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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. 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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.

Casey L. Berner 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 Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Casey L. Berner By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton . Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton takes a broadly sociological look at notable Broadway shows of the last 30 years, constructing a rough lineage from Angels in America ’s 1993 Broadway opening to Hamilton ’s runaway success in 2015-16. The book opens with a compelling prologue detailing former Vice President Mike Pence’s notorious visit to Hamilton only days after the 2016 election. Then, Rise Up! ’s fourteen chapters tackle one notable Broadway play or musical and an attendant event or movement in US politics (or within the larger theatre industry). Each chapter is titled for the year of the play’s Broadway opening from 1993 through to 2016 (with a notable gap from 2002-2007). In doing so, Jones builds an historical image of Broadway in which each show discussed represents a unique and important lesson or development that would lead, almost inevitably, to Hamilton as Broadway’s cultural and political peak. Jones’s clear journalistic prose takes readers inside the various Broadway houses where each show played. At its best, Rise Up! moves seamlessly from huge events of political prominence, to the local context of New York theatre, to the particular production on which the chapter is focused. The book’s first chapter, “1993: An Angel Lands,” does this beautifully, taking readers into the Broadway of the 1980s and the AIDS crisis, discussing Larry Kramer’s activism and artistry to serve Jones’s discussion of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America . Chapter twelve, which focuses on the notorious flop musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark , is similarly compelling, guiding readers through the backstage turmoil and the on-stage errors and injuries that plagued the production in a way that is both sensitively handled and entertaining to read without feeling sensationalized. At the same time, the book is mired by Jones inclination toward tangents that never quite weave back to his overarching argument. Hamilton serves as a prominent but ultimately weak binding agent for the history this book constructs; Jones mentions each featured play’s connection to the hit show, but the tone is more winking gesture than compelling narrative thread. In some cases, these gestures distract—chapter five contains a lengthy description of the historical duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, connected loosely to August Wilson’s King Hedley II via gun violence. Missed opportunities to more clearly cohere this narrative abound. I was particularly struck that Jones makes only passing remarks on Oskar Eustis, perhaps the figure who connects Angels in America most directly to Hamilton . Similarly, Jones discusses Frozen at length in chapter seven without mentioning that the show shared a composer with Avenue Q, the primary subject of that chapter. While Rise Up! is an enjoyable read, it presents readers with an oversimplified history without ever quite connecting its many dots. This often renders thinner analysis for theater historians and scholars. I was struck especially when chapter five, on August Wilson, ends with a comment that the playwright “did not live long enough to see the first show staged [at the August Wilson Theatre]: Jersey Boys ” (80). Some hint toward Jones’s perspective here would have been useful to me as a reader—was this an appropriate choice, given the show’s grounding in a specific location much as Wilson’s plays were? Or was it inappropriate to open Wilson’s eponymous theatre with a musical about a white doo-wop group performing in the early 1960s that largely evades the politics of the period? While Jones’s journalistic prowess makes the read interesting, the breezy tone allows him to evade deeper evaluation and critical analysis of topics. Some hint at Jones’s perspectives on these works and their cultural significance might have helped guide the reader and connect the volume’s disparate threads. My reader’s copy was also riddled with typos and minor factual errors—such as incorrectly naming The Little Mermaid in a discussion of Beauty and the Beast (59) or a reference to 2011 that, in context, must actually refer to 2001 to make sense (92)—that left me equal parts confused and distracted. These errors and misclassifications affect the very structure of the book; for instance, the seventh chapter is entitled “2002: The Pull of Vegas and the Rise of the Meta,” but the chapter details events set largely from 2004-2006 and in fact makes no reference to events in the year 2002 beyond the title. This was particularly notable, as the chapters jump from 2002 to 2007, and the contents of this chapter would fill that gap. While these errors may reflect on the editing or publisher as much as author, they raise concerns for me about the historical narrative that Jones’ book constructs when this narrative is at odds with the basic facts he presents. This book is perfect for those developing an initial interest in musical theatre or Broadway history, and could be used as a launching point for discussing commercial theatre and politics with undergraduate students, or as an entryway for further research into any one of the works included. It is also excellent for refreshing one’s memory of recent Broadway shows, especially musicals, as most major successful works since 1993 are mentioned in some capacity. Scholars aiming for a more rigorous investigation of these issues could pair Rise Up! recent volumes on musical theatre and US American culture; for instance, Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past can provide greater insight into Hamilton as a cultural juggernaut, while Stacy Wolf’s Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America plucks musical theatre from New York City and examines it in the context of communities and societies across the US. Ultimately, Rise Up! is an enjoyable and sometimes insightful read that is simply not geared toward academic readers or audiences well-versed in either musical theatre or recent political history, but can be read, used, and enjoyed with that in mind. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CASEY L. BERNER City University of New York Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Erith Jaffe-Berg 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 Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. Erith Jaffe-Berg By Published on April 8, 2021 Download Article as PDF Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative , edited by Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, presents a powerful, multifaceted record of historical and contemporary casting practices from leading American artists and scholars. The book casts an intentionally wide net, reflecting on how various communities, including Middle Eastern, Native American, African American, Latinx, as well as multilingual and disabled communities, have been impacted by the politics of casting. The book is relevant for theater artists, critics, administrators and educators of institutions that fund and produce theater. In Casting a Movement , the writers offer incisive analysis of the ways race and representation define meaning in the theatre, aiming to understand how race and racism have been reinforced and institutionalized through casting practices. Casting a Movement intentionally includes both theatre practitioners and scholars and opens with three introductory essays by Liesl Tommy, Syler, and Banks, respectively, which offer a framework and language for the subsequent 21 contributions. Reflecting on an award-filled career of directing on and off Broadway and television, Tommy underscores the importance of language in articulating social and political nuances that inform questions of casting. Syler emphasizes that “casting is inherently a political act” that is never neutral because the decision about which bodies to include already communicates information that “evokes cultural assumptions associated with skin color, gender, sexuality, and ability” (4). Banks revisits the metaphor of “the welcome table,” present in both a Spiritual and James Baldwin’s unfinished final play, as an aspiration for an inclusive space (both physical and ideational) in which artists of various backgrounds are invited to engage in each other’s art-making. In this essay originally written in 2012, Banks interrogates such terms as “nontraditional” or “color-blind casting” that anticipate the powerful expressions of “We See You, White American Theater” ( www.weseeyouwat.com ) published in 2020. Following these introductory essays, the book’s first part traces a trajectory from the language of “colorblind casting” to “color conscious casting.” Appropriately, this first part begins with Ayanna Thompson, whose writing about Shakespeare and classical productions has exposed the persistent falsity of “colorblindness” in theatre pedagogy (34). Next, Justin Emeka traces his own journey as a director: “[b]y reimagining the presence of Black and Brown life within the context of Eurocentric plays, I use theater as a tool to teach people to look for Black and Brown life where they have been trained by omission to ignore it” (47). In the third essay Brian Eugenio Herrera discusses the persistence of “whitewashing,” or the use of white actors in casting when the roles were originally written for non-white characters as a pernicious mechanism of erasure (51). In the volume’s second part, Arab-American playwright Yussef El Guindi, artistic Director Torange Yeghiazarian (Golden Thread Productions), and scholar Michael Malek Najjar consider challenges for Middle Eastern American/North African American actors in the academy, in training programs, and in the professional setting (72). As Najjar puts it in reference to August Wilson’s touchstone essay “The Ground on Which I Stand:” “Wilson’s view on African American theatre [about the pernicious effect of colorblind casting] is a helpful guide for other minoritarian theater communities” (76). Aptly, since actor Christine Bruno points out, “[d]isabled people are America’s largest minority, representing twenty-five percent of the population,” the book’s third part focuses on issues of casting and disability. Bruno, Carrie Sandahl, and Victoria Lewis consider efforts by advocacy groups on behalf of actors of color and those with disabilities (85). Sandahl makes a clarion call for those in the academic and professional theatres to take shared “responsibility for improving opportunities for theater artists along the whole pipeline”—from educational programs to the theatre, film and television industries (94). The book’s fourth part widens its perspective even further to address casting and multilingual performance, an often-neglected topic. This part, opens with a poetic rumination on storytelling and cultural ownership by playwright Caridad Svich. Next Eunice S. Ferreira and Ann Elizabeth Armstrong argue the benefits of multilingual theater for developing an audience attuned to and welcoming of difference. Reflecting the growing role of Native American theatre in the last decade, the fifth part highlights the pluralism of Native American theater voices. Ojibwe and Oneida performance artist Ty Defore (Gilzhig), echoes the previous section and offers a poem, “Journey,” that suggests paths for greater connection across diverse communities. This is an especially important chapter symbolically and ideationally for a book that calls for the imperative of intersectionality in addressing world challenges. Jean Bruce Scott and Randy Reinholz (Choctaw) discuss the evolution of the Native Voices at the Autry as a theatre that places Native narratives centrally to create “a more inclusive dialogue about what it means to be ‘American’” (147). Courtney Elkin Mohler articulates decolonial practices in contemporary Native theater. In the sixth part, the book turns to questions of stereotype in casting processes. Mei Ann Teo, for instance, acknowledges in our historic moment “a sea change” when “Asian American and Asian heritage stories are finally being told in the mainstream” (173). In powerful affirmation of intersectionality, Dorinne Kondo analyzes what she calls the “reparative creativity” of artists of color who use “multiracial collaboration and cross-racial casting” as strategies of resistance to exclusion in the theater industry and society (177). “Refusing a neat ending,” in her words, Donatella Galella sees an ongoing process of fighting for improved conditions of people of color and “cross-racial casting as a struggle over power—representation and the redistribution of roles” (191). The book’s final part reverberates with many of the themes across essays, asserting a politics of inclusion and visibility evoked by Canadian/American playwright Elaine Ávila’s title “Reaparecer” (reappear). The section ends with Priscilla Page’s essay on Collidescope: Adventures in pre- and Post-Racial America and Brandi Wilkins Catanese’s further analysis of the ongoing performance project— juxtaposing it with Daniel Banks’s working through of the welcome table. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative is a timely work whose significance goes beyond the discipline of theater to add to the national conversation on institutionalized racism. Read alongside recent political, social and artistic developments, including the Black Lives Matter movement, theatre closures precipitated by COVID-19 and the political upheavals of the Trump presidency, it remaps the field. How we want to return to theatre-making, how we will address questions of equity, diversity and inclusion in the face of persistent racism and institutionalized white supremacy are driving issues for the artist-writers in this important anthology. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ERITH JAFFE-BERG University of California, Riverside 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.

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.

Mohamadreza Babaee 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 Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Mohamadreza Babaee By Published on May 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF fig. 1: The installation room for Global (re)Entry. 2D game and multimedia installation. “Unforgetting” exhibition, University of California, Santa Cruz, Apr. 2022. Photo by author. "Have you ever held a grenade in your hands?” The participants read on a monitor screen in a room with a view of the Pacific Ocean (fig. 1). A projector screen obstructs the view and displays the live footage of the participants from a bird’s-eye angle. With white walls, a desk, a chair, and a desktop computer and monitor, the room seems desolate. An ambient soundtrack is playing in the background, projecting various sounds that travelers usually hear in any US airport: the occasional announcements, suitcases being dragged on smooth floors, the beeping sound of various scanning machines, and the occasional roarings of airplanes taking off. If the participants sit behind the computer long enough, they could hear the ambient soundtrack of the airport fading into distant notes of a piano playing in an empty alley, birds chirping in a dim forest, and raindrops falling onto thirsty leaves. The question on the screen remains visible until the participants decide to use a “Cosmic” tool to change it. If they click on the cosmic tool icon on the right side of the screen, hover the mouse over the question, and hold down left-click, the question visually morphs into the same text, with one important difference (fig. 2): “Have you ever held a kitten in your hands?” fig. 2: The redesigned immigration form question. Global (re)Entry, 2D game and multimedia installation. And such is the core mechanic in Global (re)Entry , a video game-multimedia installation that gives the participants an opportunity to rewrite the racially presumptuous questions that immigrants need to answer in their change-of-status petition forms and in-person interviews. [1] Made in collaboration with recent University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) alumni, [2] the project was first on display as a part of “Unforgetting,” an MFA exhibition of digital arts and new media projects on display at UCSC from Apr. 22 nd to May 1 st , 2022. The different projects—ranging from video games to multimedia performances—seek to address the common themes of lost histories, hidden realities, and haunting. “The artists,” writes Yolande Harris, an artist-scholar and the exhibition’s curator, “are questioning and actively participating in the destruction of old systems of oppression by imagining new systems in their place.” [3] The system in question in Global (re)Entry is the US immigration system, particularly the process through which an immigrant can petition for residency in the US. While the legal pathway to becoming a permanent resident remains a privileged route to which many undocumented immigrants have no access, Global (re)Entry aims to point out the deficiency and impracticality of legal procedures in the US immigration system built upon historical prejudice and racial bias. In Global (re)Entry , I take a critical and parodic look at the Global Entry program designed by the US Customs and Border Protection agency. Similar to other Trusted Traveler programs, Global Entry allows “low-risk” US citizens and permanent residents to use an automated machine to receive their clearance for crossing international borders. The conditions through which Global Entry considers a traveler as low risk are not disclosed publicly and are open to interpretation and bias. My project borrows textual and visual assets from the US Department of Homeland Security’s (and the associated agencies’) online documents to simulate and repurpose the traveler screening program. The player needs to answer several questions in the game to receive their travel clearance card. However, their resistance to participating in state-sponsored security theatres unlocks a new gameplay branch that leads the player to a utopian way of reimagining the US immigration system. While players can play the game to learn more about unfair border control strategies and oppressive state policies targeting immigrants, they can also creatively redesign discriminatory US immigration forms and generate pro-immigrant, antiracist manifestos. Before discussing the conceptual development of Global (re)Entry in relation to my performance background, I need to elaborate on why I am discussing this project in the special issue of a theatre and performance studies journal. This issue invites reflections on new work development with attention to how theatre artists respond to the realities of the ongoing global pandemic. I designed Global (re)Entry as a playful digital intervention into discriminatory US border politics. Although the project represents my training as an artist in experimental game design, my current work is in continuation of my years-long practice as a theatre director. I started my journey as an artist by designing, directing, and supporting experimental theatre and performance pieces about the memories that immigrants leave behind, the human impact of financial sanctions on Iran, diasporic experiences of queer people of color, and fearmongering and Islamaphobia that ensued after the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11 th , 2001. Over time, I moved away from traditional understandings of theatre to embrace postdramatic and multimedia ways of staging diverse immigrant experiences. Digital mediums and technologies play a central role in my recent projects, but I need to clarify that this digital turn in my practice is not an inevitable assimilation into the techno-utopian rhetorics hailed by megacorporate amalgamations around the country (and the world). Instead, I embraced digital methods of representation and creative intervention as I became increasingly weary of the limited access a live performance space offers to the audience. How could I make more performances about/for immigrants and refugees while many of them did not have the privilege of being in the performance space? The shortcomings of designing a performance around the physical notion of space led me to adapt digital forms of communication, representation, and intervention. Without a doubt, going through a global pandemic, which severely reduced social gatherings, contributed an additional layer to my rationale for opting for a digital sense of performance space as a site of potentials apt for facilitating human-computer interactions. [4] Global (re)Entry represents my investment in interactive digital art as a conditionally more accessible medium [5] while remaining strongly tethered to my experience as a performance maker and scholar. [6] In the following pages, I offer a brief description of Global (re)Entry as a collaborative work of art inspired by my learnings in performance theory. That is not to say that I consider the project a performance piece. Rather, I want to delineate my conceptual itinerary to clarify the significance of performance discourses in my current new work development in digital arts and new media. I am less concerned with disciplinary demarcations and more with the value of interdisciplinary creative production. The initial idea for Global (re)Entry arose from a simple question: What is a utopian vision of the US immigration system? José Esteban Muñoz’s foundational study of utopias informs my investment in utopian art making. Writing on the contemporary politics of queer of color identity formation, Muñoz believes that minoritarian individuals should imagine their lives beyond what he calls the “quagmire of the present.” It is the present-focused thinking that, according to Muñoz, stops the oppressed from imagining a better future outside the contemporary tyranny of systems. Muñoz proposes a “utopian modality” in which feelings, thoughts, and actions follow a utopian function for “fragmenting darkness” and illuminating a “world that should be, that could be, and that will be.” [7] Muñoz dismisses abstract ideas of utopia as they remain dormant in the realm of fantasy. Instead, he calls for concrete conditions of utopia that can invoke a “not-yet-conscious” potentiality, presenting the collective wish of a group that looks back at the “no-longer-conscious” past and renders hopeful “potential blueprints of a world not quite here, a horizon of possibility.” [8] Inspired by such ideas, I approached several immigrants of color that I knew personally and asked them about their utopian visions of the US immigration system. They all expressed a wish to replace the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) with a network of support that facilitates border crossing, not border policing. Concomitant to their utopian thinking was a wish for educating more US citizens about the gross flaws in the legal pathway to becoming a resident and the mental, emotional, and material toll the process could take. Global (re)Entry gives the participants an opportunity to take a critical look at the US immigration system and creatively redesign it in utopian ways. Therefore, the project represents what Claudia Costa Pederson calls “utopian ludology,” a critical-creative perspective that considers games as “places of the radical imagination,” sites that take playfulness as “enabling interactions that afford the necessary freedom to generate new kinds of thinking, feeling, and empowerment to concretize a future that dominant culture renders unthinkable.” [9] Games imbued by concrete ideas of utopia, Pederson asserts, can be “tools of persuasion,” which “open up the question of alternatives” and “reject the mimetic ideals… and commodity models of the video game industry.” [10] While I hesitate to label Global (re)Entry as merely a “persuasive game,” I am inspired by persuasive game designers who use video games for “cultural and social change” and “do so in recognition of the persuasive power of the medium, which is based on its appeal to fantasy and imagination.” [11] Utopian survival strategies of the queer of color, as theorized by Muñoz, shaped how I approached making the game. I could certainly try to make a live performance piece about border crossing (something that I had done in the past), but I could not comfortably make art for immigrants, fully knowing that many of them could not cross the myriad of borders to partake in the privilege of live physical co-presence. I remain cognizant of the ongoing debates in the field as to what constitutes liveness, namely Philip Auslander’s provocative assertion that live experiences are culturally and historically codified in relation to technological changes. [12] But if we allow ourselves to decenter our scholarly polemics in favor of making room for lived experiences of those with less transnational mobility, the question at hand might become as simple as who is in the room and who is not. As I mentioned before, digital liveness and digital spaces continue to be subject to the same question, as not everyone has equal access to entering a digital room, but I take the odds of more people worldwide having access to the internet to download a small-size, low-tech video game over US government easing up on admitting more immigrants to the country. fig. 3: Screenshot from a cutscene inside the game. Global (re)Entry. 2D game and multimedia installation. In addition to queer of color critique, I also used critical discussions of border surveillance to design Global (re)Entry . While I borrowed from scholars in different humanities fields, performance theory continued to play an essential role in my development process. Trusted traveler programs such as Global Entry are ostensibly designed to facilitate easier border crossing experiences, but in fact, they are just a ruse for easy screening of travelers and separating them into potential suspects and trustworthy users. [13] Since Homeland Security agencies are exempt from racial profiling rules, [14] race plays a vital role in designing and implementing border surveillance strategies. Writing on the surveillance of Blackness in the US, Simon Browne uses “racializing surveillance” as a term to describe systematic moments “when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries along racial lines, thereby reifying race, and where the outcome of this is often discriminatory and violent treatment.” [15] Browne contends that racializing surveillance is a “technology of social control” and suggests “how things get ordered racially by way of surveillance depends on space and time and is subject to change, but most often upholds negating strategies that first accompanied European colonial expansion and transatlantic slavery that sought to structure social relations and institutions in ways that privilege whiteness.” [16] Expanding her analysis into the racialized practices of surveillance at US airports, Browne uses the concept of “racial baggage” to identify situations in which certain acts and certain looks at the airport weigh down some travelers, while others travel lightly.” [17] Trusted traveler programs, Browne continues, are clear evidence of how racializing surveillance is practiced at airports to identify, separate, pat down, and investigate the racial baggage some travelers carry across borders. [18] In the racializing matrix of airports, questions of privacy become contested. The state watches travelers, but in that watching, not all travelers are equally suspect. As Jasbir Puar delineates, “the right to privacy is not even on the radar screen for many sectors of society, unfathomable for whom being surveilled is a way of life…the private is a racialized and nationalized construct, insofar as it is granted not only to heterosexuals but to certain citizens and withheld from many others and from noncitizens.” [19] Furthermore, Puar uses the Foucauldian notion of panopticon to suggest that the ever present surveillance technologies throughout borderlands forcefully encourage self-regulation of a sort that is “less an internalization of norms and more about constant monitoring of oneself and others, watching, waiting, listening, ordering, positioning, calculating.” [20] Performance, communication, and feminist studies scholar Rachel Hall similarly focuses on the notion of self-regulation at airports to frame airport security as a “collaborative cultural performance” that requires some passengers to continuously perform “voluntary transparency.” [21] Transparency, in Hall’s critical opinion, is a privilege, the “new white,” that if performed successfully, will grant the traveler with a moment of innocence. [22] However, Hall continues, not all travelers are given equal access to such privilege; within the post-9/11 context, military and security experts design “mediated spectacles of diabolical opacity” to produce “the stubbornly noncompliant, noncitizen suspects in the war on terror.” [23] In sum, there is a clear connection between how the state surveils populations and creates racial categories. Surveillance at airports is a racializing act that seeks to produce transparent travelers and suspect figures of the national adversary. The ubiquitous implementation of surveillance technologies at airports regulates self-monitoring practices requiring travelers to disclose their information voluntarily. Those who successfully perform their transparency might achieve a temporary moment of innocence, but travelers with racial baggage need to struggle against a racist state that considers them likely perpetrators of violence. Global (re)Entry fictionally simulates and repurposes the Global Entry trusted traveling program to (on top of encouraging utopian thinking) draw attention to intrusive methodologies that the Homeland Security agencies incorporate to produce prejudiced surveillance data, specifically about immigrants of color. The game starts as an invitation for voluntary performances of transparency, as theorized by Hall. The participants are asked to submit to an intrusive screening process requiring their biometric data. However, in line with the utopian performance-making rhetorics that undergird the projects, participants can refuse to perform transparency and, as such, unlock an alternative gameplay path that leads to creatively redesigning discriminatory US immigration forms. I use digital technologies and mediums to create interactive art about marginalized experiences. I cautiously navigate this path and remain vigilant about digital accessibility limitations, particularly in the global south. The new projects I develop represent my increasing interest in digital arts and new media. I, however, continue to also identify as a performance maker, an artist of color whose creative journey demonstrates an intertwined and growing web of performance and game design skills. As long as the adapted medium and methodology can empower me in my commitment to increasing representations of immigrants of color, the new work development process personally remains a dynamic terminology applicable to all artmaking practices. In Global (re)Entry , I follow an artistic mission that draws from the power of representation to enable utopian thinking as a necessary first step toward creating change in society. The utopian thinking that Global (re)Entry encourages is my intervention in the ongoing ostracization, surveillance, deportation, incarceration, and murdering of immigrants that state forces commit at US borders. In the face of such destructive realities, my project does not call for neoliberal reformations of the US immigration system. Instead, Global (re)Entry dares to ask the participants to muster the radical audacity, subversive creativity, and insurgent hopes necessary for entirely disabling a killing machine cloaked as the US immigration system. References [1] You can play Global (re)Entry at https://www.mbabaee.com/global-re-entry . [2] Music and sound by Madeline Doss, 2D art and UI by Fion Kwok, and Unity programming by Avery Weibel. [3] “Digital Arts and New Media | MFA Program at University of California, Santa Cruz,” accessed January 9, 2023, https://danmmfa.ucsc.edu/ . [4] Nadja Masura, Digital Theatre: The Making and Meaning of Live Mediated Performance, US & UK 1990-2020 , Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology (Springer International Publishing, 2020), 42. [5] I acknowledge that access to digital technology remains unequal, particularly in Global South. Steven Dixon, for example, writes that even though new digital technology and internet revolutionized performance forms across the US in the 90s, such revolution was absent or less tangible in other parts of the world with less to no resources for building the digital infrastructure that the new digital age demanded. For more, look at Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). [6] Although the project was originally presented as a multimedia installation, it is available online to players around the world. [7] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (New York University Press, 2009), 1. [8] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia , 22, 25, 97. [9] Claudia Costa Pederson, Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), 6. [10] Pederson, Gaming Utopia, 184. [11] Pederson, 222. [12] While Auslander initially made this comment in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999), he later revisited his argument to clarify that he does not believe technologies (vs. the people) to be the determining agent in what is live. For more, look at Auslander, Philip. “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34, no. 3 (2012): 3–11. [13] See Matthew Longo, The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). [14] See Nicole Nguyen, Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). [15] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 8. [16] Browne, Dark Matters , 16, 17. [17] Browne, 132. [18] Browne, 135. [19] Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times , 10th ed. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 125. [20] Puar, Terrorist Assemblages , 156. [21] Rachel Hall, The Transparent Traveler: The Performance and Culture of Airport Security (Duke University Press, 2015), 12. [22] Hall, The Transparent Traveler , 14. [23] Hall, 46. Footnotes About The Author(s) MOHAMADREZA BABAEE is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance at Indiana University, Bloomington. Their interdisciplinary scholarship and transmedia practice primarily focus on issues of migration and surveillance, particularly in connection to the Middle Eastern and Iranian diasporas in the US. Their first manuscript project, tentatively titled Modded Diasporas: Performing Iranian Identity , combines performance studies and critical game theory to explore how Iranian immigrants modify the circumstances of their systematic oppression to turn them into empowering opportunities, tools, and mediums. 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.

