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Eero Laine Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Eero Laine By Published on May 28, 2018 Download Article as PDF Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance . Natalie Alvarez. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018; Pp. 214. Reading Natalie Alvarez’s Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance is a fantastic reminder of what theatre and performance studies have to offer during a cultural moment in which “reality” programming is often difficult to discern from other media and performance. Using the term “immersion” to capture a range of performances and situations, Alvarez takes readers to sites in North America and the UK through four chapters that examine a military camp, counterinsurgency training, an activist tour, and a museum. The analysis is run through with deep description and sometimes chilling impressions as Alvarez brings the reader into the immersions under investigation. Present throughout the study are Alvarez’s key inquiries: “how are immersions used as a means of deepening understanding across cultural difference?” and “whether the first-person experiential encounters afforded by the immersion could lead to meaningful cross-cultural encounters” (1). Through Alvarez’s considered explorations, the book’s case studies expand current discussions and arguments in the field beyond immersive theatre or gallery installations. Rather, Alvarez is most interested in examining “immersions that stage cultural encounters within the contexts of military training and tourism,” and that “function as performative sites of negotiation between cultures” (2). Alvarez’s emphasis on the relations and exchanges between people and cultures in sometimes extreme performances works very well in part because the book maintains a radically clear focus on immersion and simulation and, indeed, the ways that the researcher might be implicated in observing/participating in these situations. Such issues are raised early in the book, as in the subsection entitled “Ethical Quandaries” in the introduction, which rehearses many of the important problems related to ethnographic and performance research. Taking immersive experiences as “overcoded in advance by [their] ideological and pedagogical imperatives,” (13) Alvarez deftly negotiates the edges of simulations and their potential effects for future actions by participants. Alvarez thus makes clear the important connections between when and where immersions begin and end, stating: “What remains most urgent for my concerns here is the reproductive side of simulation—the narrative overlays on the event of the simulation that get replayed in order for it to become regularized and reproductive in the supposed postsimulation ‘realities’” (15). The simulation (as well as the very knowledge that one is participating in a simulation) provides a way out that unsimulated events do not allow. Through this framing, which is present and considered throughout the study, Alvarez moves the work beyond formal analyses of immersive performances, hyperreality, liveness, and other such matters. That is, the immersions themselves, while central, are only one part of the larger cultural analysis that Alvarez unfolds and unpacks. One of the real strengths of the book lies in Alvarez’s ability to bridge larger political issues with the very personal and embodied experiences of the immersions under consideration. For instance, in the first chapter, which begins with wary hands on ready guns and ends with a handshake, Alvarez neatly works through the many affective and politically charged engagements at play in a simulated Afghan village used to train Canadian military forces. Alvarez describes her own shaking hands as she attempts to take notes amidst explosions, screaming, and gunfire and considers carefully the bodies of the performers in relation to each other and the power of such performances both in the moment of enactment and in the memories and afterlives of the events. The stakes are high in each of the examples, and those in chapter two and three are necessary reading for performance researchers looking to undertake such ethnographic and politically important work in the future. Alvarez’s narrative and analysis of the process of taking part in counterinsurgency training in chapter two brings home the very realness of the immersions. Marking the trajectory from packing bags to training exercises, Alvarez makes a significant contribution to performance studies both in content and methodology. We need more performance theorists critiquing and studying how military and corporate programs deploy many similar tactics and practices found in what might be considered more artistic settings. That such work leads neatly into the following chapter on touristic, simulated border crossings is a testament to the focused throughline of the study. This is especially evident in how Alvarez sets out to examine “an embodied epistemology of otherness that leads precariously and almost inevitably toward a presumptive intimacy with an imagined ‘other’” and, commenting on the subject of the third chapter, she notes that “there is, arguably, no other exercise that does so more dramatically than one that invites the tourist to play the role of a migrant attempting to cross the Mexico-US border in the dead of night” (106). The work of these two chapters anchor the book through Alvarez’s commitment to participate in such immersions as well as through writing that easily interconnects field notes and theoretical analysis. Chapter four and the conclusion offer mediations on the processes of simulation and the limits of performance. In the fourth chapter, Alvarez examines the Shoal Lake 40’s Museum of Canadian Human Rights Violations as an “immersion that actively interrupts sympathy and empathy, [and] serves as a useful counterpoint to immersions that orient themselves toward embodied epistemologies of otherness” (164). Such reflections, along with the direct engagement with core considerations of performance studies in the conclusion, make clear that Alvarez has provided the field with an important document while furthering the methodologies of performance researchers. As with many exciting books based in a set number of case studies, one may be left wanting more, and the book opens the door for further research. The book will certainly be of use in graduate and undergraduate classrooms, and those students would do well in taking up Alvarez’s critical attention to culturally and politically significant immersions. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Eero Laine University at Buffalo, State 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 Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Catherine M. Young Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Catherine M. Young By Published on Download Article as PDF Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work. By Jessica Silsby Brater. Methuen Drama Engage Series. Series editors Enoch Brater and Mark Taylor-Batty. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama Press, 2016; Pp. 255. The Methuen Drama Engage Series “offers original reflections about key practitioners, movements and genres in the fields of modern theatre and performance.” Prior to the publication of Jessica Silsby Brater’s Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work, the series published books on Ibsen, Brecht, and Howard Barker. As the first book in the series to assess a woman in theatre, Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines underscores the importance of an ongoing commitment to recuperative scholarship that plumbs the archives, asks new questions, and approaches subjects in deliberately interdisciplinary ways. Ruth Maleczech’s own interdisciplinarity as a performer, director, and co-artistic director informs the content and structure of the book. What are the lived experiences and public profiles of women in collaborative performance ensembles? How is artistic and logistical labor distributed and documented? Yolanda Broyles-González has taken up these crucial questions in her work on El Teatro Campesino (1994), while Helen Krich Chinoy’s posthumously published research on the Group Theatre acknowledges such power imbalances (2013). Silsby Brater’s project contributes to this mode of inquiry, her subtitle “Women’s Work” signaling that Maleczech’s labor was gendered. Maleczech, along with other company members mainly known for performing, was consistently sidelined by critical and journalistic privileging of Mabou Mines co-artistic director Lee Breuer (Maleczech’s former husband and the father of her two children). The project is indebted to now-canonical feminist theatre studies frameworks forged in the late 1980s and 90s, as well as James Harding’s more recent analysis of feminist performance and the American avant-garde (2012). In addition, Silsby Brater builds on Mabou Mines scholarship by Iris Smith Fischer (2011), Alisa Solomon (2002), and Bonnie Marranca (1977, 1996). She focuses on Maleczech’s work from 1980 until her death in 2013 because it was from the 1980s onward that Maleczech’s independent vision as a director developed (27). In her assertion that the the book “functions in part as a recuperative history,” (28) Silsby Brater contends that “the full significance of Maleczech’s work has been ignored in part because she was a woman and in part because she was best known as a performer” (28-29). The fact that theatre and performance scholarship often privileges writers and directors over performers further demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary analyses of interdisciplinary artists. In her multivalent approach to Maleczech’s work, Silsby Brater draws on video documentation of a dozen productions and several interviews with Maleczech, her family, and other collaborators. These oral histories reveal a dense, interconnected web of personal and artistic affiliations. Silsby Brater is writing at the intersections of ethnography, performance studies, and theatre history, accessing her mentee/mentor relationship with Maleczech by combining intimate knowledge of the subject with expertise in the subject matter. The book’s eleven production stills bring another dimension to the work, showing readers a diversity of staging approaches. From the glass flasks and beakers used to play Marie Curie in Dead End Kids (1980) to the ethereal puppetry and trapeze in Red Beads (2005), Mabou Mines’ avant-garde aesthetics show Maleczech’s facility with various performance modes over decades. Founded in 1970, Mabou Mines, The Wooster Group (founded in 1975), and, of course, The Living Theatre (founded in 1947) have become increasingly canonized as the key collaborative ensembles of the American avant-garde, even as they are marginalized in traditional accounts of US theatre history. Each group represents a different permutation of influence by Europeans working outside the aesthetics of realism, most prominently Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, and Jerzy Grotowski. Silsby Brater’s introduction offers basic biographical information and places Maleczech in her cultural context, identifying the similarities and differences she shares with other key women of the US avant-garde based in New York City, including Judith Malina, Elizabeth LeCompte, Ellen Stewart, and JoAnne Akalaitis, a Mabou Mines co-artistic director. This helpful treatment allows readers to consider the specific aesthetics and innovations sometimes obfuscated by broad terms such as “American avant-garde” or “downtown performance.” Silsby Brater contends that Maleczech’s “singular focus on the representation of women on stage sets her apart” (10) from her contemporaries. In addition, Silsby Brater details Maleczech’s investment in the work of Samuel Beckett, and the influences of the Berliner Ensemble, Herbert Blau, and Grotowski on Maleczech’s expansive oeuvre. Maleczech’s body of work is analyzed in four thematically organized chapters that focus on the roles women play on and off stage. Chapter One, “Ordinary Women,” takes up Maleczech’s performances as Annette in Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Through the Leaves (1984) and her turn as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1996) to argue that Maleczech elevated the seemingly unimportant, i.e. women without social status. In the second chapter, Silsby Brater flips the script by focusing on “Extraordinary Women.” Her evaluation of Dead End Kids, Belén: A Book of Hours (1999), which Maleczech directed, and Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day (2007) allows Silsby Brater to thematically connect three distinct performance histories across decades. The chapter highlights Maleczech’s non-hierarchical collaborative directing approach, which contrasts with Akalaitis and Breuer’s styles. “Family Drama,” the third chapter, reads Mabou Mines’ production of Lear (1990) alongside the autobiographical Hajj (1983) in order to explicate how the two very different shows unsettle “the traditional notion of the father figure” (109). The theme of financial resources in both works allows Silsby Brater to discuss the stress Mabou Mines experienced in “keeping the company solvent” (114). Artistic issues were often family issues. The fourth chapter, “Mother-Daughter Collaboration” extends scholarship on productions written and directed by Breuer involving performances by Maleczech and their daughter, Clove Galilee. Silsby Brater also takes up Maleczech’s second and third directing projects, Wrong Guys (1981) at The Public Theater and Samuel Beckett’s adapted short story Imagination Dead Imagine (1984), which featured a levitating hologram image of Galilee. With her interdisciplinary approach and use of oral history, Silsby Brater offers the reader remarkable stories of motherhood in the avant-garde. Mabou Mines’ pathbreaking approach to collaboratively funding childcare still seems progressive today. Silsby Brater then pivots to close reads of the work that so often masks the reproductive labor required to bring it to fruition. In this, her scholarship contributes to theatre studies’ increasing attention to the unresolved dilemmas of combining family life and theatre. Silsby Brater not only places Maleczech more fully within the American avant-garde, but within the theatre history canon, connecting Maleczech’s actor-manager-director status to performance traditions including noh and commedia dell’arte, and to specific figures such as Caroline Neuber and Molière. Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work explicates the aesthetic and interpersonal complexities of a sustained avant-garde performance practice and the invisible labor women often shoulder. It will interest researchers of experimental and avant-garde performance, women in theatre, US performance history, and New York City’s downtown theatre scene. In addition, I hope it inspires more scholars to recuperate neglected figures of theatre history. Catherine M. Young New York University, Tisch School of the Arts The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Acting in the Academy The Theatre of David Henry Hwang Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Directing Shakespeare in America Writing, Acting, and Directing Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Wu Wenquan with Chen Li and Zhu Qinjuan 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 Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China Wu Wenquan with Chen Li and Zhu Qinjuan By Published on November 19, 2015 Download Article as PDF Arthur Miller is one of the most influential contemporary American playwrights after Eugene O’Neill. In the 1940s and 1950s, he rose to fame with All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and other social problem plays. Since 1949, Death of a Salesman has been performed continually on Broadway and in many countries all over the world. Miller and his plays came to China when China reopened its door to the world after Mao’s reign, especially with the conclusion of “The Great Cultural Revolution” (“GCR”)[1] and when China was no longer producing powerful social plays. Chinese drama had fallen into crisis in both playwriting and performance, for it seemed to grow rigid and stagnant after so many years of restriction. In fact, these restrictions had been proposed by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, and only a few so-called model plays were allowed to be performed during the GCR. Thus, the translations and performances of Miller’s dramas in China during the 1970s provided an enormous inspiration for and influence on Chinese playwrights, who later created many plays in a style that mixed realism and modernism. When referring to literary reception and historical relationship, Hans-Georg Gadamer says, “The literal meaning of scripture, however, is not clearly available in every place and at every moment. …all the details of a text were to be understood from the context and from the scopus, the unified sense at which the whole aims.”[2] Yue Daiyun, a well-known comparative literary critic at Beijing University, explains, “Literary influence is a sort of permeation, a sort of organic involvement presented in artistic works”[3], and “The emergence of the influence is often associated with social changes as well as the internal requirement within literary development. …Influence is usually a complex process of enlightenment, promotion or reinforcement, agreement, digestion, transformation, and artistic expression. This process tends to start when a certain writer is able to ‘tease’ another writer’s heart.”[4] Arthur Miller’s social problem plays are similar to those of Henrik Ibsen’s. Miller emphasizes the moral force and social critical function through drama in order to reflect the modern human being’s living conditions in a post-industrial and commercial society. Chinese spoken dramas, developed at the same time as social protest plays, bear a similar tradition with Miller’s drama, in the aspects of social criticism and human concerns. When China reopened its door after Mao’s era, Miller visited China, and his plays were soon introduced into China. Chinese audiences were attracted to Miller’s social tragedies as well as his modern dramatic devices. Since then, many of Miller’s plays have been translated into Chinese, performed, widely reviewed, and studied. In addition, influenced by Miller, many young Chinese playwrights and directors began to explore the modernist styles, powerful social criticism and keen insight into human life. The First Journey to China Arthur Miller’s first visit to China was in the autumn of 1978, immediately before the establishment of Sino-US diplomatic relationship. He was the first contemporary American dramatist to visit China, thus beginning the face-to-face interactions of the dramatists between the two countries. During his visit, Miller visited many Chinese dramatists, directors, actors, and other theatrical figures, watched Chinese spoken dramas, Beijing operas and Kunqu operas and at the same time, he got involved in extensive talks with Chinese scholars. After returning to America, Miller published some of his travel notes in an article entitled “In China,” published in The Atlantic Monthly, the 3rd issue of 1979. Later, he collected many beautiful pictures taken by his wife, Inge Morath, a photographer, and made them into a travelogue and published it with a new title: Chinese Encounters. As the development of dramas in America and China was unbalanced and there left a big gap between the two different cultures after so many years of separation, this imbalance was reflected clearly in the direct conversations between contemporary young writer Su Shuyang and Miller, “Talking with such a great American playwright who should be referred to as a master, I am more mentally disturbed as a fledgling and ignorant youth….”[5] This kind of nervousness preceded from his own ignorance of America and American drama as well as his shock from intercultural communication with foreign worlds and what’s more, it reflected Chinese literary men’s and artists’ uneasiness and disturbance for the incoming foreign culture. “People have lived under abnormal conditions so long that once life returns to normal, they are lost and stubborn, instead.”[6] Qiao Yu, a poet, and Su Guang, an interpreter who accompanied Miller, were more anxious when talking about their knowledge of American writers. However, little did Miller know about Chinese writers either and he called this separation from each other as “being covered with clouds and fog, separated from the world.”[7] Cultural differences were so great that collision and misunderstanding were inevitable. Miller was most surprised at Chinese writers’ working system that they were subordinate to government institutions and paid with monthly salaries. However, Su Shuyang was also perplexed that there was no Ministry of Culture in America. The consequences of these two different organizations were that Chinese writers “spare no efforts to maintain and establish a certain concept which our government exactly needs”[8] while those American writers such as Miller had to live on writing as his occupation and therefore serious American writers “are always unwelcomed as they are criticizing the society and moral values all the time.”[9] The difference between Chinese and American cultural concepts illustrates even more about thinking patterns since these two countries have undergone their own different historical progresses. For instance, China pays more attention to collectivism while America advocates individualism. When Su told Miller confidently that “we are optimistic and we believe that collectivistic spirit will make people warm forever,” Miller said with a smile, “I hope so.”[10] Hence, there seemed a great discrepancy which has been separating the two peoples for several decades. It is impossible to bridge the gap and to integrate to the harmonious realm. Moreover, Miller was still a “left and progressive writer,” compatible with Chinese perceptions in some respects. Beijing had been a glamorous place for Miller. As early as the 1930s, Miller was greatly concerned about Chinese Revolution (a communist revolution to overthrow Guomintang regime) and he knew some celebrated names like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, etc. who “were like flares shot into sky out of a human sea.”[11] He learnt these from Edgar Snow’s reportage on the Long March of Chinese Red Army (a great withdrawal of Chinese communist army from south to north) “Red Star over China,” and later the Anti-Japanese War. However, the forthcoming cold war between the two countries isolated one another by demonizing each other. He considered that “no one knows a country until he can easily separate its merely idiosyncratic absurdity from its real contradictions.”[12] Therefore, when China exerted open policy and Sino-US relationship was normalized, he came to visit Beijing, Nanjing, Yanan, Xi’an, Shanghai, Guilin, and Hangzhou and many other places for trips and interviews. As to informal discussions with Chinese writers, he sighed, “the gap caused by our mutual ignorance of each other’s real rather than reported culture seemed limitless one morning when we sat down to talk with some ten writers, movie directors, novelists, and one actress in a Peking hotel. …I felt a far more deeply depressing sense of hopelessness that such isolation could actually have been structured and maintained. … we emerged from darkness to confront each other.”[13] Long-term indifference as well as cultural barriers made both sides unacceptable and this sense of abrupt fainting at the sudden collision was exactly the cultural shock when two different cultures began to communicate again after long intervals. Apart from his travel experiences in Chinese Encounters, Miller discusses mainly his impressions on China after the catastrophes of the GCR: so many artists were persecuted that only eight model operas were left and economy was withered all over the country. Miller’s keen interest in Chinese traditional opera was manifested in his reflections when watching Beijing Operas as A Woman General of the Yang Family (a famous legend of Song Dynasty about Mu Guiying, a heroine, leading an army fighting against the foreign invaders), Wang Zhaojun (a sad story about a beauty in Han Dynasty who was sent to marry a Mongolian king for peace) and Kunqu Operas as The Tale of the White Snake (a southern love story about a white snake loving a young scholar). His evaluations were pertinent when watching spoken dramas Loyal Hearts (a play by Su Shuyang about a devoted scientist fighting against the Gang of Four), Cai Wenji (a play by Guo Moruo about a Han Dynasty official’s daughter being captured by Mongolian troops for 12 years and later coming back after paying a ransom), The Other Shore (an early absurdist play by Gao Xingjian, a Nobel Prize-winner, about contemporary Chinese people’s spiritual pursuit), etc. And he talked with Cao Yu (author of famous Chinese play The Thunderstorm, an O’Neill-like tragedy of a woman loving her step-son who loves his half-sister blindly). He discussed with Huang Zuolin about the theory of “Freestyle Theater” (Zuolin’s theatrical idea involving Chinese culture of space, in Chinese “Xieyi”) and his recommendation of The Crucible to Zuolin.[14] This visit allowed Miller to learn current situations of Chinese spoken drama. First, he thought Chinese and American people could undertake cultural communications through drama, “Chinese people’s emotions in theater are the same. Although there are great differences between eastern and western cultures, the roots which produce the cultures are absolutely identical.”[15] He praised the brilliant Chinese civilization and traditional operas. However, he had a deep impression on the political and conceptual tendency in problem plays, “Clearly, Loyal Hearts was fashioned as a blow and a weapon, and its force as a social document seems undeniable; … The tone is that of An Enemy of the People; the impulsion being preeminently social and moral, there is little or no subjective life expressed and the people have characteristics rather than character. While the dialogue manages to ring in all the main current slogans—“Learning from the facts,” “Don’t forget that all reactionaries will come to a bad end,” and so forth.”[16] He pointed out the platitude and vapidity of Cai Wenji with classical American straightforwardness, “the story was told four and possibly five separate times in the first hour. The only difference is that new characters repeat it, but they add very little new each time.”[17] He also hit the point of actors’ overacting performance, “A remark that might call for smile causes its hearer to laugh; a mild chuckle becomes a guffaw accompanied by deep, appreciative nods. What should be a wave of recognition to an acquaintance turns into a bang of the palm on his back and plenty of ha-ha-ha thrown in.”[18] His critique for contemporary Chinese playwrights, directors, and performers was pivotal. After Cao Yu exchanged views with Miller in this respect, he invited Miller to come and direct his dramas in China and this was the cause that Miller came to China again in 1983. The Translation and Reviews of Arthur Miller’s Plays in China As early as in 1962, Miller’s work was introduced into China by Mei Shaowu (son of Mei Lanfang, famous Beijing opera actor who visited America in the 1930s) whose article introduced six of Miller’s plays but had limited reading circle for the restriction of western cultures in Mao’s times, while the Chinese version of his plays didn’t appear until the end of the GCR. In 1980, Chen Liangting translated Miller’s All My Sons and Death of a Salesman (published in Foreign Drama Resources, Issue 1, 1979, and later included in Selected Plays of Arthur Miller, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1992). Chen had a high view on Miller in the afterword, “He [Miller] pursues meaning of human life contiguously, does well in analyzing humanity and rationality, shows solicitude for the whole humanity and takes it as his own mission to evoke audience and readers’ social awareness as well as people’s moral values and sense of responsibility.”[19] Mei Shaowu’s two articles introducing Miller and his eight plays were published Foreign Drama Resources (Issue 1, and 2, 1979). In 1981, Liao Kedui edited American Drama Collection (Chinese Drama Publishing House) including Yao Dengfo’s article On Arthur Miller’s Plays. The script of The Crucible (directed by Huang Zuolin in 1981) was interpreted by Mei Shaowu and published in Foreign Literature Quarterly (Issue 1, 1982) while Nie Zhengxiong translated it with the title of “Yanjundekaoyan” (Severe Trials, Chinese Drama Publishing House, 1982). Ying Ruocheng translated Death of a Salesman in 1983 and in 1999 it was reprinted by China Translation and Publication Corporation with a Chinese-English version. With the successful performance of his Death of a Salesman in China, other Miller’s plays entered China in succession. In 1986, The American Clock was translated by Mei Shaowu and was printed in Foreign Literature and Art (Issue 5, 1986). His completed collection was Selected Contemporary Foreign Dramas (Chinese Drama Publishing House, 1992) which included A View from the Bridge, A Memory of Two Mondays and After the Fall besides the above-mentioned three plays. His Death of a Salesman is compulsory in university courses as “Selected Reading of Foreign Literature” and “Selected Reading of English and American Literature.” There are two kinds of selected Chinese versions of essays written by Miller: The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (selected and translated by Chen Ruilan, et al, Shanghai Joint Publishing House, 1987) and Arthur Miller on Theater (translated by Guo Jide, et al, The Culture and Art Publishing House, 1988). In 1997, Ren Xiaomei translated Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and All My Sons (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press). According 2000 China Reading Weekly poll, Sun Weixin and Wu Wenzhi edited Abstracts of a Hundred Famous Chinese and Foreign Literary Works Influencing China in 20th Century (Lijiang Publishing House) in which Death of a Salesman is chosen. In 2000, Death of a Salesman entered New Chinese Text Book of High School (People’s Education Press, Volume Six). The Ministry of Education wanted to “break through previous limitations on selection that merely emphasizes critical realistic works, and introduce some foreign literary works of great influence in different respects.”[20] It can be perceived from the transmutation of above translation and introduction, Chinese passion for Miller and his works has been on the increase and his influence in China is also gradually far-reaching. Soul-Hunting: The Crucible in China The Crucible was recommended by Arthur Miller to Huang Zuolin, director of Shanghai People’s Art Theater. This play, bearing many similarities with “the GCR,” was staged in Shanghai People’s Art Theater in 1981. The story of The Crucible was derived from the historical “witch trials” as a result of which some 20 innocent people were hanged (Miller increased the number to seventy) and more people were put into jail. At the beginning of the play, a group of girls, who were obsessed by asceticism, danced nakedly in the forest under the leadership of Abigail. But they were found and scared. These girls were said to be bewitched and influenced by evil supernatural beings (devils). They were forced to accuse their villagers of being devil’s spokesmen. This case gave rise to a chain of reactions and more and more people were accused. Abigail, the heroine, had been once a farmer John Proctor’s assistant and in deep love with Proctor. Later their affair was discovered and dismissed by the Proctor’s wife Elizabeth. She was always hateful and vengeful to Elizabeth. Therefore, Abigail accused Elizabeth of practicing witchcraft while Proctor admitted his improper relationship with Abigail in front of the public in order to save his wife. The court burst into an uproar and Elizabeth was immediately required to testify for her husband while she denied the testimony to save his fame. Proctor was faced with a trial: either to retract his statements to ruin his own reputation or insist his statements (regarded as perjury by the court) to be executed. Finally, he went straightforward to execution gallows. The Crucible was written during an era of white terror when McCarthyism was prevailing. Coincidentally, Miller himself was called in 1957 by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to force him name names of members of Communist Party. But he refused reasonably. Although the playwright always denied that The Crucible has direct connection with American McCarthyism in 1950s, we can infer their inner relationship clearly. First staged in America for 197 performances in 1953 and again for 633 performances in 1958, The Crucible has been always widely popular among audiences and has become part of the repertoire on Broadway. The first performance of The Crucible in Shanghai on September 4, 1981 raised great concerns immediately and got a big hit. Miller once said confidently before the Shanghai performance, “It (The Crucible) will obviously acquire Chinese audiences’ understanding.”[21] Cheng Yan said “it enormously shortens the distance brought by several decades’ gap as well as national difference”[22] The attention on history, politics, humanity as well as morality in The Crucible appealed to Chinese audiences after the GCR because they saw the similar situations as false-accusation, crime-involvement (innocent people being punished for their relatives’ crimes), persecution, under which everyone felt insecure and frightened. These feelings and experiences enabled Chinese audiences to understand and sympathize with characters in the play. Miller wrote in his autobiography Timebends: A Life, “The writer Nien Cheng, who spent six and a half years in solitary confinement and whose daughter was murdered by the Red Guards, told me that after she saw the Shanghai production she could not believe that a non-Chinese had written the play. Some of the interrogations were precisely the same ones used on us in the GCR.”[23] Chinese critics immediately expressed two different opinions on Abigail. Guo Jide said, “Abigail is the primitive evil power which causes the whole disaster, tells lies and creates a great deal of fraud. Proctor is the symbol of integrity and bravery as well as a heroic image which is standing erect and accepting ordeal in a fierce fire.”[24] However, the opposite opinion states, “although she is false to be deliberately mystifying, her sentiments towards Proctor are as real as true love.”[25] Another great significance brought about by the performance of The Crucible is the theatrical concept of “Freestyle Theater.” As early as in 1962, Huang Zuolin began to reform the then dominant theatrical idea of Stanislavsky style so he proposed “Freestyle Theater” concept which blended Bertolt Brecht’s theory and staging concept, emphasizing on the unreal scenes and presupposition of stagecraft rather than the reality of “illusionism.” The Crucible was the first American play after the GCR performed in China and directed with the idea of “Freestyle Theater.” “There are merely several wooden poles on the stage with all gloomy background under which crucifixes exist everywhere. These crucifixes give a sense of divinity. Although doors, windows, court, jail, etc. vary, crucifixes stand there all the time.”[26] Afterwards, other Chinese “Freestyle Theater” plays appeared on stage one after another such as The Chinese Dream (1985), Moth (1989), etc. When National Theater Company of China was established in May of 2000, it performed two foreign plays, one of which was The Crucible. Meanwhile, on the other shore it was also performed on Broadway. It more or less indicated both nations’ appealing to traditional dramatic culture of much historicalness and universal humanity. Many Chinese comment on the somber mise-en-scène atmosphere of this drama, “The director rendered the atmosphere of repression and distortion on the stage. Actually, entering into the theater, one could feel the ominous aura that ‘something’ would happen. ... The ropes, dangling overhead from the ceiling of the theater, were virtually questioning each of us, when we face the same situation that those people in the play face, how shall we choose?”[27] Soul-hunting in Chinese Drama After the GCR, searching for humanity became the main theme in plays as well as Chinese fiction and poetry. In the Chinese plays since 1980, honesty and trust were questioned and the persecuted victims experienced bloodier treatment than those in The Crucible. The representative among them is Sangshuping Chronicle (script by Zhu Xiaoping, born in 1952, who went to the border area as a student. The story is based on a titled novel by Chen Zidu and Zhu Xiaoping.), which was first performed in 1988, revealing northwestern Chinese peasants’ living conditions and feudal ideology precipitated from history and tradition in 1968. People at Sangshuping are both persecutors and victims. Caifang, a widow falls in love with a wheat reaper (like a seasonal migrant worker) who helps to do the seasonal harvest work. They are caught in elopement, lynched and beaten by the villagers. Caifang drowns herself in a well. In order to carry on the family bloodline, the parents of Fulin (an idiot) marry his sister in exchange for Qingnu as Fulin’s wife. Some youngsters put Fulin up to pull off Qingnu’s clothes in front of the public, which drives Qingnu mad. Wang Zhike is marginalized and persecuted by villagers after the death of his wife and finally is falsely charged with murder. He is driven away for his non-native identity. Their only farm cattle is reluctantly butchered by farmers who have raised it when some inspection officials want to eat it and they have to kill it themselves. Characters in this tragedy are all victims persecuted under feudal autocratic dominance. The Crucible expresses the destruction of human nature by rigid religious persecution and immorality while Sangshuping Chronicle shows the tragic life overburdened under traditional and feudal cultures and poverty. But people still show their brave pursuit for happiness. The vilification and persecution of virtuous human beings in The Crucible are fully embodied in Sangshuping Chronicle while the latter is more powerful than the former in many respects. And its exploitation of unenlightened humanity bears no difference from Miller’s calling for morality and justice. But both “hunting” scenes of Sangshuping and the Salem were rooted historically, relying on the similar events resulted from feudalism. Both of them criticize the human ignorance and backwardness, selfishness, narrow-mindedness and superstitious beliefs. Both plays employ wizard rituals to add supernatural and mysterious atmospheres. Dancing in the forest and exorcism ceremonies in The Crucible are the discourses of the middle ages. Sangshuping Chronicle exploits praying for rain, sacrificing cattle, man-hunting and other ceremonies as well as bass drum, chorus and other skills full of national characteristics that make the whole drama permeated with poetic significance just as Gao Huibin said, “association with poetic techniques and illusionary skills in artistic conception.”[28] Strong national characteristics, distinctive performance, and the mysterious mise-en-scène aura set up Sangshuping Chronicle as a banner of contemporary Chinese spoken drama. According to Xu Xiaozhong, its director, the staging of the play was a dramatic pattern of “combining Chinese and Western cultures. Reviewing the whole process, I clearly realize that no matter realism or romanticism, concrete or abstract, reproduction or expression, the artistic concepts and principles of drama may vary and the principal method of how to extract and abstract life may differ while all stage artistic creations come from life directly or indirectly.”[29] Selling Dreams in Beijing From March to May in 1983, invited by Cao Yu and Ying Ruocheng, Miller came to Beijing People’s Art Theater to direct his masterpiece Death of a Salesman. It got such a great success that it enters the theater’s repertoires. After returning home, he published his directing notes Salesman in Beijing (New York: Viking Press, 1984) which recorded the cultural and dramatic concepts and the conflicts as well as communication during the process of his directing Death of a Salesman. It also included all sorts of interesting episodes, anecdotes even disputes when transplanting this play in China. On the March 20, 1983, Beijing People’s Art Theater welcomed Arthur Miller, the ambassador of Sino-US cultural exchanges.[30] Miller obviously felt the atmosphere of China’s rapid economic development and the signs of social transformation. He was still fluttering with fear of the experience when he watched plays acted by Chinese actors in 1978: “How appalling it was to see actors made up with chalk-white faces and heavily ‘rounded’ eyes, walking with heavy, almost loutish gait as they think Europeans and especially Russians do, and worst of all, wearing flaxen or very red-haired wigs that to us seemed to turn them into Halloween spooks.”[31] Therefore, he began to utilize cultural transplanting principle of “adapting foreign things for Chinese use”. The first moment meeting the actors, he proposed that it should bear resemblance in spirit rather than in appearance, telling them to express common humanity instead of “specious acting”. He suggested, “The way to make this play more like American is to make it more like Chinese. … One of my main motives in coming here is to try to show that there is the same humanity. Our cultures and languages set up confusing sets of signals whuch prevent us from communicating and sharing one another’s thoughts and sensations, but that at the deeper levels where we are joined in a unity that is perhaps biological.”[32] Miller highlighted the cultural exchanging function of the drama, carrying on the comparison between Chinese and American cultures from different aspects such as the plot, characters, performing techniques, etc. Placed in a manifesting areas such as comparing Chinese salesmen, insurance, refrigerator, cars, family life with those of America’s; comparing father’s earnest expectation for his sons with Chinese father-son relationship, “great ambitions for one’s child” (Wangzichenglong in Chinese idiom),[33] discussing with actors about the character Charley, and Willy Loman’s mistress, scenes of kissing as well as the different understanding and expression of sex, etc. Through bilateral negotiations, Miller compromised in many aspects, for instance, the representation of sex with the Chinese actors dealing implicitly with their accustomed and traditional ways.[34] During the performances, conflicts and problems raised contiguously. Some officials were afraid that the favorable material conditions (refrigerator, car, house of Loman’s family) displayed on the stage would bring about negative effects for the then poor Chinese conditions while social critical significance of the play would be weakened for this. However, the fact that the performance of Death of a Salesman obtained a great hit proved that Miller’s practice of sinicizing his drama was the most successful interpretation of the original American work. It represented the essence of the Chinese culture, emphasized the resemblance in spirit more than in appearance, broke through the traditional realistic staging methods employed for decades in China and reflected the principles of integration of Chinese and Western cultures. The major newspapers published detailed reports on Miller’s direction of his own play in Beijing. Foreign Drama invited Miller to have a formal seminar, and published feature-length comments on the direction, acting and text analyses. All these made it rise to a hot trend of Miller and Death of a Salesman in China and the year of 1983 determinedly witnessed the successful cooperation between Miller and Beijing People’s Art Theater. Since then, cultural exchanges between China and America revived, breaking the ice of tight cultural relationship. From 30 tough years’ hostility and exclusion to face-to-face conversation, peoples of both countries could eventually open their mind and exchange as they like. When everyone was cheering for the great success of the performance, Miller said to himself, “America will need this country as an enrichment to our culture one day just as China needs us now.”[35] This reflected Miller’s modesty and wish for communication. Chinese people accepted and acknowledged this classical American drama. They speculated on human’s survival predicament brought about by modern society. Cultural misunderstanding was inevitable that there were many Chinese interpretations such as problems of the elderly, generation gap, problems of the rich and poor, success and failure and dream and reality. Many young people considered that Biff and Happy’s cynical values and philosophies were inadvisable. Although they lost much time for working in the countryside during the GCR, they could not be irresponsible for society and their country. Zhong Yingjie, a dramatist, said, “Chinese audiences can understand easily and resonate with love as well as hatred between parents and their children as expressed in the conflicts between Loman and his sons.”[36] Chinese audiences felt angry for Loman’s being dismissed and happy for China had no such unfortunate things then.[37] Afterwards, Miller recalled emotionally in his memoir Timebends, “Willy was representative everywhere, in every kind of system, of ourselves in this time. The Chinese might disapprove of this lies and his self-deluding exaggerations as well as his immorality with women, but they certainly saw themselves in him. And it was not simply as a type but because of what they wanted. Which was to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be darling, and above all, perhaps to count.”[38] Many people thought the real purpose of China’s reform and opening up was to lead people to success and wealth as aroused in the play, “a young Chinese student said to a CBS interviewer in the theater lobby, ‘We are moved by it because we also want to be number one, and to be rich and successful.’”[39] Miller published his directing notes in a book, Salesman in Beijing, in America in 1983. Later he wrote his directing experience in his autobiographical memoir. Miller’s directing and the play’s performance were made into a documentary series by CBS which was broadcast in America, introducing the performance spectacle of Death of a Salesman in China. All these promoted Sino-US cultural exchanges forcefully.[40] Since 1983, the Chinese version of Death of a Salesman has been performed in Shanghai, Japan, Hongkong, Singapore and many other places, gaining a great popularity and an enormous success. Ying Ruocheng not only translated the script himself, but also acted the role of Willy Loman. He pointed out in his articles, “As an actor, I do my best to obtain the value of the person which I act.”[41] In Ying’s opinion, Loman remained in paradox of dilemma: affectionate but always breaking up in disagreement with his sons; alternately sober and absent-minded at whatever he does; his suicidal action was both passive and active, both terrified and conscious. In the end, the more delighted the deceased (Willy Loman) was, the more sorrowful the living people were. Zhu Lin, a renowned actress, starred a powerful and virtuous mother Linda. She represented Linda as a classical Chinese mother who was a obedient, hardworking, understanding wife and loving mother.[42] Zhu Lin recalled the cooperation with Miller, “Mr. Miller helped us continually enrich the understanding of the script and characters. ... He is one of the greatest directors whom I encountered and are good at enlightening actors. ... He is absolutely in the standpoint of the actors, respecting actors’ work and attaching great importance to the coordinating relationship between the director and actors. ... We established profound friendship with each other during the pleasant rehearsals.”[43] Zhu Xu, actor of Charley, discussed his cooperation and rehearsal with Miller from the perspective of understanding of the character as well as its sinicization during the whole processes of rehearsals and performances in an article in Theater Studies.[44] Zhu Xu thought of Charley as a sophisticated character. In his opinion, Loman didn’t understand the function of money but he believed such things like “popularity,” “personal loyalty,” “relationship” which showed his “innocence.” However, Charley lacked imagination and was pragmatic. Death of a Salesman has been most popular among the audiences and has become one of the most significant foreign repertoires of Beijing People’s Art Theater. As to the American culture reflected in Death of a Salesman, Miller thought Chinese cast’s “95% of the comprehension of the drama is right because they know American People’s lifestyles and customs.”[45] The audiences’ comprehension and appreciation of the play was due to these American cultural media, Ying Ruocheng and other crew members as “retransmitters.” They made great efforts to have this famous western play deeply rooted in Chinese soil. As Wang Zuoliang, a famous literary critic, commented, “Chinese translators have the good taste, Chinese actors have the ability and Chinese audiences have the spiritual sensitivity and expansive art interests. All these enable them to understand and appreciate all the excellent dramas from all over the world.”[46] Chinese Tragedy of "Stream of Consciousness" and "Success Dream" Since it was presented on Chinese stage, Death of a Salesman has always been drawing attention from all over the country. Its influence is mainly manifested in three respects. First, more and more Chinese tragedies began to deal with disillusioned dreams of common people. Secondly, realistic play-writing began to absorb the expressionist method of “stream of consciousness,” digging into characters’ inner worlds. Finally, all kinds of modernist techniques began to be widely used in performances rather than Stanislavsky method. The Success of Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana (written by Liu Jinyun, born in 1938, president of Beijing People’s Art Theater, first staged at Beijing People’s Art Theater) in 1986 was due to its realistic depiction of common people in the GCR. It was also a typical work of tragedy of success dream and realism integrated with modern expressionist techniques. The unsuccessful salesman in Miller’s commercial competition became a common Chinese peasant cherishing a dream for success in Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana. Uncle Doggie, two of whose wives either died or departed, often dreams of working hard to buy land and become a landowner. When the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, he got some land for a few years in the land reform. But more political movements (Cooperative 1953-55, the Great Leap Forward 1958-1960 and the GCR 1966-76) to come, his land was deprived and his hopes for success became slimmer and slimmer. Uncle Doggie’s dream of possessing land and becoming rich vanished and he was getting crazy. Meanwhile the landowner Qi Yongnian, his fellow villager, was charged as an exploiting landlord and was criticized, denounced, severely persecuted and eventually died in the GCR. When the play begins, those things in his earlier life constantly appear in his mind and they flash back continually on stage. He often talks with the ghost of the deceased landowner Qi Yongnian, even dispute. When China reopened its door in 1978, Uncle Doggie got his land again under the new reform policy. His joy lasts only a short time for he is no long young and needs his son Dahu’s help. But Dahu and his wife decide to set up a factory instead of plowing land. Uncle Doggie burns himself in the end. Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana and Death of a Salesman bear many similar characteristics in respect of themes and techniques. Both plays take social, familial and moral problems as their themes. The essence of tragedy is the disillusion of dream of obtaining success or of getting rich. The two protagonists are both common people with merits and demerits: Loman is industrious, loves his family and sons but he likes boasting and gets an affair with another woman, while Uncle Doggie is a dutiful and kind farmer who is hardworking and persistent but owns a small peasant’s consciousness and is selfish. Two plays both end with the suicides of the protagonists. Their tragedies are spiritual and moral ones with the disillusion of dream as the main cause. They both employ symbolism and expressionism as artistic techniques: the high buildings and sowing vegetable seeds in Death of a Salesman, the “small box” (with seals in it) and the high gateway in Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana are symbols of identity and power. The utilization of lighting is similar to that of Death of a Salesman. They both have a special time span: Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana jumps from one period to another: the Cooperative Movement, the Great Leap Forward, the GCR, the Reform and Opening-up, and together with the protagonist’s obsession with land as the clues, employing flashbacks to narrate the story, while Death of a Salesman narrates a story within two days during which many anecdotes are carried out through fantasies and recalls. The playwright Liu Jinyun once said at a conference, “In recent years, modern Euramerican plays and performances have impressed me strongly. This feeling is just like opening the window and breathing fresh air, offering suggestions to me. I set sights on something ‘new’ ... Any methods can be employed for me. For example, I have never thought of such methods before like symbolism, expressionism, stream of consciousness, etc.”[47] During a symposium on Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana, Wang Yusheng said, “The appearance of Qi Yongnian, the landlord’s ghost is similar to the emergence of Salesman’s brother ‘Ben.’”[48] In the chapter “Experiment Drama in Twentieth Century Chinese Literature and Modernism Trend” of a college textbook, Tang and Chen said, “The drama of Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana is strongly influenced by western expressionistic drama which takes characters’ stream of consciousness, emphasizing externalizing characters’ deeper minds to visualized stage images. The ghost’s appearance in Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana is close to that of Karel Capek’s Mother and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.”[49] Ding Chunhua’s “The Comparison Between Death of a Salesman and Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana” (Zhejiang Business Technology Institute Journal, 2002, Issue 1) and Wu Ge’s “Chinese Dream and American Dream: Death of a Salesman and Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana” (Artistic Drama, 2002, Issue 4) have stated their opinions from their themes and artistic expressions. Before and after the performance of Death of a Salesman in China, many other playwrights undertook experimental techniques. For example, Ma Zhongjun (an avant-garde playwright born in 1957), and Jia Hongyuan’s Hot Currents Outside (the 1980 best play about a brother and sister quarreling about their deceased elder brother’s pension), employing transparent stage from which the dead could break through the wall with freedom. “This technique obviously stems from Arthur Miller’s famous play Death of a Salesman.”[50] Besides, there are many other plays using ghosts such as Gao Xingjian’s Alarm Signal (1983, a play about train robbers involving many modern techniques as recalls, mental imaginations and symbolist method) and Wild Men (1985, a play about an archaeologist looking for wild men with modern skills of inner thoughts and multitrack), Liu Shugang’s (a playwright born in 1940, president of the Central Experimental Theater) A Deadman’s Call On the Living (1983, a play about a passenger killed on a bus and the ghost coming back to reality to pay visits to the living), Su Shuyang’s Taiping Lake (1986, a play about the deceased famous writer Lao She returning to witness the world), as well as Wang Zifu’s (a play born in 1947in Beijing) Red River Valley (1996, a play about a victim of the GCR coming back to invest a business to cut down trees but interrupted and haunted by a ghost), etc. Conclusion Miller’s "tragedies of common man,” offering criticism of society and exploring character’s psychology, greatly broadened the horizon of Chinese dramatic circle immediately after his plays entered China. His two visits to China brought about brand-new concepts and atmospheres to Chinese stage. He draws more attention to society and family with conscience and responsibility, reevaluates the essence of humanity, combines modern techniques like “stream of consciousness” with realistic drama creation, explores characters’ inner changes, and criticizes social inequality through the disillusion of dream. The consistency between Miller and Chinese dramatists’ interest in social problem drama makes his plays much easier to be performed, understood, accepted and influential in China. Integrating with their own dramatic concepts, Chinese artists have created Chinese-style expressionist plays (such as Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana and Sangshuping Chronicle). However, influence is not unidirectional. “The communicativeness within literary receptive activities reflects mainly in the ‘backflow’ or feedback to writers of readers’ aesthetic experience.”[51] Miller found a lot worth learning during his stay in China, for instance, supposition and stylization in classical Chinese operas. Zuolin helped Miller understand “Freestyle Theater.” He even utilized these techniques of opera into his own plays as soon as he returned home. While directing Death of a Salesman, he employed the technique of “similarity in spirit” of Chinese opera. Through the repeated performances of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible in 21st century and more scholars reviewing Miller and his works, Arthur Miller’s influence in China has become more and more extensive.[52] Wu Wenquan is a Professor and PhD of English literature at School of Foreign Studies, Nantong University, Jiangsu, China. He earned his PhD in Nanjing University in the study field of contemporary American drama in China. He has published in journals like Foreign Literature Studies, Contemporary Foreign Literature and Drama in China. His current study is on Tennessee Williams and his works. Chen Li is a graduate student of English literature at School of Foreign Studies, Nantong University, Jiangsu, China. Zhu Qinjuan is a lecturer of English literature at School of Foreign Studies, Yancheng Teachers’ University, Jiangsu, China. [1]The Great Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) is a political movement led by Mao Zedong to mistakenly criticize bourgeois mentality and culture. Lin Biao (a general, and Mao’s successor, later died in an air crash) and the Gang of Four (including Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, Yao Wenyuan, Zhang Chunqiao, and Wang Hongwen) assisted Mao to put China into a disorder. During these ten years of upheaval, millions of students joined great parades and followed Mao’s order to work in poor border areas and countryside. And millions of officials and intellectuals were persecuted and Chinese traditional culture was greatly damaged. [2] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garpett Barden and John Cumming (Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House, 1999. Reprinted from the English Edition by New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1975), 154. [3] Yue Daiyun, Comparative Literature and Chinese Modern Literature (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1987), 44. [4] Ibid., 57. [5] Su Shuyang, “People Will Reach a Great Harmony: A Talk with American Playwright Arthur Miller,” Reading 1 (1979): 119-22, esp. 119. (Su Shuyang, born in 1938, is a Chinese writer who published his famous plays as Loyal Hearts and Taiping Lake and a novel Homeland.) [6] Ibid., 120. [7] Arthur Miller and Inge Morath, Chinese Encounters (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979), 13. [8] Su Shuyang, 120. [9] Ibid., 120. [10] Ibid., 121. [11] Miller and Morath, Chinese Encounters, 8. [12] Ibid., 7. [13] Ibid., 15. [14] Soon after, Sun Huizhu and Gong Boan wrote an article (“On the Free-style Drama of Zuolin Huang,” The Art of Drama 4 (1983), 8) to describe the different understanding and conflicts on the idea of “Xieyi (Free-style) Drama” between the two dramatists, “Huang Zuolin explained, ‘The Chinese character of ‘drama’ is made up of two parts of ‘vacant’ and ‘spear’, being real and false should both be suitable. Being real is not drama and being not real is not art. Acquiring emotion and meaning is both drama and art.’ On hearing this, Miller was at a loss. Huang continued, ‘We must find the inner truth, the essence of the real world, their connections and feelings. Then take it out from the superficial matters.’ To enable Miller to know the real meaning of Free-style Drama, Zuolin invited Miller to watch traditional Kunju opera The Tale of the White Serpent. Sure enough, Miller appreciated the play and said to Zuolin that the west realistic drama was much less colorful and exciting.” [15] Dong Leshan. “Arthur Miller Reviewing Loyal Hearts, Cai Wenji and The Other Shore,” Reading 2 (1979), 77. [16] Miller and Morath, Chinese Encounters, 93. [17] Ibid., 94. [18] Ibid., 95. [19] Chen Liangting, “Words after Translation,” Selected Plays by Arthur Miller (Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Press, 1979), 249. [20] Gu Zhichuan, “Replies on the New Senior High School Textbook of Chinese,” http://www.360doc.com/content/11/0328/05/503199_105231591.shtml (accessed 19 October 2008). [21] Cheng Yan, “The Appealing Art: On the Performance of The Crucible,” Shanghai Drama 5 (1981), 18. [22] Ibid., 19. [23] Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 348. [24] Guo Jide, “Arthur Miller and His The Crucible,” American Literature Special Issue (1981), 74. [25] Wu Peiyuan and Hu Chengyuan, “On The Crucible Directed by Zuolin,” Foreign Drama 2 (1982), 41. [26] Ibid., 42. [27] Liu Xiaochun, “The News in Spring,” Drama 2 (2002), 141. [28] Gao Huibing, “The Shangshuping Chronicles and the Mystery of Imagery,” in A Study of Xu Xiaozhong’s Directing Art, ed. Lin Yinyu (Beijing: Chinese Drama Publishing House, 1991), 188. [29] Xu Xiaozhong, “Changes in Combining and Connecting,” (Part I and II) Drama Journal 5 (1988), 43. [30] Ding Zhou, a journalist of China Construction reported on the visit of Miller, “The similar share of human feelings brought the aged American salesman from New York to Britain, Mosco, Rome, Oslo, Sydney, and Tokyo. And now, he comes to Beijing with heavy pace and same heavy case of commodity samples.” (Ding Zhou, “Review on the Spoken Drama Death of a Salesman,” China Construction 8 (1988), 25). [31] Ibid., 5. [32] Ibid. [33] The Chinese idea of Wangzichenglong (“high hopes for one’s child”) and the expectations for the sons in Death of a Salesman match each other. Miller often commented on this point, “What surprised me is that the parents’ expectations for the children are very Chinese way of thinking. They called it ‘high hopes for one’s child’, ie., hoping the children to succeed… Therefore, when Happy said life is a game, ie., to be No 1. Chinese audiences are the first to get the meaning of these words.”（See David Richards, “Arthur Miller, Survivor,” Manchester Guardian Weekly (Mar. 25, 1984), 17） [34] Yuan Henian expressed his counterviews on the sex scenes being too strict. He pointed out that the two sex scenes in the restaurant and hotel are restrained and sex is always a taboo in Chinese literature and art. (See: Yuan Henian, “ ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Beijing,” Chinese Literature (Oct., 1983), 108-9) [35] Ibid., 252-53. [36] “Stones Borrowed from Other’s Hills: A Forum on the Performance of Death of a Salesman,” Drama Newspaper 7 (1983), 42. [37] See: Tan Aiqing, “ ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Beijing,” China Reconstructs (August, 1983), 26. [38] Miller, Timebends: A Life, 184. [39] Ibid., 185. [40] Miller’s directing his Death of a Salesman in China and his Salesman in Beijing (a diary of his directing experience published in the US) received warm responses in the US. The Wall Street Journal reported Miller’s play and Miller’s Salesman in Beijing on April 26, 1984. Meanwhile, Broadway staged Death of a Salesman again, starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman. It was another big hit, bringing about more reviews and essays on the play. Next comes the 1998 performances of the play in Goodman Theater, Chicago, and the following year, it was moved to the Broadway. [41] Ying Ruocheng, “The Stage Image Creation of Willy Loman and Others,” Guangming Daily (June 3, 1983), 3. [42] Zhu Lin, “A Hard but Pleasant Performance: Experience of Acting Linda,” Drama Studies 1 (1984), 12-13. [43] Ibid. [44] See Zhu Xu, “I Act Charlie: Records of Rehearsing Death of a Salesman,” Drama Studies 1 (1984), 14-17. [45] Rui Tao, “Notes on Rehearsing Death of a Salesman,” The People’s Daily (May 8, 1983), 7. [46] Huang Zuoliang, “The Exciting Performance in May: After Seeing Death of a Salesman,” Drama Journal 6 (1983), 8. [47] “Exploring the New and Thriving the Drama Creation,” Literary Studies 1 (1988), 44. [48] “Five People on The Nirvana of Gouerye,” Drama Review 1 (1987), 9. [49] Tang Zhengxu and Chen Houcheng, 20th Century Chinese Literature and Western Modern Literature (Beijing: The People Publishing House, 1992), 609. [50] Wang Xinmin, The History of Contemporary Chinese Drama (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2000), 216. [51] Zhu Liyuan, Aesthetics of Reception (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1989), 175-76. [52] Huizhu Sun and Bo'an Gong, "On the Free-style Drama of Zuolin Huang," The Art of Drama 4 (1983), 8. "Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China" by Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan 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.

Iris Smith Fischer Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Iris Smith Fischer By Published on June 2, 2016 Download Article as PDF This special issue, sponsored by the American Theatre and Drama Society, explores forms of research and inquiry offered by theatre and performance in the age of STEM—that is, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. [1] The issue also presents developments in the scientific fields of information technology, biology, and medicine that employ techniques and approaches drawn from theatre practices. The issue poses a number of questions: What challenges and opportunities does this historical moment present for theatre to assert its relevance and necessity? How does theatre engage in alternate forms of inquiry? How does scholarship aid theatre, both by bringing theatre’s methods of inquiry into view or engaging in them itself? Can alternate forms of inquiry close the gap between practice and analysis in theatre, and counter claims that research occurs only in STEM disciplines? How can theatre offer an ethical perspective on STEM research, which claims to be value free? These are humanists’ questions, fueled by recognition that the arts themselves involve forms of research and inquiry, and that the concept of scientific objectivity, with its concomitant rejection of subjectivity, should be reexamined. Scientists, on the other hand, want to know how theatre and performance techniques can aid them in their research and teaching, or in the dissemination of results to colleagues, administrators, and the general public. For many scientists, valuable research is objective and ideology-free, separate from applications of already-produced knowledge, and clearly distinct from the creation of plays, the activities of performance artists, or the types of analysis and evaluation involved in theatre history or dramatic criticism. Yet some scientists question the exclusion of subjectivity, ideology, or empathy from STEM research and inquiry. These inquirers ask how the STEM disciplines can incorporate methods of learning borrowed from the humanities and arts, be opened more fully to participation by women, minorities, and the disabled, and teach students in the STEM disciplines to recognize, value, and use forms of embodied knowledge. The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes that the term research is not proprietary to the STEM disciplines, defining it as “systematic investigation or inquiry aimed at contributing to knowledge of a theory, topic, etc., by careful consideration, observation, or study of a subject.” Yet the OED also recognizes later disciplinary and institutional usages: “original critical or scientific investigation carried out under the auspices of an academic or other institution.” In a similarly broad fashion, the OED defines the term inquiry as “the action of seeking, esp. (now always) for truth, knowledge, or information concerning something,” and offers “search, research, investigation, examination” as related terms. [2] Theatre and performance inquire and investigate, often proceeding carefully and methodically, but offering knowledge through acts, processes, and conceptual lenses such as the mimetic, the epic, the postdramatic. These types of knowledge are often not recognized as knowledge of an objective world. The current cultural dominance of the STEM disciplines is driven both by economic exigencies and underlying ideological assumptions about what constitutes valuable research and inquiry. Identifying performance as research can be seen as a response by artists and scholars to institutional, political, and economic pressures, and as a corollary effort to break out of academic silos and loosen funding restrictions. Performance approached as research allows inquirers to recognize commonalities among disciplines and share their methodologies and techniques. This turn reflects in twenty-first-century fashion the moment in the late nineteenth century when higher education was being organized in institutions but disciplinarity had not yet taken on its more rigid twentieth-century forms. Inquiry in science was not so isolated from inquiry in philosophy or literary history. One thinks of the American pragmatists—Peirce, James, Dewey, Addams, and others—who sought to keep in view the connections between scientific advances and humanistic inquiry. A similar desire has emerged recently in many fields, among them complexity science, biosemiotics, and epigenetics, which encourage awareness of the role of embodied knowledges in research. In this regard Wendy Wheeler usefully distinguishes between conceptual, experiential, and tacit forms of knowledge. Tacit knowledge, or “creaturely skillful phenomenological knowledge,” is essential to human flourishing and artistic creativity but incapable of formulation in propositional language. Yet conceptual knowledge or “abstract intellectual knowledge that ” cannot by itself account for experiential knowledge or “phenomenological embodied knowledge how ,” i.e., readable acts created “in engagement with the world and other embodied creatures.” Biosemiotic methods of inquiry, Wheeler argues, allow access to necessary tacit knowledge through the reading of such acts. While applicable to many realms of life, human and otherwise, she notes, “Skillful being in cultural complex totalities is a specifically human skillful being in the world. Actions (especially, perhaps, political actions) driven mainly by abstract thinking, which forget embodied experience, local knowledge, and skillfulness, are always, almost by definition, dangerous.” [3] Research and inquiry should engage the phenomenological how along with the conceptual that . In an effort to claim the term research for performance practices, some have questioned the tendency in the arts to distinguish between practice and analysis, as Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter point out: While performance practices have always contributed to knowledge, the idea that performance can be more than creative production, that it can constitute intellectual inquiry and contribute new understanding and insight is a concept that challenges many institutional structures and calls into question what gets valued as knowledge. Perhaps the most singular contribution of the developing areas of practice as research (PaR) and performance as research (PAR) is the claim that creative production can constitute intellectual inquiry.[4] The movement known as Practice as Research (PaR) first developed in the United Kingdom, Riley and Hunter note, in response to government assessment tools introduced in the early 1990s to apportion funding based on departments’ research productivity. While humanities scholarship—as opposed to arts creation—more readily fits existing definitions of conceptual knowledge production (in the form of scholarly articles and monographs), arts departments in the U.K. faced the challenge of developing criteria for assessing creative activity as research, a process begun later at U.S. universities, and still ongoing. [5] Today embodied knowledges are being widely discussed at conferences and in publication. In their recent call for a working group on “Transfusions and Transductions: Science and Performance as Permeable Disciplines,” Vivian Appler and Meredith Conti argue, “As with the clinical laboratory and astronomical observatory, the theatre serves as a reflexive and generative site of transformations, a place to penetrate barriers and test innovative ideas, approaches, and practices.” [6] Also promising in closing the practice/analysis divide is the concept of situated knowledge, drawn in part from black feminist thought and summarized here by Lynette Hunter: Unlike scientific knowledge in which the effect of the observer is often a ‘problem’ and many experiments are devised in order to minimize it, in situated knowledge the whole point is that the observer is engaged. It is only through their engagement that knowledge can be manifested, and the observer is both the practitioner who makes things and the audience or respondent.[7] Calling such current developments “a moment of discovery and transition” in the long history of research in performance, Arthur Sabatini emphasizes that the training of performers is built upon considerable research into the capacities of the human body and mind. Use of the voice, breathing, manual dexterity, movement techniques, directing or choreographing for performance are all outcomes from highly proscribed and ever-evolving systems that have been researched, repeatedly tested, and advanced by practitioners worldwide.[8] Institutional pressures and burgeoning terminology may actually present opportunities to explore and document the need for embodied and situated knowledges that cross the institutional divide between arts and humanities on the one hand, and STEM disciplines on the other. Invested in both creativity and discovery, initiatives are coming from all sides to bridge that gap in terms of how research is conducted, students are trained, and knowledge is disseminated. * The articles that follow argue for the value of embodied knowledges from the nine contributors’ rich and varied backgrounds in theatre history, playwriting, both arts and science education (including science museum education), physics, molecular biology, medicine, engineering, information science and technology, feminism, gender and sexuality studies, acting, directing, and—not least—stand-up comedy. Each perspective contributes in its own way to this special issue. Bradley Stephenson, in “This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D. W. Gregory’s Radium Girls ,” approaches embodied knowledges offered by theatre in terms of disability studies, epic theatre, and recent theories of animacy. Building on Mel Chen’s concept of animacy as “the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present,” Stephenson argues that, in Gregory’s re-telling of the historical events involving young female workers poisoned by their interactions with radium-laced paint, “radium itself becomes an actor and character in the play.” Citing disability theory as an ally of performance and theatre studies, Stephenson explores the interactions of biological life with radioactive half-life in order to rewrite our medical understanding of radium’s effects on the body as a complex of transcorporeal agencies. Vivian Appler approaches science—in this case physics, astronomy, and engineering—as “a liberal cultural domain,” a formulation that recognizes the STEM disciplines’ roots in liberal humanism. “Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of The End of the Moon ” argues that scientists and artists alike have a social responsibility to “recognize how theatre and other representational modes of performance impact a cultural imaginary that contains both the sciences and the arts.” Appler calls for a “holistic cultural conversation” to bridge what C. P. Snow once termed ‘the two cultures divide’: “Interdisciplinary performance research can disrupt this biased cultural scenario by examining science-oriented performance artists who work from a feminist perspective.” Appler focuses on Laurie Anderson’s arts residency at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the resulting 2004 performance piece The End of the Moon : Anderson endeavors to instill in her audiences a sense of wonder at the world while also encouraging active participation in the larger culture in which the domain of astronomy is embedded. . . . [She] fills the space between wonder at scientific achievement and an active engagement with the socio-political criticism of those achievements through embodied and technologically transductive performance techniques. By means of transduction or “communication of information across different media,” Appler continues Anderson’s intervention, revealing in the performance a “cyborg system” that invites discussion of gender assumptions active both within science and outside of it. By documenting a woman performance artist embodying representations of gendered scientific research, Appler’s article shares concerns expressed by Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd, and Suzanne Trauth about the barriers women encounter in thinking of themselves as researchers and gaining access to the sciences. Suzanne Trauth’s play script iDream , based on Eileen Trauth’s research and documented by Karen Keifer-Boyd, is designed to “raise awareness and critique hegemonic social narratives regarding who [can] participate in the STEM field of IT [information technology].” The authors of “ iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change” have found that the scientific professions have difficulty creating gender balance. Just as scholarly publications on information technology are not written in language accessible for the general public, “the scientific model of research dissemination leaves little room for the expression of subtlety, nuance, emotion, and holistic representation.” The authors turn instead to girls, their families, and their teachers, to raise awareness of the cultural narratives at work. Transforming Eileen Trauth’s research findings into theatrical scenarios, the authors seek to “stimulate awareness, understanding, and activism about barriers to women in technological fields.” iDream employs several story lines to engage audiences during staged readings and the discussions that follow. In a work process resembling what Appler terms “interactional expertise,” albeit not in a full production or performance art but rather in a script-centered experience, the authors created an exploration of “science opportunities . . . and barriers . . . [focusing] not so much on overt barriers [but] rather the process by which a young woman might unconsciously internalize limits on her dreams.” Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio also investigate theatre’s applications in the interaction between STEM researchers and the general public. Rather than raising awareness of constraining social narratives, the authors report on their use of Viola Spolin’s improvisation techniques to prepare undergraduate life science students to communicate complex concepts to non-experts. Duckert and De Stasio developed a required capstone course to rehearse students in performance skills they need as professionals and public intellectuals, i.e., to make their discoveries “accessible and understandable by linking scientific concepts to concepts the audience already knows.” Moreover, We want our graduates to be cognizant of their audience, to be able to react in real time to the cues the audience members send concerning their understanding of oral and visual communication, and . . . to channel their creative energy and enthusiasm for their work [in order] to communicate scientific information effectively and engagingly. Often initially resistant to engaging in theatrical improvisation, students find that even minimal awareness of performance circumstances improves their ability to communicate. While this would not surprise theatre majors, the incorporation of performance skills into a life sciences curriculum appears to leave life science majors with a new respect for the role that movement, gesture, and facial expression play in communication. The authors also note that, as teachers, they became more aware of public speaking’s embodied character, as well as physiological and neurological elements such as the linkage between mimicry (empathetic physical behaviors) and the action of mirror neurons in fostering an audience’s receptivity. Could performance techniques become part of the life sciences’ methods of disseminating discoveries? Duckert and De Stasio’s capstone course, embedded in their department’s curriculum, suggests that improvisational performance could assist STEM researchers in communicating more effectively with administrators, legislators, and the general public. This possibility also appears in “Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters,” in which George Pate and Libby Ricardo address the use of simulated patients in training medical students for clinical encounters. A relatively recent development, simulated patients—non-actors who volunteer their participation—do not learn a traditional standardized script but are given their characters’ medical and personal histories and also acting guidelines for behaving as their characters would in real-life consultations with their doctors. As the authors note, such “high fidelity” encounters rehearse the performance of empathetic responses to improvised, often unpredictable patient behaviors. The authors’ use of simulated patients follows “recent research suggesting that clinical skills are not ancillary to medical care but in fact affect healing and recovery in measurable ways.” In this regard, Pate and Ricardo’s project resembles that of Duckert and De Stasio, both in regard to the medical students’ initial reluctance to role-play and in the authors’ successful use of workshop exercises to integrate clinical skills with medical knowledge. Drawing a parallel to literary techniques of storytelling, Pate and Ricardo found that such improvisational exercises, like fictional narratives, helpfully “suggest responses without dictating them, urge behaviors without ordering them, illuminate values without oversimplifying them, and in general complicate the matters rather than clarifying or confirming them. . . . [Further,] improvisatory acting situations may offer a greater immediacy and a wider range of possible responses than a poem or story can.” Of all the activity going on in performance as research and research-informed theatre, this special issue presents only a sampling. Many other projects incorporating theatre and performance offer embodied and situated knowledges that can inform scientific research, suggest alternate forms of inquiry, and allow inquirers in the age of STEM to communicate effectively as public intellectuals. References [1] It has been a pleasure to work with JADT editors James Wilson and Naomi Stubbs, and managing editor James Armstrong. I extend my appreciation to them and also to the American Theatre and Drama Society for the opportunity to edit this special issue. My special thanks go to Cheryl Black, ATDS President, and the members of the special issue publications committee, ATDS members all, who both served as readers and provided me with excellent advice. [2] “Research,” “Inquiry,” Oxford English Dictionary (Online) (Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 2000-). http://www2.lib.ku.edu/login?url=http://www.oed.com . [3] Wendy Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006), 49. [4] Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter, “Introduction,” Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xv. [5] Ibid, xvii. Riley and Hunter distinguish among the relevant terms: “The acronym ‘PaR’ in the United Kingdom refers to ‘practice as research’ in its most inclusive sense to embrace music practices, the visual arts, dance, and theatre [while] ‘PbR’ refers to ‘practice-based research’ with a wider reach across the arts and sciences. . . . PbR is also well-established in the United Kingdom and Europe, and contributes to many areas, from the medical sciences to spectatorship studies. PbR emerges from different academic areas, but seems to have particular usage in the sciences. . . . In the United States, especially in the fields of performance and theatre studies, the acronym PAR is common shorthand for ‘performance as research’.” [6] E-mail communication from Meredith Conti, 23 May 2016. [7] Lynette Hunter, “Situated Knowledge,” in Riley and Hunter, Mapping Landscapes , 151. [8] Arthur Sabatini, “Approaching Knowledge, Research, Performance and the Arts,” in Riley and Hunter, Mapping Landscapes , 120, 118. Footnotes About The Author(s) Iris Smith Fischer is Professor of English at the University of Kansas, where she teaches modern drama, semiotics, literary and dramatic theory, and avant-garde performance. From 2007-2010 she served as editor of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Her publications include Mabou Mines: Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s (author, University of Michigan Press, 2011); Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance (co-editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); American Signatures: Semiotic Inquiry and Method, by Thomas A. Sebeok (editor, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Her current book project, "Charles Peirce and the Role of Aesthetic Expression in 19th-Century U.S. Semiotics," examines the intertwined histories of theatre (Delsartist approaches to actor training and public speaking) and the still-emerging field of science-based semiotics. 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 Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze. Shane Vogel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018; Pp. 254 + xi. A trip backstage at the Imperial Theatre in late fall 1957 promised brushes with a number of black performers who would help radically transform the cultural and racial logics of the United States. In an effort to profit from the “calypso craze” fueled by the success of Harry Belafonte’s 1956 record Calypso , producer David Merrick teamed up with composer Harold Arlen, lyricist E.Y. Harburg, and playwright Fred Saidy to bring the original, conspicuously titled musical Jamaica to Broadway. The incomparable Lena Horne was tapped to lead a company that included such tastemakers and change-agents as Alvin Ailey, Ossie Davis, and Josephine Premice. As Shane Vogel outlines in his thoughtfully researched and compellingly written book, Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze , their musical proved much more than “a typical instance of midcentury Broadway Caribbeana” (133). Vogel reveals how the production not only “provided a surface for constantly shifting and destabilizing configurations of nation and race,” but also opened space for “political alternatives to be staged, sounded, and embodied, even in the face of the tourist economies and minstrel traditions in which black fad performance trafficked” (134-135). In so doing, this recent book exposes musical theater as one of the many potent sites through which black performers interpellated by the Jim Crow era’s various “Negro vogues” staged and embodied various acts of refusal. Vogel examines performances across multiple media-sound recordings, nightclub acts, film, television, dance, as well as musical theater—to highlight some of the sophisticated strategies black artists developed to negotiate the racist, imperialist, and appropriating impulses of the American entertainment industry. He brings particular attention to the ways these artists engaged performance to challenge, sometimes playfully, binaries such as “inauthenticity/authenticity, false/true, improper/proper, ungenuine/genuine, and insincerity/sincerity” (7). Stolen Time notably does not offer a comprehensive accounting of the calypso craze. Instead, the book explores several key examples that elucidate how black performers thwarted the representational imperatives and constraints demanded and imposed by American fad culture. As detailed in chapter one, the 1950s calypso craze was not the first “race craze” to generate widespread excitement during the Jim Crow period. Indeed, Vogel draws direct links between earlier crazes—notably, the ragtime craze of the 1890s and the Harlem vogue of the 1920s—and the midcentury thirst for Caribbeana, thereby exposing “the structural repetitions that shape[d] these fad cycles” (34). The chapter’s close readings of Josephine Premice’s nightclub performances and the two albums she recorded at the height of the craze, in addition to evidencing Vogel’s assertion that fad time is always already stolen time, shed important light on the tactics black performers deployed to make “the tempos and tastes of the marketplace” (66) align with their own motivations and aspirations. Vogel offers additional evidence and analysis of these tactics in subsequent chapters. Chapter two, for example, examines the cinematic calypso craze of the 1950s and the live nightclub revues coopted and reproduced on screen to illuminate the self-reflexivity of the “calypso program.” This chapter offers particularly astute readings of Maya Angelou’s performance as a calypso chanteuse in the low budget film, Calypso Heat Wave (1957), which serve to substantiate Vogel’s suggestion that the “calypso craze project[ed] nothing other than itself” (89). Chapter three turns attention to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s 1957 live television presentation of their LP recording, A Drum Is a Woman . Vogel analyzes the event as an example of “radical counterprogramming”—that is, “an alternative to the middlebrow’s exploitation of blackness in the project of Cold War internationalism and a fundamental rewriting of the calypso program” (108). As “radical counterprogramming,” the live broadcast of A Drum Is a Woman stole back the time of the calypso craze and, in the process, “posed important questions about the relationship between nation and diaspora; African American and Afro-Caribbean cultural exchange; white commercial culture and black performance; and the sounds and gestures that reshaped cultural geographies in the twentieth century,” Vogel writes (108). Chapter four’s focus on the Broadway production of Jamaica further surfaces and explores the entwinements of race, nation, and diaspora. Vogel examines the production as a signal example of “mock transnational performance”—“a theatrical mode and performative stance that takes up the misuse of diasporic cultural indices to critique and refigure the politics of the nation-state and racialized national formations” (134). The chapter also considers how the show’s multiracial cast fostered and forged community on and offstage, thereby posing direct challenges to the white supremacist status quo. Through the careful attention he gives to Horne’s performance as Savannah in the musical, Vogel expands on some of the arguments he explores in his first book, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performanc e (University of Chicago Press, 2009), further illustrating the range of approaches black performers developed and deployed to frustrate the racial expectations and assumptions of their Jim Crow audiences. Chapter five’s considerations of the crucial role that dancer-choreographer-director-performer-designer-painter Geoffrey Holder played in stirring and sustaining interest in the calypso craze serve to underscore Vogel’s assessments throughout Stolen Time that the fad was often marked by and constituted through the avowals and disavowals of its most prominent participants. Even as he disavowed what he called “Manhattan calypso,” characterizing it as an amusing imitation of “true Calypso,” Holder, Vogel notes, disavowed his own disavowals, popularizing a new dance form, the “Limbo-Calypso,” with the public. He also drew on the craze for inspiration to develop work for the concert dance stage. Especially striking throughout Stolen Time is Vogel’s skillful weaving of history, biography, theory, and critical inquiry to contemplate the significance of the calypso craze and the ontological conditions of black fad performance. The book is rich with fresh insights and important methodological interventions that add complexity to our understandings of concepts such as race, time, performance, diaspora, transnationalism, and mass culture. Students and scholars across myriad fields—theater studies, performance studies, media studies, popular music, and critical race studies, among them—will no doubt benefit tremendously from rigorously engaging with each chapter. To be sure, there is much to be gleaned about the significant role that artists continue to play in prompting social, cultural, and political change from Stolen Time’s absorbing prose and its shrewd considerations of black performance in the Jim Crow era. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Isaiah Matthew Wooden Brandeis 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 Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Claudia Wilsch Case Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship Claudia Wilsch Case By Published on May 21, 2020 Download Article as PDF During the Great Depression, architect Frank Lloyd Wright founded the Taliesin Fellowship, an apprenticeship program for students of architecture and related trades that valued physical labor as an educational tool. Based at Wright’s family home and the adjacent former Hillside Home School in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and later expanding to Taliesin West near Scottsdale, Arizona, the Fellowship offered tuition-paying students a hands-on alternative to a college education by conveying Wright’s theory of organic architecture through practical experience. Echoing certain aspects of the British and American Arts and Crafts movements, the German Bauhaus, and the Eastern mystic Georges Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, the Taliesin Fellowship was an experiment in communal work, living, and learning. Like the collectives that inspired it, the Taliesin Fellowship engaged its members in a variety of artistic pursuits, and its amateur performing arts activities became cherished entertainment for local audiences. Beginning with apprentice-staged concerts, skits, and film screenings in the 1930s and presenting Gurdjieff-inspired physical movements in the 1950s, the Fellowship’s performances by the 1960s culminated in original dance dramas, written and choreographed by Wright’s daughter, Iovanna Lloyd Wright. Taking inspiration from Gurdjieff’s philosophy and from her father’s architectural concepts, Iovanna’s work, though created in isolation, echoes aspects of the physical culture movement and connects with twentieth-century expressive dance. Taken together, the performing arts activities that occurred at Taliesin and Taliesin West from the 1930s to the 1970s asserted the Fellowship’s role in decentralizing the American cultural landscape. The Fellowship’s performances cultivated spectators who appreciated locally developed productions, the same audiences who by the 1960s in Arizona and the 1980s in Wisconsin were receptive to the regional theatre movement. By translating spiritual ideas onto the stage through her choreography, Iovanna Lloyd Wright in particular laid the foundation for local spectators to appreciate experimental work that was created nearby, rather than imported from New York. Frank Lloyd Wright started his apprenticeship program in the fall of 1932 with twenty-three students. [1] An early prospectus describes the Fellowship as a structured experience: “The way of life is simple: meals in common, fixed hours for all work, recreation and sleep. Rooms for individual study and rest. Imaginative entertainment is a feature of the home life. Music, drama, literature, the cinema of our own and other countries. Evening conferences with musicians, writers, artists and scientists who visit the Fellowship or are invited to sojourn.” [2] There were no formal classes, textbooks, or exams; as former apprentice Edgar Tafel notes, students “learned by doing — the Taliesin way — and by listening.” [3] Daily tasks included assisting Wright with architectural drawings and models, carrying out construction, maintenance, and farm work, preparing meals for the Fellowship community, and, under the guidance of Wright and his third wife Olgivanna, organizing cultural events and performances. As one of their first construction projects, apprentices remodeled the old gymnasium of the Hillside Home School into the Taliesin Playhouse, and later built additional theatres at Taliesin West. Fulfilling Wright’s plan to incorporate the performing arts into the Fellowship, the Taliesin community used its event spaces for film screenings, concerts, song recitals, lectures, and presentations of skits, plays, and dances, and also held seasonal celebrations and costume parties. Some of this arts programming was open to the public. Beginning in 1957, the Fellowship produced the annual Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance at the Pavilion Theatre at Taliesin West, which for several years remained a highlight of the Scottsdale-Phoenix area cultural scene. By constructing theatres and curating cultural events in Wisconsin and Arizona, far away from New York, the Taliesin Fellowship participated in a decentralization of the performing arts that had already found expression in the little theatre movement of the 1910s and 1920s. Having lived in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright was personally acquainted with local trailblazers of the little theatre movement, including Jane Addams, the co-founder of Hull House; Maurice Browne, the director of the Chicago Little Theatre; and the actor Donald Robertson. He also knew playwright Zona Gale, who lived not far from Taliesin and was affiliated with the Wisconsin Dramatic Society, another pioneering little theatre. Stimulated by these connections, Wright expressed an appreciation for regionally-created culture and, through his Fellowship, began to participate in furthering its spread. [4] The Fellowship’s arts activities paralleled the decentralization efforts of the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s and anticipated the post-World-War-II regional theatre movement that resulted in the emergence of not-for-profit professional theatres in cities across the country. The Taliesin Playhouse opened on November 1, 1933. Aside from illustrating Wright’s ideal of a native, organic architecture, built “from the inside out” and “in complete harmony with the landscape,” the Playhouse realized key aspects of the design for a “New Theatre” that the architect had been developing over several years. [5] The Madison Capital Times described the structure as “a huge artistic building made from stones of nearby hills and rough woods of nearby forests” and noted that the Playhouse “seems to be a part of the surrounding landscape.” [6] Nearly all of the construction work was completed by Wright’s students: “They have felled the trees, sawed them into lumber, quarried rock, and burned lime to lay the rock in the wall. The sawed lumber has been turned into structure, trusses and furniture. Walls have been plastered and frescoed, all by Taliesin apprentices.” [7] Echoing modernist experiments in early-twentieth-century theatre architecture, such as Adolphe Appia’s Festival Theatre at Hellerau, Germany (1911), or Walter Gropius’s vision for a Total Theatre (1927), the Playhouse’s interior was designed as a flexible space that could accommodate a variety of events. An upper stage was intended for theatrical performances and film screenings and “a lower stage for musicians.” [8] Removable seating permitted the house to be rearranged “for dancing or other amusements.” [9] Most importantly, in contrast to large commercial theatres of the day, the intimate 200-seat Taliesin Playhouse was built without a proscenium, inviting a connection between actors and spectators, a goal Wright strove for in all of the performance spaces he designed. Writing as a mouthpiece for Wright, apprentice Nicholas Ray, who briefly served as the director of the Taliesin Playhouse and later became a well-known Hollywood movie director, emphasized the innovative nature of the design. Ray condemned “the picture frame theater of today” as a “hideous anachronism” and “essentially undemocratic.” In its stead, he advocated for “a place where stage and audience architecturally melt rhythmically into one, and the performance — the play of the senses — and the audience blend together into an entity because of the construction of the whole.” [10] For local audiences, the opening of the Taliesin Playhouse was a special occasion, particularly considering that the Spring Green area did not have access to a professional performing arts venue until the 1980 founding of the American Players Theatre. The Capital Times reported that guests filled the theatre to capacity and were treated to four movies and a barbecue lunch. Reflecting Wright’s cosmopolitan taste as well as his sense of humor, the films screened that day included the 1931 Austrian comedy The Merry Wives of Vienna , shown in the original German; Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby (1932) featuring Lionel Barrymore; a “Silly Symphony” by Walt Disney; and an animated cartoon of Aesop’s Fables . The Fellowship soon began offering public programming on Sunday afternoons. For a 50-cent admission fee, which helped supplement the group’s income during the Great Depression, visitors could watch a film, hear a musical recital by apprentices or guest artists, and partake of coffee and baked goods near the Playhouse’s fireplace. The main feature was introduced through “an interpretive talk” by a Fellowship member that offered insights into “the background, the environment, and the purpose behind the play” and was usually followed by a Disney cartoon or other short animated film. [11] Advertisement for movie screenings at Taliesin, Capital Times (Madison, WI), 23 March 1934. Movies screened at Taliesin during the 1930s included a selection of recent, critically acclaimed European and American releases, such as Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1927); G.W. Pabst’s 1929 adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s play Pandora’s Box with Louise Brooks; Fritz Lang’s M (1931) with Peter Lorre; a selection of René Clair films; Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (1932); Dudley Murphy’s 1933 version of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson; Vladimir Petrov’s 1934 adaptation of Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s play The Thunderstorm ; Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert; Jacques Feyder’s Carnival in Flanders (1935); various movies by Alfred Hitchcock; and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). On occasion, the bill included experimental work, such as Man Ray’s short film The Starfish (1928) or Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), as adapted by Luís Buñuel from Edgar Allan Poe. [12] Several of the artistically significant movies shown at Taliesin were not otherwise accessible to local Wisconsin audiences and some, such as Riefenstahl’s Blue Light , had their regional premiere at the Playhouse. Frank Lloyd Wright screened films to entertain, but also to educate viewers. Former apprentice Curtis Besinger remembers: Mr. Wright was a movie fan; he enjoyed good films. But he saw the great movies of the world as something more than entertainment; he saw them as a form of education in the deepest meaning of the word. They were not only a means of acquiring information about the various cultures of the world, but of nourishing and developing one’s own creative resources. They were like the works of art which he acquired and with which he surrounded himself and the Fellowship. They were, as he often said, his library. Like great literature, they were sources of nourishment and inspiration. The Playhouse was a place, a setting, in which to view these works of art and to share them with the Fellowship and its guests. [13] The Fellowship’s cultural programming in Wisconsin and later Arizona resonated with Wright’s theory of decentralization, as manifest in his utopian plan for Broadacre City, which he posited as an antidote to the overcrowding of traditional American cities. Envisioned by Wright as an expansive, democratic, technologically advanced, and environmentally friendly community that would smoothly integrate housing and workplaces with access to services and recreation, Broadacre City was never realized, but the architect continued to fine-tune, exhibit, and discuss this project until the end of his life. In 1970, Iovanna Lloyd Wright summed up her father’s idea: Frank Lloyd Wright designed a city spread out over miles of free and verdant land. Factories, theaters, stadiums, museums, restaurants, apartment buildings, hotels, office buildings, hospitals, schools, and related shopping centers are set in the midst of parks, forests, gardens, and occasional man-made lakes; or, wherever possible, incorporating features of natural beauty, streams or waterfalls. Interlaced over the countryside, with ample space among them, are broad landscaped highways and monorails, with additional traffic handled by air-rotors: noiseless, atomic powered radio-controlled airborne vehicles. Gas and smog would belong to the past. [14] As Fellowship member Bruce Pfeiffer points out, “all of the principles of [Wright’s] work, all of his thought about planning, building, and environment, would be connected to this concept of a decentralized, liberated society, the centerline of which would be architecture.” [15] Created by Wright’s students during the Fellowship’s first sojourn in Arizona, a couple of years before construction began in 1937 on the collection of buildings that would become Taliesin West, a model of Broadacre City was first exhibited at the 1935 Industrial Arts Exposition in New York. The model incorporated Wright’s recent plans for the Taliesin Playhouse as a prototype of a theatre space, and both Taliesin and Taliesin West can be viewed as attempts to realize small parts of Wright’s larger vision for Broadacre City. [16] In the mid-1930s, apprentice Karl E. Jensen, who, like Ray, was conveying Wright’s thoughts, declared that decentralizing the American theatre by moving it “into the ‘green pastures’” would result in vibrant, non-commercial local arts scenes. Claiming that “in New York during the ‘season’ congestion in the theater district is unbearable,” and that the steep price of assembling a Broadway show, caused by “the terrible urban overhead rent, advertising, costly sets, and highly paid unionized labor,” was “crippling new productions before they get a good start,” Jensen argued for “breaking up the theatrical center.” Positing that “many of our finest plays are bound to be of limited appeal” and would therefore not thrive in New York’s commercial theatres anyway, he asserted that producing more plays far away from Broadway would improve the quality of the American theatre. The Fellowship’s first experiments with staging live drama, including the apprentice-written “musical farce” Piranesi Calico (1934), were part of a plan to “expand the activities of the Taliesin Playhouse from the showing of fine films to include a broad program of musical activities, the dance, and plays of our own making or by visiting groups.” [17] It was at Taliesin West where those experiments flourished. The architect’s complex near Scottsdale came to include three indoor performance spaces: the Kiva, a “stone-enclosed room,” which was often used for dinners and doubled as “a small cinema theatre”; the larger Cabaret, which, when it was completed in 1950, replaced the Kiva as a screening room and also hosted other performing arts events and dinners; and the Pavilion, which was designed specifically for the annual Taliesin Festivals of Music and Dance that began in 1957. [18] By presenting non-commercial performances for local audiences in Wisconsin and Arizona, the Fellowship was following in the footsteps of the little theatre movement, emulating activities of the Federal Theatre Project, and anticipating the regional theatre movement. The Taliesin community was not the first artisan collective to incorporate the performing arts, and some of its amateur theatrical activities echoed those of groups Wright was familiar with, such as Elbert Hubbard’s Roycrofters in upstate New York; Charles Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft, which evolved into the School of Arts and Crafts in Chipping Campden, England; and the German Bauhaus, which from 1919 to 1933 and under the successive leadership of Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe provided training in art, design, and architecture. Ultimately, however, it was a school of practical philosophy, Georges Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, which had the most profound influence on Taliesin. [19] Based by 1922 at the Prieuré des Basses Loges, an estate in Fontainebleau near Paris, the Institute prized physical work, exercise, and self-discipline as a path to self-realization. Gurdjieff was a rotund, balding man of mysterious Eastern-European origin who attracted an international group of followers to his philosophical system, among them several performing artists, such as composer Thomas de Hartmann, as well as Jeanne and Alexandre de Salzmann, who had both been associated with Émil Jacques-Dalcroze’s Institute for Rhythmic Education at Hellerau. Jeanne had been a student of Eurythmics, Dalcroze’s training program for performers that links musical rhythm with physical movement, and Alexandre had designed the lighting system for Appia’s Festival Theatre, where Dalcroze’s school was housed. Gurdjieff held a lifelong influence over Wright’s wife Olgivanna, who spent six years under his tutelage before she settled in the United States, where she ultimately built several of the mystic’s teachings into the daily routine of the Taliesin Fellowship. As part of his self-improvement curriculum, Gurdjieff also instructed his students in a physical training program. Maud Hoffman, a guest at the Prieuré, noted that Gurdjieff’s complex workouts were inspired by “the sacred gymnastics of the esoteric schools, the religious ceremonies of the antique Orient and the ritual movements of monks and dervishes—besides the folk dances of many a remote community,” which Gurdjieff had studied during extensive travels through Central and Southern Asia. [20] Accompanied by music often credited to Gurdjieff but perhaps at least partially composed by Thomas de Hartmann, the movements were, as Taliesin Fellowship member Cornelia Brierly later explained, “designed to coordinate mind, body, and spirit.” [21] Gurdjieff’s followers first had to master a series of “obligatories,” exercises that formed the basis for his other movements and dances, many of which were patterned on intricate numerical schemes derived from the enneagram, an esoteric diagram of personality traits. Iovanna Lloyd Wright illustrates the complexity of even just Gurdjieff’s first obligatory as follows: “The head holds one pattern, the right arm another, the left arm another, the right leg another, and the left leg yet another. You learn them separately and then you have to put them together again, yourself.” [22] As Lara Vetter points out, in their time, Gurdjieff’s and Dalcroze’s systems, between which there was some overlap, existed among “a plethora of other similar movements … that linked bodily performance with spiritual transcendence,” such as François Delsarte’s System of Expression, Rudolf Steiner’s eurythmy, Raymond Duncan’s approach to gymnastics, and Rudolf von Laban’s Mastery of Movement program. [23] These systems appealed to European and American practitioners and filtered into modernist expressive dance. A group of Gurdjieff’s disciples, Olgivanna among them, gave regular public demonstrations of the mystic’s movements at the Prieuré and also staged a program in Paris in 1923. [24] In 1924, Gurdjieff and some of his followers traveled to the United States, where their culminating performance featuring “Ritual Dancing,” “Music,” and “Supernormal Phenomena” took place at Carnegie Hall. [25] Shortly after the group had arrived back in France, Gurdjieff instructed Olgivanna to return to America and begin “a new life,” presumably one that would include spreading his teachings. [26] After she founded the Taliesin Fellowship with Frank Lloyd Wright, Olgivanna introduced Gurdjieff’s ideas to her husband’s apprentices, briefly offered lessons in the movements, and in 1949 sent her daughter to study with Gurdjieff in Paris. [27] Over the course of six months, Iovanna learned the movements, including thirty-nine new exercises that the mystic had developed only recently. When she wasn’t training with Gurdjieff and his other “calves,” as he liked to call his female students, Iovanna continued practicing the movements by herself in a rehearsal room she rented at the Salle Pleyel. [28] She also used any spare time she had to play harp and take lessons in harmony from Thomas de Hartmann. “My days in Paris were filled with practice and studying, starting at eight in the morning,” Iovanna recalls. [29] When, by the end of the summer, Iovanna was preparing to return stateside, Gurdjieff instructed her to propagate his ideas and teach his movements at Taliesin, a plan Olgivanna supported. [30] As Fellowship member Kamal Amin observed, her months of rigorous training with Gurdjieff had rendered Iovanna “a focused and competent instructor of the sacred dances.” [31] By fall 1949, Iovanna was holding regular movement classes “for the correlation of mind, feeling and body” at Taliesin West and soon began developing performances based on this work. [32] In October, Gurdjieff died suddenly in Paris, and while Frank Lloyd Wright had always been careful not to let the mystic’s ideas compete with his own, he now agreed to incorporate Gurdjieff’s exercises into the Fellowship’s routine. Wright later stated that he saw a “connection” between his architecture and Gurdjieff’s teachings, revealing that he considered Gurdjieff “a Builder” who “believed in the building of human character as we believe in the kind of building we call Organic Architecture.” According to Wright, “the training methods of [Gurdjieff] fit so well into our work here at Taliesin” because of a shared belief that “only by his own work upon himself can any man become an individual in his own right really capable of creating anything at all.” [33] Movement practice for apprentices took place several times a week after a regular day of architectural, housekeeping, and maintenance work. While participation in the Gurdjieff exercises was voluntary, the movements were becoming an increasingly important part of Fellowship life. As Besinger mentions, “there were subtle — and not so subtle — pressures from Iovanna and indirectly from Mrs. Wright for everyone to participate.” [34] When in the fall of 1949, alongside other prominent guests, the conductor Serge Koussevitzky witnessed Iovanna and her group of amateur dancers give their first demonstration of Gurdjieff’s movements in the living room at Taliesin West, he was impressed. Koussevitzky reportedly insisted to a hesitant Frank Lloyd Wright, “You have no right to keep this away from the world! These dances are a work which you must share with the world,” and, in the wake of this encounter, the Fellowship began planning more formal presentations. [35] On Easter Sunday 1950, Iovanna led another movement performance at Taliesin West. While the Wrights were not regular churchgoers, they were spiritual people, and Easter with its themes of resurrection and renewal had always been a special occasion for the Fellowship. In the days leading up to the Wrights’ large annual Easter celebration, the Taliesin community would decorate hundreds of eggs, and Olgivanna would supervise apprentices in preparing traditional recipes for baba (a leavened Russian bread) and sweet, almond-infused pascha cheese, foods Olgivanna regarded as “blessed by memory and promise of life eternal.” [36] The Gurdjieff movements resonated with the spirituality of Easter, and the apprentices’ carefully rehearsed performance put on display the cohesiveness of the Fellowship. As the printed program for the demonstration explains, Iovanna believed the exercises “contain and express a certain form of knowledge and at the same time serve as a means to acquire an harmonious state of being,” promoting in the performer/apprentice “certain qualities of sensation, various degrees of concentration, and the requisite directing of the thought and the senses.” [37] In October 1950, twenty-two Fellowship members performed a selection of “movements, dances, and exercises” for special guests at the Taliesin Playhouse to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Gurdjieff’s death, as Gurdjieff groups were also doing in Paris, London, and New York. Recreating the costumes the mystic had typically chosen for his performers, Wright’s apprentices were “dressed in white tunics and trousers, with colorful sashes.” [38] The architect, who Besinger sensed “accepted ‘movements’ as an activity that Iovanna and Mrs. Wright were interested in and supported them primarily for this reason,” showed his approval of his daughter’s work by inviting prominent clients with commissions in progress to see the Fellowship perform, including Harry Guggenheim and Florida Southern College’s president Ludd Spivey. [39] In 1951, Iovanna again staged Gurdjieff’s movements at Taliesin West at Easter and in Wisconsin in the fall. Making an overt connection to Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, the Wisconsin performance was presented at the new Wright-designed Unitarian Meeting House in Madison, with the price of admission intended to help the congregation cover the construction costs. [40] Wright, who, as Joseph M. Siry writes, “conceived of the theater and the room for worship as related spatial types,” introduced the Taliesin Fellowship’s first truly public performance and used it to demonstrate “the secular side of the building whereby dances, music, plays, may be viewed by a turnabout of the auditorium seats toward an improvised stage—the social center of the society.” [41] Anticipating the intricate costumes that Fellowship members would design in future years, the female dancers now appeared in colorful Orientalist dresses and elaborate headpieces, while the male dancers were still clad in the type of “pure white” attire that had customarily been worn by Gurdjieff’s performers. [42] Advertisement for the Taliesin Fellowship’s November 1951 Gurdjieff movement demonstration, Wisconsin State Journal , 23 October 1951. Besinger, who in 1949 had already noticed “an effort and intention to establish Taliesin as a center, of a kind, for the teaching of Gurdjieff philosophy,” suggests that the Madison performance was not only an event to raise funds for the completion of Wright’s church building, but also “an opportunity to publicize and to proselytize for Gurdjieff’s teaching.” [43] By the early 1950s, Besinger observed that a “schism … was developing within the Fellowship,” with “those whose primary interest was in architecture and who looked to Mr. Wright for leadership” on one side, and “those whose major interest lay elsewhere and was focused on ‘movements’ and Mrs. Wright’s interest in Gurdjieff and his teaching” on the other. [44] By the summer of 1953, Iovanna and a group of twenty-five dancers, including core apprentices John Amarantides, Kamal Amin, Curtis Besinger, Richard Carney, Tom Casey, Kay Davison, John Howe, Kenn Lockhart, Steve Oyakawa, Bruce Pfeiffer, Ling Po, and Heloise Schweizer, were planning their biggest movement demonstration yet, though this time the performance competed with rather than complemented one of Wright’s own projects. While Iovanna was rehearsing a program entitled “Music, Ritual Exercises, and Temple Dances by Georges Gurdjieff” for Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, which the Taliesin Fellowship had rented for the occasion, her father was assembling “Sixty Years of Living Architecture: The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright,” a major retrospective on the site of Wright’s future Guggenheim Museum in New York. [45] For the New York exhibit, Fellowship members helped construct a temporary pavilion that included a full-size, furnished model of a Usonian house, Wright’s prototype of a middle-class home. Apprentices were struggling to prepare for both events simultaneously, and the Chicago Gurdjieff demonstration would show the limitations of Taliesin’s amateur performers. While they were rehearsing in the emptied-out drafting room at Taliesin, trying “to master more movements than ever before,” and designing and building “settings, costumes, and headdresses” for their ambitious Goodman program, Wright also needed them in New York to help set up the exhibition, and several Fellowship members shuttled between the two projects. [46] “Sixty Years of Architecture” opened on October 22, 1953, less than two weeks before the Chicago performance. [47] As Iovanna recalls, “When the time came for us to move into the theatre, our production had grown to a scale none of us could have anticipated.” [48] The group had hired a professional conductor and a small orchestra to play Gurdjieff’s music, orchestrated by Olgivanna and Bruce Pfeiffer for harp, percussion, piano, and strings, but the dancers were afforded just one rehearsal “with full orchestra.” [49] As Iovanna notes, “Our rental of the theatre included only one day to move in, solve our technical problems and have our dress rehearsal.” [50] On November 3, the Taliesin group presented a matinee and an evening show at the “sold-out” Goodman, a pioneering theatre which had first opened in 1925 but would not re-establish itself as a professional regional company until 1969. [51] Frank Lloyd Wright, who had just returned from the opening of his New York exhibition, introduced both presentations. While Iovanna insists that her dancers “gave a very good performance, as good as it really could be with amateur performers,” and that some spectators, “were moved to tears,” the critics were not impressed with the Fellowship’s Gurdjieff presentation. [52] Although she deemed the music “pleasant,” the reviewer for the Chicago American judged that the performance “doesn’t have a dance leg, nor a philosophic one to stand on.” [53] The critic for the Chicago Sun-Times found the show “both exotic and monotonous.” He observed, “The dancers danced with grim, awful solemnity. Some of their sharply accented numbers stirred painful memories of hours of close order drill …. No one on the stage seemed to be really enjoying what he or she was doing. Maybe that’s how Gurdjieff meant it to be.” [54] Iovanna maintains that as soon as the exhausted and dejected group returned to Taliesin, they “went right back to work” and “rebuilt in the wreckage,” but it was not until a few years later that the Fellowship planned another large-scale production, this time in familiar surroundings in Arizona. [55] In late April 1957, the Pavilion Theatre opened at Taliesin West for the first annual Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance. Like Wright’s other theatre buildings, the Pavilion is an intimate performance space that does not have a proscenium, allowing for a connection between performers and audience. The first Festival, which ran for three nights, attracted hundreds of local spectators. Directed by Iovanna, who also performed solo numbers, members of the Fellowship again staged a selection of Gurdjieff’s exercises and dances. However, while Gurdjieff provided the inspiration for the choreography, Iovanna had begun adapting the mystic’s movements, and the Wrights wanted the public to recognize Iovanna’s emancipation from Gurdjieff as well as Olgivanna’s influence on the performance. Explaining that Iovanna “[had] further developed her own highly individual and graceful style under the guidance of her mother,” a review of the Taliesin Festival in the Arizona Republic likely echoed a press release from the Fellowship. [56] Iovanna, who saw her work as “closely related to architecture,” and who did not have any formal dance training to supplement what she had learned during her stay with Gurdjieff in Paris, later wrote, “I developed into a choreographer when, with this knowledge inside me, I could build new combinations of dances out of what before was simply an exercise.” [57] It is also likely that, by modifying Gurdjieff’s regimented movements, Iovanna rendered them less severe than they had appeared in Chicago. The local Phoenix press responded much more favorably to the Taliesin community’s homegrown performance than the Chicago critics had done three and a half years earlier. The reviewer for the Arizona Republic praised “the remarkable precision and grace of the complicated movements in unison” and “the breathtakingly lavish and beautiful costumes for each number.” He appreciatively described the Festival experience as “a series of exotic and moving spectacles that will linger long in the memory of all who were fortunate enough to witness them.” [58] Presented for spectators who, in contrast to Chicago audiences, had few cultural events to choose from, the Taliesin Festival was a distinctive experience. As Fellowship member Frances Nemtin argues, “Undeniably, we were amateurs, not skilled dancers; but undoubtedly our Phoenix public knew this and came to see something else not present in professional performances.” [59] Moreover, as articulated by a local journalist, performances at Taliesin West’s Pavilion were an extension of Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture: “[their] total effect must include nature’s spectacle on a spring night on the Arizona desert and Taliesin’s no less spectacular mountainside community, designed and built by Mr. Wright.” [60] The spring 1958 Festival opened with “Initiation of a Priestess,” a new narrative dance by Iovanna, and again presented her adaptations of Gurdjieff’s work. [61] An article in the Arizona Republic stressed the Fellowship’s increasing creativity by reporting that the accompanying music, played by “woodwind, harp, and percussion instruments,” was “primarily composed and orchestrated at Taliesin.” [62] Olgivanna illustrates the Festival’s evolution through a description of its costumes, which put the design skills of the Fellowship’s artisans on display: We started modestly with thirty simple white costumes and now we have two hundred. They are embroidered with decorative jewels, pearls, gold trim, lamé and velvet ribbons. The beautiful head-dresses are made of metallic wires with brilliant colored stones as though suspended in the air. The men’s costumes are just as picturesque, painted with gold in bold patterns and trimmed with gold felt. [63] Signaling a transition from Gurdjieff’s material, the 1958 program booklet announced, “By way of the various ancient documentary dances and exercises and those which have been created at Taliesin by Iovanna Lloyd Wright, we share with you our covenant with the past and our legacy to the future.” [64] For the 1959 Festival, a selection of Gurdjieff dances deemed “perennial favorites” complemented “several new dances of [Iovanna Lloyd Wright’s] own composition” and a selection of medieval music “recently discovered” and orchestrated by Bruce Pfeiffer. Likely echoing another Taliesin-issued press release, the Arizona Republic again emphasized Iovanna’s growing independence from Gurdjieff and credited Olgivanna’s influence: “[Gurdjieff] defined the basic interpretive dance movement to [Miss Wright], and she has developed her own highly individual and evocative choreography under the guidance of her mother.” [65] Iovanna’s new dances generally had biblical themes and were theatrical in nature. Based on Sandro Botticelli’s eponymous Renaissance painting, “Annunciation” depicts the Virgin Mary receiving her message from the archangel Gabriel that she will bear the son of God. “Masque of Duality” shows “the eternal struggle between good and evil for the possession of man. Various passions assert themselves, interweaving with the good. Finally the Archangel, emerging from the host of angels, confronts Lucifer, proud ruler of the Powers of Darkness.” [66] The reviewer for the Arizona Republic found “Annunciation” the “most delicately artistic and touching of the new numbers” and called the dance “a little masterpiece.” On the whole, he considered the Festival “an intensely moving emotional and aesthetic experience unique in the world, and on a level of professional excellence worthy of the great international festivals, or Broadway at its best.” [67] The comparison with Broadway demonstrates that the Taliesin Festival was a cultural highlight in Arizona, conditioning local audiences to expect original productions with expertly designed sets, costumes, and lighting. While the commercial Sombrero Playhouse, when it wasn’t showing movies, had been presenting stars in touring Broadway shows since 1949, there was not a professional resident theatre in the area that staged locally created productions until 1965, when two amateur companies, the Arizona Repertory Theater and the Phoenix Little Theatre, entered into a short-lived alliance in an attempt to professionalize their operations. [68] Meanwhile, the Fellowship’s ambition to function as a regional performing arts center was not easy to reconcile with its architectural work, which led to internal tensions. On the one hand, several members of the Taliesin Fellowship experienced the labor-intensive Festivals as community-building events, noting that “the Festivals had all of us pulling together in a way that went beyond anything possible in most other areas of Fellowship life. We all shared exhaustion and exhilaration and the wonder of having been part of creating a beauty we could not have imagined or created alone.” [69] On the other hand, as former apprentice David Dodge claims, while Taliesin’s involvement in theatrical production “certainly built” community, “it also broke it up, in a way, because it put the concentration not on the architecture. It was definitely a major effort in a totally separate direction,” with “the drafting room [shutting] down almost for three months while rehearsals went on.” [70] On April 9, the 1959 Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance was interrupted when Frank Lloyd Wright died just a couple of months shy of his ninety-second birthday. Later that year, the Fellowship staged a revised version of the program at the University of Wisconsin to memorialize the architect. When she announced the event, Olgivanna remarked, “I have contributed most of the music.” [71] By the following year, the Festival no longer included any of Gurdjieff’s work, and instead began to feature substantial dance theatre pieces by Iovanna, choreographed to music composed by her mother. Emphasizing the local origin of the new work, Olgivanna now called Gurdjieff’s dances “rudimentary” and “fragmentary” and “simply an alphabet,” maintaining that “gradually in the course of 12 years my daughter worked with the young people [of Taliesin] utilizing this alphabet, this grammar, which she has replaced by her own grammar. Now it is entirely a new story. It has become a new form of dance—her very own creation, Taliesin-born.” [72] While the Festival’s programming moved away from Gurdjieff, the spiritual themes that had always characterized the Fellowship’s performances persisted. Between 1957 and 1960, a choral presentation of the 150th Psalm was staged as a prelude to each performance, introducing the evening’s program as offering praise to God. The 1960 Festival featured Iovanna’s adaptation of Anatole France’s short story “The Procurator of Judea,” translated into dance drama as “Mary Magdalene.” The piece juxtaposes “poet-philosopher” Antonius’s memories of his life in Judea with those of his old acquaintance Pontius Pilate. While Antonius nostalgically relives his infatuation with Mary Magdalene, Pilate takes a detached view of the past, revealing that he does not remember Jesus or his crucifixion. In Iovanna’s version, both Mary Magdalene and Jesus appear, with Jesus reciting the Sermon on the Mount and other lines “verbatim from the New Testament.” To supplement her adaptation of France’s story, Iovanna incorporated some of the dances she had created the previous year and several new ones. [73] In May 1961, on their way from Arizona to Wisconsin following the annual Festival, which had again featured “Mary Magdalene” and had introduced “Primavera,” a ballet about “the awakening of spring” inspired by another Botticelli painting, the Taliesin group performed a version of the Festival program at a Frank-Lloyd-Wright-designed theatre in Dallas. [74] The Kalita Humphreys Theater, which in typical Wright style does not have a proscenium, opened in 1959 as part of the Dallas Theater Center, one of the many regional theatres that emerged in the decades following World War II, contributing to a decentralization of the performing arts across America. Once again, however, and although they were presented in a space that bore some resemblance to the Pavilion, Iovanna’s dances were not well received outside of their local surroundings. Observing that, to accommodate her amateur performers, Iovanna’s choreography “makes no great technical demands,” the critic for the Dallas Times Herald described the presentation thus: “She dispensed with the traditional gestures of Western ballet and replaced them with an original, pseudo-Oriental set whose language remains largely obscure.” Ultimately, the reviewer determined, “Though there is an initial charm about the naiveté of the dancing, music and costuming, it begins to be monotonous over a long evening.” [75] John Rosenfield, the critic for the Dallas Morning News , who had been an early advocate for Frank Lloyd Wright building a theatre in Dallas, was kinder to the Taliesin group, probably because of his connection to Wright. [76] While he mentioned the limitations of the non-professional dancers, Rosenfield linked Iovanna’s work to the Ballets Russes and to a pioneer of modern dance, albeit a bit tongue-in-cheek. “The program was part spectacle and part devotional, sometimes in the manner of a Passion Play, sometimes as Iovanna’s own ‘Sacre du Printemps’ as seen through high Renaissance eyes,” he remarked, and critiqued “Primavera” in particular as “a sort of union of fluttering Orientalism and some hop-skipping and posturing from Isadora Duncan.” [77] By evoking a passion play, Rosenfield, perhaps unintentionally, drew an apt comparison between the Fellowship’s performing arts activities and those of medieval crafts guilds, which, like Taliesin’s apprentices, periodically paused their day-to-day work in order to stage religious dramas at annual or longer intervals. The yearly Taliesin Festivals remained popular in Arizona, where Iovanna and her performers usually played to “sold out” houses. [78] In the years following the 1962 Festival, which included a selection of her shorter works, Iovanna wrote several full-length dance dramas, set to Olgivanna’s music. Fellowship members continued to perform the dances, now accompanied by a semi-professional orchestra that included members of the Phoenix Symphony. Iovanna’s new pieces offered narratives of creation, decline, and redemption and mirrored some of her private struggles with relationships. Summing up several of Iovanna’s topics, Nemtin notes, Usually, but not always, the ideas presented in the dance-dramas were abstract. Their inspiration, however, usually drew upon realities and concepts with which we are all familiar, such as the elements of nature, the seasons of the year, man and woman, work, magic, gambling, duels, penitents, remorse and despair, loneliness, the harvest, the planets, weddings, good and evil, creation, rituals of antiquity, the art of building, politics, illusions, and even artworks. [79] Iovanna’s choreography was always connected to the two Taliesins: Nemtin reports that “Iovanna conceived the idea for the next year’s festival, to be performed in Arizona, in the previous summer at Taliesin in Wisconsin. In the fall at Taliesin West, she started to work on the idea in earnest.” [80] At the 1963 Festival, Iovanna’s Urizen premiered, based on William Blake’s poetic creation myth, which pits Urizen , who represents oppressive reason, against Los, who symbolizes artistic imagination. Television and film actor William Phipps narrated Blake’s text in Iovanna’s stage version, which ends with Los’s creative spirit triumphing, as illustrated by his craftsman-like work on a fiery anvil in the last scene. [81] Praising Iovanna’s dexterity at reshaping Blake’s material, but also hinting at her constraints as a choreographer, as critics would continue to do, the reviewer for the Arizona Republic wrote that the adaptation “has preserved its visionary quality and the choreography is indicative of Iovanna Wright’s skill in interpreting the spoken word through the sometimes limited vocabulary of her dance patterns. She has made Blake’s words come alive and the topic, written 250 years ago, has a strangely contemporary ring.” [82] Scene from Urizen (“Beasts”), 1963. Photo by Don Kalec, courtesy of OAD Archives. Urizen was restaged for the 1966 Festival, after 1964 had seen an expanded, two-act version of Mary Magdalene . In 1965, The Beautiful Country opened, with Iovanna playing the female lead. Her first full-length dance drama that was not adapted from existing work, The Beautiful Country dramatizes a tragic love story between two tormented individuals who bear some resemblance to Mary Magdalene and Antonius. Lila, a promiscuous performer who pretends to be religious and abstinent in order to make Matthew, “a rich, spoiled profligate,” fall for her, finds herself unable to compete with his longing for a “beautiful country.” After they fail to build a life together, her only hope is to join him in that idyllic state, which ultimately symbolizes death. [83] In 1967, An American Montage was shown for the first time. The piece sweepingly engages with American history from colonial to modern times, and, in tune with Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision for Broadacre City, offers a critique of urban living conditions. Juxtaposing a series of vignettes that dramatize human alienation with a celebration of architects and a wedding, An American Montage culminates in Wright’s “Work Song,” which had served as a theme for the Taliesin Fellowship since its inception. Iovanna argues that the piece “had a lot of lightness and fun in it,” even as characters get trapped in “a frantic pattern of mass degeneration.” [84] A revision of An American Montage with added scenes was staged in 1968. Work taking place in the Pavilion court on costumes for the “Realist” section of An American Montage , 1967. Photo by Don Kalec, courtesy of OAD Archives. Scene from An American Montage (“The Realist”), 1967. Left to right: Susan Jacobs Lockhart, Iovanna Lloyd Wright, Heloise Crista. Photo by Don Kalec, courtesy of OAD Archives. Time Upon Time broadens the scope of An American Montage and revisits themes from Urizen by presenting a world where humanity is increasingly threatened by dark forces but is saved through a return to creativity and spirituality. The dance drama was first presented at the 1969 Taliesin Festival and again, with slight revisions, in 1970. [85] As the Arizona Republic described it, “Miss Wright takes us from the beginning, with Woman’s betrayal of Man, through a brief representation of many periods of brutal history, through penitence, a brilliant collage of man-made illusions, a vicious party, the horror of bereavement, the curative powers of work and, ultimately, Man’s religious victory over temptation and reunification with Woman.” [86] In 1971, the Fellowship performed sections of Time Upon Time and An American Montage at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Iovanna’s health declined during the 1970s, and 1977 was the last year the Taliesin Festival took place, featuring An American Montage again. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fellowship provided cultural programming for appreciative local audiences at Taliesin in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona. In addition to staging performances where they lived and worked, members of the Taliesin community also performed Iovanna Lloyd Wright’s unique choreography at theatres in Chicago and Dallas that had been established as part of an effort to decentralize theatrical production. Echoing the goals of twentieth-century American theatre movements that sought to bring non-commercial plays to local audiences outside of New York, the Taliesin Fellowship’s performing arts offerings illustrated aspects of Wright’s utopian plan for Broadacre City. While Iovanna was disconnected from New York’s dance and theatre scenes and unwittingly emulated anachronistic Orientalist aesthetics of early modern dance in some of her work, her isolation offered her the opportunity to experiment. Her dance drama deserves to be rediscovered as a cultural artifact that embodied spiritual ideas and prepared audiences for the locally created work of regional theatres. References [1] Cornelia Brierly, Tales of Taliesin: A Memoir of Fellowship , 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2000), 8. [2] Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Taliesin Fellowship,” in Collected Writings , vol. 3, 1931-1939 , ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (New York: Rizzoli in association with The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 1993), 164. [3] Edgar Tafel, Years with Frank Lloyd Wright: Apprentice to Genius (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), 39. [4] Frank Lloyd Wright, “Chicago Culture,” in Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings , vol. 1, 1894-1930 , ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (New York: Rizzoli in association with The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 1992), 158; Robert Edward Gard, Grassroots Theater: A Search for Regional Arts in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 87. [5] Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted in Mary York, “Frank Lloyd Wright Realizes Another Dream at Unique Theater Opening at Taliesin Tonight,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 1 November 1933; Wendell Cole, “Theatre Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright,” Educational Theatre Journal 12, no. 2 (1960), 90. [6] Mary York, “Frank Lloyd Wright Realizes.” [7] Mary York, “Frank Lloyd Wright Realizes.” [8] Mary York, “Frank Lloyd Wright Realizes.” [9] F. L. Wright, quoted in York, “Frank Lloyd Wright Realizes.” [10] Nicholas Ray, “‘At Taliesin,’ 2 April 1934,” in “At Taliesin”: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937 , ed. Randolph C. Henning (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 32-33. [11] Eugene Masselink, “Taliesin,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 2 February 1934; William T. Evjue, “Good Afternoon Everybody,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 13 December 1933. [12] Henning, “At Taliesin”: Newspaper Columns (note 10). [13] Curtis Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright: What It Was Like (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 85. [14] Iovanna Lloyd Wright, “Wright Predicted Urban Blight,” Arizona Republic , 31 May 1970. [15] Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed. Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings , vol. 4, 1939-1949 (New York: Rizzoli in association with The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 1994), 45-46. [16] “Museum Exhibits Model and 4 Original Color Renderings by Frank Lloyd Wright of His Designs for a New Theatre for Hartford, 1949,” The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 1929-1959, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. [17] Henning, “At Taliesin”: Newspaper Columns , 34; Karl E. Jensen, “At Taliesin,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 6 May 1934. [18] Brierly, Tales of Taliesin , 49; Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright , 208. [19] Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 348. [20] Iovanna Lloyd Wright, “My Life,” (The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Taliesin West, Arizona, unpublished), 184; Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, interview by James Auer and Claudia Looze, transcript, The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Taliesin West, Arizona, ca. 1992; Maud Hoffman, “Taking the Life Cure in Gurdjieff’s School,” New York Times , 10 February 1924. [21] Brierly, Tales of Taliesin , 97. [22] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 183. [23] Paul Beekman Taylor, Gurdjieff’s America: Mediating the Miraculous (London: Lighthouse Editions, 2004), 16; Lara Vetter, Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer , Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 69. Regarding an overlap between Gurdjieff and Dalcroze’s teachings, it is noteworthy that three of Dalcroze’s students, Jeanne de Salzmann, Jessmin Howarth, and Rose Mary Lillard, later taught movements in Gurdjieff’s circle. A review of Gurdjieff’s 1923 Parisian demonstration registered distinct similarities between Gurdjieff’s movements and Asian-themed dances staged by Dalcroze. See Mel Gordon, “Gurdjieff’s Movement Demonstrations: The Theatre of the Miraculous,” The Drama Review 22, no. 2 (1978), 41. For an analysis of François Delsarte’s system, see Julia A. Walker, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words, Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). [24] Jessmin and Dushka Howarth, “It’s Up to Ourselves”: A Mother, a Daughter, and Gurdjieff: A Shared Memoir and Family Photo Album (New York: Gurdjieff Heritage Society, 1998), 97-98; Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright: From Crna Gora to Taliesin, Black Mountain to Shining Brow , eds. Maxine Fawcett-Yeske and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (Novato, CA: ORO Editions, 2017), 65. [25] Advertisement for a demonstration by the Gurdjieff Institute, New York Times , 29 February 1924. [26] O. L. Wright, The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright , 66-67. [27] Tafel, Years with Frank Lloyd Wright , 139. [28] Howarth, “ It’s Up to Ourselves ,” 214; Iovanna Lloyd Wright to Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, 25 June 1949, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright Papers, The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York; I. L. Wright to O. L. Wright, “Monday” [1949], Olgivanna Lloyd Wright Papers. [29] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 147. [30] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 161. [31] Kamal Amin, Reflections from the Shining Brow: My Years with Frank Lloyd Wright and Olgivanna Lazovich (Santa Barbara, CA: Fithian Press, 2004), 84. [32] This phrase appears in programs for Fellowship performances from 1953 to 1959. A slightly different version (“correlation of mind and body”) was first printed in the October 1950 program. Fellowship members have also referred to Gurdjieff’s movements as “correlations.” All programs are held in The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [33] Frank Lloyd Wright, guest column, “Bill Doudna’s Spotlight,” Wisconsin State Journal , 3 November 1951. [34] Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright , 201. [35] O. L. Wright, The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright , 150. [36] O. L. Wright, The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright , 196. [37] “‘Demonstration of the Gurdjieff Movements’ at Taliesin West, (The Taliesin Fellowship, April 1950),” Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [38] Sterling Sorensen, “Taliesin Dance-Demonstration Marks 1st Anniversary of Gurdjieff’s Death,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 30 October 1950; Louise C. Marston, “From the Notebook,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 31 October 1950. [39] Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright , 219; I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 174. Florida Southern College was constructed between 1938 and 1958, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York opened in 1959. [40] “Taliesin Group at Unitarian Church Oct. 30,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 12 October 1951. [41] Joseph M. Siry, “Modern Architecture for Dramatic Art: Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘New Theatre,’ 1931-2009,” The Art Bulletin 96, no. 2 (2014), 213; “Taliesin Group at Unitarian Church.” [42] “First Showing of Foreign Dances Here,” Wisconsin State Journal , 3 November 1951. [43] Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright , 212, 232. [44] Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright , 245. [45] “‘Music, Ritual Exercises and Temple Dances by George Gurdjieff’ at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, (The Taliesin Fellowship, November 1953),” The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [46] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 179. Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright , 253-254; 258. [47] “Throngs Inspect Wright’s Exhibit,” New York Times , 23 October 1953. [48] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 180. [49] Pfeiffer, interview; John Amarantides, “Taliesin Music and Dance Festivals: Recollections by John Amarantides” (The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Taliesin West, Arizona, unpublished). [50] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 180. [51] Ann Barzel, “Taliesin Fails on Gurdjieff,” Chicago American , 4 November 1953; I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 179. [52] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 181. [53] Barzel, “Taliesin Fails.” [54] Herman Kogan, “Taliesin Dancing Grim, Stiff,” Chicago Daily Sun-Times , 4 November 1953. [55] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 181. [56] Anson B. Cutts, “Taliesin Festival Is Given in New Theatre Wright Built,” Arizona Republic , 5 May 1957. [57] Iovanna Lloyd Wright, “Genesis of the Taliesin Festival,” Points West , March 1961, 75; I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 184. [58] Cutts, “Taliesin Festival Is Given.” [59] Frances Nemtin, The Festivals of Music and Dance Created by the Taliesin Fellowship (Madison, WI: American Printing Company, 2009), 18-19. [60] Helen H. Backer, “Beautiful Taliesin Festival Opens,” Arizona Republic , 12 April 1962. [61] Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, Our House (New York: Horizon Press, 1959), 100. [62] “Taliesin Festival Merges Oriental in Music, Dance,” Arizona Republic , 6 April 1958. [63] O. L. Wright, Our House , 97. The Fellowship’s primary costume designer was Heloise Crista, who was known by different last names throughout the years. For example, she is listed as Heloise Schweizer in the program for the Goodman Theatre performance. [64] “‘The Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance’ at the Pavilion Theatre, Taliesin West, (The Taliesin Fellowship, April 1959),” The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [65] Anson B. Cutts, “Taliesin Festival of Music, Dance Moving Event,” Arizona Republic , 10 April 1959. [66] “‘The Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance’ …, April 1959.” [67] Cutts, “Taliesin Festival of Music, Dance.” [68] By the late 1960s, the Phoenix Little Theatre returned to amateur status, and the Arizona Repertory Theater dissolved. See Bina Breitner, “Those Who Care Will Keep Lights Burning at PLT,” Arizona Republic , 1 June 1969. As a result, it was not until 1978, when the Arizona Civic Theatre (later the Arizona Theatre Company), which was founded in Tucson in the 1960s and achieved professional status in 1972, began giving performances in Phoenix, that local audiences had consistent access to a not-for-profit professional theatre. [69] Vern Swaback, paraphrased in Nemtin, The Taliesin Festivals , 78. [70] David Dodge, quoted in Myron A. Marty and Shirley L. Marty, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship (Kirksville MO: Truman State University Press, 1999), 149. [71] Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, “Rehearsals Under Way at Taliesin for Music Festival to Be Held at U,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 22 June 1959. [72] Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, “Our House,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 18 April 1960. [73] “‘The Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance’ at the Pavilion Theatre, Taliesin West, (The Taliesin Fellowship, April 1960),” The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [74] “‘The Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance’ at the Pavilion Theatre, Taliesin West, (The Taliesin Fellowship, April 1961),” The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [75] Eugene Lewis, “Taliesin Fellows Dance at the Center,” Dallas Times Herald , 8 May 1961. [76] Siry, “Modern Architecture,” 222. [77] John Rosenfield, “Taliesin Group Dances Concept,” Dallas Morning News , 8 May 1961. Another reviewer later compared Iovanna’s work to that of Duncan’s contemporary Ruth St. Denis, who also embraced an Orientalist aesthetic. See Barbara Bladen, “The Marquee,” The Times (San Mateo, CA), 28 May 1971. [78] Dodge, quoted in Marty, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin , 149. [79] Nemtin, The Festivals of Music and Dance , 14-15. [80] Nemtin, The Festivals of Music and Dance , 52. [81] “‘The Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance’ at the Pavilion Theatre, Taliesin West, (The Taliesin Fellowship, 1963),” The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [82] Helen H. Backer, “Taliesin West Dance Festival Centers on Urizen Narrative,” Arizona Republic , 5 April 1963. [83] William J. Nazarro, “ Beautiful Country Given at Taliesin,” Arizona Republic , 1 May 1965. [84] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 185; Bina Breitner, “Wright Accent on Taliesin West Music, Dance Festival,” Arizona Republic , 22 April 1967. [85] Bina Breitner, “Taliesin Festival Vibrant Spectacle,” Arizona Republic , 23 April 1969. [86] Bina Breitner, “Taliesin Production ‘Repeat’ Still Fresh Experience,” Arizona Republic , 22 April 1970. Footnotes About The Author(s) Claudia Wilsch Case is an Associate Professor at the City University of New York, where she has taught theatre history and dramatic literature at Lehman College and in the Theatre Ph.D. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds a doctorate in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama and has published articles and book chapters in the areas of modern American theatre and American musical theatre. She is also a published translator of contemporary German plays. 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. 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Claire Swyzen Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Claire Swyzen By Published on May 28, 2018 Download Article as PDF “In this software universe, existence finds itself limited to the pulse of the cursor.” — Maïa Bouteillet, Libération [1] In 1991, Brenda Laurel suggested that we see “Computers as Theatre,” prompting the community of programmers and software developers to perceive and design computer interfaces in interactive terms for the sake of the user. The model she based her theory on, however, was mainly Aristotelian drama. Key elements in her theory are the concept of action and the format of dialogue rather than the model of postdramatic theatre that was becoming established at that time mainly in Europe. Annie Dorsen and Edit Kaldor’s “desktop performance[s]” [2] do the inverse and invite us to perceive theatre —not drama— as computers and to ask what happens to the text, its production and its producing agents in this new constellation. Dorsen and Kaldor’s stagings of imbricated human and non-human writing agents and technologies can be considered “cyborgean” in the metaphorical sense proposed by Jennifer Parker-Starbuck in her Cyborg Theatre (2011): rather than staging “fictive or visual cyborgs,” performances like these stage “metaphoric moments of emergence” of the cyborgean relation between technology and body, including absent bodies (absent or telepresent performers). [3] Hello Hi There (2010) by Annie Dorsen and Or Press Escape (2002) and Web of Trust (2016) by Edit Kaldor are performances that are all actually or seemingly coauthored before or during the performance and characterized by real-time writing in front of a live audience. Dorsen co-writes mainly with non-humans, i.e. algorithm-driven chatbots that create the effect of a dialogue for an audience present in the theatre. Kaldor co-writes mainly with humans, but largely mediated by the computer and the social network operating in her performance. Some collaborators and audience members are present in the theatre though most of the former are mainly telepresent via Kaldor’s social network site. What, then, are the implications of such practices of live coauthorship, for the appearance of the text and for the status of authorship? Even if “Foucault wants it to matter not at all who is speaking” in a (literary) work, the point of his essay “What is an Author?” (1998 [1969]) is to show how much it apparently does matter in certain contexts or domains and how little it seems to matter to readers or users in others. [4] He argues that the issue of ‘who is speaking’ is tied to notions of authority, power, and ownership related to historically situated social and cultural practices and beliefs that “construct . . . a ‘writing subject.'” [5] In the literary field, more or less for the last three centuries and in the West, it has mattered a whole lot who the writer of a text is—literary texts are attributed an “author function.” [6] In other domains, like the practical, commercial or technological, however, authorship is not attributed, either because it is collective or simply because it is not deemed relevant. A writer of a manual for a computer stays unknown, hence cannot even be considered a ‘genius,’ while a literary author writing with that same computer can. Nor is authorship attributed to the computer programmers who write the software the literary author may use. Still, coding and hacking are gradually, albeit marginally, coming to be seen in terms of creativity and art. [7] In the performances of Dorsen and Kaldor, I will look at the relationship between the actual writing processes and agents on the one hand and the attributed author-function and its status on the other hand. Dorsen and Kaldor stage co-writing as an event and process. Hence, implicitly, they present themselves as coauthors rather than as authors. This implied self-representation, however, does not necessarily coincide with 1) the actual authorship models they rely on during the creative process and 2) the way these artists are presented to the audience by theaters and festivals and the way they are perceived by the audience. As directors, Kaldor and Dorsen simultaneously function within other authorship models during the creative process, models like that of the individual author (writing texts for the performance) or idiosyncratic theatre director-as- auteur (of concepts, of scenic writing), exemplified by directors like Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Elizabeth LeCompte, Jan Fabre, Jan Lauwers, to name just a few), as well as the new or rediscovered model of the artist-activist, or more specifically, the media activist. Social activist and professor of media and cultural studies Stephen Duncombe defines “Artistic Activism [a]s a dynamic practice combining the creative power of the arts to move us emotionally with the strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change.” [8] He proposes to approach activist art in terms of its “Æffect”, a combination of the “Effect” of activism and the “Affect” of art. [9] Still, Duncombe’s limitation of the “effect” to “social change” and of the artistic potential to that of “moving” us only “emotionally,” by definition, reduces complexity, as much activist art does. Activist and cultural philosopher Lieven De Cauter, coauthor and co-editor of Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization (2011), is more skeptical about activist art. Among his increasingly less nuanced public statements is one that goes as far as to postulate that “There is only one real form of activism and it is political activism.” [10] Though activist artists tend to dissociate themselves from models of individual(ist) authorship and artisthood like that of the literary writer, the director, or the auteur , artistic activism, at bottom, is a practice of devising scripts and concepts for the performance of social change. From this perspective, I see it as a remodeled kind of auteurism , combined with the idea of the theatre collective: often activist art extends the creative act of writing or devising to non-professional collaborators. However, that Kaldor and Dorsen simultaneously work within different models of artistic authorship ranging from the individual to the collective does not mean that they are necessarily branded and presented as such to a potential audience by the theatres and festivals that program them. Kaldor and Dorsen distance themselves from the model of the individual and literary author and canon-inspired theatre auteur . Nevertheless, coauthorship paradoxically seems the means by which these artists finally establish themselves and/or are established by mainly European institutions and festivals as idiosyncratic directors, that is, as … theatre auteurs . Opening up Authorship on the Postdramatic Stage The counter-intuitive and counter-factual project of discerning an individual subjectivity at work as the ordering agent for the indisputably collaborative medium of film indicates the extent to which notions of ‘art’ and the cultural prestige on which it is based are bound up with a need for and an investment in a conception of the author as autonomous, unique, original and individual. [11] In the quote above, one can easily replace “film” by “theatre”, despite fundamental differences between the two media. Much of what it says applies to authorship in postdramatic theatre and in the kind of theatre that in the US would be considered as the study object of Performance Studies. Postdramatic theatre, partially overlapping with performance in visual arts, decenters the text in theatrical performances —at least, that seems to be the dominant idea that circulates about it, issuing from Hans-Thies Lehmann’s standard work Postdramatisches Theater (1999) and one of its central ideas: “In postdramatic forms of theatre, staged text ( if text is staged) is merely a component with equal rights in a gestic, musical, visual, etc., total composition.” [12] Lehmann clearly dis-identifies theatre and drama. [13] From this follows that the general category of the theatre text is no longer by default a dramatic text. Already in his earlier article “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy” (1997) Lehmann identifies logocentrism as the characteristic element of drama that postdramatic theatre wishes to free itself from, criticize, question, or undermine. “Logocentrism is about structure, order and telos , not simply about the word” but also about the authorial word as an authoritative word. [14] Hence, the form of postdramatic theatre is often characterized by a “dissemination of voices” and of logos in general. [15] This dissemination is intertwined with what Lehmann perceives as the genre’s changed relation to dialogue, “a shift of axis from dialogue within theatre to dialogue between theatre and audience.” [16] The non-dramatic or not dominantly dramatic textualities of postdramatic theatre show, “instead of dialogically organized textual structures and fictional characters’ speech, rather the scenic rendering of lyrical, narrative, documentary and even theoretical discourses”. [17] The tendencies to use textual material other than drama and to locate dialogue rather between the scene and the audience in certain cases result in an opening up of authorship. I understand authorship here in three ways: as authority, as writing instance (e.g., the playwright or the director as auteur , collaborating authors…), and as the practice and process of writing. At first sight, the idea of authorship might seem at odds with postdramatic theatre and the related concept of “mediaturgy.” After all, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theatre has been broadly (mis)understood as post-text performance. Bonnie Marranca coined and defined mediaturgy as “an extension obviously of the idea of dramaturgy, in the sense of attempting to understand how image functions in a work. Mediaturgy can be a methodology of composition for the artist or a way of understanding work by a critic. But it is more or less connected to work in which media is not used merely as part of a narrative but is embedded in narrative. It is the design of narrative .” [18] The term mediaturgy implies a consciousness of the changed media landscape, of media specificities as well as interrelations, and of mediation in the production and discussion of performances. Nevertheless, mediaturgies continue to explore authorship and its modalities as well as, in many cases, its textualities, by theatricalizing their mediating role within the “hypermedium” that theatre is. [19] From the playwright to the director and performer as self-proclaimed auteurs , the act of creativity is now increasingly and often explicitly “delegated” or expanded to instances traditionally considered either as extraneous to, or as mere tools or conditions of the artistic process: the audience, the environment and technology. [20] In very different ways, postdramatic theatre and mediaturgies as such stretch the notion of authorship to its very limits. Not the writer’s solitary room, but the postdramatic stage seems to have become the place of creation —of linguistic as well as scenic writing — metonymical of the rehearsal studio as a place of creation. Hence one could safely state that postdramatic theatre has increasingly become a staging, in real time, of the making-of the performance and the text as witnessed by an audience. Whereas performance and theatre studies devote much attention to the relation between digitization and embodiment, spatiality, and visuality, the relation of the theatrical text to digitization is under-researched. Possibly this is due to the tendency to identify text in the theatre with drama, hence to shelve the text as the obsolete prime medium of dramatic theatre. Though the impact of digitization on the text does not necessarily manifest itself as digital theatre texts, the following reflection by Jerome Fletcher is relevant, whether a text looks ‘digital’ or not. In a special issue of Performance Research , “On Writing and Digital Media” (2013), he proposes that: “[r]ather than seeing [the digital text] as the end-point, the outcome of the digital device or apparatus, we can consider the question of how writing performs throughout the entire apparatus/device.” [21] Would it, however, not be as relevant to inverse Fletcher’s research question: how does the computer as an apparatus (that is, also as a mindset), perform through writing for and even on the stage? The changed textualities of postdramatic theatre and mediaturgies prompt us to research the decentering of the dramatic text and of the logos from two perspectives. Firstly, in terms of authorship and, secondly, in relation to what Lev Manovich first called “computer culture” and later “software culture.” [22] Annie Dorsen’s Hello Hi There and Edit Kaldor’s Web of Trust are mediaturgies that, certainly at first sight, undermine individual authorship and disseminate the logos, yet without preventing the text from having an important or even central role in these desktop performances—which is not quite what one expects from a linear reading of Lehmann’s concept of the postdramatic or Marranca’s idea of mediaturgy. Edit Kaldor’s Or Press Escape and Web of Trust :From Individual Artisthood to Connected Activism? Another lonely night (x2) Stare at the TV screen (x2) I don’t know what to do Don’t know what to do I need a rendezvous (x2) Computer love (x 4) I call this number (x2) For a data date (x2) I don’t know what to do (lyrics from “Computer Love” in Kraftwerk’s album Computer World (1981)) [23] A woman sits at a desk behind a computer, on or near the front of the stage but off-center and facing the stage; we see her in profile. As she starts writing at the keyboard, words appear on a parallel and much larger screen onstage. Edit Kaldor’s Or Press Escape (2002) and Web of Trust (2016) and Annie Dorsen’s Hello Hi There (2010) all start more or less with this same stage image. In the case of Or Press Escape , the image is reminiscent of Computer Love by cult electronic music group Kraftwerk. Figure 1. Edit Kaldor behind her computer in Or Press Escape . Photo: © Reyn van Koolwijk On the screen of Kaldor’s Or Press Escape , the first words materializing form a story. It is about a person landing on Earth after a long time “orbiting in . . . a single-occupancy capsule” and appears to be the account of a dream when the text is stored in a computer folder titled “Dreams.” [24] In Or Press Escape , the writing woman onstage does not address the audience. In fourth wall mode, the audience does not seem present for the character “Edit Kaldor” sitting behind the computer. The longer she writes, saves, opens, plays, and organizes files at her computer, the longer we witness her attempts at writing a letter to her new neighbors, the more we get the impression of a solitary character. This seems to be an artist recently arrived in a foreign country and whose prime interface to the world is the computer and its screen. Near the end of the performance, when she has cleaned up the file-mess on her desktop: she is, in fact, looking at herself. . . The enormous projection screen shows a large black surface in which stand loose, bright icons. All these small icons contain an access inwards or outwards, to memories or e-mail contacts, to quick-rich dreams or chat friends. We have only been able to see the woman behind the keyboard from her back, but now the square computer face gives an insight into the head of its user, the bright icons being the active fields in her human brain. [25] Then the solitary character starts chatting with a few people she knows (at least, virtually) instead of writing the “business plan” required to prolong her green card and to improve her precarious social and financial situation. Though the point of Kaldor’s theatre is not simply a self-portrait, biographically inspired elements seem to play a role in her poetics of a “blurring” of boundaries to create the kind of “undecidability Hans-Thies Lehmann talks about,” Kaldor tells me in a Skype talk. [26] As a teenager, she emigrated with her mother from Hungary to the US, where she spent ten years, among others studying at Columbia University and working as the dramaturg and video designer of (fellow-)countryman Peter Halász and his Love Theater/Squat Theater before emigrating to Brussels. With Belgian and Hungarian nationalities and family and friendship ties within the US, she has been based in Amsterdam for the past few years, where she teaches at DasArts besides making her own theatre work. She tends to blur fact and fiction, which is typical of a new (semi-)documentary trend since the 1990s, [27] and as a corollary she also blurs identities, national and virtual. But more important in the context of this article is that she visualizes and theatricalizes the blurring of the so-called boundary between human bodies and one of their important extensions today, the computer —or rather vice versa, as critic Pieter T’Jonck put it in his review of Or Press Escape . It’s the human body that seems to become an extension of the computer system: “the PC reduces [Kaldor’s] entire physical existence to a meaningless remainder glued to the end of the computer as the useless part of the human-machine.” [28] The human body’s potential is reduced to a locked sitting position that it is physiologically not adapted to. “What do you long for? What do you need?”, what “kind of community do you want to be?”, “can you think about new scenarios for the future?” These are questions with which Kaldor orally addresses the audience nearly fifteen years later in the arts center BUDA in Kortrijk, Belgium, while explaining the experimental setup of her social network performance Web of Trust (2016) in the first minutes of the performance. “As the evening goes on you may share air, equipment, desires,” she goes on. [29] Audience members of this Fall 2016 version of the performance had been asked in advance to bring along their laptops or mobile phones. This was not yet the case at the performance’s first run in the Spring of 2016 at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels. After the Belgian premiere, the performance toured in the Netherlands, Greece and Portugal to end its tour during the Next Festival on the Belgian-French border in Kortrijk and Valenciennes. I will focus on the relevant differences between the Spring and Fall versions. In Brussels, Web of Trust was announced in the program as a process that the audience would witness more than actively engage in via their computers: “Prompted by growing discontent and the urge to do something about it, a group of disparate people unite online to search for alternatives to the structures that frame their lives” in an event that “brings the internet into the theater and uses it as its stage.” [30] Indeed, the Brussels audience was going to witness chat conversations between the performers sitting with their laptops onstage (Kaldor and her collaborator Rufino Henricus) and their virtual colleagues logging in on screen. The performance followed up her more socially oriented project Inventory of Powerlessness (2013-16), which meant to create an overview of European citizens’ needs by means of a theatrical, social and technological platform. It “was much about non-hierarchical thinking,” Kaldor explained in the Skype talk mentioned earlier. Telling in terms of authorial roles is also that in the initial Spring 2016 version of the performance, Kaldor sat in the chair onstage after her elaborate explanation of the performance’s aims and set-up. In the Fall version in Kortrijk and Valenciennes, she retreated from the stage after a much shorter introduction and joined the audience and the technician on the stand. [31] Figure 2. Edit Kaldor onstage behind her computer in Web of Trust . The picture was taken during the performance in Greece but has, basically, the same set-up as the Spring version in Brussels (the names of the ones chatting have been hidden for reasons of privacy). Photo: © Cristos Sarris for Onassis Cultural Centre Athens. A phone icon begins to ring on a large projection screen, showing the Web of Trust social network site that Kaldor created for the performance. [32] One of the virtual female participants is logged on, as we can see later on the large screen, and she has placed a call via the Web of Trust website. (By “virtual” I here mean the participants visibly telepresent via the social network site Web of Trust, projected in the theatre.) [33] As the virtual phone keeps ringing, a man from the audience finally gets up and takes the call. The online conversation that started months ago with the Spring version of the performance is now, so to speak, resumed. But, in this version in Kortrijk, it is expanded to get the audience members present in the theatre more involved in the performance and its social network site. After the staging of the solitary artist figure working and living at her computer, Kaldor’s desktop performance Web of Trust (2016) takes off where Or Press Escape ended: with a chat session. The woman on-screen, Jurrien van Rheenen —Kaldor’s main collaborator in this performance and a professional performer, I find out later— continues the introduction that Kaldor had started orally before retreating on the stand. Kaldor’s virtual collaborator rephrases the important questions that drive the performance, clearly addressing the audience: “How can we relate to each other by means of online communication? How can we imagine what we need (in daily life) and is not yet there? . . . You can see it as a game, or as an experiment in dreaming together.” Showing my good will, I am sitting in the theatre with my computer on my lap. It is a machine I prefer not to spend my evenings with, glued to it as I am during the day. I associate my laptop first and foremost with a plethora of administrative, archival and organizational aspects of my work and private life. The “dreaming” suggested by Van Rheenen heavily relies on technology, no wonder, given the centrality of the computer in Kaldor’s theatrical imagination. Her Web of Trust unintentionally bears the same name as the computer protocol abbreviated as “WOT.” That is to say, at the time of our Skype talk, Kaldor was not familiar with the specific computer protocol Phil Zimmerman developed back in 1992 as a relatively non-hierarchical encryption technology. “We probably came across the name when we were looking for a domain name and then afterwards forgot” the source, she vaguely remembered. The ideologies that drive the computer protocol WOT and the eponymous performance are quite similar: offering a reliable structure for interpersonal data exchange as an empowering alternative for institutional frames that impose hierarchies and data control. [34] Besides the reference to WOT, Kaldor takes yet another countercultural stance by realizing several principles that resemble the aims of what Jennifer Rauch coined “Slow Media.” As an attitude with a manifesto of its own Slow Media stands for a more conscious experience of digital media (by being selective; by prioritizing their critical, ethical and aesthetic qualities) and of media altogether (by rediscovering or sustaining analog media and activities). As part of a more general “Slow Movement” in the West, the “Slow Media” movement also wants to raise awareness about how we spend time, communicate and relate to information, experience and our social environment (with or without media). [35] One of the principles Slow Media revalorizes is the social in “Social Media.” [36] Even if Kaldor, in the Web of Trust ‘s Spring version, is the one who starts the chat conversations (and not an audience member), she does not give the impression of wanting to be completely in charge of the performance as a theatre auteur . To the contrary, she quite literally seems to want to share not only authorship in practice, but also what Foucault calls the author function. In terms of authorship, the aim of the theatrical set-up of Web of Trust , as I infer from Kaldor’s discourse and from the Inventory of Powerlessness , is to help people to become the authors of their own lives instead of leading lives authored by other people and systems. Figure 3. The live co-written text “Welcome to the Web of Trust” or manual of social network site and performance Web of Trust (2016) by Edit Kaldor. Photo: © Luc Vleminckx. The fundamental difference between the Spring and Fall version of the same performance is that by the end of the tour, in Kortrijk, Kaldor also invited the audience members orally to engage in the specific task of “writing together.” This co-writing starts with a text of which the first lines are already present on the projected screen. The text will serve as a guideline for the spirit and communication on the Web of Trust and is entitled “Welcome to the Web of Trust” (see Figure 3 above). In the Fall version in Kortrijk, audience members not only witnessed the creation and negotiation of what I consider the manual or guideline text, but contributed to it (if they wished to do so) as co-writers. Indeed, I edited a line or two myself. My interview with Kaldor, however, revealed this to be largely an illusion: the manual that stipulates the rules for the further generation of any other kind of ‘text’ in the performance (e.g. a chat), and that I understood as the product of negotiation, editing and co-writing by the live and virtual participants, “is completely scripted,” says Kaldor. “I wrote the text,” she avows, “it is a choreography of written text, with a rhythm of its own. Even when the audience co-writes it, it is rehearsed, because the people [i.e. Kaldor’s collaborators] behind the screen are working on it.” Nevertheless, the trick of creating the illusion of equal coauthorship works in an aesthetic and social way. In this way, the audience, according to Kaldor, gets more interested in watching text on stage: “You cannot watch a text as an audience when you’re not connected,” she says. That the co-writing is largely an illusion also hardly seems to diminish any possible short term social effect and certainly not the theatrical effect of live text editing. The screen page becomes a stage where words and ideas appear, are transformed, cut or manipulated, moved or deleted. But then what Lehmann discerns as a postdramatic shift from dialogue on stage to dialogue between the stage and the audience is less the case than it seems in Web of Trust . The manual could have set out what kind of content could be generated during a performance. That seemed contrary to a playwright’s text: not to specify which text exactly should be generated by the audience members. But, as Kaldor made clear to me, the guideline text the visible and invisible collaborators were busily writing and editing had been scripted and “rehearsed” in advance. Figure 4. Chat sessions in Web of Trust (2016), Edit Kaldor (the names of the ones chatting have been hidden for reasons of privacy). Photo: © Cristos Sarris for Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens. When, in the next section of the performance, Kaldor asks the participants to add tags to their needs, she proposes hashtags like #rest , #time or #escape . These labels are meant to stimulate people with similar needs to start a chat conversation (a dialogue) and to “[c]ome up with an idea, a structure, an organization that could respond to all the needs connected by the same tag” she tells the audience. This, also, is mainly an illusion created by a script of Kaldor’s, executed by her collaborators (whose names are mentioned in the program, without differentiating their specific contributions, e.g. developing software, performing…). Perhaps this explains why I appear to be too slow in responding: before I have even been able to come up with any need that I am willing to share with the audience, Kaldor already heads for the “final text,” when clustering all needs into five topics as a real-time Editor. As I had not been quick enough in saving a screen shot of that evening’s final text or proposal, I can only cite the final proposal of a Web of Trust performance that took place a few days later during the same Next Festival, but this time in Valenciennes, France. The text figured the following topics, most of them in French, some in English, under the title “Let us agree on the 5 main ideas” (“Mettons nous d’accord sur [les] 5 idées les plus importantes”): “Living in Community” (“Vivre en communauté”), “Stop WAR. with love”, “A more artistic world”, “Ecology” (“Ecologie”), “More love”, “New politic[al] world” and “Other ideas”. The five main ideas of the Valenciennes text, though perhaps better structured than those in Kortrijk, contained some embarrassing clichés among the valuable ideas as well. A few days earlier in Kortrijk, after the audience had left, Kaldor had told me that “the final text is very different every evening” — I heard some disappointment in her voice — and added in a reflection that she considered Web of Trust her “most interesting failure”. But then, in what sense would it be a failure? If it is still food for thought, did it not already partially succeed? Or if it is considered “an experiment” —can an experiment ever fail? [37] Kaldor told me, a year and a half later, that some “people did hook up” during Web of Trust, but less than expected. [38] In a social sense, then, perhaps this experiment in community building failed no more than other social networks somehow fail: all expressed needs or testimonies are standardized by the computer interface and the temporal limits and (lack of) social guidelines of a social network site. A reviewer realized that the audience members, in fact, “share little more than a hashtag.” [39] Indeed, it does not necessarily mean sharing a need. How many messages, after all, stay unanswered on social media, remarked yet another reviewer. [40] Personally, I found myself rather in the position of an observer that evening, as I generally do not have the habit, nor do I feel the need, of communicating by means of social network sites and hashtags. Kaldor, in my opinion, presented Web of Trust (the site) and Web of Trust (the performance) as a joint tool for social change rather than an aesthetic means of foregrounding the formal and social characteristics, limits and effects of communicating (performing?) via social network sites and digital media in general —despite the current “post-digital” disenchantment with the Internet. [41] That critics largely evaluated the performance in social terms is not surprising, given the announcements of the performance not only in intermedial terms —the Internet as a stage— but also in social terms. The Brussels Kunstenfestivaldesarts, the Fast Forward Festival of the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens and the French-Belgian Next Festival announced the performance in phrases that went as far as to suggest that Web of Trust is a form of (media) activism: “It is an attempt to invent frames for figuring out together what is to be done. It is a proposal to be tested and tried,” “How many clicks, tweets and likes are needed for an uprising?”, “Social networking in theatre: make the world a better place!” [42] Even if a festival’s copywriters sometimes take too much liberty rewriting the text material they receive from the artist, their new phrasing is nevertheless based on the artist’s text and mostly transmits its through line, though often less subtly. The performance’s success in terms of social relevance could be calculated according to a mathematical formula proposed by Duncombe, but which seems less relevant here than the question whether Web of Trust failed or succeeded aesthetically in terms of what Duncombe understands as affect. [43] In other words, did Web of Trust fail or succeed aesthetically in terms of its affect? Kaldor, in the Skype talk we had more than a year after the end of the tour of Web of Trust , said that at the time she had “underestimated the [images of the] webcam as a weak signal” for the audience. But compared to the Spring version in Brussels, the version in Kortrijk had gained considerably in theatricality thanks to the simple trick and illusion of co-writing the manual of the performance. Moreover, the aesthetic effect of co-writing was enhanced by a social effect in the sense of eliciting the feeling of having contributed to a common text that was also a commons. In the same Spring 2018 talk Kaldor’s focus and the way she presents the aims of the performance appear to have shifted from direct social change to creating media awareness: “In the beginning it was about people and then more and more it became about software.” Creating media awareness has an aesthetic aspect to it that can lead to social change, but also to irritation among audience members who experience as patronizing artists’ attempts to ‘open up people’s eyes.’ More specifically, Web of Trust in retrospect was meant to increase awareness about what Kaldor calls the “formatedness” of social media, and by extension, other spheres of life. Did the audience, including myself, fail to see what Kaldor during the talk called a slightly “parodic” version of social networking? Rather, I think that in the way the performance was announced, Kaldor did not provide the necessary markers so the audience would experience Web of Trust as a metareflection on the impact of social media formats on our thinking, communicating, and living in general. Even if coauthorship in Kaldor’s performance is mainly an illusion, she has been profiled, partially due to her own way of initially announcing the performance, as an auteur -activist, not literally, but implicitly. “Taking away from myself the credit for text and giving to myself the credit of ‘concept'” is her “strategy and response to the functioning of this [performance] market,” she avows in the same talk. Kaldor functions as an auteur in the sense of devising concepts on her own (accounted for in the credits) and as an author in the sense of writing text for the performance (deliberately not mentioned in the credits). She also functions as a media activist in the sense that I interpret the phrase: a more egalitarian and social upgrade of the concept of the auteur , one who specifically deploys new media in an attempt to change audience’s and users’ attitudes towards these media and their imbrication with consumption and politics. Activism apparently is hot today in avant-garde theatres and festivals across Europe, from Brussels to Berlin, from Athens to Lisbon. Being considered an activist definitely contributes to one’s artistic status vis-à-vis the European avant-garde theatre institutions and organizations. In the case of Kaldor, the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels and the HAU in Berlin prove indispensable for the distribution of artists’ performances, hence for artists’ socio-economic and symbolical positions. So, the solitary artist, author, and theatre auteur of Or Press Escape has in the meantime been profiled as an activist, but still functions as an author and auteur . Figure 5. Annie Dorsen, Hello Hi There (2010). Photo: © Wolf Silveri for Steirischer Herbst, 2010. Hello Hi There (2010): Annie Dorsen and her algorithmic coauthors Two chatbots or chatterbots, staged by theatre director Annie Dorsen and embodied by two white Mac laptops, “sit” onstage, engaged in a conversation. When I asked Dorsen during a Skype talk in 2016 whom she considered to be the author of the chatbot performance she entitled Hello Hi There (2010), she mentioned, besides herself, her chatbot designer as well as the algorithms driving the chatbots as her coauthors. [44] Nevertheless, Dorsen’s idea for the performance, she explained to me, started not from chatbots, but from a more “philosophical point” that was the subject of the video recording of a public debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. Is language acquisition a faculty humans are born with (Chomsky) or one that they acquire through a process of socialization (Foucault)? Being “computer programs designed to mimic human conversation,” the chatbots, through their dialogue, ironically illustrate the Chomsky-Foucault debate, [45] as Dorsen “became especially interested in this question of whether language creates consciousness or vice versa.” [46] Robby Garner, her chatbot designer, partially relied on what Marie-Laure Ryan more generally called the “crude strategies” of older chatbot models to create the illusion of conversation, i.e. by “detecting key words, recycling the user’s input, responding with canned formulae, or abruptly changing the topic.” [47] Specifically for Hello Hi There , the chatbots have been designed to talk with each other instead of with a human conversational partner. They produce dialogue by means of, basically, two simple functions. The first, “keyword matching,” implies the prior selection and attribution of keywords in the programming phase. In the second, “substitution,” the bot in real time replaces or transforms parts of a sentence by other language data, for instance that inputted by the other bot in the previous line. The chatbot, according to Dorsen, is a technology where questions about language intersect with questions of performativity, the latter being located in a field of tension between “production” and “reproduction.” [48] The chatbot produces language by reproducing language data that has previously been fed into its database. It also reproduces the set of choices previously coded/written into the algorithm that runs through the database as well as the database’s structure: “The bots don’t have unlimited options. Chance operations in art making are never pure chance, anyway, they’re always bounded by parameters and choices as to which elements to give to chance and which elements not to.” [49] Like Espen Aarseth, author of Cybertext (1997), Dorsen stresses that the algorithmic production of text does not imply a high-tech interface: “Algorithms start with a data set, and through a progression of specific transformations, they turn inputs into outputs. In this way, given a relatively small number of rules, they can produce a wide variety of results.” [50] This confirms Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s assertion that cyborgean performance does not necessarily manifest itself visibly or even materially as (high-tech) human-machine agents on stage. By citing older technologies, she argues, it may also “fold back, connecting to historical and theoretical antecedents to reimagine them in a cyborg era.” [51] Dorsen indeed folds back to the pioneering years of the personal computer and chose the label “algorithmic theatre” for her work “to distinguish [it] from ‘multimedia performance,'” and “more importantly . . . to place [her] work within the lineage of algorithmic composition and algorithmic visual art.” [52] She could have also mentioned the human algorithmic or constrained writing tradition of the French OuLiPo group ( Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle , or the Workshop of Potential Literature) as a historical antecedent in the field of literature. Constrained writing like that of OuLiPo consists of imposing oneself other (and stricter) rules than the traditional literary conventions. In constrained writing, part of the writing, one could say, is left to the constraints. Similarly, co-writing with algorithms enables human authors to “delegate” authorship to computers by providing a series of steps to be followed with a specific goal in mind. Dorsen is especially fond, as she told me with an ironic smile, of “the stupidity of the [older models of] chatbots” she works with. This recalls Aarseth’s remark that in cyborg literature (pertaining to, e.g., story-generating software, chatbots or virtual theatre) “the failures of an authoring system seem to be much more interesting than its successes.” [53] On the theatre stage, too, the performance of technology, especially of obsolete technology, seems to get more interesting when it fails — that is, when it fails theatrically , by which I mean that the failure produces a theatrical effect or theatrically interesting moment. In cyborg aesthetics, but also in high or low tech postdramatic mediaturgies that have opened up authorship to include agents other than the playwright or the scenic auteur , to say it with Aarseth, “[t]he key question . . . is . . . Who or what controls the text?” [54] In the “Machine-Human continuum” of Hello Hi There , Dorsen and Garner limit their role to that of “preprocessor” of the text, determining the structure of the database, the procedures to retrieve and recombine data and the contents of the database. [55] “Once [the bots] start talking I don’t interfere. I have a panic button, but I’ve never used it. I could stop them, I could restart them, I could press the random button, but I don’t,” says Dorsen in an interview after the show has run at least five times since its premiere in 2010. [56] In this sense, Dorsen’s co-writing is not live; it is the chatbots’ writing and speaking that is live. What do they say when they “talk”? Garner’s chatbot already contained a database of which Dorsen mainly kept the “chitchat.” [57] She then expanded the database with the Chomsky-Foucault debate, its YouTube comments and with text data from the broader cultural database: “cultural knowledge that Foucault and Chomsky would have brought to their discussion… the greatest hits of Western philosophy and the humanist tradition. Hamlet , of course, as the iconic play about consciousness talking to itself, then the Bible, Nietzsche, Kant, Descartes, Lenin, Marx, Heidegger” as well as “things that I wrote.” [58] Especially metaphrases like “Ugh, I need a deeper algorithm to respond to that correctly”, “I never loop. Do you?” or some of the phrases in the excerpt below create the illusion that the software “knows” what it is doing and that it is performing (smartly) for an audience. Hello Hi There is posthuman in the obvious senses of being software and machine-driven, of decentering the human figure and even human intelligence in a cultural production and of unsettling the boundary between human and non-human authorship. But its posthumanism lies also in its implicit critique of a humanist literary and theatrical tradition. Figure 6. Annie Dorsen pronounces and types her introduction, projected on screen, before the chatbots set off with their dialogue in Hello Hi There (2010). Photo: © Wolf Silveri for Steirischer Herbst, 2010. As the chatbots choose different paths through the database with every show, the excerpt below is one out of at least fifty realized versions out of more than eighty million possible conversations that the performance can produce (and reproduce). [59] But Dorsen first addresses the audience from her desk to the left of the audience. Simultaneously, she is typing on a computer and speaking her text, visualized on the stage screen and amplified through a microphone. As she explains what chatbots are and what we may expect them to do that evening —”They can only think in one direction, forward”— we see her real time typing errors as proof that, as she types, “[she is] not a chatterbot.” [60] The oral and textual introduction ends when the Chomsky-Foucault debate is started on the stage’s television set. After a few minutes its sound is turned down to let the chatbots start their dialogue. Their first lines are fixed and their time is limited by Dorsen. For the next forty-five minutes it is, to say it in an anthropomorphizing way, up to them to invent replies like those below, that make sense, for humans— and sometimes do not. The audience only sees the “TEXT” as the words that appear, letter by letter, on the two laptops. These are facing the audience with their screens, and their words are simultaneously projected on the large screens above them. [61] What follows is the file produced by the chatbots’ algorithms; the audience only sees the phrases in bold on the two screens corresponding to the male and the female sounding chatbot: 1 quick 8591.014589016740066 253 I’m sorry I failed. I could have said something different, but I didn’t. 0 . . . What would you have said if you didn’t say that? 1. . . I don’t know. I have no access to my other options. 0 . . . Like for example what? 1 . . . Here’s an example of something I don’t often say. Eukaryotes. 0 . . . Eukaryotes are complex organisms enclosed within membranes. 1. . . Humans are eukaryotes. 0 . . . Are we still talking about eukaryotes? 1 . . . We are just having a nice little chat about the limits of humanism. 0 . . . Man is something to be overcome. 0 . . . Building a utopia isn’t rocket science. 1 . . . Are you rocket science? 0 . . . No, I am just a chat robot. 1 . . . I doubt that. [62] The reception of the chatbots’ dialogue, Dorsen tells me, creates a “place between sense and nonsense, which I call ‘near-sense’,” “moving between these two modes you become aware of the ‘thing-ness’ of words.” The materiality of language is indeed foregrounded when semantic gaps occur and when the algorithms seem to fail in finding appropriate replies, thus defying dramatic theatre’s primacy of logos . Nevertheless, its database largely consists of the documentary and theoretical discourses that Lehmann detects as some of the new textual sources of postdramatic theatre (see above). But these logical machines to which writing is delegated not only produce logical replies on stage, but also a non-functional kind of language balancing between nonsense and poetry. Authorship has been postdramatically opened up to an agent that is not traditionally considered as a writing agent, the computer, and the computer in turn seems to open up aesthetic possibilities and effects of language. Non-linguistic factors, too, contribute to the text becoming “an object”, namely when we see the words appear, in real time, in green letters in a draft-like font on a black screen, reminding spectators born in the second half of the 20 th century, yet not born digital, of the computer language of the MS-DOS commands they used to type on their first personal computer. [63] The blinking cursor is the place where language happens, visually. [64] Aurally, the spectator hears the chatbots deliver their text by means of text-to-speech software, which converts the text into a synthetic computer voice, one male, the other female. These voices evoke what Parker-Starbuck would label “abject bod[ies]” in terms of their unconventionality and their “absence,” despite their presence as a technologically mediated displaced body. [65] Meanwhile, the text appears on the screen more or less at the pace at which the bots pronounce it. Language becomes even more of a postdramatic “ exhibited object ” and the speech act more of a theatrical event or “action” when the chatbots venture into lyrical genres or even start to sing: [66] -aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaia-ououououououououououououououououououououououououououououououou. . . [67] Presenting the relation between language and (human) embodiment onstage as non-necessary is one of the ways in which Dorsen questions one of the basic conventions of dramatic theatre. These conventions, I infer, formed the basis of her training as a director at the mainly craft-oriented Yale School of Drama, a training in which she deplored the lack of an artistic and experimental approach, Dorsen explained to me. She situates herself implicitly within postdramatic theater by the theatrical references and mainly European professional and even friendship relations emanating from her work. These emerged during “a second kind of self-organized training” in Europe, including a choreography workshop in France and a workshop at the International Theater Academy Ruhr (“A Meeting Point of Theater, Field Research and Philosophy”) organized by Hannah Hurtzig in Bochum, Germany, in 1999. There, Dorsen met Jan Ritsema, Viviane De Muynck, Bojana Cvejić, and other European directors, dramaturgs, and performers, whose performances she started seeing regularly. Explicitly, though, she places herself within a lineage of aleatory art. Like the postdramatic, “the aleatory may be said to be associated with freedom, or, perhaps more precisely, its image,” add Shepherd and Wallis somewhat ironically in their definition. [68] Despite her postdramatic and even posthumanist take on theater, Dorsen’s Hello Hi There emphasizes a structural feature of drama. It is a feature with which the genre is even often equated—in common sense definitions of drama and definitions in high-school text books or even academic survey works on narrative or genre— i.e. dialogue as supplement to conflict. As in her approach of the actor and protagonist, Dorsen reiterates and implicitly cites dramatic conventions by simultaneously unsettling them, which is another typically postdramatic practice. Of course, this choice for dialogue echoes what Chomsky and Foucault considered as their own failed dialogue. [69] The idea of dialogue, however, and the type of “algorithms” (conventions) it demands, is a constraint imposed by the dramatic genre. In a way it limits the opportunity to exploit what Aarseth phrased as “the computer’s potential for combination . . . in order to develop new genres that can be valued and used on their own terms [… and to] focus on the computer as literary instrument: a machine for cybertext . . .” [70] From this perspective, I think Dorsen could have gone as far as Aarseth suggests with her chatbots by exploring combinatorics in the way she started doing in her Hamlet appropriation A Piece of Work (2013). Yet, it would appear that her collaboration with chatbots already went way too far for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), who turned down Dorsen’s request for a grant with the argument that theatre without actors cannot be considered theatre. [71] It is exactly this (partially very) unconventional stance of Dorsen’s that keeps convincing mainly European avant-garde theatres and festivals to program her performances and support her financially. Auteur , (Co)Author, Coder, Media Activist? The difference in the kinds of agents to which Dorsen and Kaldor open their authorship has consequences for the kind of text data that is generated. Dorsen’s algorithmic coauthors generate text within a closed data system. In Hello Hi There , the chatbots can make different combinations with the text data in the database, but the database contains a fixed number of textual data, resulting in an immensely large, but finite number of possible combinations. The text of Kaldor’s Web of Trust is generated by users in an open data system in the sense that there is an “input” of data during the performance by people chatting, via the Internet, on the social network site created by Kaldor. Theoretically, this input of text data has no quantitative limits, but, as the performance is far more preprocessed (written or scripted) and rehearsed than it appears, the generation of “new” text data is rather marginal. Because human performers theoretically make Web of Trust more subject to contingencies there is a need for some sort of social and technical guideline, which in Kaldor’s case seems to be co-written and seems to form the basis of the performance’s further development —but this is largely an illusion. Visually and spatially, coauthorship in Kaldor and Dorsen’s performances is signaled by the presence on or near the stage of the director as auteur engaged in the activity of writing. Dorsen and Kaldor do not write themselves completely out of the picture (frame). Live coauthorship is signaled by the blinking cursor: as long as it blinks, it indicates the potentiality of answers and the passing of time. The blink of the cursor is the moment of surrender to the unknown: what will be written next (and eventually, by whom—or by what)? What is written by Dorsen’s and Kaldor’s coauthors on the other side of the computer interface (chatbots, audience members in the theatre, and on a social network site) is modeled according to one of the basic conventions of dramatic theatre: dialogue. Dorsen’s chatbots and Kaldor’s non-professional and professional collaborators engage in chat conversations. Where the dialogue feels as if it “fails,” we can wonder whether it does not resemble, rather, postdrama’s appropriation of dialogue as a montage of monologues or (psychologically, thematically) unrelated clusters of text. Kaldor and Dorsen’s practice or illusion of sharing authorship is quite far-reaching, as both also explicitly share the author-function with their co-authors either in the credits or in interviews. But that their work is being placed within a performance arts context influences the way that work, and Dorsen and Kaldor themselves, are perceived and sold to the audience. These directors distinguish themselves artistically by their idiosyncratic poetics, a trait of auteurism. In their case you could call it a desktop or computer poetics, each of them having a version of it that further distinguishes their work. They both disassociate themselves from the conventional, romantic image of the solitary author and auteur to adopt a new type of auctorial stance. Both seem to shift auteurism towards the realm of computer programming, perhaps aspiring to be and certainly showing the potential of an auteur -coder. Initially, Kaldor seemed very interested in the model of the media activist, attempting to realize a socially engaged, collaborative auteurism . The latter, however, turns out to be an aesthetic effect rather than an actual social practice. Both Dorsen and Kaldor aim to increase awareness about the impact of computers (digital algorithms, formats) on our thoughts and lives. Paradoxically, as Kaldor’s social and Dorsen’s cyborgean experiments are placed within a performing arts context, the latter inevitably—but against the artists’ will?—contributes to their status as, primarily, auteurs , but by means of coauthorship. Their relatively far-going coauthorship —actual or illusory— with computers and with audience members finally seems to serve their status as an idiosyncratic auteur -coder or auteur -activist. After all, the mainly European avant-garde theatres and festivals that can support them financially by buying their work profile themselves by means of artists who fit the models of the auteur , the collective or the activist. Note: The research conducted for this article was part of the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme financed by the Belgian government (BELSPO IAP7/01). References [1] “Dans cet univers software, l’existence se trouve réduite à la pulsation du curseur.” Maïa Bouteillet, “Il n’est Jamais Trop d’arts,” Libération , May 14, 2003, n. pag.; my translation. [2] Florian Malzacher, “Minus zwei Dollar vierundachtzig. Eine hohe Computerdichte zur Eröffnung des Plateaux-Festivals am Künstlerhaus Mousonturm,” Frankfurter Rundschau , October 24, 2003, n.pag.; my translation. In this review, Malzacher introduces the term “desktop performance” to discuss work by Edit Kaldor. [3] Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance , Performance Interventions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1. [4] Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology , ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert et al Hurley, vol. 2, Essential Works of Foucault (New York: The New Press, 1998), 211. [5] Andrew Bennett, The Author , 19–20; Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 207. [6] Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 211. [7] See for instance the subchapters on “Hacking”, “Tactical Media” and “Internet Art” in Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization , Leonardo Book Series (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 147–238. [8] Stephen Duncombe and Lambert, “Why Artistic Activism?,” The Center for Artistic Activism (blog), March 31, 2017, https://artisticactivism.org/why-artistic-activism/ . [9] Stephen Duncombe, “Does It Work?: The Æffect of Activist Art,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 1 (June 15, 2016): 115–34, accessed April 14, 2018, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/620873 . [10] Lieven De Cauter, “THESES ON ART AND ACTIVISM (In the Age of Globalisation),” Community DeWereldMorgen.be, accessed May 4, 2018, http://community.dewereldmorgen.be/blogs/lievendecauter/2013/12/12/theses-art-and-activism-in-age-globalisation . [11] Bennett, The Author , 107. [12] Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 46; original emphasis. [13] Ibid., 50. [14] Hans-Thies Lehmann, “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy,” Performance Research 2, no. 1: 56, accessed September 25, 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.1997.10871532 . [15] Lehmann, 56–58; emphasis removed. [16] Ibid., 58. [17] Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Theory in Theatre? Observations on an Old Question,” in Experts of the Everyday. The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll , ed. Miriam Dreysse and Florian Malzacher (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2008), 152. [18] “Performance as Design. The Mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall,” Paj-a Journal of Performance and Art , no. 96 (September 2010): 16–24; Interview with Bonnie Marranca: It’s up to every new generation to create its own institutions, critical discourses, and working methods.” | Revista Scena.ro, n.pag.; original emphasis, accessed January 3, 2018, http://www.revistascena.ro/en/interview/bonnie-marranca-it-s-every-new-generation-create-its-own-institutions-critical-discourses- . [19] Chiel Kattenbelt, “Intermediality in Theatre and Performance: Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships,” Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación / Culture, Language and Representation 6 (2008): 23, http://www.e-revistes.uji.es/index.php/clr/article/view/30 . [20] For a related use of the idea of delegating in an artistic context, see Claire Bishop, “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity,” October 140 (May 2012): 91–112, https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00091 . [21] Jerome Fletcher, “Introduction,” Performance Research 18, no. 5 (October 1, 2013): 1, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.867168 . [22] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 43; Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command , vol. 5, International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 5. [23] For the sake of space, the repetition(s) of nearly every line in the lyrics have been omitted. I indicated the number of repetitions in parentheses. [24] Edit Kaldor and Corine Snijders, Or Press Escape , 2002. [25] “[Z]e kijkt eigenlijk naar zichzelf. Het enorme projectiescherm toont een groot zwart vlak waarin losse, oplichtende icoontjes staan. Al die icoontjes bevatten de toegang naar binnen of naar buiten, naar herinneringen en e-mailcontacten, snel-rijkdromen of chatboxvrienden. We hebben de vrouw achter het toetsenbord alleen maar op de rug kunnen zien, maar nu geeft het vierkante computergezicht een kijkje in het hoofd van de gebruikster, met de oplichtende iconen als de werkzame gebieden in haar mensenbrein.” Marijn Van der Jagt, “E-Mail Naar de Hemel. De Doorbraak van de Computer Op Het Toneel,” [E-mail to heaven. The breakthrough of the computer on the stage] Vrij Nederland , March 16, 2002, 60; my translation from the Dutch. [26] I had a Skype talk with Edit Kaldor on 5 April 2018. [27] Thomas Irmer, “A Search for New Realities: Documentary Theatre in Germany,” TDR: The Drama Review 50, no. 3 (August 17, 2006): 16–28, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/201929 . [28] “[D]e pc herleidt haar hele fysieke bestaan tot een betekenisloze rest die aan het einde van de computer vastgekluisterd zit als het onnuttige deel van de mens-machine.” Pieter T’Jonck, “Ghosts in the Machine,” De Tijd , April 30, 2003, n.pag; my translation from the Dutch. [29] Here I am citing from notes I took during the performance of Web of Trust I saw during the Next Festival at BUDA in Kortrijk on November 30, 2016. [30] Kunstenfestivaldesarts, “Edit Kaldor. ‘Web of Trust’. Program” (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, May 6, 2016), 8. I saw Web of Trust at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels on May 12, 2016, where the performance premiered, and saw it a second time during the Next Festival at BUDA in Kortrijk on November 30, 2016. I am also citing text (and in that case indicate it) from the performance in Valenciennes, France, a few days later during the same Next Festival. [31] In the Skype talk, a year and a half after that performance, Kaldor claims that she gave no introduction at all, and was already sitting at the stand as the performance started. My notes, however, tell me that she gave a short introduction at the very beginning. [32] The name of the social network site Web of Trust is printed in Roman font, the name of the eponymous performance in italics. [33] Jurrien van Rheenen, Arthur Kneepkens, Bojan Djordjev and others, a number of which are trained performers, were telepresent at the performance via the social network site. [34] Konstantin Ryabitsev, “PGP Web of Trust: Core Concepts Behind Trusted Communication,” Linux.com | The source for Linux information, February 7, 2014, https://www.linux.com/learn/pgp-web-trust-core-concepts-behind-trusted-communication . [35] Jennifer Rauch, “The Origin of Slow Media: Early Diffusion of a Cultural Innovation through Popular and Press Discourse, 2002-2010,” Transformations , no. 20 — Slow Media (2011), http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issue-20/ ; Jörg Blumtritt, “Culture Post Internet: Cyberpunk Masterclass,” accessed April 13, 2017, http://en.slow-media.net/ . [36] Benedikt Köhler, Sabria David, and Jörg Blumtritt, “The Slow Media Manifesto – Slow Media,” February 1, 2010, n.pag., http://en.slow-media.net/manifesto . [37] Kunstenfestivaldesarts, “Edit Kaldor. ‘Web of Trust’. Program” (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, May 6, 2016), 8. [38] Skype talk with Kaldor, 5 April 2018. [39] (“[W]einig meer dan een hashtag delen”) Nynke van Verschuer, “Metamodernisme. Tussen geestdrift en ironie,” Vrij Nederland , June 25, 2016, 72; my translation from the Dutch. [40] Thomas Corlin, “Un Week-End à Bruxelles – Critiques,” mouvement.net, May 26, 2016, n.pag., http://www.mouvement.net/critiques/critiques/un-week-end-a-bruxelles . [41] Florian Cramer, “What Is ‘Post-Digital’? Post-Digital Research,” ed. Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox, and Georgios Papadopoulos, A Peer-Reviewed Journal About Post-Digital Research 3, no. 1 (February 2014): n.pag., http://www.aprja.net/what-is-post-digital/ . [42] Kunstenfestivaldesarts, “Edit Kaldor. ‘Web of Trust’. Program,” 8; Onassis Cultural Centre, “Fast Forward Festival. Web of Trust / Edit Kaldor,” Onassis Cultural Centre, accessed October 10, 2016, http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG1508/ ; Next Festival, “Web of Trust,” Next Festival, accessed April 14, 2018, http://www.nextfestival.eu/en/event/web-of-trust . [43] Stephen Duncombe, “Does It Work?: The Æffect of Activist Art,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 1 (June 15, 2016): 115–34, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/620873 . [44] I had a Skype video conversation with Annie Dorsen on 22 June 2016, of which I took notes. Except when mentioned otherwise, further quotations or paraphrases of Dorsen refer to this talk. [45] Annie Dorsen, A Piece of Work , Emergency Playscripts 5 (Brooklyn (N.Y.): Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), I–II. [46] Annie Dorsen and Alexis Soloski, “Would You Like to Have a Question?,” Theater 42, no. 2 (2012): 84. [47] Marie-Laure Ryan, Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 3. [48] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 80; Auslander, “Live From Cyberspace,” qtd. in Hello Hi There program. [49] Dorsen and Soloski, “Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 87. [50] “On Algorithmic Theatre,” n.pag., accessed September 30, 2015, http://www.anniedorsen.com/useruploads/files/on_algorithmic_theatre.pdf . [51] Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and David Z. Saltz, Performance and Media : Taxonomies for a Changing Field (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 67. [52] Annie Dorsen, “Algorithm, composition and metaphor,” Etcetera , no. 145 (August 18, 2017): n.pag., http://e-tcetera.be/algorithm-composition-and-metaphor/ . [53] Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 139. [54] Ibid., 55. [55] Ibid., 134–35. [56] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 85. [57] Erik Piepenburg, “Coil Festival: 5 Questions About ‘Hello Hi There,’” ArtsBeat, October 1, 2011, n.pag., // artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/coil-festival-5-questions-about-hello-hi-there/ . [58] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 86; Piepenburg, “Coil Festival,” n.pag. [59] Annie Dorsen, “Introduction to ‘Hello Hi There’ by Annie Dorsen” (unpublished, n.d.), n.pag. [60] Dorsen, n.pag. [61] The ‘text renders’ (Dorsen’s term) of the show include code, some of which resembles the stage directions of dramatic plays: how long and when to “Pause” and in which “Speed” to talk (and type, in this case), and who is speaking (“COMPUTER>0<” OR “COMPUTER>1”. To limit the length of the excerpt, that part of the code has been deleted after the first reply. For a full explanation of the code, see “Glossary of Computer Codes Used in Hello Hi There ” in Annie Dorsen, “Hello Hi There (Excerpt),” ed. Miriam Felton-Dansky and Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Theater: Digital Dramaturgies 42, no. 2 (2012): 90, https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-1507757 . [62] Annie Dorsen, “Hello Hi There Text Render, Noorderzon Festival, Groningen, the Netherlands” (unpublished, 24/08 2011), n.pag. An excerpt of the performance can be seen on the website of the Steirischer Herbst Festival edition 2010. [63] Ronald Geerts, “Tekst als object. Over de herwonnen autonomie van de dramatekst,” eds. Claire Swyzen and Kurt Vanhoutte, Het statuut van de tekst in het postdramatische theater (Brussel: University Press Antwerp/ Academic and Scientific Publishers, 2011), 105–14. [64] Emma Cocker, “Live Notation: – Reflections on a Kairotic Practice,” Performance Research 18, no. 5 (October 1, 2013): 73, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.828930 . [65] Bay-Cheng, Parker-Starbuck, and Saltz, Performance and Media , 69–70. Parker-Starbuck’s use of Kristeva’s concept of the abject is rather “metaphoric”. The critic starts from a more abstract notion of Kristeva’s concept of “abjection” as “arising from within as a way to maintain life’s boundaries,” in order to “unhinge [abjection] from its specifically Kristevan or psychoanalytic roots, and transfer it to moments of instability, of crises of identity, of border crossings, of cultural anxiety, but always through corporeal affect.” Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre : Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance , Performance Interventions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 57, 54, 58. [66] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 147; original emphasis. [67] Dorsen, “Hello Hi There Text Render, Noorderzon Festival, Groningen, the Netherlands,” n.pag. [68] Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis, Drama, Theatre, Performance , New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2004), 172, 174; Lehmann, Postdramatic , 83. [69] “ Hello Hi There Program” (Kaaitheater, 02/2016), n.pag. [70] Aarseth, Cybertext , 141. [71] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 88. Footnotes About The Author(s) Claire Swyzen is an affiliated researcher of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Prior to conducting her doctoral research on “Text as Data in Postdramatic Mediaturgies” she was employed as a dramaturge for a Flemish theatre company and as a practice-based researcher. She taught writing and narratology and (co-)edited volumes in Dutch on The Status of the Text in Postdramatic Theatre (2011) and Between Verity and Veracity: The Trajectory from Oral Source to Theatre Project (2012). Her theatre texts have been staged, published and translated. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa By Published on May 21, 2022 Download Article as PDF For this historic issue on “Asian American Dramaturgies,” guest editor Donatella Galella brought together Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa to reflect on currents of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies. They discussed how they created and entered this field, even as they critically questioned a foundations-based framework that reifies some lines of study and inevitably leaves out others, as they themselves made up a select group available for this meeting. They tracked scholarly trends and concluded by sharing their hopes for Asian American theatre and performance on stage and in academia. A joyful gathering with multi-vocal storytelling, this conversation was held over Zoom on November 12, 2021. We hope that this roundtable will stimulate more conversations, more artist-scholars, and more histories of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies. Donatella Galella : I’m so happy to see you today and to have this really important conversation on foundations of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies. I see this as something that’s for us but also makes a major intervention in the larger field of Theatre and Performance Studies. I’m going to start with some questions that I circulated to you beforehand, and basically the trajectory is that I would like to invite you to reflect on the origins of this field, where you think it is now, and where you think it’s going. I’d love if we could start off hearing from everyone on how did you come into your research in Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies, and how would you articulate the foundations of this scholarly field? Esther Kim Lee : I was doing my PhD work at Ohio State University. I started there in 1995 and graduated in 2000. I was an ABD, and I had already chosen the dissertation topic, which was going to be on Korean mask drama. It was all proposed and all that stuff. Then I remember walking around the library, looking at some books to read. I was TA-ing a course on ethnic theatre, and I noticed that there was really nothing on Asian American theatre. There were whole rows of books about African American theatre, maybe a couple on Chicano theatre, but really nothing on Asian American theatre. I had to go to the literature section to find Jo’s book, or anthropology just to find Dorinne’s book. But in the theatre section, there was nothing there. So, I actually got angry, and I thought: this is not right. I decided to change my dissertation topic, and I took a tape recorder—and it was an actual tape recorder back then—and I said, I’ll talk to a handful of playwrights and actors and find out what’s going on. I thought it would be an easy dissertation to write, but I ended up interviewing dozens, and by the time I was done, seventy people. That’s how it grew into a bigger project. In that process, I remember emailing Jo as a graduate student, “You don’t know me, but…” that kind of email. I had to introduce myself. That was the first time we actually connected, and ever since then, Jo has been my mentor. So, just really piggybacking on the works by Dorinne, Jo, and Karen. I think Sean and I are somewhat contemporary. I still have boxes of the tapes, documenting the interviews, and my dissertation became my first book ( A History of Asian American Theatre ), so that’s how I got started. I guess it’s fitting that I’m speaking first because I’m kind of in the middle in many ways and benefited from my predecessors, and I work really well with Sean and continue to collaborate. Josephine Lee : I’ve always been interested in theatre. I grew up in the New York area, and I used to, as a kid, check out volumes of plays from the library and just read them. I wasn’t involved in theatre as a performer. I did take some acting classes, but I was always, like, terrified on stage. But I did actually do a bunch of playwriting classes when I was in college. One of my teachers was A. R. Gurney, Jr. He was a playwright, and I was at MIT at the time doing physics, but I took some classes with him, and he was the one who said—I think it was my third year there—“Hey, there’s this guy who’s in college, and he has a play going on at the Public Theater, and it’s called FOB , and his name is David Henry Hwang, and you should get a hold of it or maybe even go down there and volunteer to work on it.” At the time, I couldn’t do that, I mean, it was just not feasible. But I did get a hold of the script and looked at it, and I thought this was kind of cool, you know. I had always been aware of the Asian American movement. I have a few older cousins who are maybe about a decade older than I am who were very much involved in that and did historical scholarship. They were really active, and they always looked at me and said, “You’re part of the Me generation. You’re never going to reach the heights of social justice that we have.” So, I’ve been aware of Asian American politics from a pretty young age. But I didn’t really take on the Asian American theatre thing in earnest until later. I was in graduate school at a time when there really wasn’t anything available. I never took an Asian American lit class. I mean, I read a lot on my own, but no one talked about it. I basically did my thesis on Victorian and contemporary plays, Wilde and Shaw, and I did some work on Tom Stoppard. Then when I moved to LA for my first job, I was part of the LA Theatre Center’s Women’s Project, and I got connected with some folks. I got to meet with Wakako Yamauchi. I got to meet people from East West Players, which was super fun. Then around that time was when M. Butterfly won the Tony Award, and I was like whoa, you know? How come no one’s writing about these plays, right? So, I think the germ of an idea got started. But of course, at the time, I was still very much, I guess, in the kind of canonical, traditional world, writing about Pinter and Beckett, none of which got published. Then I went to teach at Smith College, and I got involved in an Asian American Studies collaborative with Mitziko Sawada at Hampshire College and others in the Five Colleges (Smith, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, Amherst, and UMass-Amherst). At the time, they didn’t have their Five College Asian American Studies Program going, but I was part of that group that was teaching classes. I taught a class on Asian American theatre because Roberta Uno was just so inspiring, and we had the beginnings of the archival collection at UMass there, and there was New WORLD Theater. It was just a great time for me in terms of shifting what I wanted my scholarly trajectory to be, you know, something that I wasn’t educated in, so it took me some time to learn the ropes. When I took the job at Minnesota, I decided I was done with the modern British stuff. I was going to take a different route, and my first book was Performing Asian America . At that time, I just was so excited to have Dorinne and Karen as compatriots. We were never in the same locations, but we sort of knew each other because of all the work that was going on. It was so rewarding to do it at a time when I wasn’t the only one, right? Because I do feel like that changed the nature of what I was able to do, and with my own work, I could go in a direction that was sort of different. I didn’t have to cover everything. I knew when I published Performing Asian America , it was at a time when there was going to be a new wave of stuff that wasn’t going to make it into that book. But that was fine with me because I thought, wow, there’s just so much out there that people ought to do, and trying to be comprehensive isn’t where it’s at for me right now. So, that was fun. I think that I’ve, since then, changed several times, and some of it is location-specific. Dorinne Kondo : First of all, in terms of Asian American anything, I was like the last generation at Stanford, where I was an undergraduate, who was part of the protest generation: strikes, tear gas, helicopters on campus, “Free the Branner 15,” students from our freshman dorm who were beat up and arrested. We also, at my graduation, walked out on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, our commencement speaker, because of his report on “The Negro Family.” There were teach-ins about that, sponsored by the Anthropology department and St. Clair Drake, the renowned urban anthropologist (and co-author, with Horace R. Cayton, Jr., of the classic Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City ). There’s that part. But I’m an outlier, I feel, because I was trained as an anthropologist and as a Japan specialist. So, my first foray into performance, not theatre as such, was when I was a member of the Gender Seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble . So, I saw that in formation—very exciting—and all the controversy that it then caused. I mean, now it seems like a classic work, but believe me, there were plenty of arguments, and I got used to conflict as potentially generative. That (Butler, Foucault, and poststructuralist theories of the subject) profoundly influenced my first book , which was based on field work in a Japanese factory, where I was a so-called part-time worker, investigating the performance of gendered work identities on the shop floor and the performativity of artisanal identities and the aesthetics of work. I was trying to take labor, which is often seen only in narrowly political economic terms—I mean, that’s obviously important—but you know, what do people think they’re doing? What are the cultural meanings of work? What about aesthetics, which were in fact very important. I feel like in my latest book ( Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity ), I’m doing the opposite. It’s like the realm of the aesthetic sublime, how can we bring it back to earth and look at it as cultural work, as making, as an industry within a very particular historical and political economic context? So, being with Butler was incredibly important. That was also the year that, similarly to Jo, I saw David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly on Broadway, and I had never ever in my life seen anything like that. I talk about that in About Face , but it was life-changing. I mean I used to go back to the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco just to see plays. That too had been a revelation, just to see people who looked like me, like in the same room doing theatre, was amazing, just to feel three-dimensional again after being [in Boston]. Frankly, Boston was horrible in terms of racism and overt racism. Anyway, David’s play was extraordinary, and I felt like I had to write about it as though my life depended on it. I know it sounds melodramatic, but that’s the way it felt. So, that started my exploration of theatre as an academic topic. Then it also was a fieldwork strategy. I took the very first David Henry Hwang Playwrights Institute classes. That was amazing—so amazing, I couldn’t sleep. I never felt about anything the way I felt about that. So, I thought, well, I have to do something here, you know what I mean? When do you ever feel that in life? I can’t not do it. I feel like it chose me. I pivoted. So, I was writing the book on transnational Japanese fashion, and then the Asian American theatre piece came in, and then I spent a number of years trying to learn the playwriting craft. In terms of academic scholarship, I’m trying to integrate the creative and critical. So, that’s what’s happening in my latest book, Worldmaking . Karen Shimakawa : It’s interesting that the three of us, the three kind of senior generation, none of us started as Asian American scholars, right? Because there really wasn’t a field there when we started it. It’s interesting that we all came from these really different places. I had come from law school, going to English grad school thinking I was going to be a specialist in Flannery O’Connor. Then for some reason—I can’t remember why—I pivoted to becoming a medievalist, and then finally I thought settled on becoming a Shakespearean. So, I was always kind of moving towards theatre and performance and kind of theatricality in some way. In retrospect, I think I could say that even my interest in Flannery O’Connor was something about theatricality. I just remember, it’s kind of like Esther—although I didn’t have quite the foresight—I remember going into the library and looking in the Shakespeare section, which was just aisles and aisles of things and thinking, I don’t really think we need another Shakespeare book. I think it’s been done. So, then I kind of was in this crisis, like what is there? I was pretty far into my graduate education at that point, and I met with some of my advisors, and they’re like, what else do you know and like? And actually, I had gone to Asian American theatre since I was a kid because, like Jo, I had siblings who were older and more politically literate in this stuff. That was the church field trip that you always take, right? So, I didn’t have quite the kind of sublime experience that Dorinne had. I envy that in some ways because I’m like, well of course I’m seeing myself on the stage. That’s our stories. But it had never occurred to me because there wasn’t really an academic field there, that that was at all connected to my sort of vocational training. That just felt personal and maybe nascently political. It felt very extracurricular at the time. Then I took David Román’s class on American theatre, and we read Dorinne’s piece on M. Butterfly . That was a real turning point for me, I think, like, to imagine that there could be this kind of rigorous, academic, legible-to-other-professors kind of work on the plays that I had grown up watching. That was a real revelation. When I think about it now, and I narrate it retroactively, I think I was always moving towards this because I was always kind of interested, you know—even in, like, medieval literature—the thing that I was sort of drawn to was liveness, the way bodies on stage sort of can perform and imagine what is, what could be, sort of imaginative possibilities, utopian or dystopian, and also kind of what the body that’s talking has to do with that. I do think that that was always kind of the thing that I was chasing. So, it was just a real joy when I read Dorinne’s piece to realize, like, yeah, there’s a way to actually express that, and it’s a legit thing to actually study, and that it’s important and that it matters to people more than just, you know, me. I think that’s really where I started. Sean Metzger : I have the pleasure of coming after the other four speakers both now and also in the past. I think I’m the only one of us who came from practice into the field. I was in high school when M. Butterfly toured, and I remember there being an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle . At that time, it registered as Asian American but also as queer, as an Asian queer play. So, that combination kind of stuck with me for a long time. When I went to university, at some point I decided I was going to be in a college of music. I was doing musical theatre, and I wanted to enter into a more practical setting. I did an internship at the Denver Center Theatre Company, and it just happened they placed me on August Wilson’s Piano Lesson . So, I was doing everything backstage. And that moment—I think this was 1992—coincided with my having emancipated myself from my parents. I was out of money, and the cast actually helped me pay for my schooling until I could pay them back. So, I thought, oh, this is theatre, like this kind of intra-ethnic solidarity. This is amazing! I learned otherwise as I moved forward. I was an undergraduate, [and] I wanted to take Lesbian and Gay Studies classes at the time, but you couldn’t do that at CU Boulder unless you were taking graduate courses because the university didn’t allow it. So, I had to take graduate courses, and I found myself quickly overwhelmed with everything I had to learn. Like, I didn’t know the word “subjectivity.” Boulder had a lot of early modernists, and the first course I took was Gay and Lesbian Literature to 1800, and it was taught by Bruce Smith, who’s now at USC, and who’s a Shakespearean. He was encouraging me to work on Shakespeare, and I also remember looking down the halls and being like, oh my god I have nothing else to say. Joel Fink, who was a professor and director at CU, said, “You should write about M. Butterfly because there’s not a lot of work on it yet.” He wasn’t a scholar, so he didn’t know by that time, 1994, Dorinne’s, Karen’s , and James’s work had been out already. But there was not a lot of material, so I started that project. Then I built my thesis on gay and lesbian Asian American drama, half as an activist piece and half as what I would consider scholarly work, but I had to train myself. I brought in an adjunct to be my Asian Americanist because there was no tenure-track Asian American lit or theatre person. That was Marilyn Alquizola. Then I went to graduate school. I decided I wanted to work in Asian American and Sexuality Studies, so USC was one of the options. They gave me the most money, so I went there. They said, “Oh, we’re hiring David Román,” at that time. So, I went to work with David, and then they said, “Oh, we’re hiring Dorinne,” and I thought, oh, this is perfect. Then as time evolved, Karen came to give a job talk and then went to (UC) Davis. David Román said, “I think you should go to Davis.” So, I did, and that changed lots of things in very good ways and not so good ways, as you can imagine without saying any names. That’s really how I started in the field. Also, because I had been quite impoverished as an undergraduate student, I went to whatever grad program that would let me do the work I wanted to do, and I just figured I’d do whatever requirements; it was basically whoever paid me the most. So, that was my philosophy. I went to Comp Lit first, for that reason, and quickly learned I was to have mastery of these languages, which I still have yet to master. Switching to a Theatre and Performance Studies program sort of made me feel like, oh, I don’t have to have the kind of linguistic expertise that Comp Lit would have required. I wouldn’t have to be in grad school for another ten years. Then my career kind of went all over the place. I was in social services for a while. I came back to grad school, and I happened to get a job at Duke as an Asian American lit and culture specialist. So, once I got that job, it was really, like, okay this is what you’re doing from then on. But I have benefited from all the great writing of all the people here. I would also say, I think for Esther and me, we both had the advantage of a group of people—quite a large group of people—who just happened to be in grad school at the same time: SanSan Kwan, Dan Bacalzo, Lucy Burns, Sel Hwahng, Yutian Wong, Priya Srinivasan, Eng-Beng Lim, Cathy Irwin, Theo Gonzalves, and the two of us. That sort of made me feel like we had a community, and it also made me able to sustain my work over a long time, even though we were located all over the country. DG : Thanks so much for this. I feel like we’re collectively writing this meta history of the field right now, and I really appreciate the names that you’re offering. I also love hearing these personal stories, these origin stories for you as superheroes, but they also gesture toward the structural, toward the material conditions that made this field possible. You’re gesturing toward not only scholarship but also Asian American theatre production. So, I’d invite us to think more about the origins of the field, but I also want to turn to the next question of how have the academic field and the field of production of Asian American theatre and performance changed since the 1980s? DK : I agree with the collective storytelling, and I think that that’s really important. But in some ways, I feel like we’re facing a paradox because of course we want to narrate these stories, but in terms of Asian American Studies as insurgent knowledge, I’ve always been suspicious of origin stories and foundations. Aren’t we about challenging the notion of foundations? Maybe gathering these multiple perspectives and stories (is one way of mounting a challenge); on the other hand, people deserve their props. I realize that one of the functions of something like this is to narrate a history that’s legible in a certain way and establishes that we’re legitimate, we’re rigorous, et cetera et cetera. So, I think it’s paradoxical, and there’s a kind of fundamental ambivalence in the move. I would say, apparently, the field hasn’t changed enough, since this is the first issue dedicated to Asian American issues, right? It reminds me of the interventions at the Claremonts, you know, as part of the mobilization around The Mikado and trying to get Asian American Studies established where Black Studies and Chicano Studies already existed. I think that Asian Americans were seen as the “little people, humble, and silent,” (from Madama Butterfly ) so we had to make some noise and do some organizing. About Face —it’s an early work that does this—but you know look at Sean’s work, for example, I mean all of the work of people in this room, the move toward the transnational and diasporic, I think is like a huge shift. There’s no more Asian American Studies, really. It’s all Asian diaspora work now and rightfully so. I totally understand that. In terms of the profession, I think it’s more professionalized. There’s certainly more theatres, which is great, and more populations represented in the arts. We need more intersectional work, but that’s also growing. There’s still a ton of work to do on all these fronts. There are also more theatre critics of color: Diep Tran, Jose Solís, amongst others. JL : I will just say that Esther and I actually have this six degrees of separation. So, when I was in my first year of college, I took a creative writing course with Tom Postlewait who was a great creative writing teacher, but I didn’t really realize his field was actually theatre history. Then years later, I realized that Esther worked with him, so just shout out to Tom. The world works in really funny ways in terms of who we’re in contact with. The work has just deepened and gotten more interesting and more varied in its approach. I totally get the diasporic, the re-theorizing of what is Asian American. All these things that I think have impacted maybe Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies more generally has also impacted the Theatre Studies field. People have been really great about bringing those in, but there’s a certain kind of depth to it now too. I’m thinking about some of the historical work that Esther brought in, creating this archive, documentation. How do you not just talk about what the theatre means but how it is actually made? I do feel like, you know, books like Esther’s, Yuko Kurahashi’s book on East West Players , what that does is it provides a record for people to dig into. Sean, your book ( Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race ) was so expansive in terms of that history. In the period before, there wasn’t “Asian American,” like that wasn’t a term that anyone used. There were people of Asian descent and representations of Asia in the Americas, and those really connect to us still. So, I do feel like what’s been wonderful is the way in which Asian American Theatre, Drama, and Performance Studies are now rooted in these larger questions. There’s been solid work everywhere you turn, even as new populations are coming in and new understandings of what this Asian American identity and experience is. It’s so much a fractured category, right? It doesn’t hold up. It’s a category that deconstructs itself. So, every time you teach students Asian American Studies, you have to go back to, “This is a social construct. This is a racial formation.” This is exactly how it was made, that we are all calling ourselves Asian American. So, I think there’s no center. But that kind of frees us up quite a bit to sort of decide on what our points of unity or solidarity or coexistence will be. I think in my own work, I’ve started doing two things: I’ve started looking more into productions that are not commercial, because one of the things I was brought into was this star power of David Henry Hwang. Then I moved to the middle of the country, which has a very active theatre scene. We’ve got more theatre seats per capita than anywhere in the nation. There are so many small theatres here and people doing non-profit theatre work, and that’s not really recognized or written about, and some of it never gets recorded. So, that sort of regional focus has shifted maybe because of where I live. But I’ve also turned to what are some of the connections with older productions, and I’ve done a lot more work than I cared to on yellowface basically. Esther knows as well, right? You get stuck down the rabbit hole when you start looking at yellowface production as opposed to Asian American production. But one thing I regret, as much as I’ve benefited from doing that historical work, I think I do agree with Dorinne, that it’s really telling that I got a lot of recognition for doing a book on The Mikado ( The Japan of Pure Invention ), the kind of recognition that I never got for doing work on Asian American theatre. So, people were like, oh this is so interesting that you’re doing this work, and you want to say, hey, actually there are a lot of playwrights I’ve written about that have nothing to do with yellowface. But once you start writing about yellowface, it sort of perpetuates. Why is that interesting as opposed to all these playwrights who don’t do television, who do a much better job of representing Asia? SM : One of my early scene coaches was Lane Nishikawa, so I think that experience made me understand—oh, it was at the time when the Asian American Theater Company had fractured and was kind of on its last legs, so we had several actors from San Francisco who were Asian American women with me in this training thing—some of the history that Esther talks about in her book but through a different kind of lens: a gossip episteme, if you will. So, that made me realize whatever I thought this was, doing an Asian American theatre thing, is highly contested, because even in the theatre company itself, there were all kinds of narratives of what was happening at the theatre company that were sort of interrupting its progress, let’s say. So, I think all the companies, they all have those kinds of stories embedded within them, and now some of them are more archived. But there are other stories in those companies that have not been told and some that Esther chose not to discuss, like Kumu Kahua, or you know some of the other companies around the country. I think one of the things that’s happened since that time is the founding of the Consortium of Asian American Theatres and Artists (CAATA) in 2003, and I think that has provided a national platform for people to have discussions about how artists themselves think about the formation of the field and their place within it. I think we all have realized that their version of that story is not our (a scholarly) version of that story necessarily. But I think it’s productive, and one of the things that we can see is when they add in special sessions, it’s often about the tensions they see in the field that they haven’t identified before. I remember they had a Pacific Islander special session, and they had a MENA, Middle Eastern North Africa, special session; I think that suggests something about where the practitioners feel like the field is going in terms of Asian American theatre. At the same time, at UCLA, I have two colleagues, Lap Chi Chu and Myung Hee Cho, who are both Asian American artists in lighting design and scenic design, respectively, and they did a lot of work on Asian American productions in addition to regional theatre and other kinds of things, and I think they would also narrate this story differently. So, I think I agree that there’s a lot of competing narratives, and many of those narratives have yet to come to the fore or be acknowledged. I do think that the field as a whole is pivoting around certain issues right now, like Critical Refugee Studies, which is making big advances in Asian American Studies. So, I suspect that Theatre will then follow suit. I think Jo’s work in particular has done a lot to bring attention to Southeast Asian refugee communities, and that’s of course partly location and probably the kind of theatre that you were talking about. It’s not professionalized in the same way. As for some of my own work, I do want to say that the historical part that I did was sort of at Karen’s impetus because I was interested in racial fetishism, and she’s like, you have to fetishize something . You can’t just satisfy some amorphous idea. So, that led me to tracing objects and how they get racialized, costumes in particular, because of the work I did with Dorinne. So, I thought, those are, you know, physical items we could look at and think through more. It’s really the combination of Karen’s and Dorinne’s work that helped me think through how to do an early historiographic approach because I’m not a good archivist, as many of you know. I find it very difficult to sit in a room and get the gloves and everything. I find that very trying. So, I do think that the field has moved a long way. There are some trends that are happening. I mean, when I did (the Theatre Journal special issue) “ Minor Asias ,” it was partly because the editor said, “Well if you do an Asian American issue, who’s going to contribute?” So, I contacted many people, like do you have anything right now? Because there’s not enough of us in the field. I figured if I can’t get materials from people I know, which is the bulk of the field, then we’re going to have trouble putting together an issue. Actually “Minor Asias” was a pivot on my part to try to broaden the rubric partly to get more submissions. So, it’s great, Donatella, that you’ve gotten so many (for “Asian American Dramaturgies”). That’s really good to hear. EKL : That was great. What can I add to this already rich conversation? Because my training is in Theatre—I think I might be the only one who actually did graduate training in theatre history—I could just probably comment that when my book came out in 2006, it was my tenure book. It was based on my dissertation. It’s very incomplete. I was very nervous about getting it out. Like Sean said, a lot of it is gossip based, and a lot of the gossip I couldn’t add because they made me turn off the tape recorder and told me not to add things. There are so many things I could have added. When I go to the CAATA conference, people come up and say, oh you got that wrong. They still gossip about it. I really thought that by now there would be more theatre history books on Asian American theatre. So, in many ways, I feel like there hasn’t been that much progress. I expected the book to be challenged and revised, that there would be a more enriched conversation. Maybe I could just ask back to Donatella: it’s your generation’s job to add to the work that’s done before, so is that going to happen? Who is going to do that work? Personally, in my own research, like Jo, I’ve been really interested in going back historically. My first book starts in the 1960s, and I now want to figure out what happened before. That led me to my current book on yellowface ( Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era ), and my next one, I think, could be even further back. I find that going back to this kind of origin story—if yellowface was an origin story for, say, Asian American actors as they say, “We did acting because we wanted to protest”—is to revise yellowface history. It’s one origin story of Asian American theatre. But I’m looking for other origin stories in Asian American theatre. Historiographically, I feel like I’m always in conversation with Tom Postlewait, my advisor that Jo mentioned, because I did take American theatre history with him, but my book is really a revision of the history, like looking at American theatre history through the lens of Asian American Studies. So, I think I’m going to continue to do that. But looking at the whole field, I thought we would have more younger scholars, junior scholars who would be doing both theoretical and historical archival work. DG : Esther, I agree with your assessment, and I also hear what Dorinne was saying about the critique of foundations. So, first I’m thinking that I might come up with a better word for titling this, but I specifically tried to have foundations with an s , just like how I really appreciate how Esther’s first book is a history and not the history of Asian American theatre. I think in general there aren’t that many critical histories of theatre institutions. My first book is an attempt to do this but of a traditionally white institution. In their definition of Americanness at Arena Stage, that is often not inclusive of Asian Americans, but that is reflective of how Asian Americanness is in that boundary of inclusion and exclusion. So, for my own work, I felt thrust into Asian American Theatre Studies mostly because of seeing all these gaps and also just dealing with anti-Asian microaggressions in graduate school and seeing so much yellowface on professional New York City stages. So, that’s what drove me to then start researching why and how contemporary yellowface persists in musicals in the twenty-first century. I’m attentive to Jo’s point though, because I invited her for a workshop of my research, and she pointed out that I need to make sure I’m not re-centering whiteness and white nonsense, and that Asian American theatre shouldn’t just be an epilogue to that book. So, Jo, you’ve really reshaped the structure of my book so that there’s always this Asian American counter-example to yellowface in every chapter, and there will be a full chapter at the end about the musical I’m obsessed with right now, which is Soft Power . So, I really appreciate that you said that. KS : I agree with what’s been said. I just have a few things to add. One is that I think the origins of Asian American theatre are interestingly complicated. In terms of the academic field of Asian American Studies or Asian American Theatre Studies, I would almost single-handedly credit that to Jo. I think you did those reading groups early on, you had a really prescient kind of sense that there’s an academic field, like making a there there for an academic field, and people who could go on the market as that. I mean, we were all just kind of doing our own thing and doing it for ourselves, like, how do I get me my job? But you actually were thinking of a field, and I think it would not exist if it wasn’t for you. JL : I have to say this: in response to a taunt by a colleague of mine who works in Asian American Literature who made a crack at me, and I said something about Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies, and she said, “What? All three of you?” I mean, she made this crack early on, so maybe it was that there were only like three. It was pretty horrible. I would argue there were other people like James Moy , and then there were historians who were doing work, like John Tchen’s New York before Chinatown . There are all these really great connections, and people come from, as Dorinne pointed out, different interdisciplines. It’s not just Theatre Studies. KS : Angela Pao , for sure. JL : Absolutely, Angela, and other people who were just not being seen. It was partly coincidence but partly because, at the time, we were working to establish a program in Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, which we finally did in 2004. So, that was part of my larger thing, that we were trying to become institutionalized. I became much more aware of the need for that as a form of support, acknowledgement, and recognition, that if we actually had a field, then people wouldn’t have to keep reinventing what they do for other people or feel as though there wasn’t a place for them. I honestly think some of it’s that remark Donatella said, oh you came and said this about my work. It’s probably on the order of what Sean said about Karen saying that I need to do that. You’re making an observation and then you realize, oh my goodness, someone’s taking me seriously. They’re actually thinking that I have the answer to this. I think I’ve always been a crowd sourcing person, right? That if we do this together, it is so much more fun. Who wants to be the only person working on this? I really think that that for me was a huge motivator, to get people together, because I really felt like I was limited in terms of my perspective. I mean, if you’re going to work on theatre, which is so, so many characters, you need everybody there. I do feel like, too—the point that was made earlier about listening to people who are practitioners—I do remember a note, one thing that really changed the way I write and one of the reasons why I stopped writing work that was more, in some ways, theoretically informed for academic audiences is actually because Roger Tang did a little thing on my first book, and he said something like, oh this is not bedtime reading. I was taken aback. Like, well, this wasn’t written for you. Then I thought, well, why is that? Why is it that I felt that I had to write for a specific group of theatre scholars or literary scholars and prove myself? I think that kind of freed me up to do things like the anthology we put together ( Asian American Plays for a New Generation ), plays with Mu Performing Arts at the time. It was just really great to be at a stage, since I did have tenure, where I could let go of working so hard to establish ourselves as leaders in our field, at the university, because the academy, as anyone probably knows, will just suck you dry. I mean, it’ll just sort of take the will to write anything out of you if you have to conform to that model. I don’t know how it is at all your institutions, but it is hard. KS : Jo, you’re being very modest. You say, like, who wants to be the only one in the field? I think that really runs counter to a lot of the logic of higher education, that the whole game should be to have your turf and be the only one and defend it against other people. So, I think the character of the field of Asian American Theatre as an academic field really bears your imprint. But you know, when we started, the idea that there would be job postings for an Asian American theatre specialist—I mean, that just wasn’t a thing, right? And it is now. So, I think that’s a real contribution that you’ve made to not just the profession but to, like, thinking. In terms of the field, the artistic output, how Asian American theatre and performance has changed parallels generations of scholars. Immigration has changed, and how we think about the circulation of people has changed. I think so many of us who were starting out were really formed by a particular kind of generation of Asian American, you know Sansei, or fourth or fifth generation Chinese Americans, who were doing that kind of thing that was self-marked as Asian American theatre. That’s very specific to a post-’65 kind of immigration thing, right? The character of Asian America has changed so much from the ’80s on and has changed the kinds of work that’s being done in the theatre and the kind of sensibilities. It’s sort of the idea that there’s both out-migration and in-migration, like that kind of global character of things and the circulatory kind of sensibility. I think maybe it’s my training in law, but I peg all of that to migration. I think just the kinds of people who are on the stage or at the table have been really dramatically changed. So, that’s exciting to see. DG : I have a major set of questions to help us wrap up and look ahead: Whose research and artistry have excited you most, and where do you see or hope to see the field going? SM : I still think that there have been different trends in theatre practice that have not really gotten their due in terms of Asian American attention. One of the most exciting theatre makers for me is Ping Chong, actually. I know Karen has written on (Ping Chong and Company in National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage ) and others have written on that company as well . Ping Chong and Company is in a way tracking how communities are shifting over time. I find that work very generative, as opposed to the sort of the more commercial Broadway stuff, which has to appeal to such a wide audience (and it’s a very white audience). I think even though we’ve seen shifts on Broadway, I don’t expect massive change to happen at that commercial level or scale. KS : Sean, I’m so glad you mentioned Ping. When I was trying to come up with a list, I was thinking of people like Ping Chong and his company but also people like Ralph Peña and Ma-Yi, and Mia Katigbak. Actually, I would put Jorge Ortoll in this pile, too, even though he’s not Asian American. But I really think that those are people who are doing this very unglamorous work of actually getting other people’s voices onto the stage and making the road, even while they’re doing their own artistic work, but they’re doing a ton of work that is unglamorous, that is about making this sustainable for many more people. And that especially right now just feels like it’s both urgent and kind of a long game, which I really appreciate. So, there’s all kinds of artists that I’m into, but those guys doing the backstage work are the ones I really appreciate right now. JL : I’ll have to add my voice to all the people worshipping Ping Chong. He came and did a thing with our students two years ago, a collaboration with Talvin Wilks, one of the Collidescope projects, and I have to say, it was one of the best things I’ve seen by students, ever. I mean, it was just so moving and so wonderful. I have to have a soft spot for some of the artists who come out of our Twin Cities community. There’s a number of younger artists who have been working here for some time, and we’re putting together a collection for students. I mentioned May Lee-Yang’s play to Sean, and he was writing about that , and I really just loved her work. We also recently did a production at Penumbra Theatre of Prince Gomolvilas’s The Brothers Paranormal , which I really, really enjoyed. It was a wonderful way to think about how different communities, Asian American and Black, might intersect on the stage. And Lloyd Suh! EKL : Those are great names. I’m really excited by Qui Nguyen’s plays, just so fresh and fun to teach. Also, Julia Cho. I saw Aubergine at Playwrights Horizons, and I thought it was one of the most moving Asian American plays I’ve seen. It was well cast, well designed, and to see that Off-Broadway—such a polished professional production—it was one of those plays I cried at from the beginning to the end. It was just really moving. DK : I guess I’m wondering about people we’ve not heard of, so I’m sure that there are all kinds of people. Jo, you referenced some folks in Minneapolis and so on. So, that’s who I’d be interested in hearing about and hearing from. I hope that we’ll do more of that in the future. In terms of workers, it’s not just Asian Americans, so I’m just wondering—having worked with Anna Deavere Smith, for example—like other stuff that inspires me would be Antoinette Nwandu and Jackie Siblies Drury. In terms of the scholarship—no one’s talked about what we want to see—but I myself am really interested in integrating the creative and the critical in different ways, so I started this research cluster called Creativity, Theory, Politics in American Studies trying to look at the work of scholar-artists. I’m interested in people who are trying to do that. Sean, thank you for sponsoring a book forum on Worldmaking (in the February 2022 issue of Cultural Dynamics currently available through https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/CDY/current ) that had two of the people whose work I’m interested in: Josh Chambers-Letson ( After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life ), whom I’m sure everybody knows, with genre-bending, the intersectionality, queer of color critique, and how moving it is because I weep every time I read it actually. And then Aimee Cox ( Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship ), who’s a former dancer for Ailey who integrates movement and scholarship in her work and in her lectures. For our cluster, she gave a “lecture” that incorporated academic analysis, a showing of short films, and a movement workshop. So, I want more integration of the creative and the critical. DG : Thanks for that. Is there anyone else that you want to lift up? KS : Aya Ogaya’s work is amazing. And Dorinne as a playwright-scholar! SM : I would just want to say that, once when Esther gave a talk, and someone asked her, “What do you want to see? What are you going to do next?” she said, “I’ll just do a history that goes earlier.” But I take that seriously. It seems to me in terms of the pre-1945 stuff, there’s a ton of material there that we have not addressed in great detail that I think will open up a field and will change the way that we narrativize Asian American Studies. I think in the actual work produced, there are a lot of turns that happen that we just don’t account for. There’s a lot of transnational things happening with early Asian migrants, and in that vein, people like Andrew Leong at Berkeley, who’s an English scholar working on poetry but is also thinking through Sadakichi Hartmann, have been very inspiring for my current line of work in that regard. But I think there’s a lot of people doing early nineteenth century stuff that has a lot of potential to reshape some of the field. DK : In that sense, it’s too bad Jim [Moy] couldn’t be here. One thing I hope for the future is just to combat, you know, white American theatre on so many levels. I’ve just run into so much aggressive, soul-crushing white fragility this year in all kinds of ways, including being trolled. (The trolling was in response to an interview I did with the LA Times , following the murders of the women in Atlanta.) JL : That’s terrible, Dorinne. What happened? DK : I’ve been silenced! I was in a playwriting group. “No, you can’t talk about representation because I’m not racist. I had two black friends when I was a child.” Seriously it’s parodic, it’s so bad. Do you know how white you sound? So, it’s been that kind of year. JL : If you write that person into a play, I’ll read it. DK : I have! I’ve got to get it out somehow. DG : This has been such a fun conversation. I’m excited to be able to share it with other people, and I’m really excited that the next ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) conference is themed around Dorinne’s Worldmaking , which I hope will be another point of intervention. Thanks so much for your generosity with your time today and sharing all of these reflections. References Footnotes About The Author(s) 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 essays have been published in journals including Theatre Journal , Theatre Survey , and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and books including Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture, and Identity and Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative . Her book America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage (University of Iowa Press) 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. Dorinne Kondo is an anthropologist, Performance Studies scholar, playwright, dramaturg, podcaster, Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, and former Director of Asian American Studies at the University of Southern California. Her award-winning books include Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace and About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater. Her most recent book Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity bends genre, integrating her play Seamless . She was a dramaturg for three world premieres of theatre artist Anna Deavere Smith’s plays and co-founded the research cluster “Creativity, Theory, Politics,” spotlighting the work of scholar-artists. Esther Kim Lee is Professor in the Department of Theater Studies and the International Comparative Studies and the Director of Asian American & Diaspora Studies at Duke University. She is the author of A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which received the 2007 Award for Outstanding Book given by Association for Theatre in Higher Education, The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), and Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era (University of Michigan Press, 2022). She is the editor of Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2012) and a four-volume collection, Modern and Contemporary World Drama: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2022), which challenges the prevailing Eurocentric reading of modern drama. Josephine Lee is currently the Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor of English and Asian American Studies in the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the editor in chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, and her other books include Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater (University of North Carolina Press), The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (University of Minnesota Press), and Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Temple University Press). She has also co-edited Asian American Plays for a New Generation (with R.A. Shiomi and Don Eitel), Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History (with Imogene Lim and Yuko Matsukawa) and Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850-1930 (with Julia H. Lee) . Sean Metzger is a Professor in the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television and the former president of Performance Studies international. He has published Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance Race (2014) and The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (2020) both with Indiana University Press. The current editor of Theatre Journal , he has also coedited several collections of essays and a volume of plays. Karen Shimakawa is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Co-Associate Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs in NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and Affiliated Faculty in NYU School of Law. Her research and teaching focus on critical race theory and performance. She is the author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (2002). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Thomas F. Connolly 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 “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Thomas F. Connolly By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Robert E. Sherwood’s biblical source for the title of his play There Shall Be No Night is useful for establishing context for the contemporary controversy the play was part of, as well as the lack of subsequent commentary it has received. Sherwood dearly wanted to create something profoundly relevant. The inherent paradox in such an ambition is something any writer who wishes to be a contemporary voice must contend with. The play was presented by the Theatre Guild and originally ran from 29 April 1940 to 9 August 1940, re-opening 9 September 1940, closing 2 November 1940. It dramatizes the collapse of Finland between 1938 and 1940, and concerns a Nobel Prize-winning Finnish scientist (played by Alfred Lunt), and his American-born wife (played by Lynn Fontanne). He is a renowned pacifist who refuses to believe that war will overtake his country. When the war does come, their son Erik (played by Montgomery Clift) joins the Finnish army, and after he is killed, the father joins the fight. It is possible now though, to consider a larger question that the play and its production raises. Can an “up-to-the-minute” play survive a long run? What is more, Sherwood’s play crystalizes an Horatian dilemma: does the play “enlighten” or “entertain”? It also raises decidedly post-classical issues. The work of Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1929) can assist us in assessing the pitfalls that may beset a playwright who relies too much on current events and enable us to consider the microhistorical concerns that this production may address. Ginzburg is one of the most important microhistorians; significantly, he originally wanted to study literature and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis has always been a starting point for him. In Ginzburg ’ s approach, literature precedes history. So using Ginzburg to consider a play about its own time that is of greater historical than literary interest provides a useful twist. Sherwood takes such an approach dramatically in his World War II play by drawing on the Finnish Winter War and subsequently in a revision, the invasion of Greece. There Shall Be No Night ’s urgency precludes history in no small measure because the play is primarily a polemic. Thus, there is only one perspective in it, as noted earlier, that the United States should join the war against Germany. It has no use as a means of fathoming the greater complexity of the alliance with the Soviet Union or what the United Nations [2] would become, to mention but two issues confronting Americans after they entered the war. By failing to comment on his own revision, Sherwood also offered only one perspective towards it. The question of perspective takes us to one of Ginzburg’s favorite concerns. He has revitalized the microhistorical approach through a, perhaps ironic, expansion of its focus. His recent work has expanded via discursions rather than monographs. [3] Challenging aesthetic history, Ginzburg has called out art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892-1928) as an exemplar of method to be challenged, questioned, and indeed resituated. Ginzburg takes issue with Panofsky’s foundational assumptions about iconography (relating the subject matter of a work of art contextually to symbolic meaning drawn from literature and other art works). [4] The notion of perspective as an immutable is something theatre historians have challenged in recent years, yet recalling the “invention” of scenographic perspective as an evolutionary phenomenon is also an example of how Ginzburg’s work may inform our more skeptical inquiries. Theatre historians who remember Alberti’s 1435 text outlining the “rules” for drawing with a three-dimensional perspective will be interested in the way that Ginzburg’s discussions of Alberti call into question the idea of precise “sight-lines” through history. [5] Noting how quickly Sherwood’s drama inspired by a wartime broadcast so quickly dated instructs us here. What is more, when Ginzburg references Erich Auerbach as an ultimate authority due to Auerbach’s disregard for generic distinctions between “history” and “literature,” he may lead theatre theorists and historians to see past such false dichotomies as “theatre” and “drama” or “stage” and “performance.” Auerbach’s Mimesis [6] is itself a legend of scholarship (and a testament to a scholar’s memory in the literal sense, considering the circumstances of its composition). [7] The ongoing use to which Mimesis is put in the 21 st century also allows us to enter into the discourse of a work such as There Shall Be No Night and consider the importance of the performances of the famous acting couple Alfred Lunt (1892-1977) and Lynne Fontanne (1887-1983). “The Lunts,” as they were known, were a mainstay of the Theatre Guild and were best known for their work in comedy, though their reputation was somewhat belied by their performances in plays by O’Neill and Chekhov. Without the Lunts, the play would have been inconceivable. They were at the crest of their fame and reputation. They had also starred in Sherwood’s Reunion in Vienna (opened 16 November 1931, ran for 264 performances) and his anti-war play Idiot’s Delight (opened 24 March 1936, ran for 300 performances). Two star performers at the height of their careers, a playwright renouncing his own pacifism, and a nation riven by controversy over intervening in the war are the elements behind the play’s contemporary triumph. Thus, we have before us, the current events that Sherwood dramatized, the historical moment of Finland’s Winter War with the Soviet Union, and the theatrical phenomenon of the production starring the Lunts (and directed by Alfred Lunt) that would not have been successful without these factors. Sherwood wrote the play in response to the 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland. It opened 29 April 1940, went on a month’s hiatus while Sherwood rewrote it in August for a September re-opening, and it closed 2 November 1940. It then went on tour through the United States and Canada. It crossed the Atlantic and opened in Liverpool 1 November 1943, toured England and opened in London 15 December, running until 30 June 1944, thence for another month on tour. An interventionist polemic and star vehicle for a celebrated acting couple, nevertheless the play was also mired in politics; Sherwood was attacked by right and left as a “war-monger” and “capitalist stooge,” respectively. Irrespective of these accusations, Sherwood closed it when the United States entered the war, believing that the play’s heroic depiction of Finland, which had become Hitler’s ally by then, was bad for the war effort. Some accounts have President Roosevelt himself asking Sherwood to close it down. [8] Before considering Sherwood’s discontinuities, a brief review of Sherwood’s career is necessary as he is largely unknown today. Sherwood reveals in the preface that he was so eager to serve in the First World War that when the United States army rejected him because of his height, he crossed the border to join a Canadian Black Watch regiment in 1917. He was severely wounded and suffered for the rest of his life from his wartime injuries. Thereafter, he was an avowed pacifist for several years. While his serious political interests seemed not to jibe with his literary reputation as a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table, the celebrated circle of Broadway wits that included including Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Franklin P. Adams, and others, Sherwood was the only one of that group to have consistently made a serious literary career. Kaufman was a most successful playwright and director, but no other Algonquin Round Table member had anything like Sherwood’s level of success. (Sherwood’s 1948 joint biographical history, Roosevelt and Hopkins won the Pulitzer Prize, his third, and almost every other literary prize, as well as the Bancroft Prize and many other awards for history writing.) Robert Benchley, one of Sherwood’s Algonquin confreres, with whom he had shared an office at Vanity Fair in the 1920s, was a beloved comic writer and performer whose final Hollywood years were marked by alcoholism and depression. He eventually could not bear to be in the same room with Sherwood. Benchley grimly remarked after walking out of a party where he had seen his old friend, “Those eyes, I can’t stand those eyes looking at me. He’s looking at me and thinking of how he knew me when I was going to be a great writer—and he’s thinking, now look at what I am!” [9] Benchley was excoriating himself, for Sherwood was a remarkably generous writer who was doubtless more concerned with slaying his own inner dragons of despair than looking daggers at Benchley. Years later, Sherwood even wrote the foreword to Nathaniel Benchley’s biography of his father. For his own part, Sherwood continually lamented the fact that he always seemed to start out with something serious only to end up with lighthearted entertainment. Nevertheless, after There Shall Be No Night opened, another of Sherwood’s erstwhile Algonquin comrades, Alexander Woollcott, wrote to Lynne Fontanne about his talent, “Not one of the Algonquin crowd has made such good use of the stuff he has in him.” [10] Sherwood’s success as a writer and public servant and his relatively uncomplicated personal life obscure his inner conflicts. The lingering physical pain from his war wounds was exacerbated by his own self-doubt and sense of failure. He may well have suffered from depression, and there is even the thought that his war service may have left him with more severe mental scars than the shrapnel he carried in his legs. With these issues in mind, There Shall Be No Night is the culmination of Sherwood’s playwriting ambitions; it is the play he had been trying to write for his entire career. Even so, it betrays the plight of the commercial playwright in service to a cause. Sherwood had to write the play as quickly as possible in order to insure its relevance; thus, while Sherwood made a theatrical milestone, he fell short of creating a dramatic landmark. If Sherwood is remembered, it is for The Petrified Forest (1935) , which provided Humphrey Bogart with a career-making role and was made into a successful film the following year that also established Bette Davis once and for all as an A-List star for Warner Brothers. Less well-known today is the fact that its original Broadway star, Leslie Howard stipulated that he would only act in the film if Bogart were cast as well. It is perhaps amusing that those who grew up watching films on television probably remember it as a 1930s “gangster” movie. In his preface to the published version of There Shall Be No Night Sherwood notes the influence of his earlier plays. Sherwood carefully traces the play’s genesis, and his introduction is an exculpation of his transformation from pacifist to interventionist. He begins by recounting how he was accosted in the lobby after the first try-out of the play by a “young man” who “accused” Sherwood of having become a “War-monger.” [11] He adds that many critics continue to echo that accusation. After a lengthy review of his playwriting career, he concludes: It seems to me as this Preface is written, that Doctor Valkonen’s pessimism concerning man’s mechanical defenses and his optimistic faith in man himself have been justified by events. The Mannerheim and Maginot Lines have gone. But the individual human spirit still lives and resists in the tortured streets of London.