Y. Long “An Interview with Elaine Jackson” by Nathaniel G. Nesmith "Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston" by Michelle Cowin Gibbs "1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Antimusical The Mule-Bone Is Presented" by Eric M. Glover “'Ògún Yè Mo Yè!' Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities" by Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green "Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar" by Lisa B. Thompson "Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge" by Bernth Lindfors "Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation" by Olga Sanchez Saltveit "A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement" by Isaiah Matthew Wooden www.jadtjournal.org www.jadtjournal.org ">jadt@gc.cuny.eduwww.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative The Theatre of August Wilson Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Introduction to “Milestones in Black Theatre” Interviews and Afterviews on "Milestones in Black Theatre" Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Re-Imagining America and Theater: Race, Representation, and Form Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jeanne Klein Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 Jeanne Klein By Published on December 12, 2017 Download Article as PDF I’ve done my duty, and I’ve done no more. Tom Thumb [1] Despite the burgeoning of childhood studies since the early 1990s, few theatre historians have investigated the considerable achievements of child actors in early US theatre. As Shauna Vey argues, child actors should be re-conceptualized as wholly competent professionals capable of exercising their agency and rights. [2] Back in 1806, fifteen-year-old John Howard Payne asserted their dramatic competencies by publishing “an accurate list” of admired British and Irish “infant prodigies” in his own magazine. [3] Little did he know that well over thirty child performers had already graced US public stages since 1752 when Lewis Hallam involved his three children and one niece in what became the monopolistic Old American Company (OAC). In this essay, I reclaim four child actors who performed extensively from ages six to twelve from 1794 to 1798 when new permanent theatres were built in several major cities. [4] Miss Mary Harding and Miss M. Solomon (I’ll call her Margaret) originated or popularized substantive child characters, and Master Samuel Stockwell and Miss Harriet Sully also reenacted these classic roles. As US-born or newly naturalized citizens, these four actors were especially cherished in a nascent nation founded on moral virtues, democratic rights, and civic responsibilities. To illuminate their debuts, early careers, theatrical competencies, and subsequent lives, I offer four different case studies that exemplify how these and other child actors entered and left the profession. Throughout, I document which child actors earned substantial roles at major companies in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, Norfolk, and Richmond and later discuss how actor-managers adopted age-appropriate casting as a traditional acting convention before the nineteenth century. Most importantly, given that primary and secondary theatre history sources are remarkably silent on the achievements of child actors, I argue that these four actors in particular and several more introduced here should be recognized and valued for establishing acting, singing, and dancing as viable and respected child professions before the nineteenth century, similar to the extraordinary Billy Elliots of today. Given the lack of child-written records and scant accounts of their acting competencies, I examine the inherent challenges involved in their performances of pivotal child characters in seven British plays that premiered in the US during the auspicious 1794-96 seasons as follows: The Boy and Girl in The Children in the Wood ; the Page in The Purse ; Edward in Every One Has His Fault ; the title role in Tom Thumb ; Juliana and Narcisso in The Prisoner ; the titled Boy in The Adopted Child ; and, Little Pickle in The Spoiled Child . Significantly, these seven plays premiered most often in Philadelphia, the temporary US capital until 1800, suggesting that two actor-managers introduced these works to spotlight child characters as palpable representations of young citizens. Moreover, frequent productions of these particular plays further indicated the extensive popularity of child embodiments on stages along the eastern seaboard. As Jeffrey Richards proffers, the nine characters in these British dramas serve as a “fluid set of changeable signs whereby something British becomes American without being, exactly, either one.” [5] Their transnational and socio-economic identities signify transitional shifts toward middle and lower class children caught in familial conflicts within domestic contexts and away from such royal historical figures as the Duke of York in Richard III , Fleance in Macbeth , Prince Edward in The Battle of Hexham , and Gustava in Gustavas Vasa . As Romantic portrayals of late eighteenth-century childhood, the authentic naiveté of these nine varied characters serve to defy stereotypical tropes of childhood innocence through playwrights’ crafted mixtures of pathos and humor. The fact that child actors most often embodied these nine characters, initially in the US capital, implicates them as potential socio-political players on US stages. Given that each text required small-bodied actors to effectuate its Romantic sentiments, these embodiments of divergent childhoods may have assuaged political divisiveness between wealthy Federalists who funded and populated new permanent playhouses and “middling” Republicans who demanded more democratic repertoires. [6] As a result, recurrent performances of these noteworthy plays provided appreciable opportunities for child actors to showcase their acting, singing, and dancing talents as well as any adult stock actor. An examination of the following four actors explains how they attracted and sustained the attentions of actor-managers and critical spectators, thereby fulfilling their professional duties as disciplined actors under the mindful tutelage of their parents and guardians. [7] Four Child Actors Margaret Solomon debuted as a singer at age four in Newport in February 1792, then Boston in October, and resurfaced in Baltimore in June 1793 with her strolling parents, Mr. and Mrs. [Nathan?] Solomon. [8] When the Maryland Journal announced that her mother would present “three interesting Reasons for her Claims on Public Patronage,” perhaps one reason included support of her aspiring daughter. [9] Although the family’s whereabouts remain unknown after November 1793, they reappeared in Newport to perform with Harper’s OAC contingent in May 1794. In October, the family united with Hodgkinson’s OAC forces at Philadelphia’s Southwark Theatre where Margaret first appeared as an Apparition with Mary Harding as Fleance in Macbeth . One month later, these two girls originated the title roles in The Children in the Wood fifteen times through January 1795. [10] In New York, one critic emphasized that “too much praise cannot be bestowed on Miss Harding [the Boy] and Miss Solomon [the Girl], who, in speaking, in singing, and in action surpassed all we could have conceived of children their age.” [11] Another reviewer in Philadelphia elaborated on Margaret’s performance for personating “the little girl with singular propriety and grace. Her manner is easy and natural; her voice strong and articulate, and in her singing remarkably clear.” [12] Over the next three years, each actress would add over twenty roles to her repertoire, including various balletic pantomimes that required agile dancing abilities. Although Harding’s exact birth year, parentage, and citizenship remain a mystery, Dunlap described her as “Mr. Hodgkinson’s ward, a pretty, innocent, black-eyed girl, looking as if she might be destined to a life of purity and happiness.” [13] As a highly regarded actor-manager, John Hodgkinson determined her OAC casting and her $10 a week salary through 1802, as well as critical attention regarding her progress. [14] For instance, when pantomiming little Horatio in Madame Gardie’s Sophia of Brabant , a reviewer noticed that “Her action and expression of countenance were wonderful for one of her years” as a stage novice, and her “great improvement” as Little Pickle further justified his formative expectations. [15] When the Solomon family defected to Thomas Wignell’s Chestnut company in March 1795, Margaret extended her repertoire considerably through June 1796 in both Philadelphia and Baltimore. In June, her younger sister, Miss C. Solomon, made “her first appearance on any stage” as the Boy opposite her sister’s Girl in The Children in the Wood . [16] The family then joined Boston’s Federal Street Theatre where Margaret performed regularly from September 1796 through April 1799. [17] Meanwhile, for the April 1795 performance of The Children in the Wood , the New York Magazine introduced Samuel Stockwell as: A new candidate for public favour, in the person of a boy about six years old, who has taken the part of the little girl , since the departure of Miss Solomons [sic]. This child may really be considered as a phenomenon. He went through the part, though he had never before been on the stage, with surprising ease and propriety. The song of the ‘Waxen Doll,’ was sung with greater strength of voice, and with equal accuracy, as it had been by Miss Solomons; and we doubt not, that after being a little more accustomed to the stage, he will fully compensate us for her loss. [18] “Little Sam,” as he was called in a 1798 prelude that opened the Park Theatre, may have been the son of Constable Samuel Stockwell, initially hired to keep order at the John Street Theatre. [19] Over this small boy’s extensive career with the OAC, he played at least a dozen recorded roles through 1798 and earned a weekly salary of $4, the lowest salary among stock actors. [20] In 1792, Harriet Sully, the youngest of Matthew Sully’s nine children, made her stage debut at age three as her sister’s “tiny foot page” in Robin Hood with West and Bignall’s company in Richmond. [21] At “only five years of age,” she sang an operatic song and probably pantomimed with her siblings in Charleston. [22] After her mother’s death, she traveled with her sister, Charlotte, and her husband, Mr. Chambers, to perform with the OAC and Chestnut companies, as well as Rickett’s Circus. [23] In Boston, she played the Girl to Harding’s Boy in The Children in the Wood where she “appeared miraculously gifted. The sweet melody of her voice, and the justness and vivacity of her acting, were equally objects of wonder and applause.” [24] Although southern cast lists remain incomplete, she performed at least ten known roles through 1798. [25] Seven British Plays The remarkable acting careers of these four children were made possible by the US premieres of seven British plays selected (and usually altered) by actor-managers and orchestral maestros. The Children in the Wood by Thomas Morton, with music by Samuel Arnold and additional songs by Benjamin Carr, initiated the first major vehicle that mandated two short-stature bodies for adults to carry and hug with kisses by kneeling down to their level. [26] Seeing these affectionate moments and watching the older Boy support his tired sister during a thunderstorm in the woods surely affected family audiences. This hour-long afterpiece never failed to delight and, despite having been “hacked out of its novelty” by 1809, its child actors reminded one critic “of those times when the talents of their parents were in a similar way exerted for the public gratification.” [27] From its premiere in 1794 through 1810 alone, this classic play was performed over 130 times in ten cities until the Civil War. [28] Perhaps the fact that Morton was orphaned at age four attracted him not only to adapt but to revise this otherwise tragic story of a popular 1595 Norfolk ballad as a two-act comic opera for the stage. Rather than orphan two children, Morton keeps the parents alive (away in India) and joyfully reunites the family through the fortuitous heroism of Walter, a poor carpenter who kills the children’s would-be murderer, rescues the returning parents from ruffians, and critically wounds the evil, aristocratic, guardian uncle in the bargain. In addition to delivering dialogue within six scenes, this musical also required the Boy to sing one duet with Josephine, Walter’s fiancé, and the “very puny little” Girl to sing three solos (22). Throughout the play’s tension-filled progression, the children’s honest naiveté undercuts the sentimentality of their otherwise tragic oppressions through constant juxtapositions of serious and comic situations. [29] For example, when Walter drops his sword while fighting Oliver, the henchman, the Girl instinctively retrieves it for him. After an offstage pursuit, Walter reenters: Walter: I never knew I had so much pluck in me. Damme, how I laid his timbers. Come forth, my little tremblers, I am your champion. Girl: Have you kill’d Oliver? Walter: Dead as a door-nail. Boy: Go kill him again. Girl: Such a rogue as he cannot be too dead. (29) Likewise, in the final scene when Walter joyfully rediscovers these “poor innocents” (29) reunited with their parents, the Girl simply says, “I’m very hungry” (53). To conclude the children’s emblematic journey, the adult chorus sings, “Have we sav’d this Girl and Boy? . . . Are we out of the wood, sirs?” (56-57). These rhetorical lyrics appear to question whether Federalists and Republicans were able to save the nation’s children, especially during yellow fever epidemics that struck port cities in the 1790s. While dramatizing the triumph of innocence over villainy, seeing two children survive the treacheries of a sinister aristocrat likely affirmed the moral duty of both political parties to ensure children’s welfare at all costs. Moreover, the unlikely heroism of two children and a lowly carpenter may have fortified Republican’s defense of common laborers who were literally and figuratively building the nation’s prosperity. While The Children presented an ordinary carpenter, The Purse by James C. Cross with William Reeve’s music, introduced Will Steady, the Benevolent Tar of the subtitle, who spoke in sailors’ own lingo, thereby assuring its widespread popularity across the eastern seaboard. [30] This one-act afterpiece required the acting and singing services of our four actors as an eight-year-old Page. Considered the first nautical drama, productions also included Gothic scenic elements, having been based on “an incident said to have happened to a page in the service of the late King of Prussia.” [31] From its US premiere in January 1795 through 1815, over 160 performances were staged in major cities and towns. [32] After an eight-year voyage at sea and their escape from an Algerian slaver, Will Steady returns home with Edmund, the Baron’s son who has been presumed dead. Once inside the castle, Will sees a boy sleeping, reads an affecting letter from his distressed mother, and decides to leave one purse of his money in the boy’s pocket to alleviate their poverty. Upon reuniting with his faithful wife, Sally, he learns that she has been cruelly separated from their son who dutifully serves as the Baron’s page at the castle. Meanwhile, the Baron’s wicked steward, Theodore, seeking to hide his embezzlements, accuses the Page of stealing the purse found in his pocket. Pleading for his innocence, the Page “sobs bitterly [and] bursts into a flood of tears” (26). Just before the infuriated Baron banishes him, Will arrives in the nick of time to reveal the truth with Sally and Edmund on his heels. When Sally runs to embrace the Page, Will instantly realizes the boy is his own son and “catches him in his arms” (28). Yet rather than exile the actual thief, the benevolent Page, “a true chip of [his father’s] old block,” urges the Baron to reconsider: “Though Theodore has been bad, my Lord, if you’d forgive him perhaps he’d mend, and love and thank you for it” (29). The Baron agrees, happily reunited with his own son who leads the final chorus with Will and Sally proclaiming “Our dangers [are] o’er” (31-32). Indeed, as spectators well knew, had Will and Edmund not first escaped the actual US dangers of Algerian enslavements by Barbary pirates during this period, they would not have reunited with their families. Beyond this political premise, seeing a child-servant argue for clemency and overcome the dangers of an aristocrat’s misplaced blame may also have encouraged political partisans to practice benevolence toward their fellow citizens. The fact that a common sailor willingly shares his purse with less fortunate others could also have counseled elite spectators to share their privileged wealth more freely with hard-working indentured servants and sea-faring laborers. A New York reviewer praised “this little piece” for its “well-executed” songs, especially those sung by Hodgkinson’s Steady and Harding’s Page that “were encored loudly .” [33] In Boston, one critic found Harding’s Page “delicate and affecting,” believing she “promises future excellence,” while others argued over Hodgkinson’s alterations of his renamed American Tar . [34] In 1796, while Margaret Solomon edified Bostonians in October, Harriet Sully and Fanny L’Estrange competed within two December days across a Philadelphian street. [35] Misses Hogg, Arnold, and Gillespie also delighted audiences, respectively in Norfolk, Charleston, and Philadelphia, and Samuel Stockwell opened the new Park Theatre with his New York rendition in 1798. [36] Every One Has His Fault by Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald spoke more directly to aristocratic Federalists and Revolutionary War veterans by situating Britain’s and America’s failure to care for the worthy poor as a domestic matter in order to remedy economic inequalities. [37] Against a comic backdrop, this long-running, five-act tragi-comedy provided another cross-dressed opportunity for Harding, Solomon, and Sully to enamor audiences as Edward, a nine- to ten-year-old boy. [38] Its ensemble of domestic characters appealed to US spectators for its “faithful picture of the varied scenery of life” and its “judiciously alternate scenes of pathos and merriment.” [39] True to its title, each character displays his and her personal and social faults within contested marriages. Inchbald’s back story of a wise child, not without his own faults, presses the need for benevolent compassion among unforgiving aristocrats. Lord Norland has disinherited his daughter, Lady Eleanor, for marrying an impoverished Captain Irwin and vows never to pardon her. Nevertheless, eight years ago, he adopted a “half-starved boy,” his own grandchild, who was “forced” upon him by the child’s nurse (39). Before she died, she told Edward he was Norland’s grandchild, but Norland forbids him to speak of his parents. When Mr. Harmony remarks how much the boy is like his mother, Edward vaguely remembers her “kissing me, when she and my father went on board of a ship; and so hard she pressed me–I think I feel it now” (60). After