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By Stéphanie Bérard, with Frank Hentschker | An anthology of six contemporary Francophone Caribbean plays. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu New Plays from the Caribbean Stéphanie Bérard, with Frank Hentschker Download PDF New Plays from the Caribbean Segal Center Publication 2023 The Segal Center anthology New Plays from the Caribbean unveils the rich and diverse production of contemporary Francophone Caribbean theatre, allowing new dramatic voices to be heard and to travel around the world. The creative and innovative mixing of styles and languages (French and Creole) by playwrights from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe represent the next wave of politically engaged Caribbean theatre. The plays tell the stories and histories of contemporary Caribbean people by exploring passion, desire, and the collective experience of trauma and loss after a natural disaster. The plays denounce social, racial, and gender violence by staging real-life dramas and documentary theatre. The anthology is composed of six plays: - Adoration (L'Adoration) by Jean-René Lemoine (France/Haiti), translated by Amanda Gann; - And the Whole World Quakes/Chronicle of a Slaughter Foretold, (De toute la terre le grand effarement ) by Guy Régis Jr.(Haiti), translated by Judith Miller - Ladjablès-Wild Woman (Ladjablès) by Daniely Francisque, translated by Danielle Carlottu-Smith - Family (Une vie familiale) by Gaël Octavia, (Martinique) - Street Sad (Trottoir Chagrin ) by Luc Saint-Eloy (Guadeloupe), translated by Josh Cohen - The Day My Father Killed Me (Le jour où mon père m'a tué) by Magali Solignat and Charlotte Boimare (Guadeloupe), translated by Amelie Parenteau. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

By Daniel Gerould | A volume of previously uncollected writings by Daniel Gerould from Comparative Literature, Modern Drama, PAJ, TDR, SEEP, yale/theater and other journals. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Quick Change Daniel Gerould Download PDF 28 Theatre Essays and 4 Plays in Translation A volume of previously uncollected writings by Daniel Gerould from Comparative Literature, Modern Drama, PAJ, TDR, SEEP, yale/theater and other journals. Quick Change includes essays about Polish, Russian and French theatre, theories of melodrama and comedy, historical and medical simulations, Symbolist drama, erotic puppet theatre, comédie rosse at the Grand Guignol, Witkacy’s Doubles, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Mrożek, Battleship Potemkin, and other topics. Translations include Andrzej Bursa’s Count Cagliostro’s Animals, Henry Monnier‘s The Student and the Tart, and Oscar Méténier‘s Little Bugger and Meat-Ticket. Foreword by Richard Schechner Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Eric M. Glover 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 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Eric M. Glover By Published on April 29, 2021 Download Article as PDF The 1991 Lincoln Center Theater (LCT) production of Langston Hughes (1902-67) and Zora Neale Hurston’s (1891-60) 1931 antimusical The Mule Bone represents a milestone in Black theater history. The 1991 production resurrected a historical collaboration between two major Black artists and it used their work to offer a pointed critique of the 1990s New Jim Crow and US carceral system. In The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity , Raymond Knapp argues that in an antimusical, Black performers direct and turn the form back on itself by ironically reflecting the conventions of the genre. [1] The Black performer in an antimusical simultaneously deals critically with the form as a system of white supremacy while engaging in song and dance. In the brief exploration below, I focus on two episodes in The Mule Bone —the first, a trial set in a Black church, and the second, a song that depicts Black stowaways on train cars. Each suggests how the original 1931 work and its 1991 adaptation make milestone interventions in performing the policing of Black bodies in the Jim Crow and New Jim Crow eras respectively. Hughes and Hurston, like activist Michelle Alexander, had new ways to address problems, such as violence against and surveillance of black bodies, if only readers had paid close attention to their alternatives to practices that would produce the profit-driven prison industrial complex. Animated by a staged reading held in 1989 at the Rites and Reason Theatre (RRT), [2] Providence, where playwright and director George Houston Bass [3] laid the groundwork for reimagining the The Mule Bone, Lincoln Center picked up where Rites and Reason left off. Lincoln Center gave the antimusical the presentation that had eluded its authors back in the 1930s in part because of The Theatre Guild’s Theresa Helburn’s conceptual bias against it and in part because of the falling out between Hughes and Hurston during their collaboration on the work. Thus the 1991 production of The Mule Bone becomes significant for premiering a book and a score written, directed, choreographed, and designed largely by a Black creative team. Bass wrote a prologue and an epilogue introducing Hurston as a character, composer Taj Mahal set five of Hughes’s previously published poems to music, director Michael Schultz and choreographer Dianne McIntyre helped performers give characters body and voice, and scenic designer Edward Burbridge and lighting designer Allen Lee Hughes transformed the physical setting of Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theater into Jim Crow-era Eatonville. [4] Building on the early Black musicals of Eubie Blake, Will Marion Cook, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Hughes and Hurston levy a critique of Jim Crow in everyday life—a critique thrown into bold relief against what Michelle Alexander calls “the New Jim Crow,” the mass incarceration that builds on the legacy of Jim Crow using custom and law to secure a disproportionate amount of Black people incarcerated through the three-strikes rule for violent-felony convictions and the War on Drugs. [5] Thus, the Lincoln Center production marks a milestone in Black theater because Schultz and McIntyre’s interpretation helped to reclaim Hughes and Hurston’s places as radical political philosophers. Hughes and Hurston’s The Mule Bone , based on Hurston’s short story, “The Bone of Contention” (1929), about a political and religious fight between Baptists and Methodists, tells the story of a bromance between two figures in 1924 in Hurston’s hometown, Eatonville, in Orange County, Florida. In the short story, Dave, an angler, a Baptist, a hunter, and a local Nimrod, and Jim, a hen thief and a Methodist, do not have a bromance. In the musical Dave and Jim are transformed into a Baptist and a cakewalker and a guitarist and a Methodist, respectively. The events of The Mule Bone unfold around Dave and Jim’s characters. “Ain’t they playin’ somewhere for de white folks?” Daisy Taylor, the object of both Dave and Jim’s affections, asks. [6] Dave and Jim arrive from a performance engagement in a nearby all-white town and they treat the citizens of Eatonville to song and dance. They perform their song, “But I Rode Some,” with Dave dancing the cakewalk and Jim playing the guitar. Their desire to win Daisy drives the action forward but Dave stands in the way of Jim’s desire. Daisy chooses Dave but Jim lams him over the head with a mule bone in anger. Jim must stand trial before a judge and jury of his peers. “Now, who’s gonna take me home?” Daisy asks. [7] Act 2 takes place in the Macedonia Baptist Church which also serves as the courtroom. As James R. Grossman notes, “African-Americans in general looked to the church as an institution independent of white domination,” [8] suggesting that in this instance the church may have offered a site to administer Black rather than white justice. Joe Clarke, mayor of Eatonville, presides at the bench and other citizens serve in the capacities of defense counsel (Reverend Simms), prosecution (Elder Long), and town marshal (Lum Boger). The church gallery is full of Dave and Jim’s supporters, the division between Baptists and Methodists becoming more and more pronounced. Joe finds Jim guilty of assault against Dave and makes Jim leave town, rehabilitate himself, repent for his sins, and return in no less than two years. “We colored folks don’t need no jail,” Lounger, a citizen of Eatonville, declares. [9] However, Dave and Jim repair their relationship and run away together. The Mule Bone illuminates how theater invited Dave and Jim, the characters in the antimusical, to survive and thrive under Jim Crow. Dave and Jim earn their living by performing for white audiences. [10] Dave and Jim’s songs, framed as diegetic performances, clue the audience in to the fact that they are in control of who they are and what they want: “Dem foots done put plenty bread in our moufs,” Jim says of Dave’s dancing. Dave replies, “Wid de help of dat box, Jim,” referring to Jim’s guitar playing. [11] Given that they have to contend with “two competing forces: the demands to conform to white notions of black inferiority and the desire to resist these demands by undermining and destabilizing entrenched stereotypes of blacks onstage [sic],” the audience sees “Dave” and “Jim” in the imaginations of white audiences juxtaposed against the “real” Dave and Jim. [12] Dave and Jim’s proxies, Hughes and Hurston, transform the minstrel stereotype that Dave and Jim perform to undertake social justice. Through their songs and dances, Dave and Jim imagine alternative worlds for themselves. For example, they re-create their subjugation by white audiences in “But I Rode Some” but they also ironically find their antidote to the internalization of white supremacy. Dave and Jim’s “But I Rode Some” tells the story of a stowaway on a train captured and beaten by a white conductor, before being thrown in jail and shoved onto a chain gang: First thing I saw in jail Was a pot of peas. But I rode some, But I rode some. First thing I saw in jail Was a pot of peas. But I rode some, But I rode some. The peas was good, The meat was fat, Fell in love with the chain gang jus’ for that, But I rode some. (90) Hughes and Hurston reflect on the fact that Black people in the 1920s-30s often experienced denial of a sense of place and displacement by taking up themes of escape and resistance in the musical number. Even in the face of violence, Dave and Jim resist: “Grabbed me by the neck, /And led me to the door, /Rapped me cross the head with a Forty-Four, / But I rode some!” [13] The song structure itself has roots and routes both in the era of slavery and freedom and influenced other genres of popular music around the world. [14] Illicit travel by passenger train, often called “riding the blinds,” offered a dangerous way for Black passengers to experience a thrill of autonomy. They parked their bodies between the locomotive tender (coal car) and the “blind” end of a baggage car to hitch rides from the South to the North and everywhere in between. If conductors caught a Black person riding the blinds, conductors would (literally) throw the passenger from the train. [15] Through its strategic use of irony and subversion, the antimusical The Mule Bone is as much about the affective and cognitive powers of representational visibility as it is about Black people’s resilience. It was important to Hughes and Hurston that their Black audience saw a community of Black characters enjoying and loving life–Jim Crow be damned–self-governing their city and supporting its citizens. Looking at its 1931 and 1991 histories alongside each other invites scholars of Black theater to imagine how artists working more than half a century apart have deployed their creative powers to combat patterns of systemic racism that echo across the decades. References [1] Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton UP, 2006), 91. [2] Rites and Reason Theatre, based in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, is dedicated to producing continental African and diasporic stage works. [3] Bass, in his capacity as Langston Hughes’s estate’s executor, wrote two scenes for the production and he edited a critical edition of the script. [4] As directed by Schultz and choreographed by McIntyre, the opening night cast of the original Broadway production assembled the floor and the walls of a general store which also served as a jook joint with barrels and crates. A train track, beginning off stage left in the fly loft, formed a semicircle around the general store. The opening night cast also assembled the Macedonia Baptist Church which also served as the courtroom, including multiple rows of pews that faced downstage center, a stained-glass window upstage center, and the bench located downstage right. A community of Black people developed through song and dance in some of the most arresting musical numbers in the video of The Mule Bone that is on file at the Theater on Film and Tape Archive at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, New York. [5] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 55-56. [6] George Houston Bass and Jr. Henry Louis Gates, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (Harper Perennial, 1991), 58. [7] Bass and Gates, 99. [8] Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, To Make Our World Anew: A History of African-Americans since 1880 (Oxford UP, 2005), 90. [9] Bass and Gates, 78. [10] Musician Kenny Neal, a 1991 Theater World Award winner for acting, played the role of Jim and Eric Ware played the role of Dave. [11] Bass and Gates, 125. [12] David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theater, 1895-1910 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 1. [13] Bass and Gates, 89-90. [14] It follows what blues musicians refer to as the A-A-B pattern where the first, second, fourth, and fifth lines repeat and the remaining respond. [15] Kusmer, 144. Footnotes About The Author(s) ERIC M. GLOVER Swarthmore College Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Bernth Lindfors 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 Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Bernth Lindfors By Published on April 30, 2021 Download Article as PDF The British Newspaper Archive continues to offer a fruitful research tool for scholars wishing to study reviews of performances by actors on the British stage. I used this remarkable resource extensively when preparing biographies of the famous Black performers Ira Aldridge and Samuel Morgan Smith, [1] and I go back to it from time to time whenever new microfilms of old papers from the nineteenth century are added to it in order to see if there are any reports or anecdotes about these two actors that I might have missed. Sure enough, I have found two documents that shed some new light on Aldridge, and I offer them here in tribute to Errol Hill’s pioneering research on black actors. The first of these accounts appeared in London’s Weekly Dispatch on February 10, 1828 as a contribution on “Metropolitan Oddities” focusing on “The African Roscius,” the name ironically bestowed upon Aldridge by the London Times in its racist review of his debut in the role of Oronooko at the Coburg Theatre on October 10, 1825. Aldridge had made his initial debut in London at age seventeen five months earlier in a condensed production of Othello at the smaller Royalty Theatre in the East End, performing under the pseudonym of Mr. Keene, a deliberately playful allusion to the surname of Edmund Kean, one of England’s greatest tragedians, famous for his portrayal of Othello. Aldridge kept this facetious stage name until the real Kean collapsed on stage while playing the Moor at Covent Garden Theatre on March 25, 1833, and managers called upon Aldridge to replace him in the same role in the same theatre two weeks later. He was then billed both honestly as Mr. Aldridge and dishonestly as “a Native of Senegal,” possibly a ploy to validate his identity as a true African performer. This charade led to a controversy so bitter that it kept Aldridge off the London stage for the next fifteen years. He had already spent eight years seeking to turn what was meant as a racial insult into a praise name, and he persisted in assuming this honorific title alluding to Roscius, a great Roman actor, for the remainder of his career. When he started appearing at the Royalty Theatre, advertisements described him as a “Gentleman of Colour from the New York Theatre,” [2] and press reports on his subsequent provincial tours spoke of him as having “attained considerable celebrity in America,” [3] a gross exaggeration. One playbill in Bristol went so far as to claim erroneously that he was “known throughout America by the appellation of the African Roscius, a performer of Colour, whose flattering reception at New York and throughout all the principal Theatres in America has induced him to visit England professionally.” [4] This was more media puffery. Later in 1826, when he was finding it difficult to secure engagements and had become nearly destitute, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post and the Theatrical Observer; and Daily Bills of the Play actively sought to solicit funds that would enable him to return to America. [5] In these early years he was known to have moved to England from the New World, not directly from Africa. So the article in the Weekly Dispatch two and a half years later purported to clear up some of the confusion surrounding this unusual stranger. It may have been the first biographical article published on him in Britain and deserves to be remembered both for its errors as well as its truths. The author of this piece, identified only by his initials—W.L.R.—was William Leman Rede, the younger brother of Leman Thomas Rede, author of The Road to the Stage (1827). Both brothers enjoyed active careers in the theatre, William initially as a young actor and journalist who “speedily established himself in high favour as a critic on all matters connected with the drama. None better could distinguish between talent and pretension; none better adjust the intricate balance between the practiced charlatan and the unpractised man of promising merit.” [6] He had written a few early plays and novels and later became a very prolific playwright, specializing in popular farces and melodramas. At the time he wrote about Aldridge, he was only twenty-six years old, just six years older than Aldridge himself. Having seen so young an actor performed remarkably well in a variety of roles, Rede went to interview him in order to collect information on his background and previous experience. Here is his scoop on this surprising American African: THE AFRICAN ROSCIUS The London Stage has alternately presented every novelty that Europe can afford—we have had rope-dancers and wire-walkers, that performed all sorts of apparent impossibilities—we have had men-monkies, real dogs, horses, and elephants—even the less civilized quarters of the globe have supplied us with the phenomens [ sic ], and those lofty domes in which they profess to “hold the glass up” to nature, have been made the arena for tumblers. Novelty and merit are not twins, yet they are sometimes simultaneously produced, and the subject of my present article is one instance of this desirable conjunction. The visiters [ sic ] of the Coburg must all remember the genuine Oronooko [,] Gambia, &c., who appeared there about three years since—his late efforts have been made in the provinces, and, as it is said, he is shortly to appear at Covent Garden Theatre, a sketch of him and his adventures may prove acceptable. FREDERICK WILLIAM KEENE (the African Roscius) is the son of the Rev. W. Keene, who, though an African by birth, is a Protestant Minister in New York, and has the care of the souls of a large number of blacks; his wife (my hero’s mother) was a Creole, and the Roscius, I believe, the “first fruits” of their union, was born in New York (24th July 1807). His early days it would be difficult to describe, unless my readers were acquainted with the pastimes followed by the juvenile in the United States. At an early age, he shewed a predilection for the drama, and when about 15, joined some Gentlemen “of his own rank and complexion,” in a Theatrical scheme; they were a sort of a chess-board company—half black half white. The theatre was situated in Green-street, New York, and their first play was Richard the Third , the principal characters by four blacks, i.e. Duke of Gloster [ sic ], by the Roscius; King Henry , by Mr. Bates; Richmond , Mr. Hewlett; Buckingham , Mr. Jackson; Lady Anne (the fair Lady Anne)! by a negress , called Miss Sukey Stevens; and the Queen , by a brown fair one yclept Miss Dixon. These performers of colour were set off by the appearance of a white Tressel — (Mr. Lamb). The Roscius made a decided hit, and, after a few more trials, set out on a starring tour in Boston—where he played Othello , with a black Desdemona and a white Emilia . He then returned to New York and appeared at the Park-street Theatre as a star ; he ran through a round of characters in different parts of the United States, and then embarked for England—but, ere I follow him thither, another word of the Green-street Theatre. It was a desideratum in New York—where a large portion of the inhabitants are virtually, if not actually, excluded from the other playhouses on no plea but their colour; the prices were as follows—Boxes, 8s., (5s. English)—Pit, 4s.—Gallery, 2s. The company were most respectable—unlike some damsels of our drama—amid the black ladies there were no light characters. Mr. Mathews, in his piece of pleasantry, entitled “A Trip to America,” has described the performance of Hamlet at this theatre; now “I have been most accurate in my researches;” and finds that this story has only one fault; i.e.—that it is not true Hamlet was never performed at Green-street; it was, indeed, rehearsed for a Miss Johnson’s benefit, but never played. When Mathews visited the theatre, Pizarro was the play, and my hero was Rolla . One anecdote will suffice to show the genuine innocence (call it not ignorance) of the company. Fortune’s Frolic was got up, and Robin Roughhead (a Yorkshireman) played by a negro, who studied it from an Irishman, and went through the part with a fine Cork brogue: In this farce, there is one character who delivers some eight or ten lines—this part is marked in the cast as “a clown”—Messieurs of the somber hue, who had no notion of any clown but a pantomime one, such as they had seen at Price’s theatre, absolutely dressed this character a la Grimaldi! Some of the technical phrases of the drama, and portions of the texts, were perversely retained by them, though, in their mouths, they sounded paradoxical; for instance, Othello , bending over a Desdemona , as black as a crow, exclaimed— “Yet I’ll not shed her blood, nor scar That whiter skin of her’s than snow.” Let me return to the Roscius—he came to London, and drew crowded houses at the Coburg, where a piece, called The Negro’s Curse , was prepared for him by Milner. Since then he has been at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bath, and Bristol—at Manchester and Liverpool seven times, and he is now in Birmingham. Whilst in Scotland he met Mr. C. Kemble, who, I am informed, undertook to procure him an opening at Covent-Garden. The strongest point of his acting is intense feeling—not violent, but deep—there is a pathos even in his colloquial tones peculiar and affecting. Our first meeting was in High Holborn, where he had collected a mob round him by his extravagant laughter at the braying of a donkey, an animal he had never seen in America— Othello and Zanga are his favourite parts—but Mungo is, perhaps, his chef-d’oeuvre —his style of humour is totally different from that of any other performer—his drunken scene is a thing by itself—the very personification of liberty run mad—and presents a lively image of what we might conceive to be the folly of the Spartan slaves, when they had their one day of unrestrained freedom, both in speech and diet. The African Roscius (notwithstanding his faults and mannerisms) is an actor of great natural powers; he practices no tricks to catch applause, and rather under than over acts. His talents, and the singular circumstances in which he stands in the profession he has chosen, are claims upon kindness. His line is a limited one; and, I trust, if any prejudice arises on his appearance, it will be one favourable to him. He is a stranger, untaught, unaided, totally friendless in this country, and, with nothing to rely on but his talent, which is of an order that practice in the metropolis will render great. Some of the biographical details given here are known to be accurate; for instance, Aldridge’s date of birth, his father’s profession, his own predilection for the drama at an early age, and his involvement in a multiracial “Theatrical scheme” in New York. But his father’s name was Daniel, not a name that began with a W, and Rede wrongly assumed that Aldridge was the firstborn child in his family (he had a brother, Joshua, born seven years earlier). [7] However, Rede’s article contains one fact that has never before been mentioned by others: that Aldridge’s mother was “a Creole.” In those days the term spanned a range of different meanings. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , a Creole could indicate someone white, black, or a person of mixed racial ancestry. A creole white was usually “a descendant of European settlers, born or naturalized in those colonies or regions [of the West Indies or America] and more or less modified in type by the climate and surroundings.” A creole negro was “a negro born in the West Indies or America, as distinguished from one freshly imported from Africa.” [8] Since the Manhattan Death Libers records that Aldridge’s mother Luranah, mistranscribed in this source as Lavinia, was born in Delaware and buried in the cemetery of the black church her husband served, theatre scholars may assume that she belonged in the latter category of creoles, but cannot be certain that she had no mixed blood. [9] After all, Aldridge himself, during his initial performances at the Royal Coburg, was often described as not very dark-skinned. The Times said “The gentleman is in complexion the colour of a new half-penny, barring the brightness.” [10] The British Press confidently declared “Mr. Keene is a Creole.” [11] And when he came back to London to appear at Covent Garden, there was a good deal of commentary on his color being light brown or dark olive, and of an “oily and expressive mulatto tint” which “seems to show that he has European blood in his veins.” [12] Rede had never been to New York, but he knew a little about the “African Theatre” where Aldridge had made his start as a professional actor because a year earlier he had watched the comedian Charles Mathews mock and mimic a ludicrously inept “African Tragedian” he claimed to have seen butcher the role of Hamlet there. This was one of the most memorable satirical character sketches he performed in his popular one-man show Trip to America , which opened at the English Opera House on March 25, 1824. Mathews’s African was not a caricature of Aldridge in performance. Rather, it was a parody of the acting style of James Hewlett, the principal actor at that theatre. But when Aldridge started performing at the Coburg, some theatergoers went there expecting to see the actor Mathews had famously lampooned. Rede knew better, having spoken with Aldridge, but for more details on his acting career, he had to rely on whatever Aldridge told him, some of which was more fanciful than factual. There has been some good research done on New York’s African Theatre in recent decades, including studies by Errol Hill, George Thompson, Shane White, and Marvin McAllister. [13] By comparing what these scholars have said with what Aldridge told Rede, contemporary scholars may gain a better understanding of how Aldridge chose to present himself to the public and how that public responded to what they saw in him. The African Theatre originally grew out of the African Grove, a cabaret or “public garden” intended for the enjoyment of New York City’s black community. Opened in the summer of 1821 by William Alexander Brown, a West Indian, it offered drinks, music, and dramatic entertainments to its patrons, who initially met at Brown’s Thomas Street home in Lower Manhattan. After neighbors complained about the noise, Brown moved thirteen blocks further north to his home at the corner of Bleeker and Mercer streets a few months later. However, the space offered seating for only fifty people and audiences proved thinner, so in November or December of 1821, Brown decided to move his troupe again, this time south to a tavern or hotel in Park Row facing City Hall Park and next door to the well-established Park Theatre. Unfortunately for Brown, Stephen Price, the business manager at the Park Theatre, did not like having such competitors on his doorstep, especially since they were now performing three times a week and drawing white as well as black audiences. He sent in hecklers to disrupt performances by throwing firecrackers onto the stage and even arranged for police to raid the theatre one night and arrest all the actors. In order to be released, the actors had to promise that they would never act Shakespeare again. This kind of harassment led Brown to lease an empty lot on the east side of Mercer Street near Broadway and build a proper playhouse with seating for hundreds that opened in mid-July 1822. (Greene Street, mentioned by Rede, sat one short block west of Mercer.) Unfortunately, the harassment resumed almost immediately. On August 10 th , a mob of white ruffians interrupted a performance, assaulted the actors, and vandalized the playhouse. Brown and his actors boldly fought back. Police arrested and charged eleven of the white rioters, some of them circus workers in the city, but the case against them was eventually dismissed. To make matters worse, a severe yellow fever epidemic had started to spread throughout the city, and by early October Brown’s theatre, now called the American Theatre, had to close. Brown took his players to Albany, where they performed for the rest of the year. Surviving playbills indicate that several performances were mounted at Brown’s new theatre in the spring and early summer of 1823, but by mid-July Brown was bankrupt. Several members of his troupe stayed together and gave scattered performances in 1824, but they had to find other venues for their entertainments. [14] What was Aldridge doing during these three years? At what point did he join the African Theatre company and take part in their performances? Theatre scholars cannot confirm this precisely. His name does not appear in any of the documents concerning the company, but he may have performed under a pseudonym since his father did not approve of such sinful behavior and wanted him to be a preacher rather than an actor. But statements made by others who knew him and also by Aldridge himself suggest that he was indeed attached to Brown’s theatre company for a time. Philip A. Bell, one of his classmates at the African Free School, recalled some years later that Aldridge left school in 1822 and joined Brown’s American Theatre in 1823 after seeing a Shakespeare performance there. [15] In an autobiography Aldridge published around 1848, he claimed that his first visit to a professional theatre, specifically the Park Theatre, had “fixed the great purpose of his life, and established the whole end and aim of his existence. He would be an actor.” [16] So he “fell to work and studied the part of Rolla, in the play Pizarro , and in that character he made ‘his first appearance on any stage.’ This was at a private theatre, where he was singularly successful, and all his fellow-performers were of his own complexion” [17] —in other words, Brown’s theatre. Brown’s troupe produced Pizarro at the Hampton Hotel next door to the Park Theatre in the winter or spring of 1822, but James Hewlett played Rolla (not Aldridge). However, a second performance of Pizarro staged by Brown’s company in Albany on December 19, 1823 may have given Aldridge the opportunity to replace Hewlett in that heroic role. [18] So Bell and Aldridge’s accounts may contain some elements of truth. Aldridge also reported that he had also once played a love-sick Ethiopian Romeo opposite an Ethiopian Juliet with the same supporting cast, but there remains no hard evidence in the extant literature on the African Theatre to support this claim. [19] How reliable was the information that Aldridge gave Rede? Richard III was among the first plays ever performed at the African Grove, the pleasure garden that Brown had created for the black community. Brown staged it three times in September and October 1821 and a fourth time in January 1822, but in at least two of the performances Hewlett played the leading role supported by Mr. Bates and Mr. Jackson but not by any of the other actors and actresses Rede names in his account. In fact, none of the female performers, except Miss Dixon who later appeared in The Poor Soldier , appear to have been employed by Brown, and it seems extremely unlikely that Aldridge (thirteen years old and still at school at that time), would have been recruited to play a major role in a Shakespearean play. However, he could have become an active member of the troupe while still young, for James McCune Smith, who also had gone to school with him, reported years later that upon graduating, Aldridge, “being of a roving disposition,” had briefly shipped out on a brig. “Shortly after his return home, Brown’s theater was opened, and Ira, with his brother Joshua, took to the stage; but their father, finding it out, took them away from the theater.” [20] It remains tempting to speculate that the two actors, listed as Hutchington and J. Hutchington, performing as Buckingham and Lord Stanley in at least one of the African Theatre’s productions of Richard III , might have been these two delinquent youths. Hutchington also earned a part as a Castilian Soldier later in the African Theatre’s first performance of Pizarro . [21] In any case, Aldridge subsequently defied his father and rejoined Brown’s troupe. The rest of what Aldridge told Rede about his career in the United States appears the kind of inflated fiction that P.T. Barnum famously called Humbug or Bunk. He had never performed before Charles Mathews at the African Theatre. In fact, Mathews had never attended a production there; instead, James Hewlett had performed privately for him in the spring of 1823, inspiring Mathews’s skit of an ignorant African Tragedian in Trip to America . Aldridge also never appeared as a star at the Park Theatre, nor is there any record of him playing Othello in Boston or running through a round of characters in different parts of the United States. Aldridge could tell funny stories about other black actors at Brown’s theatre, one of whom had imitated a Yorkshireman with an Irish brogue, and another who botched lines as Othello, but these too may have been little more than highly embellished anecdotes. But Rede’s recitation of Aldridge’s impressive string of previous appearances on stage on his provincial tours seems very accurate. Indeed, over a twenty-month period after leaving London in December 1825, Aldridge had performed not only at Brighton, Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Birmingham—the major cities Rede mentions—but in at least seventeen smaller towns and villages along the way. During this time, rumors circulated that he planned to appear at Drury Lane and Covent Garden in London, but in mid-1826 his nemesis Stephen Price had become lessee of Drury Lane and remained there for the next four seasons, depriving Aldridge of that opportunity. Charles Kemble ran Covent Garden as an actor-manager and proprietor, but from 1826 to 1829 the theatre struggled with serious financial difficulty, so he probably could not have afforded to take a risk on a black actor. Rede’s article suggests that he saw that this young actor had talent and merited public attention. The last paragraph of Rede’s report in which he describes watching Aldridge perform offers a shrewd, insightful assessment of his salient abilities and minor defects. Later eyewitnesses confirm Aldridge possessed “great natural powers” as a tragedian and comedian, and one who might with further practice become still greater. But Rede need not have pitied him for being “totally friendless in this country” because Aldridge was happily married to a British woman, and two British actors he had met in New York, Henry and James Wallack, had encouraged him and helped launch him in London. Plus, by this time Rede himself had become his good friend. [22] Actually, Rede had already become so good a friend that when Aldridge announced his decision to experiment as the lessee of a theatre in Coventry on March 3, 1826 (three weeks after the publication of Rede’s essay), he said he had invited Rede to serve as his stage manager. Their collaboration included acting as well as managing the motley crew of performers and musicians they hired. Their brave experiment in running a theatre lasted barely two months, for by the end of April and beginning of May each had moved on to performer elsewhere, Aldridge in Worcester, Rede in York. I found a second source of new biographical information on Aldridge in the Carlisle Journal of April 16, 1889. It comes in the form of an amusing eyewitness report by a gentleman who recalled having seen Aldridge perform a scene from Othello at his school forty-one years earlier: Looking last week over a collection of old play bills which was in the library of the late Mr. John Clarke Ferguson, I noticed one which referred to the performance of Ira Aldridge, “the African Roscius,” in the Theatre Royal at Carlisle in the year 1848. Ira Aldridge was a man of colour—a veritable “black man”—who could assume the part of Othello without the use of burnt cork, and I have often laughed at an incident that occurred during his visit to Carlisle. He came to our school to give some recitations. It was a hot summer’s evening, and the windows of the schoolroom, which looked upon the neighboring street, were thrown wide open for the purposes of ventilation, while the boys sat listening with rapt attention to the African Roscius while he gave some scenes from Othello . He was in the midst of his address to the Senate and describing the arts by which he had wooed and won the gentle Desdemona, when a noisy fellow in the street began a most terrible row by ringing a big bell and calling “Fresh herrings!” with a loud, hoarse voice. We tittered at the curious mixture of Shakespeare and costermonger; but Ira went manfully on. So did the fresh herring merchant. My story being done She gave me for my pains a world of sighs— continued the tragedian. “All alive! Just come in!” vociferated the costermonger. Ira hesitated a moment, but resumed— She swore, in faith, ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange, 'Twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitiful, “Fresh herrings! Fresh herrings!” came booming through the window once more. The “dusky Moor,” already perspiring at every pore, with ill-concealed indignation made one final struggle— She wish’d she had not heard it— But the fresh herring man was noisier than ever— “All alive! Alive!” and the bell gave another loud clang. The blood of the African Roscius was now up. Unable longer to constrain himself he broke off in the middle of the sentence, rushed from the stage, and behind the wings we could hear him shouting—no longer the musical blank verse of the poet, but— “Stop that row, you rascal, or I’ll come and choke you with a mutton chop!” The coster was evidently taken aback for a moment by the apparition of the negro’s head through the open door; but he soon recovered his equilibrium and his voice, and the altercation which ensued helped—to the school, at least—give an amusing turn to the entertainment.[23] This prompted a response in the Carlisle Journal on 24 April the following week by another former schoolboy who remembered the same incident but also provided additional information on the black actor: A Kendal correspondent writes: — “Your notes on Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius, have interested me greatly as I knew that robustuous [sic] actor very well in Edinburgh many years ago when he played the part of Aaron, the Moor beloved by Tamora, in Titus Andronicus .