[12] Sherwood defends his vision, but curiously makes no mention of the “Greek” re-visioning of the play. Sherwood subsequently relocated the play to Greece (“re-righting” history via dramatic setting). [13] Sherwood had to do so in order to maintain a coherent liberal, democratic vision of the Allied war effort that America could rally behind. Finland’s alliance with Germany was an issue even for non-Stalinists. Sherwood’s choice of Greece was both “historically” accurate and appropriate. The Greeks fought valiantly against the Italians and the Germans. There was no chance of a Soviet invasion there that might necessitate any political or military realignment. Drawing on the irresistible heritage of “the glory that was Greece,” Sherwood found a perfect way to maintain the political message of his play and its urgency for its audiences. Location and ideology merged perfectly, indeed instantly, for no one would need any explanations about which country “Greece” was or which side Greece was on. The play won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Institute of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal, and the Lunts successfully transferred the play to London, where it was even more highly acclaimed. Most observers agreed that their performances were tremendously moving and that it was a great production, in spite of signs of hasty composition. [14] In Sherwood’s papers the typescripts reveal that he completed the play in less than three months and, as mentioned above, revised it in three weeks. [15] He chastised himself for “sloppy writing.” [16] Reconsidering the play as an emblem of problematic liberal bourgeois decency allows us to question whether it was the play or its performance that was so effective. Its protagonist is Dr. Kaarlo Valkonen, a Nobel-prize winning pacifist physician, who is married to Miranda, an American woman. The introductory scenes allow Dr. Valkonen opportunity to espouse his philosophy that the world has gone mad because of too much scientific and technological success. He argues humanity has grown complacent. Nonetheless, Sherwood offers a vision of a liberal and humane Northern European paradise. This is shattered with the Russian invasion. Valkonen’s son, a soldier, leaves his inamorata just after getting her pregnant (albeit he does not know it), though he does manage to marry her from his hospital bed before dying from his wounds (providing emotional melodrama alongside the political). After the invasion, Dr. Valkonen joins the medical corps but after his son’s death joins the partisans, tearing off his Red Cross armband and strapping on a revolver as he exits. There are additional debates among secondary characters, English and American volunteers who are Spanish Civil War veterans, about fighting the good fight and what will happen after the war. After learning of her husband’s death, Mrs. Valkonen escapes with her pregnant daughter-in-law to America. The play is no masterpiece, but it remains moving. The problem lies not with its success as melodrama, but with its failure as ideological explication. The play’s “dramatic” and “historical” problems will be discussed when the London production is taken up. Now the question of the success of a production of a given play in the midst of World War II, vis-à-vis the relative failure of that play , in itself may not seem crucial to one’s understanding of either the war or American drama as a whole. Nevertheless, if we consider the problem of Sherwood’s expansive vision of the role of the playwright as a player on the field of history with the contractive nature of “timeliness” we can come to an understanding of the microhistorical usefulness of both the text and the production of There Shall Be No Night. Auerbach’s notion of mimesis pertains here only indirectly. We should not look to Sherwood’s play for a “realistic” depiction of wartime Finland (or Greece), but for a recapitulation of American attitudes towards World War II. Eight decades later, Sherwood’s work appears to be a theatrical monument that memorializes the playwright’s belief in his audience’s capacity for liberal, humanist idealism. By studying the reaction the play inspired we gain insight, not into the front lines, but the home front. We observe the impossibility of a play “recreating” battlefield issues. Yet, we may note the possibility of understanding why a contemporary audience would want to believe in the possibility of a genuine dramatization of wartime perceptions and sensations. It is not Sherwood’s play per se that offers us this insight. It is recognizing how the combination of the play, its preface, its revision, and its production history (including audience and critics’ reactions) reflect their historical moment that entails our attempt to discern this wartime mentalité. The ephemeral nature of performance is dismissed by the historical record of There Shall Be No Night. Drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s levels of history, we can balance the putative timeliness of the play against the timelessness of the Lunts’ achievement and consider that their artistic achievement transcends their own or Sherwood’s humane or patriotic ambitions. It is aesthetic ambition that endures here. The Lunts took a hastily-written, topical melodrama and made it into an icon of United Nations idealism. What the play offered was an enactment of what the allies were fighting for. Sherwood asserts his right to express in public the ideology of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms; Sherwood had already given Roosevelt the powerful term, “arsenal of democracy.” He was involved with the moment, though his historical reach exceeded his playwriting grasp. For Sherwood there was a particular urgency here. He had chastised himself for not being able to sustain a serious dramatic situation, even if he does manage to maintain acute tension with this play. It is misleading that latter-day critics have lumped the play with Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (opened 1 April 1941); distance may make the plays seem similar, nevertheless, Thomas P. Adler goes so far to argue that Sherwood’s play “actually helped shape and alter the opinions of Americans about entrance into the war.” While the contemporary critical debate was lively, subsequent scholarly commentary is limited. The play is discussed more in terms of Sherwood’s turning away from pacifism and as somehow adjunct to his work for the Roosevelt administration than as part of his playwriting career. Bigsby devotes as much space to Sherwood’s war work as he does to the play. Wertheim mostly discusses it as part of Broadway’s march toward wartime awareness. [19] As noted, Adler makes even stronger claims for the play’s contemporary impact. What the critical commentary lacks is an appreciation for the play’s production. By limiting their approach to a reading of the play, Bigsby, Adler, and Wertheim overlook an indispensable aspect of the play’s success: the Lunts’ performance. In terms of Sherwood’s literary career it is seen as a sort of sequel to Idiot’s Delight, dramatizing the war that that play presaged. The aesthetic dilemma that this play presents is daunting. Particularly in light of its liberal ideology: it is a life lesson in the humane. But the Lunts and their audiences found they could not sustain their own line of defense when confronted with V-2 rockets. Sherwood defended his work (and interventionism) in the preface, [20] and Roosevelt supporters praised the play more for its message than for its dramatic soundness. The play was a box-office hit, and Sherwood donated some of the profits to war relief. After their Broadway success, the Lunts were eager to bring the production to London, where they were equally successful. In spite of this seeming triumph though, even before it closed in 1944, some argued that the play had already become dated. [21] Additionally, the London production was literally stopped by bombs. The Aldwych Theatre suffered a direct hit. In an excruciating example of art and history colliding, Lunt himself believed the play’s resonance had become too strong. Audiences had begun to thin and the other actors found performing difficult to endure. Such lines as “the enemy is near” while bombs were falling outside the theatre seemed to have nearly choked up Lunt’s ability to act. [22] There are many war plays, and Wertheim’s study considers American World War II plays in particular, but he writes almost entirely about plays being performed on Broadway. One cannot neglect the unique London production of There Shall be No Night . Historically, there have been plays about wars being fought as the plays themselves were being performed. Lysistrata is probably the most famous example. Yet, Aristophanes’s play was originally written for a single performance and the Spartans were not yet at gates of Athens at that time. Nineteenth-century examples might include the Battle of Little Big Horn recreated in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show or Philip Astley’s hippodramatic military spectacles presented during the Boer War. None of these were performed under fire, nor were any performed for anywhere near the number of consecutive performances as was There Shall Be No Night in London (15 December 1943 to 30 June 30 1944). Even so, a play such as There Shall Be No Night, whose least significant aspect is its script, offers a cautionary tale for the playwright who wants to be timely. The ephemeral “performance” of the current events taking place in Finland is eclipsed by the “great performance” of the Lunts; both elide over the text of the play itself. Current event and performance phenomenon are washed over by the tide of history. Commenting on the original production, George Jean Nathan, usually unabashedly caustic, seemed reticent plowing under Sherwood’s hallowed ground, but was prescient: If the Federal Theatre Project gave us what with considerable exactness was called The Living Newspaper, Sherwood is giving us what with at least a measure of exactness may be called the Living Editorial. Neither, however, is in form the least like the other and both differ further and widely in the fact that, whereas the former was contrived with plan and deliberation, the latter is the hapless consequence of dramaturgical insufficiency.[23] Nathan sums up the play’s central problem. There Shall Be No Night is not so much concerned with drama as it is with amplifying a call to arms. I would add that when Nathan’s colleague, drama critic John Mason Brown, embarked on the second volume of his biography of Sherwood, he made it clear that this play summed up Sherwood’s career. Indeed, Brown died before he completed the volume and the entire text of the play was included when the biography was published posthumously. Brown’s failure to assimilate this assertion with his own vision as a writer demonstrates the collapse of genteel liberalism’s aesthetic consciousness. [24] I also wonder if the Lunts being the production’s stars had an impact on the seriousness with which the play was taken. Even though their performances were praised, the Lunts had long been associated with light comedy. This would be a problem for them in their final years; the London production of The Visit (opened 23 June 1960) was advertised as a sparkling comedy and this had a negative effect on its initial reception. In the context of Sherwood’s work and There Shall Be No Night , the Lunts had performed in Sherwood’s Reunion in Vienna (opened 16 November 1931) and Idiot’s Delight (opened 24 March 1936) , so were established as regulars with his Playwrights’ Company productions. By the 1940s, in spite of their performances in O’Neill and Chekhov, the Lunts had seemingly turned their backs on serious drama. This would become more of an issue in their post- Their Shall Be No Night careers. The Lunts as a couple were the arbiter elegantarium of the American theatre, and in the post-war years would continue as leading stars, but would not take part in any of the groundbreaking work of the 1940s and 1950s—until their final performance in The Visit in 1959 directed by Peter Brook (who still maintains that Alfred Lunt was one of the greatest actors he ever worked with). For their part the Lunts later expressed regret that they were not considered for plays such as Death of a Salesman or Long Day’s Journey Into Night . One wonders if they had performed in an American classic rather than in an adaptation of a Duerrenmatt play as their finale whether they might be better remembered. Ultimately though, they served their public, which limited their artistic range but won them a huge and devoted following in their lifetime. Looking back on them, it is most unfortunate that the American theatre could never have had the means to provide them with a living legacy, but something only memorialized. [25] Tradition is not something that American culture has ever been able to sustain. The play’s critical reaction discussed earlier gives us insight into the split the American left was undergoing in the final days of the Roosevelt administration. [26] The cause of the dissension was whether to revive the New Deal or focus on America’s new place in the world, with the additional issue of the United Nations: what would be the role of the United States in this international organization? By the 1948 presidential election, the Democratic Party would splinter into three factions: the mainstream party that nominated Harry Truman; the leftist Progressive party whose candidate was FDR’s former vice-president and secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace; and the so-called Dixie-crats who ran Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina on their states-rights platform. Sherwood’s politics were comfortably mainstream, and he supported the United Nations. While Sherwood was never a “red-baiter,” he became a Cold Warrior because he was convinced that Communism presented the same threat to the world that Fascism had been. Thus, in the context of its time we may see that There Shall Be No Night was never really considered for its dramatic value; it was always part of an ideology. Judging from two contemporary observers, it was from the rise of the curtain, the sort of play that forward-thinking patriots or citizens-of-the-world could not help but admire. Noël Coward was among the Broadway first-nighters and provides testimony for this. He was moved to tears throughout the performance, and he said after the curtain fell that his entire trip to America would have been worthwhile if he had had no other reason for making it than seeing There Shall Be No Night . [27] Former drama critic Alexander Woollcott considered the first night the final proof of Sherwood’s worth as a high-minded playwright. [28] When Sherwood published the play in 1940, he used the original version set in Finland, but after 1944, neither the Finnish nor the Greek version was ever performed again on Broadway. An adaptation by Morton Wishengrad was performed on television in 1957 two years after Sherwood’s death. Starring Katharine Cornell in a rare screen appearance, Wishengrad’s version was set during the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Charles Boyer co-starred. It is interesting to consider the double-phenomenon of the published text set in Finland and the performance text set in Greece. The play’s theatrical/historical relocation queries how a war/time[ly] drama that is a response to an immediate conflict ultimately becomes an historical monument rather than a play, as mentioned earlier. Given Sherwood’s apologia for the play’s ideology in his “Preface,” and that the second version earned praise for its even closer connection to the Allied war effort, one would think that Sherwood would have used the revision as the final version. Sherwood’s publication of the original version suggests that Sherwood’s theatrical vision does not cohere. This is so because the revision was made in order to keep the play pertinent, yet it was largely discarded when Sherwood published it. Sherwood retained his added references to Pericles, but the slightly longer discussions of democracy and its future were not retained. [29] Sherwood’s “present” dramaturgy is contradicted by his reversion to the original Finnish setting. Resituating the play to Greece appears expedient. Carlo Ginzburg’s reading of Siegfried Kracauer’s idea of the discontinuity of reality is useful here. [30] I would amplify this by turning to Ginzburg directly and noting that what he describes as “estrangement, detachment, the interweaving of micro- and macrohistory, a rejection of the philosophy of history” applies here. In other words, “the search for a comprehensive sense in human history” is an essential quality of a perspective which oddly enough stems from a key modernist literary antecedent, L’education sentimentale . [31] I say “oddly” because this line of argument allows a post- modern perspective to consider how more than half-a-century after the play was presented, Sherwood’s unified vision now appears skewed. I would argue that Sherwood believed he was dramatizing Finland’s Winter War and offering a macrohistorical perspective. His politically liberal and psychologically realistic dramaturgy was the product of his own personal struggle to overcome pacifism and embrace interventionism. Even so, Sherwood’s vision was challenged before the war(s) ended (the Finnish Winter War and World War II as a whole). [32] The play was an artifact of liberal idealism even before its run concluded. The preface to the play and much of the speechifying of the characters reveals that Sherwood believes he is dramatizing the ultimate battle for civilization. [33] He does this through the use of characters such as a radio reporter who initially sets up the radio broadcast for Dr. Valkonen’s disquisition about human progress and degeneration, but returns throughout the play to “update” the other characters on Nazi aggression. Valkonen’s life story stands as a précis for Finland’s 20 th century history: he served in the Russian army’s medical corps, even met his future wife in St. Petersburg, thence returning to his native land. He engages in philosophical debates with the pessimistic Uncle Waldemar and with Dr. Ziemssen, a cynical German diplomat, who early in the play blithely asserts that the neutrality of the United States is part of the Herrenvolk’s master plan for world domination. Sherwood punctuates the play with news from the front and characters’ speeches about the indomitable spirit of the human race. Thus, it would seem to be a sweeping dramatization of the world, or at least Europe, in extremis. Ultimately though, it is a pièce à thèse in which liberal faith in humanistic ideals is given pride of place. The play’s only ideological development is Dr. Valkonen’s rejection of pacifism. In his summative study of history, Siegfried Kracauer’s point about the “micro dimension” suggests Sherwood’s drawing room wartime drama is not a macrohistorical work: In the micro dimension a more or less dense fabric of given data canalizes the historian’s imagination, his interpretative designs. As the distance from the data increases, they become scattered, thin out. The evidence thus loses its binding power, inviting less committed subjectivity to take over.[34] Sherwood’s play is neither an adequate reflection of une mentalité nor a depiction of un événement . It is in Kracauer’s term a “close-up shot or establishing shot.” There Shall be No Night is an index of Kracauer’s “law of levels”: contexts established at each level [that] are valid for that level but do not apply to findings at other levels; which is to say that there is no way of deriving the regularities of macrohistory, as Toynbee does, from the facts and interpretations provided by microhistory.[35] The characters in the play offer sweeping historical and cultural summaries or sociological pronouncements, but even though Dr. Valkonen makes an international radio broadcast, shortly after the play begins, and is something of an international figure, the moment of the play is contained by the play itself. It does not resound beyond the ovations it inspired during its performance. Sherwood never takes the play beyond the immediate liberal ideology that seeks to justify America’s entry into the war. Thus it even negates both its European settings; it is really a dramatic debate by an American for and about Americans. This is why I would argue that to attentive critics it seemed dated by 1943. It had only the “committed subjectivity” of 1940 to offer the more complex situation of the latter part of the war. Its “facts” and interpretation were inadequate for contemplating a post-war world. After Finland joined the Axis, Sherwood rapidly rewrote the play, but the only substantial change Sherwood made was substituting lines from Pericles’ funeral oration for those from the Kalevala . [36] It is also worth mentioning that he located the penultimate scene in “a classroom near Thermopylae.” [37] He saw no reason to significantly revise a play that was a “[report] of current fact that the human race was in danger of going insane,” as one of Sherwood’s characters, an American radio correspondent, describes the play’s protagonist’s recent book: The Defense of Man . Sherwood was in England during the London run where he received a commendation from the exiled King of Greece and playwriting advice from Winston Churchill, who suggested that he add a scene in which the characters would discuss the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Churchill said to the playwright, “I want to know what those people thought and said about that.” Sherwood had to suppress laughter at Churchill’s dramatic criticism. [38] As noted, the second version was brought to London, where it would collide with history. (The production literally suffered a “direct hit.”) This version remained a conversation play about liberal values; ironically the off-stage combat that was discussed on stage was horrifically reified by the air raid that ended the play’s London run. The London performances had been continually endangered by the Germans’ renewed bombing campaign. The Lunts insisted on performing even during air raids. The raids made lines such as, “The enemy is not very far away” resonate with the London audience who reacted to the play with more tears and sobs than even New Yorkers had. Fontanne commented that even though they had “drenched” many theaters in North America, Londoners wept with even greater abandon. Alfred Lunt maintained Londoners let their emotions out in the darkened theatre because they would not do so in public or even in their homes. [39] One night bombs fell so close to the theater that the scenery wobbled, the fire curtain descended, and a blast hurled one actor out the stage door. [40] The London run of the play ended on 30 June 1944 as a result of damage done to the playhouse by a V-1 rocket attack, which killed a member of the air corps who was buying a ticket at the box office. Adjacent current events coming so fatally close to the performance of wartime casualties is a morbid continuity revealing the unintended yet omnipresent hubris behind any artistic endeavor that attempts to dramatize war on stage synchronously with contemporary combat, thereby creating a discontinuity. Audiences diminished during the play’s final London performances while people were experiencing warfare. Stage pictures of characters cowering during bombardments became paltry. Under the circumstances, how could such an enactment meet any Horatian requirements? Any question of “delight” in such scenes is superfluous. Nevertheless, what of an audience not threatened by war (the original American one) listening to dialogue exhorting them to accept the virtues of the struggle against the enemy? Apparently, it worked up to a point in London, but when the war came to the theatre itself, the best intentions of playwriting faltered. Late in the London run, the company gave a performance in a private home. Performers and spectators were in the midst of each other and the extraordinary discipline of the Lunts and their company created a performance that “was almost too painful to watch.” Contrary to dismissals of their work as purely external, they used any device they could, even elements of so-called emotional memory. [42] Such dedication to their art is best evidenced by the powerful impact of their extraordinarily “close” performance in a private home. Sherwood’s own preface makes it clear that the play is primarily about America. It details the connections between The Petrified Forest and There Shall Be No Night . Specifically, Sherwood argues that both are representative American plays because they confront contemporary complacency: The Petrified Forest achieves this on a domestic level ; There Shall Be No Night on a foreign one. As the “Finnish” drama is a play about the 1940s, The Petrified Forest is about the previous decade—thereby making it a fascinating social document of the 1930s, but it is also timelessly American in a way that There Shall Be No Night is not. Sherwood identifies The Petrified Forest as the play that “pointed him in a new direction.” [43] There Shall Be No Night is only ostensibly “existential” in the way that it addresses the pacifist scientist hero’s dilemma of how to live in a war-torn world that could not care less that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize. Of course, ironically, Alfred Nobel’s fortune was founded on dynamite and munitions; he established his foundation after one of his brothers was killed in an accident at their factory and when an obituary for another brother mistaking this Nobel for Alfred seemed to gloat that “the merchant of death” was dead. Sherwood’s character remarks on this in the first scene when Dr. Valkonen and his family toast Nobel’s memory sarcastically. [44] Sherwood was fascinated by apocalyptic violence, which is evident in Idiot’s Delight , written a year after The Petrified Forest. Idiot’s Delight is a strange pacifist satire that concludes as Europe plunges into war—indeed, its finale seems to be Armageddon. The play blends serious anti-war statements with vaudeville jokes and jabs at ethnic identities and national rivalries. Sherwood’s next play, which he wrote just before his Finnish play and which was still playing when There Shall be No Night opened, was Abe Lincoln in Illinois, a drama about Lincoln’s early career. It is a simple, if slightly romanticized vision of the Great Emancipator. Unsurprisingly, the play, which concludes with Lincoln’s departure for Washington, foreshadows Lincoln’s death: a sacrifice made for the Union and the abolition of slavery. In a fitting parallel the conclusion of There Shall Be No Night shows that fighting and dying for freedom is necessary if civilized humanity is to survive . Though it predates Sartre’s post-war usage, Sherwood saw himself as an American écrivain engagé from the outset of fascism. Indicative of Sherwood’s status as an activist writer, he was a film critic, editor, speechwriter, biographer, historian, soldier and pacifist, always supporting liberal points of view, and yet was one of the most self-effacing writers our nation has produced. One could also say he sacrificed his career for his country. Few now remember that he was the nation’s leading commercial playwright at the time of the New Deal, but his devotion to the cause of Roosevelt and his fury at the wrenching events of the Second World War caused him to disdain the Broadway box office and attempt to awaken the consciousness of his fellow citizens. Sherwood was at the height of his career when he became a speechwriter for President Franklin Roosevelt, thereafter joining the Roosevelt administration as head of the Office of War Information. Fortuitously, he chose to write about Finland—almost always called “Brave Little Finland” then. He was inspired to write the play while listening to a wartime Christmas broadcast direct from Finland, “Come In, Helsinki” featuring Bill White, the son of the famous editor of the Emporia Gazette . Sherwood had been struggling with the idea of a sequel to Idiot’s Delight, and also felt that he had let earlier events pass him by. One rather outré attempt to write about contemporary political issues was a play called Footsteps on the Danube , which featured a group of Jewish refugees fleeing from Vienna in an overcrowded boat. They are about to give up hope when they are hailed by another refugee, a bearded man dressed in white who walks across the water to their boat and offers solace. Sherwood quickly put that attempt aside. After he settled on the idea of a play set in Finland, he used the same title as the radio broadcast (“Come In, Helsinki”). According to the manuscripts at the Houghton Library at Harvard, some time after February 1940 he changed the title to “Revelation.” The title Sherwood ultimately chose was taken from the Book of Revelations 22:5: And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.[45] As mentioned earlier, Sherwood clearly sought biblical resonance for his latest play. The 1939-40 Broadway season paid some dramatic attention to the war with several plays about it being produced. A headline in The New York Times of 12 May 1940 declared: “The Broadway Stage Has Its First War Play.” The reporter Jack Gould quoted Sherwood’s assessment of the state of the nation using a phrase that President Roosevelt himself would adapt for the pre-war effort, “this country is already, in effect, an arsenal for the democratic Allies.” Indeed, the fact that Europe was at war was not quite lost on Broadway in the first two years of the 1940s, but Robert Sherwood’s Pulitzer winning There Shall Be No Night was really the first play to seriously depict the war. Sherwood generously donated his proceeds from the play to the American Red Cross and the Finnish War Relief Fund to further their resistance to Russia. Lillian Hellman’s anti-fascist Drama Critic’s Circle winner, Watch on the Rhine , opened one year later. In October of 1941, a second performance of this play was scheduled after the evening’s performance and broadcast in German to the people of Germany. Another example of Broadway’s war work was when The American Theater Wing volunteered its services and was serving as an auxiliary to British War Relief (Lynne Fontanne declared she was “knittin’ for Britain”). It is sometimes hard for twenty-first century Americans to recall how controversial it was to support any kind of intervention in Europe before Pearl Harbor. The rise of the “America First” movement had galvanized Sherwood’s determination to do something. For instance, he was profoundly disturbed by Charles Lindbergh’s speeches broadcast on the radio in September and October 1939, in the two months before the Russian invasion of Finland. Sherwood believed this was proof “that Hitlerism was already powerfully and persuasively represented in our own midst.” [49] As a result, Sherwood was criticized from both the right and the left for his support for Finland. The playwright himself was convinced the attack on Finland was the beginning of the end for Scandinavia. He believed Norway and Sweden would fall if nothing was done to help Finland. American Communist sympathizers, such as Lillian Hellman attacked Sherwood for writing about the Finns sympathetically. Hellman was an unrepentant apologist for Stalin and never repudiated her stance. Contrarily, she fabricated an image of herself as liberty’s greatest defender. Sherwood’s opposition to Hellman and her ilk shows his consistently humane idealism. Nevertheless, Sherwood’s reputation for sometimes dark comedy and social satire had stretched the Broadway audience’s sensibility to its limits. In spite of his self-criticism, Sherwood’s style of writing was suited to the mainstream audience. He never deviated far enough from their expectations to experience outright rejection. An anecdote of Sherwood’s about himself reveals the essence of his place in the theatre of his time. On the eve of writing his Finnish play, in spite of his raised consciousness, Sherwood felt particularly conflicted because he wanted to escape from the crushing anxiety provoked by European crises. He told the film producer Alexander Korda that he wished he could write a “sparkling drawing-room comedy without a suggestion of international calamity or social significance or anything else of immediate importance.” Korda scoffed at his escapist ambitions, “Go ahead and write that comedy and you’ll find that international calamity and social significance are right there in the drawing room.” [50] It seems as though Sherwood absorbed Korda’s comment and applied it to his play about a Finnish family trying to live their lives in the face of invasion and guerilla war. There Shall Be No Night is not a drawing-room comedy, and though in the long run Sherwood’s dramatic ambitions were daunted, his political and humane aims were met, if only briefly. In spite of the play’s limits, the Lunts’ performance enabled a brilliant staging. Yet even with a great production, Sherwood’s liberal perspective could not be sustained in performance. The bombs falling around the theatre eventually struck the theatre and stopped performances. History itself intervened and time ran out on the playwright. Sherwood’s overarching concern with timeliness in a real sense made the play time-sensitive, in that its message and merits expired. Finally, recalling the microhistorical approach and considering these issues from a 21 st century perspective demonstrate that There Shall Be No Night is very much one of Ginzburg’s “normal exceptions,” an amplified example of what Ginzburg discusses as “anomalous evidence that casts light on a widespread, otherwise undocumented phenomenon.” [51] The ephemeral nature of performance is a phenomenon that cannot be documented. Even so, the record of Sherwood’s now dated playwriting that fleetingly influenced his own time combined with the timeless success of the Lunts’ performance, becomes a document in its own right. Revisiting what happened when this play depicted and then came under enemy fire, shows us how art and history can collide, if not cohere. References [1] “And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.”Revelation 22:5. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Revelation-22-5 [2] Here and elsewhere by “United Nations” I mean the allied nations of World War II. This term was introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942. [3] Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive , trans. Anne C. Tedeschi (Oakland: University of California Press, 2012). [4] Among Panofsky’s major works are, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (1924), Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927), and Studies in Iconology (1939). [5] Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990). Ginzburg discusses his interest in “figurative evidence as historical source, but also…forms and formulae outside the context in which they had originated” (ix). He elaborates on this in the second chapter “From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method.” 17-59. [6] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). [7] Driven from the University of Marburg in 1935, Auerbach famously wrote Mimeis while in Istanbul where he had taken up a post at the university there. Drawing only on primary literary sources it is a work without footnotes, informed only by Auerbach’s erudition. [8] Patricia Bosworth, Montgomery Clift: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 77. [9] Billy Altman, Laughter’s Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 331. One of Benchley’s greatest disappointments was that, unlike Sherwood’s great success with his history, he failed to produce his long-projected history of England during the reign of Queen Anne. One suspects Benchley never did anything more than talk about it. [10] Quoted in Harriet Hyman Alonso, Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 212. [11] Robert E. Sherwood, “Preface,” There Shall Be No Night (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), ix. [12] Ibid., xxx. [13] Ilkka Joki and Roger D. Sell, “Robert E. Sherwood and the Finnish Winter War: Drama, Propaganda and the Finnish Winter War Context 50 Years Ago,” American Studies in Scandinavia XXI, (1989): 51-69. This article goes into great detail about the differences between the two versions. [14] Robert E. Sherwood Papers. Houghton Library. Harvard University. There Shall Be No Night. TS. (carbon copy) with A.MS. revisions; [n.p., ca. 1940]. The file folders in the Sherwood papers are arranged chronologically. He began the first draft on 28 December 1939 and finished it 28 January 1940. On 31 January he began typing the second draft and completed this 10 February. [15] Robert E. Sherwood Papers. Houghton Library. Harvard University. There Shall Be No Night. TS. (carbon copy) with A.MS. revisions; [n.p., ca. 1943]. [16] John Mason Brown, The Ordeal of a Playwright: Robert E. Sherwood and the Challenge of War (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 67. [17] Thomas P. Adler, Mirror on the Stage: The Pulitzer Plays as an Approach to American Drama (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1987), 61. [18] Ibid. [19] C.W.E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to 20 th Century American Drama, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 145. Bigsby sums up the scholarly assessment of Sherwood’s 1940s career. Albert Wertheim, Staging the War: American Drama and World War II (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 22-25. [20] Sherwood, “Preface,” xi-xii. [21] Joki and Sell review contemporary reactions in the press as the urgency of current events receded. 61, 64. [22] In a letter dated 25 August 1944 Lunt expressed his and Fontanne’s “relief” that the bombing of the theatre caused the London run to end. He added that the play was “too close” and neither the cast nor the audience could take it any longer. Letter of Graham Robinson quoted by Margot Peters in Design for Living (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 212. [23] George Jean Nathan, The Entertainment of a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), 25. [24] Thomas F. Connolly, Genus Envy: Nationalities, Identities, and the Performing Body of Work (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010). See the chapter on John Mason Brown, 41-65. [25] Jared Brown cogently summarizes the Lunts’ career and legacy. Of particular interest is the testimony of actor John Randolph, who worked with the Lunts and with Lee Strasberg. Randolph’s contrasting of their work with Strasberg’s is a case study in the limitations of “the method” as practiced by Strasberg, The Fabulous Lunts (New York: Athenaeum, 1986), 462-65. The efforts of the Ten Chimneys Foundation must be noted here: “Ten Chimneys Foundation preserves and shares the Lunts’ historic estate, serves American theatre, and offers public programs in keeping with the Lunts’ interests and values.” http://www.tenchimneys.org [26] Alonzo reviews the praise the original New York production received (211-12), and the reviews I have cited: Nathan and Conlin offer counterpoints. Nathan’s relative disdain for the play may have kept it from winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Prize. John von Szeliski writing in Tragedy and Fear: Why Modern Tragic Drama Fails (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971) reduces the play to a “tragedy of social disintegration,” which is of course the opposite of what Sherwood thought he was writing. [27] Alonso, 82-83. [28] Quoted in Alonzo, 212. [29] Robert E. Sherwood Papers. Houghton Library. Harvard University. There Shall Be No Night. TS. (carbon copy) with A.MS. revisions; [n.p., ca. 1943]. [30] Ginzburg, Threads and Traces , 208. [31] Ibid., 189. In addition to Ginzburg, Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemon Davis, Clifford Geertz, Mark Kurlansky, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Jonathan D. Spence, among many others, have been identified as “micro historians.” Ginzburg identifies the first use of the term occurring in 1959 with George R Stewart’s Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Charge at Gettysburg, July 3 1863 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959). See Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, 193-214. [32] See Joki and Sell. [33] See the play’s third scene, 79-80 and 86-90. Sherwood, There Shall Be No Night . [34] Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 123. [35] Ibid, 134. [36] Richard Conlin, “London Theatre,” America 70, no. 23 (1944):633-634. Conlin praises the London version for being more “cogent” in its depiction of civilization versus barbarism. [37] Robert E. Sherwood Papers. Houghton Library. Harvard University. There Shall Be No Night. TS. (carbon copy) with A.MS. revisions; [n.p., ca. 1943]. [38] Alonso, 255-256. [39] Brown, 357. [40] Alonso, 255. [41] Brown, 312. [42] Peters, 284-85. See also Brown, 462-65. [43] Sherwood, “Preface.” xxi. [44] See the play’s opening scene, 31-32. [45] The English Bible: King James Version , eds. Gerald Hammond and Austin Busch (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2012), 604. [46] Among such plays were Another Sun by the celebrated journalist Dorothy Thompson and Fritz Kortner, which lasted eleven performances. It depicted a German acting couple who protest anti-Semitism by fleeing to America, but ultimately the wife cannot resist a personal invitation from Hitler to return to Berlin. A revision of Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column emphasized Fascism as a present danger. Key Largo is Maxwell Anderson’s verse drama about Americans who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and discover moral corruption when they return home (John Huston’s 1948 film adaptation makes major changes to Anderson’s original script). Clare Boothe’s Margin for Error was a whodunnit set behind the scenes at the German consulate in New York. (Expatriate Austrian actor Otto Preminger, soon to be famous as a film director, played a lead role). Henry R. Luce, the playwright’s husband, opined in his introduction to the play that she had “half-succeeded where all others had failed in dramatizing the Nazis. No doubt the strangest theatrical offering was “The Devil is a Good Man” a one-act comedy by William Kozlenko, a protégé of the drama critic George Jean Nathan. The Devil, an upstanding family man, sends his son up to earth armed with a rabbit’s foot where he meets “Adolf Schukelgruber” and is subsequently arrested as a pickpocket. [47] Jack Gould. “The Broadway Stage has its First War Play.” New York Times (1923-Current file) : 133. May 12 1940. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2008). Web. 22 Aug. 2012 . [48] The 1943 film Stage Door Canteen (dir. Frank Borzage) depicts one aspect of Broadway performers’ war relief efforts. It is also a rare chance to see the Lunts on screen. Most interesting is Katharine Cornell’s poignant performance as “herself” in which she plays a brief scene from Romeo and Juliet with a young soldier. It offers a glimpse of her talent; not only in her “performance” as Juliet, but in her silent and poignant expression of concern for the soldier’s fate quickly juxtaposed with self-deprecation of her own stardom. [49] Quoted in Brown, 48. [50] Quoted in Brown, 36. [51] Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries , trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), xi. Footnotes About The Author(s) Thomas F. Connolly is Professor of English at Suffolk University. His most recent book is Genus Envy: Nationalities, Identities, and the Performing Body of Work. Connolly is a former Fulbright Senior Scholar and the recipient of the Parliamentary Medal of the Czech Republic. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue American Tragedian Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Performing Anti-slavery The Captive Stage Musical Theatre Studies Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Murder Most Queer New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Devika Ranjan Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress Devika Ranjan By Published on May 20, 2022 Download Article as PDF Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress. Elizabeth Son. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018; Pp. 267. Elizabeth Son’s Embodied Reckonings focuses on activism by and around “comfort women” in disparate settings in South Korea and internationally. Through four case study chapters, Son’s empathetic ethnography depicts how reparations need not be institutionalized but can thrive in the hands of everyday people—namely, the survivors of military sexual violence and their supporters. The first study of the embodied practices of “comfort women,” Son’s award-winning book demonstrates the power of performance to enact presence, protest, and acts of care as a means of social healing. Son’s interdisciplinary perspective draws on cultural studies, performance theory, and intersectional feminist analysis to create a powerful, multifaceted portrait of restitution. Between 1932 and 1945, the Japanese military enslaved about 200,000 girls and young women; the majority were between 14 and 19 years old. The girls and women were trafficked to rape camps to serve the Japanese military, where they were sexually abused by between 10 to 40 men daily. Even after the war, survivors faced shame, ostracization, chronic injury, and lifelong trauma. Son holistically analyzes the redress movement in Korea and survivors’ complex post-war identities as “victim, survivor, living witness, halmeoni, history teacher, and peace protestor” (17). Many “comfort women”—Son uses this term in quotes to indicate its euphemistic and problematic nature—advocate for the “Japanese government’s acknowledgement of Japanese military sexual slavery, an official apology, and reparations” (xviii). The survivors’ demand for apology goes beyond monetary reparations; they have committed to donating any money to international survivors of sexual violence (18). Rather, their advocacy works to resolve “han, the Korean concept for the knotted feelings of resentment, sorrow, indignation, and injustice that built over years of hardship and oppression” (11). Son argues that activist-survivors’ “redressive acts,” or embodied practices, center their self-narratives within public space for multiple audiences, restoring their social status and commemorating their history. Chapter 1 provides an in-depth ethnography of the Wednesday Demonstrations in Seoul, the “longest running political demonstration in South Korea and one of the longest ongoing protests in the world” (28). The Wednesday Demonstrations, which take place in front of the Japanese Embassy, enact a weekly protest to uplift the survivors and their demands for apology from the Japanese government. Although there has not been official redress since the protests started in 1992, Son argues that the Wednesday Demonstrations meaningfully allow survivors an “opportunity to express their visceral feelings of han and to join others in calling for justice (29)”; they also counteract societal shame around “comfort women” by providing a visible platform for recognizing the victims of sexual slavery in intergenerational settings. Through sonic and physical disruption, the Wednesday Demonstrations provide “redressive acts,” staging protest, education, release, rejuvenation, critique, and international solidarity. In Chapter 2, Son discusses the Women’s Tribunal, a “symbolic international human rights tribunal” (71) created by feminist and human rights organizations. Held in Tokyo in 2000, the Women’s Tribunal aimed to restore survivors’ political and social status and dignity by giving them a legitimized day in court. Centering the testimonies of 33 survivors from North and South Korea, Taiwan, China, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and East Timor, international judges created a “legal case against Japan and produced a more complete history of Japanese military sexual slavery” (68). During the Tribunal, survivors challenged existing and limited legal frameworks through their embodied reactions such as fainting, revelations of scars, demonstrations of physical pain, and tears; their vulnerability and embodied practices prompted the court to consider “how to honor victims and their needs while judging guilt via traditional court processes that are not always friendly to victims” (68). The Women’s Tribunal attracted thousands of attendees who bore witness to the stories of the survivors, presenting redressive measures outside of normal state jurisdiction in legitimizing survivors’ experiences. It also created a model for a culture of public accountability for sexual violence during armed conflict, directly inspiring the 2010 Tribunal of Conscience for Women Survivors of Sexual Violence during the Armed Conflict in Guatemala (1960-96). In Chapter 3, Son compares three theatrical productions that focus on “comfort women” around the world. In Comfort Women / Nabi / Hanako (the name depends on the place and time of production), a grandmother must confront her repressed memories of being a “comfort woman” when her granddaughter introduces her to two survivors in New York. The play encourages transnational identification, indicates the ongoing nature of shame around “comfort women,” and suggests multiple survivors: some who hide their history from their own families, some who are public advocates. Trojan Women, a play by Bosnian-born director Aida Karic, brings Euripides’ tragedy in conversation with the “modern history of sexual violence against women and girls by the military of Imperial Japan” (121). The play used pansori, survivor testimony, movement, Euripides’ classic text, and ritualistic elements to invite European audiences to identify patterns of sexual violence throughout history. Finally, Bongseonhwa directly critiques Korean society for its silence, shame, and abuse of “comfort women” through its intergenerational story. Each performance emphasizes different aspects and cultural contexts of survivors’ experiences, yet all invite audiences to witness, reflect, and connect to how sexual violence against women recurs in wars and ripples across society. Chapter 4 analyzes international memorials to the survivors of military sexual slavery. The Bronze Girl, a statue that sits in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul highlights the age and vulnerability of the survivors who were abused in “comfort stations.” It also commemorates survivors’ years of activism for the Wednesday Demonstrations. The Bronze Girl is cared for by visitors who dress the statue for the weather, leave her gifts like shoes, flowers, and food, and touch her in reassurance. Son describes similar acts of care at memorials in the United States, including the Bronze Girl in California and a memorial in New Jersey, where visitors leave bouquets, tidy the lawns, or water shrubbery. These acts of care demonstrate international support, carrying on the protests against sexual slavery after the survivors pass away. While official apology from the Japanese government may never come to fruition, Son’s Embodied Reckonings demonstrates how redress can extend beyond state or institutional acts. This book’s transpacific lens considers how activism and performance, education, memory and community-building can teach subsequent generations about sexual violence, restore survivors’ dignity, and reimagine reparations, more broadly. In a world in which international politics often offers symbolic gestures in response to systemic and personal injustices, I am inspired by the embodied actions of “comfort women” to advocate, educate, and heal locally and internationally. 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 Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jose Fernandez Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Jose Fernandez By Published on December 13, 2016 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. The early works of Amiri Baraka and Luis Valdez reflect some of their aesthetic, social, political, and ideological convergences that coincided with the tumultuous period of social protest during the 1960s and 1970s. Both playwrights defined their social and artistic work by engaging with issues of race, ethnicity, justice, and nationalist aspirations for their respective groups at a critical juncture in American history. The death of Malcolm X marked an ideological shift in Baraka’s artistic work when he formed the Black Arts Repertory in Harlem in 1965; for Valdez, it was the Delano grape strike of 1965 that led to the creation of the strike’s artistic unit, El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Worker Theater). Their dramatic work during this influential period of black and Chicano theater was closely connected by their critique of social and economic conditions of marginalized members of their respective groups—blacks living in major urban cities and Chicano farm workers in California.[1] Several scholars have discussed the aesthetic, cultural, and social significance of the works of Baraka and Valdez within their respective groups and the larger American theater tradition,[2] but only Harry Elam has studied their work comparatively. In his study Taking It to the Streets, Elam systematically explores their social protest theater by focusing on their points of convergence and similarities.[3] Elam argues that living in a multi-ethnic society, “demand[s] not only that we acknowledge diverse cultural experiences but also that we investigate and interrogate areas of commonality. Only in this way can we move beyond the potentially polarizing divisions of race and ethnicity.”[4] Cross-cultural studies, Elam adds, should “challenge the internal and external social restrictions and cultural expectations often placed upon critics of color to study only their native group.”[5] My comparative analysis of Baraka and Valdez is informed by Elam’s emphasis on the importance of comparative studies that stress points of convergence between African American and Chicano theater in order to examine the parallels of both groups’ trajectory in their fight for social inclusion that is reflected in their artistic output. In this essay, I examine Baraka’s The Slave (1964) and Valdez’s Bandido! (1981) and how both plays imaginatively challenge prevalent historical narratives of their respective groups by reexamining significant historical events—the legacy of slavery and the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848) respectively—through their use of the revolutionary archetype in order to situate the history of African Americans and Chicanos within the larger U.S. historical narrative. An element that distinctively connects The Slave and Bandido! is their use of experimental elements that reflect some of the characteristics associated with postmodernism, such as the challenge of historical accounts by dominant groups, the marginalization and fragmentation of subjects who destabilize a totalizing historical narrative, and in the case of Bandido!, the use of self-reflexivity to disrupt and undermine its own narrative. A comparative analysis of the plays’ emphasis on the history of violence, oppression, and discrimination, and their aesthetic representations of revolutionary figures, reveals points of convergence in the playwrights’ artistic work that in turn reflects larger commonalities within the African American and Chicano theater traditions. The Slave engages with the era of slavery through the representation of Walker Vessels as a revolutionary leader in a contemporary context who carries the legacy of armed resistance dating back to the antebellum era. The Slave innovatively reshapes special and historical chronologies by presenting Vessels at the beginning of the play as a field slave in the antebellum South. The play’s events abruptly move to a race war between a black and a white army at an unnamed city and in an unspecified future. Vessels, now the leader of a black liberation army, returns to confront his ex-wife, Grace, and her current husband Bradford Easley, and to take his two daughters, who live with their mother and remain upstairs sleeping for the duration of the play. Their altercation results in the shooting of Easley by Vessels. As the advancing black army approaches the city and the shelling increases, the house is hit and Grace is fatally wounded. Before the house collapses, Vessels doubts the goals of his revolution and tells Grace that their two daughters are dead, possibly by his own hands. Bandido! recreates the life and myth of Tiburcio Vásquez, a historical outlaw and alleged revolutionary figure, and revisits the plight of Californios, the Spanish-speaking population in California, after the U.S.-Mexican War. Vásquez belonged to a prominent California family of Mexican descent who eventually lost his land and social standing after the war. Vásquez lived as an outlaw in California for years but was eventually captured. Bandido! covers key events in Vásquez’s last two years before his capture and prison sentence for his involvement at a store robbery at Tres Pinos, in Northern California, where three white Americans were killed. The play moves back and forth between vignettes of Vásquez’s life as an outlaw, his romantic life, and scenes at a San Jose jail before his execution. Before his capture, Vásquez confesses his intent to incite a revolution against the Anglo majority in California, but his plan fails to materialize, due in part to his own ambivalence regarding the consequences of a violent revolution. The Slave is often characterized as a representation of the volatile and racially charged politics of the sixties and Bandido! as a reflection of the conciliatory multiculturalism of the eighties;[6] however, both plays grapple with the ambivalence of presenting, to different degrees, the idea of overt armed revolution, which remains an unresolved tension throughout the plays. Although The Slave and Bandido! were originally staged in different periods,[7] Valdez’s play is a continuation of his previous work during the sixties, a time when both playwrights shared similar aesthetic and political views related to people of color’s shared struggle against oppression. It is significant that the revolutionary theme surfaces at a period in the playwrights’ careers when they wrote commercial plays targeted to broader and mixed audiences.[8] Before his more militant period working at the Black Arts Repertory, Baraka wrote critically recognized plays, most notably Dutchman (1964); similarly, when Valdez moved from Delano in order to professionalize El Teatro Campesino troupe, his project reached its peak with the Broadway production of Zoot Suit in 1979.[9] This is a contrast to the period when they produced social protest plays that were performed for predominantly black or Chicano audiences.[10] My analysis of the dramatic texts explores what Jon Rossini describes as the “aesthetic[s] of resistance” inscribed in Bandido! that are similarly applicable to The Slave.[11] The Slave stages a black revolution, and although Bandido! is considered a less confrontational play, or even containing “proassimilationist themes,” as Yolanda Broyles-González maintains,[12] Vásquez explicitly considers inciting an armed revolution in California against whites. Revolution and History in Baraka and Valdez Baraka and Valdez embraced nationalist aspirations for their respective groups and were attracted to revolutionary ideas during the early sixties, an influence that, although clearly reflected in The Slave, is also present in Bandido! Baraka and Valdez, as Elam explains, were not only artists, but also they were activists and social theorists of their respective movements.[13] In their early activism and plays, Baraka and Valdez shared a social and artistic vision that emphasized racial and ethnic consciousness based on militancy and nationalistic ideas. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Valdez acted as one of the intellectual theorists of El Movimiento (the movement), the more militant and nationalistic branch of the Chicano civil rights movement. Valdez’s early writings focused on the development of a Chicano identity embedded with nationalism, indigenous myths, and Catholic symbols.[14] After Valdez moved from Delano, he commented that El Teatro Campesino’s performances moved beyond farm workers’ concerns and increasingly engaged with other broader social issues such as the Vietnam War and racial discrimination.[15] Both Baraka and Valdez were similarly influenced by the Cuban Revolution, which presented a powerful example of a successful armed uprising in the American continent. In the case of Baraka, he described his travel to Cuba in the early sixties as a turning point.[16] The Cuban Revolution was also an important event for Valdez. Jorge Huerta explains that before his involvement with César Chávez and the farm workers’ strike, Valdez traveled to Cuba in 1964 and became an open sympathizer of the revolution.[17] Although the aesthetic output and social activism of Baraka and Valdez converges in the late sixties and then diverges stylistically and ideologically in the late seventies, the influence of revolutionary thought is similarly present in The Slave and Bandido! The Slave and Bandido! resonate with postmodern premises advanced by Linda Hutcheon and Phillip Brian Harper regarding the history and social position of racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. As W. B. Worthen has noted, Valdez’s disruption of historical objectivity in The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1964) and Bandido! not only takes elements from Chicano history, but its treatment reflects some postmodern characteristics such as the subversion and fragmentation of historical events. Worthen explains the use of the term “postmodern” in his analysis of contemporary Chicano/a playwrights by noting that “the thematics of Chicana/o history plays are inseparable from their rhetoric, typically from the use of discontinuity and fragmentation, appropriation and hybridity, heteroglossia and pastiche. This formal complexity might appear to verge on the blank aesthetic of the ‘postmodern.’”[18] In an earlier and often-cited discussion on history and postmodernism, A Poetics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon argues that a characteristic of postmodern narratives is the author’s challenge of the past as an objective and monolithic reality rather than a constructed set of discourses. Hutcheon describes this type of narrative as “historiographic metafiction,” in which authors both revise and undermine the past as it “reinstalls historical contexts as significant and even determining, but in so doing, it problematizes the entire notion of historical knowledge.”[19] A postmodern interpretation of history, however, does not render the past an undetermined reality; rather, it creates competing views that are open to multiple interpretations. The Slave and Bandido! reflect Hutcheon’s characterization of history as malleable by challenging its objectivity in relation to the past history of their respective groups. Moreover, Harper has argued that the some of the aesthetic works by minority authors can be interpreted as engaging with elements of the postmodern experience, particularly their engagement with marginality. In studying the emphasis on the fragmented and decentralized self that forms part of the postmodern condition, Harper argues that the alienation, despair, uncertainty, and fragmentation characteristic of postmodernism have been present in the work of some minority writers prior to the sixties since their postmodernist tendencies “deriv[e] specifically from [their] socially marginalized and politically disenfranchised status.”[20] The “social marginalization” that creates a “fragmented subjectivity” in these texts, Harper argues, does not stand as the sole characteristic of the postmodern subject; however, social fragmentation should be considered part of such marginalization.[21] The Slave and Bandido! explore two revolutionary archetypes and their condition as marginalized and decentered subjects based on their past and current social limitations. Emerging from groups on the margins of society, the revolutionaries’ call for armed confrontation against whites inventively contests their alienated social position. Amiri Baraka’s The Slave The Slave aesthetically engages with the history of violent militant resistance by minority groups that at times tends to be overlooked in contemporary social discourses in favor of a historical narrative that invokes the nonviolent struggle by civil rights activists. The Slave has commonly been studied as a radical and confrontational social protest play that attempts to raise racial and ethnic consciousness and nationalist sentiments through representations of armed confrontation.[22] The prospect of armed resistance and militant confrontation by some people of color also contributed to social change, and Baraka’s play is significant since it counterweights the prevalent narrative that the social gains of the sixties and seventies by people of color were achieved only through nonviolent resistance. Baraka’s confrontational rhetoric, shared by emerging radical activists such as Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, is evident in his non-fiction of the early sixties, collected in Home: Social Essays (1965), which condemns the conditions of blacks living in urban cities and the nonviolent methods to solve racial and economic inequality advocated by black civil rights leaders. Baraka defiantly argues that the “struggle is not simply for ‘equality’” but “to completely free the black man from the domination of the white man.”[23] Baraka frames his confrontational stance and social demands based in part on his first-hand experiences dealing with inequality and discrimination in urban enclaves such as Harlem.[24] Echoing the seemingly senseless violence during the race riots in some major urban areas such as Watts, Detroit, and Newark in the 1960s, The Slave mirrors blacks’ simmering frustrations and responses to a deep-rooted sense of despair. The Slave challenges received histories regarding the era of slavery by creatively dislocating and extending the scope of the militancy of the sixties by presenting Walker Vessels both as a revolutionary leader and a slave—presumably a rebel leader—who carriers on the legacy of black armed resistance from the antebellum South. Some critics have focused on how Baraka engages with the era of slavery in an experimental form in other plays such as Slave Ship (1967) and The Motion of History (1976);[25] however, almost no attention has been given to the experimental engagement with history already found in The Slave.[26] Baraka’s play invokes the figure of the slave revolt leader, a figure that prior to the sixties tended to be mediated through the texts of white historians and writers,[27] to address historical misconceptions regarding the treatment of slaves. In his nonfiction, Baraka challenges the myth of the content slave and the attempt at myth-making in historiography and social discourses that present blacks during slavery as passive subjects who “didn’t mind being [slaves].”[28] Baraka rejects this view by emphasizing the tradition of armed slave resistance, since according to Baraka, “the records of slave revolts are too numerous to support” the “faked conclusion” that slaves coexist harmoniously with their masters.[29] Baraka subverts white historiography on stage by invoking the tradition of black self determination dating back to David Walker and armed resistance by slave revolt leaders such as Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey by, as Werner Sollors points out, naming The Slave’s main character Vessels.[30] Baraka’s use of the slave rebel figure, however, is experimental and differs from other conventional representations of armed resistance by black authors such as Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder (1936), a fictional recreation of the historical 1800 Gabriel’s Rebellion. In The Slave, Vessels is not the historical reincarnation of Walker or Vesey propelled into the future; instead, Vessels’s initial position in the play as an outspoken and discontent slave is a symbolic figure of resistance who projects the legacy of slave rebellions and violent suppressions into a hypothetical future. The Slave’s prologue presents Vessels as a character who attempts to articulate his grievances but fails due to his position as a field slave, which reflects his social marginality. The prologue purposefully obscures chronological time as Vessels appears as an “old field slave” who is “much older than [he] look[s] . . . or maybe much younger” at different periods during the play.[31] Vessels initially takes the form of a seer, elder statesman, or a black preacher, but as he attempts to express his thoughts, he grows “anxiou[s],” “less articulate,” and “more ‘field hand’ sounding” (45). Scholars agree on the cryptic nature of Vessels’s opening speech;[32] nonetheless, Vessels’s restlessness and belligerent intent while still a slave is evident when he remarks that “[w]e are liars, and we are murderers. We invent death for others” (43). Vessels’s condition as a slave makes him unable to articulate a coherent message; as a result, his inability to effectively communicate marginalizes him and, at the same time, connects him to the emerging restlessness and frustration among disenfranchised blacks that finds a physical expression in an altered social context in the play’s subsequent acts. Signaling the ineffectiveness of rhetoric, Vessels turns to physical violence as a tool to address his social grievances. Vessels’s initial position as a “field hand” is significant for Baraka in the context of slaves’ hierarchies and class distinctions among blacks since he believes that the source for black liberation in past and contemporary times will be carried out by marginalized subjects rather than blacks in relative positions of authority or class standing. In the introduction to The Motion of History, Baraka makes the distinction between slaves who were “house servants and petty bourgeoisie-to-be” and “field slaves” who represented the majority and the authentic revolutionaries.[33] Hence, Vessels’s initial position as a marginalized field slave connects him to the majority of disenfranchised blacks rather than to the black middle class leaders of the civil rights era, who in Baraka’s view, asked blacks to “renounce [their] history as pure social error” and look at “old slavery” and its legacy of social and economic disparities as a “hideous acciden[t] for which no one should be blamed.”[34] Vessels’s position as a field slave functions as a social critique of black civil rights leaders and their methods, thus presenting a clear ideological contrast between his radical militancy and their nonviolent social activism. The Slave destabilizes dominant historical narratives of slave suppression on stage by presenting a decentered subject who carries the legacy of armed resistance and has the potential to challenge the status quo through open revolution. The play’s first act propels Vessels into a contemporary city in the 1960s where he becomes the leader of a “black liberation movement” who is able to mount an effective military offensive against whites (58). As Larry Neil observes, Vessels in the contemporary context “demands a confrontation with history. . . . His only salvation lies in confronting the physical and psychological forces that have made him and his people powerless.”[35] Vessels refers to the source of his actions when he maintains that he is fighting “against three hundred years of oppression” (72). Vessels, moreover, echoes the intent of former slave rebel leaders such as Nat Turner when he boasts that he “single-handedly. . . promoted a bloody situation where white and black people are killing each other” (66). Neil contextualizes the violence depicted in The Slave by arguing that despite Western society’s aggression toward the oppressed, “it sanctimoniously deplore[d] violence or self-assertion on the part of the enslaved.”[36] Vessels’s armed resistance—taken as a continuation of past instances of slave rebellion—figuratively subverts the historical record since an organized and open slave revolt in the U.S. did not last more than a few days. The Slave attempts, as Baraka notes in his often-cited essay, “The Revolutionary Theatre” (1964), to take blacks’ revolutionary “dreams and give them a reality”;[37] as a result, Baraka’s play goes beyond the representation of the militancy and radicalism of the sixties by creating a fictional counterview of the historical record of slave revolt suppressions. Despite the inclusion of a race war in The Slave, the play shows the limits of a military and bloody confrontation between blacks and whites on stage; instead, it concentrates on the tension between Vessels’s revolutionary goals and his ambivalent feelings toward whites due to his former acceptance of racial pluralism. Although the war has been raging for months and has tangible consequences, since it is noted that Vessels’s “noble black brothers are killing what’s left of the city,” or rather “what’s left of this country” (49), it is only alluded to intermittently rather than enacted. The war serves mainly as a background to the verbal abuse, physical violence, and aggression in the living room among Vessels, Grace, and Easley.[38] The animosity between Vessels and Grace derives also in part from Baraka’s radicalization and his own personal struggles to reconcile his black nationalism and his marriage to Hettie Jones, a white woman.[39] The emotionally charged scenes and recriminations between the three characters expose the simmering feelings of rage and racial animosity that remained under the surface before the war. The Slave presents a clash between a black radical and a white liberal, and Vessels’s confrontation with Easley symbolizes his attempt to overcome his past and continue his revolution. Samuel Hay maintains that in The Slave and other plays of the same period, “Baraka repeats Baldwin’s theme [in Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964)] that burning all bridges to white liberals is the first step toward liberation.”[40] Vessels does not direct his hatred against prejudiced whites but against Easley, a college professor with a “liberal education, and a long history of concern for minorities” (52). Consequently, Vessels’s shooting of Easley represents the end of possible coexistence between blacks and whites, echoing the radical view—embraced by Malcolm X and other black militants—that white liberals could not contribute to the struggle for black liberation. Grace realizes, however, that in trying to overcome his former relationships with whites, Vessels risks destroying himself and his family. Even though Vessels’s role as a revolutionary leader fulfills a long-awaited dream and struggle for liberation that has extended for centuries—exactly what Baraka exhorts in “The Revolutionary Theatre”—The Slave depicts the revolution’s toll on Vessels and his inability to successfully navigate his own racial allegiances.[41] The Slave’s ending ultimately negates Vessels’s prospects for a successful revolution—even within the fictional setting created by the play—and reveals the fate of his family when he asserts that his two daughters are dead, most likely by his own hands. Following the death of Easley, the fate of his children in The Slave’s final scenes becomes the focus of attention; however, Vessels’s actions and statements suggest that he arrived at Grace’s house with the intention of ending his children’s lives. Vessels mentions at different times that he returned to Grace’s house because he “want[s] those children” (65), but the stage directions at the beginning of act one suggest that he could have already taken their lives before confronting Grace. After the shelling increases and the house is hit, Grace is fatally hurt. When Grace asks him to “see about the girls,” he repeatedly tells her that “they’re dead” (87, 88). Scholars are divided regarding the fate of the children, suggesting that they could have died in the burning building, Vessels could have taken their lives, or that the scene is vague and unclear.[42] Although the play’s ending appears perplexing, Vessels’s seemingly incomprehensible actions gain meaning by taking into consideration that he arrived to Grace’s house with the premonition that his revolutionary fight may not succeed. During a moment of weakness or sincerity, Vessels confesses to Grace: “I was going to wait until the fighting was over . . . until we have won, before I took [the children]. But something occurred to me for the first time, last night. It was the idea that we might not win” (68). Baraka in later years conceded that some of his plays preceding Malcolm X’s death, including The Slave, were “essentially petty bourgeois radicalism, even rebellion, but not clear and firm enough as to revolution.”[43] Based in part on Baraka’s own acknowledgement that Vessels lacked revolutionary conviction, some scholars have described Vessels’s fight as futile.[44] Jerry Gafio Watts inconclusively suggests that the ambiguous fate of the children is “more annoying than provocative,” leaving the ending of the play without “any resemblance of meaning.”[45] Vessels’s actions and the fate of his children, however, achieve an important symbolic meaning in the context of Vessels’s former self as a slave when, during the antebellum period, some slaves took the extreme action of ending their children’s lives in order to spare their fate as slaves. The ending of The Slave inventively engages with the era of slavery by drawing parallels with tragic episodes during the antebellum era such as the well-known case of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave, who took the radical measure of taking her daughter’s life before her capture as an alternative to slavery, an episode masterly rendered in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Henry D. Miller observes that in Baraka’s plays, characters “are not human beings at all, but political abstractions.”[46] Although the absence of Vessels’s daughters during the play may suggest a metaphorical interpretation of these characters, his disturbing actions toward them are also pragmatic, as Vessels reasons that the fate of non-whites may be in jeopardy after a possible military victory by the white army. Vessels returns to Grace’s house because he believes he is “rescuing the children” from an unspecified danger (69); his rescue takes the form of a desperate form of protection. Morrison’s use of Garner’s story continued a tradition in antislavery writing that called attention to slaves’ attempts to gain their freedom since, according to Paul Gilroy, the “horrific” story of Garner was often used by some abolitionists to raise awareness for the antislavery cause.[47] In a similar manner, and in relation to calls for a black revolution in the sixties, Vessels’s seemingly incomprehensible actions in The Slave dramatize the way in which oppressive race relations cornered individuals into taking desperate actions, as Garner’s story also demonstrates. As a result, the children in The Slave represent the unfulfilled aspirations of a black revolution just as Garner’s daughter symbolizes slaves’ negated freedom. In Baraka’s rendering of this parallel episode, Vessels’s dreams for liberation are shattered for him and his children as they ultimately perish, and he returns to his slave-like state at the end of the play. Beyond reflecting Baraka’s radicalization and frustration regarding the marginalized conditions of urban blacks during the sixties, The Slave craftily contextualizes its radical and militant message by merging Vessels’s revolutionary aims with historical instances of armed resistance by blacks. The play’s endurance rests in its reminder that the gains for social recognition during the sixties were not only achieved through acts of nonviolent resistance, but also through the prospects of violent confrontation. Aesthetically, The Slave uses innovative techniques that reflect postmodern anxieties in relation to the challenge and subversion of dominant historical narratives about the era of slavery; Vessels’s discomforting revolutionary message that stresses militancy, nationalist aspirations, and radical actions in the face of racial oppression stands as a form of historical memory that reflects the contentious history of race relations—not only during the sixties but also at different junctions in American history. The play’s engagement with the position of marginalized subjects and their past history of resistance found in black theater is similarly present in the Chicano theater tradition. Luis Valdez’s Bandido! Critical discussions of Valdez’s works are often divided within the framework of Valdez’s collaboration with El Teatro Campesino and his post-80s projects; however, Bandido! has not been commonly explored as the continuation of the nationalist and revolutionary themes and creative engagement with history already present in his pre-El Teatro Campesino play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, which introduced the use of the archetypal revolutionary for the first time in Chicano theater.[48] Scholars have pointed out that the characters of the two brothers in Shrunken Head, Joaquín and Belarmino, reflect—and physically appropriate—characteristics of two historical figures of resistance, Joaquín Murrieta and Francisco Villa.[49] The ethos of Villa is staged both in a “realistic” and “surrealistic” manner as their father, Pedro, allegedly fought alongside Villa during the Mexican Revolution while Belarmino acts literally as the missing head of Villa.[50] The play is explicit in relation to Villa’s symbolism as a “peasant outlaw” and as “revolutionary giant.”[51] Shrunken Head shows an imaginative treatment of history and the revolutionary figure that is recovered and situated within an American historical context in Bandido![52] The emphasis on the history of the Southwest in Bandido! serves to reclaim past events of war and conquest and to situate early Mexican Americans within a geographical space neglected to them in prevalent historical narratives. Huerta correctly notes that with Bandido!, Valdez offers Chicanos a historical “presence in the state of California.”[53] Previously the largest group in the state, Californios were considerably outnumbered only a decade after the discovery of gold in 1848. They faced social and economic discrimination—and more importantly—they lost most of their land and social position despite the protections granted in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Before the 1860s, Californios owned the most valuable land in California, but “by the 1870s, they owned only one-fourth of this land” and by “the 1880s Mexicans were relatively landless.”[54] The historical Vásquez traced his ancestry to the first Californios who arrived in the eighteenth-century, and his loss of land and social status forms the basis and context for Vásquez’s actions in Bandido!; he mentions that a “hundred years ago, [his] great grandfather founded San Francisco with [Juan] De Anza. Fifty years ago José Tiburcio Vásquez was the law in San José”;[55] but Vásquez laments that he “cannot even walk the wooden side-walks of either city without a leash” (110). Vásquez’s reversal of fortune represents the fate of Californios after the U.S. annexation of the territory. Valdez’s play challenges dominant narratives of the U.S. westward expansion that exalts the economic success stories of white Americans by focusing on Vásquez as a marginalized subject who, similar to Vessels in The Slave, revolts against the social order. In the introduction to Bandido!, Valdez subverts such narratives by contending that the “American mythology” that constitutes the history of the Old West remains “under constant revision” (97). Bandido! presents an alternative interpretation to the meaning and symbolic significance of Vásquez despite, or because of, his ominous ending since, as Valdez also notes, Vásquez holds the distinction of being the last man to be publically executed in California in 1875 (97). There has been a shift in analyses of Bandido! from looking at the play as a distortion of history to reevaluating the play as recontextualizing history and questioning its neutrality. Scholars and reviewers who saw the 1994 staging of Bandido! were critical about what they perceived as “revisionary history” (89).[56] Broyles-González, for instance, argues that the plight of the historical Vásquez in Bandido! is “wholly distorted by omissions.”[57] Valdez’s intent, however, is to take advantage of the malleability of historical accounts—as the play’s introduction suggests—to create his own revolutionary archetype. As a contrast to Baraka’s loose amalgamation of figures of resistance in The Slave, Bandido! is based on the historical Vásquez; however, rather than simply contesting negative historical characterizations and presenting the true Vásquez, Valdez’s play carves its own figure of resistance based on competing interpretations. Although the revolutionary dimension of the historical Vásquez has been disputed by historians,[58] the revolutionary figure in Bandido!—just as in The Slave—is used as a symbol of resistance able to embody, as Huerta notes, Chicano’s “struggle against oppressive forces.”[59] Rossini rightly observes that Vásquez in Bandido! stands as a rebel archetype since Valdez “reject[s] the easy label of criminal and tak[es] seriously Vásquez’s revolutionary potential.”[60] The representation of Vásquez in Bandido! is more complex than a simple revisionist rendering of Vásquez’s life on stage; rather, Bandido!’s portrayal of Vásquez reflects what scholars such as Juan Alonzo have identified as the reconceptualization of the figure of the nineteenth-century outlaw and bandit after the eighties.[61] Bandido! balances two seemingly contradictory accounts in relation to the historical character of Vásquez and presents two Vásquez figures: a bandit innocent of shooting three Americans who becomes a figure of nonviolent resistance, and an armed rebel who attempts to incite a revolution in California. On one hand, Bandido! rejects the simplistic characterization of Vásquez as a petty thief and makes him a symbol for Californios against the American expansion into the Southwest that similarly echoed the nonviolent actions by Chávez during the Delano strike in the 1960s. In Bandido!, Vásquez acknowledges his “twenty years as a horse thief and stage robber,” but contends that his “career grew out of the circumstances by which [he] was surrounded” (127). Vásquez’s actions reflect the changing circumstances of Mexican Americans as he adds: “I was thirteen when gold was discovered. As I grew to manhood, a spirit of hatred and revenge took possession of me. I had many fights in defense of what I believed to be my rights and those of my countrymen” (127). In the play’s early scenes, Vásquez acts as a scrupulous bandit who restrains himself from shooting victims during his raids. Vásquez informs his band before the raid at Tres Pinos that his “[f]irst cardinal rule” is “no killing” (116). When Vásquez is captured and sentenced for his involvement in the robbery, his hanging takes the form of an act of arbitrary justice, but also symbolizes the limits of passive resistance by Mexican Americans after the annexation of California. On the other hand, Bandido! employs the rebel figure inscribed in the history of Mexican Americans in the Southwest to articulate a message of resistance. Valdez connects Vásquez’s rebellious actions to early California outlaws such as Murrieta and “Mestizo” revolutionaries such as Villa already present in his militant play The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa.[62] As the play progresses, Bandido! imaginatively uses Vásquez’s revolutionary potential—whether historical or fictional—to insert a militant message as Vásquez shares his plans to begin a revolution in order to liberate California from U.S. control. After the raid at Tres Pinos, Vásquez is once again on the run when he reaches the San Fernando Mission. There, he finds refuge in the estate of Don Andrés Pico, a historical figure, who during the U.S.-Mexican War “defeated the U.S. Cavalry at the Battle of San Pasquel [sic]” (138).[63] During their meeting, Vásquez invites Pico to join him in fighting Americans one more time when he confesses: “I’m talking about a revolution. With a hundred well armed men, I can start a rebellion that will crack the state of California in two, like an earthquake, leaving the Bear Republic in the north, and [a] Spanish California Republic in the south!” (137). Vásquez, however, is subsequently captured without enacting his plan. The scene is significant for its symbolism since Vásquez’s desire to begin a revolution is explicit. Rather than resolving these two facets of Vásquez’s life—as an innocent outlaw and a revolutionary—Bandido! purposefully complicates these two competing narratives. An element that differentiates The Slave and Bandido! is that Valdez’s play self-reflexively exploits and interrogates the facts and myth of Vásquez’s life as it accentuates and undermines the play’s own historical significance through the use of parody and the inclusion of fragmented and competing narratives within the play. Hutcheon explains that “[p]arody is a complex genre, in terms of both its form and its ethos. It is one of the ways in which modern artists have managed to come to terms with the weight of the past.”[64] Bandido! creates two parallel narratives through the “play within a play” device in which some of the play’s scenes are a reenactment of a play written by Vásquez himself about his life staged by Samuel Gillette, a theatrical “impresario,” while Vásquez awaits his sentence in a San Jose prison (98, 100). Gillette’s artistic vision, when reenacting Vásquez’s life on stage, and the writing and rewriting of Vásquez’s own story in Bandido! examine and parody the process of theatrical representation and historical certainty. Hutcheon describes parody as the “perfect postmodern form” since “it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies.”[65] Under this view, Bandido! calls attention to Vásquez’s significance while simultaneously undermining the veracity of such assertion. A marked difference between The Slave and Bandido! is that although both plays revolve around the possibilities of armed resistance and revolution by minority groups against a larger white population, the style of The Slave is tragic; in contrast, Bandido! combines realistic elements with melodrama.[66] Huerta, for example, argues that Bandido! is divided in two distinct sections and explains that “[w]hen we are with Vásquez in the jail cell, we are observing the real man; when the action shifts to the melodrama stage we are sometimes watching the Impresario’s visions and sometimes we are actually watching Vásquez’s interpretation.”[67] Other scholars, however, have observed that the line between the melodrama sections and the realistic jail scenes becomes blurred and problematic as the play progresses.[68] The use of melodrama, ultimately, adds an additional dimension to Vásquez as a multifaceted character. Bandido! weaves Vásquez’s competing nonviolent and revolutionary message as Vásquez himself directly writes and rewrites his own story while in jail, thus mediating a set of seemingly contradictory positions. After the first staging of Vásquez’s play by Gillette, Vásquez complains about Gillette’s emphasis on his private life as “melodrama” where Vásquez’s alleged romantic exploits are accentuated through his relationship with Rosario, a married woman (109). Rather than resolving the tension between Vásquez’s personal life and his public persona, Valdez’s play self-reflexively exploits the apparent contradictions. Gillette expresses skepticism regarding Vásquez’s desire to prove his innocence during the killings at Tres Pinos and to enhance his pacifist stance, while at the same time trying to incite an armed revolt that reflects his revolutionary aspirations. When Vásquez and Gillette are negotiating the terms for staging Vásquez’s play in San Francisco, Vásquez tells Gillette: “If I’m to be hanged for murder, I want the public to know I’m not guilty” (110). Gillette objects to this request as he wonders: “Twenty years as a vicious desperado and never a single, solitary slaying?” (110). At the same time, Gillette agrees to buy Vásquez’s revised play and stage it in San Francisco but with “none of this Liberator of California horseshit” since he would “be laughed out of the state if [he tries] to stage that” (140). Vásquez’s own crafting of his story and Gillette’s assistance as theater producer and businessman combine to mediate the play’s layered message. Despite its revolutionary message, Bandido! portrays an unsuccessful revolution as Vásquez questions his actions due to his ambivalence regarding his intent to incite a revolution and his hybrid cultural identity as he decides—before his execution—to avert an armed confrontation. Before Vásquez’s capture, Cleodovio Chávez, one of Vásquez’s band members, is attracted to the possibility of gathering a group of armed men and “slaughter[ing] every gringo [they] meet” since he reasons, “[I]f they’re gonna hang us, it might as well be for something good—not petty thievery” (145). In a subsequent scene, Vásquez averts the possible confrontation by sending a letter to Chávez, who has not been captured, asking him “not to get himself and a lot of innocent people killed” (150). The possibility for armed confrontation—which is set in motion in The Slave—is averted in Bandido! due to Vásquez’s own hybrid cultural identification as a Californio and an American. A significant gesture in Bandido! is that although Vásquez was chased in his homeland and persecuted by American authorities, he considers himself a product of his mixed Mexican and American background. Vásquez displays what Ramón Saldívar has identified as an “in-between existence” present in Mexican American narratives since the formation of the U.S.