their nine-year banishment in America, Edward’s parents return to London only to find that Captain Irwin’s gentrified friends refuse to lend him money to support his wife and other (offstage) children. Desperate to maintain his social status, Captain Irwin robs his father-in-law at gun point. Upon his capture, Edward reports to Norland that the deranged man’s “poor wife” begs him for mercy; but Norland rejects Edward’s “false conclusion” of equating the virtues of mercy and justice (61-62). To help the man’s wife, Edward exposes his fault by giving Lady Eleanor the retrieved pocketbook of bank-notes he has taken from Norland’s table and divulges his secret as Norland’s grandchild. Upon discovering her own lost child, Lady Eleanor begs her father’s forgiveness; but Norland, still cold-hearted, forces Edward to choose between them. After a moment’s hesitation, Edward takes his grandfather’s hand: “Farewell, my lord, –it almost breaks my heart to part from you; but if I have a choice, I must go with my mother” (76). Only after Harmony has reconciled others’ marital faults does Norland finally forgive his daughter, son-in-law, and grandson with joyful embraces. Having spread polite but contradictory falsehoods regarding each person’s opinions of others, Harmony has succeeded in restoring domestic peace, and “notwithstanding our numerous faults,” he sincerely wishes “that the world may speak well of us all–behind our backs” (88). Overall, this play reminded spectators that everyone has personal faults, regardless of age, class, and politics. Beyond this broad moral, hearing a virtuous child urge a callous aristocrat to practice merciful justice offered politicians a poignant model of striking compassion. Seeing this child give the aristocrat’s money to a distraught woman may have also struck spectators who knew of Revolutionary War officers’ inadequate pensions. By choosing his mother over a grandparent, this child’s decision also verified the strong maternal bonds of Republican motherhood. In New York, after “a young gentleman” attempted Edward in April 1794, Harding’s rendering was deemed “truly charming” in January 1795. [40] Subsequently, Misses Powell, Sully, Solomon, L’Estrange, and Gowen portrayed him, as did Masters Warrell and Shaw through 1798. [41] Upon seeing this “very excellent Comedy” in Baltimore, William Osborn Payne wrote that “Little Miss Hardinge [sic] as Edward played elegantly & astonishingly for so small a Child.” [42] The next child vehicle came from Henry Fielding who dramatized the Arthurian History of Tom Thumb as The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), a literary satire on heroic dramas. [43] Long after eleven-year-old Adam Hallam introduced this folkloric dwarf to the colonial stage in 1753, Solomon, Stockwell, and Harding each starred in Fielding’s farce and/or Kane O’Hara’s more condensed burletta (1780) from April 1795 through February 1798. [44] As Phyllis Dircks explains, the burletta’s success resulted from O’Hara’s “outrageous exaggeration, the clever use of literary and musical allusion, and unexpected comic bathos.” [45] By 1815, over seventy performances of Tom Thumb the Great had been staged across the north and south. [46] Unlike chapbook versions of this nursery tale, Fielding’s and O’Hara’s plot foregrounds love triangles sparked by tiny Tom’s impending marriage to a full-size princess, aptly named Huncamunca. Having captured Glumdalca, Queen of the Giants, King Arthur welcomes Tom back to court and grants his desire to marry Huncamunca as a reward. Yet Queen Dollalolla loves Tom secretly and conspires with Lord Grizzle to prevent the unimaginable match. This rebellious suitor, already enraged that “Arthur wrongs me [and] cheats me of my Huncamunca!”, readily agrees to stop Tom at all costs (O’Hara, 9). When Tom learns that Huncamunca is promised to Grizzle, he vows to kill him; for “I tell thee, Princess, had I been thy help-mate, We soon had peopled this whole realm with Thumbs”; to which Huncamunca replies, “O fie! I shudder at the gross idea!” (O’Hara, 14; cf. Fielding, 66). Bathetic comedy ensues when, during a climactic battle, Tom kills Grizzle (who has just killed Glumdalca) and declares, “Rebellion’s dead, and now–I’ll go to breakfast” (O’Hara, 19; Fielding, 90). However, as the Ghost of Gaffer Thumb has foretold, Noodle announces that a huge red Cow has devoured the great Tom Thumb; whereupon each thwarted lover kills another for revenge in quick succession, leaving the stage in a ridiculous heap of dead bodies. [47] O’Hara’s burletta adds a happy ending, inspired by The Opera of Operas (1733) by Eliza Haywood and William Hachett, in which Merlin conjures Tom out of the Cow’s mouth and raises the dead. [48] In a final gleeful “vaudeville,” Tom sings another sexually provocative verse: Come my Hunky–come my Pet, Love’s in haste, don’t stay him; Deep we are in Hymen’s debt. And ‘tis high time we pay him. (21) While the sexualized characterization of this lilliputian man-child counters the presumed sexual innocence of child actors, audiences readily accepted the common convention of casting children as Cupids. [49] Rather than remark upon Tom’s sexual innuendos, a Philadelphian critic observed how “Miss Solomon as Tom Thumb excited astonishment at her memory and the ease with which she went through the part,” while Elihu Hubbard Smith found Stockwell’s portrayal “admirable.” [50] Despite Tom’s voracious sexual appetite, girls represented him in breeches opposite older women playing Huncamunca. For instance, Margaret was paired with Mrs. Oldmixon, Miss Willems, and her mother; while Mary and Samuel flirted with Miss Arabella Brett (Mrs. Hodgkinson’s youngest sister), whom Dunlap characterized as “a child in years, but a woman in appearance.” [51] To heighten and widen physical proportions further against a child’s diminutive size, grotesque men often embodied the giant Glumdalca. As one Baltimore reviewer observed, “the large masculine form of [William] Rowson, in female habiliments, his full manly voice, whining out love for the dwarfish conqueror” also provoked considerable laughter. [52] Thus, Tom Thumb’s very character necessitated casting child actors to effectuate the ludicrous humor of this afterpiece to its greatest advantage. From his first entrance when Arthur lifts up this “tiny hero [and] pigmy giant queller” and then “sets him down” (O’Hara, 7) to his preposterous exit from an artificially constructed “Cow’s Mouth” (O’Hara, 20), Tom’s fictional presence as an actual child layered the play’s metaphorical meanings. As a socio-political capstone, O’Hara’s final chorus urged quarrelsome couples to: Let Discord cease, Let all in peace Go home and kiss their spouses. (22) In these ways, stagings of little Tommy Thumb affirmed his place in children’s nurseries as the narrative author of numerous other tales well into the nineteenth century. Watching a small child perform Tom Thumb’s heroic feats may have suggested that, no matter one’s size, each citizen held a moral duty to help solve the nation’s gigantic problems, particularly as refugees fled revolutionary rebellions occurring in France, Saint-Domingue (Haiti), and Ireland. O’Hara’s closing lyrics may have urged both political parties to cease their discordant debates over trade relationships with Britain and Caribbean colonies. If revenge-seeking spouses symbolized wars between Britain and France, then better to maintain US neutrality to ensure domestic peace at home. Having acquired Margaret Solomon, an invaluable child actor, the Chestnut company premiered John Rose’s The Prisoner; or, Female Heroism with Thomas Attwood’s music in May 1795. [53] To counter-balance its sentimental love triangles, this three-act musical romance featured the plucky heroism of the jailor’s children, Juliana and her younger brother, Narcisso, of unspecified ages. Wignell initially paired Margaret with “a young gentleman,” whereby her “astonishing powers never shone more conspicuously than as Juliana .” [54] The latter amateur was later exchanged for Miss Cassandra Gilaspie (or Gillespie), a petite, “little airy” dancer who had already played the Boy to Margaret’s Girl in The Children . [55] One year later, Mary teamed with Samuel in New York, and Miss Hardinge played with Harry Warrell in Philadelphia in 1798. [56] Although performed less than twenty times, primarily in northern cities, this afterpiece allowed child actors to showcase their physical prowess and strengthen their singing skills in three songs. [57] Within an unspecified military context (possibly some Spanish colony), Bernardo has imprisoned Don Marcos for two years for attempting to free “mutinous slaves” (1). Bernardo’s sister, Theresa, begs the jailor’s children to free her beloved Marcos from prison before her brother seeks his death for denying his marriage to Clara, Marcos’s sister. While their besotted French-speaking father, Lewis, preoccupies himself with more wine in a room adjoining the dungeon, the children steal his keys and release Marcos during a physically energetic scene done in pantomime (19). Upon recapturing Marcos and his servant Roberto, Bernardo discovers his beloved Clara and her servant, Nina, disguised as soldiers, and both men agree to exchange their sisters in marriage. In the final jubilant chorus, the two sibling cupids sing the following lyrics: Good humour, peace and glee return, Let each enjoy the rising bliss; And brushing up his ruby lips, Prepare alike to sip and kiss. (27) Watching children free a self-purported abolitionist may have resonated with northern spectators, particularly in Philadelphia and Boston, where slavery had been abolished since the early 1780s, and in New York where free and enslaved African Americans fought for their freedoms with white citizens. The unbridled patriotism of children freeing a wronged prisoner to unite him with his beloved may have affirmed abolitionists’ desires to keep African American families intact. In addition to Juliana’s heroism, seeing two young women disguised as soldiers could also have reminded spectators of women’s heroic roles at various encampments. Like previous lost-and-found-child dramas involving a lowly carpenter, a common sailor, and an impoverished captain, The Adopted Child featured Michael, a selfless fisherman who adopted a shipwrecked boy as his wealthy father, Sir Edmund, lay dying eight years ago. For this two-act musical drama by Samuel Birch and Thomas Attwood, Harding originated the titled child in May 1796, followed by Misses L’Estrange, Arnold, Solomon, Westray, Gillespie, and Sully through 1800. [58] Fifteen years later, this popular afterpiece had enjoyed well over 100 performances. [59] Like The Children and The Purse , this drama establishes its premise inside a Gothic castle where Mr. Record, an old steward, and a “childish” maid prepare for the arrival of Edmund’s suspicious relation to claim this titled estate. When Sir Bertrand and his steward, Le Sage, arrive at Michael’s ferry, Michael rejects their bribed offer to educate his already literate son who learns “Nature’s independence” through a seaman’s honest labors (17). Knowing that the Boy’s “life is fought secretly,” he finally divulges his eight-year-long secret to his wife, Nell, of how he came to adopt the “little boy” by promising not to open his trunk until Edmund’s officially declared death (13). Once Record confirms the baron’s death, Michael unlocks the trunk and reads a paper revealing his adopted son’s lawful claim to the estate. Upon learning that the evil-doers have stolen the Boy, Michael searches the forest and hears his son singing inside a convent, where Clara, Edmund’s daughter, has been “secluded from the hated passion of Sir Bertrand” (9) with her maid and now protects the captured Boy. He then procures Le Sage’s letter from the Boy’s would-be smuggler, dons his coat, and shows the letter to Clara, proving Bertrand’s deceitful plan. Before leaving with Michael in his “diabolical” disguise, the fearless Boy asks, “Where are we going? If you mean to kill me, let me tell my beads [his father’s rosary] first–“; to which Michael answers, “Kill you!–O, No!” (34) as they head for the castle. Upon reading the paper that Michael has accidently dropped, Clara discovers the Boy to be her long-lost brother. Inside the castle’s chapel, she confronts Bertrand with her father’s will on behalf of her brother’s “injur’d innocence” (35) and embraces the Boy, while Michael justifies the trunk’s additional documents delivered by Nell. In the play’s final moments, Record “asserts the right of our new Baron against injury and oppression” (38). With a metaphorical nod to political partisans, Michael reminds Nell: “it is enough for us to reflect that we have done our duty, and bore up so steadily against wind and tide to port, that we shall always find anchorage sure, and shelter from the storm” (38). The final obligatory chorus reinforces his analogical meanings “As loud huzzas unite” with spectators’ applause (38). Losing parents in recurrent shipwrecks forced many surviving orphans to wander port cities until wealthy citizens founded orphanages. Yet as Republicans well knew, common laborers also housed and educated orphans as apprentices in their respective trades. The Boy’s astute dialogue and songs not only substantiated his literacy and religiosity but also forecast his future independence as a virtuous democratic citizen. Finally, The Spoiled Child , a wildly popular, two-act farce by Isaac Bickerstaff, presents the outrageous antics of Little Pickle who wreaks havoc while home from his school holiday. [60] Miss Pickle chastises her widowed brother for failing to severely punish his son. Even after killing her parrot and crippling his father’s mare, Little Pickle always has some virtuous reason to explain his vicious actions and win back Pickle’s heart. When Miss Pickle threatens to leave her fortune to Mr. Tagg, Pickle agrees to her scheme–Little Pickle must be exchanged for Tommy, because his former nurse, Margery, has supposedly “confessed” to switching them at birth (15). Yet after colluding with Margery, Little Pickle reappears back home disguised as Tommy, a returning sailor wearing a carrot-colored wig. He resumes his insults toward his “granne” aunt (22) and plots further revenge with his younger sister, Maria, who agrees to play-act his lover. Upon discovering the young couple, Pickle disclaims Tommy to stop their unthinkable courtship, locks Maria in her room, and then receives his son’s letter of hearty repentance. Meanwhile, Little Pickle overhears Tagg plot his elopement with Miss Pickle to obtain her casket of jewels and surreptitiously sews their clothes together, forcing a farcical rupture when Tagg exits quickly to escape Pickle’s entrance and Miss Pickle leaves to retrieve her jewels. As Pickle conceals himself, Little Pickle returns in the guise of Tagg wearing a long cloak. As he about to take the casket from Miss Pickle, Pickle stops them; whereupon Little Pickle throws off his disguises and again wins his father’s forgiveness for having prevented his aunt’s elopement. However, in a brief Epilogue, Little Pickle confides to amused spectators that “I shall be tempted again to transgress” (36). As Anne Varty aptly deduces, “[Little Pickle’s] behaviour, governed by greed for instant gratification of desires, is a perfect model for the justification of Evangelically inspired notions that children manifested original sin and that their defiant will had to be broken to secure their redemption and their divinely ordered subservience to their parents.” [61] These themes likely resonated among US evangelists who baptized their children during the Second Great Awakening. Even among secularists, Little Pickle’s farcical frolics confirmed the inherent difficulties involved in raising dutiful children as virtuous citizens. In sum, the nine child characters in these seven plays evidenced divergent portraits of childhood that incorporated oppressed innocents, benevolent exemplars, moral philosophers, sexual lilliputians, patriotic heroes, recuperated barons, and scheming tricksters with overlapping traits. As suggested above, these child roles may have impacted adult spectators, based on concurrent socio-political events that affected children’s livelihoods during the 1790s. Above all, these British transplants cultivated emerging ideals of US democracy and greater equity among socio-economic classes with requisite poetic justice. After weathering dark and stormy conflicts, each text ended with calls for unified peace, harmonious love, and merciful justice for those individuals whose human faults earned them forgiveness. Significantly, the true identities of six lost-and-found children were restored and reclaimed by their rightful families, while the other three children united lost-and-found couples with warm embraces and blissful kisses. In turn, these familial themes counseled biological parents and adoptive guardians to protect and nurture US youth against all socio-political odds. To effectuate these sentiments, child actors needed to memorize and articulate pages of dialogue, master eighteen songs in six musical afterpieces, and prove their physical agility with disciplined ease–all before hundreds of spectators in cavernous playhouses. Somewhat patronizing reviews of their performances reveal astonished observers who simply could not believe that children could accomplish such feats. Yet achieve these successes they did, largely because adult actors, former novices themselves, firmly believed in and nurtured their competent capabilities. Cross-Gender and Cross-Age Casting Conventions Tracking the casting conventions used in these plays further explains the circumstances in which child actors earned their opportunities in relation to women. In 1759, when Lewis and Adam Hallam outgrew boys’ roles, their seven-year-old cousin, Nancy Hallam, introduced England’s breeches convention by playing two Shakesperean boys. [62] Thus, as boys’ voices changed upon reaching puberty, boys deferred to girls whose higher voices, and presumably shorter bodies, made them more suitable for particular child parts. With the rare exceptions of Masters Stockwell and Gray who played the Girl with her waxen doll in The Children , boys seldom embodied female characters. [63] For instance, in respective productions of Gustavas Vasa in Baltimore and Boston, Susan Wall and Cordelia Powell portrayed Gustava, the hero’s sister; but in Norfolk, Master Gray was renamed “Austava.” [64] For male servants in O’Keefe’s comic operas, Masters most often performed the Irish messenger in The Poor Soldier , Benin (“a Black”) in The Highland Reel , and Goliah in The Young Quaker until 1796 when Margaret and Mary assumed the latter two roles before Samuel earned Goliah in 1797. [65] Although Master Walsh first embodied the Adopted Child in London, it does not appear that boys assumed his role until 1803, when Master Joseph Harris represented him, ironically under the adoptive care of Mr. and Mrs. Francis. [66] For other boy roles, casting was often determined by the Jordanian demands of Mrs. Thomas Marshall, thereby denying advantages to some children. After twenty-nine-year-old Dorothy Jordan created a sensation in Dublin by making