Curtis Russell 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 Musical Theatre Books Curtis Russell By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF Actor-Musicianship . Jeremy Harrison. London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 220. The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals . Dan Dietz. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015; Pp. 591. Musical Theatre Song . Stephen Purdy. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 284. A relative newcomer to theatre studies, musical theatre scholarship has proven a fertile and comprehensive field of inquiry, as three recent publications illustrate. Though none is a monograph, each makes an important contribution. Dan Dietz’s The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals is a historical compendium that will prove a useful source for historians, practitioners, and enthusiasts, while the other two books, Actor-Musicianship by Jeremy Harrison and Musical Theatre Song by Stephen Purdy, are how-to guides for performers, each jumping off from a clear historical perspective. Including The Complete Book of 2000s Broadway Musicals , published this year, Dan Dietz has now chronicled seven decades of Broadway musical theatre history. This period doesn’t represent the entirety of the genre, but it does encompass its crystallization as a quintessential American art form, and The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals covers the decade often seen as, to use Dietz’s own word, “seminal” (xi) in that development. In his introduction, Dietz repeats the common assertion that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) represents the institutionalization of the so-called integrated musical (though he doesn’t use the term), which “utilized plot, character, song, and dance to create a unified evening of storytelling” (xi). Scott McMillin, David Savran, and others have refuted this idea, pointing to the Kern-Bolton-Wodehouse Princess Theatre musicals of the 1910s, Sissle and Blake’s Shuffle Along (1921), Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat (1927), and shows with music and lyrics by the Gershwin brothers such as Girl Crazy (1930) and Of Thee I Sing (1931) as earlier examples of the integrated form. As Dietz’s volume makes clear, however, no decade prior to the 1940s produced such a large number of canonical productions. These include Cabin in the Sky (1940), Pal Joey (1940), Lady in the Dark (1941), Carousel (1945), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Street Scene (1947), Brigadoon (1947), Finian’s Rainbow (1947), Kiss Me, Kate (1948), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), and early “concept musicals” like Allegro (1947) and Love Life (1948). These shows, as well as the other 261 musicals that opened on Broadway during the 1940s, receive the same detailed consideration in The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals as in Dietz’s other historical volumes. Listed in chronological order, each entry includes the following information about the musical: theatre name, opening and closing dates, number of performances, advertising tag lines, creative team and performer names, number of acts, setting information for book musicals, musical number titles, source material information where applicable, details on revivals or London transfers, award information, and publication and recording information. Most of this data is, of course, available online, but nowhere is it obtainable in such concise, accessible fashion. What sets the series apart, though, is Dietz’s expository critical writing for each entry. His mini-essays summarize critical reception of the plays and offer historical context. Unfortunately, there isn’t much social or analytical commentary, which would be generative for a decade that included so many shows that broke new ground for how they represented race and gender. In addition, the tome features a bibliography and several appendices, including chronologies by season and classification (revue, book musical, etc.), a list of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas performed during the period, a discography, a list of other productions of the decade that employed music, a list of published scripts, and a grouping of shows performed by venue. If the chronicle doesn’t in any way trouble the notion of what qualifies as a “Broadway musical,” the sheer amount of information on display and ease of use justifies its value. Jeremy Harrison’s much slimmer, practice-oriented Actor-Musicianship also employs a historical lens, but explores a performance convention rather than a specific time period. Exemplified in recent American theatrical production by John Doyle’s Broadway stagings of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (2005) and Company (2006), the phenomenon of the actor-musician, according to Harrison, is as old as the theatre itself. He traces its contemporary iteration in chapter one, “From the Bubble to Broadway,” though to the “counter-theatre movement” embodied by Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl’s Theatre Union (later Theatre Workshop) in 1936. There is an understandable British bias to the book; Harrison is a British performer-scholar currently running the Acting and Actor Musicianship program at Rose Bruford College in London. Littlewood and MacColl, who had extensive experience in the British folk tradition, sought to reverse what they saw as a separation of actor and musician, “informed by the gradual emergence of specialism in the processes of theatre making” (1). Harrison traces a line from the Theatre Workshop to the work of Glen Walford’s Bubble Theatre in 1972, which toured to London’s outer boroughs with The Blitz Show . Like the Theatre Workshop’s Oh, What a Lovely War! , The Blitz Show had an explicitly populist political agenda and was designed to appeal to both working- and middle-class audiences. Harrison identifies the guitar-playing actor-musicians in The Blitz Show as being key to its populist appeal, because of the conceit’s “simplicity and connection” (5). John Doyle’s actor-musician staging of classic American musicals at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury emerges in Harrison’s narrative as central to the institutionalization of actor-musicianship, previously a marginal, leftist practice, as “the British take on the American musical theatre form” (26). In chapter two, “Jack and Master,” Harrison attempts a definition of the actor-musician: is she “an actor who plays a musical instrument; or is she a musician who acts” (37)? For him, this question is of more pragmatic than phenomenological importance because it affects labor conditions and contracts, and the ways in which a performer positions herself relative to the “pervasive notion of specialism that has shaped the processes and pedagogies that apply to theatre and production” (37). He doesn’t come down firmly on either side, but he acknowledges that this is a much more pressing issue in the UK than in the US; in the United States “musicianship has simply become another skill to acquire or brush up” (56). Chapters three through six, filled with exercises developed by Harrison over the course of his long career as an actor-musician, make up the practical portion of the book: “Training the Actor-Musician: An Introduction,” “Directing Actor-Musicianship,” “Choreographing Actor-Musicianship,” and “Musically Directing Actor-Musicianship.” Chapter seven, “A Young Theatre,” is somewhat capacious despite being only a few pages long. It is a grab bag of ideas that didn’t fit elsewhere in the book, looking at youth theatre case studies, beatboxing as actor-musicianship, and Philip Auslander’s Liveness as an argument for actor-musicianship. Actor-musicianship is clearly making inroads in professional practice; last season it was an essential component of both staging and story in two new musicals on Broadway, School of Rock and Bandstand . Harrison’s volume should then be of interest to anyone studying, teaching, or training in contemporary acting practice. Musical Theatre Song , by Stephen Purdy, is subtitled “A Comprehensive Course in Selection, Preparation, and Presentation for the Modern Performer.” The book also begins with a historical survey, this time of the musical theatre genre itself, from 19 th century minstrelsy up to the 2013-14 Broadway season. Its title gives a good indication of Purdy’s verbose, welcoming tone: “Introduction to Song Selection and Historical Context: What You Should Know (and Why You Should Care).” Harrison makes the same specious argument as Dietz does about Oklahoma! , but this chapter, nearly a quarter of the entire book, makes a strong and refreshing argument for thinking historically as a performer. Purdy’s presumed audience is “the modern professional and aspiring professional theatrical singing actor,” for whom the path to “stage worthiness…is…the mysterious concoction of labor and love that it has always been to dyed-in-the-wool devotees,” (xxi) but now requires a higher level of versatility and virtuosity than ever before. Purdy’s system is organized with the goal of de-mystifying that path. The book is divided into three sections: I. Song Selection, II. Song Preparation, and III. Song Presentation. Each chapter includes a portion called “Get It Done,” which has questions and activities based on the chapter’s content. Further chapters break the process down in minute, step-by-step detail, covering everything from table work to interior monologue and objectives to posture. Purdy employs song examples both canonical (“Maria” from West Side Story , “Much More” from The Fantasticks ) and non-canonical (“Perfect” from Edges , Journey’s “Separate Ways”). The book’s contemporaneity is most evident in its discussion near the end about song performance on social media and YouTube. Far from bogging the performer down with minutiae, though, Purdy’s system is meant to help her “[B]e the pot of gold. Be the inexplicable ‘it.’ Be the surprise” (276, emphasis in original). With its combination of historicity and practicality, Musical Theatre Song , like Actor-Musicianship , will be of interest to both educators and performers. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Curtis Russell The CUNY Graduate Center 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.

Robert Thompson 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 The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Robert Thompson By Published on November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF Trance mediumship was a popular form of entertainment and potential source of spiritual education for audiences throughout most of the nineteenth century. Performing in trance began with public demonstrations of mesmerism in which a mesmerist would put a subject into an altered state of consciousness using a series of hand motions. Encouraged by the tales of Edgar Allan Poe in which entranced subjects forestalled death and reported visions of the afterlife, audiences came to expect amazing supernatural feats at these demonstrations. ([1]) In the 1850s, trance performance blossomed into a national obsession with the rise of spirit mediumship. Like the mesmeric subjects before them, a host of mostly female mediums began performing in a similarly dissociative state except that they claimed to be possessed by the spirits of the dead. Mediums would take their place at a rostrum or platform, fall into trance, and then follow their audience’s prompts in answering questions on science, philosophy, and religion in the voice of their possessing spirits. A panel then judged—based on what the medium had to say—whether the spirits had truly spoken through the medium or not. One of mediumship’s most infamous and colorful platform performers was the women’s rights advocate and free love radical Victoria Woodhull. ([2]) In addition to her mediumship, she was the first woman to run for president, operated the first woman-owned stock brokerage, and wrote for a newspaper she ran with her sister, The Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. Woodhull fit all of these undertakings into the space of about five years in a public career that burned brightly before flaming out. She arrived fairly late to trance performance, giving her first spirit-inspired lectures in 1870, and she made significant alterations to the frame of the performance to suit her purposes. Whereas traditional trance mediums foregrounded the spontaneity of their performances in making the case that their lectures were directly inspired by a supernatural source, Woodhull read from notes that her spirits had helped her to prepare in advance. These notes touched on questions of politics, sex, and marriage at a time when her fellow mediums had begun to turn their attention to more metaphysical and religious questions. While other mediums were discussing the nature of God and the fate of the soul, Woodhull was arguing for a woman’s right to divorce her husband and to vote. The content and form of Woodhull’s spirit-inspired lectures were deeply intertwined. To borrow from anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, the standard trance performance was transformative in that it sought to close the gap between the visible world of the performance and the invisible world of the spirits, rendering the spirits actually present in the body of the medium. ([3]) By contrast, Woodhull employed a more transportive style in which she did not bring her spirits into the room but rather suspended her audience’s disbelief in them long enough to make the case that they were the true origin of her ideas. She employed a kind of Brechtian theatricality insofar as she performed in a way that raised her audience’s awareness that they were experiencing an event that had been planned in advance. I argue that this gave her spirits plausible deniability in the face of her radical ideas while she maintained enough of their supernatural presence to give weight to the politics she espoused. At a time when audiences were still fairly new to hearing a woman speak about her own ideas, this style of platform speech allowed her to shift the audience’s focus from seeking proof of a supernatural presence to an engagement with terrestrial social and political principles. By making her human influence more palpable in her spirit-inspired performances, Woodhull was able to use trance mediumship as a platform to deliver a this-worldly message about sex and gender and to espouse a progressive vision for the future. Unfortunately for her, this performance strategy also gave her little cover in the face of the controversies she stirred up and ultimately led to her undoing as a national public figure. A Brief History of Trance Performance Trance as a genre of performance began with demonstrations of mesmerism. In 1836 and 1837, the French-born mesmerist Charles Poyen, inspired by Franz Anton Mesmer’s experiments in magnetic trance, traveled New England with his mesmeric subject, Cynthia Gleason. Poyen demonstrated his ability to put Gleason into a deep trance by passing his hands from her shoulders to her hands and argued that this trance was a means of curing disease and relieving pain. ([4]) The inability of observers to wake the mesmeric subject or somnambulist was an important feature of the demonstration. Gleason was subjected to sounds and sensations intended to rouse her like smelling agents, feathers, and the firing of a pistol, but only the mesmerist, Poyen, could bring her back to consciousness. ([5]) Mesmer, who invented the mesmeric technique in eighteenth-century France and demonstrated it at the French court, believed that this deeper state was achieved through the influence of the mesmerizer’s magnetic power over a fluid inside the subject, but nineteenth-century American mesmerists tended to understand mesmerism as a purely psychological act. Practitioners discovered that mesmerized subjects could access dimensions of knowledge not ordinarily accessible to the conscious subject. The fact that the somnambulist was unconscious but still able to communicate allowed their observers to peer into the hidden depths of the mind. Mesmerists developed a popularly disseminated idea that “the ‘deeper’ levels of consciousness opened the individual to the qualitatively 'higher' planes of mental existence.” ([6]) Historian Robert C. Fuller describes audiences, investigators, and practitioners marveling at the unconscious subject’s ability to perform feats of “telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition.” ([7]) Gleason, for example was able to identify objects held behind her when Poyen asked her to allow her mind to “leave the brain” and “come out of the body.” ([8]) Academic psychology was only in its infancy and would not properly address the concept of the unconscious until the 1880s, leaving mesmerists to define the mesmerized state as a possible opening onto transcendent realms of knowledge. By the 1840s, trance had become the subject of a growing public fascination. In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe published “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” about a man at the point of dying who is kept from death while spending months in a mesmeric trance. Poe may have been inspired by watching “the Poughkeepsie Seer,” Andrew Jackson Davis, perform a lecture while mesmerized. ([9]) In 1847, Davis published The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind, transcribed while he was in a trance state. Davis was building on the precedent set by Poyen and Gleason as well as the example of eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. ([10]) While entranced, Davis claimed to be able to enter a state like death and travel to other dimensions of being, namely the “Spirit World” where he was educated on the nature of existence. ([11]) Davis struggled to achieve popular recognition in the first years of his career, but he soon became a pivotal figure in the further development of trance performance because of his involvement with American spiritualism. Modern spirit mediumship began as a popular religious movement and form of entertainment on March 31, 1848 when the Fox family first communicated with a series of mysterious taps sounding throughout their home in Hydesville, New York. Sisters Kate and Margaret Fox spoke to the taps as if the taps could hear them and persuaded the disembodied intelligence producing the taps to repeat sounds and count on their cue. ([12]) News of the mysterious taps spread and soon the sisters became national celebrities, touring the country performing “rapping séances.” The Fox sisters’ mediumship became the prototype for physical mediumship which focused on physical manifestations of spirit communication like tapping sounds, tilting tables, and eventually materialized spirit bodies while Davis paved the way for a new genre of public speaking done in the voice of the spirits of the dead. By arguing in his Principles of Nature that he was able to visit a spirit world while in trance, Davis had presaged mediumship by over a year. ([13]) And so when spirit mediumship captured broad interest via the Fox sisters, he quickly attached himself to the movement, becoming a leading proponent and practitioner of what came to be called trance or platform mediumship. In this way, the spiritualist movement appropriated mesmerism's trance state, replacing the mesmerist's influence with the spirits of the dead and offering those spirits as the explanation for the trance subject's superhuman understanding. As a male performer, Davis was an outlier. While there were male trance speakers, most public demonstrations of trance communication were performed by women. Women were thought to have spiritual “sensitivities” and considered to be natural outlets for spirits to communicate through. In her feminist analysis of historical spiritualism, Ann Braude points out that, “[i]n mediumship, women’s religious leadership became normative for the first time in American history.” ([14]) In the mid-nineteenth century women were discouraged from speaking publicly but the performer's effacement by her spirits created an opening. As Braude argues, the fact that these women spoke as their spirits and not as themselves eased social tensions and made their performances more permissible. ([15]) A potentially threatening form of border-crossing defined the practice of mediumship. Mediums crossed the line between the living and the dead and, in the case of female mediums, gender lines. To deflect any censure that might come from violating these taboos, the medium put the focus on her spirits. The more the spirits could become co-present with the audience through the performance, the less challenging these transgressions became. Placing the focus on the relative reality of the spirits emphasized the audience’s critical role in judging the performance and enhanced the impression that trance was for entertainment. Mediums sought to prove themselves like circus performers attempting a daring feat or magicians performing a baffling illusion. After a short introduction, often including a prayer and hymn, the medium would take center stage channeling one or more spirits who would proceed to address the crowd. Usually, this central lecture or discourse was followed by a question-and-answer session. Here was where the critical, entertainment function was most apparent. The historian R. Laurence Moore describes how mediums were evaluated: They invited the audience to choose a jury from among themselves that would in turn select a topic of discourse for the medium. Announcing the subject to the medium, the audience then gave her a few moments to enter trance. Once in a trance, she would proceed to talk, usually for longer than an hour. The address constituted the test of her powers. ([16]) The topics chosen for trance lectures tended to be scientific (chemistry, physics, naturalism, or agriculture) or philosophical, theoretically beyond the medium's knowledge and intellectual capacity. From the audience’s perspective, this assured that the medium would have to rely on the spirits in order to adequately address the topic at hand. Not only the content of mediums’ speeches but also the style of their delivery was necessary to persuade audiences. Trance mediums had to mitigate the impression that the performance being given was theatrical in the sense of being scripted or otherwise rehearsed. Historian Simone Natale argues that trance allowed mediums to connect their performances with the “dreams, illusions, and artistic inspiration in the automatic actions of the brain and perceptual organs” which leant them a quality of authenticity for nineteenth-century spectators. “An aesthetics of creative absorption” gave the performance a feeling of spontaneity and detracted from any sense that the medium was carefully executing a trick to fool the audience. ([17]) According to theatre scholar Alice Rayner, the “theatrical occasion” is “a repetition of the loss at the edge of or alongside consciousness.” ([18]) What is lost is full conscious awareness of an originary moment that was never there in the first place. Theatre raises the audience’s awareness of the gap in time between the moment of perception and the subsequent conscious reflection on an experience. It emphasizes the fact that the meaning of the originating event—in this case, the medium's grand spiritual revelation—is always contingent on the humans who process and interpret it. In so doing, it “returns the event to its original condition of passage and persistence, of being unrecoverable and a repetition.” ([19]) Trance mediums fully dissociated and in so doing sought to deny any repetition in their performances by performing their spirits as immediately present. While their display was theatrical in the sense of being performed on a stage for an audience, it also sought to deny its own theatricality—in Rayner's sense of the word—by framing the performance as wholly spontaneous. Theatricality was particularly fraught in the mid-nineteenth century. Mediums traded on their authenticity—the promise not to be faking the spiritual intelligence they claimed to channel—but actors carried a stain of inauthenticity wherever they went. In his seminal study of anti-theatricality, Jonas Barish argues that Romanticists accused theatre artists of being insincere. Lord Byron, for example, had a penchant for closet drama because he felt that production “not only trivializes plays and introduces irrelevancies, it desecrates; it defiles the artistic integrity of the original script.” ([20]) For Byron, his poetic vision was most pure in the interior of his own mind, and the more it became exteriorized, the more it was subjected to the inherent profanation of expression. This attitude was likely spurred by a growing tension over actors' melodramatic performance style which was often highly theatrical, as opposed to the more natural ideals of the Romantics. According to David Grimsted, actors had to move quickly from role to role often with little or no rehearsal time and so the actor “almost had to have a set of mannerisms ready-made with which [s]he could embellish any character.” ([21]) Barish argues that the rising attitude among audiences and actors through the Romantic period was that the theatre “threatens to sap [actors'] authenticity, and its inescapable artificiality must be combatted with all the naturalness at the artist's command.” ([22]) These were the seeds that would ultimately blossom into Konstantin Stanislavski's system for psychological realist acting at the turn of the century. The Traditional Trance Medium( )For trance mediumship’s more successful performers, audiences discovered their authenticity in the gap between their humble and unsophisticated origins and the knowledgeable and sophisticated performances they gave for their audiences. Women were regarded as less worldly and informed, making their spirit-inspired revelations on scientific and philosophical questions all the more amazing. Many mediums’ performance of self had focused on their lack of education and skill. Trance mediums wanted spectators to believe that they were not capable of performing their spirits' messages without otherworldly