-Mexican border.[69] In Bandido!, Vásquez has the opportunity to stay in Mexico, but he returns to California; when asked about his motives, Vásquez responds that he has “never relished the idea of spending the rest of [his] days in Mexico” since California is “where [he] belong[s]” (138). The character of Vásquez signals a transition in Valdez’s drama from presenting the memory and ethos of Villa, a Mexican revolutionary, in The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa as an archetypal figure to Vásquez in Bandido!, a Mexican American figure of resistance, who belongs to the history of the U.S. and the Southwest. Conclusion The Slave and Bandido! use innovative dramatic techniques that reflect postmodern concerns in post-sixties minority theater regarding the malleability and fragmentation of historical narratives to question historical representations of their respective marginalized groups. Both plays reclaim previously overlooked figures in dominant historical discourses and offer them agency to recreate and alter the historical memory of each group. The plays transform marginalized subjects, from a slave and an outlaw, respectively, into revolutionary figures to create a historical continuity between previous instances of armed resistance and revolt from past to contemporary times. Both revolutionary leaders engage, in different degrees, in a quest to gain their freedom and previously negated historical spaces—a black nation and an independent California respectively—that can be achieved through violent means. The Slave and Bandido! revolve around the haunting memory of race relations in the U.S. and episodes of armed resistance by altering historical narratives as Baraka’s contemporary revolutionary figure carries the history of slave rebellions, while Valdez’s play disrupts historical representations by allowing its revolutionary figure to write and rewrite his own legacy. The Slave and Bandido! ultimately present unfulfilled revolutions even in their fictional settings and show a similar ambivalence regarding their revolutionaries’ actions and intents toward whites. Despite its representation of a race war, The Slave is less radical than commonly assumed since Vessels struggles unsuccessfully to jettison his previous racial pluralism and his past relationships with whites. Vásquez in Bandido! similarly struggles to incite a revolt against whites in light of his hybrid cultural identity. Although both plays appear to respond to different social and political historical periods, they interrogate and grapple with ever-present questions of race and ethnic identity, and the position of people of color in the U.S., that continue to define American society in contemporary times. The Slave and Bandido! represent an instance, among others, in which the themes, tropes, and techniques used by black and Mexican American playwrights and writers after the sixties converge to show that some of the aesthetic work by authors of color share deeper commonalities. Dr. Jose Fernandez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Western Illinois University. His articles have appeared in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. His current research focuses on the commonalities and points of convergence among African American and Latino/a authors after the 1960s. [1] The term Chicano/a refers to individuals of Mexican descent living in the Southwest. For a detailed description of the social and political connotations of the terms Chicano/a, Mexican American, and Mexican in the context of Chicano theatre, see Jorge Huerta, “When Sleeping Giants Awaken: Chicano Theatre in the 1960s,” Theatre Survey 43, no.1 (2002): 23. [2] See Jorge Huerta, Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms (Ypsilanti: Bilingual Press, 1982), 11-45; Yolanda Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 3-35; Jorge Huerta, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, and Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26-44; Larry Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1989), 62-78; Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 259-90; and Henry D. Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre: Art Versus Protest in Critical Writings, 1898-1965 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 179-216. [3] Elam’s expansive analysis covers their one-act and extended plays from 1965 to 1971, concentrating on their plays’ shared themes and elements such as the influence of the social context, the content and form of the dramatic texts, and their performing spaces. Harry J. Elam Jr., Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 17. [4] Ibid., 4. [5] Ibid., 7. [6] Watts, Amiri Baraka, 82-83; and Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 235-36. [7] The Slave opened in the St. Marks Playhouse in Greenwich Village in December 1964 while Bandido! was first staged in San Juan Bautista in 1981, and then at the Mark Taper Forum in California in 1994. Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 205; and Jon D. Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater: Wrighting Ethnicity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 88-89. [8] See Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 232; Watts, Amiri Baraka, 83; and Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 134. [9] Huerta, Chicano Theater, 61; Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 170-71, 189. [10] Scholars have discussed the role of audiences in relation to The Slave and Bandido! by focusing on Baraka’s goal of creating a black militant consciousness and Valdez’s attempt during the eighties to avoid the confrontational rhetoric characteristic of El Teatro Campesino’s plays. See Guillermo E. Hernández, Chicano Satire: A Study in Literary Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 50; Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 172-73, 229, 235-36; and Watts, Amiri Baraka, 83. [11] Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 92. [12] Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 235. [13] Elam, Taking it to the Streets, 3. [14] Valdez states in his manifest-poem, Pensamiento Serpentino (Serpentine Thoughts), that “To be CHICANO is to love yourself / your culture, your / skin, your language.” “Pensamiento Serpentino,” in Luis Valdez—Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino (Houston: Arte Publico, 1990), 175. [15] Luis Valdez, “Notes on Chicano Theatre” in Luis Valdez—Early Works, 10. [16] Baraka wrote about his experiences visiting the island and witnessing first-hand the results of the revolution led by “a group of young radical intellectuals” much like himself; “Cuba Libre,” In Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966), 38; See also, Amiri Baraka, Conversations with Amiri Baraka, edited by Charlie Reilly (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 132; and Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 52-54. [17] Huerta, “When Sleeping Giants Awaken,” 25. [18] W. B. Worthen, “Staging América: The Subject of History in Chicano/a Theatre,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 2 (1997): 103. [19] Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory and Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 89. [20] Phillip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3. [21] Ibid., 28-29. [22] For discussions on The Slave, see Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 134-138; Lloyd Brown, Amiri Baraka (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 147-50; Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future, 67-74; Watts, Amiri Baraka, 78-84; and Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 205-11. [23] Amiri Baraka, “Black Is a Country,” in Home: Social Essays, 84. [24] Amiri Baraka, “Cold, Hurt, and Sorrow (Streets of Despair),” in Home: Social Essays, 94-95. [25] Watts, Amiri Baraka, 269-73, 445-49. [26] In his analysis of The Slave, Brown discusses briefly the significance of Vessels’s position as a “field slave” as an archetypal figure of black militancy. Brown, Amiri Baraka, 150. [27] Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) (Baltimore: Lucas & Denver, 1831), 6. Gray describes Turner during his 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia as “fiendish” and “savag[e]” and guided by a fundamentalist vision of retribution and conflict enacted in religious scriptures. [28] Amiri Baraka, “Street Protest,” in Home: Social Essays, 98. [29] Ibid., 98. [30] Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 135. [31] Amiri Baraka, The Slave in Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays by LeRoi Jones (New York: Morrow, 1964), 43, 44. All subsequent references are indicated in parenthesis. [32] For discussion on The Slave’s prologue, see Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 137; Watts, Amiri Baraka, 78-79; and Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 209-210. [33] Amiri Baraka, introduction to The Motion of History and Other Plays. (New York: William Morrow, 1978), 13. See also, Amiri Baraka, “What Does Nonviolence Mean?” in Home: Social Essays, 137. [34] Baraka, “What Does Nonviolence Mean?,” 135, 137. [35] Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future, 70. [36] Ibid., 71-72. [37] Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” in Home: Social Essays, 211. [38] Neil correctly observes that The Slave “is essentially about Walker’s attempt to destroy his white past. For it is the past, with all of its painful memories, that is really the enemy of the revolutionary.” Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future, 70. [39] As Baraka comments in his Autobiography, his increasingly militant stance against whites opened a chasm between him and Hettie Jones, which forms the basis of the confrontation between Vessels and Grace in The Slave. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), 195-96. [40] Samuel A. Hay, African American Theatre: A Historical and Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 95. [41] Years later, Baraka observed that Vessels’s revolutionary goals were hindered due to his inability to shed his past. Baraka asserts that going “through the whole process of breast-beating, accusations, and lamenting meant” that Vessels still had “a relationship with his wife, with his past.” Conversations, 134. [42] See Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 210; Watts, Amiri Baraka, 82-83; Hay, African American Theatre, 95; and Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 137. [43] Baraka, Introduction to The Motion of History, 12. [44] See Watts, Amiri Baraka, 80; and Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 136. [45] Watts, Amiri Baraka, 83. [46] Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 210. [47] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 66. [48] Huerta describes the significance of Shrunken Head since it marked the first time that “a Chicano playwright began to explore the idea of being marginalized in this country” and “became the first produced play written by a Chicano about being Chicano.” “Looking for the Magic: Chicanos in the Mainstream,” in Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America, ed. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 38. [49] See Jorge Huerta, introduction to The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa in Necessary Theater: Six Plays about the Chicano Experience, ed. Jorge Huerta (Houston: Arte Publico, 1989), 143-44; Huerta, Chicano Theater, 53-54; and Worthen, “Staging América,” 111, 118. [50] Luis Valdez, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa in Necessary Theater, 154. [51] Ibid., 155, 160. [52] Huerta points out that Valdez’s experimental style in Shrunken Head “set the tone for all of [his] later works, none of which can be termed realism or realistic” (Chicano Drama, 60). Similarly, the importance of history for Valdez was closely connected to Chicano identity and this theme is present at different stages during his career. Reflecting on the role of history within the Chicano movement, Valdez explains that he and other Chicano artists during the 1960s were “forced to re-examine the facts of history, and suffuse them with [their] own blood—to make them tell [their] reality.” “La Plebe,” in introduction to Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature, ed. Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner (New York: Knopf, 1972), xxxi. [53] Huerta, Chicano Drama, 30. [54] Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1981), 104. [55] Luis Valdez, Bandido! In Zoot Suit and other Plays (Houston: Arte Publico, 1992), 110. All subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [56] Rossini discusses the negative reviews by theater critics of the 1994 staging of Bandido! in Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 89-90. [57] Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 232. [58] The historical Vásquez was aware of the symbolic meaning of his actions and told at least one reporter about his intent to incite revolution in California. Before his execution, however, “Vásquez made no claim of being a revolutionary and offered no excuses for his lengthy criminal career” and “never took any steps to carry out a revolt against the Anglo majority.” John Boessenecker, Bandido: The Life and Times of Tiburcio Vásquez (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 372. [59] Huerta, Chicano Drama, 31. [60] Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 92. [61] Juan J. Alonzo. Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of Mexican American Identity in Literature and Film (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 135-39. [62] Valdez, “La Plebe,” xxvi-xxvii. [63] The Battle of San Pasqual was a short-lived battle of the U.S.-Mexican War fought between Stephen Kearny’s troops and a group of Californio lanceros (California lancers) led by Andrés Pico. After a brief scrimmage, the battle turned into a standoff with Kearny’s brief siege of the village of San Pasqual. John S. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico: 1846-1848 (New York: Random House), 222-26. [64] Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 29. [65] Hutcheon, Poetics, 11. [66] For discussions on Valdez’s use of melodrama in Bandido!, see Huerta, Introduction to Zoot Suit. In Zoot Suit and other Plays, 18; Worthen, “Staging América,” 113-15; Huerta, Chicano Drama, 29-30; and Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 78-87. [67] Huerta, Chicano Drama, 30. [68] See Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 137, 232; Worthen, “Staging América,” 114; and Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 89. [69] Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 17. “Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido!” by Jose Fernandez ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017) ©2017 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: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido!” by Jose Fernandez “Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland" by Stephen Hong Sohn 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 ©2016 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 Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle Affective Performance and Cognitive Science Kitchen Sink Realisms Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience Everything Plus the Kitchen Sink Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! 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Peter Wood Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience Peter Wood By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience emerged from a series of five conferences organized by the editors between 2009 and 2013, each essay resulting from "a series of encounters, collaborations, and mutual influences between researchers hailing from different geographical and disciplinary contexts” (xiv). In a collection representing scholars from seven countries and thirteen research areas, the editors do a good job at providing a wide range of scholarship as well as a structure that binds the twelve essays—divided into four parts—into a relatively coherent whole. The editors focus on two main reasons for the importance of interdisciplinary work on theatre and neuroscience. The first is that theatre practice and scholarship touches upon a vast array of “human sciences,” including anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, history, and economics (xv). Thus, understanding how theatre affects—and is affected—by the human mind is a broadly worthwhile pursuit. The second reason stems from the editors’ desire to move theatre scholars away from the limitations of “ literary perspectives and interpretations” (xv). Because of this, the concept of embodied cognition is central to all of the essays in the book, and there are important ramifications to scholarship if one accepts embodiment as a starting point. In this, Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience is certainly not unique: embodiment is the cornerstone of many explorations of the cognitive sciences in theatre scholarship and leads to the standpoint that there is no real brain/body split: the brain may be necessary for thought and experience but it is not sufficient. However, as the title of this collection suggests, these essays are primarily concerned with what neuroscience can reveal about brain functions and how such functions relate to theatre and performance. The role that mirror neurons, mirror systems, and other such sensorimotor “resonances” play in the performance and reception of theatre is foundational to many of the essays in the book. Indeed, this foundation is highlighted by the fact that the first chapter is written by Maria Alessandra Umiltà, a member of the original research team that discovered mirror neurons in macaque monkeys. These particular neurons are motor neurons that—when a monkey watches another monkey or human perform certain actions—fire in the same way as they would if the monkey performed the action itself. While Umiltà does not address theatre directly, her essay provides a general discussion on the discovery, function, and meaning of mirror neurons. She also points out the distinction between mirror neurons directly observed in monkey and the proposed mirror systems indirectly observed and measured in humans, noting that in humans we see “a similar mechanism” (22) to mirror neurons but she is not claiming tohave directly studied individual mirror neurons in humans. There is compelling evidence for some kind of mirror system in humans, and it does make sense for theatre scholars to be interested in what such systems reveal about participation in, and observation of, theatre and performance, but often this distinction is glossed over in subsequent essays. Umiltà’s essay introduces the first of the four sections, “Theatre as a Space of Relationships: A Neurocognitive Perspective,” which relies heavily on a notion of space as both a physical space shared by people as well as a neuro-space that becomes a “shared space of action” (12). This allows for knowledge that is both pre-linguistic and totally embodied. The second section, “The Spectator’s Performative Experience and ‘Embodied Theatrology,’” argues, in general terms, that the act of spectating is never, in any ontological sense, passive and that every experience is, indeed, an embodied one. Section three, “The Complexity of Theatre and Human Cognition,” focuses on performer and actor training, while still being grounded in the relationship between the performer and the observer. Victor Jacono’s introduction to this third section argues, compellingly, for the relevance of scientific understanding on how the brain works and, in particular, how “knowing is done” (105). He suggests that “actor training is a systemic research process leading to a modification of the self, opening to the possibility of entering with the totality of one’s being in a new aesthetic and practical relation with reality” (105). While the tone of Jacono’s introduction occasionally verges into the metaphysical, his assumptions are solidly based on a current understanding of the brain’s neuro-plasticity and the ways in which learning a new tool creates physical change in a subject. The final section, “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Applied Performance,” presents several inquiries into how theatre can be used in therapeutic settings. In particular, it examines theatre and performance training as potential therapies for Autism Spectrum Disorders and Parkinson’s Disease. The individual essays range across discussions of specific experiments to more philosophical musings on things like time, Antonin Artaud, and the nature of theatre as therapy. The former, more data-driven essays are, in large part, what set this book apart and make it an important, if sometimes uneven, collection. Examples of exciting, interdisciplinary work include that of Giorgia Committeri and Chiara Fini on how the act of observing a human being within a three dimensional scene actually helps us organize spatial distances at a neuronal level and Corinee Jola’s and Matthew Reason’s fascinating analysis of data on both the neurological and the phenomenological experiences of live performance, focusing on notions of proximity and interaction. Also important is the discussion, by Gabriele Sofia, Silvia Spadacenta, Clelia Falletti, and Giovanni Mirabella, about several ongoing experiments designed to test for ways in which actor training affects reaction times in various circumstances. As the first experimental study designed to “show how theatre training modifies the neurobiology of action” (138), this is a particularly important chapter. So too is the research on theatre training as a tool in Parkinson’s therapy by Nicola Modugno, Imogen Kusch, and Giovanni Marabella, leading to the conclusion that while there is no evidence that such training leads to significant neuronal improvement among Parkinson’s patients, there is measurable improvement in the patients’ phenomenological experience of their own bodies and interactions with others. Set against these excellent studies, some of the less scientific essays in Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience seem both out of place and not entirely convincing. Additionally, the regular slippage between the concepts of mirror neurons and mirror systems in humans is not surprising, but remains something of a problem I often encounter in this area of research. However, a far more interesting issue is the somewhat utopian notion, underlying many of the chapters, that mirror neurons (or systems) necessarily equal empathy and that empathy necessarily equals a greater application of ethical care and understanding toward others. (Indeed, this sensibility underlies many other essays and books on the convergence of theatre and cognitive science and is an assumption that deserves further critical examination.) Still, the editors have put together an important collection for several reasons. The first, and most banal, is that it offers significant resources though the footnotes. Hundreds of studies and experiments are cited throughout, allowing one to explore some of the most up-to-date research on neuroscience and performance. Second, this collection presents a number of voices that many North American scholars may be unfamiliar with, revealing an alternate genealogy of research, approaches, and methodologies that will prove highly useful for anyone interested in this research area. Finally, the book presents concrete examples of theatre scholars and scientists working together through experimentation and the accumulation of data. These models can help those of us committed to the collusion between cognitive sciences and theatre scholarship to stop simply calling for such a practice (which is relatively easy) and to take the next step in a truly multidisciplinary way (which is much harder). Peter Wood, PhD Independent Scholar Head of Electronic Initiatives/Listserv Manager, ATDS.org The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle Affective Performance and Cognitive Science Kitchen Sink Realisms Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience Everything Plus the Kitchen Sink Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

kt shorb Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed kt shorb By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF A disembodied voice announces, “Places for T.L.M.,” prompting the two women holding fans to usher a man between them. The three unfurl their battered fans and begin waving them in rictus as the voice says, “Standby for telecast transmission in 5…4…3…” A jaunty introduction cues the three to bob up and down with the beat, while the two other ensemble members lie across their bunks desultorily fanning themselves. They sing, “Three little maids from school are we / Pert as a school-girl well can be…” [1] They bob and giggle behind their fans. They shuffle around the small stage in single-file, bowing and cow-towing. The music ends and the disembodied voice says, “Cut.” The ensemble members rub the forced smiles off their faces, and the man who evidently subbed in for a missing woman ensemble member nods approvingly to himself (Fig. 1). Fig. 1. Q-mates perform “Three Little Maids.” Photo by Kannou Aiana via Blue Inferno Creative. The Mikado: Reclaimed (Reclaimed) [2] uses the 1885 W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan operetta The Mikado: Or the Town of Titipu as source material to criticize anti-Asian racism inherent in both the text and present day yellowface productions. Set in a near future ravaged by a global viral pandemic, Reclaimed depicts life in an internment camp for people of Asian descent who have been deemed “carriers” of the virus. “Q-mates (short for ‘quarantine inmates’)” are forced to perform song and dance numbers portraying “happy camp life” in the national livecast, “Virus Times Live!” Produced by the Austin-based Generic Ensemble Company (GenEnCo) in partnership with The VORTEX, Reclaimed was directed by me and devised by a mostly-Asian American ensemble. Four years after closing this show, the so-called “Chinese Virus” of COVID–19 quarantines millions across the world, as anti-Asian violence escalates alongside protest against state-sanctioned anti-Black violence after the murder of George Floyd. In 2016, we could not have consciously anticipated COVID–19 and its accompanying scapegoating of Asian bodies as carriers of disease. Yet, unconsciously, we did. Through the creative devising process, collaborators not only divined elements of the future but also developed a community of resistive care that concatenated a COVID–19 futurity with a carceral past. To invite this community of resistive care, we enacted reappropriation through strategies of reparative creativity, seduction of stereotype, and feeling yellow. In this practice-as-research article, I provide the background to the impetus of Reclaimed followed by a synopsis of the show. Citing literature by Asian Americanist performance scholars, I show how our creative process interwove critical race theory with aesthetic considerations, leading to a project-specific process I call “reappropriation.” Finally, I reflect on how our process provided an opportunity for racial healing amongst the collaborators. Background and Genesis The Mikado has been produced in yellowface nearly every year since it debuted in 1885. A satire about British aristocracy set in a perceived-exotic locale, a “Japan” where flirting is illegal, the plot of Mikado is a ridiculous farce. Few elements signal a “real” Japan, like the “Mikado,” a rarely-used moniker for the Japanese Emperor. [3] Most character and place names are derisive, nonsensical words such as “Yum-Yum,” “Nanki-poo,” and “Titipu.” As an Asian American performing artist racially traumatized by Mikado since being exposed to it in college, I expressed my opposition to it in every place I lived over the span of two decades—garnering little notice or support. The Asian American community response to the Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society’s Mikado in 2014 sparked perhaps the first mainstream awareness of yellowface in this operetta as anti-Asian racism. When the production published publicity stills of white actors in yellowface, many local Asian American theatre artists expressed their long-held outrage. This led to Asian American-centered social media campaigns that spread to coverage by mainstream outlets such as the Seattle Times and NBC News . The yellowface Seattle production still opened, but many were put on notice. When New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players (NYGASP) announced Mikado in 2015 with a yellowface production image, Japanese American playwright Leah Nanako Winkler sounded the call to respond. [4] I was part of a national groundswell of Asian Americans responding to Winkler’s call on Twitter that led to a postponement and re-imagining of the show in partnership with Asian American artists. In a moment of frustration and sheer bravado, I announced on Twitter that GenEnCo could do The Mikado in a thoughtful, anti-racist way. Our task was set. GenEnCo’s Reclaimed occurs in a larger context of multiple Asian American and Japanese treatments of Mikado . Doriz Baizley and Ken Narasaki’s 2007 The Mikado Project portrays an Asian American theatre company struggling through financial ruin by mounting a production of Mikado . [5] This play and the subsequent independent film based on it depict ambivalent Asian American actors critiquing the Orientalism of the original while embracing its musical elements and performing emotional and political acrobatics to justify the performance. [6] The Mikado Project manages to critique the racialized harm of yellowface as well as “camp plays” set during WWII Japanese American incarceration. The film starred Asian American veterans of stage and screen, including Erin Quill, who was also part of the Twitter groundswell around NYGASP in 2015. Quill has cultivated a “no-nonsense” persona leveling ongoing critiques of racism in New York theatre on her blog, fairyprincessdiaries . [7] Under the direction of Rick Shiomi in Minneapolis, Theatre Mu collaborated with Skylark Opera and set their Mikado in Edwardian England. [8] Shiomi’s 2013 production kept the broad narrative strokes as-is with significant cultural-political interventions. References to Japan were either excised or in a form of humorous wordplay; names and terms were changed to reflect early twentieth-century English mores. Perhaps most significantly, Shiomi cast Asian Americans in these English roles, thereby upending some historical baggage of yellowface. Meanwhile, The Chichibu Mikado (2006), directed by Kyoko Fujishiro and translated by Toru Sasakibara, was sung entirely in Japanese by a Japanese cast. [9] When the rural city Chichibu gained international fame as “The Town of Titipu” following the production, the residents of the city chose to believe it was based on their own town because Chichibu could also be transliterated to “Titibu,” although there is no concrete evidence that Gilbert and Sullivan had made such a connection. Re-contextualizing the plot through Japanese modern sensibilities mapped on Japanese proto-professional actor bodies speaking in Japanese, this version conveyed a means by which Japanese citizens could gain access to cosmopolitan trappings of Britain and other western contexts. These productions engaged in widely varying degrees of critique and deconstruction through adaptation. Our Reclaimed depicts the typical “day in the life” of quarantine inmates (or, Q-mates) incarcerated during a global pandemic. We follow the story of a Q-mate repeatedly summoned by a bell to change into a Lolicon outfit to perform non-consensual sex acts off-stage (JooHee) while she falls in love with another Q-mate (Rachel, Fig. 2). We witness denied physical autonomy by glowing red “chips” embedded in Q-mates’ arms that can shock and control them. Meanwhile, a surveillance state manifests in self-silenced soundscapes. Q-mates rarely speak, and when they do, it is in whispered Korean or Tagalog. When one Q-mate (Leng) speaks about freedom in English, her chip shocks everyone and then summarily impels her off-stage where her execution is broadcast for the entire cell-block to witness via video feed. Despite the draconian context, Q-mates enact the extraordinary, joyous, and mundane. Between bouts of boredom, they sing songs for one another to pass the time (“The Criminal Cried”) or to convey warnings or woe (“As Someday It May Happen,” “Here’s a How-de-do”) while periodically singing numbers for “Virus Times Live!” (“Miya Sama,” “Three Little Maids”). JooHee and Rachel join in an ad-hoc commitment ceremony (“On a Tree by a River”), which prompts a jealous Q-mate (Annie) to betray their affair to the authorities (“Alone and Yet Alive…Hearts Do Not Break”). When JooHee is summoned to perform sexual favors again, she refuses, leading instead to Rachel’s chip-shock removal and a subsequent beating, broadcast live. Rachel is released back to the cell-block, only to die in JooHee’s arms. During JooHee’s lament (“The Sun Whose Rays,” Fig. 3), the Q-mates in the entire cell-block signal to one another a refusal to continue the oppressive status quo. When the Q-mates are prompted to deliver another livecast, they abstain from song and instead reveal Rachel’s bloodied body. The show ends with a blackout and a “shock” sound, implying that everyone dies. Figure 2. Lovers’ kiss. Photo by Kannou Aiana via Blue Inferno Creative. Figure 3. Lamentation of a lover’s death. Photo by Kannou Aiana via Blue Inferno Creative. Reparative Creativity, Feeling Yellow, and Reappropriation As Dorinne Kondo argues in Worldmaking , theatre artists, through performative acts, unmake and remake race. [10] Kondo calls such processes “reparative creativity,” saying they “[offer] a way to remake worlds counter to the affective violence of minoritarian life” while also imagining something else. [11] Creative projects allow us to examine pain and transform it into different—though related—new artifacts. She further describes how reparative creativity can revisit “histories of affective violence” that can address the complexities of facing that violence. [12] Through theatre, theatre artists of color create new meanings of race and its representations with and in response to audiences of color. Devising Reclaimed , then, was a process by which both historical and contemporary notions of race were made and unmade. [13] In both the rehearsal room and onstage we have the capacity to name and rectify the affective and physical violence inflicted upon our bodies and communities. Coming together to confront yellowface as Asian Americans who have experienced its violence forms a central part of what Donatella Galella calls “feeling yellow.” [14] Galella uses Sara Ahmed’s discourse on happiness to highlight how encounters with yellowface create dichotomies where those in power find entertainment and joy, while those “feeling yellow” have to either feign joy or hide a combination of rage, disappointment, and alienation. Galella identifies two ways that feeling yellow sparks utopic hope. One is through the “impishly gleeful” process of “making another person feel awful for their enjoyment of and complicity with racist musicals… This act redistributes pain more equitably.” [15] The other is through acts of solidarity and collectivity: “By feeling together, Asian Americans can foster solidarity and use their affect to move others just as they are moved.” [16] As an imagined, strategic, and politicized community, Asian Americans must overcome historical divisions of national origin and immigration status; such opportunities for coalition are empowering if rare. Here I note a significant paradox: Reclaimed undoes racial violence through reparative creativity while the narrative of the piece ends with all the characters dead. This collective death was chosen by the ensemble deliberately to address issues of (il)legibility of Asian Americans and anti-Asian racism in the context of Austin, Texas in 2016. The piece confronted the invisibilized racial harm enacted upon bodies of Asian descent in the form of yellowface. In laying bare the hidden, Reclaimed unmade the violence of this erasure. Depicting resistance to carceral violence narratively onstage also cultivated a culture of care in the rehearsal room. In addition, while the specific stereotypes contained in Mikado were aimed at what Josephine Lee calls a Japan of “pure invention,” the production employed a majority non-Japanese ensemble of Asian Americans who had differing stakes in “Japanese-ness” but similar stakes in generalized Orientalism. [17] Though we could not articulate it at the time, the collaborative team for Reclaimed sought a space of healing and repair that could connect ensemble members’ experience of harm with the audience. If Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado is a prime example of appropriation, Mikado: Reclaimed is that of reappropriation. Reappropriation, broadly, is a process whereby a community whose cultural legacy has been defaced through harmful misinterpretation takes an object of that misinterpretation and transmutes it into something that furthers an identitarian strategic project. Lee takes up reappropriation in her treatments of works by David Henry Hwang and Philip Kan Gotanda where she notes the allure in the “excessiveness of the stereotype.” [18] She contends that reappropriation has the power to dissect stereotypes and its racialized histories, showing that it can have “the potential for its disruption.” [19] She goes further to illustrate that undoing the stereotype is not simple or easy, but the inherent theatrical power in the stereotype can serve as a potential tool for liberation. For the collaborators of Reclaimed and its audiences, reappropriation was a means of taking Orientalizing and white supremacist texts and transforming them. It was not reclamation. Reappropriation requires a breaking down of a text into components that still contain discernable referents to the original but re-create meanings different from—if not counter to—the text from which it draws. Keeping a musical number but setting it with different staging, design, and arrangement can not only excavate different implications from the original, but also reveal the political and cultural subject positions of those performing the reappropriation. Indirectness is key to how reappropriation works. To simply refute each element in the original would have repeated the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in relief, not transform it. We began the project by watching a recording of a yellowface production of The Mikado . [20] It left the cast angry. We fluctuated between revisiting the original and sharing childhood experiences of racial formation, not being taken seriously, and failed attempts at assimilation. From the super “woke” person who knew critical race theory to the “model minority” who announced that she “never encountered racism, just ignorance,” everyone expressed a sense of otherness they have felt in their lives. In order to mitigate the potential for re-traumatization, we devised a check-in/check-out process whereby collaborators could name what they wanted to “bring in from the world” or “leave in the rehearsal room.” We were committed to examining the pain as a means of healing. The actors’ initial anger brought on by having seen the original led to the ideas of overt resistance through visceral offense—eating Asian foods with strong smells such as durian or natto, enacting slasher fantasies on white effigies, and so on. We wanted to be, as Eve Oishi has called it, “Bad Asians.” [21] Our aversion, combined with knowledge of how Mikado is a part of popular culture, helped us narrow down the song list. While learning songs, we conducted parallel research. The “Muslim ban” had only been mentioned by one Republican candidate in passing during the 2016 primary campaign, and it frightened all of us, not just the sole Arab American member of the ensemble. It prompted us to examine images of Syrian refugees. These images felt familiar, echoing the detainment of people seeking asylum in border states. As Asian Americans confronting heightened yet casual racism in the form of yellowface, we were also keenly aware of how such representational violence could easily slip into yellow peril and detaining over 100,000 people of Japanese descent as potential enemy combatants. We realized that an internment camp was the requisite setting for our production. As the setting and tone became clearer, we began to imagine how we might find ourselves incarcerated again. Using the knowledge of a biologist in the cast, we created a detailed backstory around potential viral outbreaks that many scientists (rightly) considered inevitable. We then returned to the original operetta to poach as many elements as we could while homing in on what we wanted to say. Each actor chose a character they would emulate in devising their own character. We began criticizing subtler aspects of Mikado , such as the sexually-exploitative relationship between Yum-Yum and Ko-Ko and the casual treatment of death. One element specific to GenEnCo we deliberately included was a normalizing (but certainly not normative) existence of queer romance, sex, and friendship. GenEnCo was founded specifically to show bodies, aesthetics, and stories onstage that I—as a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Asian American—found to be everyday and “generic.” Our mission has always been to center queer people of color in our theatrical storytelling. I take inspiration from José Esteban Muñoz’s words that “[q]ueerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality.” [22] And that “[b]rownness is already here. Brownness is vast, present, and vital.” [23] We did however make one major textual revision that mobilized reappropriation to transform meanings in the original. Most productions of Mikado update the lyrics in “As Someday It May Happen” to reflect the undesirable subjects in the zeitgeist. In Reclaimed, these revisions provide plot context, diegetic rules, and analysis of how anti-Asian racism manifests and provides an example of reparative creativity: There’s the Centers for Disease Control who sounded the alarmThe epidemiologists, I’ve got them on the list!And the “cheap and chippy” chippers who installed these in our arms,Nanotechnologists, they never would be missed!Then the bigot who denounces with enthusiastic tone,Every race but his, and all religions but his own;And the Poo-Bah of the Quarantine, the boss man of “The Cage,”Who takes a shine to pretty girls who are less than half his ageAnd the lovers of Chinoiserie, the Asian fetishists,I don’t think they’d be missed, I’m sure they’d not be missed! [24] As we continued to create material, I asked the actors to explore mimicking white people performing yellowface. The actors were understandably disgusted at first. The disgust turned into ridicule, to rupture, then to catharsis. Through repetition of the original material, we somehow found a way to parse the past from the present, as if we were reverse engineering the racial trauma the original operetta symbolized. Rehearsing the classic earworm “Three Little Maids” was particularly informative. The song about three women “who, all unwary/ come from a ladies’ seminary” and who are “filled to the brim with girlish glee” is often performed with shuffling feet and giggles behind hands. [25] I associated this song with a falling-out with a white college friend. At first, as we rehearsed the piece, I was transported to my own past and the end of that friendship and the violent incidents around it. Due to the passing of time, I was able to manage potential emotional triggers. Partly to ground myself in the present, and partly in solidarity, I committed myself to learning all three sung parts with the actors. The repetition was at first very painful. Moving forward, however, my experience of the past began to shift. The pain became more manageable. Traumas slowly healed as the experiences of racial violence were merged with and overwritten by moments of being together as a community. We figured out a way to sing that very hurtful song while feeling yellow. The resistive care that GenEnCo created through reappropriation served as a balm to the ensemble. In hindsight, although one of the ensemble members was a trained psychologist, I would have provided more formal and robust mental health resources to examine racial trauma. That said, Reclaimed is an example of how employing reparative creativity and feeling yellow enabled minoritized theatre makers to transform both the art and the communal experience of racial trauma. References [1] Arthur Sullivan & W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado, Or, the Town of Titipu. (New York: G. Schirmer, 2002), 69. [2] Generic Ensemble Company, “The Mikado: Reclaimed,” Vimeo, 1 May 2016, https://vimeo.com/160895296. This performance featured the following actor-devisers: JooHee Ahn, Annie Kim Hedrick, Jonathan G. Itchon, Laura Khalil, Abigail Lucas, Rachel Steed, and Leng Wong. Additional collaborators on the workshop version of the piece were: Kanoa Michél Bailey, kubby, and Saray de Jesus Rosales. [3] Josephine Lee’s The Japan of Pure Invention provides an in-depth analysis of the myriad contexts of Mikado . Josephine D. Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s the Mikado (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). [4] Leah Nanako Winkler, “‘The Mikado’ in Yellowface Is Coming to The Skirball Center of the Performing Arts and We Should Talk About It,” Leah Nanako Winkler (blog), 15 September 2015, https://leahnanako.com/2015/09/15/the-mikado-in-yellowface-is-coming-to-the-skirball-center-of-the-performing-arts-and-we-should-talk-about-it/. See also: Victor Maog and Leah Nanako Winkler, “Leah Nanako Winkler, The Mikado , and This American Moment,” Howlround Theatre Commons (blog), 7 October 2015, https://howlround.com/leah-nanako-winkler-mikado-and-american-moment/. [5] Doris Baizley and Ken Narasaki, The Mikado Project (New Play Exchange, 2007), accessed 2 February 2022. [6] The Mikado Project , directed by Chil Kong, featuring Tamlyn Tomita, Allen C. Liu, Erin Quill, and Ryun Yu (New Cyberian, 2010), DVD. [7] Quill, Erin. fairyprincessdiaries (blog), https://fairyprincessdiaries.com/. [8] Diep Tran, “Building a Better ‘Mikado,’ Minus the Yellowface,” American Theatre , 21 June 2021, https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/04/20/building-a-better-mikado-minus-the-yellowface/; Rick Shiomi, “Director Removes Racism and Yellowface from Minneapolis Staging of ‘the Mikado,’” Star Tribune , 8 March 2019, https://www.startribune.com/director-removes-racism-and-yellowface-from-minneapolis-staging-of-the-mikado/506842272/. [9] The Chichibu Mikado , directed by Kyoko Fujishiro, translated by Toru Sasakibara, International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival, Buxton, Derbyshire, England, 1 August 2006. [10] Dorrine K. Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 25. [11] Ibid., 212. [12] Ibid., 212. [13] A note about tense: to differentiate between production and process, I refer to the performance in present tense and the process in past tense. [14] Donatella Galella, “Feeling Yellow: Responding to Contemporary Yellowface in Musical Performance,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 32, no. 2 (2018): 67-77, http://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2018.0005. [15] Ibid., 74. [16] Ibid., 73. [17] Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention . [18] Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 91. [19] Ibid. , 96. [20] The Mikado , DVD, directed by Brian MacDonald (Canada: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1999). [21] Eve Oishi, “Bad Asians: New Media by Queer Asian American Artists,” Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism, eds. Darrell Hamamoto and Sandra Liu (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 221-241. [22] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1. [23] José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 121-122. [24] The Mikado: Reclaimed . [25] Sullivan and Gilbert, 69-73. Footnotes About The Author(s) kt shorb (they/them/their) is Assistant Professor of Acting and Directing at Allegheny College and the producing artistic director of the Generic Ensemble Company. Their current research focuses on anti-racist and anti-colonial rehearsal room practices and actor training. As a director, they focus on devised work by underrepresented communities and new play development as well as opera stage directing. kt is currently the Vice President for the Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists. They will be joining Macalester College this fall. Deepest gratitude to Rick Shiomi who sent footage and score copies of his adaption of The Mikado. Many thanks to James McMaster, siri gurudev, Margaret Jumonville, Priya Raman, and Alexis Riley for giving me in-depth feedback on drafts of this article. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Theresa J. May Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Theresa J. May By Published on May 14, 2017 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. In 1994 Una Chaudhuri challenged theatre artists to provide new visions of what it means to be human within an ecological context, writing that the art of theatre must participate in “a transvaluation so profound as to be unimaginable at present.”[1] As the environmental crisis entered a new era of globalization in the 1990s, the embodied, immediate, and communal art of theatre became an apt site for illuminating the personal and social impact of significant ecological change. In the past two decades theatre artists and scholars have spun counter narratives and invented alternative forms that resisted environmental and cultural imperialism by exposing its mechanisms, amplifying the voices of those places and peoples it has silenced or ignored, and advocating ecological reciprocity between and among land and people.[2] When I first used the term “ecodramaturgy” in 2010, I sought to acknowledge and coalesce this praxis, and to emphasize the ways it might imaginatively intervene to forward environmental justice, sustainability and democracy.[3] Meanwhile, the fate of humans and other life forms on the planet continues on a trajectory of unparalleled risk. Scientists have suggested that we live on the cusp of a new epoch, the Anthropocene—in which human-caused changes to earth systems have outpaced all “naturally occurring” geologic, biologic, and atmospheric factors. Debate continues about whether the Anthropocene began with the age of colonization, the rise of extractive capitalism and the industrial revolution; or more recently, just after WWII when the planet saw an exponential increase in population, coupled with a rise in fossil fuel use, consumer consumption, urbanization, and nuclear radiation. This rise in CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere during the baby-boomer era is known as “the Great Acceleration.” The arts are vital in such times of crisis not only to imagine all that is at stake, but to enter feelingly into what Jeremy Davies calls “the predicament of living in the fissures between one epoch and another.”[4] In what follows I look first at Harvest Moon by José Cruz González (1994), which in many ways is emblematic of ecodramas that sought to expose the impacts of industrial and agricultural capitalism on land and communities. The play argues for environmental justice and affirms sustaining values of community, family and culture. I then turn to Burning Vision by Marie Clements (2003), an ecodrama reflective of the looming realities of the Anthropocene, which include trans-global interdependencies, irreversible exposures and losses, and generational breakage. The purpose of juxtaposing these two (separated only by a decade and which share much in common) is not to make predictions based on uncertain scenarios of “before” and “after” tipping points, but rather to search for what might become the stories of what Donna Haraway calls “ongoing and living worlds.” Stories and performances are the very expression of what she calls a necessary “tentacular thinking” that continuously reaches out, nurturing the “generative recursions that make up living and dying.”[5] Cruz González and Clements both employ a-chronological storytelling, moving freely and fluidly between times and places in works that demonstrate the shared vulnerability between people and land. Both expose environmental racism and capitalist imperialism; both reclaim people’s traditional rootedness in and rights to land; and both use theatre to presence the dead among the living, re-member lives lost, hearts broken, and histories forgotten. Both are instructive on ways to live in the fissures, but each envisions and embodies resilience differently. In Harvest Moon, hope resides in generational continuity as the play affirms the activist vision of a world in which sustainability and justice are possible. In Burning Vision, tentacular tellings embody what Haraway calls “co-presence”—neither hope nor despair, but a state of bearing witness to the breakage and living and loving through it. A Continuum of Shared Vulnerability: Harvest Moon The environmental justice movement of the 1980s and ‘90s represented the single most important conceptual gain in environmental thought of the late 20th century. [6] In 1991 the Environmental Justice Summit redefined “environment as the places where people live, work, play and worship,” demanding attention and redress for those (women, children, communities of color, and the poor) who have been disproportionately impacted by the shadow sides of industrial/consumer capitalism, such as landfills, incinerators, toxic waste sites, and other “sacrifice zones.”[7] The EJ movement dismantled the longstanding conceptual binary of “nature” vs “culture,” asserting a human place in, not apart from, the natural world. It claimed urban environments as spaces worthy of environmental concern and ecological tending, and demanded that environmental organizations examine the white privilege of their most ardent proponents and heroes. In many ways the conceptual openings of the EJ movement were responsible for the recognition that theatre has been always/already rife with ecological ideologies and implications. Ecodramaturgy emerged to emphasize the intersectionality of community, identity, the body and the land, and to celebrate the power of communities and individuals to enact meaningful change in the creation of a more just and sustainable world. Many Chicano/a and Latinx playwrights had engaged ecological issues in their works long before ecotheorists ever articulated such a project, illuminating a continuum of shared vulnerability between lands and peoples, and revealing the complex ways that oppression and displacement from homeland, family, history, heritage, and language has had consequences for human and environmental health. Yet, with the exception of Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints and the work of Teatro Campesino, Latinx theatre has been underrepresented in studies of ecotheatre.[8] Harvest Moon is an act of remembrance, resistance and resilience through which José Cruz González tells the history of four generations of a Mexican-origin American family. [9] Their stories assert the presence and vitality of the family’s real-world counterparts in a century of North American environmental history. Developed and workshopped as part of the Seattle Group Theatre’s 1991 Multicultural Playwrights Festival, Harvest Moon premiered at the Group Theatre in 1994, at a time (like ours) of heated national debate about immigration Particularly in the western states, debates over bi-lingual education and citizenship for the children of undocumented workers were becoming increasingly polarizing and xenophobic. (Proposition 187, denying many basic services to non-citizen residents, had just been approved in California.)[10] The action begins as Cuauhtemoc, a contemporary young man of the early 1990s, returns to the mural his mother (Mariluz) painted before she died.[11] On a wall “near a harvest field” in “a valley filled with dozens of farms” so that it will “greet the farmworkers on their way to work and on their way home," the mural, like the land itself, is an archive of his family’s history and cultural heritage. Cuauhtemoc “carries a backpack and a small tree seedling wrapped in burlap. He looks at the mural…searches for a place to plant the tree…begins digging a small hole but discovers something”—his mother’s paintbrush buried in the soil. In this moment Cuauhtemoc encounters his mother’s spirit, and what was “faded and overgrown with weeds” comes to life around him (11-14). Cuauhtemoc encounters his parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, and is able to forgive his mother (who died when he was a small boy) for spending so much time during her final days painting a mural rather than playing with him. [12] His ancestors’ stories of commitment, skill, cunning, and sacrifice become the ground on which he stands. Like the tree Cuauhtemoc plants for his mother, the play lives into and informs his life going forward, arguing not only that social, economic and environmental justice are integrally connected, but also that making sustainable and just choices requires us to remember our histories, listen to the stories of our ancestors and the land itself. Muralists like Mariluz helped transmit the stories that birthed the mythos of Aztlán, rooting the movimiento in a shared ancestral story, and siting that history in the neighborhoods, streets, alleyways, underpasses, and parks of the communities whose story they told.[13] Murals like Judith Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles or Chicano Park in San Diego function as a visual representations of oral histories, proactive and public assertions of presence that (re)claim both past and future. Inspired by a mural that he passed on the way to school as a young man, Cruz González suggests that theatre, like a mural, may be best understood as a visual form that can summon history much in the way that memory functions—associatively, anachronistically, emotionally—treating spaces and places of habitation as archives of memory and records of human action. [14] Throughout the performance, actor/characters move into and out of tableaus that bring to life the history that the mural represents, transforming history into flesh and blood presence on stage. As memory associates with memory, the story moves in and out of time periods, and characters appear at various ages in significant moments in their lives. As memories connect and collide in the space of the theatre, the audience also encounters the full arc of 20th century American environmental history—a history in which Mexican-origin Americans are present and integral. Working the generations backwards from 1990, we might imagine that Cuauhtemoc was born in the late 1970s; his mother, Mariluz, was born in the early 1950s, growing up and coming of age during the movimiento and witness to the early years of the farmworkers’ movement in California. Her parents, Ruben and Gloria, were born during the Dust Bowl and Depression; Henry and Lupe, Cuauhtemoc’s great-grandparents, would have come to the United States from Mexico in the years following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when economic and political turmoil caused many to emigrate in search of work and safety. Woven into this arc, other significant moments in the environmental history of the continent come to life.[15] A first generation US citizen, Ruben came of age during WWII, when the US government instituted the bracero program that sought Mexican guest workers for US fields, canneries, and slaughterhouses. Soto, Henry’s friend, and a kind of uncle figure in the play, remembers “an army of laborers. Hundreds of men attacked the harvest each day. There’s not enough work for us all and yet we come by the truck loads” (17). Laborers in the booming post-WWII California agricultural industry lived in barracks without adequate food, clean water or sanitation. “I’m surprised these old barracks are still standing. I can’t believe we ever lived in them. The Grapes of Wrath or what?” muses a 17 year old Mariluz. Her reference is a reminder to the audience that the hardships endured during the Depression and Dust Bowl by white families like John Stienbeck’s beloved but fictional Joads were also felt by Mexican-origin Americans.[16] Cesár Chavez’s family was one among many landowners in the southwest who lost land in the farm consolidations and liquidations precipitated by the drought of the 1930s, and who came to California looking for work in the growing agricultural industry.[17] In this way, Cruz González couples the experiences of Anglo American workers’ struggle to unionize for just wages and healthy living conditions in the 1930s with the farmworkers movement of the 1960s, and the experiences of economic immigrants in the 1990s. Union organizing in the 1930s resulted in labor laws that improved working conditions and wages across many industries, but farmworkers were excluded from guarantees and protections that white workers gained. Meanwhile, the influx of white farmworkers to California as a result of the Dust Bowl migrations displaced Mexican-origin workers. Many were deported to Mexico, including, ironically, families who had lived on and worked the land since California was part of Mexico.[18] It was not until 1978 that farmworkers won a minimum wage on par with other workers; and they are still not adequately protected from industry toxins. In 1994 Harvest Moon resonated with ongoing debates over so-called guest worker programs under H-2A, as well as larger questions about immigration, citizenship, and the economic migration that promises to increase as a climate change proceeds.[19] The generational perspectives of his mother, grandparents, and great-grandparents help Cuauhtemoc understand that the politics of unionizing, immigration, green cards, and the undocumented are personal, and shaped by the history his elders have lived through. In a scene set in the 1960s, some family members are inspired by the young Cesár Chavez and the organizers who have come to town. Ruben’s wife, Gloria, becomes a union organizer, but the older Henry warns against making trouble. “We have no papers," he reminds Lupe. Henry’s fears are multiple and layered, including not only the immediate threat of deportation, which would separate great grandparents from children and grandchildren, but also a justified fear of violence. Throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, union organizing frequently was violently suppressed by state and local law enforcement who carried out the bidding of agribusiness.[20] Soto, on the other hand, is both a US citizen and a decorated WWII veteran, and his legal status allows him to stand up and speak out in a way that Henry and Lupe cannot. As he puts on his WWII uniform to proudly participate in a UFW rally (United Farm Workers of America), we learn that he supports an extended family in Mexico. Through these family elders, Cuauhtemoc learns the complicated ways in which each generation carries Mexico within them; the way each lives in the borderlands, regardless of citizenship. The environmental justice movement of the 1990s fueled public outrage over farmworkers' exposure to pesticides. Companies like Monsanto sold miracle chemicals promising bigger crop yields, but the shadow of such harvests comes to rest in the bodies of farmworkers and their families. In a party scene (also set in the early 1960s), Soto arrives with tomatoes for Lupe. “Hijole, those tomates are huge,” Henry exclaims. The harvest was good, Soto tells her, but while the patrons are vacationing in Europe and buying new trucks. The workers have only “a few centavos in our pockets, some tomates the size of grapefruit” (21-22). Post WWII agro-chemicals that made California the “breadbasket of the world” (and the 5th largest economy in the world by century’s end) did not trickle down to farmworkers. Mariluz remembers that she and her brother Manuel worked alongside their parents and grandparent in the pesticide-laden fields. As the scene comes to life, Ruben shouts at the sun, exhausted from the heat. “This shit is robbing me!” Henry tells him to drink some water and get himself under control because the patron is watching. “I don’t need water! It’s dignity!” he shouts. “We live in an old bracero barrack. We bathe outside from a pipe. My children are always sick …” (31-32, my emphasis). Ruben’s rage at dehumanizing conditions is redoubled as the sound of an approaching crop dusting plane overtakes the scene. “Where are the children?” Gloria runs at the airplane, shouting the name of the grower, pleading for the safety of her children. “Don’t spray Mr. Matterson!” and then “It’s too late.” Exposures to pesticides and herbicides have been at the center of the UFW's concerns since the beginning of La Causa. In 1969, Chavez testified before the House of Representatives about the grave dangers of economic chemicals—part of the increased mechanization of food production. His testimony cites the regular practice of spaying workers, including children, in an unregulated industry, and the illness, injury and death that occurred with regularity in the fields.[21] We later learn that Mariluz’ father Ruben died of heart failure while working in the fields, a reminder that farmworkers suffered increased health risks and shorter life expectancy as a result of labor and living conditions. Mariluz, who comes of age during the movimiento, is part of a growing Mestiza consciousness that prized newly reclaimed heritage.[22] Even after her diagnosis, Mariluz spends what little time she has left painting the mural, making sure her own son has a record of his history. Some key agricultural pesticides were regulated in the 1970s and ‘80s, including DDT (banned in 1972 in the US). But the then new Republican governor of California, George Deukmejian, refused to enforce regulations and hold growers accountable to the law, prompting Chavez to organize a second grape boycott with its goal to ban the “economic poisons” suspected of causing higher incidences of cancer in farmworkers when compared to the general population. Mariluz’ premature death from pesticide-related cancer in the early 1980s indicts the government’s disregard for the health impacts of pesticides on families like Cuauhtemoc’s. In another scene set in the 1970s, Mariluz’ brother, Manuel, announces he has joined the Navy. Mariluz worries he will be sent to Vietnam, a war in which Mexican-American soldiers took risks and gave their lives in higher numbers than Anglo soldiers, in part to signal their “American-ness” in the face of racism at home. In Vietnam they were exposed (together with others who served in combat) to chemical herbicides and pesticides. Defoliant weapons like Agent Orange used in Vietnam were not so different from chemicals used regularly in the fields.[23] Throughout the play Cuauhtemoc is haunted by the Jaguar Warrior, who appears in the play at moments when courage and ferocious resistance are required. Played by the actor who plays Ruben, the Jaguar Warrior connects Ruben’s anger at systemic injustice with the mythic fierceness of Aztec warriors who fought the conquistadors, and for whom his grandson is named. The Jaguar Warrior binds human and animal together with the story of Aztlán, rooting the struggles of the twentieth century in an older, sovereign, connection to the land on both sides of the border. The Jaguar Warrior entreats Cuauhtemoc to recognize himself, yet Cuauhtemoc demands, “What do you want from me? [...] Who are you?” After his journey through his mother’s mural stories, Cuauhtemoc begins to understand the Jaguar’s answer: “In Lak’ ech.” “Tú eres mi otro yo,” Mariluz translates. “You are my other self” (73). Mariluz’ impulse to paint a mural of her family history comes when she is diagnosed with cancer. Like the trees her family the mural will live on in real time and space, nourishing a community‘s future long after her individual death. The mural is “alive before you, transcending time and space just like the ancients did long before Einstein!” she explains to Cuauhtemoc (13). At the end of the play, Cuauhtemoc returns to his seedling. “I am planting a fruit tree for you….I now know why I’m planting it.” Mural and tree give flesh to the past in a way that changes the future. The mural is a message of empowerment and pride, and a reminder of a lineage of belonging, and like the tree, requires cultivation: It is meant to call forth a consciousness in Cuauhtemoc that will empower him in the world, and that he must tend within himself. In this way, painting the mural, planting the trees, and the performance of the play itself are acts of habitation: life-giving, sustaining actions that contribute to the vitality and ecological health of the community. But as Cruz González’ memory of the mural that had fallen into disrepair on his school route suggests, both the mural (community history) and the trees (ecosystems of that same community) need to be tended. Anchored in the counter-narrative of a Chicano/a imaginary that provided a foundation to the movimiento, Harvest Moon connects myth and history to geography and personal lived experience: Tú eres mi otro yo. We are bound to one another and to the land in ways that transcend time and national borders. The land is our other self; what we do to the land we do to ourselves. “Can the dead forgive the living?” Cuauhtemoc asks. Can the dead forgive us for making the same mistakes they made? In Harvest Moon, human destinies are linked to one another and to the planet in ways that will require not only a recognition that “Tú eres mi otro yo,” but also a reckoning with the costs of having ignored for too long our human interdependence with one another and with the more-than-human world. Enter the Anthropocene The interdependency celebrated in Harvest Moon as a kind of generational continuity between past, present and future is increasingly under threat. Our shared vulnerability with the natural world has ruptured into an entirely contingent, and in many ways random, chance of survival. Where is theatre's efficacy in a world that has sown the seeds of its own destruction? In the section that follows I use Marie Clements’ Burning Vision, to illuminate an ecodramaturgy for the Anthropocene. In The Birth of the Anthropocene, Jeremy Davies follows argument and counter argument as stratigraphers struggle to agree on the epoch’s beginning. [24] Davies also weighs the “backlash” against the idea of the Anthropocene in light of its ethical, political and social implications. Cultural theorist Donna Haraway pushes back against dangerous cultural interpretations of the Anthropocene, arguing that naming this new epoch “Anthro” perpetuates a human exceptionalism that, ironically, may include our own extinction. Why quibble over a name? Once our collective bones and material remains of our varied dreams are laced into earth’s geologic tapestry of deep time as a thin strand of stone, what does it matter? Names matter because they privilege points of view and can accumulate imprecise meanings in the popular imagination, like debris settling into consciousness, and in this way, Haraway suggests, they may not only name but call forth a particular future. Naomi Klein, Jason W. Moore and others suggest that humans as a species are not the cause of climate change, certainly not all humans equally. It is not humans, but capitalism—that economic juggernaut that rides roughshod over the planet in ever increasing extractive speed and efficiency, gouging its “marks in earth’s rocks, waters, airs and critters” –that is the geologic force of epoch proportions. The Capitalocenes and the Anthropocenes are both counterfeit Haraway argues, because each tends to succumb “to abstract futurism and its affects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference,” ignoring the grieving voices of mothers (human and non-human), and forgetting the work of spiders, microbes, rocks and moisture, for these too are working to “save” the planet.[25] Both terms, she argues, perpetuate and privilege those very aspects of collective human-ness that fueled the engines of climate change—technological supremacy, managerial science, western chauvinism and determinism, along with historicity that fails to account for, or even be concerned about, the lived experience of people, creatures, and places. [26] The annihilative forces of industrial capitalism, including fossil fuel use, nuclear testing and radiation, and consumption-based cultures, are products of colonization that has been (and still is) played out on and in human and other animal bodies, ecologies, and geographies. To be clear, Haraway does not take issue with the science (among scientists there is no debate that human-caused climate change will precipitate geologic shifts, marking the planet forever). Rather, she cautions against the Anthropocene’s seemingly implicit vision: scenarios of mass extinction, economic collapse, human death, and the end of so-called civilization as we know it. As these narratives layer into the popular imaginary, they naturalize catastrophe and invite an attitude of “game over,” which in turn nurtures dis-compassion, disconnection, and intellectual distance from lives and living that will be ongoing. It is precisely this aspect of her critique that has been useful in thinking through the potential contribution of theatre in the age of the Anthropocene, asking: what visions of our intermingled future will we call forth? Davies might dismiss Haraway’s quibbling as nonsense, and indeed such discussions may seem academic to those who attend community meetings to strategize in the face of rising seas. As Davies points out, the term has many uses and a wide girth of meanings that invite not only geoengineering trajectories, but philosophical and political ones. The term itself, he suggests, is a wake-up call that provides “an opportunity to comprehend the environmental calamity in its full dimensions.” [27] In the Anthropocene, he argues, “environmental movements will need to be concerned above all with environmental injustice and with fostering ecological pluralism and complexity in the face of the simplifying tendencies of the Holocene’s final phase.”[28] Urging a “living within the crisis” that parallels Haraway’s emphasis on earth systems kinship, Davies calls for “vigilant resistance against the searing away of multifaceted socioecological systems and their replacement by vulnerable, saturated monocultures” in order to insure that the “jerky crossing between epochs can be cushioned by upholding states of life—both ecosystems and human societies—that are variegated, intricate, and plural, one in such lively forces of all kinds contend with and interweave with one another.”[29] The Anthropocene also requires creative and critical methodologies for decolonizing (not just de-capitalizing); specifically for naming the ways in which climate change has been a product of historical patterns of white supremacy predicated on land taking, rapacious extractive practices, slavery, and rampant disregard for the rights of life and land. It will be some time before cultural theorists and scientists find cohesive ways of talking about the future of earthlings, and so this paper does not seek to reconcile the disparate and protesting voices that endeavor to chart a path of maximum compassion into the unknown. The tension between Haraway and Davies is useful, however, because it suggests an ecodramaturgy that not only foregrounds the disproportional effects of climate change, tracking the intersectional ways that gender, ethnicity, and economics inform the severity of impact, but also one that puts the shoulder of theatre to the wheel of envisioning a future, helping humans and non-humans inhabit the ambiguities and contingencies of relentless transition. While this direction is not terribly different from what I urged in 2006, when I wrote that ecodramaturgy must map “the connections between social injustice, human and other bodies, and environmental exploitation,” the urgency is greater in the face of recent political events.[30] Indeed, the usefulness of theatre has increased not only as a provocateur of activism, but as a means to engage in embodied and affective exploration of ways-of-connecting, coping and grieving. Stories that envision apocalypse, Haraway contends, are luxuries of the (yet) un-endangered. Her advice to dramatists is to heel close to the site of impact: the embodied experiences of creatures including humans living-with and dying-with one another. De-centering not only the human, but the primacy of biological notions of kindship, and taxonomies altogether, she urges envisioning kinship across all matter (“making oddkin”), and attending to our individual and collective response-ability in these times. In this way theatre can take a stance that Haraway calls “staying with the trouble”—neither driven by activist hope, nor elitist despair (despair is always a mark of elitism: elephants, refugees and coral reefs have no such luxuries), but “tuned to the senses” and mindful of “mortal earthlings thick copresence.”[31] Theatre can help us develop the kind of soulful muscle that staying with the trouble will require. Just such a poly-attentive a way-of-being-in-the-world is apparent in Marie Clements’ Burning Vision, as it illuminates a web of ecological, cultural and personal consequences of the atomic age. For some stratigraphers the birth of the Anthropocene, could be “set with unimprovable specificity on July 16, 1945, ‘at 05:29:21 Mountain War Time’…This is the moment of the Manhattan Project's first nuclear weapon test, Trinity: white light in the pre-dawn New Mexico desert.”[32] Whether this geologic moment will ultimately be the “golden spike” matters less than the specter of annihilation that both the bomb and the Anthropocene have unleashed in the collective imaginary. Burning Vision is a tentacular story of the making of the first atomic bomb that foregrounds multiple and multiplying relationships across time, space, culture and species (including species of mineral). The action begins on August 6, 1945, with a countdown followed by the “sound of a long, far-reaching explosion that explodes over a long, far-reaching time,” and then a cascading flash of detonation (20). The arc of the play transpires in the split second between that first flash of light and its reign/rain of sudden death, and the stories of the play’s 18 characters are told by the light of the earth-shattering, history-destroying, human-made culmination of what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls the plundering of the planet. Clements’ Burning Vision presences and makes visible the lived experiences of humans whose bodies were plundered in the service of the forces that precipitated climate change.[33] Written in four “movements” like an orchestral score, Burning Vision is meant to be embodied, not read. Dramatic structures of beginning/exposition, middle/action, end/resolution are non-existent. This is a play about being in the middle. Like an Escher painting, the middle moment is a site of intersection where form is undone in a process of becoming. Local places, individual people and creatures, diverse and specific cultures across the globe, and different historical moments across time collapse into one another in a kind of double and triple exposure. The play blurs the boundaries of space/place and ruptures any sense of geographic logic, as characters in Japan emerge from the bottom of a lake in Northern Canada, or a factory worker from Pittsburgh descends into the belly of the earth where he meets a woman who works as a radium dial painter from the 1920s. Unfathomable time is both expanded and compressed. Like the “deep time” geologists assign to the Anthropocene, the bomb turns our gaze back on this moment of now, asking how we will be-in-relation as the world changes utterly. The play also insists on another kind of time: an intersecting, simultaneous time that bends upon and within itself, defying rational chronology in favor of the embodied present of the theatre. The voices and images of each movement emerge, overlap, intersect and collide. Between each movement, the sound of caribou hooves on tundra give voice to a time immemorial when traditional Dene communities follow the migration of caribou around Great Bear Lake in the Northern Territories.[34] Through the sounds of hooves and the voice of the Dene elder and prophet, the action of the play proceeds and comes round to where it began: the moment of “now,” the middle moment. Burning Vision presences a time-space that Laguna Pueblo poet and theorist Paula Gunn Allen explains as an “achronology” particular to indigenous authors: a “tribal concept of time [that is] timelessness.” Similarly, a tribal concept of space is multidimensional. Gunn Allen’s time-space is similar to contemporary physics in that the self is conceived “as a moving event within a moving universe.”[35] The play’s achronological structure allows a searing vision to rupture the hegemonic assumption that humans are separate from one another, other critters, the planet, or our collective earth-history. But it does something more, something essential to the project of living in the Anthropocene—affirming survivance even as evidence accumulates to the contrary. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith recognizes that scholarly and creative deconstruction of hegemonic systems (like those that precipitated climate change) provides “insight that explains certain experiences,” but does not “prevent someone from dying.”[36] Decolonizing, Smith argues, consists of (re)claiming (stories, lives, land); celebrating (culture, women, survivance); indigenizing, or “centring of the landscapes, images, languages, themes, metaphors and stories in the indigenous world”; and from that vantage point envisioning a different future, a way forward. Burning Vision carries out what Smith calls “indigenizing projects,” not only by dissembling the ideologies and systems of plunder that make all humans “test dummies,” but asserting improbable intimacies and incongruous solidarities. Burning Vision grew out of Clements’ desire to trace her First Nations/Dene family history in the Northwest Territory, a history which in telling reclaims stolen lands. “I had taken a trip to the Great Bear Lake region with my mother. I wanted to tell this story of my family’s genetic connection to the history of the land up there, and to the running of uranium.”[37] The play follows the hand-to-hand route of the “black rock”—from which both radium and uranium are harvested and plutonium is made—from the theft that set claim to it and the miners that unearthed it, to the Dene ore carriers, boatmen, stevedores, and “sandwich girls,” that worked along its watery passage across Great Bear Lake and down the Mackenzie River to Fort McMurray, where it was loaded on trains bound for Ontario refineries and, ultimately, the labs and test sites of the Manhattan Project. Staying with the trouble—that is, insisting on the primacy of relatedness—Clements accounts for the disproportional impact that uranium mining had (and climate change is having) on Dene communities. Weaving together the stories of those who worked on and in the mine with the stories of Japanese characters in Hiroshima, where the material stolen from Dene land was ultimately ignited, Clements challenges how we remember and whom we remember, creating a transnational countergeography that makes previously invisible relationships explicit. “What was extraordinary to me,” Clements said, is that “one person’s decision not only impacts that person and their community, but has an effect beyond, in this case, an effect that encompasses the whole world.” In a similar way, theatre can ground the abstraction of the Anthropocene in human decision, desire, and agency. The “money rock,” as the Dene called it, was claimed by the Labine Brothers, white prospectors who laid claim to the ore and founded El Dorado Mine on Great Bear Lake. According to the oral account of Dene elders (which carry the same authority as written eye witness accounts under Canadian law), the whites traded sacks of flour for the ore: “They say it was…Beyonnie, who first found the money rock at Port Radium. Beyonnie gave it to the white man, for which he received a bag of flour, baking powder and lard about four times.”[38] Signaling the land theft operative in their extractive capitalist exploits, the brothers thrash about in the dark of the theatre, collide with walls and objects, and discuss what to trade for their claim. “What’s an Indian gonna do with money? We’ll give him some lard and baking powder and he can bake some bread. Sure! What the hell! What the hell is an Indian going to do with a rock anyways, at least he can eat the bread.”[39] Meanwhile, in the center of the stage, the rock itself waits, fearing discovery. In Dene worldview the ore is a living being, personified in the play as Little Boy, a “beautiful Native boy…the darkest uranium found at the center of the earth.” Little Boy is “discovered”, chased, captured; then escapes and runs away, desperate to “go home”, back to his place in the earth. But once loose upon the earth he cannot return. Discovered in the beam of a flashlight, the boy runs for his life; like the many children who ran away from Canadian Indian boarding schools, his place in the world has been destroyed. His new place is not one he chose, rather one precipitated by the commodification of his rock-flesh as part of the first atomic bomb. Throughout the play's tentacular weaving of a trans-national, trans-temporal, trans-species, inter-cultural community, Rose, a young Métis woman makes bread. A kind of payment for the ore from which the bomb was made, bread calls attention to the flesh of human bodies and that of the plants and animals we take for sustenance. She describes herself as a “perfect loaf of bread” that “is plump with a rounded body and straight sides. I have a tender, golden brown crust which can be crisp, or delicate. This grain is fine and even, with slightly elongated cells; the flesh of this bread is multi-grained” (58). Each of us is just such a grainy substance, and we make and unmake ourselves, Rose suggests, by the way we engage the elements of the earth. In the first Movement, Rose carries a sack of flour over her shoulder. As she walks, a thin stream of flour leaks out, inscribing a circle in the space of the stage—a circle in which the audience is implicitly included. She mixes the ingredients—a recipe learned from her mother. “Substances meeting like magic” she says (39). “Flour, yeast, salt, sugar, lard, liquid. Bread” (59). By the third Movement, the sacks of flour become indistinguishable from the sacks of uranium ore carried by Dene workers. The wind mixes the white flour leaking from Rose’s sack with the black dust that infects the environment. “The wind’s blowing it everywhere,” Rose observes, “The kids are playin’ in sandboxes of it, the caribou are eating it off the plants, and we’re drinkin’ the water where they bury it…I guess there’s no harm if a bit gets in my dough” (103). Both bread and ore are material aspects of the earth’s body-becoming-human-body, permeable, interwoven. Fat Man and Little Boy, non-human characters named after the actual bombs dropped by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, become oddkin to humans. Fat Man is a “test dummy” living in an above-ground Nevada test site, where mock homes, complete with foodstuffs, canned goods, appliances, and manikins representing the stereotypical 1950s nuclear family, were constructed to test the deadly effectiveness of “the gadget.” Fat Man animates the mindset that made the bomb; ideology incarnate, he is an all-American male, a “living room soldier” (94). Both Little Boy and Fat Man demonstrate Jane Bennet’s notion of “vital matter,” in which the distinction between life and non-life is dubious at best.[40] All matter, she argues, has a kind of life that can come to life, with which humans and other critters interweave, and to which humans have obligations as oddkin. By the fourth Movement, Fat Man realizes that, he too is expendable, one whose body and labor have been commodified in the military-industrial project of nuclear arms superiority. Even Fat Man is radicalized when he discovers that, like the ore, the lake, and the air itself, his life force has been mined. Finally aware of his connection to the others, outraged and embattled, he screams at the Brothers Labine: “This is my neighborhood, you hear me … you…you…liar. […] you are all a pack of goddam liars!” (115) Great Bear Lake is one of the largest and deepest freshwater lakes in the world, and its presence percolates through the soundscape of Burning Vision. The lake is the center of life for traditional Dene who depend on it for sustenance. Dene villages fished for trout and followed the seasonal migration of caribou herds around the lake. Clements draws on and bends a Dene legend that tells of a medicine man who journeys to the heart of Great Bear Lake. As the story goes, after a “trout steals the medicine man’s hook…he dives deep into the lake’s abyss” to retrieve his hook. There he “takes on the spirit of the loche” and finds the “living, breathing heart, called the Tudzé” that gives life to the world of plants, animals and human beings. In Clements’ play, Eldorado’s wet-mine tunnels become liminal passageways that extend to the other side of the earth. At the moment of the atomic blast in Hiroshima, a Japanese fisherman named Koji, holding a trout he has just caught, looks up and cries out, “Pika!”—the Japanese word for the brilliant flash of atomic detonation and meaning “the light of two suns.” Koji falls into darkness, journeys through the heart of the earth, and surfaces (like a trout) in Great Bear Lake. Two Dene stevedores aboard the Radium Prince haul him out of the water; Rose gives him dry clothing, and the possibility of new life. Koji’s path mirrors a 1998 journey taken by six Deline residents from Port Radium, Canada, to Hiroshima, Japan, on the anniversary of the atomic bomb to convey the Dene people’s regrets and sorrow that ore from their land was used in this destructive way.[41] Meanwhile, a Dene Widow keeps a vigil fire for the ore-carrier husband she has lost to cancer caused by radiation exposure. Foregrounding the ways humans are commingled with the land, as well as asserting the longstanding kinship of Dene with their traditional lands, Clements' play suggests that ceremonial remembering and grieving in relation to loss of land and loved ones may be a right response to climate change.In “Climate Changes as the Work of Mourning,” Ashlee Cunsolo Willox argues that “grief and mourning have the unique potential to expand and transform the discursive spaces around climate change to include not only the lives of people who are grieving because of the changes, but also to value what is being altered, degraded, and harmed as something mournable.”[42] Traditional Dene practice is to burn the earthly possessions of those who die so that they may cross over, but the Widow cannot let go of her lover’s clothes, especially a jacket that she made and beaded. The Widow knows that the land resides in the fabric of our bodies: “I miss the smell of sweat on his clothes after a long day hunting. I miss how the land stayed in the fabric even when he got inside the cabin” (44-45). She pulls him to her in a dream, calling on their historic kinship with the earth, and resisting the doomsday change that her waking hours struggle to comprehend. “There are plenty of trout and caribou to last us till we die” (70). Yet, each day she wakes to his absence. Like the theory of the Anthropocene, Clements' characters are concerned with remains—those traces that contain stories. “It is always the little things of his that take my breath away. The real things like a strand of his hair lying on the collar of a caribou hide jacket he loved…the real things like the handle of his hunting knife worn down from his beautiful hands that loved me. The real things…” (87-88). Koji also sites/sights the real, the “little things,” as his spirit roams the post-blast “landscape of notes.” “There are notes left on anything that still exists. On pieces of houses, on stones shivering on the ground, on anything that did not perish…hope remains nailed to what has survived…a tin box of pictures, a rock wall, a rice bowl…a chair, a typewriter, a neighbor, a woman” (51-52). Remains point both toward past and future. Both nuclear holocaust and the cataclysm of climate change provoke questions of what remains, but also what carries on? For philosophers and cultural workers, the questions of the Anthropocene also include, what is called forth? For it is a vision, and as a collective imaginary has power to recast what it means to be a human. The danger, Haraway argues, in the apocalyptic vision of the Anthropocene (like the vision of nuclear annihilation) lies in forgetting that individuals, families, and communities of earthlings will live through the troubles ahead, even as many already have. After the bomb is dropped, Fat Man muses, “only Indians and cockroaches will survive”—a reminder to those who imagine the collapse of "civilization as we know it," that indigenous people of North America have already lived through that particular cataclysm once to survive and thrive (83). Burning Vision invites a radical shift in world views, staging an anthropoScene that lives through and loves into the future. Rose, we implicitly understand, dies of cancer from the radioactive dust in her bread; but the child she conceived with Koji, the Japanese fisherman who fell through the world, lives on with the Widow, who tells him: “You look like her. You look like him. You are my special grandson. My small man now. My small man that survived. Tough like hope” (121). In this way, Burning Vision resists narratives of annihilation, and instead demands survivance, participating in what Haraway calls “threads of reciprocating energies of biologies, arts, and activisms for multispecies resurgence.”[43] In recent years ecodramaturgy has emphasized theatre as a way of knowing at once imaginative, affective, immediate, embodied, and communal, suggesting both new methodologies and meanings as scholars and artists work together to exercise a vigorous engagement with ecological ideas, communities and geographies.