[24] These remarks affirm that Aldridge made an indelible impression on audiences young and old. He could amuse schoolboys with a comical tirade and years later could remind them of the vigor with which he portrayed Aaron not as a villain but as a romantic hero. Such memories of Aldridge like the ones described in this essay, preserved in newspapers of the day, merit resurrecting and adding to the documentary record of his life and experiences. References [1] My biography of Aldridge was published in four volumes by the University of Rochester Press between 2011 and 2015. The one I wrote on Morgan Smith was published by Africa World Press in Trenton, NJ in 2018. [2] There was no theatre by that name in New York City. [3] Brighton Gazette , 15 December 1825. [4] Playbill held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. The same notice appeared in the Bristol Mercury , 20 January 1826. [5] Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post , August 31, 1826; Theatrical Observer; and Daily Bills of the Play , 2 September 1826. [6] “Recollections of Leman Rede,” New Monthly Magazine and Humorist , new series 80 (1847): 102-09. [7] Bernth Lindfors, Ira Aldridge: The Early Years ((Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 21. [8] These definitions are drawn from The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 601. [9] Lindfors, Ira Aldridge , 20. [10] London Times , 11 October 1825. [11] British Press , 11 October 1825. [12] English Chronicle , 11 April 1833; Morning Chronicle , 11 April 1833; Town Journal , 14 April 1833; the direct quotations are taken from the Globe and Traveller , 11 April 1833, and the Observer , 11 April 1833, respectively. [13] One of the first reliable accounts was given in Errol Hill’s Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (1984). Then came A Documentary History of the African Theatre (1998) by George A. Thompson, Jr., a New York City librarian who tracked down 134 published and unpublished sources that told much of what was happening there. Next was Shane White’s Stories of Freedom in Black New York (2002) and Marvin McAllister’s White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentleman of Colour: William Brown’s African and American Theater (2003). Each provides insightful commentary on the significance of Brown’s theatre, White writing as a historian of black New York, McAllister as a theatre historian and performance theorist. [14] I have been following George Thompson’s chronology throughout this portion of the narrative. [15] Philip A. Bell, “Men We Have Known: Ira Aldridge (1867),” Elevator (San Francisco), 2, and reprinted in Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius , ed. Bernth Lindfors (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2007), 49. [16] Memoir and Theatrical Career of Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius (London: Onwhyn, [1848]), and reprinted in Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius , ed. Bernth Lindfors (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2007), 13. [17] Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius , ed. Bernth Lindfors (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2007), 14. [18] H.P. Phelps, Players of a Century: A Record of the Albany Stager (Albany: Joseph McDonough, 1880), 56. [19] Memoir and Theatrical Career of Ira Aldridge , 14. [20] James McCune Smith, “Ira Aldridge,” Anglo-African Magazine , 2, no. 1 (January 1860), 27-32, and reprinted in Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius , ed. Bernth Lindfors (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2007), 37-47. [21] See George A. Thompson, Jr., A Documentary History of the African Theatre (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 70 and 228, for further details. [22] For further information on Aldridge’s theatrical activities in New York, London, and on his first tours of the British provinces, see Lindfors, Ira Aldridge and the books by Hill, Thompson, White, and McAllister cited in footnote 13. [23] Carlisle Journal , 16 April 1889. [24] An Edinburgh playbill shows that Aldridge performed as Aaron there on 24 July 1850. Footnotes About The Author(s) BERNTH LINDFORS Professor Emeritus, University of Texas at Austin Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne By Dan Poston Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF The Schaubühne’s Festival International New Drama (FIND) is well known in Berlin theater circles as a bright spot in the season. This year almost all of its productions sold out. The festival offers an intelligently curated and manageably compact chance to see exciting, internationally buzzy theater companies and their new productions without having to leave the city or go in search of different dates and touring schedules around town. The mix of plays and companies for 2025 was admirably balanced between highlighting a particular artist (the French director Caroline Guiela Nguyen), drawing together interestingly relatable work from other artists, and featuring chances to see new, experimental work by lesser known theater makers of the sort one might find at a larger “fringe” festival. FIND presented productions from 6 countries that, taken together, created a picture and conversation about new forms of naturalism, autobiography, and documentary theater, specifically about artists’ attempts to depict lives and situations that do not generally fall under the gaze of mass culture and its normative myths. All in all, the festival avoided the frequent paradoxical feeling of provinciality that can accompany efforts at “internationalization” in the cultural space—an achievement that speaks, again, to the intelligence of the Schaubühne’s current operation. Part of that cosmopolitan intelligence was an unadvertised concentration of theater pieces (4 out of 12) from Belgian companies representing different language and cultural groups—Flemish, Walloon, Burundian, and Spanish—whose histories and identities intersect complexly with the long tradition of Belgium’s own status as an “artificial” center and result of international negotiation. “Belgium” as a questioned place of belonging and citizenship in the festival could be taken as an abstract mirror for the ambivalent belonging-place of “Childhood”, another site and alleged protected center of contemporary societies that seems to cover so many silent figures of the sort the festival sought to foreground and bring to public speech. On the first night of the festival (Friday, April 4), I attended a piece in the new ground-floor performance complex, “Ku’damm 156”, just next door to the Schaubühne’s main building. The refreshingly still roughly renovated former retail space has an expansive, open “black box” layout, with several adaptable playing areas promising flexible Schaubühne use for the next, presumably leased years. The Walloon actor Cédric Eeckhout’s memory play, Héritage , was a perfect aesthetic fit for the new facility; both site and play a featured a well-designed mixture of minimalism and leftover, consumerist clutter and formlessness. Héritage picks up on Eeckhout’s earlier work about his mother (Jo Libertiaux), who in this production appears as a co-star and is, in part, also doubly portrayed by the son, Eeckhout in drag. In the post-show discussion, it was pointed out that the play could be compellingly performed in the future by actors who have no biographical connection to either Libertiaux or Eeckhout. Indeed, adding to the subtle formal arrangement and layering of Eeckhout’s tastefully faux- informal production is the sense that the play’s two characters are sculpted allegorically in a literary fashion out of their differing last names. Libertiaux (Jo) sits square in the center of her temporary temple, listening and visibly choosing to repeat lines that are fed to her in an agreeably friendly and slightly ironic manner that captivatingly suggests her support for her son and art, her modest bemusement with being the evening’s subject and shape-giver, and, yes, her freedom from the cult and regime of theater. The on-stage Eeckhout (Cédric) eeks out indeed an independent identity through various positionalities and rhythms in relation to his mother, whom he places sometimes as conversational mirror, sometimes as central dominating planet or star for his own calmly awkward or “hysterically” frenetic orbit. It is a simple story that partially celebrates and partially mourns its muse’s never-laureled status as historically avant-garde: a suburban hairdresser in the early 1980s emancipates herself from a stifling married life in a big house and raises her sons independently, while maintaining an ambivalent, non-reactionary relation to her former husband, partially for the sake of her sons and partially for the sake of (what it used to be common to call) complex humanity and love. Liberty (as Muse) on Her Throne: Jo Libertiaux in Héritage (© Bea Borgers) Héritage pays homage to the unknown heroism of people like Jo, who move history incrementally forward through strong, difficult, and sometimes joyful independent living. At the same time, the piece is a nuanced, honest, and multi-layered meditation on actual adult European gay male identity and the historically split social formation of “Generation X” divorce kids. In Eeckhout’s contemplative dance between the personal and the mass, the planet of littered electronic goods produces an intimately remembered, screened projection of ultimate—but only temporary—transcendence: bicycling up above it all with a wrinkly, vulnerably abject brown alien, the children accompanying ET were lifted temporarily (Cédric remarked) up into the popular gaze by Spielberg’s ingenious use of spectacle to transform the a domestic divorce drama into a 1980s blockbuster. Like ET, the “non-theatrical” Jo of Eeckhout’s bio-drama is treated, in Brechtian fashion, as a fount of reluctant wisdom; a reminder of mortality, love, and fragility in the general tempest; the subject of dispassionately extractive science; and a nostalgically restored mother goose for everyday misfits. Minimally mimicking the Spielberg sprezzatura of cloaking artificial intellectual arrangement in the bedazzlement of deployed cliche and nutritiously flavored schmalz, Eeckhout choppily smooths and composes Cédric’s generational statement-story using a dusty wedding-gift plastic blender from the 70s. That blender—a smart, developed postmodernism sturdily manufactured throughout the latter half of the last century—still quietly works in the age of optimally personalized, saturated Jamba Juice from perfectly ethically sourced ingredients on every city corner. Enhanced by Pauline Sikirdji’s skillfully modulated mixed-on-stage music, the production was the highlight of the festival for aesthetic achievement. Cédric as His Mother in Héritage (© Bea Borgers) The following night, I saw two comparatively maximalist productions in the main building of the Schaubühne. The Swiss director Milo Rau, who is now based in Vienna after a five-year stint in Belgium, brought his Flemish-speaking cast of mostly children from the NTGent to Berlin in order to stage a much bloodier divorce story, one also based on real events. Medea’s Children combines the classical myth of Medea with the true-story criminal case of Geneviève Lhermitte, whose horrific murder of her five children shocked Belgium in 2007. Rau’s discursive meta-drama plays exquisitely with our contemporary, indulgently simultaneous embrace of “innocence” and rejection of classical tragedy’s proscription against on-stage violence. The play opens with an extended, ironic mimesis of classical tragedy’s nachträgliche narration—the method by which it produces and suppresses the obscene. Pretending to forego dramatic business in favor of our era’s supposed post-analytical efficiency, the audience is teasingly welcomed into an “after-talk” about the production of Medea’s Children that they are told they have just seen. The ensemble’s only live adult member, Peter Seynaeve, conducts a discussion with the production’s six child actors that touches—with sprinkled moments of humorously precise, rhapsodic over-intellectuality delivered by the reflective children—on classical and modern dramaturgy, from Aeschylus to Beckett. The joke of children virtuously and monstrously performing adult routines never gets old as Rau inverts the classical Greek theater’s presentation of children as mute figures. The children’s production coach, Dirk, fails to appear (like Godot, one of the children remarks at the end of the play) except on video in the role of “Dr. Glas”. But that video only appears once the fine, opening “after-talk” breaks and the curtain opens, the nightmare of the production restarting in response to the children’s enthusiastic desire to re-perform parts of the play again, including its most violent scenes. Rau’s theater of bare (moral) cruelty, already famous for its controversial use of child actors to re-enact incredible violence against other children (in his earlier 5 Easy Pieces ), covers itself in a thick aesthetic of irony, saturated scenic design, and meta-theatrical discourse. The absorptive set of Medea’s Children , designed by ruimtevaarders (Karolien De Schepper, Christophe Engels), looks almost like a surrealistic dreamscape— Strandkorb at the end of time—waiting for the liquid element of the children’s massively spilled blood to transmogrify the solid half-architectures and extra-large back-drop video projections into satisfying art. Moving in and between these open scenic units, the talented children of Rau’s ensemble re-enact what is journalistically known about Amandine’s relationship and crimes, taking on both adult and child roles and often imitating videos previously shot on location with adult actors. Through this layered, interrupted, and always-again alienated dramatic storytelling, the audience witnesses key scenes in the tale of Dr. Glas’ long-term, pederasty-tinged financial support and live-in relationship with Amandine’s husband, whose trip to North Africa with the older man apparently drives Amandine to the gruesome, premeditated murder of their children. Where Tarantino coyly promised and demurred in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood , Rau goes for the full, long, real-time gore-porn shot. As the stage action lingers in excruciating naturalism, the child playing Amandine calls each of the other five children individually into a room and inefficiently strangles them, clobbers them over the head, and cuts their throats for minutes at a time. The remaining children are immersed in watching a film in an adjoining room. Medea on the Beach (© Michiel Devijver) The violence done and prodigious realistic blood spilt, the after-talk element of the show and the conceit of an actor/child-training Lehrstück is restored: the children discuss their mimetic techniques and reflect on mortality, as if not just Aristotle but actually Plato had counterfactually won the argument over tragedy and the right use of role-playing. The audience, meanwhile, partially covered their eyes or walked on shaking aged legs out of the theater, supported by strangers, friends, colleagues, and theater personnel. The tenderness and care displayed in the audience—a young dating couple squirmed and took turns lightly blocking each other’s vision—produced an engrossing contrast with the scene of painstaking human slaughter and unfathomable maternal betrayal on the stage. That shared split reality between demanding allegorical art and humbly surviving audience was another highpoint of the festival and a trope of its lived and performed reality. The audience’s palpable concern for the experiences and futures of the real child actors on stage (and their peers more extensively), along with the realization that actual paramedics were racing through the city to help a patron who had fainted, produced a complex object for theater’s contemplation, though one somewhat aside from Rau’s cunning depiction of a society of over-inexperienced people learning to repeatedly, virtually investigate and enact real existential blasphemies of human extinguishment. The Children Act Out and Talk Back in Rau’s Medea’s Kinderen (© Michiel Devijver) With only a few minutes in between, I walked to the other main auditorium at the Schaubühne to see the Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s LACRIMA . That 3-hour drama also thematized a marital split and the difficult repercussions for a child. Here, though, the mode was tense, neoliberal realism, in which the overweening mythic violence of a harsh but supposedly personally liberating system disfigures the characters’ lives without the cathartic exaggeration of witnessed slaughter. Following the multiple suggestions of the title, LACRIMA is a distributed crime story, where the tears of the overworked choral protagonists materialize as sewed-in drops of sparkling organic embroidery within a luxuriously celebrated, complexly interwoven social fabric. In the end, the over-heaviness of all those choral pearl-lives only slightly diminishes the glittering, televisual perfection of the symbolic wedding dress worn by an English princess for the world to admire. The play’s unremitting, hard surface tells the hidden back-story of the production of that dress, throwing light into one small backstage corner behind the sumptuous festivities of the internet era’s plutocratic crème de la crème. In the society depicted, though not in Nguyen’s serious play, the overarching comic spectacle of a fairy-tale royal union glossily covers a crime whose moment, perpetrator, and location fugitively diffuse. The fictionalized, social documentary-drama exposes many acts of not-exactly-criminal domination and exploitation, but the only villains are distant and cartoonish, their dramaturgical remove suggesting that if we saw further into their lives, we might find privileged people also caught up in a systemic stress melodrama. A spoiled English princess—whose presence in the play is only manifested by a faraway voice giving a condescending, self-satisfied voiceover and briefly participating in a carefully arranged conference call—orders the elaborate dress that is the show’s centerpiece. In Nguyen’s feminist dramaturgy, the princesses’ cartoonishness stands in for the never- or not-yet-quite-realized, cross-gendered inheritance of the patriarchal Leviathan role: picture the kingly, absorbing figure of Hobbes’ frontispiece now replaced by the floating heroine of Super Mario Brothers, clad in virginal, virtuous white. The dress itself serves as the symbolic object for the drama’s finer gestures of reflection on artmaking in the professionalized cultural industry. The commercial plot shows the high-end costuming order gratefully received by a flamboyantly kowtowing, famous, and psychotically ambitious fashion designer (another cartoon systemic villain, played by Vasanth Selvam) whose small artisan shop in Paris must quickly deliver a real wearable object meeting the designer and the princess’s extreme imaginative wishes and demands. Everything is ethical, of course!ô, which leads to further layers of exploitation, strain, and plutocratic distance from the dirty work of transforming earthy material into shine. That is, any certifiably disavowed crimes are pushed deep into the lower muddy links of the neo-colonial supply chain, which, the play suggests, looks remarkably like the old (sometimes historically also perfectly ethical) pre-neocolonial supply chains. Marian and Her Atelier Ensemble Make the Dress in Nguyen’s LACRIMA (© Jean-Louis Fernandez) With so many people—spiritually collapsed by the pressure-religion of industrial careerism—competing for haute-couture jobs in the Paris of the real world, the central miracle of the show is Marion, the remarkably even-keeled and humane head of the Paris atelier. Nguyen’s martyr to eurosocialist achievement-productivity seems to honorably preside over a diverse workshop where everyone (except for the complexly acted but bad, resentful husband-employee, played by Dan Artus) cooperates and looks morally good doing it. In Marion’s benign, performing-to-death aura, the show’s Sorkin-esque realism reproduces the neo-moral, work-life championship’s banning of all but diminutive, fleeting shadows, or irrepressible “horrendous human complexity”, from its bright lights. Maud Le Grevellec plays Nguyen’s Snow White figure with compelling minimalism, breeding in the audience the show’s main suspense: will the actor ever get the chance to show Marion totally flipping out? The plot-spoiling answer is, no, this would be unprofessional. Nguyen has reinvented the Marian devotional mystery play for our moment of 21 st -century economic structures and feminism. As it is, Marion absorbs all the stress of the cumulative distributed crimes—some of which she may even commit—so that the evil consuming princess does not have to, since appearing stressed would also be unprofessional for an envied public actor leading a marvelously crowned life. When this too-isolated, too-rigidly-suppressing, working Snow White overdoses and enters a death-like sleep, she is rescued by the miracle of love, though not by the bad-employee/ex non-Prince Charming but by her intelligently empathetic daughter (Anaele Jan Kerguistel). We never see very far into Marion’s (or anyone’s) psyche in the rigorously paced play, but we are assured by various eye glimmers and in general by the skilled ensemble acting that psyches exist, although what the use of them is anymore only the LLMs can say. We catch the mostly unspoken admiration and loyalty of the Dwarves —respected international laborers—towards Marion as they work. Even the manager (Selvam) and the extraordinarily talented embroider (Charles Vinoth Irudhayarajof) the specialized shop in Mumbai with which Marion subcontracts do not really complain; everyone is so professional, except for bad husbands and school-age adolescents, who are still learning. As it turns out, then, even the exceptions that prove the rule are exceptionally completely functional. Several subplots partially unfold in this environment of tremendous work intensity, one of which closely documents the lives of a storied traditional lace workshop in Avençon. The overriding point is that no one has the time to challenge various forms of suppression and domination and to have a full personal life. The tight, moving-parts realism of the play formally mimics the world it seeks to portray, leaving the audience with a feeling of breathlessness inside of which fuller emotions are suffocated. The cast is kept busy with the clockwork of fast, choreographed scene changes and this and that and this and that (a dynamic set design by Alice Duchange). The pacing aspires to Mission Impossible, with miserable Zoom work calls and stagnant simmering structural conflicts replacing exciting M6 gadget debriefs and crashing, shooting, bombs-exploding airplane dangles. No one has a cigarette or a joke or a bout of world-melting sardonic depression. The persistent loud heartbeats of tense electronic tonal music keep the audience physically chained to the incessant tension, as if we are acoustically connected to the pacemaker of an unconsciously sadistic, overwhelmingly empathetic physician. Even during intermission, a loud announcement informed the audience that we only had a few minutes to perhaps stand up in place, we should not leave the room. The Schaubühne has a world-historically well-behaved audience in comparison with the bulk of theater history’s more balking audiences; one suspected in true horror that most of us were cultural workers with career anxieties. The play, in other words, was an allegory of cultural and artistic demand, the harshness of the overweening, perfectionist superego leading to a decision by the on-stage figure of the artist (Marion) to purposefully ruin a magnificent, collective cultural work. In Marion’s warped climactic vision, the dress—overwrought and misshapen by displayably “ethical” ambition—was already ruined and had to be salvaged, but of course it was not ruined: it was a realistic, distorted reflection of the culture and its structures, if only the artisan and the artist would let the princess be clothed faux-perfectly in the asymmetry of her blithe wishes and the heavy world, a true work of art. But the art of the play emerges when Marion unaccountably repeats her manic, high-stakes gesture to salvage the dress’s warped pearl embroidery. It is an entirely irrational repetition, the one that confesses her psyche: Snow White finally smothers the evil princess’s controlling spell in a mime-like bout of doubled, only slightly frenetic ironing. Not to worry, though, the princess holds her frame (being more than the dress, though figured just as flat), the televised wedding proceeds splendidly, and the play audience was released from the voiceover’s control—scurrying agreeably into the lobby for a drink. In some after-part of the fable, Marian may get fewer orders and will now consider taking Saturday afternoons off for a while, until her daughter goes to university to major in STEM. Perhaps a bit shy the next day, lest I should find myself again submersed under the princess’s acoustic persecution, I watched the festival’s edition of Streitraum (a periodic Schaubühne talk series) at home via a live public video feed. Carolin Emcke proved a very competent moderator, sitting with her two guests in plain chairs before the open nightmare beach-cave landscape of Medea’s Children to discuss government funding for the arts. With an unremarked-upon visual backdrop suggesting the obvious danger of too much reliance on political or state funding for artistic work, Gesche Joost, the relatively new president of the worldwide Goethe Institute (and professor of Design Research at Berlin’s University of the Arts), and Rau, wearing his hat as the Artistic Director of the Wiener Festwochen, traced certain edges and tarried conversationally square in the transparent middle of Overton’s window of current theater political discourse. Despite the talk series’ title, there was no fighting, though plenty of clubbing. Joost shared her experiences gathering and sharing cultural intelligence from Goethe Institute’s elaborate global root system, and Rau expressed genuine excitement-concern about a select collection of international political issues. Everyone affirmed that the limits of solidarity are definitely drawn when it comes to art and cultural institutions suffering cuts, expressing though not stating an apparently agreed-upon economic theory (I can’t say which one of a few that I have heard) in which more money should be produced by someone who is obviously evilly holding it back—perhaps that Princess again! Emcke drew perhaps the festival’s biggest laugh when she pointed out that queerness for her personal history/autobiography had to do not just with abstract political commitment but with fairly uncontrollable, undeniable, even at times unwelcome and very embodied sexual desire. In other not long-ago epochs, one could have expected artists and cultural producers in Berlin to pick up on the laugh and think about the economic problem of art funding drying up as linked to the current festival’s notable sexlessness. Out of the abyss, there at the festival’s midpoint, the professionally behaving audience really did laugh just a tad too much at Emcke’s irrepressible remark, a fact that temporarily raised the question whether the general festival’s Lehrstückey dispotif toward its audience gegenüber —as in most art productions these days—was not a sociological reversal. Two days later, Consolate’s confessional ritual-piece , ICIRORI , was playing at the festival. The audience arriving at the new “fringe” retail space of the Schaubühne campus was told to wait in the bar lobby of the main theater building. At the appointed start time, Consolate, a Walloon-Burundian actor and artist, appeared and invited anyone who had suffered under systemic racism to accompany her into the other new space across the courtyard, with anyone not so identified to wait behind for the invitation of the ushers. The bulk of the audience waited quietly, contemplating the gesture of inviting outreach that also surfaced assumptions of privilege, while a small group walked with the artist across the way into the playing space. Consolate’s ICIRORI (© Mathis Bois) In a few minutes, the ushers urged the large mass of us who had remained in the bar lobby to join the others in the theater. There in a large black box space we sat on cushions laid out on low risers that formed a square, with an open playing space before us and a tilted mirror above (an effective minimalist set design by Micha Morasse). Consolate began to perform a mixed personal and social ritual with narrative, audio, and video sequences describing what she remembers and what she has reconstructed and learned about her own infancy and childhood. The audience was held and honored by the bravery and generosity of the performer’s honesty about a lived traumatic past, but also by the strong dramaturgical sensibility of the piece’s alternating opacities and clarities, storytelling, documentation, and re-enactment. In 1993, Consolate’s parents were murdered after the outbreak of a civil war in Burundi, and the four-year-old Consolate, who had survived by hiding in the woods with her sister, was found and then brought to Belgium, where she was adopted by a white family. Nearly three decades later, Consolate—already a trained theater artist—received an unexpected notice from a surviving family member in Burundi and travelled back to meet the family with whom she had shared her earliest years. The reunion was partially documented in a moving video sequence that Consolate uses in the piece to show the warmth, humor, and real recollections shared by a family separated for decades after a sudden, chaotic outbreak of extreme violence. A word in Kirundi, Consolate’s original language, “ICIRORI” signifies a self-reflexive investigation of the past in order to move forward. The piece has the feel of a world-opening invitation from stranger—whom one might ordinarily see on the street or speak to at a restaurant— into their private room of meditation and autobiographical struggle to simultaneously overcome unimaginable early loss and still find, in the daily fast-ticking of contemporary urban European life, the existentially necessary balance between confronting larger violent, unjust systems and building up one’s own life and identity. Some of the most affecting moments dealt with Consolate’s recollection of attempting to commune with her deceased parents—to remember and hear their voices—as a child growing up in Belgium. These moments were a reminder that childhood and even infancy are not just an amnesia, neither in a general sense nor in the constructed sense of repressing exceptional early injury: that in the imposed “forgetfulness” of childhood live—and still live—languages, loved people, and crucial stories, utterances, and singing that bind us more firmly to larger fabrics than any subsequently experienced matrix can or will. A mood of surprising and shared strong gentleness, anger, perseverance, guilt, and respectful grief marked the hour-long piece. It concluded with the chance for the audience, if they wished, to recite in the name of Belgium a multilingual apology that Consolate had not received, in spite of a formal petition requesting recognition that adoptions like hers had been a form of human trafficking. As the play ended, Consolate left the space, and the audience was invited to leave some dried Burundian peas, which we had received along with a bandage upon entering the theater, next to an old outfit of children’s clothes that lay on the ground. Quietly, individually and in couples and small groups, the audience gave back an offering and a wish, some sustenance and encouragement to the living spirit of the child who had outgrown and left behind the outfit on the theater floor, the same clothes in which Consolate had originally traveled to Belgium. The immersive and deeply affecting group ritual—partially paying witness to an artist’s story and process and partially an exercise in group saying and doing—had a quick liturgical follow-up in the sermon-like quality of the Elevator Repair Service’s American revival re-performance of James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1965 debate at the Cambridge Union Society. The 2021 ERS production based its verbatim dramatization on the first hour or so of the BBC-televised event at the traditional student debate club—including the opening speeches of two student debaters (played by Gavin Price and Christopher-Rashee Stevenson) as well as those following by Baldwin and Buckley. Greig Sargeant, who provided the concept for the piece, portrays Baldwin with a sympathetic, ghostly dignity, drawing the audience’s obvious sympathy, but it is a critic’s unloved duty to witness how much we depend on villains, and in this sense Ben Jalosa Williams’ playing of Buckley, the festival’s most concretized villain, merits praise for its consummate attention to detail and rhetorically nuanced, precise character study. Omitting the three final student debaters on each side of the proposed resolution, the production cuts to the announcement of the landslide vote of the 1965 audience in favor of the resolution that was proposed by the Baldwin side. One of the most important debates in the Civil Rights Era, the debate took up the resolution “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” While the speeches by Baldwin and Buckley are the obvious centerpieces—and striking feats of rhetoric provocatively resonant with the contemporary polarized discourses in the US and elsewhere—the student speeches and the entire 1960s British university culture of formal debate add to the fascinating thought-piece that the reenactment play provides. As highlighted in the text of Baldwin’s speech, the discomfort of debating American race relations in a British setting suggested welcome cultural complexity for the central European audience, for whom facilely superior condemnations of immoral politics overseas are an everyday part of public life, as they are in most places around the world, presenting the paradox of moral hatred and xenophobia as practiced at times in the name of liberal and internationalist commitment. The First Student Debater on the Buckley Side in Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge (© Joan Marcus) In a common scenic trope of contemporary theater productions, the John Collins-directed production restaged the original debate using much colder and darker aesthetics than the 1965 version. This very popular mode of minimal, distanced scenography, which significantly predates the pandemic (by half a century), suggests analytical separation, scientific isolation, medical sanitation, and, overall, darkness, whatever that is when it is not just the absence of diffuse light or a lazy overuse of black paint. The production would have been very different if it had included the clubby coziness of the original debate setting with the speakers and the hearers crammed together in a basic bodily sociality that one rarely sees anymore in high cultural spaces, except for those that have been taken over by mass tourism. The audience (rather than leaning on each other’s shoulders to get a good look) sat in fixed black tiered seats at a good remove from the action, and the debaters themselves stood isolated from one another and anyone else at several yards of empty distance. The sense of danger created by such a theatrical arrangement was curious, given the overriding consensus both in the room in 1965 and certainly among the FIND audience. The message seemed to be that we had to learn to mistrust each other even more, which did have the effect that one heard the arguments and threats made on both sides of the debate with a certain icy clarity. The iciness of the main event was to a certain degree then reversed in a short closing, imaginary scene between James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry in the former’s living room. The two famous writers joked and commiserated warmly and informally about their experiences as Black Americans and public intellectuals reacting to outrageous events and trying to formulate the best ways forward for their lives, solidarities, and politics. The epilogue-like scene transitioned at times to a faux-unscripted conversation of the two actors (Sargeant and April Matthis) playing those characters, giving the audience some history of ERC and their own engagement with it. The actors related how they had become the company’s first African-American members after being hired to play (what they hilariously parodied as strange, stereotypical, and inhuman) Black characters in ERC’s 2008 production of The Sound and the Fury . The play ended with Hansberry/Matthis bemoaning the theater’s white liberal audiences and prescribing that they should all rather become white radicals. The moral was clear, though not specific, and then it was time again not for Battle Hymn of the Republic karaoke and rows of muskets but rather for orderly lines of patient patrons at the bar, scattered tapas in the lobby, network chatting, and unknown things clicked on eager smartphones. James Baldwin/Greig Sargeant and Lorainne Hansberry/April Matthis Catch (Us) Up After the Debate (© Joan Marcus) After the sermon, it was time for music, which Nguyen’s latest production—playing at the festival in the annex “Studio” space as a preview of its upcoming first run in Strasbourg—served up in welcome plenty. If Nguyen’s LACRIMA (discussed above) carried the perfectionist weight of being her debut production as the Artistic Director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, her Valentina showed signs of deft breakage and form-relaxation, suggestive of new directorial tracks and accomplishment. The genre was still contemporary stress melodrama, whose existentially symbolic situation is the busy working person on a long tense call (including unbearable, cramped-muzac-filled holds) with a powerful institution’s call center. The dosing of calculated, repetitive music as deployed emotional manipulation in that everyday situation merges into Nguyen’s realism, which characteristically keeps a steady, heart-beating soundtrack of minimal tones running over scenes that are hyper-realistic without ever being allowed to fall (or lift?) into the shadows and awkward dirty corners of naturalism. But in Valentina , the realism is shaped by the form of the vignette, putting Nguyen’s latest work more fully into conversation with the beguiling aesthetics of Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil. In terms of melodrama, a quintessentially 19 th -century form, Rau’s Medea’s Children communes with dark gothic melodrama, while LACRIMA transplants the melodrama of the desert into the dry, extremely well-lit urban working spaces in which a few stark professionals dance a battle of the wills (surrounded by a colorful but whirling and vanishing chorus) with only a small number of actual steps and a stereotypically schematic conflict, but plenty of rhythm, coordination, and sensory overload. Valentina , meanwhile, looks melodramatically from France not westward towards the new desert-to-be-conquered of high-on-supplements Silicon Valley, but eastward, to the “folk” melodrama and its nostalgic imagination of suffering Easten Europe, a place where time once existed. Valentina and Her Friend Learn to Navigate Contemporary France (© Théâtre national de Strasbourg) The thematic focus and genre work well with Nguyen and her company’s signature style of blending amateur and professional actors into a seamless ensemble. Chloé Catrin gave a pitch-perfect performance as the overscheduled yet caring-underneath French doctor, a character who could have been LACRIMA ’s Marion working her sneaked-in second job. The exuding warmth and dedication of the Franco-Romanian actors playing the fairy tale parts of the small struggling nuclear family—the grievously sick mother (Loredana Iancu), musician father (Paul Guta), and compassionately and resourcefully intelligent school-age heroine-daughter (Angelina Iancu/Cara Parvu)—carried the show and allowed it one of the widest emotional pallets displayed in the festival. There is something still to be said for charm and for love steadily maintaining and opening connection across the ravages of impersonal economic and societal structures, even though such a remark is usually greeted by a stern and humorlessly murderous look from a truer adherent to politically dedicated theater. Truly renewing charm and love may even still exist in majoritarian communities and contexts, but here it is the trope of the impoverished east that allows these priceless cultural, human values to break sonically and (a)rhythmically through the general Nguyen style of running-through heart-beat music and crowded screenal doubling on stage. One can take a breath when someone plays the violin because the musician (generally) must as well, and there one has something basic, an allowance to live, even if evil and manipulation and systemic villainy are everywhere. In Valentina , the father plays the violin, works, loves his child and wife, supports their urgent trip and long independent stay in France to seek medical care, and seems even to be a nice, charismatic person, salt of the earth. Maybe this was the most radical figure on Berlin’s stages all year, tucked away in an annex space, with an apparatus of ideological excuse about documentary theater and real sociological research ready at hand, just in case anyone filed a lawsuit about having heard a non-Brechtian, apolitical, organic gentle melody at the theater. Other very Nguyen tropes repeated in Valentina : a topography of fairy tale meeting documentary naturalism; the mother-saving Deus-ex-machina miracle-work of the young daughter, who in the new play can learn the language of modern bureaucratic France, medical science, and the world more quickly than her kind ailing mother; the “Gift of the Magi” pain of people falling into tragic silence in order to try to help, support, and shield others, or just do their jobs responsibly and sustainably; and the foregrounding of competent, creative, hard-working, and compassionate women, young and old, heroically absorbing abundant, more-or-less crushing systemic pressures with “exemplary” nuance, resolve, fortitude, sharpness, and—somewhat above all—steady, committed management, or quietly non-reactionary sovereignty. The long list of qualities and adjectives signifies the “stuff” inside Nguyen’s central dramatic figures, which generally has to be shown by extremely subtle acting, given that all of those feelings and conflicts inside are not given space to emerge more expressively or enunciate themselves at length verbally: hence, the so-far defining aesthetic tension between overlaid neoliberal stress and burgeoning-up melodrama, with the formal and thematic positionalities often reversed. Caroline Guiela Nguyen (© Manuel Braun) The chorality of the festival continued with a final performance of Уя (Nest) , a piece in Kyrgyz and Russian by Chagaldak Zamirbekov and his Bishkek ensemble. A select social portrait of modern Kyrgyzstan, the work is based upon interviews that Zamirbekov and the cast conducted with contemporaries hailing from diverse regions and groups around their country. A naked man (Zhusupbek uulu Emil) crouches in a large tin wash basin at the center of the small set, which opens in three directions to the audience, creating from the outset a sense of intimacy or privacy-invasion, of being brought into a tiny urban flat where a group of interconnected strangers live. The canny, engaging set was designed by Marat Raiymkulov and Malika Umarova and adapted for the Schaubühne space by Ulla Willis. The intimate feeling produced by the layout of audience and tiny set reproduces, to an extent, the sense of a play set in a private apartment—a situation the company often uses in their home city. Produced in a tucked-away box in Ku’damm 156, the piece proceeds as a sequence of six mostly confessional, autobiographical monologues, with some limited interaction between the disparate flatmates. The founder of an orphanage and shelter for young mothers—Tursunbaeva Gulmira, playing a split ancient and middle-aged Kyrgyz cousin to Mother Courage—presides over the flat and the scene, sometimes forcefully engaging audience members to sweep and hold various everyday objects as she gruffly keeps the flat in tidy shape and gets the other characters moving about. A Mother Bathes and Dries A Son in Уя (Nest) (© Ilya Karimdjanov) All of the characters are remarkable and passionately making their way through a complex life, but the play’s temporary spotlight on each of them sequentially also reveals the patina of urban invisibility that cloaks them in ordinary life. Even the militant nationalist (Zhusupbek), whose uniform and brash carriage seem violently out of place in the provisional community, fades and disappears again in the shifting constellation of actors using, fixing, abandoning, and returning to a questioned national home. That collective home and small-enough shelter of experience—of a mild lawyer and religious scholar whose exiled father was a radicalized Islamicist, a struggling but dancing Shisha-bar waitress, and a sometimes-activist and international worker—is threatened, as Asylbek kyzy Zeres’ cosmopolitan, politically discontent character puts it, both by Russian aggression and Western race-based non-solidarity. The aporias in the sequential monologue form repeat the aporias in the various national and international stories that the characters utilize to shape their identities: a useful reminder that even the glocally connected events that we call cities and nations, into which we were all spilled again after the festival, cohere also out of important remembered, forgotten, or never known excisions. So much tailoring for a planetary dress that wants to eat us all just a little stitch at a time or for the dreamy intricate today-costume of a still young and even forgetfully blithe world, whatever humans are or may have been. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Dan Poston (PhD Theatre and Performance from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York) is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literatures at the University of Tübingen. His monograph, Joseph Addison: An Intellectual Biography , was published in 2023 by the University of Virginia Press. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, (former) Editor, New England Theatre in Review Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage New England Theatre in Review Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, (former) Editor, New England Theatre in Review By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF The mission of New England Theatre in Review ( NETIR ) is to document the history of producing theatres in the New England states by assessing their artistic merits, how they reflect and respond to their audiences and immediate communities, and how they fulfill their position as regional leaders supporting the growth and maturation of American theatre. Our reviewers write one-thousand-word essays that address the theatre’s full season of productions; administrative and business practices as sustainable institutions; and gender, ethnic, race, and LGBTQ+ equity, both in hiring practices and season programming. At the top of each essay is a full list of the shows, with production dates, from the 2023-24 season. Readers of this edition of NETIR who are interested in the previous history of these theatres are encouraged to consult the back issues of New England Theatre Journal. In the aggregate, these astute chronicles of the work of major American producing theatres, including American Repertory Theater, Barrington Stage, Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, Hartford Stage, Huntington Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre, Portland Stage, Shakespeare & Company, Trinity Repertory Theatre, Vermont Stage, and Yale Repertory Theatre, provide an on-going critical history that is unique in American theatre scholarship. NETIR has been particularly assiduous in documenting theatre during and after the coronavirus pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter and its manifestations via “We See You White American Theatre” and other activist movements. The exigencies of the pandemic, coupled with the equally urgent need to reform theatre structure and practice along anti-racist lines, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) both on and off stage, became the twin foci for theatres across America from 2020-21 forward. Since we are still in the post-pandemic, post-reckoning era, with many theatres continuing to struggle to regain the audiences, funding, and community support of the pre-COVID years, our reviewers continue to assess the health and well-being of their theatres right now. Have theatres changed the number, type, and/or style of plays produced; revamped artistic and administrative personnel that impact programming and operations; published new guidelines and/or DEI measures? Are virtual productions still happening? Are COVID regulations (masking, vaccinations, etc.) still in place in whole or in part? Is there any sense of “back to normalcy” or, perhaps, a new normal, whatever that may mean? This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) MARTHA S. LOMONACO is a theatre director, historian, and writer. She is Professor Emerita of Theatre and American Studies at Fairfield University, where she was resident director and ran the theatre program for thirty-four years. She is the author of two monographs Every Week, A Broadway Revue: The Tamiment Playhouse, 1921-1960 and Summer Stock: An American Theatrical Phenomenon ( Choice 2004 Outstanding Academic Title) and an edited collection, Theatre Exhibitions , volume thirty-three of Performing Arts Resources . She has been editor of New England Theatre in Review since 2010. Marti holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from New York 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 Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper by Ellen Callaghan at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Directed/Filmed/Edited: Ellen Callaghan Featuring: Veronica Viper Theme Music: Leeni Ramadan Born and raised on the Lower East Side of New York City, Veronica Viper spends her time plotting the destruction of the sense of “normalcy”, opening the close minded with the force of a crowbar and challenging the ignorant to stare into the sun that is her bosom. Nightshades is an ongoing series that not only highlights different artists around New York by giving insight into who they are and what they do, but also gives people an inside peek into a world with a different freedom, expression, creativity, and passion, even as it’s changed over the past few years–a city making art at night. One night of filming with one artist and one filmmaker. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Ellen Callaghan Documentary, Film, Performance Art, Other This film will be available to watch online May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, and it will also be screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 10 minutes Year of Release 2023 Directed/Filmed/Edited: Ellen Callaghan Featuring: Veronica Viper Theme Music: Leeni Ramadan Born and raised on the Lower East Side of New York City, Veronica Viper spends her time plotting the destruction of the sense of “normalcy”, opening the close minded with the force of a crowbar and challenging the ignorant to stare into the sun that is her bosom. Nightshades is an ongoing series that not only highlights different artists around New York by giving insight into who they are and what they do, but also gives people an inside peek into a world with a different freedom, expression, creativity, and passion, even as it’s changed over the past few years–a city making art at night. One night of filming with one artist and one filmmaker. Directed/Filmed/Edited: Ellen Callaghan Featuring: Veronica Viper Theme Music: Leeni Ramadan About The Artist(s) Ellen is a queer director, editor, producer, and head of MAEV--a film production company operating out of Brooklyn, New York. She has conceptualized and created everything from music videos and TV commercials to documentary and narrative films. Her passion is film, and she hopes to use her filmmaking skills to help make a positive impact in the world. Get in touch with the artist(s) ellen@thisismaev.com and follow them on social media https://www.ellencallaghan.com/, https://thisismaev.com/, IG: @this.is.maev, IG: @classiccallaghan Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

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. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Dahye Lee By Published on November 17, 2022 Download Article as PDF Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America . Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. 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, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. 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.