intervention. The impression they created was that they were not clever enough to fake their spirits, and so when the spirits communicated complex theological or scientific truths through them it was more plausibly supernatural because the medium lacked the knowledge and skill to pull off the spirits' level of understanding and erudition on her own. As a teenager, Cora Scott Richmond, one of America’s most prominent trance performers, succeeded in persuading the chemist James J. Mapes—who received “marvelous scientific answers” to the questions he put to her spirits—and this spring-boarded her to national attention. ([23] )Richmond, born in 1840 near the town of Cuba in Allegheny County, New York, moved with her family to Wisconsin where she was raised on a farm. Her biographer, Harrison D. Barrett, described her as “in no way different from other country girls, reared and educated as country girls are.” ([24]) She discovered her mediumship before she was ten and began trance speaking when she was only eleven, giving up school at the age of twelve to devote herself full-time to trance performance. ([25] )Nettie Colburn, best known as the medium who served Mary Todd Lincoln, was sick for much of her childhood in Hartford, Connecticut, so much so that she received almost no formal schooling. After learning of her mediumistic power at a séance, she began trance speaking in 1856 at the age of fifteen. ([26]) Both Colburn and Richmond had no vocation or training outside of mediumship, and according to the ethos of the day, weren’t worldly enough to fool a crowd of men. To further erase themselves in favor of the spirits, mediums often described themselves as absent for the spirits’ performance. Trance writer and medium Achsa Sprague fell ill with rheumatic fever at the age of 20 but after seven years made a full recovery and credited her health to the intervention of the spirits. ([27]) She went on to become a spirit-inspired poet and trance lecturer until her death in 1861. In her trance-written poetry, Sprague described her first days as a medium in “The Angel's Visit:” “Enrapt, like one inspired of old, / Forth from her lips such teachings rolled, / Till lost to self the voice would say, / ‘Tis Angels speak to you to-day. / This form has languished long in pain, / But we have given it life again...’” ([28]) In her poem, Sprague referred to herself in the third person as “this form” which became “lost to self.” It wasn’t Sprague who lectured but rather the angels or spirits addressing her audiences directly using her voice. In 1897, Cora Scott Richmond published an account of her “Psychic or Supermundane Experiences” describing what happened to her when she entered the trance state. She said, “while passing into this state I experience no physical sensations that are describable; a sense of being set free, of passing into a larger realm.” ([29]) She traveled to another metaphysical plane, meeting spirits and encountering “visions of surpassing loveliness that no language, no gift of art, even with genius portraiture, could describe.” ([30]) Like Sprague, Richmond's spirits performed the work of speaking to her audiences while Richmond's consciousness was elsewhere; receiving a mystical education in the spirit world. Through these various techniques of self-effacement, the medium sought to literally become her spirits in the presence of the audience, but in order to fully realize this metamorphosis, the medium had to shut down the audience's critical gaze. If the audience was watching and listening in order to question whether a spirit was truly present then the spirit could only ever half emerge during the performance itself. And so, despite the fact that mediums were evaluated by a panel of jurors and critiqued in the newspaper, they argued that when the spirits spoke in performance, their speech was beyond what the performance could convey and so beyond human judgment. ( [31]) Achieving this transcendence was the work of several decades. In the early days of her mediumship when Richmond was seventeen years old, she concluded a speech in Newburyport, Massachusetts by saying, “We think this will be conceded by all minds who reason from the strict rule of philosophy and of logic. We think it must be conceded by all who view the human soul as being the child of Deity, by all who claim to worship a heavenly Father and a divine God.” ([32]) In other words, her message could be validated with human rationality if the humans in question had a spiritual basis to their understanding. Three decades later, she asserted that the spirits, communicating from beyond the limits of time and space largely resisted being encapsulated within the terrestrial confines of the language, let alone performance. Her spirits said that “[r]evelation proceeds from the unknown, the absolute, to the known; from the boundless, limitless, to the limited, the relative, the enchained.” ([33]) Their “enchained” revelations, given through Richmond, were incapable of teaching any of the most significant truths about the spirit world: “No external thing can reveal God. The Soul alone, being of the nature of God, perceives God. Nothing can teach that there is God.” ([34] ) Richmond’s effort to move her spirits further and further beyond the limits of human understanding may have been a response to a culture increasingly hostile to trance performance. While trance mediumship succeeded, for a time, in capturing an American audience, by the 1870s, it began to suffer from a rising prejudice against the value of altered states of consciousness among proto-psychologists. In the decade after the Civil War, conscious control or will became a major feature of psychological thought in America. In his Principles of Mental Physiology, the influential neurophysiologist and ardent critic of spiritualism W. B. Carpenter devoted an entire chapter to the significance of the will. For Carpenter, our judgments, beliefs, and worldview are governed by a controlling will which consciously selects the ideas that best suit our perspective: “[t]he records of ‘absence of mind’ afford abundant examples of the absurd incongruities which occur, when the Will is temporarily prevented by the mental preoccupation from summoning Common Sense to check the ideas which external impressions suggest.” ([35]) A passive medium like Richmond or Sprague failed to exert “self-direction” on their mental experiences by virtue of the fact that they had no control over the trance state and opened their mind to an infinitely variable supply of beliefs and ideas which may or may not have been entirely absurd. According to historian Cathy Gutierrez, Davis recognized that “both trance and insanity occupy the nebulous ground of alternative consciousness” and attempted to save trance. Davis argued that the entranced were not suggestible whereas the insane could be easily influenced by others' stronger will. ([36]) But for Carpenter, there was no difference between subjecting oneself to the influence of the spirits and the will of a living person. The medium was like the dreamer and should not trust any of the impressions she received while her consciousness was inoperative. According to the historian of psychology S. E. D. Shortt, “[m]ost [alienists] would have accepted Carpenter's notion that the control of mind ultimately rests with the will.... For Victorian neurology, as for social theory generally, the essential capstone was the concept of individual volitional control.” ([37]) Spiritualism, which pre-dated Darwin's Origin of Species and the rise of materialist neuroscience, was ill-equipped to address rapid changes in the standards of empiricism as they moved steadily toward the establishment of formal academic psychology in the 1880s. ([38]) If dissociative states were viewed as the source for extreme error and insanity then mediumship required a new approach to the role of consciousness. Victoria Woodhull’s Radical Mediumship Victoria Woodhull took up the platform to deliver trance lectures fairly late in the genre’s development, but her career represented a revolution in what trance mediumship could achieve. In the 1870s, Woodhull broke with the standard protocols of mediumistic performance in order to promote radical cultural change. She had worked as an actor before taking up mediumship, and for Woodhull, theatricality proved central to her unique approach to mediumistic performance and allowed her to promote an agenda that pushed beyond the already progressive attitudes of mainstream spiritualists. Woodhull spoke to Congress on the topic of women's suffrage and ran for president in 1872. She published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto and she advocated for free love which at the time meant a woman's right to divorce her husband and enjoy voluntary and pleasurable sexual encounters. She was accused of being a polygamist and a prostitute and jailed on obscenity charges. And she claimed to do all of this at the direction of the spirits of the dead. Unlike the chronically ill Sprague or the rural Richmond, Woodhull's entry into public life began with a short stage career. In her late teens or early twenties, she was living in San Francisco with her first child and husband, a carousing, alcoholic physician named Canning Woodhull. According to Woodhull's contemporary and biographer Theodore Tilton, her husband made hardly any financial contribution to the family, and so to help support herself and her child she took a job as a cigar girl. But Woodhull was too “blushing, modest, and sensitive” for the job. ([39]) Luckily, around this time she met an actress named Anna Cogswell who was looking for a seamstress “to make her a theatrical wardrobe.” ([40]) But Woodhull didn't earn enough making dresses to support her family and so Cogswell suggested that she try her hand at acting. Her first role was as the Country Cousin in New York by Gas-light and she went on to perform for six weeks in a variety of roles, earning fifty-two dollars. Her final role was in The Corsican Brothers, adapted by Dion Boucicault from the French original by Alexandre Dumas, pere. Suddenly, during the ballroom scene, a spirit voice addressed Woodhull, calling her to come home, and she gave up acting to rescue her sister, Tennie, from her abusive parents. ([41]) Woodhull received word from her spirits that she should “repair to Indianapolis, there to announce herself as a medium, and to treat patients for the cure of disease.” ([42]) She was raising money in part to liberate Tennie. Tennie was also working as a healing medium, but her father “add[ed] to much that was genuine in her mediumship, more that was charlatanry,” including selling lye as a cancer cure and burning away the skin of his clients. Using the money she raised, Woodhull “clutched Tennie as by main force and flung her out of this semi-humbug, to the mingled astonishment of her money-greedy family, one and all.” ([43]) With her sister by her side, Woodhull launched into a public career that was rooted in trance mediumship but ranged widely from politics to the stock market to the newspaper business. While Woodhull's stage career was short, Tilton made a point of praising Woodhull's ability to memorize. According to Tilton, “the text was given to [Woodhull] in the morning, she learned and rehearsed it during the day, and made a fair hit in it at night.” ([44]) At the time Tilton was writing his biography of Woodhull, the pair were friends and so this tidbit about memorization likely came from Woodhull herself and was included with her approval. She was proud of her skill, but her skill posed a direct challenge to the spontaneity trance mediums traditionally projected onto their performances. The fact that Woodhull was in the regular habit of memorizing lines would have introduced an opportunity to create a fraudulent trance performance that she had rehearsed in advance except that Woodhull made no claim to direct and immediate spiritual inspiration on the platform. Woodhull took ownership of her skill to prepare, memorize, and perform her lectures because she made a significant change to the frame of the trance performance. Woodhull did not perform as her spirits but rather with her spirits, trading on the audience's impression that her speeches were supernaturally inspired while maintaining her conscious presence in the room as a performer. Woodhull performed as herself, reading from the spirit-inspired notes transcribed in advance of her speaking engagements. She spoke about her spirits in the third person in contrast to more traditional trance mediums, whose spirits spoke in the first person. Richmond, who was frequently controlled by a group of spirits, used pronouns like “we” and “us.” Sprague spoke of herself while in trance as “our own medium.” ([45]) By contrast, Woodhull talked in terms of being educated by her spirits in advance of her lectures. In her speech, “The Elixir of Life,” for example, she argued for women's sexual and political freedom based on the authority of “Spirits, who have never deceived me, have informed and shown me why it must be so.” ([46]) Woodhull did not so much compose in the voice of her spirits as write in conjunction with their voices. While this may seem like a small distinction, it actually held major implications for the way Woodhull performed and was perceived by her audiences. To begin, Woodhull's manuscripts, whether composed consciously or unconsciously, did not comprise the whole of her remarks. Critics frequently observed how she would put down her notes and speak extemporaneously. The Newburgh Telegraph, for example, described how “She began her lecture by reading from [her] manuscript, but gradually warming with her subject, she placed the manuscript on the table, and spoke as she felt, citing numerous dramatic incidents in her extended career since she began the 'Social Crusade,' as proofs of the peculiar views she holds.” ([47]) The Argus of Albany, New York reported that Woodhull delivered her “peroration... without looking at the manuscript” and Albany's Evening Post said that “[w]hen Mrs. Woodhull speaks without notes, she is a better orator than either Anna Dickinson or Olive Logan.” ([48] )At her speaking engagements, Woodhull’s spirits served a background role, writing Woodhull's manuscript before the performance but leaving Woodhull to consciously convey, elaborate, and express her own opinions on their theories as herself. While Woodhull was generally more consciously aware than her fellow trance performers at her speaking engagements, her style should not be read as a complete break with traditional trance performance. Tilton contended that, like Richmond and Sprague, Woodhull was entirely beholden to her spirits. She “lived her life” according to their dictates and entered into the spirit realm on a daily basis. ([49]) As for her lectures, “every characteristic utterance which she gives to the world is dictated while under spirit-influence, and most often in a totally unconscious state. The words that fall from her lips are garnered by the swift pen of her husband, and published almost verbatim as she gets and gives them.” ([50]) Tilton’s description of Woodhull's process was very likely her biographer's attempt to respond to the at least partially true assertion that Woodhull's speeches were written for her by her second husband, James Harvey Blood, and the social reformer Stephen Pearl Andrews, a frequent contributor to Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly. ([51]) The key distinction between Woodhull and other female trance mediums is that Woodhull's spirits did not dictate her speech while in performance but in advance of the performance. If her critics are any indication, Woodhull largely succeeded in maintaining the aura of spiritual inspiration while assigning her spirits an offstage role. An admirer at the Cincinnati Inquirer observed that the “expression of her face sometimes, when she got warmed up to her subject, grew almost spiritual.” ([52]) Writing for the spiritualist publication The Banner of Light, Allen Putnam said, Mrs. Woodhull may, for aught we know, be herself very able—may be a highly talented human being. But she avows, and we believe that, in the main, her higher, bolder, more startling and yet coherent productions are passed through her brain by an expanded, disembodied intelligence. Consequently, we are surveying her as the instrument of some super-mundane being or beings, and not as a self-controlling actor and speaker. ([53]) Whereas other trance speakers like Richmond and Sprague explicitly performed in a dissociative state as their spirits, Woodhull created an ambiguous performance that blurred the line between the medium and her spirits. Her audiences were often unsure as to whether they were listening to Woodhull the orator or spirits speaking through her. This ambiguity shifted the audience's focus from the truth claims of the spirits to the talents of the speaker herself. Critics and commentators frequently noted Woodhull's skill as an orator. The Evening Post writer said that Woodhull “would have made a glorious actress. She has just the looks and brain-power necessary to become the early and successful rival of any actress who ever lived.” ([54]) The Ohio State Journal said “Mrs. Woodhull possesses a voice, an enunciation and a manner that would have made her a fortune upon a tragic stage. At times she grows terribly earnest and fires off her words as if they were red hot and unpleasant occupants of her mouth.” ([55]) Woodhull encouraged this association with the theatre by having her sister, Tennie, read a scene from Macbeth before her 1875 lectures. While Woodhull was willing to share credit with her spirits for the content of her performances, she succeeded in taking sole credit for the quality of her delivery. All of this served to render Woodhull’s performances a more secular affair in contrast to her fellow trance mediums. Richmond framed her trance lectures with prayers and hymns, foregrounding the religious dimension of trance speech. Woodhull opened her performances with Shakespeare or the poetry of Richard Sheridan. Woodhull's ability to convey a this-worldly perspective while maintaining a connection to her spirits had much to do with how she situated the moment of spiritual revelation in relation to the moment of performance. Richmond and Sprague may have been personally enlightened by the spirits but their spirits performed as themselves, having no use for the medium's own understanding. Since Woodhull performed as herself, her personal enlightenment was the originating event that she recreated and repeated in her performances. As such, the lecture’s higher meaning was not hidden in the mysterious realm of the spirits but brought down to earth in the person of the medium who claimed a full understanding of what the spirits meant to convey. This is the difference between the oracle and the augur. The oracle speaks in the voice of the gods, but her message can be incomprehensible and often requires further interpretation. The augur interprets the signs etched by the gods in this world in a way that is fully comprehensible but subject to human error. The spirits reside in an unconscious or subliminal space and the medium straddles the unconscious and conscious mind, tending toward one side or the other depending on the depth of the trance. In Woodhull's performances, the intervention of her conscious will allowed her to appropriate the sacred power of the spirits to achieve terrestrial ends. Conscious use equates to profane use, cutting up the infinite truth of the transcendent source by enchaining it in a finite vessel. Woodhull was focused on wielding her spirits for practical ends, and the greatest truths for Woodhull had their test in creating actual change in the human world. Her most celebrated causes were the sexual liberation and political enfranchisement of women. In 1870, she spoke to a special committee of Congress, arguing that women already had the right to vote since the 14(th) and 15(th) amendments—passed to end the socio-political disenfranchisement of African Americans following the Civil War—guaranteed that right for all citizens. She argued that, The right to vote cannot be denied on account of race. All people included in the term race have the right to vote, unless otherwise prohibited.... Men are also essentially just; and when the thought shall really come home to them, with the cogency of conviction, that they have, through thoughtlessness, been all along acting unjustly to their mothers and wives and daughters, by depriving them of political rights, it may happen that there will come up a great swelling-tide of reactionary sentiment which will make a sudden revolution. ([56]) This speech made no reference to the spirits or supernatural motives or designs but was, rather, a fairly straightforward argument for her cause. In 1872, she was nominated as the presidential candidate of the Equal Rights Party, even though the government still denied her right to vote in the election. As a candidate, her speeches dwelled on grand themes like freedom and justice but remained heavily rooted in practical politics. She argued that “no personal merit or demerit can interfere between individuals so that one may, by arbitration or laws, be placed unequally with another” and “every individual is entitled to all the natural wealth that he or she requires to minister to the various wants of the body.” ([57]) Just as Woodhull hybridized the form of her trance performance—being neither fully dissociated nor fully separated from her spirits—she also hybridized her content. Her practical goals maintained some connection to spiritual ends. As an advocate for free love—which, to Woodhull, meant a woman's right to seek out a healthy monogamous relationship—she argued that men and women should be allowed to dissolve their marriages at any time for any cause. In her 1875 lecture “Breaking the Seals; The Key to the Hidden Mystery” she told her audiences that a spiritual-sexual apocalypse she envisioned was presaged in the Bible, which, when read using her spirits' “cabalistic key” described the means by which individuals could achieve immortality. The key involved interpreting the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for the human body and sexual congress as the union of creative forces to generate an “elixir of life” or a “perfected blending of the positive and negative creative powers, from which shall come the constant rejuvenation or building up of the body.” Woodhull held this secret back from her audience: “do you ask what is the process by which this is to be gained? This I am not permitted to tell now. But I know what it is. I have been shown by the spirit of truth all things that relate to this wonderful mystery.” ([58]) She suggested that her listeners return to their Bibles and, using the clues she had provided them with, discover the secret for themselves. Significantly, the secret belonged first to the spirits and then to Woodhull, but it remained a secret. The truth, this “Elixir of Life,” came closer to this world but, in line with the ambiguity of Woodhull's spiritual inspiration, kept one foot in the other world. It had practical consequences—life-enriching sexual union—and could be known in practical terms, but it remained secret and required spiritual and intellectual work to discern. In her “Elixir of Life” lecture which she toured with in 1873, Woodhull envisioned a literal closing of the gap between the spiritual and human worlds, hinging on practical changes to social codes and sexual habits. Nineteenth-century marriage, which condemned women to sexual slavery, had precipitated “growing disgust sexually, between the sexes.” ([59]) Social and political circumstances in the form of women's disenfranchisement were holding the spirits back from bringing an apocalyptic new age to the people of earth. Many couples joined in happy sexual unions were required to create a supernatural erotic energy, welcoming the spirits to descend to earth and sanctify humanity: “[i]t will be readily understood that, when the final union has occurred; when Spirits become materialized, and human beings become Spiritualized, that the bodies in which both shall appear will be of the same etherealized material.” ([60]) In this vision, otherworldly spiritual designs and this-worldly practical designs overlapped in a perfect synthesis and Woodhull's political program became a spiritual quest, realizable through human political and social change. The Orator as Effigy Woodhull’s radical secular and spiritual quest would eventually lead to her downfall as a public figure. Joseph Roach argues that when a performer troubles society's boundaries, she can function as a surrogate or effigy sacrificed on the altar of a culture's superfluity: “‘burning in effigy’ is a performance of waste, the elimination of a monstrous double, but one fashioned by artifice as a stand-in, an ‘unproductive expenditure’ that both sustains the community with the comforting fiction that real borders exist and troubles it with the spectacle of their immolation.” ([61]) Woodhull's secularization of trance as a form of entertainment coupled with the artifice and theatricality of her performances rendered her as just such a stand-in. She became expendable; a curiosity and sideshow that ultimately had to be dispensed with for society to carry on as usual. Unlike Richmond or Sprague, Woodhull did not seek to displace herself with her spirits as a crosser of boundaries. By embodying the medium's conscious empowerment and advocating for women's social and sexual liberation, Woodhull directly attacked the effacing premise that had made female trance mediumship possible. This profaned the spirits through practical use for political and terrestrial ends and crossed well beyond the heavily-patrolled borders of religious and sexual propriety, forcing a crisis that demanded a monstrous double—Woodhull herself—be burned in effigy. Her various causes were often too progressive even for the spiritualists or women's rights advocates she circulated among. Suffrage leaders like Susan B. Anthony and leading spiritualists were uncomfortable aligning themselves with Woodhull's free love politics, and so those politics rested