Search Results

Michael Osinski Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Michael Osinski By Published on May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF September 3, 2017. It’s the day Twin Peaks: The Return reached its gut-wrenching conclusion and seared a hole in my heart and my brain. I’d seen my fair share of David Lynch’s work before. I knew how impossible it can be to explain the narratives and describe the visuals. Lynch himself has resisted attaching words to his work, stating “A film should stand on its own. It’s absurd if a filmmaker needs to say what a film means in words.”[i] I still haven’t found the words to describe the feeling I had watching that finale, but at that moment, I knew I had to make a piece of theatre that recreated that feeling for others. Almost exactly two years later, I presented Red Lodge, Montana [ii], co-created with an ensemble of performers and Twin Peaks enthusiasts, at the 2019 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Billed as an unapologetic love letter to David Lynch, the production felt like a live-action nightmare where audience members traveled through the abandoned locker room of an old South Philly high school. One reviewer called it “a bizarro fusion of indolence, violence, nudity, sex, and dance.”[iii] I’m proud of the work we did. I also know that co-creating, directing, and producing a site-specific theatre piece in a found space took its toll on me (and my bank account). So in the interest of preserving the mental and physical health of other creative artists out there, I’m sharing some of the lessons I learned from the experience. (Unfortunately none of these lessons involve fundraising. That remains a mystery to me.) Lesson 1: Start with structure. Contrary to popular belief, theatre artists don’t really create something from nothing. There has to be a spark, an impetus, a burning question. And if you want to stay organized and foster greater creativity, you need scaffolding. You need Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s third “basic building block for devised work” – structure.[iv] This may seem antithetical to Lynch’s aesthetic. As a director he insists “the only way we make heads or tails of [life] is through intuition” and believes “there’s an ocean of consciousness inside each of us…an ocean of solutions.”[v] But how do you communicate that to a team full of artists who aren’t swimming in your own personal ocean? Saying that I wanted to create an homage to David Lynch helped, but it didn’t provide enough of a framework. Especially if we wanted to create more than just a carbon copy of what he’s already made. So I asked my team to generate a list of “ingredients.” We watched Lynch’s film and television work and took note of all the elements that recur throughout his oeuvre. This established our scaffolding and gave us a checklist to return to as we made the piece. Do we have a few excruciatingly slow and drawn-out conversations? Check. Are we featuring music and costuming from a bygone era (usually the 1950s)? Check. Have we staged any moments of terrifying yet unexplained imagery? You tell me. (See Figure 1.) Figure 1: (l-r) Terrill Braswell, Amanda Schoonover, Geremy Webne-Behrman, and Megan Edelman in RED LODGE, MONTANA . Scenery by Dylan FitzSimons. Lighting by Sydney Norris. Sound by Daniel Ison. Stage Management by Eleanor Safer. Photo by Emilie Krause (Glass Canary Photography). I also brought back my “hybrid method” for inventing characters. I start almost every devising process by looking at a canonical text, because it gives us a narrative model to draw from. In this case I chose Bus Stop by William Inge. When the time came to build characters, I asked each actor to select 1 character from Bus Stop and 1 character from Lynch’s work and form a hybrid character from the two. They would list specific traits and circumstances of each character interchangeably – using a questionnaire I’ve borrowed from The Viewpoints Book [vi] – and mold their character around these attributes. These profiles provided the foundation for composition work, where each cast member created a short movement-filled piece to introduce us to their character. The pieces then fueled a series of structured improvisations with preset given circumstances and objectives. Many of these improvs turned into scripted scenes, but even the ones that didn’t make it to the final script helped to establish the mythology for our fictionalized town of Red Lodge. I wasn’t the only one who found this structure useful. Performer and co-creator Kelly McCaughan told me that “limiting what can happen within an improv helped flesh out something specific each time. And being able to pitch our ideas within that structured prompt created a really collaborative room.”[vii] Lesson 2: Stay flexible. Found spaces always sound like a cool idea, until you have to stage a show in one. When I first met with the representative from Bok Building in South Philadelphia, she showed me an old dusty room FILLED with rows and rows of lockers and benches. Talk about creativity coming from limitations! My brain instantly filled with images of actors hiding inside lockers for dramatic reveals, scampering in between the rows to frighten audience members, and even climbing atop the lockers to act out scenes above the audience’s heads. (See Figure 2.) Figure 2: The former girls’ locker room at Bok in South Philadelphia in early 2019. Photo by Michael Osinski. The next time I saw the space, almost all the lockers had been inexplicably removed. (See Figure 3.) Figure 3: The same former girls’ locker room at Bok in South Philadelphia in summer 2019. Photo by Michael Osinski. A big empty room felt less like limitless possibility and more like a huge hindrance to me. How could I create the same locations and effects without constructing a set? I had to adjust. I itemized the physical attributes and environmental effects I needed for each scene and figured out how to use the existing architecture to achieve it. For instance, we had originally envisioned one drug-fueled scene taking place on a rooftop. We were going to create a small plywood supported staging area across the tops of several banks of lockers. But without those lockers, I had no way of achieving this. I knew the scene needed some height, and it couldn’t take place in a room with doors and walls. The space had to feel liminal or transitory. Suddenly our rooftop scene became a stairwell scene. (See Figure 4.) Figure 4: (l-r) Amanda Schoonover and Kelly McCaughan in RED LODGE, MONTANA . Scenery by Dylan FitzSimons. Lighting by Sydney Norris. Sound by Daniel Ison. Stage Management by Eleanor Safer. Photo by Emilie Krause (Glass Canary Photography). We had also staged a rather intimate and claustrophobic scene involving full nudity and demonic possession. (It is David Lynch, after all.) But how do you make an audience feel trapped in a big empty room? I decided to stage this scene in the room’s entryway, with only 3 instruments lighting the space, and the EXIT sign and double doors in full view. It allowed the audience to crowd around a small area, and it created a terrifying moment when one of the characters pounded on the doors to escape. (See Figure 5.) Figure 5: (l-r) Josh Hitchens and Geremy Webne-Behrman in RED LODGE, MONTANA . Scenery by Dylan FitzSimons. Lighting by Sydney Norris. Sound by Daniel Ison. Stage Management by Eleanor Safer. Photo by Emilie Krause (Glass Canary Photography). Performer and co-creator Amanda Schoonover remembers another adjustment we made: “David Lynch often has characters that simply disappear from a scene, and we were stumped about how to make that happen without the magic of film. Once we got into the space, we discovered there were all these pillars that actors could hide behind, so with a little lighting trick, they could simply appear or disappear. It was always satisfying to hear the audience gasp when an actor seemed to appear out of thin air.”[viii] Staying flexible ultimately saved the production. If I had forced my original staging on the found space, it would have been disastrous. In true David Lynch fashion, I had to listen to what the walls were telling me. Lesson 3: Stand in your audience’s shoes. No instruction manual exists for understanding David Lynch’s work. But when you’re leading three dozen audience members through a promenade style fringe piece in a dark echoey room, you gotta make a few signs. The work itself should terrify the audience, not the possibility of running face-first into a concrete pillar. You can’t throw your audience into your deep ocean without a flotation device – you have to take care of them. I put more focus on logistics than I ever have for a piece I’ve made – at times I felt more like an engineer than an artist. Yet I didn’t want to mar the phenomenological experience of walking through a Lynch-inspired nightmare. How could I physically guide audience members in a way that kept them tuned into the show and still blended with our existing aesthetic (i.e. without turning on a bunch of harsh overhead fluorescents)? The answer was threefold. To map out a clear path, we did what any college dorm resident would do – we strung up holiday lights. It sounds silly, but it really has become human instinct to “follow the light.” Every time one scene ended, a new strand of lights would turn on and direct audience members to a different section of the room. Did we rely on a super clumsy system of turning on and off power strips throughout the room to make this happen? We sure did. (See Lesson 2: Stay flexible.) Because at the end of the day, no theatrical experience – no matter how thrilling – is worth risking a lawsuit. Even my years as a tour guide at college did not prepare me for how difficult it is to herd a group of people through a dimly lit medium-sized room. To keep people on the path and position them for maximum visibility, we employed “docents.” We asked two of our artist friends to dress up as two peripheral yet enigmatic Twin Peaks characters – The Giant and Lil[ix] – and communicate with gestures to physically (and mysteriously) walk the audience through the nightmare. Finally, to give our audience some narrative guidance, we filmed a series of short teaser videos[x] that introduced the characters and acted as a prologue. We released the videos weekly leading up to the opening performance to build anticipation and to guide our audience without providing too many answers. The world we’d created made total sense to us, and we wanted people to be weirded out, but we also wanted them to care about what (and whom) they were watching. Lesson 4: Trust your gut and your collaborators. There’s no such thing as a doubt-free creative process. I think we asked ourselves “Is this any good?”, and “Will anyone like this?”, and of course “Will this make any sense?” countless times. In a weird way, though, embracing the work of an artist like David Lynch gave us some freedom. He never worries about whether his work will transmit a singular message to the audience. He’s just translating the ideas inside his head to the screen. When Lynch made Blue Velvet , the ideas came to him “in fragments…it was red lips, green lawns, and the song – Bobby Vinton’s version of ‘ Blue Velvet .’ The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.”[xi] He didn’t question what it all meant. He trusted his intuition. I wondered, can we apply this attitude or approach to other work? Can we free ourselves of this burden when we’re creating something with more verisimilitude? We are making art after all, and art is neither good nor bad. It exists for others to appreciate, critique, reject, embrace, dissect. As much as we may have fretted over the narrative logic of our piece, we made something that made sense to us. We created art for others to interpret. And as long as we’re taking care of our audience and being socially responsible in our storytelling, why should we fret so much over how others will interpret the work? I can’t say that I’ve succeeded at this yet. I still find myself fretting. But I’d like to think there’s an answer here somewhere. As theatre artists we can choose to embrace or deny the increased digitization of our world. If we embrace it, we risk losing the immediacy of a live in-person experience. If we deny it, we ignore our future audiences. I propose we strive for something in the middle. I believe creating a site-specific film-inspired theatrical experience like Red Lodge, Montana accomplishes this. I also know crafting experiences like this can be difficult. I hope these lessons encourage you, inspire you, and prevent you from making too many mistakes…or at least from drowning in your own creative ocean. References [i] David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (New York: TarcherPerigree, 2016), 19.[ii] https://www.findtheantidote.org/red-lodge-montana [iii] Kathryn Osenlund. “ RED LODGE, MONTANA (The Antidote): 2019 Fringe review.” Phindie. http://phindie.com/20057-20057-red-lodge-montana-the-antidote-2019-fringe-review/ (accessed October 21, 2022). [iv] Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005), 154. [v] Lynch, 45. [vi] Bogart and Landau, 129. [vii] Kelly McCaughan, e-mail message to author, March 8, 2023. [viii] Amanda Schoonover, e-mail message to author, March 8, 2023. [ix] https://tinyurl.com/yckx4hfe [x] https://vimeo.com/showcase/6242247 [xi] Lynch, 23. [xii] https://www.michael-osinski.com/ [xiii] https://open.spotify.com/show/6aWe8gTL3tFH2b6Fwve6ul?si=5827da219b474b70 [xiv] https://www.youtube.com/@thisonegoesto11podcast Footnotes About The Author(s) MICHEAL OSINSKI [xii] (he/him) directs theatre because he likes solving puzzles. He manages his self-producing collective The Antidote, and he was co-founder and Producing Artistic Director of Flashpoint Theatre Company in Philadelphia. He received his MFA in Directing from The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, and he was a Drama League Directing Fellow in 2014. He is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance at St. Lawrence University, where he will devise another show in Fall 2023, and he produces and co-hosts a music podcast called This One Goes to 11 (on Spotify[xiii] and YouTube[xiv]). 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 Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Phoebe Rumsey Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Phoebe Rumsey By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical by Kevin Winkler offers educators, students, and Bob Fosse enthusiasts a history of the choreographer’s early life, creative influences, apprenticeships, and Broadway and film successes. Winkler interrogates how Fosse’s passionate and often tumultuous relationship with collaborators, personal partners, and the musical theatre genre, in general, came together to create his indelible style and legacy. Big Deal is part of the Broadway Legacies series edited by Geoffrey Block that includes Carol Oja’s Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War and Todd Decker’s Show Boat : Performing Race in an American Musical . Big Deal is the second book in the series devoted to a choreographer, the first being Agnes de Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance by Kara Anne Gardner. Prior to his twenty-year engagement as a curator and archivist for the New York Public Library, Winkler had a career as a professional dancer, and he danced in Fosse’s 1982 Broadway revival of Little Me . His bodily understanding of dance and keen attention to historical detail bring a fresh perspective to Fosse’s work and illuminate why Fosse privileged the dancing body above all else. To achieve this analysis, Winkler’s book traces Fosse’s career chronologically across three trajectories: the transformation of the Broadway musical over forty years, the women in his life and their influence on his aesthetic, and “the social and political climate of his era” (2). The first chapter provides an overview of Fosse’s dance training and early performance career that shaped his style. Winkler succinctly explains, “While his later work could display touches of sentimentality and pathos, it was the triangulation of vaudeville, burlesque, and nightclubs that formed the basis of Fosse’s aesthetic DNA” (17). Chapter two encapsulates Fosse’s apprenticeships as a Broadway choreographer, including his work and relationship with Jerome Robbins. Winkler is very insightful in this area as he details how Robbins watched over Fosse and, in turn, Fosse took on this role later in his career with other emerging choreographers. In chapter three, Winkler analyzes how Damn Yankees (1955) and Redhead (1959) established Fosse and his lifetime muse Gwen Verdon as forces on Broadway. He then charts Fosse’s quest for total control over a production through discussions of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), Sweet Charity (1966), and Pippin (1972) in the next two chapters. The book then moves to an investigation of Fosse’s work as a film director. Winkler claims “film is the ideal medium for Fosse’s perfectionism” (149) and supports this argument by describing, from chapter six and onward, how Fosse worked to incorporate the choreographic on camera. Winkler devotes considerable time to probing the physicality of the bizarre choices that Fosse made (i.e. abrupt moves from reality to fantasy and up-close camera footage of open-heart surgery) to create All That Jazz (1979), a film of his life story loosely disguised by name changes. The book closes with the titular show Big Deal (1986) and the legacy that Fosse leaves behind. It is in these final chapters where Winkler explicitly articulates one of the main interventions of the book that has been simmering throughout—how the dancers Fosse worked with, such as Gwen Verdon, Ann Reinking, and Chet Walker, are the embodiment of his work. Winkler contends that, for all of Fosse’s tangible achievements and awards, the Fosse style is ultimately about the bodily repertoire and how the technique has been passed down through generations of dancers. Fosse’s legacy consists of “the dancers who hold within their bodies his unique choreographic language” (275). Overall, the text is well written and thoroughly researched. Winkler’s description and analysis of Fosse’s choreography and creative strategies are the book’s key contributions, particularly given the minimal amount of scholarship that delves deeply into what dance is doing in musical theatre. By providing a glossary of dance terms in the preface of the book, Winkler makes a concerted effort to model a method of critically examining dance in musical theatre. Some moments in the body of the text when defining terms, such as “the concept musical” or “Brechtian” are slightly abrupt but much appreciated. There are many backstage tidbits sprinkled throughout the entire book, but Winkler is at his best when exploring Fosse’s choreographic process through descriptions of the body in motion. For instance, he describes the dancers in the now famous “Hey! Big Spender” number in Sweet Charity as “Undulating and lunging in all directions, they travel like a giant Medusa across the stage before breaking out for a final exhortation” (120). Pointedly, Winkler identifies how Fosse borrowed, revised, and tweaked previous movements as part of his process and, through this sense of repurposing over innovation, the Fosse style solidifies. At his most critical, Winkler explains Fosse’s singular vision: “That he was not aware of, or chose to ignore, innovations by his peers that he now claimed for himself made Fosse appear disengaged from what was happening elsewhere in the theatre” (268). Towards the end of the book, Winkler alleges that Fosse cast dancers regardless of race or ethnicity, an unusual practice for the time. Though this topic is not a major throughline to the book, it is worthy of mention in this current era of attempts to diversify casts. This book will be helpful to students, researchers, and educators seeking to trace the historical chronology of choreographers into director-choreographers. For scholars of musical theatre, this book rethinks Fosse’s dedication “to redefine not only how a dancing chorus looked but how it functioned” (73). Big Deal also joins the larger conversation that surrounds theatre about the collaborative process and the artistic consequences of turning away from collaboration in search of ultimate control. References Footnotes About The Author(s) PHOEBE RUMSEY The CUNY Graduate Center Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Derek Miller Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage On Bow and Exit Music Derek Miller By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF To begin at the end: actors land in a tableau; lights fade; curtain falls. In the American musical theatre, a final chord sounds in the orchestra. End of play. But not end of production, nor end of performance. For the curtain rises again; lights come back on; actors pose for their bows. And, in many musicals, the orchestra accompanies this whole sequence. This ultimate, non-diegetic musical moment stamps indelibly the fate of some shows. [1] Recalling the industry run-through of The Music Man , the show’s creator Meredith Willson noted that curtain call as particularly memorable, a sign of good things to come for his masterpiece: The piano started “Seventy-Six Trombones.” Out came the dancers playing their pantomime trombones, swinging cross that stage as proud as you’ll ever wanta see anybody be. That’s when the audience burst into spontaneous rhythmic applause as though cued to do so—as it has happened with every audience from that day forward. (Walter Kerr described it a year later in a Saturday Evening Post article on the theatre, saying that “the rhythmic hand-clapping which greeted the finale of The Music Man on opening night was the only time I have ever felt a single irresistible impulse sweep over an entire audience and stir it to a demonstration that could not possibly have been inhibited.”) [2] While that show’s curtain call aroused an unusual level of fervor in its audiences, Willson’s story exposes the importance of “bow music,” the music that plays while the cast takes their bows, and “exit music,” which plays as the audience leaves the theater. This essay explores the role of bow and exit music in the American musical. Bow and exit music—arriving as they do at the liminal moment when the preceding narrative gives way to everyday life—help audiences interpret the musical as an artistic phenomenon and encourage a particular audience relationship to the show as a commercial product. Performing this dual function, bow and exit music resemble film and television music for title sequences, end credits, and trailers. As a recent essay on that topic summarized, “Title and credit sequences link the inside and outside of fictional texts, the acknowledgement of the real-world origin of a film with its story and storyworld. In doing so, they also connect the institutional and economic reality of a film to its story.” [3] As a form of popular mass entertainment, American musicals, like film and television, must always negotiate “economic reality.” Indeed, the strain between the twin domains of art/commerce is audible in much research on the American musical. [4] Bow and exit music announce with particular poignancy the musical’s struggle for both cultural significance and financial success. The pages that follow provide an interpretive framework for understanding how bow and exit music work in the musical theatre. First, I consider how bow and exit music both sustain and disrupt extant theories of the non-musical curtain call. I then explore productions that use bow and exit music to reinforce or inflect the preceding narrative, either by emphasizing a show’s theme or by reshaping how audiences interpret characters. Shifting to commerce, I attend to shows that rely on bow and exit music to create economic demand. Finally, I argue that bow and exit music allow us better to recognize the strangeness of the creative labor that makes and performs musicals. Throughout the essay, my readings of individual shows model how we may better understand the American musical’s attempts to reconcile art and commerce when we listen carefully to the musical’s final moments. Studying Liminal Performance Events It is hard to know both where bow and exit music come from and how frequently they were heard in any given period of musical theatre history. The practice’s origins remain entirely obscure, though Michael Pisani’s herculean research into music from the nineteenth-century theater suggests that recovering this history may be possible. [5] Available evidence suggests that, at least since the so-called Golden Age (roughly 1940 to 1965), bow and exit music have been as normal a part of the American musical as choruses and eleven-o’clock numbers. For the analyses that follow, I examined 34 piano-vocal scores for musicals that opened between 1930 and 1984, among which only two (Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel [1945] and Allegro [1947]) included neither bow nor exit music. Because most scores are available only by rental from licensing agencies, my survey favored successful shows by well-known composers, that is, works that the major university libraries I consulted saw fit to purchase for their collections. I expanded that archive beyond published scores to include printed production scripts, as well as two film recordings. It is not impossible that my haphazard sample overestimates bow and exit music’s importance. However, given that bow and exit music derive from standard Broadway production practices (as I explain below), my sample likely provides an adequate view of bow and exit music’s normal place in the American musical theater. Indeed, while no archive speaks fully to the performances it documents, bow and exit music are so completely artifacts of production—that is, they come out of such particular production circumstances—that wherever bow and exit music appear in the archive, they most likely sounded in performance. I hazard that my archival explorations underestimate both the practice’s prevalence and the nuance with which it has been deployed. Why then, despite this prevalence, have these musics received so little scholarly (or even lay) attention? For one thing, bow and exit music exemplify liminal performance elements, elements that occur at the border between the theatrical event as such and the broader performance event that encloses it. [6] Other musical examples of such liminal performance events include overtures and entr’actes. Non-musical practices such as curtain speeches and intermissions fit into this category. Bow music, of course, underscores the paradigmatic liminal event in the theater, the curtain call, during which performers offer themselves to the audience for recognition and applause. Critical attention to curtain calls, while scant given the practice’s ubiquity, acknowledges the practice as a peculiar mélange of the semiotic field of the theatrical illusion and the phenomenal field of the performance. On the one hand, curtain calls provide finality, ending the play and the theatrical event. Yet the curtain call, as part of the performance event, also remains susceptible to audience interpretation; we cannot help but “read” the curtain call and its meanings just as we read the play. For Terence Hawkes, the curtain call thus manages an important kind of double “closure,” referring both to the audience’s ability to read a play as a meaningful semiotic system (to “close with” a play) and to the final moment of the play itself (“closure” as in “the end”). The curtain call has particular force, according to Hawkes, on the modern stage, which invites the audience to interpret everything they see and encourages a state of “total semiotization” in which there exists no “event, no matter how gratuitous or unsought for. . . that a modern audience would be unable to close with.” [7] In other words, Hawkes believes that the circle of meaningful representation in theatre now encompasses any event that takes place in and around a performance, which includes the curtain call, despite that practice’s traditional closure “to critical discussion.” Moreover, Hawkes suggests that curtain calls, far from signifying only unconsciously and accidentally, often reflect explicitly on the semiotic system that preceded them. “Actors rehearse” their bows, Hawkes notes; they circumscribe their behavior to suit the moment. Having just played Hamlet, an actor will not “laugh or caper about as a man might who has scored (in the soccer fashion) a success.” In short, the theatrical event that precedes the curtain call limits what performers can do in the curtain call itself. The curtain call represents, then, not a moment after the play so much as the play’s “edge,” which appears to the audience immediately before the play’s ultimate disappearance. [8] Director William Ball emphasizes that theatrical traditions and actors’ egos play their own crucial role in staging a proper curtain call. For instance, Ball insists that curtain calls be kept short and also create a natural dramatic arc by inspiring a crescendo of applause. He identifies the curtain call as a “disciplined ritual,” in which performers should bow simply, accepting audience praise “with ritual gratitude.” [9] Ball’s emphatic reuse of the word “ritual” underlines the curtain call’s obedience to codes of behavior as strict as those that mark the performance of the play itself. Moreover, to actors, the curtain call adds an essential layer of meaning that Hawkes leaves out. The order in which actors bow and the strength of the audience’s applause reveal to the actor the relative success of her performance. This fact challenges a director staging the bows for, say, Romeo and Juliet , in which Mercutio’s performance has likely inspired more audience adoration than Romeo’s. Ball recommends directors bring the two lovers out together after Mercutio, thus ensuring the necessary crescendo. [10] In determining the order of the curtain call, the director gives a “profoundly significant signal of approval” to the actor. [11] Doing right by performers when staging the curtain call influences the quality of an actor’s performance: “if the actor feels betrayed, he won’t act well.” [12] Ball thus reverses Hawkes’ line of causality between play and curtain call. For Hawkes, the performance determines the actor’s possible behavior during the curtain call. Ball emphasizes rather that the curtain call’s staging affects the actor’s ego and, therefore, the quality of the actor’s performance. Bert States, like Hawkes, recognizes that character persists during the curtain call, “remain[ing] in the actor, like a ghost.” [13] Yet States also stresses that the bowing actor performs not only herself and the character, but also her vulnerability as a performer, particularly by revealing the residual effects of her labor. In States’s words, the actor cannot, “refuse to display his ‘wounds’: the paint, the perspiration, the breathlessness, all the traces of having been through the role—or the role, like a fever, having been through him. Even the trace of fatigue . . . is in order because it suggests that this was hard work.” [14] These theorists of the curtain call all agree that the curtain call means something in relation to the play that it ends. They view the curtain call as a multi-layered performance that inflects the quality of the theatrical event that preceded it, reflects the tenor of the dramatic proceedings, and offers the labor of performance for the audience’s consideration. At this “seam” between the “fiction of the play” and the “fiction of manners,” audiences and actors alike return to the real world through this ritual that sews together reality and dream. [15] As Nicholas Ridout summarizes, the theater’s “machinery of representation. . . still generat[es] sparks of representation that contaminate. . . a straight face-to-face encounter” between actors and audience. [16] The curtain call, far from a merely pro forma theatrical ritual, still shimmers with meaning accrued from and borne by the just-concluded performance. All of the elements that these writers—Hawkes, Ball, States, and Ridout—recognize in the curtain call resonate, too, in bow and exit music. Yet bow and exit music, far from merely duplicating the above functions, retune the way audiences interpret the production, receive performers’ labor, and transition from the play back into the rest of their lives. Typology To understand how precisely bow and exit music expand the rich phenomenal experience of the non-musical curtain call, we must first address the fact that bow and exit music are, as a rule, not original musical compositions. Rather, they repeat (sometimes with variations) music that the audience has already heard in the show. Bow and exit music thus present a fundamentally different interpretive problem than the related practice of end credit music in film and television. End credits for today’s prestige television programs often employ a popular song that shapes how audiences interpret the episode that has just ended. [17] But that song only rarely features in the episode itself. These “novel musical postfaces,” as musicologist Annette Davison names them, speak from entirely outside the show, offering an external, sometimes jarring, commentary. [18] Musicals, by contrast, provide their own musical material for the curtain call. As post-show underscoring, bow and exit music may not be part of the theatrical performance, but the songs they rehearse were part of that performance. Bow and exit music thus also diverge from historical uses of music at the end of a performance. Music, of course, plays an important role in most Western theatrical traditions dating back to Greek tragedy. Many theatres use song (and sometimes dance) to close an evening’s entertainments. Such songs may be chosen for their energy, to provide the audience with an extra dose of good cheer on their journey home. Bow and exit music are often selected for the same purpose. But where other traditions draw on popular music from outside the show, bow and exit music are composed from internal musical ideas. They do not simply extend the performance event by providing extra music, but rather extend the music of the theatrical event into the performance event. The musical relationship between bow and exit music and the musical itself takes four basic forms. The first type of bow and exit music is no music whatsoever. Porgy & Bess , Carousel , Allegro , and West Side Story include no bow music in their printed scores. [19] These shows follow closely the operetta or opera tradition, in which, after the final chord, one neither can nor should say more, musically. The second and third types (the most popular) feature a single song for the bow music, often a show’s trademark number. The song can appear either with lyrics or without. A charming example of a single song with lyrics comes from Kiss Me, Kate , in which the cast sings “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” as they bow, but with new a couplet: “So tonight just recite to your matie / ‘Kiss me, Kate, Kiss me, Kate, Kiss me, Katie.’” [20] Babes in Arms ends with a full cast version of “Where or When”; Cabaret ‘s cast bows to a company rendition of the title song; and Damn Yankees closes with everyone singing about “Heart.” [21] Alternatively—the third category—the single song might appear without lyrics, in a purely orchestral guise. This is the case for Guys and Dolls , in which a reprise of the title song serves first as the finale, sung by the entire company. Composer and lyricist Frank Loesser then repurposes the same number for the bows. The score notes simply: “Repeat Orch[estra] only for Curtain calls.” [22] My Fair Lady harps on “I Could Have Danced All Night”; The Music Man trumpets “Seventy-six Trombones”; Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music circles back to “Night Waltz I” from the Entr’acte. [23] Finally, some shows feature a medley, as Sondheim’s Follies does, with bow music that includes fragments of “Who’s That Woman?” and “Beautiful Girls.” [24] Funny Girl ‘s bows take place mostly to the rousing “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” but transition to the ballad “People” near the end. [25] Summarizing bow music’s four general categories, we have: none; single song with lyrics; single song without lyrics; and medley. Each of those forms encourages a different array of interpretations, as the short examples above hint. Thus, the choice among these types, as well as the specific songs chosen, reflect and inflect our understanding of a musical. Representational Strategies Single Songs and Themes Let us consider now how bow music sustains the fundamental dichotomy of all curtain calls, that between the representational apparatus of the text and the phenomenal experience of the performance. The simplest way to bring closure to the theatrical event is simply to restate the central theme of the musical, usually with a single song. While, as I explain below, productions pick single songs for non-artistic reasons, too, a well-chosen single song can neatly reinforce the intellectual and emotional experience of the play. For example, the single song without lyrics accompanying Fiddler on the Roof ‘s curtain call is, unsurprisingly, “Tradition.” [26] The same song opens the show, serves as the show’s thematic center, and represents a natural choice for the bows. Yet the choice of an upbeat and rousing final tune can also work against the rest of the play. Man of La Mancha ‘s “The Impossible Dream” became that show’s popular standard, yet the title song appears as the bow music, selected perhaps for its driving rhythm. That choice is particularly odd given that the play’s final moments depict Cervantes and his servant’s departure to face the Inquisition, while the cast sings “Impossible Dream.” The driving bombast of the title song, repeated as the bow music, tramples “Impossible Dream”’s memorable rising melody and drowns out the play’s stoic and moving final strains. [27] The show’s creators might well have heeded one Broadway music director’s warning that the selection of bow and exit music “should be made with regard to the audience’s experience of the show.” [28] For some concept musicals of the 1970s, the single song’s emphatic closure was itself a dangerous trap. Unlike Golden Age musicals with clear resolutions, concept musicals often thrive on uncertainty and open-endedness. Nonetheless, many of those same shows sought to retain ties to the earlier tradition and devised new strategies for using bow and exit music to reinforce their shows’ thematic opposition to closure. Consider, for instance, A Chorus Line , one of the finest examples of the musical as meta-theater. The show’s subject—the life of a Broadway chorister—organized and inspired the show’s creative process and determined the musical’s narrative structure. Strikingly, the show maintains its vertiginous metatheatrical sensibility in the curtain call, or rather, in the lack thereof. As the playscript notes: “Lights fade on ‘Rockette’ kick line [at the end of ‘One’] . . . . After singers cut off, orchestra continues vamp phrase, very loud, until cut off cue from stage manager. There are no additional ‘Bows’ after this—leaving the audience with an image of a kick line that goes on forever.” [29] The stage directions suggest both the oppressive repetitiveness of the chorister’s life in the “very loud” vamp, and, in the refusal to offer the performers for bows, a gesture towards the absence of closure as the show’s meaning. That is, although an individual chorister’s career may end, the chorus line “goes on forever.” A Chorus Line acts against audience expectations about the curtain call-as-closure to deny the finality that the moment usually provides, while still working within the single-song paradigm described above. Pippin , like A Chorus Line , is a highly metatheatrical show. The printed piano-vocal score of Stephen Schwartz’s work includes No. 36 “Bows,” consisting of the opening number, “Magic to Do,” with lyrics. [30] Schwartz seems to have imagined traditional bows, in which the company closes by celebrating the illusions they had promised the audience at the start of the show. The play, however, ends in a state of extreme anxiety about the “magic” of play-making and needed a different kind of sonic curtain call. In director Bob Fosse’s ingenious staging—as captured on video of the touring production—the bows make meaning not through music, but through speech. [31] The play, a sort of bildungspiel about a sensitive son of King Charlemagne, takes place within the frame of a commedia troupe’s performance. Everything goes drastically awry in the musical’s final scene when Pippin declares his independence from the show. The Leading Player then strips Pippin, his wife Catherine, and their son of costumes, lights, and music. “Orchestra, pack up your fiddles. Get your horns. Let’s go,” orders the Lead Player. Then, to the pianist, who has been vamping throughout the last scene: “Take your damn hands off that keyboard.” The Leading Player then snarls at Pippin, “You try singing without music sweetheart.” Pippin complies, singing a few a cappella bars of the finale. Catherine speaks: CATHERINE Pippin … do you feel that you’ve compromised? PIPPIN No. CATHERINE Do you feel like a coward? PIPPIN No. CATHERINE How do you feel …? PIPPIN Trapped … but happy … (He looks from one to the other and smiles) which isn’t too bad for the end of a musical comedy. Ta-da! [32] The three then bow and “ the curtain comes down .” At this point, the curtain call is extremely fraught. The end of the play hinges on Pippin and his family’s escape from the mode of representation, a fact wryly acknowledged in Pippin’s reference to “a musical comedy” and in their bowing. If the production returned to the typical mode of closure for a musical, using Schwartz’s music cue for the bows, it would have evacuated the meaning that the show’s final moments had so carefully constructed. Fosse solved this problem by having the cast members announce each other with a handheld mic, to no musical accompaniment. Only after introducing the cast (and then the conductor) by name, does the company sing a reprise of “Magic to Do.” This curtain call thus has an unusual soundtrack: the names of the performers. Fosse’s choice emphasizes actors over characters and assumes a stance explicitly outside the make-believe world of the play. Pippin thus continues the tradition of the sonically scored curtain call, and even returns to the single-song format eventually. But by replacing music with the actors’ names, Fosse’s Pippin production closed in the metatheatrical spirit that pervaded the rest of the play and defined its ending. Medleys and Characters While Pippin uses sound during the curtain call to question the possibility of closure and to critique representation itself, other shows use music to reinforce the representational apparatus. Music, for instance, can act like a costume, a residue of character that clings to the actors as they receive the audience’s applause. The Harold Prince/Chelsea Theater version of Candide , for example, uses medley to rich effect, as the principals take their calls accompanied by songs associated with their characters. [33] The company bows first to “Battle Music,” Paquette and Maximillian to “Life is Happiness Indeed,” the Old Lady to the Spanish chorus from “Easily Assimilated,” Candide and Cunegonde to “Oh Happy We,” and Voltaire to “Bon Voyage.” The entire company then sings the latter song’s final chorus. Music works here almost leitmotivically; the songs index character. But unlike a truly Wagnerian leitmotiv, which metamorphoses along with the changing circumstances of its referent, the melodies in the bow music remain fixed to specific conceptions of character. The music therefore restricts how we read character while the actors bow. Consider particularly Candide and Cunegonde, who find redemption in their final musical number when they accept a simple, quotidian existence and embrace the nobility of work and family. When the couple bow, they do so to the music of their Act I duet, in which Candide’s dream of a modest life clashes with Cunegonde’s fantasies of wealth. Certainly, “Oh Happy We”’s elegant, spry melody makes livelier bow music than the hymn-like finale, “Make Our Garden Grow.” But the journey of these two characters to arrive at the finale’s insights washes away in the return of the former tune, which, even if we have forgotten the lyrics, evokes instability in its irregular meter. The choice of music suggests an actor playing Oedipus who, before bowing, washes the bloody makeup from his eyes and changes into a clean tunic. The bloodied costume that clings to a bowing actor signals the Oedipus who has been through a journey. But the choice of music for Candide and Cunegonde here erases their journey. The selection of “Oh Happy We” for the bows may very well be self-consciously ironic. Whether the production used this tune wittingly or not, the musical underscoring instructs us to read character in a particular way. A slightly different effect arises from the leitmotivic medley at the end of Trevor Nunn’s revival of Oklahoma! [34] The curtain call is a dance number, fully choreographed by Susan Stroman. First, the men’s and women’s choruses and featured dancers bow to “The Farmer and the Cowman,” then Ali Hakim to his solo number, “It’s a Scandal! It’s a Outrage!,” then Will and Ado Annie to “All er Nothin’.” Aunt Eller, then Curly and Laurey all bow to “Beautiful Mornin’,” a fittingly bucolic tune that was also the show’s finale. Before this final trio appears, the antagonist, Jud, bows to the bathetic duet he sings with Curly, “Poor Jud is Daid.” The noble theme, as sounded in William David Brohn’s orchestration for brass choir, underscores not Jud’s function as a melodramatic villain, but rather his humanity. Indeed, the song reminds us, if we recall the words, that Jud is dead, and that Oklahoma! resolves at the expense of Jud’s life. If Jud bowed instead to his aria, “Lonely Room,” a twitching, minor key number, full of clustering dissonances, our reception of that character during the bows would differ significantly. [35] Nunn adds one further flourish after all the actors have bowed: the entire company gathers in a group to reprise the choral section of the title song. As a quick key to the implications of this gesture, consider Andrea Most’s reading of Oklahoma! Most suggests that “anyone willing and able to perform the songs and dances can join” the community of a musical. [36] But neither Jud nor Ali Hakim is on stage to sing “Oklahoma” during the play’s wedding scene. Nunn’s decision to have them sing with the full company here thus suggests that these two characters, identified by Most as outsiders, are actually integral to the community, as I have argued elsewhere. [37] When Jud and Ali Hakim sing “Oklahoma” with the full company, the tensions necessary to create a stable community come to the fore. The audience recognizes that the community cannot make Oklahoma without the internal pressure provided by Jud and Ali Hakim. In the full company reprise of the title song during the bows, those two purported outsiders perform their true status as insiders. The Nunn production’s bow music helps us better interpret these characters. Bow music can thus be another residue of character, like a costume. Medleys prove particularly useful forms for this use of bow music because the medley allows the bow music to speak directly to each character by playing that character’s best-known tune. But by selecting a melody for each character, bow music cues specific aspects of a character, adding a last moment of semiotic representation that draws on and revises what we have experienced in the rest of the show. Commercial Strategies The original production of Oklahoma! , as captured in the score and in a published playscript, ends not with the now-famous title song, but with a full company reprise of the duet “People Will Say We’re in Love.” [38] In many ways, the song is a bizarre choice for the bows, being neither an anthem for the show nor for the company, but rather a private song for Curly and Laurey. Indeed, the number’s conceit is that the lovers should not show public affection because the community might comment on it. Yet during the bows, the whole cast sings it. Why? Because the production team expected the song to be a hit. This factor, the song’s potential economic afterlife, is the final—and perhaps most important—function of the musical curtain call. That is, bow music cues the audience to buy a cast album. In this respect, the musical theater’s bows differ significantly from those of non-musicals. As Nicholas Ridout observes, although all curtain calls “conclude a market transaction,” because the actual economics of the performance were “sorted out before the curtain even rose,” the curtain call’s applause (and the performers’ acceptance of applause) forms part of a gift economy. [39] But in many musicals, both musical motifs and commercial motives underscore this gift exchange between the audience and the actors. Bow music, for such musicals, answers the demands of commerce: which tune is most salable? Thus, Gershwin’s Girl Crazy wraps up with “Embraceable You” before jumping to “I’ve Got Rhythm”; Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey signs off with “I Could Write a Book” (in fairness, about half of the songs from that show have hit potential); and the same authors’ The Boys from Syracuse goes back to “Falling in Love with Love.” [40] I noted above that Funny Girl ’s curtain call music transitions from “Don’t Rain on My Parade” to “People.” I conjecture that the change in tune cued star Barbra Streisand’s entrance. Both songs became huge hits and remain associated with Streisand, but only “People” put Streisand on Billboard charts in 1964. Indeed, she had recorded that number as a single even prior to the show’s premiere. [41] This economic imperative is so insistent that the great production team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II refused to let bow music’s commercial potential pass them by, even in their shows without bow music. As noted above, some of the pair’s most high-minded works, such as South Pacific , The King and I , and The Sound of Music , follow the operatic tradition and include no bow music. Those shows do, however, include scored exit music, music to be played while the audience leaves the theater. Exit music does not distinguish itself enough from bow music formally to merit a separate discussion. It does, however, underline how much these last two musical numbers speak to the musical theater’s commercial interest. For if bow music, due to the presence of the actors, contains traces of its representational function alongside its economic imperatives, exit music seems to have given up representation entirely. Exit music exists almost solely to worm a catchy tune into the audience’s ear. One guide to writing a musical explains that exit music supplies “the flavour that will be left in the public’s ear, the one you want them to keep humming as they make their way to the lobby and perhaps buy on cassette or compact disc.” [42] Thus, South Pacific ’s exit music is “Some Enchanted Evening” (a number one hit for Perry Como in 1949), which leads into “Bali Ha’i”; The King and I features “Whistle a Happy Tune” and then “Shall We Dance”; and The Sound of Music essentially repeats the entr’acte with a medley of the title song, “Do Re Mi,” and “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” [43] In the 1950s, these shows were big business; the albums for all three sat high on the Billboard Charts at various times. [44] And although these three shows offer themselves for the audience’s approval in silence during the curtain call, accepting the purer gift relationship suggested by Ridout, they immediately assume an actively commercial stance as the audience files out of the theater. Thus, if a show’s representational economy recedes in the final moments of a performance event, through the use of bow and exit music, the economics of representation come to the fore. Musical Labor Exit music—and some bow music—thus faces as much towards the audience as towards the actors. That is, if one regards bow and exit music’s “sparks of representation” (to use Ridout’s phrase) as fundamentally coloring the fictional world of the play, the economic imperatives that undergird these musical numbers project outwards, into the audience, now figured as consumers. As I suggested above, the naked commercial desires in bow and exit music differ meaningfully from the ghosted economic exchange in the non-musical curtain call, as theorized by Ridout. But the dual model I have described thus far for bow and exit music remains fundamentally the same as that theorized by Hawkes, Ball, States, and Ridout. There remains one significant element of the curtain call hinted at by Ball and States that I have not yet addressed: labor. Unlike non-musical curtain calls, curtain calls underscored by bow and exit music conspicuously divide labor between two groups of performers: actors and musicians. The usually invisible labor of technicians, not to mention the persistent but forgotten labor of countless other creative and administrative performers (house staff, casting agents, etc.), always ghosts the curtain call, and merits consideration in the general theory of curtain calls. But the case of musicians who play bow and exit music differs from that of backstage workers accustomed to having their labor go unacknowledged. In other circumstances, musicians can and do accept their own applause, not only for non-theatrical performances, but even in other categories of music drama such as opera. Silent curtain calls, by allowing on- and off-stage performers to rest together, equalize the labor of instrumentalists and stage performers. [45] Such unity becomes more apparent when compared to musical theater’s bow and exit musics, which undermine the integration of music and drama in the so-called integrated musical by so clearly dividing the laboring performers into two camps. During musical curtain calls, the actors transition towards their leisure time while the musicians continue to work. And in shows with exit music, a particularly speedy actor may be out the theater door before the musicians have played their final chord. Just as William Ball suggests that the order in which actors bow can impact the quality of their performances, James H. Laster, advising aspiring music directors, suggests that exit music’s liminality also informs its quality. A “young, inexperienced orchestra may feel that the exit music is not important,” Laster warns. “But they need to be informed that their job is not finished until the cut-off at the last note of the exit music.” [46] Steve Suskin, author of a book on Broadway’s orchestrators, hears not boredom or inattention, but rather joy in exit music. Embedded among the musicians for a performance of Sweeney Todd , Suskin explained the end of the show thus: Everybody leaves; everybody except the orchestra, which plays the exit music. But it is a lighthearted group of musicians playing now: the drama is over, the tension is gone, the spell is broken. It is now merely music. [The music director] gives the final cutoff, the music ends with a crisp button from the brass, and we file out of the pit. [47] Whether the musicians celebrate bow and exit music as a moment for relaxed improvisation or let their minds wander at the seemingly unimportant (and often unhearable, beneath applause and chatter) end of a long performance, the fundamental disparity remains: musicians continue their labor in the musical theater well after other performers have ceased their own work. And what of the labor that goes into creating bow and exit music? A show’s orchestrator and her staff traditionally select and arrange the bow and exit music, often only in the last moments of a show’s rehearsal process. Yet, while the final decision about such music occurs quite late, the tunes are frequently among the first written for the show because bow and exit music often derive from among a production’s “utility” arrangements, arrangements made during the rehearsal period to fulfill practical needs in the rehearsal room. As Robert Russell Bennett, the dean of musical theater orchestrators, explains, “You take three, four, or five of the principal melodies and arrange them (with the tune in its original form complete in each case) so that, at the direction of the conductor, they may be played” by any section of the orchestra at any volume. [48] Such utility arrangements provide placeholder music for scene changes and underscoring, as well as the overture, entr’acte, and the “Chaser, Exit or Outmarch.” [49] Each of these categories later receives “special treatment” as the production takes final form and as the orchestrator has time to focus on them individually. In Bennett’s general narrative of an orchestrator’s work, however, that time might arrive only during the final few preview performances. [50] Two points here deserve underlining. First, in bow and exit music the orchestrator and team of arrangers announce themselves as essential members in the vast peripheral, artisanal workforce that crafts a Broadway show. [51] Their work on bow and exit music enhances both the artistic value of the show, when bow and exit music addresses the play’s representational apparatus, and the production’s economic value, when the exit music helps inspire sales of recordings. Second, bow and exit music, though the last elements of a show in performance, appear very early in the production process (at least, in their form as utilities). This fact strongly differentiates bow and exit music from the non-musical curtain call, which directors rarely think about until dress rehearsals. Although the production staff might settle on bow and exit music quite late in the process, the tunes from among which the staff chooses, far from being an afterthought, literally underscore the show’s rehearsals. The practice of relying on utilities codifies those melodies as essential to the entire structure of the show: they are the beginning (overture), middle (entr’acte), and end (exit music), well before the company sets the rest of the show. As a result, songs written early, songs that captured a relatively primitive conception of a show, occupy a large sonic space in the rehearsal period. [52] Fundamentally, utilities reveal how much work a show’s purely orchestral music does for the rest of a production. It is no coincidence that utilities are so called: they are, first and foremost, useful. Even if they later sound differently (or disappear entirely), they noisily—and, paradoxically, inconspicuously—underscore a significant portion of the production process. The utilities that become bow and exit music may end up as the musical last word or as an afterthought, but they are often also part of a show’s origin. Take a Bow This article has considered how bow and exit music affect our interpretation of the musical theater, and particularly how these musical practices amplify the often discordant relationship between the musical’s artistic and commercial aspirations. Like the curtain call that bow music underscores, bow and exit music occupy a strange border at the end of the theatrical event and near the end of the performance event. Despite a relatively narrow set of formal types available for bow and exit music, productions have used those musics to reinforce the show’s theme, to revise the audience’s understanding of character, and to promote the show’s commercial afterlife in recordings. A longer analysis of a specific show might benefit from exploring more the choice of songs (particularly in relationship to the overture), and the details of tempi (usually moderate to fast), meter (usually duple), or arrangement (usually the same key and orchestration as an earlier iteration). One might also consider bow and exit music as utilized by a particular orchestrator, composer, director, etc. With a more comprehensive data set, one might explore how bow music changes from era to era, or from subgenre to subgenre. As I hope this sketch of bow and exit music’s functions makes clear, musicals do not cease making meaning when the curtain falls, but actively and consciously continue to do so until the moment that an audience member steps out of hearing range of the orchestra. In other words, music performs in the musical theater longer than any other medium. And when we listen to that music, we might have to reinterpret some shows. To conclude with one example, consider The Pajama Game , the Richard Adler and Jerry Ross musical of 1954. In a recent history of the musical theater, Larry Stempel accuses George Abbott, the show’s original director and co-book writer, of avoiding politics. The plot concerns a struggle between management and labor at a pajama factory, a struggle that constrains the romance between a foreman and a shopworker/union leader. As Stempel notes, the show opened in the midst of the McCarthy hearings, a climate not amenable to claims for strong workers’ rights. Citing Abbott’s own statement denying any “propaganda” in the show, Stempel declares Pajama Game “militantly apolitical,” with “no serious intent of any kind.” [53] As far as most of the show goes, Stempel is right, the politics are tepid. Even the finale plays up romantic fun rather than politics, with a version of the title song that accompanies a fashion parade, culminating with the appearance of the leads, Babe and Sid wearing only a pajama top and bottom, respectively. That number also functions as a curtain call; the principals appear in the appropriate order. The entire company then sings the title song’s chorus. [54] This is charming, but, as Stempel complains of the entire show, emphasizes the romantic plots at the expense of the management-labor conflict. But then the company sings a different tune. They do not sing the ballad “Hey There,” a hit for Rosemary Clooney in 1954. [55] They do not sing the catchy love duet “There Once Was a Man.” They do not sing the jazzy “Steam Heat,” which featured iconic Bob Fosse choreography for Carol Haney. No, they sing none of the show’s hits. Rather, the entire cast sings a march in six-eight time, which, while certainly energetic, is not memorable enough to sell an album. They sing the show’s rallying labor cry: Seven and a half cents doesn’t buy a helluva lot, Seven and a half cents doesn’t mean a thing, But give it to me every hour Forty hours every week That’s enough for me to be Livin’ like a king. [56] This number’s return, at this moment, is a striking political gesture, a reminder that behind the play’s love stories lurks a serious economic struggle. This message, moreover, occupies what is traditionally the most overtly commercial moment in musical theater. We might, then, hear this bow music’s explicit turn to economics as a wry wink at the function of bow and exit music itself. The number says in all seriousness that economic circumstances are at the root of contemporary life, even as it asks you to buy the recording when the performance ends, that is, when the music finally stops. [57] References [1] Diegetic music forms part of the narrative world of a play; characters within the narrative frame can hear it and/or produce it. Only the audience hears non-diegetic music. For example, in The Pajama Game , “Steam Heat” is a diegetic number, a literal performance in which three characters dance and sing for their fellow union members. “Hey There” is non-diegetic: the character Sid Sorokin does not sing; the actor does. [2] Meredith Willson, But He Doesn’t Know the Territory (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 153-154. [3] Phil Powrie and Guido Heldt, “Introduction: Trailers, Titles, and End Credits,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 8 (2014), 111. [4] See, for example, Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Harburg, The Broadway Musical: Collaboration in Commerce and Art (New York: NYU Press, 1993) and Steven Adler, On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). [5] Michael V. Pisani, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London & New York (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014). [6] For a theory of the boundaries between the theatrical and the performance event, see Richard Schechner, “Drama, Script, Theater, Performance,” in Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 2003). Scholars of film titles and end credits seem to prefer Gérard Genette’s language of “paratext” to describe those musical practices. See Powrie and Heldt, “Introduction: Trailers, Titles, and End Credits,” 111-112. [7] Terence Hawkes, “Opening Closure,” Modern Drama 24 (1981), 355-356. Hawkes offers the example of a pimple on an actor’s nose as an unintentional element that audience members might “be prepared to acknowledge, interpret, and even perhaps to applaud.” [8] Hawkes, “Opening Closure,” 356. [9] William Ball, A Sense of Direction (New York: Drama Publishers, 1980), 143. [10] Ball, A Sense of Direction , 145. Ball cites other plays such as Othello , The Three Sisters , and The Man Who Came to Dinner that pose similar problems in balancing star supporting turns against the work of a relatively unsympathetic lead. [11] Ball, A Sense of Direction , 145. [12] Ball, A Sense of Direction , 146. Dressing room assignments are, Ball notes, similarly loaded status symbols for actors, and, like curtain calls, can affect an actor’s work on stage. [13] Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 199. [14] States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms , 203. [15] States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms , 203. [16] Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 162. [17] See Annette Davison, “The End is Nigh: Music Postfaces and End-Credit Sequences in Contemporary Television Serials,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 8 (2014) for an explanation of this practice’s origins and uses in The Sopranos . [18] Davison, “The End is Nigh,” 197. Davison observes that some shows have begun linking end credit music more closely to the preceding episode’s “sound world” (212). [19] George Gershwin, Du Bose Heyward, and Ira Gerswhin, Porgy and Bess (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Gershwin Publishing Corporation/Chappell & Co., Inc., 1935); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Carousel (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1945); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Allegro (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1948); Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins, West Side Story (Piano Vocal Score) (New York: G. Schirmer, Inc. and Chappell & Co., Inc., 1959). [20] Cole Porter, Kiss Me, Kate (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappell & Co., Inc., 1967), No. 24a “Grand Finale—Last Curtain.” [21] Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Babes in Arms (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappell & Co., Inc., 1960), No. 23 Curtain Calls; John Kander and Fred Ebb, Cabaret (Piano-Vocal Score) Times Square Music Publications Company, 1968), Curtain Calls (No. 29); Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Damn Yankees (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1957), No. 33 Heart (Bows). [22] Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1953), “The Happy Ending.” [23] Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, My Fair Lady (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappel & Co., 1958), Music for Curtain Calls (No. 27); Meredith Willson, The Music Man (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1958), Curtain Call Music (No. 26); Stephen Sondheim, A Little Night Music (Piano-Vocal Score) Revelation Music Publishing Corp. & Rilting Music, Inc., 1974), Bows (No. 33). [24] Stephen Sondheim, Follies (Piano-Vocal Score) Range Road Music Inc., Quartet Music Inc., Rilting Music Inc., and Burthen Music Compnay, Inc., 1971), No. 20 Bows. [25] Jule Styne, Funny Girl (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappell-Styne, Inc. and Wonderful Music Corp., 1964), Curtain and Exit Music (No. 30). [26] Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, Fiddler on the Roof (Piano-Vocal Score) Sunbeam Music Corp., 1965), Music for Bows (No. 34). [27] Mitch Leigh, Joe Darion, and Dale Wasserman, Man of La Mancha (Piano-Vocal Score) , Revised ed. (Greenwich, CT: Cherry Lane Music Co., 1965), Bows (No. 30). The show does, however, conclude No. 31 Exit Music with “The Impossible Dream.” [28] Joseph Church, Music Direction for the Stage: A View from the Podium (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 240. [29] James Kirkwood, Michael Bennett, and Nicholas Dante, A Chorus Line (New York: Applause Books, 1995), 145. [30] Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson, Pippin (Piano-Vocal Score) CPP/Belwin, Inc., 1988). [31] Pippin, His Life and Times , dir. David Sheehan (Tulsa: VCI Home Video, 2000), DVD. [32] Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson, Pippin: A Musical Comedy (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1975), 83. [33] Leonard Bernstein et al., Candide (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Schirmer Books, 1976), Bows (No. 22). The printed score includes stage directions and dialogue from the Prince production. Those directions indicate that, when the curtain rises after the finale, “ the COMPANY pours out onto the ramps [around the seating area] as the PRINCIPALS take their bows in the order of their precedence to the following music ” (230). Bracketed character names above particular measures in the score indicate when in the number each character appears. The score of the original production included no bow music (Leonard Bernstein, Lillian Hellman, and Richard Wilbur, Candide (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: G. Schirmer, 1958)), while the authorized Boosey & Hawkes edition (Leonard Bernstein, Hugh Wheeler, and Richard Wilbur, Candide (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Jalni Publications, Inc. and Boosey & Hawkes, 1994)) does include No. 28 Bows. That number appears to be the final section of the Overture (bars 231-287), minus ten bars of melody from the upper woodwinds. [34] A film documents this production’s incarnation at the Royal National Theatre in London. Oklahoma! , dir. Trevor Nunn (Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2003), DVD. [35] Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, actor Shuler Hensley’s performance as Jud was exceptionally well received. Hensley received multiple awards for his performance, including the Olivier, Tony, and Drama Desk Awards for Supporting Actor in a Musical. “Awards,” Oklahoma! (2002), Internet Broadway Database, http://ibdb.com/production.php?id=12938, accessed 26 May 2015. [36] Andrea Most, “‘We Know We Belong to the Land’: The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! ,” PMLA 113, no. 1 (1998), 79. [37] Derek Miller, “‘Underneath the Ground’: Jud and the Community in Oklahoma! ,” Studies in Musical Theatre 2, no. 2 (2008). [38] Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma! (New York: Williamson, 1943), Finale Ultimo (No. 29). [39] Ridout, Stage Fright , 162, 164. [40] George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Guy Bolton, and John McGowan, Girl Crazy (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: New World Music Corp., 1954), Final II (No. 25); Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and John O’Hara, Pal Joey (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Chappell & Co., 1962), Curtain Calls (I Could Write a Book); Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and George Abbott, The Boys from Syracuse (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Chappell & Co., 1965), No. 20 Curtain Music. [41] As one biographer explains, “Barbra agreed to go into the studio and record [‘People’] as a single. But since Capitol Records, not Columbia, was to record the cast album, Columbia executives were reluctant to do anything to promote Funny Girl . In the end, they agreed to release the single only if ‘People’ was on the B side of the record. Columbia would do little to promote the song, instead focusing their efforts on the A side, ‘I Am Woman.’” Christopher Anderson, Barbra: The Way She Is (New York: William Morrow, 2006), 119. Despite Columbia’s lack of interest, that single spent 12 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number five. Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 1986). [42] Stephen Citron, The Musical: From the Inside Out (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), 257. The author notes, even more practically, that up-tempo exit music also “facilitate[s] clearing the aisles” more quickly. [43] Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, South Pacific (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1949), Exit Music (No. 49); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, The King and I (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1951), Exit Music (No. 46); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, The Sound of Music (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1960), No. 47 Exit Music. “Some Enchanted Evening” spent five weeks at number one for Perry Como (his B side, “Bali Ha’i,” hit number five), while also reaching the top 10 on recordings by Bing Crosby, Jo Stafford, Frank Sinatra, Ezio Pinza (the song’s originator in his role as Emile de Becque), and Paul Weston. Whitburn, Pop Memories . [44] South Pacific appeared on the pop charts at number seven on 21 May 1949; number one was Kiss Me, Kate . Within two weeks, South Pacific was the best-selling popular music LP in the country, where it remained for 69 weeks, ultimately spending 400 weeks on the top charts. Laurence Maslon, The South Pacific Companion (New York: Fireside, 2008), 153. The King and I performed the least well, hovering around number four (for both 75s and 33s) in summer and fall 1951. The Sound of Music spent 276 weeks on Billboard’s Top 200, including 16 weeks at number one. Joel Whitburn, The Billboard Albums , 6th ed. (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 2006). [45] I sense some condescension in how conductors accept audience accolades on behalf of the orchestra, particularly when the conductor joins the actors or singers on stage, leaving the musicians in the pit below. The disparity between conductor and instrumentalist seems slightly less wide in musicals, even if the conductor bows quickly for the audience during the bow music, perhaps because such a gesture permits the orchestra a fleeting moment of performance without the conductor’s guidance. Or, as one writer makes the same point negatively: “Providing the playing of the bow music will not fall apart if the conductor stops beating time, he can acknowledge [the actors’ pointing at the orchestra during bows] by turning and bowing to the audience.” James H. Laster, So You’re the New Musical Director!: An Introduction to Conducting a Broadway Musical (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2001), 146. [46] Laster, So You’re the New Musical Director! , 127. [47] Steven Suskin, The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 289. Broadway music director Joseph Church affirms Suskin’s view that exit music achieves an “informality” that “reflects the relaxation of the theater experience in its closing moments.” Church, Music Direction for the Stage , 240. [48] Robert Russell Bennett, Instrumentally Speaking (Melville, NY: Belwin-Mills Publishing Corp., 1975), 107. [49] Bennett, Instrumentally Speaking , 107. Bennett suggests that, among these standard orchestral numbers, only the overture regularly merits careful attention, and not much care at that. Even a “fancy permanent” or “New York overture,” as Bennett wryly calls it, earns little more than a single orchestral read-through before opening night. A 1951 New Yorker profile of Bennett opens describing the composition of The King and I ’s overture, completed mere hours before the first tryout in New Haven. Herbert Warren Wind, “Another Opening, Another Show,” The New Yorker (1951), 46. Today, overtures have become quite scarce, according to Joseph Church. Church, Music Direction for the Stage , 239. [50] Bennett, Instrumentally Speaking , 111. Conductor Rob Berman recently affirmed that, while “composers might have some input” in choosing exit music, the selection derives usually from among the utilities. Exit music remains “one of the last pieces of music created for a show.” Robert Simonson and Kenneth Jones, “Ask Playbill.com: A Question About Exit Music and Musicals,” Playbill.com , http://www.playbill.com/features/article/ask-playbill.com-a-question-about-exit-music-at-musicals-187760 . [51] Suskin, Sound of Broadway Music provides an excellent account of orchestrators and arrangers, who occupy the strange liminal space between creative artistry and technical labor that defines so much backstage work. [52] The situation differs, of course, for revivals, for which the score already exists. In such cases, the production staff may have even more creative energy to expend on overtures or bow and exit music, as evidenced by the Candide and Oklahoma! revivals discussed above. [53] Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (New York: Norton, 2010), 424. [54] Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, The Pajama Game (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1955), No. 25 “The Pajama Game—Closing.” [55] “Hey There” spent 24 weeks on Billboard ’s “Honor Roll of Hits” (issues of 24 July 1954 to 1 January 1955), reaching number one in the 2 October 1954 issue (survey week ending 22 September) and remaining there through the issue of 13 November (survey week ending 3 November), for seven weeks at the top. Another song from the show, “Hernando’s Hideaway,” spent 18 weeks in the top twenty (issue of 29 May 1954 to 25 September 1954), but never reached number one. The “Honor Roll of Hits” combines sales of recordings and sheet music with juke box and radio performances. [56] Adler and Ross, The Pajama Game , No. 25a “Seven and a Half Cents—Reprise.” [57] For a list of piano-vocal scores consulted, many of which are also cited in the body of the essay, see my personal website, http://visualizingbroadway.com/broadway/bow_and_exit_music_table.html . Footnotes About The Author(s) Derek Miller is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University where he teaches courses in theater history and dramatic literature. His articles on theatrical and musical performance have appeared in publications including Theatre Journal and Studies in Musical Theatre . His book, Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770-1911 , is under contract with Cambridge University Press. More information at scholar.harvard.edu/dmiller . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue May Irwin American Musical Theater Musical Theatre Books New York's Yiddish Theater Chinese Looks Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project On Bow and Exit Music Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Patrizia Paolini Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK Patrizia Paolini By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF In April 2023, my work became the object of censorship—both indirectly and a posteriori . The precipitating incident involved a late middle-aged male performer appearing in a vest, a pair of cowboy boots, and a slightly grubby yet arguably innocuous pair of Y-fronts. The body reveal of such a character had been carefully constructed. It was informed by an aesthetic I share with my ensemble Jesus Paolini Park (JPP), and which makes satirical and critical reference to the biased perception of female versus male and young versus senior bodies. I am a theatre and live performance practitioner who has been based in the UK since 1997. Since 2016, my practice has been linked to Hoxton Hall, an original music hall in the East End of London. At Hoxton Hall, JPP and I developed Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret , a “deconstructed cabaret” and the focus of my doctoral research on “Post-Variety & Cabaret,” a theoretical, self-made term describing what I do: a form between genres. Extracts from that work, including the “Y-fronts,” were chosen by the artist and producer Margot Przymierska for inclusion in a programme designed to animate an evening in April 2023 at the Polish Cultural Institute in London. The adverse reaction of The Polish Cultural Institute (“a part of Polish diplomatic mission, dedicated to nurturing and promoting cultural ties between the United Kingdom and Poland”) to the material contrasted strongly with Margot’s judgment and with the work’s reception at numerous showings in Hoxton Hall. It was described by the event’s organizers as “obscene.” It was claimed, by the same organizers, that it had triggered a “recurring nightmare.” The sight of a mature male in Y-fronts was labelled as indecent. As a consequence, Margot was banned from the Institute and her fee significantly reduced. The ramifications of this night, a detailed account of which appears in Cabaret and Decency: How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped By Censorship have not just landed me in the thick of a continually evolving debate on censorship and propelled me into wider-ranging research on the correlation between contemporary censorship and the perennial “high versus low” cultural divide in the UK,(1) but have also caused me to reflect on how the experience may resonate globally, more particularly with the readership of JADT , as well as with the wider theatrical community of the U.S. Philip Fisher’s remark that “excessive behaviour [in the U.S.] is likely to be mirrored by equivalent extremists [in the UK] before too long” prompts the question as to whether the two countries could be mirroring each other, and therefore potentially learning from each other.(2) As Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “global cultural flows” has taught us, the phenomenon of globalization means that theories and ideas are spreading worldwide, from one place to another, with ease.(3) We are both countries where free expression is supposed to be enshrined in law. As a slew of recent articles in the British press point out, in both countries, censorship is creeping in and disturbing arts and artists, causing them to wonder how, or if, to act.(4) What, if anything, can the U.S. learn from the UK? Perhaps the relevance and potential usefulness of my own experience for the American artistic community is to be found in the insights that my reflection offers and the ensuing conversations that were held, rather than in a particular strategy or solution that should be immediately adopted by artists and scholars in the U.S. Any reaction to censorship, it could be argued, is particular to the context and may be dependent on a specific funding situation. Can we afford, in other words, to speak out? As Nicholas Serota told the Financial Times , “the role of Arts Council England is to act as a protector of artistic freedom, and if we don’t have that freedom, then we move towards living in a country where liberty of both thought and voice is constrained,”(5) adding that “we see plenty of places – look at the US now – where direct funding can be withdrawn as a result of a change of government.”(6) The unexpected reaction to what I call “the Y-fronts episode” has led me, both as a researcher and practitioner, to reflect on the current dynamics of censorship in all societies and how: “What we believe about censorship often reveals how we understand society and the self.”(7) In this regard, it would be useful to summarize at the outset the salient aspects of contemporary censorship discourse centered around New Censorship Theory (NCT). In Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After , Matthew Bunn offers a critical analysis of NCT. Emerging in the latest decades of the twentieth century, NCT’s central objective has been “to recast censorship from a negative, repressive force, concerned only with prohibiting, silencing, and erasing, to a productive force that creates new forms of discourse, new forms of communication, and new genres of speech.”(8) Bunn argues that in this way the controlling effect of censorship [conceived to prevent offences] has been shifted from state control of production and distribution [of speech], onto self-censorship and its dependence on the “market.” It is my hope that by raising questions and offering reflections, the conversations that follow with fellow practitioners and professionals will draw attention to the current censorship discourse and its significance to practitioners and the wider sector. The interviewees introduced below were each asked about censorship as part of the process of my questioning about what actually happened on that April evening in 2023.(9) TESTIMONIES The interviewees responded identically to two aspects of the subject.(10) Firstly, the word “censorship” itself provoked a whole series of hesitations: “Oh! Umm…”, “Oh, dear!”, “Umm!”, “Well... in which sense?”, “Really?”, “Hemm!” and “What do you mean?” This unanimous reaction to the term suggests censorship is not an appealing subject for discussion. Secondly, none of the interviewees were familiar with NCT. Both these reactions seem to indicate that arts professionals in the UK are reluctant to engage with notions of contemporary censorship. While leaving it to the reader to consider the questions that could follow on from this initial observation, it seems significant to note that, before proceeding with the interviews, I received the distinct impression that censorship was not their favourite subject. Interviewees were all asked identical questions. Rather than transcribe the full interview of each interviewee, I report each interviewee’s most distinctive approach to the issue. I have grouped together those who shared the same approach and highlighted similar and contrasting views. Benevolent Approach Expressed no concerns about censorship. John Callaghan British musician, writer, and performance artist. PATRIZIA: Have you ever been censored? JOHN: I don't think my stuff is susceptible to censorship, particularly because…I'm not swearing. I'm not attacking any particular government. I'm just being me.(11) Kieron Jecchinis Classically trained English actor. Graduated from Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1979. Film: Full Metal Jacket (1987). Theatre: West End. Member of JPP ensemble, played Y-front character. PATRIZIA: What do you think about censorship? KIERON: When I go and see some theatre I just find it so refreshing. You just think. Oh, ****. They can say that! And to be able to say that…it's just so affirming. PATRIZIA: …And the Y-Fronts? You’ve become a recurring nightmare to some staff. KIERON: I think there must have been some misunderstanding between the Institute and Margot.(12) Sarcastic Approach Approached the conversation with sarcasm. Margot Przymierska Performer, writer, facilitator and creative producer born in Białystok (Poland) and based in London (UK). Producer of PolBud Cabaret, commissioned by Polish Cultural Institute, leading up to the indirect and a posteriori censorship April 2023 . PATRIZIA: Do you think it makes sense to implement censorship in whatever capacity? MARGOT: …it makes complete sense to have censorship if you want to own the narrative or perspective on a particular thing. And if you want to silence the artist, maybe all the voices that disagree with your point of view. So it's a very useful tool. And, less sarcastically, MARGOT: I think if you want to have censorship, you have to put in place a clear mechanism. As Margot, was the direct recipient of the Y-fronts a posteriori censorship, our conversation expanded: PATRIZIA: What do you think about how the Polish Cultural Institute treated you? MARGOT: A real exercise of power and authority…they needed to appear like they're taking the complaints from the audience members seriously and they have to show to them that they have punished the person who's responsible … They told me – “You breached the contract…if I went to you and I've ordered something and you gave me a different product, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on. We would then refer to that contract. Like we didn't order this.” – Yeah, but, I don't make sausages in Tesco.(13) You cannot order something off the shelf because it doesn't exist. I'm making it fresh, fresh performance and it's not as finite as a sausage.(14) Reactionary Approach Strongly disapprove of censorship. Claire and Roland Muldoon Artists, entrepreneurs, partners in work and in life. Core members of CAST (Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre), UK counterculture and alternative comedy pioneers. PATRIZIA: NCT sees censorship as a positive tool to be used in society, as it facilitates the best way of expressing something without offending anyone… CLAIRE (in a gentle yet direct manner): It can hurt…It hurts people who are the right people to hurt. It is important to express what has to be expressed. ROLAND: I can't imagine it [NCT] working, really. Referring to their long career: PATRIZIA: So, you really were quite troublemakers? ROLAND and CLAIR (finishing each other’s sentence): Oh yeah, usually yeah. Performing, I mean, what else is there? Otherwise there is no point … that's the function (of performing) otherwise…You know, it turns into Hollywood.(15) Subtle, Necessary Approach The following interviewees are both heads of arts and cultural organizations. Stuart Cox Current director of Hoxton Hall, the music hall in Shoreditch, London, originated in 1838, and which has hosted my work since 2016 . PATRIZIA: Since state censorship had been abolished (in the UK), in 1968, who should decide how to control expression these days? STUART: You have to do it….Or the audience will let you know…the artist has to be cautious and question very honestly what might be the impact of their work. PATRIZIA: How do you approach circumstances related to censorship in your role as chief director of Hoxton Hall? STUART: … that basically is my role, in every aspect. So like you know … Do I pay this person this amount of money? What's the impact of that? Do I take this piece on? What's the impact of that? I'm looking at this piece and I see something that had caused me a worry about whether that is right…I have to really think about the decision around things, and that includes why you're telling a person they can't do that at this stage and just be very…true to who you are and those decisions…And I think I would hope that always when I'm facing those decisions, I try to do it with thought. And consider everyone in that process. Inspired by the Muldoon’s opposing view, I say: PATRIZIA: Maybe, rightly or wrongly, I'm sure, it may happen that there may be the need to…or maybe the feeling that it would be right… like we need and want to “break” something. They, the artist wants to do something that…it is a risk because it could…in fact, offend somebody, because it may be important to do so… STUART: You know, I get what you're saying. But…I still think that you have to kind of talk to everyone. You kind of like involve the artists themselves in this conversation…There has to be, I think…to move on something in the centre…and then make the kind of decision about that … In a positive way…(16) Karena Johnson Former Artistic Director and CEO of Hoxton Hall. Since 2022 Head of Creative Collaboration & Learning at the Barbican.(17) PATRIZIA: What’s your thought about current censorship? KARENA: I think it's a tricky time … the Internet and all that … although we might be in a live performance space, actually we still work within a digital landscape and the digital world allows you to say anything you want uncensored. And so the idea that you can behave as you would digitally in real life is not really … A tenable thing to do. PATRIZIA: Did you ever have to enforce censorship? KARENA: I think no, I've never really had to censor anything. Because, I think the work finds the audience that it speaks to… no one is going to come and pitch me something that’s going to be, like racist or sexist or homophobic, because all the organisations I've ever worked in are very clear about that and my politics have aligned very clearly with those institutions. However, it's only in bigger institutions … It's because of visibility. It has other things to deal with like, you know, like funders, like sponsors, like patrons ... Yeah. And I think that conversation, comes up when you have to deal with the bigger institutions... PATRIZIA: Who exercises control, censorship these days? Institutions or culture itself? KARENA: Yeah … big institutions, maybe are controlling or looking after or leading their culture, having different level of responsibility than you do when you've got a fringe venue … Also, I think that there's a very big difference between what an institution and what and artist might think is censorship or not. Is censorship saying you can't do that thing? Maybe, … or … It's not for me. I would say that's just a choice. But for the individual artist … [it] is important … that nobody should ever say no, and that if you're saying no, it's censorship. But I don't think that is actually censorship.(18) Within the industry, Cox’s and Johnson’s professional roles differ from the other interviewees (all artists), in that they operate in a realm between artists and institutions. This seems to influence their similar approach to censorship. To counterbalance the Cox-Johnson approach, we’ll look at another professional in a leading role at a cultural organization: Will Gompertz. The former artistic director of the Barbican Cantre and a former BBC arts editor clarifies his position on censorship by identifying “cancel culture as the greatest challenge facing the arts.”(19) In an interview in Prospect magazine, he responds to the question “What is the greatest challenge facing the arts industry today?” by saying: … it has to be cancel culture. The purpose of the arts is to question, challenge, reflect and enlighten. Great art reveals a truth, and debate and disagreement about the nature of that truth is a function of art. But such is the rallying power of social media, debate is being stifled by self-censorship and fear of disagreeing with the prevailing orthodoxy. Previous generations have fought hard for free speech; so must we.(20) Gompertz held his position as director of the Barbican Centre, from 2021 to autumn 2023. His appointment and resignation were surrounded by controversy. The beginning of his time at the Barbican, when the Centre was dealing with serious accusations of racism within the organization coincided with the need of a “long journey of cultural change at the Barbican”(21) as indicated by The City.(22) Dex reports: “The Centre’s director of Arts and Learning, former Tate and BBC man Will Gompertz, has been hastily elevated to ‘joint interim managing director’”, which lead to Gompertz’s final appointment as artistic director. Shortly before his departure, the Barbican cancelled Resolve Collective’s exhibition in the wake of “anti-Palestinian censorship.”(23) As reported, collective artist Yto Barrada’s statement, “We cannot take seriously a public institution that does not hold a space for free thinking and debate, however challenging it might feel to some staff, board members, or anxious politicians,”(24) indicates the complexity of the event. In a joint statement with Claire Spencer, Gompertz said: “During the run of their exhibition, Resolve Collective and their collaborators have been subject to a number of unacceptable experiences...…we are taking this situation extremely seriously and are currently working with the broader Barbican team to understand the details of what happened.”(25) A few months later Will Gompertz left the Barbican Centre for a much less prestigious position. Official declarations on the reasons for his sudden departure are unavailable. Gompertz’s relevance to this observation is his clear position on censorship, as reported by Prospect in 2023, a position not commonly shared or expressed by people of his profile. Coincidently, Will Gompertz, with the aim of making the Barbican a more inclusive and diverse center for art, education and enterprise, created the position of Head of Creative Collaboration & Learning at the Barbican to which the last interviewee, Karena Johnson, was appointed. Conclusion By bringing together the interviewees’ testimonies, this piece has raised several questions. On the one hand, we have The Muldoons encouraging a self-censorship that aims to protect the “trouble making” nature of the material; “otherwise there is no point.” On the other hand, we have Cox insisting on the importance of self-censorship as a way of being in control of the impact of what the practitioner says, in respect of all involved. Consequently, self-censorship could promote or have an adverse effect on what would be expected to be a controlled outcome. Is it possible, then, contra NCT, that what is called self-censorship could promote unwanted reactions? As a practitioner, it seems necessary to remark on the noticeable division between the Cox-Johnson approach and that of the other interviewees. The preoccupations and responsibilities of heads of arts and culture organizations seem closely correlated with the person in charge of these organizations. Gompertz’s case is a good example of the complexity of control at that level. The Y-fronts episode has unveiled artists’ inability to predict all possible reactions to their work. Also, applying self-censorship could paralyse the artist’s practice altogether if all possible offences should be considered by the artist. The vivid testimony of the final interviewee would perfectly elucidate my thinking. Factual Approach Ridiculusmus A multi award-winning theatre company led by David Woods and Jon Haynes that has been producing seriously funny theatre since 1992. PATRIZIA: What do you think about the Y-fronts episode? And what about censorship currently defined by NCT? JON: It makes me think about a walkabout act David and I did in Dublin in the 1990s. I think he’d nicked the idea from somewhere else. We walked through the streets following each other, joined by a rope tied in a noose around each of our necks. It seemed to be going well. Then a woman sidled up to me and said, “I find what you’re doing offensive because my brother committed suicide the other week.” How could you have applied NCT to that? Just not to have done the act, I suppose. One has to go about one’s practice under the assumption that with anything you do there is always going to be someone somewhere who will find what you do offensive (“And not in a good way,” as the saying goes). But then, following on from that, there will always be someone somewhere who finds the watered down, safe and possibly more insipid version of your original (or nicked) idea offensive as well. Which means that in the end you’re frozen and can’t do anything.(26) References Patrizia Paolini, “How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped by Censorship,” Comedy Studies 16, no. 1 (2025): 118-133. Philip Fisher, “Censorship Rears its Ugly Head”, British Theatre Guide , February 17, 2023, accessed June 4, 2025. https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/features/censorship-rears-its-ugly-head-592 . Arjun Appadurai. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2-3 (1990): 296. Natasha Tripney, “Cancel Cultures: Theatre Censorship Around the World”, The Stage , March 8, 2024, accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.thestage.co.uk/long-reads/cancel-cultures-theatre-censorship-around-the-world ; Lyn Gardner, “How Will Artistic Freedom Endure as Political Tides Shift?” The Stage , April 28, 2025, accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/how-will-artistic-freedom-endure-as-political-tides-shift-arts-council-lyn-gardner ; Kate Maltby, “Artistic Freedom in our Theatres is Being Lost to Fear and Self-Censorship,”’ The Guardian , October 12, 2024 accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/12/artistic-freedom-in-theatres-lost-to-fear-self-censorship . Arts Council England is a UK government-funded body. Founded in 1994, it is dedicated to promoting the performing, visual and literary arts in England. Nicholas Serota, quoted in Franklin Nelson, “Axing Arts Quangos Risks ‘Liberty of Thought’ Says Nicholas Serota,” Financial Times , April 18, 2025, accessed June 4, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/4229bcfe-80a4-4a62-b5f8-ec8f11d99976 . Matthew Bunn, “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After,” History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015): 29. Bunn, “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After,” 26. The interviews were conducted in accordance with the ethical requirements put in place by the University of Kent. The interviews included in this essay were conducted with ethical approval through the University of Kent, UK. Each participant provided written consent for their names and interview contributions to be published in this essay. John Callaghan, interview by Patrizia Paolini, August 27, 2024 Kieron Jecchinis, interview by Patrizia Paolini, December 7, 2023 A renowned UK superstore. Margot Przymierska, interview by Patrizia Paolini, October 8, 2023. Claire and Roland Muldoon, interview by Patrizia Paolini, August 28, 2024. Stuart Cox, interview by Patrizia Paolini, November 3, 2023. The Barbican Centre is a performing arts centre in the Barbican Estate of the City of London. It is owned, funded, and managed by the City of London Corporation. Karena Johnson, interview by Patrizia Paolini, February 2, 2024. Harriet Sherwood, “Will Gompertz to Become Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum,” Guardian , August 4, 2023, accessed November 20, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/04/will-gompertz-to-become-director-of-sir-john-soanes-museum . Prospect Team, “Will Gompertz: Cancel Culture is Stifling the Arts,” Prospect , May 10, 2023, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/music/61326/will-gompertz-barbican-cancel-culture-arts . Robert Dex, “Racism Row at the Barbican - How Did It Start and What Happens Next?,” Evening Standard , November 15, 2021, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/racism-row-barbican-centre-what-happens-next-b966025.html . The City of London Corporation is the governing body of the Square Mile, dedicated to a vibrant and thriving City. The Barbican Centre is in part of this governing body. Garreth Harris. 2023. “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of 'Anti-Palestinian Censorship' Row,” The Art Magazine , June 23, 2023, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Lanre Bakare, “Two Artists Withdraw Work from Barbican Show in Row Over Gaza Talk,” Guardian, March 8, 2024, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/mar/08/two-artists-withdraw-work-from-barbican-show-in-row-over-gaza-talk . Garreth Harris, “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of ‘Anti-Palestinian Censorship’ Row,” The Art Magazine , June 23, 2023, accessed November 18, 2024, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Ridiculusmus, Jon Haynes, and David Woods, interview by Patrizia Paolini, November 28, 2023. Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2-3 (1990): 295–310. Bakare, Lanre. “Two Artists Withdraw Work from Barbican Show in Row Over Gaza Talk.” Guardian , 8 March 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/mar/08/two-artists-withdraw-work-from-barbican-show-in-row-over-gaza-talk . Bunn, Matthew. “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After.” History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015): 25-44. Callaghan, John. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 27 August 2024. Cox, Stuart. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 3 November 2023. Dex, Robert. “Racism Row at the Barbican - How Did It Start and What Happens Next?’. Evening Standard , 15 November 2021. https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/racism-row-barbican-centre-what-happens-next-b966025.html . Fisher, Philip. “Censorship Rears its Ugly Head.” British Theatre Guide . 17 February 2023. https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/features/censorship-rears-its-ugly-head-592 . Gardner, Lyn. “How will artistic freedom endure as political tides shift?” The Stage . 28th April 2025. https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/how-will-artistic-freedom-endure-as-political-tides-shift-arts-council-lyn-gardner . Harris, Garreth. “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of ‘Anti-Palestinian Censorship’ Row.” The Art Magazine , 23 June 2023. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Jecchinis, Kieron. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 7 December 2023. Johnson, Karena. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 2 February 2024. Itzin, Catherine. “CAST (Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre).” In Stages in the Revolution , Routledge, 1980 Maltby, Kate. “Artistic freedom in our theatres is being lost to fear and self-censorship”. The Guardian . 12th October 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/12/artistic-freedom-in-theatres-lost-to-fear-self-censorship . Muldoon, Claire, and Roland Muldoon. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 28 August 2024. Nelson, Franklin. “Axing Arts Quangos Risks ‘Liberty of Thought’ Says Nicholas Serota.” Financial Times , 18 April 2025. https://www.ft.com/content/4229bcfe-80a4-4a62-b5f8-ec8f11d99976 . Paolini, Patrizia. “Cabaret and Decency: How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped by Censorship.” Comedy Studies 16 (2024): 118-133. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2040610X.2024.2404298?src= Prospect Team. “Will Gompertz: Cancel Culture is Stifling the Arts.” Prospect , 10 May 2023. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/music/61326/will-gompertz-barbican-cancel-culture-arts . Przymierska, Margot. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 8 October 2023. Ridiculusmus, Jon Haynes, and David Woods. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 28 November 2023. Sherwood, Harriet. “Will Gompertz to Become Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum.” Guardian, 4 August 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/04/will-gompertz-to-become-director-of-sir-john-soanes-museum . Tripney, Natasha. “Cancel Cultures: Theatre Censorship Around the World.” The Stage , 8 March 2024. https://www.thestage.co.uk/long-reads/cancel-cultures-theatre-censorship-around-the-world . Footnotes About The Author(s) PATRIZIA PAOLINI (she/her) is a theatre maker and live performance practitioner with over twenty-five years’ experience. Currently, she is working on a practice-based research PhD project, ‘Post Variety & Cabaret,’ at The University of Kent. Her broad career includes many original productions and collaborations. Since 1999, she has been an associate of Ridiculusmus, the award-winning theatre company that has produced, among other acclaimed works, The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland . Since 2016, her deconstructed cabaret, Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret, has been regularly programmed at Hoxton Hall, London. Her practice is the invaluable, rich terrain, base of her research which focuses on popular performance, the ‘high - low’ cultural divide, and social class dominance’s dynamics. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Nic Barilar Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 Nic Barilar By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF In September of 1960, St. Vincent Troubridge, the Assistant Examiner of Plays in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office—the United Kingdom’s theatre censor—submitted his report recommending a license for a production of Irish writer Seán O’Casey’s comedy The Drums of Father Ned . Troubridge details how he arrived at his recommendation, explaining he “approached this play with circumspection,” because “I remembered that its banning by the Archbishop of Dublin caused the collapse of last year’s [ sic ] Dublin Festival of Drama.”(1) Indeed, not the prior year but two years earlier, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid refused permission for a mass to open the 1958 spring cultural festival, An Tóstal , after learning that the Dublin International Theatre Festival (part of An Tóstal ) would include a new O’Casey play and an adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses . Media soon reported McQuaid’s decision. O’Casey took the news with only mild irritation since, as far as he knew, the festival still planned to produce his work. When O’Casey received a letter from producers at the theatre where his comedy was to perform requesting he give the director authority to alter the play, O’Casey revoked his permission and claimed he was the victim of a church ban. This, together with the festival’s own ejection of Ulysses , led Samuel Beckett to pull his contributions to the festival in solidarity. Without headliners, the organizers cancelled the 1958 theatre festival.(2) Troubridge’s report reveals a key insight on censorship that has gone under-theorized: reading a text with the memory that it was banned can change or even shape its reception. Troubridge explains that the play’s censorship made him “read the play with extreme care” in order to “steer a course between accepting too readily the opinion of a possibly reactionary Irish cleric and giving offence to” UK Catholics. What he found was criticism of Irish clergymen as bigoted and out of touch with their flocks. Troubridge argues, “though it is understandable that the Archbishop of Dublin may not like it, it should cause no more offence to the Catholic Church than if one remarked that Alexander Borgia was not a perfect Pope.”(3) Troubridge specifically read with imagined differences between Ireland and the UK in mind, interpreted the play through Irish censorship, and judged its suitability within British legality and sensibilities. This comparison of national values raises pressing questions about the role that the memory of censorship performs when it adheres to cultural objects: How do such memories contribute to the interpretation of the object’s representations? How do acts of censorship continue to impact cultural objects and their reception long after and far away from the initiating act of censorship? What is the political effect of engaging with censorship history as an interpretive tool? These questions become thornier when considered through not just a textual reading of O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned , but also its world premiere performance by the amateur Lafayette Little Theatre in Indiana in 1959. Unlike Troubridge, the Hoosiers in attendance had no “natural” memory of the play’s censorship. Rather, the artists constructed their own. Through advertising, publicity, and program notes, the Lafayette Little Theatre (LLT) built what Alison Landsberg calls “prosthetic memory”: cultural memory acquired through media engagement rather than lived experiences or familial/national descent.(4) This prosthetic memory of censorship took the form of a narrative about O’Casey’s play, Ireland, and America, too. Ireland became an imagined space of oppression against which the Americans were invited to interpret and contrast themselves. After all, it was in America where O’Casey’s play was performed. In this way, the LLT’s narrative around the production participated in Cold War-era discourses of American exceptionalism. Although the artificial memory of censorship gave the audience a way to interpret O’Casey’s play, the Ireland performed onstage sometimes clashed with the narratives that the memory projected, challenging the LLT’s underlying assumptions about Ireland and America. While reviews are limited, memory and performance studies methodologies can help theorize the cultural work the production undertook. Not only is The Drums of Father Ned deeply Irish, it’s also deeply leftist. Ironically, by inviting the Cold War Hoosiers to interpret the play through the lens provided by the memory of censorship, the LLT’s performance of Father Ned ’s communist sympathies held the potential to reflexively highlight Lafayette’s memories of anticommunism. These competing memories convoluted O’Casey’s play, yielding ambivalence. While Landsberg studies the way prosthetic memory can bridge identity differences to progressive ends, the case of the LLT’s Father Ned demonstrates the political limits of prosthetic memories of censorship. In addition to shedding new light on a neglected performance in Irish and O’Casey studies as well as a neglected geography in U.S. theatre history, the LLT’s Father Ned offers scholars, artists, political commentators, and activists ways of thinking about, contending with, or even appropriating or adopting censorship history.(5) In particular, the LLT’s use of censorship memories suggests that censorship’s effects are not bound to the time/place of their enactment: censorship moves, and as it moves it continues to exert censorial effects. According to Judith Butler, censorship is “a productive form of power” that creates as it attempts to negate. For Butler, censorship never completely erases its target. If a state seeks to ban a word, it must state the word to ban it, recirculating language it sought to destroy. Censorship paradoxically makes its subjects “[take] on new life as a part of the very discourse produced by the mechanism of censorship.”(6) This “performative contradiction” disrupts the limitations censors try to impose, transforming them into sites of contestation—into something “banned.”(7) As sites of contestation, censored objects and subjects invite people to performatively renegotiate or “produce” interpretations of the ideas under contestation. This slippage, the recirculation inherent in censorship’s performative contradiction, entails mobility—across geographies, discourses, media, and time—and as censorship moves it continues to “produce” via people’s engagement with it. Today, when censorship can take place through online policing, cancel culture, and self-censorship, when the mantle of “silenced” and “censored” can be adopted and projected via social media’s megaphone (among other means), it is imperative that scholars and artists reckon with both its movement and its effect as an interpretive framework. Father Ned 's Journey to Indiana How did an amateur theatre in Indiana come to be the first to produce a play by a world-renowned playwright? The answer lies with Dr. Robert Hogan, remembered today as one of Irish theatre’s most “indefatigable annalists.”(8) Having previously contacted O’Casey for his doctoral thesis, he wrote to the playwright after learning about the festival scandal, asking if O’Casey would send him a copy of the play so that he could write on it.(9) It was not until January 1959 that Hogan broached the subject of producing Father Ned in Lafayette, where he was working in the English department at Purdue University. Following the collapse of the Dublin festival, O’Casey entertained several offers to produce The Drums of Father Ned on professional stages, but none had come to fruition.(10) Without other options, the group’s amateurism probably didn’t deter O’Casey. Indeed, Hogan suggested the production upon recalling O’Casey’s youthful participation in amateur dramatics.(11) What’s more, several O’Casey plays premiered with amateur groups.(12) While James Moran suggests O’Casey turned to amateurs out of economic necessity, Susan Canon Harris argues Britain’s Unity Theatre, which premiered The Star Turns Red in 1940, better suited O’Casey’s politics as a workers’ theatre.(13) The LLT hardly shared O’Casey’s revolutionary aspirations, though. It’s likely that the LLT’s biggest incentive to stage O’Casey’s play was the financial opportunity that would come with producing a famous playwright’s world premiere. The Drums of Father Ned did not fit their practical or aesthetic profile. They mostly produced conventional New York hits like Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden and stage versions of popular films like Frederick Knott’s Dial “M” for Murder . Of the 117 plays the LLT produced from their 1931 founding to Father Ned in 1959, eighty-nine were by American or English playwrights. Only seven had been by Irish writers, and it had been a decade since their last Irish play.(14) Father Ned also has a cast of twenty-nine, significantly larger than most LLT shows (compare with Chalk Garden ’s six and Dial “M” ’s nine). The large cast posed an opportunity to recruit LLT members, however. Their budget depended on company membership and program advertising. Only those who purchased a membership could see or participate in LLT shows, and the company was losing members to television by the late 1950s.(15) They also made tickets available to the public for the first time.(16) The play’s controversial past was itself a selling point: the show was a box office hit. Over two thousand attended its 4-night run at Sunnyside Junior High.(17) This success was despite the play’s Irish focus, which also made it an outlier for LLT shows. The Drums of Father Ned is an ensemble piece with a thin narrative, allowing O’Casey to focus on ideas in vignette-like episodes that critique Irish life. The play begins with a satire of the Irish War for Independence (1919–21), a foundational moment in Ireland’s and the characters’ national consciousness. Titled the “Prerumble,” the scene shows the Black and Tans—British royal police—capturing two young men, Binnington and McGilligan. The pair hate each other so much that the Black and Tans eventually release them saying, “these two rats will do more harm to Ireland living than they’ll ever do to Ireland dead.”(18) O’Casey depicts Irishmen of the period as in conflict with each other as much as with the British. Time then jumps to 1950s Ireland, and the rest of the play revolves around the imaginary town of Doonavale as its inhabitants prepare for An Tóstal (the same festival in which the play, itself, was to perform). Now the Mayor and Deputy Mayor, Binnington and McGilligan still hate each other (and even fought on opposite sides of the Irish Civil War [1922–23]), but overlook their grudge when it comes to money. Their adult children and local laborers rehearse a pageant about the 1798 Irish Rebellion. The Mayor and his Deputy await a shipment of lumber that turns out to be “red” lumber from Russia. Meanwhile, a North Irish businessman, Alec Skerighan, attempts to woo Binnington’s servant, Bernadette, but ultimately assaults her. Murray, a local organist, rehearses choral numbers under the controlling eye of the parish priest, Father Fillifogue. The eponymous Father Ned is Fillifogue’s foil. Although he never appears onstage, Father Ned is the spirit of the Tóstal : his passion, openness, and investment in the community’s future inspire the younger characters. By the end of the play, the older characters lose their power and the town joins Father Ned in a march to change. While not realist, the style helps O’Casey manifest cultural and political changes he believed were necessary. O’Casey uses the play to critique the cultural and economic atrophy of 1950s Ireland and posits An Tóstal as something of a cure for Ireland’s ills. There were too few jobs and an over-emphasis on agriculture, protectionism, and self-sufficiency that failed to reckon with postwar realities.(19) Lack of economic opportunity contributed to emigration. From 1951 to 1961, nearly a sixth of the population left the Republic.(20) Women, especially, fled in pursuit of change, bodily autonomy, marital opportunities, and escape from ostracism and the national marriage bar.(21) An Tóstal attempted to stimulate the economy by extending the tourist season with historical and religious pageantry, sports, concerts, and theatre.(22) O’Casey felt An Tóstal ’s activities, influx of foreigners, and opportunities for young people could stir Ireland’s renewal.(23) Unlike Ireland, Lafayette was a prosperous place in 1959, buoyed by post-war prosperity, Purdue University, and major manufacturers like Alcoa and a Coca-Cola bottling plant (which purchased space in the production program).(24) There were few ways for The Drums of Father Ned to resonate with the Hoosiers. According to Irish theatre historian Patrick Lonergan, when Irish plays that center Irish histories/issues perform abroad, they “must be framed or mediated in a way that will provide an interpretive framework for a[n]…audience lacking specialized knowledge of Ireland.”(25) Lafayette’s audience needed a way to engage with the play. So Hogan and the LLT built a memory of Irish censorship for them. “Dublin’s loss is Lafayette’s gain”: Learning to Remember Ireland in Indiana Hogan and the LLT constructed this memory through production publicity—what Hogan called his “propaganda” in a letter to O’Casey.(26) In addition to advertising the event, these materials constituted a discursive field through which audiences could recall the memory of Irish censorship during the performance to help interpret the play. Hogan constructed this memory through a narrative of American exceptionalism that explained the staging of O’Casey’s play in Lafayette, positioning the locals in relationship to the play and its history. For Landsberg, prosthetic memory forms through an embodied interaction with media that allows audiences to take on histories other than their own.(27) This interactive dynamic appears in these performance-adjacent texts and positions the play’s history, O’Casey’s biography, and the LLT production in relation to Lafayette. From the start, the LLT framed Father Ned through its scandalous past. Their first press announcement stated, “the play has already become something of an international ‘cause-celebre’ because of its dramatic withdrawal from the Dublin International Theatre Festival last summer and from the subsequent cancelling of the festival.” This announcement gives no description of the play’s content, emphasizing its history and O’Casey as “the greatest living dramatist of the English-speaking world” instead—a telling choice for an article that also served as an audition notice.(28) After casting, an editorial pitched the show as a vote of confidence from O’Casey and an honor for the city: “it will be interesting and stimulating to be among the first in the world to hear what so famous an Irish literary figure who ranks with Shaw, Joyce and Yeats has to say.”(29) Hogan’s marketing went farther, calling on Lafayette to participate in an unfolding history that would repudiate Irish censorship. Hogan embedded that invitation in essays defining O’Casey’s life by injustice. The first of these articles glossed the theatre festival scandal. Hogan ends this article with the Manchester Guardian ’s report: “One may contemplate [the festival’s] ruins as a monument to the subservient orthodoxy which so often passes for piety in Ireland.” Eliciting a comparison between oppressed Ireland and a tolerant U.S., Hogan concludes, “But in this case, Dublin’s loss is Greater Lafayette’s gain.”(30) Hogan penned publicity in the form of a history-in-progress that interpolates its readers, encouraging them to participate in the story’s triumphant conclusion. The logic and rhetoric of Hogan’s writing absorbed the LLT’s performance into America’s culture of containment. In the first decades of the Cold War, the global spread of communism and the U.S.’s foreign containment policy pushed anticommunist sentiment to paranoiac heights.(31) If communism couldn’t be contained abroad, it could penetrate and threaten the U.S. from within. In this way, the foreign policy of containment came home. Containment culture simultaneously constructed and policed American norms through discursive and cultural production, negotiating American ideals according to specific needs rather than a stable set of principles.(32) For example, although domestic commentators labeled abstract art un-American, the State Department deployed American abstract art abroad to promote American expressive freedom.(33) Simultaneously, containment culture sanctioned the expulsion of perceived subversiveness in its aim to cultivate idealized Americans, such as in 1951 when Lafayette schools ejected a government textbook that teachers and officials argued supported communism. Indiana followed suit one year later. Lafayette commentators argued that it wasn’t that America’s youth shouldn’t know about communism but that they shouldn’t be taught there’s anything redeemable in it.(34) The LLT’s narrative that framed their production of Father Ned projected local pride in righting an international wrong, of being an exceptionally tolerant and progressive space for artistic expression. In his publicity work, Hogan depicts Ireland as an oppressed and oppressive other in contrast to America, clarifying the national character of the memory of censorship he staged the play against. Hogan continues his history of Ireland via O’Casey, casting the playwright as an outcast genius and decrying Ireland. Hogan’s next article summarized O’Casey’s adolescence in colonial Ireland, emphasizing his poverty.(35) Next, he described O’Casey’s early adulthood, painting a picture of an artist who became keenly aware of social injustice as he entered the workforce and struggled to survive against the backdrop of the bloody revolutionary era.(36) In his subsequent article, Hogan reshapes Ireland from oppressed to oppressor through a description of the 1926 riots over O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars and O’Casey’s later self-exile to Britain.(37) Hogan’s final article conjured an embattled O’Casey whose artistic home at the Abbey Theatre pushed him out of Ireland by rejecting his misunderstood WWI drama The Silver Tassie .(38) Hogan connects this to Father Ned ’s history: O’Casey continually searches for an outlet, and Lafayette, Hogan implies, can give him vent. This publicity rhetorically established Lafayette’s place in the play’s history. The advertisements always touted that it was a world premiere, simultaneously promoting the event, framing it for the community, and providing a proxy-rehearsal for attending the play, priming the audience for how to think about it.(39) These advertisements expect its audience to have some familiarity with how the play arrived in Lafayette and ask Hoosiers to imagine themselves in that history. As the opening approached, the Lafayette and West Lafayette mayors proclaimed a “World Premiere Week” in honor of the LLT’s historic achievement, and the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce urged the community support this “event of world-wide theatrical importance.”(40) Both implicitly understand the production via its censorship: Ireland refused it, allowing Lafayette to make history. Although it’s unlikely everyone in the LLT audience read all of Hogan’s articles, the production program reproduced much of their content and rhetoric, grounding spectators in their curated history. It introduces O’Casey as “a stormy figure in the British Theatre,” tracing O’Casey’s earlier controversies through the theatre festival scandal. “Well,” the note proclaims, “Dublin’s loss is Lafayette’s gain,” echoing the earlier article.(41) Again, the production positioned the Hoosier community as the solution to Irish censorship. Hogan and the LLT brought the memory of Irish censorship to Indiana through the production’s paratexts, establishing a framework for audiences to interpret the show. Othering Ireland on the Hoosier Stage Onstage, the LLT worked to differentiate Ireland from Lafayette. The prosthetic memory of Irish censorship further distanced the audience from identifying with the Ireland onstage by allowing the spectators to position themselves and their world as different. According to the narrative Hogan and the LLT created, it was by virtue of their unique place in the world that the play could appear in Lafayette at all. Indeed, O’Casey draws a particularly harsh sketch of historical and contemporary Ireland—but he does so to imagine Ireland’s movement from oppression to utopia via O’Casey’s communism. This complicates the memory’s neat Indiana/Ireland division and, by extension, the performance’s politics. For O’Casey, Ireland’s stagnancy was due to its political and cultural conservatism. According to The Drums of Father Ned , a new politics grounded in a communal sociality of care rather than competition is necessary to move Ireland forward. The prosthetic memory of Irish censorship made it difficult for the LLT’s production to resonate in this way because it situated Lafayette in a position of progressive superiority compared to Ireland. Lafayette was more progressive than Ireland by dint of the banned play’s mere presence and communism was a wholly negative force to be expelled, not adopted. Because amateur theatre is an especially “situated practice… rooted in its local environment,” the LLT artists needed to perform Irishness to contrast with Lafayette.(42) The minimal set, historically and culturally inaccurate costumes, auditorium, and performers were constant reminders of the local circumstances of production. Performing with Irish dialects was one of the major ways the company used to create difference, even though O’Casey twice told Hogan not to bother, saying that he preferred the actors’ natural voices over contrivance.(43) To perform without an Irish brogue in a production that so reflexively pointed out its localness would risk limiting its capacity to depict Ireland as other. Take, for instance, Robert Corbin, who played Father Fillifogue. According to Richard “Dick” Jaeger, who played the church organist Mr. Murray (see Figure 1), the LLT frequently cast Corbin in older roles because he was a person with albinism, and directors felt his light skin and hair aged his appearance while his relative youth allowed for physical dexterity and endurance unavailable to many seniors.(44) Corbin’s past performances as older men would have haunted his Father Fillifogue for LLT regulars, highlighting the show’s localness.(45) Performing with Irish dialects helped to distinguish the Irish characters from the Hoosier actors who played them, even as many in the audience surely delighted in seeing friends, family, and colleagues onstage. Figure 1: The LLT’s staging of “The Prerumble.” IE/NLI/MS/44,728/6/1. Nevertheless, Jaeger distinctly recalled Hogan and co-director Jeanne Orr telling everyone to speak with “a broad theatre accent.” According to Jaeger, Hogan taught the cast the dialect to varying degrees of success.(46) Corroborating the importance of dialects, news coverage sold the authentic Irish speech of one cast member, Geraldine Gray, an Irish immigrant who “hasn’t lost her Irish brogue,” as a selling point that lent authenticity to the production.(47) Gray was joined by fellow immigrant Nicholas Bielenberg, a graduate student at Purdue, who played the Man of the Pike in the play’s 1798 pageant. Both noted their Irish origins in their program bios. Bielenberg confirmed in a 2020 interview that the cast used Irish dialects, adding that he and Gray helped the others, and that it wasn’t exaggerated but “soft.”(48) The sound of the play, together with Gray and Bielenberg’s presence, confirmed the legitimacy of the production’s representations of Ireland while constantly marking it as different from Lafayette. In its movement from oppression to utopic progress, The Drums of Father Ned begins with a bleak picture of colonial Ireland, creating sharp contrasts with Lafayette in the LLT’s production. The production began with the silhouette of a town in flames behind a scrim, with a cross-topped spire especially visible and a white Celtic cross standing before the scrim. A group of Hoosiers clad in black sweaters, khaki pants, and berets played the Black and Tans, firearms in hand (see Figure 2). The officers force the hateful Binnington and McGilligan to talk to each other and run side-by-side while the officers shoot just to the left and right of each—coercing the hateful pair together, mixing social and martial torture to humorous effect. This staging of the Irish War for Independence, with its hellish backdrop and violence, is a darker depiction of Ireland than that contained in the memory of censorship. After the Black and Tans march away, gunshots sound and Binnington exclaims, “Aha, our boys are givin’ it to them! God direct their aim.” Here, O’Casey marshals the name of God in service of dehumanizing violence induced by the colonial relationship. At the scene’s conclusion, the audience heard a war chant accompanied by a drumroll.(49) As the program’s glossary notes, the drums signify a Protestant ritual, pointing to the sectarianism that informs Ireland’s history and foreshadows the continued sectarian divide in independent Ireland. Figure 2: Mr. Murray (Richard “Dick” Jaeger) rehearses for An Tóstal under the watchful eye of Father Fillifogue (Robert Corbin, right). IE/NLI/MS/44,728/6/4. The sardonic violence, Irish dialects, war-torn setting, and dark humor solidified Ireland as an other and likely inspired in spectators an endearing thankfulness to not be in Ireland. The scene was intense enough to frighten Hogan’s child.(50) The “Prerumble” evoked for the Hoosiers a far-off place not their own. The prosthetic memory of Irish censorship reinforced this critical distance by providing a narrative framework about the play that positioned Lafayette both as Ireland’s tolerant counterpart and the banned play’s home. Rather than offer pathways to empathy and progressive politics, prosthetic memory denied them by further cementing and implicitly vilifying cultural difference through the comparison of Hoosiers and Irish, Indiana and Ireland. The Specter of Anticommunism and Hoosier Intolerance From the prologue through the play’s end, O’Casey works to supplant one Irish nationalism with another. O’Casey draws connections between the revolutionary era and the contemporary one, arguing that Ireland’s stagnancy is due to the conservatism, capitalism, and parochialism that calcified after independence. O’Casey proposes Ireland can overcome its economic failures and socio-cultural malaise through an alternative nationalism that embraced a broadly socialist worldview of communal care over competition and profit. As the play progresses, these two nationalisms come into increasing conflict until O’Casey’s politics win out, paving the way for a utopian future. The memory of Irish censorship, though, likely muddled this critique, continuously reinscribing its viewers in a binary where America out-progresses Ireland. American containment culture resisted O’Casey’s dramaturgy even as the play unfolded, contributing to an ambivalent reception. The first major source of revolutionary energy in The Drums of Father Ned emerges from the 1798 Rebellion An Tóstal pageant rehearsed by the younger characters. This failed uprising against British imperialism provided O’Casey with a historical model for his alternative Irish nationalism precisely because it was led by an interfaith group that hoped its call for equality would transcend Ireland’s divisions. O’Casey specifically saw in its leader, Wolfe Tone, a proto-Marxist willingness to fight structural inequalities and advocate for universal equality.(51) He thus renders the 1798 pageant in Father Ned as a nostalgic, patriotic melodrama.(52) Further, he plants this idealism in the younger generation of characters who are inspired to work toward their vision of a renewed Ireland where anything short of an equal and united Ireland “is but quiet decay.”(53) For the younger characters (and O’Casey), there’s hope in the rehearsal of a nationalism that forgoes the historical divisions of the revolutionary period. O’Casey minimizes the youths’ “radicalism” through the ridiculously conservative Father Fillifogue: “So your play babbles about the rights of man. [ He chuckles mockingly .] What with your rights of women, rights of children, rights of trades unions, rights of th’ laity, an’ civil rights—[ shouting angrily ] youse are paralysin’ life!”(54) The peaceful “quiet decay” is Fillifogue’s ideal, which a more caring and equal democracy can undo. The players are earnest in their efforts, too. The players express genuine connection with the pageant, saying ahead of their rehearsal that “We have to get on with th’ work of resuscitatin’ Ireland.” Binnington and McGilligan admonish their efforts as a waste of time and money. But the younger characters see in their labor not a chance to “widen the walls of a bank” but to care for the good of their community, drawing on the communist imagery of hammer and sickle to make their case.(55) Such imagery would likely have set off alarms in the minds of the Cold War Hoosiers in attendance. Indiana and Lafayette, in particular, were centers of anticommunist fervor. Indiana was one of only four states to pass legislation banning the Communist Party from the ballot, and the state also required people in certain professions take loyalty oaths to qualify for employment.(56) In 1957, worried about communism in Indiana University’s faculty and the relocation of the Communist Party USA headquarters to Chicago, Indiana legislators established a state-level House Un-American Activities Committee, which, at the federal level, famously investigated suspected communist activity in public and private sectors.(57) Lafayette also participated in this project at the local level. In 1949, Purdue University employees took loyalty oaths. Ten years later—the same year as the LLT production—Purdue complied with a federal mandate requiring loyalty oaths from students seeking federal student loans, and commentators approved.(58) In fact, Lafayette beat the drums for anticommunism, outlawing outright communism’s promotion, support, advertisement, dissemination, or advancement, punishable by fine and imprisonment.(59) While it is unclear if the city charged or convicted anyone for violating the ban, the law projected a unified front in the “total cold war,” as President Eisenhower put it, against communism. Hogan, at least, participated in that war. Hogan’s scholarship makes clear his anticommunism, even when it came to O’Casey. He scathingly describes The Star Turns Red as the O’Casey play that is “closest to straight propaganda…and it is his poorest play.…There is no real dramatic clash here because there are no characters. There is only disembodied opinion.” Hogan goes on to quote critic George Jean Nathan: “the two worst influences on present-day playwrights are, very often, Strindberg and Communism.” To Hogan, O’Casey’s primary contribution was his formal experimentation, and he reads Father Ned as a parable of a universal cycle of death and renewal, represented in its generational transition.(60) It is harder to suggest what Jeanne Orr, who co-directed with Hogan, thought or knew of O’Casey’s politics or its presence in Father Ned . In a newspaper article, Orr said that O’Casey “is attacking intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and confining attitudes” in the play.(61) Her granddaughter, Jessica Jeanne Orr Urley, stated in a 2020 interview that her grandmother was progressive.(62) Holding a degree in speech from Ohio State University as well as a master’s from Purdue, Orr was highly educated. In an article in the local daily, the Journal and Courier , about her work, Orr listed amateur theatre actor and director, puppeteer, radio and theatre dramatist, and seamstress among her work in addition to her labor as a mother and wife.(63) She later won an award for a children’s book she authored and illustrated that celebrates individualism and difference.(64) She also greatly admired the play, expressing in a post-show letter to O’Casey her “deep gratitude…for what became my most interesting, challenging, and thoroughly rewarding experience in the theatre.”(65) None of this means she was procommunist, of course. It is unlikely that the LLT embraced O’Casey’s communistic utopianism. Like Orr, Hogan also recognized that the play’s Ireland moves from puritanism to tolerance.(66) At the time, though, he also consistently ignored or disparaged the playwright’s leftism. It is probable that the directors’ varying perspectives and especially Hogan’s anticommunism informed staging choices and obfuscated the play’s politics, at least. The 1798 pageant is one instance where dramaturgical confusion is evident. In a post-show report Hogan wrote to O’Casey, he explained that they kept to the letter of the script to the best of their abilities, but that they may have tonally missed the mark with the 1798 pageant. Hogan explained that they played the dueling scene “in a purposely awkward grand manner with broad stage gestures and amateurish bumbling. I think it was one of the best scenes, though one woman stalked out during it, saying, ‘My God, I’m leaving if the acting is this bad.’”(67) Following O’Casey’s stage directions, the scene should show a lack of preparation, not inability. To stage the pageant in such a broad manner that it turns spectators out of the theatre is to potentially ridicule the ideas and characters in which O’Casey lodged hope. Showing their inspiration as an absurd or naïve game of poorly acted make-believe instead of an enactment of earnestly held beliefs that rehearse utopia undermines O’Casey’s politics. For an audience already inclined toward anticommunism, deprecating the play’s communism could have reinforced preconceived prejudices. If Ireland was an other against which to compare the U.S., rather than help to propel Ireland toward progressivism, the LLT’s staging of the pageant kept Ireland in a place of naivety at best and repression at worst. Even if the production staged the scene in congruence with O’Casey’s politics, the performance still would have othered Ireland—but it would have been an other that exceeded the imagined tolerance that the prosthetic memory of Irish censorship established. Again, the memory of censorship positioned the audience in a comparative relationship with the banned art that allows the audience to work through their own subjectivity and understanding of history. Audiences make meaning from perceived contrasts between the histories laden with the memory of censorship, the banned art itself, and their own time and place. Instead of imagining Ireland as more progressive than the U.S. or entirely repressed, it’s quite probable that the production’s staging of 1798 left spectators with multiple Irelands of varying character. At this point in the show, read through the cultural memory of Irish censorship, the performance maintained U.S. exceptionalism by limiting the challenge O’Casey’s dramaturgy posed to that constructed memory and the American identities the memory safeguarded. Rather than encourage audiences to embrace difference and understand themselves anew, the prosthetic memory of censorship permitted audiences to reinscribe their exceptionalism vis-à-vis the politically muddled staging. Each instance the play addresses communism is a moment of negotiation, where The Drums of Father Ned summons the Hoosier history of anticommunism and asks the audience to contend with their assumptions. Hogan and the LLT did not create their prosthetic memory of Irish censorship to reckon with any interpolative dynamic other than the “tolerant here”/“oppressive there” dichotomy, yet the performance asked its audience to consider O’Casey’s communism as a way to better the world. The cultural memory of Irish censorship conflicted with the positive, progressive Ireland in Father Ned because the memory allowed the Hoosier audience to place themselves in a dominant hierarchical position to the Irish on the basis of their supposed tolerance. Read through an interpretive framework that privileged American identities and histories, O’Casey’s fantastical “progressive Ireland” pointed out Lafayette’s own history of political intolerance. The performance conjured the specter of Hoosier anticommunist intolerance and censorship, scrambling the memory of censorship’s predetermined relationship to Ireland and the politics of Cold War containment culture. Irish censorship moved to highlight and critique histories of censorship that Lafayette took for granted, challenging what it meant to be Hoosier. The play’s references to communism are never only about communism, but are in conversation with ideas like religion, sexuality, and gender. The production interrogated these categories’ function as regulators of the domestic communist containment project, questioning the supposedly binary nature of communist/U.S. culture. For instance, late in the play the northern Protestant Skerighan debates religion with the southern Catholics. He asks Michael Binnington whether God is a Catholic or a Protestant and Michael shares, He’s neither; but He is all…He may be but a shout of th’ people in th’ street.…It might be a shout for freedom, like th’ shout of men on Bunker Hill; shout of th’ people for bread in th’ streets, as in th’ French Revolution; or for th’ world’s ownership by th’ people, as in the Soviet Union.(68) Michael frames God in revolutionary terms, in justice and communal, humanitarian care. As Moran argues, “O’Casey co-opts such theological language in order to justify the communist cause.”(69) O’Casey’s advocacy of communism comes out of a very Christian place, but it nevertheless is still an advocacy of communism and would have resonated against Lafayette’s history and jarred with the memory of censorship. Lafayette saw its share of religiously-motivated anticommunism, enacting their ban on communism in part because communism “denies God and the God given rights which our government is designed to respect.”(70) The conservative columnist Fulton Lewis Jr. argued in an article that appeared in the Journal and Courier in 1958 that the U.S.’s “superior heritage of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man” would be key to defeating communism.(71) For O’Casey, the brotherhood of man is precisely where God is located and communism is its logical political expression. When Father Fillifogue discovers Binnington and McGilligan’s plot to import lumber from Soviet Russia to save money, he furiously exclaims, “You rascals, how can I let my people live under roofs of atheistical timber?” and demands they burn it. The youths, including several dressed in their eighteenth-century pageant costumes and wielding pike and musket props, refuse, condemning Fillifogue’s command as the burning of homes.(72) O’Casey thus makes the priest’s anticommunism immoral and impractical. This is a small revolution, but one that O’Casey emphasizes, too, with the 1798 pageanters: the alternative, communal nationalism that they earlier rehearsed, they now enact. O’Casey turns Christianity’s “inherent anticommunism” on its head. In Lafayette’s estimation, Christianity expelled communism and worked to guarantee Americanism. In O’Casey’s logic, Christianity that manages to get over its own piety easily promulgates communism—a total reversal of containment principles. O’Casey’s Ireland is the more tolerant imaginary and, arguably, the more Christian state, a representation that upsets the memory of Irish censorship. On this point, the play may have upset some religious Hoosiers, too. According to Bielenberg, some Catholics in the audience “frowned upon” the play because they thought it antireligious. Bielenberg insisted that these objections were not based on O’Casey’s communism, arguing that they weren’t aware of it.(73) This contradicts what Hogan told O’Casey about the Catholic response: “Indeed, there were a couple priests chortling in the audience one night. About 20percent [ sic ] of the people in the town or [ sic ] Catholics, but there have been no rumbles.”