By Daniel Veronese, Lola Arias, Federico Leon, Rafael Spregelburd, Jean Graham-Jones | This book brings US readers cutting-edge work from one of Latin America’s most vibrant theatrical scenes: < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu BAiT: Buenos Aires in Translation Daniel Veronese, Lola Arias, Federico Leon, Rafael Spregelburd, Jean Graham-Jones Download PDF 4 Plays from Argentina This publication of the four plays presented at New York’s Performance Space 122 2006 festival, BAiT: Buenos Aires in Translation, brings US readers cutting-edge work from one of Latin America’s most vibrant theatrical scenes: 1. Women Dreamt Horses Daniel Veronese’s drama about a dinner where siblings argue over the fate of the family business. 2. A Kingdom, a Country or a Wasteland, in the Snow Lola Arias’s tense tragedy about two sisters struggling to survive in a postapocalyptic landscape, and the wild man who disrupts their lives. 3. Panic Inspired by horror flicks, Rafael Spregelburd’s drama follows mother who attempts to recover her safe-deposit-box key from the hand of a corpse. Directed by Brooke O’Harra of the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf. 4. Ex-Antwone A dreamlike play by Federico León, in which memories and fantasies overlap when a man navigates a labyrinth. With plays from Daniel Veronese, Lola Arias, Federico Leon, Rafael Spregelburd Translated and Edited by Jean Graham-Jones. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

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

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 Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF During the fall of 2020 I had the privilege of interviewing a group of groundbreaking scholars in Black Theatre: Harry Elam, Jr., E. Patrick Johnson, David Krasner, Bernth Lindfors, Sandra Richards, Sandra Shannon, and Harvey Young . Asking each of these distinguished colleagues the same four questions, I invited them to share their insights into the current state of the field, describe important milestones they have marked, and suggest those that have yet to be documented. What a gift it was to spend time with these generous colleagues and to hear their perspectives on the state of Black Theatre and Performance. The essay below represents a synthesis of roughly eight hours of live interviews as well as written responses to my questions. Additionally, in some instances, the interviewees mentioned works by rising generations of scholars and I reached out to those colleagues for their thoughts. I have included the comments of those who were able to respond in a concluding section entitled “Afterviews,” featuring Julius Fleming, La Donna Forsgren, Donatella Galella, Douglas A. Jones, Jr. , and Adrienne C. Macki. Certain themes echo throughout the comments below: The need to embrace Black Theatre as a site of both joy and resistance; the need to explore and document uncharted histories that lie outside traditional definitions or sites of “theatre,” and the opportunities to create more intersectional narratives of Black theatremakers. I offer my thanks to everyone involved for making the time to share their insights and for laying out a number of pathways and challenges for students and scholars studying Black Theatre’s past, present, and future. What critical junctures in the field of Black Theatre have yet to be marked? David Krasner began with a call to expand and complicate the Black Theatre canon by delving back into the archives for long-forgotten or lost works: “Scholars need to consider what they do with the scripts that never received production—for example, the Black radical left works of the 1930s that often got buried or went unperformed due to political pressure.” Krasner cited earlier manuscript versions of Theodore Ward’s The Big White Fog or of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto that reveal the extent to which authors had to compromise their original visions. He asks, “What might an exploration of these texts reveal about the ongoing political discourses of this formative era in Black theatre and performance? Artists of the 1960s often critiqued what they imagined as the timidity of earlier generations, without grasping the levels of censorship those earlier playwrights faced on a daily basis.” He also pointed researchers towards Bert Williams and George Walker’s unproduced play, Just Like White Folks , which they could never get produced. Krasner describes Black artists walking, “a razor’s edge of how far you can push things – what you can say and what you can’t.” He invites scholars to explore, “what did artists want to say and how did they get their messages across despite the restrictions they faced?” As he notes, “Errol Hill and Jim Hatch really set the trend of exploring what performers had to do to get audiences and how they worked the system.” Bernth Lindfors emphasized the new directions that the field of Black Theatre Studies has taken since he first began his research into nineteenth-century Black star Ira Aldridge many years ago. Lindfors honors Errol Hill’s emphasis on the experience of Black actors beyond the US. He hails it as “essential in imagining the impact of Black performance outside the minstrel traditions and legal restrictions that hampered its growth in the US throughout the nineteenth century. Yet Aldridge continues to dominate the scholarly imagination, and in many ways, valorizes the narrative of exceptionalism so often attached to Black performers.” Just as Krasner urges research into less-familiar texts, Lindfors encourages scholars to explore the stories of lesser-known Black artists (as he has done in his most recent study, The Theatrical Career of Samuel Morgan Smith ), declaring, “Populating the history of Black theatre with their stories not only reveals the number of Black artists who managed to establish successful careers in a white-dominated industry. It can reveal patterns of collaboration and legacies of interracial performance traditions as well.” E. Patrick Johnson laughingly notes that he gives the “answer people would expect” about the critical junctures still to be marked in the field: the influence of LGBTQIA+ artists in Black theatre, as well as the impact of Black women and feminist interventions in Black theatre history. And, he adds, “Black queer theatre history has yet to be told in its fullness,” underscoring the importance of recognizing artists who either self-identified as queer or who likely were (such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston). Johnson pays tribute to the “plethora of Black queer artists producing work during the 1980s that we lost to AIDS, including Marlon Riggs, or the artists whose work explicitly explored the Black queer experience of that time, including the Pomo Afro Homos theatre troupe (1990-1995).” He also notes that Lorraine Hansberry’s queer identity had only been “celebrated very recently.” Sandra Shannon suggests that scholars of Black theatre are beginning to see the fruits of decades of labor and documentation, but that, “the inflection point we see at the moment – with the combination of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, the murder of so many Black Americans, will inevitably transform our future scholarship on Black theatre in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.” She adds that, “the moment we’re in has put race relations front and center and has dispelled any illusions about what Obama’s election accomplished.” She stresses the need to see the “big picture” on confronting systemic racism through Black theatre. Shannon wryly acknowledges the irony that, “Black artists have always used moments like this to create revolutions,” suggesting that “We may even see the creation of a new cycle series,” (referencing August Wilson’s 10-play history of Black America). Sandra Richards invites scholars of Black Theatre in the Americas to rethink their chronologies, asking, “Where do we start? With Yoruba traditions? With the Middle Passage, to put it on the slave ship as various African aesthetics merged into new genres, all marked by trauma?” Richards asks, “where do we learn what Black is?” She looks to colleagues like Kathy Perkins who have helped to make visible the histories of production at HBCUs, or institutions like the University of Iowa, that contributed to the training of Black theatre artists (particularly designers, who are so often overlooked in chronicles of Black theatre history). Richards reminds contemporary Black artists and scholars that they, “may be following in someone’s footsteps and not realize it,” simply because that history remains undocumented. For her, that lack of historical context robs contemporary scholars and artists of a crucial sense of heritage—of a “family tree” that confers an important sense of belonging . Harry Elam, Jr. ’s comments echo Richards’s call to remember the “family tree,” as he observes, “Are we in a critical juncture now ? There is a tendency to focus on the contemporary in Black Theatre, rather than looking back . We have to mark our history.” Elam points to the rise of “neo-slave plays,” including those by Suzan-Lori Parks, Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, and Jeremy O. Harris, and the ways in which they, “look back at history as a way to reckon with it.” He ponders what scholars might take away from this irreverent approach to playing with history. Like Shannon, Elam also questions how the pandemic crisis will impact opportunities for new Black playwrights to make their mark, asking, “How will rising authors get seen” when theatre makers often privilege the more familiar and established Black writers? Harvey Young argues, “More attention could and should be paid to intersectionality, specifically Blackness and latinidad as well as Blackness and transgender identity. Although there have been important early studies in performance studies and communication studies—such as E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón Rivera-Servera’s terrific edited collection Blacktino Queer Performance and C. Riley Snorton’s stellar monograph Black on Both Sides , there needs to be more scholarship in those disciplines and also an equivalent set of smart, sophisticated writings that specifically center theatre. Furthermore, gender and sexuality, when indexed by race, should not be assumed (as topics) to exist primarily in the disciplines of performance studies or American Studies.” Young notes that, “It is difficult to conceive of latinidad without Blackness or African diasporic presence. This is increasingly apparent in the writings of mainstream authors (such as Junot Diaz). We need to more fully interrogate how and why scholarship on latinidad sometimes seems to deliberately erase or render invisible Blackness even as it offers nuanced, sophisticated ways of considering performances of whiteness and/or indigeneity. Certainly, the similarities of Blackness and Brownness is hinted at in Jose Esteban Munoz’s posthumously published Sense of Brown —in which Munoz (thanks to the keen editorial work of Joshua Chambers Letson and Tavia Nyong’o) links the affective resonance of being and feeling Black and Brown. Blackness and Brownness influence and build upon one another. It might be helpful to think of Blackness and Brownness as twins, perhaps fraternal, which influence and inspire one another with shared roots (and occasionally overlapping diasporic routes). Of course, there are myriad examples in which Blackness is Brownness, co-existing and overlapping within the same body.” How might we document the ways that Black theatre scholars and artists are remapping the field? How have you experienced shifts in the profession? Krasner highlights efforts to shift scholarly attention away from, “familiar urban centers towards less familiar regions such as St. Louis or Seattle that provided homes to active Black theatre artists and companies. By focusing on the performers, designers, dancers, and crew who made those regional theatres possible, contemporary researchers can illuminate rich histories that lie beyond the familiar Broadway-oriented narratives.” As he observes, “There are pockets of local Black theatre history that reveal wonderful acts of resistance and wonderful work.” Lindfors echoes Krasner’s suggestion to look beyond the familiar US circuits, but he directs attention, “beyond the borders of North America to a focus on Black mobility as a productive line of inquiry.” He points to recent studies such as Bill Egan’s African American Entertainers in Australia and New Zealand and Kathleen Chater’s Henry Box Brown: From Slavery to Show Business that looks at the experience of a Black American entertainer in Victorian England. In addition to telling the histories of Black artists in cities beyond familiar urban theatre centers, Johnson argues that, “there is so much Black theatre happening in informal spaces, not on formal stages,” and he highlights the recent scholarship of Koritha Mitchell and Julius Fleming that invites readers to frame alternate spaces for Black theatre. Richards sees Black Theatre becoming, “more inclusive as queer studies and explorations of trans and non-binary identities” intersect with current scholarship. She points to the work of E. Patrick Johnson and a generation of rising scholars who have expanded the parameters of Black theatre studies. She also stresses the expansion of research around Afro-Latinx intersections, Diasporic Studies, and Gender Studies, and their exciting potential to shape future research in the field of Black Theatre. Musing on the terminology that will emerge to define the new directions in the field, she queries, “ Is diaspora the correct term for a new generation?” Shannon points to the work of scholars like Harvey Young, Tavia Nyong’o, Jonathan Shandell, Donatella Galella, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., Koritha Mitchell, La Donna Forsgren, Nicole Hodges Persley, Sandra Mayo, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Adrienne Macki, and Brandi Catanese as part of a critical reimagining of Black theatre history, illuminating the milieu and context of Black dramas. Shannon sees these scholars delving into the histories of the communities that inspire Black theatre and how theatre in turn serves and supports these communities, “these scholars are taking the primacy off the stage and focusing on theatre as an ecosystem.” Like Krasner and Johnson, Shannon also points to the need to document theatre work being done at all levels in the Black community. With the passion that marks her Wilson scholarship, she exclaims, “I want to understand it all!” Like Shannon, Elam salutes Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Harvey Young, and other Black Theatre scholars, “who are changing what we look at.” He also praised editors such as LeAnn Fields of the University of Michigan Press for making books on Black Theatre Studies visible across the profession, and credits Fields, along with Colbert, Young, and others with expanding definitions of Black Theatre beyond the stage to encompass broader definitions of performance. Elam notes particularly the need to look at failures as well as successes in telling the histories of Black Theatre: “Think about things that didn’t work. What reverberations did they create? When we don’t look at failures, we erase histories and we erase legacies of repetition and cycles of learning. Don’t imagine these things never happened. Tell their stories.” As Elam argues, scholars can look at histories of failed attempts to understand how Black Theatre emerged in its present forms. Young points to the opportunities offered by new technologies to document Black Theatre histories: “What is needed is a digital mapping project to better identify and chart the nodal networks of influence and inspiration to reveal how structures (archives, institutes, centers, funding initiatives) have been created to preserve the history and bolster the future possibilities of Black performance.” He adds that achieving a critical mass will prove as important as any new technologies: “A small number of people in the academy research and work specifically in Black theatre. This paucity means that single individuals build entire branches, whole genres, of study. While it is a testament to their rigor that a handful of names have become synonymous with the objects of their study (Sandra G. Shannon’s work on August Wilson’s dramaturgy is a clear example), it is important for collectives to form to engage future researchers in an effort to further these explorations (the August Wilson Society, co-founded by Professor Shannon is a prime example). Each one, Bring one. The work that Monica White Ndounou has done with her Craft Institute, in partnership with Dartmouth College, has helped to brings artists and scholars into conversation with the aim of impacting professional theatre and the academy. It is meaningful that Brandi Wilkins Catanese and thereafter La Donna Forsgren, as editors of Theatre Survey , will frame the conversations on theatre studies through the year 2024.” What and whose legacies have we begun to recognize and where does vital work remain to be done? Like Johnson, Krasner emphasizes the opportunity for researchers to explore and elevate “community” theatre histories in reclaiming legacies of Black theatre and performance. Asking how scholars can uncover the “invisible traditions people come from,” he described not only the community-based performance histories, “but early traveling circuits, Black gay cabarets, and the lives of those artists who had to stay invisible in order to stay safe.” As he argues, “You have to piece the stories together and use your imagination to think about what they went through.” He adds that historians need to, “think about where they see themselves in the story.” Johnson asks, “How do we document informal spaces where Black performance happens?” For Johnson, oral histories, rudimentary recordings, playbills, photos can start to fill in histories, but for pieces created in “non-traditional” spaces, documentation remains a significant issue. Johnson salutes contemporary social media for, “supporting documentation and distribution,” yet he expressed a significant concern about the urgent need to create an archive (and he is part of a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Grant to develop a Black Arts Archives). For Johnson, “If the works are not documented, how do we provide evidence they occurred?” Lindfors invites scholars to “trace the histories of artists such as Dusé Mohamed Ali, editor of The African Times and Orient Review and The Comet , as well as an actor, playwright, activist, and theatre critic (who once interviewed Oscar Wilde). While much has been written about Ali in the context of literary and political histories, few have focused on his contributions to African theatre. What might a study of Ali’s theatre career reveal about the development of British Black Theatre history and historiography?” Shannon ’s role as President of the August Wilson Society offers her unique insights into the curation of Black theatre histories. She hopes to continue to document the impact of the “Wilsonian Warriors” – the artists, directors, designers, and other theatre-makers whose collaborations with Wilson continue to ripple across the field and to inspire rising generations. Richards recalls her own start in the field of Black Theatre when she had to seek out colleagues like Margaret Wilkerson after graduate school because neither her undergraduate nor her graduate program offered courses in Black or African American theatre and there was “no one else” to offer her guidance. She marks the shift in the profession that has brought Black Theatre into a sharper focus alongside Performance Studies in ways that have, “created more breathing space and more intellectual opportunities.” She also hails, “the push towards Black Theatre of the Americas ,” that she sees emerging across the field. She named colleagues including Douglas A. Jones Jr., La Donna Forsgren, and Koritha Mitchell among those doing exciting work to push the field into new conversations. Young points to developing areas in Black Theatre scholarship, “There has been a considerable effort over the past two decades to spotlight and recognize the work of Black women theatre makers. We are all indebted to the editorial work (as well as to the professional practice) of Kathy Perkins, whose anthologies have made it easier to access the writings of Black women dramatists. Koritha Mitchell’s spotlighting of women writers will inspire a new generation of researchers to consider Black women’s theatrical and performance literature. In addition, recent explorations into the life and theatre of Lorraine Hansberry, by Soyica Diggs Colbert and Imani Perry, are cementing Hansberry’s place within the canon of internationally significant playwrights.” However, he adds, “there is much to be done with regard to exploring Blackness within national theatre cultures. Significant research needs to be done on Black Canadian theatre. The critical study of performance by underrepresented groups (with the possible exception of First Nations theatre) in Canada remains at a nascent stage. Maureen Moynagh’s important edited collection, African-Canadian Theatre , helpfully charts the landscape. There is an emerging body of critical scholarship on contemporary Black British theatre but the volume of work does not compare with that centering African American theatre. However, Lynette Goddard has been an enviably effective champion of this necessary work and alongside other scholars, such as Deidre Osbourne and Mary F. Brewer, has created an impressively substantial critical core. In addition to continued exploration of the Caribbean influence inherent in the works of Lloyd Richards, Trey Anthony, and Winsome Pinnock among others, it is helpful to spotlight the ongoing theatre in the Caribbean, including but not limited to Jamaica.” Have you uncovered a milestone from the past whose impact scholars have yet to realize? In thinking about milestones, legacies, and the call to think about where he sees himself in the stories he explores, Krasner acknowledges his privilege in being a “Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” who feels the responsibility to bear witness to the racism he saw growing up and that he sees around him still. He argues that “scholars can connect to those who can no longer speak for themselves,” and they can honor the artists, “who refused to run away” from overwhelming racism and discrimination. Citing Ada Overton Walker, Krasner hails her bravery: “How good, how brave, how savvy, and how determined she must have been to succeed.” As he contends, “Performance can find the cracks in the walls. You can burn a manuscript, but performance finds a way.” Lindfors describes the moments that Errol Hill reached out to him with encouragement to keep going in his quest to document Ira Aldridge’s career. He mentioned one moment in particular when Errol was terribly ill, yet took the time to reach out and inspire him. He asks, “How can we offer the same generosity, support, and validation to the scholars of today? And can we bear in mind how meaningful it is to have our scholarly ‘heroes’ recognize our work?” Elam echoes Lindfors’s gratitude to the researchers and artists who paved the way for contemporary scholars, including Errol Hill (whom he described as an inspirational “model of rigor”). Hill was renowned as both a scholar and an artist, enjoying a career as a playwright, performer, and director, and Elam recognizes the importance of “ making theatre as well as studying it.” He asks, “Are we creating opportunities for these rising scholars to do work in labs that will help them understand their subjects in new ways?” He stresses the vital relationship of theory to practice as critical in thinking about and with Black Theatre. Elam also envisions a field which honors its past and nurtures its future – underscoring the importance of making those support networks visible so that new generations of scholars never feel isolated. Johnson salutes another group of “heroes,” shifting his lens towards the “unsung heroes in the curation of Black performance who were critical to making sure that the history of Black Theatre happens .” He also looks ahead to the “next frontier” in Black theatre – exploring the impact of sexuality gender and mapping the “whole genealogy of Black theatre made possible by artists like George C. Wolfe, Robert O’Hara, and Michael R. Jackson.” As Johnson notes, “We’re now seeing lots of Black queer artists creating – so many people whose work grew out of the art created in backyards, community centers, churches, and other spaces where Black artists found space and voice.” Shannon declares, “Black theatre has the potential to heal – how can we use Black theatre to show the way forward in this moment?” She invites colleagues to take advantage of this, “call to arms moment,” arguing that “subversive acts are necessary to deal with hegemonic structures.” She cites the current moment as, “particularly ripe for Black women who have become heroines and who are establishing their legacies.” Like Richards, she also reminds contemporary scholars to pay attention to the power of HBCUs, and to “reach up to claim and tout the value of these institutions.” Richards points to the COVID-19 crisis and the many other challenges shaping the professoriate as the next milestone to mark in the field of Black Theatre. She asks, “Where are we going after the pandemic when professional opportunities will have shrunk, but the need to do and to document Black Theatre will not?” Afterviews Each of the scholars I interviewed mentioned a number of newer voices that have begun to shape discourses on Black Theatre. The “ Afterviews ” below showcase some of their responses to the question: “Where do you think the field of Black Theatre is headed in the future?” Julius Fleming: “What will Blackness be?” “What will blackness be?” As I reflect upon the futures of Black Theatre and Performance Studies, this prescient question from literary and performance theorist Fred Moten looms. An aesthetic and political tradition, black theatre and performance has allowed us to probe what blackness is and what blackness might be. Because the construction of the modern world relies on the extraction and abstraction of black bodies, the critical attention that Black Theatre and Performance Studies pays to the body will be vital to understanding, critiquing, and reconfiguring the known world and its futures—and to discovering new worlds and otherwise possibilities. From expanding uses of digital technologies within live theatre to staging plays that spotlight the State’s uneven, race-based practices of State care in the wake of natural disaster, black theatre and performance consistently engages the most innovative tools and pressing social concerns that animate the “now.” And the concerns of the “now,” we know, are the animate legacies of various pasts and the building blocks of times that are yet-to-come. In this sense, what excites me most about the future of Black Theatre and Performance Studies is that it will become an even more radical and robust enterprise, one that expands what we know and how we know it. Mirroring the nature of its object of study (i.e., performance), the field will remain unruly and innovative—on the run as it were. And yet, it will continue to negotiate the structural threat of disappearance and ephemerality ignited by the harrowing rise of increasingly anti-intellectual societies. But whatever the nature of those times that are yet-to-come, Black Theatre and Performance will be a site to which we can continue to turn to understand what blackness is and might be, which is also to say what the world is and might be. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. “ “Hurston’s Call” Two recent publications explore theatrical practices that emerged from the sociality of everyday black persons that pay little to no regard for how such practices comported with mainstream tastes or courted sanction from black elites and other bourgeois gatekeepers. These books—Chinua Thelwell’s Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond (UMass) and Rashida Shaw McMahon’s The Black Circuit: Race, Performance, and Spectatorship (Routledge)—offer exemplary historiographies of how Black performance cultures are often at their most inventive and nourishing when they refuse to organize themselves around the white gaze. Thelwell’s examination of Black minstrels forging Black diasporic networks of care across continents and Shaw McMahon’s of thriving African American theatre makers outside and against majoritarian institutions reveal the importance of studying Black performance that traffics in (sociocultural) politics that easily offends prevailing critical opinion. In “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), Zora Neale Hurston called on critics to carry out these very sorts of investigations—our sensibilities be damned! For a host of intellectual and institutional reasons, Black Theatre and Performance Studies has generally pursed tacks more in line with W.E.B. Du Bois’s cultural theories. But Thelwell’s and Shaw McMahon’s fantastic new books show the importance of decentering Du Boisean frameworks for those thinkers like Hurston formulated. Such an approach recovers undertheorized Black performance genealogies and, accordingly, helps redress several of the class, political, and regional biases that continue to organize our field. Heeding Hurston’s call is both urgent and necessary: my hope is that it will shape methodologies and archival priorities in Black Theatre and Performance Studies for decades to come. Adrienne C. Macki: “Clarion Call” Certainly, the Black Lives Matter movement has prompted important global conversations. Black Theatre and Performance will continue to build upon that momentum as it remains at the forefront of this clarion call to promote a more inclusive space advancing diverse, underrepresented, and often disenfranchised perspectives. Of course, this is a divisive time, but I am interested in choosing to embrace radical optimism and recognize Black Theatre and Performance’s labor to mobilize audiences. I have long been interested in activist community-based theatres that employ theatre as a transformative space to promote conversation, healing, equity, and action. Simultaneously, white institutions, white leadership, and white audiences must listen and be vigilant while working towards understanding as well as acknowledging their privilege. Such steps are necessary to topple white supremacy. It sounds simplistic, but I am taking seriously the need for radical change and I am thinking about what concrete actions would look like on a practical level. Towards that end, the recent institutional practice of circulating statements that “we stand in solidarity…” is insufficient; it pays lip service to issues of equity that have plagued the field for far too long. It is high time for theatre organizations and allies to implement real change. Action is imperative to dismantle anti-black racism. Silence is complicit. Accordingly, in this context, Black Theatre and Performance has the potential to cultivate tangible opportunities for communities to rebuild, reconnect, and reimagine equity and inclusion. Likewise, the field may assume an explicit and central role in guiding academic, community, and professional theatres. Donatella Galella: “Read, Cite, and Commit” Black scholars are doing brilliant work in the field of Black Theatre and Performance, and all of us should engage with it. A lot of current scholarship carefully considers affect to understand Black spectatorship and survival. La Donna S. Forsgren’s award-winning essay on The Wiz reveals the pleasures of queer Black feminist viewing practices. Ashon Crawley reminds us of the importance of Black joy in a context that spectacularizes trauma. To identify and navigate “know-your-place aggression,” Koritha Mitchell encourages us to center on Black success and frame white violence as a reaction. At the same time, anger can be useful, as Nikki Yeboah cites Audre Lorde and offers her play The M(O)thers , which encourages audiences to link personal stories of Black mothers to larger patterns of police anti-Blackness and to propel anti-racist action. Black creativity as research also emerges in new scholarship that challenges the normative academic book structure of analyzing one case study per chapter with allegedly objective distance. In Ezili’s Mirrors , Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley follows the lwa to sing multi-voiced Black girl ways of knowing. E. Patrick Johnson similarly follows Miss B., playing with meanings of honeypot and presenting oral histories of same-gender-loving Black women in the U.S. South. This is but a fraction of the exciting work that will shape the future of the field. I am eager to learn more, and I hope that more scholars will read, cite, and commit to radical Black politics from reparations to prison abolition. La Donna Forsgren: “Agitate for Change” While the need to produce life-sustaining art may seem especially urgent during the Black Lives Matter movement of today, the reality is that creating and disseminating Black art has always been vital to our survival as a people. As such, I am cautiously optimistic about the future of black theatre and performance. I envision the rising generation of Black theatre artists creating new works and manifestos that speak to the needs of our community. Manifestos such as “We See You, White American Theatre”—incited by the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests—have created space for critical thought and action to obliterate systemic racism from our professional and university stages. I envision rising scholars also attending to the material realities of what it means to be Black in America and amplifying works produced at historically black theatres, many of which will not survive years of scarce funding compounded further by the financial devastation of a global pandemic. Despite my optimistic vision, I also understand that systemic racism intrenches every aspect of our society. To revolutionize our field, we must agitate for change beyond the appearance of inclusivity. History has shown that granting a select few Black artists and scholars “a seat at the table” does not change the nature of the table. If we do not take action now, this newfound interest in Black art and scholarship will slip through the cracks of history as a passing “trend,” going gently into that good night. I want scholars to reconsider what constitutes the “archive” and reclaim heretofore marginalized works of Black women and LGBTQ+ members of our community. I want historically Black theatres to sustain the next generation of artists and thrive. I want Black artists and their allies to use this moment to dismantle all oppressive behaviors and practices of the past and envision a new, truly equitable future. If we can do this; I envision another great era of Black cultural flowering. BIOS: Harry J. Elam, Jr , currently the President of Occidental College, is the author and co-editor of seven books, including the award-winning The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (University of Michigan Press, 2006), and dozens of journal articles and book chapters. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. The Association for Theatre in Higher Education awarded him its highest recognition, the Distinguished Scholar Award, and he is the recipient of the Career Achievement Award from the American Society for Theatre Research. Elam has also directed professionally for more than 25 years, including Tod, the Boy, for the Oakland Ensemble Company, and Blues for an Alabama Sky for Theaterworks in Palo Alto, winner of Drama-Logue Awards for Best Production, Best Design, Best Ensemble Cast and Best Direction. He also has directed several of August Wilson’s plays, including Radio Golf, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Fences . Julius B. Fleming, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he specializes in African American literary and cultural production and black performance studies. Fleming is currently completing his first book manuscript, entitled “Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Refusal to Wait for Freedom,” under contract with New York University Press. He is also beginning work on a second book project that explores the new geographies of colonial expansion and their impact on Afro-diasporic literary and cultural production. Having served as Associate Editor of Callaloo and Black Perspectives , the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, his work appears and is forthcoming in American Literature , American Literary History , South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo , The James Baldwin Review , and The Southern Quarterly . La Donna L. Forsgren is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre; concurrent faculty in the Gender Studies Program; and affiliate faculty in the Department of Africana Studies. She currently serves as Vice President/Conference Planner for the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Her first book, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement, investigates the works and careers of Martie Evans-Charles, J.E. Franklin, Sonia Sanchez, and Barbara Ann Teer (Northwestern University Press 2018). Her second book, Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance (Northwestern University Press 2020) explores the art and activism of pioneering black women intellectuals of the 1960-1970s . She has contributed articles to journals such as Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Continuum, and Callaloo, as well as book chapters in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (Routledge, 2019), Teaching Critical Performance Theory in Today’s Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities (Routledge, 2020), The Great North American Stage Directors (Bloomsbury Methuen, forthcoming), and Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current book project explores queer black feminist spectatorship in contemporary musical theatre. Donatella Galella is an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside. She researches how systemic racism shapes contemporary American theatre from the ways white institutions capitalize on blackness to the persistence of yellowface in musicals. Her book America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage was an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and a Finalist for the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Patrick Johnson is is Dean of the School of Communication and Annenberg University Professor at Northwestern University. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Johnson’s work has greatly impacted African American Studies, Performance Studies, and Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is the author of several books, including Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003); Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008); Black. Queer. Southern. Women.—An Oral History (2018); Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women (2019), in addition to a number of edited and co-edited collections, essays, and plays. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, where he is also Assistant Dean of Humanities. He is the author of The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Michigan 2014); co-editor of the essay collection Race and Performance after Repetition (Duke 2020); editor of the special issue of Modern Drama 62.4 “Slavery’s Reinventions” (Winter 2019). He is currently writing a book on black minstrelsy and its role in the production of African American literary modernism; an essay from that project appears in Theatre Journal 73.2 (2021). David Krasner has taught acting, directing, and theatre history for 40 years. He is currently Chair of Theatre at Five Towns College in Long Island, New York, where he oversees the BFA Program in Musical Theatre, Acting, and Design/Tech. He is the author and editor of eleven books, three dozen articles, and over sixty book and performance reviews, ranging from theatre history, dramatic literature, a two-volume history of modern drama, acting, theatre and philosophy, theatre in theory, and a two-volume history of African American Theatre. He has twice received the Errol Hill Award from the American Society for Theatre Research for the best work on African American Theatre, and in 2008 he received the Betty Jean Jones Award for the best teacher of American theatre and drama. He has served, and continues to serve, on a dozen editorial advisory boards, including Stanislavsky Studies, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, African American Review , and Theatre Annual . He has been the co-editor of the University of Michigan Press’s series Theater: Theory / Text / Performance since 2006. Bernth Lindfors, Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote biographies of Ira Aldridge and Samuel Morgan Smith after retiring from teaching in 2003. His earlier theatrical research focused on works by African playwrights such as Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Hubert Ogunde and Mbongeni Ngema, most of whom wrote their plays in English. He also published two books that dealt with African entertainers who performed in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Indiana University Press, 1999) and Early African Entertainments Abroad: From the Hottentot Venus to Africa’s First Olympians (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). Adrienne C. Macki is an Associate Professor in Dramatic Arts, Faculty in the Institute for Africana Studies, and American Studies Program at the University of Connecticut. She teaches courses in gender and performance, Black theatre, African American women playwrights, sports and performance, and introduction to theatre. She enjoys developing new work for young audiences and has authored numerous articles and essays. Her book, Harlem’s Theaters: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939 (Northwestern UP, 2015) received the 2016 Errol Hill Award, Honorable Mention, for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). She has served on the boards of the American Theatre and Drama Society, the Black Theatre Network, and on the Executive Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research. Adrienne received her B.A. in Theatre from Middlebury College, Masters in Theatre Education from Emerson College, and Ph.D. in Drama from Tufts University. Sandra Richards is Professor Emerita at Northwestern University. Her research specialties include African American, African, African Diaspora, and American theatre and drama, she has authored Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre of Femi Osofisan and numerous articles on a range of black dramatists. Richards is co-editor (with Sandra Shannon) of the MLA Handbook of Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson . She was also part of the editorial term of Kathy A. Perkins, Renee Alexander Craft, and Thomas F. DeFrantz that produced The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (2018). From 2001-2004, she held the Leon Forrest Professorship of African American Studies that supported research and publication on issues of cultural tourism to slave sites throughout the Black Atlantic. In 2007 ATHE recognized her as an Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education, while ASTR honored her with its Outstanding Scholar award in 2017. Sandra G. Shannon is Professor Emerita of African American Literature in the Department of English at Howard University, is widely considered the leading authority on playwright August Wilson and a major scholar in the field of African American drama. She is the author of two book-length studies, numerous essays, and chapters on African American literature, in general, and, more specifically, on August Wilson and his American Century Cycle plays. She has also served as Editor and Co-editor of four essay collections. Dr. Shannon is a Founder member of the August Wilson Society, and, since 2006, has served as its President. She is a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre–so honored in 2018 for being a “distinguished achiever in professional and educational theatre.” She was elected by this body to serve as its next Dean (beginning in 2022). In 2018, Dr. Shannon was awarded the prestigious Winona Fletcher Award from the Black Theatre Network for her “academic excellence in theatre scholarship.” Dr. Shannon is currently Artist-in-Residence at Pittsburgh, PA’s August Wilson African American Cultural Center where she serves as a chief consultant for the Center’s forthcoming state-of-the-art interactive exhibit, August Wilson: A Writer’s Landscape. (For a complete list of her publications see: https://works.bepress.com/sandra-shannon/ . Harvey Young is Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University. His research on the performance and experience of race has been widely published in academic journals, profiled in the New Yorker , the Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education . As a commentator on popular culture, he has appeared on CNN, 20/20, and Good Morning America as well as within the pages of the New York Times , Vanity Fair and People . He has published seven books, including Embodying Black Experience , winner of “Book of the Year” awards from the National Communication Association and the American Society for Theatre Research. His forthcoming edited collection (with Megan Geigner) Theatre After Empire will be published in 2021. He is Immediate Past President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and has served as Trustee/Board Member of the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago, American Society for Theatre Research, Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra and Yale Club of Chicago. References Footnotes About The Author(s) HEATHER S. NATHANS Professor, Tufts University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Stephanie Lim 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 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Stephanie Lim By Published on December 10, 2020 Download Article as PDF For a woman to bear a child, she must . . . in her own personal way, she must . . . love her husband. Love him, as she can love only him. Only him . . . she must love—with her whole . . . heart. There. Now, you know everything.[1] Frau Bergman, Spring Awakening In the opening scene of Spring Awakening , Wendla begs her mother to explain where babies come from, to which her mother bemoans, “Wendla, child, you cannot imagine—.” In Deaf West Theatre’s version of the show, Frau Bergman speaks this line while bringing her pinky finger up to her head, palm outward, but Wendla quickly corrects the gesture, indicating that her mother has actually inverted the American Sign Language (ASL) for “imagine,” a word signed with palm facing inward. [2] As part of a larger dialogue that closes with the epigraph above, Bergman’s struggle to communicate about sexual intercourse in both ASL and English is one of many exchanges in which adults find themselves unable to communicate effectively with teenagers. The theme of (mis)communication is also evoked through characters’ refusal to communicate with each other at all, as in the musical number “Totally Fucked.” When Melchior’s teachers demand he confess to having authored the obscene 10-page document, “The Art of Sleeping With” (which they claim hastened the suicide of his best friend Moritz), they reject his attempts to explain. Whereas the dialogue between Bergman and her daughter demonstrates failed communication due partly to lack of linguistic proficiency, Melchior finds himself “totally fucked,” because the adults refuse to listen to him entirely. Moments such as these abound in Deaf West’s production of Spring Awakening and profoundly inform the musical’s dramatic arc, continually demonstrating the boundaries between Deaf and hearing worlds. These breakdowns of communication—either the inability to communicate with others or the refusal to—make the dramatic consequences of a show about miscommunication all the more compellingly tragic. The production’s choices move beyond an access-oriented approach for d/Deaf audiences, [3] as the integration of ASL adds a dramaturgical emphasis to the musical’s themes. In re-imagining the world of Spring Awakening in a d/Deaf context, the “real world” spaces off-stage that often privilege oralist and audist practices are radically inverted onstage, rendering verbal communication unreliable and, instead, prioritizing the literal gestures and physicality of sign language. Exploring the relationship between Deaf West’s Spring Awakening and traditional stagings of the show, this paper looks specifically at how the production’s intricate gestures and staging make visible the boundary between Deaf and hearing communities. The production provides not only the literal stage upon which the Deaf and hearing worlds convene, but also a space where Deaf culture and silence are often emphasized, reconsidering traditional renderings of the Deaf/hearing divide within the space and modalities of musical theatre. Troubling “All That’s Known”: Interrogating the Hearing Line English and ASL scholar Christopher Krentz offers a productive way to understand the space between Deaf and hearing worlds through what he calls the “hearing line,” or the “invisible boundary separating deaf and hearing people.” [4] Drawing from W.E.B. DuBois’ “color line,” Krentz’s hearing line calls attention to—and calls into question—the complex, ever-shifting, and uneven binary between deafness and “hearingness,” whereby identities are formed and shaped. If, at the hearing line, one’s ability to hear informs one’s identity (and corresponding privilege), the world generated in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening is an analogous manifestation of this line, made visible across private and public spaces. Additionally, in the same way that reading and writing offer for Krentz a mutual space for Deaf and hearing worlds to convene—“a place where differences may recede and binaries may be transcended” [5] —so too does the stage attempt to enlighten and alter the complicated relationship between Deaf and hearing identities. In Deaf West’s Spring Awakening , the hearing line is continually emphasized and intensified to both convey and bolster the frequent failures of communication between the adults and teenagers, a point made relentlessly in traditional productions of the musical and in the original 1891 play by Frank Wedekind. The hearing line is also troubled, disrupted, and circumvented at times, often through musical numbers, to accentuate Deaf culture, identity, and silence. In the process, the show exposes, challenges, and reconsiders the hierarchical positions of the Deaf/hearing worlds found at the hearing line, both in the show and in the real-world—ultimately attempting to bridge the gap between the two worlds. Although ASL/English productions such as this have attempted to increase access for d/Deaf audiences, Deaf West’s musical productions (which to date include Oliver! , Sleeping Beauty Wakes , Big River , Pippin , Spring Awakening , and an adaptation of Medusa ) are nonetheless criticized for not being fully accessible. d/Deaf audience members have continually noted the difficulty in understanding ASL used on-stage because of SimCom [6] (which weakens and obscures linguistic meaning, made via the hands and face, known as non-manual markers), the ineffective lighting design in some scenes (at times either too dark or too bright), and the inconsistent use of captions and clear sightlines (or clear access to d/Deaf actors’ communicative gestures and expressions). [7] Jehanne C. McCullough denounces Spring Awakening in particular for being for hearing people rather than for Deaf people because the overall design and casting of the show continually works in favor of hearing audiences. [8] As a hearing audience member, I acknowledge my own limited perspective and hearing privilege in my viewings and readings of the show. Because of the space always-already created by musical theatre (i.e. sound-centric), and given Deaf West’s uses of SimCom and captions, I was afforded more opportunities to understand what was going on. Nonetheless, by highlighting the casting, staging, and choreographic choices of Deaf West’s revival, I hope to point out how frequently the production emphasizes Deaf perspectives over hearing ones, generating an overall shift towards Deaf modalities of experiencing musical theatre. More explicitly than in their previous musicals, this production challenges the hearing line by including various moments that attempt to prioritize and even simulate Deaf experience. Several scenes in the show not only emphasize the hearing line but also purposely call into question the hierarchy that holds audism and oralism superior to deafness. During the first classroom scene, for instance, Herr Sonnenstich calls on various students to recite from Virgil’s Aeneid , enforcing what is known as oralism, the nineteenth-century practice of teaching d/Deaf students through lip reading and vocalizing, which rejects the use of ASL altogether. When Ernst uses ASL to facilitate his own vocalization of the poem, Sonnenstich berates him and angrily strikes a pointing stick against the desk. Later, when Moritz vocally recites a word incorrectly (“multim olim” instead of “multim ille”), Sonnenstich chastises him, mocking the way Moritz sounds when vocalizing and even making up random hand gestures to accompany his voice. In traditional productions, Moritz’s failure is often performed and read as a result of his laziness, his lack of scholarly aptitude, and the fact that he is caught sleeping (an action noted in the libretto); however, Moritz’s vocalized error here, wholly unaccompanied by ASL, adds a layer of complexity to the situation: his mistake might also be a mispronunciation if he does not vocalize regularly. As a result of Sonnenstich’s offensive conduct, Melchior stands up for Moritz and tries to minimize the humiliation by attempting to rationalize the mistake. Suggesting that “multim olim” be recognized as a new critical commentary on Aeneas , Melchior uses SimCom so that his classmates can all understand him. This being Melchior’s first scene also critically positions him as an ally and advocate of Deaf culture, Deaf identity, and language—an important position he maintains throughout the show. By setting the production clearly in the historical context of the late 1800s, Deaf West’s version presents oralism as the framework through which to understand the show. Many of the adults’ actions also uphold audist and oralist ideologies, a dramaturgical choice that affixes specific nuance to the constant miscommunication that pervades the show thematically. At the same time, the dramatized suppression of a rich and vibrant language like ASL and Melchior’s presence as a hearing character who undertakes the plight of his Deaf classmates bring to light the ethics of such an oppressive system. The overall story arc between Wendla and Frau Bergman also presents the devastating consequences that miscommunication, or rather the desire not to communicate at all, can have. Demonstrating the hearing line within the privacy of the home, Wendla asks her mother to explain where babies come from, as discussed in this paper’s opening example. Frau Bergman, rather than explaining the truth—birth as a natural, physiological phenomenon that may result from intercourse—evades the question and explains the process of conception as vaguely as possible, in part because she does not know how to expound on the topic through ASL. The full damage of Bergman’s failure to explain how babies are conceived is revealed in Act Two, when the Bergmans find out Wendla is pregnant. Wendla’s response is to cry out, “My God, why didn’t you tell me everything?” [9] —the only line in the show vocalized by Deaf actor Sandra Mae Frank, rather than voiced by the Voice of Wendla, Katie Boeck. Interestingly, the emphasis on communicative failure also falsely suggests the opposite of what happens: if only Wendla could “hear,” her mother could have fully communicated the truth in English. This mother-daughter relationship, as well as the relationship between hearing and deafness, is further exaggerated and complicated when two doctors become involved in Wendla’s pregnancy. The first, Doctor von Brausepulver, communicates with Wendla using SimCom during their run at The Wallis and using English only on Broadway; when Frau Bergman asks about Wendla’s nausea, Brausepulver ends by speaking but not signing, “Not uncommon. Trust me, child. You’ll be fine ” (emphasis added), performing the emphasized phrases in an over-enunciated and exaggerated manner at Wendla, indicated both vocally and physically. [10] Immediately after, Brausepulver speaks with Frau Bergman off to the side, a whispered conversation that is never spoken aloud to the audience. This secret, “silent” conversation is contrasted soon after by the second physician, Schmidt, who is recommended by Bergman’s “doctor friend” to perform Wendla’s abortion, unbeknownst to Wendla. In this second scene, Schmidt (played by a deaf performer) signs to Bergman in ASL only, “Now, listen to my instructions carefully,” and explains where to bring Wendla. These scenes function together ironically: Brausepulver whispers to Bergman to avoid Wendla’s overhearing him, even though she is deaf, while Schmidt communicates with Bergman in ASL, a language Bergman herself struggles with. The tragedy of Wendla’s eventual death is partly caused and greatly augmented by the adults’ inability and unwillingness to communicate with her and with each other. While the scenes above perpetuate the normative hierarchy of the hearing line (wherein the hearing world is often dominant), other scenes intensify the divide and prioritize silence and ASL. Specifically, Moritz’s confession to his father about failing his final exams is one of the production’s two brief scenes that are communicated entirely through ASL, though subtitled in English. Herr Stiefel continually probes Moritz for an explanation of how they can show their faces publicly: “What are your mother and I supposed to do?” “What do I tell them at the bank?” “How do we go to Church?” Stiefel’s interrogation insinuates that the family will be negatively perceived by the community because of Moritz’s failure, and the shame of Moritz’s failure can also be read as a further marginalization of the family as d/Deaf. In any staging of the scene, silence always permeates the interaction between Moritz and his father; that is, all questions go unanswered, as Moritz is unable to respond at all out of fear and/or shame. But in Deaf West’s staging, the placing of two d/Deaf actors onstage alone further heightens the power of “silence,” not as a passive space or absence of sound, but as a space that includes energy, emotion, and movement, particularly that of ASL. For hearing audiences, the minute-and-a-half scene is ostensibly done in complete silence, except for Herr Stiefel’s brief vocalized yells. While hearing audiences might experience the aural “silence” of this scene, it is the magnitude and force of Stiefel’s rage when he interrogates Moritz that is emphasized, redefining the notion of silence itself. Anyone with experience being reprimanded by a parent can immediately sense Herr Stiefel’s nonstop “shouting,” conveyed through his agitated signing and aggressive movements, like grabbing Moritz by the collar, as well as the word “failed” continuously projected/subtitled on the back wall. Silence here shows what “the deaf family experience [is] like, and how signing can be loving, but can also be angry and scream-like, thus proving to the audience how diverse of a language ASL is.” [11] Moreover, although this scene is punctuated by captions projected onto the back wall—still privileging hearing audiences in providing them a means by which to understand the scene—the prioritizing of and focus on ASL rather than on vocalized speech compels hearing audiences to reconsider the ways in which meaning is communicated, changing how audiences hear and listen , particularly in the space of musical theatre. As a further punctuation of the hearing line, the production’s casting of Deaf/“Voice of” pairs (utilized for the characters of Wendla, Moritz, Martha, Otto, Thea, and Ernst) purposely positions the younger characters in the Deaf world, thereby creating a clear alliance among the students rather than among any of the adults, none of whom were cast in Deaf/Voice of pairs, as noted in the Playbill. In addition, Melchior is positioned as the hearing line in human form, performed by a hearing actor who is fluent in ASL. That Melchior uses SimCom is problematic from a linguistic and logistical point of view, since he is the main character and has a great deal of dialogue. Dramaturgically, however, Melchior is the hearing line made manifest—a human bridge between d/Deaf and hearing worlds, such that SimCom becomes a metaphor for Melchior’s existence in and ability to move in-between both worlds. Notably, of the parents portrayed in the production, Melchior’s are the only Deaf/hearing couple—his mother being Deaf and his father being hearing, using SimCom. Melchior’s actions can thus be read as an attempt to mediate the relationships across both worlds, particularly between teachers and students, and adults and teenagers. On the one hand, because the show employs SimCom with specific characters (rather than double-casting all of the characters) in order to demonstrate the failures in communication, an ironic result is to impair another essential line of communication, diluting the messages from stage to audience. On the other hand, the use of SimCom for adult characters like Brausepulver and Frau Bergman heightens the collapse of communication and highlights the Deaf/hearing dichotomy. By using Deaf/Voice Of pairs, delineations between Deaf/hearing in the adults, and SimCom in the case of Melchior, the characters influence and embody the ever-shifting state of the hearing line in the world of the play. Musically, the production also presents, pushes against, and interrogates the hearing line through the use non-spoken and gestural languages. These languages accentuate the teenagers’ emotional, psychological, and physical states. For example, “And Then There Were None” is both an intensification of the Deaf/hearing dichotomy and an attempt to circumvent the hierarchy produced by and at the hearing line. In the epistolary song, Moritz and Frau Gabor, Melchior’s mother, write a series of letters to each other, detailed within the song’s lyrics. Although Gabor is certainly the most sympathetic and idealistic of the adults, the song itself portrays her unwillingness to believe Moritz’s “veiled threat that, should escape not be possible, [he] would take [his] own life,” creating a more nuanced iteration of her own failure in communication: she “hears” him but refuses to actually listen to what he says. Since the actors playing Moritz and Frau Gabor are d/Deaf, the number compels audiences to focus on the signing rather than on the singing. Hanschen and Georg are the only hearing characters that briefly perform lyrics through SimCom; however, the staging of the song concentrates on Gabor and Moritz, who are later joined by Otto and Ernst—all characters who are played by d/Deaf actors. Therefore, rather than marginalizing the physicality of ASL, it is put front and center, while the Voices Of are off to the sides. This is also a visceral reversal of the limited use of ASL in theatrical settings: typically, d/Deaf access to a show is performed solely by platform interpreters, who are placed off to the sides of the stage. By putting deafness and Deaf identity at the forefront, Deaf West inverts the hearing line dramaturgically through its characters and linguistically for its audiences. A second song that places emphasis on physicality, gesture, and ASL is “Totally Fucked,” which highlights the younger characters’ resistance to their adult counterparts. In traditional stagings of the show, “Totally Fucked” is the ultimate anthem of teenage angst and rebellion, underscored by the music itself. Deaf West stages this number as a rock concert, putting even more emphasis than the original Broadway production on the physical, aggressive, and sometimes sexually and linguistically explicit movements of the choreography. What becomes most important in this song—and indeed, throughout the show’s many musical numbers—is not so much the lyrics but, rather, the gestural and non-verbal languages that accompany the lyrics and music, including choreography, lighting design, and the principal focus on ASL, as in “And Then There Were None.” Sarah Wilbur suggests that Deaf West’s version of the show triumphs because of these layered gestural economies, that is, “the demands that the company’s multifaceted use of gesture places on audiences, performers, and producers.” [12] As a “visual-gestural language,” [13] ASL becomes the most powerful tool on Deaf West’s stage. “Totally Fucked” is, in all productions, a mutinous response to the “yes” or “no” that adults demand of Melchior and his peers. But in Deaf West’s version, the song also becomes an outright reversal of the hearing line in which hearing and oralism are traditionally favored. Deaf West’s “Totally Fucked” takes physicality and gestures to new heights and meanings, imbuing a song known for its loud and extreme chaos with ASL, a language just as intense, powerful, and “loud” (or, in this case, boisterous) in its own unique way. In this way, both multiplying and subverting the traditional modalities of musical theatre beyond merely vocalized speech and music, Spring Awakening highlights a Deaf perspective, a rewriting of the hearing line, through its transformative inclusion of Deaf culture, identity, and language. “I’m Gonna Be Your Bruise”: Sharing Signs On and Across Bodies Additional restructurings of the hearing line occur within Deaf West’s practice of “sharing signs,” [14] when two (or more) actors sign words/phrases together. The use of shared signs reveals how important meaning-making can occur via ASL on and across the literal bodies of performers and characters, which English alone cannot achieve. This practice arises frequently throughout Spring Awakening to emphasize the intimate and physical (often sensual and sexualized) connections between characters. In a show explicitly about sex, shared signs also add complexity to the relationships between characters and bolster the already-sexualized content of the libretto and music. Shared signs first appear in the production during “My Junk,” when Hanschen channels Desdemona and masturbates to Correggio’s Jupiter and Io . With Herr Rilow (Hanschen’s father) constantly rapping on the bathroom door, Hanschen’s urgency to “finish” is augmented by two, three, and eventually five girls who help him sign and masturbate simultaneously: Wendla holds up the picture, while Thea’s right arm signs with Hanschen’s left; when Fraulein Grossebustenhalter asks Georg to “bring out the left hand,” Hanschen switches arms, this time signing with Martha’s left arm while masturbating with his own left; finally, when Rilow demands that Hanschen go back to bed, Martha and Thea sign together, while Anna takes on the task of stroking Hanschen, and Heidi rubs Hanschen’s arms, put above his head to signal his letting go of all control. The abundance and entanglement of hands becomes visually striking, and sharing signs is conceived as an overt sexual act, used to create and complete Hanschen’s stimulation, arousal, and climax—a sexual awakening that is already written into the character. Moreover, this early sequence of shared signs, with its explicit sexual content, adds a related charge to subsequent uses of this device, which acquire similar connotations of intimacy, physicality, and sexuality. The use of shared signs in the songs following “My Junk” reinforce the teenagers’ desires to feel , close to each other and/or anything at all, since the adults in their lives refuse to do so. “The Word of Your Body,” performed by Melchior and Wendla and later reprised by Hanschen and Ernst, first occurs when Melchior and Wendla touch hands for the first time and a brief pause transpires between them. Focusing on the chorus (“O, I’m gonna be wounded. / O, I’m gonna be your wound. / O, I’m gonna bruise you. / O, you’re gonna be my bruise” [15] ), the signs and shared signs for “wound” and “bruise” speak directly to the song’s meaning, especially because the performers sign on the other person’s body. Their signs for “wounded” are made individually, but the repeated sign for “wound”—made with index fingers pointing in and slightly twisting in opposite directions—becomes an entangled idea, as they literally crisscross over and under each other’s arms while signing. Additionally, using an ASL variation to indicate “bruise,” performers sign the color “black”—made by swiping a finger across one’s forehead—on the other person’s body: in the first line, they each point to Melchior for “I’m gonna” and then sign “black” on each other’s foreheads, but in the second line, they point to Wendla for “I’m gonna” and then sign “black” across each other’s chests. As in ASL, the position of the signs adds further meaning to the song: the forehead could signify a mental “bruise,” while the chest signifies the heart or the soul/spirit, suggesting the ways in which Melchior and Wendla’s impending relationship will affect the characters. Since ASL is not normally signed on another person’s body (but, instead, on the affected spot of one’s own body), the repeated act of signing on and across another’s body makes the black and blue metaphor all the more violent and serves as a foreshadowing for the ambiguous brutality and possible rape between Wendla and Melchior that occurs later in the show. Deaf West’s staging of “Touch Me” also utilizes shared signs to visually represent the characters’ sharing of knowledge and of themselves with each other, diminishing the original staging’s emphasis on individual experience and suppressed, inner turmoil, while also accentuating relationships that are both erotic and indeterminate in nature. Melchior and Moritz’s shared signs during “Touch Me” produce ambiguous, bisexual dimensions in both characters and also positions Melchior as “top” regarding both Moritz and Wendla. The very act of sharing signs parallels Melchior’s desire to share his (sexual) knowledge with Moritz, and Moritz’s mutual desire to learn about sex from Melchior, prompted by Melchior’s self-assured insight about how it must feel for a woman to give herself to another, “defending yourself until, finally, you surrender and feel Heaven break over you.” In Raymond Knapp’s reading of Huck and Jim’s relationship in Deaf West’s Big River , Knapp notes that the sharing of signs reinforces their already-intimate friendship and “comes across as a rueful acknowledgment of their impossible love.” [16] Just as Big River ’s Huck and Jim establish a hierarchical rapport through their sharing of signs (especially in “Muddy Water”), Melchior’s position of intellectual authority over Moritz is reinforced through their interconnecting signs as well. Melchior and Moritz’s homosocial relationship—like Huck and Jim’s—is expressed gesturally, evoking homosexuality through physical, shared signs. The shared signs of “Touch Me” also move beyond Melchior and Moritz. In the original Broadway staging of the song, Melchior briefly grabs and controls Moritz’s arms during the song’s chorus (“Touch me—just like that. / And that—O, yeah—now, that’s heaven” [17] ), gesturing toward sight or enlightenment (guiding Moritz’s hands toward Moritz’s eyes) and the discovery of sexuality. The rest of the song is performed by the whole ensemble individually, choreographed within the limited spaces around and on their own bodies. In Deaf West’s version of the number, however, Georg’s solo and final chorus of the song results in a burst of choreography and shared signs amongst the younger characters. Melchior and Moritz sign together and constantly link hands and arms, and several other cast members also pair up to sign together for the chorus (Wendla and Ernst, Thea and Heidi, and Martha and Anna). This choreography underscores the sexuality of the song’s lyrics and altogether multiplies the sexual connotations of shared signs. That the performers appear here in same-sex and mixed-sex pairs adds further homosocial and bi/homosexual undercurrents to a song literally about sex and sexuality. Although the multiplicity of shared signs here could perhaps suggest something like a sexual orgy, the pairing up of the girls and of characters like Wendla and Ernst also highlights the consequences of repressing the truth about sex and of isolating girls and boys: children will educate each other about sex if their parents refuse to. By accentuating the act of sharing through the physical act of sharing signs, and by drawing sharp attention to how sign language can function in tandem with and across multiple bodies, Deaf West shifts the hearing line towards a d/Deaf production of knowledge and community- and relationship-building. “And Now Our Bodies Are The Guilty Ones”: Deaf Experience & Expression Deaf West’s production further revises the hearing line by prioritizing moments of d/Deaf experience and expression. This includes an emphasis on the body and on touch in particular, calling attention to the importance of physical expression and contact found at the hearing line from a d/Deaf perspective: effective ASL depends on the physicality of the speaker, and physical touch holds particular importance within the formation of Deaf community and interactions. Moreover, the production highlights Deaf modalities of meaning-making, including through language and music. That the production generates instances of d/Deaf sensory experience and expression also contests versions of deafness that, in the past, have been romanticized or demonized—that is, the writing of deaf characters who are either pitied or detested. Similar to nineteenth-century deaf writers who “subvert power arrangements, not to mention concepts of reality and order,” [18] Deaf West thereby rewrites the power dynamics of the hearing line and produces a d/Deaf sensibility and awareness of the world and of music in particular. Further building upon the play’s themes of communication and connection, the production stresses physical touch and sense over sight and language to simulate characters’ need to be close to others and their (blind) desire to feel anything at all. Two “games” take place in which characters are blindfolded, accentuating physicality, sensory deprivation, intensification, and feeling . In the first instance, the students play a version of blind man’s buff with Moritz: depriving him of sight, the students continually circle around him, slapping and smacking various parts of his body, then quickly pulling away before he can catch them. The second game occurs at the top of Act Two, when Melchior and Wendla are blindfolded and play a game of trust, walking on chairs that are continually being set down by the cast, literally trusting the other cast members with their “safety” and feeling their way across the stage to the piano. These blindfold games, in which characters willingly deprive themselves of sight—seemingly the most important element to ASL—address the unspeakable-ness of their lives and underscore the fact that not everything can be verbally or even gesturally communicated between them. Metaphorically, these scenes also depict the teenagers “feeling their way” through life, an irony since they actually do not know what they are doing, despite the adults always being portrayed and thought of as the most ignorant and naïve. [19] These acts of blindfolding, though ironic in a d/Deaf context, maintains focus on the sense of touch found at the heart of Deaf culture. Moreover, the actions limit the usual emphasis on English-centered or hearing-centered modalities and communication. Much like the ASL-centric “silent” scene in which Moritz admits his failure at school to his father, several scenes also show central characters briefly privileging Deaf modalities of meaning-making over English- and hearing-centered ones, or the consequences of the opposite. The scenes also primarily revolve around characters’ desires to “feel something” beyond merely the physical or emotional—that is, to feel something inexpressible through language alone. For instance, during Wendla and Melchior’s beating scene, Wendla continually presses Melchior to beat her with a wooden switch, expressing a longing to feel something (“My entire life. I’ve never . . . felt . . . Anything ”). The actor playing Melchior momentarily foregoes SimCom to sign, “I’ll teach you to say: ‘Please.’” The words are projected for hearing audiences, making this one of Melchior’s two ASL-only lines and adding a disquieting moment to what is already the most harrowing line in the scene. Melchior’s second and only other ASL-only line occurs a few scenes later, right before they have sex, when he signs “forgive me” onto Wendla’s hand; that this too is done in aural silence, with words projected, functions conversely to his line during the beating scene and demonstrates his deep regret for what transpired. Throughout these scenes, Melchior’s use of ASL-only is in the first instance chillingly harsh, but in the second an attempt at compassion, such that his brief but powerful uses of ASL over English perpetuate a complicated sexual politics at the hearing line: Melchior, who exists simultaneously in the hearing and Deaf worlds, exercises his knowledge of sex and ASL both to influence the situation but also to communicate intimately with Wendla, who is primarily read as Deaf although she has a Voice Of partner on stage. Although the act may falsely suggest that language alone can successfully express his raw, complicated emotions, Melchior’s abandoning of English functions as an attempt to communicate fully and intimately with Wendla in ways that no other relationship on stage does. In contrast to Melchior and Wendla’s relationship, a later scene between Ilse and Moritz demonstrates the damaging consequences of unequal communication between d/Deaf and hearing individuals, wherein English and hearing are privileged. While Wendla believes being beaten will allow her to feel something , Moritz believes ending his own life will allow him to feel something different than the despair caused by school and his parents, again a desire inaccessible via language. Ilse unknowingly runs into Moritz as he is searching for his gun and becomes an embodiment of the failures that can be found at the Deaf/hearing divide, specifically in her audist actions. Moritz, too distracted and overwhelmed by his own personal crisis, rejects Ilse’s continued requests (in SimCom) to walk her home, causing Ilse to purposely abandon her use of ASL. She indignantly proclaims in English-only, “You know, by the time you finally wake up, I’ll be lying on some trash heap.” She then removes her wig to reveal her baldness, having recently undergone chemotherapy, before walking offstage. [20] The performative function of removing her wig could, in part, be read as Ilse’s way of trying to stay in control of the situation even beyond her linguistic prerogative, and unlike Melchior’s purposeful abandonment of English with Wendla, Ilse’s actions reimpose the communication gap. The fact that Ilse gives up her position as an ally by discarding the use of ASL not only perpetuates the normative hierarchies of the Deaf/hearing divide and hearing line, but also demonstrates the disheartening consequences of what happens when people cease their attempts to truly communicate and empathize with each other. Momentarily generating a Deaf experience of musical meaning-making, [21] a single ASL-only musical line occurs at the very end of the show, during “The Song of Purple Summer.” These moments highlight for (predominantly hearing) audiences an even wider spectrum of Deaf (multi-)sensory experiences and meaning-making modalities that move beyond sight and speech alone. When Melchior is confronted by the ghosts of Moritz and Wendla, he decides not to kill himself and realizes that they will always be with him; this is musically signified in the repetition of the phrase “Not gone.” However, coupled with ASL, and repeated several times by the ensemble, one phrase omits the singing in favor of the signing; that is, the phrase is signed in ASL but not sung in English. As in Deaf West’s productions of Big River and Pippin , this crucial musical moment is placed towards the show’s finale, displacing hearing audiences from the audist realm but also repositioning them within the Deaf side of musical experience. No longer is music (or meaning) simply about tones and sounds, but it is now instilled with physicality and feeling for both Deaf and hearing audiences. As one final gesture toward the Deaf/hearing divide, the production splits the pairs of characters—deaf and “Voices Of”—from one another, adding dramaturgical intricacy to the deaths of characters. Before Moritz commits suicide, he pushes the Voice of Moritz’s mic down, indicating that he no longer needs an aural voice anymore; the actor playing the Voice of Moritz subsequently walks offstage, and Moritz proceeds to sign his lines without vocal accompaniment, with words projected on the wall. This matches the aural silence of the only other ASL-only scene in the show, the earlier scene between him and his father. The second death occurs when Wendla is taken to get an abortion: in a burst of chaos onstage, one doctor grabs Wendla while another grabs the Voice of Wendla, ushering them offstage in different directions; the shrieking that follows (indicating her pain and subsequent death) comes from Wendla’s side of the wings rather than the Voice of’s. As with Ilse’s earlier abandonment of ASL, Moritz’s voiceless suicide demonstrates an end to his interaction and communication with the (hearing) world, embodied through his voluntary separation from his Voice Of. This is contrasted with the unwanted death of Wendla—brought about by the actions of her mother—which includes the involuntary separation from her Voice Of and subsequent vocalized cries. The varying degrees of d/Deaf expression and experiences performed in the show—of emotions, music, life, and death—symbolize the limitations of spoken language and hearing in partiality of d/Deaf perceptions of the world on stage. In ways that traditional stagings cannot, the production’s d/Deaf lens enhances the meanings and complexities of these themes, characters, and relationships. “And All Shall Know the Wonder”: Reconsidering the Hearing Line Certainly, the integration of ASL in Deaf West’s production opens up the predominantly hearing space of musical theatre, generating a communal space geared towards accessibility and inclusion. Critics and scholars have continually praised Deaf West’s production of Spring Awakening for its groundbreaking ways of addressing issues of inclusion, accessibility, and diversity in theatrical productions, particularly with regard to the intersection of disability activism and the national theatre scene. It brought the first actor in a wheelchair, Ali Stroker, onto the Broadway musical stage, and it was also the first to provide access and innovative interpretation services to deaf-blind theatregoers. Disability Studies scholar Rachel Kolb asserts that the production’s power lies in its ability to reconsider “a question that is increasingly relevant in culture: how to tell stories in more inclusive ways.” [22] But more significantly, the dramaturgical effects of Deaf West’s staging, their artistic use of sign language via shared signs, and the retelling of Spring Awakening through a d/Deaf perspective deliberately rewrites the hearing line. While Krentz’s notion of the hearing line specifically attends to Deaf stories within literature, his ideas certainly extend to the stage, where distinctive worlds can be represented, tested, and played out. The theatrical choices in Spring Awakening thus present, interrogate, and invert the Deaf/hearing dichotomy on-stage, dramatically and dramaturgically, and give audiences a view at the damaging effects of oralism and audism found in the real-world. Rather than suggest that the hearing line itself is a negative factor, Krentz merely notes its existence, arguing that it illuminates the differences that exist between the two worlds. Yet the hearing line does create a hierarchy of difference in reality: the two sides are not equal. Such a difference plays out as a real-world divide in American culture that exists between the Deaf and hearing communities, ideologically affirmed through oralist, audist, and ableist practices and institutions—especially in the case of musical theatre. This emphasized difference and separation has also stigmatized the Deaf community as less than normate bodies, historically “viewed as a physical impairment associated with such disabilities as blindness, cognitive, and motor impairments,” and something to be diagnosed and corrected. [23] Deaf West has made it their mission to trouble the imbalances of the hearing line, not only calling attention to the hearing line itself but also calling it into question and, hopefully, subverting it in the process. In reconsidering the hearing line, ASL/Deaf musical theatre thereby becomes a 21 st century platform on which to bridge the gap between the Deaf and hearing worlds. References [1] Steven Sater, Spring Awakening (New York: Theatre Comminications Group, 2007), act 1 scene 1, Adobe Digital Editions PDF. [2] . This interaction also suggests that ASL is not Bergman’s native language, further signaling the divide between mother and daughter, and adult and teenage characters. [3] . Following Deaf Studies and cultural practice, the use of the lower-case represents the audiological state. The upper-case represents the Deaf community and culture. [4] . Christopher Krentz, Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 2. [5] . Krentz, Writing Deafness, 16. Krentz attributes this space to what Disability/Deaf Studies scholar Lennard J. Davis’s calls literature’s “deafened moment,” wherein “reading and writing are basically silent and visual acts” that produce “a meeting ground of sorts between deaf and hearing people” (Krentz, 16). In the context of Spring Awakening , the stage is “deafened” in a completely different manner: an extremely loud, un-silent space, sanctioning the sharp physicality of rock music and, in so doing, tilting the passive nature of literature toward the active, dynamic nature of musical theatre. [6] . “SimCom,” or Simultaneous Communication, refers to the simultaneous use of sign language and verbal speech by a speaker. Although it seems practical and useful for speakers in a Deaf/hearing space to use SimCom for the benefit of all present, research has shown that the messages produced and received by SimCom are not equivalent—and thus obstructive to communication—because the grammatical structures of both languages are vastly different. Such actions are akin to speaking in one language while writing in another. As such, ASL most often suffers when this practice is used. For more on SimCom, see Stephanie Tevenal and Miako Villanueva, “Are You Getting the Message?: The Effects of SimCom on the Message Received by Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing Students,” Sign Language Studies 9, no. 39 (2009): 266–286. Also see Ronnie B. Wilbur and Lesa Petersen, “Modality Interactions of Speech and Signing in Simultaneous Communication,” Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research 41, no. 1 (1998): 200–12. [7] . Kayla Epstein and Alex Needham, “Spring Awakening on Broadway: Deaf Viewers Give Their Verdict,” The Guardian , 29 October 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/oct/29/spring-awakening-broadway-deaf-viewers-give-verdict . For more on creating an equitable space for d/Deaf audiences, see Brandice Rafus-Brenning, “The Aesthetics of Deaf West Theatre: Balancing the Theatre-Going Experience for Deaf and Hearing Audiences” (Master’s thesis, California State University, Northridge, 2018), 1–29. [8] . Jehanne C. McCullough, “10 Things the Raving Reviews Don’t Tell You About Spring Awakening,” 6 December 2015, https://jehanne.wordpress.com/2015/12/06/10-things-the-raving-reviews-dont-tell-you-about-spring-awakening-2/ . Soon after McCullough’s post was published, The Daily Moth posted a dialogue with McCullough, Deaf West’s Artistic Director DJ Kurs and ASL Master Linda Bove, in which Kurs and Bove explained the intent of the show, including their artistic reasoning behind using SimCom. See The Daily Moth (@TheDailyMoth), “Spring Awakening: Accessibility for Deaf,” Facebook video, 9 December 2015, https://www.facebook.com/TheDailyMoth/posts/464086633793242?