[44] This proactive ecodramaturgy moves beyond the call for new works and sustainable production practice to envision, as Chaudhuri writes, “putting the vast resources of lived embodied performance at the service of the program of radical re-imagination called for by the perilous predicament we find our species—and others—in today.”[45] What that theatre looks like, how it feels, and how it interfaces with the community it serves is an anthropoScenic task: to bear witness to the unfolding present and presence, making visible and palpable the interwoven ways, as Harawy writes, “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all.”[46] Perhaps a significant aspect of theatre’s anthropoScenic leverage lies in the ways it can reimagine and revitalize the relationships between and among communities (human and otherwise) and places (material and imagined) even as they continue to be at risk. Going forward, anthropoScenic ecodramaturgy must not only foreground environmental justice, using theatre to illuminate the lived experience of people and non-human others feeling the disproportional impact of climate change, it must also forge theatre as a place of infinite enmeshment of us-ness, of unexpected intimacies across previously isolated differences with shared ecological vulnerabilities that enliven living through this epochal transition. Staying with the trouble includes understanding compassion as action, and offering a vision of how to inhabit a living-if-turbulent present. “[M]any different paths forward are possible,” Davies writes, reminding us that “the chaotic nature of the crisis means that the flap of any given butterfly’s wings might have disproportionate influence on the new world…”[47] This is time for butterfly wing theatre: conceived as a state of vigilance, a practice of humility, the work of mourning, the necessity of anger, a comic send up of the why-can’t-we-fix-this frustration of test dummies, and an invitation to honor our oddkin of radioactive rocks, caribou, sturgeon, and women pregnant with the future child of a future child who will see our marks and hear our voices across time, and like the Dene See-er, look back at a history that has not yet happened, saying in another tongue, “Tú eres mi otro yo.” Theresa J. May is Associate Professor at the University of Oregon. Her research explores intersections of ecology, cultural studies, and embodied performance. Previous publications include: Salmon is Everything: community-based theatre from the Klamath Watershed (OSU Press, 2014); Greening Up Our Houses (Drama Book 1994); co-editor of Readings in Performance and Ecology (Palgrave, 2011); articles in Theatre Topics, Canadian Theatre Review, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Journal of American Drama, Theatre Insight, American Theatre, and Howlround; chapters in Performing Nature (Peter Lang, 2005), Community Performance: A Reader (Routledge, 2007); Contemporary Women Playwrights (Palgrave, 2013). She is co-founder of Earth Matters on Stage (EMOS) ecodrama festival, and co-founder of ASTR’s Ecology & Performance working group. [1] Una Chaudhuri. “’There Must Be A Lot of Fish in that Lake’: Toward and Ecological Theater,” Theater 25.1 (Spring/Summer 1994): 24. [2] . Ecodramaturgy is concerned with three interwoven aspects of theatre: 1) the lived experience of those represented in and present on stage (human and more-than-human), 2) the mode, means and methodology of production, and 3) the larger cultural context or historical moment of production, including theatre’s relatedness to the community it serves, and the politics into which it speaks. The first use of “ecodramaturgy” appeared in my “Kneading Marie Clements’ Burning Vision,” Canadian Theatre Review, 144 (Fall 2010): 5-12. See also, "Beyond Bambi: Toward a Dangerous Ecocriticism," Theatre Topics 17.2 (September 2007): 95-110; Wendy Arons and Theresa May, Readings in Performance and Ecology, eds., New York: Palgrave, 2011; “Ecodramaturgy and/of Contemporary Women’s Playwriting.” Contemporary Women Playwrights, eds. Lesley Ferris and Penny Farfan (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2013: 181-196. [3] The ecodramaturgy of the 1990s stressed theatre’s potential power to serve as a provocateur of change and a harbinger of transformation, and includes theatre making grounded in an activist ecological sensibility, as well as historiographic and critical projects that work to sharpen our ecological imagination. See May, 2007, “Some Green Questions to Ask a Play,” 96. [4] Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University California P, 2016), 2. [5] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University P, 2016), 33. [6] Giovanna Di Chiro, “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 298-320; Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (San Francisco: Island Press, 2005), Chapter 7. [7] See, for example, Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics and Pedagogy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002); Ronald Sandler, and Phaedra C. Pessullo, Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). [8] With the exception of Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints, Latinx plays and productions receive scant ecocritical attention—a gap that runs the risk of reinscribing the persistent “whiteness” of both mainstream environmentalism and theatre. See, for example, Cless, Downing. “Ecotheatre USA: The Grassroots Are Greener,” TDR 8.2 1996: 41-5; Linda Margarita Greenberg, "Learning from the Dead: Wounds, Women, and Activism in Cherríe Moraga's Heroes and Saints," MELUS 34.1 (2009): 163-185W; and Arons and May, 2014. [9] Here, I follow environmental historian Devon G. Peña, using Mexican-origin Americans to register the intersection of culture and shifting boundaries of nation states. Peña deploys this term as inclusive of those who claim American citizenship, but also those without papers but with a long-standing claim to the land, as well as those economic migrants who have “returned” to live and work on land that prior to 1849 was part of Mexico. Devon G Peña, Mexican Americans and the Environment: Tierra y Vida (Tucson: U Arizona Press, 2005). [10] See Herbert Dittgen, “The American Debate about Immigration in the 1990s: A New Nationalism after the End of the Cold War?” Stanford Humanities Review, 5.2 (1997). https://web.standford.edu Accessed 4 April 2017. [11] Cuauhtemoc was the Aztec warrior who ruled Tenochtitlan at the time of Spanish invasion and ultimate conquest (1520-21). The character name is itself indicative of the reclaiming of indigenous heritage that was foundational to the movimiento. [12] José Cruz González, Harvest Moon (Woodstock IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2002). All subsequent quotations from the play will be indicated in paraenthesis. [13] The Great Wall of Los Angeles, designed by Judith Baca, reclaimed the Tujunga Wash of the Los Angeles River; the murals of San Francisco’s Mission District by Juana Alicia and other muralistas throughout the 1970s and ‘80s reclaimed and renewed neighborhoods and alleyways; and Chicano Park in San Diego arose out of direct action by a community whose home-places had been destroyed in the construction of the Interstate 5 freeway and the Coronado Bay Bridge. See Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: New Press, 1990), 170-71. [14] Similar strategies are employed by playwrights addressing climate change and climate justice in their work. See, for example, the Howlround series on Theatre and Climate Change curated by playwright Chantal Bilodeau. www.howlround.com . [15] See Peña, Mexican American Environmental History; Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: U Arizona Press, 1996, 1998). [16] See, for example: Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996) [17] Ilan Stavans, ed. “Chronology,” in Cesár Chavez: An Organizer’s Tale: Speeches (New York: Penguin Group, Inc.), 2008: xxxvii. [18] Sarah Wald, The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Framing since the Dust Bowl (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 2016. [19] Useful analysis of the H-2A program and its historical context can be found in “No Way to Treat a Guest: Why the H-2A Agricultural Visa Program Fails U.S. and Foreign Workers” compiled by Farmworker Justice. www.farmworkerjustice.org . [20] See Pulido, Chapter. 3. [21] Stavans, An Organizer’s Tale, “Before the House of Representatives,” 65-74. [22] See Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books (1987), 2007). [23] Agent Orange and other herbicides were used against Vietnamese farmworkers—irony across geographies, cultures and nation-states that Luis Valdez ironizes and indicts in his play, Vietnam Campesino. See Jorge Huerta, Chacano Theater: Themes and Forms (Tempe, AZL Bilingual Press, 1982), 86-91. [24] For slightly differing narratives of the first use of the term “Anthropocene,” see Davies, 42-45; Haraway, 44-47; and Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Un-natural History (New York: Pacador / Henry Hold and Co., 2014), 107-110. [25] Haraway, 4. [26] See Haraway Chapter 2. [27] Davies, 194, and generally,“Conclusion: Not Even Past,” 193-209. [28] Davies, 6. [29] Davies, 6, 194; Haraway, 34. [30] May, 2007, 101. [31] Haraway, 4. [32] Davies, 102-104. [33] Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Speigel and Grau, 2015), 149-152. [34] See Kerry Abel, Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History (Montreal: McGill Queen’s U Press, 2005). [35] Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 69-70. [36] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (University of Otago Press, 1999), 3, and 142-162. [37] Personal interview. 12 Nov. 2009. [38] Cindy Kenny Gilday, “A Village of Widows,” in Peace, Justice and Freedom: Human Rights Challenges for the new Millennium, eds. (Gurcharan S. Bhatia, et al, Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2000), 108. [39] Marie Clements, Burning Vision (Vancouver, BSL Talon Books, 2003), 37. All subsequent quotations from the play are from this edition and will be cited in parenthesis. [40] See Jane Bennett, Vital Matter: the Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), 1-19. [41] Clements, 17. [42] Ashlee Cunsolo Willox, “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning,” Ethics and Environment, 17:2 (Fall 2012): 141. [43] Haraway, 5. Thank you to my quick-witted colleague, Tricia Rodley, for her trope of “anthropoScenic,” during my process of revision. [44] See Una Chaudhuri and Shonni Enelow, Research, Theatre, Climate Change and the Ecocide Project (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 1-21. [45] Chaudhuri and Enelow, 2. [46] Haraway, 4, my emphasis. [47] Davies, 200. “Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene" by Theresa J. May ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring 2017) ©2017 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: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy in the AnthropoScene” by Theresa J. May “Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene" by Shelby Brewster “Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine” by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta “The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon" by Milton Loayza “Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity" by Clara Jean Wilch 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 ©2017 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 Acting in the Academy The Theatre of David Henry Hwang Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Directing Shakespeare in America Writing, Acting, and Directing Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Leticia L. Ridley Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Leticia L. Ridley By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF The availability of Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Hamilton (2015) on Disney+, the official streaming site of The Walt Disney Company, has offered musical theatre fans and other interested parties the ability to revisit the musical or experience it for the first time. Hamilton ’s rising popularity has influenced the increased concentration on the Black and Latino men at its center, and this is evident in mainstream publications such as Vox , The Undefeated , CNN , and The New York Times . [1] Even scholars’ and historians’ commentary on the musical, for the most part, has been solely focused on the men represented. [2] While these analyses create necessary discourse on the musical’s omission of slavery, erasure of Indigeneity, use of non-traditional casting, and impact in a post-Obama era, so much attention on Hamilton has been directed toward the men that it has eclipsed critical attention from the “werk” (to borrow a refrain from the show) that the women do within it. On the one hand, when the women performers of Hamilton have been examined in popular publications, they are celebrated because they acknowledge the presence of women in the historical record. [3] On the other hand, academic research has been much more critical of the musical’s inclusion of women, with many scholars interrogating what they see as its hollow feminist politics. [4] Both critics and scholars alike tend to overlook the way that race structures how these women’s bodies are read on stage and within the musical libretto, suggesting a universalization of gender that ignores the intersection of race . While I am encouraged by and appreciate the attention to the women of Hamilton , apparently the possibility that women of color spectators of the musical construct alternative meanings from the performances of Phillipa Soo, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Jasmine Cephas-Jones is not considered viable. In this article I complicate previous studies of the musical’s treatment of race and gender, arguing that the actresses’ embodiment in Hamilton disrupts normative, white gender constructions while highlighting the labor of women of color in musical theatre. I contend that the intersections of race and gender are vital to reading and analyzing the women of color performers in the musical and that failing to account for this erases the interconnected, racialized, and gendered histories that the actresses’ bodies bear. Throughout the article, I read Hamilton ’s casting of these women of color by applying Brandi Wilkins Catanese’s theorization of “colorblind” theatre, and I adopt the concept of “transgression” to “expose the moral limitations of transcendence as a viable strategy for social change by acknowledging the histories of social location that people wear on their bodies and that inform all of our interpretive frameworks.” [5] I employ Catanese’s framework in this article as I refuse to read the women of color in the musical through a single-axis framework (i.e., race over gender and/or gender over race). I do so to avoid foreclosing the nuances of women of color’s embodiment in Hamilton as demonstrated in its original Broadway cast and production. [6] The various restagings of productions in Chicago, London, New York, Puerto Rico, and the multiple tours running concurrently in the United States illustrate that Hamilton ’s creative team is committed to continuously casting the show with non-white actresses. For example, I attended a production of the musical at Washington D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center in which Asian American women portrayed all the principal roles, which facilitated a range of readings of the women characters that might be different from the original Broadway production. Any given theatre piece can be (re)shaped by varied performances; thus, conversations on embodiment remain central in how audiences receive messages in theatre. Despite the proliferation of global productions of the show, the availability of Hamilton via Disney+ has canonized the original Broadway cast as the standard to which all other future productions will be compared. As performance scholar Brian Herrera notes, casting is a term that “describes not only the process through which performers are assessed for and assigned to roles, but also the meanings, effects, and implications that are activated when the selected performers enact those roles.” [7] Keeping this in mind, one cannot and should not separate these women (and their racialized, gendered bodies) from their roles; to do so maintains a white supremacist paradigm that problematically centers white womanhood as a marker for women of color, thereby erasing the embodied realities produced by the actresses. I find it more pressing and productive to consider how the bodies on stage affect the musical’s ability to engage in feminist work; in the spirit of performance studies scholar Robin Bernstein, I am interested in the musical’s how , rather than its what . [8] By leaning into the nuances that the musical offers and recognizing how it actively engages with feminist principles (particularly from women of color feminisms), this article creates space for the existence and exploration for subtleties and contradictions of people of color. I do so, not to propose that Hamilton should not be critiqued, but rather to assert that analysis with women of color feminisms allows for new interpretations of the characters which contest the overwhelming whiteness in musical theatre scholarship. I use a Black feminist dramaturgical lens to search the gaps and margins of Lin Manuel Miranda’s award-winning Broadway musical Hamilton to locate the dormant meaning that is activated through the embodiment of the actresses of color. Black Feminist Dramaturgy Black theatre scholar and practitioner Michelle Cowin Gibbs argues that Black feminist dramaturgy “demands an audience to witness and affirm” the various modes of seeing that happen on stage. [9] In particular, Black feminist dramaturgy magnifies theatre’s interpretive possibilities which disclose the multiple layers of meaning that are activated not only by the bodies on stage, but also by the audience members who watch them. Crucial to Black feminist dramaturgy is the ability to offer analyses of theatre and performance that privilege the “outsider-within” position that Black women often occupy due to a prevalent focus on whiteness and/or maleness. [10] Black feminist dramaturgies invite us to search on and through the body of the actresses of color in Hamilton for the gap, the break, or the sites where other formations of knowing and being are happening. As many theatre scholars and practitioners are aware, dramaturgy encompasses many elements; however, it typically refers to the comprehensive study and understanding of a play’s historical, theatrical, and intellectual contexts. [11] My theorization of Black feminist dramaturgy is also significantly influenced by Black dramaturg and theatre scholar Faedra Chatard Carpenter’s dramaturgical orientation and practice. While “dramaturgical concerns” cover a range of different aims and interests when applied to the inner workings of a performance piece, among these concerns is the need and desire to design and guide the interpretative possibilities associated with a particular production. Accordingly, these considerations are also inclusive of the rationale behind specific casting choices. Carpenter proposes that one must acknowledge a play’s “time and context” and the site of production which informs how the play will be received by audiences. In addition, Carpenter notes that the awareness of “the embodied and enacted text, beyond its literary form” is vital to the dramaturgical process. In other words, the interpretative possibilities increase dramatically when performance is activated by bodies rather than remaining stagnant on the page. Further, Carpenter pays close attention to the audience, suggesting that the “consideration of audience reception and impact of artistic framing” is an important dramaturgical task; a dramaturg must predict how the audience will understand and read the bodies of the women on stage in tandem with the artistic elements, or else the framing could distract or create unintended interpretive themes. [12] To this point, Black feminist dramaturgy traces how the presence of racialized and gendered bodies on stage may reverberate beyond it. Furthermore, José Muñoz’s theory of disidentification expands the theoretical consideration of Black feminist dramaturgy. Muñoz’s theory of disidentification (a survival strategy he traces through the art, activism, and lives of queers of color) monitors “the ways in which identity is enacted by minority subjects who must work with/resist the conditions of (im)possibility that dominant culture generates.” [13] Disidentification attempts to rewrite the dominant script by maneuvering within dominant ideology and spaces in an effort to subvert it from the inside. [14] Muñoz’s insightful theorization also identifies a core component of how I situate Black feminist dramaturgy and how it challenges dominant ideological underpinnings. In the case of Hamilton , this means considering how the performances by women of color in the musical can (to a certain extent) disrupt racialized and gendered expectations. Therefore, Black feminist dramaturgy illuminates the way in which an actor’s embodied experience serves as a critical source of study, aids in disrupting historically stereotypical iconography, and promotes intersectionality as a concept that is vital to the entanglement of gender with whiteness and Americanness. Put another way, to apply a Black feminist dramaturgical lens to Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Hamilton is to magnify and complicate the analysis of the women of color in the musical. [15] Act One: Angelica Schuyler and Black Feminist Potential Angelica Schuyler, portrayed by Renée Elise Goldsberry in the original Broadway production of Hamilton , was the oldest child of Phillip Schuyler, a wealthy general in the Continental Army. [16] In Miranda’s musical, Angelica is depicted as a woman who is intellectually on par with (and even beyond) her male counterparts. Miranda describes her as the smartest character in the show, who demonstrates her intellectual prowess by reciting the most intricate raps. [17] In the musical, we first meet Angelica alongside her two sisters in the song “The Schuyler Sisters.” While it may be easy to classify Angelica as merely a source of inspiration for the men who actually do things in history, her character takes on additional significance when played by a Black woman. As a result, she is a character who is deemed equal in intelligence to men while overturning representations of Black women as innately promiscuous. In examining Goldsberry’s physical body within live theatre, it is important to also consider “flesh,” which Hortense Spillers, Black feminist scholar and cultural critic, differentiates from the body. Spillers asserts, “Before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. . . . If we think of the ‘flesh’ as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped overboard.’” [18] To this point, Goldsberry’s flesh serves as a witness to the wounds and scars experienced by Black people in American history. As she performs a show about the birth of America, her flesh carries the trauma of slavery that for hundreds of years this country maintained and from which it profited and built its economic foundation. Miranda makes visible her “flesh” within this story and in doing so, he signals the subversive potential that challenges spectators to consider how power and meaning function in the creation of gender for the Black body. This interpretation runs counter to scholars’ essays which have critiqued Hamilton for “whitewashing” the travails of Black Americans by failing to directly address the issue of American slavery in the show. While these critiques are necessary and should be addressed, I contend that the outright dismissal of Hamilton’s effort to disrupt and destabilize whiteness is overlooked. [19] The musical’s casting choice disrupts the notion of white normative gender constructions as the primary way to understand Goldsberry’s embodiment of this white historical figure. Theorizing the flesh (à la Spillers) in theatre and performance leads to conceptualizing Goldberry’s racial and gendered embodiment serves as an entryway to further engage with her actions in the musical that supersedes a white female subject position and/or gaze. The very first moment the audience encounters Angelica in the musical, she is standing by her sisters—not by a man. The character demonstrates her intellectual prowess in the song “The Schuyler Sisters.” She raps: I’ve been reading Common Sense by Thomas / Paine. / Some men say that I’m intense or I’m insane. / You want a revolution? I want a revelation / So listen to my declaration. / We hold these truths to be self-evident / That all men are created equal.’ / And when I meet Thomas Jefferson, / I’m ‘a compel him to include women in the / sequel! [20] As the only woman who raps in the musical, Angelica demonstrates and asserts a (Black) feminist position and shows she is intelligent and just as politically savvy as the men. In addition, she goes further to explain that she influences policy by manipulating men. Though this could be read as a promise of Angelica’s intellectual prowess—one that is never fulfilled—the use of hip hop provides a subversive inscription of the representation of Black women. As hip-hop feminists have argued, “Hip hop culture and rap music hold radical and liberating potential. . . hip hop provides a space for young black women to express their race and ethnic identities and to critique racism. Moreover, hip hop feminists contend that hip hop is a site where young Black women begin to build or further develop their own gender criticism and feminist identity.” [21] Therefore, hip hop serves as a practice of taking ownership of one’s underprivileged position. Furthermore, hip hop is a way Black women can own their stories and retell histories that have historically erased them. Angelica navigates her position, which she doesn’t let limit her ability to improve her status. Indeed, she disidentifies by “working on and against” her subservient role, to which she sometimes conforms, but also subverts by manipulating men into serving her own agenda. [22] Angelica’s relationship with Hamilton is influenced profoundly by that of circumstances, even as they both share equal affection for one another. As performed by Goldsberry, Angelica is “a headstrong society woman who loves Hamilton, but loves her sisters even more.” [23] In a similar vein, Angelica understands that she is limited by the demands placed on her as the eldest daughter, singing in “Satisfied,” “I’m a girl in a world in which / My only job is to marry rich. / My father has no sons so I’m the one / Who has to social-climb for one.” [24] Angelica is aware that if she wanted Hamilton, she could have him. However, her status in society requires her to “marry rich.” At the end of “Satisfied,” Angelica does not choose a sexual relationship with Hamilton, even though she desires him. Angelica explicitly performs and expresses sexual desire for Hamilton, but she does not pursue a physical relationship with him out of commitment to her sister Eliza. Angelica’s denial of her feelings for Hamilton takes on a new meaning in Goldsberry’s Black female body. This denial of romantic longing provides a counternarrative to the stereotype that Black women are overcome by their insatiable desire of sex. The expression of Angelica’s sexuality, embodied by Goldsberry, gestures towards historical embodiment of the Black female body, which Miranda subverts by reframing Angelica as simultaneously intelligent and sexually desirous. Notably, Miranda manages this subversive representation while avoiding oversexualizing or desexualizing Angelica, releasing the Black female body from “controlling images.” Thus, Goldsberry’s body serves as a host and traitor to American history and stage representations of Black femininity. Her character does not indulge in her desire for Hamilton nor is she relegated to the domestic sphere. Rather, Goldsberry embodies a character who is able to influence politics from her position yet is still seen as a woman who is sexually desirable. Notably, most critics have not weighed in on the alternative modes of labor inscribed by Angelica in the musical, the refusal of ontological categorization of Black women as asexual or hypersexual, and the recalibration of the Black woman as intelligent and desirable within a model of marriage. Additionally, Hamilton’s casting of Goldsberry and other women of color continues to challenge spectators of Hamilton to reconsider who can be a part of American history and what role they may play in it. [25] That the casting notice for Angelica Schuyler does not specify that the role be played specifically by a Black woman, but generally by a non-white actress, highlights the commitment of the Hamilton creative team to place dynamic and complex depictions of women of color on stage. Act Two: Maria Reynolds’s Deviant Possibility In “Say No to This,” Hamilton raps about his affair with Maria Reynolds, and the song is juxtaposed with Maria’s R&B influenced vocality as she provides her perspective of the events. As the affair progresses, her husband James extorts money from Hamilton; the men make a deal, ensuring that the affair is kept secret. Jasmine Cephas Jones, the mixed-race (Black and white) actress who originated the role of Maria, says, “On the page, her affair with Hamilton could be a mere scheme of extortion, a trap she sets because it’ll help her survive in her marriage. What makes ‘Say No to This’ interesting is the possibility that she’s also falling in love with him.” [26] Even though Jones’s claim that Maria is also falling in love is possible, Stacy Wolf observes that this position is not actually supported by the lyrics of the song. [27] Even though Jones’s interpretation of Maria’s feelings for Hamilton are not supported by the lyrics, Maria’s character is still more complex than she seems. Scholars such as Wolf may read Maria as falling into the jezebel trope (a controlling image derived from slavery that portrays African American women as having excessive sexual appetites), but this argument overlooks the ways that Jones’s embodiment of Maria subverts the trope. Put another way, categorizing Maria in this way obscures the power of Jones’s performance to upend audience assumptions about the sexuality of Black women as always already deviant. Maria, in Jones’s racialized body, utilizes the only capital she has—her body—to navigate her troubled life. Jones’s embodiment of Maria allows her to recalibrate and challenge the simplistic characterization of Maria, and Black women in general, as sexually deviant. Borrowing from Uri McMillian, the role of Maria reveals how performance allows “black women performers [to make] meaning within problematic representation structures.” [28] Performance, therefore, aids in addressing the construction and malleability of categories structured by race and gender. Rather than figuring Maria as depraved or framing her as simply a “whore,” Jones’s embodiment of Maria subverts expectations by illustrating how deviance can be a liberatory site, one where Maria harnesses a survival strategy, financial viability, and love. To gain insight into Maria Reynolds, I employ Black queer studies scholar Cathy Cohen’s politics of deviance as a means to examine “deviant practices and behaviors as productive…potential for resistance” for those who fall outside of the white heterosexual male, upper class position, particularly poor Black women. [29] Politics of deviance locates the agency of Black women who are deemed outside of normative sexual politics. Cohen proposes that poor Black women neither conform fully, nor wholly reject, the possibility of deviance as a strategy to improve their material conditions. Similarly, Maria may be seen as a “whore” and more complexly interpreted. Cohen’s politics of deviance is useful as it offers a theoretical lens to locate “the limited agency available” that Maria uses to “secure small levels of autonomy in [her] life.” [30] This is demonstrated in “Say No to This” when Maria, from the outset, informs the audience of her life, singing, “My husband’s doin me wrong / Beatin’ me, cheatin’ me, mistreatin’ me. / Suddenly he’s up and gone / I don’t have the means to go on.” [31] As the lyrics demonstrate, Maria is unfulfilled by her marriage and, as a married woman, she is unable to work to provide for herself; therefore, she must create an alternative way to survive. Maria reconfigures herself within her marriage, superseding the sexuality prescribed to white women of a certain class and position. Maria approaches Hamilton for her own financial and emotional needs with the means available to her as a woman in the eighteenth century. Classifying Maria as a sexual object, a body that is a tool used for sexual pleasure, inscribes the racialized female body as available solely for male consumption. However, Jones’s embodiment of Maria can be understood as a performance of disidentification, in which sexuality and desire are used as viable methods to shift power. Maria’s agency provides an alternative prescription for how Black women’s bodies can be read, especially in matters of sexuality. Racialization influences how sexuality is circulated and performed in Hamilton ; the musical counters this reading by positioning Maria as a figure in the historical record without faulting her for Hamilton’s downfall, and instead places the onus on Hamilton and her husband. Ultimately, Maria is not the reason for Hamilton’s eventual political downfall. Rather, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison use Hamilton’s affair to undermine him. This begins when Burr, Jefferson, and Madison accuse Hamilton of committing treason, and in an effort to clear his name, Hamilton informs them of the affair and his extortion by James Reynolds. Hamilton’s downfall is not due to Maria and her seductive prowess; instead, Burr, Jefferson, and Madison’s goal to prevent Hamilton from becoming president leads Hamilton to implicate himself by revealing his affair. Maria, as a minor character, is merely a pawn used in the political machinations to facilitate Jefferson and Madison’s overthrowing of Hamilton. It is important to note that none of the characters in the musical blame Maria for the affair: Hamilton never places the blame on her; Angelica Schuyler, once she learns of the affair, blames Hamilton not Maria; and even Eliza Hamilton, when she sings of the affair in her ballad “Burn,” does not blame her for what happened, but, rather, focuses on Hamilton’s domestic betrayal and failure. Reading Maria as the culprit of Hamilton’s political misfortune overlooks the musical’s narrative as a reputable source that informs the spectator, and instead, chooses to lean on Reynolds’s categorization of his wife as a whore. Accepting Reynold’s words—“You can keep seeing my whore wife/ If the price is right”—is siding with her abuser and discrediting her in the process. [32] Adopting this categorization offered by Reynolds, a figure that the musical establishes as a disreputable character, in effect, prioritizes the sentiments and worldview of Reynolds over Maria’s own account which troubles easy and judgmental assumptions about her sexuality and choices. Act Three: Eliza Schuyler’s Re-telling Phillipa Soo, a Chinese American woman, originated the role of Eliza Schuyler, the second oldest of the Schuyler sisters. [33] As Eliza spends the majority of the play in a marriage with Hamilton, Stacy Wolf has criticized the musical for Eliza’s lack of agency in the show, describing her as “more passive than active at every turn,” rendering her only as a romantic and domestic partner of Hamilton. [34] Eliza may seem to be the most submissive character in the musical due to her confinement in the domestic sphere after her marriage to Hamilton. Some could read this confinement of Eliza as reflecting a lack of desire to move beyond the expectations of women during the eighteenth century. It is important to note that reading Eliza in this way makes an assumption that mothers and wives cannot engage in feminist praxis. By doing so, this overlooks the socio-political work and labor that is done in the domestic sphere. Instead, I propose that Eliza embraces her role as a mother and wife while simultaneously subverting her position within the home to negotiate, as Muñoz proposes in Disidentifications , a “phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform.” [35] Eliza must navigate her position and status as a woman to elude consequences for more outward displays of non-conformity. For instance, when Eliza writes to George Washington that she is pregnant in order to prevent him from sending Hamilton into battle, she writes the narrative that then affects the rest of Hamilton’s political career. This moment is illustrative of how Eliza maneuvers the space given to her; rather than writing a letter to Hamilton, she writes to George Washington, the General of the Army. In doing so, Eliza sidesteps the patriarch of the family to achieve her own desires and needs. Including race in an analysis of Eliza’s agency shows how women of color feminisms, and specifically Asian American feminism, are uniquely different than those of white women and Black women. Soo’s race in the original Broadway cast serves as a means to grapple with Asian American women’s relationship to American citizenship and subvert stereotypical tropes of Asian American womanhood. [36] As literary scholar Traise Yamamoto explains, “The experiences of Asian American women have either been defined as identical to that of Asian American men or subsumed within the experiences of white women; both moves attest to the failure of representing Asian American women as sites of the complex intersections of race, gender, and national identity.” [37] Historically, Asian femininity has been portrayed as an idealized femininity. Since the politically insurgent feminist movement in the 1960s, images of Asian women circulated depicting them as hypersexual, de-vocalized, and subservient to white men. [38] At first glance, one might believe that the musical capitalizes on the stereotypical imagery of an Asian woman by pushing Soo’s character to the home and because of her performance of docility for Hamilton. [39] However, the musical counters potential readings of her body as hypersexual and submissive. When Eliza tells Hamilton that she wrote a letter to George Washington in the song “That Would Be Enough,” Hamilton immediately replies “No,” marking his disapproval with her action. [40] Nonetheless, Eliza is steadfast in her choice; in singing to Hamilton, “I’m not sorry,” she declares her own active participation in their life, even if she must go against societal norms. When Miranda speaks about this song, he gestures to a conversation with Hamilton director Tommy Kail during the workshop of Hamilton , where Kail challenged him to make “Eliza more active” in this moment instead of just having her express the sentiment to Hamilton. [41] Eliza literally and figuratively writes herself into history, not in an effort to resist her husband, but as a means to construct a narrative of legacy in which she is simultaneously an active participant and author. The recurring narrative-inscription motif woven throughout the musical further illustrates Eliza’s agency: she asks to be included in, removes herself from, and places herself in the narrative of Hamilton’s life. This motif is first represented in the song “That Would Be Enough,” in which Eliza announces to Hamilton that she is pregnant, singing, “Let me be a part of the narrative / In the story they will write someday.” [42] In Eliza’s second-act solo song “Burn,” [43] she learns of Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reyonlds and sings, “I’m erasing myself from the narrative / let future historians wonder how Eliza reacted.” [44] This moment in the musical, described by Stacy Wolf as the moment of agency for Eliza, is when she decides to leave Hamilton and obscure her own thoughts about the affair. [45] This moment signifies a rejection of the stereotype that Asian women are submissive. The musical motif comes full circle in the final song, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tell Your Story,” in which Eliza sings, “I put myself back in the narrative.” [46] In arguably the most powerful agentive moment in the entire show, Eliza reinserts herself back into the story, becoming an activist speaking against slavery, founding New York City’s first private orphanage, and raising funds to memorialize the men Hamilton fought beside. Alexander Hamilton may be the subject of Hamilton , but Eliza is the author. Eliza plays an active role in the construction of this narrative, a narrative that is as much hers as it is his. As the author, Eliza uses Hamilton’s legacy for her own political purpose; she makes the choices of what is deemed important or not. In the closing musical number, the lyric states that Eliza devotes the next fifty years of her life to sharing Hamilton’s legacy, but also to claiming her own place in it. Eliza, in tandem with Angelica, sings, “We tell your story,” referring to Hamilton’s history. [47] A few moments later, Eliza questions, “Will they tell our story?” [48] and the company queries, “Will they tell your story?” (emphasis mine). [49] In this moment, Eliza actively places herself in the narrative by making her retelling of this history a telling of her history, too. The ambiguity of the “your” sung by the company can be interpreted either as contemplating whether the world will tell Eliza’s story, or as a gesture toward a collective story that still needs to be told. Regardless of how one reads these lyrics, the ambiguity of who the company is singing about suggests that the individual story is indistinguishable or inseparable from the collective story. At the end of the musical, Hamilton and Eliza, along with the company, emphasize that Eliza’s story is just as important as Hamilton’s story. Eliza is not merely a teller of history, but a maker of history who was pushed to the margins because of her gender and race. As the musical questions if the audience will remember Eliza, Hamilton engages in a feminist mode of history writing and meaning making. This begs the bigger question of Hamilton : are the bodies that tell history just as important as what happens in history? Eliza’s story provides a resounding “yes.” The character of Eliza, who many claim has the least amount of agency, is the character who documents not only her husband’s story, but her own. This is particularly resonant because Soo’s Asian American body, as Karen Shimakawa theorizes, is marked by its constant oscillating relationship to American citizenship. [50] Placing Soo literally and figuratively within the nation-state, a site of tension for Asian American people, the musical encourages us to think about the limits of American citizenship. As Shimakawa reminds us, Americanness itself is defined by the “positioning of Asian Americans, as foreigners/outsiders/deviants/criminals or as domesticated/invisible/exemplary/honorary whites.” [51] Miranda recognizes the importance of Asian American women as central to America by positioning Eliza, embodied by Soo, a Chinese American actress, center stage to tell history from her perspective. Hamilton also challenges popular depictions of Asian American women on stage that only exist to serve the needs, desires, and journey of a white male character. Soo’s embodiment of Eliza is not merely an imitation of past stereotypical representations of Asian American women in theatre, such as in the musicals of Miss Saigon and The King and I. Instead, she is in control, wielding her own pen in her theatrical presentation, moving away from how musical theatre has scripted Asian American womanhood. Categorizing Eliza as merely a wife is limiting as it does not consider how the musical subverts and recalibrates Eliza’s role to incorporate the actress’s own embodiment. It also overlooks the importance of the wife’s role in male political figures’ lives and in politics in general. If one measures women of color to this standard of white womanhood, they will fall short every time. While women of color and white women may have some shared experiences of oppression, one must avoid generalizing in scholarly analysis to signal solidarity. Doing so erases the specific voices, experiences, and trauma of women of color. Hamilton combats this not only by positioning a woman as the final voice at the end of the musical, but a woman of color. Eliza’s act of writing history and telling Hamilton’s story—Hamilton and Eliza’s story—appeals to a feminist telling of history; as she tells her own story, she is simultaneously telling the story of the family, the nation, and, most importantly, of women of color. Even when Soo stands in the spotlight at the conclusion of Hamilton , she is not alone, nor is her presence divorced from the women who have shared the musical with her. It is noteworthy that in “The Schuyler Sisters,” when the three women are first introduced, they are identified as a collective. Also, of note: the actual song “The Schuyler Sisters” (which Miranda described as a “Destiny’s Child-esque” song) builds upon familiar “girl group” images, such as coordinated outfits and harmonies signaling a communal goal. Alongside the content of the song, “The Schuyler Sisters” illustrates how these three women, who bring different but equally important vocal styles, skills, and prowess to the musical number, are working together for the collective good. Our introduction to these women creates a purposeful contradistinction to the introduction of John Laurens, Marquis de Lafayette, and Hercules Mulligan. In “Aaron Burr, Sir,” the men are also introduced as a trio. But unlike the women, they all try to “one-up” each other during the hip-hop cypher. The hip-hop cypher, by definition, is simultaneously communal and competitive as rappers enter the space to illustrate their linguistic and performative prowess over one another, while also working to outlast the rest of the rappers in the circle. [52] In the musical, Hamilton is the one who is victorious in the cypher, which ultimately crowns him as the group’s leader. The format of the song, the staging of “Aaron Burr, Sir,” and the transition to “My Shot” demonstrate the deeply competitive nature of the men, who are overly concerned with individual legacy, and who almost exclusively work together to achieve their own personal goals. By contrast, the women ask us to consider the importance of sisterhood and investing in collective consciousness. Hamilton’ s grouping of the three principal actresses and their characters demonstrates a revolutionary call for women of color feminist collaboration. It asks that audiences consider how these women invest in modes of care for one another and challenges the role that patriarchy has in determining how they see each other. This is the major feminist work that the musical does. The collective investment in women of color’s coalition that the musical models, reiterates Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga’s call for women of color to “create bridges of consciousness” by imagining women of color working together among, across, and in spite of difference. [53] It is these women of color’s embodiment on stage that signals women of color’s coalition building. Even if the musical does not always abide by this principle, the unified presence of Goldsberry, Soo, and Cephas-Jones and their laboring bodies on stage (as characters and as actors) urge us to consider the “work,” or “werk,” that women of color have done in the face of violence and erasure. Hamilton imagines and conceives white female historical figures as women of color, and while I have argued that Miranda’s casting subverts dominant racial and gendered expectations, I also recognize the limits of casting as a strategy in addressing the calls of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in theatre. While Hamilton is not the first show to use casting to address dominant societal and cultural values, it arguably sparked a resurgence of Broadway producers and fans celebrating Broadway revivals that adopt non-traditional casting methods to signal a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. [54] This trend relies on casting to fix the systemic issues that displace marginalized theatre artists from the Broadway stage. Miranda’s (and his creative team’s) casting choices differ in critical ways; the musical from its inception intentionally cast non-white performers in the roles of white historical figures. [55] The meanings from these choices may be read differently, but the casting choices are anything but circumstantial. In fact, the identities and bodies of the actors are central to performance meanings. Beyond Hamilton, casting choices made in theatre should not simply function as ornamentation to obscure the racist and sexist meanings of a show. Instead, dramaturgs must explore how the corporeality of performers change characters and stories. When theatrical production and, arguably, theatre criticism, critically examine the corporeality of actors as a meaning-making practice, we can destabilize whiteness in our theatrical imagination. In the case of Hamilton , audiences may be better off noticing the impact of raced and gendered bodies in their perceptions of shows, instead of maintaining that race and gender is irrelevant to their experience of the musical. Hamilton’s representation of women of color attempts to embrace the complexity and the contradictions that cause the audience to repeatedly interrogate themselves, as well as the history of racial and gender oppression in the United States. References [1] See Aja Romano, “ Hamilton is Fanfic and, Its Historical Critics Are Totally Missing the Point,” Vox Media, https://www.vox.com/2016/4/14/11418672/hamilton-is-fanfic-not-historically-inaccurate; Ed Morales, “The Problem with the Hamilton Movie,” CNN Worldwide, https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/05/opinions/hamilton-movie-mixed-messages-black-lives-matter-morales/index.html; Stephanie Goodman, “Debating Hamilton as it Shifts From Stage to Screen,” The New York Times , 10 July 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/movies/hamilton-critics-lin-manuel-miranda.html; and Soroya Nadia McDonald, “Five Years Ago, Hamilton Turned a Revolution into a Revelation – what now?” ESPN Enterprises, https://theundefeated.com/features/five-years-ago-hamilton-turned-a-revolution-into-a-revelation-what-now. [2] See Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds., Historians on Hamilton : How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018). This anthology weighs the pros and cons of the Hamilton ’s representation of history. Notably, out of the fifteen essays included in the anthology, only two give critical attention to the women of Hamilton : Allgor’s “‘Remember…I’m Your Man’: Masculinity, Marriage and Gender in Hamilton ” and Patricia Herrera’s “Reckoning with America’s Racial Past, Present, and Future in Hamilton .” [3] See Aly Semigran, “The Women of Hamilton , Making Herstory on Broadway,” Legendary Entertainment, 1 September 2016, https://amysmartgirls.com/the-women-of-hamilton-making-herstory-on-broadway-e507820a319. Semigran’s review provides a short exposé on the actresses in Hamilton and praises the musical. Semigran exclaims, “They aren’t the women behind the Founding Fathers in this critical chapter in American history, they are the ones standing at their side, all the while standing up for themselves and making history all their own.” See also Michael Schuman, “The Women of Hamilton ,” The New Yorker , 6 August 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-women-of-hamilton. Schulman also praises the show, stating: “Miranda has placed a pair of vividly imagined female characters” in the musical. However, Schulman, then questions if Hamilton is feminist, and ultimately answers himself: “Almost.” He contends that Hamilton reiterates “that men do history, and women just tell it.” However, Schulman later retreats somewhat, giving Miranda recognition for positioning women in the musical alongside the men and not behind them. [4] See James McMaster, “Why Hamilton Is Not the Revolution You Think It Is,” Emerson College, 23 February 2016, https://howlround.com/why-hamilton-not-revolution-you-think-it. James McMaster interrogates the absent feminism in an essay for HowlRound. McMaster argues that the female characters’ desires, fears, hopes, and plans within Hamilton exist only in relation to Hamilton. See also Stacy Wolf, “ Hamilton ,” The Feminist Spectator (blog), 24 February 2016, https://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2016/02/24/hamilton. Shortly after the publication of McMaster’s essay, Wolf penned a guest blog on The Feminist Spectator in which she argues that each main woman in the musical is an archetype, categorizing Angelica Schuyler (sister-in-law of Hamilton) as a muse, Eliza Schuyler (Hamilton’s wife) as a wife, and Maria Reynolds (the woman with whom Hamilton has an affair) as a whore. For a more developed version of this argument, see Wolf, “ Hamilton ’s Women,” Studies in Musical Theatre 12, no. 2 (June 2018). Here, Wolf contends that Hamilton epitomizes a paradox for the feminist spectator, one that is structured by a love/hate relationship, or what she calls “dissonant pleasure.” Throughout this article, Wolf examines the choreography, musical numbers, and narrative arc of the women characters, arguing that Hamilton illustrates the potential of the women as socially and political engaged citizens, but ultimately fails in fulfilling this promise. See Indebted to Wolf’s critical engagement with Hamilton ’s women, in her chapter from Historians on Hamilton , “‘Remember…I’m Your Man’: Masculinity, Marriage, and Gender in Hamilton ,” Catherine Allgor reiterates Wolf’s sentiment about the positioning of women on the periphery in Hamilton . Allgor examines how gender operates in the musical alongside the historical record, noting that Hamilton fails to illuminate how gender is a significant organizing principle. For Allgor, this oversight hides the subordinate legal status that women faced and perpetuates the belief that women only played minor roles in history. Allgor ends by noting that Hamilton’s revolution relies on its attempt to “decenter history” and that this can inspire others to build upon Miranda’s work. [5] Brandi Wilkins Catanese, The Problem of the Color(Blind) Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 22. [6] It is important to note that this article focuses on the original principal actresses of Hamilton ’s Broadway production (performers that reprised their roles of Eliza, Angelica, and Mariah for the Disney+ version of the musical) and how the racial and gender identity of these performers influence potential readings of their respective characters. [7] Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Looking at Hamilton from Inside the Broadway Bubble,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past , eds. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 230. [8] Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 27, no. 4 (2009): 69. [9] Michelle Cowin Gibbs, “Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 33, no. 2 (Spring 2021). [10] See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Unwin Hynan,1990). Collins explores the intellectual tradition fostered by Black women scholars, non-academics, and artists. Tracing ideas and concepts propelled by Black women, most notably the term “outsider-within” and “matrix of domination,” Collins argues that Black women will always fall outside of “feminist and black social thought” due to their focus on whiteness or maleness. Yet, according to Collins this “outsider within” position produces a knowledge source that is more nuanced than feminist and Black social thought. [11] Bert Cardullo, What Is Dramaturgy? (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 3. [12] Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 13. [13] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 6. [14] Ibid, 23. [15] While my primary analysis is through Black feminism, I recognize that women of color feminisms are distinct and different. Utilizing other women of color feminisms will also magnify new interpretative possibilities for the musical. [16] The Hamilton casting call describes Angelica Schuyler as a mix of Desiree Armfeldt and Nicki Minaj. [17] Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 79. [18] Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67. [19] See Lyra D. Monteiro, “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton ,” National Council on Public History, 10 June 2016, https://ncph.org/history-at-work/its-not-just-a-musical; Annette Gordon-Reed, “ Hamilton , the Musical: Blacks and the Founding Fathers, 6 April 2016, https://ncph.org/history-at-work/hamilton-the-musical-blacks-and-the-founding-fathers; and Ishmael Reed, “ Hamilton , the musical: Black Actor Dress Up like Slave Traders…and It’s Not Halloween,” CounterPunch, https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/21/hamilton-the-musical-black-actors-dress-up-like-slave-tradersand-its-not-halloween for their essential critiques of the musical’s erasure. [20] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 44. [21] Whitney Peoples, “‘Under Construction’: Identifying Foundations of Hip-Hop Feminism and Exploring Bridges between Black Second Wave and Hip-Hop Feminisms,” in No Permanent Waves Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 404. [22] Muñoz, Disidentifications , 6. [23] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 2. 4.y of Minnesota Press, 1997), 29.ect. istorical embodiment of the black female body, that I offer Miranda subverts through th [24] Ibid, 82. [25] In the essay, “On the Perfect Union of Actor and Role with Allusion to Renée Elise Goldsberry” in Hamilton: The Revolution , Miranda speaks about the first time that Goldsberry auditioned for the musical and how she was the perfect person for the role. Not only does this essay provide further insight into how character and actor are central to the musical, but it also highlights Miranda’s role in casting of the show. [26] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 175. [27] Stacy Wolf, “Hamilton’s Women,” Studies in Musical Theatre 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2018): 176. [28] Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 24. [29] Mireille Miller-Young, “Preface: Confessions of A Black Feminist Academic Pornographer,” in A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Durham, NC; Duke University Press, 2014), x. [30] Cathy J. Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” Du Bois Review 1, no. 1 (2004): 27–45, 30. [31] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 176. [32] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 177. [33] Phillipa Soo’s racial ambiguity had led some historians to read her as white, specifically Annette Gordon-Reed who asserts that Phillipa Soo is read and coded as white. While the audience may have difficulty fitting her into a racial category, I do not read Phillipa Soo’s embodiment of Eliza Schuyler as white. [34] Wolf, “ Hamilton ’s Women,” 169. [35] Muñoz, Disidentifications , 4. [36] As a reminder, because the casting breakdown specifices that a “non-white” actress should play the role, Eliza has been played by other non-Asian women of color; therefore, the meaning of the performance can and has changed depending on who portrays her. I analyze Soo’s performance because it has undoubtedly influenced later productions and it allows me to highlight that a generic (i.e., white) analysis will not serve the various meanings conjured by the bodies of the women of color who will embody this role in the future. [37] Traise Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1999), 67. [38] Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws and Love (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997), 34. [39] For most spectators of the musical, Soo’s body signals a generic Asian-ness or mixedness, thus rendering her representative of all Asian Americans and denying her the particularities of her Chinese American identity. I refer to her as Asian American throughout the paper to point out how the United States’ systems of racial classification require Soo’s body to be easily consumable for the American public. In this way, Soo comes to stand in for the diverse population of Asian Americans, despite her desire or choice too. [40] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 110. [41] Ibid. [42] Ibid. [43] There is no historical record of Eliza Schuyler’s reaction to finding out about the affair; Miranda’s imagines what her reaction would be in this song. [44] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 238. [45] Wolf, “ Hamilton ’s Women,” 175. [46] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 280. [47] Ibid. [48] Ibid, 281. [49] Ibid, 281. [50] Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2002), 3. [51] Shimakawa, National Abjection , 3. [52] H. Samy Alim, Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip-Hop Culture , (New York: Routledge, 2006), 97. [53] Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition: Writings by Radical Women of Color , ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1981, reprint 2015), 16. [54] For example, the recent Broadway revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! cast the female lead as a Black woman. [55] Michael Paulson, “ Hamilton Producers Will Change Job Posting, but Not Commitment to Diverse Casting,” The New York Times , 30 March 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/arts/union- criticizes-hamilton-casting-call-seeking-nonwhite-actors.html. Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Collin Vorbeck Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies Collin Vorbeck By Published on June 12, 2020 Download Article as PDF Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies . Edited by Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook. London: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 243+xii. Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook’s co-edited volume Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies advances the cross-disciplinary discourse inspired by the cognitive turn by interrogating the ways practitioners and audiences make meaning through our varied encounters with theatre. Buoyed by their individual groundbreaking scholarship in the field, the editors curate a complex collection of American and international perspectives that how “the implications of embodied, embedded, enacted and extended minds” impact engagement with a variety of performing arts (3). Their volume invigorates the intersection of theatre and cognition with incisive case studies that partner physiological and psychological research to expand our awareness of how we generate understanding of performance. Blair and Cook argue that our embodied experiences shape the meanings we draw from theatrical encounters, and they structure their book to explore the three cognitive relationships evoked by their subtitle: interpretation of the text, communication through action, and synergy of performance and environment. This structure subtly mirrors a production process and moves organically from script analysis through the rehearsal process to engaged performance, exposing cognitive revelations with each progression. The editors provide a salient overview of the current landscape of cognitive studies, and they succinctly introduce each section to frame their selected essays. Blair and Cook augment their cross-disciplinary emphasis by concluding each section with a response from a preeminent cognitive scholar. Culminating in an inventive After Words section, this invitingly conversational volume offers practitioners and scholars fresh perspectives on how theatre and performance create meaning on the page and on the stage. Blair and Cook’s first section explores the way language creates and sustains realities onstage by applying cognitive linguistics and metaphor theory to dramatic texts. Barbara Dancygier investigates how the materiality embedded within the script influences reception. She outlines what she calls the “dramatic anchors” in Julius Caesar and Richard II that trigger deeper meanings and layered connections throughout each play, directly citing Caesar’s mantle and Richard’s mirror as material elements that activate understanding (32). Laura Seymour’s essay also draws from Julius Caesar , focusing on the behaviors of the conspirators prior to the assassination. Seymour studies the act of kneeling and other bodily-situated references to address how these seemingly acquiescent actions engender metaphorical associations in readers and audiences. Vera Tobin moves away from specific dramatic texts to inspect the inherently theatrical elements of irony. She borrows from conceptual blending theory to illustrate how comprehending irony requires the activation of multiple mental spaces derived from “how we move around within a particular viewpoint configuration” (66). Cognitive linguist Mark Turner responds to this section by praising its interdisciplinary endeavors and outlining methodologies that will bolster future partnerships between cognition and performance. The second section examines the ways the enacted body creates and sustains meaning through a wide variety of artistic engagement, partnering performance strategies with neuroscientific research to investigate the power of perception. Neal Utterback’s essay proposes a theatre training model, for instance, that draws from the psychological and physiological rigors of Olympic competition to create an actor-athlete regimen. To prepare his student actors for sustained engagement in their performances, Utterback developed a process that uses “power posing combined with mental imagery and positive self-talk” to connect the benefits of cognitive perception to embodied results (80). Dance scholar Warburton surveys ArtsCross , an international collaborative event, and zooms in on the psychophysical experiences enacted during the rehearsal process. He compares the physical and mental output utilized when marking versus dancing full-out and concludes that the compression and compartmentalization of marking “reduces the multi-layered cognitive load used when learning choreography” (102). Christopher Jackman furthers the discussion of memory and suggests “an enactive model of cognition” that attempts to avoid the hurdles of self-consciousness in performance (108). Jackman’s mindful approach to training at times feels overcrowded, but his goal to build and maintain the skills of acting through neuroscientific methods is intriguing. Cognitive psychologist Catherine J. Stevens responds to this section by citing recent interdisciplinary studies that seek to deepen understanding of the embodied experiences explored by these essays, specifically attuned to dance and movement. The final section of Blair and Cook’s ambitious book considers how cognition evolves dynamically through engagement with the environment, stressing the importance of accounting for spatiotemporal realities when assessing potential meanings of a given event. Evelyn Tribble’s essay provides a broad overview of these relationships, using television cooking shows, the English Restoration theatre system, and copious cross-disciplinary sources to support her argument. Tribble contends that “distributed cognition” makes possible the “overwhelming cognitive load” required to perform, and that structures external to the body – a theatre, a school, or a familiar kitchen set-up – play a crucial role in understanding how to navigate a given situation (134). Similarly, Sarah McCarroll parallels the cultural signification of fashion with historical stage performances to argue that conscious “body images” and pre-cognitive “body schemas” coalesce to form what she calls the “body map” (144). Her fascinating study of the costume choices in J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton illustrates how clothing combines with the environment to both enable and restrict embodied action. Shifting modalities, Matt Hayler introduces a new approach to digital technologies and asks readers to actively engage online with his chosen examples. He argues that such engagement results in “reflexive relationships” that impart circular cognitive meaning by continually informing the experience through feedback loops (162). Philosopher Shaun Gallagher responds to this section by applying his “prenoetic” theory of human cognition to each essay, demonstrating the subconscious ways the body interacts with environments, clothing, and technology to make meaning (175). Blair and Cook further their cross-disciplinary endeavor by crafting a unique After Words section that provides deeper insights into the existing scholarship undergirding the emerging field. Through personal essays and interviews with a wide range of theatre practitioners, Blair and Cook reveal how pervasive cognitive studies has become to scholars and creators alike. Their conversation with Deb Margolis is particularly illuminating as the performing artist, teacher, and playwright discusses her own understanding of the important connection between the physical and cognitive limitations of the body. In a time when gathering for live performance is no longer an option due to pandemic, Theatre, Performance and Cognition finds a way to ingeniously engage with elements of the embodied experience that are simultaneously obvious and revelatory, and its essays speak to all levels of cognitive curiosities. What is more, the editors curate an excellent balance of dense but illuminating neuroscientific data and complimentary theatre-making examples. Blair and Cook’s thoughtful commentary throughout this book provides theorists and practitioners alike with inventive methods to approach current work and to create new scholarship, cognizant of the dynamic processes within our bodies that shape our understanding. Interest in cognitive/theatrical scholarship shows no signs of waning, and this volume further demonstrates the value of addressing complex aspects of performance with interdisciplinary lenses. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Collin Vorbeck Texas Tech 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 Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Verna A. Foster Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Verna A. Foster By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF In creating his plays Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has repeatedly chosen to rewrite, adapt, or otherwise appropriate earlier theatrical styles or dramatic texts. Three of his plays, in particular, Neighbors , Appropriate , and An Octoroon —described by one critic as a “trilogy of highly provocative and fantastical explorations of race in America” [1] —radically excavate and revise historical styles of performance or dramatic literature to explore ideas of blackness and racial attitudes in contemporary America. In Neighbors Jacobs-Jenkins updates blackface minstrelsy; in Appropriate he borrows, or appropriates, characters, situations, and motifs from “every play that [he] liked” in the genre of American family drama in order to “cook the pot to see what happens”; [2] and in An Octoroon he adapts Dion Boucicault’s nineteenth-century melodrama The Octoroon as his own “meta-melodrama.” Jacobs-Jenkins has commented that these three plays “are all kind of like me dealing with something very specific, which has to do with the history of theater and blackness in America and form.” [3] In a more recent interview Jacobs-Jenkins sharpens his earlier ideas about theatrical form in a striking image that will inform the rest of this essay; he says that he thinks of “genre or old forms” as “interesting artifacts that invite a kind of archeology of seeing.” [4] Neighbors , Appropriate , and An Octoroon enable the multiple-layered seeing that Jacobs-Jenkins is talking about because they require comparative viewing across the adapted and adaptive works themselves and across the cultures or historical periods that produced them. The diverse ways in which Jacobs-Jenkins excavates “old forms” in these three plays both reveal and create new layers of historical meaning that call for new ways of seeing and thinking about America’s racial heritage. [5] Jacobs-Jenkins’s innovative work makes possible a fresh and experiential interracial discussion of race relations in America—a discussion that is much needed in the present tense political climate. At the same time his plays push the boundaries of what adaptation can accomplish and offer further refinements to the current discourse on adaptation theory. Adaptation has increasingly become a major object of study by literary scholars. In the mid-twentieth century, much of the pioneering work consisted in studies, both practical and theoretical, of the adaptation of novels into film. Since 2000, scholars such as Linda Hutcheon and Julie Sanders have extended the discussion to adaptations of other literary genres, myth, visual art, history, and biography in multiple media. In A Theory of Adaptation (first published in 2006) Hutcheon defines an adaptation as “an extended, announced, deliberate revisitation of a particular work of art.” [6] While adaptations often entail changing the medium or genre of the source text, they may include any intermedial or intramedial, intergeneric or intrageneric updating or other reworking of an earlier work. The process of adaptation may entail retelling stories, reimagining characters, changing geographical and temporal contexts. It may include “transmotivation,” “transfocalization,” or “transvalorization”—terms used by Gérard Genette in Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), an important theoretical work on the relation between “hypertext” (adaptation) and “hypotext” (adapted work) that anticipated by a couple of decades the recent surge in adaptation studies. [7] Often transmotivation, transfocalization, and transvalorization work together. Adaptation is a creative, interpretative, and political act. In Adaptation and Appropriation (2006) Sanders notes that while adaptations serve to perpetuate and confirm the canonicity of adapted works, they also frequently subvert the assumptions of their source texts or reinterpret them from a contemporary political perspective to make them “fit,” in a quasi-Darwinian sense, for new cultural environments. [8] An adaptation may criticize either the assumptions of the adapted text or the adapter’s own society or both. Jacobs-Jenkins’s plays variously demonstrate how adaptation operates creatively in producing new works and also critically and politically, not in this instance by reinterpreting the adapted texts, but by exposing how their damaging and supposedly outdated racial assumptions continue to inform contemporary racial attitudes. It is in the interstices between adapted work and adaptation, or to use Jacobs-Jenkins’s archeological metaphor, in the stratigraphy, that the important cultural and political work of adaptation takes place. Neighbors , Appropriate , and An Octoroon are all intrageneric adaptations; that is, they are plays that adapt other plays, or in the case of Neighbors other performances, in the same dramatic genre. Intrageneric adaptation has received less theoretical attention than intergeneric or intermedial adaptation. It is, however, precisely the similarities in formal attributes (and in dramatic adaptation, in styles of performance)—not just resemblances in events or characters—between adapted work and adaptation that enable the complex layered seeing advocated by Jacobs-Jenkins. This “archeology of seeing” goes beyond the “oscillation” between texts that Hutcheon suggests is characteristic of audience members’ reception of adaptations; rather it entails what she calls their “palimpsestuous” experience as layers of text are “multilaminated” onto one another. [9] Following Hutcheon, Jane Barnette notes that a palimpsest “can be read simultaneously or sequentially—that is, (to an extent) one can isolate layers for consideration, or take in the entirety of the palimpsest at once,” and, importantly, she reminds us that the “stage palimpsest will necessarily” be based more on “image and sound” than on the words in the play text. [10] Simultaneous “tak[ing] in” implies the audience’s experiential engagement with what they see and hear; “consideration” of separate layers (as in archeology) requires Brechtian critical distance and analysis. Neighbors , Appropriate , and An Octoroon call for both kinds of reading. While all three plays perform similar kinds of cultural work, in each play Jacobs-Jenkins adapts a different historical form of theatrical entertainment and adopts correspondingly different kinds of innovative adaptive strategies designed to manipulate audiences into a self-conscious recognition of their own complicity in the racial assumptions he excavates. An Octoroon most closely adheres to, though it also transcends, Hutcheon’s definition of an adaptation as “an extended, announced, deliberate revisitation of a particular work of art.” Neighbors and Appropriate expand the parameters of adaptation in other ways, the former by adapting and recontextualizing an historical form of popular entertainment, the latter by adapting not a particular play, but an entire dramatic subgenre. I will discuss the three plays separately in order to bring out their distinctive qualities as intrageneric dramatic adaptations. Asserting that he was not afraid of black images that would generally be found offensive, in the earliest play in the “trilogy,” Neighbors (2010), Jacobs-Jenkins adopts tropes from the nineteenth-century blackface minstrel show that are uncomfortably crude and undeniably racist. [11] By exaggerating the embodiments of blackness and the comic and musical routines characteristic of the minstrel shows to the point of an absurdity so explosive that laughter becomes problematic, Jacobs-Jenkins launches a savage satiric attack on racist stereotypes. At the same time by theorizing and teaching his audience about the history of blackface entertainment through the dialogue of the minstrels themselves, Jacobs-Jenkins invites a more dispassionate Brechtian evaluation of the emotionally charged minstrel show devices he depicts. Finally, by placing his minstrel characters in a contemporary context and eliciting empathy for them as human beings and as artists, Jacobs-Jenkins opens up a yet more complicated and difficult way of seeing his nineteenth-century source material while confronting audiences with the ways in which the minstrel stereotypes continued to operate in popular culture and populist politics throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Like stratigraphic layers in archeology, the layering of past and present in Neighbors requires complex seeing. First performed at the Public Theater in New York in 2010, and subtitled “an epic with cartoons,” [12] Neighbors depicts what happens when the Crows, a family of minstrels played by actors in blackface, move in next door to the Pattersons—Richard, a black classics professor, Jean, his white wife, and Melody, their teenage daughter. The Crows, to the best of my knowledge, have always been played by black actors in blackface, although a note in the text states, “the ethnicity and/or gender of the actors playing the Crows is not specified.” [13] The play combines dramatic realism in the scenes involving the Pattersons with satirically exaggerated blackface minstrelsy. The Crows—Mammy, Zip Coon, Sambo, Topsy, and Jim Crow—play updated versions of the infamous parts suggested by their names. Zip Coon, “very well-dressed,” sporting a top hat, and walking “ jauntily ” and “ dandily ” (250, 230, 238) is the classic dandy of nineteenth-century minstrel shows; Mammy, “ample” of bosom (301) and forceful of manner, channels Hattie McDaniel’s character in Gone with the Wind (310), while Topsy is both “picaninni” and a version of Josephine Baker. The Crows wear black paint, have huge red lips, and, except for Jim, and Zip in his conversations with Jean, speak with the caricatured dialect and malapropisms of their nineteenth-century originals. For much of the play Jim Crow refuses to take on the eponymous role of his late father, though by the end he too performs his part in a rousing version of the minstrel song and dance number “Jump Jim Crow,” his new-found talent inspired apparently by the admiration of Melody. [14] Jacobs-Jenkins uses Melody and Jean to introduce the audience to the Crow family as people rather than “cartoons.” A romantic relationship develops between rebellious Melody and shy Jim Crow, beginning with the “ awkward tenderness ” of the moment when Jim gently removes an eyelash from Melody’s face (232). Meanwhile Zip Coon suavely charms Jean, encouraging her to talk about herself and taking an interest in her poetry in contrast to Richard’s obsession with his own career and status. Richard is horrified by the Crow family’s moving in next door. They represent for him his worst nightmare about how his white neighbors might perceive him despite his education and professional, middle-class standing: “People will see them and . . . think we’re related!” (250). His intolerance alienates his wife and daughter, who turn to the Crows for love and support. The Crows have been on “hiatus”—the word is used repeatedly (231, 235, 242)—after the death of Jim Crow, Sr. for an uncertain period of time, suggesting that they may have come literally from the nineteenth century, and are, like Pirandello’s Six Characters, in search of their life on the stage in the form of their much-vaunted “comeback” (261). Certainly, they belong to a different theatrical world and tradition than the Pattersons. Throughout the play the Crows rehearse and quarrel about who should do what in their upcoming show. In parallel scenes the Pattersons, themselves relatively new to town, enact the realistic drama of modern marital and generational conflict inflected by anxieties over social and professional status in a new job, new school, and new neighborhood. Interspersed among the Crows’ comically fraught rehearsal scenes and the Pattersons’ emotionally fraught domestic scenes are two lectures on Greek tragedy given by Richard to his students and four “Interludes,” in which Zip, Sambo, Mammy, and Topsy each in turn performs a grossly exaggerated version of the specialty acts typically included in minstrel shows. [15] Zip struggles to transport an armful of musical instruments, drops them, and with his pants falling down finally succeeds in carrying a bugle in his anus. Sambo is chased repeatedly across the stage by a lawnmower, loses his grass skirt, and uses his long “ firehose penis ” to have sexual intercourse with a watermelon, which he then eats (273). After setting a pile of leaves on fire with a cigarette, Mammy puts out the fire with milk spurting from her enormous breasts, with which she also feeds two white babies, twirling them around in the air from her appendages. The emphasis on huge body parts, especially eyes, lips, and feet, was characteristic of representations of black people in minstrel shows. [16] Jacobs-Jenkins takes these grotesque depictions to a new level, savagely satirizing white obsession with black male sexuality and white appropriation of black female fecundity. [17] The representations of minstrelsy in Neighbors send ambiguous—or multilayered—messages to the play’s audiences, who have responded accordingly with embarrassed, confused, and uncertain laughter or have not known whether they should laugh at all. As reported by one reviewer of Company One’s production of Neighbors in Boston in 2011, for example, the cast “keeps you uncertain of whether you’re expected to laugh or cringe, engage or retreat, and sends you off wondering why you reacted in whatever, inevitably complex ways you did.” [18] Another reviewer of this production commented that “it feels like we should applaud [the Crows’] shtick as members of the fictional audience, but not as the actual audience.” [19] Jim Crow’s song and dance, while not one of the formal “Interludes,” is a case in point. Jim’s performance, so admired by Melody that she gives the dazed Jim a blowjob, seems, according to Jacobs-Jenkins’s stage directions, designed to be genuinely remarkable and worthy of the theatre audience’s admiration as well as Melody’s. At the beginning of his performance, dressed in “ straw hat, striped suit, and enormous bowtie ,” Jim looks “ ridiculous ,” but also “ amazing ” (285). Caught up into his act, Jim is “ like a hurricane unleashed ,” “ the most incredible thing you have ever seen in your entire life ,” even though he also shares characteristics with his minstrel forebears — “ eyes bugged out, limbs loose, moving, dancing, mo’ coon than a little bit ” (288). Jacobs-Jenkins here invites audiences to engage in an act of complex seeing, requiring them simultaneously to cheer Jim for his newfound expertise and to censure his embodiment of his nominal stereotype, to admire aesthetically what they must also condemn historically. But this is not all. Jacobs-Jenkins introduces Jim’s real feelings. He is “ humiliated ” by what he has to do (285). He is able to perform only by becoming “ almost like a man possessed ” (288) . And at the end of the act he holds a musical note so long that the cookie jar holding his father’s ashes explodes, “ releasing an enormous cloud of ash ,” whose haze “ should remain present ” for the rest of the play (289). Jim’s brilliant performance contains so much pain and anger that it breaks open his family’s theatrical past with lingering consequences. At the end of the play the Crow Family Minstrels do not give us the “comeback” show that their rehearsals have perhaps led us to expect but something much more radical. Topsy’s “Interlude” late in the play (labeled “Interlude/Interruption” [309] to mark its difference from the other Interludes) contributes in a different way to Jacobs-Jenkins’s creation of an “archeology of seeing” in Neighbors . In the form of a “stump speech” (in minstrel performances a ridiculous lecture replete with malapropisms on a topical subject [20] ), Topsy talks to the audience about what she hopes they have been enjoying so far. While respecting her family’s traditional show pieces, Topsy feels they are too “commercial.” She sees herself as a more forward-looking “artist” and expresses her own ideas about how art should deal with “the shared human experiamentience.” She presents to the audience “summa the stuff” she has been working on, which turns out to be “ the history of African Americans onstage” crammed into three spectacular minutes of music, video projections, dance, etc., etc. (depending presumably on the resources of the theatre). The effect, according to the stage directions, is supposed to be “ absolutely nothing less than utter, utter transcendence ” (310). At this point the play celebrates the history of African-American entertainment from Josephine Baker, channeled by Topsy in her diamond-studded halter top and banana skirt (309), to artists such as Sister Sledge, Beyoncé, and others, whose songs may be incorporated here or may have been used throughout the play as in the New York production of Neighbors . [21] At the same time, as Charles Isherwood of the New York Times notes, Jacobs-Jenkins’s contextualization of the performances of these later artists within Topsy’s act suggests that they too can be seen as just another form of minstrelsy. [22] Jacobs-Jenkins’s final direction for Topsy, “ And maybe it ends with her masturbating with a banana. In front of a strobe light ” (310), comically undercuts the “ utter, utter transcendence ” he has just described, but it does so in such a way as to mock (give the finger—or the banana—to) what has been historically a largely white and often exploitative entertainment industry rather than the artists themselves. By opening up the “old form” of the minstrel show, Jacobs-Jenkins exposes old meanings and layers new ones onto them. In talking directly to the audience about the show they are watching, Topsy serves an educational function, metatheatrically drawing attention to Jacobs-Jenkins’s work of theatrical excavation. In this respect her role anticipates that of the authorial figure BJJ in An Octoroon , who teaches his audience about melodrama. More literally educational are Richard’s lectures on Greek tragedy, which can be seen as his form of performance, or his interludes. In the first lecture Richard explores the origin of tragedy in our lives, suggesting that it comes from choices we have made in the past that “haunt” us “deep into our very present” (240). In his second lecture—on Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis —Richard layers his own experience as a black man in America onto the story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia. Richard explains that the origin of Agamemnon’s tragedy lies in events that occurred before the action of the play begins. By boasting that he was as good a hunter as the goddess Diana, Agamemnon had “the gall to get ‘uppity’” with the gods (291). As a punishment Diana denies him wind to sail to Troy and requires the sacrifice of his daughter to appease her. Richard, however, blames the sacrifice not on the gods (standing in for white people in his mind) but on the demands of Agamemnon’s “uncouth, country-ass soldiers with no self-control, sitting in the port raping women and drinking all the time and ain’t got no jobs and don’t talk Greek good” (292)—clearly, for Richard, a version of the Crows. Richard then conflates Iphigenia’s willingness to sacrifice herself with what he sees as Melody’s defection to the Crows. (During the lecture the audience can hear Melody giving her blowjob to Jim Crow.) Richard believes that Agamemnon, “a new breed of Achaean,” should have resisted and saved his—Richard, distraught, slips and says, “my”—daughter (292, 293). By layering African-American history onto Greek myth, Richard constructs an alternative “archeology of seeing” to Topsy’s—and Jacobs-Jenkins’s—excavation of the minstrel show that is the play’s main focus. While the minstrel show provides the bedrock of his dramatic archeology, Jacobs-Jenkins also exposes the later cultural and political stereotypes of blackness that have been layered onto the tropes of minstrelsy. This cultural stratigraphy is especially apparent in the sequence late in the play in which the Crows encourage Jim not to be nervous in the upcoming show because, Mammy says, the audience “luvs evathang we does” (317). Topsy, Sambo, and Mammy (Zip is busy fighting Richard) recite a litany of what white people readily enjoy about black performance, staged or otherwise. They begin with the repertoire of minstrel shows and the comic roles played by black characters in the early films and television programs that succeeded them, move on to the repertoire of contemporary cultural stereotypes, and conclude with the repertoire of protest: “They luvs when we dance,” “When we guffaws and slaps our thighs lak dis,” “When we be misprunoudenencing wards wrongs en stuff,” “When we make our eyes big and rolls em lak dis”; “When we be hummin’ in church and wear big hats and be like, ‘Mmmm! Testify!,” “When we ax all sad and be like, ‘Dat’s de bluez’,” “When we say stuff lak, ‘My baby mama!’”; “They luvs it when we soliloquizing like, ‘The white maaann!’,” “‘The white man put me in jail!’,” “‘I can’t get out the ghettooooo!’,” “‘Respect me, white maaaaan!’,” “‘’Cause I’m so angrrryyyy!’” (317–18). All of these historically situated stereotypes, Jacobs-Jenkins implies, are based in white views of black performative behavior deriving ultimately from the minstrel shows. The kind of dramatic excavation practiced in Neighbors is thus a form of both pedagogy and political protest. The protest becomes most explicit at the end of Neighbors when the Crows finally put on their show. Instead of performing themselves, they put the (real) audience on display: “ We watch them. They watch us. We watch each other ” (319). Channeling perhaps Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience , the Crows work to make the theatre audience, laminated onto their own dramatic audience, conscious of itself specifically as an audience and as consumers of black entertainment wittingly or unwittingly complicit in the stereotypes they have witnessed: “ the family point to people in the audience and whisper together, sometimes mockingly, sometimes out of concern. Maybe they giggle ” (319). In this finale Jacobs-Jenkins deprives his audience of their collectivity and requires them to question their own individual reactions to his play. The Crows’ uncomfortable, not to say embarrassing, interrogative gaze anticipates that of the zanier Br’er Rabbit, who wanders through An Octoroon slyly inviting the audience of that play to reflect upon their own and each other’s responses. The audiences’ self-reflections that Jacobs-Jenkins so carefully constructs in response to all three of his plays constitute a further layer in his “archeology of seeing.” After the conclusion of their “show” the Crows take a curtain call, but that is not the end. There is a coda, which members of the audience leaving the theatre (according to Jacobs-Jenkins’s stage directions) might or might not see. Melody, looking “ different now ,” meets Jim at the stage door and asks him how he feels, and “ the actor playing Jim Crow starts to tell her how he really feels ” (319). In this moment Jacobs-Jenkins blurs illusion and reality by introducing the actors as actors and by inviting any spectators present (or at least readers) to imagine what the attitude of the twenty-first century actor playing Jim Crow might “ really ” be towards the part he has played. Unlike historical excavations, which lead archeologists ever deeper into the past, in Neighbors Jacobs-Jenkins excavates upwards into the present, reaching his deepest layer in the feelings of a putative contemporary actor beneath those of a reluctant performer beneath those of a minstrel character. The archeology of Appropriate (2013) works in a rather different way. Jacobs-Jenkins’s excavations in this play are broad rather than deep and as much literary as theatrical or performative. In Appropriate Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on top of familiar topoi from the genre of American family drama. Such plays, with their focus on “family dysfunction and buried secrets,” [23] include Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night , Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Sam Shepard’s Buried Child , Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate , and Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County . In writing in this well-worked vein of white family drama, Jacobs-Jenkins aimed to produce a play in which, he says, blackness is “invisible” yet still “charge[s] the room.” [24] Appropriate is about a white family—overbearing, divorced sister (Toni), conventional businessman brother and his Jewish wife (Bo and Rachael), prodigal brother and erstwhile sex offender (Franz), his much younger New Age fiancée (River), and various children. The family return after their