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Steven Otfinoski Fairfield 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 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 Steven Otfinoski Fairfield University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Adam Chanier - Berat and Andy Grotelueschen in A New Brain at Barrington Stage. Photo: Daniel Radar The Happiest Man on Earth Mark St. Germain (24 May-17 Jun.) Cabaret John Kander, Fred Ebb and Joe Masteroff (14 June-8 July) Tiny Father Mike Lew (27 June-22 July) Blues for an Alabama Sky Pearl Cleage (18 Jul. -5 Aug.) Faith Healer Brian Friel (6-28 Aug.) A New Brain William Finn and James Lapine (16 Aug.- 10 Sept.) English Sanaz Toossi (27 Sept.-15 Oct.) Artistic Director Alan Paul’s first season at BSC was a winning combination of compelling musicals, thoughtful plays, and worthy revivals. When we first saw Eddie Jaku (ably played by Kenneth Tigar) in the season’s opener, The Happiest Man on Earth, he was chatting with patrons at the St. Germain Stage and appeared to indeed be the titular character. Only when he began his harrowing narrative did we understand that the price for such happiness. Based on Jaku’s memoir, effectively dramatized by St. Germain, Jaku relives his life as a Jew in Hitler’s Germany from his expulsion from school in his native Leipzig to barely surviving Auschwitz to his final rescue at war’s end in Belgium. This tight, 80-minute monologue took place on an appropriately stark set by James Noone, backed by a wall of horizontal boards evoking the boxcars that carried Jaku and thousands of other Jews to the death camps. Jaku’s final message that we must see ourselves as part of an extended human family is one that reverberates in our own troubled times. Troubled times indeed haunted an emotionally charged revival of Cabaret , the first production directed by Paul. The Kit Kat Club, the symbol of 1920s free-wheeling Berlin, never looked more dazzlingly decadent or shockingly contemporary. The first time we heard the stirring anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” it was not sung by Hitler’s minions but by a quartet of trans and nonbinary performers, whose hopes for a better future would soon be dashed. At the center of this growing conflict is the Emcee, brilliantly embodied by Nik Alexander, who alternated between the svelte seducer and the play’s conscience. Paul skillfully blended some of the club scenes with the book relationship scenes, perhaps no more effectively than when American Cliff (Dan Amboyer), an unwitting courier for the Nazi cause, was seen in transit as the company sang “Money,” the prime motive for his actions. Krysta Rodriguez was a tortured Sally Bowles who turned the title number into a gut-wrenching anthem of despair. Tiny Father, a co-world premiere with the Chautauqua Theater Company, written by Mike Lew, takes place in a neonatal intensive care unit rendered in every stainless steel detail by scenic designer Wilson Chin. Daniel, compellingly played by Andy Lucien, is the hapless Black father who is overwhelmed by the premature birth of a daughter he initially had no intention of letting into his life. As the intermission-less production progresses, the tiny baby grows, and so does the ‘tiny father,’ thanks in large part to the help of Caroline, the compassionate yet by-the-book nurse (Jennifer Ikeda). Once Daniel resolves his issues with fatherhood, the play loses some steam as a less convincing conflict arises over care and the possible prejudice between father and caregiver. However, the ending, where Daniel finally recognizes his debt to Caroline, is a fitting conclusion for a beautifully uplifting play. Race also plays a role in Blues for an Alabama Sky, the fine revival of Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play. The drama is set in 1930 Manhattan, where the Harlem Renaissance is in full flower and the dreams of ordinary Blacks are built on the success of such giants as poet Langston Hughes and entertainer Josephine Baker, the toast of Paris. Brandon Alvion was pure kinetic comic energy as Guy, the not-so-closeted gay costume designer, whose dream of working for Baker in France is finally realized. Yet his triumph results in tragedy for two of his closest friends and his antagonist, a transplanted Alabamian. Tsilala Brock was the struggling singer who chose Guy and Paris over a more stable life with country boy Leland, an earthy and empathetic DeLeon Dallas. Funny, engrossing, and ultimately heartbreaking, Blues captures the aspirations and struggles of Black America today as well as any contemporary play. Another revival, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, is a remarkable quartet of monologues for three characters that deal with the mysteries of faith, friendship, and guilt. Christopher Innvar was mesmerizing as Frank Hardy, the titular character who bears the weight of his work and its consequences for others. Gretchen Egolf played his long-suffering wife, Grace, a chain-smoking neurotic who claims, “I’m one of his fictions, too.” Finally, there is Frank’s manager, Teddy, whom Mark H. Dold brought to life with a much-needed comic flair. In the end, when Frank shuffled off, overcoat buttoned tightly, into a netherworld of his own making, we were left to wonder what was truth and what was fiction and which is more important to humanity’s survival. BSC’s second musical of the season was a sparkling revival of William Finn and James Lapine’s A New Brain. Songwriter Gordon Schwinn (a lovable nebbish Adam Chanler-Berat) is frustrated writing songs for