(74) It is entirely possible that Hogan simply did not hear the rumbles that Bielenberg heard or that the response was inconsistent. It is entirely possible that some in the audience thought the play was antireligious because of the connections O’Casey makes between communism and Christianity. To challenge the cultural politics of conservative religiosity was to stand against the faith. Rejecting O’Casey’s religious message also meant rejecting his communism and thus maintaining containment culture. This logic clashes with the cultural memory of Irish censorship by suggesting that perhaps Dublin’s archbishop was right to protest the play. Ireland and the U.S. are more closely aligned than the memory’s narrative suggests because both refuse communism and antireligion, which, according to this logic, is in the best interests of both nations. Containment culture also policed sexuality and gender as signs of healthy American values, but these categories were more fraught. In some respects, norms were ideals: heterosexuality, monogamous marriage, the wife-as-homemaker and husband-as-breadwinner. Early Cold War America agonized over perceived threats to hegemonic expressions of masculinity. More women were in the workforce, blurring gender roles and yielding a more egalitarian domesticity. Many believed that women’s evolving social roles impacted sexual mores, decentering male sexual pleasure. WWII gave men greater purchase to carry out supposedly natural aggressions, yet men were also expected to be gentle providers and role models. Further, husbands were expected to be sexually experienced enough to pleasure their wives but not so much as to detract from their marriage. Monogamy and premarital abstinence could thus hinder masculinity even as it was also an ideal. This “crisis of masculinity” exposed political anxieties: sexual and gender “deviance” equaled political subversion.(75) The publication of Indiana University professor Alfred C. Kinsey’s studies on sexuality created a firestorm, revealing the great extent to which Americans “deviated.” As Indianapolis minister Dr. Jean S. Milner sermonized, “there is a fundamental kinship between this thing [Kinsey’s report on female sexuality] and Communism and…though it may seem to be a thousand miles from Communism, [it] will contribute invariably towards Communism, for both are based on the same naturalistic philosophy."(76) Given communists’ supposed proclivity for “abnormal” sexuality and gender expression, recentering masculinity could guard America. But this generally meant accepting men would need to practice aggression and sexual prowess to gain the experience necessary to manage their homes.(77) Two scenes in The Drums of Father Ned bring American assumptions about communism and sex and gender into dialogue. With the revelation of the “red” timber, chaos descends. Fillifogue blames Michael and Nora: “We have had peace here till youse came back from Dublin [where they attend university] with your design to use the Tosthal for your own ends; but I won’t allow your idle impudence to molest our pure peace.”(78) His language is terribly ironic, for their “peace” is one of patriarchal abuse, as evidenced by the Ulsterman Skerighan’s assault on Bernadette the maid on the pretense that she enticed him by “twutterin’ [her] luddle bum” at him. Skerighan forces himself onto her and kisses her against her will. Though at first, she “coyly” tries to dissuade his advances, she finally screams and pushes him off. Panicking, Skerighan tries to bribe Bernadette into silence and although she first refuses she ultimately takes his money—gesturing to her powerlessness. Fillifogue then tells Skerighan that he saw Bernadette running from the house. Fillifogue interprets Bernadette’s retreat as a sign of her sinfulness, but it’s more likely that she is fleeing after the assault.(79) Bernadette represents the condition in which many Irish women found themselves and that led many to emigrate. Fillifogue’s culture of peace thus comes at the expense of women’s mistreatment. Like the pageant sequence, the LLT production apparently played Bernadette’s assault primarily for laughs. While Moran is right that the scene points out one of the reasons so many Irish women emigrated, Hogan called the scene “delightful” in his scholarship and failed to contend with its violence.(80) Rather, the sequence is one of several representations of misogyny in Ireland that O’Casey depicted in his later plays, as Moran demonstrates. Between the archival photograph of the scene (see Figure 3) and his comment that they pushed the play’s comedy, it’s likely Hogan and Orr staged it in a slapstick style. Figure 3: The North Irish Protestant businessman Alec Skerighan (Stuart Main) approaches a shocked maid, Bernadette (Patricia Hensley), after whirling her to the sofa. IE/NLI/MS/44,728/6/2. The LLT’s staging reflects the Cold War’s masculinity crisis. Skerighan’s sexual aggression is acceptable and even desirable under this logic. In this interpretation, Bernadette still resists his aggression but then feigns distress in an overly dramatic fashion in order to extort Skerighan, making light of the assault to comedic effect, complete with dramatic irony that cues the audience to Bernadette’s ruse instead of grappling with her trauma. This benefits Skerighan’s masculinity at the risk of Bernadette’s safety. Read through the memory of Irish censorship, instead of cultural difference, here the LLT production perversely performed the gendered oppression O’Casey meant to critique as normal, closely aligning the conservative Irish patriarchy with American masculinity. The movement of censorship as memory likely had the effect of confirming already entrenched attitudes rather than critique either Ireland or the U.S. The Drums of Father Ned concludes with a positive link between communism and sexuality. As Binnington and McGilligan try to support Fillifogue at the end of the play in his suppression of the young people’s enthusiasm, Nora attacks their support of capitalism and patriarchy. Fillifogue’s ridiculous response blames her thinking on “th’ College lettin’ th’ students wear jeans. I warned th’ Chancellor that allowing the students to dress like manual labourers would have a communistic tendency and influence.”(81) Michael then reveals that he and Nora have been living together and sharing a bed while at College. Their parents collapse into chairs in shocked paralysis, as the despairing priest proclaims, “Youse see, youse hear! The jeans, jeans, jeans!”(82) In this satire of Red-Scare hysteria, Fillifogue connects their sexual behavior with communism via jeans. Nora’s openness about their relationship is what finally topples the older generation. The Romeo and Juliet –esque couple from opposing “houses” live and sleep together without any mention of marriage, violating normative expectations. Once revealed, this “revolutionary” sexuality that ignores old enmities shatters Irish conservatism and ushers in the dawn of O’Casey’s Irish utopia. A culture that accepts a kind of communism, Christian principles, sexual liberty, and social equality without contradiction, the Ireland that concludes the play far exceeds the limits of what counted as Hoosier tolerance and exceptionalism. The end of the play sees Ireland shift politically, with Nora and Michael contesting their parents’ elected positions. The young leave the old, deciding to follow Father Ned’s march into the future. As Binnington and McGilligan struggle to rise from their stupefaction, they beckon their wives to bring them their mayoral regalia, but the robes, hats, and chains are too big for them.(83) This bit of fantasy illustrates they are inadequate for the needs of governance. Fillifogue similarly collapses as his parish abandons him for Father Ned, who has encouraged progressivism, and the three slump over and admit defeat: “Ireland has gone to the fair!” – meaning both the young as well as the Tóstal fair. Skerighan, whose business also depends upon his dealings with Binnington and McGilligan, tries to rouse the three Catholics to stop Father Ned by singing a mocking Protestant song. Father Ned’s march interrupts and drowns out Skerighan’s divisive tune, and Murray urges them to join the united front. Father Ned’s drums roll, and the play ends (see Figure 4).(84) Faith in competition loses to faith in community. Figure 4: The Drums of Father Ned ’s final tableaux at the LLT. IE/NLI/MS/44,728/6/3 The play asks its audience where it stands. Will they march to Father Ned’s beat or stay behind? The LLT performance asked Lafayette to take on what it means to live under censorship, to affectively feel and think through the contradictions in their thinking and history, and to maybe even entertain a politics that may never have had a place in the community had it not been for their willingness to indulge in the fantasy of American exceptionalism. But the show also skirted the drama’s progressive potential. The play’s procommunist outlook, at turns muted or ridiculed but ultimately fulfilled, was not wholly subsumed. Audiences voiced their confusion. As Hogan told O’Casey, “but even tho [ sic ] they were entertained and chortled and guffawed through more than two hours, I’ve got to ruefully admit that a lot went away wondering what the play was about;” and in his book, “there were a lot of people who left shrugging.”(85) Henry Hewes, drama critic for the Saturday Review , traveled from New York to see the production. In his review, he, too, commented on a sense of bewilderment.(86) In its movement from Ireland to the U.S., the world premiere of The Drums of Father Ned repudiated Lafayette, Indiana, and the U.S.’s contradictory intolerance and exceptionalism. By making the case that communistic politics and culture can achieve a more equal, tolerant world and presenting an Ireland that accepts ideas and practices which U.S. containment culture rejected, the LLT production rebutted its own narrative about Lafayette’s exceptionalism. Yet because the company built its framework around the notion that the Hoosiers already occupied the ultimate possible political position, even a utopian play that reminded them not only of what they had refused to tolerate, but that those very ideas and practices could make the world better failed to offer much beyond the challenge itself. Ireland might have played a small role in shaping how Lafayette’s theatregoers understood themselves, but taking on the prosthetic memory of Irish censorship very likely produced more ambivalence than serious reflection, let alone a renegotiation of their own biases. And despite the pretensions to progress that making banned cultural objects accessible can entail, the Lafayette production of O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned demonstrates how the cultural memory of censorship can limit progress and inspire political complacency. All photographs were scanned by the National Library of Ireland and are shared with the permission of Shivaun O’Casey. References St. Vincent Troubridge, Report on The Drums of Father Ned , September 26, 1960, The Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence, LCP CORR 1960/1074/1, The British Library, London. Christopher Murray, Seán O’Casey: Writer at Work: A Biography (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 386–404. Troubridge. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004), 2. Previous studies considering O’Casey’s play have focused on the archbishop’s intervention and/or the text itself. See Joan FitzPatrick Dean, Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 160–65; Joseph Greenwood, ‘Hear My Song’: Irish Theatre and Popular Song in the 1950s and 1960s (Peter Lang, 2017), 133– 57; James Moran, The Theatre of Seán O’Casey (Bloomsbury, 2013), 30–31, 117–46; Christopher Murray, “O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned in Context,” in A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage , ed. Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa, 117–29 (Indiana University Press, 2000); Paul O’Brien, Seán O’Casey: Political Activist and Writer (Cork University Press, 2023), 256–64. Judith Butler, “Ruled Out: Vocabularies of the Censor,” in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation , ed. Robert C. Post (Getty Research Institute, 1998), 249, 248. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge, 1997), 130. Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 309. Sean O’Casey, The Letters of Sean O’Casey , ed. David Krause, vol. 3, 1955–1958 (Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 254, 306 n. 1, 551–2; Hogan to O’Casey, received March 4, 1958, Seán O’Casey Papers (hereafter cited as O’Casey Papers), IE/NLI/MS/37,846/2, National Library of Ireland, Dublin. John Moody to O’Casey, February 18, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,074; J.E.C. Lewis-Crosby to O’Casey, March 10, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,051; Paul Shyre to O’Casey, March 14, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,051; Paul Shyre to O’Casey, March 29, 1958, April 18, 1958, May 19, 1958, June 5, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,079/3; Harold Goldblatt to O’Casey, October 7, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,051; O’Casey to Harold Goldblatt, October 12, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,051; O’Casey, Letters , 3: 536, 568, 575, 580–82, 954–55, 612, 627–28. Robert Hogan, The Experiments of Sean O’Casey (St. Martin’s Press, 1960), 140–41. These included The Star Turns Red in 1940 at Liverpool’s Unity Theatre and both Purple Dust and Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy at Newcastle’s People’s Theatre in 1942 and 1949, respectively. Moran, 27, 29–31, 248 n. 100. Moran, 27; Susan Canon Harris, Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the International Left, 1892–1964 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017),192–94. Jim Hanks, Stage Memories and Curtains (On Stage/Back Stage) (Copymat Services, 1998), 62–66. The other plays by Irish playwrights were George Bernard Shaw’s The Great Catherine and Candida , Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest , Lennox Robinson’s The Far-Off Hills , and St. John Ervine’s Friends and Relations , The Ship , and The First Mrs. Frasier. Ibid., 12, 16. “World Premiere of Play by Irish Author,” Journal and Courier , April 25, 1959. “A Few Tickets Are Left for O’Casey Play,” Journal and Courier , April 25, 1959. Sean O’Casey, The Drums of Father Ned (St. Martin’s, 1960), 10. John Bradley, “Changing the Rules: Why the Failures of the 1950s Forced a Transition in Economic Policy-making,” in The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , ed. Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan (Mercier, 2004), 105–17; Mary E. Daly, Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957–1973 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 6–7, 19–24; Eleanor O’Leary, Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland (Bloomsbury, 2018), 11–12, 38–43. Edna Delaney, “The Vanishing Irish? The Exodus from Ireland in the 1950s,” in Keogh et al., 81. Caitríona Clear, “‘Too Fond of Going’: Female Emigration and Change for Women in Ireland, 1946–1961.,” in Keogh et al., 135–46; Sandra McAvoy, “Before Cadden: Abortion in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ireland,” in Keogh et al., 147–63. The marriage bar was a national policy in Ireland that women resign from their posts in certain jobs upon marriage and prohibited married women from joining the civil service. The policy lasted until 1973. See Daly, 128, 151–55. Eric G. E. Zuelow, Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War (Syracuse University Press, 2009), 67–69, 124–35. O’Casey, Letters , 3: 414, 416, 423–24, 433. O’Casey was also critical, however, of the materialism he saw at the heart of An Tóstal . See ibid., 266. Alcoa, “Lafayette Families Live Better Because of Alcoa,” Journal and Courier , July 23, 1959; Program for the Lafayette Little Theatre Association production of The Drums of Father Ned , 4–5, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,161/4. Patrick Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 92. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. Landsberg, 108. “Little Theatre May Do World Premiere,” Journal and Courier , February 26, 1959. “World Premiere,” Journal and Courier , March 4, 1959. Robert Hogan, “O’Casey Play Already Has Stormy History,” Journal and Courier , March 7, 1959. Larry Ceplair, Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History (Praeger, 2011), 91–190; M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 122–90. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (Basic Books, 2008); Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Duke University Press, 1995). Michael L. Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 1–6. “Text Rejected As Socialistic,” Journal and Courier , December 14, 1951; “Textbook Action Vindicated,” Journal and Courier , December 13, 1952. Robert Hogan, “O’Casey Started with Little, Learned Much,” Journal and Courier , March 21, 1959. Robert Hogan, “O’Casey Saved Money for Reading Material,” Journal and Courier , April 4, 1959. Robert Hogan, “Like Most, O’Casey Left Native Land,” Journal and Courier , April 9, 1959. On the Plough and the Star riots, see Morash, 163–71. Robert Hogan, “Play Rejection Called Crucial O’Casey Event,” Journal and Courier , April 16, 1959. On the Abbey’s rejection of The Silver Tassie , see Moran, 20–23, 66–80. Hogan also appeared on local television and radio to promote the play. Bill Brooks, “Around Here,” Journal and Courier , April 18, 1959. Lafayette Little Theatre Association, Advertisements for The Drums of Father Ned , Journal and Courier , April 8 and 9, 1959 . “Proclaim Week for Premiere,” Journal and Courier , April 16, 1959; Resolution of the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. “About the Play,” Program for the Lafayette Little Theatre Association Production of The Drums of Father Ned , O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,161/4. Helene Nicholson, Nadine Holdsworth, and Jane Milling, The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 12. Sean O’Casey, The Letters of Sean O’Casey , ed. David Krause, vol. 4, 1959–1964 (Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 14, 20. Richard Jaeger, phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, April 16, 2016. My deepest thanks to Richard “Dick” Jaeger and Nicholas Bielenberg for sharing their thoughts and memories of the production. On the ways past roles “haunt” actors’ present performances, see Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (University of Michigan Press, 2001), 1–15, 52–95. Jaeger interview. UPI, “Premiere Of Irish Playwright’s Drama Slated For Lafayette,” Anderson Daily Bulletin , April 22, 1959. Nicholas Bielenberg, phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, July 3, 2020. O’Casey, Father Ned , 7–12. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. O’Casey, Letters , 3: 464. O’Casey quotes a play from Shaw to explain his views of Tone and communism. See George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (Penguin, 1984), 163. See also, Moran, 36. O’Casey saw melodramas of 1798 as a young man. See Stephen Watt, Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theatre (Syracuse University Press, 1991), 31, 51, 59, 143–87. O’Casey, Father Ned , 36. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 32. Ceplair, 238 n. 24; Heale, 29. Dale R. Sorenson, “The Anticommunist Consensus in Indiana” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1980), 94, 127, 194–7. “Loyalty at Purdue Covered by Oath,” Journal and Courier , June 4, 1949; “Loyalty Oaths and Defense,” Journal and Courier , December 2, 1959; Mary Schlott, “Loan Loyalty Oath OK with Purdue,” Journal and Courier , November 19, 1959; George E. Sokolsky, “Loyalty Oaths and Such,” Journal and Courier , February 22, 1960. “Council Will Act On City Communism Ban,” Journal and Courier , September 29, 1950; “City Acts to Prohibit Communist Activities,” Journal and Courier , August 5, 1950. Hogan, Experiments , 85–86, 98, 139. “World Premiere.” Jessica Jeanne Orr Urley, phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, March 22, 2020. My thanks to Jessica for helping me gain a better sense of her grandmother as a human and artist. Mary Kemmer, “Seven Plays, Two Sons A Degree in Six Years,” Journal and Courier , August 29, 1959. Urley interview. Jeanne Orr to O’Casey, June 8, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. Hogan, Experiments , 135–42. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. O’Casey, Father Ned , 92. Moran, 127. Qtd. in “Council Will Act.” Fulton Lewis Jr., “The Answer to Communism,” Journal and Courier , August 28, 1958. O’Casey, Father Ned , 95–96. Bielenberg interview. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. Hogan does say, though, that Geraldine Gray, the Irish immigrant who played Nora, “gave us a bit of trouble about the crucifix in Act I, and a couple of actors took the play to a priest who sai[d] nothing wrong in it.” Clearly, there was some trepidation in the cast as well. K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (Routledge, 2005), xxi–ii, 9–17, 124–25; Miriam G. Ruemann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (University of California Press, 2005), 9, 55, 59, 68, 76–85. Qtd. in Wardell B. Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research (Harper and Row, 1972), 366. Cuordileone, Manhood , 78, 84. O’Casey, Father Ned , 97. Ibid., 58–61. Moran, 142; Hogan, Experiments , 137. O’Casey, Father Ned , 98–99. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 104–05. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3; Hogan, Experiments , 143. Henry Hewes, “Broadway Postscript: The Green Crow Flies Again,” Saturday Review , May 9, 1959. Bibliography Alcoa. “Lafayette Families Live Better Because of Alcoa.” Advertisement. Journal and Courier , July 23, 1959. Bielenberg, Nicholas. Phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, July 3, 2020. Bradley, John. “Changing the Rules: Why the Failures of the 1950s Forced a Transition in Economic Policy-making.” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , edited by Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan. Mercier, 2004. Brooks, Bill. “Around Here.” Journal and Courier , April 18, 1959. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge, 1997. ---. “Ruled Out: Vocabularies of the Censor.” In Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation , edited by Robert C. Post. Getty Research Institute, 1998. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine . University of Michigan Press, 2001. Ceplair, Larry. Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History . Praeger, 2011. Clear, Caitríona. “‘Too Fond of Going’: Female Emigration and Change for Women in Ireland, 1946–1961..” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , edited by Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan. Mercier, 2004. Cuordileone, K. A. Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War. Routledge, 2005. Daly, Mary E. Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957–1973 . Cambridge University Press, 2016. Dean, Joan FitzPatrick. Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland. University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Delaney, Edna. “The Vanishing Irish? The Exodus from Ireland in the 1950s.” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , edited by Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan. Mercier, 2004. Greenwood, Joseph. ‘Hear My Song’: Irish Theatre and Popular Song in the 1950s and 1960s. Peter Lang, 2017. Hanks, Jim. Stage Memories and Curtains (On Stage/Back Stage) . Copymat Services, 1998. Harris, Susan Canon. Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the International Left, 1892–1964. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Heale, M. J. American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 . Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Hewes, Henry. “Broadway Postscript: The Green Crow Flies Again.” Saturday Review , May 9, 1959. Hogan, Robert. The Experiments of Sean O’Casey . St. Martin’s Press, 1960. ---. “Like Most, O’Casey Left Native Land,” Journal and Courier , April 9, 1959. ---. “O’Casey Play Already Has Stormy History.” Journal and Courier , March 7, 1959. ---. “O’Casey Saved Money for Reading Material.” Journal and Courier , April 4, 1959. ---. “O’Casey Started with Little, Learned Much.” Journal and Courier , March 21, 1959. ---. “Play Rejection Called Crucial O’Casey Event.” Journal and Courier , April 16, 1959 Jaeger, Richard. Phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, April 16, 2016. Journal and Courier . “City Acts to Prohibit Communist Activities.” August 5, 1950. ---. “Council Will Act On City Communism Ban.” September 29, 1950. ---. “A Few Tickets Are Left for O’Casey Play.” April 25, 1959. ---. “Little Theatre May Do World Premiere.” February 26, 1959. ---. “Loyalty at Purdue Covered by Oath.” June 4, 1949. ---. “Loyalty Oaths and Defense.” December 2, 1959. ---. “Proclaim Week for Premiere.” April 16, 1959. ---. “Text Rejected As Socialistic.” December 14, 1951. ---. “Textbook Action Vindicated.” December 13, 1952. ---. “World Premiere.” March 4, 1959. ---. “World Premiere of Play by Irish Author.” April 25, 1959. Kemmer, Mary. “Seven Plays, Two Sons A Degree in Six Years.” Journal and Courier , August 29, 1959. Krenn, Michael L. Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War. University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Lafayette Little Theatre Association, Advertisements for The Drums of Father Ned . Journal and Courier , April 8 and 9, 1959. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture . Columbia University Press, 2004. Lewis Jr., Fulton. “The Answer to Communism.” Journal and Courier , August 28, 1958. Lonergan, Patrick. Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era . Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era . Basic Books, 2008. McAvoy, Sandra. “Before Cadden: Abortion in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ireland.” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , edited by Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan. Mercier, 2004. Moran, James. The Theatre of Seán O’Casey . Bloomsbury: 2013. Morash, Christopher. A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 . Cambridge University Press, 2002. Murray, Christopher. “O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned in Context.” In A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage , edited by Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa. Indiana University Press, 2000. ---. Seán O’Casey: Writer at Work: A Biography . McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age . Duke University Press, 1995. Nicholson, Helene, Nadine Holdsworth, and Jane Milling. The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre . Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. O’Brien, Paul. Seán O’Casey: Political Activist and Writer . Cork University Press, 2023. O’Casey, Eileen. Eileen O’Casey Papers. National Library of Ireland, Dublin. O’Casey, Seán/Sean. The Drums of Father Ned . St. Martin’s, 1960. ---. The Letters of Sean O’Casey . Edited by David Krause. Vol. 3: 1955–1958. Catholic University Press, 1989. ---. The Letters of Sean O’Casey . Edited by David Krause. Vol. 4: 1959–1964. Catholic University of America Press, 1992. ---. Seán O’Casey Papers. National Library of Ireland, Dublin. O’Leary, Eleanor. Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland. Bloomsbury, 2018. Pomeroy, Wardell B. Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research . Harper and Row, 1972. Ruemann, Miriam G. American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports . University of California Press, 2005. Schlott, Mary. “Loan Loyalty Oath OK with Purdue.” Journal and Courier , November 19, 1959. Shaw, George Bernard. John Bull’s Other Island . Penguin, 1984. Sokolsky, George E. “Loyalty Oaths and Such.” Journal and Courier , February 22, 1960. Sorenson, Dale R. “The Anticommunist Consensus in Indiana.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1980. Troubridge, St. Vincent. Report on The Drums of Father Ned , September 26, 1960. British Library, London, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Correspondence, 1960/1074/1. UPI. “Premiere Of Irish Playwright’s Drama Slated For Lafayette.” Anderson Daily Bulletin , April 22, 1959. Urley, Jessica Jeanne Orr. Phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, March 22, 2020. Watt, Stephen. Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theatre. Syracuse University Press, 1991. Zuelow, Eric G. E. Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War. Syracuse University Press, 2009. Footnotes About The Author(s) NIC BARILAR is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Nic earned his PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Pittsburgh in 2021. Nic’s research has appeared in the edited collections Beckett Beyond the Normal (Edinburgh University Press, 2020; pb 2022), The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature (Routledge, 2024), and The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Nic is also an actor, proud member of Actors’ Equity Association, and director. Among his creative credits, he produced and directed the North American premiere of Irish playwright Máiréad Ní Ghráda’s classic 1965 drama On Trial ( An Triail , 1964). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Jennifer Mogbock and company in Toni Stone at The Huntington. Photo: T. Charles Erickson Prayer for the French Republic Joshua Harmon (7 Sep-2 Oct) Fat Ham James Ijames (22 Sep-22 Oct) The Band’s Visit Itmar Moses and David Yazbeck (10 Nov-17 Dec) The Heart Sellers Lloyd Suh (21 Nov-23 Dec) Yippee Ki Yay Richard Marsh (27 Dec-31 Dec) Stand Up if You’re Here Tonight John Klovenbach (20 Jan-23 March) John Proctor is the Villain Kimberly Belflower (8 Feb-10 March) Toni Stone Lydia R. Diamond (17 May-16 June) In July 2023, Christopher Mannelli became Executive Director of The Huntington, following Michael Maso’s forty+ year run as Managing Director. Mannelli took over a strong organization, fully recovered from the pandemic, that offered an extensive season performed in three venues. The Huntington’s first full season with Loretta Greco as Artistic Director opened on the main stage in grand style. Prayer for the French Republic is an expansive three-hour journey across five generations of French Jews. Everything about The Huntington’s production matched the play’s ambitions that began with full color, enlarged (8.5”x11”) program books at a time when some theatres shifted to QR codes. The set featured a rotating dining table that provided critical clues to following the sprawling story. Tony Estrella, as the narrator, delivered historical context directly to the audience, while the remaining cast enacted their private trauma. Carly Zien, as Elodie, delivered an astonishing stream-of-consciousness monologue that illustrated humans’ complex discrepancies. Meanwhile, at The Calderwood, 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner, Fat Ham served up a comedic rap on Hamlet at a Black family backyard barbeque in the American South. Each character bears attributes of their Shakespearean equivalent, plus invented twists. Juicy: misunderstood; moody; and contemplative as any Hamlet, was also obese and gay. The production shredded the fourth wall, fed off our familiarity with Shakespeare’s play, and then skewered it with potato salad, sausage, and pulled pork. The comedy was often broad, always inciteful. Juicy’s karaoke number began so badly it was hilarious, until it turned chilling. Standouts among the cast included Lau’rie Roach as Tio and James T. Alfred at Rev/Pap. Shaken with laughter, I wondered how Fat Ham could mirror Hamlet to the end. Let it be said that death visits the barbeque in ways both funny and fitting. “Nothing is as beautiful as something you don’t expect,” Dina, an Israeli kibbutznik, suggests to Tewfiq, the Egyptian band leader. The sentiment encapsulates the simple pleasure of The Band’s Visit . The Huntington, in collaboration with Speakeasy Stage, delivered unexpected beauty in this musical that infuses traditional Middle Eastern music with a Broadway sound. Director Paul Daigneault highlighted music and broad comedy over the slim plot of this feel-good confection, where scenes unrolled as cross-cultural vignettes that elevated shared humanity over political differences. The Huntington celebrated a non-traditional Thanksgiving. Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers emphasizes comedy over pathos when Filipino immigrant Luna (Jenna Agbayani) and Korean immigrant Jane (Judy Song) come together on this strange holiday in a strange land in 1973. When Luna utters, “So, we’re the lucky ones,” with a profound sigh, she pierces the comic surface of baffled immigrants trying to cook a frozen turkey to reveal two lonely souls. The set was remarkably appalling: a messy studio apartment lined with glossy wallpaper, boxed in a black frame, elevated above the stage. One wall incorporated a sliding glass door, the only opportunity for variable light. Whenever they dreamed of a larger life, the women drifted toward the light. An equally unconventional holiday gift, Yippee-Ki-Yay , is part reenactment of the classic 1980s film, Die Hard ; part confessional of a Die Hard geek; part stand-up comedy; all unspooled in awful meter. Uninitiated audience members were probably perplexed by Darrel Bailey’s zany performance: fluffing imaginary big hair from his bald head; turning the bloodthirsty villain into a pirouetting diva. Those of us familiar with the source, however, anticipated every corny cliché and witty takedown of the movie’s profligate confusions. I received an email a few days before Stand Up if You’re Here Tonight , directing me to enter the theatre through the back alley. Street construction, I figured. On a drizzly January night, one stark light from a small door illuminated the dark alley and beckoned me up two flights and into the rear of the Michael Maso Studio, littered with dusty furniture, clouded mirrors and consignment-quality rejects. Eventually, an old man walked among the clutter and began. Several times. Each diversion was humorous. When wiry, wonderful Jim Ortlieb proclaimed such witticisms as, “Two pots near each other never boil. Make pasta in the space between,” I understood this as a play about nothing. Turns out, the back-alley intimacy was critical to the show’s success, so willingly did supposed grown-ups participate in silly hijinks. It might seem a stretch to legions of high school students burdened with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that John Proctor could be the villain. Yet playwright Kimberly Belflower makes a convincing case that John Proctor is the Villain . This remarkable resetting shifts witch hysteria in seventeenth-century Salem to a twenty-first century Georgia high school, where coming-of-age girls are treated as suspect while male authorities are exalted, despite whatever horrifics they’ve performed. The ensemble cast featured five outstanding women drowning in adolescent torment and triumph. Their friendships and jealousies ricocheted around the stage, exposing the emotional complexity of becoming adults. Yet, the stand out was Benjamin Isaac as Lee Turner, the school nobody, whose character realizes the greatest emotional growth. It was pure delight to watch this man-boy (potentially the next generation’s adulterer) find new understanding of himself and his relationship to women. Toni Stone , the season’s finale, was a hit. The Huntington’s long affiliation with playwright Lydia R. Diamond ( Stick Fly, Smart People, The Bluest Eye ) scored in this funny, poignant bio of Toni Stone, the first professional female baseball player who played in the Negro leagues in the 1950s. As Toni, marvelous Jennifer Mogbock told us straight up she’s no good at telling stories in the right order, then launched an opening monologue that fast pitched the joys of baseball. She also held her own against the supporting cast of ten men playing an array of characters. The second act made a few errors, perhaps because accurate biography doesn’t align with theatrical climax. Two production numbers, fabulously choreographed by Ebony Williams, provided the buoyancy of a Broadway musical, while Diamond’s sparkling script and crisp direction beautifully modulated the euphoria and struggles befitting a lonely woman playing in a dwindling league. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) PAUL E. FALLON is an architect who spent over thirty years designing housing and healthcare facilities. A commitment to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake became the focus of his first book, Architecture by Moonlight . In 2015-2016, Paul bicycled through each of the 48 contiguous states and asked everyone he met the same question. How Will We Live Tomorrow? became his second book. Returning to Cambridge, MA, Paul continues to write blog essays, plays, and NETIR articles about Boston-area theatre companies. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jessica L. Peña Torres  Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Jessica L. Peña Torres By Published on May 8, 2023 Download Article as PDF Zapateado, burlesque dancing, and a mix of mariachi, son jarocho, and electronic music combine to create the world for MÉXICO (EXPROPRIATED), a bilingual dance-theater piece that surveys three regions of México (Jalisco, Sonora, Veracruz) through a dramatization of the origins of ballet folklórico. With songs such as “Son de la Negra,” “La Bruja,” and “La Bamba,” the dancers of Coctel Explosivo present Mexico’s folkloric diaspora while inviting the audience to reflect upon a heritage that has been as appropriated as Carolina Herrera’s latest collection. MÉXICO (EXPROPRIATED) unearths the politics and history of ballet folklórico, which has been presented as authentic Mexican culture for decades and puts it under the microscope for the audience to decide: should we keep these dances in the repertoire, or should we re-choreograph them to reflect their complicated histories? My Desilusión with Ballet Folklórico I saw the Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández live onstage for the first time at the Strathmore Theatre in North Bethesda, MD in 2015. Even though it was a reach, I dreamed about dancing for Hernández’s company. That night in Bethesda, I became enamorada of the colors, the technique, and the professionalism of the most famous dance company in Mexico. The female dancers, all tall, very thin, and, significantly, light-skinned, looked like Barbie dolls to me. For days, I daydreamed of their high battements in “Guerrero,” the lightness of their faldeo in “Jalisco,” and their pas de vals in “Revolución.” A few months later, I moved to Mexico City to audition for the company, but a quick visit to their website shattered my hopes in seconds. The section “Auditions” listed under “requirements”: “Estatura minima: mujeres 1.68 m” (Minimum height: women 5’5’’) [i] . I was four inches too short. I thought about the dancers I had seen perform and could not help but compare my short height to their statuesque bodies. A month or so later, I was dancing with the Ballet Folclórico Nacional de México de Silvia Lozano, a sixty-year-old-company founded by a former dancer of Hernández’s, Maestra Silvia Lozano. In rehearsals, it did not take long for me to start hearing chisme (gossip) about what it was like to work for other major folklórico companies in the city. I heard rumors that teachers and administrators in Hernández’s company bullied dancers if they had darker skin or were “overweight.” More interesting, however, was criticism about how Hernández’s works were not “authentic” or “traditional,” but, rather, highly stylized. All of this chisme reminded me of the dances I had witnessed in Bethesda. The cuadros (dance suites) were very beautifully executed, yes, but the technique, including the port de bras , the battements , the forward-carrying of the upper body, the lightness of the feet, the emphasis on turnout, and the precision of the turns, resembled that of classical ballet companies. The press deemed Hernández “La Emperatriz del Tesoro Mexicano del Folklor” (the Empress of the Mexican Treasure of Folklore) who brought to the world stage the “incomparable culture of Mexico” [ii] . How does Hernández’s use of Western, classical dance factor into these achievements? Moreover, how does Hernandez’s company sell the image of Mexico to the rest of the world? How does this legacy shape Mexican understandings of what it means to be Mexican? If her dances are not particularly “authentic,” then what claims to indigeneity, if any, does she have? And how did she acquire the indigenous dance material she has adapted to the stage? These and more questions started to pull apart a tapestry in my head, one I had constructed in my time as a ballet folklórico dancer with the images I believed to be a true representation of mexicanidad . Because I had performed with ballet folklórico companies in both Mexico and the United States, I thought of Hernández’s choreographic work as the footprint for folklórico dancers everywhere; her legacy extended across borders and with it, the way audiences perceived Mexican identity. This tapestry, however, was unraveling and to replace it, I was weaving together many ethical issues that this dance form brought up. As an artist-scholar, I began to question myself: how could I even begin to address these problem as a ballet folklórico dancer? Authoethnography México (expropriated) [iii] –– in Spanish, México (expropiado) ––is the result of an auto-ethnographic project that I began in 2019. [iv] An original evening-long piece of dance theatre, this work—which premiered as a web project in 2020, during the pandemic, and on stage in Mexico City in April 2022—is my attempt to rechoreograph the ballet folklórico form as established by Hernández through Practice as Research methodology (PaR) as delineated by Robin Nelson (2013) and Vida Midgelow (2018) [v] . Utilizing cabaret, contemporary dance, folklórico, zapateado (footwork) , flamenco, burlesque, and text, México (expropriated) seeks to re-appropriate ballet folklórico’s problematic images and characters of three different cuadros:“ Jalisco,” “La Danza del Venado,” and “Veracruz.” In this article, I will discuss the (re)creation of one of the characters featured in “Jalisco:” la china poblana . Following José Muñoz’s concept of disidentification as described in his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics [vi] , I aim to complicate the politics of my mestizo body through my artistic work. Reflecting upon Muñoz’s theory on how identity has been “formed in response to the cultural logics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and misogyny ––cultural logics that . . . work to undergrid state power,” [vii] I argue that these same notions have been thrust upon Mexican identity. Inspired by Muñoz’s theory, I explore the social imaginary of what it means to be Mexican and actively use choreographic and theatrical tools to disidentify from these hegemonic notions, specifically as they influenced the creation of the ballet folklórico form. Since disidentification is a “strategy that works on and against dominant ideology,” [viii] I use it to challenge the traditional elements of mexicanidad [ix] . By disidentifying from the ballet folklórico form, I am “working on and against” [x] the cultural structures that I learned from a discipline that trained my body and shaped my artistic practices during my time as a professional ballet folklórico dancer in Mexico and the United States. Throughout the process of creating México (expropriated) , my cast and I considered “what is it to dance Mexican?” [xi] By exploring tropes and characters of Mexican folklore such as la china poblana , el charro , el Venado , el Negrito , and la Mulata , we investigated what it means to perform authenticity and who, in reality, were the characters that contributed to the nationalist project of the postrevolutionary period, specifically as Amalia Hernández featured them in her world-famous repertory. Lastly, I sought to reclaim agency as a former ballet folklórico professional dancer by offering an alternative interpretation of these characters, one that would provide audiences with a playful yet cutting critique of the way we perform ballet folklórico within and outside of Mexico. Because ballet folklórico was created to consolidate a national identity, it serves to reinforce hegemonic notions of mexicanidad. México (expropriated) subverts stereotypes associated with Mexican identity, performatively unveils the unethical and inauthentic practices of ballet folklórico, and actively rejects heterosexist, racist, and homophobic gender roles embedded in both traditions. This article describes and analyzes the recreation of the character of la china poblana , while also reflecting on the changes the piece underwent in several versions of the project. Originally, I planned to present the work on stage in Austin, Texas in spring 2020, with a cast of Latinx performers. (See figure 1) . However the pandemic forced me to reconfigure the work as an interactive website. In 2022, I was able to stage the work (with a Mexican cast) at Teatro Benito Juárez in Mexico City as part of the City’s Department of Culture annual programming. (See figure 2) . Over the course of its production history, the piece transformed by way of medium, cast, audience, geographical location, language (English/Spanish to Spanish-only), and time [xii] . Left: Poster for Mexico (expropriated) by Jessica Peña Torres and the Ensemble. Photos by Juan Leyva. Design by Khristian Méndez Aguirre. March 2020. Right: Poster for Mexico (expropriado) by Jessica Peña Torres and Coctel Explosivo. Photo by Mona E. Avalos. April 2022 Synopsis It’s 1955 in Mexico City and Petra, a talented and well-connected dancer and choreographer, is starting a company to show the dances of Mexico as never seen before. In order to create her repertoire, she will need to teach the dancers of her company how to embody the characters that represent each of the different regions in Mexico. Jalisco Jalisco, a state in the Pacific coast, is the home of tequila, mariachis, and colonial histories. Besides being the “whitest” region of central Mexico, Jalisco’s folkloric dances have become the epitome of Mexican dance traditions. “El Jarabe Tapatío,” for instance, is one of the most frequently performed pieces in the repertoire of any ballet folklórico, from professional companies to amateur groups. Although these dances are certainly emblematic of Mexican identity, they perpetuate heteronormative gender roles through the characters of la china poblana and el charro. In this scene, we take these traditions and re-examine them through song and dance. Mexico City 2022 live performance script excerpt: PETRA David ¿Cuántas veces te tengo que repetir esto? ¿Qué es esto? Petra imita a David con movimientos burdos. PETRA Qué vergüenza contigo. Me hiciste pasar un momento muy difícil. El charro es macho. Con el pecho arriba. Firme. Seguro de su hombría. No con movimientos afeminados. Y Mary… ¿Sabes que estoy pensando? No. Claro que no lo sabes. Tantos años en un cabaret me hacen pensar que nunca podré sacar lo corriente de ti. La China Poblana es elegante, femenina… No me estés haciendo repetir las cosas. Ustedes saben muy bien lo que quiero. Quiero un baile bien ejecutado. No vulgaridades ¿No les da pena que los venga a ver un productor y ustedes bailen como amateurs de carpa? PETRA David, how many times do I have to repeat this to you? What is this? Petra imitates David with crude movements. PETRA How embarrassing of you. You put me through a very difficult time. El charro is macho. With his chest up. Firm. Sure of his manhood. Not with effeminate movements. And Mary… You know what I’m thinking? No. Of course you don’t. So many years in a cabaret make me think that I will never be able to get the ordinary out of you. La China Poblana is elegant, feminine… Don’t make me repeat myself. You know very well what I want. I want a well-executed dance. Not… vulgarities. Don’t you feel ashamed when a producer comes to see you and you dance like amateurs from a carpa? The choreography of folkloric dances in Mexico dates back to postrevolutionary times, specifically to the 1920s and 1930s. “Jarabe Tapatío,” known outside of Mexico as “Mexican Hat Dance” became Mexico’s national dance, with la china poblan a wearing tri-color hair bows (referencing the Mexican flag) and a colorful skirt embroidered with sequins depicting a national symbol (such as the eagle), and el charro in his mariachi hat. Most, if not all, professional and collegiate ballet folklórico companies have a version of the “Jarabe Tapatío” in their repertoire. The word “jarabe” means syrup, and “tapatío,” which comes from the Nahuátl word “Thapatiotl,” [xiii] is used to name people from the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco’s capital city. The dance originated from the “Guajolote,” a dance of the Huichol community where the male bird courts the female bird [xiv] . Similar to the “Guajolote,” in “Jarabe Tapatío” el charro , played by a male dancer, pursues la china poblana , played by a female dancer [xv] . “Jarabe Tapatío” is one of the works in ballet folklórico repertoires that perpetuates hegemonic gender roles in Mexican society. Maria del Carmen Vázquez Mantecón (2000) notes that la china poblana , as a symbol of Mexican identity, represented the “grace and virtue of the Mexican woman,” who served as the object of heterosexual male desire by balancing a dichotomy between wife or prostitute [xvi] . This character also appeared frequently in the writing of 19th-century authors who described her as a mestizo woman who did not conform to society standards but rather enjoyed the freedom of her love encounters. Similar to how la china poblana became a romanticized version of the Mexican woman, el charro became “the symbol of the ideal Mexican man” [xvii] . During the conquest, the Spanish brought horses to Mexico. Those who owned and knew how to ride these majestic animals were regarded as the upper class given their European ancestry. The hacendados (landowners) often knew how to break wild horses, ride them, and perform all sorts of tricks, a feat that reflected their male prowess and social standing. The patriarchal system of 19th century Mexico put men, regardless of class, in charge of women and children in the absence of the hacendado . As such, the vaqueros (horsemen) often learned how to execute these acts in spite of their socioeconomic class. This mixing of the upper, middle and lower classes in the charrería culture led to the formation of a male identity that denoted unity, an unbreakable code of ethics, and an unyielding bravery to defend the family and the hacienda [xviii] . After the revolution ended in 1920, a nationalistic discourse called for the romanticized construction of a specific image of el charro as a strong, skilled, hard-working man to represent male vigor. In ballet folklórico, this character came to represent masculine traits that were favored by the proponents of lo mexicano . As such, el charro often appeared “pursuing and ultimately capturing the woman” he partnered in the dance [xix] . To create material for my own iteration of the cuadro of “Jalisco,” specifically “Jarabe Tapatío,” the ensemble and I played with devised work. We created scenes that reflected the expectations that the social imaginary holds for Mexican women, especially as embodied by the character of la china poblana . The rehearsals led us into big and important discussions about the female body, as it relates to shape, size, and the color of the skin. For example, our work together inspired two of the 2020 cast members, Marina DeYoe-Pedraza and Erica Saucedo, to write a poem titled “Si yo fuera la china poblana” (If I was la china poblana ). Below is a short excerpt. MARINA Si yo fuera la china poblana I would… Go Wherever I want kill and eat whatever I find. Grow into una montaña alta y vasta Too dangerous to climb ERICA If you took all of our bones, Our bodies together … bones piled on bones. Bodies bodies cuerpos Bodies that …are not ours Que no han sido nuestros cuerpos for hundreds of years… (Breath) it’s been a long time since these brown bodies could walk down the street Soft supple MARINA Si yo fuera la china poblana I would be Un Escorpión. Defend myself by puncturing and poisoning those who try to smother me. Through vivid imagery, Marina and Erica explore the possibility of escaping stereotypes and reclaiming agency by becoming either a scorpion, a horse, or even a mountain, all too dangerous for men to dominate. Marina, for example, imagines her china poblana able to defend herself from all predators that mean to subdue her. Through this poem, the dancers overtly expresses their desire to be “whatever [they] wanted.” Embodying Marina and Erica’s words, the three women of the cast (who also included Venese Alcantar) dance solos that combine contemporary technique, footwork and tender yet assertive movement. They manipulate their skirts and play with the contrast of softness and coarseness through varied movements such as jumps and turns and small and big gestures. In the word “puncturing,” for example, the dancers put their foot down and squash one of la china poblana ’s metaphorical enemies. For the filmed version, we recorded the dancers’ voices reciting the poem and paired them with James Parker’s original music and filmed them dancing one at a time. We, then, played with video images of the three dancers (dancing as soloists), either one video of one dancer alone or sometimes two or three video/dancers superimposed. Since they often moved to the same choreography, the change from body to body, at times created the image of a palimpsest of the three women, generating the illusion that even though there were all different women, they shared common histories of oppression and a desire for freedom, and at times, revenge. (See figure 3). Marina DeYoe-Pedraza, Erica Saucedo and Venese Alcantar in México (expropriated) by Jessica Peña Torres and the Ensemble Photo still from video by Michael Bruner. The Vortex, Austin, TX. October 2020. For the 2022 staged version, I wanted to incorporate the new cast’s experiences around female agency. In rehearsal, we talked about their desires to be “whatever they wanted,” and everyone wrote what that prompt meant for them. I gathered their responses and sent them to a friend and poet, Mercy Medina Gonzalez, who wrote a new Spanish-language poem for the dancers to perform. Similar to the 2020 version, the dancers recorded their voices reciting the poem. For the live performances, the dancers moved to their own voices and words, poetically arranged by Mercy but embodied by them. It was their words, their voice, their bodies that we saw onstage. Below is an excerpt of the poem: TODAS Mujer. La Mujer Mexicana que ama y crea. Yo soy La China Poblana. La que entre las cortinas de sus temblores, busca el viento para alimentar sus alas. MARY Toma el suspiro del mundo por los cuernos, y conoce cómo llevarlo hasta las raíces del alma, a todas las esquinas que nos hacen hermosas. Si yo fuera ella, me enterraría bajo la tierra para crecer como mazorca blanda y aprender el nombre de los truenos. Sería curandera y bruja, el esperpento hecho verbo. Esa mujer canta conmigo. Yo soy La China Poblana ERICA La que escarba para hallar el murmullo de la tierra blanda y consume el ardor de los que se rindieron. No le teme ni a la sangre ni a los muertos y busca el aroma de las montañas más altas las cumbres del cielo que no toca; araña. Porque el mundo le debe plenitud y contento. LOLA La que es cuerpo mío y ajeno cuerpos de cuantas nos hemos caído la que nace de huesos y de ríos yo soy La China Poblana la serpiente que deja el cuello al pico de las águilas y el veneno de la araña cuando ataca un caballo que no se monta, un cuervo que arranca los ojos de quienes nos violentan. TODAS La que conoce la amargura de la luna y carga con la sombra de los ciclos. Con su cuerpo mustio es el canal del eterno ir y venir de los vivos. No se aguanta, se transforma en la fuerza de todas las cruces enterradas en carreteras y montes. ALL THE WOMEN Woman. The Mexican Woman that loves and creates. I am La China Poblana. The one that between the curtains of her tremors, seeks the wind to feed her wings. MARY She takes the sigh of the world by the horns, and knows how to take it to the roots of the soul, to all the corners that make us beautiful. If I were her, I would bury myself under the ground to grow as soft cob and learn the name of thunder. I would be a healer and a witch, the grotesque made verb. That woman sings with me. I am La China Poblana ERICA The one who digs to find the murmur of the soft earth and consume the ardor of those who surrendered. She is not afraid of blood or the dead and seeks the scent of the highest mountains, the peaks of heaven that she does not touch; scratches. Because the world owes her fullness and contentment. LOLA The one that is my body and someone else’s bodies of how many we have fallen. The one that is born of bones and rivers I am La China Poblana the serpent that leaves the neck of the eagles beak and the venom of the spider when it attacks a horse that does not ride, a crow that plucks out the eyes of those who violate us. ALL THE WOMEN The one who knows the bitterness of the moon and carries the shadow of the cycles. With her withered body, it is the channel of the eternal coming and going of the living. She doesn’t endure, she becomes the force of all the crosses buried in roads and mountains. (See figure 4). Andrea Rubí Santillán, Samantha Romero Peña, Miriam Garma, and Ileana Díaz Manzur in México (expropiado) by Jessica Peña Torres and Coctel Explosivo. Photo by Ricardo Antonio Ramos. Teatro Benito Juárez, Mexico City. April 2022 In both the 2020 and the 2022 version, our recreation of the character of la china poblana aims to provoke the audience’s affect by simultaneously reproducing visual and aural performances of female agency. Through the evocative descriptions pronounced by the women of the cast through their bodies and voices, we hoped to touch the audience’s sensibilities and make them wonder what it would be like if women could, in fact, be whatever they wanted. Utilizing text and contemporary dance, I sought to to dis-identify from folklórico dance traditions, specifically those inscribed in performances of the character of la china poblana. Conclusion Colorful lights, elegant costumes, presentational smiles and headpieces that not even Lady Gaga could dream of… ballet folklórico offers its audience a taste of Mexico’s regional and cultural diversity. Through my auto-ethnographical project that explores, among other themes, the politics of my mestizo body, I conclude that ballet folklórico desperately needs to be re-choreographed to reflect its colonial history of cultural appropriation and exoticization . I believe that professional, collegiate, and amateur companies of the form should revisit the way they incorporate the pieces of the canon into their repertory if they wish to stop perpetuating racist, heterosexist, classist, and unethical images of the diverse regions of Mexico. When audiences think about Mexico, they often think of the distinct mariachi music, the strong charros , the beautiful china poblana , and many other images that were conceived as components of mexicanidad in postrevolutionary Mexico. These images, however, continue to paint a romanticized vision of Mexico that has never existed. As a millennial coming of age in Reynosa, Tamaulipas ––known for making the headlines of major newspapers as an incubator for cartel violence and drugs–– I think of an alternative image of Mexico to the one painted through a full-length concert of ballet folklórico. Just in 2020, for instance, the number of femicides in my home country increased to an alarming 10 per day. Ballet folklórico does not present this reality, nor the one lived by the many marginalized communities in Mexico; there’s no room for the bad and the ugly in this form. Through Mexico (expropriated) , I aimed to re-choreograph three pieces in the folklórico canon and complicate hegemonic images of mexicanidad. By deconstructing stereotypes of the nation as they relate to gender, race, and class, I aimed to dis-identify from the ballet folklórico form to complicate the discussion of what it means to be Mexican in the 21 st century. Borrowing from contemporary dance, flamenco, jazz, hip hop, and burlesque, I reclaim the agency of my own body to re-choreograph cuadros such as “Jalisco ” and recreate characters such as la china poblana. References [i] “Audiciones,” Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández, Accessed November 22, 2018. http://balletfolkloricodemexico.com.mx. [ii] TheCharlieRoll, “Amalia Hernández y el Ballet Folklórico de México – Entrevista y Documental de 1992,” YouTube, October 26, 2017, video, http://youtube.com/watch?v=hOPBBPR-G5Y [iii] My master’s thesis “México (expropriated): Appropriation, Representation, and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico,” which I authored in the Spring 2020 to graduate from the Performance as Public Practice program at the University of Texas at Austin, explored the ballet folklórico dance form in imagining lo mexicano by focusing on Ballet Folklórico de México, Mexico’s leading and most influential company. I argued that BFM has helped the state and the social elite shape an exoticized Mexico for the consumption of foreigners and tourists, and has, within Mexico, offered a problematic embodiment of mexicanidad that reflects racial, nationalistic, class, and gender biases. In addition, I considered Hernández flawed ethnographic methodology which included appropriating and stylizing folk dances through the infusion of ballet and modern dance techniques. The company presents these dances as “authentic” to its paying audiences, and does not offer any reciprocity, support, or acknowledgment to the communities from which Hernández “borrowed” these dances. In addition, her legacy has and continues to permeate many dance companies who imitate BFM’s dances, inadvertently reproducing a colonialist model of exoticization and cultural theft. [iv] Very much inspired by Astrid Hadad’s 2019 performance of Hecha in Mexico , I developed México (expropriated) to satirize stereotypical notions of mexicanidad as imagined by Mexicans and non-Mexicans alike. Like Hadad, I aim to make a feminist intervention in national discourses of mexicanidad as developed in the postrevolutionary period . [v] As Nelson explains, in PaR methodology the doing becomes the knowing . In other words, by dancing, choreographing, writing, and performing México (expropriated) , I am both researching and providing evidence of my research inquiry. As Midgelow suggests, a PaR approach allows artist/scholars to explore the process of creating work as just as significant as the performance of that work before a live audience. [vi] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota : University of Minnesota Press, 1999). [vii] Muñoz, “Disidentifications,” 5. [viii] Muñoz, “Disidentifications,” 11. [ix] In Chapter 5 “La Moda Mexicana: Exotic Women,” of Imagining la Chica Moderna : Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917-1936 (2008) Joanne Hershfield explores the concept of mexicanidad , the state’s attempt to construct a national identity at the beginning of the 20th century. Exploiting the richness of indigenous cultures, she argues that intellectuals and politicians forged an “authentic” image of Mexico, the “domestic exotic,” rooted in stereotypes of indigenous communities, which the nation then used for capitalist consumption. [x] Muñoz, “Disidentifications,” 11. [xi] I am influenced by my advisor and Professor Rebecca Rossen, whose book, Dancing Jewish (2014), includes three sections that describe an auto-ethnographic dance project for which she asked two of her subjects to make her a “Jewish” dance. Similarly, in México (expropriated) , I explore notions of mexicanidad, as I actively think over the question “what is it to dance Mexican?” Moreover, in Dancing Jewish , Rossen argues that Jewish choreographers negotiate ethnicity and gender in tandem, while challenging “traditional models for femininity (or masculinity); advance social and political agendas; and imagine radical new possibilities for themselves as individuals, artists, and Jews.” Similarly, I argue that mexicanidad is a construction of hegemonic images that contain complex syntheses of gender, ethnicity, nationality, race, and class. Through the process of creating and performing this work, we have been able to imagine new possibilities to stage mexicanidad . [xii] An important change from the filmed to the staged version is that we increased the number of roles from six to eight. For the filmed version, there were six performers including Venese Alcantar (“Veni”), David Cruz (“David”), Marina DeYoe-Pedraza (“Mari”), Jesus Valles (“EMCEE”), Erica Saucedo (“Eri”), and myself (“Pari”). For the staged version, we created three new characters, which featured Mexico City-based performers: José David Carrera Piñón (“Sebastian”), Miriam Garma (“Lola”), Daniel Losoya (”Narrador”), Ileana Manzur (“Veni” became “Vanessa”), Roberto Mosqueda (“David”), Samantha Romero (“Erica”), Andrea Rubí (“Mary”), and myself (“Pari” became “Petra”). Lastly, for the Mexico City live performance I was able to expand the creative team, which included costume designer Edurne Fernández, technical director Pedro Pazarán, and scenic designer Gisselle Gómez Rivera. Composer James Parker created the score for both versions. Another big change from film to stage was the narrative structure of the piece. The filmed version consisted of five separate viñetas (vignettes) following an episodic narrative form. Although the characters appeared through the different scenes, there was no unifying narrative between each separate viñeta. For the Spanish-only/staged adaptation, I worked with filmmaker and screenwriter Nina Chávez Góngora to re-develop the script for the staged version, which read more like a play with numerous dance pieces, often interrupted by the EMCEE, “Narrador.” Adapting the piece to include a unifying narrative throughout gave audiences a stronger chance to connect with the characters, which in turn led to a more effective way to communicate our critique. [xiii] Cashion, quoted in Lawrence Alan Trujillo, The Spanish Influence On the Mexican Folkdance of Yucatán, Veracruz, And Jalisco, Mexico. (Denver: Dart Publications, 1974), 55. [xiv] Lawrence Alan Trujillo, The Spanish Influence On the Mexican Folkdance of Yucatán, Veracruz, And Jalisco, Mexico. (Denver: Dart Publications, 1974), 58. [xv] Sydney Hutchinson, “The Ballet Folklórico de México and the Construction of the Mexican Nation through Dance,” in Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos . (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 209. [xvi] , María del Carmen Vázquez Mantecón, “La China Mexicana, Mejor Conocida Como China Poblana,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 22, no. 77 (2000): 124. [xvii] Gabriela Mendoza-García, “The Jarabe Tapatío: Imagining Race, Nation, Class, and Gender in 1920s Mexico,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity , edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 319. [xviii] Olga Nájera Ramírez, “Engendering Nationalism: Identity, Discourse, and the Mexican Charro, ” Anthropological Quarterly 67, no. 1 (1994): 4. [xix] Nájera Ramírez, “Engendering Nationalism,” 7. Bibliography “Audiciones.” Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández. Accessed November 22, 2018. http://balletfolkloricodemexico.com.mx. Hershfield, Joanne. Imagining La Chica Moderna Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917-1936. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Hutchinson, Sydney. “The Ballet Folklórico de México and the Construction of the Mexican Nation through Dance.” In Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos, edited by Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Norma E. Cantú, and Brenda M. Romero. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Mendoza.García, Gabriela. “The Jarabe Tapatío: Imagining Race, Nation, Class, and Gender in 1920s Mexico.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity , edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young, 319-343 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Midgelow, Vida. Practice-as-Research. United Kingdom: 2018. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Nájera Ramírez, Olga. “Engendering Nationalism: Identity, Discourse, and the Mexican Charro .” Anthropological Quarterly 67, no. 1, (1994): 1-14. Nelson, Robin. Practice as Research in the Arts : Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances / Written and Edited by Robin Nelson, Director of Research, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Peña Torres, Jessica. “México (expropriated): Appropriation, Representation and Re- Choreography of Ballet Folklórico.” Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 2020. Rossen, Rebecca. Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. TheCharlieRoll. “Amalia Hernández y el Ballet Folklórico de México – Entrevista y Documental de 1992.” YouTube. October 26, 2017. Video. http://youtube.com/watch?v=hOPBBPR-G5Y. Trujillo, Lawrence Alan. The Spanish Influence On the Mexican Folkdance of Yucatán, Veracruz, And Jalisco, Mexico. Denver: Dart Publications, 1974. Vázquez Mantecón, María del Carmen. “La China Mexicana, Mejor Conocida Como China Poblana.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 22, no. 77, (2000): 123-150. Footnotes About The Author(s) JESSICA L. PEÑA TORRES (she/her) is a dance/theatre artist and emerging scholar focused on Mexican identity and performance. She graduated from The University of Texas—Pan American with a B.A. in Dance and Theatre and from the University of Texas at Austin with an M.A. in Performance as Public Practice, where she is now pursuing a Ph.D. At UT Austin, Peña Torres continues to study the intersection between nationalism and the performing arts in postrevolutionary Mexico. With her company, Coctel Explosivo, Peña Torres produces dance-theatre works that explore this intersection. 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 Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jan Mason Western Connecticut State University Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 Jan Mason Western Connecticut State University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Renata Eastlick, Carman Lacivita, and Anne Scurria in Hartford Stage's Pride and Prejudice Photo: T. Charles Erickson. Pride and Prejudice Kate Hamill, adapted from the novel by Jane Austen (12 Oct. – 5 Nov.) A Christmas Carol : A Ghost Story of Christmas Charles Dickens, adapted by Michael Wilson (24 Nov. – 24 Dec.) Simona’s Search Martin Zimmerman (18 Jan. – 11 Feb.) The Hot Wing King Katori Hall (29 Feb. – 24 Mar.) All My Sons Arthur Miller (11 Apr. – 5 May) 2.5 Minute Ride Lisa Kron (30 May – 23 Jun.) Hartford Stage’s 2023-24 season opened with a delightful production of Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, beautifully directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo with whimsical costumes by Haydee Zeldeth and elegant scenic design by Sara Brown, complete with revolving stage. This wonderful, witty, whirlwind of a production kept audiences laughing while still managing to tug at their heartstrings when Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy finally pledged their love. Fun was the name of the game in this production with clever musical moments composed by Daniel Baker & Co. and choreographed by Shura Baryshnikov. Hartford audiences were graced with the presence of Anne Scurria, a longtime favorite company member of Providence’s Trinity Repertory Theatre, who gave a crowd-pleasing performance as both Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Bennet in this gender-bent production. It was unfortunate to learn that ticket sales for this enjoyable season-opener fell short of projections. For the past two seasons, Hartford Stage has presented Joe Landry’s pared-down It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play as its holiday offering, but last year that production undersold, and this year the theatre took a cue from its audience, bringing back former Artistic Director Michael Wilson to direct his adaptation of the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol . Audiences were clearly hankering for this holiday tradition, and they came out in droves to see this lively, spectacular production that involves many families from the area with its inclusion of dozens of children and local actors. In addition to many returning performers, Allen Gilmore joined the cast as Scrooge for the first time and brought new depth to this familiar character. Alejo Vietti and Zack Brown were responsible for the fabulous costumes, with impressive wigs designed by Brittany Hartman. In January, Hartford Stage began the year with a world-premiere production of Martin Zimmerman’s Simonia’s Search . The story centered on the concept of intergenerational trauma, the idea that trauma experienced by one person may be passed to subsequent generations of a family. Weighty material by any means, though this production managed some lighter moments, with actor Christopher Bannow donning tentacles to play a sea creature in one of the more absurd twists in the non-linear plotline. Every scenic design this season (excepting A Christmas Carol ) blocked off the tricky upstage area of Hartford Stage’s large thrust theatre space, which had the dual effect of shrinking the playing area while bringing the action closer to the audience. Katori Hall’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning play The Hot Wing King was no exception, with an elaborate two-story set designed by Emmie Finckel. The playing space included a detailed living area and kitchen, an upstairs bedroom, and a side yard complete with basketball hoop. The cast skillfully delivered performances that contrasted broad comedic turns with more heartfelt moments. Israel Erron Ford, who appeared in Yale Repertory Theatre’s delightful 2019 production of Twelfth Night , gave an outstanding performance as the character Isom. This lively production was directed by Christopher Betts, rounding out his tenure as the theatre’s inaugural Willis Fellow. In 2020, Hartford Stage joined many of the nation’s cultural institutions in a realignment toward diversity, equity, and inclusion as a response to the abhorrent murder of George Floyd Jr. As part of this intentional work to create a culture of belonging and inclusion, Hartford Stage designed the Joyce C. Willis Fellowship to engage black artists in a two-year residency. Marsha Mason starred as Kate Keller in the April production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, and the powerful name recognition of both leading lady and playwright proved to be a big draw for regional Hartford audiences. Riw Rakkulchon designed the impressive set for the backyard of the Keller home, complete with a back porch of a two-story 1950s suburban house and grass-filled yard. Marsha Mason did not disappoint, and the strong ensemble gave compelling performances in Miller’s play about duty and betrayal. Lena Kaminsky gave a tour-de-force performance in 2.5 Minute Ride, Lisa Kron’s one-woman show, to round out the season in June. The simple set of cardboard boxes by Judy Gailen and effective lighting by Daisy Long deftly guided the audience through the sprawling storyline which included international travel and leaps through time spanning most of the last century. Hartford Stage has settled into a new normal post-pandemic that must be less frenzied and is certainly more economical. Prior to the pandemic,the theatre consistently presented six or sometimes seven productions in a season over and above the dutifully presented annual holiday show A Christmas Carol, which they previously treated as a separate entity and did not ever include in their season lineups. Since reopening post-pandemic, Hartford Stage has presented six shows, including A Christmas Carol . This reduction of one to two productions per year includes a shift in scheduling that puts one production in the fall before the holiday show instead of two, and four plays spanning the months of January to June. Given the theatre industry’s current trend for equitable, safe workplaces with reasonable schedules, this new normal may be a much-needed shift to a manageable workload. It should be noted however, that these reduced seasons are accompanied by a reduction in staff and sources of funding. A comparison of program notes from this season and one from the 2017-2018 season shows a reduction in artistic and administrative staff by a number ranging between one to five people across most departments, with the abolishment of staffing for apprentices and writers under commission. It is also made clear by this comparison that the number of institutional and individual donors is down from pre-pandemic levels. Although Hartford Stage has a strong history of new play development, it seems that next year there will be a pause to that tradition as well. Next season includes the classics Romeo and Juliet, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the holiday extravaganza A Christmas Carol, along with more contemporary works: Two Trains Running, Laughs in Spanish, and Hurricane Diane. This reviewer hopes Hartford Stage will continue to build back post-pandemic and succeed in its efforts to consistently bring audiences back to the theatre. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Jan Mason has directed theatre in Boston, Connecticut, and New York City, and she has directed opera in Connecticut and Italy. In New York City she developed new plays with Ensemble Studio Theatre (Theatre Lab Member); The Women’s Project (Director’s Forum Member); Rattlestick (Artistic Associate); and New Georges (Affiliated Artist and Roaring Girl). She teaches and directs at several Connecticut colleges and universities. In 2023 her play Lost & Found was produced in a festival of new work in Vermont, and her play Jack & Jill was published in Mini Plays Magazine and Literature Today . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Nicholas Orvis Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Nicholas Orvis By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF PLAYING REAL: MIMESIS, MEDIA, AND MISCHIEF. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Lindsay Brandon Hunter’s Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief offers valuable insights into the practices and problems of mediatized performances that play with and against conventional notions of “the real.” Hunter wisely eschews both the well-trod liveness debates of Performance Studies and, more challengingly, the many anxieties attendant on media’s increasingly destabilized relationship to reality. Instead, she embraces these performances’ playful construction of the real as a means to make mischief—particularly, mischief with the dominant paradigms within which such performances exist. The book proves a fruitful contribution to interdisciplinary theater and performance studies, applying its analysis in equal measure to the fields of broadcast theater (such as the well-known NT Live), reality television programming, and alternate reality games (ARGs). Each of these fields, as Hunter discusses, is “tethered in some way to an imaginary of the real” (xvii-xviii). Her six core chapters are neatly divided into three pairs, one for each of the creative fields under discussion, and move from performances with which theater scholars are likely to be familiar (broadcast performances in chapter one, the Wooster Group’s 2007 Hamlet in chapter two) through a deeply theatrical slice of television (reality television in chapter three and particularly “scripted reality” in chapter four) and, then, into the growing critical terrain exploring intersections of theater, performance, and game-playing (through the particular lens of ARGs in chapters five and six). Each set of chapters offers a helpfully polyvalent reading on its source material, with the initial chapters in each pair (one, three, and five) doing the work of theorizing a medium’s relationship to the real while the subsequent chapters (two, four, and six) offer deep dives into case studies that provide nuance which complicates the previous discussion. Hunter’s writing displays an impressive command of the existing scholarly literature of what might be considered three distinct fields, in particular, drawing upon the work of Sarah Bay-Cheng and Philip Auslander, to consider these mediatized performances as not distanced from, but rather engaged in the construction of, reality. Hunter offers fruitful provocations in her close readings and theorizing. She begins by examining the ways broadcast theater, beginning with the 1964 Electronovision capture of Richard Burton’s Hamlet , have striven to “translate” the supposedly ineluctable liveness of theater to the cinema or television screen—and in so doing, she proposes, have revealed “liveness to be less theater’s ontology than its brand ” (12, original emphasis). It’s the brand of a certain kind of theater, at the very least: the well-funded, nationally acclaimed, artistically conservative institutions that can afford to finance these undertakings, such as the National Theatre in London or New York’s Metropolitan Opera. As Hunter rightly observes, these organizations are engaged not only in transmitting their performances but to didactic work that, by dictating the viewer’s focus, enforces “a particular skill of ‘reading’ theater” in accordance with the directors’ and producers’ intentions (18). Hunter suggests that through such direction, this broadcast work has the potential to disrupt, or at least inflect, the dominant norms of theatergoing (19). I wonder, however, whether in practice such disruption will come to pass or whether this medium will remain the province of artistically conservative (sometimes conservational) institutions—the ones most consistently able to muster the funds needed to create the broadcasts discussed. While Hunter’s second chapter focuses on the Wooster Group’s remixing of that 1964 Hamlet , the third and fourth chapters expand her horizons dramatically, taking in the realm of reality TV with a focus on the performance of romantic love. Hunter skillfully weaves together existing analyses and critiques from the field of media studies with her own theater-grounded theorizing; of particular note is her explication of “unreceived acting,” an inversion of Michael Kirby’s theory of “received acting” articulated in “On Acting and Not Acting.” Reality TV performers, Hunter suggests, may be read by their audiences as specifically not acting—even when their performances are clearly embedded in the histrionic conventions of reality television (53-54). This concept offers, I think, a useful way of reading not only reality TV performances but other performance approaches broadcast on social media platforms or live-streaming sites such as Twitch, as well. Hunter’s final chapters tackle alternate reality games. These games—often lengthy explorations of another world—offer exciting ground for a performance scholar, and Hunter adroitly brings both performance theorists and some notables of game studies (particularly Jane McGonigal) to bear on these performative acts of play. McGonigal’s own World Without Oil seems to offer a hopeful case study in chapter five, suggesting that ARGs can help players engage critically with the world around them. Unfortunately, this optimism is immediately undercut by chapter six’s dissection of a (somewhat sinister) 2010 game encouraging players to embrace surveillance technology when it’s in the “right hands,” Conspiracy for Good —an ARG funded in part by Nokia and featuring its then-new image recognition technology. The dichotomy of chapters five and six points to an unresolved tension in Hunter’s monograph: although she consistently returns to an optimistic view of the “mischief” these performances create, there seems to be almost as much evidence in favor of such disruption serving ill ends. Hunter acknowledges these concerns briefly in her epilogue, and it’s fair to say that this volume—begun before both the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic—is an opening salvo in the discussion of this mischief’s role in contemporary society rather than a final statement. Ultimately, Playing Real is a well-researched and valuable monograph, skillfully speaking across multiple fields to consider the ways we use theatrical artifice not only to tell stories about our reality but to construct and play with it, as well. Playing Real will be of greatest interest to researchers in performance and media studies, yet scholars—or classrooms—examining broadcast theater, intermedial theater, reality television, or ARGs will find it valuable. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) NICHOLAS ORVIS (he/him) is a doctoral candidate at the School of Drama at Yale. From 2014-2019 he was Literary Associate and Resident Dramaturg at Premiere Stages at Kean University. Other dramaturgical work includes Yale Repertory Theater, Portland Stage Company, the Tank, and the Yale Cabaret. He is a former managing editor of Theater magazine, and his critical writing has appeared in Theater , 3Views on Theatre , and HowlRound . He co-produces (with Percival Hornak) Dungeons + Drama Nerds , an ongoing podcast. His research interests include game-based performances, immersive theater, and early modern European drama. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Bess Rowen and Benjamin Gillespie Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Editorial Introduction Bess Rowen and Benjamin Gillespie By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF As 2024 comes to a close, we are grateful for the contributions, collaborations, and interactions we have had through this journal. Although uncertain times lie ahead, we remain committed to the importance of the exchange of new ideas, the rigor of peer review, and the indefatigable forward motion of the field of Theatre and Performance Studies. This issue’s array of articles, book reviews, and performance reviews once again provide a snapshot of the dynamic work happening all around us. We begin with Catherine Heiner’s piece, “A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play ,” which examines the gendered expectations about Black women upon which Jeremy O. Harris’s play relies. Using a post-show discussion as an entry point, Heiner’s work puts comedic discourse into conversation with discussions of race and gender to perceive Slave Play in a new light. Alisa Zhulina’s essay, “Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita : Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov,” also challenges gender norms, this time by putting adaptations of Lolita from two queer feminist playwrights into context alongside society’s rife relationship with the source material. Zhulina specifically highlights the challenges and taboo of Lolita in live performance. The following essay, “‘It’s Cumming yet for a’ that’: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century” comes from Thomas Keith, whose thoughtful meditation on Alan Cumming’s work on the dance theatre piece Burn mixes adept performance analysis with historical context. Finally, Allan Johnson’s “Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin ’s Alternate ‘Theo Ending’” brings fresh attention to the 1972 musical with a dramaturgical focus on its use of the popular device of metatheatricality together with psychology The next two entries come from a new series of interviews which will run over the next several issues of JADT called “Queer Voices.” Each involve a conversation with a contemporary queer theatre maker or writer. Our first two pieces feature Jim Wilson in conversation with renowned Tony Award-winning playwright and performer Harvey Fierstein and Bess Rowen speaking to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright James Ijames. We end our issue with the book and performance review sections, which continue to reflect the scholarly and production offerings of the current moment. In this issue, our performance review section is serving a rather somber purpose. As many of our readers know, New England Theatre Journal has been forced to shutter after decades of close coverage of regional theatre in that area of the country. When Stuart Hecht approached the editors to ask if he could find a home for the completed performance review section–which, in NETJ , covers entire seasons of programming instead of specific performances–we were proud to oblige, despite the unfortunate circumstances. We are running that section intact with introductions and assistance from both the journal’s editor, Stuart Hecht, and the performance review section editor, Marti LoMonaco. We are also happy to report that JADT will continue to partner with the editors of NETJ to make sure that these theatres still receive coverage going forward. We hope that you enjoy JADT ’s rich offerings this issue and that readers will be inspired to submit new work. Our Spring special issue will be on the topic of Censorship, so stay tuned for that eerily timely topic. But, as Tennessee Williams would say, “ En Avant! ” This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) BESS ROWEN (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She is also affiliate faculty for both Gender & Women's Studies and Irish Studies. She is a member of Actors' Equity and an intimacy choreographer. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021) focuses on affective stage directions. Her next book project looks at the theatrical archetype of the “mean teenage girl.” Other recent work can be found in Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders & Sexualities , Theatre Survey , and The Eugene O'Neill Review , among other publications. She also serves as the LGBTQ+ Focus Group Representative at ATHE and as the Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . BENJAMIN GILLESPIE (PhD) is Doctoral Lecturer in Communication, Gender Studies, and Theatre at Baruch College, City University of New York. His essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review , and a wide range of scholarly anthologies. He is currently editing two volumes: Split Britches: Fifty Years On and Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging , both to be published by the University of Michigan Press. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Maureen McDonnell Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Maureen McDonnell By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Alison Bechdel offered a complicated and compelling memoir in her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), adapted by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori into the Broadway musical Fun Home (2015). Both works presented an adult Bechdel reflecting on her father’s troubled life as a closeted gay man and his possible death by suicide. As Bechdel herself noted, “it’s not like a happy story, it’s not something that you would celebrate or be proud of.” [1] Bechdel’s coining of “tragicomic” as her book’s genre highlights its fraught narrative and its visual format indebted to “comics” rather than to comedy. Bechdel’s bleak overview of her father’s life and death served as a backdrop for a production that posited truthfulness as life-affirming and as a means of survival. Fun Home ’s marketers, however, imagined that being forthright about the production’s contents and its masculine lesbian protagonist would threaten the show’s entertainment and economic potential. It was noted before the show opened that “the promotional text for the show downplays the queer aspects,” a restriction that was by design. [2] According to Tom Greenwald, Fun Home ’s chief marketing strategist and the production’s strategy officer, the main advertising objective was to “make sure that it’s never ever associated specifically with the ‘plot or subject matter.’” Instead, the marketing team decided to frame the musical as a relatable story of a family “like yours.” [3] The marketers assumed that would-be playgoers would be uninterested in this tragic hero/ine if her sexuality were known. Ticket buyers who perceived the lesbian protagonist’s sexuality as a barrier to their “recognition of [her] humanity” risked not experiencing the subsequent ethical empathy that tragedy might elicit. [4] In the marketers’ efforts to circumvent the lesbophobia and taboos against suicide they imagined would-be playgoers might hold, they became complicit in such prejudices. As the production was met with commercial and critical success, a “both/and” marketing approach surfaced: that the production was both timeless and timely, with the production newly presented as a vehicle for affirming emerging legal gains for LGBTQ+ rights generally, and marriage equality in particular. This rising sensibility that lesbian characters and culture were commodifiable might justify future shifts from Broadway’s systematic exclusion of lesbian characters, even if for mercenary, capitalistic reasons. The creative team voiced their support of lesbians and their rights throughout the run, a departure from the endorsed narrative of Greenwald’s company. The producers began to echo the creative artists’ advocacy after two nearly simultaneous events: the production’s anniversary of winning five Tony Awards and the Orlando mass shooting as the deadliest incident of violence against LGBTQ+ people in US history. The producers’ commentary swerved in June 2016 when they began championing both the production and the communities it represented, albeit a year after the show’s critical reception was secure. These evolving campaigns suggest the vulnerability of productions that feature female actors playing sexual minorities and gender non-conforming characters. By featuring a butch lesbian as its lead, Fun Home was culturally revolutionary, providing a cultural—and commercial—landmark for mainstream musical theater. The musical featured three different actors performing the characters of Alison Bechdel: “small” Alison at 8, “medium” Alison at 19, and Alison at 43. The categorizations emphasized the characters’ visual differences (e.g. “small” versus “youngest”), in keeping with what may be a cartoonist’s default parameters. The adult Bechdel character served as a narrator, drawing at an artist’s table as she observed and commented on the memories enacted by her younger counterparts. An early line of Alison’s summarizes the plot: “Caption: Dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town. And he was gay, and I was gay, and he killed himself, and I became a lesbian cartoonist” (“Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue”). [5] This expository line frontloaded the musical’s conclusion within the first eleven minutes of performance. [6] The musical’s disclosure was strikingly more efficient than that of the marketing team. It was only after Fun Home opened that Tom Greenwald revealed that the “marketing team jokingly referred to [the play] as a ‘lesbian suicide musical.’” [7] This inaccurate characterization invited misdirection of a familiar type. [8] Despite a long cultural history that presents lesbians as necessarily isolated, doomed, and suicidal, this production challenged those tropes by presenting a lesbian protagonist who survives the dramatic action. [9] This theatrical and biographical outcome indicates the political dimensions of Fun Home ’s tragedy, as its lack of an abject lesbian underscores that the tragic lesbian figure is conjured and constructed rather than fixed and innate. The team’s “joke” not only reinforced a stereotypical narrative about lesbian death, but also suggested that they saw the narrative arc of Bruce Bechdel (Alison Bechdel’s father) upstaging that of his daughter (it is Bruce who dies by suicide in the musical). Despite the decentering and misrepresentation of Alison Bechdel’s character, playgoers would have been able to easily learn that this dramatic protagonist’s real-life counterpart helped shape this creative narrative rather than becoming a victim of it. The marketing team’s omission of Alison Bechdel from the promotional campaign was perhaps motivated by their desire to make the show more broadly appealing to investors by erasing her sexuality and survival. Such concerns about financial solvency reflected the financial structure of 21 st century Broadway productions, a time in which corporate interests frequently override artistic innovation. [10] Theater scholar Steven Adler writes of this trend, noting that production often depended upon partnerships, sometimes with the powerful real estate moguls who owned the theaters, [which] provided the best means of mounting shows. Corporations, with extensive financial and marketing resources, recognized fertile territory in the hardscrabble of midtown Manhattan and joined the fray. A Broadway presence might bolster the corporate brand, as with Disney. [11] Disney-authorized productions are sometimes called “McMusicals” (a term that emphasizes the production’s consumability) or “technomusicals,” which theater director and scholar John Bush Jones describes as “a phenomenon . . . driven by visual spectacle” and “engender[ing] little or no thinking at all.” [12] Such spectacles are often mined from popular movies and books whose familiarity allows productions to draw upon already established fan bases. American musical scholar Elizabeth Wollman points out that these moments of: synergy allow[] a company to sell itself along with any product it hawks. The Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast , for example, can be mentioned in Disney films and television shows, or advertised on Disney-owned radio stations. Disney musicals can also serve as advertisements for one another.[13] Wollman notes that “shows with corporate backing can now be hyped internationally in myriad ways long before a theatrical property begins its run,” a factor that contributes to Broadway functioning as a “global crossroads, populated by transnational corporations catering to tourists.” [14] Given that only one in five Broadway shows recoup their initial investment, derivative productions and revivals included, the marketing campaign reflects both the financial precariousness of theater generally and reticence about Fun Home ’s cultural content specifically. Investor caution is especially warranted with musicals, particularly if they are new. Commercial houses rarely undertake such efforts. Instead, creative teams who wish to develop those works mostly rely on non-profit theaters whose educational and artistic missions state their willingness to sustain financial loss. Such collaborations can be contentious, as revealed by Ars Nova’s decision to file suit for breach of contract over their billing after their production Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 transferred to Broadway in 2016, or result in a commercial juggernaut like Hamilton. [15] Fun Home ’s move from the Public Theater to Broadway was underwritten by three primary producers, Kristen Caskey, Barbara Whitman, and Mike Isaacson. In an interview published shortly after their investment was recouped, the producers provided a thumbnail sketch of the skepticism people held towards the production: “They said we were insane to do this,” said Mike Isaacson. “Really? You’re bringing that to Broadway?” recalled Barbara Whitman. “I think crazy was the word we heard most,” said Kristin Caskey.[16] Admittedly, the producers’ diction may have been only unintentionally ableist. But such comments problematically echoed the disproven historical notion that people who were sexual minorities were mentally ill, another suggestion of discomfort about Fun Home ’s treatment of sexuality from people outside of the creative team. [17] Such stereotypical conflation of “insanity” and lesbianism re-produced the specter of the tragic lesbian the producers attempted to discard. Frank disclosures aren’t the only way lesbianism surfaces within Broadway musicals. Musical theater scholar Stacy Wolf’s generative work invites playgoers to deploy “a spectatorial/auditorial ‘lesbian’ position that is not essentialist but rather performative: any willing, willful spectator may embody such a position of lesbian spectatorship” which can “lesbianize” the text. [18] Fun Home extends itself beyond presenting a “hypothetical lesbian heroine” because its protagonist’s sexuality is not solely dependent on viewers decoding subtext or deploying Wolf’s rhetorical techniques but is additionally affirmed by depicting the character Alison’s queer childhood and subsequent coming out. [19] Moreover, Fun Home offers an androcentric lead, a break from Broadway’s dominant tradition. Fun Home ’s departure from highlighting feminine lesbians risks what literature scholar Ann M. Ciasullo cautions against: dehumanizing the butch lesbian who is imagined as “too dangerous, too loaded a figure to be represented.” [20] However, one of the chief innovations of Fun Home was its butch lesbian lead. Instead of functioning as a surrogate or scapegoat, the theatrical Alisons’ desires “lead the way to a different future” rather than “fasten[ing]” lesbians “to the image of the past.” [21] This theatrical breakthrough appears nowhere in the advertising campaign. In their attempts to de-lesbianize the production, the marketers buried both the lede and the lead. There have been other musicals that prominently include identifiable lesbian characters, although that misrepresentation is often uneven at best and sometimes presents lesbian characters whose sole function seems to be as “the object of the show’s most unsavory jokes.” [22] Lisa Kron, the lyricist and book writer for Fun Home , revealed her response to what she saw as a trend: “there was a moment where someone would say the word lesbian as a non sequitur because it was funny. I’d be so on board, and then I’d be slapped in the face by it. It was just like, This character’s a joke. This is not a person .” [23] Within the production, actor Beth Malone navigated this pitfall when delivering adult Alison’s line that someone she saw briefly as a child was “an old-school butch.” Malone explained her delivery of this line and her efforts to recuperate that term as follows: When I say the word “butch,” I say it with the color of, like I’m saying the word supermodel. Because from my lens, the word butch is the most beautiful adjective I can come up with. “Oh my God, she was an old-school butch !” Like satisfying words coming out of your mouth. Still, it gets titters because the word “butch” is a punch line. For every other show that has ever existed, “butch” and “dyke” have been a punch line for the end of a gay man’s joke. So now we are taking that word, like the word queer, we’re owning it and saying, butch is a beautiful thing.[24] In Malone’s account, her artistic and activist sensibilities converged in playing this role. Such moments are bolstered because Fun Home featured a number of queer characters who are not solely defined by their orientation or gender identity, and whose presence is important for the plot. [25] Although these features were present in other productions, the non-existent track record for butch-centered musicals indicates an asymmetrical Broadway history characterized by sexism and lesbophobia. If we compare Fun Home with another contemporary musical with an LGBTQ+ lead character, Kinky Boots is an apt choice. Based on a 2005 film inspired by true events, Kinky Boots took thirty weeks to recoup its $13.5 million investment, roughly the same timeline as Fun Home (which had lower ticket prices). [26] Kinky Boots had a fuller theatrical tradition than Fun Home to draw upon: male actors inherit a variety of gendered performance traditions, theatrical practices that are increasingly familiar to and co-opted by straight playgoers. [27] Gay male leads and gender non-conforming characters played by male actors are not new features of musicals. (Consider this partial history: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Rent, Kiss of the Spider Woman, La Cage Aux Folles, Falsettos, A Chorus Line, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Avenue Q, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Spring Awakening, and Cabaret .) Stacy Wolf usefully points out a key difference between this theatrical tradition and the one women inherit, noting that “the visibility of white gay men’s alliance with musicals stems in part from capital (cultural and real) and the general visibility of a relatively identifiable affluent, urban, white, gay male culture.” [28] This disparity in capital was indicated in material ways by Fun Home ’s relatively small cast of nine, orchestra of seven, and slim advertising budget, all of which kept production costs low. Kinky Boots ’ cast was more than three times the size of Fun Home ’s, and had an orchestra of thirteen musicians. The diverging cultural capital of gay men and lesbians also surfaced in the showcasing of the titular “kinky boots” in that production’s poster campaign, and the cloaking of Bechdel’s experience within that of Fun Home , whose posters evoked the colors of the 1970s in color values too deep to invoke a rainbow flag. [29] The advertisements for Kinky Boots flaunted sexual and gender transgressiveness whereas Fun Home ’s marketers closeted their characters. Fun Home ’s marketing team was not alone in minimizing its connection with underrepresented groups outside of Broadway’s cultural mainstream. For instance, Hamilton ’s producers deliberately distanced Hamilton from the hip hop music and culture that influenced Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show, a redirection that included a name change of the show itself from Hamilton Mixtape despite his earlier hit In the Heights . [30] (Bechdel’s book title, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic , was also abridged.) Such concerns about a production’s broad appeal surface in Fun Home ’s production history, as seen in one critic’s question: “Is America ready for a musical about a middle-aged, butch lesbian?” [31] This hesitancy was echoed by the creative team and by Bechdel, who drily noted that “Lesbians are inherently uncommodifiable. . . . It’s a gift.” [32] Bechdel, in her suggestion that being imagined as uncommodifiable offers lesbians a way to resist being dehumanized, echoes the precise concern of Fun Home ’s marketers. In other words, Bechdel doesn’t realize how right the marketers imagined her to be: she hits a nerve along with her punchline. Lisa Kron discussed this concern after the musical won the 2015 Tony Award: We were constantly having to rewrite the assumed narrative, which was that this was not commercially viable. Because it’s a serious piece of work. You know, it’s not a pure entertainment, even though it is very entertaining. Because it was written by women, because it not only focuses on women characters but lesbian characters and more than that has a butch lesbian protagonist.[33] Kron clearly states her diagnosis of people’s reticence about the show’s viability: misogyny and lesbophobia, particularly towards masculine lesbians. Within that interview, Kron revealed the persistence of that narrative, even after the show was hitting crucial markers of success: Even when we were succeeding, even when it had had a successful run at the Public and we were selling tickets on Broadway, still the question was being asked “do you think this will work on Broadway?” These financial concerns lingered, despite the production’s relatively quick financial solvency. The investors of Fun Home recouped their investment of $5.25 million dollars within eight months. [34] The tour also returned its investment within eight months, benchmarks that belie the supposed need to commercially closet Fun Home. [35] The marketing of Fun Home reveals a two-pronged approach. The first tactic universalized the musical. The subsequent tactic encouraged playgoers to see the production as politically engaged. In one article, readers are told that: The subject matter, obviously, is a complication in a Broadway market dominated by lighter material. The show’s producers, Kristin Caskey, Mike Isaacson and Barbara Whitman, who raised $5.2 million [sic] to finance the Broadway transfer, are emphasizing the father-daughter relationship and journey of self-discovery, rather than the sexuality, the suicide or the fact that Alison’s father ran a funeral home (“Fun Home” was the Bechdel children’s nickname for the business).[36] Occasionally members of the creative reinforced the producers’ tenet that Fun Home is about a generic family whose story resulted in a “father-daughter heartbreaker.” [37] Judy Kuhn, who played Alison’s mother, Helen, appeared in a promo saying that “[e]verybody can relate to [the play] because everybody has a family.” [38] Elsewhere, the investor Kristin Caskey suggested that the musical offers an opportunity for “seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.” [39] Caskey volunteered that: this is how I saw the show: It was about a child and her relationship with a parent, and as she became an adult, how she came to peace with how she saw that parent. . . . I think a broad audience can relate to that, and will give the show a chance to be commercial.[40] Caskey’s comments removed gender and sexuality as factors within the theatrical work, suggesting their irrelevance for audiences. This sidestepping so overgeneralized the musical’s protagonist and her narrative arc that it nearly misrepresents the show. By the production’s end, the producing team detoured from its initial, sanitizing premise of the musical’s universal family to advance a counternarrative: that the show served as a cultural milestone. These antithetical approaches— that the production was both ahistorical and historically prescient—occurred concurrently during the Broadway run. As Fun Home prepared to move to Broadway from the Public Theater the notoriety of Bechdel’s book became a promotional tool, although not an automatically synergistic or positive one. [41] In February 2014, the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina Upstate announced that Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic would be part of their optional summer reading programs. Politicians responded by voting to defund those public colleges. Rep. Garry Smith, R-Greenville, justified his vote by explaining that the book “goes beyond the pale of academic debate. It graphically shows lesbian acts.” [42] (Readers who pick up Bechdel’s book expecting pornography might be disappointed to find relatively few anatomical moments, aside from her drawing of a male corpse in her father’s embalming studio.) Alison Bechdel and the production team went to South Carolina in April 2014 so that the cast could perform part of the musical as the six-month censorship debate was swirling. [43] This unanticipated pre-Broadway debut “tour” marked a pivot: the creative team began to directly comment on and interact with the censorship debate even as Fun Home ’s marketing products featured no references likely to cause controversy. The production’s responsiveness escalated in the upcoming months: the cast put Fun Home in dialogue with real-time national debates about marriage equality. The play opened a few days before the US Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments about the Obergefell v. Hodges case. Beth Malone commented on this timing in an interview given before the court decision: Right now, the Supreme Court is arguing for our rights as human beings, and I’m going home to my wife tonight who I married in a court of law in New York City. This is a time in our lives. This is quite a time. This is quite a season.[44] Fun Home ’s actors commented on that case in front of larger audiences as well. As he delivered his Tony speech for playing Bruce, Michael Cerveris spoke of his “hope” that the Supreme Court would support LGBTQ+ citizens’ right to marriage. [45] Eighteen days later when the court confirmed marriage equality, the evening’s performance included a new prop: a rainbow flag brought on to stage after the bows. Beth Malone put the flag around her and did a victory lap around the stage, before saying “What an amazing time to be an American. We owe this night to the people who came before us.” [46] In other interviews, Malone specified the activist and artistic pasts to which she felt indebted: The only reason Fun Home itself can be a mainstream Broadway show is because of the fringe work of my sisters that came before me, like the Five Lesbian Brothers, doing this downtown theatre that was so edgy and it was happening in the margins. The margins had to exist for a really long time before it incrementally crept toward the center.[47] After the Supreme Court passed this civil rights case in June 2015, Fun Home began to be included in publications marketed towards LGBTQ+ readers. One such instance was the article within Out magazine that exclusively featured the actors who identified as lesbian or gay in the Broadway production (Beth Malone, Roberta Colindrez, and Joel Perez) alongside Bechdel and Kron. [48] In another produced segment, Malone appears with her wife in a video that features her Fun Home pre-performance commute. [49] These curated moments provided evidence for Malone’s sense that lesbian rights are moving towards “the center” of public sympathy and support. The marketing of Fun Home as proof of American exceptionalism to seventeen ambassadors from the United Nations in March 2016 also hinted at a newfound security for LGBTQ+ people. [50] Three months later, however, Fun Home responded to an intensely harmful event that targeted LGBTQ+ people. The crimes committed at Pulse (a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida) resulted in the deaths of forty-nine victims and the wounding of fifty-eight other people. This event sparked a number of responses from Broadway workers, including at the Tony Awards which were held on the day of the attacks (12 June 2016) as scheduled. Although individual Broadway actors participated in an Orlando tribute, Fun Home was the only production to travel to Florida to be physically present with the victims, survivors, and their families. [51] Beth Malone and Michael Cerveris each wrote publicly about this pilgrimage in tones consonant with the LGBTQ+ advocacy they articulated before the production’s run. [52] The producers’ willingness to highlight the LGBTQ+ themes of the production was newly evident: Mike Isaacson : “For our company, there is no choice but to respond with what we have, what we know, and the belief that it leads to something.” Barbara Whitman : “I think we all had that same reaction: What can we do? This is something we can actually do.” Kristin Caskey : “It was one of those perfect moments where everyone aligned and did so quite quickly, understanding that many of the ideas and themes within ‘Fun Home’ would be a perfect gift and a way for the community to come together in advocation for LGBT rights.”[53] Their unified perspective diverged from Tom Greenwald’s earlier recommendation to “never ever associat[e] [the play] with . . . the subject matter.” At this moment, some fourteen months after the show opened on Broadway, the producers unambiguously voiced their objection to the homophobic and lesbophobic crimes. [54] Particularly striking is Caskey’s transition in framing Fun Home : the show is no longer about “a child and her relationship with a parent,” but a “gift . . . for the community to come together in advocation for LGBT rights,” with her suggestion that the artistic production and political advocacy were linked. The trio continued this pattern of speaking to LGBTQ+ people when in Orlando, writing in a joint statement that “as the first musical with a lesbian protagonist, we so often hear from audience members at ‘Fun Home’ that it was the first time they saw themselves represented on a Broadway stage. We all feel so helpless, but hopefully this will allow us to give back to the LGBT community in this tiny way.” [55] Here, the protagonist’s identity was presented as a pioneering choice, rather than a detail that needed to be hidden. Moreover, the producers acknowledged their debt to the LGBT community rather than distancing the show from that community. Such a development from reticence and repression to an overt championing of LGBTQ+ individuals’ rights was remarkable and challenged the historical pattern of excluding lesbian characters from Broadway stages. These actions that openly acknowledge and affirm the production’s debt to LGBTQ+ artists speak to the gains that the production enabled. Ceveris and Bechdel offer ways to see the historical context of the run. Michael Ceveris says: We’ve played through an extraordinary moment in our country’s history and the most progressive and heartening ways and the most retroactive and terrifying ways. We played through the Supreme Court’s decision, we played through the naming of the first national monument to gay and lesbian rights, and we played through a massacre that was horrific enough in itself and in its aftermath, when some of the hatred and reactionary comments that were made were just as horrifying. If there was ever a play that arrived on Broadway in the moment it was most needed, I think this would be it.[56] Ceveris encapsulated his perspective of the show as a necessary one. Bechdel’s comments featured her characteristic ambivalence: it’s a funny moment. It’s a very funny moment for LGBT culture and civil rights right now. I feel like the play and the success of the play is very much tied into what’s happening in the culture.[57] Like Bechdel in her emphasis of the production’s connection with the contemporary moment, Fun Home ’s composer Jeanine Tesori spoke of production’s role in advancing agendas outside the theater: And so I think that this has met our time, it’s a musical of our time. It makes me think . . . it’s available, what else can it do? What are the next stages? Where are we, what can we express [in] that conversation, the global conversation, the national conversation?[58] The answers to Tesori’s questions are forthcoming: it remains to be seen what artistic and commercial risks might be undertaken to create a more diverse, inclusive theatrical tradition for women actors to inhabit. Despite the censorship that characterized Fun Home ‘s early promotion, the producers ultimately reckoned with a literal tragedy that befell LGBTQ+ people. This transition suggests a recognition that tragedies can be spurred by settings, such as a homophobic society, rather than by LGBTQ+ people’s existence. Fun Home ultimately offered a way forward for a more varied performance history and for productive interplay between onstage representation and offstage politics. Fun Home ’s temporal context offers a useful demarcation of the interplay between civic and theatrical tragedies, and the creative ways that theater can elicit empathy. References [1] StuckinVermont, “Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on Broadway,” 11:49, YouTube , 22 April 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9vD7Nc0L3k (accessed 1 May 2017). [2] Sarah Mirk, “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’ Will Now be a New York Musical,” Bitch Media , 11 October 2013, www.bitchmedia.org/post/alison-bechdels-fun-home-will-now-be-a-new-york-musical (accessed 17 January 2017). [3] Kalle Oskari Matilla, “Selling Queerness: The Curious Case of Fun Home ,” The Atlantic , 25 April 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/04/branding-queerness-the-curious-case-of-fun-home/479532/ (accessed 21 August 2016). [4] Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 334. [5] This line was taken from a “Stuck in Vermont” interview with Bechdel in 2008. Bechdel’s comment appears around 4:50 minutes into the clip. The varied sources for the musical suggest the creative team’s early openness to Bechdel’s contributions beyond the published pages of her visual memoir. StuckinVermont, “Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on Broadway.” [6] According to Robert Petkoff, the actor playing Alison’s father during the tour, the content of the show remained a surprise to some playgoers: “There are people in the audience who are like, ‘What?! I saw kids dancing on the poster—this doesn’t seem to be that story!’” Lori McCue, “The star and designer of ‘Fun Home’ on how their show still surprises audiences,” The Washington Post , 27 April 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2017/04/27/the-star-and-designer-of-fun-home-on-how-their-show-still-surprises-audiences/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.80af729129a9 (accessed 20 July 2017). [7] Matilla, “Selling Queerness.” [8] Heather K. Love charts this genealogy in “Spectacular Failure: The Figure of the Lesbian in ‘Mulholland Drive,’” New Literary History 35, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 120–22. [9] The phrase “Bury your gays” serves as a shorthand for this narrative in popular media. GLAAD (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) provides data on the occurrence and type of LGBTQ+ representations on film and TV. See their Studio Responsibility Index for film data (www.glaad.org/sri/2018), and the “Where We Are On TV” reports (www.glaad.org/tags/where-we-are-tv). [10] Steven Adler, “Box Office,” The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical , eds. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 356. [11] Ibid., 352. [12] Quoted in Mark N. Grant, “The Age of McMusicals,” The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 304–15. Jones’s primary examples of the category “technomusical” are Disney productions and those affiliated with Andrew Lloyd Webber. [13] Elizabeth Wollman, The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 145. [14] Ibid., 145, 144. [15] Michael Sokolove profiles Hamilton ’s producer Jeffrey Seller in “The C.E.O. of ‘Hamilton’ Inc.,” The New York Times , 5 April 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/magazine/the-ceo-of-hamilton-inc.html (accessed 10 May 2018). For an overview of the Great Comet attribute dispute and resolution see the following: Michael Paulson, “Three Words Lead to a Battle Over ‘Great Comet’ on Broadway,” The New York Times , 19 October 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/theater/three-words-lead-to-a-battle-over-great-comet-on-broadway.html (accessed 17 May 2018); Michael Gioia, “ Great Comet Billing Dispute Prompts Lawsuit,” Playbill , 28 October 2016, www.playbill.com/article/ars-nova-sues-great-comet-producers-and-explains-why-were-taking-a-stand (accessed 17 May 2018); Michael Paulson, “Dispute at ‘Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812’ Leads to a Lawsuit,” New York Times , 30 October 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/theater/dispute-at-natasha-pierre-the-great-comet-of-1812-leads-to-lawsuit.html (accessed 17 May 2018); Jeremy Girard, “Peace Now: ‘Natasha, Pierre’ Production and Non-Profit Group Agree to Secret Deal,” Deadline, 2 November 2016, www.deadline.com/2016/11/broadway-lawsuit-natasha-pierre-josh-groban-1201845138/ (accessed 17 May 2018). [16] Michael Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups on Broadway,” The New York Times , 13 December 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/12/14/theater/fun-home-recoups-on-broadway.html (accessed 3 June 2016). Caskey repeated the characterization of the show as “crazy” in her conversation with Whitman preserved at Story Corps. “Fun Home producers Barbara Whitman and Kristen Caskey,” Story Corps , 1 April 2016, www.archive.storycorps.org/interviews/fun-home-co-producers-barbara-whitman-and-kristin-caskey/ (accessed 14 June 2018). After the Tony Awards, Isaacson repeated this diction: “Everybody had been telling us we were crazy, even stupid” (Paulson, “Winning”). As the production went on tour within the US, Isaacson described the “whole endeavor [as] a crazy leap of faith” (Moffit, “Taking on ‘tough stuff’”). Michael Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Finds That Winning a Tony is the Best Way to Market a Musical,” The New York Times , 9 June 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/theater/theaterspecial/fun-home-finds-that-winning-a-tony-is-the-best-way-to-market-a-musical.html (accessed 15 June 2015). Kelly Moffit, “Taking on ‘tough stuff’ with beauty, talent, humor: St. Louis-produced ‘Fun Home’ opens at The Fox,” St. Louis Public Radio , 17 November 2016, www.news.stlpublicradio.org/post/taking-tough-stuff-beauty-talent-humor-st-louis-produced-fun-home-opens-fox (accessed 21 August 2018). [17] The American Psychiatric Association included homosexuality in the second and third editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . The classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder was omitted in their 1987 volume. Neel Burton, “When Homosexuality Stopped Being a Mental Disorder,” Psychology Today , 18 September 2015, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201509/when-homosexuality-stopped-being-mental-disorder (accessed 20 August 2018). [18] Stacy Wolf, “‘Never Gonna Be a Man/Catch Me if You Can/I Won’t Grow Up’: A Lesbian Account of Mary Martin as Peter Pan,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 4 (1997): 494. She uses “lesbianize” as a verb in A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 26. This claim about audience reception is also a starting point for Wolf’s book-length projects, including Changed for Good , in which Wolf argues that Wicked musically and visually codes Elphaba and Glinda as the show’s central couple. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). [19] Chris Straayer’s phrase describes viewers’ willful interpretations of texts that do not secure the character’s sexuality or heroism. “The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine in Narrative Feature Film,” in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture , eds. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 44–69. [20] Ann M. Ciasullo, “Making Her (In)Visible: Cultural Representations of Lesbianism and the Lesbian Body in the 1990s,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 605. [21] Love, “Spectacular Failure,” 129. In the footnote that follows this sentence, Love references Elizabeth Freeman’s “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations,” New Literary History 31 (2000): 727–44. [22] Ben Brantley, “Candy Worship in the Temple of the Prom Queen,” The New York Times , 20 April 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/theater/reviews/30blon.html (accessed 9 June 2016). In Stagestruck , playwright Sarah Schulman offers a productive overview of lesbian theatrical context and the ways that lesbian characters are considered more commodifiable when presented from non-lesbian playwrights, with Rent as a key example. Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). [23] Mirk, “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home.’” [24] Adam Hetrick, “For Beth Malone, ‘Butch is a Beautiful Thing’—What This Fun Home Star Learned Playing Lesbian,” Playbill , 29 June 2015, www.playbill.com/news/article/for-beth-malone-butch-is-a-beautiful-thing-what-this-fun-home-star-learned-playing-lesbian-351968 (accessed 1 July 2015). [25] These are key features of “The Vito Russo Test.” See “The Vito Russo Test,” GLAAD, www.glaad.org/sri/2018/vitorusso (accessed 14 August 2018). [26] Andrew Gans, “Tony-Winning Musical Kinky Boots Recoups Initial Investment,” Playbill , 3 October 2013, www.playbill.com/article/tony-winning-musical-kinky-boots-recoups-initial-investment-com-210206 (accessed 19 June 2017). According to Brent Lang, the recuperation happened in large part because of the high costs of Kinky Boots tickets. “ Kinky Boots Recoups $13.5 Investment,” The Wrap , 3 October 2013, www.thewrap.com/kinky-boots-recoups-13-5m-investment/ (accessed 19 June 2017). For additional context, Rent recouped in fifteen weeks, Avenue Q took forty weeks, and Matilda took some nineteen months to recoup its $16 million capitalization (Adler, “Box Office,” 352). Fun Home ’s cost of $5.25 million in 2015 was less than that of Spring Awakening in 2007, which cost $6 million. Spring Awakening ’s production team was concerned that their box office might suffer from their production’s content: like Fun Home , that musical includes suicide, adult language, homoeroticism, and teenage sexuality. For Matilda box office details, see David Cox, “Broadway Musical ‘Matilda’ Turns a Profit,” Variety , 5 December 2014, www.variety.com/2014/legit/news/matilda-recoups-broadway-musical-1201372084/. For all other box office details, see Adler, “Box Office,” 352. [27] Michael Ceveris, incidentally, “set the record for playing the most performances as the East German rock ‘n’ roll singer Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” For information on Ceveris’s record, see Carey Purcell, “Michael Ceveris on the Closing of Fun Home: ‘It Arrived on Broadway in the Moment it Was Most Needed,’” Out, 22 August 2016, www.out.com/theater-dance/2016/8/22/michael-cerveris-closing-fun-home-it-arrived-broadway-moment-it-was-most (accessed 12 February 2017). [28] Stacy Wolf, “The Queer Pleasures of Mary Martin and Broadway: The Sound of Music as a Lesbian Musical,” Modern Drama 39, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 52. [29] Other details specific to Bechdel’s experience were stripped from the campaign. Whereas the cover for Bechdel’s book referenced the family’s funeral home, including a Mass card reappropriated as her book title, the musical’s poster omitted that background and that prop. [30] See Sokolove, “The C.E.O. of ‘Hamilton’, Inc.,” where Jeffrey Seller characterized the name change as a result of “gentle but persistent prodding before Miranda finally agreed.” Patricia Herrera writes about the ways in which Hamilton “proclaims an inclusive narrative of American identity that obscures the histories of racism that are at the base of so much of the American experience,” as well as the promotional distance from the show’s “acoustic environment shaped by Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American musical, oral, visual, and dance forms and practices.” Patricia Herrera, “Reckoning with America’s Racial Past, Present, and Future in Hamilton ,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past , eds. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 262, 260. [31] June Thomas, “ Fun Home Won Five Tonys. How Did a Graphic Memoir Become a Musical?” Slate , 8 June 2015, www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2013/10/08/fun_home_is_america_ready_for_a_musical_about_a_butch_lesbian.html (accessed 21 April 2017). [32] Rae Binstock, “Why Lesbian Spaces Will Always Be in Danger of Closing, and Why Some Will Always Survive,” Slate , 20 December 2016, www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/12/20/why_do_lesbian_spaces_have_such_a_hard_time_staying_in_business.html (accessed 21 April 2017). [33] “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’: The Coming-Out Memoir That Became a Hit Broadway Musical,” Democracy Now! , 30 July 2015, www.democracynow.org/2015/7/30/alison_bechdels_fun_home_the_coming (accessed 14 May 2017). [34] Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups.” [35] Andrew Gans, “National Tour of Fun Home Recoups Investment,” Playbill , 17 May 2017, www.playbill.com/article/national-tour-of-fun-home-recoups-investment (accessed 19 June 2017). [36] Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups.” [37] Patrick Healey, “Moving Your Show to Broadway? Not So Fast,” The New York Times , 8 May 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/theater/theaterspecial/moving-your-show-to-broadway-not-so-fast.html (accessed 2 May 2017). [38] “Life with Father! Learn the True Tale Behind the New Broadway Musical Fun Home ,” Broadway.com , 23 March 2015, www.broadway.com/buzz/180076/life-with-father-learn-the-true-tale-behind-the-new-broadway-musical-fun-home/ (accessed 13 March 2017). [39] Paulson, “Tonys.” Kristen Caskey was played off by the orchestra in the midst of her acceptance speech. Lisa Kron’s acceptance speech was not televised, but can be found here: Jerry Portwood, “ Fun Home was the big musical winner at the awards,” Out , 8 June 2016, www.out.com/popnography/2015/6/08/watch-lisa-kron-gives-moving-tonys-acceptance-speech (accessed 9 June 2016). [40] Healy, “Moving.” [41] The Public Theater’s Public Lab held a run of Fun Home in 2012 in their Newman theater, and a subsequent off-Broadway run at the Public Theater that began in September 2014. Manuel Betancourt, “From the Public to Broadway: Fun Home ’s Growing Pains,” HowlRound , 22 October 2015, www.howlround.com/from-the-public-to-broadway-fun-home-s-growing-pains (accessed 27 August 2018). [42] Betsy Gomez provides commentary on this provision, which “mandates that students be allowed to avoid encountering educational material they find ‘objectionable based on a sincerely held religious, moral, or cultural belief.’” Betsy Gomez, “This Compromise Is Not Acceptable: CBLDF Joins Coalition Condemning South Carolina Budget Provision,” Comic Book Legal Defense Fund , 13 June 2014, www.cbldf.org/2014/06/this-compromise-is-not-acceptable-cbldf-joins-coalition-questioning-south-carolina-budget-provision/ (accessed 22 May 2017). [43] Democracy Now! , “Alison Bechdel’s ’Fun Home.’” [44] Hetrick, “Butch is a Beautiful Thing.” [45] Michael Ceveris gave the speech on 8 June 2015. Michael Musto, “Lesbian Musical Crushes Gershwin Show, and Other Tony Awards Revelations,” Out , 8 June 2015, www.out.com/michael-musto/2015/6/08/lesbian-musical-fun-home-crushes-gershwin-show-tony-awards-revelations (accessed 10 June 2015). [46] These moments have been preserved by the production team, and can be easily accessed on their webpage. The Playbill Video site shows Kron commenting that the play is “at the cusp of an evolving opening moment.” Playbill Video, “Lisa Kron, Michael Cerveris, Judy Kuhn and Emily Skeggs Have Fun Talking “Fun Home” at BroadwayCon!,” 7:51, YouTube , 3 February 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdltIKzwLUk (accessed 13 March 2016). [47] Hetrick, “Butch is a Beautiful Thing.” [48] “Out100: The Fun Home Family,” Out , 9 November 2015, www.out.com/out100-2015/2015/11/09/out100-fun-home-family (accessed 17 May 2016). The shoot includes a stylist, an approach reminiscent of some of Rent ’s promotion techniques which included clothing lines at Manhattan’s Bloomingdales and fashion spreads featuring the cast. See Michael Riedel, “Available at Bloomies: The ‘Rent’ Rags Can Be Yours—For a Price,” New York Daily News, 30 April 1996, 35. [49] Theatre Mania, “A Day with Fun Home Star Beth Malone,” 6:35, YouTube , 30 September 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hQw_uwzJCc (accessed 3 June 2016). [50] As Matilla notes, US Ambassador Samantha Powers took her colleagues to this event in May 2016, see “Selling Queerness.” [51] Carmen Triola, “‘Fun Home’ Is Going to Orlando to Perform a Benefit Concert for Pulse Shooting Victims,” FlavorWire , 6 July 2016, www.flavorwire.com/583516/fun-home-is-going-to-orlando-to-perform-a-benefit-concert-for-pulse-shooting-victims (accessed 22 July 2016). [52] For additional reports of this trip, see the following: “Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ Cast Sets Benefit Performance for Orlando Victims,” Hollywood Reporter , 5 July 2016, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/broadways-fun-home-cast-sets-908612 (accessed 11 April 2018); Michael Ceveris, “Taking ‘Fun Home’ to Orlando for a Catharsis Onstage and Off,” The New York Times , 6 August 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/08/06/theater/taking-fun-home-to-orlando-for-a-catharsis-onstage-and-off.html (accessed 11 April 2018); Hal Boedecker, “Pulse benefit: Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ plays Orlando,” Orlando Sentinel , 5 July 2016, www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/tv/tv-guy/os-pulse-benefit-broadway-s-fun-home-plays-orlando-20160705-story.html (accessed 11 April 2018). [53] Mark Kennedy, “Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ cast sets benefit for Orlando victims,” AP News , 5 July 2016, wwwapnews.com/c90a05bc88204ae4950c0ada08bf48e8 (accessed 22 July 2016). [54] After their advocacy, Isaacson was awarded an Equality Award from the St. Louis chapter of the Human Rights Campaign, and Caskey was appointed the executive vice president of Ambassador Theater Group’s North American operations. See Judith Newmark, “‘Fun Home’ reaps more honors for its producers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch , 20 November 2015, www.stltoday.com/entertainment/arts-and-theatre/culture-club/fun-home-reaps-more-honors-for-its-producers/article_492d110f-3d24-574a-8517-a4dcd372b5f5.html (accessed 6 June 2018); Gordon Cox, “Broadway Producer Kristen Caskey Joins Ambassador Theater Group,” Variety , 29 November 2016, www.variety.com/2016/legit/news/kristin-caskey-ambassador-theater-group-north-america-1201928759/ (accessed 6 June 2018). [55] Matthew J. Palm, “‘Fun Home’: Cast is here for you,” Orlando Sentinel , 20 July 2016, www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/arts-and-theater/os-fun-home-orlando-benefit-20160713-story.html#nt=inbody-1%20Ceveris%20%E2%80%93%20idea%20in%20middle%20of%20show,%20producers%E2%80%99%20response (accessed 22 July 2016). [56] Purcell, “On the Closing of Fun Home .” [57] Democracy Now! , “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home.’” [58] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) MAUREEN MCDONNELL is Director of Women’s and Gender Studies and Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University. Her research interests include gender studies, early modern drama (including Shakespeare), and American Sign Language in performance. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF The night before Independence Day in 1933, something unprecedented occurred. [1] As part of Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition, “Jewish Day” was celebrated, culminating in a record-breaking performance that garnered an audience of between 125,000 and 150,000 spectators crammed into Chicago’s Soldier Field, causing massive traffic jams before and after. [2] While some of Chicago’s other immigrant ethnicities were represented as part of the Expo, Jewish Day and its show-stopping finale were the most notable ethnically-oriented events of the entire fair. So impactful was the performance, The Romance of a People , that not only did it receive twelve columns of coverage in the Chicago Tribune the following day, but an encore performance was sponsored by the Tribune three nights after the initial performance. Ultimately a bold Zionist affair, raising money for creating the would-be Jewish refuge of Palestine, The Romance of a People combined spectacle and politics in a remarkably successful performance as Hitler was coming into power. A decade later, in the midst of World War II, another Jewish pageant of massive scale graced the city, but after ten years of atrocities, the motives and emotions were much different. Well into wartime, 1943 brought the New York-originated pageant, We Will Never Die , to Chicago as part of a nationwide tour. While still promoting the increasingly insistent need for a government-sanctioned nationhood (the demand which transformed Palestine into Israel five years after the Chicago performance), the pageant, as evidenced by its title, spoke to the threat to Jewish life and identity by the Nazis. Even more than in The Romance of a People, We Will Never Die carried the fear of genocide. A somber tone and a tocsin of impending death replaced the patriotic and inclusive hunger for recognition evident in The Romance of a People . Another decade later, as series of smaller individual performances were organized as part of a nationwide Jewish-American celebration: the American Jewish Tercentenary. Commemorating three hundred years of Jewish presence in America, the year-long event was held from 1954 through 1955, and boasted “forums, exhibitions, pageants, musical festivals, and public dinners organized by local committees in at least four hundred cities and towns.” [3] While these three decades of pageants bore similarities in theme and in production elements, their execution and tone differ drastically, speaking to the radically different times in American history for Jews and America’s relationship to the Jews. In our examination of these pageants, we understand them to be historically contingent, site-specific, and temporally-bounded events. Each of these Jewish-American pageants relied on its historical specificity and locale, while these elements also contributed to their lack of performance longevity. But it is in their nuanced, culturally-reflective status that we find these pageants compelling—they are historical artifacts that didactically perform their own contextually-contingent ideologies. Furthermore, as we focus on each of the three decades of pageants in the paper that follows, we contend with the ways in which their varying degrees of site-specificity are also intricately bound within a broader American network, reflective of both Jewish American microcosms and the macro-national level. Pageants and Politics We use twentieth-century Jewish pageants to argue that the pageant form of theatre is an ideal forum by which to make claims about citizenship and political engagement. While these pageants differ from traditional theatre in terms of their fluid scripting, grand scale, and limited potential for extended performance runs, they nonetheless resemble normative theatre in that they are specific, performed events with beginnings and endpoints, they feature performers enacting a narrative upon a stage, and they rely heavily on the audience-performance dynamic that is live theatre’s hallmark. That said, however, by virtue of the extent of its stagecraft, audience, and ambition within the public sphere, the pageant form, as distinct from the routinely-performed play, expresses the perspective of a segment of the population. This was particularly important from the end of the Civil War to the 1960s, a period of extensive immigration, during which the issue of accepting and integrating ethnic immigrants was salient and “patriotic pageants became a popular form for promoting the assimilation of the immigrant into American society.” [4] Pageants reached their apogee in the first half of the twentieth century, playing off the desire to solidify an American tradition, but this was necessary precisely because of the migrants who had to demonstrate that, despite diverse customs, religions, and beliefs, they belonged to—and were fervently patriotic towards—the American nation. Explicating this sentiment, albeit baldly, Esther Willard Bates describes this integration in her pageantry how-to guide, The Art of Producing Pageants from 1925: “pageantry is more than an end; it is also a means. . . . It teaches our late-comers the story of the nation in an imaginative manner, and when they act [as] our fore-fathers and speak their very words, they become part-owners in our traditions.” [5] The ethnic pageant, and in this case the Jewish-American pageant, was designed to meet this need but was also situated in light of the political needs of the community, as defined by organizations with the resources and authority to create extensive performances, requiring personnel, locations, and the activation of audiences. Pageants are not merely a means of displaying nationalism and tradition but also an occasion on which community resources are expended to set a political agenda. America’s longstanding tradition of using spectacle and pageantry for the formation and assertion of “Americanness” can be traced back to the earliest years of the American republic. Colorful, boisterous, and clear in message, pageants of early American history fostered community among America’s ethnic, religious, and social groups, simultaneously unifying them under a single banner of American identity and mobilizing as a vehicle for hybrid American-ethnic identity formation. S. E. Wilmer traces this long history of America’s theatricalized nationalism in Theatre, Society and the Nation . “Particularly in times of national crisis,” he states, “the theatre has served as a political and ideological tool to help reconfigure the [American] nation,” defining or challenging “national values and the notion of the nation,” and “reformulating concepts of national identity” that even predate Germany’s nationalistic theatrical Romanticism. [6] While the American-Jewish relationship to pageantry reflects these community—and nation-building—protocols, by the twentieth century pageants changed in their focus. Pageants became strategic attempts at persuasion, both within the community and beyond. American perceptions of Jews, both American and international, have also altered greatly over the course of the twentieth century, and the changing approaches to Jewish-American pageantry are as much a reflection of this shift in perception as of the changing relationship of American Jews to both America and assimilation. In American Historical Pageantry , David Glassberg describes the legacy of early American pageantry, its heyday in the first decades of the twentieth century, and its ultimate decline after the late-1920s. In its prime, historical pageantry played a major role in American celebrations and festivals, showcasing “the belief that history could be made into a dramatic public ritual through which the residents of a town, by acting out the right version of their past, could bring about some kind of future social and political transformation.” [7] Reiterating both American pride and the possibilities of growth of the town, neighborhood, or ethnic association, these productions presented an idealized vision of past and future through “the use of historical imagery to discover or invent an appropriate tradition in support of reform.” [8] In addition to Glassberg’s and Wilmer’s book-length studies on historical American pageantry, from early to mid-century American works, Richard M. Fried’s The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America examines national patriotic activity and efforts executed through theatrical pageantry and ritual, implemented through federal-level initiatives, as a means of reasserting national identity during troubling political times, particularly focusing in on Cold War-era “patriotic and civic pageantry.” [9] While the book does not focus closely in on them, Fried also acknowledges the plethora of more localized, group-specific pageant performance traditions from the turn-of-the-century onwards. Additionally, a number of articles focus specifically on minority-driven American political pageants, including those by Stephen J. Whitfield, Robert Skloot, and Lauren Love, that individually explore two of the pageants discussed within this article, examining the pageants’ “civic purpose” and ability to activate Jewish solidarity. [10] Likewise, in “Performing the Polish-American Patriot,” Megan E. Geigner similarly examines theatrical pageant performances that serve to reiterate hyphenated other-American identity as a means of galvanizing patriotic kinship. [11] In this same vein, Martha S. LoMonaco’s work on nineteenth-century Mormon pageants looks at historical pageantry as creating a foothold in American historical narrative through performance. [12] Taken together, recent scholarship displays a clear interest – albeit a diffuse one – in the performance practices of minority groups in America who used pageantry as a means of articulating their hyphenated American identity. While this article seeks to add to this body of literature, our goal is also to further that discussion by including the ways in which mid-century Jewish-American pageants built upon such an American tradition, while, conversely, discussing how we can use these past pageants as a way to explore the turns in performance practices in moments where Jewish and American-Jewish identity are in jeopardy. Our approach offers a macro view of how pageants were utilized as a means of identity production and group unification spanning three decades. Despite the overall decline in popularity of the pageant form across America, the mid-century Jewish pageants we discuss display a continuation of those same ideologies fostered by the American pageant tradition, but with particular, persuasive goals sensitive to the situation of American and global Jewry. While small towns no longer emphasized the performance of patriotism, this became increasingly important for urban Jews. For the Jewish community, the pageant both energized the community and spoke to the wider American public through the media representations of the large gatherings. Though the American pageant form by this point had morphed into the “folk play, the restored museum village, or the annual historical festival . . . depict[ing] the past as a separate world from the present,” Jewish American pageants before, during, and after the Second World War successfully bridged the gap between the ethnic enclave and the Christian public. [13] Employing familiar techniques and tropes that were long central to American civil religion, [14] these pageants continued the American pageantry legacy while utilizing the theatrical form as a successful way to assert an overtly didactic message: Jews are a unique and worthy people, they lack a homeland ( Romance of a People ), they are threatened with destruction from un-American enemies ( We Will Never Die ), and they share core American values while contributing to national history (the Tercentennial pageants). Each moment of pageantry had its own agenda, but the overall message—the insistence that Jews were worthy and patriotic Americans—remained throughout. By performing these Jewish narratives within but not eclipsed by an American narrative, these pageants performed Jewish difference, thereby drawing attention to specifically Jewish issues before Jewish and broader audiences. Furthermore, these pageants also represent a unique moment in the American pageantry legacy, as they also interpolate its historical tradition of ethnic subsumption into a homogenous (Anglo-)American, nationalist narrative. These three mid-twentieth-century pageants allow Jews to represent themselves (i.e. prominent Jews in American history) while still arguing for their Americanness and adopting a stance that hybridizes the American aesthetic and American nationalism. Additionally, we examine the ways in which these Jewish-American pageants are responsive to their contemporary moment in explicit and didactic ways that limit their potential for longevity but that offer themselves up to historians as illuminating points of reference into their cultural and political contexts. We examine each of these pageants, describing their content and how they situated the Jewish community in light of contemporary issues that a large, well-attended performance could address. 