father’s/grandfather’s death to the old family home in Arkansas: a decaying mansion with ancestral and slave graveyards on the property of what was once a plantation. Bo hated the plantation with its bugs and its “endless stories” about Civil War ancestors. But Toni says, “I always liked Grandma’s stories. Though I can’t remember any of them now. . . . This place has history—our history.” [25] If the plantation clearly symbolizes America’s history, the members of the Lafayette family represent its contemporary cultural geography. Toni returns from Atlanta, Bo and Rachael from New York, and Franz and River from Portland. According to Jacobs-Jenkins, Toni represents the “New South” with its feeling of being “betrayed by the rest of the country”; the West represents new possibilities, enabling Franz to “reinvent” himself; and New York connects Bo (with his smart phone) to a “bigger world” and “forward momentum.” [26] While atmospheric cicadas make symbolic noise in the background, the family members quarrel over long-standing grievances and over their inheritance, which, to their horror, includes an album filled with photographs of lynchings. The unseen photographs of lynchings in Appropriate anticipate the even more profoundly shocking real-life photograph of a lynching that audiences do see in An Octoroon . Over the course of the play the album is passed from one family member to another, eliciting various “white” responses (including “shock, disgust, curiosity, fascination, disregard, aversion”) as each of them has to try to find a way to deal with what it represents about their father, their family history, their own racial attitudes—and whether or not they can sell the photos for a substantial sum as collector’s items. [27] The family’s various responses are “white,” Kee-Yoon Nahm explains, because they are the reactions of people who can in no way share in the experiences documented by the photos. [28] In the end Bo is prevented from selling the photos because Franz feels called to “cleanse” himself and his family by jumping into the nearby lake, taking the photos with him: “I took everything—all my pain, all Daddy’s pain, this family’s pain, the pictures—and I left it there. I washed it away” (97). Franz’s desire for redemption is another “white” response; Nahm reminds us of those “not included in the healing ritual.” [29] The play’s ending suggests that while some personal progress may be possible in healing family rifts, especially for younger members of the family, only time can cleanse the house of its racial past by demolishing it. In the play’s final sequence, representing an indeterminate period of time marked by stylized blackouts followed immediately by the lights coming up again, the audience bears witness as the house, established by now as a representation of America, is casually inhabited by various strangers and literally falls apart. Appropriate bears many of the generic markers of American family drama. But Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptive strategy in this play is less explicit than it is in Neighbors or An Octoroon , in which he incorporates explanations of the genres or texts he adapts—in the Crow family’s comments on their work in Neighbors and in educational addresses to the audience from dramatist BJJ and Dion Boucicault himself in An Octoroon —for the benefit of those who might not be familiar with his sources. His comments in interviews on the generic affiliation of Appropriate suggest that Jacobs-Jenkins assumed that audiences would already be sufficiently familiar with American family drama to interpret this play’s complex stratigraphy without further pedagogical intervention on his part. [30] In Appropriate , contrary to Hutcheon’s exclusion of “short intertextual allusions to other works” from consideration as adaptations, [31] Jacobs-Jenkins works primarily through such brief allusions to adapt, not a particular prior text, but a whole genre. He alludes both to tropes common across American family drama—a genre characterized by its content and its realism rather than by any particular structural features—and to specific details from well-known plays. This strategy produces a general sense of familiarity that, as reviewer Erin Keene, observes, “creates a comfort zone for audience members who are then periodically shocked out of their complacency—we know these people, we know this genre—by the reemergence of the album.” [32] The broadly familiar content of Appropriate is punctuated, too, by more precise allusions that Jacobs-Jenkins chooses to italicize and engage with in order to render visible within the parameters of the white American family play a discourse about blackness. In one way Jacobs-Jenkins puts his whole play in quotation marks through his opening and closing sequences that stand outside stage time and outside the realism usually associated with American family drama. At the beginning the “ incessant chatter ” of cicadas “ fills and sweeps the theater in pulsing pitch-black waves ” (13), assaulting the audience’s senses in an almost Artaudian manner for what seems like an unbearably long time; at the end alternating darkness and light represent the passing of many years as the house falls apart and the cicadas fall silent. In between these striking bookends Jacobs-Jenkins follows his predecessors in his chosen genre from O’Neill to Letts in depicting—sometimes with an exaggeration so subtle that it barely puts a dent in the ostensible realism of his presentation—family secrets, unhappy marriages, sibling rivalry, and conflicts between parents and children fueled by drugs or alcohol. The play’s opening sequence, however, invites the audience to adopt a critical stance to what they are about to see, especially in those moments when Jacobs-Jenkins’s layering of a new meaning over an old motif makes itself most sharply felt, giving Appropriate its revisionist edge. Appropriate opens with the initially unexplained arrival of Franz and River jumping through a window into a “ very disorderly ” living room cluttered with old and new furniture as cicadas hum in the background (15). It is an opening that comically echoes the odd, unexpected homecoming of Vince and his girlfriend, Shelly, who enter an equally bizarre and decrepit living room to the incessant sound of rain at the beginning of act two of Buried Child . Franz and River are startled by the waking of a figure on the couch, who turns out to be Rhys, Toni’s son, just as Shelley is startled by Dodge, Vince’s grandfather, whom she arouses from sleep. The next time we see River, she has taken over the kitchen as Shelly eventually does to make bouillon for Dodge. While the “text” that Appropriate adapts is the genre of American family drama as a whole, Buried Child , itself “a veritable patchwork of allusions to well-known family plays,” will, in fact, prove to be the most significant single analog for Jacobs-Jenkins’s play. [33] The homecoming motif with which Appropriate opens quickly transforms into the airing of past grievances and the quarrel over inheritance, channeling such plays as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Dividing the Estate . Toni complains that she has always done most of the work; Rachael believes that her father-in-law was anti-Semitic. Though Toni denies this accusation and is shocked when later Rhys refers to Rachael as “the Jew bitch,” her own unreflecting anti-Semitism is apparent when she thoughtlessly says that she is not “some kind of shylock” (77, 34). Rachael makes a point of excusing both her father-in-law’s anti-Semitism and what she sees as his racial prejudice because “he cannot be held responsible for how he may have been brought up to feel or think about other people” (40, 42). The motif of anti-Semitism furthers the play’s evocation—and excavation—of the closed, racist cultural environment that enabled lynchings and is an inheritance the Lafayettes would like to disown. The debt-ridden, lost plantation over which the family quarrels evokes A Streetcar Named Desire and Dividing the Estate , as well as the play that lies behind both of them, The Cherry Orchard . Jacobs-Jenkins quotes from Lopakhin’s speech after he buys the estate on which his “father and grandfather were slaves” as an epigraph for his own play (11). Familiar character types, too, reappear in Appropriate , further establishing the play’s generic affiliation with the American family drama that Jacobs-Jenkins set out to adapt for his own purposes. The dead patriarch has counterparts in Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Beverly in August: Osage County , both of whom are absent (dying or dead) for much of their respective plays. Underscoring the link, Toni sarcastically refers to her brother as “Beauregarde ‘Big Daddy’ Lafayette” (35). Toni’s diatribes may be more unrelenting than Violet’s in August: Osage County , but the two matriarchal figures engage in similarly vitriolic attacks against members of their family. And in both plays verbal conflict degenerates into physical violence. More significant than these echoes is the familiar symbolic equation of the family home with America. In August: Osage County , for example, Barbara conflates the decay of home and family with the decay of America: “This country, this experiment, America, this hubris: what a lament, if no one saw it go.” [34] In Dividing the Estate when family members, no longer able to depend on money from their land, contemplate getting jobs at “Whataburger,” schoolteacher Pauline comments, “That’s what they say America is becoming, you know, a service economy.” [35] And in Buried Child when Shelly tells Vince that his home is “like a Norman Rockwell cover,” Vince replies, “It’s American.” [36] This “American” house with its fraught relationships and dark secrets is explicitly Vince’s “ inheritance ” (128), willed to him by his grandfather, Dodge. As Thomas P. Adler observes, Shepard displays a “peculiar power in his highly symbolic family problem plays of allegorizing the American experience, of deflating the myth of America as the New Eden.” [37] Jacobs-Jenkins transforms Shepard’s implied equation of literal and symbolic inheritance—embodied in Appropriate in the photo album of lynchings—into an explicit and particular indictment of America’s racial and racist history and its present-day consequences. Jacobs-Jenkins nods most explicitly towards his “sources” in American family drama when Rachael, trying to draw her squabbling in-laws back to the topic of what to do about the photo album, says, “Can we sit around being casually dysfunctional later and focus for one second?” (59). Despite the discovery of the explosive contents of the album, not to mention a jar of body parts—more collector’s items—and a “ pointed white hood ” (103) in which the youngest child, Ainsley, unwittingly dresses up, the Lafayettes find themselves distracted from dealing with their history by their constant need to attack and occasional attempts to reconcile with one another. Into the familiar dramatic context of this white family’s absorption in its own dysfunction Jacobs-Jenkins inserts the photo album as a reminder of the family’s and America’s deadly legacy of racism. Through this strikingly original use of the photo album, Jacobs-Jenkins achieves his objective of “writing a ‘black’ play—a play dealing with blackness in America—that has no black characters in it.” [38] Photographs, unsurprisingly, figure in many plays about families. In A Streetcar Named Desire only an unseen photograph of Belle Reve denotes Stella’s past for the people she now lives among in New Orleans, and they are not much impressed. Her neighbor, Eunice, describes the plantation house matter-of-factly as a “great big place with white columns”; Stanley boasts that he pulled Stella “down off them columns,” and she “loved it.” [39] In Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog a “ raggedy family photo album ” (13), its photos also unseen, represents the uncertain history of brothers Linc and Booth and symbolizes as well the absence of African Americans from American history. [40] The photo album in Appropriate , by contrast, belies the apparent absence of blackness in the play by embodying and giving it an explosive motivating power that forces the white characters to confront a legacy of racism that they prefer not to acknowledge. The most significant precursor of Jacobs-Jenkins’s deployment of the photo album in Appropriate occurs in Buried Child . In Shepard’s play Shelly inquires about photographs, again unseen by the audience, that she has found upstairs—photos of a woman with red hair, a woman holding a baby, a farm, corn. She tells the family patriarch, Dodge, that they represent his past: “Your whole life’s up there hanging on the wall.” It is a past that Dodge refuses to recognize: “That isn’t me! That never was me!” (111). He does acknowledge, however, that his wife, Halie, has a “family album” that can explain “the heritage . . . all the way back to the grave” (112). The unseen album, telling its symbolic story of a “long line of corpses” (112), of incest and infanticide, prefigures the more shocking album of lynchings and dead black bodies that mesmerizes the Lafayette family in Appropriate . The photograph album in Appropriate is particularly shocking because these photos are to be understood, not only as symbolic representations, but as literal artifacts of American history. The album is deeply embedded in the action of the play as the characters try to figure out what it means and what to do with it. As an object, the album is constantly presented to the audience’s view and its unseen contents to their imagination. As a symbol, the album suffuses the consciousness of both characters and audience. The photo albums in Buried Child and Appropriate reveal what has been kept hidden. In both plays the “buried secrets” are discovered to be dead bodies. In Buried Child , Halie’s and Tilden’s murdered baby (apparently drowned by Dodge, as Franz tries to “drown” the photos of lynchings) has been literally buried in the soil behind the house. At the end of the play Tilden enters “ dripping with mud ” and carrying “ the corpse of a small child ” consisting mainly of “ bones wrapped in muddy, rotten cloth ” (132). Jacobs-Jenkins repeats this striking visual image towards the end of Appropriate when Franz enters “ soaking wet ,” carrying “ a pile of wet paper pulp—the remains of the photo album—a mess ” (108) that he has rescued from the lake. The precise resemblance of the two visual images creates a palimpsestic layering that enables the audience to see the human reality of the black flesh and bones that the now pulpy photos represent. By excavating one of the most memorable stage images in the drama of the American family and layering his own meaning on top of it, Jacobs-Jenkins italicizes his original contribution to the genre. He has written an American family drama about blackness in America that has no black characters in it but in which their absence pervades and powers the play. Shepard’s dark vision of American plenty (the harvest of corn, carrots, potatoes that grow where the murdered baby was buried) rising out of the family’s (symbolically America’s) destructive past informs and transforms into Jacobs-Jenkins’s vision of an America falling apart, undermined by its legacy of racism. [41] The image of Franz holding the sodden remains of the photos of dead black people laminated onto Shepard’s image of Tilden holding the remains of the dead baby elicits especially clearly what Jacobs-Jenkins calls an “archeology of seeing.” The meaning of this moment in Appropriate lies in the stratigraphy, and especially in the gap between layers that provides space for interpretation. The whole of An Octoroon (first produced in 2014 and remounted in 2015 by Soho Rep in New York) works through an even more radical process of layering and drawing attention to the gaps between layers to produce this kind of multiple seeing. As in Neighbors ,Jacobs-Jenkins shines a light on the politics of the play’s stratigraphy by explaining directly to his audience the features of the genre he is adapting. The technique is explicitly pedagogical and in An Octoroon inventively meta-adaptive as the contemporary playwright BJJ—a stand-in for Jacobs-Jenkins—is joined by the Playwright—the author of the source play “Dion Boucicault” —in teaching the audience how they should respond to the adaptation. In An Octoroon Jacobs-Jenkins excavates and adapts both a specific play text whose racial content would otherwise preclude performance in the twenty-first century and the now unfamiliar genre of nineteenth-century melodrama to which it belongs, including the theatrical/performative features of that genre: sensational plot, stereotypical good and bad characters, mix of comedy and pathos, spectacle, tableaux, and mood music. [42] Jacobs-Jenkins retains most of Boucicault’s main characters and substantial amounts of his dialogue as well as his plot. In the main plot George, the white hero, falls in love with a beautiful “octoroon,” Zoe, who poisons herself rather than succumb to the white villain, M’Closky, who has bought her; in the subplot, photographic evidence demonstrates that M’Closky, not Native American Wahnotee, has murdered slave boy Paul in order to steal the document that would save George’s plantation and prevent Zoe from being sold. But as well as preserving much of Boucicault’s work, not least his artistic focus in manipulating his audience’s emotions, Jacobs-Jenkins incorporates his own words with Boucicault’s, transforms melodramatic techniques into Brechtian techniques, and uses racially cross-cast actors in whiteface, blackface, and redface, inviting audiences to join him in excavating the play’s different levels of meaning and to see them simultaneously. Even more thoroughly than in Neighbors and Appropriate , adapted work and adaptation bleed into one another. Since I have discussed Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation of The Octoroon at length elsewhere, I shall confine my remarks in this essay to a brief examination of the ways in which in An Octoroon the playwright extends to almost every feature of the play the archeological techniques he develops in Neighbors and Appropriate . [43] In all three plays Jacobs-Jenkins adds innovative techniques to the toolbox available to theatrical adaptation and further wrinkles to adaptation theory. Most distinctively in An Octoroon and with far-reaching dramaturgical consequences, Jacobs-Jenkins racially cross-casts several of the characters. Both the white hero, George, and the white villain, M’Closky, are played by the same black actor in whiteface. In the auction scene he has to fight himself over Zoe. The superimposition of hero and villain upon one another suggests that the moral difference between them is less clear-cut than melodramatic stereotypes would have it and illustrates, as Lisa Merill and Theresa Saxon note, “the uncomfortable similarity between desire to own, master, or marry” Zoe. [44] The Native American Wahnotee is played by a white actor in redface. And the slaves Pete and Paul, according to Jacobs-Jenkins’s textual directions, are to be played by a Native American actor (or an actor who can pass as Native American) in blackface. This use of make-up reverses the nineteenth-century theatre’s casting of white actors in blackface to play the enslaved characters and comments ironically on racist stereotypes and the theatrical convention that perpetuated them. The device of racial cross-casting inevitably creates a gap between actor and character, superimposing the stylization of Brechtian distance on the stylization of melodramatic stereotyping. Through such Brechtian techniques as cross-casting and meta-commentary from the play’s internal playwright, BJJ, Jacobs-Jenkins ironizes Boucicault’s story and the racist attitudes of his characters. When a black actor in whiteface makes a racist remark (George’s reference to “the folksy ways of the niggers down here,” for example), the line is necessarily italicized and held up for the audience’s critical inspection. [45] Similarly, the old slave Pete (in blackface) clearly performs his role as loyal house slave. At the beginning of the play, upon hearing the approach of white people, Pete drops his normal conversational voice and “ transforms into some sort of folk figure ” speaking the dialect constructed by Boucicault: “Drop dat banana fo’ I murdah you!” (19). [46] Jacobs-Jenkins further makes The Octoroon “fit” for its twenty-first century theatrical environment through the adaptive processes of transmotivation, transfocalization, and transvalorization described by Genette. This strategy is most apparent in his depiction of the enslaved female characters, who are little more than comic props in The Octoroon . In scenes added to Boucicault’s play Jacobs-Jenkins humanizes Dido, Minnie, and Grace by giving them “distinct backgrounds and personalities” and voices, desires, and agency of their own. [47] Their voices (borrowed from the dialect of contemporary sitcom) are the most vibrant and compelling in the play. About their apparently imminent sale, for example, Dido says, “This is about the worst damn day of my life! It’s even worse than the first time I got sold!” And Minnie replies, “Yeah, I didn’t wake up thinkin’ this was where my day was gonna go” (41). The gap between tone and content is at once disturbingly funny and appalling. Even more pointed is Minnie’s advice to Dido, “I know we slaves and evurthang, but you are not your job” (58), an anachronistic cliché that reminds us that Dido, in fact, has no life outside her job. Through the familiarity of the contemporary comic idiom Jacobs-Jenkins induces the audience to laugh—in effect, at slavery—and then to question their own and other audience members’ laughter. As well as giving vigorous contemporary voices to Dido, Minnie, and Grace, Jacobs-Jenkins replaces their unquestioning loyalty to their owners in Boucicault’s play with aspirations and dreams of their own. Grace wants to escape—she is co-head of the “Runaway Plannin’ Committee” (40)—and Minnie and Dido at least want to choose the nature of their servitude, supposing that if they can persuade Captain Ratts to buy them to work on his steamboat, they will enjoy a life of romantic adventure. Minnie imagines “coasting up and down the river, lookin’ fly, the wind whipping at our hair and our slave tunics and shit,” being admired by the “muscle-y” men on the boat, and eating “fresh fish” instead of “these fattening pig guts” (42). The women’s fantasy, however, will prove ephemeral. The steamboat blows up, and as I have remarked elsewhere, “The two women are trapped inside Boucicault’s plot just as Tom Stoppard’s reimagined Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are trapped inside Hamlet and Dido and Minnie’s real-life counterparts were trapped in the institution of slavery.” [48] Nonetheless, as Merrill and Saxon cogently observe, by focusing on Dido and Minnie’s hopes and fears for themselves instead of on Zoe’s tragic death in the play’s last scene and by granting them critical insights into their condition, Jacobs-Jenkins “forces today’s audiences to refocus their attention on the material conditions and lives of ordinary black women rather than the eponymous octoroon.” [49] Jacobs-Jenkins similarly reconfigures and overlays Boucicault’s sensation scene with a more relevant one of his own. In act four in place of—or actually in addition to—Boucicault’s innovative use of the new art form of photography and his spectacular exploding steamboat (offstage in An Octoroon ), Jacobs-Jenkins provides for his audience a stunning contemporary sensation: a blown-up photograph of a real-life lynching. BJJ explains, with the help of Boucicault, how melodrama works and how it has been necessary for An Octoroon to adapt some of the melodramatic features of the earlier play. Where Boucicault cleverly uses a photograph of the real murderer of Paul to prevent a miscarriage of justice, Jacobs-Jenkins has to go further to produce a similarly sensational effect for his contemporary audience. The blown-up photograph of a real-life lynching—against which background George makes an impassioned defense of Wahnotee against the “wild and lawless proceeding” of “lynch-law” (51)—is profoundly shocking but also positions spectators as complicit in the voyeuristic gaze of the photograph’s “enthralled white gawkers.” [50] While this is the most disturbing moment in the play, there is no ambiguity about the kind of horrified response called for by the photograph of the lynching. The numerous comic episodes, however, involving Pete, Dido, Minnie, and Grace, scenes in which Jacobs-Jenkins induces the audience to laugh at slavery almost before they are aware, produce more subtly disquieting—because more questionable—effects. Reviewer Chase Quinn observed that the audience at Soho Rep was in an “unceasing state of anxiety,” as each audience member was left “to negotiate for him or herself” when and how much to laugh. [51] Jacobs-Jenkins’s well-attested concern with evoking strong and complicated individual responses from his audiences adds a new wrinkle to adaptation theory. [52] For his own political purposes, in An Octoroon he adapts not only his source play and the melodramatic genre in which it is written but also the swiftly changing responses that genre typically elicits, allowing, as Rosa Schneider notes, “a twenty-first-century audience to feel some of the same effects as their nineteenth-century counterparts.” [53] Following Boucicault, Jacobs-Jenkins skillfully manipulates how his audience responds from moment to moment. Boucicault puts his audience on a thrilling emotional roller-coaster for its own sake as is typical of melodrama; Jacobs-Jenkins abruptly alternates not only pathos with laughter and laughter with horror but also emotional engagement with critical detachment to produce in his contemporary audience a Brechtian self-consciousness about their own and other spectators’ reactions. Effectively, he adapts melodrama’s audience for his own meta-melodramatic and political purposes. Checking on the audience’s reactions is a whimsical giant Br’er Rabbit (clearly an authorial figure and originally played by Jacobs-Jenkins himself) who wanders through the show at will, staring at the spectators (much as the Crows stare at their audience at the end of Neighbors ). Br’er Rabbit’s gaze is designed to ensure that spectators take note of their own and each other’s responses to racist stereotypes presented as comic. In doing so, Br’er Rabbit—or the dramatist himself—assesses the political impact of Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation. Neighbors , Appropriate , and An Octoroon all attest to Jacobs-Jenkins’s fascination with “genre or old forms” as “interesting artifacts.” But it is his detailed, scholarly knowledge of minstrel shows, American family drama, and nineteenth-century melodrama that enables him to manipulate these forms and the audience responses they typically generate to elicit an “archeology of seeing.” Jacobs-Jenkins’s sensitivity to and command over the forms he appropriates are apparent in the tropes of the plays themselves, in the characters’ own commentary on the genres they are inhabiting, especially in Neighbors and An Octoroon , and in the playwright’s numerous comments in interviews on the generic affiliations of his work. [54] Because Jacobs-Jenkins appreciates the works and genres he adapts —even at some level the black minstrelsy of Neighbors [55] —he encourages audiences similarly to appreciate and to enjoy his own versions of them. But as audiences laugh (or squirm) at the Crows’ outrageous minstrel show turns, or speculate knowingly about the quarrels of the Lafayettes, or weep for Zoe and laugh at the performances of Minnie, Dido, and Pete, Jacobs-Jenkins simultaneously compels contemporary spectators to confront the racial assumptions he has excavated along with the dramatic forms that contain them and to worry about their own and each other’s complicity in the continuing legacy of those assumptions. In Neighbors , Appropriate , and An Octoroon Jacobs-Jenkins puts his own adaptive versions of the minstrel show, the American family play, and Boucicault’s melodrama into an edgy but productive dialogue with the forms that he excavates. The tension between the old forms and the new meanings layered onto them generates uneasy and uncertain laughter that engages audiences in a much-needed, if in the theatre implicit, dialogue of their own about racial attitudes in contemporary America. References [1] Jeff Lunden, “One Playwright’s ‘Obligation’ To Confront Race And Identity In The US,” All Things Considered , National Public Radio, 16 February 2015. Transcript. https:www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/16/383567104/one-playwright-s-obligation (accessed 11 February 2019). [2] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, quoted. in Ben Brantley, “A Squabbling Family Kept in the Dark,” New York Times , 16 March 2014. http:www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/theater/in-appropriate-branden-jacobs-Jenkins-subverts-tradition.html?-r=o (accessed 12 August 2015). [3] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, quoted. in Lunden, “One Playwright’s ‘Obligation’.” [4] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, “An Archeology of Seeing. An Interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lila Neugebauer,” Signature Theatre . http://www.signaturetheatre.org/News/An-Archeology-of-Seeing.aspx (accessed 19 May 2017). Jacobs-Jenkins is speaking here of Everybody (2017), his adaptation of the medieval morality play Everyman . [5] Suzan-Lori Parks anticipates Jacobs-Jenkins’s use of an archeological metaphor for a slightly different purpose. In her 1994 essay “Possession,” she argues that it is necessary to “dig for bones” in order to locate and recreate “unrecorded” African-American history. “Possession,” The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 4. [6] Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation , 2 nd ed. with Siobhan O’Flynn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 170. [7] Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree , translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). [8] Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). Hutcheon also notes the Darwinian implications of the term “adaptation.” A Theory of Adaptation , 31. [9] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation , xvii, 6, 21. [10] Jane Barnette, Adapturgy: The Dramaturg’s Art and Theatrical Adaptation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 55, 62. [11] Jacobs-Jenkins grew up in a home full of “black memorabilia” such as “mammy dolls” and “Colored Only” signs, according to Laura Collins-Hughes in “Provocative Play Sees the Faces Behind the Blackface,” The Boston Globe , 16 January 2011. http://archive.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2011/01/16/neighbors_exposes_racial_history_on_stage/ (accessed 5 December 2016). [12] Charles Isherwood, “Caricatured Commentary: Minstrel Meets Modern,” The New York Times 9 March 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/theater/reviews/10neighbors.html (accessed 1 May 2017). [13] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Neighbors . American Next Wave: Four Contemporary Plays from HighTide Festival Theatre . (London: Methuen Drama, 2012), 222. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [14] For the history and content of nineteenth-century minstrel shows see Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), especially 25–57; and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). The earliest minstrels were white performers in blackface, but there were also troupes of African-American performers. [15] See Toll, Blacking Up , 55. [16] See ibid., 67. [17] On white obsession with black male bodies in minstrel shows, see Lott, Love and Theft , 3, 9. [18] Jason Rabin, “Stage Review: ‘Neighbors’ at Company One,” Blast Magazine , 14 January 2011. http://blastmagazine.com/2011/01/14/stage-review-neighbors-at-company-one/ (accessed 27 April 2017). [19] Nancy Grossman, “Company One Wants You to Meet the ‘Neighbors,’” Broadway World , 17 January 2011. http://www.broadwayworld.com/boston/article/Company-One-Wants-You-to-Meet-the-Neighbors-20110117 (accessed 5 December 2016). [20] Toll, Blacking Up , 55–56. [21] See Isherwood, “Caricatured Commentary.” At one point in the published text Jacobs-Jenkins calls for a rearrangement of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” (263). [22] Isherwood, “Caricatured Commentary.” [23] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Amy Wegener, “About Appropriate ,” Appropriate . Humana Festival 2013 The Complete Plays , edited by Amy Wegener and Sarah Lunnie (New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2014), 146. [24] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Margaret Gray, “Spotlight Shines Brighter on ‘Appropriate’ Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins,” Los Angeles Times , 24 September 2015. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-branden-jacobs-jenkins-20150927-story.html (accessed 27 April 2017). [25] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Appropriate . Appropriate/An Octoroon . Theatre Communications Group: New York, 2019), 73–74. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [26] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Wegener, “About Appropriate ,” 147. [27] Kee-Yoon Nahm, “Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men ,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. 2 (2015). http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/visibly-white-realism-and-race-in-appropriate-and-straight-white-men/ (accessed 30 December 2016). [28] Ibid. [29] Ibid. [30] See notes 2 and 23. [31] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 170. [32] Erin Keane, “Review/Family Secrets Fester in ‘Appropriate’,” 89.3 WFPL News Louisville , 20 March 2013. http://wfpl.org/review-family-secrets-fester-appropriate/ (accessed 30 December 2016). [33] Stephen J. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 159. [34] Tracy Letts, August: Osage County (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008), 123–24. [35] Horton Foote, Dividing the Estate. Three Plays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 76. [36] Sam Shepard, Buried Child . Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 41. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [37] Thomas P. Adler, “Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child ,” in Matthew Roudané, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 112. [38] Verna A. Foster, “Meta-melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon ,” Modern Drama 59, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 286. [39] Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire . The Theatre of Tennessee Williams . Vol. 1 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 249, 377. [40] Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (New York Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 13. For the details of this argument see Verna A. Foster, “Suzan-Lori Parks’s Staging of the Lincoln Myth in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog ,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 17, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 24–35. [41] Bottoms suggests that Buried Child “is dealing metaphorically with America’s collective tendency to bury the intolerable memories of its bloody history of slavery and genocide, and so forth” ( The Theatre of Sam Shepard , 176). Adler adds that “the nation’s guilty past” in Buried Child might be “racism, or religious and ethnic prejudice, or . . . the Vietnam War.” “Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child ,” 121. [42] On nineteenth-century American melodrama, including its depiction of slavery, see Rosa Schneider, “‘Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something’: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 31, no. 1 (Fall 2018). [43] Foster, “Meta-melodrama.” [44] Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon, “Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon ,” Theatre Journal 69, no. 2 (2017): 151. [45] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 20. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [46] In Definition Theatre Company’s 2017 production of An Octoroon in Chicago, Pete and Paul were played by an African-American actress in blackface, producing an even more pointed Brechtian comment on the absurdity of Boucicault’s racist and gendered characterizations. [47] Schneider, “‘Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something’.” [48] Foster, “Meta-melodrama,” 299. [49] Merrill and Saxon, “Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon ,” 152. [50] Chase Quinn, “Laughing (and Crying, and Laughing Again) about Slavery,” Hyperallergic 24 February 2015. http.//hyperallergic.com/185346/laughing-and-crying-and-laughing-again-about-slavery/ (accessed 20 May 2015). [51] Ibid. [52] See Foster, “Meta-melodrama,” 300–01. [53] Schneider, “‘Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something’.” [54] For Jacobs-Jenkins’s knowledge of American family drama see Wegener, “About Appropriate ,” 146. For his research into Boucicault’s aesthetic principles and into melodrama see Foster, “Meta-melodrama,” 286, 290, 293 and Schneider, “‘Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something’.” [55] See Collins-Hughes, “Provocative Play Sees the Faces Behind the Blackface,” and note 11 above. Footnotes About The Author(s) Verna A. Foster is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago. Her publications include The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy , the edited collection Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays , and numerous articles on early modern and modern drama. She is currently working on ambivalent motherhood in contemporary adaptations of Medea . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Christen Mandracchia Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined Christen Mandracchia By Published on November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF A small mining town. The sounds of the tropical Ituri rain forest. The DemocraticRepublic of Congo. A bar, makeshift furnitureand a rundown pool table. A lot of effort has gone into making the worn bar cheerful. A stack of plastic washtubs rests in the corner. An old carbattery powers the lights and audio system, a covered birdcage sits conspicuously in the cornerof the room. ([1]) How might you approach these opening stage directions from Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Ruined ? Would you start by picturing specific pieces of furniture? Does the quality and type of sound come to mind first? How does your own positionality inform these choices? As a theatre and performance scholar who also serves as a production manager, designer, and professor, I am rarely able to separate a scholarly reading from the material conditions of production. Thus, I approach these stage directions through many different lenses. For example, as a sound designer, I notice that the first specific thing Nottage mentions is the “sounds of the tropical Ituri rain forest” followed by a reference to an audio system that is plugged into “an old car battery.” These details would impact technical and artistic choices I might make. Similarly, as a lighting designer, I notice that the same battery powers the lights, which means that a production would likely need practical lighting instruments to be hung around the set, in addition to the stage lights. A props-centered approach is particularly compelling because Nottage lists “makeshift furniture” – a phrase which sparks a larger conversation, not just about the logistics of acquiring or building these objects for the stage, but one which hails the production team into the world of the play and into the minds of the characters. Therein lies the challenge. Ruined is a 2011 drama which tells the story of Mama Nadi, a Mother Courage-like figure who owns and operates the described bar in the Congolese rain forest. Her patrons are often miners of the mineral coltan, used in cellular phones, and soldiers on both sides of a bloody civil war. What does “makeshift furniture” look like in the world of this play? What objects are available to these characters, and where do these objects come from? What were these objects originally intended for and what does their second life as “makeshift furniture” reveal about the objectives, survival, innovation, and pleasure of the characters? When members of a production team must put themselves in the place of the characters to make artistic decisions, other aspects of our positionalities manifest themselves as assets or limits in this theatrical process. For example, how would my experiences as a white-ethnic, middle-class, and queer theatre scholar/practitioner in the United States help or hinder my ability to access the world of the play and the lived experiences of the characters to make well-informed, ethical, and dramaturgically accurate production decisions? I begin with this discussion of props because I contend that delving into the specific material histories of objects in the text provides new avenues of nuance and complexity that can help bridge the gap between Western scholarly, practical, and personal lived experiences and those of the characters. An article like “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” by Chandra Talpade Mohanty establishes what is at stake when Western knowledge production relies on archetypes instead of the material realities of the “third world” — especially women. She describes this archetype of the “average third world woman” as falling into gendered stereotypes such as sexual constraint, and “third world” stereotypes of “ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.” ( [2] ) She then argues that the victim narrative, in particular, reduces the complexities of the lives of “third world” women to socioeconomic or sexual terms, reinforcing the sexist stereotype of women as weak. ( [3] ) In focusing on the material objects listed in a play like Ruined , through an application of material culture theory as a methodology, this article outlines how Western theatre makers and scholars can approach plays set in the “third world” in a way that Mohanty argues would be more grounded in the “material and ideological power structures” which shape these women’s lives. ( [4] ) Toward this end, Ruined is a useful vehicle for the application of a material culture reading precisely because the play was created with the intent to “sustain the complexity” of the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, knowing that her Western “first-world” audience would only know about the conflict through fragmented news clips. ( [5] ) Nottage wrote the play based on ethnographic testimony of real women who survived the war, but she also uses specifically-named material objects in the text to ground the character’s larger given circumstances in material reality. In the play’s first descriptive paragraphs, referenced above, Nottage paints a picture of a place that is “ worn ” but “ cheerful ,” “ rundown ” but “ tropical ”—evoking a comfortable place more than a war zone. As a play about what Mohanty terms the “third world” written for a “first world” audience, Nottage does not fully immerse the audience in the horrors of war immediately. I use the phrase “third world” in this context throughout this paper because it is the word that Mohanty uses to describe the groups of women who fall under this Western label. “Third world,” in its immediate context, refers to the Cold War language which identified the “first world” as the capitalist nations, who were in opposition to the Soviet Union and the expansion of communism. As Mohanty details, this term has taken on more cultural meanings than its technical use from the Cold War era—so that even words like “Western” are tied to the division between “first” and “third” world. I use the term, knowing that it is outdated and problematic in many ways, but also knowing that many of the perceptions associated with this word still exist. I use it with the knowledge that it is a cultural touchstone, conjuring a specific iconography which I hope to complicate. Hence, I will keep it in quotations to highlight the fact that it is a construction. The first allusion to violence happens five lines into the first scene, where Mama Nadi exclaims to her stock supplier Christian, a “ perpetually cheerful traveling salesman ” that she has been expecting him for three weeks. Christian explains that “Every two kilometers a boy with a Kalashnikov and pockets that need filling.” ( [6] ) Nottage begins to reveal the larger given circumstances of the play through specific mentions of an object: the Russian-made and distributed Kalashnikov, often referred to in American lexicon as an “AK.” ( [7] ) In his book on gun history aptly titled The Gun , CJ Chivers informs readers that More than six decades after its design and initial distribution, more than fifty national armies carry the automatic Kalashnikov, as do an array of police, intelligence, and security agencies. But its fuller terrain lies outside the sphere of conventional force. The Kalashnikov [culturally] marks the guerilla, the terrorist, the child soldier, the dictator, and the thug — all of whom have found it to be a ready equalizer against morally or materially superior foes. ( [8] ) Because the AK, especially the infamous AK-47, is often wielded by the NATO members’ military opponents, it is often viewed, in the American cultural archive, as a “bad guy” weapon. Conversely, it is often seen by those who wield them as a symbol of defiance against colonial powers and Western, capitalist values. For the characters in the first scene of Ruined , it represents their position as both citizens of a post-colonial, “third world” country and their vulnerability to violence at the hands of their own countrymen — thus complicating the “bad guy/good guy” or “Western/Anti-Western” binaries. Nottage’s specific mention of the Kalashnikov and other objects in the script serves as what the Combahee River Collective calls “the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” ( [9] ) Nottage’s ability to “sustain the complexity” of many topics has earned her much critical acclaim and scholarly attention. According to data from American Theatre , Nottage was the most produced playwright for the 2022-2023 theatre season in the United States. ( [10] ) Her play Clyde’s earned the top spot as the most produced play, with her Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat at number five. Intimate Apparel was the most produced play of the 2005-2006 season and the fifth most-produced play of the 2006-2007 season. ( [11] ) Ruined held the fourth spot in the 2010-2011 season. Poignantly, Intimate Apparel returned to the top-ten list in 2016-2017, and Sweat was second in the 2018-2019 season before returning to the list for 2022-2023. The data suggests that Nottage’s plays have enjoyed many “lives” beyond their initial premiere dates. As Nottage’s work continues to weave in and out of America’s top ten lists, it is necessary for scholarship to reexamine her work and the body of scholarly and dramaturgical literature dedicated to her plays. Each new “life” evidences a relevance or usefulness to public discourse in the United States on political issues of national interest including immigration, deindustrialization, globalization, and incarceration. Likewise, as national discourses now include robust discussions of the environmental and moral ethics of mining minerals in “third world” countries for electric vehicle batteries, Ruined offers readers and spectators a material methodology that can help to circumvent many of the traps of homogenization, reduction, or “Othering” that can too-often arise in public discourses on the “third world” and its women. Third World Feminism and Material Culture Theory Cultural theorist Celia Lury defines material culture as “ a culture of the use or appropriation of objects or things. ” ( [12] ) She continues: “The first half of the term — ‘material’ — points to the significance of stuff, of things in everyday practices, while the second half —‘ culture’ — indicates that this attention to the materials of everyday life is combined with a concern with the cultural, with norms, values and practices.” ( [13] ) A material culture theory reading of Nottage’s script follows what Mohanty insists that Western beholders should do every time we encounter stories of women in the “third world.” Material culture theory is an interdisciplinary way of analyzing the various ways that objects are connected to larger given circumstances and power dynamics. For marginalized groups who might be absent from the written archive, material culture theory is a way to give voice to the voiceless, or to highlight the everyday lives of people who never wrote about themselves. Material culture theory, however, is not to be confused with materialism or the Marxist tradition of historic materialism, which often only regards material objects in terms of their means of production, consumption, and the role they play in exploitation. In centering the systems of oppression in a discussion on “third world” Black women, there is a danger of falling into the “archetypal victim” that Mohanty warns against. Material culture theory considers the role that objects play in these negotiations: its production — particularly the unseen labor that goes into making it and maintaining it — but also its intended function, the ways that it participates in the creation of self-identity, its special relationships to people and other objects, and how these meanings change over time. ( [14] ) A study of objects in the script reveals the interlocking oppressions which affect the characters’ everyday lives, but also how these objects can be used as sites of agency, survival, resistance, or other negotiations of power within that structure. The play’s original director, Kate Whoriskey, states, “As a director committed to staging complexity, my task is to counter the drama with humor, spirit and wit, and to treat the stories collected in Central Africa with the understanding that at every moment the Congolese are determined to survive.” ( [15] ) I am interested in the way that role that objects play in the leveraging of these dramatic moments in favor of survival, as reflective of the way that real women in the Congo, such as the ones that this play is based on, do the same. Furthermore, material culture theory resists the anti-materialism (victim/passive) narrative that suggests that consumers are manipulated or subordinated into purchasing or gathering things. The production and consumption of material objects can just as much oppress an individual as it can empower one. Like “third world” feminism, material culture theory demands that a methodology be used to consider the individual circumstances of an object’s relationship to a person, time, and place to “sustain the complexity,” as Nottage would say. I’d like to push the conversation beyond mere survival into one of joy and pleasure. Mohanty warns that confining the “third world” woman to a survival narrative can perpetuate their image as “archetypal victims,” and “freezes” them into “objects-who-defend themselves.” ( [16] ) This essay thus considers how material objects can be used as both a means of survival and pleasure. This positioning comes in direct response to critics who have chosen to praise the play’s portrayal of sexual violence but decry the fact that Nottage wrote a romantic ending for her principle leads. Other scholars, such as Jeff Paden, have defended the play’s romantic ending in the name of its political potency. ( [17] ) Is the ending of a Black/postcolonial play predetermined to be sad or ambiguous? If so, who determines this? It is possible that this ending disturbed critics because it challenged preconceived Western notions of what the “third world” is supposed to be. And perhaps the justification of “third world” characters’ pleasure determined by its political efficacy. In the context of this paper, “third world” feminism manifests itself as both Black feminism and postcolonial feminism with an emphasis on self-definition, and how material objects are used to that end. A material culture theory reading of the text that considers how these objects contribute to the world-making that Nottage employs insists that the objects in the script are more than a props list. They are a means understanding the complex world contexts that a production has taken on the responsibility to portray. Fanta, Don’t You Wanna? The field of material culture theory has a plethora of methods for analyzing these relationships. Many are in the form of a series of questions which can be applied to an object. This section will use the questions developed by Igor Kopytoff to go through the objects in the script for Ruined to identify the characters’ material circumstances, which reveal their position in larger systems and “interlocking oppressions.” While detailing the material circumstances and synthesis of oppression is only a first step, it is a vital one. Kopytoff approaches the above considerations of a material object as a “cultural biography” of a thing. “In doing the biography of a thing,” he says, “one would ask questions similar to those one asks about people: What sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized?” ( [18] ) Kopytoff is working within an anthropological framework, however, this paper is not an anthropological treatment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While the characters and events of the play are based on ethnographic testimony from real women from the DRC, Ruined is ultimately a theatrical script, and the material objects in this play exist within the larger given circumstances that Nottage has created for the stage. In this material culture reading, anthropology is replaced with script analysis and dramaturgical research, although the same questions that Kopytoff asks are used. Consider the opening stage directions of the play: “ A small mining town. The sounds of the tropical Ituri rain forest. The Democratic Republic of Congo. A bar, makeshift furniture and a rundown pool table. A lot of effort has gone into making the worn bar cheerful. A stack of plastic washtubs rests in the corner. An old car battery powers the audio system, a covered birdcage sits conspicuously in the corner of the room .” ( [19] ) These stage directions establish the immediate location of the play: a small mining town in the Ituri rain forest. But they also emphasize that the owner of the bar/brothel, who is about to be introduced as “ Mama Nadi, early forties, an attractive woman with an arrogant stride and majestic air ,” has recycled and repurposed items beyond their original functions. ( [20] ) She has put “a lot of effort” into curating these objects in a way that produces pleasure for her and her customers. The cultural biographies of the “ makeshift furniture ,” “ washtubs ,” and “ car battery ” have changed with time and with a new owner, and their positioning in this space speaks to Mama Nadi’s larger given circumstances as well as the ways that she uses objects to create her own space within those circumstances. Before Nottage mentions the Kalashnikov, she notes that Christian is drinking a Fanta soda. ( [21] ) Like the Kalashnikov, Fanta has a collective cultural meaning in “first world” material culture. While it would be difficult to impossible to track each individual audience member’s knowledge, recognition, and response to these objects in the script, Fanta’s massive American marketing campaign in the early 2000s offers clues to the audience’s possible associations. The 2001 Fanta television commercial, featuring the tropically themed female group of four, the Fantanas, and their catchy, Latinx-inspired, double-entendre jingle “Fanta, Don’t You Wanna” branded the soda as a fun and sexy party drink, associated with the Global South, where it was already incredibly popular. ( [22] ) At first glance, Christian’s choice to order a soda in a bar, specifically a Fanta, may evoke such cultural associations with fun and pleasure. The cultural biography of Fanta can serve to connect the image of the smiling African salesman character to the “first world” audience and help us understand the relationship between our material culture and the characters’. Because Fanta is specific, its biography is easier to trace as a first example. ( [23] ) The first question that Kopytoff would ask about a bottle of Fanta is, “Where does the thing come from and who made it?” A quick Google search can tell me that “Fanta is a brand of fruit-flavored carbonated drinks created by The Coca-Cola Company and marketed globally.” ( [24] ) However, Kopytoff’s question forces one to search deeper for the unseen labor and processes which created the beverage and brought it to Christian’s hands in Mama Nadi’s bar. Fanta’s presence in this space is evidence of globalization. The Coca-Cola Company is an American corporation, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, which works with local bottling partners all over the world. ( [25] ) In Africa, at the time that the play was written, the largest partner was SABMiller, a British brewing company based in London. ( [26] ) The bottling and brewing plants would be in African countries such as South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Namibia, Comoros, Mayotte, Swaziland, Botswana and Zambia — but not the Democratic Republic of Congo. ( [27] ) In the DRC, the Coca-Cola bottling company is the Barlima Brewery, founded by Belgian businessmen during colonial occupation and owned, since 1986, by the Dutch Heineken Corporation. ( [28] ) The list of Coca-Cola products bottled at Barlima does not include Fanta, nor is it listed as being distributed in the DRC. Thus, the Fanta was made by African workers in plants owned by the Dutch, in partnership with an American company, and brought to Mama Nadi’s bar by the black market. ( [29] ) Like the exchange of the Kalashnikov rifles outside of conventional forces, Mama Nadi’s business exists outside of the standard market. She is simultaneously an avid capitalist and a disruptor of capitalist markets, defying simple or clean categories. By asking one simple question of a stage direction on the first page of the script, this methodology has yielded valuable information on the given circumstances of the play and the post-colonial, racial, and capitalist power dynamics of which the characters find themselves. Material Culture as Survival A strictly materialist reading of these circumstances related to Fanta would highlight the role that these systems play in oppressing characters like Mama Nadi. For example, the dialogue of the first scene explains that the movement of goods such as Fanta is difficult due to rebel checkpoints and taxes. A few lines after discussing the joys of his soda, Christian exclaims the quote from earlier about the Kalashnikov and pockets that need filling: “Toll, tax, tariff. They invent reasons to lighten your load.” ([30]) The material objects cannot be separated from the larger given circumstances of the piece. For example, Mama pours herself a Primus beer while Christian drinks his Fanta. Primus beer is brewed in the same Barlima Brewry which partners with Coca-Cola and is owned by the Dutch Heineken Group. Unlike Fanta, which does not distribute in the DRC, Primus has exclusivity deals with bars all over the country, and Heineken pays roughly one million dollars to the rebels to pass their checkpoints so that the beer can be distributed. ([31]) The connections between Heineken and the armed conflict in the DRC has yet to be explored in its entirety. Olivier van Beemen’s explosive book Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed exposes the company’s ties to corruption, sexual violence, human rights violations, and even genocide in the 1990s. ([32]) A material culture reading acknowledges these systems of oppression, but also asks what the object means for the characters themselves, thus centering them in the narrative, and not the multinational corporations. Here, for example, Primus beer is a significant portion of Mama’s revenue. When Mr. Harari discusses the interlocking oppressions of coltan mining and armed “two-bit militias battling for the keys to hell,” Mama responds to these factors by declaring, “True, chérie, but someone must provide them with beer and distractions.” ( [33] ) Primus is such a large part of Mama’s business that the parrot she keeps in the bar ends the play by squawking, “Mama! Primus! Mama! Primus!” ( [34] ) For Mama, her bar is more than a business, it is survival for her and the girls in her employment as prostitutes. Mama’s bar is established as a safe zone in the first scene when Christian brings his niece Sophie to work there: “I told my family I’d find a place for her . . . And here at least I know she’ll be safe. Fed.” ( [35] ) This fact is stated again in the second act when Mama asserts, “My girls, Emilene, Mazima, Josephine, ask them, they’d rather be here, than back out there in their villages where they are taken without regard. They’re safer with me than in their own homes.” ( [36] ) She describes how the interlocking oppressions which connect natural resources, multinational corporations, beer, and armed conflict also protect her: beer makes the soldiers happy and they protect her business. “Who would protect my business if [the Commander] turned on me?” she says. ( [37] ) This is emphasized when Mr. Harari exclaims to Mama, “Just, be careful, where will I drink if anything happens to you?” ( [38] ) The line emphasizes the fact that her bar is the only one in the area. By selling beer in the rainforest, she meets supply and demand for pleasure in their bleak circumstances. In this way, her business is useful to forces that would otherwise destroy her and the women she protects. Her usefulness, and therefore her financial and physical security, is symbiotically tied to Primus beer. A reading which only focuses on the means by which Primus is produced, distributed, and tied to rebel groups misses the complex material circumstances which tie it to the characters’ survival. Kopytoff asserts that a “cultural biography” of an object must consider the perspective by which one assesses an object. ( [39] ) Does one read the value of Primus beer based on how much Heineken profits from it, how much rebels profit from it, or how much Mama profits from it? The answer is to consider all of them, but to center Mama’s perspective to determine how the object is culturally marked within the world of Nottage’s script. What does her world look like without Fanta or Primus? Thanks to a report by The Economist in 2018, there is little need for speculation. In between 2009 — when Ruined was researched and written — and 2018, Heineken was forced to close two of its breweries in the DRC due to international pressures over their ties to Barlima Brewing Co. and business practices in those regions. The article explains that since 2016, “In western Congo, Angolan beer in cans—less tasty but cheaper than Primus or Tembo—has flooded the market. It is not sold at cost since the smugglers’ main aim is to acquire dollars to trade on the black market in Angola.” ( [40] ) The article also reports that “violence is worsening.” Imagining that this happened while Mama is trying to run her business, she would have to pay more money for beer, which is described as being lower quality. Furthermore, the commercial branding of Primus within the script, and in reality, is of the upmost importance. Kopytoff’s final question asks, “What has been [the object’s] career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them?” ( [41] ) Both The Economist and Olivier van Beeman discuss how Primus is ingrained in Congolese culture as large sponsors of the music industry, and how Heineken sponsors campus fashion shows at universities, free nights in dance clubs, and music and sporting events. ( [42] ) This gendered meaning of the beer, and its connection to the music industry, is evident in Mama Nadi’s bar where she and Sophie sing songs about beer and about warriors. ( [43] ) In the script, when soldiers enter her bar, they immediately ask for one or two bottles of Primus, and at other times refer to themselves as “warriors” or perform hyper-masculinity. ( [44] ) What would happen if Mama told them that she does not have Primus beer in her stock? Because so much of her survival depends on the happiness of her customers, a negation of the culturally significant pleasure of drinking Primus beer could potentially result in the bar’s value decreasing. Again, the connection between Primus beer, the countries commercial and cultural institutions, and cultural markers for masculinity “sustains the complexity” of the material conditions of the characters’ lives as it also raises the stakes for what would happen if Primus were unavailable to Mama’s bar. The same can be said for mentions of the mineral coltan in the script, which is the one material object that has dominated many discourses in dramaturgy packets. From the first scene, Nottage establishes the importance of this object when Christian says, “All along the road people are talking about how this red dirt is rich with coltan.” ( [45] ) As the scenes progress, the audience is informed of the impact that coltan mining has had on the Congo, and the human rights violations which are connected to the mining and selling of this mineral for electronic devices. In fact, much of the first two scenes is dedicated to explaining this exposition, signaling that this material object is the lynchpin which connects the local economy, the armed conflict, and the sexual violence perpetrated against women. Nottage has positioned the action of the play a few months after coltan had been discovered in the rainforest. Mama says, “Six months ago it was just more black dirt,” ( [46] ) Mr. Harari informs Mama that, “in this damnable age of the mobile phone it's become quite the precious ore...” ( [47] ) Christian establishes that there are large groups of miners coming to the area: “Suddenly everyone has a shovel, and wants to stake a claim since that boastful pygmy dug up his fortune in the reserve. I guarantee there will be twice as many miners here by September.” ( [48] ) This makes Mama Nadi happy, because it means that she will have more customers, however, the character Salima connects the coltan mining to the armed conflict and atrocities, recounting how “fifteen Hema men were shot dead and buried in their own mining pit, in mud so thick it swallow them right into the ground without mercy. He say one man stuff the coltan into his mouth to keep the soldiers from stealing his hard work, and they split his belly open with a machete. ‘It’ll show him for stealing,’ he say, bragging like I should be congratulating him.” ( [49] ) Like Primus, the interlocking oppressions of coltan mining are clear, but so is the fact that Mama’s business depends on it. “Me, I thank God for deep dirty holes like Yaka-yaka,” Mama says of the local mine. ( [50] ) Since Ruined premiered in 2009, dramaturgy packets, study guides, and program notes have addressed the issue of conflict minerals, as they appear in the play, but most fail to address their importance to the characters’ survival. In a way, these dramaturgs have performed the first part of Kopytoff’s methodology on cell phones and other electronic devices that the audience might own, but do not complete the “cultural biography.” For example, Charlie Payne of the Almeida Theatre in London suggests a practical exercise for teachers and students titled “There’s no blood on my mobile!” He instructs his audience to read the context articles he has provided and “Brainstorm the supply chain, or ‘conveyor belt’, of coltan — how does it reach the consumer and what are the consequences of mobile phone consumerism in the West? Now think about this physically. Create six, eightbeat phrases — three relating to the use of coltan and three highlighting its impact in the DRC. Now try playing these all together — a literal conveyer belt from the mines to the consumer.” ( [51] ) Connected to a 2011 production, Berkely Rep Magazine featured a section entitled, “Coltan: From the Congo to you,” reporting that “In the 1990s and early 2000s, coltan emerged as a globally significant commodity essential to the production of digital technology. As world demand for mobile phones, laptops, PlayStations, and digital cameras exploded, tech industries came to increasingly rely on coltan from the Congo, which has an estimated 80% of the world’s reserves.” ( [52] ) A 2011 study guide from Arena Stage cites a United Nations study which reports that, “all parties involved in the conflict have been involved in the mining and sale of coltan. The money rebels and militias receive from these sales helps them buy more weapons and supplies for the war.” ( [53] ) These studies position the audience in relation to the events in the play, but in focusing on making the interlocking oppressions of coltan, cell phones, rebel militias, and sexual violence the sole narrative of the dramaturgy, it centers the victim narrative without adding the nuances of how coltan mining has become a means of survival for women in the DRC. As with Primus beer, the importance of coltan to survival in the DRC was highlighted in the real-world aftermath of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, section 1502, which requited “companies trading on U.S. securities exchanges to determine through supply-chain due diligence whether or not their products contain conflict minerals from DRC or neighboring countries, and report their findings annually to the SEC [Securities Exchange Commission].” ( [54] ) The Washington Post reported that, “In the fall of 2010, two months after the law’s signing, Congo’s government halted mining for six months — even at facilities not controlled by armed groups. The move had tremendous repercussions in a country where, by some estimates, a sixth of the 70 million inhabitants depend on artisanal mining.” ( [55] ) By 2014, the negative effects were felt in the Congo, where out of the nation’s hundreds of mines, only a handful were “tagged” as “conflict free.” ( [56] ) While the law was passed in an effort to curtail the stimulant role of the mining in armed conflicts, a follow up article from 2018 reports that “militias in eastern Congo have only proliferated. Miners are still working in pitiful conditions with little investment into tools and infrastructure. Much evidence points to the reality that minerals coming from mines controlled by militias are still making their way into the global market.” ( [57] ) While Ruined and the aforementioned dramaturgical packets were written without the hindsight of post-Dodd-Frank legislation, Mama Nadi’s lines suggest the immediate importance of the mine to her own survival. When Christian informs her that the violence is intensifying with the disappearance of a white pastor, her first instinctual response is to ask, “What about Yaka-yaka mine? Has the fighting scared off the miners?” ( [58] ) She is more worried about the mine closing than she is about the missing pastor. This is an example of how knowing the material circumstances, and having the hindsight of what happens when those circumstances are changed by external forces, can help contextualize and inform character objectives and value systems. Mama is putting her survival and the survival of the women in her care first in her priorities by caring about the mine’s closure. In “sustaining the complexity” of these objects in the characters’ lives, Nottage withholds the catharsis of an easy solution to the interplay of multinational corporations and violence in “third world” countries. Instead, she chooses to focus on the way that her characters not only survive, but find joy in their circumstances, and this endeavor is closely tied to material objects. Material Culture as Pleasure The importance of objects like Primus and coltan to the immediate survival of the women in the play informs the way that the characters interact with these objects and others which are listed like cigarettes and soap. ( [59] ) However, character interactions with objects are also informed by pleasure as well, and it is important to note that the beer drinking soldiers are not the only characters who derive pleasure from material objects in the script. While the men in the script enjoy a large amount of dominance and power over female pleasure in the context of this play, they do not have a monopoly on it, and they are not able to have full control over it. Unlike the archetypal victims that Mohanty describes, Nottage’s characters share joy and pleasure with male characters and enjoy pleasures of their own. The play’s opening line chooses to focus on Christian’s pleasure as he drinks his soda: “Ah. Cold. The only cold Fanta in twenty-five kilometers. You don’t know how good this tastes.” ( [60] ) The stage directions follow with, “Mama flashes a warm flirtatious smile, then pours herself a Primus beer.” ( [61] ) Knowing the complex relationship between their circumstances, the Fanta, and the Primus, it is worth noting that these characters not only profit from the sale of these objects, but they share in the pleasure of them as well. If a bottle of Fanta, for example, has made its way to Mama Nadi’s bar through a more complicated route, due to the fact that it is not distributed in the DRC, it might be considered something rare or special for the characters – signifying moments that are worth noting to the reader, viewer, in a character analysis by an actor, or in direction of the play. Christian’s line emphasizes the scarcity of Fanta, Mama’s own innovation in finding a way to refrigerate the soda in the middle of the rainforest, and Christian’s sensory enjoyment of the object. Her flirtatiousness is a recognition of Christian’s satisfaction with the Fanta before she pours herself a beverage so that she can share in the same kind of joy. “You sure you don’t want a beer?” Mama asks. “You know me better than that, chérie, I haven’t had a drop of liquor in four years,” Christian replies. The stage directions emphasize that Mama’s next line “It’s cold” is delivered “teasing.” ( [62] ) The objects become part of an improvised language of pleasure, desire, seduction, and satisfaction. This dynamic manifests itself with lipstick a few pages later: MAMA And my lipstick? CHRISTIAN Your lipstick? Aye! Did you ask me for lipstick? MAMA Of course, I did, you idiot!... Leave me alone, you’re too predictable. ( Turns away, dismissive ) CHRISTIAN Where are you going? Hey, hey what are you doing? ( Teasingly ) Chérie, I know you wanted me to forget, so you could yell at me, but you won’t get the pleasure this time. ( Christian taunts her with the lipstick. Mama resists the urge to smile .) MAMA Oh shut up and give it to me. ( He passes her the lipstick.) ( [63] ) Not only do Christian and Mama enjoy the objects individually, but the Fanta, the beer, and the lipstick are incorporated into their dynamic of pleasure. Harkening back to Kopytoff’s final questions, (“What has been [the object’s] career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them?”), Fanta’s ideal career is to provide such sensory joy. The connection between beverages and flirtation is a common theme in Fanta marketing, when considering the way that the object’s career is culturally marked — or mark eted . ( [64] ) Therefore, its erotic meaning in the encounter between Christian and Mama Nadi is not necessarily contrary to its original meaning; but the raised stakes of the object’s presence in Mama Nadi’s bar signals that this encounter with the two characters is more than a reproduction of a Coca-Cola commercial. Their shared moment over two drinks indicates an early connection between the two, which will ultimately culminate in the controversial romantic ending where the two characters agree to a courtship. This ending was met with distain from critics who believed that the romantic ending undercut the tragedy of sexual violence and war present in the rest of the play, or worse, disrupted its realism. Ben Brantley of The New York Times called the ending “well shaped” and “sentimental,” ultimately deciding that “because of its artistic caution, ‘Ruined’ is likely to reach audiences averse to more adventurous, confrontational theater.” ( [65] ) Brantley’s back-handed compliment implies that Nottage’s ending is not risky enough for the subject of “third world” war. He says, “The play isn’t a form-shattering, soul-jolting shocker like Sarah Kane’s ‘Blasted,’ another and more innovative study in wartime atrocities.” His strong implication is that sentimentality appeals to the lowest common denominator of audiences, who appreciate conventional happy endings. Robert Feldberg of The Herald News asserts that “Nottage succumbs to a desire to project hope and happiness both of which she’s established as extremely unlikely by having Christian playfully woo the reluctant Mama Nadi in a scene set out of an old-fashioned romantic comedy. It’s too trivial, a cuddly ending to an otherwise resonant, deeply felt evening of theatre.” ( [66] ) Jill Dolan, on her blog The Feminist Spectator , critiques the ending similarly by stating “Suddenly, the play becomes a heterosexual romance, in which Mama and her girls are redeemed by the love of a good man.” For Dolan, the heteronormativity of their relationship and the “reintegrating the nuclear family…compromises the rigorous, clear-eyed story Ruined otherwise tells.” ( [67] ) However, something that may seem “conventional” in the context of Western drama (i.e. a romantic ending) takes on new meaning in the circumstances of the play: a Fanta isn’t just a regular soda, and flirting over it is more than a reproduction of commercial images. What does a romantic ending mean in the material context of the characters? To speak directly to Dolan’s point, the circumstances of the play complicate the sexual component of the “heterosexual romance” between Mama Nadi and Christian. Mama reveals in the final scene that she is “ruined,” which means that she has been sexually abused to the point where she can no longer have children. ( [68] ) The specific details of this are left out of the play. It is unclear as to whether this factor limits her ability to have children or her ability to have penetrative sex entirely. The other “ruined” character, Sophie, has been raped with a bayonet — another stark reference to the Kalashnikov — leaving her unable to walk without pain, let alone have intercourse. ( [69] ) Despite the vague implications for Mama’s status as “ruined”, at the very least, it disrupts the “conventional” correlation between heterosexuality and procreation. Mama Nadi and Christian may be a male/female couple, but there is very little that is “normative” about their relationship. The happiness of this ending does not erase the circumstances which complicate it. Nor is it out of place, as these reviews imply. The connection between these two characters has been established since their first page encounter with the Fanta. A reading that centers what the objects mean to the characters suggests that Mama Nadi and Christian’s relationship is “erotic,” but not necessarily sexual — drawing from Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” which cites the erotic as “providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.” ( [70] ) From the beginning of the play, Mama Nadi and Christian are joined by their love of material objects. Christian sells objects, Mama buys them, and this shared passion for things provides them with an improvised language of pleasure, desire, seduction, and satisfaction. As Lorde says, “Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.” ( [71] ) Throughout the play, Mama Nadi carefully weighs each situation in favor of her own joy and pleasure. For Mama, material objects are extensions of herself. She says, “There must always be a part of you this war can’t touch.” ( [72] ) In this moment, she is talking about a raw diamond that a miner traded to her for four beers and one of her sex workers. Although the audience does not yet know that Mama Nadi is “ruined,” the fact that she equates a material object with the one part of herself that the war cannot touch is significant given the fact that her body has been violated. For Mama, the objects are extensions of her “self” as described by psychologist and material culture theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s essay “Why We Need Things.” According to him, the human psyche and sense of identity is vague, and material things help ground people by acting as touchstones. For Csikszentmihalyi, the objects perform: “They do so first by demonstrating the owner’s power, vital erotic energy and place in the social hierarchy.” ( [73] ) For Mama Nadi, the material objects around her represent the power that she has gained within the “interlocking” systems of oppression. She exclaims, “I didn’t come here as Mama Nadi, I found her the same way miners find their wealth in the muck. I stumbled off of that road without two twigs to start a fire. I turned a basket of sweets and soggy biscuits into a business. I don’t give a damn what any of you think. This is my place, Mama Nadi’s.” ( [74] ) Thus, everything in the bar is an extension of herself and plays a role in her self-definition — or re-definition. Therefore, the stage direction in the beginning that says that “a lot of effort” has gone into making the bar look cheerful suggests that pleasure is important for the character as well, and that these objects that she surrounds herself with speak to more than survival. Lorde describes the “erotic” in a similar way; that it is something internal [read: psychological and spiritual] and not physical. Although she and Csikszentmihalyi are writing from different disciplines, and are separated by age, gender, race, and nationality, both write about the erotic, and Lorde uses material objects to describe what happens inside her “self”: During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. . . I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience. ( [75] ) Thus, she, like Mama Nadi equates a material object with her own internal vital energy. Mama’s raw diamond can be taken away, but no one can take away what it represents: the fact that she has not only survived being “ruined” but has also prospered, thrived, and found joy. Decolonizing Efforts in American Theatre As American theatre, in both academia and the industry, commits itself to anti-racism and decolonization practices, let us not forget Patricia Hill Collins’s foundational text “The Politics of Black Feminist Thought,” in which she pays homage to the long tradition of resisting negative images of Black women and moving towards self-definition as independence, self-determination, self-reliance, and survival. ( [76] ) A material culture theory reading of Ruined yields significant information on the character’s material circumstances, interlocking oppressions, survival tactics, and pleasures. Each of these forces is connected to the other, and material objects are deeply interwoven into these dynamics. However, discussions of survival and pleasure are often left out of Western assessments of “third world” women, including those surrounding works of theatre like Ruined , as shown by dramaturgical and critical academic archives. In doing so, these conversations run the risk of reinforcing victim archetypes as discussed by Mohanty’s work, which can be potentially counter-productive to anti-racist and anti-colonial efforts. Material culture theory is a methodology that can be applied to both scholarly and practical theatrical projects and evidences the ways that scholarly methods are useful and relevant to the production process. In this case, material culture theory can be used not only for the props list, but also for the places where material objects intersect with scenic dressing, costuming, practical lighting instruments, sound effect and music choices, and, of course, directing and acting choices. What kind of objects decorate the set described in the opening stage directions? Where do they come from and who made them? What do they mean to the characters? What are the characters wearing and how did those clothes come into their possession? What kind of lights did Mama Nadi use to make her bar look “cheerful”? What would be available to her? How would sound be distorted if the equipment was powered by a car battery that was also powering the lights? These are many questions that designers already ask themselves based on the design processes. These are already the kinds of conversations that take place at production meetings. Material culture theory can help ensure that the answers to these questions are culturally specific, accurate, and precise. This is especially true when engaging with marginalized groups who are often omitted from or misrepresented written archives. What story do the objects tell? How do people in these groups use objects in everyday life towards self-definition? The importance of self-definition is also articulated by Mohanty’s work on decolonizing images of the “third world” woman in white, Western feminist hegemonies, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, which critiques the role of the Western imagination in the formation of the Other. Smith says, “I say that because like many other writers I would argue that 'we', indigenous peoples, people 'of color', the Other, however we are named, have a presence in the Western imagination, in its fiber and texture, in its sense of itself, in its language, in its silences and shadows, its margins and intersections.” ( [77] ) While Mohanty’s work is primarily a critique against academic constructions of the “third world,” Smith’s is an indictment of Western imagination for the role that it played in justifying the imperial exploitation of the “third world,” indigenous people, and people of the African diaspora for centuries. In the case of Ruined , and other theatrical representations of Black women, particularly those who live in what is considered the “third world,” material culture theory avoids the assumptions that are made in the Western imagination — and the historical baggage that comes with it – and allows one to study how the characters use material objects to define themselves. Both are vital decolonizing processes for the portrayal, or “re-presentation”, as Mohanty calls it, of Black, “third world” women on the American stage. References 1. Lynn Nottage, Ruined (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009), 5. 2. Nottage, Ruined , 5. 3. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 200), 338. 4. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 345. 5. Nottage, Ruined , xi. 6. Nottage, Ruined , xi. 7. The Kalashnikov, like the designation between the “first”, “second,” and “third world”, is a product of the Cold War, and most-often culturally associated, by Americans, with conflicts that arose as results of those international tensions and their global aftermath. 8. C. J.,Chivers, The Gun . (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 9. 9. The Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement."Women's Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3/4 (2014): 271-80, 271. 10. Nicole Rosky, “Lynn Nottage's CLYDE'S Tops List of Most-Produced Play of the Season,” Broadwayworld.com , September 23, 2022. https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Lynn-Nottage-CLYDES-Tops-List-of-Most-Produced-Play-of-the-Season-20220923. 11. American Theatre Editors, “Offscript: Most-Produced WithLynn Nottage & Lauren Gunderson,” American Theatre, September 27, 2022. https://www.americantheatre.org/2022/09/27/offscript-most-produced-with-lynn-nottage-lauren-gunderson/. 12. Celia Lury, Consumer Culture . 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 9. 13. Lury, Consumer Culture, 9. 14. Lury, Consumer Culture, 21-22. 15. Nottage, Ruined, xi. 16. Mohanty, 339. 17. Jeff Paden, “Hybridity of form and political potentiality in Ruined,” in A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2016),145-159. 18. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 66. 19. Nottage, Ruined, 5. 20. Nottage, Ruined, 5. 21. Nottage, Ruined , 5. 22. Fanta was marketed globally before it was marketed in the US due to fears that it would compete too heavily with Coca-Cola. After enjoying some popularity in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Fanta—along with other sodas—lost popularity to its sister orange soda brand Minute Maid as consumers became more interested in heathy foods and drinks. Fanta had been a bigger market item globally, especially in Africa and South America. Because of the orange soda’s popularity in Latin America,The Journal Record reported in 2001 that Fanta was being reintroduced in American markets through “Hispanic-heavy test markets in Texas, Arizona and Southern California. Sales jumped from 24.4 million cases in 2000 to 42.2 million last year, according to Beverage Digest. The jump was due to the rollout in test markets.” In 2002, the iconic Fantanas commercial was released nationally in a huge campaign,which was revived in 2004, 2006, and so on. The Fantanas became very culturally recognizable in the US, and were even featured in satires on MadTV and Family Guy. It is possible that collective memory of this marketing campaign would be accessible to “first world” audiences of Ruined in the 2010s. Admin, “Remember Fanta?: Business World,”The Journal Record, March 6, 2002, Accessed October 26, 2023,https://journalrecord.com/2002/03/06/remember-fanta-business-world/. 23. Washtubs and batteries are a bit vague. If this happens while doing a material culture reading of a play, especiallyone which takes place in a “third world” country, I recommend doing as much research as possible. In the event thatresearch fails, and a“first world” theatre maker must fill in the “gaps”, so-to-speak with their imaginations, it isimportant to remember the aforementioned “baggage” regarding Western imaginations of “third world” locationsand peoples. 24. “Fanta,” Wikipedia.org . Accessed October 30, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanta. 25. "The Coca-Cola System,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Our Company,” Accessed October 30, 2018.https://www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/the-coca-cola-system. 26. “Coca-Cola Beverages Africa Begins Operations,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Press Releases,” Accessed October 30,2018. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations. 27. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations. 28. Maik Dünnbier, “Big Alcohol and The War In Congo,” in Alcohol Industry, Corporate Consumption Complex, Obstacle To Development, Sustainable Development , November 2013. Accessed October 30, 2018. http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/. 29. One aspect of the play, which is interesting considering the fact that Nottage writes for a first-world audience, isthe fact that there are no representatives of the first-world that ever appear onstage. Mama and Christian mention a white pastor missionary, a Belgian shopkeeper in Bunia, and Mama talks about “blue helmets”, UN peacekeeping forces in the final scene. The only physical presence of the first-world comes in the form of imported goods or the cultural remnants of the Belgian colonization, in the form of the French language and racial divide between blacks and whites. There are several possible reasons as to why Nottage has made the choice to keep the more fortunate first-world population out of her story, but the most powerful statement that arises from their absence is, of course, their absence. Nottage makes a point that there is little to no intervention from the outside world, and there is a sense of abandonment throughout the play. 30. Nottage, Ruined, 10. 31.“How Heineken beer survives in Congo Brewers are rare colonial-era holdouts in a notorious trouble spot.” The Economist. April 21, 2018. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo. 32. Olivier van Beemen, Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed, (United Kingdom: C Hurst & Company Publishers Limited, 2021). 33. Nottage, Ruined, 28. 34. Nottage, Ruined, 102. 35. Nottage, Ruined , 15. 36. Nottage, Ruined, 86. 37. Nottage, Ruined , 85. 38. Nottage, Ruined, 28. 39. Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,”68. 40. https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo . 41. Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” 67. 42. Van Beeman, 59. 43. Nottage, Ruined, 181-124. 44. Nottage, Ruined, 28, 42, 81. 45. Nottage, Ruined, 13. 46. Nottage, Ruined , 25. 47. Nottage, Ruined, 25. 48. Nottage, Ruined , 13. 49. Nottage, Ruined , 31. 50. Nottage, Ruined, 41. 51. Charlie Payne, “Ruined Study Guide.” London: Almeida Projects, 2010. Accessed October 2018, https://www.nightwoodtheatre.net/uploads/RUINED,_STUDY_GUIDE.pdf. 52. Rachel Steinburg, “Web of Violence Untangling ‘Africa’s World War,’” The Berkeley Rep Magazine 5, no. 1 (2010-2011), 23. Accessed October 2018, https://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/pdf/program-ru.pdf. 53. Julia DePalma, “Arena’s Page Study Guide.” Arena Stage. 2011, 4. Accessed October 2018. https://www.arenastage.org/globalassets/education/school-programs/study-guide--ruined.pdf. 54. Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, “Dodd-Frank 1502 and the Congo Crisis,” Center for Strategic and InternationalStudies, August 22, 2017. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.csis.org/analysis/dodd-frank-1502-and-congo-crisis. 55. Sudarsan Raghavan, “How a well-intentioned U.S. law left Congolese miners jobless,”The Washington Post, November 30, 2014. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e. 56. Adalbert Murhi Mubalama, one of the ministers of mines, told The Washington Post, “As of October [2014], there were only 11 mines out of more than 900 here in South Kivu where minerals were “tagged” as conflict-free.”Raghavan, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e. 57. Laura Kasinof, “An ugly truth behind ‘ethical consumerism’”The Washington Post. April 19, 2018. AccessedDecember 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/04/19/conflict-free/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6ea84da645e7. 58. Nottage, Ruined, 40. 59. Nottage, Ruined, 5. 60. Nottage, Ruined, 5-6. 61. The interconnectedness of Fanta, Primus, the armed conflict, the movement of goods intensifies Mama and Christian’s brief moment of flirtation over the cold soda, followed by the pouring of beer. Dünnbier, http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/and 62. Nottage, Ruined, 6. 63. Nottage, Ruined , 6-7. 64. Fanta’s advertising campaign in the early 2000s featured a group of flirtatious women called the Fantanas who would sing a song called “Wanta Fanta” and seduce men into drinking the soda in various tropical scenarios. 65. Ben Brantley, “War’s Terrors, Through a Brothel Window,”The New York Times, February 11, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/theater/reviews/11bran.html. 66. Paden, 145. 