Little Pickle her signature role in 1790, actor-managers treated such “romps” as a virtual line of business solely for more experienced actresses. Charles Durang described Mrs. Marshall as an attractive, very petite, five-foot-tall woman “having a round face, an arch and sprightly expression of features, with sparkling eyes . . . . She possessed a melodious powerful and extensive soprano voice, which she used with skill and musical precision.” [67] Therefore, for the US premiere of Every One Has His Fault in March 1794, she initially adopted Edward at the Chestnut. [68] After Master Warrell played Edward in June for unknown reasons, Durang remarked that “It became necessary to change the performer to Mrs. Francis. Mrs. Marshall subsequently made a great sensation” in this role, because “The beauties of her Edward . . . were dwelt upon . . . as the perfection of the art. The impressiveness of the affecting scene between Lady Eleanor Irvine [sic] and Edward . . . drew tears from the most enlightened audience.” [69] Despite such plaudits for this “peculiarly affecting” scene, “Roscius” chastised the actress for a “defect in her attitude” by not walking “sufficiently erect” in a more dignified manner, perhaps “imputed to her bashfulness in appearing in male habiliments.” [70] After eight-year-old Miss Menage originated the Page in London, Mrs. Marshall donned his apparel for the US premiere of The Purse in Philadelphia in January 1795, one month before Mary introduced him to New Yorkers. [71] In July, Margaret appropriated the part from Mrs. Marshall, having proven her mettle to Wignell. [72] In addition to five other girls and two boys, Harry Warrell also earned this androgynous role in Baltimore in 1798. [73] While child actors sustained these parts, the titled boy of The Spoiled Child literally spoiled casting opportunities for at least three girls. Once again, the indomitable Mrs. Marshall premiered Little Pickle in March 1794 and controlled her “unequaled performances” through 1812 as Mrs. Wilmot. [74] When Margaret finally wrested this prize in June 1796, Mrs. Rowson’s prologue exhorted audiences to “Forget for this night the charming Mrs. Marshall.” [75] Yet Solomon and Eliza Arnold faced another Jordanian competitor in Mrs. Williamson who ruled Little Pickle from her US debut in Boston at age twenty-four in January 1796 through her untimely death in October 1799 under her husband’s management. When the Williamsons left Boston in April 1797, Mrs. Marshall resumed Little Pickle in May, although Margaret held onto Edward and the Page. [76] As for nine-year-old Eliza, she had recently played Little Pickle in Portland under her mother’s tutelage. Here, an observer felt astonished by the powers of “her youth, her beauty, her innocence.” [77] Despite such raptures, manager John Sollee cast Mrs. Williamson as Little Pickle and relegated Eliza to Maria for his northern company. [78] Beginning in August 1797, a contentious “war” erupted at two New York theatres between Sollee at John Street and Wignell at Greenwich Street a few blocks away. [79] Based on Odell’s extant cast lists, it appears that Sollee used Eliza very little, other than for a walk-on in his production of The Battle of Bunker Hill . Previous performances by Wignell’s child actors suggest that Harry Warrell may have played Tom Thumb, and Fanny L’Estrange likely repeated the Adopted Child and the Page. [80] However, Sollee did not cast Eliza in these latter two roles until his retreat back to Charleston. At the end of this bitter New York season, Mrs. Marshall reclaimed Edward to benefit Philadelphia’s yellow fever sufferers, and Miss Hardinge [sic] made her US debut as a page in The Orphan and may have been paired with Harry or Master Warren in The Children . [81] Only when a group of rebellious actors left Sollee to play in Wilmington and a renegade Charleston company was Eliza able to reprise Little Pickle under Mr. Edgar’s management. [82] Unlike Margaret and Eliza, Mary evaded these competitions, given Hodgkinson’s stalwart casting in which she maintained Little Pickle over his wife from March 1795 through 1804. [83] Meanwhile, across southern circuits, Mrs. Ann [Bignall] West held Little Pickle until Mrs. Williamson arrived in Charleston in November 1797. [84] When Mr. and Mrs. Chambers returned from Ireland in July 1799, Alexandre Placide hired them for his Charleston season and cast Harriet as Edward and the Girl in The Children later that winter. [85] In December, after playing Little Pickle in Philadelphia, Mrs. Marshall abruptly left the Chestnut over a casting dispute and assumed the roles Mrs. Chambers had taken after Mrs. Williamson’s death. [86] The following year, Harriet watched Mrs. Marshall play the Adopted Child and Little Pickle in January and February, until Placide cast her in these roles in March, perhaps with Marshall’s coaching. [87] With the exception of these contested roles, only plays calling for male and female siblings guaranteed the casting of child actors over older women, as in the cases of The Children and The Prisoner . In 1798, Stockwell and Miss Hogg played Mrs. Bland’s children in Dunlap’s short-lived production of André ; and, for his more successful adaptation of Kotzebue’s The Stranger , they were accompanied by four-year-old George H. Barrett. [88] In early 1800, Sully and Stockwell initiated Cora’s “infant” boy as a novitiate role for countless child actors in adaptations of Kotzebue’s Pizarro in Peru that never failed to inspire pathos for over six decades. [89] Subsequent Lives and Legacies Based on casting decisions initially made by Hodgkinson and Wignell, these acting conventions explain how and why Harding originated the Boy in The Children and the Adopted Child; while Solomon initiated the Girl in The Children , Juliana in The Prisoner , and revived Tom Thumb, with affirmative support from Stockwell and Sully. After successful portrayals of Edward, the Page, and Little Pickle, child actors added more solo and sibling roles to their repertoires in 1800. In these ways, our four actors established foundational legacies for concomitant and successive child performers into the nineteenth century. Having been tutored assiduously by their parents or guardians as salaried apprentices, they advanced their theatrical careers into adolescence. In early 1799, Mr. Solomon left his family to perform in Charleston, while Mrs. Solomon and her two daughters played in Boston through April and then rejoined Wignell’s company in December through November 1802. [90] In February 1803, Margaret reunited with her father in Charleston where she made her first appearance there as the Adopted Child. [91] She rejoined the Chestnut company in December for performances in Annapolis, Philadelphia, and Baltimore at least through June 1804 when she reprised Tom Thumb. [92] Whether she left the stage thereafter at or after age sixteen, possibly to marry, remains an ongoing mystery. Mary Harding remained in Hodgkinson’s household through mid-August 1802 until she married Mr. G. Marshall. [93] She later joined Placide’s company in Charleston under Hodgkinson’s management. [94] For her first appearance there in February 1804, Carpenter described her as a person who has “that delicate fragility which never fails to interest the male sex. Her face is expressive and strongly marked by the hand of Thalia. She seems to be adept (for her age) in lively comedy, and received and deserved the applause due to good acting.” [95] Sometime after Hodgkinson’s death from yellow fever in September 1805, she returned to the Park where his two daughters, Fanny and Rosina, memorialized him in The Children . [96] After meeting William Clark, a fellow actor, she married him in Charleston in January 1807; and, in June 1809, their daughter, Phoebe, debuted as Cora’s child in Norfolk. [97] In 1811, one month after Phoebe played Gustava at the Richmond Theatre, a disastrous fire erupted there on December 26, but the couple managed to escape through a backstage door and survived this tragedy. [98] Two years later, the family returned to the Park, where Phoebe played the Girl in The Children , and they continued to perform in various cities at least through 1823. [99] After playing numerous supportive boys in New York, Samuel was announced as Mr. Stockwell in 1806, while Fanny Hodgkinson played Tom Thumb. [100] He then joined Mary for two seasons in Charleston and subsequently performed in Providence and Boston. [101] In 1810, he married Catherine Henry in Boston; and their son, Samuel B. Stockwell, played Tom Thumb in 1824, among other child roles, and became a highly regarded scenic and panoramic painter. [102] From November 1799 through July 1800, Harriet Sully performed classic child roles in Charleston and Norfolk and again sang “I Never Will be Married” at age twelve. [103] Ironically, after spending time in Antigua with her sister, she returned to Norfolk in 1801 to live with her Aunt Margaretta Sully West “until she could be married.” [104] After performing there for another season, she announced her retirement from the stage in June 1802 at age fourteen and married Dr. Joseph Porcher three years later. [105] Conclusion Reclaiming the professional achievements of four major child actors validates their crucial significance not only as theatrical exemplars of late eighteenth-century childhood and performance but also as dramatic socio-political participants in US democracy. Despite childist or prejudicial attitudes toward children, child actors should be touted as equally important stars in US theatre. The foundational evidence in these four, necessarily detailed, case studies offers historians a dynamic model for investigating the continuities of successive child actors and other disruptions of age-appropriate casting through US premieres of additional dramas into the nineteenth century. Notably, this microhistory corroborates Dunlap’s claim made in 1832: “By those who have consulted the actor’s calling a good and reputable one, children have been trained to it, and are among the best and worthiest, as artists and members of society.” [106] Based on the theatrical conditions of the 1790s, all stock companies could have been defined as Theatres for Young Audiences, given the work of numerous child performers, local supernumeraries, call-boys, and other young assistants and servants who labored on and off stages for child and adult spectators. As Durang asserted, “The theatre was then a school” and a close-knit “family” where highly respected actresses “cultivated intellect and polished manners” among young members in the green room. [107] Like humble but great Tom Thumbs, child actors had done their duties but ever so much more as significant players who should be remembered in the annals of US theatre as verisimilar justifications for age-appropriate casting today. I extend my deepest gratitude to Heather Nathans for her astute scholarship and Caitlin Donnelly, Head of Public Services at KU’s Spencer Research Library, who generously shared and extended our mutual enthusiasms for Miss M. Solomon. References [1] Henry Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great , ed. Darryl P. Domingo (New York: Broadview Press, 2013), 30. [2] Shauna Vey, Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), 7-9. [3] John Howard Payne, “An Accurate List of the Infant Prodigies. . . .” The Thespian Mirror 1, no. 8 (1806): 61. [4] See also my previous companion essays “An Epoch of Child Spectators in Early US Theatre,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 10, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 21-39; and “Without Distinction of Age: The Pivotal Roles of Child Actors and Their Spectators in Nineteenth-Century Theatre,” The Lion and the Unicorn 36, no. 2 (April 2012): 117-35. [5] Jeffrey H. Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11. [6] Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). [7] All cast lists have been compiled from the following sources: George O. Seilhamer, A History of the American Theatre (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1969; repr. 1888-91), 3 vols.; David Ritchey, comp. and ed. A Guide to the Baltimore Stage in the Eighteenth Century: A History and Day Book Calendar (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982); Eola Willis, The Charleston Stage in the XVIII Century (Columbia, SC: State Company, 1924); Mary Julia Curtis, “The Early Charleston Stage: 1703-1798” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1968); George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage , vol. 1 and 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927); Thomas Clark Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1933); Mary Ruth Michael, “A History of the Professional Theatre in Boston from the Beginning to 1815” (PhD diss., Radcliffe College, 1941); Joseph N. Ireland, Records of the New York Stage , vol. 1 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968; rprt. 1866-67); Martin Staples Shockley, The Richmond Stage 1784-1812 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977); Lucy B. Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk, Virginia, 1788-1812” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1993); Richard P. Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide in Charleston, 1794-1812,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1983); J. Max Patrick, Savannah’s Pioneer Theater from Its Origins to 1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1953); Charles Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage between the years 1749 and 1855 (originally in Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch , 1854-1860); Geddeth Smith, The Brief Career of Eliza Poe (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1988); and, George O. Willard, History of the Providence Stage, 1762-1891 (Providence: Rhode Island News Company, 1891). [8] Heather Nathans investigates the Solomon family in Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 89-97, 148-49. Although she cannot verify their Jewish identities with certainty, she speculates that Mr. Solomon may have been among the first Jewish American actors “from the South,” having first performed in Charleston in April 1785. Pilkinton identifies his first name as “Nathan” when he performs with his wife in Norfolk in early 1791, 542. See also O. G. Sonneck, Early Concert-Life in America (1731-1800 ) (Leipzig: Breitkopt and Härtel, 1907), 229, 146 and Early Opera in America (New York: G. Schirmer, 1915), 152. [9] Ritchey, A Guide , 123, 25, in Maryland Journal , 16 July 1793. [10] Seilhamer, A History , 3: 258-60, 105. [11] “Theatrical Register No. 3,” New York Magazine (January 1795): 1. [12] Aurora (20 March 1795), qtd. in Susan L. Porter, With an Air Debonair: Musical Theatre in America, 1785-1815 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 244. [13] William Dunlap, A History of the American Theatre from its Origins to 1832 (1832; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 199. Billy Harbin notes that Harding had been his ward “over a year previously” with no source, in “The Career of John Hodgkinson in the American Theatre” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1970), 151, note 5. If true, Harding could have played boy servants in earlier OAC productions lacking complete cast lists. [14] John Hodgkinson, Narrative of His Connection with the Old American Company (New York: J. Oram, 1797), 15; Dunlap, A History , 277. [15] “Theatrical Register,” New York Magazine 6 no. 1 (January 1795): 1; Daily Advertiser , 13 February 1795, qtd. in Odell, Annals , 1:402. [16] Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 301. [17] Michael, “A History of the Professional Theatre in Boston,” 2:67-117; Dunlap, A History , 146. As an apprentice, “Croaker” also recalled seeing the family perform for two weeks in Greenfield, MA, in the Boston Courier , 12 November 1849, note, 3. [18] “Theatrical Register,” New York Magazine 6, no. 4 (April 1795): 194 (emphasis in original). [19] William Milns, All in a Bustle: or the New House (New York: Literary Printing Office, 1798), 15; William Duncan, The New York Directory and Register (New York: Swords, 1794), 178, 238. [20] Seilhamer, A History , 3:323-24, 393, 395; Odell, Annals , 2:6, 21; Ireland, Records , 1:134; Dunlap, A History , 277. [21] Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 64, 70, 76. [22] Willis, The Charleston Stage , 217. [23] Seilhamer, A History , 3:222-24, 270-71; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 328; Michael, “A History,” 1:100-01. [24] Federal Orrery , 12 November 1795, qtd. in Michael, “A History,” 1:109. [25] Gaps in children’s performance records here and elsewhere may also be explained by their attendance at schools to learn literacy skills. [26] Susan L. Porter, ed. British Opera in America: Children in the Wood (1795) . . ., vol. 1 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), xv-xvii (hereafter The Children cited in text from the OAC’s 1795 publication). [27] “Theatrical Register,” New York Magazine 6 no. 1 (January 1795): 1; “Theatrical Register,” The Ramblers’ Magazine (2 January 1809): 89. [28] Porter, British Opera , xv. [29] Barry Sutcliffe, introduction to Plays by George Colman the Younger and Thomas Morton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 32-36. [30] J. C. Cross, The Purse (London: William Lane, 1794), in Literature Online at www.literature.proquest.com (hereafter cited in text). [31] New York Magazine (Feb 1795). [32] Porter, With an Air Debonair , 413; Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity , 284-86. [33] New York Magazine (Feb 1795) (emphasis in original). [34] Federal Orrery (5 November 1795), qtd. in Michael, “A History,” 1:105, 103. [35] Michael, “A History,” 2:83; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 313-14. [36] Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 495; Smith, The Brief Career of Eliza Poe , 135; Ireland, Records , 1:174. Although Gillespie’s performance as the Page in June 1796 was announced as “Being her last appearance upon any stage” (Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 301), she continued to perform over the next four years with Mrs. West’s company before marrying Thomas C. West in 1800 (Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 478-79). [37] Mrs. Inchbald, ed. Every One Has His Fault , in The British Theatre , vol. 23 (London: Longman, et al., 1808) (hereafter cited in text); Katherine S. Green, “Mr. Harmony and the Events of January 1793: Elizabeth Inchbald’s Every One Has His Fault ,” Theatre Journal 56, no. 1 (2004): 55-58. [38] Seilhamer, A History , 3:119, 347. [39] The Portfolio (21 Feb 1801). [40] Seilhamer, A History , 3:119; New York Magazine (Feb 1795). [41] Michael, “A History,” 2:29, 45, 70, 490; Ritchey, A Guide , 215; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 349; Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 122. “Master Warrell” could have been James, the eldest of three brothers hired as dancers with their parents; or, more likely, Thomas who played around forty utility boys, including Augustus in Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers , from 1794 to 1798. Thomas was announced as “Master” or “Mr. T. Warrell” irregularly in 1797. Beginning in June 1797, Harry performed Tom Thumb, the Page, and the Boy in The Children and Narcisso with Miss Hardinge [sic], after first appearing as Leo the Lion in a harlequinade two and a half years earlier (Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 235, 366-67; Ritchey, A Guide , 219-20, 227). [42] An Unconscious Autobiography: William Osborn Payne’s Diary and Letters 1796 to 1804 , ed. Thatcher T. P. Luquer (New York: Privately Printed, 1938), 23. [43] Fielding’s potential source is no longer extant; in Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies , 97 (hereafter cited in text). [44] Seilhamer, A History , 1:61; Kane O’Hara, Tom Thumb , “A burletta . . . Altered from Henry Fielding,” (London: Barker and Son, 1805), in Literature Online at www.literature.proquest.com (hereafter cited in text). It remains unclear which version, or amalgamation, companies actually produced. Cast lists for the Chestnut’s productions in Philadelphia include Cleora and Mustacha, Huncamunca’s two maids, indicating Fielding’s original (Seilhamer, A History , 3:184; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 248, 267, 278, 391). O’Hara renames them Frizaletta and Plum and reduces their dialogue to one line each. For subsequent Baltimore performances, Seilhamer indicates O’Hara’s authorship (3:194) but with a cast change for Mustacha (3:200); and, Ritchey specifies Fielding’s “operatical farce” ( A Guide , 298, 315) or “burletta” (218) with his named maids (153, 160, 182, 199, 219). In Boston, Michael specifies O’Hara’s adaptation with Cleora and Mustachia [sic] (“A History,” 2:89). A January 1798 advertisement in New York’s Weekly Museum announces “a musical burletta,” albeit with Fielding’s full title (Odell insert after 1:476). See table inserts (n.p.) in Sonneck, Early Opera , which presume O’Hara’s version with music by Arne and Markordt. [45] Phyllis T. Dircks, The Eighteenth-Century English Burletta (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1999), 99-100. [46] Porter, With an Air Debonair , 493; Willis, The Charleston Stage , 353; Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 185. [47] See drawing in V. C. Clinton-Baddeley, The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1660 (London: Methuen, 1952), 60. [48] Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies , 145-50. [49] For example, when Harding recited an epilogue as Cupid, the New York Magazine thought “she looked indeed ‘the little God of Love’” (February 1795), an observation probably true for Stockwell’s Cupid in another pantomime (Seilhamer, A History , 3:324). [50] Qtd. in Seilhamer, A History , 3:175; The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith , ed. James E. Cronin (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1973), 318. [51] Seilhamer, A History , 3:184, 200; Dunlap, A History , 151; Odell, Annals , 2:10. [52] Maryland Journal , 17 August 1795, qtd. in Ritchey, A Guide , 29. [53] John Rose, The Prisoner (London: Lowndes, 1792), in Eighteenth Century Collections Online at www.galegroup.com (hereafter cited in text). [54] Philadelphia Gazette (n.d.), qtd. in Seilhamer, A History , 3:175. [55] Seilhamer, A History , 3:183, 205-06, 209. [56] Seilhamer, A History , 3:323-24; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 366. [57] Porter, With an Air Debonair , 480. [58] Samuel Birch, The Adopted Child (Boston: Edes, 1798), in Eighteenth Century Collections Online at www.galegroup.com (hereafter cited in text). To characterize relational appearances between a marriageable sister and her much younger brother, adolescent or married women portrayed Clara, including Miss Broadhurst, Mrs. Hodgkinson, Mrs. Warrell, Mrs. Graupner, Mrs. Placide, and Miss Ellen Westray in Seilhamer, A History , 3:323; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 333; Curtis, “The Early Charleston Stage,” 398; Michael, “A History,” 2:91, 98, 117; Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 497, 546; Sodders, 2:455. [59] Porter, With an Air Debonair , 428. [60] Isaac Bickerstaff, The Spoiled Child (Dublin: Booksellers, 1792), in Literature Online at www.literature.proquest.com (hereafter cited in text); Porter, With an Air Debonair , 489-90. [61] Anne Varty, Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 114. [62] Seilhamer, A History , 1:144; Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 35-38. [63] Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 99. [64] Ritchey, A Guide , 69; Seilhamer, A History , 3:235; Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 481. [65] Seilhamer, A History , 3:327, 395; Michael, “A History,” 2:73, 82. [66] Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 43. Stockwell may have played this boy in December 1798, but Seilhamer, Ireland, and Odell do not provide cast lists. [67] Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 40. Mrs. Marshall’s birth year is unknown. See entry for Lydia Webb in Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses . . . in London , vol. 15 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 314-17. [68] Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 204. Sixteen-year-old Harriet Grist originated Edward in London, based on Mrs. Inchbald’s recommendation, in James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald (London: Bentley, 1833), 1:308. [69] Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 40, 44; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 217, 224; Ritchey, A Guide , 132; and see note 41. [70] Minerva , 20 February 1796. [71] Seilhamer, A History , 3:172, 183, 110, 115-16; Porter, With an Air Debonair , 480. [72] Seilhamer, A History , 3:193, 199. [73] Seilhamer, A History , 3:290; Ritchey, A Guide , 227. [74] Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 40; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 204, 206; Odell, Annals , 2:386. [75] Qtd. in Seilhamer, A History , 3:204-05; Ritchey, A Guide , 203. In September 1796, Mr. and Mrs. Marshall were hired by John Williamson as first singers at Boston’s Federal Theatre (Michael, “A History,” 1:138-39). [76] Michael, “A History,” 2:60, 70, 83, 87. [77] Qtd. in Smith, The Brief Career of Eliza Poe , 27. [78] Smith, The Brief Career of Eliza Poe , 33. [79] Odell, Annals , 1:445-70. [80] Ritchey, A Guide , 219; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 313, 333, 348. [81] Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 356; Ritchey, A Guide , 229. [82] Smith, The Brief Career of Eliza Poe , 39-42, 135. [83] Odell, Annals , 1:385, 424; Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 2:551. Mary deferred to Mrs. Williamson for one Boston night in July 1797; Michael, “A History,” 2:512. [84] Willis, The Charleston Stage , 206; Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 111; Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 786; Curtis, “The Early Charleston Stage,” 391-93. [85] Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 252, note 43. [86] William Wood, Personal Recollections of the Stage (Philadelphia: Carey Baird, 1855), 60-61; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 402; Curtis, “The Early Charleston Stage,” 392-93; Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 1:185-86, 2:551. [87] Following Willis (441-42), Sodders incorrectly identifies “Miss Sully” as thirty-year-old Elizabeth, who had eloped with Middleton Smith five years earlier (Willis, The Charleston Stage , 191), rather than Harriet, for child roles this season (“The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 2:435, 439, 443, 446, 448, 451, 455), per Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 252. [88] Odell, Annals , 2:18, 43. [89] Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 1:187-88, 2:448; William Dunlap, Pizarro in Peru (New York: Hopkins, 1800), in Literature Online at www.literature.proquest.com . [90] Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 1:165-66; Michael, “A History,” 2:101, 105, 106, 109, 111, 114, 115; Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 63, 68, 70. [91] Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 2:518. [92] Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 73; see Early American playbills, 1750-1812: Guide, Harvard University Library at http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hou01711 . [93] Dunlap, A History , 298; Odell, Annals , 2:146. At this point, two Marshall couples create confusions. Patrick incorrectly claims that “Mrs. G. Marshall” played in Savannah in late 1800 when she was still in New York as Miss Harding (Patrick, Savannah’s Pioneer Theater , 38; Odell, Annals , 2:99-106). Lydia Marshall was in Europe during the 1803-04 season (Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 1:250), not Boston (Michael, “A History,” 1:350, 2:191). She reappeared as Mrs. Wilmot with her second husband in Washington in 1805 ( National Intelligencer , 19 July 1805) and then in Richmond (Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 213). [94] Sodders includes Mrs. G. Marshall in casts beginning in February 1804, but Harbin claims she did not join Hodgkinson until October (“The Career of John Hodgkinson,” 230). [95] Charleston Courier , 12 February 1804, qtd. in Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 246. [96] Ireland, Records , 1:232. [97] “Marriage and Death Notices from the City-Gazett [sic] and Daily Advertiser,” The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 30, no. 4 (October 1929): 244; Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 460; Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 2:730. [98] Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 345, 355, 375. [99] Odell, Annals , 2:413, 424, 435, 438, 441; Ireland, Records , 1:120; Augusta Chronicle (6 February and 2 April 1823). I am unable to verify further accounts of Mary’s life, but see “Great Trial for Adultery, Divorce, &c.,” New York Herald , 24 November 1841; New York Daily Tribune , 11 January 1845; New York Times , 23 January 1862; “Died,” New York Times , 15 June 1870. [100] Odell, Annals , 2:261. [101] Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 2:626; Willard, History of the Providence Stage, 36; Michael, “A History,” 1:585. [102] Massachusetts Town Clerk Vital and Town Records, Marriages 1800-1849, vol. 2, K-Z, 282; “Green Room Intelligence,” Saturday Evening Post , 4 December 1824; “Letter from ‘Acorn,’” Spirit of the Times , 14 October 1854: 410; Ireland, Records , 1:134, 444. [103] Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 2:435, 443-55; Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 546; Ritchey, A Guide , 209. [104] Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 546, 550; Norfolk Herald , 25 April 1801, 1315, 1484. [105] Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 547; Willis, The Charleston Stage , 191. [106] Dunlap, A History , 407. [107] Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 60. Durang also describes “two green rooms.” “One green room was used for musical rehearsals, dancing practices, &c., and it was a place where the juvenile members of the corps might indulge their freaks unrestrainedly.” The principal green room was a “polished drawing-room” where “perfect etiquette” was “always preserved” (34). Footnotes About The Author(s) Jeanne Klein (now retired) directed productions for children and taught Theatre for Young Audiences, US Theatre History, and Children and Drama, among other courses, for thirty years at the University of Kansas. Her numerous articles have been published in Youth Theatre Journal , Theatre Topics , Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , and Journal of Aesthetic Education , among many others. She is currently investigating African American child performers in the 1890s. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue May Irwin American Musical Theater Musical Theatre Books New York's Yiddish Theater Chinese Looks Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project On Bow and Exit Music Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jocelyn L. Buckner Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas Jocelyn L. Buckner By Published on May 23, 2020 Download Article as PDF This American Theatre and Drama Society special issue of JADT features four essays that explore what “local” performance means across very different community contexts. Throughout the Americas, communities generate and are informed by performance in ways that reveal, challenge, and strengthen shared understanding about the identity of the local. Performance plays a role in articulating a collective representation of self not only to local residents, but perhaps also to communities outside the realm of the art work’s place of origin. The call for papers for this issue was inspired in part by Jan Cohen-Cruz’s L ocal Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States [1] . Cohen-Cruz explains that in community-based productions, members of a community are “a primary source of the text, possibly of performers as well, and definitely a goodly portion of the audience … Community-based performance relies on artists guiding the creation of original work or material adapted to, and with people with a primary relationship to the content, not necessarily to the craft” (2). This special issue builds upon Cohen-Cruz’s work to further explore the significance and influence of local and community-based performances, both past and present, across the Americas.This collection not only illuminates performance practices in specific locales by particular constituents; it also creates connections between studies of community performance and other methodologies and theories of theatre and performance studies. The five authors featured here consider performances in artistic residencies, immigrant communities, localized eco-tourism, and indigenous-language theatre. These pieces highlight culturally specific work generated at the local level, advance the argument for studies focused on performance tuned to community rather than commercial appeal, and draw correlations to larger social and artistic phenomena in the process. In “The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship,” Claudia Wilsch Case explores the local and regional impact of performances by members of Frank Lloyd Wright’s residential apprenticeship program. The Taliesin Fellowship encouraged its participants in a range of creative endeavors. Its amateur public performances developed into a popular attraction for local residents hungry for artistic experiences. Case provides detailed analysis of the apprentices’ early concerts and skits alongside film screenings from the 1930s, tracing the development of physical movement pieces inspired by Eastern mystic Georges Gurdjieff in the 1950s which, by the 1960s, had evolved into original dance dramas written and choreographed by Wright’s daughter, Iovanna Lloyd Wright. Case argues that the performances occurring at Taliesin and Taliesin West from the 1930s to the 1970s exemplified the Fellowship’s role in remapping the American cultural landscape. By privileging work developed locally, rather than dispatched from larger cultural centers such as New York, Case illustrates how the Taliesin Fellowship cultivated area audiences’ appreciation for locally crafted performances, reinforcing community ties while also priming them for the US regional theatre movement. Sarah Campbell advocates for a multi-faceted approach to studying Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula, arguing that it is often perceived as insignificant due to how it has been treated in scholarship. In “’La conjura de Xinum’ and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre” Campbell considers Maya language theatre as an “art world,” defined as a system of interconnected participants determining the reception and influencing the significance of a piece of art. She highlights how dialogues surrounding Maya identity reflect the ways external alliances intersect with community members and organizations that produce theatre, resulting in varying valuations of this work. To illustrate her point, Campbell provides a compelling argument for considering the context for and ensuing local and critical responses to a community-based performance in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo, Mexico, called “La conjura de Xinum.” Campbell makes the case that one should not dismiss the play as simply a fringe act by a community theatre troupe in rural Mexico; instead, the performance exposes the agency of Maya artists in promoting language and cultural revitalization. By illustrating the interconnected nature of artists, audiences, and scholars/critics, Campbell illuminates the roles of respective participants and their influence on the creation, perception, and valuation of Maya language theatre, both in the community from which it emerges and beyond. In “Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the ‘Toxic Mound Tours,’” Rachel E. Bauer and Kristen M. Kalz employ performance studies to examine how Ross privileges place, environment, and history in her performance, revealing the long term effects of environmental contamination and its consequences for residents living adjacent to the five stops on her Toxic Mound Tour. By featuring several spaces whose contamination dates back to WWII and Cold War era weapons production, Bauer and Kalz argue that Ross’s tour educates ecotourists on the environmental and health risks that the St. Louis community has assumed in the interest of national safety, thereby rewriting the local history of these spaces and their legacy for today’s community. Sharing their experience as ecotourists in their own community, Bauer and Kalz underscore the significance of featuring place as event to reveal how disparate individuals are linked through a deeper understanding of community spaces and a collective awareness of belonging. Arnab Banerji’s critical analysis of New Brunswick, New Jersey’s South Asian Theatre Festival (SATF) defines the dynamics of the festival’s shared creative community and the immigrant community’s efforts to affirm itself as a major American subculture. In “Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018,” Banerji asserts that the artists involved in the festival are not only celebrating their culture of origin, but also delineating its relationship with their new home culture here in the United States. While the SATF might at first glance be regarded as simply a public performance of plays, Banerji’s analysis of the audience’s engagement with the works, the mindful curation of festival content, and the cultural sensitivity given to the production of the festival, reveals the complex dynamics of immigration and integration at play on stage and in the audience for these performances. Through examining the SATF as a site for individuals of the South Asian diaspora to assert their cultural citizenship as well as an opportunity to perform acts of creative citizenship, Banerji illustrates how these artists appeal to an audience that does not necessarily conform to geographic, linguistic, and socio-cultural boundaries. Banerji’s piece contributes to the growing field of scholarship on South Asian