1933: The Romance of a People The Romance of a People was a three-hour pageant of epic proportions: a program “which symbolize[d] four thousand years of colorful history—history high in its drama, packed with pathos, terrible in tragedies, glorious in its victories.” [15] The pageant featured 3,500 cast members, including singers and dancers reminiscent of a Greek Chorus on a massive scale, nearly all of whom were local residents of Chicago and members of the Jewish community. [16] To prevent chaos and cacophony from the humongous cast, director Isaac Van Grove opted to amplify mechanically the speeches and songs of the cast from a room hidden beneath the stage. Covered in a Chicago Daily Tribune article that ran the day after the initial performance, columnist Virginia Gardner’s discussion of the methods utilized by Van Grove for the production, and the fact that it merited newspaper coverage at all, provides evidence of its remarkable execution. “The control room and amplifying system made possible what Van Grove described as ‘the effect of an intimate theater two blocks long.’” [17] The marriage of artistry and technology not only assisted in executing the mass theatre in which Van Grove openly believed, but also aligned with the Century of Progress mission to promote technology unimaginable in the previous hundred years. [18] Van Grove is credited for pioneering amplified sound for a theatrical production, as he did in The Romance of a People . [19] Across all press reports and published material about The Romance of a People , it is evident that the public reception was strong. The word “colorful” appears a dozen times throughout the pageant’s press coverage, as do accolades about the audiences’ upturned faces and positive Jewish attitudes and self-opinion, such as in David and Goliath allegories. [20] The positive perception of the extravagance at Soldier Field is clear but seems largely to pertain to the material only aesthetically. While the production aimed to educate for the purposes of the Zionist cause, Van Grove and his producers spared no expense to generate entertainment and to immerse the audience in the spectacle. Six months earlier in December 1932, Chicago audiences had an early taste when a massive Chanukah holiday pageant, also directed by Van Grove (and similarly produced by Meyer Weisgal), was staged at the Chicago Stadium, entitled “Israel Reborn.” [21] Though the cast size and audience numbers were more than doubled for The Romance of a People , the previous Jewish “theatrical spectacle” was heralded as a performance that “one sees once in a generation.” [22] Van Grove knew going into the colossal Soldier Field production what had worked so triumphantly only half a year prior for a similar Chicago audience. Van Grove was a staunch believer in the opportunity to create theatrical impact that “mass spectacle” afforded. [23] To Van Grove, the possibilities for emotional gravitas were substantially higher when utilizing pageantry and grand-scale spectacle, rather than realism that he considered “passé.” [24] It was the power of thousands of bodies in coordinated movement that Van Grove believed could elicit the vital response The Romance of a People needed. While the pageant aimed to garner support and attention for the Zionist cause, it also allowed an emotional appeal to non-Jewish audience members. The pageant strove to engage Jews and Christians alike, so much so that it was commented on in nearly all reviews of the pageant production. Perhaps the Chicago Daily News reporter, S. J. Duncan-Clark, put it most poignantly in his pageant review that ran 5 July 1933, highlighting the community forged through pageantry: There was laughter and weeping among the thronging spectators for the floodtide of emotion had been released. Christians and Jews grasped hands with a new sense of spiritual kinship. There were thousands of Christians present. All Christian creeds had joined in approving and promoting the magnificent project of their Jewish neighbors.[25] While Duncan-Clark recognizes the pageant’s message of Jewish distinctiveness in order to highlight the specific plight of its people, he rightly points to the pageant’s goal of community orientation—attempting to bring others into the fight for Jewish lives abroad. Regardless of, or perhaps due to, the diversity of the audience, the pageant itself was both a dramatic and edifying affair, chronicling notable events in Jewish history. The pageant depicted “forty centuries of religion” in the form of six episodes with two interludes, starting with a dramatization of the religion’s formation. [26] A 27-foot idol of the god Moloch surrounded by 500 slaves and worshippers set the scene for Judaism’s rejection of the false god, thereby depicting “the birth of true religious concepts.” [27] Furthermore, this attempt at monotheistic universality is mentioned in the pageant’s program “Greeting and Tribute” penned by producer and script-writer Meyer Weisgal. Hailing the presumed diversity of the crowd, Weisgal declaimed, “Among you are representatives of all the races and creeds which are incorporated in the structure of the American Republic. The composition of this assembly bears equal witness, therefore, to the spirit of fellowship and mutual respect among diversities of faith and race.” [28] While his program greeting closes with a reminder of the pageant’s Zionist cause, Weisgal’s preamble anticipates what would later be the American Jewish Tercentenary’s purpose: realigning Jewishness within an American historical context and within a multiethnic community. The pageant consisted of a prologue, six episodes, and two “interludes” (performed transitions) that outlined widely-known moments from “biblical and historical records,” from ancient to present times. [29] Beginning with “The Creation,” a scene depicted the first lines of the Torah (the Jewish Bible) and the creation of humanity, using chaotic lights and sound to represent “the morning of Creation, the freshness of the world as it came from the hand of the divine Artificer.” [30] This scene was followed by the aforementioned birth of Judaism and Abraham’s covenant with God after denouncing the impending sacrifice to a false god, the escape from slavery in Egypt, the building of the first temple and its subsequent destruction, exiles wandering in search of a new homeland, and finally, deliverance to a new Israel. Part of the pageant’s power comes not from the scenes depicted, but rather the sheer scale of the production itself. The thousands of bodies onstage before gigantic scenery, depicting, at turns, false idols, the temple in Jerusalem, and finally the future homeland, constituted a remarkable spectacle. The use of amplified sound enabled giant choreographed movement onstage to take place without worry about carrying noise, while the stereophonic voice-acting of forty or so actors depicting The Voice of God, Abraham, and other significant figures were hidden beneath the stage, merging media and performance technologies to enable unimpeded spectacle. The production set for the pageant was claimed to be “unquestionably the most elaborate stage ever built” at Soldier Field. [31] A “mammoth” four level, 200-foot long, 150-foot wide set filled much of the stadium. “Fashioned to look like stone, the set, on the one hand, suggested the use of ancient materials, substantial enough to endure for thousands of years into the future. On the other hand, solid but blank, this place’s history was waiting to be inscribed.” [32] The tiered stage accommodated a chorus of 1,500 and an orchestra on a single level, with ample room left for the action of the performance, [33] with the temple at stage center, adorned with a Star of David. [34] Advanced coverage in the Chicago Daily Tribune raved of the pageant’s precedent-breaking visual spectacle, including embedded floor lighting, four 35-foot lighting towers, and a giant glass “curtain” (35 feet long by 25 feet high) onto which colorful light effects would be projected. [35] These lights were used with great dramatic effect for the final stage picture: a single light blazed from darkness to illuminate the temple’s star, as the sung prayer “Shema Yisrael/Hear, O Israel” brought the pageant to a close. [36] The production’s playbill also reflected the high level of community interest and involvement. Featuring advertisements and well-wishes from organizations and businesses citywide (both Jewish and secular), the program itself enacted a coherent community voice vouching support of the production, albeit a commercially motivated one. [37] The program serves as a material testament to the city’s vested interest in the Jewish community’s patronage. The range of pageant-specific advertisements include a message in handwritten Yiddish from Sophie Tucker of The 225 Club, a note to the “Jews of Chicago” from D. L. Toffenetti of the Triangle Restaurants franchise, and an ad from Flashtric Sign Works, creators of “One of the Most Outstanding Features of Jewish Day,” the illuminated Star of David used in the production. [38] The playbill, therefore, performed the same integrated community mentality that the pageant itself asserted and reflected a desire for its success from community supporters. In his history of Soldier Field, Liam T. A. Ford notes that “rather than promoting assimilation into America’s melting pot, [ The Romance of a People ] helped make pride in being Jewish more acceptable to non-Jewish Chicagoans and at the same time, helped define what being Jewish would mean for generations of American Jews.” [39] Ford’s assertion as to the pageant’s reverberating impact on public performances of Jewishness in America in the generations to come certainly rings true when considering the next generation’s overlapping uses of spectacles for asserting Jewish-American acceptance. That said, the pageants in the decades that follow The Romance of a People differ in important ways, reflecting their altered political and cultural circumstances. 1943: We Will Never Die World War II created a new context for Jewish-American pageantry. A decade after The Romance of a People , the fate of European Jews was desperate, survival in the balance, while at the same time the might of the American military was arrayed against their tormentors. Though, perhaps, saving Jews was not a prime motivator of American military involvement, the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis was used to justify the war effort, leading to sympathy for Jews and a rejection of the more overt forms of prejudice in the United States.' The 1943 pageant, We Will Never Die , was produced at a moment in which wartime patriotism was linked to a hatred of anti-Semitism, and the pageant built on this connection. We Will Never Die premiered at New York’s Madison Square Garden, emphasizing that preserving Jewish culture and community was consistent with American values, and it featured a laundry list of theatre-celebrity involvement, including direction by Moss Hart, script by Ben Hecht, music by Kurt Weil, and was produced by Billy Rose. As their titles suggest, the decade between Romance of a People and We Will Never Die dramatically altered the substance of these theatrical narratives. While both pageants featured distinctly Jewish narratives, The Romance of a People represented hope and galvanization, whereas 1943’s We Will Never Die , facing the grim realities of Nazi crimes, presented a desperate plea for Jewish safety and mobilization to assure it. Both pageants were attended by both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, [40] and each addressed the future of Jewish inclusion and preservation. While We Will Never Die was more didactic, both pageants played off ethnic distinctiveness—Jews as a special category of “Americans”—in gaining the attention of an audience that accepted the legitimacy of that difference. Perhaps the pageants had limited effects in changing American policy, but in performance, they made the case that Jewish interests were American interests. We Will Never Die , performed on 9 May 1943 at the Chicago Stadium, proffered similar themes as The Romance of a People , but with darker, more somber tones. The pageant was a “memorial to the 2,000,000 Jews” that the producers stated had already been murdered in Europe, and was penned by acclaimed Jewish-American playwright and screenwriter, Ben Hecht. [41] We Will Never Die used vastly disparate tactics from The Romance of a People , and was credited as the first wide-scale dramatic presentation of the destruction of the Jews in Europe. [42] Contrary to the optimism of the 1933 pageant, We Will Never Die threw violent, gory details at audiences, hoping to make viewers incensed at the slaughter, rather than to convince the crowds of the goodliness and godliness of the Jewish people. We Will Never Die featured a cast of 1,000 and garnered a Chicago audience between 15,000 to 20,000. [43] It was treated as a critical step in advancing the cause of the Jewish people. The Chicago Daily Tribune titled their review, “Pageant Stirs 15,000 to Vow: Jew Must Live.” [44] Using high praise, the Tribune reviewer, Edward Barry, wrote, From a majestic stage flanked by representations of the tablets of the law and the star of David, 1,000 American Jews last night delivered a plea to an audience of 15,000, and thru these 15,000 to the world, to heed the plight of the Jews of Europe before the last remnants of the race there are sacrificed to the Nazi fury.[45] In contrast to the 1933 review by James O’Donnell Bennett, who reviewed The Romance of a People , Barry does not differentiate the Jews and gentiles in the audience, perhaps indicating the unifying, humanist appeal of the material. Unlike the historical epic of The Romance of a People , We Will Never Die opted for relative naturalism in the script. Though the production set consisted of “two towering Tablets containing the Ten Commandments loom[ing] at the back of the stage,” much of the dialogue is realistic and personable, albeit didactic, and often gruesomely so. [46] The show begins with the Kol Nidre chant from Yom Kippur, [47] a shofar is blown, and a rabbi emerges from between the two tablets to introduce and honor the plight of “the two million who have been killed in Europe.” [48] The rabbi gives the stage over to two narrators who begin a series of short episodes, each addressing the Jewish plight. The first of four episodes begins with a “roll call” of important Jewish contributors to American and global life—somewhat foreshadowing the Tercentenary narratives—including a disparate collection of individuals, such as Luis Ponce de Leon, Benjamin Disraeli, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Gompers. The second episode chronicles one Jewish-American soldier’s wartime experience and urgent telegraph home on the brink of his death during American defeat in the Philippines. Episode Three chronicles the struggle and uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, [49] and the pageant closes with an episode entitled, “Remember Us,” consisting of the dead announcing their gruesome ends at the hands of the Nazis, while beseeching the audience not to forget them. Closing with two narrators urging American involvement in the Jewish plight, the pageant used the rhetoric of the American ethic: We [Americans] have brave soldiers who are fighting to victory. But the massacre of the unarmed civilians is beyond the reach of their guns. The desert and the Mediterranean are the battle front and they are honorably engaged on it. The massacre in Europe is our battle front—and we are not honorably engaged on it.[50] Then, making a greater, global claim, a second narrator decries, “the crime of Europe calls for the mobilization of every shred of righteousness and spiritual power left in the world.” [51] While We Will Never Die offered a persuasive cry for a cohesive front and fight against the Axis and Nazism in order to rescue the remaining European Jewry, support from American Jewish organizations was spotty. Though Ben Hecht, the pageant’s scriptwriter, presented a work-in-progress to garner financial support from the Jewish community, “with representatives of nearly three-dozen Jewish organizations,” the groups “could not agree to work together in support of the forthcoming pageant. Even when Hecht . . . offered to withdraw the formal endorsement of the controversial Committee for a Jewish Army and to work only behind the scenes, the others declined to sponsor We Will Never Die .” [52] Furthermore, the pageant attempted not only “[t]o heighten concern for doomed coreligionists . . . it was also targeted at public opinion and at the nation’s capital. Hecht and his collaborators . . . wanted to stimulate a change in policy.” [53] This ambitious goal was also ultimately unattainable. As Whitfield argues in “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946”: Perhaps none of these pageants was great enough, soaring enough, memorable enough . . . but there is a more likely explanation. It asks too much of art to expect it to halt the juggernaut of tyranny. Nazism and fascism were too powerful for that. . . . Neither masterpieces nor spectacles could influence geopolitics; and the lesson that many Jews learned is that, while art can enhance and illuminate and expose power, only countervailing force can effectively confront it. . . . That realization meant consolidating a sense of peoplehood, instilling in American Jewish audiences a sense of transatlantic solidarity.[54] While transatlantic solidarity was important during the war years due to the threat to Jewry in Europe, other issues took priority during the 1950s as Jews attempted to demonstrate their bona fides as “Americans.” Whitfield points toward what would become the strategy of the yearlong American Jewish celebration to follow a decade after We Will Never Die . 1954-55: A Return to Different Roots After the war, like so much else, the politics of American-Jewish pageants were indelibly altered. During the 1950s, rather than reaching outward, emphasizing a “transatlantic solidarity,” the 1954-55 Jewish-American Tercentenary pageants focused inwards, emphasizing the particularly Jewish role in the development of American life and culture over the past 300 years. These pageants were intended to incorporate Jews into American collective memory, perhaps given the concern about seeing Jews as Communists. [55] With the existential threat to Jewish life resolved in Europe, the next challenge for American Jewry was to demonstrate to fellow citizens questioning their patriotism that Jews had long been integral to American life. American-Jewish pageantry turned to its local soil to advance a narrative of Jewish “Americanness,” which became further emphasized as the Cold War tensions increased and questions of loyalty became salient. Post-war Jewish-American pageantry presented a narrative of long-standing Jewish commitment to America since its founding, no longer suggesting that the United States must do something for Jews, but instead that Jews have done something for America. The culmination of this assimilationist, hybrid-identity of Jewish-American status was the year-long American Jewish Tercentenary celebration, occurring from September 1954 through May 1955. Celebrated nationwide, the 300 th anniversary of Jewish American presence was memorialized through publications, celebratory events, television and radio formats, and pageant spectacles. The Tercentenary was well-timed for this assertion of the embeddedness of Jews in American life. The specter of Communism conjured a need to perform a non-threatening—solidly American—Jewish identity, and a choice was made to create a celebration that publicly proclaimed this allegiance. Unlike the massive spectacles in the 1930s and ‘40s, these Tercentenary pageants were on a smaller scale, [56] a function surely of a decline in large-scale pageants, and perhaps a reaction to large-scale rallies in Germany and the Soviet Union. These pageants were performed in cities across the country but with more modest casts and in smaller venues. With their local orientation, these pageants had a different position in creating public awareness and perception than the highly successful mass pageants that had taken place previously and were centered mainly in Chicago and New York, with subsequent tour stops at other urban centers, including Detroit and Washington D.C. Although hints of the post-war assimilationist movement could be seen in sporadic pageants and publications from the immediate post-war years through the early nineteen-fifties, the Jewish Tercentenary was distinct: it hoped to include every Jewish community, large or small, in the national celebration of Jewish influence on American life and democracy. Founded in 1953, the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee (AJTC) was formed to promote and establish the commemoratory year of anniversary celebrations, building on the tercentennial theme of “Man’s Opportunities and Responsibilities Under Freedom.” To this end, numerous pamphlets were published under the auspices of the organization, created to aid and encourage Jewish communities and organizations taking part across the country. Explicit in their intended goals, the materials from the AJTC provided a clear set of instructions to follow for all manner of anniversary celebration attempts nationwide. In their clarity, these instructional booklets asked that a certain ideal narrative be followed and performed across all related performance platforms. That narrative not only asserted the early and unchanging importance of Jews in America but also their unceasing dedication to the American way of life, emphasizing democratic governance. In the numerous texts published by or with the support of the AJTC, American democracy is central. The texts didactically indicate Jewish involvement through centuries of American politics and patriotism, including one text referencing Oscar Straus’s contention that the “Hebrew Old Testament” influenced America’s foundational democratic ideals. [57] What is abundantly clear in this heavy-handed commentary is that the Jewish organization saw a need to counter the association of Jews and Communism, a perspective widely accepted in the Depression years but receding in the post-war period. [58] The culmination of the Tercentenary celebration contributed to delinking Jewishness from Communist associations in the minds of the American public, despite the continuing presence of Jews in the shrinking Communist movement. Even prior to the Tercentenary celebration, the American Jewish Committee was laying the groundwork for the later message of Jewish-American involvement in foundational American democracy. A pamphlet published in 1950, written by David De Sola Pool, chairman of the American Jewish Historical Society provisional committee for planning the tercentenary project, addresses these themes. In the pamphlet’s culminating page, De Sola Pool lists the “Fruits of the Tercentenary Celebration,” providing insight into his, and presumably the committee’s, goals for the tercentenary celebration year. Heralding the coming reinvigoration of Jewish presence within American society, De Sola Pool states that the tercentenary celebration “carried out in this broad national way will make vivid for all Americans, Christians and Jews alike, how deep and centuried is the stake of the Jews in the United States,” and furthermore, that the tercentenary “will further devotion to the Hebraic ideals of democracy that have helped to mold American democracy.” [59] In 1954, a reissue of the 1905 events of the 250 th anniversary was published by the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, seemingly as another means of naturalizing the occurrence of the 300 th . In 1905, the 250 th Anniversary of Jewish settlement in the US was celebrated on Thanksgiving Day, in an effort to “make the celebration a truly national event,” underscoring the centrality of American secular holidays and nationalism within Jewish-American identity. [60] The official celebratory proceedings for the opening event included addresses from the Catholic Bishop Coadjutor of New York, David Greer, as well as secular figures such as former president, Grover Cleveland, governor of New York State, Frank Higgins, and Mayor of New York City, George McClellan. The ceremony closed with an audience rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” [61] This pan-religious, nationalist service was designed to establish Jewish Americans’ place within the cornucopia of American identities. However, the vast historical distance between the 250 th anniversary and the tercentenary couldn’t possibly have been anticipated, and the Tercentenary events had to take into account the changes in America and globally that had occurred during the past half-century. Within her pamphlet outlining Tercentenary pageant guidelines, Adele Gutman Nathan echoes the linking of Jews and early American democracy: “From the time the Jewish pilgrims arrived in 1654 at the little port of New Amsterdam . . . Jews as individuals and as groups have participated dramatically in each step of the creation of our nation, in its never-ending search for true democracy.” [62] With one small exception, [63] she fails to mention the enormous Jewish pageants of the past two decades within her description of previous American pageantry, though she mentions other popular productions from the time. This lack of connection between the Tercentenary and earlier pageants highlights their profound ideological and aspirational differences. While The Romance of a People , We Will Never Die , and the Tercentenary pageants all fall into the pageantry category, utilizing particular features of narration, spectacle, anti-realism, and episodic structures, their similarities end with that. As Nathan’s pamphlet outlined, the Tercentenary pageants strove to integrate Jewish historical presence in the United States in the grander American narrative, therefore establishing loyal Jewish “Americanness” in the post-war period. Just as earlier American historical pageants, such as the 1914 Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, [64] aimed to create an optimistic future by crafting an idealized past, the Tercentenary pageants strove for the same goal. Conversely, The Romance of a People and We Will Never Die performed Jewish difference to assert their message, while the Tercentenary performed proudly assimilationist narratives. With communities permitted either to purchase ready-made scripts (offering titles such as Faith and Freedom , The Lamp of Liberty , and We Came to an Island [65] ) or to pen their own community-oriented pageants, towns and cities across America performed their own local renditions of American Jewish history. These pageants simultaneously asserted contemporary (and historical) Jewish presence alongside Jewish integrity and ingenuity throughout American history. The basic narrative entailed several narrators framing a number of short episodes that featured notable figures through introduction or initial verbal reenactment of the scene by the narrators. For example, the 1955 pageant, The Quilt , written by Mae Clement Perley for the Louisville, Kentucky Tercentenary celebration, includes episodes describing Jewish ties to Abraham Lincoln, community ties to Louis Brandeis, and dramatized peacemaking amongst Jews and the previous Native American dwellers of Kentucky, all being reenacted in order to educate two Louisville youth about their community’s illustrious history. [66] Highly didactic, the narrative of Jewish impact on American life and society is clear. Though specific to Kentucky history, Perley’s script bears strong resemblance to more generic pageant scripts available for purchase, written to be performed across the country, and available in formats either broad enough to suit any local setting, or able to be shaped to include local events and memories. The Golden Door , penned by Norman Corwin for the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, is an example of the former, that could be tailored to any community and offered an American narrative, depicting a broad Jewish-American history. Featuring numerous short monologues from notable public figures attesting to positive Jewish-American presence, the script is comprised of short, didactic vignettes. Monologues are delivered from figures as diverse as George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Levi Strauss, and the voice of God, among many others. Another alternative was a that enabled portions of the play script to be personalized for local performances. This was the case of Faith and Freedom , written by Marc Siegal for the Tercentenary committee. The script is comprised of the same narrated episodic format, and attends to both local and nationwide Jewish-American history, even including a pre-written but optional scene, available for use if the community possessed an esteemed member who had been “an eyewitness to the growth of [the] Jewish community since 1880.” [67] If so, such a person could have been featured in a scene in conversation with the narrator, Dr. Goldman, as an integral part of the plot and pageant’s mission. This potential character, “Mr. Blank,” could deliver a monologue on the hardships of early Jewish settlement in the local area, including needing to move frequently as the Jewish neighborhoods changed. Additionally, the character emphasizes the increased community engagement and local involvement in the present time: “Around (blank year) we elected our first (name of public office), (name of person). There was real excitement when he won.” [68] Much like The Golden Door , This is Our Home , written by I. Goldberg and Yuri Suhl for the Committee for the 300 th Anniversary of Jewish Settlement in the U.S., similarly enabled personalization, though also incorporated Yiddish into the core script, with nearly 50% of dialogue in Yiddish. Unlike other Tercentenary pageant scripts, this suggests a different Jewish community, one in which assimilation had not entirely erased Yiddish-language usage, potentially indicating a more recently immigrated community audience and/or one more interested in maintaining a more visible Jewish presence in a secularizing nation. In spite of its Yiddish components, however, This is Our Home almost verbatim follows the formulaic model of incorporating a Jewish thread into known nationalistic, American narratives. With four episodes and voice-overs by Albert Einstein, Chaim Zhitlowsky, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the play begins with a rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” followed by English and Yiddish preambles that echo each other’s statement of the shared heritage of American and Jewish-American beginnings. This performative tactic, which extends beyond the presentation of Jewish presence in early America, led to grander statements of Jewish exemplification of true American democratic ideals. This juncture was ripe for classic American pageantry techniques, “at the intersection of progressivism and antimodernism [that] placed nostalgic imagery in a dynamic, future-oriented reform context.” [69] As was the case with the two previous pageant moments, the Tercentenary responded to contemporary political conditions. Ultimately, while the American Jewish Tercentenary celebration seems to have aided the strengthening of Jewish public image in America, the festivities, tributes, and commemorations of 1954-55 were less frequently or substantially reported in newspapers and made a less significant mark on public memory. Unlike the earlier massive-scale pageants, the Jewish Tercentenary was about blending in to the standing American narrative, erasing radical associations, naturalizing patriotism and nationalist contributions, and asserting neighborliness. Politics of Pageants Each of the pageants we examine in this essay assert Jewish significance in their individual performances; either pushing toward redefining the group’s investment in broader Jewish issues, or by insisting upon Jewish importance in early and foundational American narratives. These pageants came about during such “times of crisis” in which the necessity of American interest and involvement in Jewishness needed to be emphasized, galvanized, and supported. [70] As previously discussed, each of these mid-century pageants did so in its own manner specific to the cultural and political contexts in which they emerged, but collectively they performed Jewishness in a broader American context and in that way similarly reinvented Jewish-Americanness in their respective decades. Furthermore, each performance discussed pageants as the appropriate mode of performance by building upon America’s long history of pageantry as a means for ethnic communities’ performed articulation and redefinition of their own hybrid identities. Pageants are both theatrically significant and historically situated. That is their purpose and their charm: they uncover the themes of a community and the challenges that are being faced. As performances, they attempt to persuade their audiences about those issues that are currently engaged. These three decades of pageants, produced at distinct historical moments, demonstrate that the idea of a “Jewish pageant”—or for that matter any pageant—must be contextualized. Even more than most forms of theatricality, the pageant attempts to inspire or to rouse a public that sees itself as belonging together and sharing common assumptions and desires. The pageant form is, in some sense, the most communal of all dramatic genres: this is true not only because of its massive production values, the fact that the performers are often members of the same community as the audience, and that the authors have deep local roots, but also because the themes and the morals build a sense of unity. The pageant provides a nexus of the study of theatre, history, and sociology. While these three mid-century Jewish-American pageants each present didactic accounts of ethnic history, they do so with markedly different agendas, each a presentation of and response to Jewish-American needs and interests at the time. Beginning with the start of the worldwide Jewish crisis in 1933 as Hitler took power in Germany and spanning through the post-war period of critical ethnic assimilation, each of these pageants served to both attract broad-scale interest through the mass-appeal of spectacle and sought to channel nationwide Jewish-American interest into a singular political performance (or set of performances), thereby powerfully enacting a desired outcome, from recognition to rescue to the reconstitution of Americaness. While each pageant utilized Jewish history and linked it to the present, each depended on a different set of values and historical events, shaping collective memory for specific purposes. For this reason, too, each pageant may itself offer fruitful insight into the moment in which it emerged. Because of their questionable literary authority and their focus on events of the moment, it is understandable that, unlike canonical drama, pageants will not be reprised over time, and, as a result, few scholars have focused on examples of the form as signals of current civic concerns and ethnic worries. These three Jewish-American pageants, however, demonstrate that such historically contingent productions have value as indicators of the state of society. The community provides a stage that these dramas fill. For all their local interest, pageants reveal the world. References [1] The authors thank Megan Geigner and Grace Overbeke for comments on an earlier version of this paper. [2] Earl Mullin, “Holiday Throng at Fair Nears Monday Record,” Chicago Daily Tribune (5 July 1933): 1. The current capacity is only 61,500. For the 1933 pageant, seating spilled from the stadium seating onto the stadium green, with makeshift seating filling the playing area all the way up to the stage. (Lauren Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood: The Romance of a People at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair,” TDR: The Drama Review 55, no. 3 (2011): 61.) [3] Arthur A. Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 196. [4] S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 108. [5] Esther Willard Bates, The Art of Producing Pageants (Walter H. Baker Company: Boston, 1925), 240. [6] Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation , 11. [7] David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 4. [8] Ibid., 4. [9] Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 122. [10] For reference, see Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946,” American Jewish History 84, no. 3 (September, 1996): 221-250.; Robert Skloot, “We Will Never Die”: The Success and Failure of a Holocaust Pageant,” Theatre Journal 37, no. 2 (May, 1995): 167-180.; and Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 57-67. [11] Megan Geigner, “Performing the Polish-American patriot: civic performance and hyphenated identity in World War I Chicago,” Theatre History Studies 34 (2015): 59-78. [12] Martha S. LoMonaco, “Mormon Pageants as American Historical Performance,” Theatre Symposium 17 (2009): 69-83. [13] Ibid., 288. [14] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no.1, (1967): 1-21. [15] “The Romance of a People.” Official World’s Fair Weekly: A Century of Progress International Exposition Week Ending July 8 th (Chicago: The Cuneo Press Inc., 1933), 6. [16] Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 63. [17] Virginia Gardener, “Unseen Actors Supply Sound at Jewish Pageant: Sing, Play and Speak in Hidden Room,” Chicago Daily Tribune (4 July, 1933): 4. [18] Ibid., 6. [19] Garfield discusses the use of amplified sound in The Romance of the People in his article about the pageant, arguing that Van Grove’s use of amplification in this context was totally unique for theatrical performances in the US. “The ‘binaural, electro-acoustical system,’ as it was called, was a highly innovative sound set-up – probably the first public use in the United States of what has since come to be known as stereophonic sound.” David Garfield, “The Romance of a People,” Educational Theatre Journal 24, no. 4 (1972): 440. [20] James O’Donnell Bennett, “125,000 Witness Jewish Spectacle: Mighty Drama Traces History Back 4,000 Years; Climax of Jewry’s Day at Fair,” Chicago Daily Tribune (4 July, 1933): 2. [21] “The Romance of a People,” Official World’s Fair Weekly: A Century of Progress International Exposition , 6. [22] Ibid., 6. [23] Garfield, “The Romance of a People,” 436. [24] Ibid., 436. [25] S. J. Duncan-Clark, “Jewish ‘Romance of a People’ Kindles Thrill of Faith in 150,000 Spectators,” The Chicago Daily News (5 July, 1933). [26] Rev. John Evans, “Jewish pageant to depict 40 centuries of religion,” Chicago Daily Tribune (9 June, 1933): 10. [27] Ibid., 10. [28] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People” pageant program reprint from 1933 (Chicago: Chicago Jewish Historical Society, 2000), 1. [29] Ibid., 17. [30] Ibid., 18. [31] Liam T. A. Ford, Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 157. [32] Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 60. [33] Edward Moore, “Stage Effects at Jewish Fete to Make History: Lighting Arrangements to be Feature,” Chicago Daily Tribune (17 June, 1933): 6. [34] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 18. [35] Moore, “Stage Effects at Jewish Fete to Make History,” 6. [36] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 19. [37] While the Pageant program includes Exposition-wide advertisements, it also contains numerous “Jewish Day” specific advertisements and messages from sponsors. [38] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 56. [39] Ford, Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City , 155. [40] While audience statistics are not known to be available, the sheer numbers of spectators that attended both events render ethnic and religious homogeneity highly unlikely. In the first performance, The Romance of a People performed in front of anywhere between 125,000 and 150,000 people, depending on the source. We Will Never Die performed before an estimated 15,000-20,000 (for the opening Chicago performance). Furthermore, We Will Never Die had a significant tour around the US, including a stop in Washington, DC, where President Roosevelt sent First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in his stead, as well as numerous cabinet, Supreme Court, and Congress members (See Medoff 2002). [41] We Will Never Die Official Program from Madison Square Garden 9 March, 1943 (New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), cover. [42] certainyl ESexecuted this through loosa, 2002.”ers in attendance that night included First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, all the way Rafael Medoff, Militant Zionism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002), 85. [43] Edward Barry, “Pageant Stirs 15,000 to Vow Jew Must Live,” Chicago Daily Tribune (20 May, 1943): 1. [44] Ibid., 1. [45] Ibid., 1. [46] Ben Hecht, We Will Never Die: A Memorial Dedicated to the 2,000,000 Jewish Dead of Europe Pageant Script (New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), 11. [47] The Jewish Day of Atonement. [48] Hecht, We Will Never Die, 11. [49] The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is generally considered to have begun on April 19, 1943. The original production of We Will Never Die occurred in New York on March 9 th prior to the start of the Uprising, as did the Washington DC performance on April 12 th , but Hecht later incorporated an additional scene entitled “The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto,” which was performed in Los Angeles on July 21, 1943. The date written in the script for the start of the uprising was March 17, 1943 (Hecht, We Will Never Die , 29). [50] Ibid., 39. [51] Ibid., 39. [52] Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946,” 239. The Committee for a Jewish Army had been proposed by the Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, and was designed to create a fighting force against Hitler, but which would also support the aspiration for a Jewish-led Palestine. [53] Ibid., 239. [54] Ibid., 251. [55] Aaron Beim and Gary Alan Fine, “The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice: Reputational Images of the Postwar Disjuncture of Jews and Communism,” The Sociological Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2007): 376. [56] On the larger-end of cast size, Chicago’s main Tercentenary pageant featured 1,000 performers, compared to The Romance of a People ’s 3,500. [57] David De Sola Pool, Planning for the Tercentenary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States in 1954-55 (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1950). [58] Beim and Fine, “The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice,” 375. [59] De Sola Pool, Planning for the Tercentenary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States in 1954-55 , 414. [60] Judith Friedman Rosen, “In Search of… Earlier American Jewish Anniversary Celebrations: 1905 and 1954,” American Jewish History 92, no. 4 (2004): 481. [61] American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, Exercises in the celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States, 1655-1905 original pamphlet reprint (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954). [62] Adele Gutman Nathan, Producing Tercentenary Pageants (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954), 7. [63] Nathan mentions a single Jewish themed pageant/play from wartime, The Eternal Road (1937), though only to use it as an example of what not to do: don’t use “canned music” (Ibid., 9). [64] “St. Louis officials desperately sought to present a different civic image to the nation. They felt that a successful historical pageant would not only cleanse the city’s tarnished reputation nationwide, but also advance a single civic identity around which the various people sand classes could rally to enact reforms at home.” Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry , 159-60. [65] Listed in American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, Program Materials for the American Jewish Tercentenary (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954). [66] Mae [Maie] Clement Perley, The Quilt (Louisville: Jewish Tercentenary Committee of the Conference of Jewish Organizations, December 1954). Written for presentation in Louisville on March 8, 1955. [67] Marc Siegel, Faith and Freedom: A Dramatic Presentation (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary, 1954), 20. [68] Ibid., 21. [69] Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry , 5. [70] Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation , 11 Footnotes About The Author(s) Rachel Merrill Moss is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University and a 2018-2019 Fulbright grantee to Poland. While earning her MA in Theatre History and Criticism from CUNY Brooklyn College, she worked in New York as a theatre critic and dramaturg. Rachel has presented work at the American Society for Theatre Research, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the Polish-Jewish Studies Working Group. Gary Alan Fine is James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, a member of the faculty of the Interdisciplinary Program in Theatre and Drama, and a former theatre critic. He is the author of numerous articles and book, including most recently, Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education . He writes extensively on reputations and scandals in art worlds and in politics. 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: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf 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 Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Erica Stevens Abbitt 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 Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Erica Stevens Abbitt By Published on December 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF EMILY MANN: REBEL ARTIST OF THE AMERICAN THEATRE. Alexis Greene. Guilford, CT: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2023; Pp. 391. Alexis Greene has written a timely, accessible biography of one of America’s greatest living theatrical icons, playwright,director and artistic visionary Emily Mann.The creator since the 1970s of a unique brand of documentary theatre featuring the contradictory, impassioned testimony of real people in crisis, Mann is also an award-winning director, and one of a handful of successful female theatre administrators in this country, recognized for her 30-year tenure asartistic director of Princeton’s McCarter Theater. As the title suggests, Greene argues that Mann’s allergy to preconceived assumptions and the status quo (both politically and theatrically) has been the engine of her achievement. For Greene, Mann’s career does not simply represent triumph over personal trauma, chronic illness and a patriarchal theatre establishment: it provides a testament to the power of radical resistance. In Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater , Greene has wisely used an approach akin to Mann’s own “theatre of testimony.” After hours of interviewing family, friends, associates and the artist herself, Greene uncovered a series of compelling (but sometimes contradictory) narratives. These rich conversations, woven into a deceptively simple chronological structure, provide the reader with a nuanced view of a complex artist and activist. Well-illustrated, with an excellent bibliography and index, the text is divided into a series ofshort, readable chapters. The first third of the book moves briskly through Mann’s family history and its Jewish roots, the influence of her activist parents, her coming-of-age in Chicago in the1960s, and her early theatrical experiments as a student at Radcliffe. In the next section, Greene provides a valuable overview of Mann’s evolution as a creative artist,as she developed techniques for representing real people threatened by forces larger than themselves. The arc of Mann’s early work, from Annulla: An Autobiography (regarding a Jewish woman in post-Holocaust Britain) to Still Life (featuring a Vietnam vet, his mistress and his abused wife) and the landmark drama Execution of Justice (exploring the 1978 assassination at San Francisco City Hall of Harvey Milk and George Moscone) reveals two key insights on Mann’s aesthetic and social praxis. The first insight involves the way Mann gradually widened her perspective and added characters to her plays, creating a vast, polyphonic and more explicitly political dramaturgy. The second is how Mann’s youthful experience of violence (as the victim of sexual assault) drove her need to represent both victim and perpetrator, and sharpened her emphasis on the process of reconciliation and recovery. The final third of Greene’s book hones in on Mann’s tenure as Artistic Director at the McCarter Theatre, her development of translations and new works exploring race and social legacies in America (such as Having Our Say and Greensboro: A Requiem ), and her forays as a director to regional and Broadway stages. Here, Greene gives readers a perceptive take on the patterns of failure and success that have marked Mann’s career— bruising challenges, including her struggles with multiple sclerosis and conflicts with her board, juxtaposed with artistic successes and national recognition. Greene reads Mann's career to exemplify ongoing gender inequity in theatre, despite many generations of women’s achievement and advocacy. But persistence is all, and that is what Mann has contributed. As Greene puts it, "Sometimes being a rebel simply means staying the course" (131). Well-documented and engaging, Greene’s Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater will appeal to a wide range of constituencies. Those concerned with identity and performance in an era of cancel-culture will find descriptions of Mann’s techniques reaching across divisions of race, class, gender and ideology to represent difference (including Blackness and queer experience) relevant in ongoing debates on a core issue of contemporary theater practice. In this, the book interacts with several recent publications on race, equity, diversity and performance,such as Casting a Movement (edited by Claire Syler and Daniel Banks), as well as the innovative"calling in” movement developed by educator/activist Loretta J. Ross. Unexpected tidbits in this biography will provide keen theatre-goers with lively insights, including descriptions of Mann’s encounters with Winnie Mandela, and her long-standing friendship with leading performers, activists and advocates, from John Spencer to Nadine Strossen and Gloria Steinem. Themes of advocacy, alliance building and mentorship run through the volume, furnishing the reader with a vivid sense of the generous, collectivist process that may be one of Mann’s least acknowledged, but most important accomplishments. Greene’s exploration of Mann’s experience with chronic illness during some of the most productive years of her career provides an important contribution to a growing scholarship on trauma, disability and theatre, as well. Her treatment of Mann’s work as part of a national conversation on truth and power should prove valuable to"discourse in the public square" (ix) and to those committed to the study of theatre as civic practice. For students and emerging artists, especially, Greene’s text is an excellent resource, providing a detailed critique of Mann’s major works and methodology in clear and accessible prose. The book’s depiction of the travails of a theatre administrator on the shop floor of the industry should prove enlightening to would-be producers and artistic administrators, especially those from under-represented groups. Indeed, this biography serves as both a cautionary tale and a blueprint for success, reminding outsider aspirants to positions of power the strategies they may need to transform a supposedly “liberal” theatre establishment. For theatre scholars in general (and feminist scholars in particular), Greene’s examination of this significant artist fills a gap in the literature, providing a much-needed comprehensive and updated appraisal of Mann’s career and legacy in the 21st century. Greene, author of Lucille Lortel: Queen of Off-Broadway , and a novelist, educator, critic and theatre practitioner in her own right, notes that one of the major goals in her work is to reveal the everyday lives (as well as the extraordinary achievements) of women in the field. In the end, Greene’s approach for this volume, sympathetic but never sycophantic, is resonant with Mann’s own process and vision. It reminds us that keen observation and empathetic representation are at the heart of effective theatrical expression. This volume validates the career of a woman whose focus on theatre as means of advancing social justice has never wavered—and it underscores, for theatre-makers, students and researchers alike, the potential of performance as a radical force for change. References Greene, Alexis. Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater. Guilford: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2023. Footnotes About The Author(s) Dr. Erica Stevens Abbitt is Professor Emerita in the School of Dramatic Art. From 2015-17, she also served FAHSS as director of the Humanities Research Group. A native of Montreal, Erica earned a BA in political science from McGill before training as an actor. Her theatre career in Canada, the US, New Zealand and the UK included the BBC series OPPENHEIMER, stage roles in London and Off-Broadway and directing, writing and producing credits in regional theatre. In 1999, she returned to her studies, receiving an MA in Theatre History from California State University, Northridge and a PhD in Critical Studies from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. Joining the University of Windsor in 2004, she focused on revitalizing the theatre studies curriculum to include contemporary thinking on race, nation, gender, power and identity, as well as performance. 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 Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Raymond Saraceni Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage Raymond Saraceni By Published on November 25, 2022 Download Article as PDF Introduction During the early decades of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia became besotted by its own reflection—a growing desire to perceive and to reflect upon itself is clearly manifested in the work of contemporaneous painters, novelists, and organizers of street pageants, as well as in the work of dramatists and theatre impresarios. Perhaps the bustling and industrializing metropolis that was in the process of supplanting the supposedly genteel Federalist city of the preceding century sought something reassuring in beholding itself. The federal government had decamped for the banks of the Potomac in 1800, while with each year the significance of Philadelphia as the birthplace of the nation was slipping further from the space of living memory; meanwhile, immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and even the French Caribbean further altered the deportment and civic culture of the city, as did blacks fleeing slavery in the American south. [1] Given such changes, the need to reflect upon and represent precisely what the city was and how it is signified in the present became increasingly important. Broadly speaking, representations of Philadelphia on canvas or in engravings took one of two forms: one emphasizing the city’s grand architecture and orderly thoroughfares, the other its often boisterous and irrepressible citizens. William Russell Birch, an English-born painter who published four editions of Philadelphia street scenes between 1800 and 1820, created elegant depictions of the city that called viewers’ attention to Philadelphia’s graceful Georgian buildings and its broad boulevards. His images of an orderly Philadelphia peopled by well-mannered and deferential citizens are notable too for a kind of antiseptic quality: the garbage and manure that would no doubt have been found throughout the city’s streets and byways are nowhere to be found. [2] John Lewis Krimmel, born in 1786 and a recent immigrant from Württemberg, was also a painter of Philadelphia street scenes, but his work is of a very different kind than Birch’s. While human figures are of marginal importance to the latter, they are Krimmel’s primary focus. Paintings such as Fourth of July in Center Square (1812) and Election Day at the State House (1815) call our attention not to those buildings that frame the action, but to the crowds themselves: swaggering, celebratory, combustible, and heterogeneous. The energy of his work is equal parts dynamism and hazard—despite the affability of certain of his human subjects, one could easily imagine being pushed aside, pick-pocketed or worse in the midst of such a swirling tumult of urban types. What we find in such aquatints and etchings we also find just a few years later upon the Philadelphia stage; the social energies unleashed as the city’s identity shifted from the eighteenth-century “Birthplace of the Nation” to the nineteenth-century “Workshop of the World,” were echoed, reified, challenged, and reconfigured in Philadelphia’s playhouses. By the end of the 1820s, Philadelphia was struggling to understand and represent the tumult and dislocation of its present in terms of what had already become for many an idealized past. As Gary B. Nash has argued, the “formative decade” of the 1820s was characterized by the construction of a “web of memory” in the Quaker City, a process that involved the founding of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the wake of the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit in 1824, an institution whose very purpose was to collect those artifacts that might help “to preserve [a] memory of the past or use it to refurbish the present.” Such a process was, however, “made all the more complicated by the fact that Philadelphians, in their growing diversity, came to understand that memory-making was [not] a value-free and politically sanitized matter, [for] . . . as soon as people began to see that the shaping of Philadelphia’s past was a partisan activity, . . . the process of remembering Philadelphia became . . . contested . . . and has remained so ever since.” [3] Representing contemporary Philadelphia to Philadelphia audiences thus became aesthetically compelling at precisely the same moment that Nash considers as decisive in the city’s first serious encounter with shaping historical memory. Both processes were equally fraught. In the following pages, I wish to consider in particular Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass , and the Walnut Street Theatre’s staging of both The Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . What did these entertainments signify for contemporary Philadelphians? How did audiences reflect upon these performances of self-reflection? When Bird and his contemporaries held a looking glass before the face of America’s First City, what did its audiences behold? These plays, I will argue, allow us to apprehend the formation of Philadelphian civic identity at an inflection point, with the stage itself at the heart of the city’s self-enactment. Indeed, it is not possible to understand this moment of civic identity formation and/or dissolution without working to grasp how it was experienced by those Philadelphians who attended and called upon the theatre to reflect, upend, or further reify the realities they felt themselves to inhabit at the beginning of the Jacksonian era, when the tensions touched upon in the works of Birch and Krimmel reached a kind of climax. Whereas scholars have long worked to situate Philadelphia performances of the antebellum period within the context of the development of American cultural identity, comparatively little attention has been given to the work of the Philadelphia stage relative to the development of Philadelphia civic culture itself. Bird’s Looking Glass , read alongside Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster , confirms a sense that when Philadelphians beheld their city at the end of the 1820s, they saw a place that was no longer the gentlemanly Quaker metropolis of William Penn and his heirs anymore than it was exclusively the eighteenth-century cradle of liberty and shrine of American independence. Instead, audiences beheld a heterogeneous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberant modern metropolis—one characterized by instability and menace as well as by a kind of phenomenologically liberating and disruptive knavery. In these plays, we will find that the exterior street scene becomes the primary space for contesting civic identity, just as it was in the work of painters and engravers like Birch and Krimmel. Bird’s Looking Glass In July of 1828 the ambivalent physician and aspiring dramatist, Robert Montgomery Bird, did something extraordinary: he held up a mirror to the city of Philadelphia. With the publication of his City Looking Glass , Bird invites audiences to look into his dramaturgical “mirror of the times . . . to see such knaves and asses / [a]s, we hope, can’t be seen in your own looking glasses.” [4] The comedy he presents offers us a comprehensive picture of Philadelphia types: wealthy merchants and their headstrong daughters, seedy procuresses and blackmailers, street-savvy rakes and pugnacious (if good-natured) sailors, as well as a promenading African American woman and a visiting Southern gentleman, not to mention servants, constables, and various “young bucks” reflecting various degrees of moral turpitude. On the one hand, the play appears as a somewhat conventional variation on a theme by Terence: sentimentality and mistaken identities abound, even as we encounter the familiar device of a long-lost child reunited with her aged, pining father. At the same time, however, the play’s rambunctious and youthful energy – its gleeful determination to consider the seedy underbelly of life in the Quaker City – mark Bird’s entertainment as being worlds away from what the European larmoyant tradition had formerly wrought of the same comic paradigm. Though apparently never brought to the stage, City Looking Glass may be read as heralding an emergent impulse on the part of Philadelphia to perceive and perform itself, as well as an impulse on the part of dramatists and theatre managers to contest the city’s established reputation as a place of congruity, regularity, and gentlemanly deportment. Bird extends and develops the metaphor of the looking glass throughout his prologue, hoping (or lamenting) that “when some pleasing liniment is shown, / . . . each might softly whisper, ‘That’s my own!’ / And where an uglier product of our labour [sic], / [w]ith the same readiness, say ‘That’s my neighbor!’” Seeking to present a timely, up-to-date urban comedy, Bird next promises his audience “certain tricks and capers / [s]uch as you look for daily in the papers.” [5] What is extraordinary here is not Bird’s deployment of the mirror as a metaphor so much as the way in which he does so, as well as the situation of his Looking Glass within the context of Philadelphia’s emergent obsession with seeing itself in the theatre. As Tim P. Vos has pointed out, the mirror was a popular signifier in the literature of the early American republic, but not necessarily a sign of “objectivity’s normative ascendance.” Instead, the looking glass was most often deployed as “a metaphor for the self-examination of one’s soul or character by holding up individuals either to be emulated or abhorred . . . the mirror was not simply a material article for returning light it received, it was a cultural artifact for returning enlightenment and judgment.” [6] In Bird’s comedy, the play itself is the looking glass—a looking glass absent in the material form but imagined instead as forcefully present in and as the act of performance. Indeed, Bird maintained a persistent fascination with images and reflections—with ways of constructing, refracting, and performing (or re-performing) phenomena of various kinds—throughout his life. In the 1840s and 50s, he famously experimented with an early photographic process called the Calotype, developing not only some of the first photographic images of Philadelphia but also developing an image of his own portrait, painted on canvas by his wife, Mary Mayer Bird. Thus, just as he would eventually reflect upon and replicate an image of his own image in light and shadow, with Looking Glass the dramatist may be understood as presenting us with the city itself as engaged perpetually in its own protean self-enactment—though here the subject is not an individual but a civic, corporate phenomenon. In his study of Philadelphia’s literary history, Samuel Otter argues that eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers in the Quaker City “shared a sense that Philadelphia was a place where, in concentrated form, a peculiarly American experiment was being conducted,” that the public sphere in Philadelphia developed in a unique way “through a series of violent episodes that were interpreted as tests of individual, racial, and civic character.” He goes on to say that “the border status of the city, its symbolic value and political history, its resilient African American population, and its circumstances of extremity provoked inquiries that unfolded in a range of texts over decades.” [7] Otter’s interest here is literary, so while he considers the work of Philadelphia authors like Charles Brockden Brown and George Lippard (both of whom sought to challenge the normative representation of Philadelphia as the refined and gentlemanly capital of Penn’s enlightened Commonwealth), his attention to drama and theatrical performance is slight. It thus should not surprise us that in considering the work of Robert Montgomery Bird, Otter almost entirely overlooks his plays in favor of his prose fiction. Nevertheless, there is much that is useful in Otter’s work relative to an understanding of Philadelphia drama and performance. During the early years of the nineteenth century, Otter writes, urban life in the Quaker City “seemed newly legible . . . as a limit outside the self that shaped identity, [as] . . . a felt excess that resisted such limits, and as a possibility for transformation.” [8] But if this was the moment that Philadelphia became legible, I argue that it is also the moment that Philadelphia become performable ; Otter claims that during the early years of the nineteenth century “Philadelphia came into fiction, and fiction became Philadelphian.” [9] So is this the case for drama and performance, particularly toward the end of the 1820s and most notably at first in Robert Montgomery Bird’s The City Looking Glass ? The play involves the machinations of two brothers who come to Philadelphia in order to make a fortune passing counterfeit bills; one of the brothers, Ravin, is also blackmailing a procuress named Mrs. Gall as he seeks to take possession of her ward: the beautiful and virtuous Emma. This same young woman has also won the heart of our hero, Mr. Roslin, a scion of a respectable family whose hopes for marriage are dashed when he learns that Emma is essentially being raised in a house of ill repute. Meanwhile, Roslin’s old school chum—a southern gentleman named Raleigh—has come to town to court Diana Headstrong, Roslin’s cousin. At first, Raleigh’s hopes for marriage are frustrated because of his being misidentified by Headstrong as a notorious swindler, a charge that brings the young man’s father, the elder Raleigh, to Philadelphia in defense of his son’s reputation (this despite the old man’s enduring heart-brokenness as a result of his young daughter’s disappearance many years before). At long last, however, all obstacles to marriage are removed when Emma is discovered to be Raleigh’s long-lost sister, and the villainous Ravin the very swindler that Headstrong (falling victim to Ravin’s manipulation) had earlier misidentified as Raleigh himself. By the end of the play Ravin’s brother, Ringfinger, has been compelled to give evidence against his brother and the two villains are hauled off to receive their just desserts. The play compels attention not so much for its intrigue, however, as for its disruptive depiction of the Quaker City as a disorderly and unruly space. It is as if Philadelphia were here reflected via a distorted funhouse mirror—a kind of giddy exercise in grotesquerie. Such an enterprise was not without precedent or progenitors, to be sure. Tom and Jerry, or Life in London (that episodic celebration of urban slumming, low-life milieux, and rakish misbehavior) had crossed the pond and debuted at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre in April of 1823. Francis Wemyss, a leading actor who had himself recently arrived from Britain and who would serve as manager of several Philadelphia theatres over the decades, records that Tom and Jerry was so popular upon its first appearance in the city that it was picked up and performed by Cowell’s “circus corps” as soon as the Chestnut Street company disembarked for its sojourn to Baltimore and Washington, and was presented at the Walnut Street for the remainder of the season. [10] In his study of populist and underclass performance on the nineteenth-century American stage, Peter P. Reed explores the influence of Tom and Jerry ; he argues that theatres in the United States sought to ensure the continued popularity of the play “by tapping the urban lore of American cities” so that “[g]limpses of the distant metropole’s underworld gave way to representations of a newly localized urban culture, [as] Tom and Jerry helped constitute a specifically American urban public sphere built upon complex rituals of underclass performance and elite patronage.” [11] While The City Looking Glass is not a direct iteration of Tom and Jerry , the energies unleashed by the latter seem to play a role in Bird’s treatment of Philadelphia as a series of street scenes, dives, and the low performances associated with both—a local and particular manifestation of Americans’ increasing consciousness of and investment in “the entertainment value of their own urban low scenes [and their] fascination with stagey underclass characters” who continue to appear throughout the first half of the nineteenth century on the stage and in print. [12] Stagey, underclass characters abound in Bird’s play; they are far more memorable than the ladies and gentlemen, just as the action of the play’s street scenes and exteriors is more memorable than the goings-on in the parlors or drawing rooms of its respectable homes. For it is on the city’s byways and back lanes, as well as in the showboating of its volatile young “bucks” (characters like the sometime lawyer, Bolt, and his streetwise henchmen, Mossrose and Crossbar), that Philadelphia is meant to perceive most clearly its disfigured reflection, to experience most dramatically its contested character. Indeed, Philadelphia’s civic character was already long-understood as being manifest in its streets, specifically in its gridiron arrangement of thoroughfares intersecting at right angles and organized around a series of five open squares framing deep individual lots for houses and gardens — an arrangement proposed by William Penn and his surveyor, Thomas Holme, at the very founding of the colony. Philadelphia’s character as a planned settlement with broad, straight avenues as an alternative to the overcrowded, walled, medieval cities of Europe was an important aspect of what gave the place its initial cachet and self-image as a modern city founded on Enlightenment principles. Philadelphia, as Samuel Otter observes, sought to understand itself as defined by the “symmetry and discipline” of its orderly thoroughfares, as the “perpendicular array of streets and squares . . . were linked with the rectitude of its founder and its Quaker inhabitants.” [13] However, the sameness and regularity characteristic of its general appearance engendered, too, a quality of stultifying rigidity ripe for contestation and aesthetic sabotage. When visiting Philadelphia in the summer of 1830, Mrs. Trollope wrote that the city was “built with extreme and . . . wearisome regularity,” and that “all is even, straight, uniform, and uninteresting.” [14] Just three years later, the Scottish traveler Thomas Hamilton wrote similarly that Philadelphia represented “an infringement on the rights of individual eccentricity—a rigid and prosaic despotism of right angles and parallelograms.” [15] Local dramatists had gotten there even earlier. In his 1806 comedy, Tears and Smiles , James Nelson Barker gives us the character of Nathan Yank, domestic and runner-of-errands for the play’s romantic hero, who repeatedly loses his way amidst the wearisome sameness of Philadelphia’s streets, much to the consternation of his employer and the complication of the plot. While Barker’s sentimental comedy walks the streets of prosaic sameness rather than those of symmetry and rectitude, he is not so much interested in contesting the self-image of Philadelphia as he is in enjoying a good-natured jest with his knowing audience. Nor is the city as such at the center of Barker’s dramaturgy: the final acts of the play take us out of Philadelphia altogether, to a quiet country estate in Fairmount. Bird, by contrast, cannot imagine leaving the city behind, for what would his Looking Glass have to show us then? Otter has written about Benjamin Franklin’s autobiographical writings as, among other things, a guide “to crafting appearances that unsettled the relationship between character and performance,” deploying tales of his youthful progress in the city to “help create a public arena in which individuals were taught to be acutely conscious of their own social performances.” [16] Bird continues this work, albeit in a different key, with an early scene between his malefactor brothers where Ravin upbraids the less-assured Ringfinger over the latter’s persistent weakness for picking pockets. Picking pockets is, Ravin tells him, “a damned low vice” when set against the more refined criminal endeavor of counterfeiting. Refusing to aim higher has had a deleterious effect on Ringfinger, whose “gentility sits as clumsily upon [him] as new clothes.” Gentility and breeding, the sine qua non of the Philadelphia gentleman, are simply matters of wearing the costume well and of playing the role with confidence, for “character . . . is oftener established by conceit than by natural privilege.” [17] This troubling of the relationship between substance and “mere” appearance prefigures the promiscuous relationship in Bird’s Philadelphia between the gentleman and the scoundrel; nowhere is this more clear than in the character of Bolt, a good-for-nothing rogue whose ill-treatment at the hands of the brother villains leads to their demise. Roslin describes Bolt as indeed a “gentleman,” but one with a “black eye.” He expands upon this observation, noting that Bolt is the very “representative of a Philadelphia buck” one who has had opportunities of becoming a gentleman, [but] amends his gentility by the addition of certain accomplishments peculiar to the vulgar; that is, he has been half-educated at college and half bred at home; is seen sometimes at a lawyer’s office [but] … more frequently in the tavern with a terrapin under his nose and a wine bottle at his elbow: he fiddles a little and boxes to admiration; wears a costly coat; keeps a mistress, and sometimes a dog; above all can brag of having shot one grouse on the Jersey colings and one man on the Delaware lines. [18] Bolt is thus an apparently successful Philadelphia lawyer who hails from a supposedly well-bred Philadelphia family. Yet he is a man of halves: part genteel cavalier, part vulgar roughneck. Otter notes that in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, “a strategic display of enterprise might lead to worldly success [as] . . . habits of industry, discipline, and virtue” serve to “secure character.” [19] Bolt, however, particularly in Roslin’s representation of him, destabilizes character in his troubling of any distinction between high and low. Not simply a slumming gentleman, he appears to be downright dangerous: while Bolt engages in genteel pastimes like grouse hunting (albeit with limited success), his shooting a man “on the Delaware lines” might betoken either a refined duelist or an unstable sociopath. Indeed, Roslin’s servant, Nathan Nobody, observes that all aristocratic families of the city are most likely mere whited sepulchers, asserting to his master in the spirit of hearty “republicanism” that whenever he sees one of their coats of arms he can only conclude that “they have formerly . . . had in the family more arms than ears; that their titles are registered in a jail book; that their family house was a dunghill and their tree of genealogy a gallows.” The colorful and dexterous Nobody appears to have learned this sort of leveler’s vision at the theatre, where he also came to appreciate “how a wise man can climb on the shoulders of fools.” [20] In Bird’s variation on Abbott and Costello’s verbal monkeyshines, Nathan Nobody is a Somebody, while the aspirational aristocrats of Philadelphia are the real Nobodies. As mentioned above, it is largely upon the byways and back alleys of the city that Bird’s drama of contestation and shifting selves is played out. The “wearisome regularity,” of Philadelphia’s streets, the “symmetry and discipline” of its gridiron pattern of thoroughfares, are here reworked so as to prepare a common space for emergent and variable identity, the sort of undertaking which Elizabeth Maddock Dillon regards as “the shared terrain … of embodiment and representational force.” [21] Indeed, most of the decisive action of Looking Glass takes place out of doors on the city’s thoroughfares. In the course of the play’s five “street scenes” Roslin and Nathan agree on an undertaking that drives the early action, Bolt flirts indecorously with a series of ladies (bringing on the decisive intervention of the sailor, Tom Taffrail), Diana is rescued by Raleigh after she has taken flight from Bolt, Emma is rescued from Mrs. Gall and Ravin by Roslin, and finally, Nathan is delivered from Ravin’s clutches by Tom Taffrail (thus setting up the play’s concluding action). In the course of such intrigue, Philadelphia is transformed into an utterly unrecognizable landscape – or seascape – of protean, Bosh-like strangeness, perhaps best represented by Tom Taffrail’s indignant retort to Bolt that he is not the only man that has been run foul of by unlawful cruisers in this here cursedty [sic] deceitful town. There’s sharks and swordfish enough, though they keep their heads underwater, to nibble one’s eyes out of his head and run their snouts into one’s keel. I have seen a painted pirate run up into a gentle-man’s headquarters as naturally as into a Spanish West-India harbour [sic]. [22] The good citizens of Philadelphia are here reduced to sinister sea creatures or the keels of renegade corsairs (the latter identification pungent with sexual innuendo)—a comic but nevertheless disquieting depiction that conflates machine with man and beast. Nor is it an arbitrary choice to give these sentiments to Tom. “Seafarers and their families dominated certain parts of the Philadelphia cityscape,” Simon P. Newman reminds us, enjoying “a vibrant and highly visible culture.” While Philadelphia’s sailors “participated in the street politics of the early republic alongside laborers, mechanics, and other working men and women, more than any other group they had witnessed and experienced revolutionary transformations, and they participated in American politics within that context.” [23] A peculiar and pugnacious combination of rube and sea-dog, Tom is also the consummate street performer, belting out a spooky moritat about a murderous sailor and his mistress’ ghost as part of Nobody’s deliverance from Ravin’s clutches. Not only has Bird tapped into and deployed what Newman regards as the self-conscious display that characterized the behavior of Philadelphia’s seafarers, whose “scarred” and “tattooed” bodies vividly “proclaimed their profession,” [24] but he also allows the character who would have most closely been identified with the revolutionary energies of the Atlantic World the power to most memorably re-inscribe the streets of Philadelphia as unsettling sea-lanes of depravity, full of predatory creatures best policed by guileless sailors with powerful fists and strong singing voices. Indeed, fisticuffs are never far off in Bird’s Philadelphia. It is Tom who earlier thrashes Bolt and his cronies when the part-time lawyer assails Diana on a street corner; frightened and angry, she demands vengeance, insisting that her suitor, Mr. Raleigh, “come along and make ready to beat somebody.” “Isn’t this the City of Brotherly Love?” protests the Southern gentleman. [25] It would appear not. In her New World Drama , Elizabeth Maddock Dillon writes of how dramatic texts as well as theatrical performance engender “operations of representation” that oscillate between “riotous disorder and collective consent,” for drama and performance make visible “the possibility of consensus in the making as well as the possibility of . . . dissolving [a] collective sense of meaning . . . into one of noise and riot.” [26] I suggest that The City Looking Glass accomplishes precisely this work: dissolving a consensus image of “the City of Brotherly Love” as an ordered, gentlemanly, Federalist city while proposing another. Bird’s play offers us a Philadelphia at once less-familiar and more frightening—more volatile yet more exuberant—than the metropolis imagined by James Nelson Barker, a rendering that also seems to lure us away from the possibility of consensus. Indeed, the City of Brotherly Love has here become the space of rough-and-tumble and free-for-all, of disorderly “noise and riot.” If Bird’s looking glass may be apprehended in and as the act of performance, those reflections we do not see—or those performances we glimpse only fleetingly—are at least as significant as those that command our fuller attention. Though largely absent from the play, Bird would seem to deploy Philadelphia’s African American population as a further signification of disruption and dissensus at the performative heart of the city’s contested character. Samuel Otter has commented upon Bolt’s humiliation when one of the female passersby he seeks to accost turns out to be a finely-attired African American woman, arguing that staging such a “misalignment between costume and visage, and playing this exposure for shock and laughs” underlines a point of juncture between Bird’s treatment of African Americans in Looking Glass , and Edward W. Clay’s notorious print series, “Life in Philadelphia.” [27] Certainly this moment in the play performs work similar to Clay’s etchings, widely popular and first issued between 1828 and 1830: to mock social posturing amongst the city’s African American population. At the same time, Bird’s text is more multivalent here than we might think, very much as Clay’s print series also seems to have been. Otter reminds us that Clay’s African American caricatures represent “a mixture of class desire and African American satire, in ratios impossible to recover.” [28] This point is further clarified by Christian DuComb, who speaks of Clay’s aquatints as “lampooning the pretentious manners of both whites and blacks . . . [albeit] Clay’s mockery of affluent whites seem[s] comparatively mild.” [29] What is especially interesting about Bolt’s brief encounter with the black woman is that, though finely dressed, she is hardly displaying or performing herself in the way that Bolt and his cronies seem to be: indeed, what first attracts Bolt’s attention is that she “bends her head and walks fast” as she passes by, anxious (most likely) to avoid the attention of these white men. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has explored the significance of self-display and parade for African Americans during the early years of the nineteenth century, arguing that such phenomena signified that “their (black nation within a) nation existed,” [30] such moments of self-enactment functioned in a sense “as rituals do, in that they aestheticized, formalized, and sustained structures of (national) feeling among their [African American] participants.” [31] Looking Glass may thus be said to undermine and/or deny such moments of efficacious self-display for/to Philadelphia’s African Americans. There is no such “national feeling” in evidence at such a hurried and apparently apprehensive moment. It is Bolt, in fact, whose swaggering self-performance is called to our attention—though such behavior hardly makes a favorable impression here, merely reinforcing (as one of his henchmen would have it) that Bolt “prides himself on being an ignoramus.” [32] Every bit as compelling is the utter absence of African American characters otherwise. The invisibility of the city’s African Americans in Bird’s Looking Glass may very well have been a function of their irreducible visibility in the cultural and political life of contemporary Philadelphia. By the decade of the 1820s, Philadelphia was “the most important center of free blacks in the country, [its] black churches, schools, and mutual aid associations . . . more numerous than any other American city’s.” [33] Such a reality unsettled white historians like John Fanning Watson, who in 1830 lamented that “the aspirings [sic] and little vanities” of contemporary black Philadelphians “have been rapidly growing,” and “while twenty to thirty years ago they were much humbler, [now] they show an overweening fondness for display and vainglory.” [34] The villainous Ravin seems especially perturbed by the city’s blacks, exhibiting a penchant for perceiving Philadelphia itself through the lens of its African American population (perhaps as a reminder of his hailing from less racially heterogenous New Hampshire). Outraged by the behavior of Raleigh, Ravin accuses him of possessing “more impudence than a Philadelphia negro.” [35] Later, in drunken exasperation, he laments to Mrs. Gall that “they allow no nuisances here, except negro class meetings, dogs, and church bells.” [36] Such class meetings did indeed signify to many of Philadelphia’s uniquely visible and influential African American population; ever since clergyman Richard Allen established the first such black communion in Philadelphia in 1786, such class meetings symbolized “equal privileges for blacks,” even as they engendered “recalcitrant white opposition” from the very beginning. [37] Interestingly, in his descriptions of Philadelphia’s blacks, Ravin uses the term “negro”—an appellation that John Fanning Watson reports was no longer favored by the city’s more-assured and self-conscious African Americans, who increasingly preferred to call themselves “coloured” [sic]. [38] It is hard to know whether Ravin’s turn of phrase signifies his own or Bird’s indifference to this preference (or indeed, whether or not Watson is even entirely correct). What is more certain, however, is that Bird’s Looking Glass reflects its author’s (and most likely white Philadelphia’s) ambivalence about its African American population, a population that is at once largely absent from the play as well as inseparable from all the “noise and chaos” inherent in the representation and signification of Philadelphia’s combustible, boisterous, and often-antagonistic urban character. Highway Robbery In City Looking Glass , Ravin arranges for an ersatz kidnapping of Diana so that he himself might “rescue” her from the clutches of his co-conspirator. The plot (which quickly unravels) is set to take place as Diana travels by coach along the Ridge Road. [39] The primary thoroughfare connecting Philadelphia and Reading, the Ridge Road had been in use since the early years of the eighteenth century; it was heavy with traffic in Bird’s day, offering weary travelers a number of inns and fashionable hotels where they might rest after a long day’s journey. It was a dangerous route as well, and in the year following the publication of City Looking Glass , a real incident took place on the Ridge Road that riveted the attention of all of Philadelphia. In the early morning hours of 6 December 1829, the Reading Mail Stage was set upon by three highwaymen named Porter, Poteet, and Wilson. According to contemporary accounts, these men were weavers residing in Northern Liberties, a district at the time that was just outside of the City of Philadelphia. Porter seems to have been the ringleader: he apparently organized the undertaking and it was he who robbed the passengers and rifled through the mailboxes while Wilson and Poteet guarded him with their pistols. [40] Eventually, the three were apprehended; Porter would be tried and executed upon Poteet’s testimony, while Wilson’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by President Jackson. These men belonged to Philadelphia’s growing population of Irish immigrants, many of whom resided in Kensington and the Northern Liberties, where they were often employed as semi-skilled handloom weavers. Indeed, tensions in the former neighborhood had already ignited into rioting in 1828, with immigrant Roman Catholic Irish weavers pitted against Protestant American Nativists. [41] Charles Durang speaks of the “unprecedented excitement” in Philadelphia “resulting from the trial and conviction of the three mail robbers” in the spring of 1830, going on to mention that “business at the Walnut Street Theatre had not been very brisk, and it struck [manager] Sam Chapman that to dramatize the subject of this excitement would prove a clever card to attract the audience who then patronized the house.” [42] Called The Mail Robbers , the play would premiere on 10 May of that year. Clearly, the crime struck a chord and Chapman aimed to capitalize. Mrs. Trollope herself notes the “great interest” shown by a number of Philadelphians in the case of “two criminals who had been convicted of robbing the Baltimore [sic] Mail, and who were lying under sentence of death.” She was told that “one of the prisoners [Wilson] was an American, and the other [Porter] an Irishman,” the former convinced that his sentence of death would be commuted. She goes on to report that several of her companions, “in canvassing the subject, declared that if one were hanged and the other spared, [Porter’s] hanging would be a murder and not a legal execution, [as] very nearly all the white men who had suffered death since the Declaration of Independence had been Irishmen.” [43] This sympathy for Porter is perhaps surprising, particularly given the fact that the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin had described him as a terrifying criminal, “the blackest and most fiendish we ever looked upon,” whose “very childhood exhibited symptoms of a bold, audacious and vindictively wicked disposition, which defied all advice and correction.” [44] The discussion described by Mrs. Trollope reminds us that the production at the Walnut Street was extremely attuned to the obsessions of Philadelphia. Indeed, the fates of Porter and Wilson had yet to be resolved at the time The Mail Robbers was presented; Porter would not be executed until 3 July 1830—about two months after the play’s premiere. While The Mail Robbers , along with Looking Glass , seeks to challenge, redefine, and reconfigure notions of what Philadelphia means and how the city signifies to/for its inhabitants, there is one especially important difference to consider here. The response to the former play is shaped in certain especially significant ways by its performance (the latter play, as mentioned above, seems never to have been staged). In both plays, Philadelphia (and particularly its hinterlands in the case of Mail Robbers ) is a place characterized by real danger, but that danger seems to have been more urgently and unambiguously presented in Mail Robbers— perhaps not surprisingly, given the episodes dramatized here were inspired by true events. As we will see, what is especially interesting is the way in which the real-life and enacted dramas seem to have been to some degree conflated by individuals like Charles Durang, whose History of the Philadelphia Stage provides us with a sense of the peculiar semiotic disruptions that Chapman and his play may have accomplished for audiences of the Quaker City. Once more, the locus for contesting the character of the city and its environs are the streets and byways of the region, as the venerable old Ridge Turnpike becomes a place of mayhem and crime. Federal Philadelphia may have built its primacy upon the port and docks that connected it to the wider Atlantic world; by the beginning of the 1830s, however, Philadelphia’s commercial supremacy as a shipping port was slipping badly, with New York and Baltimore on the rise. Even so, rich deposits of iron and anthracite extracted upstate began to transform Philadelphia into the nation’s primary center of manufacturing. [45] In Mail Robbers , the city’s focus is turned from the Delaware wharves toward the transshipment centers, factories, and coalfields of Schuylkill County and the Lehigh Valley. According to the Columbia Star , Porter was especially interested in setting upon the Reading Mail because it carried valuable goods and well-to-do travelers between Philadelphia and the increasingly-prosperous industrial hubs of Reading and Pottsville. [46] In turning the city toward its own backcountry, Chapman was also offering his audience a kind of anthropological night journey into the wastes of Philadelphia’s contemporary “urban wilderness.” In doing so, his drama would seem to have undermined the ways in which Philadelphia had long sought to deploy its urban and semi-urban green spaces not as signifiers of wastes and danger but as “carefully constructed rural ‘stages’ upon which to perform” itself. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs has argued that it was within and upon “stages” such as the gardens at Gray’s Ferry just across the Schuylkill River, and those located at Vauxhall at Broad and Chestnut streets, that a salubrious “oneness with nature” might be enacted; indeed, by “highlighting those features . . . most clearly conforming to the rural idyll, proprietors [of these sites] capitalized on ideas of rural innocence and its relationship to patriotism through” the enactments of those various entertainments offered at such locations. [48] The rural and semi-rural space that served as the locus for Mail Robbers was apparently reconfigured as savage and terrifying by Chapman and his creative team, however, presenting its audience with a picture of human beings, not as well-pruned cultivars, but as untamed and intractable prodigies of nature and liberty run amok. Yet here it is not simply urban or semi-rural spaces that function as sites of contestation: the actor-manager at the helm of the Walnut Street, the playmaker who had crafted The Mail Robbers, became himself the locus of contested viewings and interpretations. A playbill promoting the drama suggests that Chapman sought to sell the play as a bit of moral edification, for we read that the theatre managers “ever desirous to display vice in its true colors and to show the rising generation the inevitable consequences of crime, have embraced the leading features of the late atrocious mail robbery in forming the present drama.” [49] Durang reports that the play was repeated on the evening after its premiere to “a full pit and gallery,” despite the fact that “the boxes were thin.” [50] This would seem to suggest that responses to the play were divided along class lines, with more respectable and genteel theatregoers turning away from what more robust, populist viewers applauded. Such a conflicted response comes as no surprise when we consider the variety of ways in which Porter and his behavior were understood in Philadelphia, as well as the various ways of reading or viewing Chapman himself. Despite the depiction of Porter in the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin as little more than a savage, Mrs. Trollope’s companions clearly sympathized with him, as the city’s growing Irish population doubtless did as well. The American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser reported that “special constables,” as well as a corps of “Marines from the Navy Yard” were placed on alert the day that Porter met the hangman, as “many persons were apprehensive that [his execution] would be attended with riot,” most likely by Irish immigrants from Kensington and Northern Liberties. [51] Most compelling here, however, is Charles Durang’s response, for he seems to conflate Chapman and Porter while at the same time evaluating both men’s “performances” quite differently. He describes the latter as an Irishman (a stout, thickset man, with a very sinister countenance pitted with the smallpox) [who] seemed to give all the orders to his associates in villainy. He exhibited not only that quality which in an honorable cause would have been called chivalrous bravery, but also, in rifling the passengers, displayed much courtesy and politeness. [52] Durang goes on to report that Porter’s chivalry manifested itself most memorably in his refusal to take a silver watch given to one of the passengers by his mother and that he even went so far as to return a piece of tobacco. Clearly, we are encountering here what Peter P. Reed regards as a fundamental characteristic of the rogue protagonist upon the early American stage: the demonstration of “singular and spectacular outlaw charisma.” [53] What is especially interesting about Durang’s recollection of the crime is that no such behavior is attributed to Porter in the account of the robbery printed in the Columbia Star , where it is Poteet who is said to have returned a watch (supposedly a family heirloom) to one of the passengers, as well as half-dollar to another. Given that his description of the real Porter and the actual crime is offered in the context of a description of The Mail Robbers , one begins to feel that Durang’s recollection of the former may have been shaped by the latter. If so, does this supposed depiction of Porter and his behavior provide us with a rough sense of what Chapman’s Mail Robbers —and the performance of Porter—may have offered audiences? We can do little more than speculate here, but certainly, Durang is much less sanguine about Chapman’s portrayal than Porter’s self-enactment. He is especially critical of Chapman’s “false and trashy, melodramatic coloring,” for while conceding Chapman an “artist in that species of clap-trap drama, . . . the chaste and high behests of Melpomene” being absent from his craft, his acting was merely “pretentious and illusory,” his gifts sufficient only for dramatizing “local subjects of a startling and horrid nature.” [54] The conflation of Porter’s charismatic lowness with Chapman’s less-admirable low style would seem to present Chapman / Porter as what Reed might call “a contested site of cultural valuation,” part of that larger process whereby the stage “transforms the outcasts and conscripts of circum-Atlantic modernity into entertainment.” [55] Indeed, the conflation of Porter and Chapman seems itself to be a function of that “stagey low [which] emerges from and destabilizes the identity formations, collective affiliations, and disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [56] Further destabilizing rogue representations, however, is the contrast between Durang’s ungenerous assessment of Chapman’s capabilities and what we find elsewhere, particularly when we turn to the reminiscences of Francis C. Wemyss, the British theatre impresario who brought him from Covent Garden to the United States in 1827. [57] Wemyss writes that to his mind Chapman was “a man of varied talent, of much knowledge and a universal favorite,” going on to note that “had he lived, he would have produced an entire revolution in minor American drama.” [58] Unfortunately, Chapman met his demise soon after the premiere of The Mail Robbers —indeed, as a direct result of his staging the play, at least in Durang’s telling. “For the purpose of dramatizing this abhorrent event,” he writes, “Chapman, with his scene painter Wilkins or Harry Isherwood (we forget which) went on horseback to view the spot [where the robbery took place], so as to give an accurate description of its localities.” [59] While at the scene, Chapman was wounded in a fall from his horse; the wound was further infected when later that evening he donned his costume at the Walnut Street—including a brass armor breastplate which he wore against his skin. “Verdigris poisoned the wound,” Durang goes on to report, and Chapman died a few days later, on 16 May. [60] Reinforcing Reed’s sense that presenting the underclass on American stages represents a constant tension between “discipline and unruliness,” [61] it is not especially difficult to read Durang as celebrating Porter’s unruliness while also offering us a tale of stage sensationalism and hack melodrama justifiably disciplined: Chapman the “claptrap” performer is hoist with his own phenomenological petard, the enactment of his unseemly drama leading directly to his demise. However, the question remains, why is Chapman so obviously Durang’s bête noir ? Here we must turn again to the particulars of the Philadelphia stage. Reed writes of how, beginning in the 1820s, “the clubby, personal world of managers and actors who had produced the post-revolutionary generation of theatre had begun to disappear.” [62] In Philadelphia, a development which is sometimes understood as a gradual phenomenon happened with a bang, at a very particular moment. Though Philadelphia was “the emporium of all the regular dramatic talent of the United States” during the 1828–9 theatre season, according to Francis C. Wemyss, “this season was also the most disastrous one ever known; the actors being literally in a state of desperation.” [63] By the end of the season, the three principal theatres of the city (the Chestnut Street, the Arch Street, and the Walnut Street) had closed their doors. William Warren, manager of the venerable Chestnut Street and direct heir of its Federal Era founders, was obliged to surrender his responsibilities to a new management team, consisting of Wemyss himself and Mr. Pratt. William Wood, formerly Warren’s co-manager and himself struggling to helm the tottering Arch Street, wrote subsequently of this crisis as one brought about by over-competition between the three principal theatres, going on to say that the drama “was at sixes and sevens” during the tumultuous 1828-9 season. According to Wood, it is at this moment that the history of the Philadelphia theatre, “that is to say, any history of a continuous and regular management” now “comes to an end,” for there had been “a complete debacle, or breaking up of everything that had been.” [64] The new men who were left standing in the wake of this catastrophe were managers like Wemyss and performers like his protegee, Sam Chapman. Thus, we see how Chapman may have signified the inauguration of a cheaper, tawdrier, less-decorous chapter in the history of the Philadelphia theatre—at least for men like Durang—with Mail Robbers serving as the instrument of Chapman’s subsequent (and not wholly unwelcome) removal from the stage. The Devil and Dr. Foster However, to fully grasp Chapman’s signification upon the Philadelphia stage, we must also understand his role relative to the Walnut Street’s production of an 1830 pantomime entitled Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . As with Mail Robbers , actual events lie very much at the center of the play’s energy and signification: a tale of misrepresentation and theft and naked chutzpah. Here, however, the culprits are not banditti but the impresarios of the Walnut and Arch Street theatres themselves. Similar to what we saw in the Looking Glass , the most memorable episodes of Doctor Foster take place on the street, within the public sphere and the space of public action—though the resolution offered by Foster appears to have been pitched to a different key. If Looking Glass expresses a kind of troubled, admonitory pleasure in the shifting sense of what Philadelphia means, Foster seems all giddy delight as the action winds up – it is a coming out party of sorts in celebration of a civic identity just coming into its own. Likewise, if Mail Robbers allows us to appreciate how the conflation of performance with real event works for Durang and most likely for others to represent both the nobly wicked (Porter) and the opportunistic (Chapman) as receiving their just desserts, Doctor Foster’s resolution is zanier and more explosive. With one stroke, the restoration of order appears to have been presented here as both accomplished and unlikely—perhaps even unhoped for. Doctor Foster grew directly out of what William Wood regards as a self-destructive battle between the city’s primary theatres, in particular the Arch Street and the Walnut Street. Indeed, Doctor Foster was intended in part as an ironic response to rival productions of a pantomime entitled Doctor Faustus ; the Walnut Street’s staging opened on 12 December 1829, the Arch Street’s four days later. There was a bit of skullduggery involved, however, for Durang reports that “the Chapman dynasty” at the helm of the former playhouse infiltrated the Arch Street under the pretense of confraternal solicitude, only to highjack the particulars of that theatre’s much-anticipated production of Faustus and rush the Walnut Street’s staging onto the boards just prior to its rival’s. [65] Durang reports that “public opinion was much divided on the relative merits of the piece as brought out by the two theatres,” though it is clear that he disapproves of Chapman’s decision to “reciprocate those marks of civility” extended to him on the part of the Arch Street management by “literally uprooting” its staging of the pantomime and transposing it to the Walnut Street. [66] Clearly, this was not the sort of “regular” and gentlemanly management that was said to have long-characterized the Philadelphia theatre, and whose loss is so bemoaned by William Wood above. Unsurprisingly, Francis Wemyss represents Chapman’s actions quite differently, arguing that his protegee’s gambit “was a fair business rivalry for which S. Chapman deserves great credit,” for “he reaped, by promptitude, the reward that belonged to [Arch Street manager] Philips.” [67] Once more, we see the Philadelphia stage and its rival theatres at the heart of Philadelphia’s self-enactment, for it seems to have been impossible for audiences to view either staging of Faustus without also seeing the performance of the city’s leading cultural institutions as themselves being indissolubly part of the drama. This point becomes even more clear when we consider that the Walnut Street also presented, on the same evening as the eleventh performance of Faustus (25 th December), an historical melodrama entitled William Penn; or the Elm Tree . Durang seems to regard this staging of Philadelphia and its past as a kind of antidote to the unsavoriness of the Faustus affair (though Chapman appeared in the play as the Quaker, Hickory Old Bay), conflating its romantic evocation of a bygone age with nostalgia for his own youth. All the local scenes in and adjacent to our city wherein … Penn’s first interview with the Indians occurred were accurately taken and beautifully painted. The Great Elm Tree (under whose wide-spreading branches we have passed in our boyhood), the ship Welcome floating under the bank of the Delaware, reposing … under the shadows of the majestic elm, were all very beautifully depicted. [68] Durang subsequently goes on to argue that “the representation of such historical subjects … impresses the mind with a love of country and brings pleasant memories back to the mind of age,” even as the Philadelphia stage here becomes “a normal institution to impart moral lessons in relaxation.” [69] We thus see in those dramatic offerings presented at the Walnut Street on Christmas night of 1829 contested representations of what Philadelphia is, contested representations of the work accomplished by its cultural institutions. Once more, Otter’s characteristic “set of rhetorical instabilities” is reconfigured here as a set of performative instabilities, as Philadelphia’s “spatial complexities and local urgencies” compel its dramatists to present the city “as an event, [as] the place where . . . civic identity [was] forged while the country and a transatlantic audience watched.” [70] William Penn also seems to have something in common with one of Stubbs’s several pleasure gardens: spaces on the cusps of things where cultural identity, “being intrinsically tied to the rural idyll, [to] simplicity, and innocence” feels itself to be challenged and even “supplanted by increasingly urban and modern ideas.” [71] It is this tension between rural simplicity and urban modernity—not to mention a related tension between the idealizing mission of art and its more subversive, populist vitality—that is on full display when we consider the double bill of William Penn and Doctor Faustus relative to the staging a few months later, of Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . The latter, which opened on 23 rd March 1830, is described as a “local burlesque parody” [72] of the Faustus tale, and represents a celebratory fortissimo relative to the symphony of unfolding, disruptive, and insurgent energies that we have been exploring. Certainly, there was nothing new in a burlesque treatment of Faustus , nor in the resituating of the good doctor’s medieval career within a bustling, contemporary metropolis; such treatments were already familiar to London theatre-goers, who had seen their first Faustus harlequinade as early as 1723. [73] What is unique about the Walnut Street’s treatment, however, is its determination to deploy the form as a way of seeing and enacting Philadelphia itself, utilizing as it does the sudden transformations and visual sleights-of-hand so characteristic of pantomime to destabilize any representation of the city as the gentlemanly, “distressingly regular” metropolis so famously bemoaned by Charles Dickens about a decade later. [74] The action begins in an “old times suburban schoolhouse in the vicinity of Philadelphia,” where Dr. Foster (played by Sam Chapman’s brother, William) first raises Mephistopheles, quickly shifting to “a view of the old Hall of Independence” peopled with “political loafers and office seekers.” Here a parade of rowdies apparently spoofed a popular song, “March, March, March Along Chestnut Street,” the scene reducing to ridicule one of the city’s most solemn sites, especially once a huckster appears to hawk Swain’s Panacea to “ladies, negroes, cripples and . . . Siamese boys.” [75] It is fairly easy to understand such a “graphic and miraculous representation” of lowlifes and the urban hoi polloi as an instance of what Dillon describes as “the local and embodied nature of the performative commons,” an embodiment imparting to an otherwise-invisible populace the enduring force of “possibilities . . . that can be mobilized at the site of ontic and mimetic intersection . . . in scenes of dissensus and epistemic disruption.” [76] In fact, what Durang calls “the old Hall of Independence”—a kind of national “performative commons”—had only quite recently been awarded this illustrious sobriquet, for it was the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to the site upon his grand tour of the United States in 1824 that helped to shape the Philadelphia public’s growing awareness of the city’s history. As Nicholas Wainwright has noted, Lafayette’s official reception in the East Room of the State House brought the building itself “which had hitherto been accorded little reverence,” to the attention of the guarantors of Philadelphia’s cultural patrimony. [77] On that day a parade very different from the one described in Durang’s account of Doctor Foster passed before the State House. Beneath a triumphal arch some 24 feet high marched Lafayette’s military escort: 4000 cavalrymen, infantrymen, artillerists, and riflemen, along with 150 veterans of the Revolutionary War and a number of floats carrying several hundred cord-winders, rope-makers, weavers, shipbuilders, butchers, and coopers. [78] While few in the audience would have experienced the events of 1776, Lafayette’s parade had taken place less than six years before Doctor Foster was presented and would have thus been very much alive in civic memory. The parade of loafers and office-seekers, of hucksters and mountebanks and cripples, thus conflates, undermines, and destabilizes several of the most celebrated moments in Philadelphia civic memory by reclaiming the “performative commons,” while at the same time deflating the aesthetic aspirations of the Doctors Faustus presented just a few months earlier. High culture and momentous history are here reduced to dispute and ridicule, even as such ridicule opens up a space for an irreverent, and impertinent present—a present (and a city) that increasingly prided itself on a refusal to stand on ceremony. A subsequent transformation then hurls Foster into the midst of what we have already discovered to function as a signifier of robust, “chaotic,” and decidedly contemporary Philadelphia: an African American scene—specifically a religious meeting quickly expanding into a euphoric, disorderly “general melee.” [79] While we have only Durang’s performance reconstruction to work from, it would seem rather easy here to apply the lens offered to us by Eric Lott when attempting to grasp the multivalent semiotics of such a moment. This church celebration presided over by a “sable gemman” [sic] invites the Walnut Street’s predominately white audience both to participation and derision, to “disavowal or ridicule of the Other” as well as to “an interracial identification with it” [80] —the “Other” in this case almost certainly white actors in blackface, further destabilizing any one definitive reading of this performative moment. Despite the difficulty of determining Durang’s particular attitude here (patronizing affection or ridicule are only two options), the deployment of what Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has called “linguistic incompetence” in his description of the religious meeting (“sable gemman”) would seem to reinforce the “belief that African Americans were inherently lacking as speaking subjects and therefore unqualified for full freedom in the increasingly modern world.” [81] As Jones, Jr. points out, in the absence of slavery, culture was deployed by white Northerners as a strategy for keeping African Americans captive in a realm of “existential indeterminacy.” [82] Given the relatively large size of Philadelphia’s African American population, not to mention the city’s proximity to the slave-owning Southern states (the city’s upper classes were dominated by Copperheads), [83] such a strategy was particularly and characteristically fraught in the Quaker City. In the midst of such a discussion, it is difficult not to think of Pavel Petrovich Svinin’s famous rendering of Philadelphia’s Black Methodists Holding a Prayer Meeting , executed in watercolor and pen and ink sometime around 1813. This outdoor scene is equal parts ebullience and chaos; its depiction of the celebrants in what would appear to be a contagious moment of communal spiritual ecstasy is equal parts ridicule and fascination – the artist both identifying with and determinedly distancing himself from his subjects. Svinin thus may be said to refract and to reiterate Jones, Jr.’s “existential indeterminacy” in this work. With much less to go on, Durang’s tone (as well as Doctor Foster’s ) may very well reflect a similar fluidity, accomplishing the work of the “captive stage” in the slippery space between ridicule and subversive high-spirits, between racist mimicry and patronizing fascination. In the following scene, after Foster has escaped from the Arch Street Prison (where he had been incarcerated for attacking a local politician), we find ourselves on Prune Street, “next to the old jail wall,” where Foster “appears as Colonel Pluck of the Bloody Eighty-Fourth Regiment.” [84] This is a particularly dense moment of the pantomime, one which we can only understand by situating it within the city’s particular past and present. The “old jail wall” on Prune Street where Foster finds himself doubtless belongs to what was known as the Walnut Street Penitentiary, a structure that extended from Walnut to Prune Street and from Fifth Street to Sixth. Established in 1773, the prison had been subsequently transformed “from a simple holding place for those awaiting trial . . . into a place and instrument of punishment and reformation in and of itself, wherein the minds and bodies of criminals might be attuned to responsible work.” [85] In new construction undertaken in the 1790s, it was specified that there be added cells “for separate and solitary confinement,” thus inaugurating what would become perhaps the most distinctive feature of the so-called Pennsylvania System of prison reform. [86] The Arch Street Prison from which Foster has escaped represented a subsequent (and failed) attempt at reform; inaugurated in 1823, it proved a notoriously disagreeable place whose inmates suffered from an outbreak of cholera just weeks after the prison was opened. Peter P. Reed has commented upon the ways in which theatrical forms, and pantomime in particular, were put to use in the early Republic, pointing out how such entertainments allowed the “stagey low” to emerge from and destabilize “identity formations” and “disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [87] Here Doctor Foster deploys the quick transitions and transformations characteristic of pantomime to destabilize the often-misplaced idealism and moral pretentiousness that compromised Pennsylvania penal reform in the fraught transition from theory to praxis. Neither the Arch Street nor the Walnut Street prisons can contain nor forestall the hijinks of the protean Dr. Foster (at once a Philadelphia schoolteacher, Doctor Faustus himself, and now Colonel Pluck) as the sheer performative gusto of the character makes him impervious to imprisonment and utterly resistant to the sort of “responsible work” that the penal system was supposed to engender in all those who were locked away. Instead of turning to thrift and industry, Foster turns to mock aria, belting out “It’s my Delight to Learn Them to Write in our City,” before the scene shifts “slap dash” to yet another exterior, where Foster raises visions of specters from steamy washtubs. [88] Disciplinary practices (and institutions) are not for him. Foster’s appearance as Colonel Pluck also situates the pantomime as an act of phenomenological vandalism carried out against Philadelphia’s decorous, gentlemanly self-image as propagated and circulated by the city’s elite. Since the passage of the Militia Act in 1792, Philadelphia workingmen had bristled at the requirement that all able-bodied white males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five serve with local, self-governing militia detachments. While elite volunteer units (disparagingly called “Silk Stocking Companies”) formed the upper tier of Pennsylvania’s militia during the first half of the nineteenth century, the public militia companies ranked far below these in civic esteem. All eligible men unable to afford private company membership were required to enroll in such public companies, where they could expect only the poorest sort of training, often at the hands of indifferent or incompetent officers. Taken from work without compensation and often fined for non-compliance, these men also had to equip themselves at their own expense. [89] The Northern Liberties 84 th Regiment was one such company, and in 1825 its members elected John Pluck, a hostler or perhaps a tavern keeper described in contemporary accounts as bow-legged and hunchbacked, as their colonel. On Muster Day, in an attempt to “irritate middlebrow spectators with a drawn-out parody of the militia system,” [90] Pluck led the men of the 84 th in what the Saturday Evening Post described as a “Grand Military Farce.” [91] He was “mounted on a spavined white nag, behatted with a huge chapeau-de-bras , [and] a . . . woman’s bonnet . . . burlap pants clinched up with a belt and enormous buckle [as well as] a giant sword parodying ceremonial military dress.” [92] Pluck quickly became a national celebrity, appearing on stages in New York, Boston, Providence, Albany, and Richmond before returning to Philadelphia and finding himself court-martialed. Sean DuComb tells us that the erstwhile Colonel’s “name and likeness circulated widely for more than a decade after his national tour,” though by 1832 Pluck would undergo a transformation from an “agent of parody” into “an object of contempt, [a] symbol of racialized disorder” conflated with African American organizers of annual parades anticipating (and later celebrating) the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. [93] Intriguingly, Doctor Foster seems to represent Colonel Pluck in mid-career, a parody of Philadelphia elite pretension and “Silk Stocking” affectedness rather than a burlesque of African American aspiration (indeed, the only musical number that is not explicitly identified as a parody in Durang’s description of Doctor Foster is a serenade performed on the Kent Bugle by Philadelphia’s celebrated African-American maestro, Frank Johnson). Here an 1825 Muster Day lampoon of proud militiamen on display is replicated onstage (rather in the manner of Richard Schechner’s “twice-behaved behavior”) to produce both a simulacrum of an earlier event as well as a further destabilization of aristocratic Philadelphia at the hands of the “stagey low.” In eighteenth-century afterpieces like The Necromancer , as John O’Brien points out, when Harlequin Faustus is at last taken to Hell, a convocation of pagan deities typically arrives for a concluding masque, the presence of the gods “a sign that order has been restored to a cosmos disrupted by [Faustus’] illicit magic.” [94] When Dr. Foster is carried off to the infernal regions, however, the effect and intention seem very different, the audience enjoying a grand and most sudden ingenious change of [Carter’s Livery Stables] into frying pandemonium. Chorus of fryers, bakers, brewers, bailers, roasters, stewards and broilers [crying] “Put him in the pot & make him hot. Hot pot, make him hot.” [95] The Walnut Street’s burlesque refuses us a sense of order restored from on high. For it is not the gods, but a combustible and uproarious gang of kitchen laborers who take the stage—managing to punish Foster while at the same time declining to resolve the silliness and visual anarchy of the evening into anything like regularity and order. We are left here in a space halfway between charivari and street party, a space where “anything can happen and it probably will”— Hellzapoppin’ on the streets of the Quaker City. Indeed, Durang’s closing remarks concerning the play point to the final transformation that Doctor Foster was able to accomplish. “This truly ridiculous burlesque upon the drama of ‘Faustus,’ the production of which had caused so much bitter rivalry between the Arch and the Walnut houses, to both of their detriment, now created much fun and laughter.” [96] The play reimagines Philadelphia itself as a kind of urban Cockaigne, a chaotic city of grotesque yet thoroughly delightful anarchic misrule and semiotic plenitude—exorcizing the specter of morally edifying (and financially ruinous) high drama from both the Arch Street and the Walnut Street houses, clearing a space on the Philadelphia stage for the delight of the masses rather than their moral edification. We are here a long way indeed from Penn’s Greene Country Town, from his Great Elm Tree, and from the good ship Welcome , just as we are a long way from the street scenes created by William Russell Birch—from a city characterized by nostalgia, genteel regularity, and a “prosaic despotism of right angles.” In the Philadelphia of Sam Chapman and Robert Montgomery Bird, a city that had only just begun to see and to perform itself as such, the angles are forever crooked and the conduct provocatively irregular. Conclusion When Philadelphia audiences of the early Jacksonian era beheld for the first time their (very contemporary) city reflected back to them from the stages of Philadelphia’s several playhouses, they encountered something deliberately other than the rural idyll of Penn’s Holy Experiment as well as something deliberately alternative to the eighteenth-century Shrine of Liberty. The civic culture of the Quaker City was at an inflection point, and Philadelphians went to the theatre in part to experience the reworking, the re-presentation, of that civic identity in performative time. What they found was a heterogenous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberantly modern metropolis—a place of “noise and riot” characterized by depravity and violence as well as by a raw and free-wheeling absurdity, by the grotesque as well as the gleeful. Indeed, plays like Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia invited audiences to apprehend not just the “stagy low” but the theatres themselves as sites where contemporaneity was being constructed—with the playhouses and their managers often engaged in self-referential sleights-of-hand. Here the relationship between signified and signifier becomes a shifty and promiscuous one, whether deliberately (dueling Doctor Faustus productions become the singular travesty of Doctor Foster , with Philadelphia and her theatres themselves as protagonists), or by semiotic happenstance (an actor-manager suffers a mortal blow for the crime of bad taste, while the somehow nobler though more dangerous Porter who inspired his performance faces execution on the gallows). For its part, Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass seems to have inaugurated the sort of semiotic rough-and-tumble characteristic of a thoroughly reimagined urban-cultural landscape. Here we find ourselves for the first time in a space where Quaker earnestness and solemnity dissolve into the outrageous and the preposterous, where street scenes reveal neither “wearisome regularity” nor patriot parades but instead crooked alleyways peopled by morally-misshapen lowlifes whose machinations drive the action of the play and who seem intent upon finishing off once and for all any lingering sense of Philadelphia propriety or the idealism that supposedly characterized the city’s founding. Consensus becomes dissensus, with Philadelphia placed on display as a site for the contestation of identities. The City of Brotherly Love had stepped through the looking glass, and the streets now firmly belonged neither to sober Square Toes nor to stalwart patriots, but to the rascals, the reprobates and the scoundrels. References [1] Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 124. [2] Ibid., 109. [3] Ibid., 8-9. [4] Bird, City Looking Glass (Philadelphia: 1828), 4. [5] Ibid. [6] “A Mirror of the Times: A History of the Mirror Metaphor in Journalism” Journalism Studies , vol. 12, no. 5 (2011): 578. [7] Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8. [8] Ibid. [9] Ibid. [10] Francis Courtney. Wemyss, Twenty-Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager (New York: Burgess, Stringer and Co., 1847), 84–5. [11] Peter P. Reed, Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 133. [12] Ibid., 137. [13] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 11. [14] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1949), 260–61. [15] Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (New York: Augustus M. Keeley, 1968), 337–38. [16] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 73. [17] Bird, City Looking Glass , 6. [18] Ibid., 66. [19] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 88. [20] Bird, City Looking Glass , 18. [21] Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649 – 1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. [22] Bird. City Looking Glass , 114. [23] Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 122–3. [24] Ibid. [25] Bird, City Looking Glass , 48. [26] Ibid., 49. [27] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 105–6. [28] Ibid., 87. [29] Christian DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 60. [30] Douglas A. Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 34. [31] Ibid. [32] Bird, City Looking Glass , 45. [33] Nash, First City , 147. [34] John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia: Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants (Philadelphia: 1830), 479. [35] Bird, City Looking Glass , 30. [36] Ibid., 52. [37] Gayard Wilmore, ed., African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 7. [38] Watson, Annals of Philadelphia , 479. [39] Bird, City Looking Glass , 21. [40] Columbia Star and Christian Index (Philadelphia: 15 May 1830), 318. [41] Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), 4, 13. [42] Charles Durang, The Philadelphia Stage from 1749 – 1850 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, 1854-55), vol. III, 243. [43] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans , 286. [44] Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin . INCOMPLETE CITATION, (Philadelphia: 15 May h , 1830). [45] Nash, First City , 157. [46] Columbia Star and Christian Index. INCOMPLETE CITATION, 318. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance: American Pleasure Gardens and Entertainment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 54. [48] Ibid. [49] Quoted in Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 275. [50] Ibid. [51] American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser (Philadelphia: 3 July 1830). [52] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [53] Reed, Rogue Performances , 10. [54] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [55] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [56] Ibid. [57] Oscar Weglin, Early American Plays, 1774 – 1830: A Compilation of the Titles of Plays and Dramatic Poems Written by Authors Born or Residing in North America Previous to 1830 (New York: The Literary Collector Press, 1905), 21. [58] Francis Courtney Wemyss, Theatrical Biography, or The Life of an Actor Manager (Glasgow: Griffin & Co., 1848), 160. [59] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [60] Ibid. [61] Reed. Rogue Performances , 186. [62] Ibid., 15. [63] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 153. [64] William Wood, Personal Recollections of the Stage (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1855), 353. [65] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 266. [66] Ibid. [67] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 154. [68] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [69] Ibid. [70] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 14. [71] Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance , 59. [72] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [73] John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1600 – 1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 110. [74] Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation , ed. Patricia Ingham (New York: Penguin, 2000), 104. [75] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [76] Dillon, New World Drama , 29–30. [77] Nicholas B. Wainwright, “The Age of Nicholas Biddle: 1825–1841” in Philadelphia: a 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), 301. [78] Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America , 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 14. [79] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [80] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124. [81] Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage , 49. [82] Ibid. [83] Nash., First City , 231. [84] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [85] Newman, Embodied History , 10. [86] LeRoy B. DePuy, “The Walnut Street Prison: Pennsylvania’s First Penitentiary.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies . vol. 18, no. 2 (1951): 131. [87] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [88] Durang, Philadelphia Stage , vol III, 271. [89] Nash, First City , 201. [90] DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 90. [91] Saturday Evening Post . (Philadelphia: INCOMPLETE CITATION AND DATE FORMAT 21 May, 1825). [92] Susan G. Davis, “The Career of Colonel Pluck: Folk Drama and Public Protest in 19 th Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , vol. 109 no. 2 (April 1985): 188. [93] Ducomb, Haunted City , 89–91. [94] O’Brien, Harlequin Britain , 110. [95] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [96] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) RAYMOND SARACENI teaches in the Center for Liberal Education at Villanova University. He is a company member of Iron Age Theatre and holds a Ph.D. in drama from Tufts 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 “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

Jasmeene Francois Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Jasmeene Francois By Published on April 8, 2021 Download Article as PDF The Theatre of August Wilson . Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224 . In The Theatre of August Wilson , Alan Nadel critically analyzes the dramatic texts of August Wilson’s cycle of ten plays about African American life in the 20th century in relation to the concept of property rights and the law. In this first comprehensive companion to Wilson’s full cycle, Nadel continues his sustained scholarship and editorial contributions demonstrated in May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson (1994) and August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth Century Cycle (2010). The chapters in his latest study ground Nadel’s argument that “America has always suffered from a profound confusion of human rights and property rights” (2). Beyond presenting an accessible, nuanced study of Wilson’s drama, this volume serves to “underscore… the dimensions of privilege that have transparently enveloped America during what has been called the ‘The American Century’” (2). Nadel argues that throughout American history, law has been an instrument of privilege rather than justice and that the injustices suffered led African Americans to create artistic sites of innovation such as the blues—and Wilson’s theatre. The blues, Nadel claims, provided Wilson an “entry to this history” and serves a “psychic tableau of disrupted dreams and displaced passions…” (2). Nadel begins his valuable analysis with a brief biography of August Wilson (1945-2005), illuminating aspects of Wilson’s life as key to his multifaceted drama. Chapter one, “Becoming August Wilson,” highlights Wilson’s childhood as Fredrick Kittel and his transformation to working playwright; here, Nadel weaves in Wilson’s own words from personal interviews. Interestingly, he focuses on the playwright’s relationships with his parents, his Pittsburgh neighborhood, and his education, connecting these relationships with Wilson’s early career as a writer. Especially notable to Wilson’s artistry is his introduction to and love for the blues. The second part of the biography focuses on Wilson’s career in Minneapolis, his work at the O’Neill Theater Center (with Lloyd Richards) and then on Broadway. In chapter two, “History and/as Performance: The Drama of African American History,” Nadel argues that history is performative and that “History” creates rather than “describes events.” The production of narratives gets deemed factual through the method of performing them. Writing without jargon, he uses the example of a witness to an accident to explain his argument: the witness’s viewpoint is told and recorded and thus becomes part of the historical record. He connects this argument with Wilson’s work with characters such as Troy from Fences who “articulates his own version of history” in Nadel’s reading (19). In a sense, Wilson’s work “engages with history” through characters and by dramatizing the blues (19). The chapters are structured thematically using one or two plays as case study. Chapters three through nine each open with a different play’s production history and plot summary before developing analysis. This structure orients readers who may be curious about the development of specific plays in Wilson’s cycle, as well as those seeking to contextualize the plots. Chapter Three, for example, examines how history and elements of the blues are captured through dramatic structure and characters, using Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom . This chapter in particular considers the entirety of the cycle and its relationship to music. In thinking about the blues, Nadel sees the ten plays as “ten cuts on an album surveying the twentieth century African American blues” (38). Shifting back to Ma Rainy , set in the 1920s, Nadel argues that the play provides an introduction to American history and a decade when blues were central to Black life. Nadel emphasizes that Wilson’s work could be read as musical compositions and orchestrations: thus, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom becomes a “paradigmatic play in Wilson’s canon” (42). Chapter 4 provides a critical analysis of law and property in Gem of the Ocean and Jitney . The chapter considers how Gem of the Ocean , set in the 1910s, begins the Wilson cycle and introduces how capitalism creates the world of Wilson’s plays. Connecting it to Jitney , Wilson’s first piece written for the cycle (set in the 1970s in a black-owned unlicensed taxi service), Nadel examines how characters navigate in that very system where black communities are disenfranchised. Chapter Five examines property in Fences , set in the 1950s, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone , set in 1911. Nadel focuses on the fence as the “idea of property” (68). He argues that the “act of naming” in Fences enacts “fence building”, connecting with the idea of property within the United States (68). Later chapters continue to consider property and the law as they provide critical companions to specific Wilson plays, including: Two Trains Running , Seven Guitars , King Hedley II and Radio Golf . This compelling volume also includes contributions from scholars Donald E. Pease and Harry Elam Jr. who further critical analysis of Seven Guitars and King Hedley II . An Americanist, Pease’s chapter extends focus on the significance of the blues, giving a brief historical context of the genre, as well as interview material on Wilson’s approach to music. While Nadel examines the dramatic texts, Elam Jr’s chapter considers performance of these texts as theatre. Elam’s chapter analyzes director Bartlett Sher’s production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in its 2009 revival on Broadway and Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s staging of Jitney for Broadway premiere in 2017. Elam’s chapter aims to situate these signal performances within the cultural and political context of their times of production, decades after Wilson wrote the plays. These valuable and insightful additions deepen our understanding of Wilson’s contributions to theatre and American history. In The Theatre of August Wilson , Nadel masterfully weaves theory and history with a thorough analysis of Wilson’s dramatic texts. Fittingly, he provides ample analysis of the blues as a storytelling device while the book’s unique lens considers the plays in relation to how law and property are portrayed. The monograph is useful for scholars from varying disciplines and theater practitioners seeking critical analysis of August Wilson’s cycle plays. Beyond connecting plays across the cycle, Nadel also gives specific evidence of how the plays speak to law and property rights, slavery and the forces of capitalism in America, and the incorporation of the blues by Wilson to illuminate the African American experience and creativity through the 20th century. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JASMEENE FRANCOIS Graduate Center, CUNY Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Derek Munson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. Derek Munson By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre . Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre is the first book-length study to chronicle Ellen Stewart’s exceptional contributions to twentieth and twenty-first century theatre. Written by expert in U.S. theatre Cindy Rosenthal, the book is ambitious in scope and stays true to the idiosyncratic tenets of avant-garde theatre that made Ellen Stewart famous. Rosenthal began research for the project in 2006 when TDR commissioned her to write a comprehensive article about La MaMa. Until this point, Ellen Stewart had been fiercely guarded about her privacy and determined that no book would be written about her or La MaMa. However, Rosenthal’s article pleased Stewart, so she agreed to a manuscript with the caveat that Rosenthal approach the book through the lens of La MaMa’s vast poster collection and through the words of the artists who had passed through La MaMa’s doors since its inception in 1961. The result is a historical narrative of colorful anecdotes, archival photographs, and rare posters that examine La MaMa’s longevity as the foremost Off-Off-Broadway venue. Ellen Stewart Presents is primarily an archival and ethnographic study that is organized into five chronological chapters beginning with the 1960s and ending in 2011, shortly after Stewart’s death at the age of ninety-one. Over the course of a decade, Rosenthal interviewed numerous artists and spent countless hours engaged with La MaMa’s vast collection of show business ephemera. Rosenthal tells the story of La MaMa’s early years, when the theatre was tucked away in a little basement in the East Village. She tells the story of playwrights like Lanford Wilson and Harvey Fierstein who began their careers at La MaMa and went on to achieve commercial success while other artists like Split Britches and Yara Arts Group remained committed to their downtown roots. She tells the story of the birth of the Off-Off-Broadway movement, which was instrumental in the development of avant-garde theatre in the United States. And she tells the story of print posters and how the medium arose, particularly in relation to La MaMa. But where Rosenthal excels is in the telling of the stories about Stewart’s theatre “babies,” artists who were nurtured with love and affection and enjoyed Stewart’s hands-off approach to producing (9). One such person is “Multidisciplinary artist, composer, filmmaker, and choreographer Meredith Monk” who, in 1976, created what John Killacky claims is “one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century,” the opera Quarry (67). A meditation on World War II, Quarry is characteristic of the avant-garde movement with its innovative narrative and “audience-as-set” convention. After a successful limited engagement, the opera was scheduled again a few months later, but La MaMa’s doors were closed for yet another building code violation (Stewart’s troubles with the city are chronicled in Hillary Miller’s Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York ). Monk fondly remembers being with Stewart after La MaMa was shuttered, asking “What producer would be sitting there, crying with you?” (67) Quarry eventually moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and won an Obie Award, and Monk later brought the opera back to La MaMa in 1986. Ellen Stewart Presents features two of the posters from the original production of Quarry designed by Monk and Monica Moseley . Monk recalls that Stewart gave La MaMa artists complete freedom with poster designs, and she appreciates why Stewart finally approved a book about her life’s work: “Posters do it better than photographs. It’s hard to show in one photo what a play is about because a photograph capture[s]… a specific moment in time… a visual artist can distill one powerful image in a poster that can represent a production—and that is why she wanted to tell the story that way” (19). Indeed, Rosenthal selected more than one hundred posters from La MaMa’s archive of approximately twenty-five hundred posters (many now available online) to create a work that is as much a visual journey as it is an oral history. Ellen Stewart Presents functions on multiple historical levels—perhaps too many for a single volume—with glowing reviews and few critical detractors. Rosenthal celebrates Ellen Stewart as a force of nature who was instrumental in shaping the course of the American stage. Perhaps Stewart’s greatest legacy is the freedom she gave to theatre artists from all over the world, the freedom to innovate and explore with less constraint than commercial theatre. Today, under the new artistic leadership of Mia Yoo, La MaMa is a thriving international arts institution that includes the Umbria International workshop that gathers each summer outside of Spoleto, Italy. With so much more to tell about its subject, Ellen Stewart Presents opens the door to further scholarship about one of the most important theatre visionaries of the twentieth century. Meredith Monk remembers that if Stewart liked an idea and said, “do it,” the artist had found a new home: “Ellen was totally about love… And that’s La MaMa” (71-72). References Footnotes About The Author(s) DEREK MUNSON University of Missouri Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Andrea Harris Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 1 Visit Journal Homepage Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama Andrea Harris By Published on March 5, 2015 Download Article as PDF When the frontier melodrama, The Scouts of the Prairie , And, Red Deviltry As It Is! , opened in Chicago in December 1872, it marked the beginning of a performance genre that would have significant impact on the American national imagination. Written by Ned Buntline (E. Z. C. Judson), the dime novel author who christened William F. Cody “Buffalo Bill,” The Scouts of the Prairie was the first stage play to star the famous frontiersman as himself, playing out the “real” drama of his Western adventures for spectators. Scouts launched a fourteen-year theatrical tradition that evolved into Buffalo Bill’s Wild West , the extremely successful performance spectacle that played across the US and in Europe for three decades. Scholars have long credited Cody’s Wild West as “the most important commercial vehicle for the fabrication and transmission of the Myth of the Frontier,” the thesis that the road to modernity was necessarily fraught with violent conflicts between “civilized” and “savage” peoples. [1] Appearing alongside Cody in the frontier play were Buntline himself, the scout John “Texas Jack” Omohundro, and, as the American Indian princess Dove Eye and Cody’s love interest, the Italian ballerina Giuseppina Morlacchi. The lion’s share of the existing scholarship on Cody’s performance focuses on his better-known large outdoor spectacles, sidelining the theatrical combinations that started his thespian career. More recent studies are expanding our knowledge of Cody’s stage plays, but even here, no one has questioned the incongruous casting of the famous Italian ballerina as an American Indian woman in the production that launched the western celebrity’s stage career, The Scouts of the Prairie . [2] Most authors mention that the cast of Scouts included a well-known Italian dancer, but stop short of asking what kind of dance she did in the play, why dance might have been included, or what meanings it might have expressed. But by casting such a neutral lens on the dancing Dove Eye, scholars have failed to understand dance itself as a meaningful text in the play. As I will show, Morlacchi’s dancing in The Scouts of the Prairie —not only the fact that she danced, but how , set in context with nineteenth-century discourses on ballet, the female ballet dancer, and the city—produces a more complex reading of Morlacchi’s character and the frontier melodrama. Born in Milan in 1836, Morlacchi was six years old when she entered the famed La Scala ballet academy, then the world’s leader in classical dance under the leadership of Carlo Blasis. With her impeccable training, Morlacchi worked with some of the most reputable choreographers in Europe, and was soon invited to join the ballet company at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. She was engaged by artist-manager Don Juan de Pol to come to the US to appear in the 1867 The Devil’s Auction , one of the elaborate ballet-spectacles that became immensely popular after the success of The Black Crook in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Morlacchi worked as both a dancer and choreographer on the ballet-spectacle stage, until she left that genre to pursue her own choreographic career. Making its home in Boston, the Morlacchi Ballet traveled the country from 1868-1872, performing a mixed repertory drawn from European Romantic and post-Romantic ballets and American spectaculars and melodramas. Critics saw in Morlacchi’s dancing the essence of European culture transported to American stages. “She has sparked an excitement among the most cultivated of our citizens and everyone wants to see her perform,” [3] asserted the New York Evening Transcript , and Boston papers concurred, “Many of the refined and cultivated people . . . whose knowledge of art has been perfected by European experiences have been the first in America to detect the genius of this danseuse.” [4] How interesting, then, to find Morlacchi, the embodiment of European classicism, the exemplar of cultured taste, appearing alongside the rugged western scouts, bringing European academic dance onto Buffalo Bill’s (otherwise) “wild” frontier stage. It is not clear how Morlacchi found her way into the western melodrama. Her company was performing at Nixon’s Opera House in Chicago in late 1872, when Buntline finally convinced Cody and Omohundro to meet him in that city for their theatrical debut. Morlacchi was a sought-after performer by theatre managers, and was known as a talented dramatic mime. Perhaps previous roles she had created for herself, including a mute Native American woman in The Wept of Wish-ton-wish , made her seem an especially attractive choice for the Dove Eye role. Perhaps it was Morlacchi’s manager, Major John M. Burke, who met Cody a year later through the dancer and became the highly influential publicity manager who crafted much of the legendary imagery of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West , who pointed her towards Buntline’s cast. At any rate, at the end of her company’s season in Chicago in late 1872, Morlacchi was engaged to join the cast of The Scouts of the Prairie as Dove Eye, the Indian maiden. [5] Though no script survives, scholars have been able to rebuild much of the plot of Scouts through program scene synopses and newspaper reviews. [6] As the play opened, trapper Cale Durg (played by Buntline) entered the camp he shared with his ward, the “lovely white girl” Hazel Eye. [7] Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack (both played by themselves) stormed in “with a fiendish yell” [8] and a tale of their last hunt. Dove Eye ran into the scouts’ camp to warn them of her tribesmen’s plans to attack them, led by Wolf Slayer. Yelling war whoops, the four exited, intent on revenge. In the next scene, Hazel Eye was captured by Wolf Slayer and his Indians, recruited by the renegade Mormon Ben, who desired her for his fiftieth wife. Durg tried to save her, but he was outnumbered, and he and Hazel Eye were tied to the stake to be burned. The Indians danced and sang a “Death Dance” around Durg, while he, unperturbed, taunted his captors. Dove Eye “dance[d] in [and] sever[ed] the bonds of Hazel Eye;” together they freed Durg, and fought the Indians. [9] Bill and Jack came to the rescue, vowing “Death to the Redskins,” and Act I concluded with a massive slaughter of Indians, leading the New York Times reviewer to comment that “the unmitigated bloodshed that ends every act and almost every scene of this unique composition were so satisfactory to the public, that the management might be forgiven for hereafter assuming that the key to success must lie in the exhibition of cataracts of gore.” [10] In Act II, Bill declared his love for Dove Eye, and, in turn, Jack his for Hazel Eye. Their bliss was short-lived, however, as both women were again abducted by the Indians, and Durg again captured. Once again tied up (to a tree this time), Durg took the opportunity to deliver a temperance lecture, one of actor/playwright Buntline’s long-time causes. Durg was shot and killed by Wolf Slayer. As Act III opened, Bill and Jack swore vengeance for their slain friend, and Dove Eye and Hazel Eye expressed their loyalty to one another. The Indians gathered for a “Scalp Dance,” as a struggle between Wolf Slayer and Big Eagle, Dove Eye’s father, ended in the stabbing of the latter. When Dove Eye found her father’s body, she prayed to Manitou, the Indian god of revenge—perhaps another opportunity for a dance—then she and Hazel Eye returned to the camp for a final battle. [11] The renegades started a fire and a ferocious war ensued as the scouts and women “triumph[ed] over their enemies, with a train on the Pacific Railroad and a burning prairie in the background.” [12] In the play’s final tableau, the two couples embraced, the lights fading on the triumph of romance framed by the inevitable progression of America’s western frontier. In the very few studies that give her more than a passing mention, Dove Eye is interpreted as “the ubiquitous friendly native maiden,” or the “noble savage” in contrast to the “utter savage” of the warlike Indians around her. [13] Her character is viewed as a Pocahontas figure, giving up her people and culture for the love of the white man, Cody. A common trope on the nineteenth-century stage, the Pocahontas character served as the “most well known and irresistible symbol” of the absorption of American Indians into white culture and the expropriation of their own culture. [14] That absorption was accomplished through the lens of gender and sexuality; as Mary Dearborn notes, “it is precisely because Pocahontas is expected to embody both aspects of the image [the noble Princess and the randy Squaw] that hers is so convenient, compelling, and ultimately intolerable a legend. . . . Her story functions as a compelling locus for American feeling toward . . . miscegenation, or sexual relations between white men and ethnic women.” [15] As Buffalo Bill’s love interest, Dove Eye’s Indian Princess role fulfilled many of these elements in Scouts : the contrast of royal heritage and sexual availability; the assimilation of the forgiving, supportive Indian woman; and proof of the supremacy of white culture with the reassuring combination of Native consent and cooperation. Although the centrality of movement in Morlacchi’s role has not been taken into account in previous scholarship, a dance analysis would reinforce this reading, particularly given the fact that at least some of her dances as Dove Eye seem to have been performed on pointe . One critic noted how a “few graceful steps inserted into one of the scenes reminded playgoers of [Morlacchi’s] former triumph in the ballet.” [16] Another observed in her performance “the fawnlike bound of the antelope—if the antelope ever bounds on the points of its toes.” [17] Joellen Meglin has shown that ballet served to symbolize “civilization triumphing over savagery” in representations of Native Americans in productions at the pre-Romantic Paris Opéra. [18] In Scouts , Morlacchi’s ballet dancing would seem to have functioned similarly, the consummate European ballerina serving as the “whitening” force that mediated between civilization and savagery in Dove Eye’s character. When the Italian ballet star rose to the pointes of her slippers, the image signaled that Dove Eye was more civilized, closer to European culture than her tribesmen, especially in contrast to the other “Death” and “Scalp” dances in the play that served as signs of an “authentic” Indian culture. [19] The incorporation of ballet into Scouts literally replaced a Native dance form with a European one on Dove Eye’s body, an erasure that colluded with the US government’s efforts to colonize Native lands. Yet the “civilization” and “savagery” binary only in part explains the incongruous mixture of buckskin and pointe shoes in Morlacchi’s Dove Eye performance. Robert C. Allen has shown the way in which the female burlesque performer’s body was a site of multiple interpretations, often ambiguous and contradictory, that were related to changing gender and class roles. [20] As I will show, the ballet dancer (or “ballet-girl,” as she was known in popular discourses, no matter her rank onstage) embodied a similar set of tensions, and Morlacchi brought this complexity with her into The Scouts of the Prairie : a little bit of the burlesque tradition on the frontier stage. When dance becomes an equal part of the analysis, the way in which the foreign ballerina and her dancing served as a necessarily complicated signifier for a host of socio-cultural anxieties appears, many of them conflicting, and all of them indicating the need for the stabilizing and reassuring force of the exemplary western hero, Buffalo Bill, at the end of the play. In what follows, I attempt to widen the scope on the meanings that ballet brought into this frontier melodrama by putting it in dialogue with contemporaneous discourses of ballet and the ballet dancer in the mass circulation print industry out of which Scouts arose. Critics certainly found Morlacchi to be a civilizing force in the play, and a much-needed one at that. Although little venom was spared in appraisals of Scouts or its audience, Morlacchi was persistently set apart in the press. “Mlle Morlacchi deserves a word by herself in this wholesale slaughter,” decreed the Boston reviewer; “In the opening piece . . . she danced exquisitely and with all her accustomed grace and skill, and the audience recognized her merit and called her before the curtain accordingly.” [21] Penned another, “in her opening performance she gave a number of her beautiful dances as gracefully and as equisitely [ sic ] as ever.” [22] And one reviewer noted that that the “Indian scalping, buffalo shooting and redskin-whooping drama” appealed to the lower classes seated in the gallery, while the better class of patrons in the house preferred Morlacchi’s dancing in the curtain raiser. [23] For critics, Morlacchi’s dancing was a welcome respite of upper-class taste in the otherwise uncouth frontier melodrama. Such praise of Morlacchi’s dancing in The Scouts of the Prairie has been interpreted rather straightforwardly as evidence of her talent. But here the plot thickens. Critics’ responses to Scouts , and to Morlacchi’s appearance in it, are indicative of the cultural hierarchy that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, one that Lawrence Levine has described as a “struggle to establish aesthetic standards, to separate true art from the purely vulgar.” [24] Persistently dividing the audience and the content of Scouts into “high” and “low” components, the extant criticism points to the struggle over class that that was waged in theatrical life in the latter nineteenth century. And critics indeed saw The Scouts of the Prairie as class warfare. “To criticize this composition as a play, or analyze its plot, would be ridiculous, for it has nothing to do with art,” declared a New York writer. “It is simply a dime novel set to scenery.” [25] While critics readily perceived ballet as a civilizing influence in The Scouts of the Prairie , the existing criticism cannot fully demonstrate how the mostly male, working-class audience that cheered the play would have responded to the incongruous contrast of the “best dancer in New York” playing the role of an Indian woman who shot a rifle, fought, screeched war whoops and chased the bad guys—and mixed it all with the occasional Romantic-style divertissement. [26] The comparison to a dime novel pointed to the fact that playwright Ned Buntline was among the highest-paid authors of the dime novel industry: cheap popular fiction mass-produced by publishing firms between the 1840s and the 1890s, predominantly for a male, white, lower class readership. [27] Buntline’s readership was likely the same audience targeted by The Scouts of the Prairie ; the script was created very quickly by piecing together characters from his dime novel series on Buffalo Bill (although the novelette on Dove Eye was published after the premiere of the play, which suggests she was a new character he created for the stage,) [28] and, as a celebrity author, Buntline received top billing, along with Cody and Omohundro. Before he turned to Western tales in 1859, Buntline was well known for his mystery-of-the-city books, which unveiled the crime and poverty of the city, along with the extravagance and decadence of the rich. [29] Alexander Saxton aligns Buntline’s turn to the West with an overall shift in dime novels after 1850 that brought the ideological dimensions of the “Free Soil hero,” particularly white egalitarianism and class mobility, into the new Western hero. [30] I will return to Saxton’s argument at the end of this article. For now, it is worth noting that Buntline was committed to a nativist political ideology that preached anti-aristocratic egalitarianism and class mobility, and blamed urban problems onto foreign presence in the US. [31] As author and activist Buntline helped shape a working-class, anti-immigrant culture in opposition to the elite and foreign corruption of the industrial city. In Buntline’s urban fiction, the city is a dangerous and unpredictable place, full of dark, secret corners in which foreign-born villains prey on working class heroes and heroines. As Shelley Streeby describes, Buntline’s urban adventures cast the city “as a feminizing space in which ‘fashion’ holds sway and distinguishes a ‘simple’ yet civilized yeoman masculinity from a ‘savage’ state that is implicitly identified with foreign, nonwhite, or urban others.” [32] Buntline often positioned the theatre as one of the primary sites of corruption and immorality in the city, as was the case in his 1848 The Mysteries and Miseries of New York . [33] More precisely, the ballet theatre was the setting for his urban melodrama, Rose Seymour, or The Ballet Girl’s Revenge . Written seven years before the premiere of The Scouts of the Prairie , this dime novel portrayed the ballet world as a den of underground crime in which wealthy and licentious immigrants preyed on poor American girls. Every time Rose, the impoverished, motherless heroine who auditions to be a ballet-girl, enters the Broadway theatre, or even dons her ballet costume, her situation quickly becomes life-threatening: she is pursued, abducted, imprisoned, lusted after, and even set aflame one night when her muslin skirt brushes the gas lights. At one point, six particularly rough male audience members, overcome by her performance, leapt onto the stage and chased her through the theatre, howling and breaking down doors in their pursuit. [34] Published four years before he gave up urban reform literature for the Buffalo Bill dime novels that launched Scouts , the ballet theatre figured in Buntline’s story as a handy metaphor for urban perversions; a violent place devoid of morals, where passions ran wild, appearances could not be trusted, and dangerous foreigners, “rich, handsome, and liberal,” constantly sought to destroy Rose’s innate American goodness. [35] Buntline’s characterization of the moral and social dangers of the ballet theatre was part of a much larger set of nineteenth-century discourses that viewed ballet as a foreign threat to American values. Anti-ballet rhetoric was multi-faceted: religious reformers saw it as a menace to middle-class morality, while dime novel and story paper authors, like Buntline, cast it as part of the larger threat posed to the working classes by immigration and industrialization. That is, attacks on ballet appeared in a wide variety of popular literature, directed at different segments of the population. But these genres were united in their anxiety over the increasing influence of a rapidly growing middle class after the Civil War. Persistent connections were made in popular discourses between this new “fashionable” class, European social and political decay, and the presence of ballet in the United States. The “ballet-girl” (as she was called, no matter her rank) became a site for these anxieties; as in Buntline’s Rose , she was a trigger for multiple concerns about foreign influence, social divisions, and the dangers to American virtues within a rapidly transforming urban space. Unlike on the Opéra stage, to American audiences in 1872, ballet would not necessarily have served as an uncomplicated or even positive symbol of modern civilization. As Barbara Barker has shown, the history of ballet in the US involved “the slow transplanting and rooting of an essentially foreign form.” [36] Since before the turn of the nineteenth century, French and Italian troupes had been touring to America, and by the early decades, European ballerinas were appearing in the US with increasing regularity. As ballet become more popular, debates raged over the meaning of a European high art on the American stage. According to Christopher Martin, by the late 1820s debates over ballet in the US had evolved into a discourse that superimposed questions of national values and identity—indeed, the very fate of the nation—onto the theatrical representation of the female body. [37] While some hoped that European ballet would help America develop its own high culture, detractors saw ballet as symptomatic of a decadent and degenerate European civilization. The latter is perhaps most famously expressed in Samuel Morse’s vitriolic speech on French ballerina Francisque Hutin’s 1827 appearance in New York, in which he decried ballet, “the PUBLIC EXPOSURE OF A NAKED FEMALE,” as “the importation of these lowest instruments of vice from the sinks of monarchical corruption.” [38] For like-minded dissenters, the problem with ballet was that it went for the senses instead of the intellect, inappropriate for the values of the young republic. As the Christian Register put it: There is nothing in Europe which so directly and effectually saps the fountains of virtue and moral sensibility. It has no fellowship with the mind. . . . It excites none of the finer sensibilities of the heart—it calls forth no moral sentiments of any kind. It is the product of a state of society worn out with luxury and indulgence and seeking excitements in the lowest order of natural propensities. . . . We should consider the establishment of the Ballet in the U. States not only as a wide dereliction from the virtues of our forefathers, but as a great moral evil—an evil more contagious and more pernicious to society than any bodily disease which has ever afflicted our country. [39] In such discourses, ballet, seducing viewers with its spectacular and feminine beauty, represented the bread and circuses of the European monarchy, a threat to not only the American theatergoer’s morals, but also to American political institutions. In the furor over ballet in America that raged for most of the nineteenth century, the dance form was linked to European civilization, and the anxieties it provoked for its critics were inextricable from concerns about the fate of the republic. Some hoped that the European art would help America develop its own high culture, but ballet’s dissenters saw it as a threat to the moral, social, and political fabric of the country. When foreign correspondents wrote columns home about the corruptions of Parisian society, ballet was embedded in their warnings. The Parisian ballet-girl was a representative of “the loosest class in the world”: self-indulgent and reckless with her body, her money, and her health. [40] Behind Paris’s proliferation of glittering amusements—its cafes, gardens, department stores, theatres, operas, and ballets—lay a society in decay, a darker world of courtesans and immorality. An attitude of extravagance had overtaken French culture, replacing the Revolutionary “watchwords” of “liberty, equality, [and] fraternity.” While the French people mouthed these ideas, and were taught that they had a democratic government, in reality, they have undergone a social revolution and have come to regard these words in another sense. Liberty [here] does not imply freedom of political action and opinion. On the contrary it means to be free from all concerns of government and to have license to do anything they please with themselves and their property. . . . The French notion of liberty is fulfilled [as long] as the people have the wherewithal to fill their stomachs and indulge their sensuality. [41] Beneath the Parisian fashionable life lurked the ruins of revolutionary ideals. In these accounts, ballet, with its “sumptuous and exhausting lifestyle,” was emblematic of the ruin to which such a life of self-indulgence would inevitably lead. [42] Ballet was a foreign other, a symbol of a decadent and degenerate European culture and political system, and a menace to republican values. But if ballet’s sensuality and excessive “indulgence” made it morally suspect in the antebellum US, by the mid-1860s such lavishness had become the major selling point for a new form, the ballet-spectacle. Most famously represented by the 1866 The Black Crook with its “bewildering forest of female legs” and “barbaric splendor,” ballet-spectacles combined elements from melodrama, farce, and parody, and featured fantastical plots, spectacular special effects, and numerous grand ballets with large casts of European ballerinas. [43] The popularity of these productions generated an outpouring of warnings about their dangers, many of them focused on the female dancer as a site of moral and social transgression. Ballet dancers contrived “to reach men through the senses; to stir their blood with material agencies as the Maria Bonfantis and Sohlkes, and Morlacchis do. Charming exemplars they for American ladies—for the pure daughters of a proud country.” [44] The real cause for alarm was that these amusements indicated a growing preoccupation with pleasure as an end in itself. As a writer for the Brooklyn Eagle parsed, it was not the popularity of ballet per se that was the problem; it was that “the function of a ballet-girl in a modern burlesque or spectacle has nothing to do with either graceful or pantomimic action. She is hired to look pretty, and to appear in little clothing.” The worry that ballet went for the senses, rather than the mind, had long troubled its critics, particularly the religiously-oriented. But after the Civil War, ballet’s pleasurable ends increasingly pointed to larger socio-economic concerns; in particular, “the enjoyment of wealth by a class to whom labor, whether of hand or brain, is alike strange. Money which brings with it no obvious duties . . . can hardly fail to be a disastrous inheritance.” [45] Whereas ballet triggered fears of the corrupting influences of foreign culture throughout the bulk of the nineteenth century, postwar it became central to a new domestic threat: the rise of a culture of consumption and the growth of a new bourgeois class. William Leach has identified the decades after the Civil War as the key period in the development of a “culture of consumer capitalism,” marked by “acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness, the cult of the new, the democratization of desire, and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society.” [46] Urbanization and industrialization eroded the familial and agricultural culture that had characterized America to that point, bringing not only rapid economic and lifestyle changes, but also creating a much more fluid socioeconomic system and an expanding class of nouveau riche in the metropolis, variously known as the “fashionables” or the “shoddy aristocracy.” This new class had gotten their fortunes quickly, probably in a business venture, but completely lacked the “good breeding and intelligence” that suited their new social class. [47] The shoddies were the most flagrant example of a society that worshipped money, and was “content with nothing less than . . . an ever-changing life of amusements.” [48] Certain spaces in the city that were built to accommodate this new upper-middle class, including the park, the shopping mall, the theatre, and the ballet-spectacle—spaces, in other words, in which the fashionable life of newness, leisure, pleasure, and social display was lived—became geographical symbols of the debauchery of this new class in popular literature. [49] Such was the case in a new genre of urban nonfiction formed after the Civil War. These works retained the “wicked city motif” found in their dime novel antecedents, yet they purported to be true accounts of city life, even guides to urban spaces. On the surface, it seems that these urban exposés were primarily addressed to upper class concerns over the disruption posed by the shoddies to the socioeconomic order; yet their wide readership also suggests they were highly popular. Nonetheless, there was a clear relationship between the genres, as the nonfiction works carried forward the core themes of popular urban fiction, including the concern that the metropolis was generating both an aristocracy and an underclass whose degenerate lifestyles were endangering American values. [50] Most of these urban nonfiction works were organized around social types and/or social spaces. A repeated structural motif was the grouping of classes of women to symbolize various forms of urban vice. As Mona Domosh notes, as the primary class of consumers, women often served as targets for fears about the rise of consumer capitalism in post-Civil War discourses. The “desiring” woman became the symbol of the lack of control and tendency for excess responsible for the moral decay of the city. [51] In the urban nonfictional exposés, certain types of women who disrupted conventional social and gender boundaries stood for the physical and moral danger of the city streets: the prostitute, the working woman, and, most importantly for my purposes, the “New York Woman.” The New York Woman served as a metaphor for the vices of “fashionable society,” as illustrated in two urban nonfiction books published in the 1860s: Marie Louise Hankins’s Women of New York and George Ellington’s The Women of New York or the Underworld of the Great City . She dressed stylishly, even extravagantly, performed an elaborate daily toilette to make herself beautiful, and devoted her time to shopping and going to parties, the theatre, the opera, and the ballet, all to the neglect of her children. Amongst the New York Woman’s trespasses was her artifice: through dress, make-up, facial enameling, false hair, false teeth, and devices such as padded calves and ankles, she could appear to be what she was not. Such external artifice pointed to internal deceit; the New York Woman could appear respectable on the outside, but be of wicked heart. “Did we speak of the falsity of women as regards their heart and their inner life,” wrote Ellington, “we would not only tire the reader, but make him lose all faith in human nature, at least as far as women are concerned.” [52] A particular dilemma was the New York Woman’s ability to pass for a higher social class than the one to which she belonged. The New York Woman was also self-indulgent. Obsessed with money and luxury, she gave into her own desires and was seemingly incapable of restraint. The urban exposés traced two possible “routes from personal indulgence to societal destruction: one path followed the course of overconsumption; the other route followed the course of sexual deviance.” [53] In the first of these, her New York Woman’s extravagance led to the downfall of others around her: the men who struggled to support her resorted to illegal ways of getting money or, frustrated by her indulgences, to infidelity; or her servants found themselves buying things they could not afford in a vain attempt to keep up with her expectations of social status. “There is no influence so powerful as that of example; and when one woman steps beyond the bounds of propriety in any direction, she is sure to be followed by a dozen other weak ones,” avowed Ellington, until finally, “the whole of society becomes demoralized and corrupted.” [54] In the second path to social degredation, women turned to various modes of prostitution in order to fulfill their extravagant need for goods, either in gift or payment form. The ballet-girl was a special subtype of the New York Woman in these books. She shared the same faults: she was overindulgent, and her appearance was the result of a great deal of embellishment. “The coryphée is not one to let a chance slip that promises any pleasure,” noted Ellington. “The majority of these girls need and must have excitement. Without it they could not exist. . . . Seemingly, they live but for the pleasures of the day.” [55] The ballet dancer’s grace was a façade that required not only make-up and hair care, but also great physical pain. Accounts of the arduous, violent nature of ballet training were ubiquitous in mid-nineteenth century exposés. Not unlike the fashionable metropolitan woman, who would undergo foot binding to make her feet smaller for the latest footwear, the ballet dancer submitted her body to abnormal suffering in order to create her illusion of perfection. She could not be trusted either. “When ‘made up’ on the stage, with aid of ribbons, gause [ sic ], false curls, a gay costume, and pearl power and vinegar rouge,” cautioned Hankins, “she will appear to be not more than sixteen, and as beautiful as an angel; but […] by day light, in her plain clothes, she might be taken for thirty-five—perhaps forty!” [56] Moreover, her lifestyle all too often led to sexual deviance or to her own destruction. Ellington’s summation is characteristic: “Many have risen to the goal of their ambition, many have given up and returned to their former occupations, while many have sunk low into that dark abyss from which there is no resurrection, without hope and without mercy, betrayed by those who flatter but to ruin.” [57] On the one hand, authors saw the ballet-girl as a victim of this dangerous urban world, even though her temperament made her particularly susceptible to its temptations of materialism and indulgence. This was especially true if she were American: numerous dime novels and newspaper short stories followed the adventures of good American girls, who, being forced into the ballet world (usually because they suffered financial distress, and lacked a mother’s moral guidance), had no choice but to navigate its moral and physical dangers. [58] As Ellington put it, American ballet-girls tended to be much more chaste, especially when compared to the “peculiar ideas of morality” of the French dancers. [59] But on the other hand, the ballet-girl was a symptom of a much bigger socio-economic epidemic. She personified the destruction of simple American values in the one of the city’s most dangerous places: the ballet theatre. The theatre, and especially the ballet theatre, figured prominently in this literature as one of the primary signifiers for the transforming class structure of the city under the influence of the new bourgeoisie. The ballet was one of the places the shoddies could be found flaunting their extravagance, “throw[ing] bouquets to the bare-legged dancers;” even worse, ballet was one of the disrespectable professions, along with “mineral waters” and prostitution, on which the shoddies depended for quick money. [60] In Hankins’ tale, the ballet-girl, whom she calls Helen, came from this shoddy class, forced into dancing to keep her family from starvation when her father quickly made a fortune in some unnamed business, then just as quickly lost it. Helen’s life was miserable: “with an aching heart, and a brain too often burning with the insults which she has received from those who take advantage of her exposed and unprotected situation, poor Helen Bray, like many of her sisters, comes upon the stage to dance and smile, and entertain the public world.” [61] For these authors, ballet served as a locus for the shoddies and their transgressions in multiple ways; it was the site of their creation, existence, and also their downfall. The ballet-girl thus functioned in mid-nineteenth century sensationalist urban literature very much in the way that Peter Buckley has noted of the prostitute. As a “fallen” woman, she served the narrative function of being authorized: to move among the dangerous classes of the city and to recognize—where the novelist and the reader might not—the evil intentions of the fashionably dressed. Because she [was] situated in the places of social and sexual promiscuity, where the extremes of social class converge, she provoke[d] the story of the city. [She allowed] the narration of the unnarratable. [62] The same might be said about the ballet-girl. In both the fictional mysteries-of-the-city and the nonfiction urban exposés, she was able to simultaneously reference the feminized hedonism of “fashionable” society, and the encroachment of European decadence on American society and values. Connoting an influence that was unavoidably “foreign” and potentially deviant, the ballet dancer ushered in the class conflicts and contradictions of the industrial city in all of its most dangerous, “unnarratable,” connotations. Alexander Saxton argues that what united the dime novel industry was the reliance on class struggle as a structural trope, across a diversity of subject matter. Most importantly for my purposes here, the Western narrative was “conceptualized in dime novels in terms of conflicts between fraternal egalitarianism on one hand and social hierarchy and deference on the other.” [63] The widespread support for territorial expansion in the mass press was buttressed by the belief that western lands held the fix for the socio-economic problems of the city. [64] Following this argument, Indian killing was de rigeur for the western hero because western expansion held the promise of a concept of civilization not racked by class conflict, “a western expanding white republic.” [65] Saxton views the western hero as the progeny of the prewar Free Soil hero, the literary representative of the ideals of social mobility and white fraternity that lay at the foundation of Republican ideology. Key characteristics of the western hero included lower-class roots, a background in Indian killing, and the ability to cross class divisions, usually by winning the favor of an upper-class woman’s family and marrying her. [66] Saxton’s exemplary model of such a character is Buntline’s first depiction of Cody in his 1869 Buffalo Bill: The King of the Border Men , the work that soon led both author and subject to their theatrical debut in The Scouts of the Prairie . As Bill, in Buntline’s story, leaves his modest vernacular beginnings to, first, fight the Indians who work for white ruffians, and finally, marry a banker’s daughter, he dramatizes American social advancement. Importantly for my purposes, romantic partnership is crucial to the western hero’s liberation from class boundaries. “It is not so much that lower-class origin has been denied,” explains Saxton, “but that equal access to privileges of the upper class, including acquisition of wealth and marriageability, has been triumphantly vindicated.” [67] From this perspective, one might speculate that, in the eyes of the working-class audience, as Buffalo Bill and Dove Eye embrace at the end of The Scouts of the Prairie against the backdrop of a speeding locomotive, symbol of the westward push of industrialization, perhaps the corruptions of a foreign, elitist culture that the Italian ballerina signified were at least as much in need of containment by the western hero than the alterity represented by the Indian Dove Eye. Not only the savagery of the Native American, but also the vices and cruelties of industrial conflict, were quelled under Cody’s stabilizing hand. When read intertextually with the narrative of the ballet-girl in popular literature, the spectre of a European “other” who gestured Eastward to the class and cultural reorganization of the metropolis emerges in The Scouts of the Prairie , the earliest prototype of the Wild West spectacles. In addition to affirming Dove Eye’s civilized side, Morlacchi’s ballet-dancing body pointed to social and economic worries about class, gender, and race in capitalist civilization. Several issues linger: how was Morlacchi’s dancing positioned in the play, and did the relationship between text and dance ultimately embrace these various levels of meaning or attempt to resolve them somehow? How would audiences in non-urban geographical locations have perceived ballet dancing in Scouts ? What role did the racism aimed at immigrants during the period play in Morlacchi’s—and ballet’s—positioning in the frontier play? [68] These questions remain difficult to answer, given the extant textual and critical resources through which we might rebuild the way in which a high “foreign” art intersected with this dime novel drama. [69] Such problems emerge, however, when we see the incorporation of ballet dancing, and the associations it carried, as a specific dramaturgical choice in The Scouts of the Prairie , one that went far, far beyond mere spectacle to gesture towards the class and cultural divisions at the heart of the question of “civilization” itself. References [1] Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 87, 86. On the Wild West as American mythology, see also Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). [2] Sandra K. Sagala’s monograph is the most comprehensive source on these theatrical productions: see Buffalo Bill on Stage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). See also Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50-67. Neither author considers Morlacchi’s dancing in the role of Dove Eye or explores the historical context of ballet in the image or the plays. [3] Qtd. in Chris Enss, Buffalo Gals: Women of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2006), 4. [4] Qtd. in Barbara Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo: The American Careers of Marie Bonfanti, Rita Sangalli, and Giuseppina Morlacchi (New York: Dance Horizons, 1984), 121. [5] Morlacchi’s company was in financial trouble at the time, but there is no direct evidence that she took the role in Scouts out of financial desperation. The year after Scouts premiered, Morlacchi married Omohundro. She appeared in two subsequent Cody melodramas, playing an Indian maiden in The Scouts of the Plains and an Irish girl in Life on the Border , in between which she returned to the opera house for productions of Ahmed and her own production of La Bayadère . Morlacchi and Omohundro split from Cody in 1876 to create their own western combination plays, in several of which Morlacchi played an Indian maiden role. After Omohundro died in 1880, Morlacchi retired from the stage, and spent the following years teaching ballet lessons to the mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, where she and Omohundro owned a home. All biographical information drawn from Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 111-167. For John M. Burke, see Chris Dixon, “Introduction: The Mysterious Major Burke,” in John M. Burke, Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace . Introduction ed. Chris Dixon. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Online at Cody Studies , http://www.codystudies.org/?tag=john-m-burke (accessed 5 September 2014). [6] Early studies that mention the plot include James Monaghan, “The Stage Career of Buffalo Bill,” The Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 31, no. 4 (December 1938): 414-416; and William S.E. Coleman, “Buffalo Bill on Stage,” Players, 47, no. 2 (1971): 80-91. Craig Francis Nieuwenhuyse’s unpublished dissertation is the most detailed study of The Scouts of the Prairie , and his attempted reconstruction of the plot the most thorough. See Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage: Buffalo Bill Cody’s First Celebration of the Conquest of the American Frontier” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1981), see especially 43-74 for the plot. Sagala also includes a detailed account of the narrative ( Buffalo Bill on Stage , 21-23). [7] Chicago Daily Tribune , 19 December 1872, 4. The role of Hazel Eye was initially played by Eloe Carfano, but the secondary sources are not clear about her identity. Barbara Barker, Morlacchi’s biographer, says that Carfano was a member of Morlacchi’s ballet company (Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 153); Sandra K. Sagala describes her as a “Cuban actress” who joined the Scouts’ company on tour (Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage , 27). Both could be true; as Sagala notes, the reviews are confusing, and it may be that reviewers could not always tell the two women apart. However, Barker’s evidence that Carfano danced with Morlacchi in Scouts is based on the after-the-fact recollection of Omohundro’s brother that “both women danced on the tips of their toes” in the play (Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 156). I have found no reviews that mention Carfano’s dancing, only Morlacchi’s. [8] Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 54. Nieuwenhuyse’s source for the following quotations regarding the plot is the Troop C Ledger , Buffalo Bill Historical Center. See note 9 for details about this Ledger. [9] “The Scouts at Pike’s Opera House” (Cincinnati), Clipping, n.d n.p, William F. Cody Collection, “Stage Play Notices and Reviews 1872-1880: Black Book,” in Buffalo Bill Cody Scrapbooks 1875-1903, Manuscript 6, William F. Cody, roll 1. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, WY. This is a microfilm of the Troop C Ledger, held at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, which contains numerous newspaper clippings cut so as to fit as many as possible on a page. Most of these clippings do not include dates or page numbers, and in some the name of the publication and/or its location has been omitted as well. Hereafter: BBHC Ledger. [10] “Amusements,” New York Times , 1 April 1873, 4. [11] Barker suggests a dance may have been incorporated into Dove Eye’s prayer scene; see Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 156. [12] Qtd. in Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 72. [13] Hall, Performing the American Frontier , 54; Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 111. [14] Rebecca Jaroff, “Opposing Forces: (Re)Playing Pocahontas and the Politics of Indian Removal on the Antebellum Stage,” Comparative Drama 40, no. 4 (Winter 2006/2007): 486. [15] Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 99. [16] “The Scouts of the Prairie: A Lively Representation of Border Life” (Utica), BBHC Ledger, n.d., n.p. [17] “Academy of Music” (Indianapolis), BBHC Ledger, n.d n.p. [18] Joellen Meglin, “‘Sauvages,’ Sex Role and Semiotics: Representations of Native Americans in the French Ballet 1736-1837, Part Two: The Nineteenth Century,” Dance Chronicle 23, no. 3 (2000): 291. [19] Real Native Americans were added to the cast after the premiere, where they were mixed with non-Native “extras.” Costumes, weaponry, songs, and dances included in the play all worked to signify the display of an authentic Native culture onstage. Nieuwenhuyse notes that critics had trouble seeing the difference between the Native and non-Native performers, and that, ultimately, reviewers emphasized the overall brutality of the Indians through stereotypes that reinforced government’s eradication policies. Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 29, 43, 79-80, 130-31. [20] Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). [21] Boston Daily Advertiser , 4 March 1873, issue 54, column G. The reviewer’s reference to “Madmoiselle” Morlacchi points to the fact that, although predominately Italian, dancers in the ballet-spectacles were typically billed as “French” to cater to an emergent bourgeois class who saw Paris as the apex of cultural refinement, see Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 6. [22] Qtd. in Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 50. [23] Qtd. in Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage , 64. [24] Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 128. Also see Hall, Performing the American Frontier , 12-14; Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage , 16, 64. [25] “The Scouts of the Prairie” (Niblo’s Garden, New York City), BBHC Ledger, n.d n.p. [26] BBHC Ledger, no title, n.d., n.p. Reviews note that, while the packed houses at The Scouts of the Prairie were predominantly male, the audience was a mixture of upper and lower class patrons. See also “From the Prairie: Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack and Ned Buntline at the Academy of Music,” which describes how “men seemed to be arranged in close layers from the orchestra railing clear away up to the remotest corners of the gallery.” BBHC, n.d., n.p. My account of Morlacchi’s dancing in the play draws on the account of her biographer Barbara Barker, who describes that Morlacchi’s choreographic style adhered to the pantomimic, dramatic style of the ballet d’action tradition in which she was trained. [27] The dime novel industry included story papers, dime novels, and pamphlets like the cheap library. Michael Denning states that the continuities and repetitions between these formats justifies embracing them all under the term “dime novels,” which also distinguishes this genre from publications aimed at a middle-class readership. I am following his usage of the term. See Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 10-12. On the composition of the dime novel audience, see Denning, Mechanic Accents 27-30, and also Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1990), 328. [28] Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 82-83. This is not to say that Dove Eye did not have antecedents in Buntline’s novels, which invites further research. [29] Buntline’s first frontier story was Stella Delorme; of The Comanche’s Dream: A Wild and Fanciful Story of Savage Chivalry , which launched a series of Western dime novels. Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 82. Buntline’s oeuvre also included international adventure romances, Naval stories, and urban melodramas. For a well-developed examination of Buntline’s career, see Chapter 5 of Peter Buckley, To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820-1860 . (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984). [30] Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic , 196. [31] Buntline switched party affiliations often, but was a committed member of the nativist cause from at least 1848 to the late 1850s, a member of the Order of United Americans and their offspring, the Know-Nothing Party. He also played a leading role in the American Committee, which helped instigate the 1849 Astor Place theatre riot, an event directly related to the class oppositions grafted onto the growing division between “high” and “low” culture. Later, as a celebrity author, Buntline was recruited to campaign for the Republican Party in 1876, 1880, and 1884. Splitting with the Republican Party in 1884, when he refused to support candidate James G. Blaine, he announced himself as an Independent Republican, and then fell out of favor with the Party for his earlier affiliation with the Know-Nothings. See Jay Monaghan, The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1952), 162-181, 192-217, 264, 272, 279-80. While it goes beyond the scope of my analysis of Morlacchi’s role in The Scouts of the Prairie , it also bears mention that Buntline’s nativist politics are also evident in the fact that, although the Indians in the play bear the brunt of the punishment, the real villains are the Mormon and immigrant renegades who mastermind the Indian attacks on the scouts. For a fuller account of mid-nineteenth century Republicanism than I can provide here, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); on nativism, see Dale T. Knobel, America for the Americans: the Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne, 1996). [32] Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 143. [33] For instance, the working-class heroine is threatened by the wealthy foreigner who pursues her that he will have her reputation ruined like Clara Norris (an actress of the day) “or any other of the stock company of the theatre of vice in the city.” Elsewhere, the theatre stands as a metaphor for the dark side of the city: the domain of the city prostitute is referred to as “the theatre of nightly infamy.” Ned Buntline, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: a story of real life (New York, 1848), 159, 9. Electronic version available by Sabin Americana . Gale, Cengage Learning, http://galenet.galegroup.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/servlet/Sabin?af=RN&ae=CY103135748&srchtp=a&ste=14, (accessed 15 August 2013). [34] Ned Buntline, Rose Seymour, or The Ballet Girl’s Revenge, a tale of the New-York Drama (New York: Hilton, 1865). [35] Ibid., 29. [36] Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 3. [37] Christopher Martin, “Naked Females and Splay-Footed Sprawlers: Ballerinas on the Stage in Jacksonian America,” Theatre Survey 51, no. 1 (May 2010): 95-114. [38] Qtd. in ibid., 100. [39] Christian Register , 8 December 1827, 6, 49. [40] “The Ballet-Girls of Paris,” Brooklyn Eagle , 22 February 1870, 6. [41] “Foreign Correspondence,” Brooklyn Eagle , 9 January 1858, 2. [42] “The Ballet-Girls of Paris,” 6. [43] Qtd. in George Freedley, “The Black Crook and the White Fawn,” in Chronicles of the American Dance: From the Shakers to Martha Graham , ed. Paul Magriel (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), 77, 70. [44] Junius Henry Browne, “The Ballet as a Social Evil,” Northern Monthly , II (2 April 1868). Qtd. in Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 18. [45] “The Social Morality of the Day,” The Brooklyn Eagle , 8 June 1871, 1. Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online, http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/Default/Skins/BEagle/Client.asp?Skin=Beagle (accessed 14 November 2012). [46] William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 3. [47] George Ellington, The Women of New York: Or, the Under-World of the Great City: Illustrating the Life of Women of Fashion, Women of Pleasure, Actresses and Ballet Girls, Etc. (New York: New York Book Co., 1869), 117. [48] Ibid., 24. [49] On the construction of social spaces, including theatres, for the growing middle-class, see Mona Domosh, “The Women of New York: A Fashionable Moral Geography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, no. 5 (2001): 577-579. On the way in which the rise of the ballet-spectacle intertwined with and helped promote the dominance of business-class theatrical production in the post-Civil War years, see Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 231-257 (especially 242-243 on ballet-spectacles, or “musical extravaganzas”). [50] Stuart M. Blumin, “Explaining the New Metropolis: Perception, Depiction, and Analysis in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York City,” Journal of Urban History 11 (November 1984): 11. See Blumin, “Explaining the New Metropolis,” 35, for the sales of these books, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands. As Blumin noted in 1984, the postwar urban nonfiction is an understudied genre; I found little additional scholarship on this literature, with the exception of Mona Domosh’s “The Women of New York: A Fashionable Moral Geography.” Drawing on Blumin’s work, Denning notes that the relationship between these nonfictional urban exposés and mysteries-of-the-city novels is evidenced in the fact that some authors attempted to work in both genres; Denning, 228, no.8. [51] Domosh, “The Women of New York,” 575. [52] Ellington, The Women of New York , 90. [53] Domosh, “The Women of New York,”586. [54] Ellington, 121. [55] Ibid., 515. [56] Marie Louise Hankins, Women of New York (New York: M.L. Hankins & Co., 1861), 157-58. [57] Ellington, 514. [58] See, for example, “The Ballet Dancer,” Brooklyn Eagle , 20 August 1853, 1. [59] Ellington, 513, 511. [60] Ibid., 117, 119. [61] Hankins, Women of New York , 159-160. [62] Peter Buckley, To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820-1860 . (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984), 442-443. Buckley’s subject is the character of the prostitute in Ned Buntline’s 1848 The Mysteries and Miseries of New York . [63] Saxton, Rise and Fall , 330. Arguing that dime-novel thematic material often supported Republican party ideology, and that the industry maintained close ties to that party, Saxton places the western hero in popular fiction after 1850 within the lineage of the earlier “Free Soil hero,” who “by transcending the limits of region and class, could bid for national spokesmanship” (187). See Saxton, 183-203; 321-347. [64] Alexander Saxton, “Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press,” American Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 229-230. [65] Alexander Saxton, “The Racial Trajectory of the Western Hero,” Amerasia 11, no. 2 (1984): 70. Saxton locates one source of the western hero in Jacksonian democracy, in which class divisions and upper-class dominance were broken down through appeals to egalitarian ideals within white civilization and racial hostility against enemies outside of it; see 68-70. Also Saxton, Rise and Fall , 183-201. [66] On the Free Soil hero, see Saxton, Rise and Fall , 195ff; on the western hero as the inheritor of those values, see 321-344. [67] Saxton, Rise and Fall , 337-338. [68] Matthew Frye Jacobson has documented that, with swelling immigration in the nineteenth century, “white” became no longer a singular, monolithic category, but rather plural, subject to shades and variations. Celtic, German, and Italian immigrants in particular were perceived as “savage,” or racially in-between, and thus unfit for citizenship. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Some criticism of the Italian dancers who brought ballet to American shores suggests that they were at times viewed through such racialist lenses, not readily seen as “white” in the public eye. For instance, in her role as Dove Eye, Morlacchi was referred to as the scouts’ “dusky-faced friend” (“The Scouts of the Prairie: A Lively Representation of Border Life” [Utica]), and as “tawny but not tawdry” [“Academy of Music” (Indianapolis), BBHC Ledger, n.d., n.p.]. And when a Omaha reviewer described Morlacchi as “a mulatto dancer,” Cody shot back that such a claim was “simply contemptible ,” and corrected that “[her] skin is as white, and blood as pure as your own—if not purer” (qtd. in Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage , 26). The racialist conflicts associated with Italian ballerinas in the nineteenth-century US warrant greater exploration. [69] I explore the historiographic problems associated with this research more fully in Andrea Harris, “The Phantom Dancer, or, the Case of the Mysterious Toe Shoe in the Frontier Prop Closet,” in “A Tyranny of Documents: The Performing Arts Historian as Film Noir Detective,” ed. Stephen Johnson, special issue, Performing Arts Resources 28 (2011): 151-59. Footnotes About The Author(s) ANDREA HARRIS is assistant professor of dance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her current book, Making Ballet American , is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Her essays have appeared in Dance Chronicle , Interrogating America Through Theatre and Performance , Discourses in Dance , and Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange , and she is the editor of Before, Between, and Beyond , the most recent collection of dance historian Sally Banes’s works. Dr. Harris has also taught at Texas Christian University, the University of Oklahoma, and the Universidad de las Américas. Her performance credits include the Martha Graham Dance Company and Li Chiao-Ping Dance. 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: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee 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 Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Caitlin A.Kane Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Caitlin A.Kane By Published on May 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF Leigh Fondakowski (they/she) has dedicated nearly 25 years to creating theatre from narrative interviews and archival research. In works including The Laramie Project, The People’s Temple, I Think I Like Girls, and Spill, Fondakowski uses the words of real people to create nuanced portraits of communities in crisis and to illuminate difficult moments in U.S. history. In 2018, they were commissioned to craft a podcast about women’s liberation in honor of the 19th Amendment centennial. That commission led to Feminist Files , [i] an audio theatre series about the “nerdy revolutionaries” (including Dr. Bernice “Bunny” Sandler, Pauli Murray, Edith Green, and Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink) who started the “academic sex revolution” by clandestinely passing the legislation that we now know as Title IX. Although the commission for that work came before the pandemic began, Fondakowski’s research and creative process were undeniably affected and constrained by pandemic-era shutdowns and by rising awareness of the need for more accessible approaches to producing and presenting theatre. In this conversation, conducted via Zoom in November 2022, Fondakowski and I discuss how these forces shaped their development of a hybrid podcast-theatre form that blends Fondakowski’s first-person narrative, recorded interviews with relatives of those who led the fight for gender equity in academia, and performances of edited archival materials. Podcasts and other audio forms, we both agree, have great potential for theatre artists interested in exploring experimental and unconventional dramatic forms and for creating more accessible theatrical works. Caitlin Kane: Can you describe Feminist Files for those who have not yet heard it? Leigh Fondakowski: Feminist Files is a ten-part narrative audio series that tells the secret origin story of Title IX. It covers the years of 1969-1976, tracing how this group of women in Washington went behind the scenes to create legislation that has had an amazing impact. CK: In the series, you describe those women as “nerdy revolutionaries,” and it is such an apt descriptor. LF: Right, there are a lot of cliches about women’s libbers from that period: bra-burning, protests in the streets, all that kind of stuff. That did happen. The radical lesbians were really at the forefront, but the women [whose stories we tell in the series] were not doing that. These were women who were focused on legislative change. The thing that I love about the [timing of this project] – it’s tragic in a way – but Feminist Files was released on the 50th anniversary of Title IX in June [2022], and the day after that, Roe was overturned. So, in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX pass, and in 1973, Roe is instated. Half a century later, Title IX is the last one standing. It is incredible in terms of the arc of history. CK: It makes the series even more urgent at this moment. There is a lot that we can learn about the legislative side of activism from the women whose stories you tell. LF: Right. I think my biggest discovery was realizing the intricacies and the convergence of different people’s work that went into [passing Title IX]. I never really thought about how the sausage gets made. CK: How did you become interested in the stories of this group of feminist activists and the history of Title IX? LF: The project has a bit of a history. I was approached by this media company called Frequency Machine – a young startup co-founded by two women. They wanted to do something for the centennial of the 19th Amendment, so they approached me with this outline they had created for a women’s series, right? I wish I could show you this document. Each episode was an epic chunk of women’s liberation from 1910 to the present. So, I was like, I’ll take this, and I’ll see what I can find. I knew Title IX could be one of the episodes, so I sat down to talk with Rora [Brodwin, another playwright who had previously written a solo show about her Great-Aunt Bunny Sandler, the “godmother of Title IX”], and I realized the series could tell Rora’s story and the story of Title IX. Then, I went to the Schlesinger Library and was convinced that it could be the whole series because I found all this material there. There was so much material, and there were so many parts to the story that I was discovering. So, I went back to [Frequency Machine], and I pitched it. The producers had a background in reality television, so we had to learn how to talk to one another, how to find a common language. I had to learn to speak in TV dramatic logic, which I’m still learning. It took a lot to convince them that there would be enough drama in it because this is not true crime, you know. I told them, “We’re gonna use oral history, but we’re gonna have an actor perform it.” And they were like, “Why are we gonna have an actor perform it? Can’t we just use the real audio of it?” But Bunny Sandler isn’t an actor, so the real audio doesn’t quite have that dramatic energy. I said, “I’m gonna adapt it to my style.” It was a long process of me convincing them this could be dramatic enough, which it turns out it absolutely is. In the end, I think maybe [the producers] were beaten down by my endlessly returning to this pitch! They also gave me the freedom to create something they didn’t entirely understand at first, which is a rare opportunity as an artist, to be trusted in that way. So, the origin story of it was that it was supposed to be this gigantic women’s history. From a hundred years of women’s history, I homed in on Title IX. CK: The audio theatre form that you developed for this project blends the dramatic forms that you use in your interview- and archival-based plays with a more conventional podcast structure. Can you describe how this developmental process built on the processes that you’ve used in the theatre? LF: What’s interesting about it for me as a writer is I really hear text musically when I’m playwriting, both when there’s pre-existing text and when I’m making the text up. In a way, it was like a long rehearsal process. I could live with these recordings and edit from these recordings. Instead of saying to the actor, “Cut that line” or “change this around,” I could just do that with their voice. It did give me the thought that, in the future, when I’m playwriting from big source material again, I’ll have actors record the read-throughs of the whole play so that I have that audio and can play with that audio as I’m playwriting. This form also frees you from having to worry about bodies and space. You create an image world for each episode –you can really focus on voices and story. CK: What do you see as the possibilities for this form looking forward? LF: I think that it’s an underexplored form. I mean, it’s interesting to see what’s happening in the theatre, right? Audible is putting plays on tape… LA Theater Works has been doing it forever, but I think people are more open to audio now, and Hollywood has jumped on the bandwagon because it’s a proof of concept, right? They don’t have to invest in developing a TV series. It can be a podcast first, and then, they can decide they want to make it into a TV series. But there are also people who – instead of selling their intellectual property to someone in Hollywood – they are making an audio version where they have more control and can play with form. It has been called the Wild West because it doesn’t have a lot of rules. SAG and Equity don’t know what to do with it. It’s not governed by any of that stuff, so people are still just exploring. I think it’s a truly experimental landscape right now. It’s also just a different form, right? When [the producers] were giving me notes, they were saying that I needed to imagine someone doing their laundry, being on the treadmill, or cleaning their house. So, we’ve lowered the artistic bar, but it’s also universal. Everybody can access it. It’s not expensive, so in terms of what you were saying earlier– CK: In terms of what the COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated for us as theatre-makers– LF: Right, we still have an issue in the theatre of affordability and accessibility: how much money is spent to make the thing, who gets to watch it, and who are the gatekeepers. In this podcast world, you still have some constraints, but anybody can make a podcast, and most people can access it. CK: You are somewhat present in your theatrical work as an interviewer or narrator figure, but in Feminist Files, you play a much more substantive role. What was it like to be that present as the host and narrator of this series? How did it feel to put yourself into the work in that way? LF: I’ve always resisted that, but in this form, it felt like an inevitability because I’m the one finding this stuff, and I’m trying to recreate this experience for the listener of going on this journey [as a researcher]. Before I found the oral history transcript [in Bunny Sandler’s files at the Schlesinger Library], Rora [Brodwin] had already told me most of Bunny’s history and her own story of sexual assault, including her going into the Title IX office that her great-aunt had created and not being able to tell her great-aunt about that experience. So, that was a narrative arc, right? Then, some of the most moving experiences for me were finding Pauli [Murray’s] journal, realizing that I was working beneath her portrait [in the archive], and Rora introducing me to her as a figure in history. I thought Rora was going to be able to thread all those other elements in. I spent an unbelievable number of hours putting [Rora and Bunny’s] voices together, so they were telling the story together. I thought it was just gonna be the two of them talking to each other because they couldn’t talk to each other in real life anymore, but there was too much that needed to be filled in. I needed to talk people through and give context. I would also say that Sarah Lambert [my co-producer] had a lot to do with it because she is the standard bearer for artistic integrity. So, when Sarah was encouraging me to put myself forward, I knew I had to pay attention. She had never said that in any other process. And, of course, Sarah fact-checked everything to within an inch of its life, so I always felt confident in everything we were saying, you know? And then I had to learn how to direct myself narrating, which was a process. CK: Right – I can imagine how different that felt from working in a theatre with actors, particularly amidst the pandemic. Can you describe your directorial process? How did you do the recordings? Was the whole process done via Zoom? LF: Yeah, [the actors] would set up recording studios, most of the time in their closets, and then they would record, and I would direct via Zoom, but I didn’t have a live feed to the recording because they were sent these kits with SIM cards, so it was nerve-wracking. I could hear how they were sounding over Zoom, and I could hear when they messed up a line, but I couldn’t hear the quality of the recording until they sent us the files, so some of the editing was based on the takes and how they sounded. It was a very different process than when you’re building work in a room with actors. CK: Did you do all the editing yourself, or did you do a rough edit and then have audio engineers who cleaned things up? LF: I did all the editing. I’m trying to think of how many passes on average, but we did a pass, and then, [the producers] would give notes, and then, we’d do another pass, and they would give notes. As it came more into form, they had more and more to say about it. In the beginning, they didn’t know what it was going to be, so they didn’t have much to say, but as it began to take shape, they wanted to weigh in more and more. Then it went to the sound person, Gary [Grundei], and he would edit based on sound, which was such an important element. So, there were probably three to five editing passes for each episode. CK: You mentioned that the process of creating this felt like being in twelve straight weeks of tech. LF: It really did. After I would make the final layout of the words, it would go to an engineer who does a pause pass, which is like a pacing pass. Then, it went to Gary for sound design again, and it came back to me, and I would usually edit out large swaths of the text based on Gary’s work. CK: He does beautiful work, recreating the sounds of the archive for instance, which is both such a quiet space and a space that really comes alive in this podcast. Given how effective this form was in activating this period of feminist history and the capaciousness of the title, Feminist Files, I wonder if there is any plan for additional seasons or episodes? LF: I wanted to call it The Consequential Feminist. CK: What happened to that title? LF: That title never made it out of committee! CK: That’s too bad! LF: I know. I wanted it to be called The Consequential Feminist. I really fought for that title. I think that’s why you hear the term so often in the series. The producers were a bit wary of Feminist Files, too. They wanted to shorten it to be F Files. Because feminism is a “bad” word – people recoil and don’t want to pay attention to feminism. The producers were feminists themselves but having worked in Hollywood for as long as they had, and experienced the sexism and misogyny of the industry, they felt people would be afraid of the word. CK: That’s disheartening. Do you know what the response has been to the project, given the title you chose? LF: It has a steady following but not gigantic because they are a young startup without a big marketing budget. We’re hoping that we’ll be nominated for a GLAAD Award so it can gain some traction. It’s had a steady following, but I only know that from hearing from people that they’re listening to it and enjoying it. CK: If it gets a more robust response, do you think there will be other iterations of the project? LF: That was the idea. The idea was that it could be anthologized, that we’d go back to the archives. I don’t think they’re gonna let me do it, but the story that I want to do next is one I came across accidentally in my research. Somebody left in the scanner a membership card for women in the KKK. It was just sitting there, and Teddy [one of the archivists] said, “Oh, they’ve left this in here.” We were both looking at it and looking at each other, and she said, “Yep, that archive is here.” I mean, that’s a whole different story. We tend to think of the history of mobilization on the left, but I don’t think we think of the history of mobilization on the right. CK: It would be a hard story to sit with for a long time, and you’d have to find an entry point for yourself and audiences, to help them find their way into that story and recognize it as part of our history that we need to grapple with. This project centers on a more uplifting narrative, but it was crafted at a difficult time. You began researching Feminist Files before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the recording and editing of the project was completed in 2020. What was it like to be working on it in the early months of the pandemic? LF: Well, as you know, it was a very scary and isolating time. Once we figured out the mechanics of how to send people the [recording] kits, and I started directing those recordings, though, it was like, “Oh, I’m back in my world.” Being able to spend those hours with Mercedes [Hererro], who is a longtime collaborator of mine, getting to be in the room with Ronald Peet, having conversations with Margo Hall about Black Lives Matter and her life – it was like air in a world without air, you know? And in the end, the producers and I did find a common language and we became strong collaborators, we trusted each other. They were able to get Jodie Foster on board to play Bunny, which shows how much they believed in this project. Getting to work with Jodie [Foster], with that high calibre of an actor… I got off that Zoom call, and I was dancing around the living room. It was lifesaving to have something big to focus on and to be able to connect artistically with people to create it. As a director, working with actors is the whole game, right? Without having that contact, you can think about the projects you want to make and read plays and do other things, but that engagement is where the creative flow really happens. [At the beginning of the pandemic], it felt like that was gone, and it would never be back. But then, it was right there. I could connect with these actors. It was amazing. The decision to have them break character from time to time to have conversations with me was me trying to capture that feeling of creating something together. We’re discovering something together. We’re in community, which is how the women in the story were also in community. I was trying to mirror that. It was a gift. References [i] Fondakowski, Leigh. Feminist Files. Accessed November 10, 2022. https://feminist-files.sounder.fm . Footnotes About The Author(s) CAITLIN KANE (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Dramatic Criticism at Kent State University and a freelance dramaturg, director, and intimacy director. Their research and creative practice sit at the intersection of theatre and social change and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies and center on queer and feminist approaches to staging history. 