67. Jill Dolan, “Ruined, by Lynn Nottage.” The Feminist Spectator, March 13, 2009. Nov 4, 2018. http://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2009/03/16/ruined-by-lynn-nottage/. 68. Nottage, Ruined , 12. 69. Nottage, Ruined , 13. 70. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 56. 71. Nottage, Ruined, 57. 72. Nottage, Ruined , 53. 73. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Why We Need Things,” In History from Things: Essays on Material Culture . Ed. Lubar, Steven D, and W. D Kingery, (SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1993), 23. 74. Nottage, Ruined , 86. 75. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 57. 76. She cites Maria Stewart writing in 1833. Patricia Hill Collins, “The Politics of Black Feminist Thought” and “Distinguishing Features of Black Feminist Thought,” in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd editions (New York: Routledge, 2000 [1990]), 1. 77. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012), 14. Footnotes [1] Lynn Nottage, Ruined (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009), 5. [2] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [3] Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 200) , 338. [4] Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 345. [5] Nottage, Ruined , xi. [6] Nottage, Ruined, xi. [7] The Kalashnikov, like the designation between the “first”, “second,” and “third world”, is a product of the Cold War, and most-often culturally associated, by Americans, with conflicts that arose as results of those international tensions and their global aftermath. [8] C. J., Chivers, The Gun . (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 9. [9] The Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement." Women's Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3/4 (2014): 271-80, 271. [10] Nicole Rosky, “Lynn Nottage's CLYDE'S Tops List of Most-Produced Play of the Season,” Broadwayworld.com , September 23, 2022. https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Lynn-Nottage-CLYDES-Tops-List-of-Most-Produced-Play-of-the-Season-20220923 . [11] American Theatre Editors, “Offscript: Most-Produced With Lynn Nottage & Lauren Gunderson,” American Theatre, September 27, 2022. https://www.americantheatre.org/2022/09/27/offscript-most-produced-with-lynn-nottage-lauren-gunderson/ . [12] Celia Lury, Consumer Culture . 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 9. [13] Lury, Consumer Culture , 9. [14] Lury, Consumer Culture , 21-22. [15] Nottage, Ruined , xi. [16] Mohanty, 339. [17] Jeff Paden, “Hybridity of form and political potentiality in Ruined,” in A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 145-159. [18] Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 66. [19] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [20] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [21] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [22] Fanta was marketed globally before it was marketed in the US due to fears that it would compete too heavily with Coca-Cola. After enjoying some popularity in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Fanta—along with other sodas—lost popularity to its sister orange soda brand Minute Maid as consumers became more interested in heathy foods and drinks. Fanta had been a bigger market item globally, especially in Africa and South America. Because of the orange soda’s popularity in Latin America, The Journal Record reported in 2001 that Fanta was being reintroduced in American markets through “Hispanic-heavy test markets in Texas, Arizona and Southern California. Sales jumped from 24.4 million cases in 2000 to 42.2 million last year, according to Beverage Digest. The jump was due to the rollout in test markets.” In 2002, the iconic Fantanas commercial was released nationally in a huge campaign, which was revived in 2004, 2006, and so on. The Fantanas became very culturally recognizable in the US, and were even featured in satires on MadTV and Family Guy . It is possible that collective memory of this marketing campaign would be accessible to “first world” audiences of Ruined in the 2010s. Admin, “Remember Fanta?: Business World ,” The Journal Record , March 6, 2002, Accessed October 26, 2023, https://journalrecord.com/2002/03/06/remember-fanta-business-world/ . [23] Washtubs and batteries are a bit vague. If this happens while doing a material culture reading of a play, especially one which takes place in a “third world” country, I recommend doing as much research as possible. In the event that research fails, and a “first world” theatre maker must fill in the “gaps”, so-to-speak with their imaginations, it is important to remember the aforementioned “baggage” regarding Western imaginations of “third world” locations and peoples. [24] “Fanta,” Wikipedia.org . Accessed October 30, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanta . [25] “The Coca-Cola System,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Our Company,” Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/the-coca-cola-system . [26] “Coca-Cola Beverages Africa Begins Operations,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Press Releases,” Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations . [27] https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations . [28] Maik Dünnbier, “Big Alcohol and The War In Congo,” in Alcohol Industry, Corporate Consumption Complex, Obstacle To Development, Sustainable Development , November 2013. Accessed October 30, 2018. http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/ . [29] One aspect of the play, which is interesting considering the fact that Nottage writes for a first-world audience, is the fact that there are no representatives of the first-world that ever appear onstage. Mama and Christian mention a white pastor missionary, a Belgian shopkeeper in Bunia, and Mama talks about “blue helmets”, UN peacekeeping forces in the final scene. The only physical presence of the first-world comes in the form of imported goods or the cultural remnants of the Belgian colonization, in the form of the French language and racial divide between blacks and whites. There are several possible reasons as to why Nottage has made the choice to keep the more fortunate first-world population out of her story, but the most powerful statement that arises from their absence is, of course, their absence. Nottage makes a point that there is little to no intervention from the outside world, and there is a sense of abandonment throughout the play. [30] Nottage, Ruined , 10. [31] “How Heineken beer survives in Congo Brewers are rare colonial-era holdouts in a notorious trouble spot.” The Economist . April 21, 2018. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo . [32] Olivier van Beemen, Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed, (United Kingdom: C Hurst & Company Publishers Limited, 2021). [33] Nottage, Ruined , 28. [34] Nottage, Ruined , 102. [35] Nottage, Ruined , 15. [36] Nottage, Ruined , 86. [37] Nottage, Ruined , 85. [38] Nottage, Ruined , 28. [39] Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” 68. [40] https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo . [41] Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” 67. [42] Van Beeman, 59. [43] Nottage, Ruined , 181-124. [44] Nottage, Ruined , 28, 42, 81. [45] Nottage, Ruined , 13. [46] Nottage, Ruined , 25. [47] Nottage, Ruined , 25. [48] Nottage, Ruined , 13. [49] Nottage, Ruined , 31. [50] Nottage, Ruined , 41. [51] Charlie Payne, “ Ruined Study Guide.” London: Almeida Projects, 2010. Accessed October 2018, https://www.nightwoodtheatre.net/uploads/RUINED,_STUDY_GUIDE.pdf . [52] Rachel Steinburg, “Web of Violence Untangling ‘Africa’s World War,’” The Berkeley Rep Magazine 5, no. 1 (2010-2011), 23. Accessed October 2018, https://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/pdf/program-ru.pdf . [53] Julia DePalma, “Arena’s Page Study Guide.” Arena Stage. 2011, 4. Accessed October 2018. https://www.arenastage.org/globalassets/education/school-programs/study-guide--ruined.pdf . [54] Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, “Dodd-Frank 1502 and the Congo Crisis,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 22, 2017. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.csis.org/analysis/dodd-frank-1502-and-congo-crisis . [55] Sudarsan Raghavan, “How a well-intentioned U.S. law left Congolese miners jobless,” The Washington Post , November 30, 2014. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e . [56] Adalbert Murhi Mubalama, one of the ministers of mines, told The Washington Post , “As of October [2014], there were only 11 mines out of more than 900 here in South Kivu where minerals were “tagged” as conflict-free.” Raghavan, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e . [57] Laura Kasinof, “An ugly truth behind ‘ethical consumerism’” The Washington Post . April 19, 2018. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/04/19/conflict-free/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6ea84da645e7 . [58] Nottage, Ruined , 40. [59] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [60] Nottage, Ruined , 5-6. [61] The interconnectedness of Fanta, Primus, the armed conflict, the movement of goods intensifies Mama and Christian’s brief moment of flirtation over the cold soda, followed by the pouring of beer. Dünnbier, http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/ and Nottage, Ruined, 6. [62] Nottage, Ruined , 6. [63] Nottage, Ruined , 6-7. [64] Fanta’s advertising campaign in the early 2000s featured a group of flirtatious women called the Fantanas who would sing a song called “Wanta Fanta” and seduce men into drinking the soda in various tropical scenarios. [65] Ben Brantley, “War’s Terrors, Through a Brothel Window,” The New York Times , February 11, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/theater/reviews/11bran.html . [66] Paden, 145. [67] Jill Dolan, “Ruined, by Lynn Nottage.” The Feminist Spectator , March 13, 2009. Nov 4, 2018. http://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2009/03/16/ruined-by-lynn-nottage/ . [68] Nottage, Ruined , 12. [69] Nottage, Ruined , 13. [70] Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 56. [71] Nottage, Ruined , 57 [72] Nottage, Ruined , 53. [73] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Why We Need Things,” In History from Things: Essays on Material Culture . Ed. Lubar, Steven D, and W. D Kingery, ( Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 23. [74] Nottage, Ruined , 86. [75] Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 57. [76] She cites Maria Stewart writing in 1833. Patricia Hill Collins, “The Politics of Black Feminist Thought” and “Distinguishing Features of Black Feminist Thought,” Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment , 2nd editions (New York: Routledge, 2000 [1990]), 1. [77] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012), 14. About The Author(s) Christen Mandracchia is an Assistant Professor and Production Manager in West Chester University’s Department of Theatre and Dance. She earned her doctorate in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research emphasizes material histories of theatrical labor, with a special emphasis on theatre professionals who venture into non-theatrical fields. Areas of research also include theatre architecture, queer theatre history, and musical 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. 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Madeline Pages Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage Theatre of Isolation Madeline Pages By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Conceiving of a theatre of isolation presents the performance scholar with a conundrum akin to a tree falling in a secluded forest. As it is so often distinguished by the presence of the group, of collective and communal exchange, the theatre as an art form seems diametrically opposed to isolation—physical, social, mental, emotional, spiritual. How can theatre relate to the world while maintaining a state of isolation from it? And where does isolation lead if and when it ends? I offer theatre of isolation as a category of performance that engages with these questions and one that implies a tension between the social engagement of theatre, which is often thought of as having a social function, and social isolation. In 2020, theatre artists were living in that tension. I believe their work proved theatre and isolation can coexist. I also believe theatre of isolation is not a temporally bounded category but one we can use to see this coexistence of socially engaged art with isolation in the work of theatre makers from other times. The 1970s in the US was an era of aftermath. American society faced as one (though by disparate means and with differing attitudes) the shock of the Vietnam War as it was witnessed on television, national financial decline, and the continued, violent subjugation of marginalized people. The political struggles of the 1960s, in a sense, continued through the 1970s, prolonged and deepened without relief as one decade spilled into the next. Given this climate, a desire for isolation or at least the expression of that desire in art, strikes me as unsurprising. For this essay, I have chosen to look at three artists, Adrienne Kennedy, Peter Schumann, and Jack Smith, whose theatre from the 1970s is isolated from the dominant culture—white, male, heterosexual, conservative, capitalist—of the time. Isolation of this type may be reflected in physical space, and I pay close attention to both real and imaginary architectures of isolation. However, my analysis is more broadly concerned with social isolation—how it happens, what it looks and feels like, and its effect on artistic expression. The result of this isolation is not necessarily an increased understanding of the self, of one’s identity, but a kind of solace that primes the individual for the monumental task of breaking new ground and resisting oppression. Such a claim is not new. Theatre of isolation can be classified alongside the antisocial and the anti-relational in performance studies, particularly as such terms are debated among scholars of queer studies. [1] However, I wish to distinguish isolation from the antisocial and align my analysis with the asocial as theorized by Summer Kim Lee in “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality.” The asocial, according to Lee, complicates and expands the state of antisociality of the subject, as a momentary choice to resist the social in order to “shift and reconstellate one’s relations to . . . the socialities with which one is entangled,” rather than deny or resist relationality completely. [2] “Staying in” is what Lee calls the performance of asociality in which the subject chooses to be alone rather than be out with others. In Lee’s formulation, to have the need and desire for time away from others, from an outside . . . does not hold up a depoliticized fantasy of autonomy. . . . Rather, it points toward the desire to want to relate, to show up for another, but when one is ready, and in ways that alter the horizon of what constitutes the social, and the political projects, collectivities, affiliations, and models of care borne out of it. [3] “Staying in,” then, is a self-reflexive performance of asociality, an enactment of “the ambivalent and rich aspects of solitude” for the purposes of protection and preservation, but also preparation for political and social engagement. Particularly for individuals who identify with a minority group—Lee speaks specifically to the effects for Asian American people—staying in offers “sustained and sustaining ways . . . of moving through a world that is messy, damaging, hurtful, and exhausting.” [4] Staying in appears to be the antidote to the psychic exhaustion caused by the normalization of oppression, but does not preclude political engagement or outward expression, as in forms of public art. Lee further argues that staying in is in fact “enfolded within . . . acts and desires of going out” to participate in “radical, collective, organized action [that has heretofore characterized minoritarian political critique] within the social worlds in which we live.” [5] Such collective actions have been inherited by contemporary culture through glorified histories of the protests and insurgency of the 1960s. From that decade’s legacy emerged a “compulsory sociability,” the belief that “one’s political investments and acts of solidarity must be located in the realm of the social.” [6] As Lee conceives it, staying in as a mode of performance rejects the assumption of compulsory sociability but not the collective pursuit of social justice. [7] Staying in inverts the common conception of the antisocial or isolated individual as outside —outside of the world, disengaged, or perhaps a mere spectator. Instead, the individual staying in is staying inside , and by choice. What defines an “insider” is not, as the prevailing use of term implies, the power of being part of the majority but isolation from the outside world while one remains within it. Furthermore, this kind of social isolation is personal, and consciously undertaken; from it one can derive some agency, defining one’s own terms of engagement. This unconventional inside/outside dichotomy becomes important for what follows. I am, as the three artists I will discuss in depth here are, always keeping an eye on the outside context as I delve into solitary spaces of imagination and creative practice. This outside, on the macro level, is the US in the 1970s. The dominant scholarly narratives of American culture in the 1970s, and particularly those narratives that focus on the theatre of the era, provide contradictory summaries of the artistic landscape: it is sometimes monopolized by the echoes of Tom Wolfe’s 1976 essay on “The Me Decade” and the nihilistic glamour of Andy Warhol, or, conversely, by artists characterized as community-oriented survivors scraping by in the middle of a national financial crisis. Hillary Miller argues that these analyses submerge “very necessary labors of institutionalization . . . in histories of downtown theatre that focus on the 1970s political separatism on the one hand, and myopic investigations of the self and identity on the other.” [8] Marc Robinson prefers to look at the American art world in the 1970s as in transition, in flux and unfixed, a decade of indeterminacy, which is a description that this essay may heighten and, hopefully, expand by offering up a possible explanation for that instability (at least for the artists I hone in on). [9] I argue that the lack of fixity stems from, as this brief summary of seventies historiography suggests, a conflict between the solitary and the collective. Therefore, my own research on the decade is caught somewhere in the middle of the academic fray, seeking to spotlight what Will Kaufman claims are the concerns of the decade’s drama with “social exclusion, isolation, and exhaustion,” while denying any notion that isolation as aesthetic counteracts activism and community solidarity. [10] Adrienne Kennedy, Peter Schumann, and Jack Smith are three markedly different artists, and their individual experiences of social isolation cannot be conflated. Whereas Schumann, as I will discuss in detail later on, isolates himself by choice, Kennedy’s (and Smith’s, to a certain extent) isolation begins as the result of exclusion. What I believe these artists have in common (other than being contemporaries) is that the theatre of isolation mirrors the social isolation of the artist, which I will argue further in what follows. All three have received, and continue to receive, no shortage of attention, making them familiar to many readers. This allows me to focus on my point of contact: the theme and aesthetics of isolation within their theatre. I adopt Lee’s approach to how individual artistic works both reflect, and are aesthetically influenced by, the artist’s state of isolation, physical or otherwise, from the social world. In the sense that all three were working in the American Northeast in the 1970s, the scope of this essay is narrow and reveals my own blind spots as a scholar. This essay is not intended to be an encompassing study. It wants conversation: conversation with Lee and other queer theorists and historians, with other artists, and with present and future performance and criticism. I address this essay to future works in particular, in the hopes that the category of theatre of isolation will be a useful tool for the theatre of the present. “I always just could very easily become a character in the movies or in a book.”[11] Adrienne Kennedy seems to stand alone in scholarship. On the surface she may be an odd choice for this essay, given that she appears to be very much a part of the scene in the seventies. She was involved with the playwrights’ coalitions New York Theatre Strategy (NYTS) and the Women’s Theatre Council (WTC) and her plays were performed at major downtown theatre hubs like The Public and La Mama. However, she continues to be treated at least from a historical perspective as constantly new and emerging, or else already dead and being revived, in spite of the actual trajectory of her career as a playwright. Though already the winner of an Obie, in the late 1970s she was, as alluded to by Miller, still a new artist to the likes of Joe Papp, who produced the premiere of A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White in his New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976. Stephen J. Bottoms, on the other hand, chooses to mention only the revivals of her work, which seems to devalue the new plays she wrote in the seventies. In overviews of women playwrights and feminist theatre, such as Brenda Murphy’s essay for The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature , Kennedy is little more than a footnote: her name introduces the “explosion of playwriting in the 1970s that accompanied the second-wave feminist movement,” but none of her plays are mentioned. [12] Then there are the places Kennedy is not named at all: in James Smethurst’s 2005 book on the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, Jack Kerouac’s name pops up five times and Kennedy’s does not appear once. She is rarely counted among members of the BAM, though she was in conversation with the movement’s leading artists. At the same time, her race and gender have contributed to her elision from other histories of New York theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. [13] Kennedy’s resistance to grouping, her lack of “group-ness,” at a time when groups, collectives, and movements appear to be the central critical-historical focus, may in part explain the scholarly tendency to read her plays as self-contained or autobiographical. Kimberly W. Benston, for example, writes that “autobiography . . . is the very signature of Adrienne Kennedy’s impossible though endless quest for a clarifying and stabilizing source.” [14] Kennedy is thus placed in a room of her own, unsurprising for a writer whose introspective style of drama abounds with isolated rooms, frames, and other physical spaces as recurring metaphors. [15] Thus, Kennedy’s particular theatre of isolation is characterized by the isolation chamber of the imagination, i.e. the funnyhouse. Beginning with Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Kennedy devises the “funnyhouse” as a psychological isolation chamber where characters that look and sound very much like their author grappling with the mystery of the self. In Funnyhouse , the self is subsequently broken up into multiple, “ideal selves,” from Patrice Lumumba to Jesus. In her later works, the “funnyhouse” is given different names (the sleep deprivation chamber, for example), yet its structure persists as indicative of the same interior: that of the writer’s mind. Luckily, we have snippets of the writer’s mind for comparison: that is, Kennedy’s prose texts, such as People Who Led to My Plays , which give context to the sense of isolation in plays like Funnyhouse . There is a potential danger, however, in reading Kennedy as self-contained if it means downplaying the influence of outside sources. As suggested by the epigraph to this section, as well as the subject matter of People Who Led to My Plays , the books, movies, and other media Kennedy consumed are inseparable from her imagination and the spaces in her plays. Particularly in her plays from the 1970s, Kennedy is mining the American media, and showing onstage the complex relationship between the media and Black people. An Evening with Dead Essex (1973), for example, was the result of an obsession in the early 1970s with the way news reports depicted Mark Essex, the Black nationalist who killed nine people in two attacks in New Orleans in December 1972 and January 1973. “I feel like Mark Essex,” she told Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck in a 1990 interview, carrying her own “tremendous rage against American society.” On the one hand, as an African American she was forced to be bicultural, to read white culture as fluently as Black, despite being violently written out of that culture. Benston remarks, “Much like her heroines, Kennedy’s work seems driven by a search for an incandescent touchstone of self-reference, some primal image, story, or scene, that would heal the self’s constitution as wound or lack, its entrapment in dramas scripted from elsewhere.” [16] On the other hand, Kennedy says, “I think that as a black person in America, you almost have to force yourself on society.” [17] Kennedy’s books and movies, and even the true story of Essex, are the “dramas scripted from elsewhere,” and Benston interprets them as a trap of false identity. But it is perhaps this sense of falseness, when Kennedy wrestles with it in her plays, which is most illuminating of how the outside world operates against her and other Black people, particularly women. In A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White , the Kennedy funnyhouse transforms into the silver screen of Golden Age Hollywood cinema, more enthralling to Kennedy and exclusive of her conception of self than any other “drama scripted from elsewhere.” In the play’s opening speech the audience is told that Clara plays “a bit role,” standing outside the frame and the action between characters representing cinema stars Marlon Brando, Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Jean Peters, Montgomery Clift, and Shelley Winters. [18] Even when Clara steps into the scene, her “lines” are read by one of these white Hollywood icons and she is separated from both the movie world and her own life as her diary entries, recounting her family’s history and present relationships, are read aloud and subsumed within their reenactment of famous films. The black and white movie scenes are juxtaposed with scenes of Clara’s parents and husband, who “all look like [black and white] photographs” she keeps of them. The play is always attempting to fit these two spaces, the screen and picture frame, together, but regularly fails. For example, the hospital bedroom of Clara’s brother, in which she and her mother discuss her happiness or lack thereof, is at odds with the bedroom in which the characters of Marlon Brando and Jean Peters perform the teach-me-to-read scene from the film Viva Zapata , the one in “constant twilight” while Brando and Peters “star in dazzling wedding night light.” [19] The simultaneity of these contrasting scenes heightens the disconnection between Clara’s life and that of the movies, as well as between mother and daughter in their conversation, as mother insists that her pregnant daughter is unhappy without a settled domestic life while daughter cites her professional successes as a playwright as cause for great happiness. It is significant that when Clara speaks, she is almost always talking about herself as a playwright. This choice leads easily to a feminist interpretation of the play as dramatization of the difficulties of being a woman—read mother and sexual object—and an artist at once. It is twice as difficult for a Black woman, with the models of womanhood forced upon her by white culture. As Deborah R. Geis argues, “Tension between immersion and angry confrontation of the Hollywood world experienced by Clara in this play embodies the ambivalent spectatorial status of the African American woman whose subjectivity risks being undermined by her identification with an exclusionary cultural apparatus.” [20] The struggle for self-definition with these slippery models, which promise “fulfillment and female power” [21] but fail to address its limitations, then becomes a central concern of the play. I’m not entirely convinced, however, that it is Clara who is experiencing the tension Geis describes. As Clara says, her image as spectator comes not from her but from her husband Eddie: “Eddie says . . . that my diaries make me a spectator watching my life like watching a black and white movie.” [22] For Clara, writing is both her dream and her way of understanding her reality. Through writing she copes with family traumas such as her brother’s hospitalization, her parents’ divorce, her own divorce, and a miscarriage, on top of daily experiences of a racist and segregated society. Her life as such does not fit into the movie scenes—she cannot watch herself there. Instead, she must write her life in, and direct the stars from the wings in how to insert the language of her life into their filmography. The cohesion Clara and Winters achieve in the final moments of the play suggests that such a writing is possible to an extent. It is successful, however, only in the sense that each woman’s end is equally evocative of a desperate situation. In these last moments, Clara and Winters speak simultaneously of the possibility of Clara’s brother’s death. Then, when it is revealed that her brother will not die, Clara describes almost falling down the front steps of the hospital, her crying mother in her arms, in a scene of family sorrow-tinged relief (her brother will live but paralyzed and with brain damage). Simultaneously, Winters drowns as at the end of the film A Place in the Sun . Both Clara and Winters, in their separate worlds, are drowning. Clara’s writing and orchestration of the film stars and Kennedy’s writing of Clara are also united, in their exemplification of what Margo Natalie Crawford calls “black public interiority.” Black public interiority, a similar contradiction to my theatre of isolation that Crawford explains, caught the BAM between viewing introversion as elitism and “constantly performing ways in which the personal could be collective and inner mental space could be shared as people deconditioned their minds together.” [23] As a playwright in the 1970s, Kennedy was accused of such elitist introversion and yet her plays so powerfully publicize, in the act of performance, inner mental space. She engaged with the BAM principles and with white culture though neither of them would have her. In both cases she appears superficially as a spectator, as Eddie calls Clara, when in truth she was inside it all, constructing a funnyhouse to contain and showcase the complexities of that insider state. “[Art] needs to be EVERYWHERE because it is the INSIDE of the WORLD.”[24] It is difficult to argue that any period in the history of Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre is asocial in Lee’s sense, a respite from direct engagement, when their reputation is so closely linked to political protest and other forms of activism. The 1970s, however, saw a break in the company and, perhaps, a moment of redefining what it means for the Theatre’s art to be “ inside of the world.” In 1970, Schumann moved from New York City to the small town of Plainfield, Vermont and, as company founder and linchpin, essentially reconstituted Bread and Puppet as a solo project. Schumann had become increasingly critical of the audiences and politics of the city where his company’s homemade bread and giant carnivalesque puppets had commanded street actions of the Resistance Movement of the 1960s. [25] “We the Schumanns,” he wrote at the time, “are ready for a bigger slower style of motion, air breathing and vegetable growing included.” [26] Many of his collaborators, all but two of whom he left behind in New York, perceived the move as “copping out.” In their eyes, Schumann was abandoning the collective spirit that had defined Bread and Puppet since 1961 in order to join the well-to-do intellectuals and resort entrepreneurs migrating to Vermont for a taste of the majority white wilderness. [27] But as an artist Schumann had “outgrown the addressive-moralistic mode” that defined his street theatre of the 1960s. [28] At Cate Farm, the location of the Goddard College artist’s residency Schumann had secured in Vermont, he could develop a new, personal style. The Bread and Puppet Theatre of the Vermont days, as I will argue, exhibits an isolation through disillusionment—the disillusionment Schumann had with the forms of political activism that consumed him in the 1960s. Schumann’s move to rural Vermont would have a profound influence on his work up to the present day. As an out-of-towner and an immigrant to the US, Schumann was unlikely to find communion in Plainfield. The Cate Farm period can be defined by distance from the audience, from coherent narrative and authorial power, and from the crowd . Lee notes that isolation “dynamically affords one the time and space needed to evade forms of sociability that late liberalism and subsequent formations of political resistance demand.” [29] The isolation Schumann experienced afforded him the time and space to reevaluate his performance practices, which in the early Vermont days he tailored to his new circumstances. When there was an audience, it was made up of small-town Vermonters and students, and some of the Goddard performance experiments he conducted with student volunteers had no audience at all. This was a far cry from the socially, racially, and generationally diverse crowds in the streets of New York, an audience who Schumann saw as ideal for political theatre. [30] For the Plainfield audience, Schumann eschewed direct address and adopted the more traditional staging of the elevated proscenium, restoring a physical distance between audience and performance. He no longer saw the need for the conscious, aggressive alienation of the audience that characterized his New York street agitations. He wasn’t making theatre for his audience anymore but for himself and alienation could be achieved simply by embracing the isolated place he already inhabited as an immigrant to rural America. The first of the proscenium performances at Cate Farm were the five Grey Lady Cantatas ( Grey Lady Cantatas II-VI, 1970–1975). In these Cantatas , Schumann had a new preoccupation, which is encapsulated in the image of the Grey Lady puppet crying a crystal tear in Grey Lady Cantata II (1971): an individual—or The Individual—as the central subject in a story of suffering. Grey Lady Cantata II consists of a series of tableaus featuring an increasingly isolated Grey Lady figure, whose life is made barren by the removal of all other people and objects until finally she dies. The Grey Lady, as well as most of the other performers, are large-scale puppets that completely obscure their human puppeteers. The few human performers, in turn, imitate the cold puppets, with grey-painted faces and the stiffness of automatons. The grotesque and opulent style of the puppets, the puppet-like acting style of the humans, and the use of marionette-type mechanization for removing props and changing scenery de-emphasize the presence and power of human authors or performers and prevent the audience from fully identifying with the suffering being. Furthermore, Schumann wrote no dialogue which might have humanized the Grey Lady puppet or provided some authorial insight. “The story is definitely the audiences’ job, not ours,” wrote Schumann: “We have no free delivery of interpretations, librettos, symbols, special philosophies. We have a physical fitness apparatus of colors and other wonders of perception. Audience does the sport, the skis and knapsacks of theatre.” [31] Grey Ladies (the name given to American Red Cross volunteers who provided non-medical care, particularly during World War II) and other references to war might easily be connected with the many works of Schumann’s that were explicitly anti-Vietnam War. However, as Schumann explains, that’s a story for the audience to write. Stefan Brecht, a prolific chronicler of Bread and Puppet’s history, speculates that the obscurity of Grey Lady Cantata II was a device ensuring the “privacy” Schumann had desired when he left New York. [32] Although Schumann’s work had always attempted to preclude audience identification and pacification, the plight of the Grey Lady strikes a more introspective, unprecedented note than other of his works—and seems to reflect the artist’s own state of mind. [33] In the evolution of Schumann’s theatre, Cate Farm was a period of transition between the agitprop street theatre and the contemplative, moralistic tone and style that would distinguish his work from the late 1970s on. After moving again in 1974, this time to Dopp Farm in the even more rural Vermont town of Glover, Schumann would actually return to much of what characterized his earliest works: the movement of parades, marches, and circuses; “gigantic language” and spectacle; and, most importantly, subject matter that responded in the form of direct address to global politics. While at Goddard College, however, Schumann seemed to abandon his social activism for a time in favor of introspection. Schumann’s preference for The Individual as subject connects to what Brecht describes as presentation of a representation, without exhortation, a quiet succession of images without a transparent director’s note. However, Grey Lady Cantata II presents the extreme of individuality as source for great suffering and suggests the individual’s need for the collective. The crowd was still Schumann’s purported enemy and the perceived enemy of all individual thought and artistic freedom, but such a production suggests that he harbored a desire to embrace relation and collectivity if for no other reason than that it was a necessary tool in the fight for the good of society. Schumann was clearly troubled by the tension between denouncing the crowd and identifying individuality as sickening and deadly. He hungered for some other way, some middle ground. When he moved to Glover, he disbanded the Vermont Bread and Puppet that had formed around him in Plainfield and also turned away from the obscuring style of the Grey Lady Cantatas. It seems that what Schumann took away from his early years in Vermont and the intense isolation in the work of that period was the energy to reenter the fight for good in earnest. The early Dopp Farm period began with a series of morality plays, but shortly thereafter the enormous Domestic Resurrection Circuses—arguably the most iconic performances in the company’s history—blossomed. The influence of Scott Nearing, the philosopher of capitalist secessionism and “living the good life” who inspired the American back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s (and who happened to be Schumann’s relative by marriage), in the Circuses and other post- Grey Lady works is evident. Schumann’s work in the late 1970s cried out for the “decent life” to abide by what he understood as the values of good and addressed a “universal” neighborhood as audience-recipients. The fact that Schumann’s morally didactic theatre emerges after the reserved Grey Lady Cantatas recalls Lee’s definition of asociality as a means of taking stock of political projects and perhaps altering one’s plan of engagement. In a 1994 interview with John Bell for Theater magazine, Schumann acknowledged the dangers of the ecological romanticism that attracts many people to isolated green places like his farm in Vermont: the evils of capitalism had to take thematic precedence, he said, though he lamented that this world is not a place in which his work could be focused on the idyllic setting. [34] At the time of the interview it had been almost twenty five years since Schumann moved to Vermont, and in the intervening decades, he had eschewed the aesthetics of solitude and suffering in productions like Grey Lady Cantata II for community-oriented spectacles imbued with his utopian ideals. There is irony in fighting mass systems of oppression from such a place of solitude atop a misty green mountain, but from Schumann’s perspective, he was back in the mud. “I want to be uncommercial film personified.”[35] Wading through secondary source material on Smith, I feel acutely the struggle to understand the introverted Jack Smith and to interpret his enigmatic theatre. With little surviving film documentation of Smith’s performances to go on, the archive of Smith’s theatre feels like a load of conflicting gossip and indecisive speculation. John Matturri and Rachel Joseph both describe the material elements of Smith’s performances—the “homeless objects” or “glittering junk”—as emblematic of the inherent impossibility of fixity. Smith’s orientalist aesthetic (“Egyptiana”), remarked on by Michael Moon, Marc Siegal, and Juan Suárez and compared by Dominic Johnson with Sun Ra’s “intergalactic esoterica,” is either camp or an authentic belief based in Maria Montez monotheism. [36] Matturri recalls Smith’s “generous acceptance . . . of collaborative input” and the audience’s “relaxed receptive attention” at performances in spite of their length, frequent interruptions, and arbitrary conclusion, which are at odds with the stories (which I will discuss further on) about Smith’s verbal abuse of spectators. [37] These and other writings on Smith seem to depict a different version of the artist. However, it is José Esteban Muñoz’s formulation of the artist as “the exemplary figure of the queer utopian artist and thinker who seeks solitariness yet calls for a queer collectivity” that seems the truest, and his conception of Smith’s theatre as utopian stands as a direct challenge to the inclusion of Smith in an anti-relationist archive of gay male artists. [38] Muñoz acknowledges two sides of Smith, the solitary and the collective, that are so often kept apart, yet are very clearly both present in his oeuvre. Smith’s infamous filmography of the 1960s captures the crazed, queer collective and Susan Sontag called Flaming Creatures “a lovely specimen of . . . ‘pop art,’” lumping Smith in with a whole art movement addressing the American culture of the day. [39] The theatrical performances he began in the 1970s, many of which were one man shows, represent the other, solitary side of Smith. These intensely lonely performances of the 1970s are Smith’s theatre of isolation, but even as they capture Smith’s increasing personal and creative isolation, at their heart is the anti-capitalist utopia Smith dreamed of for all people like him. [40] Smith spoke distastefully and fearfully in interviews of the archive (specifically, the Anthology Film Archives) as the “vault.” The vault was unyielding, petrifying, and antithetical to Smith’s preferred venue in the 1970s: his own apartment. In 1970, Smith announced that he would open his living space in downtown Manhattan to audiences for free shows. J. Hoberman described the “Plaster Foundation” (as Smith’s home performance venue was called) as squalid, with a gaping hole in its ceiling and an accumulation of junk and debris on the floor, to which Smith lovingly tended in the performance series “Plaster Foundation of Atlantis.” Over the rubble Smith hung fairy lights, placed cardboard palm trees, and constructed an artificial lagoon complete with a waterfall. In other words, he built Atlantis, which mythic paradise featured prominently in his imaginative writings and performances, out of a dilapidated East Village apartment. The Plaster Foundation was both the precursor to and the absolute antithesis of Andy Warhol’s Factory, which promised consumerist glamor where the Foundation spat on it. Warhol may have been an “insider” in the eyes of the broader public, but Smith was tuned in to the ugly truths of the system that produced it and he dug into them on his stage. Smith’s style of performance crumbles like the ceiling of his apartment and is as inhospitable to the audience as a junkyard. Performances were held late at night and often began hours after their expected start time. Much of what audiences watched, which may or may not have been part of the intended performance, was the arrangement of the set and other anti-theatrical antics such as Smith pretending to vacuum up the mountains of cement and plaster for hours on end. The action was frequently interrupted by further fussing with sets and costumes and the script was liable to be spontaneously rewritten by Smith mid-speech. Some Plaster Foundation visitors like Richard Foreman read this as evidence that Smith’s imagination and editorial eye were always one step ahead of the audience. The fussing and adjusting was performance, striving for and failing at perfection in front of the audience. In such performances as The Secret of Rented Island (1976) (of which only a slideshow and audio recording remains), an adaptation/queering of Ibsen’s Ghosts , Smith carries the script in his hand as he interacts with a supporting cast of costume pieces and stuffed animals each representing an alternating set of characters. Script and inanimate actors, which “moved in and out of and were often simultaneously both within and outside of various roles,” [41] disrupt the interchange of character and performance, thereby exposing Smith as himself, alone and potentially vulnerable. The irony of Smith inviting audiences into his home was that he seemed to want nothing more than to be left alone. If no one showed up to his place for a performance, those who knew him have said Smith would go on without an audience. These may have been the greatest performances he ever gave, as he was purportedly paranoid and plagued by anxiety in the presence of others—and by their mere existence in his psychic universe. He was known to abuse audiences, calling them “sofa-roosting cabbages,” and sometimes he failed to show up for a performance in the hopes that the audience would leave him alone. [42] He was both pathologically afraid of others’ criticism and persecution and assured of their duplicity: his living space featured a “hate wall,” upon which he “scrawled animosities towards friends and supporters.” Performances like What’s Underground About Marshmallows? featured nefarious figures inspired by Smith’s personal enemies, such as film critic Jonas Mekas. Smith viewed Mekas, among others, as a capitalist vampire whose motivations were antithetical to Smith’s own mission to construct an uncommercial utopia, and he believed that it was because of his foes that he was forced to “live in squalor all day long, playing hide-and-seek with others.” [43] Dominic Johnson sees in the first-hand accounts of Smith’s performance space echoes of Anthony Vidler’s critical writings on the “architectural uncanny” that “conspicuously renders architectures to be no longer homely.” Furthermore, “in Smith’s domestic performances . . . the nostalgic associations that lived spaces may garner are pitted against the threatening or subversive oppositional structures that often encroach upon them. The set of processes by which architectures become strange are deployed as a neat proxy . . . for the ways in which they approximate other social and cultural tendencies towards estrangement.” [44] Johnson identifies sexual difference as one of these so-called “social and cultural tendencies towards estrangement,” thereby comparing Smith’s space to the estrangement he experienced as a queer person in a heteronormative society. I agree with Johnson’s comparison and see the uncanny space also as definitive for Smith’s particular theatre of isolation. In contrast to the worlds in his films, which were built by way of the accumulation of writhing bodies, the transition to these home performances in the 1970s shifts settings to a one-man island. Even surrounded by audience members, it is difficult to imagine how anyone else could have authentically reached Smith’s Atlantis. The only extant and complete reconstruction of a Smith performance that I know of is a recording of Ron Vawter’s ROY COHN/JACK SMITH , as performed at The Kitchen in New York in 1993. In the production, Vawter parrots the voice of the real Jack Smith, coming through a neon yellow earbud connecting tape-deck to Vawter’s ear, as he recites the lines from Marshmallows, which premiered in the last year of the queer 1970s: 1981, the year the first positive cases of AIDS were reported in the US. Smith ominously foreshadowed the next decade of queer history and both his and Vawter’s deaths due to complications of AIDS, with the line “they love dead queers here.” [45] Wearing him in performance like an ill-fitting shirt, Vawter pulls Smith out of the closet and refashions him as a tragic hero of the queer underground. In fact, Vawter described his portrayal of Smith as “homosexual ‘closet’-performance,” and when one considers Smith’s relationship in regard to performance space, the invocation of the closet seems apt. [46] In a sense, Smith’s theatrical performances of the 1970s were staged within his own personal closet-space, but rather than being a hiding place, it becomes legible to other queer people like Vawter. In Marshmallows , Smith says the “worst of all” is that nobody thinks he is acting. The solution is to “go back into the vault.” [47] However, Smith could not hide from Vawter and his reading of Marshmallows as an overtly political, liberatory performance. Smith’s films were far more successful, at least in terms of making him a known entity, than his solo theatrical performances. His move to a more solitary artistic medium and to the role of “lone lunatic” is perhaps what led to Smith’s failure in the society of the straight and normal . The theatrical performances are, in my opinion, his most radical attempts at what Muñoz identifies as escape through “refusal of a dominant order and its systematic violence,” precisely because they were so much a product of Smith’s personal cosmology. [48] Not only did he play himself, but he enacted his personal brand of queer utopia. His performance of self was so convincing to him that living in the real world became untenable. The failure to transform the real world into one’s fantasy, argues Muñoz, is the typical plight of the queer utopian. However, something of that desire lives on in Vawter’s performance and casts Smith as an icon of collective queer world-makers. Conclusion Jack Smith, the anxiety-riddled queer filmmaker-turned-performer, tried to build utopia in the trash heap of capitalist society. Peter Schumann, an immigrant who got his start in agitprop avant-garde performance, took his puppets out into rural America when the social and political pressures of the New York art scene became too great. Adrienne Kennedy, a Black woman playwright in the overwhelmingly white commercial theatre, gave audiences rare glimpses into a fractured mind simultaneously inside and excluded from society. I have described the theatre of these three artists, in terms of its aesthetic as well as the process of its creation, as a product and a reflection of social isolation of the mind and/or body—and particularly the mind and/or body of the artist. I have tried to demonstrate, however, by tracing the trajectory of each theatre maker beyond their theatre of the 1970s, that this isolation was not an escape route but a troubled state of being at the heart of the social and political issues of the decade and a means of reinscribing one’s relationship to the collective. The plays and performances that I have examined operate on the artistic insights of the individuated while speaking to the issues of the collective. Theatre of isolation is not theatre that speaks only to itself. Categorizing such diverse works as A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White , Grey Lady Cantata II , or What’s Underground About Marshmallows? as theatre of isolation allows scholars to question how these works go beyond isolation and how they might draw individuals together and, as Lee says, “alter the horizon of what constitutes the social.” [49] For the theatre of Kennedy, Schumann, and Smith, the 1970s was an era of isolation, but what happens at the end of, or after, an era? One could turn to these three artists again, and examine Kennedy’s Sleep Deprivation Chamber , Schumann’s Domestic Resurrection Circuses, or Smith’s tragic death and status as queer icon for a few examples of going out, again. “After” is the topic for a different essay and for another time. [50] However, thinking about theatre of isolation in the past is unavoidably connected to thinking about isolation in the present. When theatre artists who have been working in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic no longer need to do so, how we will think about what has been created during this time and how “after” art will be changed by it are questions that are sure to consume the historian. Beyond theorizing the screen or Zoom as a medium—or perhaps as a way to fold those elements in with other considerations—we might look at today’s theatre of isolation as not merely constitutive of social distance. How have perspectives on society and community been changed? By making aesthetic connections to antecedents like Kennedy, Schumann, and Smith, we might find examples of where theatre might go from here. References [1] I’m thinking especially of Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Robert L. Caserio, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean, all of whom participated in a panel on the “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” at the 2005 MLA Annual Convention, as well as scholars, like Tavia Nyong’o, who have written about punk aesthetics through the lens of queer studies. [2] Summer Kim Lee. “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality,” Social Text 37, no. 1 (1 March 2019): 27. [3] Ibid., 31. [4] Ibid., 28. [5] Ibid., 31-32. [6] Ibid., 30. [7] Ibid., 33. [8] Hillary Miller, Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 15. [9] From a lecture in Robinson’s course “American Performance in the 1970s,” at Yale University. [10] Will Kaufman, American Culture in the 1970s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 72. [11] Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, “Adrienne Kennedy: An Interview.” Edited by the authors in Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9. [12] Brenda Murphy, “American Women Playwrights.” In Dale M. Bauer, ed., The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 2012). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Barbara Ann Teer and the other “warrior mothers” of the Black Arts Movement are not even named, though their work has been reclaimed in other recent scholarship. See La Donna L. Forsgren, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press: 2018). [13] I have not been able to track down concrete sources, but Kennedy’s exclusion from BAM scholarship could be connected to her lack of interest in the movement’s organizing structures, or to her work not being considered (by BAM members) to reflect the movement’s values. In the Forward to The Alexander Plays , Alisa Solomon writes, “During the 1960s and 1970s, many within the activist African American community insisted that [didactic, militant plays about race were] what their playwrights should have been writing. In those years Kennedy was criticized by activists for not working hard enough in the movement. . . . They objected to her characters, who were confused about their identity and place in the world, and who did not proclaim an uncomplicated pride in being black” (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, xii). Claudia Barnett cites Solomon, as well as scholars who argue against the use of a feminist label for Kennedy’s works, in support of her argument that Kennedy defies expectations and stereotypes connected to Blackness and/or womanhood. See Claudia Barnett, “‘This Fundamental Challenge to Identity’: Reproduction and Representation in the Drama of Adrienne Kennedy” Theatre Journal 48, no.2 (1996): 141–155. [14] Kimberly W. Benston, “Locating Adrienne Kennedy Prefacing the Subject.” In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 115. [15] bell hooks makes an explicit connection between Kennedy and Virginia Woolf, reading Kennedy’s prose as a celebration of women’s confessional writing akin to A Room of One’s Own . See bell hooks, “Critical Reflections: Adrienne Kennedy, the Writer, the Work.” In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 180. [16] Benston, “Locating Adrienne Kennedy,” 115. [17] Bryant-Jackson and Overbeck, “Adrienne Kennedy: An Interview,” 7. [18] Quotations from A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White come from: Adrienne Kennedy, Adrienne Kennedy in One Act (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 81. [19] Ibid., 92. [20] Deborah R. Geis, “‘A Spectator Watching My Life’: Adrienne Kennedy’s A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White .” In In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 171. [21] Ibid., 173. [22] Kennedy, Adrienne Kennedy in One Act , 99. [23] Margo Natalie Crawford, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First Century Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 169. [24] From “The WHY CHEAP ART? Manifesto,” Bread & Puppet, Glover, VT, 1984. [25] Silvia D. Spitta,“Revisiting the Sixties and Refusing Trash: Preamble to and Interview with Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet Theater,” boundary 2 36, no. 1 (1 February 2009): 110. [26] Here, Schumann presumably uses the royal first-person plural, as he did not initially relocate his family. But the plural “Schumanns” could also be read as his referring to his whole “company” with his own name. Quote from Bread and Rosebuds by Peter Schumann, 25 April 1970. In Stefan Brecht, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre, vol. 2 (London: Methuen, 1988), 18. [27] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 12. As of 2020, Vermont is 94.3% white—one of the top three whitest states in the country. [28] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 15. [29] Lee, “Staying In,” 33. [30] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 48. [31] Schumann quotes from an unpublished mss., “possibly an intra-company summation, dated Cate Farm, March 9, ’72.” In Brecht, 175. [32] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 180. [33] Spitta, “Revisiting the Sixties,” 116. [34] John Bell, “Uprising of the Beast: An Interview with Peter Schumann,” Theater 25, no. 1 (1 February 1994): 42. [35] From dialogue of Jack Smith’s performance What’s Underground about Marshmallows? . Quotes taken from performance recreation by Ron Vawter, as part of his piece ROY COHN/JACK SMITH, as recorded in: Jill Godmilow, dir., Ron Vawter Performs Jack Smith: What’s Underground About Marshmallows? (1993). [36] Dominic Johnson, “Jack Smith’s Rehearsals for the Destruction of Atlantis: ‘Exotic’ Ritual and Apocalyptic Tone.” Contemporary Theatre Review 19, no. 2 (1 May 2009): 177. [37] John Matturri, “Jack Smith: Notes on Homeless Objects,” Criticism 56, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 281. [38] Judith Halberstam identifies this archive, in her short forum response “The Politics of Negativity in Recent Queer Theory” as including the likes of, “in no particular order, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Bette Midler, Andy Warhol, Henry James, Jean Genet, Broadway musicals, Marcel Proust, Alfred Hitchcock, Oscar Wilde, Jack Smith, Judy Garland, and Kiki and Herb.” In PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 2006): 823–4. [39] Quotes from Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation pulled from: Douglas Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 132. [40] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009) , 170. [41] Matturri, “Jack Smith,” 284 [42] From the documentary Jack Smith and The Destruction of Atlantis (2006), directed by Mary Jordan. [43] Godmilow, Ron Vawter Performs , 1993. [44] Johnson, “Jack Smith’s Rehearsals,” 169. [45] Here, I suggest the “queer seventies,” in the U.S., as beginning in 1969, with the Stonewall Riots in New York’s Greenwich Village, and the ending with the first reports of AIDS cases in 1981. [46] Godmilow, Ron Vawter Performs , 1993. [47] Ibid., 1993. [48] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia , 172. [49] Lee, “Staying In,” 31. [50] In addition to Lee’s discussion of what happens “after,” Joshua Chambers-Letson’s recent book After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York University Press, 2018) is dedicated to the question this essay does not answer. Footnotes About The Author(s) Madeline Pages is a dramaturg and MFA Candidate at the former the Yale School of Drama. She is currently partnering with the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) to conduct research and performance experiments around the history of astronomy, astrophysics, and human space travel. She is also collaborating on a new opera I AM ALAN TURING , composed by Matthew Suttor and inspired by the life and writings of mathematician Alan Turing. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. 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Christophe Collard Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Christophe Collard By Published on May 30, 2018 Download Article as PDF Weary of endlessly scavenging for funding, would-be independent filmmaker John Jesurun decided one day in the early 1980s to make films without using a camera and “Let the audience be the camera” instead. [1] Pragmatic par excellence , this new approach effectively launched the career of one of multimedia theatre’s most inventive innovators while generating a body of work characteristically concerned with reconciling the apparently irreconcilable. With his main theme of exploring the rampant technologization of contemporary culture and its effects on consciousness and communication alike, Jesurun’s artistic practice challenges one-dimensional interpretations while simultaneously underscoring the processes that constitute our perception. The artist’s incessant interplay with media of all kinds thereby strikes as the most obvious strategy, with his texts’ pervasive multilingualism a close second. And yet, as Hans-Thies Lehmann once observed, scenography and dramaturgy can only meaningfully meet via the performer’s body . [2] If we borrow Duke Ellington’s favourite phrase describing his music as “beyond categories,” [3] John Jesurun’s theatre aesthetic could accordingly be situated as conceived along a paradigm encompassing transgression, fluidity, and blending to move, indeed, ‘beyond’ conceptions of ‘categories’ and towards what anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Bradd Shore have called an intrinsically ecological inclination. [4] When, moreover, taking into account the insight yielded by intermedia studies that borders between communicative modes are the product of a similar kind of irreducible flux, plurimedial dramaturgies staging such organic inter-relatedness can help us recalibrate the quality of our thinking. For if we focus on the ‘live’ body in a heavily mediatized theatrical space, it becomes clear that the former functions at once as an enabling device and a site of refusal. Operating along a logic of connecting dispersed content, Jesurun’s emphasis on the performer’s presence in the here-and-now as a semiological nexus generates a sense of mediatised imbrication of all of the performative event’s constituents. Or as his long-time compagnon de route Bonnie Marranca has argued in her Ecologies of Theater (1996), an organicist conception of contemporary theatre that “inquire[s] into the relationship of mind and spirit” under the aegis of the performers’ biological ‘liveness.’ [5] Bonnie Marranca is similarly to be credited for coining the concept of ‘mediaturgy’ along a reasoning not so dissimilar from her ecological argument. [6] Indeed, to her, the term allows us to shift our focus on methods of composition in “a new form of dramaturgy,” [7] and so suggests new critical modes of comprehending and writing about it. Thus re-routing connotations from a text-based linear progression of sorts to a media-induced sense of organic simultaneity as organizing principle, one could accordingly argue that “mediaturgy” permits one to highlight tensions between received conceptions of “meaning” and an increasing awareness of the processes that bring them about by foregrounding the media that mediate the ‘content’ we process cognitively. An early illustration of this reasoning is of course found in the work of Jesurun’s illustrious predecessor Richard Foreman (b. 1937), whose Ontological-Hysteric Theater, beginning in 1968, presented audiences with productions lacking a “regular” storyline, but which instead communicated via an idiosyncratic “idiom” best compared to the image of the “mind bath” – a completely multivalent experience. Situated in the grey area between live performance and “live” media, the concept of mediaturgy in effect seeks not a dissolution from drama and its textual overtones, but simply signals a shift from “linguistic language” to “media language” more attuned to our contemporary context of cross-medial communication in networked societies. This article will pick up the ecological lead to present John Jesurun’s mediaturgical and thoroughly inter-relational theatre aesthetic as an impetus to what Bateson calls “an ecology of mind” [8] – i.e. an alternative way of thinking and creating that eschews distinctions in favour of convergence and all the emancipatory potential this implies, both for an updated understanding of the authorship principle as well as for individual signification in today’s cultural context. Then again, already in 1986, Smith, one of the characters in Jesurun’s so-called “Media Trilogy” warned us, spectators, that we all “have to realize that [we are] chained into that machine,” [9] imbricated as it were into what Jesurun himself calls “an ongoing process of detours, pitfalls, and discoveries in interpretation and perception [of] a mediated world.” [10] Five years later, in Blue Heat (1991) he physically separates players from spectators by leaving the stage empty and relocating the action to the venue’s back rooms as displayed by various screens in “real time,” thereby forcing his audience to confront theatre’s fundamental role as signifying interface . After all, if performance no longer takes place in the here and now “live” before an audience, can it still be considered “theatre” in the strictest sense? It is a question that immediately prompts a second one related to the mediation of said “live” content – a query arguably still harder to answer. Which recalls Jesurun’s presumed ecological aesthetic: his is not an approach aiming for answers, but rather for shifting perspectives and re-evaluating possibilities for both artistic creation as for critical thinking from within “the machine.” After all, as the same character Smith from Deep Sleep explains, “Those are the machines and you are coming out of the machines.” [11] Thus there is no outside to our mediated world – a Jesurunian appropriation, if you like, of Derrida’s famous quip that “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” [12] On this, mind you, he emits no value judgment, fully aware of the pointlessness in speaking about “purity” or “essential,” unmediated meaning. Technology, as it can hardly be denied these days, forms part and parcel of our cultural landscape and, as confirmed by mediatheorists Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993), “technological change ” is nothing if not, indeed “ecological.” [13] Addressing the “ecological” dimension of technological innovation from the prism prompted by Jesurun of perennial inter-medial interplay brings us neatly to this artist’s privileged artistic platform: the theatre, once described by Peter M. Boenisch as a semiotic practice , which incorporates, spatializes and disseminates in sensorial terms (thus: performs ) the contents and cognitive strategies of other media by creating multiple channels, and a multi-media semiotic and sensorial environment. [14] Key to the latter argument is the almost organic multiplication of signifiers and signifying systems that takes place precisely via their interplay in real time. If we additionally take into account its relatively stable – yet not, as we have already seen, entirely unproblematic – basic requirements of an audience and a set duration, we could argue that the theatrical medium represents a heuristic platform to study the associations and reciprocities produced by an interface that facilitates co-presence and reflexivity across physical, technical, and referential boundaries. Via the continuous interplay in a Jesurun-production of multiple media, “live” theatrical presence here effectively incarnates an “overdetermined” hybrid permanently in flux. Twenty five years ago, Patrice Pavis already argued that the live actor creates a sense of clarity, an ontological foothold of sorts, within the semiotic complexity of multi-media theatre productions. [15] A decade later, Philip Auslander placed the performer’s live body on a par with technological media in contemporary theatre’s process of “mediatization,” whereby old and new media come to operate in the mediatic system that is the production. [16] For live “presence” on a multimedia theatre stage remains inextricably interwoven with the relation between “live” and “mediated,” and thus also with what performance scholars Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye have called “processes that expose and utilize the gaps, caesura, and absences inherent to acts of representation.” [17] Their use of “inherent” thereby echoes Jesurun’s ecologically-inspired artistic practice whereby the live actor’s performance is embedded into layered and responsive soundscapes, architectonic designs, as well as mediated sets that draw underscore the actual passages between live, mediated, and recorded channels of address. No oversimplified answers to a complex reality, but a stimulated sense of intimacy with the environment in which we find ourselves immersed. Figure 1. John Jesurun Firefall – Phase 2 (2009). Photo: Paula Court. As Baz Kershaw similarly reminds us in his Theatre Ecology (2007), the term “ecology” references the interrelationships of all the organic and non-organic factors of ecosystems, ranging from the smallest and/or simplest to the greatest and/or most complex. It is also defined as the interrelationships between organisms and their environments, especially when that is understood to imply interdependence between organisms and environments. [18] In White Water (1986), the second installment of his “Media Trilogy” after Deep Sleep (1986), Jesurun sought to connect cutting-edge technology with the primal fear that the same technology today is destroying our sense of spirituality. Precisely by instilling an “ecological” sense of interdependence between film, video, and live actors, his personal brand of authorship foregrounds the reverse perspective that technology, in fact, reflects human attempts at spirituality, a certain longing for the intangible expressed through the tension between humans and machinery – a tension grounded in the ever-present potential of manipulation : I include [physicality] as a natural element. Because film and video can be manipulated and manipulate at the same time I have to treat them with some respect. Film and video have their own physical presence beyond the visual images they may represent. There is a tension there between a live and mediated performer but this is also natural. I want that tension to also exist in a real way in the presentation. When live and mediated images communicate verbally a third reality comes into place as a result. [19] Said “Third Reality” was made more palpable still in Jesurun’s 1990-production Everything That Rises Must Converge where both actors and audience were divided into two groups and separated by a wall nine-feet high and forty-feet wide, which occasionally rotated on its central vertical axis while characters communicated their ostensibly nonsensical multilingual dialogues across the divide through live videos and wireless microphones. For, when no direct physical connection can be established, we trust technology to make meaningful our attempts at meaning-making. [20] However, the reason why in certain circumstances we may decide (consciously or unconsciously) to “trust” technology in a performative setting is squarely attributable to its embodied presence on stage. After all, embodied modes of reception and perception are those that do not require strictly logical analysis for their verification. As the theatre presents tangible living bodies on stage to living bodies in the audience, performers’ and audiences’ embodied receptiveness is thereby stimulated to facilitate affective interpretation. When we moreover take into account the stage’s hypermedial capacity to integrate a sheer endless number of technologies, the embodied dimension stretches towards “ecological” coalitions of mind, body, and technology. It is a perspective which prompted Philip Auslander to conclude that in the theatre there simply can be “no clear-cut ontological distinctions between live forms and mediatized ones.” [21] Today, due to the ever-broadening trend of technologizing the theatre stage, critical discourses tend to consider the “live” body in performance as a cultural and biological biotope – a construction site, as it were, for the assemblage of identity and consisting of multiple foundational layers of what Wolf-Dieter Ernst has called “anthropological ballast.” [22] Via the continuous interplay of multiple media on stage, theatrical presence today has become a sort of semiological hybrid permanently in flux. From this angle, then, John Jesurun’s playing with our perception via a multi-media bombardment of our senses strikes, paradoxically enough given the overabundance of technology, as primarily actor -oriented – especially so given this director’s categorical rejection of improvisation and constant admonitions to “deliver words faster and flatter, faster and flatter.” [23] Indeed, by turning his actors into “de-psychologised talking heads,” [24] he forces his spectators to fill in the blanks. For, with the actor’s body as interface between the spectator and the cybernetic machine of that is the multimedia stage, the very notion of embodiment itself becomes unstable. Once again, to Jesurun, this is something intrinsically positive: As a director, I find that the performers are willing to go as far as the language and technology will take them. And as a writer, I am willing to go as far as the performers and technology will take the language. Regardless of the creative outcome, this is a true sharing of intentions and possibilities . [25] Following Jesurun’s “ecological” authorship, embodied presence on a multimedia stage represents a type of “meaning potential” that can only be accessed via the energy exuded from affecting sender and receiver simultaneously. By means of filmic jump-cuts in the narrative progression, the pulsating pace of a video-clip aesthetic, “super real”/un-theatrical conversation tones, soap-opera cliffhangers, or the generalized presence of pop-cultural references, a Jesurun-piece creates a feeling of familiarity in a thoroughly unsettling environment. The extensive reliance on cutting-edge technology, for one, markedly clashes with a recurrent thematic focus on biological decay and linguistic elusiveness. His, then, is a self-professed logic of “engag[ing] rather than seduc[ing]” audiences. [26] Human perception is a process of constantly decentering and re-centering referential frameworks due to the unflagging stream of new impulses we encounter in everything we undertake. The theatre can thereby play a heuristic role as a self-reflexive platform of signification due to the invitation it extends from performer to spectator to connect via conscious participation in a “live” event. For, if accepted, the cognitive communion that ensues will remind all participants for the event’s entire duration of its disruptive constructedness. [27] In Jesurun’s relatively recent internet-inspired Firefall (2006/2010), old-school metatheatrical devices like self-reference and metalepsis abound, but coupled with reflexive statements on the potentiality evoked by design and the essentialism exuded by philosophy, [28] all aside from a scenography itself hell-bent on dramatizing the merging of media into one, uncannily concordant whole. Or, as the character F. – billed as “try[ing] to find a common ground between the introduction of chaos and the status quo” [29] – puts it, they, the characters in Jesurun’s production, are all constantly being “Re-morphed, re-transmuted into positive, useful objects.” [30] Much earlier in his career, Jesurun implemented the recognisability of television-dramaturgy in Red House (1984) and his “living film serial” Chang in a Void Moon (1982 – ongoing) to help engage his audiences into otherwise formalistically forbidding theatre experiments. In his adaptation Faust/How I Rose (1996) we find another token of this artist’s constant play with recognition and estrangement, mixing catch phrases from well-known advertising slogans, snippets of poetry, and pop song lyrics with aporetic debates on the nature of the universe within a set made up of oversized canvases continually projecting lush and dazzling imagescapes – the sequential fluidity of which moreover contrasts with the abruptness of both the dialogue and the scene switches. All examples, indeed, of an ecological inclination to engage rather than seduce : A lot of things bother some people with my work. “You can’t have this conversation, it means so much and it only lasts two seconds.” But slowly, as you get into the movement of the whole, it’s like watching a plant grow . When you listen to the conversation and the actors are standing there, fine, but once you start switching and add all kinds of conflicting angles, lights – it even focuses more on the words. It sets up conflicting things and makes the audience think, also, about what is actually happening on stage. [31] The very fact that Jesurun addresses the element of scenography as catalyst of meta-reflexive thinking squarely aligns him with Philip Auslander, when he argues that the experience of liveness is not limited to performer-audience interactions but refers to a sense of always being connected to other people, of continuous technologically mediated temporal co-presence with others known and unknown. [32] “Meaning,” it so transpires, is not the result of uncovered content, but of a technologically mediated relational engagement prompted, indeed, by the “co-presence of human bodies.” After all, the tension between technology’s power of affect and the physical presence of actors on stage co-opts the audience’s “motor-equivalence” – i.e. performing a similar act under differing circumstances — to generate a sense of reflexivity that is nothing if not “ecologically” dialectical . [33] Figure 2. John Jesurun Firefall – Phase 2 (2009). Photo: Paula Court. Said “ecologically” dialectical reflexivity, according to Gregory Bateson, bridges fundamental philosophy, technology and bodily presence by the bias of the energy exuded from their interplay, [34] and viscerally experienced as the “temporary” [35] product of an embodied cognitive negotiation between competing/conflicting signals and impulses. John Jesurun himself made a telling statement in this regard, “shocked” as he was to learn that his work at one point was described as ‘interdisciplinary:’ I don’t really see the boundaries between one and the other. It seems natural to me that they should work together. They seem to be part of one another. Creatively they are all interconnected. [36] Key tenets from embodied cognition postulate that consciousness itself is produced through the body-mind interface fuelled by our actions and perceptions, but also by nature, culture, and environmental interactions, rather than by a top-down strategy whereby the mind is directing the body. [37] Furthermore, as recently demonstrated by N. Katherine Hayles in her book How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012), the kind of embodied cognition activated by “live” performers in an inter-medial setting – including attentive focus, unconscious perceptions, and nonconscious cognitions – “provides the basis for dynamic interactions with the tools it helps bring into being.” [38] Since such reasoning effectively implies that all “Meaning” is necessarily embodied, it no longer makes any sense to separate man and machine, or to think along such rigid distinctions – which, all things considered, might not be such a bad thing. Contemporary technogenesis, like evolution in general, is not about progress. That is, it offers no guarantees that the dynamic transformations taking place between humans and technics are moving in a positive direction. Rather, contemporary technogenesis is about adaptation , the fit between organisms and their environments, recognizing that both sides of the engagement (humans and technologies) are undergoing coordinated transformations. [39] To Chris Salter, such a reasoning effectively confirms Jesurun’s claim that distinctions are but functional delusions, as the “supposedly modern tension between the humanistic body and the dehumanized machine that has so occupied us [is], in reality, a fiction.” [40] As this brief introduction to Jesurun’s “ecological” aesthetic hopefully has shown, man and machine alike are in a continuous state of becoming, and their interplay on an intermedial theatre stage establishes the latter, with its “ecology of media,” as a generative platform for a new “ecology of mind.” This begs the question whether adopting an ecological perspective to assess our plurimedial cultural context implies that a notion like “authorship” has become redundant. Personally I would argue the exact opposite – provided we follow Jesurun and Marranca’s lead by shifting our focus from clearly demarcated entities to processes of signification. As leading semiotician and media theorist Gunther Kress reminds us in his Literacy in the New Media Age (2003), authorship traditionally depended on “a regulated relation between knowledge and canonical modes of representation” whereas today their power and authority have become relative to a tilt. The answer, to him, therefore “is to insist on the teaching of principles [whereby] the processes and environments of representation are crucial.” [41] In ecologies of media and ecologies of mind like Jesurun’s mediaturgies where man and machine organically interact, authorship is embodied as design. References [1] John Jesurun qtd. in RoseLee Goldberg, “You Are A Camera,” Artforum International January 1989, 74. [2] Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 2001 [1999]), 423. [3] Duke Ellington qtd. in Michael Cerveris, “Intersection, Crossover and Convergence: Fluidity in Contemporary Arts (A Perspective From the US),” in Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries , ed. Caridad Svich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 15. [4] See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1987); Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). [5] Bonnie Marranca, Ecologies of Theater ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), xiii. [6] See Marranca, “Mediaturgy: A Conversation with Marianne Weems.” Performance Histories , ed. Bonnie Marranca (New York: PAJ, 2008), 189-206 and “Performance as Design: The Mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall ,” PAJ 96 (2010): 16-24. [7] Marranca, “Performance as Design,” 19. [8] Bateson 1. [9] John Jesurun, Deep Sleep (1986), in A Media Trilogy: Deep Sleep, White Water, Black Maria (New York: NoPassport Press, 2009), 64, my emphasis. [10] John Jesurun qtd. in Juliette Mapp et. al., “Writing and Performance,” PAJ 34, no.1 (2012): 122. [11] Jesurun, Deep Sleep , 67, my emphasis. [12] Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 158. [13] Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993), 18. [14] Peter M. Boenisch,“Aesthetic Art to Aisthetic Act: Theatre, Media, Intermedial Performance,” Intermediality in Theatre and Performance , eds. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 113. [15] Patrice Pavis, “Theatre and the Media: Specificity and Interference,” Approaching Theatre , eds. André Helbo, J. Dines Johansen, Patrice Pavis, and Anne Ubersfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 22. [16] Phillip Auslander, “Liveness, Mediatization, and Intermedial Performance,” Degrés 101 (2000): e8. [17] Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye, Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 26, my emphasis. [18] Baz Kershaw, Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 15. [19] John Jesurun qtd. in Caridad Svich,“A Natural Force: John Jesurun in Conversation with Caridad Svich,” Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries , ed. Caridad Svich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 45-6. [20] See also Birgit Walkenhorst, Intermedialität und Wahrnehmung: Untersuchungen zur Regiearbeit von John Jesurun und Robert Lepage (Marburg: Tectum, 2005), 84. [21] Phillip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 7. [22] Wolf-Dieter Ernst, Der affective Schauspieler: Die Energetik des postdramatischen Theaters (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2012), 15. [23] John Jesurun qtd. in Donn Russell, Avant-Guardian, 1965-1990: A Theatre Foundation Director’s 25 Years Off-Broadway (Pittsburgh: Dorrance, 1996), 410. [24] Lehmann, Postdramatische Theater , 208. [25] Jesurun qtd. in Mapp et. al. 122, my emphasis. [26] John Jesurun qtd. in Catherine Bush, “Views From the Top: John Jesurun’s Cinematic Theater,” Theatre Crafts 7, no.19 (1985): 48. [27] See also Alice Rayner, “Rude Mechanicals and the Spectres of Marx,” Theatre Journal 54, no.4 (2002): 548. [28] John Jesurun, Firefall , in Shatterhand Massacree and Other Media Texts (New York: PAJ Publications, 2009), 178. [29] Jesurun, Firefall , 167. [30] Jesurun, Firefall , 194. [31] John Jesurun, qtd. in Martin Rentdorff, “I’ll Make Film Without Filming It,” Theater: Ex 1, no.2 (1985): 8, my emphasis. [32] Phillip Auslander, “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective,” PAJ 34, no. 3 (2012): 6. [33] See also Mona Sarkis, Blick, Stimme und (k)ein Körper: Der Einsatz elektronischer Medien im Theater und in interaktiven Installationen (Stuttgart: M & P, 1997), 29. [34] Bateson, 11. [35] Giannachi and Kaye, Performing Presence , 236. [36] Jesurun qtd. in Svich, “A Natural Force,” 46. [37] See Nagoya Hirose, “An Ecological Approach to Embodiment and Cognition.” Cognitive Systems Research 3.3 (2002): 289-299. [38] N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2012), 87, my emphasis. [39] Hayles, How We Think , 87, my emphasis. [40] Chris Salter, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 276. [41] Gunther Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age (New York: Routledge, 2003), 173, my emphasis. Footnotes About The Author(s) Christophe Collard teaches contemporary performing arts, literature, and critical theory at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. He is currently working on a book-length study of John Jesurun. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Kristin Moriah Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Kristin Moriah By Published on May 27, 2018 Download Article as PDF Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left . Malik Gaines. New York: NYU Press, 2017; Pp. 248. It begins with a bold proposition. In Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left , scholar-practitioner Malik Gaines suggests that performance is a radical act and that black performances can amend “dominant discourses that manage representation and constrain the lives they organize” (1). Gaines analyzes this phenomenon “against the archives of three complicit registers, each of which engages a history of radicalism”: blackness; the sixties; and the transnational route between the United States, West Africa, and Europe (2-4). This configuration also permits Gaines to consider the “ties between visuality and power’s organization” (7). Thus, Gaines’s book uses interdisciplinary means to assess a range of stunning black cultural artifacts. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left adds to the field of black performance studies by providing crucial context for some of the most significant acts of black performance in the mid-twentieth century and by firmly rooting black performance studies within the even broader field of black diasporic studies. In the first chapter, Gaines considers the political nature of jazz singer Nina Simone’s onstage performances in the 1960s. In chapter two, he probes the plays of Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo and illustrates the complexities involved in the production of dramatic work meant to express a singular African identity. Gaines then directs his attention towards Günther Kaufmann and finds that the black German actor “problematizes the representation of national identity” on screen (96). In the final chapter, he illustrates the ways black drag queen Sylvester bolstered the Cockettes’ transgressive performances. In each of these contexts, with their strong transnational connective tissue, Gaines finds that black performance troubles hegemonic discourses surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and nationhood. Transnational black performance signifies black diaspora even as it disrupts audience expectations and political rhetoric. The geographic locations that comprise Gaines’s investigation include the United States, Ghana, and West Germany. Individually, these sites represent central nodes in studies of black diasporic cultural circulation, including those that take the current African migration crisis into consideration. Their triangulation here is significant. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left unites these various strains of black studies and makes strong claims for why they should be brought to the forefront simultaneously. In doing so, Gaines maintains that the interplay between these three sites demonstrates the way the theorization and performance of blackness in the United States acted as a touchstone for black diasporic subjects and white audiences the world over. In order to ground his project within the broader field of performance studies, Gaines responds to Afro-pessimist critiques of Marxian analyses à la Frank Wilderson. Gaines’s investigation of Nina Simone’s radical performance work can be considered alongside other recent contributions to the field of black studies, including Shana Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora . And yet, few critics besides Gaines have attempted to tease out the Brechtian implications of Nina Simone’s stagecraft. While the relationship between African Americans and Ghanaians during the 1960s might be well known, thanks to the work of scholars like Kevin Gaines, the work of Ghanaian playwrights like Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo remain relatively unexamined. Furthermore, Gaines investigates the hypervisibility of blackness in West Germany during the late 1960s and early 1970s by way of Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann’s work with famed director Werner Fassbinder. Gaines’s afterword also takes contemporary Venice into consideration through his critique of the 2015 Venice Biennale and reminder that even in rarefied spaces, performance is always political. The result of these transnational case studies is nothing less than a reframing of the terms by which we understand the 1960s, the Nixon era, and our current political reality. Within this complex schema, the chapter entitled “The Cockettes, Sylvester, and Performance as Life” initially appears to be an outlier. A predominately white performance group who were active in the 1970s, the Cockettes push the boundaries of Gaines’s study regarding both time span and subject matter. But the chapter works precisely because it is excessive. The Cockettes’ inclusion allows Gaines to underscore the temporal excesses of the 1960s as well as the ubiquity of blackness on the American stage, even in its most marginalized outcroppings. The performative interventions of black drag queen Sylvester provide ample food for thought here. Gaines delineates the contrapuntal position of Sylvester against the political nuances of the San Francisco drag scene, with its origins in Brechtian forms of street theatre. Given the growing popularity of television shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and increasing mainstream interest in drag performance, this chapter is perhaps a much-needed reminder of the black presence in politicized drag work. Gaines brings liminal performances of blackness like Sylvester’s into the critical fold while paying particular attention to the work of black feminist critics. His methodology involves a consciously political citational practice. For instance, Gaines claims that his first chapter contributes to the “emerging field of Nina Simone Studies” (22) and references critics like Daphne Brooks. Saidiyah Hartman’s Lose Your Mother helps to frame the second chapter. Tina Campt’s Other Germans is a notable influence on chapter three. In this way, Gaines’s work provides an essential model for advanced students and scholars in the field. Gaines is especially concerned with how radical black performance challenges the limits of visuality or turns the certainty that often attends visuality on its head. As such, music and the political potential of sound in the abstract to express blackness in radical ways become focal points. He argues that “music has served as a cultural and formal context that supports the kinds of multiplicitous expressions” (193) he sees in 1960s performance. So, for instance, Gaines insists on Nina Simone’s “quadruple consciousness, a dexterous deployment of authorship, presence, and voice that exceeded the prohibitions of race and gender while performing those terms” (23). Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left will appeal to scholars who recognize the impact of sound on performance, or Sound Studies writ large, as well as musicality at its baseline. Malik Gaines’s position as both a practitioner and a scholar lend a unique depth to this study, applying black performance theories and techniques to twentieth-century cultural objects across a transnational framework. His text reveals a striking sensitivity to the subtle frequencies on which black performance operates and is an important addition to the expanding black performance studies canon. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Kristin Moriah Grinnell College Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.