__tn__=-R . [9] Sater, Spring Awakening , act 2 scene 6, Adobe Digital Editions PDF. [10] . This action performs the myth that deaf individuals can read lips or can hear better at higher volumes. This misconception is also often generated by the person speaking (or shouting) in a slow, almost childlike way, again calling attention to the hearing line. On Broadway, Brausepulver also verbally emphasized the lines and used the ASL for “fine,” although he did not use ASL for the rest of the scene. [11] . Christian Lewis, “Spring Awakening Is Currently Broadway’s Most Important Show,” Huffington Post , 4 December 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/christian-lewis/spring-awakening-is-curre_b_8721352.html . [12] . Sarah Wilbur, “Gestural Economies and Production Pedagogies in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening .” TDR: The Drama Review 60, no. 2 (2016): 146. [13] . Wilbur, “Gestural Economies and Production Pedagogies,” 148. [14] . Raymond Knapp. “Disabling Privilege, Further Reflections on Deaf West’s Big River,” Studies in Musical Theatre 9, no. 1 (2015): 105–9. [15] Sater, Spring Awakening , act 1 scene 5, Adobe Digital Editions PDF. [16] . Raymond Knapp, “‘Waitin’ for the Light to Shine’: Musicals and Disability,” The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies , ed. Blake Howe et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 828. [17] Sater, Spring Awakening , act 1 scene 4, Adobe Digital Editions PDF. [18] . Krentz, 17. [19] . This is most pronounced by Frank Wedekind’s own description of the original play as “a tragedy of childhood” and his dedication of the work “to parents and teachers.” See Emma Goldman, “Frank Wedekind—The Awakening of Spring,” in The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (The Anarchist Library, 1914), 27 February 2009, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-social-significance-of-the-modern-drama#toc21 . [20] . Notably, this action occurred only during performances at The Wallis. During the production’s Inner City Arts and Broadway runs, Rodriguez completed her lines in SimCom and exited the stage without removing her wig. In an article for Cosmopolitan , Rodriguez shares her experiences during chemotherapy of both wearing wigs and being bald in public, eventually learning to be comfortable with her appearance and regaining her self-confidence. For more on her experience, see Krysta Rodriguez, “What I Learned About Myself From Going Out Bald in Public,” Cosmopolitan , 30 March 2015, available at http://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/a38428/krysta-rodriguez-cancer-bald-wigs/ . [21] . Numerous scholars working across the fields of music, performance, and Deaf studies have pointed out the multimodal, multi-sensory ways in which d/Deaf people “listen” to music—that is, through a combination of visual, physical, and kinetic sensory encounters and experiences. See Joseph Straus, Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (Oxford University Press, 2011); Jessica A. Holmes, “Expert Listening beyond the Limits of Hearing: Music and Deafness,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 70, no. 1 (2017): 171–220; Carol A. Padden and Tom L. Humphries, Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Harvard University Press, 1990); and Anabel Maler, “Songs for Hands: Analyzing Interactions of Sign Language and Music,” Music Theory Online 19 (2013). [22] . Rachel Kolb, “‘Spring Awakening’ and the Power of Inclusive Art,” The Atlantic , 18 October 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/spring-awakening-and-the-power-of-inclusive-art/411061/ . [23] . Megan A. Jones, “Deafness as Culture: A Psychosocial Perspective,” Disability Studies Quarterly 22, no. 2 (2000), available at http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/344/435 . Footnotes About The Author(s) STEPHANIE LIM studies the inclusion of American Sign Language in music and musical theatre performance and the resulting cultural translations/adaptations that occur. She is the Disability Studies Assistant Area Chair for Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA), where she is also a Michael K. Schoenecke Leadership Institute Fellow. Publications appear in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Everything Sondheim, Studies in Musical Theatre, and Popular Culture Studies Journal. Stephanie is a CSU Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program (CDIP) Fellow and teaches undergraduate courses in English and Theatre at California State University, Northridge, where she received her BA and MA in English. She is currently a PhD student in Drama & Theatre at University of California, Irvine. 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 "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison 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 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening 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. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Attila Szabó, Frank Hentschker | Hungarian language anthology of five contemporary American theater plays. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Szertelen Színdarabok New Yorkból (Riff Raff Plays from New York) Attila Szabó, Frank Hentschker Download PDF Hungarian politicians cut funding in 2013 for international theatre productions and festivals in Budapest, quoting: “We don’t need these riffraff plays from New York.” As a reaction, the Segal Center published a Hungarian language anthology of five contemporary American theater plays edited by Frank Hentschker and Attila Szabó, translated to Hungarian by Attila Szabó and Noémi Kecskés. The anthology includes: Neighbors by Branden Jackobs-Jenkins, Detroit by Lisa D'Amour, Intermeddlers by Sarah Stites based on Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, The Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven by Young Jean Lee and Seven American Deaths and Disasters by Kenneth Goldsmith. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

MORIAH EVANS presents Sharing at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Sharing MORIAH EVANS 7-7:50 pm Friday, October 18, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP An assemblage, a mashup of recent performance practices—it might be described as painstaking, indulgent, myopic, esoteric, spiritual, psychosocial, activist, inert. No matter what it is—all the activities shared exist as tactics of refusal and offer an otherwise. Performed by Malcolm-x Betts, Maggie Cloud, Moriah Evans, Lizzie Feidelson, Lydia Okrent, and Anh Vo Photo: David Watson LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Moriah Evans positions choreography as an expansive social process. Drawing on somatic choreographic practices and feminist critiques of dance and visual culture, her works expand dance beyond the visible, to explore different ways of sensing both ourselves and our relationships to one another. Malcolm-x Betts is a New York based visual and dance artist whose work is rooted in investigating embodiment for liberation, Black imagination, and directly engaging with challenges placed on the physical body. Maggie Cloud is a Brooklyn based performer and acupuncturist. Lizzie Feidelson is a writer and performer. Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer. Their work fleshes out the body as a vessel for apparitional forces. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

In conversation about past and upcoming projects PRELUDE Festival 2023 ARTIST TALK Annie-B Parson Dance, Discussion English 30 minutes 3:30PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All In conversation about past and upcoming projects Big Dance Theater Content / Trigger Description: Annie-B will give an artist talk. Choreographer Annie-B Parson is the artistic director of Obie award-winning Big Dance Theater, which she co-founded in 1991 with Paul Lazar and Molly Hickok. Parson has co-created over twenty large-scale works for such venues as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Old Vic/London, Saddler’s Wells/London, The Walker, The National Theater/Paris, Japan Society and The Kitchen. Outside of her company, some of the artists she has worked with include David Byrne, David Bowie, Lorde, St. Vincent, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Wendy Whelan, Anne Carson, Esperanza Spalding, Suzan-Lori Parks, Laurie Anderson, Salt n Pepa, Jonathan Demme, and the Martha Graham Dance Company. Parson choreographed and did musical staging for American Utopia, and she choreographed Byrne’s musical Here Lies Love which is currently on Broadway; as well as his tours with Brian Eno, and St. Vincent. Parson recently choreographed two operas: Candide at the Lyon Opera, and The Hours at The Met. Parson’s writing has been published in The Atlantic, and The Paris Review; her book The Choreography of Everyday Life is published by Verso Press. Upcoming, with Thomas F. DeFrantz, she is co-editing a book entitled: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study. bigdancetheater.org anniebparson.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Benjamin Miller Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 3 Visit Journal Homepage Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre Benjamin Miller By Published on November 12, 2015 Download Article as PDF When George Washington Dixon took to the stage in 1834 to perform “Zip Coon,” his latest incarnation of a blackface dandy, he most likely bent his knee a little more than in his previous portrayals of the dandy, garbled his speech a little more, and added some garish costume accessories. Dixon was twisting the dandy into something new and alien. The twisting of the dandy was a theatrical response to the real black dandies who had been present in the urban centers of America for several decades, and who provoked debates about racial classifications, white and black freedoms, and the American class system. Dixon’s participation in these debates—through the bending, distorting character changes he made—continued a process of transformation of the blackface dandy in early American theatre. The exact nature of this course of alteration, and the reasons for the blackface dandy's remodelling over time, are debatable, due to the array of influences on the character, contradictory primary texts and contemporary reviews of blackface performance, and contentious methodologies for investigating blackface entertainment. This article will draw on minstrel studies to analyse the character of the blackface dandy in three iconic songs of early American blackface theatre, “My Long Tail Blue,” “Jim Crow,” and “Zip Coon.” Arguably, the earliest popular representations of black dandyism on the American stage contained features and characteristics designed to diminish any threat posed by real black dandies to the white working class’ imagined white superiority, and these features were quickly amplified in the following years to repress the perceived challenge posed by discourses and performances of black liberty. The rapid transformation of the blackface dandy entrenched a narrative of white liberty that undercut any potential arguments for cross-racial working-class solidarity, abolition, cross-racial sexual relationships, or black rights. Within a decade of the first blackface dandy treading the boards in America, a destructive discourse of blackness—exemplified in the character of Zip Coon—eliminated the possibility that early blackface theatre could provide a theatrical response to social transformations in America that might champion the causes of equality and black liberty. Exactly how these discourses and causes are investigated has been brought into question lately. Recent methodological shifts in studies of blackness have provided an important intervention within minstrel studies, providing the occasion to reassess the figure of the blackface dandy and the role of such a figure within discourses of blackface theatre, blackness, and American liberty more generally. Methodological Shifts: The Four Stages of Minstrel Studies For nearly a century, minstrel scholars have debated the role of racial discourses in blackface performance. Mikko Tuhkanen has categorized minstrel scholars into three periods, with more recent work potentially constituting a fourth shift in approaches to minstrel studies. A common feature within twentieth-century blackface minstrelsy studies, so argues Tuhkanen, is the “repetitive dismissals of earlier studies as biased, insubstantial, or politically motivated.”[1] In the 1930s Carl Wittke and Constance Rourke theorized blackface as a process of “cultural borrowing” where white performers used performance styles of black people in creating a uniquely American form of cultural expression.[2] Responding to this reading of minstrelsy, from the 1950s through the 1970s Ralph Ellison, Nathan Huggins, and Robert Toll dismissed studies such as Wittke’s and Rourke’s, claiming they focused too intently on national formations and failed to understand the harmful racial ideologies circulating in blackface entertainment; for Ellison, Huggins, and Toll blackface was “a reflecting surface” in which white anxieties about race and politics are resolved through harmful racial stereotypes of blackness.[3] Thirdly, Eric Lott pioneered a revival in minstrel studies, followed by authors such as W.T. Lhamon, Dale Cockrell and William Mahar, attempting to balance the approaches of the first two periods of minstrel studies.[4] In Love and Theft Lott argued that Ellison, Huggins and Toll were “representative of the reigning view of minstrelsy as racial domination,” suggesting their work performs a “necessary critique [that] seems somewhat crude and idealist,” and that, instead, minstrel studies should present a “subtler account of racial representations” that reads blackface minstrelsy as a “distorted mirror, reflecting displacements and condensations and discontinuities . . . multiple determinations” of whiteness and blackness.[5] The third group condemn earlier critics who claim blackface performance to be “an unequivocally racist, antiblack practice, both in intentions and effects,” and instead, insist on a more nuanced reading strategy, one that highlights the multiple determinations of identity and political issues, intentional and unintentional, that lead to the possibility of both crosscultural affinity and antiblack sentiment in blackface performance.[6] The complication of intentionality is a feature of this third group of scholars, who re-animate rebellious, anti-bourgeois themes in blackface performance, and prioritize these themes over the oppressive, racist consequences of blackface. Tuhkanen remains neutral in the debate, concluding that the development of minstrel studies “like blackface performance itself . . . has evolved with the twists and turns of its own ‘lore cycle.’”[7] Since Tuhkanen’s 2001 article, a group of scholars have taken issue with the approaches and findings of the third group. In other words, to Tuhkanen’s genealogy of blackface minstrel studies can be added a fourth turn: scholars including Daphne Brooks, Tavia Nyong’o, and Douglas Jones who question the methodologies of previous studies in order to emphasize the way black people—audiences, artists, activists, and everyday people—shaped and responded to blackface performance over time.[8] Presenting an intervention that informs the approach taken to the analysis of blackface dandies in this article, the fourth turn in minstrel studies advocates for a methodological re-orientation that reveals historical blind spots in earlier histories and suggests ways to prioritize black experiences in an analysis of white performances of blackness. Brooks’ theorization of black performance after 1850 suggests that blackface stage characters can be read as responses by white performers to challenges issued by black people arguing against white authority and control. Brooks, in identifying how late nineteenth-century black performers intent on social, cultural and political transformation inhabited and transformed the stereotypes of blackness created by the early white minstrels, urges scholars to consider minstrelsy’s “strategy of alienating the body and ‘blackness’” and “how the practice of alienation participated in the making of a dissident theatrical figure that travelled the stage in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and found itself at the center of both hegemonic and resistant social and cultural ideologies.”[9] Brooks, that is, suggests that the racial stereotypes created in early blackface performance styles were used for both oppressive and liberatory discourses of blackness. The term “alienation,” for Brooks, refers to the “white minstrel performer’s production and navigation of a violently deformed black corporeality”—a physically and representationally twisted and gnarled form of blackness—that “shored up white supremacist ideology . . . grotesquely exposing the mutual constitution” of whiteness with blackness.[10] Such a stance reiterates the concerns of the scholars in the third turn of minstrel studies—such as Lott, who advocated for an analysis of how political and social concerns of the white performers and audiences (the constitution of whiteness) energized blackface performance—while emphasizing the fusion of social and racial themes in minstrelsy to create a unique discourse of blackness that ultimately asserts white superiority. But, importantly, Brooks adds another paradigm for analysis, examining how, particularly later in the nineteenth century, the discourse of blackness was re-appropriated and transformed by black performers, critics, and authors with an interest in black liberty. An exemplary demonstration of the methodological shift advocated by Brooks is Nyong’o’s study Amalgamation Waltz, which incorporates the performances, perspectives and responses of black people into an understanding of blackface theatre. Nyong’o recounts how an editor of the Colored American, Samuel Cornish, attacked blackface minstrelsy and chastised black members of the audiences at such performances. In 1841, recounting a friend’s experience of attending a blackface show, Cornish complained: he never saw so many colored persons at the theatre in his life, hundreds were there, and among whom were many very respectable looking persons. O shame! paying money, hard earned, to support such places and such men, to heap ridicule and a burlesque upon them in their very presence, and upon their whole class.[11] While Cornish’s attempts to convince black patrons to boycott such venues may not have been entirely successful, Frederick Douglass, in 1848, clearly thought the intended audience of blackface entertainment was white, and labelled blackface performers “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of the white fellow-citizens.”[12] Nyong’o’s methodological re-focussing—bringing contemporary black voices into a consideration of blackface performance—highlights historical inaccuracies in earlier studies of blackface, the blind spots in what has been labelled an “orthodox division of minstrelsy into an early radical phase followed by its co-optation by commercial and middle-class interests by the 1850s.”[13] The radical phase, according to scholars such as Lott, Cockrell, Lhamon and Mahar, occurred from the 1820s to the 1840s as blackface performers engaged in and promoted cross-racial solidarity—even amalgamation—in the hope of uniting a working class that opposed exploitation by the upper classes.[14] The commercial stage, according to such scholars, occurred as blackface minstrelsy transformed into a form of entertainment for white audiences, where working-class audiences would enjoy criticisms of the upper class and both working-class and upper-class white audiences shared enjoyment in an oppressive discourse of antiblack racism.[15] Suggesting this orthodox historical view “merely transposes the desire for mongrel authenticity onto the mythic origins of a popular style,” Nyong’o reviews early blackface performance through the lens of black critics.[16] Early blackface performers are repositioned as capitalising on anxieties over racial amalgamation, leading to responses by black activists and abolitionists, whose criticisms of blackface performers’ attacks on black dignity demonstrated “concerns over respectability that animate black responses to the amalgamation panic.”[17] The methodological prioritization of black experience in the work of Nyongo, and others such as Brooks, has the potential to improve understandings of, and theories about, early blackface performance. Drawing directly on the methodological shift promoted by Nyong’o, Jones breaks with earlier groups of blackface scholars to theorize what can be termed the “expropriationist twist” of early blackface performance. Jones reinterprets black performance traditions—such as the slave performers who danced, sang and joked for money and goods at Catherine Market near Brooklyn during the 1820s—that Lhamon has shown to have influenced early blackface performers.[18] While Lhamon reads the lines of influence, from black to white performers, as an example of cross-racial solidarity, Jones reads the exchange differently.[19] Taking Fred Moten’s theorization of the black avant-garde—which identifies a “liberty awaiting activation, the politico-economic, ontological, and aesthetic surplus” in work by black artists and about “blackness”[20]—Jones questions the consequences of white would-be blackface entertainers appropriating the liberatory surplus of black performance. Jones describes this theft as “a cutting, ultimately ghastly, twist” in the historical development of blackface performance: Call it the turn of expropriation: those who donned burnt cork and crafted minstrelsy recognized the potentiality of the surplus of black performance and used it to activate their “liberty waiting.”[21] The expropriationist twist theorized by Jones explains the ideological dimensions of what Brooks referred to as “alienation.” The deformed corporeality enacted by white performers in an attempt to alienate blackness from the source of its original black expression did more than separate blackness from black concerns, it transformed blackness into an object used to present white, working-class concerns, particularly concerns to do with white working class freedom from labor exploitation. This twist in the performance of blackness is mirrored in minstrel studies that ignore the role of black people in provoking and responding to blackface performance. A reorientation of blackface criticism along the lines suggested by Jones, Nyong’o, and Brooks redresses the twist in studies of blackness, a twist typified by the ignorance of black voices and concerns in re-telling blackface history. For Jones, the “vast majority of the literature on early minstrelsy” uphold the orthodox historical view of minstrelsy criticized by Nyong’o; the orthodox view is the result of a methodology whereby “scholars borrow the model of those who crafted minstrelsy itself by refusing black people except when they are advantageous to one’s particular narrative.”[22] In other words, Jones escalates the need for a methodological change by likening earlier blackface scholars to the exclusionary blackface performers they study. Jones demonstrates the new methodology by examining how “an increasingly assertive free black community in the North” agitated for social change in the 1820s and 1830s, where for anxious white communities “blackface became one way to regulate and attenuate” such pressures.[23] Such an analysis reveals how “Minstrelsy emerged as a conduit of white assertion and a buffer against black protest.”[24] Beginning with a close analysis of an early blackface dandy that utilized blackness to present white concerns on stage, and examining both how this early dandy figure was transformed as blackface entertainment’s popularity bloomed and black responses to blackface theatre’s popularity, this article examines the twisting of the dandy in a way that begins to redress the twisting of minstrel studies. Central to blackface performance’s responses to white anxieties about transformations in American culture was the figure of the black dandy. In her history of black dandyism, Monica Miller states that black dandies emerged in response to several changes in American society and culture, including the end of festivals where black people had used fancy dress in parodying upper class whites, the end of the international slave trade and the abolition of slavery in various states at different times.[25] According to Miller, newly freed black people and their families or communities were accumulating modest amounts of wealth as a result of more economic freedoms and began to use fancy dress to announce their arrival as a new American demographic. The arrival of the black dandy into America’s urban centres was almost immediately followed by attacks and criticisms: “Attempts to control the perceived impertinency of these newly emboldened, newly fashionable blacks ranged from the subtle to the outrageous. Excessive responses included ripping the new clothes off the backs of those blacks dressed beyond what whites could bear.”[26] More subtle responses occurred on American stages. The blackface dandy is a stage character developed and refigured from the 1820s on to respond to the actual emergence of black dandies in American society as well as other social and cultural concerns. Given that the advent of black dandyism coincided with the use of typically upper-class clothing by white Americans who used elaborate suits and accessories to distinguish American identity, society and culture from Europe, the history of the black dandy as an argument about class and race restrictions is entangled with the history of the white dandy as an argument about American nationalism. For Miller, blackface dandies, as caricatures, “became part of a cultural critique of perceived white decadence that becomes increasingly difficult to parse from concerns about black ‘striving.’”[27] Themselves the product of various traditions, including clowning, commedia dell’arte, and burlesque, the blackface dandy developed as a stage character that was embroiled with these theatrical traditions as much as with the various social and cultural traditions that had led white and black Americans to use refined ways of dressing as embodied forms of argument in the first place. Black dandies, and associated stage representations, are the product of multiple traditions and critiques and, thus, must be analyzed as indeterminate or multiplicitous: In his adaptability, the dandy figure is firmly ensconced within the flow of African American history, linking African traditions and black recognition and subversive play with white power in the colonial period to black statements of respectability and individuality in freedom. Blackface minstrelsy and other caricatures fought against this mobility even as they acknowledged the ability of the figure and its real-life counterparts to reinvent themselves.[28] Importantly, the blackface dandy can be read as an acknowledgement of the power and rebellious force of real black dandies and, simultaneously, as an attempt by white performers to redress the arguments made by real black dandies against racial and social norms. The transformations of the blackface dandy in the early 1830s reveal the tensions between acknowledgement and neutralization of black resistance in American society and culture. An Early Blackface Dandy: Long Tail Blue The best-known performer of blackface dandyism in the period of early blackface was Dixon, born to a poor family in Richmond, Virginia, probably in 1801. Of what little is known about his early life, Cockrell describes how a circus manager noticed Dixon’s potential as a vocalist at the age of 15 and he was apprenticed to West’s traveling circus as an errand boy; also, it is likely he first used blackface as a clown in the circus.[29] Citing the various formal influences on early blackface, Lott mentions the American clown, as well as the harlequin of commedia dell’arte and the burlesque tramp, as overlapping traditions “tending more or less toward self mockery on the one hand and subversion on the other.”[30] Such diverse traditions influenced the formation of the blackface dandy character. A proponent of the self-mockery and subversion typical of blackface clowning and commedia dell’arte, Dixon became known for his performances of the blackface song “My Long Tail Blue” as early as 1827.[31] Of Dixon’s “My Long Tail Blue” the S. Foster Damon songbook—Series of Old American Songs (1936)—states: “it remained for half a century one of the standard burnt-cork songs.”[32] Given it is rare to find versions of “My Long Tail Blue” with a post-1830 publication date (where they are provided), or in post-1840 song sheet collections, it is unlikely the popularity of “My Long Tail Blue” lasted more than a decade. Nevertheless, “My Long Tail Blue” did popularize the character of the black dandy, which certainly proved to be an enduring presence, though continually altered and adjusted to respond to white concerns and black responses and challenges, in blackface entertainment over the rest of the century. In a description of some of Dixon’s performances in 1829, Cockrell points to the constituency of the audience in early blackface performance: during a three-day, late-July span, [Dixon] appeared at the Bowery Theatre, the Chatham Garden Theatre, and the Park Theatre and at all three sang in blackface . . . performing for “crowded galleries and scantily filled boxes,” a solid indication of the heart of his audience.[33] Ticket prices ensured that, generally, working-class crowds populated the gallery and upper-class audiences patronized the boxes. Cornish’s concerns in the early 1840s about black audience members in blackface shows suggest Dixon’s audience may have included black and white workers.[34] In any case, Dixon’s blackface routines appear to have been disliked by upper-class people, but delivered him success through the general approval of working-class, gallery audiences. The story narrated in “My Long Tail Blue” reveals what it is that appealed to these working-class audiences. “My Long Tail Blue” tells the story of a black dandy who courts women and flouts authority. The narrator of the song describes his blue jacket with long tails, a mark of respectability and class. The dandy—named Blue—wears his blue jacket on Sundays, while (religiously) pursuing women. While audiences enjoyed hearing about the character’s sexual pursuits, they also wished to see the upwardly mobile dandy brought down a peg or two. The song doesn’t disappoint, describing an encounter between Blue and Jim Crow.[35] In “My Long Tail Blue,” Crow is an escaped black slave who is found courting a white girl named Sue when Blue intrudes. As Blue intervenes and Crow sneaks away, Blue is arrested and his jacket is torn in a scuffle with the authorities. Blue has his jacket mended upon his release from jail and the song concludes with him advising the audience to go and buy a jacket so they too can be like him, winning the ladies’ hearts, flouting authority, and rising up the social hierarchy. Many aspects of the performance—from the costume to the lyrics, to the advertisements and musical style—represent the first moves by a white performer to alienate the black dandy in the creation of a blackface dandy. In her article “Daddy Blue: The Evolution of the Dark Dandy,” Barbara Lewis reads Blue as a dignified character (unlike the more loathsome characters that would dominate the following decades). Further, Lewis states that Blue represented the condition of some black Americans in reality: Blue’s handsome, dignified image, the epitome of rationality and reserve, reflected the situation for a sizable and growing segment of [upwardly mobile] African Americans. . . . Blue emblematically expressed the assurance and achievement of this group.[36] Lewis bases her reading of Blue as a somewhat authentic representation of actual, well-dressed black men on the lyrics, but also on a lithograph of Blue that was printed on the front page of an early publication of the song’s sheet music. Regardless of whether “My Long Tail Blue” faithfully reproduced or radically altered the figure of the black dandy, Dixon’s portrayal and his audience’s endorsement were provoked by the presence of refined, dignified black men in American public life. The lithograph for the sheet music provides a glimpse into how Dixon’s performance was framed and received. Given the aspects of the image mentioned in her analysis, Lewis is likely referring to the lithograph published by Atwill’s and reproduced here in Fig. 1. Another typical lithograph published by Firth has been reproduced in Fig. 2. While Lewis reads Blue as a dignified and respectable man of property who is ready to put his equal citizenship with white men to the test by taking his place in a “teeming metropolis,”[37] she misses some revealing details in the lithograph of Blue, details that are amplified when compared with the second lithograph. It is true, as Lewis states, that Blue appears to be dignified and wealthy; however, he is also demonized. In the Atwill’s lithograph Blue’s hat brim curls upwards at either end, simulating devil’s horns (Fig. 1).[38] In the Firth lithograph Blue’s moustache provides the devil’s curls, while the tail of his jacket flows away from his body into sharp points, mimicking something snake-ish or devilish (Fig. 2).[39] In both lithographs Blue’s eyes are squinted and shifty; they bring his character further under suspicion. These details bring into question the authenticity of Blue as a representation of real black dandies, instead offering support to the suggestions of Nyong’o and Jones that the twisting of blackness for white purposes in early blackface performance may have occurred more rapidly than the orthodox retelling of blackface history presumes. Arguably, the fact that Lewis misses these details allows her to idolize the character—perhaps in an effort to find an accurate cultural representation of the real black dandies of the period, who were bravely challenging social boundaries and confronting the often violent treatment of dignified black people. The missed details might result from an over-reliance on orthodox readings of minstrel history that place “My Long Tail Blue” in an early, radical stage of the form’s development. And yet, the lithographs need not be read as accurate portraits of actual dandies in order to recognize the agency of black dandies at the time. As Miller suggests, while the elaborate costume of real black dandies was “a symbol of a self-conscious manipulation of authority,” it was tempered by the corresponding representations of blackface dandyism, “an attempted denigratory parody of free blacks’ pride and enterprise.”[40] In comparing the lithographs, then, Blue should not be read as an accurate representation of real black dandies, but as an early response to the anxieties white society felt toward real black dandies. The demonization, brought about by the embodied arguments of black dandies, reveal the expropriative twist enacted by white performers who would go on to craft various determinations of blackness to alleviate their own concerns throughout the rest of the century. Figure 1: “My Long Tail Blue” (New York: Atwill’s, c.1827). The character of a dandy, Blue, with horned top hat, shifty eyes, and a straight, dignified stance. Image courtesy of John Hay Library, Brown University. Figure 2: “My Long Tail Blue” (New York: Firth, c.1827). The character of a dandy, Blue, with tailed coat, spiked moustache, shifty eyes, and a formal stance. Image courtesy of John Hay Library, Brown University. The liberatory surplus of real black dandies was transformed through Dixon’s portrayal into an argument for increased white working-class freedoms. For example, Blue’s blackness serves as a synonym for social transgression. Blue does not obey rules; for this he is a character that many in the predominantly white audience—with desires to escape social regulations—would have admired. His pursuit of women was also appealing to white audiences, but any association of white audience members with black freedoms needed to be controlled. Lott reads the phallic “long tail” of Blue’s coat as representing “white man’s obsession with a rampageous black penis . . . invoking the power of ‘blackness’ while deriding it, in an effort of cultural control.”