American performance as well as local acts. As much as theatre and academic communities often privilege “professional” nationally and internationally recognized centers of cultural production, the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing closure of virtually all productions and performance venues well into 2020 and beyond, has revealed how much we actually rely on local resources and artists for a sense of connection to one another and to ourselves. During these unprecedented times, what so many of us are searching for – and missing desperately – is the reassurance that comes from connection to community. Theatre has survived centuries of crises – from plagues, to world wars, to economic collapses. With each threat, theatre has always managed to realign with the needs of the audience, sometimes by relocating, whether that be to the outskirts of town or to cyberspace, and often by reframing the definition of “local” and where, how, and through whom artistic communities coalesce. The sphere of community held by theatrical performance is proving elastic in the age of the coronavirus, expanding to circle the globe and welcome audiences around the world who are hungrily streaming professionally produced, pre-recorded theatrical content online. Simultaneously, theatre has compressed to include synchronous, intimate, devised Zoom performances for audiences of one who have isolated themselves at home and are desperate for personal, human connection. By reimagining the parameters of production and participation by both artists and audiences, theatre and its communities will not only survive, but it will reinvent itself and its relevance to those looking for themselves and for a sense of belonging. This issue goes to press in the wake of ongoing violence against people of color, specifically the anti-Black violence evidenced in the recent murders of George Floyd, Ahmuad Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, and many others, alongside the subsequent violence perpetrated against those peacefully protesting their deaths. The idea of community, at the local and national level, is being tested once again. Theatre artists and scholars are uniquely positioned to reflect on systemic prejudices, which are also manifest in the theatre industry at large. As scholars/artists/citizens we have an obligation to aid in the development of new community models both within our industry and at the local level that are committed to supporting and participating in anti-racist protests, pedagogy, and productions; honoring and mourning the lives of those who have been lost; amplifying voices of the marginalized and silenced; and advocating for messages of allyship, equity, and inclusion. Theatre must help heal and build community and I encourage you to find ways to participate in and support this work. As uncertainty and possibility simultaneously loom in the future of theatre and performance, this issue serves as an example of work yet to be done to herald the role of theatre and performance in defining and preserving community at the local level throughout the Americas. This issue was made possible by the support of Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, President of the American Theatre and Drama Society; the stewardship of JADT editors Naomi Stubbs and James Wilson and managing editor Jessica Applebaum; the dedication of members of our Editorial Board who contributed their time and expertise to fostering these essays; and the keen eye of editorial assistant Zach Dailey. I wish readers health and safety in these extraordinary times, and hope this scholarship inspires others to consider their relationship to local acts within their own communities. Editorial Board for Special Issue Dorothy Chansky Mark Cosdon La Donna Pie Forsgren Khalid Long Laura MacDonald Derek Miller Hillary E. Miller Heather S. Nathans Diego Villada References [1] Jan Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States , (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 2. Footnotes About The Author(s) Jocelyn L. Buckner is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Chapman University in Orange, California. She is the editor of A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage (Routledge), and a former book review editor and managing editor for Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism . She has published articles and reviews in African American Review , American Studies Journal , Ecumenica Journal , Journal of American Drama and Theatre , HowlRound , Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , Popular Entertainment Studies , Theatre History Studies , Theatre Journal , Theatre Survey, and Theatre Topics , as well as book chapters in the collections Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere and Food and Theatre on the World Stage , and over a dozen entries in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stage Actors and Acting . Buckner is also the resident dramaturg of The Chance Theater in Anaheim, CA, and has collaborated with other theatres including South Coast Repertory Theatre, Center Theatre Group, Native Voices at the Autry, as well as London’s Donmar Warehouse and Theatre 503. She is the Vice President of the American Theatre and Drama Society. 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 Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Maureen McDonnell Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Maureen McDonnell By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. by Maureen McDonnell The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 2 (Winter 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Alison Bechdel offered a complicated and compelling memoir in her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), adapted by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori into the Broadway musical Fun Home (2015). Both works presented an adult Bechdel reflecting on her father’s troubled life as a closeted gay man and his possible death by suicide. As Bechdel herself noted, “it’s not like a happy story, it’s not something that you would celebrate or be proud of.”[1] Bechdel’s coining of “tragicomic” as her book’s genre highlights its fraught narrative and its visual format indebted to “comics” rather than to comedy. Bechdel’s bleak overview of her father’s life and death served as a backdrop for a production that posited truthfulness as life-affirming and as a means of survival. Fun Home’s marketers, however, imagined that being forthright about the production’s contents and its masculine lesbian protagonist would threaten the show’s entertainment and economic potential. It was noted before the show opened that “the promotional text for the show downplays the queer aspects,” a restriction that was by design.[2] According to Tom Greenwald, Fun Home’s chief marketing strategist and the production’s strategy officer, the main advertising objective was to “make sure that it’s never ever associated specifically with the ‘plot or subject matter.’” Instead, the marketing team decided to frame the musical as a relatable story of a family “like yours.” [3] The marketers assumed that would-be playgoers would be uninterested in this tragic hero/ine if her sexuality were known. Ticket buyers who perceived the lesbian protagonist’s sexuality as a barrier to their “recognition of [her] humanity” risked not experiencing the subsequent ethical empathy that tragedy might elicit.[4] In the marketers’ efforts to circumvent the lesbophobia and taboos against suicide they imagined would-be playgoers might hold, they became complicit in such prejudices. As the production was met with commercial and critical success, a “both/and” marketing approach surfaced: that the production was both timeless and timely, with the production newly presented as a vehicle for affirming emerging legal gains for LGBTQ+ rights generally, and marriage equality in particular. This rising sensibility that lesbian characters and culture were commodifiable might justify future shifts from Broadway’s systematic exclusion of lesbian characters, even if for mercenary, capitalistic reasons. The creative team voiced their support of lesbians and their rights throughout the run, a departure from the endorsed narrative of Greenwald’s company. The producers began to echo the creative artists’ advocacy after two nearly simultaneous events: the production’s anniversary of winning five Tony Awards and the Orlando mass shooting as the deadliest incident of violence against LGBTQ+ people in US history. The producers’ commentary swerved in June 2016 when they began championing both the production and the communities it represented, albeit a year after the show’s critical reception was secure. These evolving campaigns suggest the vulnerability of productions that feature female actors playing sexual minorities and gender non-conforming characters. By featuring a butch lesbian as its lead, Fun Home was culturally revolutionary, providing a cultural—and commercial—landmark for mainstream musical theater. The musical featured three different actors performing the characters of Alison Bechdel: “small” Alison at 8, “medium” Alison at 19, and Alison at 43. The categorizations emphasized the characters’ visual differences (e.g. “small” versus “youngest”), in keeping with what may be a cartoonist’s default parameters. The adult Bechdel character served as a narrator, drawing at an artist’s table as she observed and commented on the memories enacted by her younger counterparts. An early line of Alison’s summarizes the plot: “Caption: Dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town. And he was gay, and I was gay, and he killed himself, and I became a lesbian cartoonist” (“Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue”).[5] This expository line frontloaded the musical’s conclusion within the first eleven minutes of performance.[6] The musical’s disclosure was strikingly more efficient than that of the marketing team. It was only after Fun Home opened that Tom Greenwald revealed that the “marketing team jokingly referred to [the play] as a ‘lesbian suicide musical.’”[7] This inaccurate characterization invited misdirection of a familiar type.[8] Despite a long cultural history that presents lesbians as necessarily isolated, doomed, and suicidal, this production challenged those tropes by presenting a lesbian protagonist who survives the dramatic action.[9] This theatrical and biographical outcome indicates the political dimensions of Fun Home’s tragedy, as its lack of an abject lesbian underscores that the tragic lesbian figure is conjured and constructed rather than fixed and innate. The team’s “joke” not only reinforced a stereotypical narrative about lesbian death, but also suggested that they saw the narrative arc of Bruce Bechdel (Alison Bechdel’s father) upstaging that of his daughter (it is Bruce who dies by suicide in the musical). Despite the decentering and misrepresentation of Alison Bechdel’s character, playgoers would have been able to easily learn that this dramatic protagonist’s real-life counterpart helped shape this creative narrative rather than becoming a victim of it. The marketing team’s omission of Alison Bechdel from the promotional campaign was perhaps motivated by their desire to make the show more broadly appealing to investors by erasing her sexuality and survival. Such concerns about financial solvency reflected the financial structure of 21st century Broadway productions, a time in which corporate interests frequently override artistic innovation.[10] Theater scholar Steven Adler writes of this trend, noting that production often depended upon partnerships, sometimes with the powerful real estate moguls who owned the theaters, [which] provided the best means of mounting shows. Corporations, with extensive financial and marketing resources, recognized fertile territory in the hardscrabble of midtown Manhattan and joined the fray. A Broadway presence might bolster the corporate brand, as with Disney.[11] Disney-authorized productions are sometimes called “McMusicals” (a term that emphasizes the production’s consumability) or “technomusicals,” which theater director and scholar John Bush Jones describes as “a phenomenon . . . driven by visual spectacle” and “engender[ing] little or no thinking at all.”[12] Such spectacles are often mined from popular movies and books whose familiarity allows productions to draw upon already established fan bases. American musical scholar Elizabeth Wollman points out that these moments of synergy allow[] a company to sell itself along with any product it hawks. The Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast, for example, can be mentioned in Disney films and television shows, or advertised on Disney-owned radio stations. Disney musicals can also serve as advertisements for one another.[13] Wollman notes that “shows with corporate backing can now be hyped internationally in myriad ways long before a theatrical property begins its run,” a factor that contributes to Broadway functioning as a “global crossroads, populated by transnational corporations catering to tourists.”[14] Given that only one in five Broadway shows recoup their initial investment, derivative productions and revivals included, the marketing campaign reflects both the financial precariousness of theater generally and reticence about Fun Home’s cultural content specifically. Investor caution is especially warranted with musicals, particularly if they are new. Commercial houses rarely undertake such efforts. Instead, creative teams who wish to develop those works mostly rely on non-profit theaters whose educational and artistic missions state their willingness to sustain financial loss. Such collaborations can be contentious, as revealed by Ars Nova’s decision to file suit for breach of contract over their billing after their production Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 transferred to Broadway in 2016, or result in a commercial juggernaut like Hamilton.[15] Fun Home’s move from the Public Theater to Broadway was underwritten by three primary producers, Kristen Caskey, Barbara Whitman, and Mike Isaacson. In an interview published shortly after their investment was recouped, the producers provided a thumbnail sketch of the skepticism people held towards the production: “They said we were insane to do this,” said Mike Isaacson. “Really? You’re bringing that to Broadway?” recalled Barbara Whitman. “I think crazy was the word we heard most,” said Kristin Caskey.[16] Admittedly, the producers’ diction may have been only unintentionally ableist. But such comments problematically echoed the disproven historical notion that people who were sexual minorities were mentally ill, another suggestion of discomfort about Fun Home’s treatment of sexuality from people outside of the creative team.[17] Such stereotypical conflation of “insanity” and lesbianism re-produced the specter of the tragic lesbian the producers attempted to discard. Frank disclosures aren’t the only way lesbianism surfaces within Broadway musicals. Musical theater scholar Stacy Wolf’s generative work invites playgoers to deploy “a spectatorial/auditorial ‘lesbian’ position that is not essentialist but rather performative: any willing, willful spectator may embody such a position of lesbian spectatorship” which can “lesbianize” the text.[18] Fun Home extends itself beyond presenting a “hypothetical lesbian heroine” because its protagonist’s sexuality is not solely dependent on viewers decoding subtext or deploying Wolf’s rhetorical techniques but is additionally affirmed by depicting the character Alison’s queer childhood and subsequent coming out.[19] Moreover, Fun Home offers an androcentric lead, a break from Broadway’s dominant tradition. Fun Home’s departure from highlighting feminine lesbians risks what literature scholar Ann M. Ciasullo cautions against: dehumanizing the butch lesbian who is imagined as “too dangerous, too loaded a figure to be represented.”[20] However, one of the chief innovations of Fun Home was its butch lesbian lead. Instead of functioning as a surrogate or scapegoat, the theatrical Alisons’ desires “lead the way to a different future” rather than “fasten[ing]” lesbians “to the image of the past.”[21] This theatrical breakthrough appears nowhere in the advertising campaign. In their attempts to de-lesbianize the production, the marketers buried both the lede and the lead. There have been other musicals that prominently include identifiable lesbian characters, although that misrepresentation is often uneven at best and sometimes presents lesbian characters whose sole function seems to be as “the object of the show’s most unsavory jokes.”[22] Lisa Kron, the lyricist and book writer for Fun Home, revealed her response to what she saw as a trend: “there was a moment where someone would say the word lesbian as a non sequitur because it was funny. I’d be so on board, and then I’d be slapped in the face by it. It was just like, This character’s a joke. This is not a person.”[23] Within the production, actor Beth Malone navigated this pitfall when delivering adult Alison’s line that someone she saw briefly as a child was “an old-school butch.” Malone explained her delivery of this line and her efforts to recuperate that term as follows: When I say the word “butch,” I say it with the color of, like I’m saying the word supermodel. Because from my lens, the word butch is the most beautiful adjective I can come up with. “Oh my God, she was an old-school butch!” Like satisfying words coming out of your mouth. Still, it gets titters because the word “butch” is a punch line. For every other show that has ever existed, “butch” and “dyke” have been a punch line for the end of a gay man’s joke. So now we are taking that word, like the word queer, we're owning it and saying, butch is a beautiful thing.[24] In Malone’s account, her artistic and activist sensibilities converged in playing this role. Such moments are bolstered because Fun Home featured a number of queer characters who are not solely defined by their orientation or gender identity, and whose presence is important for the plot.[25] Although these features were present in other productions, the non-existent track record for butch-centered musicals indicates an asymmetrical Broadway history characterized by sexism and lesbophobia. If we compare Fun Home with another contemporary musical with an LGBTQ+ lead character, Kinky Boots is an apt choice. Based on a 2005 film inspired by true events, Kinky Boots took thirty weeks to recoup its $13.5 million investment, roughly the same timeline as Fun Home (which had lower ticket prices).[26] Kinky Boots had a fuller theatrical tradition than Fun Home to draw upon: male actors inherit a variety of gendered performance traditions, theatrical practices that are increasingly familiar to and co-opted by straight playgoers.