a TV kiddie show when he suffers what might be a brain hemorrhage or stroke. The catchy, propulsive tunes and heartfelt lyrics made for a gloriously entertaining 95 minutes, although, at times one wished the composer had plumbed deeper into his characters and their conflicts, especially in the relationship of Gordon and his boyfriend Roger, a powerhouse-voiced Darrell Purcell, Jr. Other memorable members of the energetic cast were Mary Testa as Gordon’s mother and Andy Grotelueschen as the delightful Mr. Bungee, the kiddie show star, who is alternatively Gordon’s froggy nemesis and his gentle mentor. BSC’s season ender, English, is appropriately about immigrants and the language they leave behind when they come to America. The four Iranian students learning English before they leave their homeland, like their teacher Marjan (Nazanin Nour), are wrestling with an uncertain future. The only male member, Omid (Babak Tafti), actually has American citizenship but stays in Iran to connect with a culture and people he fears he is losing. This sense of cultural loss permeated the play just like the bright fluorescent lights by lighting designer Masha Tsimring that glared down on Afsoon Pajoufar’s boxed-in classroom that left no place to hide. Playwright Toossi portrayed the contentious Elham, who, like other characters in the play, is both “understood and misunderstood.” Shortly after this production was announced, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) STEVEN OTFINOSKI teaches in the English department at Fairfield University. He is an award-winning playwright with productions across the Eastern states and abroad. His ten-minute comedy “The Audition” won the Best Script Award at the Short + Sweet Festival in Sydney, Australia. Steve is also the author of more than 200 books for young adults and has been the long-time reviewer of summer theater in the Berkshires for New England Theatre in Review . He lives in Stratford, Connecticut with his wife Beverly, a retired teacher and editor, and their two Aussie Shepherds. 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.

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.

Book Reviews 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 Re-Imagining America and Theater: Race, Representation, and Form Book Reviews By Published on April 8, 2021 Download Article as PDF Maya Roth, Editor Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative Edited by Claire Syler and Daniel Banks Reviewed by Erith Jaffe-Berg Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden. Reviewed by DeRon Williams The Theatre of August Wilson By Alan Nadel Reviewed by Jasmeene Francois The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage By Kurt Eisen Reviewed by Richard Hayes Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future By James Shapiro Reviewed by Kaitlin Nabors Books Received The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative The Theatre of August Wilson Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Introduction to “Milestones in Black Theatre” Interviews and Afterviews on "Milestones in Black Theatre" Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Re-Imagining America and Theater: Race, Representation, and Form Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Daphne P. Lei Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Daphne P. Lei By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF “China boys, you be legendary obeyers of the law, legendary humble, legendary passive…. I curse ya honorary white!”—Frank Chin, Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) [1] “You are not White and that is what matters to some men.”—Philip Kan Gotanda, I Dream of Chang and Eng (2016) [2] The oscillation and negotiation between “honorary white” and “not white” reflect the Asian American experience on stage and in society. The first Chinese student Yung Wing graduated from Yale University in 1854; however, AAPI students continued to struggle against injustice and discrimination in the education system and finally, in 2009 President Obama signed the Executive Order 13515 to establish Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISI) programs on university campuses. [3] The slow recognition of AAPI students in higher education reveals a fundamental problem of negotiating a minoritarian time with the majoritarian space, which I address by interrogating similar issues in university theatre and by proposing a new dramaturgical paradigm and theatre pedagogy. I challenge contemporary diversity rhetoric, which focuses on an off-white spatial inclusivity, and I advocate for a unique minoritarian time: the off-yellow time. My brief analysis of the production of Philip Kan Gotanda’s I Dream of Chang and Eng (University of California, Irvine, 2017) illustrates the intervention of activist Asian American dramaturgy. Diversity is not just a keyword in a university’s value statement; it has an intricate and intrinsic relationship with materiality, affect, and learning. [4] California, where I reside and work, is facing unique challenges: The 2020 US Census reports that about 7.2% of the US population and 17% of California’s population is AAPI. My institution, University of California, Irvine, is both an AANAPISI and HSI (Hispanic Serving Institution); 37% of the domestic student population is AAPI, and 75% of international students are from Asian countries as of 2020. The shifting majority-minority population ratio and increasing transpacific influx [5] directly confront the familiar American “racial formation,” which relies on the sociopolitical