firmly on Woodhull's own shoulders. Actors are not responsible for the actions and opinions of their characters, but by performing as her spirits' knowledgeable interpreter, Woodhull collapsed the distinction between herself and her source, serving as both actor and character. In turn, she became responsible and let her spirits off the hook for all of the things her audiences disliked about her speeches. In an editorial from the Troy Daily Whig, a writer professed to having been at least partially won over by hearing Woodhull speak and meeting her afterward. Comparing her to Joan of Arc and Emmanuel Swedenborg, he interpreted her spirits as a kind of inherent genius but questioned whether Woodhull was putting that genius to good use: “[s]he has such an intense nature... that I presume she sees visions—as many angels as St. John perhaps—as many devils as Luther.... she is an abnormal growth of democratic institutions—thoroughly sincere, partly insane, and fitted to exaggerate great truths like self-denying love, into theoretical free love and some practical mischief.” ([62]) The writer believed that Woodhull saw visions but that she embellished them, distorting her spirits’ inspiration through her own mischievous designs. Woodhull understood that she was quickly falling into the role of sacrificial victim and sought to replace herself with a substitute. Substitution is common in the use of both ritual and mythological sacrifices. In the history of ritual sacrifice, poor children were substituted for the children of kings, animals were substituted for humans, and bread for animals. In mythology, Artemis substituted a deer for Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia, and the God of Abraham accepted a sheep in place of Isaac. ([63]) In theatre, ancient heroes try and fail to locate a scapegoat for the divine curses that haunt them; Renaissance protagonists often bring down a series of other characters on their way to the grave; and melodramatic heroes seek villains to die in theirs or their loved one’s places. Woodhull’s choice for substitute was a novel and convenient one: the abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Beecher and Woodhull happened to both include Theodore Tilton in their close circle of friends. Beecher was having an affair with Tilton's wife, Elizabeth, and in 1872 Woodhull discovered the poorly kept secret. Beecher had been speaking out vehemently against Woodhull's radical free love politics, and Woodhull saw this affair as an opportunity to reveal her opponents' hypocrisy. Being in overlapping social circles with Beecher, she attempted to persuade him to get out ahead of her plan to expose the affair and confess in a joint public address, officially aligning himself with the free love movement. Beecher appeared to be willing to go along with Woodhull, or at least so she believed, until the last moment when he failed to show at their speaking engagement. This prompted Woodhull to take to the pages of the Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly to publish news of his marital transgressions. ([64] ) But airing Beecher’s affair kept Woodhull in the role of her own champion. She had failed to coerce Beecher into standing in front of her as a substitute. Woodhull’s article drew the attention of notorious moralizer Anthony Comstock who prosecuted Woodhull, her sister, and her husband. ([65]) Comstock had them charged with distributing obscene materials through the mail because of a secondary article in the Beecher issue about two wealthy men debauching a pair of teenage girls. Comstock's raid and destruction of Woodhull's office and subsequent libel suit depleted her financial resources and imperiled her health. She was arrested and briefly jailed which gave Woodhull another opening for a theatrical display. Having been released from the Ludlow jail, a second order for her arrest had been issued and the police planned to apprehend her at a scheduled speaking engagement. Woodhull dressed as an old Quaker woman and worked her way to the front of the crowd, throwing off the disguise as the crowd gathered around her, shielding her from the police for the duration of her speech. ([66]) “I come into your presence from a cell in the American Bastille,” she said, painting herself as a revolutionary, “to which I was confined by the cowardly servility of the age.” ([67]) She participated in a series of very public trials in which she was prosecuted by Comstock and sued by L. C. Challis—one the men she and her sister had accused of corrupting teenagers. This culminated with Tilton's lawsuit against Beecher in 1874 and 1875 for which she served as a witness. The Comstock prosecution and scandal that followed wore Woodhull down and eventually put an end to her political and speaking careers; an immolation in the name of her sexual and spiritual border-crossing. ([68]) In 1877, she sailed for England and never regained the celebrity she'd enjoyed as a radical mediumistic orator. Woodhull utilized a progressive style of paradoxically conscious trance performance as a vehicle to spread a progressive social agenda. She knew from the reactions of her detractors that her viewpoints were radical. Even if she had chosen to present free love and women's enfranchisement in the form of direct spirit communication, her highly critical audience would have quickly discredited both her and her spirits. Whether driven by ego or cunning, she chose to put herself between her spirits and her audience. In this way, her spirits were able to maintain a kind of authority even in the face of audiences who disagreed with her. While this routine succeeded in keeping Woodhull and her politics in the spotlight for much of the first half of the 1870s, it could not be sustained forever. Operating on the vanguard, her role was to introduce the public to ideas they had never before considered. These ideas included new approaches to sex, marriage, and the family but also the nature of performance and consciousness. Often viewed as an aberration and curiosity by her contemporaries, Woodhull is better interpreted as a free-thinking innovator, willing to adopt and share unpopular opinions and happy to play to fans and critics alike as long as she could draw a crowd. References 1. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845) and “Mesmeric Revelation” (1849) in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Charleston, South Carolina: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016). 2. “Free love” in the 1870s generally referred to more liberal marriage laws rather than the communal partner-sharing of the 1960s. 3. Barbara Myerhoff, “The transformation of consciousness in ritual performances: some thoughts and questions” in By Means of Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 247. 4. Charles Poyen, Proofs of Animal Magnetism in New England (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, and Co., 1837). 5. Poyen, Proofs, 130-131. 6. Robert C. Fuller, Americans and the Unconscious (London: Oxford U. P., 1986), 36. 7. Fuller, Americans, 31. 8. Poyen, Proofs, 138-139. 9. John DeSalvo, Andrew Jackson Davis: The First American Prophet and Clairvoyant (Morrisville, North Carolina: Lulu, 2005). 10. Swedenborg experienced a series of dreams or visions which became the basis for his own Biblical theology. Mesmerists took inspiration from the fact that Swedenborg's revelations had come in an altered state of consciousness. See A Compendium of the Theological Works of Emmanuel Swedenborg (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1974). 11. Andrew Jackson Davis, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (New York: S.S. Lyon and William Fishbough, 1847). Davis said, “there is another distinct principle, which appears and is evident to me as Spirit. Also there is a mediator, or medium connecting the spirit with the body. This mediator I know as sensation. And when this medium becomes disunited, there is a physical dissolution, and a spiritual elevation to a different sphere of existence” (42). 12. D. M. Dewey, History of the Strange Sounds or Rappings, Heard in Rochester and Western New York and Usually Called the Mysterious Noises! Which are supposed by many to be communications from the spirit world, together with all the explanation that can as yet be given of the matter. (Rochester: D. M. Dewey, 1850), 15. By rapping through the letters of the alphabet, the taps eventually identified themselves as having been produced by the spirit of a peddler who had been killed by some previous owners of the house and buried in the basement. 13. Davis argued in his Principles of Nature that “the free, unshackled spirit... can receive impressions instantaneously of all things desired,--and with its spiritual senses, communicate with spiritual substances.” Of his own mesmerized state, he said, “When you ask me a question, I am then existing in the medium or sphere of the body; but in investigating and finding the answer, I pass to the sphere where I can associate with the truth and reality” (43-44). 14. Anne Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth Century America (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1989), 82. 15. Braude, Spirits, 82. 16. R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 113. 17. Simone Natale, Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 27. 18. Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death's Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2006), 17. 19. Rayner, Ghosts, 26. 20. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1985), 334. 21. David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 94. 22. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 347-348. 23. Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism (George H. Durhan, Co., 1926; Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975), I: 134. 24. Harrison D. Barrett, Life Work of Cora L. V. Richmond (Chicago: Hack and Anderson, 1895), 8. 25. Braude, Radical Spirits, 86. 26. Nettie Colburn Maynard, Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist? Or Curious Revelations from the Life of a Trance Medium (Philadelphia: Rufus C. Hartranft, 1891), 1-23. 27. Athaldine Smith, “Achsa Sprague and Mary Clark's Experiences in the First Ten Spheres of Spirit Life,” (Springfield: Star Publishing, n.d.) 28. Achsa Sprague, The Poet and Other Poems (Boston: W. White and Co., 1864), 300-301. 29. Cora L. V. Richmond, “Psychic or Supermundane Experiences,” The Arena (July 1897). 30. Cora L. V. Richmond, “Psychic or Supermundane Experiences,” The Arena (July 1897). 31. In one of the harshest criticisms Richmond received, the Christian Inquirer said that her performance was “chiefly a prolonged school-girl's essay, with allusions to the fragrant flowers, and bespangled with talk about the glittering stars. Now and then there was a striking sentence, but as a whole it was vague, sentimental and exceedingly weak” (21 August 1858). 32. Cora L. V. Hatch, “A Discourse on the Immutable Decrees of God and the Free Agency of Man,” delivered in City Hall, Newburyport, Mass. 22 November 1857. http://www.interfarfacing.com/ ImmutableDegreesFreeAgencyMan.htm (accessed 9 August 2022). 33. Cora L. V. Richmond, The Soul in Human Embodiments (Richmond, 1888; reprint, St. Louis: MAS Publishing, 1999), 10. 34. Richmond, Soul, 13. 35. W. B. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, with their applications to the training and discipline of the mind and the study of its morbid conditions (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1875), 391-392. 36. Cathy Gutierrez, Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (London: Oxford U. P., 2009), 163. 37. S. E. D. Shortt, Victorian Lunacy: Richard M. Bucke and the Practice of Late Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry (London: Cambridge U. P., 1986), 117. 38. Wouter Hanegraaf, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), 471. 39. Theodore Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull: A Biographical Sketch,” The Golden Tracts no. 3 (New York: Office of the Golden Tracts, 1871), 17. Although Tilton would go on to resent Woodhull for her role in the Beecher scandal, at the time he wrote his biography of her, they were close friends. This gave him unique access to the details of Woodhull's personal life but also colored his narrative heavily in her favor. 40. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 17. 41. Tennie Claflin was born Tennessee Claflin but changed her name to Tennie C. after leaving her parents'; home with her sister. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 17-19. 42. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 19. 43. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 22. Woodhull had a contentious relationship with her immediate and extended family throughout her life. 44. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 17-18. 45. See, for example, Cora L. V. Tappan, “The History of Occultism and its Relations to Spiritualism,” Banner of Light 39, no. 22 (26 August 1876): 1. 46. Victoria C. Woodhull, “The Elixir of Life; or, Why Do We Die? An Oration Delivered before the Tenth Annual Convention of the American Association of Spiritualists, at Grow’s Opera House, Chicago, Ills., by Victoria C. Woodhull, September 18, 1873” (New York: Woodhull & Claflin, 1873). 47. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly 9, no. 8 (23 January 1875). Woodhull made a regular habit of reprinting notices about her performances in her own newspaper. In reprinting these reviews, she tacitly approved of or gave the impression that she approved of their characterization of her. 48. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly 10, no. 14 (4 September 1875). 49. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 8. 50. Tilton, “Victoria C. Woodhull,” 9. This process is a direct echo of the way in which Andrew Jackson Davis composed his Principles of Nature with his scribe, William Fishbough. This suggests the possibility that Woodhull was intentionally assuming a more masculine trance role. 51. Myra Macpherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex Suffrage and Scandal in the Gilded Age (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2014), 54-55. 52. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly 9, no. 10 (27 November 1875). 53. Banner of Light (20 November 1875). 54. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly 10, no. 14 (4 September 1875). 55. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, 10, Number 26 (27 November 1875). 56. Victoria C. Woodhull, “The Memorial of Victoria C. Woodhull, to the honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the United States in Congress assembled, respectfully showeth regarding women voting” New York, 1870. https://www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.12800900/ (Accessed 9 August 2022). Some members of the women's suffrage movement were annoyed with Woodhull for having brokered this address to a congressional committee because they viewed her as an attention-seeking upstart who had not yet earned her place among them. 57. Victoria C. Woodhull, “A Speech on the Impending Revolution,” in Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull, ed. Cari M. Carpenter, (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 2010), 67. 58. Victoria Woodhull, “Breaking the Seals; The Key to the Hidden Mystery an oration delivered by Victoria C. Woodhull, First in Martin House, Albany, N. Y., Friday Evening, Aug. 2 1875, and since at various other cities in the east,” Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly 10, no. 17 (25 September 1875). In this speech, Woodhull took a strange turn toward occultism, using a 'cabalistic' key to reveal the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for the human body. She gave this speech at the same time that Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott had attracted the notice of America's spiritualists with their new Theosophical Society which drew heavily on Egyptian occult themes in its early days, and so it's likely Woodhull was attempting to capitalize on a new vogue for occultism. That having been said, the speech's reference to an “elixir” helps to create continuity with her earlier work on “The Elixir of Life.” 59. Victoria C. Woodhull, “The Elixir of Life; or, Why Do We Die? An Oration Delivered before the Tenth Annual Convention of the American Association of Spiritualists, at Grow’s Opera House, Chicago, Ills., by Victoria C. Woodhull, September 18, 1873” (New York: Woodhull & Claflin, 1873). 60. Woodhull, “Elixir.” Woodhull loops all the way back to trance's mesmeric roots by discovering her “elixir” in the magnetic poles of two sexual partners. Complementary positive and negative poles cure disease in the afflicted partners and promote health and longevity. 61. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia U. P., 1996), 41. 62. E. H. G. C., Reprinted in the Banner of Light 30, no. 4, (7 October 1871), 2. 63. Gabriele Weiler, “Human Sacrifice in Greek Culture” in Human Sacrifice in Jewish and Christian Tradition, ed. Diethard Romheld, Armin Lange, and Karin Finsterbusch (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 64. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly (2 November 1872). 65. New York Times (3 November 1872). 66. Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly (23 January 1873). 67. Victoria C. Woodhull, “The Naked Truth or the Situation Reviewed,” in Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull, ed. Cari M. Carpenter, (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 2010), 125. 68. Woodhull was in such terrible shape at the nadir of the scandal that news circulated that she had died. Later, corrections were issued that she was only seriously ill. New York Times (7 June 1873). For his part, Beecher's reputation survived Woodhull's attempt to expose him. To this day, a statue of Beecher stands in Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn, New York. There is, to my knowledge, no corresponding statue of Woodhull. Footnotes About The Author(s) Robert C. Thompson is Associate Professor of Theatre and the Director of Performing Arts Programming at Chesapeake College on Maryland's Eastern Shore. He publishes on paranormal tourism and American occultism and is the host of Occult Confessions, a history podcast about alternative religious traditions. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. 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Donatella Galella 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 Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Donatella Galella By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity . Dorinne Kondo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018; Pp. 376. Using dramaturgy, autoethnography, psychoanalysis, and critical race theory, Dorinne Kondo argues that performance shapes race in Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity . She stakes a claim to creativity as work that can imagine new ways of existing, but also reify the status quo and drain minoritarian life force. She builds on her previous book, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater , by theorizing racialized reception; restructuring the normative form of academic manuscripts; and examining plays by Anna Deavere Smith, David Henry Hwang, and herself. Kondo critiques how liberal humanism evacuates the uneven power dynamics of theatre, yet she ultimately insists on possibilities for progressive change. Worldmaking resembles a drama that demystifies theatrical and academic labor. In the Acknowledgements, Kondo considers the embodied, emotional conditions of writing this book. She shows the work. She organizes her theoretical interventions, dramaturgical analyses, and personal stories into an overture, chapters within three acts, and three entr’actes, culminating in her own original play, Seamless . Early on, Kondo defines an array of key terms. Taking seriously Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s understanding of racism as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, Kondo theorizes “ racial affect , which enlivens some and diminishes others, and affective violence , especially in sites assumed to be far from racial violence,” like the theatre (11, italics in original). The unequal distribution of emotions accords with racial hierarchies. For instance, white spectators might laugh uproariously at Clybourne Park , Bruce Norris’s white reframing of A Raisin in the Sun , while spectators of color might shudder. Kondo cites psychoanalytical thinkers like Melanie Klein and Hanna Segal to theorize reparative mirroring, reparative criticism, and reparative creativity. In the first case, audience members of color can feel invigorated seeing representations of themselves on stage. Dramaturgs and other artists can enact reparative criticism and creativity by making plays more progressive and composing their own feminist, anti-racist artworks. Stressing collaboration, Kondo further offers the terms politics of affiliation and politics of agonistics to convey solidarity and struggle toward a more equitable world in and beyond the theatre. As Kondo lays out the field of theatrical production, she does not presume that readers already know details like how little playwrights earn for playwriting as opposed to screenwriting. She provides statistics and interview excerpts to demonstrate how resources go disproportionately to white men. Kondo speaks to scholars from a wide range of fields—Theatre and Performance Studies, Anthropology, Ethnic Studies—as well as practicing artists and students. In Act Two, Kondo applies her terms to her case studies, primarily Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) and Yellow Face (2007). She contextualizes Anna Deavere Smith’s and David Henry Hwang’s careers as well as her relationships with them; she served as dramaturg for three of Smith’s plays— Twilight , House Arrest (1997), and Let Me Down Easy (2008)—and she has dialogued with Hwang in person and in her scholarship. Kondo devotes one chapter to Smith’s artistic process and political project. Smith interviews and performs as subjects involved with a particular event or theme, in this case, the Los Angeles uprisings after police assaulted Rodney King and were mostly exonerated for their anti-black violence. By embodying subjects across various identities, Smith grounds their experiences, demonstrates their relationality, and represents minoritized voices too often silenced in the theatre. Because Twilight presents different perspectives and no easy solutions to systemic oppression, the play models a nuanced history. At the same time, Kondo recognizes that some critics praised Twilight due to their interpretation of the play as celebrating power-free, individual-based common humanity. A highpoint of Worldmaking is when Kondo details her experiences as one of four dramaturgs for Twilight . Her behind-the-scenes account distinguishes various versions of the text, from the premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, to the transfer to Broadway, to the adaptation for television; she also explains how dramaturgs gave feedback on Smith’s performances of the interviews. For example, she discusses how they switched the play’s last monologue to avoid letting audiences presume racial equity to be inevitable. Exemplifying a politics of affiliation and politics of agonistics, Kondo describes how she fought for the inclusion of Asian Americans to disrupt the black-white binary, represent Korean Americans, and challenge stereotypes. She even brought Smith to tears. But what she greatly admires about Smith is her willingness to be challenged. Another distinct pleasure of Worldmaking is Kondo’s style of storytelling. She recalls unexpectedly seeing Smith perform as herself (Kondo) and voluntarily handing dramaturg-director-producer Oskar Eustis five single-spaced pages of notes on Yellow Face . And the book reproduces these notes! The book underscores the major contributions of dramaturgs. For Kondo, “Dramaturgical critique deploys research, theory, and scholarship for reparative ends” (197). In her chapter on Yellow Face , Kondo articulates how David Henry Hwang makes and unmakes race, and she suggests that she might have influenced the final script for the Public Theater. Set against the 1990s Miss Saigon protests and U.S. yellow peril, the comedic docudrama follows playwright DHH dealing with his immigrant father, who longs for the American dream, and his own accidental casting of a white man to play an Asian American character. In the original East West Players staging, the play ended with a melding of the Chinese father and white actor, evoking an ethereal racial equality. After Kondo offered critiques of this power-evasive liberal fantasy, the revised Yellow Face underlined that fantasy as such and firmly connected anti-Chinese persecution with the father’s death. Kondo concludes the book with reparative creativity: her play Seamless and a chapter covering her journey with the play, including the racialized challenges of trying to persuade a professional theatre to produce it. The play centers on Diane Kubota, a lawyer grappling with the extent to which she can know her parents and their experiences of Japanese American internment, and, too, how gendered generational traumas affect her. Combining realism, direct address, fantasy sequences, and flashbacks, Seamless draws from Kondo’s life and raises questions about Asian American epistemology and ontology. Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity joins new, necessary scholarship reflecting on the work of minoritarian art such as After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization by Judith Hamera. In reading this book, I felt the reparative mirroring that Kondo theorizes, from her experiences of spectatorial affective violence to her centering of an Asian American woman in her play. Like DHH at the end of Yellow Face , Kondo reminds us, “And I go back to work, searching for my own face.” References Footnotes About The Author(s) Donatella Galella University of California, Riverside 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.