[27] Gay male leads and gender non-conforming characters played by male actors are not new features of musicals. (Consider this partial history: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Rent, Kiss of the Spider Woman, La Cage Aux Folles, Falsettos, A Chorus Line, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Avenue Q, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Spring Awakening, and Cabaret.) Stacy Wolf usefully points out a key difference between this theatrical tradition and the one women inherit, noting that “the visibility of white gay men’s alliance with musicals stems in part from capital (cultural and real) and the general visibility of a relatively identifiable affluent, urban, white, gay male culture.”[28] This disparity in capital was indicated in material ways by Fun Home’s relatively small cast of nine, orchestra of seven, and slim advertising budget, all of which kept production costs low. Kinky Boots’ cast was more than three times the size of Fun Home’s, and had an orchestra of thirteen musicians. The diverging cultural capital of gay men and lesbians also surfaced in the showcasing of the titular “kinky boots” in that production’s poster campaign, and the cloaking of Bechdel’s experience within that of Fun Home, whose posters evoked the colors of the 1970s in color values too deep to invoke a rainbow flag.[29] The advertisements for Kinky Boots flaunted sexual and gender transgressiveness whereas Fun Home’s marketers closeted their characters. Fun Home’s marketing team was not alone in minimizing its connection with underrepresented groups outside of Broadway’s cultural mainstream. For instance, Hamilton’s producers deliberately distanced Hamilton from the hip hop music and culture that influenced Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show, a redirection that included a name change of the show itself from Hamilton Mixtape despite his earlier hit In the Heights.[30] (Bechdel’s book title, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, was also abridged.) Such concerns about a production’s broad appeal surface in Fun Home’s production history, as seen in one critic’s question: “Is America ready for a musical about a middle-aged, butch lesbian?”[31] This hesitancy was echoed by the creative team and by Bechdel, who drily noted that “Lesbians are inherently uncommodifiable. . . . It’s a gift.”[32] Bechdel, in her suggestion that being imagined as uncommodifiable offers lesbians a way to resist being dehumanized, echoes the precise concern of Fun Home’s marketers. In other words, Bechdel doesn’t realize how right the marketers imagined her to be: she hits a nerve along with her punchline. Lisa Kron discussed this concern after the musical won the 2015 Tony Award: We were constantly having to rewrite the assumed narrative, which was that this was not commercially viable. Because it’s a serious piece of work. You know, it’s not a pure entertainment, even though it is very entertaining. Because it was written by women, because it not only focuses on women characters but lesbian characters and more than that has a butch lesbian protagonist.[33] Kron clearly states her diagnosis of people’s reticence about the show’s viability: misogyny and lesbophobia, particularly towards masculine lesbians. Within that interview, Kron revealed the persistence of that narrative, even after the show was hitting crucial markers of success: Even when we were succeeding, even when it had had a successful run at the Public and we were selling tickets on Broadway, still the question was being asked “do you think this will work on Broadway?” These financial concerns lingered, despite the production’s relatively quick financial solvency. The investors of Fun Home recouped their investment of $5.25 million dollars within eight months.[34] The tour also returned its investment within eight months, benchmarks that belie the supposed need to commercially closet Fun Home.[35] The marketing of Fun Home reveals a two-pronged approach. The first tactic universalized the musical. The subsequent tactic encouraged playgoers to see the production as politically engaged. In one article, readers are told that: The subject matter, obviously, is a complication in a Broadway market dominated by lighter material. The show’s producers, Kristin Caskey, Mike Isaacson and Barbara Whitman, who raised $5.2 million [sic] to finance the Broadway transfer, are emphasizing the father-daughter relationship and journey of self-discovery, rather than the sexuality, the suicide or the fact that Alison’s father ran a funeral home (“Fun Home” was the Bechdel children’s nickname for the business).[36] Occasionally members of the creative reinforced the producers’ tenet that Fun Home is about a generic family whose story resulted in a “father-daughter heartbreaker.”[37] Judy Kuhn, who played Alison’s mother, Helen, appeared in a promo saying that “[e]verybody can relate to [the play] because everybody has a family.”[38] Elsewhere, the investor Kristin Caskey suggested that the musical offers an opportunity for “seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.”[39] Caskey volunteered that this is how I saw the show: It was about a child and her relationship with a parent, and as she became an adult, how she came to peace with how she saw that parent. . . . I think a broad audience can relate to that, and will give the show a chance to be commercial.[40] Caskey’s comments removed gender and sexuality as factors within the theatrical work, suggesting their irrelevance for audiences. This sidestepping so overgeneralized the musical’s protagonist and her narrative arc that it nearly misrepresents the show. By the production’s end, the producing team detoured from its initial, sanitizing premise of the musical’s universal family to advance a counternarrative: that the show served as a cultural milestone. These antithetical approaches— that the production was both ahistorical and historically prescient—occurred concurrently during the Broadway run. As Fun Home prepared to move to Broadway from the Public Theater the notoriety of Bechdel’s book became a promotional tool, although not an automatically synergistic or positive one.[41] In February 2014, the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina Upstate announced that Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic would be part of their optional summer reading programs. Politicians responded by voting to defund those public colleges. Rep. Garry Smith, R-Greenville, justified his vote by explaining that the book “goes beyond the pale of academic debate. It graphically shows lesbian acts.”[42] (Readers who pick up Bechdel’s book expecting pornography might be disappointed to find relatively few anatomical moments, aside from her drawing of a male corpse in her father’s embalming studio.) Alison Bechdel and the production team went to South Carolina in April 2014 so that the cast could perform part of the musical as the six-month censorship debate was swirling.[43] This unanticipated pre-Broadway debut “tour” marked a pivot: the creative team began to directly comment on and interact with the censorship debate even as Fun Home’s marketing products featured no references likely to cause controversy. The production’s responsiveness escalated in the upcoming months: the cast put Fun Home in dialogue with real-time national debates about marriage equality. The play opened a few days before the US Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments about the Obergefell v. Hodges case. Beth Malone commented on this timing in an interview given before the court decision: Right now, the Supreme Court is arguing for our rights as human beings, and I’m going home to my wife tonight who I married in a court of law in New York City. This is a time in our lives. This is quite a time. This is quite a season.[44] Fun Home’s actors commented on that case in front of larger audiences as well. As he delivered his Tony speech for playing Bruce, Michael Cerveris spoke of his “hope” that the Supreme Court would support LGBTQ+ citizens’ right to marriage.[45] Eighteen days later when the court confirmed marriage equality, the evening’s performance included a new prop: a rainbow flag brought on to stage after the bows. Beth Malone put the flag around her and did a victory lap around the stage, before saying “What an amazing time to be an American. We owe this night to the people who came before us.”[46] In other interviews, Malone specified the activist and artistic pasts to which she felt indebted: The only reason Fun Home itself can be a mainstream Broadway show is because of the fringe work of my sisters that came before me, like the Five Lesbian Brothers, doing this downtown theatre that was so edgy and it was happening in the margins. The margins had to exist for a really long time before it incrementally crept toward the center.[47] After the Supreme Court passed this civil rights case in June 2015, Fun Home began to be included in publications marketed towards LGBTQ+ readers. One such instance was the article within Out magazine that exclusively featured the actors who identified as lesbian or gay in the Broadway production (Beth Malone, Roberta Colindrez, and Joel Perez) alongside Bechdel and Kron.[48] In another produced segment, Malone appears with her wife in a video that features her Fun Home pre-performance commute.[49] These curated moments provided evidence for Malone’s sense that lesbian rights are moving towards “the center” of public sympathy and support. The marketing of Fun Home as proof of American exceptionalism to seventeen ambassadors from the United Nations in March 2016 also hinted at a newfound security for LGBTQ+ people.[50] Three months later, however, Fun Home responded to an intensely harmful event that targeted LGBTQ+ people. The crimes committed at Pulse (a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida) resulted in the deaths of forty-nine victims and the wounding of fifty-eight other people. This event sparked a number of responses from Broadway workers, including at the Tony Awards which were held on the day of the attacks (12 June 2016) as scheduled. Although individual Broadway actors participated in an Orlando tribute, Fun Home was the only production to travel to Florida to be physically present with the victims, survivors, and their families.[51] Beth Malone and Michael Cerveris each wrote publicly about this pilgrimage in tones consonant with the LGBTQ+ advocacy they articulated before the production’s run.[52] The producers’ willingness to highlight the LGBTQ+ themes of the production was newly evident: Mike Isaacson: “For our company, there is no choice but to respond with what we have, what we know, and the belief that it leads to something.” Barbara Whitman: “I think we all had that same reaction: What can we do? This is something we can actually do.” Kristin Caskey: “It was one of those perfect moments where everyone aligned and did so quite quickly, understanding that many of the ideas and themes within ‘Fun Home’ would be a perfect gift and a way for the community to come together in advocation for LGBT rights.”[53] Their unified perspective diverged from Tom Greenwald’s earlier recommendation to “never ever associat[e] [the play] with . . . the subject matter.” At this moment, some fourteen months after the show opened on Broadway, the producers unambiguously voiced their objection to the homophobic and lesbophobic crimes.[54] Particularly striking is Caskey’s transition in framing Fun Home: the show is no longer about “a child and her relationship with a parent,” but a “gift . . . for the community to come together in advocation for LGBT rights,” with her suggestion that the artistic production and political advocacy were linked. The trio continued this pattern of speaking to LGBTQ+ people when in Orlando, writing in a joint statement that “as the first musical with a lesbian protagonist, we so often hear from audience members at ‘Fun Home’ that it was the first time they saw themselves represented on a Broadway stage. We all feel so helpless, but hopefully this will allow us to give back to the LGBT community in this tiny way.”[55] Here, the protagonist’s identity was presented as a pioneering choice, rather than a detail that needed to be hidden. Moreover, the producers acknowledged their debt to the LGBT community rather than distancing the show from that community. Such a development from reticence and repression to an overt championing of LGBTQ+ individuals’ rights was remarkable and challenged the historical pattern of excluding lesbian characters from Broadway stages. These actions that openly acknowledge and affirm the production’s debt to LGBTQ+ artists speak to the gains that the production enabled. Ceveris and Bechdel offer ways to see the historical context of the run. Michael Ceveris says: We’ve played through an extraordinary moment in our country’s history and the most progressive and heartening ways and the most retroactive and terrifying ways. We played through the Supreme Court’s decision, we played through the naming of the first national monument to gay and lesbian rights, and we played through a massacre that was horrific enough in itself and in its aftermath, when some of the hatred and reactionary comments that were made were just as horrifying. If there was ever a play that arrived on Broadway in the moment it was most needed, I think this would be it.[56] Ceveris encapsulated his perspective of the show as a necessary one. Bechdel’s comments featured her characteristic ambivalence: it’s a funny moment. It’s a very funny moment for LGBT culture and civil rights right now. I feel like the play and the success of the play is very much tied into what’s happening in the culture.[57] Like Bechdel in her emphasis of the production’s connection with the contemporary moment, Fun Home’s composer Jeanine Tesori spoke of production’s role in advancing agendas outside the theater: And so I think that this has met our time, it’s a musical of our time. It makes me think . . . it’s available, what else can it do? What are the next stages? Where are we, what can we express [in] that conversation, the global conversation, the national conversation?[58] The answers to Tesori’s questions are forthcoming: it remains to be seen what artistic and commercial risks might be undertaken to create a more diverse, inclusive theatrical tradition for women actors to inhabit. Despite the censorship that characterized Fun Home's early promotion, the producers ultimately reckoned with a literal tragedy that befell LGBTQ+ people. This transition suggests a recognition that tragedies can be spurred by settings, such as a homophobic society, rather than by LGBTQ+ people’s existence. Fun Home ultimately offered a way forward for a more varied performance history and for productive interplay between onstage representation and offstage politics. Fun Home’s temporal context offers a useful demarcation of the interplay between civic and theatrical tragedies, and the creative ways that theater can elicit empathy. Maureen McDonnell is Director of Women’s and Gender Studies and Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University. Her research interests include gender studies, early modern drama (including Shakespeare), and American Sign Language in performance. [1] StuckinVermont, “Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on Broadway,” 11:49, YouTube, 22 April 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9vD7Nc0L3k (accessed 1 May 2017). [2] Sarah Mirk, “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’ Will Now be a New York Musical,” Bitch Media, 11 October 2013, www.bitchmedia.org/post/alison-bechdels-fun-home-will-now-be-a-new-york-musical (accessed 17 January 2017). [3] Kalle Oskari Matilla, “Selling Queerness: The Curious Case of Fun Home,” The Atlantic, 25 April 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/04/branding-queerness-the-curious-case-of-fun-home/479532/ (accessed 21 August 2016). [4] Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 334. [5] This line was taken from a “Stuck in Vermont” interview with Bechdel in 2008. Bechdel’s comment appears around 4:50 minutes into the clip. The varied sources for the musical suggest the creative team’s early openness to Bechdel’s contributions beyond the published pages of her visual memoir. StuckinVermont, “Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on Broadway.” [6] According to Robert Petkoff, the actor playing Alison’s father during the tour, the content of the show remained a surprise to some playgoers: “There are people in the audience who are like, ‘What?! I saw kids dancing on the poster—this doesn’t seem to be that story!’” Lori McCue, “The star and designer of ‘Fun Home’ on how their show still surprises audiences,” The Washington Post, 27 April 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2017/04/27/the-star-and-designer-of-fun-home-on-how-their-show-still-surprises-audiences/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.80af729129a9 (accessed 20 July 2017). [7] Matilla, “Selling Queerness.” [8] Heather K. Love charts this genealogy in “Spectacular Failure: The Figure of the Lesbian in ‘Mulholland Drive,’” New Literary History 35, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 120–22. [9] The phrase “Bury your gays” serves as a shorthand for this narrative in popular media. GLAAD (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) provides data on the occurrence and type of LGBTQ+ representations on film and TV. See their Studio Responsibility Index for film data (www.glaad.org/sri/2018), and the “Where We Are On TV” reports (www.glaad.org/tags/where-we-are-tv). [10] Steven Adler, “Box Office,” The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, eds. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 356. [11] Ibid., 352. [12] Quoted in Mark N. Grant, “The Age of McMusicals,” The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 304–15. Jones’s primary examples of the category “technomusical” are Disney productions and those affiliated with Andrew Lloyd Webber. [13] Elizabeth Wollman, The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 145. [14] Ibid., 145, 144. [15] Michael Sokolove profiles Hamilton’s producer Jeffrey Seller in “The C.E.O. of ‘Hamilton’ Inc.,” The New York Times, 5 April 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/magazine/the-ceo-of-hamilton-inc.html (accessed 10 May 2018). For an overview of the Great Comet attribute dispute and resolution see the following: Michael Paulson, “Three Words Lead to a Battle Over ‘Great Comet’ on Broadway,” The New York Times, 19 October 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/theater/three-words-lead-to-a-battle-over-great-comet-on-broadway.html (accessed 17 May 2018); Michael Gioia, “Great Comet Billing Dispute Prompts Lawsuit,” Playbill, 28 October 2016, www.playbill.com/article/ars-nova-sues-great-comet-producers-and-explains-why-were-taking-a-stand (accessed 17 May 2018); Michael Paulson, “Dispute at ‘Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812’ Leads to a Lawsuit,” New York Times, 30 October 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/theater/dispute-at-natasha-pierre-the-great-comet-of-1812-leads-to-lawsuit.html (accessed 17 May 2018); Jeremy Girard, “Peace Now: ‘Natasha, Pierre’ Production and Non-Profit Group Agree to Secret Deal,” Deadline, 2 November 2016, www.deadline.com/2016/11/broadway-lawsuit-natasha-pierre-josh-groban-1201845138/ (accessed 17 May 2018). [16] Michael Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups on Broadway,” The New York Times, 13 December 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/12/14/theater/fun-home-recoups-on-broadway.html (accessed 3 June 2016). Caskey repeated the characterization of the show as “crazy” in her conversation with Whitman preserved at Story Corps. “Fun Home producers Barbara Whitman and Kristen Caskey,” Story Corps, 1 April 2016, www.archive.storycorps.org/interviews/fun-home-co-producers-barbara-whitman-and-kristin-caskey/ (accessed 14 June 2018). After the Tony Awards, Isaacson repeated this diction: “Everybody had been telling us we were crazy, even stupid” (Paulson, “Winning”). As the production went on tour within the US, Isaacson described the “whole endeavor [as] a crazy leap of faith” (Moffit, “Taking on ‘tough stuff’”). Michael Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Finds That Winning a Tony is the Best Way to Market a Musical,” The New York Times, 9 June 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/theater/theaterspecial/fun-home-finds-that-winning-a-tony-is-the-best-way-to-market-a-musical.html (accessed 15 June 2015). Kelly Moffit, “Taking on ‘tough stuff’ with beauty, talent, humor: St. Louis-produced ‘Fun Home’ opens at The Fox,” St. Louis Public Radio, 17 November 2016, www.news.stlpublicradio.org/post/taking-tough-stuff-beauty-talent-humor-st-louis-produced-fun-home-opens-fox (accessed 21 August 2018). [17] The American Psychiatric Association included homosexuality in the second and third editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder was omitted in their 1987 volume. Neel Burton, “When Homosexuality Stopped Being a Mental Disorder,” Psychology Today, 18 September 2015, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201509/when-homosexuality-stopped-being-mental-disorder (accessed 20 August 2018). [18] Stacy Wolf, “‘Never Gonna Be a Man/Catch Me if You Can/I Won’t Grow Up’: A Lesbian Account of Mary Martin as Peter Pan,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 4 (1997): 494. She uses “lesbianize” as a verb in A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 26. This claim about audience reception is also a starting point for Wolf’s book-length projects, including Changed for Good, in which Wolf argues that Wicked musically and visually codes Elphaba and Glinda as the show’s central couple. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). [19] Chris Straayer’s phrase describes viewers’ willful interpretations of texts that do not secure the character’s sexuality or heroism. “The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine in Narrative Feature Film,” in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, eds. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 44–69. [20] Ann M. Ciasullo, “Making Her (In)Visible: Cultural Representations of Lesbianism and the Lesbian Body in the 1990s,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 605. [21] Love, “Spectacular Failure,” 129. In the footnote that follows this sentence, Love references Elizabeth Freeman’s “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations,” New Literary History 31 (2000): 727–44. [22] Ben Brantley, “Candy Worship in the Temple of the Prom Queen,” The New York Times, 20 April 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/theater/reviews/30blon.html (accessed 9 June 2016). In Stagestruck, playwright Sarah Schulman offers a productive overview of lesbian theatrical context and the ways that lesbian characters are considered more commodifiable when presented from non-lesbian playwrights, with Rent as a key example. Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). [23] Mirk, “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home.’” [24] Adam Hetrick, “For Beth Malone, ‘Butch is a Beautiful Thing’—What This Fun Home Star Learned Playing Lesbian,” Playbill, 29 June 2015, www.playbill.com/news/article/for-beth-malone-butch-is-a-beautiful-thing-what-this-fun-home-star-learned-playing-lesbian-351968 (accessed 1 July 2015). [25] These are key features of “The Vito Russo Test.” See “The Vito Russo Test,” GLAAD, www.glaad.org/sri/2018/vitorusso (accessed 14 August 2018). [26]Andrew Gans, “Tony-Winning Musical Kinky Boots Recoups Initial Investment,” Playbill, 3 October 2013, www.playbill.com/article/tony-winning-musical-kinky-boots-recoups-initial-investment-com-210206 (accessed 19 June 2017). According to Brent Lang, the recuperation happened in large part because of the high costs of Kinky Boots tickets. “Kinky Boots Recoups $13.5 Investment,” The Wrap, 3 October 2013, www.thewrap.com/kinky-boots-recoups-13-5m-investment/ (accessed 19 June 2017). For additional context, Rent recouped in fifteen weeks, Avenue Q took forty weeks, and Matilda took some nineteen months to recoup its $16 million capitalization (Adler, “Box Office,” 352). Fun Home’s cost of $5.25 million in 2015 was less than that of Spring Awakening in 2007, which cost $6 million. Spring Awakening’s production team was concerned that their box office might suffer from their production’s content: like Fun Home, that musical includes suicide, adult language, homoeroticism, and teenage sexuality. For Matilda box office details, see David Cox, “Broadway Musical ‘Matilda’ Turns a Profit,” Variety, 5 December 2014, www.variety.com/2014/legit/news/matilda-recoups-broadway-musical-1201372084/. For all other box office details, see Adler, “Box Office,” 352. [27] Michael Ceveris, incidentally, “set the record for playing the most performances as the East German rock ‘n’ roll singer Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” For information on Ceveris’s record, see Carey Purcell, “Michael Ceveris on the Closing of Fun Home: ‘It Arrived on Broadway in the Moment it Was Most Needed,’” Out, 22 August 2016, www.out.com/theater-dance/2016/8/22/michael-cerveris-closing-fun-home-it-arrived-broadway-moment-it-was-most (accessed 12 February 2017). [28] Stacy Wolf, “The Queer Pleasures of Mary Martin and Broadway: The Sound of Music as a Lesbian Musical,” Modern Drama 39, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 52. [29] Other details specific to Bechdel’s experience were stripped from the campaign. Whereas the cover for Bechdel’s book referenced the family’s funeral home, including a Mass card reappropriated as her book title, the musical’s poster omitted that background and that prop. [30] See Sokolove, “The C.E.O. of ‘Hamilton’, Inc.,” where Jeffrey Seller characterized the name change as a result of “gentle but persistent prodding before Miranda finally agreed.” Patricia Herrera writes about the ways in which Hamilton “proclaims an inclusive narrative of American identity that obscures the histories of racism that are at the base of so much of the American experience,” as well as the promotional distance from the show’s “acoustic environment shaped by Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American musical, oral, visual, and dance forms and practices.” Patricia Herrera, “Reckoning with America’s Racial Past, Present, and Future in Hamilton,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past, eds. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 262, 260. [31] June Thomas, “Fun Home Won Five Tonys. How Did a Graphic Memoir Become a Musical?” Slate, 8 June 2015, www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2013/10/08/fun_home_is_america_ready_for_a_musical_about_a_butch_lesbian.html (accessed 21 April 2017). [32]Rae Binstock, “Why Lesbian Spaces Will Always Be in Danger of Closing, and Why Some Will Always Survive,” Slate, 20 December 2016, www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/12/20/why_do_lesbian_spaces_have_such_a_hard_time_staying_in_business.html (accessed 21 April 2017). [33] “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’: The Coming-Out Memoir That Became a Hit Broadway Musical,” Democracy Now!, 30 July 2015, www.democracynow.org/2015/7/30/alison_bechdels_fun_home_the_coming (accessed 14 May 2017). [34] Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups.” [35] Andrew Gans, “National Tour of Fun Home Recoups Investment,” Playbill, 17 May 2017, www.playbill.com/article/national-tour-of-fun-home-recoups-investment (accessed 19 June 2017). [36] Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups.” [37] Patrick Healey, “Moving Your Show to Broadway? Not So Fast,” The New York Times, 8 May 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/theater/theaterspecial/moving-your-show-to-broadway-not-so-fast.html (accessed 2 May 2017). [38] “Life with Father! Learn the True Tale Behind the New Broadway Musical Fun Home,” Broadway.com, 23 March 2015, www.broadway.com/buzz/180076/life-with-father-learn-the-true-tale-behind-the-new-broadway-musical-fun-home/ (accessed 13 March 2017). [39] Paulson, “Tonys.” Kristen Caskey was played off by the orchestra in the midst of her acceptance speech. Lisa Kron’s acceptance speech was not televised, but can be found here: Jerry Portwood, “Fun Home was the big musical winner at the awards,” Out, 8 June 2016, www.out.com/popnography/2015/6/08/watch-lisa-kron-gives-moving-tonys-acceptance-speech (accessed 9 June 2016). [40] Healy, “Moving.” [41] The Public Theater’s Public Lab held a run of Fun Home in 2012 in their Newman theater, and a subsequent off-Broadway run at the Public Theater that began in September 2014. Manuel Betancourt, “From the Public to Broadway: Fun Home’s Growing Pains,” HowlRound, 22 October 2015, www.howlround.com/from-the-public-to-broadway-fun-home-s-growing-pains (accessed 27 August 2018). [42] Betsy Gomez provides commentary on this provision, which “mandates that students be allowed to avoid encountering educational material they find ‘objectionable based on a sincerely held religious, moral, or cultural belief.’” Betsy Gomez, “This Compromise Is Not Acceptable: CBLDF Joins Coalition Condemning South Carolina Budget Provision,” Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, 13 June 2014, www.cbldf.org/2014/06/this-compromise-is-not-acceptable-cbldf-joins-coalition-questioning-south-carolina-budget-provision/ (accessed 22 May 2017). [43] Democracy Now!, “Alison Bechdel’s ’Fun Home.’” [44] Hetrick, “Butch is a Beautiful Thing.” [45] Michael Ceveris gave the speech on 8 June 2015. Michael Musto, “Lesbian Musical Crushes Gershwin Show, and Other Tony Awards Revelations,” Out, 8 June 2015, www.out.com/michael-musto/2015/6/08/lesbian-musical-fun-home-crushes-gershwin-show-tony-awards-revelations (accessed 10 June 2015). [46] These moments have been preserved by the production team, and can be easily accessed on their webpage. The Playbill Video site shows Kron commenting that the play is “at the cusp of an evolving opening moment.” Playbill Video, “Lisa Kron, Michael Cerveris, Judy Kuhn and Emily Skeggs Have Fun Talking "Fun Home" at BroadwayCon!,” 7:51, YouTube, 3 February 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdltIKzwLUk (accessed 13 March 2016). [47] Hetrick, “Butch is a Beautiful Thing.” [48] “Out100: The Fun Home Family,” Out, 9 November 2015, www.out.com/out100-2015/2015/11/09/out100-fun-home-family (accessed 17 May 2016). The shoot includes a stylist, an approach reminiscent of some of Rent’s promotion techniques which included clothing lines at Manhattan’s Bloomingdales and fashion spreads featuring the cast. See Michael Riedel, “Available at Bloomies: The ‘Rent’ Rags Can Be Yours—For a Price,” New York Daily News, 30 April 1996, 35. [49] Theatre Mania, “A Day with Fun Home Star Beth Malone,” 6:35, YouTube, 30 September 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hQw_uwzJCc (accessed 3 June 2016). [50] As Matilla notes, US Ambassador Samantha Powers took her colleagues to this event in May 2016, see “Selling Queerness.” [51] Carmen Triola, “‘Fun Home’ Is Going to Orlando to Perform a Benefit Concert for Pulse Shooting Victims,” FlavorWire, 6 July 2016, www.flavorwire.com/583516/fun-home-is-going-to-orlando-to-perform-a-benefit-concert-for-pulse-shooting-victims (accessed 22 July 2016). [52] For additional reports of this trip, see the following: “Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ Cast Sets Benefit Performance for Orlando Victims,” Hollywood Reporter, 5 July 2016, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/broadways-fun-home-cast-sets-908612 (accessed 11 April 2018); Michael Ceveris, “Taking ‘Fun Home’ to Orlando for a Catharsis Onstage and Off,” The New York Times, 6 August 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/08/06/theater/taking-fun-home-to-orlando-for-a-catharsis-onstage-and-off.html (accessed 11 April 2018); Hal Boedecker, “Pulse benefit: Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ plays Orlando,” Orlando Sentinel, 5 July 2016, www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/tv/tv-guy/os-pulse-benefit-broadway-s-fun-home-plays-orlando-20160705-story.html (accessed 11 April 2018). [53] Mark Kennedy, “Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ cast sets benefit for Orlando victims,” AP News, 5 July 2016, wwwapnews.com/c90a05bc88204ae4950c0ada08bf48e8 (accessed 22 July 2016). [54] After their advocacy, Isaacson was awarded an Equality Award from the St. Louis chapter of the Human Rights Campaign, and Caskey was appointed the executive vice president of Ambassador Theater Group’s North American operations. See Judith Newmark, “‘Fun Home’ reaps more honors for its producers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 20 November 2015, www.stltoday.com/entertainment/arts-and-theatre/culture-club/fun-home-reaps-more-honors-for-its-producers/article_492d110f-3d24-574a-8517-a4dcd372b5f5.html (accessed 6 June 2018); Gordon Cox, “Broadway Producer Kristen Caskey Joins Ambassador Theater Group,” Variety, 29 November 2016, www.variety.com/2016/legit/news/kristin-caskey-ambassador-theater-group-north-america-1201928759/ (accessed 6 June 2018). [55] Matthew J. Palm, “‘Fun Home’: Cast is here for you,” Orlando Sentinel, 20 July 2016, www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/arts-and-theater/os-fun-home-orlando-benefit-20160713-story.html#nt=inbody-1%20Ceveris%20%E2%80%93%20idea%20in%20middle%20of%20show,%20producers%E2%80%99%20response (accessed 22 July 2016). [56] Purcell, “On the Closing of Fun Home.” [57] Democracy Now!, “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home.’” [58] Ibid. "Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a ‘Lesbian Suicide Musical’" by Maureen McDonnell ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 2 (Winter 2019) ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre" by Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler "Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003)" by Konstantinos Blatanis "Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy" by Nathalie Aghoro "'Take Caroline Away': Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change" by Joanna Mansbridge "The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America" by Julia Rössler "Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a ‘Lesbian Suicide Musical’" by Maureen McDonnell www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Black Performance and Pedagogy Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Susan C. W. Abbotson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Susan C. W. Abbotson By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America. Jacqueline O’Connor. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016; Pp. 215 + xii. Taking a new historicist approach, Jacqueline O’Connor’s Law and Sexuality examines Tennessee Williams’s representations of sexual transgression in his drama and fiction as connected to issues of legality and social responses toward what was considered deviant. For Williams, sex constitutes the core of a person’s identity, and he clearly wrestled with what could be allowed in public versus what should be kept in private. O’Connor writes well, and her discussion of how this plays out in A Streetcar Named Desire is particularly compelling; it makes one wish she had covered more of his works. Williams, she asserts, does not simply focus on the socially marginalized, but on the legally so, and he refuses to view his characters as sordid, but compassionately recognizes them as troubled. As O’Connor suggests, tongue-in-cheek, Williams was not just interested in “the kindness of strangers” but also “kindness toward the strange” (27), as he wished to “distinguish the morally acceptable from the legally actionable” (30). When Williams began writing, post-war society had brought new sexual freedoms but any non-normative behavior was deemed disgusting and often subject to legal action. O’Connor posits that Williams’s “first-hand observations about the private and public lives of Americans whose sexual identities and practices situated them outside the law, whether male or female, gay or straight, rich or poor” inform all of his writing (2). That Williams was gay is clear, but O’Connor rightly insists that it is important to understand when he was gay. Her concerns are less with Williams’ literary life than his sexual one, which was in conflict with the laws and culture of his time, and how he personally and artistically navigated “tensions between the deviant and the orthodox” (5). This may make the book of greater interest to those engaged in cultural or American studies rather than literary. To establish her thesis regarding the bifurcation of Williams’s response to his own sexuality, O’Connor’s introduction depicts his development within a “complex and contradictory cultural reality” during which gay culture had become highly developed and accessible, and yet deeply transgressive and legally restricted (8). During Williams’s formative period, laws legislating sexual behavior of any kind multiplied, and in these pre-AIDS years “gay culture” was more concerned with the legal ramifications of “pick-ups,” rather than medical ones. In terms of biographical detail, she offers no more than one could glean from John Lahr’s Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh , but she gives a clear picture of what it was like to be gay in mid-century America. Focusing on Williams’s awareness of the “vulnerability of his own illegal body” (2) and the dual stream of attraction and revulsion that his writing–both personal and public–illustrates toward lives perceived by mainstream society as aberrant, she asks that we read his texts, not as narratives of Williams as a self-hating homosexual, but as coded challenges to the draconian sexual rules of law when he wrote. It is here she suggests something new. Using material from personal notebooks and letters, alongside published and draft versions of some of his key dramas and fiction, O’Connor illustrates Williams’s attitude towards social and legal perceptions of “sexual deviance” and the ways his language and situations echo these to expose the inadequacy of these perceptions. O’Connor weaves in legal debates and rulings of the time to make her argument. The study is comprised of an introduction and conclusion, plus four chapters; the first three chapters focus on Williams’ mid-century work (ordered thematically rather than chronologically) and the fourth considers later works’ reception from the 1970s. O’Connor has spent significant time in the archives, and all the expected