[41] Further, as Nyong’o powerfully argues, the affect of cross-racial sexuality was particularly important in the first debates throughout the 1830s over racial equality, abolition and amalgamation.[42] Any boisterous delights to be taken in Blue’s sexual exploits were accompanied by concerns about crossracial relationships and their political associates, equal rights and freedom. As such, the sexual freedoms and any suggestion of equality and amalgamation are closed down in the narrative of the song by a fantasy of black-on-black violence (Crow versus Blue), that resolves the tension and allows audiences to re-assume their position as civilized, restrained white men differentiated from the violent black buffoons in the song’s narrative. The cultural control of Blue’s crossracial freedoms occurred through his alienation, his demonization, released the uncomfortable realization of shared liberatory interests with a black character at the same time as it addressed the animosity many whites felt towards the class of real black dandies populating the urban centers of America. To demonstrate the animosity working-class white people felt toward real black dandies, Lewis describes riots in Philadelphia during 1828 when “white ruffians” (whose “mobocratic tactics” were endorsed by local papers) physically assaulted and verbally insulted many elegant and well-dressed black people who attended balls and dances.[43] The social presence among white workers of genuine animosity toward black dandies and strongly held beliefs in an essential difference between white and black people led performers to respond with racial characterizations that differentiated white audiences from troubling presences such as Blue so that audiences could feel both socially and culturally secure. The alienation of Blue, then, suggests the expropriation and twisting of blackness to white ends occurred, albeit more subtly than in later performances, in the earliest blackface shows. Dixon’s “My Long Tail Blue” signalled the emergence of the professional blackface entertainer, and in doing so paved the way for an almost ubiquitous expropriation of blackness in decades to follow. In fact, it was the regional folk character of Jim Crow, named in “My Long Tail Blue,” who became the most famous character of early blackface theatre. While Dixon was having success with “My Long Tail Blue,” Rice began composing a song and dance about Jim Crow to which Dixon would respond in turn. Rice’s “Jim Crow” displayed a particular brand of animosity toward black dandies that would become a feature of blackface performance for decades to come. Attacking the Dandy: Jim Crow and Zip Coon Rice was born around 1808 and grew up “in New York’s most ethnically mixed neighborhood—the Seventh Ward—along the East River docks.”[44] After time spent working as a carpenter’s apprentice, by the mid-1820s Rice had turned to acting and was appearing in “supernumerary roles” in plays and by 1828 he was on the road full-time with a performance troupe, still performing bit-parts in various plays.[45] It was not long before Rice had stolen the show in his minor roles at the Park theatre in New York during 1828, drawing criticism from his senior actors who felt he distracted audiences from their shows, and by late 1828 Rice was on playbills for comic songs during interludes.[46] In 1830 Rice debuted a routine involving a catchy song and a quirky dance, possibly learnt from black performers at Catherine Market before Rice adapted it to the stage. The routine defined his career. By 22 September 1830, he was listed on a playbill for his performance of “Jim Crow,” a song Cockrell claims to have been instantly popular.[47] Two years later Rice was headlining with “Jim Crow” in New York. Between 1836 and 1841 Rice performed the song to acclaim in England, Ireland, Scotland, and France, returning several times to the United States, each time more popular than before.[48] While Rice’s popularity should not be underestimated—he is often incorrectly described as the first blackface performer, Jim Crow is the most well-known character from the period, and various versions of “Jim Crow” remained in the repertoire of blackface performers and folk bands for over a century—his popularity needs to be contextualized. In Cornish’s boycott call of blackface theatres he mentioned Rice by name and described him as “that most contemptible of all Buffoons,” and claimed, according to Nyong’o, that Rice’s trans-atlantic success had garnered support among Europeans for the US slave industry.[49] In other words, Rice’s popularity was not absolute and his routine was not as enlightened as scholars such as Lhamon believe. In fact, the persuasiveness of Rice’s racism may have been enabled by the slipperiness—the open-endedness—of the textual traces of his performances. There are a number of versions of “Jim Crow.” Lhamon, in his collection of songs and plays performed by Rice, reproduces a version of “The Original Jim Crow” published in New York in 1832 (hereafter referred to as version A).[50] The version has no less than forty-four short, four-line verses, each followed by the chorus: “Weel about and turn about and do jis so, / eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.”[51] Another version, published in Philadelphia in the same year, contains nineteen verses (hereafter referred to as version B), only some the same as version A. Version B is subtitled “A Comic Song (Sung by Mr. Rice at the Chestnut Theatre).”[52] In both versions the chorus is the same, yet the verses differ. Early blackface songs were highly improvised and adapted to current affairs and the place of performance. There were, however, some constants in the performance, including the chorus, followed by a lengthy musical “turn around” in which the famous hopping and spinning dance-step would be performed, the twisted knee of the character, the raggedy costume, and the oscillation between stumbling soft-shoe shuffles and energetic, bounding leaps. The wheeling and spinning nature of Jim Crow suggests that the song is playing with themes of racial inversion. The chorus—which could constitute half the performance—is an obvious example. Version A contains several verses where Jim Crow pities white people because they are not black: Kase it dar misfortune, And dey’d spend ebery dollar, If dey only could be Gentlemen ob colour. It almost break my heart, To see dem envy me, An from my soul I wish dem, Full as black as we.[53] The narrator of version A continually slips between referring to the audience as white people (“I’m glad dat I’m a niggar, / An don’t you wish you was too”), and as black people (“Now my brodder niggars,” and, above, “as black as we”).[54] Version B—recalling Blue’s invitation to follow suit—invites the (white) audience to become (black) Jim Crows: Den go ahed wite fokes Don’t be slow, Hop ober dubble trubble Jump Jim Crow.[55] While these various audience affiliations are indicative of both black and white audience members, it is also an indication of how audiences were actually invited to simultaneously associate and disassociate with blackness, or, to cite Huggins: “one could almost at will move in or out of the blackface character.”[56] This dis/association is, arguably, essential to an expropriation of black liberty—a taking hold, and removal, of the aesthetic of freedom. Like the narrative of “My Long Tail Blue,” the antics described in “Jim Crow” invite white working-class audiences to envy black freedom, despise the bourgeois, and enjoy violence toward black dandies. The lithographs on the front covers of song sheets for “Jim Crow” show the character with one bent, twisted knee, emphasising a deformed version of masculinity that served to alienate blackness and differentiate it from the ideals of white manliness held by the predominantly white, working-class audience (see, for example, Fig. 3).[57] Far from any hint of dignity shown in the character of Blue, the physical deformity of Crow acts simultaneously to explain his strange, leaping dance and to mark blackness as physically inferior to the white working-class audiences of the time. “Jim Crow” is among the earliest cultural texts that are openly hostile to black dandies (a feature of Jim Crow’s character). In version A of “Jim Crow,” three verses relate Jim Crow’s encounter with a black dandy: I met a Philadelphia niggar Dress’d up quite nice and clean . . . . So I knocked down dis Sambo And shut up his light, . . . . Says I go away you niggar Or I’ll skin you like an eel.[58] The acclamation of such violence rests uneasily against the actual violence that was being directed against well-dressed black people at the time. And yet the jokes continued as Rice’s rocketing popularity led to his own star-vehicle play Oh! Hush! Or, the Virginny Cupids. Rice’s Oh! Hush! sees the character of a black dandy, Sambo Johnson, discovering the affair of his sweetheart when he enters the kitchen where she works (and where his rival suitor, Gumbo Cuffee, has hidden). Cuffee, played by Rice, was a veritable Jim Crow: an upstart, dandy-hating, field-working, anti-authoritarian man. No script of the original performance remains, though Lhamon has edited a later adaptation by Charles White. For the purposes of this discussion, the following joke from Oh! Hush! is certainly in the spirit of “Jim Crow”: CUFF: Excuse my interrupting you for I see you am busy readin’ de paper. Would you be so kind as to enlighten us upon de principal topicks ob de day? JOHNSON: Well, Mr. Cuff, I hab no objection ‘kase I see dat you common unsophisticated gemmen hab not got edgemcation yourself, and you am ‘bliged to come to me who has. So spread around, you unintellumgent bracks, hear de news ob de day discoursed in de most fluid manner. (He reads out some local items.) Dar has been a great storm at sea and de ships hab been turned upside down. CUFF: (looks at paper): Why, Mr. Johnson, you’ve got the paper upside down! (All laugh heartily).[59] The joke is clearly on the pretentious, unintelligent, black dandy, and Cuff (a.k.a Jim Crow) is his foil. The dandy, now transformed into a despicable figure, represents a turn to what Lott labels as the scapegoating of the black dandy, a character embodying “the amalgamationist threat of abolition” and allegorically revealing “the class threat of those who were advocating for it [abolition].”[60] Such attacks on black dandyism reveal how “anticapitalist frustrations,” such as animosity toward upper-class social reformists and the abolitionist bourgeoisie, “stalled potentially positive racial feelings” to uncover “the viciously racist underside of these frustrations.”[61] That is, the dandy represented working-class bosses as well as the educated elite, some of whom had become leaders of the abolitionist movement and raised the possibility that worried white working-class people: that amalgamation and equality could eliminate racial difference among workers. To hate the dandy was to hate white reformers, black reformers, and black workers. And Jim Crow most certainly hated dandies. Through his immense success, the figure of the black dandy had been transformed. Whether Rice’s extreme popularity forced a change in Dixon’s portrayal of the black dandy, or Dixon was a keen judge of social attitudes toward blackness, Dixon’s next song continued to alienate blackness with a performance that would strip the dignity of Blue completely. In 1834, Dixon first performed the song “on which his renown finally came to rest.”[62] It is debatable whether Dixon wrote the song, or whether various little-known singers had performed it for many years before, but, undoubtedly, it was Dixon who made “Zip Coon” the only song of the 1830s to compare in popularity with “Jim Crow.” “Zip Coon” is a monstrous song that mimics certain elements of “Jim Crow.” The lyrics are often nonsensical, with the chorus consisting of “Oh, zip a duden duden duden, zip a duden day” repeated four times.[63] The opening verse leads to the chorus with the line: “Den over dubble trubble, Zip coon will jump.”[64] This line echoes Jim Crow’s insistence that white people “hop ober dubble trubble / Jump Jim Crow,” just as other lines in the song appropriate other elements of “Jim Crow.”[65] Both songs, for example, reference the 1814 battle of New Orleans, where the working-class hero of the late 1820s and early 1830s, President Andrew Jackson, had previously defeated the British forces led by Major General Edward Packenham. In the lithographs for the two songs, too, Zip mimics Crow (See Fig. 3 and Fig. 4).[66] Zip’s bent knee and arms are almost exact copies of Crow’s, and despite the obvious costume differences, Zip’s costume, like Crow’s, is exuberant and disorderly, superfluous and mis-matched. Zip, the lithograph and various appropriations within the text suggest, is Blue with a twist of Crow. Zip mimicked Crow’s invocation of popular, working-class nationalism. Perhaps Zip, as he jumped “over dubble trubble,” even incorporated a spinning leap similar to the one that Rice had made famous. Figure 3: “The Original Jim Crow” (Riley, c.1832). The character of an escaped slave, Jim Crow, with bent knee and foot and ragged clothes. Image courtesy of John Hay Library, Brown University. Figure 4: “Zip Coon” (Hewitt, c.1834). The character of a buffoonish dandy, Zip Coon, with gnarled limbs in a stance similar to typical portrayals of Jim Crow. Image courtesy of John Hay Library, Brown University. The representation of blackness in “Zip Coon” is just as disjointed as in “Jim Crow,” where the narration continually oscillates between descriptions of and association with blackness. This disarray is present in the narrative voice, which slips from the first to the third person. Sometimes it is a narrator talking about meeting Zip Coon, or describing him; sometimes it is Zip himself talking about politics, his mother or a girl who loves him. The sexual pursuits and freedoms of Blue and Crow remain, but the disassociation is made all the easier by Coon’s more obvious buffoonery. As with the previous songs, “Zip Coon” allowed audiences to seize the liberties of a wealthy, sexually active, luxuriant dandy, envy those freedoms and release them with a narrative of racial deformity. The presumed political injustice of racial equality and amalgamation, then, is derided allowing white working-class audiences to fantasize about their own importance as the most manly and necessary national type. It was a belief that motivated many to protest against abolition. The twisting of the dandy—from Blue through Crow to Coon—was near absolute by the time anti-abolitionist rioters stormed a church, ransacked houses, and took siege of a theatre to disrupt a ritzy performance by renowned tragedian Edwin Forrest in 1834. Actors were driven off stage and the rioters threatened to destroy the premises until the theatre manager thought to subdue them by staging an impromtu performance catering to their ideals. He brought out an actor to sing none other than “Zip Coon.”[67] As the first three groups of minstrel scholars would have it, this riot and blackface resolution occurred at a time when early blackface performance was rebellious, encouraging cross-racial solidarity. And yet minstrelsy is here, as early as 1834 and just six years after Dixon revolutionized American theatre with “Long Tail Blue,” co-opted into an antiblack, anti-amalgamation pogrom. What was it about a blackface dandy that so calmed the crowd? Certainly not the suggestion of cross-racial affiliation. In fact, what the analysis of the blackface dandy in this article has shown is that, from the earliest representations on the blackface stage, the dandy was incorporated into a process of alienating blackness. And the dandy was rapidly twisted into a grotesque effigy to calm the minds of anti-abolitionist rioters. As Nyong’o and Jones have forcefully argued, the discourse of blackness under blackface saw the theft of potential narratives of black freedom and its transformation—disfigurement—into narratives to support white working-class freedoms.[68] But, following this expropriation and alienation, what of the potential “liberty awaiting activation”? The changes in representation of the dandy from “My Long Tail Blue,” through “Jim Crow,” to “Zip Coon” indicates a much broader shift in the representation of blackness between 1828 and 1834. The distortion of the characterization of blackness stripped the black dandy of subversive potential and had a significant impact in real life for some early nineteenth-century Americans. Lewis reads firstly Jim Crow and then Zip Coon as figures growing out of white working-class hostility towards dignified black people who were slowly accumulating wealth: If Crow served as the antithesis to Blue, Coon mixed their individual elements into a scoundrel composite, the gangling servant dressed in the master’s clothes. Coon combined the original and its reverse into a mockery of the former.[69] Lewis effectively maps the evolution of the dandy figure as it related to attitudes towards blackness in Jacksonian America. Testing Lewis’ argument, it can be seen that Lewis is correct to imply racist characters mirrored (perhaps even provoked) real violence that was occurring against black people at the time (be it through direct physical intimidation or the institution of slavery). But the analysis in this article shows that Crow was not simply the “reverse” of Blue, but a heightened form of the animosity towards black people that was actually inherent in the portrayal of Blue. Such an analysis, in tandem with Lewis’ and Miller’s analysis of the history of real black dandies, refutes claims that blackface performance was revolutionary and radical despite (or besides) its racism. Even as blackface entertainment articulated the desires of the white working class or arguments against white dandies and class traitors, blackface also represented the broader shift occurring in white social attitudes toward blackness. Seen clearly in the shift from Blue to Zip, between 1828 and 1834 the iconography of racism that permeated the popular imagination of working-class Americans amplified subhuman, demonic and grotesque features, and it did so to ease white audiences’ concerns about abolition, amalgamation and other discourses of black freedom. The figure of the blackface dandy became a cornerstone of professional blackface minstrelsy from the 1840s onward, and even into the nostalgic vaudevillian revivals of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The ways that the blackface dandy allowed for working-class animosity of the upper classes, for upper-class self-mockery, and for general mockery of black people proved popular for a more economically diverse audience than the rowdy working-class crowds of early blackface. For Lott, the diverse appeals of professional minstrelsy—many of them embodied in the character of the black dandy—closed down any cross-racial affiliation potentially inspired by blackface performance: Energies directed against the state apparatus might too easily join those focused on black people. . . . Class straits may energize interracial cooperation, but they are also often likely to close down the possibility of interracial embrace.[70] And yet, the re-readings of blackface minstrel history to account for black influences upon and responses to early blackface—applied in this paper to the blackface dandy—bring into question whether there was ever the potential for a social, inter-racial embrace with the blackface dandy as a catalyst. In fact, as the work of Brooks, Miller, and Barbara Webb show, it was not until black performers and activists such as George Walker and W.E.B. DuBois inhabited and transformed the blackface dandy stereotype that any possibility of overcoming, in a productive and unifying way, the white animosity toward black freedoms was possible.[71] Despite the best efforts of white performers to twist and alienate blackness, and despite the devastating impact of narratives of white supremacy staged through blackface performance for half a century, the surplus of black liberty was, and arguably still is, awaiting activation in these stage types, responses, and texts. Recognizing this is an essential step toward undoing the white racial privilege created in early minstrel representations. And framing early blackface texts and characters as responses to narratives of black freedom will expose them for what they are: illusions of white control. Benjamin Miller is a lecturer in the School of Letters, Art and Media at the University of Sydney. His research examines the relationship between representations of race in the US and Australia. He completed his PhD thesis in 2010 on representations of blackness and Aboriginality in American and Australian culture and has published on representations of Aboriginal people in Australian theatre, cinema and literature, and on the writing of Aboriginal author David Unaipon. [1] Mikko Tuhkanen, “Of Blackface and Paranoid Knowledge: Richard Wright, Jacques Lacan and the Ambivalence of Black Minstrelsy,” Diacritics 31, no. 2 (2001): 13. [2] See Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1930); Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931). [3] Tuhkanen, “Of Blackface,” 16. See also Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” [1958], in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1964), 45-59; Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). [4] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also W.T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); William Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Ante-bellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1999). [5] Lott, Love and Theft, 7-8. [6] Tuhkanen, “Of Blackface,” 16. [7] Ibid., 13-14. [8] Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (London: Duke University Press, 2006); Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Douglas Jones Jr., “Black Politics but Not Black People: Rethinking the Social and ‘Racial’ History of Early Minstrelsy,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 2 (2013): 21-37. [9] Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 28. [10] Ibid., 27-28. [11] Quoted in Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 120. [12] Quoted in Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 123. [13] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 8. [14] W.T. Lhamon Jr., Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 8. According to Lhamon, “The [early blackface] scripts had enough play to make them particularly useful for organizing heterogeneous publics. In flocking to see Jim Crow, disparate types discovered their mutual affinities. Around Jim Crow’s mask the dispersed riffraff of a quickening industrialism began to act out their own parts in a new play in which the insubordinates were mixing among themselves but not melding with the previously dominant” (8). [15] Cockrell, Demons, 161. For Cockrell, as early blackface transformed into minstrelsy around 1843, “Caught in the middle, between class and race, white common people had to devise both upward and downward processes and rituals” (161). [16] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 8. [17] Ibid., 8-9. [18] Lhamon, Raising Cain, 34. [19] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 30. Lhamon suggests that the blackface characterization of Jim Crow provided the “template” for a “transracial affiliation [that] was virtually unprecedented” (30). [20] Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 41. [21] Jones, “Black Politics,” 25. Emphasis in original. [22] Ibid., 27-28. [23] Ibid., 17. [24] Ibid. [25] Monica Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 101. [26] Ibid., 102. [27] Ibid., 101. [28] Ibid., 105. [29] Cockrell, Demons, 96. [30] Lott, Love and Theft, 22. [31] Barbara Lewis, “Daddy Blue: The Evolution of the Dark Daddy,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 257. [32] Quoted in ibid. [33] Cockrell, Demons, 96. [34] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 120. [35] As an aside, it should be noted that the Jim Crow character here was drawn from regional, oral folk tales that had been circulating for decades before the character was appropriated and adapted into the exemplar early blackface character performed by T.D. Rice. Lhamon, Raising Cain, 180. [36] Lewis, “Daddy Blue,” 259-60. [37] Ibid., 258-9. [38] “My Long Tail Blue” (New York: Atwill, c.1827). [39] “My Long Tail Blue” (New York: Firth, c. 1827). [40] Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 81. [41] Lott, Love and Theft, 25-26. [42] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 72. [43] Lewis, “Daddy Blue,” 264. [44] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 1. [45] Cockrell, Demons, 62. [46] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 32-33. [47] Cockrell, Demons, 64. [48] Ibid., 65-66. [49] Nyong’o, Amalgmation Waltz, 121. [50] “The Original Jim Crow,” (New York: Riley, c.1832), republished in Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 95-102. [51] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 96. [52] “Jim Crow: A Comic Song (Sung by Rice at the Chestnut St Theatre),” (Philadelphia: Edgar, c.1832). [53] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 99. [54] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 98. It is also important here to make a note about the language of the sources I am quoting. I quote some hateful words in this article. In choosing to include these words I am following the argument of Jabari Asim in The N Word: “the word ‘nigger’ serves . . . as a linguistic extension of white supremacy, the most potent part of a language of oppression that has changed over time from overt to coded.” For Asim, the “N word” and other derogatory words are hurtful, but open identification of such language helps to identify moments of racism while also acknowledging the close relationship between language and privilege. For more, see Jabari Asim, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why (New York: Houghton, 2007), 4. [55] “Jim Crow: A Comic Song,” stanza 18. [56] Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 257. [57] “The Original Jim Crow,” n.p. [58] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 98. [59] Ibid., 150. [60] Lott, Love and Theft, 134. [61] Ibid., 135. [62] Cockrell, Demons, 99. [63] “Zip Coon: A Favorite Comic Song (Sung by G.W. Dixon),” (New York: Hewitt, 1834). [64] Ibid., stanza 1. [65] “Jim Crow: A Comic Song,” stanza 18. [66] “The Original Jim Crow,” n.p.; “Zip Coon,” n.p. [67] Lott, Love and Theft, 132-3. [68] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 122; Jones, “Black Politics,” 25. [69] Lewis, “Daddy Blue,” 259. [70] Lott, Love and Theft, 237. [71] Brooks, Bodies, 207-17; Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 137-45; Barbara Webb, “The Black Dandyism of George Walker: A Case Study in Genealogical Method,” The Drama Review 45, no. 4 (2001): 7-24. "Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre" by Benjamin Miller ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 27, Number 3 (Fall 2015) ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Jim Bredeson Editorial Assistant: Kyueun Kim Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Bill Demastes Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre” by Benjamin Miller “West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s” by Malcolm Richardson “Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China” by Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2015 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 Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Peter Zazzali 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 Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Peter Zazzali By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF During the spring of 2013, Nora Ephron’s play Lucky Guy played to sold out houses recouping its producers’ initial investment of $3.6 million after a mere eight weeks, a remarkable feat for a Broadway drama. Whereas most successes on the Great White Way are splashy musicals with high production values (think Wicked and The Lion King ) so-called “straight plays” usually operate at a financial loss as part of a comparatively short run. Lucky Guy , however, was an exception in that Ephron’s play grossed over $1 million weekly while earning Tony Award nominations for its director, playwright, and most significantly, its leading actor: Tom Hanks. [1] Like Ephron, Hanks had never worked on Broadway prior to Lucky Guy , or anywhere else of note in the theatre, thereby begging the question: how can two relative novices of the stage achieve such critical acclaim and financial success on their first try? I argue that the reason for this is Hanks’s celebrity. With symbolic capital that included two Academy Awards and roles in Hollywood hits such as Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Hanks’s involvement ensured that Lucky Guy would find and affect its audience. As Guy Debord states in his seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle , celebrity is a “commodity [that] attains the total occupation of social life,” [2] a conceit that speaks to the fetishization of movie stars like Hanks who try their hand at stage acting. But what gets lost in this negotiation between celebrity film star and theatre artist? What causes the commodified frenzy that defines the relationship between an actor and his audience, a connection whose ramifications are as significant artistically as they are socio-economically? What is the spectator’s state of consciousness in this phenomenal exchange? Ultimately, what does society’s fascination with celebrity mean for theatre as an art form? This article positions celebrity as a socially induced phenomenon that causes regressive perceptions of stage acting, and by extension, the art of theatre. Relying on a combination of cultural materialism and modern psychology, I will examine the phenomenological connection between celebrity actors and their adoring “stage” audience. Thus, I argue the festishization of a celebrity such as Hanks produces a viable, if imagined, relationship between a “star” and his audience, a negotiation that has reductive implications for the art of the stage actor. Celebrity actors are directly associated with film and television, insofar as their image is distributed and consumed en masse towards forging familiarity with the public. Indeed, the term familiarity shares the same etymological root as “fame” and is a benchmark for becoming a celebrity. In fact, fame and celebrity are mutually inclusive concepts resulting from exposure through the media. From Facebook and Twitter to television and the Internet, today’s cultural consumer has unprecedented access to the lives and careers of famous people. [3] As such, a social phenomenon has ensued in which the fascination of celebrities becomes a self-fulfilling practice with consumers craving and following mediatized narratives that create and perpetuate household names. With respect to actors, again, film and television especially apply to this dynamic. While stage performers have occasionally garnered fame throughout theatre history, its scope and measure pale by comparison to film and TV stars today. Whereas the likes of Edwin Forrest and the Lunts, for example, were celebrities in their respective chronological contexts, they simply did not attract the worldwide attention that today’s film and TV icons do. Thus, on-camera performance mediums in conjunction with mass media are the root and cause of an actor’s fame and celebrity formation. Being famous and being skilled in one’s artistic craft as an actor, however, are not necessarily inclusive considerations. It would seem rather easy to identify the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Cruise as celebrities, for example, but a different matter altogether to recognize them as trained actors. Like Hanks, neither attended drama school or received any formal education in acting. Instead, they had fortunate career “breaks” as young men and have since burnished their fame starring in blockbusters such as The Terminator and Mission Impossible —movies that could hardly be considered demonstrations of virtuosic acting, insofar as the material is largely driven by action-packed plotlines, special affects, and two-dimensional characterizations, thereby calling for a performance style that lends more to a personality type than a skilled artist. To borrow again from Debord, it is sheer spectacle. As such, a celebrity is needed to complete the branding and distributional appeal of the film. Of course there are film and television productions with gifted performers. Yet on-camera acting is decidedly different from the stage, where an actor must possess the physical, vocal, and emotional heft to render a performance with size and presence worthy of arresting the audience’s attention for lengthy periods of time. There are after all no second takes when acting onstage. On-camera performance, however, requires an authenticity that is not needed for the stage. The adage “the camera does not lie” is a truism in that film/TV acting is steeped in verisimilitude, whereas the stage actor renders a theatricalized illusion of reality. Acting for the camera and onstage are distinct practices that require separate and select skills. It is no different from distinguishing the qualifications between a musical theatre actor and one who specializes in Shakespeare, or, to reference another field altogether, it can be likened to the difference between a violinist and a trumpet player—both are musicians, but neither would be expected to handle the other’s instrument with the same skill as their primary métier. To be sure, I am not arguing that theatre acting is superior to on-camera performance, but rather, that it requires a specialized skillset that takes years of training and experience to master. The expectation that someone who has not been onstage for decades (as was the case with Hanks) can convincingly and compellingly render a major role seems remote. While a fine and accomplished film actor, Hanks was at best under-qualified to hold the stage for two hours, as noted by the New York Times’ Ben Brantley who meekly described his performance as “honorable.” [4] Celebrity can be understood in a number of ways. First, it is a social phenomenon in which the structures and institutions of a given culture are determining factors. For example, in Europe a football star like Luis Suarez is well known to the general public, given the continent’s passion for the sport, but in the US he is hardly a household name because we are comparably disinterested in professional soccer. On the other hand, some celebrities have a scope of recognition that is worldwide: Madonna, Muhammad Ali, and Barack Obama, to name a few. With respect to the latter, the symbiotic relationship of celebrity and fame comes into play, insofar as global leaders—for reasons that are both intended and not—receive media attention that provides them the same widespread idolatry (and criticism) as those in the more commonly celebretized spheres of sport and entertainment. The current phenomenon of Donald Trump’s pursuit of the US presidency supports this point in that he wields his celebrity to generate media attention and dominate his opponents: as the Wall Street Journal reports, Trump is “sucking the oxygen” out of the campaign. [5] Despite the fact that he has never held public office and refuses to offer a single policy plan of substance, as of this writing he continues to lead in every national and state poll. Thus, his celebrity and media coverage can be seen as the signature reason for his popularity among prospective Republican primary voters. The second distinguishing aspect of celebrity is what Robert van Krieken calls “the economics of attention,” or the ways in which the “intersection between culture and commerce” become endeavors of capital exchange. [6] The grist of this process is the invocation and distribution of a highly visible image that serves as a branding mechanism for the purpose of generating economic, cultural, political, and/or symbolic capital. Here too Trump provides an excellent example in that his brand, and by extension, the capital it garners on behalf of his campaign and the media outlets that cover him is significant. Likewise, an actor is valued for his brand as defined by fame and notoriety, characteristics that do not necessarily equate with his artistry. As this article endeavors to demonstrate, an actor’s status in the entertainment industry is commensurate with his prestige and sociopolitical status. [7] His worth to a given production often comes down to how much attention he can bring to it, a value that is determined symbolically. Therefore, celebrity can be understood as a form of symbolic capital that lends recognition, credit, and legitimacy to a project’s exchange value . Consequently, the “buzz” and “charisma” that a revered celebrity such as Hanks brings to a theatrical production has unmistakable economic implications. In addition to providing credibility to Ephron’s play, his status as a famous, Academy Award-winning star assured producers that Lucky Guy had a chance of being that rare Broadway drama that turns a profit. What does this dynamic mean for the US theatre, and more specifically, the aesthetic of American stage acting? To the extent that producers are intent on treating their production as a commercial endeavor, we will continue to see celebrities such as Hanks appearing in roles and contexts for which they are under-qualified. For all his remarkable accomplishments in film and television, Hanks is unproven and untrained as a stage actor. Casting him in a major part on Broadway, a venue that is itself considered the apotheosis of US theatre, sends a clear message that an actor is valued not so much for his craft, but rather, the attention that he can bring a project vis-à-vis his celebrity. The New York Times drama critic, Charles Isherwood, makes this very point in his article, “Stage Acting: It’s Nice Work if You Can Afford It”: Big movie and television stars are the mega-corporations of the acting profession, and they seem to be acquiring an increasing measure of the industry’s rewards, leaving less for the vast number of fameless actors…. If performers’ attractiveness and fame are what studios and even theaters want to buy and market, talent and experience naturally become commodities with lesser or no value.[8] The film and television industry has come to determine the casting practices of the US theatre. Though the example of Hanks pertains to Broadway, where Hollywood stars amass cultural capital by burnishing their resumes with stage credits, the US not-for-profit theatre is also prone to the commodified underpinnings of the celebrity society. In addition to landing the occasional household name to tread their boards, regional theatres from San Diego to Chicago consistently ape the production practices of the commercial theatre, as indicated by American Theatre magazine, which reports that thirteen of the fourteen “most-produced” plays appearing on US stages in 2013 were either done “On” or Off-Broadway. [9] US actors are incentivized to become celebrities, or at least to pursue work in the sectors of the profession that supplement the celebrity society: film and television. Indeed, having a stage career is generally unfeasible today. Whereas forty years ago an actor could work year-round as part of a resident company at a regional theatre, today he must look to film and television to make a living. [10] Unfortunately, the mid-1970s and early-1980s witnessed a downturn in the US economy and a generational change of artistic directors, inauspicious developments that caused regional theatres to disband their resident companies and cast on a show-by-show basis. This trend has persisted ever since. For example, the accomplished actor Jay O. Sanders claims that having a theatre career today is “totally impractical” and admits being forced to seek employment in the entertainment industry for his livelihood: My goal has been to make it work so I can do the great classics and new plays on stage. I’ve done over 100 films, but I don’t think of them as my career. I am forced to diversify my work to make the money to support what I love and am trained to do.