Bess Rowen 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 Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames Bess Rowen By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Photo: Selfie by James Ijames. Playwright James Ijames was already a household name in Philadelphia before he won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Fat Ham . He first garnered critical attention as a performer after graduating with an MFA in Acting from Temple University. He then turned his attention to directing at major Philadelphia theaters such as the Arden and the Wilma, and he later became one of the co-Artistic Directors of the latter. And plays like 2017’s Kill Move Paradise , a meditation on the killing of unarmed Black men by police set in limbo, had already gained important national interest. As his colleague at Villanova University, I have had the opportunity to watch his accomplishments grow. And in 2022, I watched as audiences flocked to the family cookout for his explicitly Black and queer adaptation of Hamlet , first at The Public Theater and later on Broadway. His public profile continues to rise, as proven by his newest play, Good Bones , which was in rehearsal at The Public as I sat down to ask him about the current state of the American theatre. Bess Rowen: I’m curious to start by asking what are you excited to see in the forthcoming season? What excites you about the American theatre season right now? It can be individual plays, playwrights, or themes you’re seeing pop. And it can include your own work! James Ijames: What am I excited to see? I’m excited to see Branden Jacobs-Jenkins back on Broadway. Soon. And in a new play category. I’m excited that Jamie Lloyd is going to be directing on Broadway again. Rowen: Yes! And are there any themes that pop for you? What stands out to you as something that’s going on right now, or something that’s coming, that marks a difference? Ijames: Yeah, that’s the thing. I actually think we’re actually reverting back to some of our old stuff. A little bit. I think we, as an industry, were like, ( smugly ) “Wow, look at us. We did it. They saw us. They saw the white American theatre. And we fixed it. We’re great, right? Okay, we’re great.” It feels like that a little bit. And that’s not everywhere. But there is this sense of congratulation, of making it through a trying time—if you were able to make it through a trying time. And then I think the very real, and natural, impulse right now is to stop the hemorrhaging and get people back into the buildings. And the quickest way that people do that is by doing things that feel comfortable. And what happens when you start to make art that feels comfortable is that you start to build systems around it that also offer certain people comfort—not everybody comfort, but certain people comfort. Yeah, I think we are flipping a little bit on some of the stuff we were gonna do. Now, I do think we overcorrected as well. There were some places where I thought “how many of these do we gotta…?” There was a bit of that as well, but now we’ve sort of patted our collective selves on the back and said we’re this great inclusive space. But hey, you know, as always in transition…I do think it is better than when I started. I do think young people coming into this industry are finding a much better industry than the one that I found when I came in. Both as a Black person, as a queer person, as a person not born in an urban setting and doesn’t know how to move through those spaces, who had to sort of learn how to do that. Yeah, I don’t know. Rowen: That’s such a good point, too. Because it reminds me that so often the theatre is reacting. It’s reacting and trying to kind of guess at what the next thing it needs to touch is. Ijames: Yes. Rowen: And I have noticed more butts in seats at theaters that I’m going to that have new work in them a lot of the time. But I think a lot about what “new work” means. Is it the same story by a new person, or is it actually a new story? And those are two different ways of selling tickets, which is important for us to remember. But you’ve been a part of that change of moving the dial at least slightly forward, and that’s something! That is really an impressive feat. And I do hope that now that we went very far in one direction and are now heading kind of far in the other direction that we land in some sort of happy medium. Ijames: Yeah. I think we learned a ton so that there are lessons we all learned that we can come back to. But it’s just so easy to go back to the how you used to do it. It’s so easy. It’s so intoxicating to just go there. And just because of the circumstances, I think there’s a bit of that. But, I will say this. I also think this is a moment that is kind of ripe. I think the best work to come…How do I say this? We haven’t seen the great works that are gonna come out of this moment. We might start to see that, but I really do think we’re gonna see artists be theorists in their craft more. That’s the thing I’m kind of hungry for. Like, who’s doing something formally interesting? There was this moment with Jackie Sibblies Drury and Lucas Hnath where there were some real formal challenges. You know, we usually let Europe do that for us ( laughs ). Rowen: Yes! It’s true. But Europe is more anti-text than we are. So, we have this American writing tradition that can also be a staging tradition. But often we have not thought of it like that. We’ve thought of it as, “look at this great piece of literature that someone wrote.” And, right, but those people staged that. And that’s what’s so cool about Jackie Sibblies Drury’s work and Lucas Hnath’s work, because those plays say “okay, I need a pool on stage. Okay, there’s a moment where the audience needs to come on stage.” That’s a bold choice, and people were up for it. Ijames: You know, people are really game for that! And I think in this moment where is so easy to watch some of the best dramatic writing in the world on television, on your couch—I mean, Succession is a beautifully written show. It is incredible writing! So, what can we do in the theatre that requires liveness, that requires you to be in space with other people, to sort of be in citizenship with other people. I think we have to begin to find forms that feed that and that will draw people back. Because people pay thousands of dollars to see Beyoncé because they want to be in a community with a lot of people. Rowen: And they want to see something they can’t see anywhere else! Like we need to give them something they can’t see anywhere else, and they can’t experience everywhere else. And you’re so right about the TV aspect, too. I think about that because I watch these shows like Only Murders in the Building , which I’m not saying is the best written show in the world. But it’s a very smart show that is written by a bunch of theatre people, which is why the characters are so interesting and fully fleshed out. Bringing the theatre to TV is really interesting, now we have to figure out what we can bring from those series back into the theatre. And that’s a little more challenging. Because I feel like we often not quite apologizing to our audiences, but we’re saying, “don’t worry, it’s so worth this money, and we won’t even keep you here that long! It’s gonna be fine!” There’s something about the safeness of “don’t worry, you’re gonna sit there and see this thing and you don’t have to come back for the next episode. Just sit back and relax!” Ijames: ( laughs ) Yes! Rowen: I want us to trust our audiences a little bit more, because I do think that what we’ve learned is that they will show up for something different. It’s a different audience that might show up for something different, but they will. Ijames : They will! Yes, I think that’s the thing we haven’t confronted. Is that what an audience is has changed a little bit. And we have all of these “rules” about our industry that we have from, I guess, the 19th century. Like plays start at 8. Why do plays start at 8 still? If I wanted to catch a show on my way home from work, no, I have to wait. If I’m in midtown, I’ve got to wait around, if I’m downtown…that’s a thing that we have just accepted and not questioned. So, that’s one example of audience changing, and the needs of the audience changing. Rowen: Right! Ijames: I also think that there’s a lot of talk about how our attention span has been shortened—I just think it’s been reorganized. Like, I’m able to pay attention. You just have to hold my attention. And it’s a little more difficult to hold my attention. Rowen: Exactly! But people will sit there and binge a show. We do have the attention span to do that, you’re right. It’s just that we won’t sit there passively for just anything. Ijames: Yes. Rowen: That’s the change. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Ijames: I don’t think that’s a bad thing either. And I also wonder about…what are some things that can happen in a theatre—I won’t call these play—that people can come in and out of? Like if you can get people in there because they can have some agency about how they can move through the space, you can reorient people into what this is. So, when you do ask them to sit down, they’re not like “I’ve never been here before.” Rowen: Right. Ijames: So, I just think we have to mix up what we’re doing. We can’t just plan a season of a bunch of plays and musicals and think just because they won Tony’s last year they’re going to automatically sell. The thing I always wonder about in Philadelphia is that it has this huge sports fan culture. And I just wonder: what is the way to harness and invite those people into our space to come and see? Because they wanna be in a collective. Maybe they just don’t feel like they’re allowed in that space, so they don’t come into that space. I don’t know. Rowen: Yeah, because at an Eagles game you could leave and get a refreshment and come back. Some people do sit or stand there and watch the game the whole time, and don’t go anywhere, but some people are coming in and out. And still, that creates community and there is an overwhelming community feeling with the sports teams at the center. And those fans would do anything to see those teams, like they travel all over to see those teams compete. And I’ve heard people say that the difference is that there’s no competition in the theatre. Ijames: Hmmm. Rowen: Which is fascinating because I feel like I can talk about plays where there is competition, but it’s not “real” competition. Like it’s falsified somehow because the understanding is, I think, that there’s no real risk. Ijames: Right. Rowen: But we know there is a real risk in doing live theatre. But the competition can’t be between the actors and the audience. It has to be something that people are signing up to watch. So, I’m sure there’s a way to harness that. That’s such an interesting point. Because also, as a New Yorker, I tend to defer to thinking about New York. But the New York is a very particular theatre community, and it is not like what is happening in most of our country and the world. So, we have to think local in terms of what our community needs from the theatre. And I think a lot of people don’t think like that. Thinking of an untapped audience who would be into it is a great way of thinking about it instead of worrying that we’re going to scare off our subscribers. There’s so often a reaction of, “we’re going to lose them if we don’t do something.” Ijames: And I’m like, “we’ve lost them. They’re already gone. They’re not coming back.” Rowen: And also, are we raising the next generation of subscribers? There’s no rule that subscribers have to be a certain age. If you make a season people want to see, they’ll come. […] That’s a really interesting point about untapped audiences and what we’re actually doing, aside from just doing programming we think is interesting to get people into “the American theatre.” In terms of what you’ve seen recently, what excites you as an audience member lately? Ijames: What have I seen lately? I’ve been pretty intensely in rehearsal. But I really loved Stereophonic . Yeah, I really loved that. Rowen: Me too. What an unusual, creative play. The basis is so simple and it’s so unique. Ijames: Right? I just was sort of dazzled by it. Rowen: Also proof that people will sit there for three hours if it’s good. Ijames: This is also very true, yeah. I saw Kenny Leon’s [direction of Suzan-Lori Parks’s] Topdog/Underdog last season…was it last season? The season before last? Rowen: I think it was two seasons ago. It was excellent. Ijames: And I also saw his [direction of Samm-Art Williams’s] Home at the beginning of this season. And I just love what he’s doing with bringing those plays back that, you know, had a life but didn’t really get the wind in their sails the way they should have because of the time. And it was really lovely to see that play. What else have I seen lately that I’ve liked? I really liked Hilma at the Wilma ( laughs ). Rowen: Hilma at the Wilma! Ijames: The Comeuppance . Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance . I just…he can do anything. Rowen: Yeah. I said to him when I talked to him that when I was sitting there and watching that play I literally had a thought in my head that was: this must have been what it felt like to watch a new Eugene O’Neill play at the time. Something that makes you think, formally, I’ve never seen anything that does this. It totally works, but what a different approach. What a fascinating and subtle change. I’m excited to see it at the Wilma this season. And I’ve been telling everyone I know to see it. Ijames: It’s such a good play, and I haven’t been in any rehearsals, but I imagine it will be a very good production. What else? I haven’t been seeing a bunch lately. Rowen: It’s okay, you’ve been a bit busy! I’m gonna let you go in a second, so for a final provocation for you: If you could say something to the current American theatre about what you hope is coming next, what would you like to see happen next in the US queer theatre? Ijames: Oh. I want to see larger and more robust and sustained systems of support and development for trans playwrights in particular. I feel like there are times sometimes people will come to me with “oh, this is kind of interesting, you should do something with this.” And I say, “there’s a trans playwright who should be writing this and you should find them to write it.” You know, I think organizations maybe feel timid to program it, but the audience is there. People are ready for that kind of storytelling. I think a lot of formal and structural things that we don’t even think about are happening in that space that we could all learn from. And that could really change and elevate what we’re doing in this country in theatre. So, that’s a thing I want. I want there to be plays about queer people where their queerness is completely quotidian. Rowen: Yeah, yes. Ijames: Like, the problem is: we’ve gotta sell the cherry orchard. You know, just like in a straight play. Rowen: Right! We, a gay couple, must sell our cherry orchard. Ijames: Yeah, are we gonna keep the piano or sell it? Can the problem be, “Laura, what are you gonna do if you don’t get married?” We don’t get to do that. It’s always gotta be: “Oh, you’re queer. What a problem!” ( laughs ). Rowen: ( laughs ) It’s true! Well, I feel like you do that, though. One of the things I love about your work in terms of representation, and I’ve said this to you before, is that you write bi and pansexual men, particularly Black men, who are…where that’s not the problem of the play. And specifically for bi and pan people, that is often the problem of what the representation is. It’s often like, “oh no! What kind of gender do you want to be with, and how does that define your personhood?” And, it’s like, no, they’re just existing in space. And when that’s revealed, that’s never the conflict. That is such a radical move, and so generous. It always moves me so much when I see those particular kinds of representation. And I’ve been lucky enough to see it live in a few of your plays. And I’m always thinking that there is someone in the audience who this is opening up…this is a moment where they’re just going ( exhales ). They’re relaxing. And they’re thinking, “Okay, I’m alright. I’m safe here.” And it isn’t going to be an hour and half more of people being like “Oh, but what about your identity?” So, thank you for that! References Footnotes About The Author(s) BESS ROWEN is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and affiliated faculty in Gender & Women’s Studies and Irish Studies at Villanova University. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2021. Recent articles have appeared in Theatre Survey , Theatre Topics , Modern Drama , and The Eugene O’Neill Review . Her next book project focuses on the representation of mean teenage girls on stage. She also served as the co-editor of the Journal of American Drama & Theatre and the performance review editor for The Eugene O’Neill Review . 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.

Jeanne Klein 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 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Jeanne Klein By Published on April 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre . Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn has accomplished a significant feat. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre marks the first book-length study that examines the emergent history of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences (LTYA) from its earliest Indigenous origins, as well as its burgeoning dramatic literature and scholarship over the past three decades. Having grown up in New Mexico and west Texas, Aragόn writes passionately from her lived childhood experiences as a Chicana/India. Her family engaged in rasquache teatro in their backyard, performed in biennial pastorela and pasiόn plays at their church, traveled in a van to perform, work, protest, and march for Chicana/o rights, and assisted border-crossing Mexican families. Facing both Anglo and Mexican prejudices, she came to recognize the double consciousness of her borderlands identity. Based on her personal, coming-of-age experiences, Aragόn argues her theory of “performing mestizaje” in which she defines bicultural and hybrid body-mind concepts that (a) exhibit an Indigenous identity in Chicana/o Latina/o cultures through language and body practices, (b) enable a transformation that helps explain mestiza/o and Indigenous consciousness, spirituality, and healing, (c) participate in promoting Indigenous rituals and celebrations through the use of mythology and symbolism, and (d) enact cultural production that contests, resists, and interrogates the impacts of imperialism and colonial systems. (3) In these ways, she gives voice to Chicana/o and Mexican-American young people whose dramatized stories remain disparaged among professional theatre companies and all too many university theatre programs today. The first three out of five chapters (half the book) comprise a meticulous literature review with requisite due diligence. In the first chapter, Aragόn’s overview of US children’s theatre is based on somewhat inaccurate narratives propounded by the Theatre for Youth and Community program at Arizona State University in Tempe, the site of her heretofore unpublished dissertation. Contrary to canonical constructions that US professional theatre and dramatic literature for children began in the 1880s, prominent child actors actually began performing plays in professional theatre companies for young spectators in the 1790s, as well as Shakespeare’s works and pantomimes since the 1750s. More importantly, she addresses the nascent study of LTYA with critical texts and play anthologies that began to appear in the 1990s. In regard to shifting cultural constructions of childhood, her heavy reliance on classic Piagetian stages of child development reflects an unfortunate yet understandable lack of awareness of this field’s complex advancements in social-cognitive and neuroscientific realms. Chapter two builds upon the crucial foundations of other scholars by reviewing the Indigenous roots of child performances in Mesoamerican rituals through Spanish colonial pastorales. After Mexico’s independence from Spain, theatrical Mexican families toured southwestern US territories and their children, the first generation of native-born Mexican-American actors, starred in Spanish-language theatre companies through the 1950s. Photographs of child performers, including stars María Luisa Villalongín and Leonardo “Lalo” G. Astol, enliven their costumed performances. From there, the pivotal Chicana/o movement begun in the 1960s gave rise to multiple youth teatros that sparked today’s generation of major LTYA playwrights. To underscore the cultural, political, economic, social, and psychological specificity of young Chicana/o identities, Aragόn delineates border theory and Chicana feminism in connection with theatre scholarship in chapter three. She also explicates Jean Phinney’s three-stage psycho-social model of ethnic identity development (1989-90). In chapter four, Aragόn applies all theoretical frameworks by analyzing representations of children and adolescents in six pivotal plays: Alicia in Wonder Tierra (or I Can’t Eat Goat Head) by Silvia Gonzalez S., Farolitos of Christmas by Rudolfo Anaya, The Highest Heaven by José Cruz González, No saco nada de la escuela by Luis Miguel Valdez, Simply María or The American Dream by Josefina Lόpez, and The Drop Out by Carlos Morton. Her succinct comparative summation of these coming-of-age plays reveals how extraordinary child and adolescent protagonists successfully negotiate familial, social, political, and psychological border crossings by age, gender, class, and ethnic identities through physical journeys, metaphorical dreams, or in school settings. Playwrights’ biographies, featured with their child and adult photographs, also serve to justify how and why these foundational works created borderlands children’s theatre. The final most provocative chapter adds Aragόn’s illuminating interviews with each playwright in which they recount their most memorable theatrical and school experiences and their artistic connections with the empowering Chicana/o movement. Notably, many highlighted their frustrating challenges trying to get their plays produced by mainstream professional companies. Paradoxically, once El Teatro Campesino achieved its mainstream status, youth teatros declined until university-bred artist-scholars revived and advanced LTYA for young audiences, albeit with too few child and adolescent actors, while various community organizations expanded theatre with Latina/o young people. Yet even today, as Aragόn makes clear, childism remains firmly entrenched far behind all other contested cultural movements (e.g., December 2016 issue of American Theatre). Despite the formation of Latinx Theatre Commons in 2012, LTYA festivals still vie for national recognition among mediated adaptations of children’s literature and other popularized trends. Even so, Aragόn’s optimistic outlook for the future of LTYA inspires hope and bodes well for the next generation of theatre artist-scholars. From my perspective, this slim but somewhat overwritten book tends to reproduce its major points unnecessarily throughout each chapter. Moreover, the requisite postmodern need to use and repeat Mexican-American, Chicana/o, Latina/o, or Latinx terminology may or may not bog down the flow of readers’ experiences. However, my foremost concern has to do with Routledge, a major theatre publisher that has failed this author by ignoring its copy-editing responsibilities. Regardless of these reservations, Aragón ultimately offers more than a cursory glimpse of historical legacies and trending representations of children and young people in LTYA. As the population of Latina/o and biracial children soars, Borderlands Children’s Theatre calls us all to take immediate actions by ensuring that young voices are not only heard but respected and celebrated for present and future generations. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JEANNE KLEIN Lawrence, Kansas 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.

Richard Jones Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director Richard Jones By Published on May 27, 2018 Download Article as PDF Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director . Natka Bianchini. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Pp. 204. To discuss the production history of Samuel Beckett’s work in the US is inevitably to begin with Alan Schneider. Schneider directed the American premiere of all twelve of Beckett’s major works, from the Miami opening of Waiting for Godot in 1956 to Catastrophe and What Where in New York in 1983; five of these ( Happy Days , Not I , Ohio Impromptu , Rockaby , and What Where ) were world premieres. He also directed the aptly titled Film , whose collaboration occasioned Beckett’s only visit to the US. In Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America , Natka Bianchini examines the growing relationship between Beckett and Schneider, and charts the development of Beckett’s American productions. Bianchini’s introductory chapter makes two crucial points. First, Beckett scholarship, even of his work for the theatre, has concentrated rightly or wrongly on dramatic texts rather than on theatrical productions; this book seeks to balance those scales at least a little. Secondly, for production histories to be any more than cursory, we need more than production reviews. Luckily, both Beckett and Schneider were avid letter-writers, and Bianchini benefited enormously from “Schneider’s inveterate saving of his notebooks, letters, and theatrical ephemera” (8). Indeed, the geographical distance between the two men contributed to more detailed and thoughtful correspondence between them than would have occurred had they been able to communicate more freely and informally. It should come as no surprise that the period from 1956-71, described by Bianchini as one of “resistance to and uncertainty about Beckett’s work” (14), and encompassing the American premieres of Waiting for Godot , Endgame , Krapp’s Last Tape , and Happy Days , should receive three of the five numbered chapters and nearly half of the book’s total text. The first post-introductory chapter draws its title from one of the most misguided promotional campaigns in theatre history: producer Michael Myerberg’s attempt to capitalize on the star quality of Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell by hyping Waiting for Godot as “The Laugh Sensation of Two Continents.” The out-of-town opening at the Coconut Grove in Miami appropriately receives more attention here than does any other collaboration between Beckett and Schneider, despite its failure in virtually every sense of that term. It was the first time the two had worked together, and it was clear that Schneider had attempted to stage the play Beckett wrote, while Lahr saw the play as a star vehicle, and Myerberg was more interested in placating his star than in supporting the authority of his director. The subsequent two chapters, more traditionally titled “Finding a Home Off-Broadway” and “A Series of Firsts,” trace simultaneously the growing if perhaps grudging acceptance by the New York establishment of Beckett as a writer of stature and the burgeoning professional relationship between Beckett and Schneider. Perhaps of particular significance is the 1958 letter from Beckett to Schneider about a change in the “business” of Endgame . Although Schneider had convinced designer David Hays to simplify the set and resisted the producers’ attempts to “gag it up” (50), he did, in the final tableau, burden Clov with skis, a climbing rope, a backpack, and an oar—none of which appear in Beckett’s stage directions. Beckett, hearing of the change, wrote “I’m told Clov carries skis…I think I understand your idea, but I feel this is wrong, stylistically…Load him down with as much as you like with shabby banal things…but not skis” (51). One wonders if even such an apparently insignificant departure would have been tolerated in another director. Unfortunately, no correspondence remains from the next few months, so whether Schneider apologized for the change, or whether he removed the skis for the end of the run, is unknown. The next two chapters, “New York and Beyond” and “American Zenith,” discuss both revivals of earlier works and the premieres of Beckett’s later plays, including four world premieres. Beckett was now firmly established to the point of having February 16, 1984 declared “Samuel Beckett Day” in Manhattan in ceremonies attended by not only New York’s mayor Ed Koch but both New York US Senators, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Alfonse M. D’Amato. By this time, Beckett’s plays were more likely to be produced off-Broadway or outside New York altogether in the burgeoning regional theatre scene, at academic conferences, and on university campuses. The book concludes with an excellent if brief assessment of Schneider’s legacy. Wondering why Schneider is not more highlighted in lists of significant American directors, Bianchini muses that perhaps he was devalued for “slavishly following an author’s text without contributing his own artistic vision” (148). She points out, aptly, that “regardless of the level of detail in Beckett’s stage directions, there is still work to be done in mediating the text” (150). Bianchini ultimately argues that Schneider as a Beckett director should be viewed precisely the way that Billie Whitelaw is perceived as a Beckett actor, as an example of how “ interpretation of the author’s text can be both visionary, and, simultaneously, truthful to the author’s intent” (149). One could certainly find fault with some details of this book: a couple of grammatical errors made it into print, some points are merely repeated without expansion, the index could be more comprehensive, and a chronology would be useful. Bianchini sides with Schneider in all disputes except those with Beckett himself, and she accuses those who discount or argue with Schneider of “bias” (7) or even “duplicity” (24). But these are quibbles. This book is a readable, often fascinating work that relies on a host of source material never before brought together: the notes and bibliography total more than a quarter of the book’s length. Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America will be of enormous assistance to those who wish to better understand either of its central characters, or the American theatre especially in the period from 1956-71, or indeed the relationship between playwright and director in the theatrical process. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Richard Jones Stephen F. Austin State University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 1 Visit Journal Homepage Between Blackface and Bondage: The Incompletely Forgotten Failure of The Underground Railroad's 1879 Midwestern Tour By Published on March 9, 2014 Download Article as PDF In 1879, nineteen-year-old Pauline Hopkins's musical slave drama, The Underground Railroad, flopped. Reviews panned the production, suggesting the plagiaristic knock-off of Joseph Bradford's Out of Bondage "lacked interest and was devoid of plot." Audiences noted the lackluster performances, asserting "the company can't sing like the Hyers sisters" (the pioneering African American sister act who had performed in Out of Bondage only a few months earlier). Even the play's leading man, Sam Lucas, accepted the production's failure [ . . . ] [scribd id=211700003 key=key-wx0gvnnrb7bq62uslcn mode=scroll height=930 width=600] References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Between Blackface and Bondage: The Incompletely Forgotten Failure of The Underground Railroad's 1879 Midwestern Tour “One Live as Two, Two Live as One”: Bert Williams and the Uprooted Bamboo Tree Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival Feminist Periodization as a Structural Component of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Seokhun Choi 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 Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Seokhun Choi By Published on November 8, 2019 Download Article as PDF Introduction: Mourning, Estrangement, and Affect According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, world-renowned experts on loss and healing, we now live in “a new death-denying, grief-dismissing world” as illness and death disappeared from the public view and reemerged in the hospital and funeral home. [1] Accordingly, mourning has become a private affair, giving rise to what Sandra M. Gilbert calls “the shame of the mourner” or “Job’s shame” which is “the shame of the one who fears he has been singled out for suffering because he is unworthy of happiness,” particularly in contemporary British and American cultures. [2] It is in this cultural context that Leslie Atkins Durham situates Eurydice (2003), one of Sarah Ruhl’s early plays about bereavement. Durham reads the play alongside the irony that while “Americans had much to grieve” in the wake of big- and small-scale tragedies including 9/11, the Gulf War, and Hurricane Katrina, “grieving and mourning have been carefully regulated” in the delicate political climate of the Bush administration. [3] Although modern society in general has relegated the gloomy subject to the private realm and periphery, human mortality is a universal and perennial issue since all of us will lose someone and eventually die. In this respect, Ruhl’s plays of mourning— Eurydice , The Clean House (2004), and Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2006)—not only hold considerable significance for grief-stricken theatregoers today as they provide an occasion of communal mourning, but also make a strong case for the importance of theatre as an affective cultural medium. On the other hand, Ruhl’s theatre is not simply a venue of sorrow and tears as her plays represent bereavement in unusual ways with surreal humor: Eurydice depicts a fairytale version of the Underworld populated by clownish characters including a tricycle-riding Hades and talking stones; Dead Man’s Cell Phone is a romantic comedy which begins with an organ broker’s sudden death from a heart attack and ends with his mother’s (off-stage) self-immolation with barbecue fire; and finally, a cancer patient is literally killed with a joke in The Clean House . In these plays which resist conventional realism, highly emotional circumstances are interrupted by an unexpected turn of events and death and grief are estranged by humor with mixed emotional results. In an attempt to expound the dramaturgical significance of Ruhl’s peculiar method of estrangement in her plays of mourning, this essay revisits the German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht’s theory of Verfremdungseffekt (hereafter referred to as “V-effect”), a representational strategy that “allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.” [4] The estrangement of death and grief in Eurydice , The Clean House , and Dead Man’s Cell Phone is achieved by various techniques evocative of Brecht’s epic theatre, with humor at the core of the process. Far from showing how Ruhl’s estrangement is indebted to Brecht, my aim is to use his theory as a point of contrast to articulate how Ruhl’s distancing devices in the plays defamiliarize emotion for emotion’s sake relieved of the materialist premises of V-effect. Here, Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), an anti-war satire revolving around the protagonist’s loss of her three children, will serve as the specific reference point for Brecht’s result-oriented V-effect, in contraposition to what I propose to call ‘estrangement affect ’ (hereafter referred to as ‘E-affect’), Ruhl’s emotion-centered estrangement for the audience’s rehearsal of bereavement. This conceptual formulation of E-affect suggests a new possibility to understand and use estrangement as a theatrical device detached from its original ideological context. While Brecht’s influence on Ruhl’s antirealist dramaturgy has generally been noted, her major critics, such as Durham, James Al-Shamma, and Ana Fernández-Caparrós, have borrowed the German scholar Franz Roh’s “magic realism” and the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky’s “defamiliarization” ( ostranenie ) to analyze Ruhl’s estrangement devices in her grief-themed plays. For instance, Al-Shamma traces Ruhl’s lineage back to Brecht via Tony Kushner, John Guare, and Thornton Wilder, making several specific references to the German playwright throughout his monograph on Ruhl’s major works. [5] Aside from the fact that some critics used the term in their performance reviews of her plays, Al-Shamma does not explicitly state why he draws on magic realism instead of Brecht’s epic theatre to illuminate on the antirealist characteristics of The Clean House . While his choice seems to reflect his awareness of the discrepancy between the play’s non-rationalist poetics and the strain of European rationalism found in Brecht, the unstated rationale warrants further investigation. If he puts Ruhl in the genealogy of Brecht along the line of her American predecessors and wants to talk about estrangement in her plays, why not Brecht? In her essay on Dead Man’s Cell Phone , Fernández-Caparrós analyzes the estrangement process in the play in terms of ostranenie . And yet, she only applies ostranenie to the cell phone, but not to the central theme of death, despite her observation that the play and The Clean House are two of the plays that demonstrate “Ruhl’s distinctive concern with dying and its aftermath” and “approach mortality ‘with a somewhat lighter touch.’” [6] As a result, the significant relationship between estrangement and the emotion of grief in the play remains unexplained. While magic realism and ostranenie resonate with Ruhl’s aesthetics and help illuminate the major issues that the plays tackle, drawing on the literary notions seems to limit her estrangement to noetic and stylistic concerns. More fundamentally, magic realism and defamiliarization were developed in the context of postcolonial fiction and Russian formalism, respectively, without regard to the mechanics of theatre, where the audience emotionally reacts to the action on stage. I seek to complement these previous studies by paying particular attention to the emotional function of Ruhl’s estrangement (E-affect) in comparison with the V-effect, which is arguably the most systematic theory of estrangement proposed thus far, particularly as a way to combat emotional manipulation in the theatrical context. Since the so-called “affective turn,” the word “affect” has gained wide currency, particularly in literature and cultural studies, and has sometimes been distinguished from feeling or emotion as “a preliminal, preconscious phenomenon.” [7] However, it would be arbitrary to maintain such a neat distinction since the word connotes a wide range of bodily experiences which may well include emotional responses; for instance, the Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines affect as “the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily changes” or “a set of observable manifestations of a subjectively experienced emotion.” [8] Also, the affect-emotion dichotomy is not strictly adhered to by many theorists of affect including Silvan S. Tomkins, whose foundational system of primary affects is comprised of the nine emotional responses of interest, enjoyment, surprise, fear, anger, distress, shame, contempt, and disgust, [9] and Eve K. Sedgwick, who expands on Tomkins’ work in her Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003). In this essay, I adopt James Thompson’s definition of affect as “emotional, often automatic, embodied responses that occur in relation to something else—be it object of observation, recall of a memory or practical activity” and use it as the counter term to “effect” to focus on the emotion of grief. [10] Here, the affect of grief is specifically attached to people who are lost, although affects, as Sedgwick notes, can have any object such as “things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects.” [11] Making Death Visible and Grief Felt The unrealistic and abstract settings of Eurydice , The Clean House , and Dead Man’s Cell Phone blur the line between the worlds of the living and of the dead. Eurydice takes place on a dark, bare stage suggestive of the Underworld with rusty pipes, an abstracted River of Forgetfulness, and strange watery noises. The living and the dead exchange letters by dropping them on the soil and the characters arrive in the Underworld in a raining elevator. In Dead Man’s Cell Phone , the dead man Gordon, who now is “in a hell reserved for people who sell organs on the black market and the people who loved them,” transcends the boundary between life and death by telling the audience about the last moment of his death and even having a conversation with the protagonist Jean. [12] The Clean House is set in the all-white living room of the snobbish doctor Lane’s house in a “ metaphysical Connecticut ” or “ a house that is not far from the sea and not far from the city ,” where the 27-year-old Brazilian maid Matilde sees imaginary visions of her deceased parents reenacted on stage. [13] The plays’ phantasmagoric settings allow the living and the dead to co-inhabit the same space to restore death to the domain of everyday life. [14] The representation of the dead on stage and the living characters’ struggle with the losses inevitably elicit highly emotional responses from the audience. A couple of years before she wrote Eurydice , Ruhl published an essay on one of her mentors, María Irene Fornés, titled “Six Small Thoughts on Fornés, the Problem of Intention, and Willfulness.” In the essay, Ruhl pits Fornés’ “theatre of desire and pleasure” against two different types of western theatre that revolve around the notion of objective: American realist theatre and Brecht’s politically-motivated epic theatre. On behalf of Fornés, Ruhl argues that a “heightened emotional state” such as grief can be self-justifying as a pure emotional process without an external purpose: It wants nothing. It is complete in itself. If X dies, and I grieve for X, my grief does not depend on a frustrated desire for X. I know that I can’t have X from beyond the grave. I am not thinking about how to ameliorate my grief. My grief for X is beyond desire and beyond intention. It is a state. [15] Like Tomkins who argued that “affect is an end in itself,” Ruhl views the affect of grief as a natural process that has to happen for its own sake. [16] The grief that her characters experience and the audience may share with them is not meant to achieve any objective, at least in the sense of the character’s objective in the realist theatre (i.e. what does the character want?) or the socialist aim of epic theatre. In feeling grief, neither the characters nor the audience are supposed to think of ways to bring the deceased back to life or prevent others’ deaths. Rather, grief is a state of acceptance and the emotion matters in itself. Ruhl’s view of grief makes a striking contrast with that of Brecht who aimed at “an extremely classical, cold, highly intellectual style of performance.” [17] Here, it would be important to note that Brecht was not against emotion per se . For instance, comparing Brecht’s treatment of emotion in The Measures Taken (1930) and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948), R. Darren Gobert concludes that Brecht’s initial “hostility toward emotional effects” rose as a reaction to the behaviorist understanding of emotion and his view evolved from the “wholesale rejection” to “cognitive catharsis”—an emotive clarification that works alongside reason. [18] Similarly, Darko Suvin argues that Brecht was against emotion at first but later “suppressed the final opposition between emotion and reason.” [19] Thus, Brecht’s revolt against empathy did not connote an outright rejection of emotion, at least towards his late career—the phase Vidar Thorsteinsson refers to as “the late Brecht’s passionate defense of political-theatrical affect.” [20] Still, Brecht’s approval of emotion hinged on the proviso that it is based on reason and conducive to his socialist goal for his ultimate aim was to make the audience “feel emotions that would drive them to try to change situations like the ones represented on stage.” [21] One good example is his use of grief as a medium of rational critique in Mother Courage . Brecht wanted to lead the audience to critically examine the circumstances surrounding Mother Courage’s grief rather than simply share her emotion. John Rouse explains how Helene Weigel’s Mother Courage “defamiliarized Courage’s grief through the very demonstration of that grief” to achieve V-effect as follows: Both Brecht’s play and his production allow Courage this intensely human moment in order to illustrate for the audience the basic social contradiction out of which the character is built. Courage is both businesswoman and mother. Or rather, she tries to be both; the social realities of the total war from which she tries to profit as businesswoman prevent her from fulfilling her responsibilities as mother. She has been confronted with a nearly impossible economic choice—either she lose her son or she pay a sum that will cost her the wagon, her only means of supporting herself and her daughter. But she has tried to avoid making this choice in attempting to deal her way out. . . . Sounds of gunfire teach both her and the audience that her delay is indeed costly. Courage bears responsibility for her own extreme moment of grief. . . . Brecht allows Courage her grief, but he also uses it to provide his audience with the necessary data for a dialectical analysis of his play’s social relationships. [22] As Rouse explains above, the play directs the audience’s attention to the social and individual causes of Courage’s grief: war and her delayed action. For Brecht, it is of critical importance that these conditions look problematic and alterable to the audience, and grief is used against grief—i.e. to ward off further grief occasions in reality—as a tool for the stimulation of their critical thinking and social action. The contrast between Ruhl and Brecht in terms of grief reveals a fundamental difference in their approaches to the issue of human mortality. Whereas Mother Courage ascribes the deaths of the heroine’s children to identifiable causes as a way of exhorting the audience “to take pleasure in the possibilities of change in all things,” bereavement in Ruhl’s plays of mourning is beyond human control. [23] In Eurydice , the father is already dead when he first appears, residing in the Underworld, and the cause of his death is not mentioned at all—although it is possible, since it is an auto-biographical play, to assume that he, like the playwright’s own father, died of cancer. Similarly, the cause of Gordon’s sudden heart attack in Dead Man’s Cell Phone remains unidentified; he was just eating a lentil soup at a café instead of the lobster bisque he wanted. Ana’s death in The Clean House , though it could be argued that it was facilitated by Ana’s refusal to be hospitalized and Matilde’s joke, is due fundamentally to her stage four breast cancer, a medical condition that is incurable by contemporary medicine. These characters’ deaths are thrust upon the other characters due to unpreventable causes. More significantly, Ruhl’s plays are not a critique of such causes of death; they do not say cancer and the heart attack, for instance, are evil in the way Brecht deemed war and capitalism. A materialist application of V-effect to the plays would be equivalent to trying to find ways to change the individual or social circumstances that made these characters die, which would be a preposterous task for Ruhl’s audience given the circumstances. These points of contrast suggest that Ruhl is interested in dealing with bereavement as an inevitable incident rather than analyzing its causes and preventing it. In the plays, Ruhl presents three different types of response to bereavement: committing suicide to follow the deceased, trying to save the deceased (only if, of course, it appears possible), and acceptance. Eurydice, Mrs. Gottlieb, and Matilde’s father make the first choice: Eurydice dies a “second death” by dipping herself in Lethe, Mrs. Gottlieb sets herself on fire, and Matilde’s father shoots himself. Even though the emotional difficulty of their loss and their sincere desire to be reunited with their lost family member are understandable, it is apparent that suicide is not the best course of action for two main reasons. First, there is no guarantee that they will see the deceased after the suicide; they, overcome by their emotion, act on impulse despite the potential futility of such a venture into the unknown. Secondly, by killing themselves, they are causing further bereavement and grief for their surviving family and others who care about them. Orpheus and Lane’s husband Charles show the second type of response; Orpheus braves the gates of hell to bring his bride back to the world of the living, and Charles flies to Alaska to find a yew tree, a conifer that is believed to have some healing effect on cancer patients and used to produce chemotherapy drugs. [24] Unfortunately, their long trips turn out to be counter-productive. Orpheus and Eurydice only reaffirm their differences and have to experience a second separation, and Charles deprives himself of Ana’s last days which he could have spent with her and belatedly arrives with the tree only to find her dead. The failure of the two daring attempts attests to their lack of control over their significant other’s life—the case of Orpheus does so in a more symbolic way than realistic since the mythical setting cannot be taken literally. Here, Charles’s former aphorism to Lane in defense of his morally questionable affair with Ana returns to himself: “There are things—big invisible things—that come unannounced—they walk in, and we have to give way.” [25] These two purpose-driven reactions to bereavement—suicide and rescue mission—do not appear to improve the situation at all and their questionable efficacy alludes to the philosophy of life, or of death to be more specific, that the plays communicate to the audience: that there are events in life that frustrate human will and effort and demand acceptance. The third response of acceptance is represented by Matilde, who, instead of making the extreme choice her father made, moves on to make a living by cleaning Lane’s house in a foreign country. She is the character that initiates the symbolic gesture of acceptance in the play: to stop cleaning. In the play, the “clean house” is a visual metaphor for the ideal of perfect life, and to give that up is an acknowledgment that life cannot always stay in order and under control. Likewise, Lane and her sister Virginia leave the house in a mess only after realizing that the first step to come to terms with life’s inevitabilities is to let go and accept the situation as it unfolds. Here, acceptance in mourning does not mean abandonment or defeatism but care and wisdom. In mourning for the loss of her parents, Matilde resorts to some “strange” ways to keep her loss in perspective and maintain some emotional distance to it. For example, she tries to imagine her parents’ happy moments and make up new jokes, remembering her late mother’s advice: “in order to tell a good joke, you have to believe that your problems are very small, and that the world is very big.” [26] She does not simply accept her loss but also interrupts her own grief with some estrangement techniques including humor à la Brecht. Here, she not only models a peculiar attitude of acceptance herself but also serves as a good reference point for the peculiar rehearsal of bereavement that Ruhl stages for the audience in her three plays of mourning. Making Death Strange and Ameliorating Grief Ruhl’s interest in the theme of bereavement derives from her personal experience of losing her father to cancer when she was twenty years old, and she invites the audience to share her characters’ similar experiences and go along with their emotional journey. At the same time, she, knowing too well the emotional challenges of such occasions, represents their circumstances in strange ways to “ameliorate” the audience’s sorrow aroused by her characters’ losses, using several estrangement devices that are generally associated with Brecht’s epic theatre. As it is well known, Brecht devised various estrangement techniques to interrupt the realism of stage and the audience’s empathy. For instance, such interruption is achieved in Mother Courage by a wide range of dramatic and theatrical means including, but not limited to, a sudden change in situation, emotional tone, acting style, line delivery method etc., as Robert Leach succinctly captures: Peace is interrupted by war; direct address is interrupted by conversation; song by speech, and the method of singing, Sprechstimme , is a method of interrupting singing with speaking and vice versa; Mother Courage’s failure is interrupted by her success as a businesswoman, her mother’s pride by her grief; even the melodrama of the shooting of Kattrin as she drums to awaken Halle is interrupted by comedy. [27] As mentioned earlier, the goal of the interruptions is to help the audience keep some emotional distance from the characters and the situations they are in as a way of promoting critical observation. Here, Mother Courage’s loss and grief serve as a catalyst for this cerebral enterprise, and, as a result, the absurdity of social reality and the characters’ attitudes toward it are exposed as alterable conditions. Similar estrangement devices are used in Ruhl’s plays but the given circumstances of bereavement obviate such a critical exercise since they, as discussed above, are unchangeable. The most obvious Brechtian staging techniques in the plays are double casting, direct audience address, and subtitles. For instance, A Nasty Interesting Young Man and the Child in Eurydice , the Other Woman and the stranger in Dead Man’s Cell Phone , and Matilde’s deceased parents and Ana and Charles in The Clean House are double cast. Secondly, the chorus of Stones in Eurydice , Gordon in Dead Man’s Cell Phone , and Matilde, Lane, and Virginia in The Clean House all directly address the audience to break the fourth wall. In addition, subtitles, a distancing device that harks back to Brecht’s use of placards, are often projected on stage in The Clean House . [28] These antirealist aesthetics remind the audience of the theatricality of performance and create some emotional distance to the characters’ losses and suffering. In short, whereas the emotion of grief itself is objectless, Ruhl’s E-affect has a specific objective for the audience: to alleviate their emotional pain as they, watching the plays, rehearse bereavement. Ruhl also employs other estrangement devices that are more grief-specific. The most telling example would be the cell phones that ring in the middle of Gordon’s mother Mrs. Gottlieb’s funeral speech to disturb the solemnity of the woeful event. In Eurydice , it is mainly the Stones who interrupt the doleful atmosphere of the Underworld as the foil of humanity capable of grief and sympathy. Their intrusive and disturbing character is similar to that of the cell phones but their interruption is intentional and more inconsiderate. The apathetic Stones discourage Eurydice’s grief with the warning, “Being sad is not allowed! Act like a stone.” [29] Watching her mourning over the second death of her father, the Stones admonish her as follows: LOUD STONE. Didn’t you already mourn for your father, young lady? LITTLE STONE. Some things should be left well enough alone. BIG STONE. To mourn twice is excessive. LITTLE STONE. To mourn three times a sin. LOUD STONE. Life is like a good meal. BIG STONE. Only gluttons want more food when they finish their helping. LITTLE STONE. Learn to be moderate. BIG STONE. It’s weird for a dead person to be morbid. LITTLE STONE. We don’t like to watch it! LOUD STONE. We don’t like to see it! BIG STONE. It makes me uncomfortable. THE STONES. Don’t cry! Don’t cry! [30] The Stones’ heartless reproach above seems to suggest how grief is generally repressed in modern times although a “mourner should be allowed to experience his sorrow” for grief only has the power to heal. [31] It is probably a similar internal voice of repression that keeps Mrs. Gottlieb crying alone like “a small animal in pain” somewhere in her house. [32] The Stones’ coldness and rude remarks do not only satirize the modern culture that tries to keep death and grief at bay but also enable a detached look at Eurydice’s mourning by interrupting her moment of grief. The most notable example of such interruption in The Clean House is Matilde’s killing joke. As her breast cancer worsens, Ana asks Matilde