representation of “different types of human bodies.” [6] Fortunately, Asian Americans come to the rescue with what I call utility ethnicity because they both fall within and exceed frames of racial diversity: Asian faculty often bear the extra burden of serving as token representatives or mentors for underrepresented groups; when necessary, Asians are included under the umbrella of BIPOC to boost a bigger diversity number for the institution; AAPI students are usually excluded from URM (underrepresented minority) fellowships because of the misconception of universal Asian wealth. Being “utile,” AAPI are presented as minorities, people of color, or honorary whites. Utility ethnicity , or an ethnicity with racial value contingent on institutional need, is an empty signifier because the significance of the specific racial group can be re/determined based on the context. It is also a diversity placeholder because the degrees of colorization can be re/defined to balance the ethnic diversity of the whole . Utility ethnicity allows the institutionalized diversity rhetoric to stay in flux and à la mode, so a perfect diversity snapshot of the institution is available at any given moment. Race and ethnicity are often approached in spatial terms. George Lipsitz analyzes how racism takes place through segregation, exclusion, commodification, and other means. [7] Diversity rhetoric—inclusivity, visibility, mobility, intersectionality—implies that diversity takes up space , concretely or metaphorically, two or three-dimensionally, in a majoritarian place. To include people who “look different” in a traditionally white space is a simple way to imagine diversity. [8] Just look at the multicolor recruitment brochures or diversity pie charts of any American university, which is often described as “a site of colonization and US imperialism” [9] where “white cultural identifiers are the default.” [10] Race and ethnicity in US history are always tied with citizenship. The process of naturalization/neutralization inevitably happens when minority students enter the colonial space of the university. They need to be off-white. What is off-white? “Off-white” is “a yellowish or grayish white” [11] ; to make off-white paint, one needs “stock white” mixed with a tint of “yellow oxide.” [12] To enter the space of higher education, many AAPI students try to maximize the “stock white”; however, unlike different kinds of whiteness with historically contingent mobility, [13] yellowness remains a tint that cannot be eliminated completely. Off-white, the subdued background color that every institution needs, is the best entry ticket for Asian Americans. Off-white is the new yellow in higher education; the most diversity-conscientious institution might best be an off-white institution. Although there is more awareness about “conscientious” training (vs. conventional training) [14] and color “conscious” casting (vs. color-blind casting) [15] today, for Asian American actors, progress is painfully slow. In the theatre conservatory setting, the dynamics of traditional master-disciple are similar to what Homi Bhabha calls “colonial mimicry”: “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” [16] The Asian American mimicry— almost the same, but not quite; not quite, not white, only off-white —also has the implication of neutralization, naturalization, and legitimization. In general, a conservatory wishes to maximize students’ marketability with the efficient machinery running on a well-tested colonial formula at the institutional tempo. Any slippage, ambivalence, curiosity, risk-taking, or experimentation would interrupt the flow and cause deviation. AAPI theatre students go with the flow, staying low in their off-white minor or ensemble roles, which are the best roles AAPIs can hope for in a conventional season. While the off-white ensemble contributes to the look of diversity without causing a ruckus, denying actors of color their cultural identifiers is doubly failing them in education, as ethnicity-specific roles are still needed in the industry. [17] I approach Asian American dramaturgy in higher education by prioritizing temporality, which is inevitably connected to spatiality. There are different ways of considering AAPI time. Historically, vying for spatial coexistence, the East often needed to exist behind Western time. Such “temporal disjunction” deprived Asians of contemporaneity. [18] The progression/regression in immigration policies determined the spatial inclusion/exclusion of AAPIs at any historical moment. For theatre education, my emphasis is on tempo —the flow, speed, rhythm, interruption, and flexibility of time. A polyphonic tune incorporated with various tempi — andante, allegro, ritardando, staccato, legato , and rubato— describes a successful diversity theatre pedagogy. [19] Time defines space, space alters time. It is through flexible tempi that an off-yellow time can be cultivated, and equity and humanity can be imagined. I Dream of Chang and Eng (2017), the first mainstage production at the University of California, Irvine with AAPI actors in leading roles since the department’s inception in 1956, was a temporary rupture of the well-established theatre conservatory paradigm. I first proposed the play for the season of 2015–2016, understanding my chance of success would be slim, but I also knew that without an Asian American play in the season, there would be no progress for Asian theatrical visibility. The story about the famous Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), depicts Asian immigrants’ struggles against