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 Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Khalid Y. Long Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Khalid Y. Long By Published on April 27, 2021 Download Article as PDF Glenda Dickerson (1945-2012) is often recognized as a pioneering Black woman theatre director. [1] A more expansive view of her career, however, would highlight Dickerson’s important role as a playwright, an adaptor/deviser, a teacher, and as this essay will illustrate, a progenitor of feminist theatre and performance theory. This essay offers a brief rumination on how Dickerson made a Black feminist intervention into feminist theatre and performance theory as she became one of the earliest voices to intercede and ensure that Black women had a seat at the table. [2] Glenda Dickerson’s intervention into feminist theatre and performance theory appears in her critical writings. Accordingly, these essays illustrate her engagement with Black feminist thought and elucidate how she modeled a feminist theatre theory through her creative works. Dickerson, along with other pioneering feminist theatre artists, “reshaped the modern dramatic/theatrical canon, and signaled its difference from mainstream (male) theatre.” [3] Dickerson’s select body of essays prompted white feminist theorists and practitioners to be cognizant of race and class as well as gender in their work and scholarship. [4] Moreover, Dickerson’s writings serve a dual function for readers: first, they offer an entryway into her life and creative process as a Black feminist artist. Secondly, they detail her subjective experiences as a Black woman within the professional worlds of theatre and academia. Feminist Theatre Theory: A Brief Overview of Inclusion and Exclusion Emerging as both an analytical tool as well as a methodology, feminism has been one of the foremost theoretical apparatuses to shape the field of theatre especially as it has called scholars’ attention to the dynamics of gender and sexuality. The scholars and critics, such as those mentioned below, who have contributed to founding and shaping a feminist theatre theory are diverse in their historical ideas, cultural approaches, and theoretical foregrounding. While there is no singular definition or description of feminist theatre theory to encapsulate such a wide-ranging array of positions, a brief overview of the legacies of some of the most significant contributors may help to situate Dickerson’s contribution to the field. Some of the foundational voices to assist in establishing feminism as an area of study within theatre/drama and English programs during the early part of the 1980s include Dinah Louise Leavitt, Helen Krich Chinoy, Linda Walsh Jenkins, and Helene Keyssar. As Elaine Aston notes, their texts had an impact on the field of theatre studies, however, they focused mainly on the playwrights and theatre practitioners who came to prominence during the 1970s. Aston maintains, “Studies of this kind were instrumental in making feminist and/or women’s theatre work visible but, to develop this, what was needed […] was a more fully rehearsed critical response critical frameworks appropriate for feminist analysis and ‘looking’.” [5] The scholars to heed Aston’s call were Sue-Ellen Case, Jill Dolan and Lynda Hart, among others. In Theatre & Feminism, Kim Solga provides a summary of the ground-breaking studies, including the works of Case, Dolan, and Hart, arguing that their scholarship indelibly changed the field of theatre studies and theatre practice by forging a relationship between feminist theory and theatre/performance. Solga singles out the year between 1988 and 1989 as “a watershed for feminist performance theory and criticism.” [6] The year witnessed the publication of some of feminist theatre’s major works: Sue-Ellen Case’s Feminism and Theatre , Jill Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic, and Lynda Hart’s edited collection, Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre . As this quick survey suggests, scholars, critics, and practitioners sustained a commitment to deconstructing the landscape of male privilege that positioned women on the margins or, in many cases, excluded them entirely from the histories of theatre and performance. Even though feminist theatre theory advanced theatre studies and practice, most of the earlier scholars and critics to develop a feminist theatre theory were predominantly white women concerned with gender , rather than race as a determining factor. And even though theatre scholar Sandra L. Richards pressed the issue back in 1991, declaring that it was “time that white women and men began to participate in the project of bringing more black women’s writing and theatre work to critical attention,” [7] the concerted efforts of white feminists still marginalized the lived experiences of Black women and other women of color. Within early theoretical studies of feminist theatre, the inclusion of women of color seemed an afterthought. A Return to 1987 Dickerson’s first significant contribution to the burgeoning field of feminist theatre and performance theory appeared in 1987—predating Solga’s “watershed” moment for feminist scholars and artists. During the 1987 pre-conference of the Women and Theatre Program, a focus group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Dickerson delivered her groundbreaking speech, “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre.” [8] With this speech, Dickerson infused a Black woman’s voice into the field of theatre and performance while simultaneously theorizing a Black woman’s subjectivity. Dickerson made her speech the same year that pioneering Black feminist scholar Barbara Christian wrote her pivotal essay, “The Race for Theory,” in which she suggests that we “read the works of our writers in our various ways and remain open to the intricacies of the intersection of language, class, race, and gender in the literature.” [9] Just as Christian called for a new way to nuance Black women’s cultural productions (i.e., fiction, poetry, novels, etc.), Dickerson led the charge in theatre to reverse what she identified as Black women being “triply locked out: by class, by race, and history.” [10] Dickerson’s and Christians’ declarations underscores their engagement with the theory of intersectionality (foreshadowing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of the term in 1989). Dickerson’s concern with the “silenced voice of the woman of color” [11] fueled her mission to reclaim and re-center Black women’s voices and image through performance so that they no longer had to “depend on an often-distorted illustration.” [12] Throughout “The Cult of True Womanhood,” Dickerson also evokes the names of early “race women” [13] such as Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as more contemporary writers, cultural critics, and activists such as Lucille Clifton, Mary Helen Washington, Eleanor Traylor, and Winnie Mandela. Dickerson’s essay draws on Black feminist theory and literary criticism. As Lisa Anderson notes in Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama (2008) and La Donna Forsgren discusses in In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatist of the Black Arts Movement (2018), Black feminist theory and literary criticism helped to propel a new critical language that, in turn, formulated a method to read and analyze Black feminist aesthetics within a plethora of literary and artistic mediums and genres. Dickerson’s “The Cult of True Womanhood” essay also invokes the concept of “womanism.” She writes, “I went searching with Alice Walker for ‘our mothers’ gardens.’ That’s when I became a womanist. So, naturally I had to incorporate her salty definition. . .” [14] Womanism encompasses the concept of being “Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. […] Traditionally universalist…” [15] Theatre scholar Freda Scott Giles writes about Dickerson’s manifestation of womanism within her works: “Some feminists have given the impression that much of the feminist movement is fixated on the victimization of women; womanism resists that notion. The big picture is liberty and justice for all. The goal of freeing society from racism, classism, and sexism is mutually exclusive.” [16] A number of revolutionary Black feminist and womanist writers including Gloria I. Joseph and Audre Lorde have asserted that Black feminism, as well as womanism, offers a globally-inclusive framework. As early as 1979, Lorde called for feminist-activists (regardless of gender identity) to overthrow the ideologies that have contributed to racist, classist, and sexist attitudes and practices both in the United States and abroad. For example, in her essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde contends that feminist theory is not complete “without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.” [17] Lorde’s theoretical manifesto calls for a liberatory praxis unequivocally focused on the absence of Black women, poor women, queer women, and third world women’s experiences, among others, from larger feminist discourses. Like Lorde, Dickerson also takes a global perspective with her work. In “The Cult of True Womanhood” she writes: When you start reading ancient myths and womanist literature and traveling to countries where the people look like you, you gain a so-called global perspective. Not only is the language of oppression the same the world over; the anguish of women is echoed around the world and resonates from continent to continent. The torture of mothers who lose their daughters to rape, war, drugs, poverty; the suffering of women who are tortured and die in Latin American prisons; the untimely death of young women who are killed by drunk drivers or yuppie lovers in New York’s Central Park and then twice victimized by the courts and press: these women are sisters in suffering, fixed on the fangs of the two-headed serpent. Their silenced voices, their stilled tongues are symbolized for me in the illegal banning of South Africa’s Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, whom the people call “Mother of the Nation.”[18] Seen in this light, Dickerson’s artistic mantra mirrors Lorde’s manifesto as she strove to create a theatre that materializes what Lorde considers “differences” among women’s lived experiences. This appears most clearly in Dickerson’s final artistic work, The Kitchen Prayer Series, a trilogy of performances inspired by the tragic events of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. Centered around the question, “What is it like for women all around the world to live with war and terror daily?” Dickerson’s triptych interrogates how women from across the globe, navigate a world where war and terror are quotidian experiences. Several white feminist scholars have recognized Dickerson’s contribution to the developing field of feminist theatre studies. [19] For example, in the introduction to Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre Sue-Ellen Case writes about Dickerson’s essay, “The Cult of True Womanhood”: Dickerson amplifies the audacity of that voice and its strength within a critique of the form of the drama – its predilection for heroes – particularly heroes of a certain gender and class. From the pleasures of those audacious roots, Dickerson creates a theatre, as a director, and a theory of the theatre, as a feminist theorist. Dickerson’s move illustrates one way in which the social movement and the feminist theorist/theatre practitioner traverse a common terrain – the pleasure of a historical moment, a material condition moving with the gestures of the stage and the dynamics of performative forms.[20] Interestingly, Case does not explicitly name race as a factor within Dickerson’s theoretical framework. Instead, she focuses on gender and class. However, by calling out the “historical moment, a material condition,” as a “common terrain” Dickerson negotiates, Case makes the point that Dickerson’s theory, as well as her theatre are formulated through materialist feminism which aims to critique the “conditions of class, race, and gender oppression, and demands the radical transformation of social structures.” [21] Additionally, Case makes an important observation by calling attention to Dickerson’s role as an innovative feminist performance maker. As Dickerson laments, “Gone was the pompous director’s gaze, absent the royal director’s chair.” [22] Renouncing a longing to sit among the “ranks of directors,” Glenda Dickerson declared herself a “PraiseSinger.” “A true PraiseSinger,” Dickerson explains, is a guardian of the archetypes of her culture’s collective unconscious. Her function is not to invent but to rediscover and to animate. From this day forth, I will be concerned not with acts, and scenes and curtains; but with redemption, retrieval, and reclamation. The chair in which I sit will no longer be called the director’s chair, but the blood-bought mercy seat. From that seat, my work will be a mission, my goal will be a miracle.[23] With Dickerson denouncing the patriarchal throne of the director in her pioneering essay, she emerges as one of the earliest women theatre artists to use a Black feminist lens to reconsider the position of the director and their function. Final Thoughts I hope that this essay will shed light on Dickerson’s role as an audacious critical theorist and excavate her from the hidden cracks of (theatre) history. A closer look at her other essays – written at various periods throughout her career – would further illustrate her deepening commitment to Black feminist theatre as well as Black feminist epistemology. As both her critical writings as well as her creative works demonstrate, Dickerson challenged conventional modes of theatre making while also using theatre as a platform to bring marginalized, silenced, and forgotten people center stage. Dickerson’s scholarly and artistic works offer a model for those looking to subvert the dominant paradigms. References [1] When Dickerson is referenced in studies that address African American theatre or Black women in theatre such as Errol Hill and James V. Hatch’s A History of African American Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003) or Anthony Hill and Douglas Q. Barnett’s Historical Dictionary of African American Theatre (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), it is usually a small survey of her work as a director. Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow’s reference book, American Women Directors of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008) also provides a broad survey of Dickerson’s work in the theatre that is premised on interviews Fliotsos conducted with Dickerson. [2] My larger project in progress offers a richer exploration of Dickerson’s career, from her start as a student of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s to her final creative project The Kitchen Prayer Series before her untimely death in 2012. [3] Elaine Aston, An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1995), 57. [4] Dickerson’s essays include: “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre” which was first published in Theatre Journal (vol. 40, no. 2, 1988) and republished in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre edited by Sue-Ellen Case (New York: Methuen, 1988); “Wearing Red: When a Rowdy Band of Charismatics Learned to Say ‘NO!’” in Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as if Gender and Race Matter , edited by Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); “Rode a Railroad that Had No Track” in A Sourcebook of African-American Performances edited by Annemarie Bean (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); and “Festivities and Jubilations on the Graves of the Dead: Sanctifying Sullied Space” in Performance and Cultural Politics , edited by Elin Diamond (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). [5] Elaine Aston, “Foreword,” in Feminism and Theatre , ed. Sue-Ellen Case (New York: Methuen, 2014), ix -x. [6] Kim Solga, Theatre & Feminism (New York: Palgrave), 16. [7] Sandra L. Richards made this statement in a paper she delivered, “Women, Theatre, and Social Action,” at the ‘Breaking the Surface” conference/festival held in Calgary, November 13-17, 1991. I learned of Richards’ paper, and subsequently her quote, from Lizbeth Goodman’s book Contemporary Feminist Theatre: To Each Her Own (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) . [8] “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre” was later published in Theatre Journal in 1988 and in 1990 re-published in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre , edited by Sue-Ellen Case. I am utilizing the published version of Dickerson’s speech and will therefore refer to it as a written essay. [9] Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique , no.6 (1987): 53. [10] Glenda Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre , ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1990), 110. [11] Dickerson, “Cult of True Womanhood” 110. [12] Khalid Y. Long, “The Black Feminist Theatre of Glenda Dickerson,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance , ed. Kathy A. Perkins et al (New York: Routledge), 183. [13] In her book, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women , Black feminist studies scholar Brittney C. Cooper defines the phrase “race women” as “the first Black women intellectuals [and activist]. As they entered into public racial leadership roles beyond the church in the decades after reconstruction, they explicitly fashioned for themselves a public duty to serve their people through the diligent and careful intellectual work and attention to proving the intellectual character of the race” (11). [14] Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 115. [15] Alice Walker, In Search of Mother’s Garden: Womanist Prose , 1st ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi. [16] Freda Scott Giles, “Glenda Dickerson’s Nu Shu: Combining Feminist Discourse/Pedagogy/Theatre,” in Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook , ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge, 2007), 141. [17] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 111. Lorde’s essay was first delivered as a speech at a conference in 1979 honoring Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex , and later published in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (page missing?). The essay was republished in Lorde’s collection Sister Outsider . [18] Dickerson, “Cult of True Womanhood” 115. [19] Similar to Case, Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement, the editors of Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing as if Gender and Race Matter, consider Dickerson a “godmother,” noting that her “intellectual and artistic courage and generosity have given us permission to think past the limits of our own cultural identification as white women and to begin investigating the way Big Daddy crosses into communities of color,” 5. [20] Sue-Ellen Case, “Introduction,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1990), 4. [21] Aston, Feminism and Theatre , 9. [22] Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 118. [23] Ibid., 118. Footnotes About The Author(s) KHALID Y. LONG is an assistant professor of theatre and coordinator of theatre studies at Columbia College Chicago. Khalid has published essays in Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre and Performance as well as the Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance . His forthcoming scholarship includes essays in Theatre Design & Technology , TDR: The Drama Review , and Critical Essays on the Politics of Oscar Hammerstein II edited by Donald Gagnon. Khalid has also contributed essays to Black Masks , a long-established black theatre magazine. Khalid’s current book project is a critical study of Black feminist artist Glenda Dickerson. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Shelby Brewster 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 Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Shelby Brewster By Published on May 14, 2017 Download Article as PDF A new food cart appeared on Rivington Street in Manhattan in May 2015, serving up a brand-new confection. Living up to their reputation for pursuing the latest food trends with unbridled passion, here New York City residents encountered a new culinary delicacy: smog meringues. Using a combination of scientific techniques and culinary processes, chefs whipped up a number of egg meringues infused with sulfur, nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, and hydrocarbons, all air pollutants. Visitors could choose from three smog varieties; different combinations of chemicals replicating the air quality of several global cities, each meringue infused with the taste of Mexico City, Los Angeles, or Beijing. An installment of the ongoing performance piece Smog Tasting , this food cart is the invention of the artist think tank Center for Genomic Gastronomy. Since its founding in 2010 by artists Zach Denfeld and Catherine Kramer, the Center has worked internationally, creating lectures, performances, exhibitions, and publications. Each of their pieces is designed “to map food controversies, to prototype alternative culinary futures, to imagine a more just, biodiverse and beautiful food system.” [1] Casting themselves as “food phreakers,” Center artists are committed to open access, operating under the principle that food technology and culture should be open and available to all, not kept secret within scientific laboratories or corporate offices. I turn to the work of The Center for Genomic Gastronomy in order to examine how a politics for the Anthropocene, a practice of ecological thought and radical coexistence, might be approached through performance. Geologist Paul Crutzen suggested in 2000 that the weight of human action on Earth has been so massive that it has altered the geological record, necessitating the delineation of a new geological era. The essential definition of the Anthropocene, as indicated by its etymology, is the age of the human. However, as Jedediah Purdy rightly claims, “to define the Anthropocene is to emphasize what we think is most important” in the relationship between humans and nature. [2] Some have pushed back against a perceived universalization of the human within scientific discourses of the Anthropocene. For example, Christophe Bounneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue that depicting the Anthropocene as “the new epoch of humans, the age of man,” simplifies the diversity of humanity and glosses over the complex historical, social, and economic processes that compose and create ecological change. [3] In particular, Bounneuil and Fressoz point to the sharp increase in income inequality and take so-called anthropocenologists to task for not adequately including discussions of wealth disparity in their analyses. [4] Others, such as Donna Haraway and Jason W. Moore, have favored the term “Capitalocene” over Anthropocene as a mechanism to foreground the contributions of capitalism to environmental change. [5] Although capitalism is inextricably bound up in the Anthropocene, Haraway and Moore’s formulation of the Capitalocene is not sufficient to address its effects. As Dipesh Chakrabarty eloquently demonstrates, any critique of the Anthropocene that solely addresses global capitalism remains lacking: “these critiques do not give us an adequate hold on human history once we accept that the crisis of climate change is here with us and may exist as part of this planet for much longer than capitalism or long after capitalism has undergone many more historic mutations.” [6] A history of the Anthropocene must also take the long view of deep history and consider humans as a species. The challenge of such a history, as Chakrabarty explains, entails holding together “intellectual formations that are somewhat in tension with each other: the planetary and the global; deep and recorded histories; species thinking and critiques of capital.” [7] A politics for the Anthropocene, then, necessitates both a practice of critiquing capital while also pursuing species thinking. Recognizing the impact of manmade economic systems on the infinitely interconnected global ecological system, paired with an epistemological shift that reconceives humans as species, might begin to address the urgencies of the current ecological and historical moment. The exigencies of the Anthropocene demand not just a new political party plank or proposal. What we need, as Bruno Latour writes, is “the total transformation of what it means to do politics (so as to include nonhumans) and what it means to do science.” [8] But how might such a transformation be accomplished? What does this politics look like? Latour’s particular instantiation of politics involves taking the agency of nonhuman agents seriously, and allowing for their participation in the political process. Unsurprisingly, this is a difficult concept to imagine: how can entities as dissimilar (and nonhuman) as Artic foxes, the Pacific Ocean, and electrical grids equally participate in a political process? While I do not profess to have an answer to this dilemma, Latour’s focus on composition can also provide a useful beginning place for imagining a new politics for the Anthropocene. In Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy , Latour defines politics as “the entire set of tasks that allow the progressive composition of a common world.” [9] Under the threat of global warming, shrinking polar ice caps, and food and water scarcity, the common world, that shared by humans and nonhumans alike, must be collectively composed anew to ensure the continuation of life on the planet. This common world should take seriously the agency of nonhuman entities, not merely for their use value for human progress, but as deserving of surviving and thriving. In tandem with the recognition of the value of the nonhuman should be a reconceptualization of the position of humans within the global ecological system and the scale of deep history. This is what Chakrabarty calls species thinking. Thinking humanity as a species helps destabilize the long-held nature-culture divide. Casting Nature as pristine, green, and largely undisturbed by human intervention prior to the Industrial Revolution is neither productive nor accurate. As Purdy explains, “Because we shape everything, from the upper atmosphere to the deep seas, there is no more nature that stands apart from human beings. There is no place or living thing that we haven’t changed.” [10] Any politics for this new geological epoch will necessarily involve rethinking the place of humans within the global ecological system and the very meaning of nature. Throughout his work, Timothy Morton has argued for replacing nature with ecology, particularly because the idea of Nature as “a holistic, healthy, real thing” actually prevents environmental justice. He advocates for replacing Nature with ecology, with “radical coexistence.” [11] Ecological thought, then, means thinking through the sheer interconnectedness of the global ecological system—Morton refers to this as “the mesh.” [12] A practical politics for the Anthropocene must begin with the realization that humanity does not stand outside of the environment, but rather is a species woven into this mesh. As “a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings—animal, vegetable, or mineral,” thinking ecologically can begin the political project of balancing human flourishing with that of the planet as a whole. [13] The question of what non-anthropocentric environmental justice will look like in practice, and on the global scale which the crises of the Anthropocene necessitate, is only beginning to be explored. These Anthropocenic crises can be difficult to apprehend because of the scales of deep history and global ecology. For example, Morton calls global warming a “hyperobject,” something withdrawn from humans because of its massive space and time scales. Therefore, hyperobjects “exhibit their effects interobjectively ; that is, they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects.” [14] For example, I cannot feel global warming directly . I cannot touch it or taste it. But I can feel the unseasonably warm February temperatures recently recorded in Pennsylvania. Both thinking ecologically, a recognition of the interconnectedness of humans as a species within the global ecological mesh, and apprehending hyperobjects, entities with spacetime scales so massive that they cannot be directly encountered, can be achieved through art. Through their particular aesthetic characteristics, the performances created by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy enact ecological thought and reveal the hyperobject of climate change. By questioning contemporary capitalist consumption and gesturing toward radical coexistence, the performances I consider here point to a future in which humans, as individuals and as species, might inhabit the world differently in the Anthropocene. Specifically, the Center addresses the challenge of a politics for the Anthropocene through food. Simultaneously an individual and social practice, eating is one of the most evident ways in which human activity is wrapped up in global ecologies. We all have to eat. More than simply the relationship between food producers and consumers, as researchers Lisa Chase and Vern Grubinger have argued, global food systems involve a “much more complex and broad-reaching set of interactions that go far beyond the production, processing, and distribution of food to include the connection of food to the health of people and the environment.” [15] Particularly in the last 150 years, food systems have become increasingly industrialized. Food has become a commodity produced and controlled by a small number of corporate entities with a vested economic interest in marketing particular (often processed) foodstuffs to global markets. [16] The industrialization of food systems, coupled with the exponential growth of the human population, is a major cause of climate change. G. BeVier of the Gates Foundation reported in 2012 that global agriculture, including both crops and livestock, use approximately seventy percent of fresh water resources. [17] Livestock agriculture constitutes the single largest use of land on Earth, occupying “30% of the world’s ice-free surface, contributes 40% of global agricultural gross domestic product…all while using vast areas of rangelands, one-third of the freshwater, and one-third of global cropland as feed.” [18] At the same time, ecological change has contributed to food insecurity for some populations, particularly in the global south, as the effects of climate change result in the reduction of certain crops like wheat. [19] In spite of the very real agricultural impacts of climate change, environmentalist movements advocating for sustainability have proven unable to provoke large-scale political action. For Eduardo Mendieta, politics describes, “that which has to do with the creation of collective possibilities through deliberation, in which a collectivity addresses itself both as subject and object of its deliberations.” [20] The political is “about projecting and making possible collective or communal futures. The future is always the product of politics. But there is no future that is not projected from some actuality, some present.” [21] A politics for the Anthropocene, then, must apprehend the present to project a possible collectively composed future. Crucial first steps to this political project include recognition of the urgencies of global ecological change (global warming is real), consideration of nonhuman entities beyond their usefulness as resources for human activity, thinking ecologically, and taking the long view of deep history through species thinking. While they do not advocate a complete overhaul of current politics, the Center’s performances enact these first steps, showing us a glimpse of a politics for the Anthropocene through performance, a glimpse through a projection of the future from the present. Following Mendieta’s provocation, I will explore three of the Center for Genomic Gastronomy’s performances: De-extinction Deli (2013), Planetary Sculpture Supper Club (2011-3) , and Smog Tasting (2015) . These pieces both reveal the operations of current global food systems and imagine what future ones might look like. As what I term speculative performances, they call forth and embody possible ecological futures and alternative culinary presents. I take inspiration for this term from the genre of speculative fiction, most often popularized as science fiction or sf. As science fiction scholars have demonstrated, the critical capacity of speculative fiction lies in its ability to juxtapose the familiar and the strange. Darko Suvin, following Brecht, called this cognitive estrangement in his seminal 1979 work Metamorphoses of Science Fiction . Works of speculative fiction are “always already critical theory,” encapsulating both the realistic, or cognitive, and the marvelous, or estranging. [22] Gerald Alva Miller has argued that via cognitive estrangement, science fiction narratives create virtual spaces in which critical discourses are not only illuminated or explicated, but enacted and performed. [23] Science fiction critic L. Timmel Duchamp postulates that the significant distinction between works of narrative science fiction and philosophy is the process of “fleshing out the experiment,” making social, political, and scientific changes “personal, intimate, and emotionally authentic.” [24] If, as Duchamp argues, speculative narratives can flesh out critical discourse for readers, speculative performances, like those created by the Center, quite literally give critical discourse flesh. Through performance, the interactions and encounters of bodies in action, the Center gestures toward the critical futures of the Anthropocene, enacting a practice of species thinking and capitalist critique. By navigating the complexities of current food systems through performance, the Center for Genomic Gastronomy projects multiple possible futures through gastronomic interventions, asking participants what their place within those futures might be. Ultimately, through these performative imaginings, the beginnings of a more connected, more just, more thoughtful politics for the Anthropocene might emerge. “Yesterday’s Meat Tomorrow:” The De-extinction Deli A neat wooden market stand sporting a black and white striped bunting is the centerpiece of the Center’s performance De-extinction Deli (2013) and its second incarnation De-extinction Deli (To-Go) (2016). Reminiscent of a butcher’s counter or a food cart, the De-extinction Deli is “a fantastical market stand designed to highlight the emerging technologies, risks, and outcomes of the growing movement to revive, rear, and possibly eat, extinct species.” [25] Visitors to the stand have the opportunity to learn about and engage with the discourse of de-extinction in a number of ways. Center artists, co-founder Zack Denfeld clad in a butcher’s apron in particular, attend to the market stand and answer questions about this newly emerging scientific endeavor. Butcher paper take-aways featuring infographics and artistic renderings of extinct species also serve to inform visitors of various ongoing de-extinction efforts. The Deli also displays several glass vials of “Certified De-Extinct Habitat,” samples of the foodstuffs and botanical species necessary for several extinct species to survive. Visitors can cast their votes in a public poll consisting of three questions: Should humans revive extinct organisms? Would you eat a de-extinct organism? If so, which of tomorrow’s specials would you choose: Passenger Pigeon, Aurochs, or Pyrenean Ibex? The votes are publicly tallied on a chalkboard, and visitors receive a small button bearing the image of their preferred de-extinct culinary special to display on their lapels. The De-extinction Deli features a number of paper placemats explaining the various methods of de-extinction currently employed by scientists and the various species that they target in their efforts. These methods include the modification of existing species with genetic material from extinct species and the use of genetic material to breed clones of species that have more recently disappeared. The most popular de-extinction endeavor, spearheaded by Dr. George Church and the Harvard Woolly Mammoth Revival team, seeks to introduce particular genetic traits to Asian elephants to “revive” the extinct Woolly Mammoth and repopulate the Siberian tundra. In 2014, the team successfully spliced mammoth DNA into the genome of an Asian elephant, a significant step toward creating a mammoth embryo. Other de-extinction groups are working on so-called Revive and Restore projects under the auspices of The Long Now Foundation. Specific projects include The Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback, ongoing since 2012, and the Heath Hen Project, in progress since 2014. [26] Efforts such as these tout potential benefits for biodiversity and conservation by casting these particular animals as keystone species essential for the survival and/or restoration of their ecosystems. Praised as a particularly fashionable conservation effort, with its science fiction resonances, de-extinction is attractive. As ecologist Josh Donlan explains, de-extinction may be successful precisely because it has the support of “average citizens.” As many as fifty percent of Americans believe that scientists will bring back an extinct animal via cloning by 2050. [27] By focusing on “charismatic” species like the Woolly Mammoth or Passenger Pigeon, however, the de-extinction discipline seems to ignore the long history of extinction and the human actions that contributed to it in the first place. The growth of the human species at the beginning of the Holocene, about 12,000 years ago, coincided with the mass extinction of megafauna, including the Woolly Mammoth. While scientists remain divided on the exact role of human hunting practices in this extinction, some scholars have cited these events as the beginning of the Anthropocene itself. For example, in Extinction: A Radical History , Ashley Dawson argues that the extinction of megafauna marks the beginning of humanity’s significant alteration of the planet. Approximately 60,000 years ago, as the rapidly increasing human population spread across the globe’s landmass, facilitated by the invention of language, they hunted megafauna into extinction. [28] Of course, the Woolly Mammoth extinction predates the institution of global capitalism. However, rapid population and industrial growth has resulted in an increase in species extinctions. In 2014 the World Wildlife Fund announced that half of the planet’s animals had disappeared in the previous forty years. The same report found that to sustain the current rate of global consumption, one and a half Earths would be needed. Four planets are needed to match the U.S. rate of consumption. [29] De-extinction Deli, by advertising mammoth meat for future consumption, forces participants to consider the purpose of reviving extinct species or reinvigorating disappearing populations. I do not mean to suggest that Dr. Church intends his resurrected Woolly Mammoths to become the latest culinary trend. But by casting them as such, the Center prompts the question: if the social, cultural, and economic practices that lead to extinction persist, why revive and restore extinct species at all? Through speculative performance, the Center exposes these practices and opens up the rhetoric of de-extinction to critical interrogation by “average citizens” who are not necessarily part of the de-extinction discipline, but who are part of the global food system. The past, present, and future of human food systems collapse within this small market stand, as De-extinction Deli draws from the evolutionary past to envision a culinary future through contemporary practices of consumption. As yesterday’s meat, each of the species on offer once served as a food source, not just for humans but for other species. By advertising them as soon-to-be available for human consumption, this performance strikes at critiques of capitalism that de-extinction rhetoric ignores. Practices of consumption are intricately entwined with extinctions, one of the most visible consequences of massive ecological change. Precisely because they were yesterday’s meats, targeted for consumption by the human population, several of the species showcased at the De-extinction Deli were destroyed. Scientists behind the de-extinction movement, like Dr. George Church, while rightly advocating for the ecological importance of said species, do not address the potential impact of contemporary consumptive practices on any de-extinct species. By asking participants not only whether species should be de-extincted, but also if they would consume such an animal, the Center brings human culinary practices into the debate. One of the takeaways the Deli provides visitors is a butcher paper infographic depicting a Woolly Mammoth as a butcher’s chart, delineating the twenty-two different cuts of meat that could be taken from a single animal. Casting the present practice of butchering cattle onto the past species of the Woolly Mammoth, the Deli performs a possible culinary future in which once-extinct animals not only re-inhabit the Earth but also embody a new gustatory possibility. As “tomorrow’s special,” de-extinct species become analogous to products like Kobe beef: relatively rare, prohibitively expensive, and only available to those with the resources to pay for them. By asking participants to place an order one for the species and publicly display that order with a badge, the Center opens up space for critical examination of de-extinction rhetoric in light of human consumption. Moving the de-extinction discourse out of the realms of scientific possibility and conservation into niche gastronomic production foregrounds the contemporary consumptive capitalist impulse that continues to contribute to species extinction. Moreover, by professing their desire to consume a future de-extinct species, participants become implicated in the flow of capital intertwined with the Anthropocene. If scientists are successful in their efforts to undo thousands of years of human action that contributed to extinction, and the Woolly Mammoth, Aurochs, and Pyrenean Ibex reappear, “will they have a place on deli shelves?” [30] With the inclusion of samples of “Certified De-Extinct Habitat,” De-extinction Deli also prompts questions of the resources necessary to maintain possible populations of Mammoths and Aurochs. Will the future ecological system be able to support any de-extinct species, particularly in light of currently disappearing habitats that are a major cause of the current uptick in loss of animal species? Might market demand for these new culinary delicacies result in destruction of other species’ habitat, reminiscent of the domination of cattle production within the United States, a major contributor to a number of ecological challenges, including water scarcity and air pollution? In its future-oriented speculative form, the De-extinction Deli both educates participants and complicates the discourse of de-extinction by bringing in questions of capital, consumption, and consumers. The Deli made another appearance several years after its debut as De-extinction Deli (To Go) inside London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. All of the components of the original market stand remained, with the addition of another interactive piece. Visitors could choose to write and mail a postcard to researchers within the de-extinction field. The postcards featured images from the Deli’s butcher paper infographics and photographs of hypothetical dishes made with de-extinct species: the Passenger Pigeon accompanied by a banner reading “See why they went so fast the first time,” the Pyrean Ibex by “(B)Raising the Dead,” and the Heath Hen by “Revive and Reheat.” [31] Visitors checked a box indicating whether they believed we should not de-extinct these species, de-extinct, or de-extinct and eat them. Additional space was provided for visitors to explain their choice. Postcards were addressed to The Long Now Foundation, Revive and Restore, the Harvard Woolly Mammoth Revival team, San Diego Frozen Zoo, and the North East Science Station. [32] The Center borrows this tactic from Stewart Brand. In 1966 Brand led a postcard campaign that targeted NASA and demanded they release satellite images recently taken of the whole Earth. Brand is now President of the Board of Directors of The Long Now Foundation, one of the organizations leading de-extinction efforts. The Center claims to parallel Brand’s “hopeful/paranoid” question by asking exactly who de-extinct species are for and why they are being revived. [33] By sending these postcards, the Center provokes both critical thinking about human consumption and direct political intervention into de-extinction discourse, facilitating an interaction between scientists and citizens, a divide that has proven difficult to bridge. The De-extinction Deli uses present culinary practices to interrogate the possibilities for de-extinct species in global food systems. As a speculative performance, the Deli entails hypothetical rather than actual consumption, projecting a gustatory future from the actualities of the present. Although each of the future specialties at the De-extinction Deli is hypothetical, the performance interrogates the possible act of consuming them: the ethical, social, scientific, and political ramifications at the intersection of de-extinction and consumption. Through De-extinction Deli , in the absence of actual eating of food, Center artists and Deli visitors enact critical thought on the practice and meaning of human food systems. In light of the ecological changes we are currently witnessing, what will sitting down to dinner in the Anthropocene look like? Coming to the Table: The Planetary Sculpture Supper Club The Center’s recurring performance installation The Planetary Sculpture Supper Club first convened in July 2011, in Portland, Oregon. Center artists collaborated with Special Snowflake Supper Club and Gorilla Meats Co. to create an eight-course meal designed to point toward the numerous ways that humans sculpt the planet and the biosphere. Since its debut, the Supper Club has been convened in Bangalore, India (2011); Leiden, Netherlands (2012); Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2013); Portland, Oregon (2013); Lisbon, Portugal (2013). Although the menus featured at each performance vary, the questions the Center claims guide their design inspire all the meetings of the Supper Club : “What preferences, constraints, biases or assumptions determine the genomes that comprise our food system? Which food system? How big is it? What role should individuals, communities, governments, or businesses have in determining the genomes that make up our food systems and ecological-systems?” [34] Reminiscent of De-extinction Deli’s butcher paper infographics, the menus and placemats given to participants of the Supper Clubs explain the ingredients of each dish and, perhaps more importantly, the culinary and scientific discourses they are imbricated in. At some meetings of the Supper Club Center artists (including Zach Denfeld in his ubiquitous apron) guide diners through their experience of the meal as a supplement to the detailed menus also provided. As explained on the Planetary Sculpture Supper Club placemat, these dinners are “an opportunity to explore the co-evolution of gastronomy and larger ecological, technological and political systems.” [35] Venues for the Supper Club have included museum spaces, festivals, dining halls, and pop up restaurants. No matter the venue, each convening of the Supper Club has a similar dramaturgy: participants sharing a meal around one or several large tables in a communal experience. I will focus on the 2013 performance at Pittsburgh’s Center for PostNatural History. The supper was held within the Exhibit Hall at a large table placed amidst the Center for PostNatural History’s collection of photographs, taxidermic animals, and other ephemera cataloguing humanity’s various interventions into the natural world. [36] Like each Planetary Sculpture Supper Club menu, the Pittsburgh menu was designed to reveal attitudes toward food and to lay bare the often invisible ways that scientists, farmers, and consumers have altered the genomes of our food. Center artists worked with students from Richard Pell’s PostNatural Art Studio at Carnegie Mellon University to design the following menu: Apéritif: Three Milks: Alive, Dead & Resurrected Tasting Flight : A Selection of Five Sugars Amuse bouche: Invisible: Root Vegetable Stew with Waxworm Roux, Imposter: Lumpia ‘Wax Moth’ atop a Honey-Chile Sauce, Immaculate: Waxworm Soft Shell Taco with Chile Marrón Main: Producer: Seaweed Salad, Primary Consumer: Boiled Shrimp Tossed in an Old Bay Blend, Secondary Consumer: Pan-Fried Catfish, Secondary Consumer: Seared Lemon-Pepper Pike, Tertiary Consumer: Blackened Alligator in a Citrus Honey Sauce Digestif: Frackfluid and Baileys Dessert : Lemon Curd, Avocado & Sour Cream Tartlet served with a Miracle Berry. [37] Through the act of consuming these dishes, coupled with the pedagogical tool of the menus, the Center strives to recast humans as “agents of selection,” revealing the ways in which food choices, even on an individual level, can impact global ecology. Whereas the De-extinction Deli performed the possibility of the new culinary specialty of de-extinct species in the absence of any actual consumption of food, the Supper Club performs a speculative gastronomy by reassembling actual ingredients in new combinations. None of the ingredients here are hypothetical. Instead, via techniques of cognitive estrangement in which familiar foodstuffs are reshaped via strange, unusual culinary techniques, the Center aims to provoke diners to see themselves as a part of a global ecological system, rather than outside or superior to it. The Center takes advantage of a recent trend in high-end dining, an intense focus on the scenography and dramaturgy of the dining experience. As Joshua Abrams explains, “few encounters are simultaneously as intimate and as social as eating.” Because they “[draw] focus to taste through a Brechtian process of making-strange alongside a conscious engagement with the visual arts of design,” chefs challenge diners to actively engage with their experience of eating and reconsider what it really means to fulfill a biological need as basic as eating in the Anthropocene. [38] The scenography of the Pittsburgh Supper Club in particular contributes to the kind of estranging effect that Abrams identifies. It is precisely this estrangement that the Center deploys to provoke questions about humanity’s role in the global food system through this performance. The meal takes place among a plethora of ephemera that represent how humanity has changed the natural world. One of the Center for PostNatural History’s primary specimens, for example, is the taxidermic body of a BioSteel goat genetically modified to produce spider silk in its milk for the purpose of manufacturing pharmaceuticals. This mise-en-scène, by foregrounding the degree of human action in the biosphere, will hopefully spark a similar interrogation of the courses being served. The meal’s second course particularly reflects the Center’s focus on food changes on a molecular scale. A tasting flight of five sugars, this course pairs the natural sweetener sucrose, derived from plants like sugar cane, with the artificially created aspartame, sucralose, and saccharin. Each of these substances is created by molecular manipulation within scientific laboratories. Tasting them alongside naturally derived sucrose ideally forces consideration of how scientific technology is changing our food, not only on the visible scale of which varieties of vegetable are available year-round, but also on the invisible, molecular level. The tasting presentation includes the brand names under which these substances can be found in grocery stores (Sweet’N Low, Equal, Splenda, Truvia), recognizing the role that capitalist free markets play in this food system. As the Pittsburgh Supper Club ’s scenography highlights humans’ interventions in the food system on a molecular scale, some of the dishes themselves prompt diners to recognize how they are interwoven into the macrocosm of the planetary ecological system. By creating the food chain, the Pittsburgh meal’s main course facilitates the self-recognition the Center calls for, accepting the impact of our food choices on the global ecosystem: “ Producer : Seaweed Salad, Primary Consumer : Boiled Shrimp Tossed in an Old Bay Blend, Secondary Consumer : Pan-Fried Catfish, Secondary Consumer : Seared Lemon-Pepper Pike, Tertiary Consumer : Blackened Alligator in a Citrus Honey Sauce.” [39] This course itself encapsulates the structure of the food chain into a single plate, reinforced by its description on the menu. Beginning with the producer species, in this case seaweed, the course follows the chain of links between producer and consumer species. A culinary microcosm of the food web, the synthesis of seaweed, shrimp, catfish, pike, and alligator within a single course is a gastronomic manifestation of the macrocosmic ecological system. The links of the food chain are revealed through the practice of cooking and underlined by the explanation of the course on the menu. In the act of consuming this course, producer and consumer species alike, the human participant becomes the quaternary consumer, the apex predator. I argue that participants’ consumption of this course, accompanied by the menu description that underscores the ecological connections between these particular species as part of the food web, is an exercise in “species thinking.” Dipesh Chakrabarty aligns species thinking with deep history, recognizing that as a particular kind of species, humans, “in the process of dominating other species, acquire the status of a geologic force.” [40] By positioning humans as species in relation to others, the Pittsburgh Supper Club, and the main course in particular, facilitates species thinking. Through the consumption of all of the links in this particular food chain the diner’s place in it becomes clear: seaweed->shrimp->catfish->pike->alligator->human. At the same time, other courses in the Supper Club highlight the disproportionate impact humans as a species have on the biosphere. Humans are both like other species (they are part of the food chain) and not like other species (they exercise massive influence at all levels of the biosphere). Bruno Latour describes this particular condition of the Anthropocene: “micro- and macrocosm are now literally and not simply symbolically connected.” [41] The ecosystem of the seaweed plant which composes the Supper Club’s Seaweed Salad no longer simply contains its habitat and consumers—shrimp, catfish, pike, alligator. Now the economic pressures of the global seafood industry, market demand, environmental activists, and governmental regulatory policies are part of that ecosystem. In this particular dish, capitalism shows itself in the trademarked Old Bay Seasoning, a blend of seafood seasoning manufactured by Fortune 1000 company McCormick & Company. As captured by this particular dish, the realm of human action does not sit above or outside of ecological systems. Instead, human tastes and choices, both on the individual and corporate scale, are entangled within the ecological structures of the food chain. The Center underscores these connections through the dinner’s menus and placemats, and the artists’ presence at the event. By recasting meals in this way, the Center prompts questions central to ecological change: how do humans, as individuals and species, influence the genomes of the global food system? Once this question is considered, diners can then begin to determine whether their roles are effective for the continued survival of the global ecosystem, or not. Through the microcosm of the dinner table, Planetary Sculpture Supper Club interrogates food systems on both the micro and the macro scale, from the minutiae of sugar molecules to the intricacies of the food chain. As an exercise in species thinking, participants in the Planetary Sculpture Supper Club might reconceptualize themselves as agents of selection that are part of the food chain, not outside of it. Both De-extinction Deli and The Planetary Sculpture Supper Club take on the politics of human food systems through speculative performances, as practices of consumption and culinary choice have played a central role in the ecological change that marks the Anthropocene. In the Center’s particular speculative style, food can also become a tactic to intervene in the discourse of climate change. Tasting Smog In their 2011 Smog Tasting project, Center artists took culinary techniques out of the kitchen, making egg meringues in areas with high air pollution. Center artists Zack Denfeld and Catherine Kramer were on location in Bangalore, India, when they were inspired by Harold McGee’s seminal culinary book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. McGee describes meringues, a light dessert made from beaten egg whites and sugar, as up to ninety percent air. Any particulate matter hovering in the air becomes trapped inside the meringue. Armed with egg whites and whisks, Center artists went out into the streets of Bangalore and whipped up meringues flavored with the air pollution from several locations around the city. In 2015, the Center built a Smog Synthesizer, an “experimental food cart” that used scientific techniques to recreate the air pollution from a number of cities and times to infuse them into meringues. Scientists often replicate the atmospheres of different locations within the lab for research purposes. This process is achieved by injecting precursor chemicals into a chamber and exposing them to UV light. The Smog Synthesizer food cart features several such chambers. By whipping the egg whites into a meringue within them, the manufactured air becomes infused into the dessert. With support from the Finnish Cultural Institute and the New Museum’s IDEA CITY festival, this cart debuted at the 2015 meeting of the World Health Organization in Geneva, followed by an appearance on New York City streets for the Ideas City Festival. Center artists, with collaborator Nicole Twilley of Edible Geography, recreated a London peasouper, a 1950s Los Angeles photochemical smog, and present-day Atlanta under an air quality warning. Each of these smogs has a particular chemical makeup as well as contemporary resonances as they have come to represent particular types or genres of pollution that scientists use to categorize air quality. The London fog, with a high sulfur content, is quite common in present day Beijing, and the Los Angeles smog resembles the air quality of contemporary Mexico City. [42] Center artists took the Smog Synthesizer cart out onto New York City streets and served up these three unique meringues to festival-goers and passersby. Here, rather than performing a speculative future of food, the Center deploys a gastronomic device, the egg meringue, as a tactic in an act of speculation. What if we ate air pollutants instead of breathing them? Would there be further action to ameliorate the effects of air pollution? Via the culinary vehicle of eggs, air, and sugar, in Smog Tasting the Center makes visible the complex and often invisible consequence of major global industry. Through the whipped eggs and sugar, the hyperobject of air pollution is captured and tasted. Smog Tasting opens up the space in which the hyperobject can be seen, thought, experienced, and tasted. The relationship between the “aesthetic properties” of the meringues and the air, to use Morton’s term, captures the hyperobject, making it intelligible to human participants. The most common reaction that people participating in the smog tasting cart performance have had, according to Center co-founder Zack Denfeld, has been a questioning one: are the meringues safe to eat? He responds by asking whether it is safe to breathe. [43] Because the medium of air is largely invisible, and the hyperobject of climate change difficult to grasp, the question of whether the air is safe becomes obscured in daily life. The properties of the meringue, its composition as ninety percent air, renders it an aesthetic object capable of gesturing toward the hyperobject that is climate change. As a bodily function, breathing is largely unconscious, automatically controlled and regulated by the brain. Eating, however, is a conscious act. Smog meringues remove pollution from the air, the medium of the unconscious physical process of breathing, and infuse it into a consumable object, revealing the pervasiveness of air pollution through the act of eating. And through the performative action of consuming a smog meringue participants taste the consequences of climate change. This performance in particular takes on a DIY flavor. On their website the Center encourages students or community groups to use egg meringues to capture the air quality in their own environs. The materials necessary to create a smog meringue are readily accessible: eggs, sugar, bowl, whisk, oven, and polluted air. Hypothetically, anyone could hypothetically create their own smog meringues. The batter can be tested for its pollutants and then mobilized as a sort of “Trojan treat.” By mailing the confection to politicians and business magnates, the smog meringues can secret the consequences of air pollution to those bearing more responsibility for climate change, or with more power to fight it. [44] The Center hopes that the gustatory experience of tasting smog can spur critical self-examination on the part of those in power. By recreating location-specific air outside of their original contexts in the Smog Tasting Cart, the Center also performs a speculative geography, asking what if the air in New York or Geneva was as polluted as the London peasouper? This speculative geography reveals one of the most complicated aspects of the Anthropocene: climate change is simultaneously local and global. While its causes are tied to global economic systems, and its effects are entwined within the global ecosystem, the consequences of these massive environmental changes are not distributed equally across the world’s locations or populations. As major metropolitan centers both Geneva and New York City have their own issues with pollution. State and national governments monitor air quality daily and will issue warnings about traveling outside. Consuming an egg meringue with the taste of other cities’ air pollution draws attention to local air quality as well as necessitates consideration of the states of other, more distant, locales. The Smog Tasting Cart collapses the local and global, gesturing toward a critical pitfall in the idea of the Anthropocene that must be addressed in the pursuit of ecological justice and any politics for the Anthropocene: unequal distribution of effects and responsibility for climate change. The ecological and economic consequences of the pervasion of capital into nature, of which air pollution is just one example, are unequally distributed to lower-income populations. Bringing the air quality of Mexico City to New York City via the vehicle of an egg meringue lays bare the sometimes-invisible network of capital, in this instance between the United States and Mexico, making visible its ecological effects. Recreating the air from one locality to another provokes the question of whether it is safe for the people of Atlanta, Beijing, and Mexico City to breathe as well. Regardless of whether the International Union of Geological Sciences decides to officially declare that we are living in the epoch of the Anthropocene (as of this writing that designation has not been officially made), the realities of massive ecological change cannot be denied. In Bonneuil and Fressoz’s words, “we have passed the exit gate from the Holocene. We have reached a threshold.” [45] Many of the changes we are currently witnessing are potentially irreversible. The Arctic ice is melting. Species are disappearing, whether or not scientists might resurrect them, along with their habitats. Fossil fuel extraction continues largely unabated. The question becomes, then, how to survive in the Anthropocene, and what a politics for this new era looks like. While a complicated and complex thing that is difficult to apprehend and comprehend, like climate change or quantum physics, this politics begins with thinking of or speculating about alternative ways of being. Or, in the case of the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, alternative ways of eating. Their subversive use of culinary customs first implicates audiences in their participation within flows of capital. By playing with possible food futures in De-extinction Deli, revealing the enmeshment of the human species within the food web in Planetary Sculpture Supper Club, and discovering what air pollution tastes like in Smog Tasting , the Center’s performances expose their participants’ place within global systems so that they might renegotiate that place in the future. Their speculative performances encapsulate a multiplicity of possible food futures, twisting existing culinary practices to project different ways of seeing the connectivity, the mesh, of global ecology. Not simply an intellectual exercise, not just thinking of interconnectedness, but an embodied practice of species thinking that opens up critical questions of how humans and nonhumans alike might survive the Anthropocene. In 1973, prolific science fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin urged the need for more speculative cultural production, because “an improbable and unmanageable world is going to produce an improbable and hypothetical art. At this point realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.” [46] The Anthropocene is nothing if not improbable and unmanageable. Speculative performances, like those created by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, can not only make sense of the immensity that is global ecological change, in all its manifestations, but also point the way toward a politics of the Anthropocene. And perhaps, as Donna Haraway has written, “make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and recomposition.” [47] By simultaneously encapsulating anti-capitalist and species thinking, as a move toward a politics for the Anthropocene, performance can begin that process of recomposition. References [1] “About,” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy , accessed December 2, 2016, http://genomicgastronomy.com/about/. [2] Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 2. [3] Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015), 4. [4] Ibid., 70-1. [5] Both Jason W. Moore and Donna Haraway have developed this term. See Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159-165; and Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism , ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016). [6] Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 212. [7] Ibid., 213. [8] Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” New Literary History 41 (2010): 476. [9] Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy , trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 53. [10] Purdy, After Nature, 2-3. [11] Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 10. [12] Ibid. , 5. [13] Ibid., 7. [14] Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1. [15] Lisa Chase and Vern Grubinger, Food, Farms, and Community: Exploring Food Systems (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2014), 1. [16] See Anthony Winson, The Industrial Diet: The Degradation of Food and the Struggle for Healthy Eating (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013). [17] G. BeVier, “Global Food Systems: Feeding the World,” Reproduction in Domestic Animals 47, suppl. 4 (2012): 77. [18] Mario Herrero, et. al., “Biomass use, production, feed efficiencies, and greenhouse gas emissions from global livestock systems,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 110, no. 52 (December 24, 2013): 20,888. [19] See Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock of the Anthropocene , 24. [20] Eduardo Mendieta, “Globalization, Cosmopolitics, Decoloniality: Politics for/of the Anthropocene,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Political Philosophy, ed. Andrew Fiala (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 217, emphasis mine. [21] Ibid., 217-8. [22] Gerald Alva Miller Jr., Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3, 15. [23] Ibid., 16. [24] L. Timmel Duchamp, “How to Do Things with Ideas,” in Sci Fi in the Mind’s Eye: Reading Science through Science Fiction , ed. Margret Grebowicz (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 2007), 69. [25] “De-extinction Deli,” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, access November 23, 2016, http://genomicgastronomy.com/work/2013-2/deli/. [26] See http://reviverestore.org. [27] Josh Donlan, “De-extinction in a crisis discipline.” Frontiers of Biogeography 6, no.1 (2014): 27. [28] Ashley Dawson, Extinction: A Radical History (New York: OR Books, 2016), 34-5. [29] Carrington, Damian. “Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the last 40 years, says WWF.” The Guardian . September 30, 2014. [30] “De-extinction Deli.” [31] “De-extinction Deli (To Go),” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, accessed January 2, 2017, http://genomicgastronomy.com/work/2016-2/de-extinction-deli-to-go/. [32] Each of these organizations participates in the de-extinction movement in some way. Under the auspices of The Long Now Foundation, Revive and Restore contributes to biodiversity and conservation specifically through genetic rescue of species. The Northeast Science Station, led by director Sergey Zimov, oversees the Pleistocene Park, a conservation habitat for species like reindeer and bison. Zimov hopes to eventually populate this area with revived Woolly Mammoths (see http://www.pleistocenepark.ru/en/). The San Diego Frozen Zoo, part of the Beckman Center for Conservation Research, houses over 10,000 different samples of genetic material from approximately 1,000 species groups. The True Nature Foundation, a loosely associated group of scientists and local research groups, is spearheading the project to de-extinct the Aurochs out of their office in The Netherlands. [33] “De-extinction Deli (To Go).” [34] “Planetary Sculpture Supper Club: Portland,” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, accessed November 30, 2016, http://genomicgastronomy.com/work/2011-2/supper-club/. [35] “PSSC: Dublin Grow Your Own,” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, accessed January 2, 2017, http://genomicgastronomy.com/work/2013-2/pssc-dublin-grow-your-own/. [36] See http://postnatural.org. [37] “Planetary Sculpture Supper Club: Pittsburgh,” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, accessed November 30, 2016, http://genomicgastronomy.com/work/2013-2/planetary-sculpture-supper-club-pittsburgh/. [38] Joshua Abrams, “Mise en Plate: The Scenographic Imagination and the Contemporary Restaurant,” Performance Research 18, no. 3 (2013): 11. [39] “Planetary Sculpture Supper Club: Pittsburgh,” emphasis mine. [40] Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 214. [41] Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” 481. [42] Nicola Twilley, “Smog Meringues,” Edible Geography: Thinking Through Food, May 30, 2015, http://www.ediblegeography.com/smog-meringues/. [43] Ibid. [44] “Smog Tasting,” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, accessed December 8, 2016, http://genomicgastronomy.com/work/2011-2/smog-tasting/. [45] Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock of the Anthropocene, xiii. [46] Ursula K. Le Guin, “1973 National Book Award Acceptance Remarks” (speech, New York City, April 12, 1973), K.U. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Ursula-K-Le-Guin_NationalBookAward-Speech_1973.pdf. [47] Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene,” 160. Footnotes About The Author(s) SHELBY BREWSTER is a doctoral student in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and a 2015-16 Provost Humanities Fellow Predoctoral Fellow. She is interested in science and technology studies, digital performance, and science fiction studies. She has presented work at ATHE, ASTR, CATR, and Comparative Drama. Her current research explores how theatre and performance artists use speculative strategies, usually confined to science fiction literature, to critique the relationship between humans and their environments, as well as to imagine new ways of being human. Guest Editor for Special Issue: Bruce McConachie Editorial Board for Special Issue: Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.