to end her acute pain by making her die laughing with a joke. Matilde grants her wish and euthanizes her in the same way her father accidentally killed her mother, which “symbolically rectifies her mother’s murder as an act of mercy rather than an accident.” [33] Here, the audience’s emotional response of grief to her death is interrupted by the irony of dying from laughter. As the last example of the killing joke suggests, a major component of E-affect is humor, whose mechanism and function can be construed in light of the incongruity and relief theories of humor. According to John Morreall, the two theories, along with the superiority theory, constitute the three major theories of humor. The superiority theory of humor notes that “laughter is always directed at someone as a kind of scorn,” while the relief theory sees the major function of humor as “the venting of excess nervous energy” through laughter. [34] According to the third and most widely-accepted incongruity theory, “what amuses us is some object of perception or thought that clashes with what we would have expected in a particular set or circumstances.” [35] Despite the obvious differences, the three theories of humor are more complementary than contradictory as they focus on different aspects of humor. Generally speaking, the superiority theory is primarily concerned with the satirical nature of humor (i.e. intention of the joker), the incongruity theory with its semantic aspect (i.e. why jokes are funny), and, finally, the relief theory with humor’s physiological function (i.e. effect of humor). [36] The incongruity and relief theories are therefore not incompatible with each other and can be used together to shed light on the source and effect of humor in Ruhl’s plays. Incongruity as the source of humor in Ruhl’s plays has mainly to do with the irony of representing the serious theme of mortality in the comic mode. First of all, such inconsistency can be observed in the contrast between the classic image of afterlife and the plays’ comic representation of it. The Underworld of Eurydice is ruled by a Child riding on a red tricycle and wearing a hat and clothes too small for him, and spooky but clownish figures known as Big, Loud, and Little Stones are its major inhabitants. The fairytale setting is significantly different from the grim and terrifying image of Hades in classical accounts such as Virgil’s. [37] Eurydice’s Father, who would start his wedding speech with “one or two funny jokes,” has been living there since his death, and he describes his life after death this way: the atmosphere smells. And there are strange high-pitched noises—like a tea kettle always boiling over. But it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. And, for the most part, there is a pleasant atmosphere and you can work and socialize, much like at home. I’m working in the business world and it seems that, here, you can better see the far-reaching consequences of your actions. [38] His sensual description of the Underworld devoid of metaphysical seriousness and melancholy is unusual and refreshing. He seems to lead a rather easygoing life there, occasionally writing letters to her living daughter and practicing the jitterbug for fun. Although people lose their connection to their former lives, the life in the Underworld doesn’t seem that grim. On a similar note, Gordon describes the hell he is now in as a place where people “only have one costume” and “go to the Laundromat once a week,” and Matilde imagines heaven to be “a sea of untranslated jokes” where “everyone is laughing.” [39] These unorthodox and blithe images of afterlife challenge the common assumptions and expectations in contemporary religious and popular culture. In Dead Man’s Cell Phone and The Clean House , similar incongruity is witnessed in the circumstances of the characters’ deaths. At the opening of the second act, Gordon describes the last day of his life to the audience, on which he woke up thinking he’d like a lobster bisque. When he finally arrived in the café, he, much to his dismay, found Jean finishing the last lobster bisque that was supposed to be his so he had to settle for lentil instead. All of a sudden, he had a heart attack and began to think about to whom he would make the last phone call although his heart stopped before he could make the call. This is how he describes his last moment: A man doesn’t call his brother on his deathbed—no—he wants a woman’s voice—but the heart keeps on heaving itself up—out of my chest—into my mouth—and I’m thinking—that bitch over there ate all the lobster bisque, this is all her fault—and I look over at her, and she looks like an angel—not like a bitch angel at all—and I think—good—good—I’m glad she had the last bite—I’m glad. Then I die. [40] The gravity of death is lifted by the comic situation of dying in the middle of eating a lentil soup, jealous of another person enjoying the much-wanted lobster bisque. His mother’s self-immolation with barbecue fire at the end of the play also displays a similar incongruity between the quotidian and casual occasion of eating and the singular and serious event of death. What further estranges her bizarre method of suicide is her second son Dwight’s seeming indifference to or even approval of his mother’s self-immolation. Both her death and Dwight’s reaction challenge common expectations and produce surreal humor. Humor’s central role in the E-affect is most explicit in The Clean House since not only does the play begin with Matilde’s joke about the first night of a virgin man in Portuguese but also its plot revolves around two killing jokes. According to Matilde, her father, contrary to his good intention, choked his wife to death with a joke on their anniversary and shot himself in order to follow her. She reprises the family “tragedy” when she kills Ana in the same way albeit for a different reason. These homicides sound absurd for jokes and laughter are not seriously considered as possible causes of death. [41] The ideas of jokes and laughter in themselves evoke humor but what makes them even more humorous is their incongruity with the grave topic of mortality. In fact, incongruity is the main principle of Brechtian humor, too. As a device to prevent the audience’s emotional engagement he called empathy, he employed “a range of comic elements, from slapstick and commedia dell’arte exaggeration, to burlesque and stagey playfulness” with a view to promoting the audience’s recognition of the gap between ideal and reality in his contemporary society. [42] In other words, the comic in Brechtian theatre is “a structural principle underlying acts and communications that exposes the conflict between what is and what should be.” [43] In both Brecht and Ruhl, therefore, humor arises from the conflict between one’s expectations and what actually follows and plays a pivotal role in the estrangement process, although the two playwrights use humor for significantly different purposes. Unlike Brecht who formulated V-effect under the shadow of fascism and capitalism, Ruhl’s employment of humor had a deeply personal motivation. Ruhl’s father used to tell a joke to the concerned family during his struggle with cancer and he was one of the people who made her believe that “humor pushed to an extreme, like any emotion, has a transformative power.” [44] Another person who nurtured her belief in the power of humor is Italian writer Italo Calvino who considered lightness as the foremost quality of the New Millennium. Ruhl likewise believes that lightness is “a philosophical and aesthetic viewpoint, deeply serious, and has a kind of wisdom—stepping back to be able to laugh at horrible things even as you’re experiencing them.” [45] Aside from these personal and philosophical influences, it was her college mentor Paula Vogel who taught her to translate the wisdom of humor into the idiom of theatre. Vogel’s Baltimore Waltz (1990), a semi-autobiographical comedy about terminal illness, death, and grief, was a primary dramatic influence on the estrangement of death and grief in her plays. [46] In short, Ruhl’s E-affect was developed in a very different personal and historical context from the V-effect to serve a different function as she uses humor mainly for the audience’s relief of tension and emotional excess. In contrast to Brecht’s satirical humor designed to provoke the audience’s resistance to the status quo, Ruhl’s humor is geared toward acceptance. The clinical psychologist Rod A. Martin explains the positive function of humor as follows: Because it inherently involves incongruity and multiple interpretations, humor provides a way for the individual to shift perspective on a stressful situation, reappraising it from a new and less threatening point of view. As a consequence of this humorous reappraisal, the situation becomes less stressful and more manageable. . . . Humor and laughter provide a means for cancer patients to make light of their illness and maintain a spirit of optimism, and jokes about death are a way for people to distance themselves emotionally from thoughts of their own mortality. Thus, by laughing at the fundamental incongruities of life and diminishing threats by turning them into objects of nonserious play, humor is a way of refusing to be overcome by the people and situations, both large and small, that threaten our well-being. [47] Owing to the transformative power of humor, Ruhl’s audience can take a more objective view of the situation and maintain control of their emotion while participating in the mourning. In psychological parlance, this type of humor is called “gallows humor,” which Katie Watson defines as “humor that treats serious, frightening, or painful subject matter in a light or satirical way.” [48] The term originally comes from Freud’s example of prisoners joking on their way to the gallows, and gallows humor can be distinguished from cruel or derogatory humor by the analogy of “whistling as you go through the graveyard” versus “kicking over the gravestones.” [49] According to clinical psychologist Thomas Kuhlman, gallows humor flourishes in a hopeless situation that “justifies the psychological shift from a goal-directed frame of mind to a playful one.” [50] Likewise, Ruhl’s humorous representations of bereavement introduced above take the audience away from a rationalist and goal-driven perspective to a playful state of mind. While intellect is an important component of this process, the physiological function of laughter, which usually accompanies humor, is also critical. According to the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, a proponent of the relief theory along the line of Freud, laughter is “purposeless” in the sense that, unlike fear that makes a person run from the danger, laughter is not directed to “special ends”; it is just “an uncontrolled discharge of energy.” [51] Likewise, humor in Ruhl’s E-affect mainly serves an affective or physiological function. The aforementioned incongruities—the fairytale version of the Underworld, Gordon’s and her mother’s unusual circumstances of deaths involving lobster bisque and barbecue fire, and the motif of killing jokes—not only set an emotionally ambiguous tone throughout the plays but also allow the audience to release their emotional tension though laughter. Here, the point of such relief is not to prevent or repress their grief—if so, why represent grief in the first place?—but to help them grieve well as they rehearse bereavement. Navigating sorrow in the comic mode, Ruhl’s plays lead the audience to laugh through grief or grieve through laughter as a result of empathy. Unlike Brecht, Ruhl’s E-affect is not opposed to grief, but it does resist an excess of grief lest one should fail to recover from the overwhelming emotion. It guides the audience through their mourning process without necessitating a sober inspection of the situation to find a practical solution. According to Ruhl, “laughter is a kind of acceptance” since it is to acquiesce to the view that “life is funny, because it’s both tragic and bizarre.” [52] Critics such as Charles Isherwood, Peter Marks, and David Rooney have used the word “whimsical” to describe Ruhl’s antirealist and fluid dramaturgy but that is in fact what her plays show life itself to be. By inducing the audience to laugh at life’s most difficult experience represented on stage, Ruhl challenges them to face life’s uncertainties with courage. Conclusion: Towards a Theatre of Emotional Freedom Today’s Brechtian scholarship, even after the publication of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre , which problematizes “the overpowering authority of Brecht” and defines postdramatic theatre as “a post-Brechtian theatre ,” is still heavily concerned with the question of empathy with the materialist premises and implications of V-effect taken for granted. [53] For instance, David Krasner and Paul Woodruff find fault with Brecht’s narrow view of empathy and redefine it as both an emotional and cognitive response fundamental to theatrical spectatorship. Other major Brechtian scholars aforementioned have challenged the conventional understanding of Brecht’s stance towards emotion by making a notable case for Brecht’s transition to a positive assessment of emotion later in his career. The central question is whether emotion necessarily encumbers rational criticism or not. While Brecht and his critics all acknowledge the importance of emotional engagement in theatre spectatorship, their views presuppose the utilitarian credo that emotion should contribute to socio-political agenda somehow. However, this focus on “effects—identifiable social outcomes, messages or impacts,” as Thompson argues, can lead us to overlook “the radical potential of the freedom to enjoy beautiful radiant things .” [54] In this respect, Ruhl’s E-affect supplies us with an alternative model to Brecht’s epic theatre to understand and describe other types of non-realist drama that have so far been discussed in relation to his name and focus on affect instead. Even though Ruhl does not make practical suggestions as to how one can bring a lost person back or avert death, I would argue that her plays of mourning are graced with profound insight in their earnest and extraordinary explorations of some of life’s most grievous experiences. Despite considerable development in science and medicine, there are many questions yet to be answered and we are still mortal beings subject to forces larger than life. Against our wish, unfortunate events do occur, demanding the serenity to accept what we cannot change and ready ourselves to deal with the aftermath of what must come to pass. In this regard, Ruhl’s sincere engagement with such matters deserves attention for learning to accept is as important as fighting to fix a problem. Grieving for the sake of grieving does not simply mean abandonment, lack of purpose, or being selfish and indifferent to others. Rather, it means pleasure and freedom in Ruhl’s theatre. Fornés believes that life is “not constantly about wanting to get something from somebody else”—as most American actors are taught within the realist tradition—but about pleasure, particularly “the pleasure of communication.” [55] In Ruhl’s plays of mourning, death is closely linked to community, and the community literally includes the dead: Eurydice’s father, Gordon, and Matilde’s late parents. This communal aspect of her plays evokes the essential affinity between theatre and mourning. In many ways, theatre itself can be seen to be a place of mourning. In the Western classical formulation, for example, theatre evokes multiple losses, restaging past events and resuscitating the voices of those who are no longer there. At the same time, it enables an “acting out” of projective losses, those phantasmatic griefs that remain unspoken within the performance of everyday life. [56] Ruhl’s theatre is meant to be a gathering space of people made of flesh and blood, with feelings and desires, and entitled to laugh and cry without being told to stop being melodramatic and channel their emotion into some socially productive action. As a playwright, Ruhl’s genuine interest in grief and emotion contributes to increased “appreciation of the roles of feeling and of bodies in making meaning,” which “recalibrates historical hierarchies of meaning which have denigrated bodies, feelings and, for that matter, theatre and performance.” [57] For the audience, Ruhl’s theatre allows its human subjects to exist outside the burden of utility, celebrate their emotional freedom and have the pleasure of communication with each other—even with the dead—whether in laughing or mourning, or doing both at the same time. References [1] Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Keller, On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss (New York: Scribner, 2005), 205. [2] Sandra M. Gilbert, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 261. [3] Leslie Atkins Durham, Women’s Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century: Sarah Ruhl and Her Contemporaries (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 31. [4] Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic , ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 192. The most widely accepted English translation of Verfremdung has been “alienation” since the publication of John Willett’s collection of Brecht’s essays, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic , published in 1964. However, the accuracy of this translation has been contested by several scholars. According to Michael Patterson, for instance, the closest English translation is “distanciation,” and Robert Gordon has pointed out that Verfremdung can be more accurately translated as “strange-making” or “distancing.” See Michael Patterson, “Brecht’s Legacy” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht , ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 273-87 (274); Robert Gordon, The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theories in Perspective (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 233. In this article, I use ‘estrangement’ as the general term for the theatrical method of making something strange whether in the strictly Brechtian sense or not, chiefly because the word most immediately communicates the idea of making something ‘strange.’ Also, the rarely adopted phrase ‘estrangement effect’ itself makes V-effect unfamiliar, which is the partial aim of the current essay. [5] See James Al-Shamma, Sarah Ruhl: A Critical Study of the Plays (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 187. [6] Ana Fernández-Caparrós, “Death and the Community of Comic Romance: Sarah Ruhl’s Poetics of Transformation in Dead Man’s Cell Phone ,” Contemporary Theatre Review 25, no.4 (2015): 489. [7] Megan Watkins, “Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect,” in The Affect Theory Reader , ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 269. In a similar vein, Brian Massumi defines affect as “an ability to affect and be affected” and “a prepersonal intensity” rather than a personal feeling. See Brian Massumi, “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments,” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xvi. [8] “Affect,” Merriam-Webster , https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affect (accessed 5 August 2018). [9] Silvan S. Tomkins, “The Quest for Primary Motives: Biography and Autobiography of an Idea” in Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins , ed. E. Virginia Demos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 58. [10] James Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 119. [11] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003), 19. [12] Sarah Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008), 80. [13] Sarah Ruhl, “The Clean House,” in The Clean House and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), 7. [14] In this regard, it is significant that the terminally-ill cancer patient Ana in The Clean House spends her last days in Lane’s house instead of the hospital, the modern institution that has had “local monopoly on death” since the twentieth century. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years (2nd ed.), trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 584. So, when Ana dies in her house, Lane, the doctor, starts panicking and says, “I’ve never seen someone die in a house before. Only in a hospital.” Ruhl, “The Clean House,” 106. Ana’s choice literally brings death home in order to show that it is an undeniable part of our everyday life. [15] Sarah Ruhl, “Six Small Thoughts on Fornés, the Problem of Intention, and Willfulness,” Theatre Topics 11, no. 2 (2001): 197. [16] Silvan S. Tomkins, Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins , ed. E. Virginia Demos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 51. [17] Brecht, Brecht on Theatre , 14. [18] R. Darren Gobert, “Cognitive Catharsis in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, ” Modern Drama 49, no. 1 (2006): 13. [19] Darko Suvin, “Emotion, Brecht, Empathy vs. Sympathy,” Brecht Jahrbuch / The Brecht Yearbook 33 (2008): 58. [20] Similarly to Gobert and Suvin, Thorsteinsson holds that “Brecht’s late dramatic theory” in the 1940s is “more eager to chart the territory of production through an affective, emotional, and bodily exploration.” Vidar Thorsteinsson, “‘This Great Passion for Producing’: The Affective Reversal of Brecht’s Dramatic Theory,” Cultural Critique 97 (2017): 58. Thompson also argues that affect was an integral part of Brecht’s epic theatre. Thompson, Performance Affects , 129–130. [21] See Paul Woodruff, “Engaging Emotion in Theater: A Brechtian Model in Theater History,” The Monist 71, no. 2 (1988): 237. [22] John Rouse, “Brecht and the Contradictory Actor,” in Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide , ed. Phillip B. Zarrilli (New York: Routledge, 2002), 255. [23] Brecht, Brecht on Theatre , 202. [24] According to Jennifer Heller, Charles wrongly chooses “a thing” (“yew”) over “a human connection” (“you”). Jennifer Heller, “‘To Follow Pleasure’s Sway’: Atomism in Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House ,” Modern Drama , 60, no. 4 (2017): 443. [25] Ruhl, “The Clean House,” 63. [26] Ibid., 26. [27] Robert Leach, “Mother Courage and Her Children,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht , ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 135. [28] Peter Marks, who saw the Wooly Mammoth Theatre production in 2005, notes that “Ruhl intermittently has subtitles flashed on a panel above the set, as if her characters were the subjects of a documentary.” According to him, some of the subtitles are “mere recitations of apparent events” while others “offer ironic commentary.” Peter Marks, “‘Clean House’: A Lemon-Fresh Shine,” The Washington Post , 19 July 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/18/AR2005071801502.html (accessed 1 August 2018). [29] Ruhl, “Eurydice,” in The Clean House and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), 373. [30] Ibid., 406. [31] Kübler-Ross and Keller, On Grief and Grieving , 24. [32] Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone , 49. [33] Al-Shamma, Sarah Ruhl , 39. [34] John Morreall, introduction to The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor , ed. by John Morreall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987) 3–6. [35] Ibid., 6. [36] Salvatore Attardo also sees the tripartite division as a “commonly accepted classification” and notes that the three theories are “not incompatible” with each other. Salvatore Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humor (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), 47–49. [37] Here’s lines 467-70 from Virgil’s Georgics IV, for instance: “The jaws of a Spartan cavern, Death’s towering gateway, / and the grove miasmic with black dread—he entered them / and came to the realm of the dead with its fearsome king, / their hearts impossible to soften with living prayers.” Virgil and Janet Lembke, Virgil’s Georgics: A New Verse Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 75. [38] Ruhl, “Eurydice,” 343. [39] Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone , 82; Ruhl, “The Clean House,” 109. [40] Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone , 61. [41] Although death from laughter is rare and not usually discussed as a serious research topic in medicine, there have been several reports of the case in history, mostly caused by asphyxiation or heart failure. One of the earliest records comes from Book VII of Diogenes Laertius (meaning “Lives of Eminent Philosophers”) which gives the account that the Ancient Greek scholar Chrysippus died after “a violent fit of laughter,” looking at his donkey eating his figs. R. D. Hicks, ed., Diogenes Laertius (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, 1972), http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=D.%20L (accessed 25 July 2018). A more recent and credible case is that of Alex Mitchell, the Scottish bricklayer who “died from heart failure after laughing non-stop at The Goodies ” in 1975. Although the cause of his death was simply thought to be a cardiac arrest at that time, doctors now believe that Mitchell had Long QT syndrome, “a rare form disease which causes irregular heartbeats,” based on his granddaughter’s abnormal heart condition. Andrew Levy, “Doctors Solve Mystery of a Man Who ‘Died from Laughter’ While Watching The Goodies after His Granddaughter Nearly Dies from Same Rare Heart Condition,” Mail Online , last modified 20 June, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2162102/Doctors-solve-mystery-man-died-laughter-watching-The-Goodies-granddaughter-nearly-dies-rare-heart-condition.html (accessed 15 June 2018). For people of normal health, death from laughter is simply a joke. [42] Marc Silberman, “Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy,” Social Research 79, no. 1 (2012): 170. [43] Ibid. [44] Wendy Weckwerth, “More Invisible Terrains,” Theater 34, no. 2 (2004): 32. [45] John Lahr, “Surreal Life: The plays of Sarah Ruhl,” The New Yorker , 17 March 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/17/surreal-life (accessed 20 May 2018). [46] Al-Shamma, Sarah Ruhl , 43. [47] Rod A. Martin, The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (San Diego: Elsevier, 2007), 19. [48] Katie Watson, “Gallows Humor in Medicine,” Hastings Center Report 41, no. 5 (2011): 38. [49] D. Wear, et al, “Derogatory and Cynical Humor Directed towards Patients: Views of Residents and Attending Doctors,” Medical Education 43 (2009): 39. [50] Thomas L. Kuhlman, “Gallows Humor for a Scaffold Setting: Managing Aggressive Patients on a Maximum-Security Forensic Unit,” Hospital and Community Psychiatry 39, no. 10 (1988): 1087. [51] Herbert Spencer, “The Physiology of Laughter,” in The Bibliophile Library of Literature, Art, and Rare Manuscripts , vol. 22, ed. Nathan Haskell Dole, Forrest Morgan, and Caroline Ticknor (New York: International Bibliophile Society, 1904), 7566. [52] Alexis Greene, ed., Women Writing Plays: Three Decades of The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 138. [53] Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York: Routledge, 2006), 29, 33; italics in original. [54] Thompson, Performance Affects , 6; emphasis in original. [55] Quoted in Ruhl, “Six Small Thoughts on Fornés,” 187, 197. [56] Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, “Ghost Writing,” in Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief , ed. Kear and Steinberg (London: Routledge, 1999), 6. [57] Paul Allain and Jen Harvie, Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance , 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014), 149. Footnotes About The Author(s) Seokhun Choi holds a PhD in theatre from the University of Kansas and is currently Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Seoul. He has widely published on contemporary American and Korean theatre and popular culture, and his essays have appeared in Korean and international journals including Journal of American Drama and Theatre , Ecumenica: Journal of Theatre and Performance , and Theatre Research International . His two forthcoming articles (fall 2019) deal with two recent Shakespeare productions in South Korea and will appear in Kritika Kultura and Asian Theatre Journal , respectively. He is also a co-editor of the 2017 special issue of Cultural Studies Review on media, mobilities and identity in Asia. 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.