xenophobia and their ultimate success—a perfect story to address the changing campus demographics and climate. Practicality was on my mind: with racial anomaly as the theme, the script required only four Asian actors and one Black actor, which seemed a manageable challenge. The director ended up casting seven white actors and one Latinx actor, besides the aforementioned five. Strategically, instead of vouching for Asian actors’ perfect colonial mimicry (almost white), I stressed their yellowness as a unique asset for authentically portraying immigrants. After long and sincere conversations, the department promised to reconsider the play if qualified Asian actors could be identified the next year. The extended deadline motivated me to found “Theatre Woks” in late 2015 to identify and cultivate Asian talent; if I can’t find qualified Asian actors, I will make them! AAPI students responded overwhelmingly and our goal was crystal clear—to prove that we are here and we are good enough . I enlisted help to train actors, emphasizing diction and audition skills, dismantling the myth that Asians do not speak good (American midwestern) English. [20] After a few months’ work, we presented a staged reading to showcase Asian American actors, and we received the green light from the department. The mainstage season, which usually consists of six productions, is decided collectively by faculty after a laborious, months-long process. As a non-practice faculty member crossing the practice/scholarship divide obtaining a major slot for minoritized students, I understood that the unique opportunity for Chang and Eng might also create some discomfort. I volunteered to be the dramaturg. A dramaturg always needs to negotiate their inside/outside/tangential positionality. On the one hand, a faculty dramaturg in an all-student production requires even more mindfulness of the power dynamics. On the other hand, a knowledgeable Asian American dramaturg needs to take an activist role to steer the production and avoid the nightmarish embarrassment of yellowface or inauthentic Asian mise en scène . I needed to be there but not get in the way. I built a website to house my extensive research as a knowledge bank for the creative and production teams. I shared my collection of Chinese opera costumes with the MFA student designers to help them properly build the costumes, including the shoes for Afong Moy’s bound feet. I organized a two-day scholarly symposium, approaching the theme from such disciplines as disability studies, linguistics, and anthropology. I had clear communication and great rapport with the director. However, cracking institutionalized conventions such as strict protocols for staging certain types of scenes required patience and creativity. I was simultaneously a coach of language and Chinese opera movements, a consultant for the director and designers, a peer ethnographer in the mode of “deep hanging out,” [21] and a friend listening to students’ concerns (Fig. 1). Figure 1. Soon after Chang and Eng’s arrival in Boston, America was busy transforming them into Oriental commodity for the white entertainment industry. In the center, Edmund Truong (left) and Kevin Lin (right) play the famous Siamese Twins. I Dream of Chang and Eng by Philip Kan Gotanda, directed by Ricardo Rocha, at University of California, Irvine (spring, 2017). Photo by Paul R. Kennedy. To truly convey the hardships Chang and Eng faced as new immigrants in a hostile environment and to maximize the educational opportunity for students, the director set up an “off-yellow” laboratory: with the playwright’s approval, each actor would speak some of their lines in Mandarin Chinese. Among the thirteen actors, only two were native Mandarin speakers, whose yellowness became a resource for their peers, reversing the yellow/white hierarchy. [22] I translated the lines and marked them with pinyin romanization and gave individual tutorials. The equal awkwardness that all non-Mandarin speakers—both those who were AAPI and those who were not—experienced built a surprising camaraderie. Students greeted each other with their Chinese lines, including the line by the only Black character: “You are not White ( ni bushi bairen ).” This reversed colonial mimicry made the non-Asian students understand their arduous work could best make them feel “off-yellow,” whereas their fellow AAPI students constantly needed to strive for feeling “off-white.” [23] The similar awkwardness shared across racial lines offered a rare educational opportunity as the linguistically unfit challenged the conventional notion of racial misfits. The play itself engages with these critical questions of racialization. On their voyage to Boston, Chang and Eng befriend Learned Jack, a free Black sailor, who warns them of their true color: “You are not White and that is what matters to some men” (12). Thriving on displaying their freakish yellowness, Chan and Eng never understand their yellow existence in real-life horror. In a scene set in 1835, on their way to the city of Jackson, they are mistaken as “poor Indians savages” (26) (“Chocktaw. Seminoles maybe…” [43]) and nearly lynched. “Are we colored or abominations?” they ask desperately after having escaped the near-death violence. They are reminded again: “You are not white.” (45) The yellowness that spills off stage almost costs them their real lives; their color is the true abomination (Fig. 2). Figure 2. Chang and Eng are mistaken for “poor Indians savages” and nearly lynched. They ask: “Are we colored or abominations?” Learned Jack (Chris Menza, left) clarifies: “You are