[11] It is not only the remuneration of on-camera employment that benefits actors like Sanders, but the symbolic credibility that comes with working on a high profile project. The economics of attention could not be clearer. If an actor can appear with celebrities in major Hollywood films—a feat Sanders has repeatedly achieved—he advances his professional legitimacy, a crucial characteristic in winning future employment. This sociocultural paradigm has serious ramifications for acting as an art form and the ways in which it is perceived. The symbolic value of celebrity manifests through a spectator’s intangible connection to certain thoughts, affects, and most significantly, feelings that are caused by—yet otherwise divorced from—the object (person) being fetishized. The Western Marxist Theodor Adorno articulates this phenomenal exchange in describing the fetishization of music. He argues that singers or instrumentalists are valued not for their ability to express a given composition, but for the ways in which they are marketed publicly: “For all contemporary musical life is dominated by the commodity form; the last pre-capitalist residues have been eliminated.” [12] Adorno goes on to depict the “fetish character” of music as a schism between the musician and the listener, as identified by the artist’s detachment from the materials of his labor. He uses NBC’s radio broadcasts of the celebrity conductor Arturo Toscanini to exemplify how radio and television detach the artist from the musical composition. [13] Both the artist and listener measure the cultural product’s value by its symbolic worth, which in this instance pertains to Toscanini’s prestige. At no point in the production and reception of the NBC broadcast is there a tangible connection between Toscanini, his musicianship, and the listener/consumer. Instead, the dynamic of cultural production, distribution, and consumption is defined by the fetishization of Toscanini as “the world’s best composer,” thereby rendering both him and his work commodities that adhere to what Adorno terms the “culture industry.” [14] Adorno claims the fetishization of singers also occurs at the expense of their artistry: “Musical fetishism takes possession of the public valuation of singing voices.” [15] The singer’s technical virtuosity and craft is eclipsed once he is mediated as a marketable commodity whose image and music fit the formula for success, which, again, is synonymous with the singer’s exchange value, a criterion determined by his status as a celebrity. We can see this socially induced phenomenon in today’s pop artists in that their image operates as a material good for mass consumption at the expense of vocal technique or musicality. From Justin Bieber to Lady Gaga, celebrity singers seem more intent on creating and safeguarding their image than enhancing whatever musicianship they might have. Gaga’s formulaic music, for example, is accompanied by her outlandish costumes and highly contrived iconoclasm, a strategy that is clearly advancing her brand according to starcount.com, which anoints her the world’s most famous person. [16] A similar case could be made of her predecessor, Madonna, whose “success,” as pop culture scholar John Fiske asserts, was “due at least as much to her videos and her personality as her music.” [17] In tracing Madonna’s fame to her socially constructed image, Fiske reminds us that her first album, Madonna (1983), was initially a commercial failure and that it was not until she made the video “Lucky Star” that her career began to take off. [18] The basis for this breakthrough, he argues, was to use mass media to deploy mythical signifiers to evoke a sexually empowered figure towards rendering Madonna a pop icon for adolescent girls and gay men, both of whom comprised her fan base during much of the 1980s. As Lady Gaga would do years later, Madonna represented a “fine example of the capitalist pop industry at work” and established a singing career that had little to with “what she sounded like.” [19] As such, both would-be artists exemplify what Adorno refers to as “the star principle.” [20] Adorno’s contemporary and colleague, Walter Benjamin, explains how the mass production and distribution of cultural goods as images causes artists to be alienated from their audience. Echoing Adorno’s concern for the social role of art during a time of unprecedented advancements in technology, Benjamin uses the actor to differentiate what he terms “cult” and “exhibition” values relative to theatre and film. In the case of the former, he argues stage acting possesses an aura that must be experienced live between the actor and his audience. This exchange can be likened to Jerzy Grotowski’s theorization and practice of “Poor Theatre,” an aesthetic devoid of spectacle and marked by the direct, ephemeral, and “holy encounter” defining the actor/spectator relationship. [21] Contrarily, film acting represents exhibition value, which can be synonymously understood as exchange value deriving from the technological mediation of art into objects that are reproduced en masse . Thus, a film actor’s celebrity is directly proportionate to the distribution and consumption of his image. Benjamin depicts this dynamic as the spectator “identifying with the camera,” or more specifically the image emanating from it, thereby causing the same schism between an artwork and its beholder that Adorno describes in the commodification of music. [22] The irony to this phenomenon is when a celebrity does theatre. When an actor of Hanks’s stature appears onstage, it begs the question: is the audience responding to Hanks the celebrity or the character he is representing? Are they there to see Ephron’s play, or are they star-struck spectators arriving to see a celebrity in the flesh strut his stuff? While it would be impossible to exactly know what an audience’s collective intention is for seeing a given production, we can apply what the philosopher/psychiatrist collaborators Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari term the philosophy of desire to analyze the consciousness of said audience in the context of the celebrity society. Some psychiatrists and social scientists suggest that the phenomenon of fandom is para-social in that a beholder forms a fictional bond with a celebrity. This connection exists in degrees ranging from causal followers to an obsessed worshiper. In both instances, an individual idolizes celebrities according to how his/her “consciousness is structured and organized in a particular way.” [23] These points of connection can pertain to a range of self-identifying characteristics, such as gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and personal ideals. One’s sense of self and belonging in the world are reinforced through an imagined relationship with a complete stranger. Thus, the production and distribution of celebrities through and within the various media constituting the entertainment industry can be seen as a grand marketing ploy intended to appeal to intended audiences. This practice is obvious in advertising campaigns, for example, where celebrity endorsements are made according to the buyer being targeted. The commercial theatre operates this way too, which explains why actors are cast in leading roles not because they are experienced stage performers but rather, because they have the star power, the symbolic capital, to appeal to a certain consumer base. Indeed, America’s crème de le crème of theatre, Broadway, has been deploying this strategy for decades: Madonna’s appearance in David Mamet’s Speed the Plow had teens flocking to the theatres in 1988, just as Sean P. Diddy Combs and Daniel Radcliffe would respectively do on behalf of A Raisin in the Sun (2004) and Equus (2007). Though the celebrification process exists in part at the level of the individual fan, it must be seen as a social phenomenon to understand its role in the commodification of US theatre and acting. As such, desire plays a significant role in the formation and sustaining of a given celebrity and how he can be utilized to market a theatrical production. At the core of classical theories of psychiatry is the concept of desire as per the parental/child relationship that then gets transferred onto another individual, usually a romantic partner. When considering this paradigm in the social sphere, desire must be seen as an abstraction, which in the context of capitalism means commodities, be they material possessions or symbols; the latter of course could be conceived as a celebrity. In this way desire is understood as the social unconscious constructing and conditioning consciousness vis-à-vis an imagined relationship with a famous person. This relationship varies according to the degree of emotional investment on the part of any given beholder, yet even for the more casual fan some form of socially induced phenomenon is at stake. Nothing is formed exclusively at the personal level. Raymond Williams refers to such a process as structures of feeling where “there is frequent tension between the received interpretation [a beholder’s fantasy] and practical experience,” otherwise understood as reality. [24] His theory suggests a social experience like an art movement or the idolization of an individual that takes on an unconscious presence within a certain cultural context, within which an individual’s perceptions of an object and/or experience becomes subsumed by the collective, thereby creating a “structure of feeling” that has significant implications along social lines. In the case of celebrities, dominant forms of social understanding jointly create and potentially sustain a person’s fame. The construction of Tom Hanks as a cultural icon proves as much. Since Hanks began amassing symbolic value for his cinematic achievements, especially dating back to his Academy Award winning work in Forrest Gump (1994), his prestige has continued to grow in US popular culture. His numerous starring roles in Hollywood blockbusters, his work as a producer of films and television programs, and as mentioned at the outset of the article, his debut on Broadway in a work penned by an unproven playwright—a project that would never have been produced had it not been for Hanks and his symbolic capital—all demonstrate the process and ramifications of celebrity formation. Desire is at the heart of the social unconscious and can be seen as the primary source of celebrity formation. As such, it can be likened to Adorno’s critique of the fetishization of cultural goods in that society at large succumbs to the trappings of the culture industry in ways that remain largely undetectable. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire can further illuminate the formation and function of celebrity. Though their overarching argument is to locate desire as a catalyst for political revolution, their paradigm can also apply to the social unconscious’s role in the celebrification process. Deleuze and Guattari argue that human desire exists at the level of the unconscious and is the catalyst for production in a capitalist society. Claiming that desire is constantly “striving [to] become more” by “becoming other [or] different,” they define it as a “force composed” of abstract machines that become manifest in an individual’s conscious and unconscious perception of social codes operating at the level of his thoughts, emotions, and corporeal experience. [25] The abstract machine, or force, functions as a sociocultural phenomenon dictating the course and content of material production, within which the psychological and the social are closely linked. The process of celebrification mobilizes a collective desire towards commodifying a given object for consumption: the star. Unlike standard material goods, however, the celebrity’s value to a consumer is intangible. Whereas one could purchase a stylish article of clothing or a fancy car to satisfy one’s consumer needs, purchasing a ticket to see a celebrity in a Broadway show provides the buyer the ontological experience he seeks: seeing a famous person in the flesh. To crudely borrow from Shakespeare, “the play is [NOT] the thing,” but rather, being in close proximity to the object of desire, the celebrity, is what prevails. [26] Driven by the social unconscious, the doting patron buys his ticket to have an experience that he desires to be as “real” as it is unique. However, these characteristics in the context of performance are antithetical and merely a psychological ruse existing at the social level. Adorno’s schematization of mass culture makes this case in stating that the “difference between culture and practical life disappear.” [27] The beauty of an aesthetic given to the realm of the imagination and uniqueness regresses to what Adorno terms “empirical reality,” a pedestrian experience defined by “doing what everyone else does.” [28] In fact, there is nothing unique whatsoever about seeing a celebrity up close in a performance; quite the contrary, it is merely a socially induced product of mass culture masquerading as something special. Adorno addresses the issue of an artwork’s uniqueness relative to “empirical reality” by referring to the “spiritual essence” of the former, and can therein apply to stage acting and theatre. [29] Comparing aesthetic beauty to a fireworks display, he depicts art as a transcendent experience that can be identified as an “apparition.” [30] The apparition implies a spirituality that causes a phenomenological effect that is evanescent—evanescence reconceived as “liveness” is of course a distinguishing characteristic of theatre. Ultimately, Adorno does not use the term “spirit” in an ethereal manner, but addresses it relative to an artwork’s form. In arguing that “the spirit of artworks is bound up with their form,” he defines it as a sensual affect that is the product of a given piece’s constituent elements. [31] Contrary to supernatural associations with the term, Adorno describes spirit as an artwork’s “vital” and “substantial” essence, and not “a thin abstract layer hovering above” the selfsame work. [32] It is affective, if phenomenal, and the result of a process that can be objectively measured. Identifying art as jointly spiritual and tangible, Adorno dialectically analyzes the dynamic between a work’s phenomenal affect and its material form, which he terms its “thing-like” dimensions; in the case of the stage actor this would be the expressivity of his body, voice, emotions, and imagination. [33] The work’s spirit is thus generated by the artwork’s material form for the purpose of transcending that very form. While the artwork’s spirit is its defining attribute, it is created through a process that is contingent on the work’s constitutive elements, such as the dialectical connection between the sounds of a sonata relative to its paginal composition, or actors mediating a scripted drama into a character. It is near impossible, however, for a celebrity to achieve spiritualization in a theatrical performance. No matter how skilled he might be, the celebrity actor’s fame ultimately becomes his undoing in that the audience is likelier to be conscious of his personality at the expense of the character he portrays. In fact, there are some celebrities who have been trained for the stage and are quite gifted as such—Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, to name a few. Indeed, these three actors were the headliners for the New York Shakespeare Festival’s critically acclaimed production of The Seagull in 2001. Nonetheless, their familiarity to the average audience member compromised the significant criterion of losing themselves in the role, a point the headline of the New York Times review inadvertently underscored: “Streep meets Chekhov, Up in Central Park.” [34] The issue is not Ben Brantley’s praise for these three actors, which was consistent with nearly every critical account of their performances, but that their familiarity to the average spectator superseded the characters they played, and as Michael Quinn’s semiotic analysis of celebrity actors suggests: “exceeded the needs of the fiction [by] keeping them from disappearing entirely into the acting figure of the drama.” [35] Writing in 1990, Quinn’s prescient observation has never been more fully realized in US theatre. Today’s audiences are distracted by their preconceived perceptions of a celebrity’s personal life and/or former projects to the point of not being capable of “accepting” his performance at face value. [36] Moreover, this subliminal ghosting of a given performance is abetted by a show’s branding, as producers attempt to capitalize on the name recognition of their star performer(s). Unfortunately, the actor’s actual work gets lost in the exchange. The presence of the celebrity actor therefore has a potentially regressive effect on the theatrical production. To the extent that the performer takes attention away from the production, he can be seen as little more than a distraction, the source of which, again, comes from the social unconscious desire to be in the presence of someone famous. While it is altogether possible that some audience members can overlook these types of distractions, most cannot, as Ben Brantley suggests in his review of Julia Roberts in David Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain (2006): The startling conclusion of most of the critics seems to be that the Oscar-winning actress who can command $20 million for a role in Hollywood actually cannot act very well at all. At least, not when her audience is a flesh-and-bone one, rather than a sympathetic lens.[37] Brantley tellingly summarizes how Roberts’s celebrity dominated the production at the expense of Greenberg’s play: One of the three stars of the Broadway revival of Three Days of Rain, which opened last night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, is Julia Roberts, who is making her big-time theatrical debut…. There is no way that this show is not going to be all about Julia…. Ms. Roberts is the sole reason this limited-run revival has become the most coveted ticket in town.[38] The source of the theatrical production, Three Days of Rain , is overcome by the forces of socially manifested desire in which the material good, seeing Roberts perform live, becomes the selling point. While one might argue that casting Roberts has the benefit of widening the audience to include those who would not otherwise go to the theatre, her appearance onstage has reductive implications for US acting, and moreover, the role of art in society. The desire undergirding our social unconscious gives rise to the spectacle of celebrity, thereby causing society to consume a person’s image en masse at the expense of the actress’s work and the play in which she appears. The allure of Roberts in affect displaces her acting, and moreover, redefines the theatrical experience in her image. The irony of course is unmistakable in that Roberts’s fame negates any chance the audience will be capable of encountering her performance in the context of Three Days of Rain . Guy Debord argues that technologically generated spectacle formulates the phenomenon of celebrity. Similar to Benjamin’s description of an artwork’s “exhibition value,” Debord posits spectacles—and the images that constitute them—as “signs of the ruling production” that signify how people should live their lives. [39] Adorno makes a similar case in discussing the harmful effects of film and television, insofar as both mediums uphold potentially damaging and “nefarious” social stereotypes by evoking a “pseudo-reality” at the expense of a dialectical analysis of society, or put more simply, film and television tend to privilege conformity and discourage critical analysis. [40] The on-camera actor therefore feeds into a system of signs that simultaneously shapes and reinforces the “banal” status quo by offering cultural consumers “pseudo-enjoyment.” [41] Celebrity performers are particularly influential in this process, as Debord notes: The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification[42] Celebrity actors are therefore dominated by and contribute to society’s commodification of cultural goods, in which artistry loses its uniqueness and “everything” becomes “mediated by images” that separate people from themselves and others in favor of conforming to the capitalist social order. [43] Debord identifies the regression of fetishizing artistic goods for mass consumption, thereby reducing them to commodities that displace tangible human interaction. [44] The social unconscious is very much at play in this dynamic, as people unwittingly are led by desire in responding to technologically generated images and thus “the commodity attains the total occupation of social life.” [45] The acquisition of commodities relies on a process of “spectacular representation” that is marked by the peddling of sameness under the guise of autonomy, as the hocking of reproductions—such as an actor’s image—masquerades as “the real thing.” [46] The culture industry is at the center of this process, which in the case of acting can best be seen in the trappings of Hollywood, thereby causing what Adorno terms the “deaestheticization of art.” [47] The spectacular grip of celebrity on the American theatre persists. Every production of the 2013/14 Broadway season had at least one famous person among its ranks, a fact underscored by the commensurate Tony Awards telecast, when celebrities such as Samuel L. Jackson and Lucy Liu presented honors to the likes of Bryan Cranston (HBO’s Breaking Bad ) and Neil Patrick Harris ( How I Met Your Mother ). Guest appearances by Sting and Jennifer Hudson further demonstrated this practice. In Hudson’s case, she was pitching a song from the musical version of the hit film Finding Neverland , which was playing at the American Repertory Theatre at the time and later opened on Broadway that ensuing fall. It is ironic, however, that Hudson was hired solely for the Tony telecast and was never in the production. Other Hollywood stars that graced Broadway stages that season included Glenn Close ( A Delicate Balance ), Bradley Cooper ( The Elephant Man ), and Hugh Jackman ( The River ). Trying to bank on the symbolic capital of Hollywood, the Tony Awards telecast also featured Kevin Bacon, Rosie O’Donnell, Tina Fey, and Ethan Hawke, among numerous others. Perhaps the most incongruous star to appear was the iconic Clint Eastwood, who was so out of sorts that he butchered the name of the venerable stage director Darko Tresnjak and mistook the final titular word in the drama The Cripple of Innishman for “Irishman.” Two rather perplexing errors, given that Eastwood had the seemingly simple charge of merely reading the teleprompter and contents of the winning envelope, a two-minute action that a little bit of rehearsal could have adequately prepared him to execute. Unfortunately, the show was live and he had no chance to cut his flawed performance in favor of a second take. Perhaps the larger question is: Why was Eastwood presenting in the first place? He is not a theatre professional, a fact made all the more apparent by his bungled presentation. During the same telecast Rosie O’Donnell recalled her youth to describe how she first fell in love with theatre: “Hollywood was vague and an illusion, but Broadway was real.” Her privileging of “reality” can be read with unintended irony in that the illusory and imaginative essence of theatre, especially as it pertains to the work of actors, is often displaced by the spectacle of celebrity; theatre’s embracement of reality is—to borrow from Adorno—of the empirical or pedestrian variety, thereby discounting any chance to achieve a product steeped in wonder, spirit, and shared celebration. The unconscious desire of theatregoers—a drive that is socially induced—is projected onto the figure of the celebrity, whose presence therein is filtered through her image, which has been produced, distributed and consumed through the mass media. The object of desire is therefore not the play, its actors, or the theatrical event, but the star performer and her symbolic worth to an audience of doting fans. It is a phenomenon owed to the fetishized forces of capitalism and has precious little to with stage acting or the aesthetic of theatre. References [1] Adam Hetrick, “Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy , Starring Tom Hanks, Ends Broadway Run, July 3 rd ,” Playbill.com , http://www.playbill.com/news/article/179720-Nora-Ephrons-Lucky-Guy-Starring-Tom-Hanks-Ends-Broadway-Run-July-3 (accessed 15 January 2014). [2] Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI: Black and Red, 1983), sec. 42. [3] For more on the cultural consumption of celebrities, see Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, Starstruck: the Business of Celebrity (New York: Faber and Faber, 2010); and Daniel Herwitz, The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). [4] Ben Brantley, “Old-School Newsman, After Deadline: Tom Hanks in ‘Lucky Guy’ at the Broadhurst Theatre,” New York Times , 1 April 2013. [5] Ben Zimmer, “‘Oxygen Out of the Room’: From Clever Cause to Cliché,” The Wall Street Journal , 31 July 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/oxygen-out-of-the-room-from-clever-clause-to-cliche-1438366552 (accessed 4 January 2016). [6] Robert van Krieken, Celebrity Society (New York: Routledge, 2012), 53. [7] For a useful analysis of the role of symbolic capital in determining the value of cultural goods, see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” in The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 112-41. [8] Charles Isherwood, “Stage Acting: It’s Nice Work If You Can Afford It,” New York Times , 15 January 2006. [9] “Season Preview,” American Theatre , October 2013. [10] Steven DiPaola, “The 2012-2013 Theatrical Season Report,” Equity News (December 2013). [11] Jay O. Sanders, interview with author, 31 August 2013. Sanders received his training from the professional acting program at the State University of New York at Purchase during the 1970s. [12] Theodor Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (New York: Routledge, 1991): 37-38. Also, see Marx, Capital , vol. 1, chap. 1, sec. 4, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” [13] Ibid., 35. [14] Ibid. [15] Ibid. , 36. [16] According to starcount.com, a site that uses Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube to measure a celebrity’s popularity, Lady Gaga has over 30 million fans. This site identifies her as the most popular individual in the US. http://www.starcount.com/all-platforms/Worldwide/Musician (accessed 12 July 2015). [17] John Fiske, “Madonna,” in Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies , ed. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein (New York: Routledge, 2001), 246. [18] Ibid. [19] Ibid., 246-47. [20] Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” 35. [21] Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2002), 55-60. [22] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Shocken Books, 1978), 220. [23] van Krieken, Celebrity Society, 73. [24] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 130-31. [25] Phillip Goodchild, Delueze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (London: SAGE Publications, 1996), 44-45. [26] Hamlet, ed., Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (New York: Arden Shakespeare, 2014), 2.2.566. Reference is to act, scene, and line. [27] Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry , 61. [28] Ibid. [29] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 78-94. [30] Ibid., 85. [31] Ibid., 89. [32] Ibid., 88-90. [33] Ibid., 86-87. [34] Ben Brantley, “Streep Meets Chekhov, Up in Central Park,” New York Times , 13 August 2001. [35] Michael Quinn, “Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting,” New Theatre Quarterly 6, no. 22 (May 1990): 154. [36] Ibid, 155. [37] Quoted in David Usborne, “Critics Rain Insults on Julia Roberts’s Broadway Debut,” The Independent , 22 April 2006 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/critics-rain-insults-on-julia-roberts-broadway-debut-475125.html (accessed 15 July 2015). [38] Ben Brantley, “Enough Said About ‘Three Days of Rain.’ Let’s Talk About Julia Roberts!” New York Times , 20 April 2006, http://theater.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/theater/reviews/20rain.html (accessed 28 March 2011). [39] Debord, Society of the Spectacle , sec. 7. [40] Theodor Adorno, “How to Look at Television,” in The Culture Industry , ed. J.M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 1991), 158, 171. [41] Debord, Society of the Spectacle , sec. 59. [42] Ibid., sec. 60. [43] Ibid., secs. 1, 4. [44] Ibid., sec. 36. [45] Ibid., sec. 42. [46] Ibid., sec. 60. [47] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 16. Footnotes About The Author(s) Dr. Peter Zazzali is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of Kansas. A specialist in actor training and the sociology of theatre, his work has appeared in Theatre Topics , PAJ , and The European Legacy , among other peer-reviewed journals. In April of 2016, Routledge will release his book: Acting in the Academy: The History of Professional Actor Training in US Higher Education . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Musical Theatre Studies “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 Performing Anti-slavery American Tragedian Murder Most Queer The Captive Stage Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Meghan Duffy, Daniel Gerould | A bibliography of critical studies in english on the theory and practice of comedy in drama, theatre, and performance. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Comedy: A Bibliography Meghan Duffy, Daniel Gerould Download PDF A Bibliography of Critical Studies in English on the Theory and Practice of Comedy in Drama, Theatre, and Performance “Comedy has been particularly unpropitious to definers,” declared the great dictionary maker Dr. Johnson, and the German novelist and aesthetician Jean Paul quipped, “Definitions of the comic serve the sole purpose of being themselves comic.” Accepting the challenge, the keenest minds have been drawn to the debate about the nature of comedy and attracted to speculation about its theory and practice. For all lovers of comedy, Comedy: A Bibliography is an essential guide and resource, providing authors, titles, and publication data for over a thousand books and articles devoted to this most elusive of genres. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition by Kalina Stefanova Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF “Thank you!” as a Theme, “Thank you!” as a Code (highlights of the International Theatre Festival of Sibiu and its 32 nd edition) “Let’s say “thank you” to God, to our friends, parents, children, to everyone, that we are alive, that we can smile, that we can love, that we can share; let us thank all those who help us make this festival happen…. this huge and spectacular family that wants goodness and beauty on earth.” This is how Constantin Chiriac, the founder, president and, in effect, main engine of the Festival since 1993, ends his address in the catalogue this year. The phrase “Thank you”, though, was not only a theme of the 32 nd edition. It is a code to the essence of the Festival in principle, an explanation, at least partial, of its transformation over the years into a phenomenon of a world scale – so far the third largest one, after those in Edinburgh and Avignon. In the same address Chiriac pinpoints the main reasons for the theme’s choice, yet one of them stands out: “… in a time of heightened conflict, when war and hatred bring so much destruction,” what was sought out was “… a theme that would make us more open, more thoughtful, and more beautiful…” – “a magic word” that can tame even “those who do us no good…” This is an excellent encapsulation of the broad-minded manner in which the Festival has been cut out from its very start. It is with the same broad-mindedness and extraordinary panache that its editions continue to be created over the years. It is the Festival that transformed Sibiu – the 15 th in size city in Romania, with a population of 134000 – into a very sought-out destination, with over 100000 visitors arriving there especially for the event. At the same time, despite the throngs of people and the numerous new, glossy buildings, Sibiu hasn’t lost its authentic atmosphere and spirit. And this too the city owes to the Festival, to its distinct respect for tradition – respect that characterizes many of its accompanying undertakings. Like the Walk of Fame. There are other such Walks around the world, yet what distinguishes the one in Sibiu – containing already 77 stars of stars – is its special whereabouts. It connects the place of the oldest theatre in Romania (built in 1788) with the place where the future new building of the National Theatre “Radu Stanca” – the organizer of the Festival – will stand. Yet, among the numerous such undertakings marked with the Festival’s “hats-off” to tradition and its focus on building bridges between the past, present and future, what stands out most is the main rubric in its program, entitled Heritage Performances . Initiated back in 2005, it presents emblematic productions of “Radu Stanca” Theatre. Importantly, the “set” selected for each year does not necessarily differ in full with the one of the previous Festival edition. There are shows which could be in the selection for many years. Such is the case with the famed and spectacular Faust of Silviu Purkarete, created back in 2007, which was the very first show in the rubric this year too; or another long-running Purkarete’s production – The Scarlet Princess, staged in 2018, which also featured there. 20 years after the start of the rubric, these heritage performances could be viewed as forming a special collection – something like a live theatre museum . Notably: a museum not only of the output of “Radu Stanca” Theatre and, thus, of Romanian theatre, but of world theatre as well. For, I dare say, these productions have changed the face of theatre at large. It has to be underlined that they are live shows, part of the repertoire of “Radu Stance”, not revived especially for the Festival. There are many theatre museums around the world – with important expositions of photos, set-designs, costumes, recreated offices of prominent playwrights, directors, and artists, with arrays of artifacts from emblematic productions, etc. Yet, the special “collection” formed by the heritage performances of the Sibiu Festival is reminiscent only of the Asian “living national treasures” – artists or genres. Here, though, the scale is different – it concerns a whole art form. And an art form in development at that! For, as the time goes by the heritage performances develop, improve; the very chance for the viewers to make a live comparison between them over the years also gets enriched. This gives the “collection” a special educational added value too, transforms it into a one-of-a-kind spiritual institution in the whole theatre world. Mind you: there is no bombastic title of this unique undertaking; it’s been unfolding to no fanfare. Simply, with the Heritage Performances rubric the Festival says a most humble and yet most inspired “Thank you!” to the Theatre and serves it with an astonishing devotion and dedication. With the this unofficial live museum of theatre Festival creates for the audience, the artists and the students alike a direct access to the assets of an idiosyncratic theatrical spiritual bank which get incessantly enriched and renewed. Among the shows included in the rubric this year, the one that stood out for me was Games, Words, Crickets… directed by Purkarete . Maybe because it reminded me of another face of Purcarete’s talent, so different from the one manifested in the monumental Faust and in the colorful The Scarlet Princess . Or simply because under this talkative title – seemingly very concrete, yet as though decided to not disclose what the show is about – there is so special gem of a production. It has already been separately covered for this magazine after its premiere in the illuminating review by the esteemed scholar and critic Ion Tomas. (vol. 18, 2023) Yet, I believe it deserves to be placed again and again under our spotlight for more readers to find out about it. The main character in Games, Words, Crickets… is the poetic word, the word with God’s sparkle in it – the word as a beginning, as a gift from above gathering heaven and earth, flesh and spirit, all in one, united by beauty, by love, by life. Poetry in this show is high and elevating, childish and jumpy, playful and full of joie-de-vivre. A hymn, a prayer, a fable, a story in white verse… A praise for poetry itself, a praise for the Holy Mother, a praise for the plum brandy as a gift sent to the man for help and for joy, a praise for the invincible Balkan spirit… In brief: a praise to God and all His creations… By Nazim Hikmet, Paul Verlaine, Shakepeare, Sergey Esenin, Radu Stanca, Mihai Eminescu, Marin Sorescu… As if all the world and all human life from days of yore till now, as it has been seen by the poets, is now gathered in the palm of one human being who presents it to us with such rapture, such joy, such trepidation as though he himself creates every word, every line, every image, every nuance before us and for each and everyone of us. Constantin Chiriac is the astonishing actor who savors the joy of sharing with us as if the very birth of all that poetry. I have seen him in many roles and have always wondered if there is any one he can not handle. Now I know the answer. For, this role is much more difficult than all the rest. Here there is no one person to impersonate so organically as if you are that very person. There is no one face, body, soul, behavior to enliven on stage and yet to remain your own self intact. Great poetry is to hand your soul to the others without leaving anything just for yourself so that you can find a shelter there. Great poetry is to give your eyes to the others so that they could see the world through them, to reach out to them as a small child, without fear and trust them with anything to hide. So that you could share the joy of the spring’s advent, the mystery of moon, the sky’s tenderness, the elusiveness of dream, the joy of the crickets’ song, love, happiness, gratitude to God, to nature, to life, the exaltation of dance … During this show one gets to live though all this in its pure form. Chiriac wakens all these feelings in us not only through the poets’ words but also through his own attitude to everything these words have to say, cry out, cover, shy away from, hide… At one point, he is as if a pure spirit, lost in nature’s beauty, in another, he gluttonously eats a piece of water melon while the juice flows freely down his arm; immediately afterwards, already on his knees and with head resting on the back of his hand – surely the only part of it not sticky then – he prays… And in all that he is so organic, not a hint of falseness cracking the air of full truthfulness he exudes. In his aforementioned address Chiriac recalls how when his parents made him happy and he didn’t know how to thank them, they would caress his head. Later on, he would regularly say “thank you” “with so much truth in my voice that it brought tears to their eyes.” In this shared memory, I believe, is the key to his acting approach in Games, Words, Crickets… as well as one more explanation of all he does for the Festival and the theatre in principle. Even in an address of just three paragraphs he needs the “anchor” of a concrete story – something that he has felt with his own heart; a need for enveloping the spirit in a body, for making the common feel personal, so that it doesn’t sound empty, so that it could touch, convince, feel true. This show does not narrate a single story, as it usually happens in theatre, or one big story, as it usually happens in the theatre of Purcarete. In it every poem is a story in its own right, shared as a first-hand experience, and at first glance these stories may seem small but it is exactly they that form the big story of our life. The very choice of the poems as well as the concrete collage of them makes this even more palpable. Exactly as it is said in one of them, “Words have their time. You can’t just throw them around when you want.” At times Chiriac steps aside, so that he could look at the words and everything they have to say from “the outside” – to see them together with us, the audience. For instance, when the air in the theatre hall is charged with rapture – our rapture with one of the poems – he looks at us and says, “Paul Verlain!” in such a manner as if asking, “How splendid it is, isn’t it?” At the same time, as if a conductor summoning the sound at the end of a rapturous music piece, he puts an exclamation mark instead of a dot. Chiriac’s masterpiece of acting in this show is not at all an unexpected tour de force. He has started his career with poetic recitals – a popular genre at that time in Romania – and has a formidable experience in this field. I myself have witnessed many a time how his speeches at international forums, where he’s in his capacity as a Festival head, all of a sudden soar into poetry, or he takes everyone by surprise reciting a famous monologue by Shakespeare, for instance. The hall then gets so quiet, as if people hold their breath, and the respective event immediately gets uplifted to another level. Even in such cases his poetical detours are not simply reciting of a beautiful text, they are an expression of his joy that this text exists and that he can share it with us. And again, at the end, when he tells us what the poem is, the way he pronounces the title and the poet’s name imply the same, “How splendid it is, isn’t it?”, unuttered with words but expressed with eyes, which accompanies the poetry in Games, Words, Crickets… Although it may not seem so from all already said Games, Words, Crickets… is a one-man show. Yes, it is only Chiriac who has the floor throughout it, yet he is not alone on stage. There are 17 more actors there and part of them are there quite before he makes his entrance. Clad in white shirts and light beige mid trousers, as if giant children, in the beginning they are snowmen, with just hinted most characteristic features; then, with the advent of spring, they “melt down”. Then they build crystal pyramids from transparent wine glasses – pyramids which start slowly gliding on a thin transparent belt horizontally on stage, at the background of sounds of water created before us with of a bucket and small plastic bottles. Further on, one of them would hold a long stick with a lantern and an etude about the moon follows. Then all of them grab umbrellas, wind blows, and it’s already autumn. Then they grab pillows and snuggle, and the night falls…. Not simply do these “grown up” children become the background of poetry on stage, Purcarete transforms them into the very atmosphere of the poetic images and feelings – an unusual Chorus who “comments” and “reacts” on behalf of nature. “What’s going on?”, Chiriac asks them at one point, when the night starts falling down, and they respond with the usual sounds of dusk. This is a dialogue with nature as a Chorus