Benjamin Gillespie 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 The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Benjamin Gillespie By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF This roundtable brings together key voices in the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project including co-directors Linda S. Chapman and Alyce Dissette along with Ain Gordon and Moe Angelos . The discussion offers a behind-the-scenes look at a significant initiative to preserve the legacies of eleven pioneering LGBTQ+ performance artists including Ain Gordon, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Lola Pashalinski, Carmelita Tropicana, John Kelly, Richard Move, and Ishmael Houston-Jones. The project, which began in 2024, is housed under the Pick Up Performance Company and was born out of a shared recognition that queer performance histories—especially those emerging from the experimental downtown New York scene—remain vulnerable to erasure. The group discusses the logistical, political, and ethical stakes of preserving ephemeral theatre, dance, and performance work, particularly when much of it was created in non-traditional theatre spaces such as bars and clubs and beyond institutional frameworks. Overall, the roundtable explores questions of archival accessibility, digitization, and the necessity of preservation from the unique perspective of living artists shaping their own histories and how they are told. This wide-ranging conversation reflects on personal and intergenerational connections and the role of community in shaping how queer art is made and remembered. It also considers the archive as an artistic undertaking that resists linearity through embracing the complexity and contradictions embedded in queer history. Finally, the respondents offer an intimate and pragmatic look at how queer collective memory, aesthetics, and activism intersect to shape a more inclusive historical record of performance. This roundtable conversation was conducted on May 23, 2025 via Zoom. It has been edited for clarity and brevity. Benjamin Gillespie: I thought we could start by having each of you briefly introduce how you got involved with the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project. Linda S. Chapman: I left New York Theatre Workshop in 2020 after twenty-six years with the company. In 2023, Alyce and Ain asked me to join the board of the Pick Up Performance Company following the death of Ain’s father and co-artistic director, David Gordon. They asked me to help develop new projects for the company, extending the work that Ain and David did to making new work with “friends and family”, very much a part of the ethos of the Pick Up Performance Company. I had already begun preliminary work on organizing my longtime partner Lola Pashalinski’s archive. Alyce had worked with David Gordon on creating an incredible digital archive for him over the course of six years ( https://davidgordon.nyc/ ) which I had followed closely, and I thought maybe she could advise me on creating an archive for Lola. Understanding that, for a performer, it’s more difficult to raise funds to support archive work, we started thinking: Who else might we invite into this idea to help? Of course, Ain and Alyce were right there—and would need Ain’s work organized. And I had been in conversation with Moe and the Five Lesbian Brothers about their thoughts around archives and where they might go. There was some nascent interest already, and then, organically, the rest of the group came together. The project evolved out of our conversations together. Carmelita Tropicana joined in. Alyce was doing work with John Kelly and so he joined. Ishmael Houston-Jones and Richard Move were also artists from the community that we deeply admired. It developed organically out of the desire to preserve this work. Moe Angeles (right) on the stoop beside the St. Marks Baths on the street of that same name, being documented by Rio Sophia (left) from Queer/Art/Mentorship. Photo by Jess Dobkin Moe Angelos: I’m a downtown theater/performance maker and have been a character in that landscape for a long time. I’m one of the Five Lesbian Brothers. Linda produced all of our plays at New York Theatre Workshop. We are all connected. I think at some point I was kvetching, “What are we going to do with all our stuff?” because there isn’t just one, but five of us. We’re a company. I knew it was going to be some work to figure out what to do with the archive because there are a lot of voices who might want different things. The Brothers have figured that out, but I was informally consulting with Linda, asking “How do we go forward?” Because we’re getting old. One of us will die eventually. Our first concern was not to leave a huge mess for the other Brothers. Just to make it cleaner. That tumbled into a whole set of questions: How do we collect, catalog, digitize, store? Who’s going to take our stuff? Because it’s important. It’s a piece of history—self-made playwrights, devisers, whatever we are. Sometimes I look back at performance work that was done and think, “Oh my God, that was an amazing idea!” But it’s gone—forgotten. Couldn’t some of those things be captured for others so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel? That’s how I got scooped up into this fantastic world of the project. Alyce was gung-ho on the project and kindly asked the Five Lesbian Brothers to be a part of it. One offshoot of the archive project is generating collaborations within the group as well. Ain just directed my revised show This Used to Be Gay last weekend which was a great success. I learned so much from the process. Ain, you did a beautiful job directing. I got nothing but wonderful feedback, especially the new visual elements. It really enhanced the piece. Ain Gordon: There’s nothing to decorate and stage if there isn’t a script. Thank you for making that, Moe. I enjoyed it. I’m a fan. With regards to the project, there are a couple things I want to mention. My father and I co-directed the Pick Up Performance Company. He died in 2022. There were the tangible realities of going from a two-artist budget to a one-artist budget project company, and questions about how to practically handle that. It felt jerry-rigged to bring someone else in as co-director, but familial extension is in the DNA of the company. Alyce and I moved to the idea of “friends and family”—artists who have worked with me or who worked with David who don’t have infrastructure for their projects, bringing them under the Pick Up Company umbrella to offer a home for their work. It felt like a way to serve the community and grow the company in a way that feels right. Orbiting conversations about archiving happened without me at first. Things do happen behind my back! ( laughs ). But it eventually came back to me. As a playwright and theatre-maker, I do a lot of work sourcing archives and overlooked stories. I have strong feelings about how history is traditionally constructed and how people are sucked into believing it’s a fact when, in reality, it’s just an interpretive engine. Archives also tend to be for the converted. People go looking for what they already know is there. That’s a problem. We talked a lot about that and how to pierce that wall. We also talked about how we might not be able to secure real support for our individual archives, but that a critical mass could attract interest and also offer a contextual portrait of a geographic, generational moment. Over the years, as theatre-makers we didn’t all collaborate directly all the time, but we were side by side seeing each other’s work. We were making work in parallel. That interaction is useful for researchers and for young queer theatre-makers to know about. Alyce Dissette: I feel as if I’m the more pragmatic member of the team ( laughs ). I recall having a coffee over Christmas break two years ago with Moe and Linda. They were talking to me about where to go with Lola’s archive, where to go with the Five Lesbian Brothers’s archive. I’m not a complicated thinker. I just said, “You’re never going to raise money for individual archives. So one way to approach this may be to put us in a group—a group that made some sort of sense for us to work together.” That conversation led to other conversations. We brought in Ain—because not too much secret goes on without him knowing! ( laughs .) And then we all talked for a while. Ain, Linda, and I curated the other artists that would participate—thinking about what made sense aesthetically and practically in terms of forming a group initiative. Then we tested the waters to see if we could actually raise money for such a thing. It was one of those wonderful moments where nobody was negative about this idea or about these artists. It’s a very special group we’ve created. They represent a time when two things were happening in the field: first, they were emerging as queer artists and gaining legitimacy in the downtown art scene in New York; second, they were simultaneously being hit with the AIDS epidemic. Those two factors were major in the careers of these people. We also have a generational divide. Lola is our oldest artist. Richard Move is our youngest artist. That’s also representational of the impact they had on the field and on LGBTQ+ rights. A lot of the artists that came through while they were working died. A lot of people died. And people seem to forget that. So, I said that I would be co-director of the project. But I didn’t want to do it alone, and Ain suggested Linda as my partner in crime. We’ve also formed an amazing group of advisors representing the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Library of Congress, the National Theatre Archive Project, and other movers and shakers in the field. They’ve been more than generous with their time and support. Gillespie: It’s wonderful how all of you are connected and have a common vision that honors individual artists’ perspectives. I should mention that this project also relates to the work I’m doing in my scholarship. I’m currently working on an anthology about Split Britches’s work that documents the last two decades of work by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver including scripts, interviews, essays, along with a companion digital archive with photos and video to accompany the book. More broadly, I’m interested in queer legacy, performance archives, and how intergenerational connections can be made and sustained between younger and older queer artists. What is the mission of the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project, and what are its central goals? Dissette: The two central portions of the mission are 1) To create legitimate archives that go into a permanent collection so that the work will be saved, and 2) To figure out a way to make the material publicly accessible as opposed to disappearing into a collection only scholars can access. Obviously, the process of archiving a career, a body of work, is a huge undertaking. It takes a lot of time and work. But then where does it go? We don’t want it to disappear in boxes. One of the things we did with David Gordon’s archive is make it publicly accessible online, and it is available now ( https://davidgordon.nyc/ ). Because the Mellon Foundation gave us the funding for that project, we were able to create an in-depth artistic legacy that people can access online. That’s a new thing in the digital age. It’s exploding in some places and nonexistent in others. But for us, both parts are essential: a legitimate collection that lives somewhere, and public access. Ideally, there will be public access for the entire group so that anyone can search and access all eleven artists in the project. We don’t know where that will land yet. We can work on that while doing the pragmatic work of assembling the archives—which is a long and complicated process. Chapman: Could I just add a subsection of our mission? Alyce and I don’t feel we can do more than help put these archives together, but we’d like to distribute some of our findings and the work we’re doing to support the larger community. We’re developing inventory systems, making connections throughout the community of people interested in theatre and performance archives. We’re organizing an event in June (2025) on digital archives, bringing together the American LGBTQ+ Museum, The Feminist Institute, and our project. We’re seeking opportunities to meet people in the community. We’re reaching out to the major archives including Fales Library at NYU, the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and others. We’re hoping to contribute beyond just building the archives to help disseminate what we’re learning for others to benefit. Gillespie: And you did an exhibition at BAM last year right? Dissette: The BAM exhibition was huge for us. It really helped kick things off. BAM’s artistic leaders were instrumental partners. At the time, BAM was producing Taylor Mac’s Bark of Millions and they wanted to show there was an existing LGBTQ+ artistic legacy—that this work didn’t just appear out of nowhere. There was whole history and community of artists practicing for decades. Amy Casello is a great thinker and supporter of it all. Gillespie: Is BAM also one of your community partners? Dissette: Yes. We did a few events in conjunction with the exhibition last year. We are in conversation with BAM about future collaborations. Institutions get busy, especially now, but we want to maintain a community around this project throughout its development. We’ll do a few events every year as we work, and BAM is certainly a part of that community. Gillespie: I want to ask about the actual archives themselves. You mentioned the digital archiving process. What are some of the challenges or difficulties with building performance-based archives? It’s obviously quite different than other genres of art when you’re archiving ephemeral work. Gordon: One of the challenges is right here among us: there are very different types of performance histories across the artists in our group. Carmelita, John, and to some extent the Five Lesbian Brothers did a lot of work in clubs, which are very rarely documented. Or if they are, they’re on very endangered media formats. This is part of what I mean when I say that history is a kind of fictive engine. There are economic factors that make some work easier to document and some harder. Then there’s the question of how the archive tells the story of why things are missing or absent from the record, or do we just passively let the absence remain? What is the narration that frames that absence for an uninitiated viewer? Dissette: These are very particular archives. They’re artist-driven, not institutionally driven, and that’s a very different approach. We’re using the David Gordon Archive as a model because David made all the decisions about how he wanted his work left behind. There’s video, scripts—we had to figure out how to organize it so it could be accessible. Then there’s the boring digital labor of scanning everything. When we sent his forty boxes to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, we had digital copies of everything meaningful. David contextualized everything by writing what he called “scripts,” but they’re really stories—decade by decade—about how the work was made and what happened. That matched his philosophy that art and life are the same thing. Each artist will need to find their voice in this process—how they want to frame their body of work and what they want people to know. Then there’s the more conventional archive methodology: organizing scripts, video, letters, documents. There’s just a lot of stuff, and we need to figure out what will be saved and what digitized. David’s online archive is organized by decade. All the work from that decade is listed. You click on the work, and everything—programs, photos, etc.—are accessible from that page. This isn’t something you can do on WordPress. It was professionally programmed. We hope to have resources to do something similar. But first we have to do the grunt work—organizing archive materials and making them accessible. And it’s a lot of labor. Most of us don’t even know what we have yet. We’re just starting. Angelos: And then there’s the inherent problem with live performance. We’re doing the work to be in the room with the people in the room. It’s not necessarily intended to be recorded. We’re not making a movie. We’re not making a video. It’s ephemeral. You can’t really capture what was happening behind the camera at a club. And we did a lot of one-offs—someone’s benefit, an avant-garde-arama, and other things like that. We’d write a specific thing for a one-off event and maybe all that’s left behind is a lyric sheet. So that’s interesting too. We did a lot of that type of work. We all did. Dissette: We were just talking about that yesterday with Carmelita—about starting to organize things. She has all these sheets of paper, and now they need to be organized in some way. Chapman: In the case of Lola’s work with the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, they weren’t able to record it most of it. They didn’t have access to equipment in those days. We’re talking about the late 1960s into the early 1980s when Lola left the company. That was the time people were just starting to record performances. So there’s very little live documentation—at least from that period. With the Five Lesbian Brothers, and with David and Ain’s work, some performances are documented. But it’s uneven. The other thing I want to add, and this isn’t about digitization per se, but I think an important part of our mission is that our artists are all living. They’re all still alive and are making the decisions about what they want to be archived. With Lola, for instance, we’re doing oral histories and transcribing those as a form of storytelling—the kind Ain described so beautifully. Gillespie: It’s important that you mentioned that these are artist-led projects. Oftentimes, archives aren’t consolidated by the artists themselves. That’s what’s so exciting about this project. The artists have a lot of say in how their work will be digitized or archived, but also in how that legacy will look in public-facing contexts. Gordon: Yes, and the word “consolidation” is exactly the one I want to avoid. There’s a project I did for the Mark Taper Forum. I have fourteen of the twenty-five drafts of that script. I want all fourteen to be in the archive. I want everyone to know what hell that was. Gillespie: I understand that impulse because then you get to see the artist’s process. That’s a big part of the work. Gordon: It fights what I think writing history tends to do—making it seem like there was a series of steps that led inevitably to the thing that’s now historicized. And that’s rarely the case in creating performance. I’m interested in making the archive demonstrate the chaos of the creative process. History narrows an array of events into a traceable sequence that appears to have led to the thing it wishes to historicize. But that’s the opposite of what actually occurs, at least for me. That’s not how any work comes to be. In a lot of these downtown shows, someone would ask you to participate in a show. I’d say, “Okay, great!” I had a title but hadn’t written a word before I was invited to participate. Chapman: Here’s an example. Lola and I made a piece about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas that we worked on for many years. It relates back to how HIV impacted our work. We started the piece with our friend Georg Osterman, another member of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. We were making a piece about Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson. George passed away in 1995. We had a draft script and we were ready to go into production. But without Georg—because the work was so personal to both George and Lola—we didn’t see how we could go forward. Our friends and community encouraged us to think differently. They didn’t want all that work to be lost. That led us to evolve a new piece about Gertrude and Alice. But that work would never have come about without the AIDS epidemic. That’s the unwieldy kind of story that we’re documenting. It’s part of telling the story of a whole era. Gillespie: Do you feel there will be difficulties navigating how to tell this story without narrowing it—or “consolidating” it? (I promise I won’t use that word again, Ain!) How will you present it publicly in a way that’s visible to people who might not have been around or don’t necessarily know the context. One thing about this group is that you all knew each other. You were all working in the same time and place. You saw a lot of the work. But a future viewer may not have. And it’s still important for them to try to understand it. Moe: What do you think the challenges might be in telling your story through the archive, or the Five Lesbian Brothers’ story? Angelos: All of what we’re talking about is rooted in personal relationships, right? That’s the part I don’t know how to make legible—other than “we were in the same room at the same time.” But it’s such an important part of this work. It’s the “family business,” as the Pick Up Performance Company says. It’s about who you know. I don’t know that it’s so different from insider trading—it’s who you know, and who shares some sensibility in a context. We were all in New York City. And what did that mean in that era? The city was very different. You could still hang out your shingle and start making shows without an MFA from Yale or wherever. No dis on that, but I don’t know if it’s possible to do it the same way now. There was this autodidactic process, and we were teaching ourselves as we went. That feels very different now. It’s hard to make it legible without sounding like, “It used to be better—get off my lawn.” But it really made a difference. We didn’t have to work four days out of five for the landlord. I don’t know what young artists do now. I don’t know how they do it. Gillespie: And your work in This Used to Be Gay really captures that history in a unique way. You’re calling back to a queer history that helps contextualize the work being made and tell that story. It’s also very funny. Chapman: I worked at Theater for the New City in the early eighties. It was my first administrative job. That’s where I met Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, who had worked with Spiderwoman Theater. That was even before Split Britches emerged from the work they did together. I saw the first two WOW festivals—before there was a dedicated WOW space. In her show, Moe takes us back to the original WOW Café theatre on 11th Street. Then we move 4th Street. I’m very connected to that history. I’m motivated and inspired by the begats—seeing Gordon’s work at Dance Theater Workshop, knowing he came out of Judson Church, where George Bartenieff and Crystal Field had worked. Those connections, how these artists influenced each other beyond our group—it’s eternally fascinating! I get excited about how these elements of community affect aesthetics, how we make work, what we’re interested in. I think our particular brain trust in the project—our artists—is really dynamic. There’s so much potential in how we relate and communicate across aesthetics and generations. There’s so much more to explore beyond sorting papers and digitizing materials. We’re telling the story of work in the East Village, a sort of performance phenomenon. You can’t recreate those moments or that time and place. It’s unique. Ain Gordon (left) with Josh Quillen in “Relics and their Humans" at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Photo: Darrell Hoeman Gordon: I think telling the story is the same as designing the experience of the archive itself, especially for someone arriving at it online. It's like the first ten minutes of a live performance. I ask the same questions: What will they see first? What will set the tone? How do we make it feel the way we want it to feel? How do we disassemble the linear steppingstones that history likes to create and convey some of the randomness, the chaos, and the chance? Those things can happen—it depends on how it’s designed, what kind of contextualizing the artists do. Personally, I loathe finding aids. I won’t even read them anymore—I go straight to the indexing. Because the finding aid does exactly what I don’t want done. So how do we rethink finding aids for these archives? Could we write something different? Maybe six different people write six different versions, and users can choose which one to follow. I don’t know, but I want us to think about that. Chapman: And we’re talking about people who were groundbreaking. These are artists telling stories that had never been told before. They were pushing against years of repression and silencing. And once you break that open . . . who knows? I don’t think we’re finished exploring that yet. Dissette: It’s a little overwhelming, to be honest. But one good thing about archiving is that it takes time. It’s not like a production. We will learn things as we go, and I’m counting on that. We certainly made it up as we went along with David’s archive. I have colleagues who work in tech. I worked at the Voyager Company that produced those CD-ROMs. I ran the first digital art contest back in the 90s. I’m interested in the process. And what we gain are opportunities that emerge within that process. That’s the most interesting part of this work to me. Gillespie: The digital archives of David Gordon ( https://davidgordon.nyc/ ) and Lola Pashalinski ( https://performingartslegacy.org/pashalinski/ ), as they stand now, are kind of independent of this project, right? Do you imagine that the archives you’re assembling in this project will resemble the work on those archives? Dissette: David’s archive is independent and is strictly a model for what we’re doing. It’s not part of this project except to show what’s possible. Lola’s current online presence is through the Entertainment Community Fund’s Legacy Project . That’s another kind of framework where many artists are represented. They designed the portal. It’s a possible model for us, but I’d like something more complex, technologically speaking. They did a really good job creating infrastructure where people could enter information. But my fantasy is that we partner with a major institution to create a portal—a really complicated portal—where this would be one entity, and other entities could also live in the future. Gordon: In fantasy land, all of us would be on one portal. If you searched “1980,” you’d get everything all eleven artists made in 1980—not just one. Dissette: That’s the cool thing about David’s archive—it has a search engine. You can’t do that in many places. As the technology improves, there are more possibilities. But there are also difficult decisions. Video will be all over the place. There’s no way to consolidate it. Ishmael Houston-Jones has something like thirty videos at the NYPL through Dance Theater Workshop. In David’s case, we partnered with the NYPL Performing Arts Library since his work was going into their permanent collection. So now there’s a direct link to the NYPL Digital Collections where David’s videos live. The public can access it online. But we don’t know yet what will be streamable outside the NYPL system. Right now, to view most of it, you need to physically go to the library. Sometimes, there’s a lack of sophisticated understanding about what websites can be. David’s site was designed by someone who is a media artist, someone from MIT—an artist in her own right. She and David talked through the vision. Then she came back with a structure for the archive. That’s different than someone just making categories in WordPress. It’s a different level. Chapman: Also, the Legacy Project site for Lola is not a complete archive. It does have a fairly developed chronology of all the work. But it doesn’t have all the photos. It doesn’t have a lot of audio. It’s material that we could easily transfer to another kind of site if we want to do that as we develop. But it’s not complete. We’re further ahead because we actually do have a dedicated archivist, but these are incredibly time-consuming processes. Gillespie: It sounds like the archives, in an ideal world, are kind of a new collaborative art project where the artists themselves will collaborate with a media artist to think about how this will look and be mapped out in a non-traditional, nonlinear way. That is really interesting because it’s kind of a queering of the archive itself. It’s not chronological. You want these to tell the story in a way that’s messy and real and shows the connections between artists. Dissette: It’s important to say also that they wouldn’t have access to anything without producers, which in this project are Linda and myself. The producers are the people who are facilitating a process. Just putting an archivist with an artist will not be enough. There must be someone guiding the process at some level. I mean, it’s like a show. Chapman : I think making new work out of the archival materials is something a lot of us are interested in right now. Dissette: David Gordon named it “Archivography.” The performances were called “Live Archivography,” and then there’s the website. I think also he resented being relegated to historicizing as the only fundable action. He had more to give. And I think that’s actually the benefit of us all doing it before he died. Gillespie : I’m curious about funding. What is your approach right now, or what are your plans for procuring funding to help with this project? Angelos: Oh, we’re going to ask the NEA and NEH immediately! ( laughs ). Their new mandate—what the NEA is supposed to do now—is fund disaster recovery. And, you know, this is a disaster! Gordon: We’re all in recovery. Angelos: Just little gallows humor there . . . Chapman : Alyce is going through all the various funding agencies that we can think of. And Ain and Alyce particularly have really developed great language which we are using. We’re leaving no stone unturned. Of course, anybody we ever knew who ever gave any money as an individual is getting approached. We’ve had a very generous anonymous donation. Because of some former funding that the Pick Up had, we’re able to start making this a project that is part of the broader work of the company. Dissette: Having been raising money for a long time, one of the wonderful things about raising money for this project is that everybody we’ve talked to likes the project. Nobody had told us it’s a terrible idea. Nobody. And nobody’s been even middle-of-the-road about it. That’s been the response universally so far. We got initial startup money from the Howard Gilman Foundation which has helped. But we will need more. We’re approaching some major foundations about that. And the fact that we're committed to making the process be part of the community—working with the community—is key. And so NYSCA and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs have been supportive of this, in addition to our other projects though the Pick Up Performance Company. Funding takes a while, especially big funding. They commit money years in advance. But we’re working on it. The artists are also helping. Gillespie : Do you see additional projects like Moe’s This Used to Be Gay with the Pick Up Performance Company connected to the project? Gordon: If the artists are interested in it then absolutely. It’s artist-driven from our standpoint. Some of these artists have enough infrastructure that they wouldn’t necessarily want to do that. Some don’t. It would be very case by case. We’re absolutely open to it, and also in no way mandating it. Gillespie We’ve talked about digital archives, but what about the physical archives? Have you thought about what to do with all the paper? Chapman : Absolutely. And we do also have other artifacts besides just the paper. Those are all big questions that come up as we’re putting these collections together. But I think the physical collections are really important too. Dissette : We have said that the physical archives could go to different repositories as long as the virtual one unites them all. But there are some people who are also interested in perhaps the physical archives going into one repository. So that’s a moving part of a conversation now. Collage image created for the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project – in top center photo left to right Co-directors Linda S. Chapman, Alyce Dissette, archivist Vivian Stein, Advisor Robert Croonquist References Footnotes About The Author(s) MOE ANGELOS is a theatre artist and writer. She's one of the OBIE-Award winning Five Lesbian Brothers and has been a member of the Wow Café Theatre in NYC since 1981. She's a main collaborator in The Builders Association, creating media-infused performances that have toured all over the universe that is accessible to non-billionaires. She has collaborated with many downtown NYC luminaries including Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Anne Bogart, Lois Weaver, Kate Stafford, Carmelita Tropicana, Brooke O’Harra, Half Straddle, New Georges and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company. She has been a mentor in Queer/Art/Mentorship several times and in Toronto, her work has been presented at FADO Centre for Performance Art and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. In October 2024 she was in the latest Builders' premiere at the Skirball Center at NYU, Atlas Drugged which is about artificial intelligence's insidious influence on the democratic process, which now seems more plausible than ever. During Covid-19, she appeared on Zoom, Twitch and Streamyard and currently by day, she works in United Scenic Artists 829 painting scenery and helping make Hollywood dreams come true. Moe is not on the socials so don't try to click and subscribe but if you're curious ask ChatGPT about her. LINDA S. CHAPMAN (Co-Director LGBTQ+ Artist Archive Project) is Founding President of Youth Arts New York (YANY) providing experiences in the arts, science, and civil society to engage youth in building a future of peace, social justice, and sustainability. A current member of the Board of the Pick Up Performance Company, she retired in 2020 as the Associate Artistic Director of New York Theatre Workshop. Chapman joined the company in 1995 and served as an instrumental curator, advocate, and collaborator. Prior to her time at NYTW, she was Managing Director of The Wooster Group from 1983—94. She was a co-producer of DYKE TV, a grass roots, public access program, made by and for the lesbian community. Linda is also co-writer and performer of the Obie Award-winning Gertrude and Alice: A Likeness to Loving with her life partner of forty years Lola Pashalinski, their two-character play about Gertrude Stein and her longtime companion Alice B. Toklas, directed by Anne Bogart. She co-adapted Ann Bannon’s lesbian classics The Beebo Brinker Chronicles for the stage with playwright Kate Moira Ryan. The play was awarded a GLAAD Media Award and nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. She is a Lilly Award and Prelude ‘23 Frankie Award winner. ALYCE DISSETTE (Co-Director LGBTQ+ Artist Archive Project) is a producer for performing, visual, film, and digital artists who has worked in a wide range of venues and projects from staff member in the Metropolitan Opera Presentations Department to former Executive Producer of the PBS national series, “Alive from Off Center,” and on digital media productions with the Voyager Co. She has worked with hundreds of artists including filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, François Girard, Mark Pellington, visual artist James Turrell, author Art Spiegelman, and in the performing arts, Sir Richard Alston, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Karin Coonrod, Ain Gordon, David Gordon, Philip Glass, Nona Hendryx, John Kelly, Urban Bush Women, and Robert Wilson. She has served on the Board of Directors for Dance/USA and the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York. She produced the multi-faceted archive project for director/choreographer/writer David Gordon that is considered a model in the field. She has been the Producing Director for the Pick Up Performance Company since 2001. AIN GORDON is a three-time Obie Award-winning writer/director/actor, a two-time NYFA recipient a Guggenheim Fellow in Playwriting, and a Creative Capital Awardee. Gordon’s work often focuses on marginalized/forgotten histories and the obscured figures found within. Recent projects include Relics And Their Humans : collaborating with Josh Quillen to frame a real-life couple from Dover, OH, at Krannert Center (IL), Arizona Arts Live, Wexner Center (OH), and La MaMa (NY); These Don’t Easily Scatter : excavating the early years of the AIDS crisis in Philadelphia, in collaboration with the William Way LGBT Community Center with support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage plus development at Boston University; Radicals In Miniature : collaborating with Josh Quillen on a series of requiems to personal icons at Baryshnikov Arts (NY), International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Quick Center, Connecticut College (all CT), Williams College and The Yard (both MA); and 217 Boxes Of Dr. Henry Anonymous : culminating a 2-year residency at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania focused on Dr. John Fryer who, in 1972, disguised as Dr. Anonymous opposed the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of homosexuality as a disease at the Painted Bride (PA), Baryshnikov Arts (NY), Transylvania University (KY) and the Center For The Art of Performance UCLA. Gordon’s work has also been seen at BAM Next Wave, New York Theater Workshop, the Mark Taper Forum, Flynn Center, HERE Arts Center, DiverseWorks, Performance Space 122/PSNY, Dance Theater Workshop/NYLA, George St Playhouse (NJ), and MASS MoCA, among many others. Gordon is a former Core Writer of the Playwright’s Center (MN), has twice held the post of Visiting Artist at the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (PA), a former Artist-In-Residence at NYU Tisch School of The Arts, former Resident Artist at The Hermitage (FL), and was a 2020 Pabst Endowed Writer-In-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Gordon has been a Director of the Pick Up Performance Co(s) since 1992. 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.