not white.” I Dream of Chang and Eng by Philip Kan Gotanda, directed by Ricardo Rocha, at University of California, Irvine (spring, 2017). Photo by Paul R. Kennedy. My pedagogical intervention was to alter the institutional tempo. An experienced graduate student actor of color from the cast described the institutional time/space: when opening their mouths, students of color always need to be well-informed and articulate because they don’t have the privilege of making mistakes or asking questions, unlike white students whose curiosity is encouraged. Minority students need to proceed with the speed of andante (walking) and the attitude of allegro (happy), or, as he explained to me, they are made to feel that “they do not deserve to be there.” This is exactly when time means space: allowing doubts or errors means privileged time— ritardando (slowing down) and staccato (interruption)—which translates into privileged space—“deserving to be there.” A graduate designer of color noted that faculty tended to talk to her in a slow manner as if she did not have the intellectual capacity to comprehend instructions. The change of tempo when addressing a native English speaker of color from andante to an uninvited ritardando perhaps “meant well” but backfired because of the racialized and gendered implications. Despite my activism, the systemic racialized aura and residue were still very prevalent in the overall production structure, and most minority students (both actors and crew) felt frustrated. The MFA actor of color noticed that AAPI students were belittled, often not in public: “It is privately beating them down, breaking them, making them feel worthless and lose confidence.” All AAPI students expressed similar sentiments but made a conscious choice not to speak up for fear that the first Asian American production would be the last if Asian American students were proven to be troublemakers. They felt that they had already taken up very precious space on stage, so asking for extra time would have been too much. They were extremely proud to be involved in the historic production and saddened by the difficult experience. [24] The sold-out performances were beautifully moving; many audience members came to me with sincere appreciation, often in tears. Unfortunately, the animosity toward minority students and the lack of enthusiasm for another AAPI production afterward beg the question: did the production aiming to celebrate AAPI lives become an institutional mechanism to deem Asian American students unfit? Nevertheless, there was a profound, personal impact on AAPI students and audiences, and Theatre Woks continued to thrive. My hope is that students will stage their own dramaturgical interventions and little by little, show by show, eventually change the climate of theatre at the university and beyond. Here, finally, I want to introduce another concept of time: tempo rubato, stolen time. Tempo rubato offers the flexibility to alter the tempo for learning. Tempo rubato is responsible borrowing, not outright stealing; the time borrowed needs to be paid back. Off-white is achieved through elimination, but off-yellow through deliberate cultivation. If the institutional time would allow tempo rubato , students could have the luxury to learn about ethnic and cultural complexities, such as taking the time to learn a line of Chinese or a proper movement, such as letting oneself experience embarrassment and awkwardness and creating an off-yellow time and space for all. If the institution allows activist Asian American dramaturgy to implement ritardando in the early process to inspire deep learning, andante and allegro might happen organically in the future. Instead of celebrating AAPI’s off-whiteness, Asian American activist dramatury advocates an off-yellow tempo to help imagine a space for truly diverse thinking, equitable learning, and compassionate being. References [1] Frank Chin, Chickencoop Chinaman/The Year of Dragon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), 37. [2] Philip Kan Gotanda, “I Dream of Chang and Eng” (unpublished manuscript, 28 July 2016), doc file. Subsequent quotations from the play will come from this unpublished manuscript. I wish to express my gratitude to Philip Kan Gotanda, renowned pioneer Asian American playwright, filmmaker, and educator. Gotanda first introduced me to an earlier version of the play in 2012 and was very supportive throughout the production process. He was the keynote speaker in the symposium I organized for the production and saw the performance. [3] For a university to qualify for AANAPISI status, the enrollment of AAPI undergraduate students has to be at least 10%. [4] Sara Ahmed defines diversity work (programs to promote diversity), diversity practitioners (people who design and implement diversity programs and policies), and diversity world (meetings, workshops, and conference on diversity) in her book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2012). [5] Loan Anh Pham, “Campus UC Irvine ranked No. 2 in diversity among colleges,” AsAmNews , 21 September 2020, https://asamnews.com/2020/09/21/wall-street-journal-ranks-uc-irvine-second-in-diversity-among-nations-colleges-both-an-asian-american-pacific-islander-and-hispanic-serving-institution/. [6] Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formations in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55-56. [7] George Lipsitz. How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). [8] Nirwar Puwar, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies out of Place (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 1. [9] Claire Zhuang, “A Parting Letter to My MFA Program,” Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics, 6 June 2017, https://www.ethosreview.org/intellectual-spaces/a-parting-letter-to-my-mfa-program. Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20180730052129/https://www.ethosreview.org/intellectual-spaces/a-parting-letter-to-my-mfa-program (accessed 7 April 2021). Frustrated with the imperialistic approach and white supremacist value in theatre education, she read the letter during her portfolio review and withdrew from the program at the University of Virginia. [10] Nicole Brewer, “Training with a Difference.” American Theatre (January 2018), 54-58. [11] Merriam-Webster , s.v. “off-white ( n. ),” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/off-white (accessed 28 May 2022). [12] Dean Stickler, The Keys to Color: A Decorator’s Handbook for Coloring Paints, Plasters and Glazes (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2010), 55. According to color theory, off-white is within the shade of white, which includes cream, ivory, eggshell, vanilla, and others. [13] According to Matthew Frye Jacobson, one can be “both white and racially distinct from other whites.” Different kinds of whites (Celts, Slavs, Anglos) can “become” Caucasians (vs. non-white) at different historical moments. See Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1998), 6. In Southern California today, the large population of Armenian and Iranian Americans, which might be seen as socially and culturally “less white” than the Irish in early American history, is nevertheless “white” according to the US Census. [14] Nicole Brewer writes, “Conscientious training believes that the background and knowledge each student brings must be acknowledged as relevant and pertinent to their development in theatre.” It develops a “cross-cultural collaborative curriculum.” Brewer, “Training with a Difference,” American Theatre (January 2018), 54-58. [15] August Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand, a Speech on Black Theatre and Performance.” Callaloo 20, no. 3 (1998): 493-503. [16] Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 85-92. [17] Brewer, 54-58. [18] Daphne P. Lei, Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 73-75. [19] Andante, allegro, ritardando, staccato, legato , and rubato are common musical terms to mark time. Andante ( lit. walking) is moderate speed; allegro ( lit. happy) indicates fast and bright tempo; and staccato ( lit. detached) means playing notes separately while legato ( lit. tied together) means connecting the notes while playing; ritardando is slowing down; rubato ( lit. stolen) indicates that strict tempo can be modified to allow for expressive freedom. [20] Ricardo Rocha, a PhD student with professional acting and directing experience helped me train actors. He was later chosen to be the director of Chang and Eng by the department chair. [21] Dorinne Kondo identifies Renato Rosaldo’s “deep hanging out” as an ethnographical style of dramaturgy in her World-Making: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 7. [22] I also recruited two community members, eleven-year-old twins who are native Chinese speakers to play the young twins. Their scenes were separately rehearsed, so I do not include them in the language learning experience. [23] I am obviously paying homage to José Estaban Muñoz’s theorization of “feeling brown” and Donatella Galella’s “feeling yellow.” See Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s ‘The Sweetest Hangover (And Other STDs),’” Theatre Journal 52, no. 1, Latino Performance (March 2000): 67-79, and Galella, “Feeling Yellow: Responding to Contemporary Yellowface in Musical Performance,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 32, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 67-77. [24] To avoid any faculty/student conflict, no students signed up for class credits with me. I interviewed them only after the production was over so they could speak frankly about their experience. Footnotes About The Author(s) Daphne P. Lei is Professor of Drama, at the University of California, Irvine. She is internationally known for her scholarship on Chinese opera, Asian American theatre, intercultural, transnational, and transpacific performance. She is the author of three monographs: Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Alternative Chinese Opera in the Age of Globalization: Performing Zero (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Uncrossing the Borders: Performing Chinese in Gendered (Trans)Nationalism (University of Michigan Press, 2019). Daphne P. Lei is also the co-editor of The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2020, with Charlotte McIvor) and is currently co-authoring Theatre Histories: An Introduction (Routledge, 4th edition) with Tobin Nellhaus, Tamara Underiner, and Patricia Ybarra. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Esther Kim Lee Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Esther Kim Lee By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF When I was writing my dissertation in the late 1990s, I would tell anyone who would ask that my topic was Asian American theatre. I was ready with my elevator speech tinged with obligatory graduate student’s anxiety, but mostly, I was excited to share how I was interviewing artists around the country for the project. “Actors, playwrights, communities, and producers!,” my voice would rise. Some people politely responded with “that’s interesting,” which could mean many things, but often, I would get an answer that ran something like, “oh, I love kabuki!” I would have no choice but to smile and say, “me too” because it was true and because I had to think about my follow up response. How aggressively do I explain that Asian theatre is different from Asian American theatre? How do I detail the links between Asian American theatre and other American ethnic theatres? Should I describe the stereotype of the perpetual foreigner and how it represents the exclusion of Asian Americans in the imagining of America? Or do I present a crash course on the East West Players, the first Asian American theatre company founded in 1965 in Los Angeles? Depending on the circumstance and my mood, my response varied, but generally, I tried my best to explain the significance of documenting a part of American theatre history that had been overlooked. While I grew tired of explaining my project, I also fantasized about titling my yet to be written book “Strangers Onstage” to recall Ronald Takaki’s seminal book, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1990). Most Asian immigrants crossed the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic. Because of their visual and geographic strangeness compared to European immigrants, they were excluded from citizenship, accused as disloyal, interned, and disenfranchised from all sectors of the society. Theatre was no exception. American theatre, as Karen Shimakawa has brilliantly argued, has functioned as a major site of “national abjection” of Asian Americans. Feeling like a stranger myself, I wanted to tell the story of other strangers who collectively built Asian American theatre while hoping to bridge different disciplines, including Asian American studies and theatre and performance studies. On that metaphorical bridge, I had the fortune of meeting scholars, both senior and emerging, who shared my scholarly mission and who also felt like strangers in a field that was still not legible to many. Together, however, we knew the field had much potential for multiplicity of research agendas, theoretical growth, and critical intervention. In the past five years, several books have been published as a full demonstration of that potential. The titles include: Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns’ Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (2013); Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson’s A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (2013); Sean Metzger’s Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (2014); Eng-Beng Lim’s Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (2014); and Ju Yon Kim’s The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (2015). The books showcase innovative interdisciplinary approaches and nuanced understandings of how race, body, geopolitics, history, and performance intersect. It is an incredibly formative time for those of us writing about the relationship between performance and “Asia.” I believe we are witnessing the emergence of a new field that has yet to be named. I can try to name it, although none of them are completely satisfactory: Asian diaporic performances; transnational performance in the Asias (to borrow Lim’s plural noun); and Asian/American performances (although I wince at the thought of using the slash). The difficulty in naming the field stems from the fundamental shift in how the authors pose their questions. Two decades ago, the questions I asked about Asian American theatre were about representation and empowerment onstage: for instance, how can we let Jonathan Pryce perform in yellowface makeup in Miss Saigon when talented Asian American actors do not even get to audition for the role? While such questions of representation and empowerment are still relevant, the books I mention above ask readers to look beyond the stage and to reexamine all concepts. Performance, for instance, is not simply a mode of representation, but it is an episteme. Instead of looking at performance as an object of study, as I did for my dissertation, the authors use performance as a methodological tool to examine how meaning is created both on and off stage. Similarly, Asia is not a stable geographical location but a constructed concept that connotes power structure and positionality. The books examine the interplay between the quotidian and the theatrical and between racialization and the performative to address broader questions of gender, sexuality, politics, and law. For instance, Burns uses the term puro arte to explore how the Filipino/a performing body is central to understanding the US-Philippine imperial relations. Metzger, on the other hand, focuses on fashion to trace how American perception of China has changed in the past 150 years. In all of the books, the performance of everyday, or what Kim calls the mundane, is central to identifying what is a stake in body politics. Indeed, what is at stake now? Perhaps an answer to that question can be found in how all of the authors variously describe their subjects of study as ironies, paradoxes, and ambiguities. Lim, for example, describes the Asian native boy during colonial encounters as a “critical paradox” because he embodied contradictory fantasies and fears and because his identity can be described only as queer and performative, both of which are paradoxical concepts to begin with. Chambers-Letson focuses on the legal paradox of demanding assimilation of Asian Americans while passing exclusionary laws. What can we learn from these paradoxes? Come to think of it, “stranger onstage” is also a paradoxical idea. The theatrical stage demands an illusion of reality that promises to make the stranger familiar. The stranger is still onstage, the recent books seem to say collectively, except the stage is much broader, and the stranger has many questions. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Esther Kim Lee is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland. She is the author of A History of Asian American Theatre (2006) and The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (2015). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue American Tragedian Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Performing Anti-slavery The Captive Stage Musical Theatre Studies Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Murder Most Queer New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