critics are given voice, including David Savran, John Bak, and John Clum. A non-Williams scholar will find this a useful compendium, however, much of it recycles their views rather than extending them. Her few disagreements arise less from analyzing what William wrote than why he wrote as he did. She argues that we cannot grasp Williams’s work and politics without specific understanding that he was writing in an era when active laws suppressed even the mention of anti-normative sexuality, let alone explicit focus on the acts themselves. The first chapter references Night of the Iguana , but chiefly focuses on Streetcar , while the second chapter on fiction has an even narrower scope, beginning with brief analysis of “Hard Candy,” followed by “One Arm;” the pairing of these last two short works suggests compelling and ultimately sympathetic complexities in the characters of Krupper and Oliver, but what of the trickier Anthony Burns in “Desire and the Black Masseur.” The exclusion of so many relevant plays, such as Summer and Smoke , Camino Real , Suddenly Last Summer, or Sweet Bird of Youth limits the book’s persuasiveness, though the coverage of Streetcar and “One Arm” is enhanced by O’Connor’s discussion of alternate drafts of each text that effectively illustrate key decisions Williams made in their creation and revision. However, both chapters begin to feel repetitive. Judicious editing would have allowed for discussion of more plays and stories to strengthen the book’s thesis regarding the prevalence and impact of these tropes in Williams’s work. The third chapter proceeds similarly. After offering selective insights on how to view the sexuality of Big Daddy and Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , this chapter centers on Battle of Angels and its revision, Orpheus Descending, as complex studies of “law, morality and justice” in Williams’s America (125). Although the chapter is titled “The Fugitive Kind,” and a still from the movie graces the book’s cover, it is not discussed. The final chapter develops O’Connor’s argument that Williams’s 1975 Memoirs and its reception poisoned critics against his later work. This chapter moves into an insightful analysis of Small Craft Warnings , The Mutilation , and The Gnädiges Fräulein as works in which Williams renegotiated his attitudes for a post-Stonewall era. Again, analysis of more works would better bolster her argument that the “neglect of legal and political investigations of the diverse sexualities featured regularly in his drama and fiction” (18). Williams was politically aware has long been established. That he was also committed “to exposing the cultural suspicion and condemnation of sexual desire” (19) sounds valid, but O’Connor’s insistence on the “political urgency” (172) of his texts, and that “his work challenged not just attitudes, but policies” (48), reads a tad overblown. Ultimately, this book provides a valuable history of twentieth-century developments and changes in laws governing sexuality that contributes to American Studies scholarship, and O’Connor illustrates how the language of these laws permeates some of Williams’s writing for stage and fiction. To prove this negotiation was a conscious political act, or that his writing had legal ramifications is harder. However, if we view the fate of Williams’s sexualized characters from the contextualized perspective O’Connor demands, in which a violent outcome does not constitute the judgmental retribution some believe, but rather an outcome undercut by an underlying and often transformative compassion, then the book also offers Williams scholars a lens through which to reconsider his controversial characters. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Susan C. W. Abbotson Rhode Island College Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Michael Valdez Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Michael Valdez By Published on June 12, 2020 Download Article as PDF The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography . Arnold Aronson. London: Methuen Drama Publishing, 2018; Pp. 254. Arnold Aronson originally published The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography in 1981 when the term “environmental,” then recently popularized by Richard Schechner, had not yet lost ground to terms with more current purchase like “site-specific” and “immersive.” In this revised edition, after reprinting the first nine chapters save for minor alterations, the author attempts to incorporate the scenographic developments over the last four decades into his original argument, centering around the “environmental tradition.” While the two new chapters do not sustain the same level of deep, historical engagement, the small but poignant edits to the original text and the addition of illustrations throughout help to streamline and illuminate Aronson’s argument. Organized along a loosely chronological sequence, Aronson works along a continuum of environmental theatre, from completely “frontal” productions which starkly divide the audience and actors, to productions that totally incorporate the spectator into the frame of the performance. To Aronson, who echoes Schechner, environmental theatre refers to the relationship between audience, performer, and space, stipulating that a performance is not environmental if the audience retains a detached, frontal relationship to the performance even though it might take place outside of a theatre proper. The first chapter lays out myriad modes of performance that negotiate the shared space between performer and spectator, from actors reaching out through the fourth wall to outdoor, processional, multi-space, mobile engagements. Chapter two historicizes these spatial experimentations and innovations in what he terms the environmental tradition, lucidly displaying that non-frontal uses of performance space can be found in religious, non-Western and folk traditions, citing Christian mumming plays, the fêtes of the French Revolution, and the Indian festival of Bhavana . Aronson’s scenographic approach to performance history allows him to examine amusement environments such as fairs, carnivals, and processions in how attendees and audience are incorporated as performers within the larger space, and to anticipate later experimentation from Schechner’s work with The Performance Group to Reza Abdoh’s perambulatory use of New York City’s meatpacking district. While the author is the first to that this is far from an exhaustive study of non-frontal performance, his book nonetheless remains an invaluable resource for scholars and designers, offering critical touchstones in the influence of political and theoretical movements on performance forms and theatre architecture in the 20 th century. Centering performances, manifestos, and theoretical sketches by Appia, Jarry, Marinetti, Reinhardt, and Piscator among others, Aronson organizes his third chapter around early 20 th century reactions against the limitations of the proscenium stage. Aronson brings to light the environmental aspects of Futurist, Surrealist, and Dada presentations, from Marinetti’s tactile theatre that necessitated audience engagement via touch to André Breton’s call for the Surrealists to take to the streets. Bauhaus artists and architects are the focus of the fourth, where Aronson highlights Frederick Kiesler’s attempts to architecturally integrate the spectator into the scenography of the performance. The fifth and sixth chapters comprise a cogent overview of revolutionary Russian scenic innovation from the 1890s to the 1930s. Well-researched, detailed, and attentive to the broader political, sociocultural, and artistic influences from both Western Europe and the US, I believe that these chapters are best suited for scholarly use. Using Meyerhold’s progression of Constructivist experimentation as an organizational through-line, Aronson argues that environmental and post-revolutionary Russian performance share a core concern with the perception, creation, and use of space, going as far as to say the first “truly” environmental theatre productions were produced by Nikolai Okhlopkov between 1932 and 1934. Meticulously attending to disparate vectors of influence, Aronson shows that while Russian practitioners theorized these architectural innovations within contemporary Communist principles, scenographic roots can be found in Medici and revolutionary French pageants, fêtes , and processions. Chapters seven, eight, and nine survey popular postwar performance forms outside traditional theatre spaces: Happenings, found environments and transformed spaces. Aronson highlights performance experiments that attempt to manipulate and alter perception, breaking spectators out of conventional viewing habits, often using specific characteristics of spaces not originally intended for theatrical performance. Chapter eight has the only explicit section on dance; here Aronson explores the uses of found and created space in the postmodern dance movement, taking Meredith Monk’s dance-theatre work Vessel , which took place across three locales in New York City, as emblematic. Read historiographically, the first nine chapters offer a glance into early Performance Studies, revealing the author’s close proximity to the work of Richard Schechner. Not only does the text lean on one of Schechner’s coined terms, but his six axioms are reprinted in their entirety. Aronson finds a way to link back to Schechner’s work in every chapter, regardless of the time periods. Juxtaposed with the chapters on revolutionary Russian theatre architecture written with a honed eye for historical and cultural detail, the two new chapters seem like an additive gesture rather than a thoughtful reconsideration of the larger project. By framing “site-specific” and “immersive” theatre squarely in the continuation of the “environmental tradition,” Aronson glosses over key questions of perception, audience agency, history, and politics inherent to these theatrical innovations. As the author states in the introduction to the revised edition, the narrow focus on spatial organization is limited, and as such, is best read in tandem with texts like James Frieze’s edited collection Reframing Immersive Theatre , which augments a strictly scenographic analysis with broader inquiries into the political and cultural implications of these developments. Aronson’s 1981 edition has been and surely will continue to be, cited and used in introductory theatre studies and theatre design texts. Similarly, Aronson’s edited volume The Routledge Guide to Scenography is required reading for anyone in the discipline. Thus, I am left wanting at the end of this revisited monograph, having anticipated more. Still, Aronson’s text remains an important jargon-free point of entry to the intersection of theatre theory, performance, and architecture in Europe and the US, serving as jumping-off point into more nuanced, theoretically ambitious works such as Dorita Hannah’s Event-Space: Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde and Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance by Josephine Machon. At its core, The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography lays out a vastly useful if not sparse rubric, against which students and researchers can find their bearings in the history of a number of non-frontal performance traditions. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Michael Valdez University of Minnesota, Twin Cities 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 Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Dahye Lee Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America Dahye Lee By Published on November 17, 2022 Download Article as PDF Rebekah J. Kowal’s Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America emerged out of photos of “ethnic dance” that she stumbled upon in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dance Collection. By researching archives of this “lost chapter of American dance history” (19), Kowal investigates what it meant to put globalism into practice through “dancing the world smaller” in mid-century America. Kowal zooms in on the dance scene of New York City—the most heterogeneous city in America that emerged as the global cultural capital—as central to what she calls postwar America’s “globalist projects.” Throughout, she examines complications that existed in the staging of international dance as an important means of imagining both the United States as a new global superpower and a world with the US at the center. She compellingly reveals how mid-century universalist approaches to diversity and cross-cultural embodiment were characterized by “dueling impulses” towards “openness, multiculturalism, and multilateralism” on one hand, and “nationalism, containment, homogeneity, … and racist American cultural heritages,” on the other (8). Notably, she recognizes the contributions of dance artists whose work was produced in New York City, framing those underrepresented in dance history scholarship as indispensable to the formation of American modern dance as well as American globalism. Kowal presents rich archival research, analyzed through a close reading of materials ranging from programs, calendars, and contracts to interviews, letters, and autobiographical essays. Her writing weaves these materials together, bringing readers in. Equally impressive is her dexterity with explaining the political and historical contexts of mid-Century America that are all intermeshed. Consequently, the volume speaks to multiple fields of studies, from interculturalism and postcolonial studies to Cold War history and immigration studies, as it pursues dance history. Each of the book’s four chapters revolves around the work of an individual artist or a set of performances. While each chapter functions as a case study, they also interconnect, culminating in her discussion of the International Dance Festival in 1948 for New York City’s Golden Jubilee. (The fiftieth anniversary celebrated the unification of the city’s five boroughs to form the Greater City of New York). Chapter one, “Staging Integration,” focuses on Around the World with Dance and Song , a dance program at the American Museum of Natural History from 1943 to 1952. The series presented dance performances from forty-four countries, unparalleled for “its diverse offerings and expansive definition of international dance” (37). As Kowal shows, the series reflected mid-century globalist thinking and efforts to “put the city on the international map as a global center for international dance production and performance.” Set against the backdrop of the US entry into World War II and increased expectations that museums be “useful to society,” the program was ended because it was deemed not “serious and scholarly” enough (34). Guiding her readers through the innovative project’s arc, Kowal demonstrates that even though its efficacy in staging globalism can best be seen “as a substitution for or simulacrum of experience” or “armchair travel,” the program still made two important achievements: it contributed to a redefinition of ethnic dance in the mid-twentieth century and it “prompt[ed] Americans to look outward” (71). Chapter two, “Staging Ethnologic Dance,” centers on the work of La Meri, one of the most accomplished concert dancers of her time, named “the highest authority on ethnological dances” (74). The co-founder with Ruth St. Denis of the School of Natya, later renamed the Ethnologic Dance Center, La Meri was an “ambassador of dance,” widely considered an “intercultural mediator” (117). Kowal takes Homi Bhabha’s theory of mimicry to analyze La Meri’s eclectic dance practices that illuminate ambivalence at work (74). One important focus of the chapter is the dancer’s fraught relationship with St. Denis, with whom she was often compared. Kowal explores the complicated case of La Meri, who was at the intersection of enjoying cultural privileges as a white dance artist, given the benefit of doubt in terms of her work’s authenticity on one hand, and cast outside the mainstream as an ethnic dance artist, whose work was dismissed as “recreative” rather than “creative” on the other (102). Chapter three, “Staging Diaspora,” aligns Arthur A. Schomburg’s advocacy of vindicationist politics in early Black history and Michel de Certeau’s ideas about “the necessity for disenfranchised peoples to be their own historians.” Here, Kowal focuses on African dance festivals directed by Asadata Dafora, a Sierra Leonean-born dancer who became “the first African to put an African show [in] the American Theatre and concert halls” (123). Dafora worked under the auspices of the African Academy of Arts and Research in the 1930s and ‘40s, a significant era of African American concert dance, which afforded increased opportunities to artists of the African diaspora (124). Framing mixed critical receptions of Dafora’s work and its authenticity by writers including Zora Neale Hurston and John Martin, Kowal demonstrates how Dafora registered as a “transnational subject” whose ambassadorial work “[spoke] for Africa,” building bridges between African and American cultures (144). Both chapters two and three research liminal subjects—La Meri and Dafora—who moved both within and outside of the mainstream, invariably engaged in debates over cultural authority and authenticity. The fourth and last chapter, “Staging Diversity/Staging Containment,” circles back to the case study of the 1948 International Dance Festival. Kowal examines critical discourses surrounding three different companies that performed for the festival: the Paris Opera Ballet, Ram Gopal and his Hindu Ballet, and Charles Weidman. As Kowal reveals, the festival’s grand plan aimed to celebrate multicultural aspects of the city by showcasing a sampler of global dances. However, “much to [the organizer’s] chagrin,” only three out of the fourteen invited countries—one among them being America—responded to invitations (168). Juxtaposing Weidman’s success against the two “others”—Paris Opera Ballet’s director Serge Lifar, who was labeled as a “Queerographer,” and Ram Gopal, who played the role of a “foreign exotic,” Kowal asserts that the festival “crystalized ideals and contradictions of mid-century globalism” (199). In other words, the festival, promoting diversity and opposing differences simultaneously, exemplified the difficulties and complexities of staging globalism in America in the early Cold War years. Thematically, Kowal’s book revolves around dance’s intercultural potential—its ability to bring people together and bridge cultural differences. While demonstrating the contradictory political gestures at work in mid-century American globalism through her compelling case studies, this monograph encourages readers to understand how “dancing the world smaller” might become possible. Dancing the World Smaller is a valuable addition to global studies as well as dance studies, seeking to understand globalism from the perspectives of dance and performance as a practice, a performance, and as lived experience. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DAHYE LEE City University of New York 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 “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.