and, naturally, the answers do not come back in words. And again as a Chorus, these “grown-up” children, together with us, are also audience of all the poetry Chiriac endows us with – as it were our extension on stage. It would be so easy for a director to use multimedia instead as a background of such a show. But would even the most technically modern multimedia be able to substitute all these live eyes and hearts, all the different frequencies exuded by these 18 human bodies and souls? And would it be able to achieve such depth of the communion between the man and the world, such diversity of the nuances of this communion, as it happens in Games, Words, Crickets… ? It does great credit to Purcarete that he has chosen to achieve all this and, most importantly, to create the impalpable via the most authentically theatrical and yet most difficult way. Towards the end of the show, during something like a dance, while Chiriac, standing slightly aside, shares with us the n’th portion of beauty, suddenly it turns out that among the dancers there are two other Chiriacs – puppets of his size, attire, face and manners, each one of them led by several puppeteers. The three of them sit at a table: he en face to us, his doubles at the two sides. The doubles start repeating each gesture of his, each mimic, and the feeling gets to be surreal. Exactly as the watermelon minutes before that, or the ode to the brandy wouldn’t let the show stay on just one lyrical wave, and do balance it instead, now the two counterparts endow it with an additional dimension and make it even livelier. After the “talk” of the three (with a voice-over of Chiriac), another dance follows – the Zorba’s sirtaki. All 17 actors dance, including the doubles, only Chiriac, again aside, sets the rhythm with a bell and starts the last poem: “Oh, stay and sip from one more cup at the old crossroads of old rivers, for when it comes to love and wine all men become most joyous givers…” As he continues with the marvelous lyrics of Kazantzakis and other poets, he joins the dance and, although the lights soon go off, the music and his words keep on resounding – as a hymn of life – life that goes on even when the actors on its stage have already stepped down and new ones are soon to make their entrance there… “Poet of the stage, that’s how Silviu Purcarete was defined by Georges Banu, the late brilliant Romanian-French critic. Adriana Mocca, a Romanian actress, in turn, called him “a collector of beauty”. To me, Games, Words, Crickets… is a hymn of life exactly as poetry and beauty – life as it could be and as it is created to be. There is nothing ugly in it. The ugly and the evil are not invited there. Only the games, the words, the crickets, and everything the dots that follow in the title imply. To me this show is much more difficult and complex an endeavor than the mega-productions, like Metamorphoses, Faust, and The Scarlet Princess . Of course, they require a mighty directorial talent few others possess – a type of talent that has deservedly earned Purcarete a world-wide recognition as a master of exuberantly rich theatricality (if I may take the liberty to paraphrase another esteemed Romanian critic and scholar Octavian Saiu). Yet, to be able to create such an inseparable entity of poetry and beauty, as he does in Games, Words, Crickets… , and, moreover, to manage preserve its fine frequency vibrations for a whole hour and twenty minutes so that its integrity doesn’t fall apart is an even more extraordinary achievement. The fact that Purcarete is equally good at both the breath-taking spectacular and the intangible that makes one holds one’s breath, lest the spell gets broken, places him among the very few contemporary directors of such a strikingly wide diapason. Electra – a production by another revered Romanian director, Michai Manuitiu – was included in the Heritage performances too and stood out with its special status. Created back in 2005, it gained a cult status over the following years. In the beginning of 2025 it was revived in its fully original shape and even with some of its original actors. Of course, now, some of the young actors of “Radu Stanca” Theatre share the stage with them. It is exactly this passing of the acting torch before the audience’s eyes that not only makes the production unique but further underlines the importance of the rubric as a live spiritual territory. For, with Electra in the Heritage “collection”, this unique live theatre museum goes one step further: it manifests the possibility for organic upgrading of the theatre art within one and the same production in a “time lapse” of two decades. Notably too, Manuitiu’s Electra could serve as a point of reference, an idiosyncratic mirror in which major differences between theatre of 20 years ago and theatre of today stand out, alas, not always in favor of the latter. For instance, the distinct asceticism in terms of the material, like set-design, costumes, etc. stands in stark contrast with the many-ness that tends to overwhelm the nowadays stages. Also, Electra looks and feels like a stylized ritual and, with very few exceptions, doesn’t get into the literal illustrativeness when it comes to the elements of violence in the plot, unlike contemporary theatre which seems nearly obsessed with direct displays of violence. That is why Electra doesn’t look like a B-rated movie focused on close-ups of the very destruction of the human flesh’s integrity but feels rather like a dance or a painting. As for the regular theatre program, among the main accents was No Yogurt for the Dead , written and directed by Tiago Rodriguez, a production of the NTGent, Belgium (co-produced by Culturgest, Lisbon, Weiner Festwochen and Picollo Teatro di Milano – Teatro D’Europa). This show, to me, is like an unusual diary of a contemporary Scheherazade. A first-hand narrative, most of the time directly en-face to the audience, is the main approach for building the story. Importantly, again no multimedia interferes here – i.e. we are not being offered “to go to the movies” in the theatre, as often is the case these days. Moreover, theatre is especially emphasized. The audience is introduced to the story by one of the characters – a nurse. She is played by the only one of the three actresses in the show who plays just one role from the beginning to the end. The other two actresses assign themselves the roles of a father and a son, as well as two fake beards that will help us distinguish them – long and short (as their characters will be called, respectively – Long Beard and Short Beard). In the course of the action, they will not only openly exchange these roles, but will also get to play others, yet from the moment they “get into” all these roles, they are completely truthful, nearly without any detachment. This dance of realism and overt theatricality is a very good balancer for the story, as it doesn’t let it become merely documentary, although it is a true one, nor does it let it trespass into the territory of the sentimental and succumb to pain, although it is about the death of a dearest person. The story is about (and of) the director’s father – a respected journalist who writes his last reportage in the form of a diary in the hospital during his last days before his death. It is this diary which is the basic material for building the action – it is something like a magnet which draws together the fragmentary pieces of the story. However, it is not an ordinary diary but, exactly like Scheherazade, it sort of manages to win back from death another day and another day, and another day… And, like Scheherazade, this diary has its own secret: in the end, it turns out that in it there are only inarticulate scribbles – dashes and dots. Most of the action takes place around and in a hospital bed on the left of the stage. On the right, an uneven and fragmented hill rises, made of what looks like pieces of pressed cardboard with visible cracks between them, like in a glacier. There is another hospital bed on it – with a patient. However, he is most of the time in a half-back position or sitting sideways to us. So we don’t get to see him well, but we hear him almost all the time. For, his role is to “provide” the main musical background of the story – on a guitar. The major musical accents in the show, though, are the songs sang by the two actresses who play the father and the son. And their singing is remarkable, I dare say, it’s truly unforgettable! These songs, like the diary, are not ordinary ones. They too are like a magnet, even a stronger one than the diary. For, it is exactly they that gather the crumbling world of the dying man and restore not only the contours but as it were the very flesh of his slipping life. They are like the flickering of a fire which is about to go out, but, when it flares up again, it burns for a little while as if it was never about to die. Flare-ups that are sort of mirages, as if death is not coming and there is still plenty of time left for memories here, in this world, with those closest to us. These songs are the major strength of the show. Not only because of the way they are performed, but also because of the very choice of time and space, when the action should stop its horizontal course and fly up (or downwards, if that’s how we imagine the past). Most often this happens unexpectedly, as if out of the blue. Yet it is always exactly “on time”, when the story has fallen apart into too many pieces – because of the playing with roles and wigs, because of the strange use of two languages at the same time (the nurse speaks in Flemish, the father and son in Portuguese), because of the very fragmentary montage of the separate pieces… And then – then a song bursts forth and immediately brings everything together. And just as until then the characters (and even the story itself) have “acted like men” – iron, strong and cold-blooded – now they all of a sudden give way to their feelings and let their tears flow. The theatre at this moment is pushed aside and it is the human being in principle who remains on stage – the human being with everything that is a symbol of the heart – love, longing, tenderness, pain… The human being, like one big heart, fills the stage, the theatre, us. These songs decipher the dashes and dots in the father’s diary. They transform them into meaning, that is, into life. It is through them that death not only gets postponed, they make death pointless, even when the son finds his father’s bed already empty – waiting for the next patient. It is these songs that “make” the show. They contain the key to Tiago Rodrigues’ directorial talent: his fееl for the innermost human and his skill to fill the stage, the theatre, and us with this so elusive a “substance”; and, importantly, his ability to do so not the usual way, through familiar theatrical means, and, yet, paradoxically, to manage to achieve the oldest thing in the theatre – to move you to the bottom of your heart. I intended to write about the shortcomings of the show too. About its numerous endings, some of which it could easily do without. About the fact that some details of the story border on clichés, like the pen the son keeps forgetting to bring to his father and when he does so, he is already gone. Or that some contemporary performative clichés could have easily been avoided, like serving tea to the audience during the funeral, as if the viewers too are attending it… However, now, when time has passed since I saw the show in Sibiu, I find that the flows have faded and lost significance; that, when I think of this unique diary-reportage in songs, it grabs me by the throat as if it were my personal piece of memory. A memory of something the significance of which we find out much later after it happened, when time has erased the unnecessary little details. A memory which as if lifts us up, moves us away from the usual time-track, and extends our life each time when we remember it… I also think now what an amazing gesture of a son to his father’s memory this show is! The other production from the regular theatre program of the International Theatre Festival of Sibiu that struck me most was Jonah , at that time the newest directorial work of Silviu Purkarete . A co-production of the Romanian “Radu Stanca” National Theatre in Sibiu and the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, it steps on a Romanian play (by Marin Sorescu) which is, in turn, based on the famed Biblical story. The main performer is Asian (the Japanese star Kuranosuke Sasaki) and there are three speechless characters played by Romanians. “Why do people waste their time on things that are useless after death?” – wonders Jonah, the main character of the play, created back in 1968. This question, so topical in the nowadays world of excesses, is like a pitchfork both for the play and the production. The focus of both aligns according to this question. I.e. Jonah , as a play and as a production alike, is about all the rest: “… the spiritual communion that brings us closer to the primal energies of nature in which divinity manifests itself,” if I may take the liberty to quote the excellent description of the show in the Festival catalogue. Jonah , the show, is like a revelation. It is wise in a Biblical manner and luminous in a New Testament way. The first feature is a contribution of the playwright, the second – of the director. The play is a 26-page monologue, which I strongly recommend for reading – it brings a true literary joy. Jonah, like his namesake in the Bible, is in a big fish, but here the fish is in another, even bigger one, which in turn is in a third. However, notably, the direction of the “opening” of these, so to speak, Matryoshka type of fishes is the opposite of the way we do open Matryoshka dolls in reality, as here Jonah goes from the smaller fish to a bigger one and then to an even bigger one. I.e. the direction is vice versa. None of these fishes appear to be familiar with one of the main laws of life formulate by Jonah: “There should be a grid at the entrance of every soul. So no one can get inside it [armed] with a knife.” (He reaches this conclusion as a result of his personal observation after having managed to cut his way from fish 1 to fish 2.) I can’t help sharing yet another of Sorescu wisdoms presented as Jonah’s lines: “In the life of the world, I think, there must be a moment when all people think about their mother, even the dead. The daughter about the mother, the mother of her mother, the grandmother of her mother… until you arrive at the first mother great and good… What stillness then must be in the world! In that moment, if someone cried for help, he’s be heard by the whole earth.” Another unforgettable image is the dream Jonah has of building “a wooden bench in the middle of the sea. A grand construction of planed oak, so that the more cowardly seagulls could rest on it during a storm. … the wind to settle there from time to time [too], and, thinking of me, say, ‘He never made anything worthwhile in his life apart from this wooden bench, putting the sea all round it.’ I’ve given it a lot of thought, and that is what I’d really like to do. Oh, what a sanctuary, to sit head in hands, in the middle of the soul.” The so profound and so beautifully put insights Jonah comes up with do not make the play abstract. The poetical streak that goes through it intertwines with a splendid sense of humour and with the extraordinary ingenuity of the character in his attempt to talk with the world inside and outside of the fishes. For, “like any very lonely man, Jonah talks aloud to himself”, as Sorescu describes him in the beginning of the play. “He asks questions and gives answers, behaving all the time as if there were two characters on stage. He ‘splits’ and then ‘contracts’ himself back according to his inner life and stage demands.” This distinct dialogical nature of Jonah’s monologue – both as contents and as a manner of expression – is also a substantial strength of the text, as it doesn’t let the viewers’ attention get distracted from the stage for a single second. At one moment, two other fishermen enter the stage – they too have been swallowed by the fish – but they serve as just another spring-board for Jonah’s imagination. To handle the role of Jonah is a big challenge, indeed, since, apart from the concrete man, the actor has to be play as it were the whole world – the sea, the fishes, his wife, the wives of the other two fishermen in there, his mother, the cloud, whose shadow weighs in the fisherman’s net…. Sorescu very well knew this and he even suggested, “if the role is too difficult, another actor may play the last two scenes.” Purcarete’s decision to invite an Asian actor to perform Jonah further enhances the role, and considerably at that! In the first place, the main character, “his” world and “his” life, which at their very core are Romanian and, thus, also bear the distinct characteristics and mentality of the Balkans, get to be seen “from the outside” – through the eyes of a totally different culture in general – and get to be explored via a totally different sensitivity. Apart from that large cultural new viewpoint, there is also the personal new point of view of the actor himself. In interviews Sasaki mentions that before his work on the role he was not familiar with the Biblical story about Jonah and the whale, so he plays the role as the story of an ordinary fisherman. This, of course, doesn’t mean that the viewers familiar with the story would entirely forego searching for allegorical layers in the play. On the contrary! And this, in turn, adds yet another parallel viewpoint. Finally, the very organic disassociation of Sasaki from the Biblical story can be perceived as type of an estrangement in handling the character, adding one more perspective. This perspective might be perceived as a hint at the typical estrangement in the traditional Asian theatre. The effect of all that is very similar to the Matryoshka effect of the fishes in the play and on stage, each one opening up new perspectives towards Janah and the world. Sasaki is impressively economic in his choice of acting means of expression. During a considerable part of the time he sits or squats in the middle of the proscenium, and in the second case his hands are embracing his legs. This outside ascetics is coupled with the special inner finesse that humility and wisdom result in. This combination helps every detail of the text to stand out. So none of the words he utters, nor anything in-between the lines, gets lost en route to the audience; everything resonates with crystal clarity. In the beginning of the play Sorescu underlines that the role requires “great flexibility and simplicity”. This is exactly what Sasaki brings to it. Sorescu defines his play as “a tragedy in four scenes”. Indeed, in the original text, after Jonah manages to get out of fist 1 and then out of fish 2, and again doesn’t see the sun, at the very end, he gets out his knife again and “cuts open his own stomach”, pronouncing at the same time the final words, “Somehow we’ll find our way to the light.” Having decided not to follow these instructions and to cut the end and the final line of Jonah, Purkarete in effect changes the genre of the play and, thus, allows both the main character and respectively the whole show to dwell in the sphere of light – both literally and figuratively. He doesn’t follow Sorescu’s instruction for the set either. While in the original the milieu is predominantly naturalistic – inside the fishes, thus, very dark, the set-design in Purkarete’s Jonah is mainly in light, pastel tones. During the first part of the action, a large, slightly wrinkled, paper curtain in off-white plays the role of a back-wing of the proscenium, leaving the rest of the stage off-sight. It is right in front of it where Jonah sits with only a small aquarium with a red fish in it next to him. Then this curtain gets torn from behind at only several places, so that Jonah, already behind it, appears to be like a giant – with hands and legs far apart. Afterwards he cuts all of it, when he gets into the bigger fish. The overall feeling this curtain brings, together with most of the rest of the set, yes, could be of a vast water space, but could also easily be of a vast sky. For, Jonah and his whole world feel like being imbued and enveloped by that tenderness which exists only in the sky. Maybe he actually floats on a cloud, like in an Asian fairy-tale? And maybe this cloud is in another cloud, and it, in turn, is in another one…. In its colours – pastel in both literal and figurative sense, and in its inner light, Jonah resembles Games, Words, Crickets… The semblances continue in that both are one-man shows, yet there are other actors on stage – here, apart from the other two fishermen, we also get to see the actress who sings a beautiful melody as a music background. At the same time, the roles of the three speechless actors are not really big, unlike the role/s of the 17 actors in Games, Words, Crickets… To me, Jonah is even more difficult as a directing task than Games, Words, Crickets… On the one hand, it is very chamber-like. I first saw it during its visit to Sofia before the Sibiu Festival and the size of the National Theatre’s big stage and hall suddenly ceased to matter. Jonah managed to turn them into the most intimate chamber theatre – in terms of impact. At the same time, the production is monumental in a special way – so to speak, monumental from the inside – because of the revelatory feeling it evokes. I guess Jonah is a future “exhibit” in the Festival’s Heritage “collection”. A remarkable demonstration of how cultures could hug and understand each other on the stage, and how together they could hug, understand and love the human being. In other words, Jonah is another opportunity for the International Theatre Festival of Sibiu to say “Thank you!” to the theatre and to the audience . Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Professor Kalina Stefanova is an author or editor of sixteen books: fourteen books on theatre, and two narratives. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the New York University and has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), Meiji University (Japan), and at the Shanghai Theatre Academy (China), among others. In 2016, she was appointed the Visiting Distinguished Professor of the Arts School of Wuhan University, China, as well as Distinguished Researcher of the Chinese Arts Criticism Foundation of Wuhan University. She served as IATC’s vice-president for 5 years (2001-2006) and as its Director of Symposia (2006-2010). In 2007, she was the dramaturg of the highly acclaimed production of Pentecost by David Edgar, directed by Mladen Kiselov, at the Stratford Festival in Canada. Since 2001, she has regularly served as an evaluation expert for cultural and educational programs of the European Commission. Currently she teaches at the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Stuart J. Hecht, (former) Editor in Chief, New England Theatre Journal Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 Stuart J. Hecht, (former) Editor in Chief, New England Theatre Journal By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF How long should a scholarly journal continue? For how long can it function meaningfully? It is really a case-by-case question, determined by some combination of opportunity, support, and demand. This past December New England Theatre Journal lost its funding and was forced to cease publication after a thirty-five-year run. In the mid-1980s, years immediately prior to the founding of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), there was an organizational gap for those interested in publishing scholarly work on theatre in purely theatrical terms. Theatre Journal continued but had shifted toward European-based theory, leaving no setting for studies that considered theatrical practice from a historical context. [A few years later ATHE began Theatre Topics to correct this, though it only focused on practice, thereby creating a permanent schism between thought and practice between the two.] In 1952, legendary Boston theatre critic Elliot Norton helped establish the New England Theatre Conference (NETC) as a regional theatre organization designed to serve mostly local practice: youth theatre, professional theatre, community theatre, and secondary theatre were its primary focus. It offered prizes for playwriting, operated annual auditions for summer stock theatres nationally, and hosted a vibrant annual convention. In time, its board included faculty representatives from Tufts, Emerson, Boston University, Berklee School, Northeastern, Brown, and Boston College, as well as leading professionals and Elhi educators. Yet it did not offer much by way of opportunities for advanced theatre study. The NETC’s then-president, Joyce Devlin of Mt. Holyoke, led efforts to respond to this gap by working to develop a new scholarly publication, under the auspices of NETC, which would balance advanced theatre scholarship and practice. She assembled a team entrusted with developing a new publication titled New England Theatre Journal . It would be open to scholarship from the regional to the international, would include a Books in Review section, as well as a New England Theatre in Review section. In keeping with its NETC’s regional mission, efforts were made to ensure NETJ’s leadership would be drawn from the New England states. The planning team included Charles Combs, Jeffrey Martin, Mort Kaplan, Robert Colby, Arthur Dirks and Jack Welch of Baker’s Plays. A key influential advisor was Don Wilmeth. Charles Combs was named the first editor of NETJ with Jeffrey Martin serving as co-editor. I served as a reader on that first issue and then became “the other” co-editor by its third year. It was an annual publication and all submissions were vetted blindly by outside evaluators. We were fortunate in the quality of work submitted by authors such as J. Ellen Gainor, William Grange, Bernard Dukore, Kim Marra and Richard Schechner, to name but a few. Our pages have featured important work by established scholars such as Laurence Senelick, Felicia Hardison Londré, Rosemarie Bank, Frank Hildy, John Frick, Barry Witham, Bruce McConachie, Kim Marra, Odai Johnson, James Fisher, Anne Fletcher, Cheryl Black and Arnold Aronson. They also included young authors just beginning significant careers, like Heather Nathans, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Rob K. Baum, Amy Hughes, Stephen Bottoms, La Donna Forsgren, Michelle Granshaw, Maya Cantu and many more. Over two hundred full-length articles in all. Personally, having had my own articles unceremoniously rejected without explanation by another publications, I believed that it crucial to provide authors with quality feedback on their submission, whether accepted or not. This would give authors an explanation for our decisions, but would also provide guidelines on how to improve their work should they wish to submit it elsewhere. We hoped this would contribute to the health of our field overall, as well as provide realistic encouragement for each author. It was never the plan for me to serve so long a term as Editor in Chief of NETJ . Charles Combs gave way to Jeffrey Martin, causing me to bump up to first co-editor, with another colleague taking over the second co-editor slot. Then when I, in turn, took over the lead spot from Jeffrey, we lost both of our co-editors: one took over as lead editor for Theatre Topics and the other did not receive tenure. From then on we kept looking for replacements among the New England region, but were unsuccessful doing so, for one reason or another. In the meantime, I kept on as lead and was most fortunate that Jeffrey Martin decided to return to a co-editor position, alongside me, for all these many years. Because most academic journals are directly affiliated with major organizations, ours is not, which has afforded us a continuity of philosophy as well as core personnel. We also benefited for many years by the impeccable copy/format work of Tobin Nellhaus as well as a stable of outstanding outside evaluators, most notable for his many years of such assistance, Jonathan Chambers. Furthermore, while we have occasionally published work that reflects our New England roots, there have otherwise been no geographical restrictions on authors or topics. In fact, we welcomed being a site for work that often bucked current trends, where authors with new ideas or perspectives could find a home for non-mainstream work of still-meaningful value. A quick glance at past issues reveals that we published the last interview with Spalding Gray and an interview with Kenny Leon on directing August Wilson; theatre performed on American military bases and an article on theatre in Japanese internment camps; theatre in China, theatre in Nigeria, even though most articles centered on theatre in the Americas, there is much concerning race and gender to be found among them. Cultural trends have shifted and turned over the years of our existence and we have tried to navigate them as best we could, trying to maintain our commitment to ideas (rather than theory) in application (on stage for a live audience). Sympathetic to historical dynamics, it was always fascinating to find work where authors found parallels between the past and the present, noting how the fundamental dynamic of performance/audience tended to remain constant even as societal concerns might shift. For example, I loved how a recent issue of NETJ included a piece on new (!) discoveries of the original staging of the ancient Egyptian Abydos Passion plays, another on the “echoes of Cervantes” as found in Othello , alongside an article on Thornton Wilder’s cycles of history as well as another about a most recent feminist adaptation/production of Macbeth . A small journal such as ours is subject to chance when it comes to submissions; we usually cannot insist on a particular topic or approach, instead are dependent upon the vagaries of whomever happens to submit their work in any given year. And yet we were occasionally able to feature such more specialized sections over the years, rather than the usual eclectic mix: for example, our 2009 issue featured a subsection on Theatre and Undergraduate Education, edited by Nancy Kindelan; in 2013 Arvid Sponberg edited a subsection on the roots of contemporary Chicago theatre; Heather Nathans’ 2005 article on diasporic imagination led to her offer to support and edit an entire extra issue of NETJ in 2008, which focused entirely on the work of August Wilson. Still, we always celebrated the eclectic because it tended to reflect the variety of work being done in our academic and professional theatre world; hence our final 2023 issue of NETJ was composed of articles on Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, on the historical shifts in China’s classic play, The White-haired Girl , an essay on using theatre to combat AIDS in New York, and a study of feminist violence in a recent adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde. Add to this a subsection on musical theatre that included a piece on the use of traditional Fado performance in Bahai, another on how the Spiderwoman Theatre in New York remixed a performative treatise towards a queer politics of Indigenous femme existence, while our last article offered guidelines for introducing anti-Racist strategies when teaching a college-level musical theatre course. I wonder what subsequent issues of NETJ might have offered readers. It’s been a fascinating, informative journey! However, sad to say, in late 2023 New England Theatre Conference notified us that they no longer could afford to support NETJ , forcing us to close shop. It was a sad day, but perhaps inevitable. Hopefully our legacy will remain on paper and online. To all who contributed, past and present, I offer a mighty word of thanks. A key component of NETJ was our Theatre in Performance section. Rather than just offer a setting where reviewers could simply send in reviews of live performances, we hoped to establish an archive of professional, non-profit theatre work as done in the New England region during the course of each past year. Ideally, we hoped to make NETJ into an assemblage of the best regional work over a period of several decades, a source for future students,researchers, as well as fans. This section’s success relied upon whoever happened to be reviewing a given production, as well as whoever happened to be the Editor of this section; some years were better than others. While some Editors viewed this as a setting to promote those theatres uncritically, it was tougher to find those equipped to evaluate according to higher standards. While some Editors proved perhaps more effective than others, in recent years, this section of NETJ thrived under the stewardship and supervision of Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, who built up a string of reviewers, expanded the number of theatres covered, and established high and consistent standards by which to assess their work. When we learned of the demise of NETJ this past December, Marti and her reviewers were already in the middle of reviewing the 2023-2024 New England theatre season. While the rest of the journal had not yet begun to process work, and hence not really impacted by the sudden and unexpected halt, it seemed a shame that the work of this arm of NETJ should not find readership. I made some inquiries of peer journals and was delighted when the editors of The Journal of American Drama and Theatre stepped forward, offering to publish this last remnant of NETJ’s work. Rather than being downcast, we were thrilled to find supportive colleagues willing to give us a more celebratory send-off. I think I speak for all the editors and authors of New England Theatre Journal when I say thank you to JADT for this generous gesture. Thanks also to our many contributors and readers who have enabled us to survive, grow and flourish. Your support has been more than appreciated. Below please find our NETJ 2023-2024 theatre in review section. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) STUART J. HECHT is Associate Professor of theatre at Boston College and also the long-standing Editor of New England Theatre Journal . In addition to publishing many scholarly articles and book chapters, Hecht authored Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation and the American Musical, a basis for the Peabody Award-winning documentary, “The Broadway Musical: a Jewish Legacy.” He also co-edited Makeshift Chicago Stages: a Century of Theatre and Performance . A Member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, Hecht served on the artistic staffs of both the Goodman and Wisdom Bridge theatres in Chicago and was founding Chair of the Boston College Theatre Department. He is currently writing a book on Jane Addams’ Hull-House and its 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 A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Tom Grady. Bristol Community College Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Tom Grady. Bristol Community College By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Gabriel Graetz and John Hardin in Hangmen at the Gamm. Photo: Cat Laine Topdog|Underdog Suzan-Lori Parks (7 Sept. – 1 Oct.) Hangmen Martin McDonagh (2 – 26 Nov.) It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play adapted by Joe Landry (9 – 24 Dec.) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee (25 Jan. – 18 Feb.) Twelfth Night William Shakespeare (21 Mar. - 14 Apr.) Doubt: A Parable John Patrick Shanley (9 May – 2 Jun.) The 39th season of the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm) was notable for its polished, self-assured productions. Their mission purports to “engage seriously with the most important issues of our time.” The use of “our time” is relative since this slate of plays was apparently less focused on shining a light, at least directly, upon current issues than bringing bankable titles to Rhode Island. Not a serious problem, but it is notable that two of the plays were recent Broadway revivals ( Topdog/Underdog won 2023’s Best Revival Tony Award, and Doubt: A Parable earned three 2024 Tony nominations). Certainly, the productions drew parallels to our cultural moment, but the connections were associative rather than direct. The issues are still important, but that is where their currency ended. And perhaps that was enough, especially given the quality of the productions. For the season opener, the Gamm offered a serviceable version of Suzan Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog . The performers in this two-hander, Anthony T. Goss and Marc Pierre, while compelling, had yet to find their way in acting and reacting in the same production. Most memorable was Michael McGarty’s stunner of a set, which completely gutted and transformed the Gamm’s interior into the world’s saddest rooming house. But first, the audience was funneled down a dim, David Lynch-y hallway, replete with scuzzy walls and electric candle sconces, one of which was fritzing on and off, only to open out to an elevated, square playing area, the audience seated on four sides. The boxing ring motif, replete with Klieg lights, pitted the play’s two brothers in the ring as they bobbed and weaved their way to the play’s inevitable knockout. While the play is almost 24 years old, its withering hopelessness for Black people’s access to the American Dream still resonated. Next up was Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen, helmed by artistic director Tony Estrella. The lavish production values and impeccable casting made this a roundhouse of theatrical showmanship. The wraparound soundscape and noirish lighting gave weight to McDonagh’s black comedy about psychos and dum-dums meting out justice. McDonagh’s elliptical dialogue provided a platform for some serious showboating, and Estrella found just the right ensemble, led by Steve Kidd, who were put to the test with some elaborate stage combat as they charged up and down Jessica Hill Kidd’s sturdy, two-tiered set. It was this season’s highlight. The staged radio version of It’s a Wonderful Life is apparently enshrined as the Gamm’s annual holiday tradition and served an easy, lived-in feel. It’s just the story performed with the actors behind mic stands, peppered with some witty commercial breaks. The standout voice work belonged to character actors Fred Sullivan and Ernie Bishop, who often switched roles, sometimes midsentence. While Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is arguably one of the most important plays of the 20th century, it is also a long, relentless battering ram of invective, and in the wrong hands, it is torturous for all the wrong reasons. The Gamm has earned its stripes to take on this behemoth. Much credit must go to director Steve Kidd for creating such tight focus and momentum. Kidd positioned the subtext for these four characters to be in a fierce competition to be seen. He staged their desperation in restless stage movement without it ever looking like “blocking.” The two leads, especially Tony Estrella and Jeanine Kane, have deepened their craft over the years; they were inside their characters instead of pushing them. This highly energized production had an extended run. Next was the Gamm’s deliriously silly take on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night . There was a moment of dread, though. Early on, an audience member was dragged on stage for a quick two-step. This was a big uh-oh for seasoned Rhode Island theatergoers who don’t necessarily appreciate “interactive” bits, such as delivering a monologue about aging while patting the bald head of an unwitting and mortified audience member. Thankfully, this tactic was kept to a minimum. Instead, this more assured production drew upon the Gamm’s skills with live music and galumphing farce. The set itself, a pair of shipping containers with swinging crate doors, escalated the absurd and showstopping entrances and exits of Malvolio, Toby Belch, and company. The Gamm concluded its season with John Patrick Shanley’s masterpiece, Doubt . This production was an apotheosis for one actor’s career. Phyllis Kay played the imperious Sister Aloysius, and as they say, it was a part she was born to play. Kay is small in stature but booming in presence, employing her voice’s lower register to decimate anyone who challenges her surety. But there was vulnerability, too, eking its way out in the play’s quiet, final moments, and it was utterly shattering. Kay knows her subtext and was ready to parry in the many bouts that occur during this investigation of veracity. The remainder of the cast was less assured. Perhaps the choice to end this season with this play had less to do with the Gamm’s mission than it did with celebrating a local artist at the height of her craft. Season 39 demonstrated the promise of a sustainable future for the Gamm and its milestone 2024-25 40th season: The Effect by Lucy Prebble, Amadeus by Peter Shaffer, Girls & Boys by Dennis Kelly, Between Riverside and Crazy by Stephen Adly Guirgis, Hamlet by William Shakespeare. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) TOM GRADY is a playwright whose work has been staged by notable companies like Trinity Repertory Company and The Drama League. He was a story consultant for David Henry Hwang’s Tony-nominated Flower Drum Song . His play An American Cocktail won the Clauder Competition, while Global Village earned the Dallas Theatre Critics Forum Award and was a finalist for a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. He wrote and co-directed Symposium , starring Oscar-nominated Margaret Avery, winning awards at fifteen festivals. Grady holds a BA in Film and a Master’s in English, and he teaches at Bristol Community College in New Bedford, MA. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.