I. B. Hopkins 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 Our Town I. B. Hopkins By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Our Town By Thornton Wilder Directed by Shawn Sides CRASHBOX Austin, TEXAS November 15, 2024 Reviewed by I. B. Hopkins You would be forgiven for remembering Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as quaint. The Pulitzer Prize-winning staple of the American dramatic repertoire has so frequently been produced by schools and community theatres since it premiered in 1938 that its edge—at least in recollection—may have dulled somewhat from sheer exposure. The play depicts a small New Hampshire town going about its everyday routines in the early twentieth century and takes pains to stress its ordinariness at every turn. In their recent production, Austin-based theatre collective the Rude Mechs articulated a desire to neither reinvent nor see something new in the classic. Instead, the company rather puzzlingly advertised, “We’re gonna try as hard as we can to do it as Wilder intended.” This statement of intent acknowledges the company’s long history of remixing classics, such as their “fixing” Shakespeare series or locating transcendence in Tennessee Williams’s bit parts in The Method Gun . Doing Our Town “as Wilder intended” decidedly breaks from their punkish approach to adaptation, intimating that there may be more lurking beneath its inoffensive surface than audiences might assume. For director Shawn Sides and company, the appeal and enigma of Our Town seemed to be distilled in its first-person plural title. Situated in the intimate and unadorned CRASHBOX performance warehouse in Austin’s gentrifying Eastside neighborhood, the environment gratifyingly contrasted the traditional Americana of Wilder’s fictional Grover’s Corners. The rural, church- and family-centered, and presumed white world of the play is ostensibly incompatible with the Texas capital’s progressive and multiethnic brand of urbanism. Far from tritely extolling the universality of love or family, however, the script effectively doubles down on local particularity by specifying that the actors portraying townspeople be verbally identified by their names. Inasmuch, the Rude Mechs’s gambit to fulfill Wilder’s intentions also highlighted casting choices that reflect Austin’s diversity, though this was more than just presenting an array of bodies on stage that vary along dimensions of race, gender expression, and size. In the context of the Performing Garage-like setting, the production’s execution of the script’s instruction to narrate actors’ names also points up Our Town ’s striking anticipation of later experimental theatre works and the long tradition of ensemble-driven, devised performances. The original play has famously absent scenery, but this production went further with rehearsal-quality furniture, no affected New England accents, and costume designer Aaron Flynn’s inconspicuous, contemporary choices. In her gray jeans and dark neutral top, for example, Mrs. Webb could easily have been out shopping at H-E-B, the local central Texas grocery store. Seeming to strip even the costumes of their costumey-ness announced a certain rejection of the play’s lingering pretenses, an escalation of Wilder’s first stage direction: “No curtain. No scenery.” This design scheme deviated notably from many productions, including both the 1938 premiere and the 2024 Broadway revival. In short, Sides and the cast worked to countermand any sense that Grover’s Corners might serve as an idyllic Anytown, USA or a parable for human experience. Without altering a word of Wilder’s text, they redirected abstract nostalgia to focus on the here and now simply by subtracting production elements that suggested early twentieth-century New Hampshire. What was left in the compact space was a room full of Austinites, many of them longtime members of the local arts community. This staging seemed to find the Rude Mechs attempting to manifest our town , the one to which they and the audience belong, and which has undergone such tremendous growth and changes since the collective formed twenty-five years ago. To that end, dividing the Stage Manager role among four of the collective’s co-producing artistic directors (Madge Darlington, Thomas Graves, Lana Lesley, and Alexandra Bassiakou Shaw) most directly manifested the production’s sense of diffusion, the our -ness of Our Town. Even casting that resists the avuncular, “hat on and pipe in mouth” type indicated by Wilder affords a great deal of stage time and power to a single, starring role. By dividing these place-setting and contemplative monologues among a quartet of performers speaking in unhurried, matter-of-fact tones, this Our Town defamiliarized the warmth of small-town life, which continually brought the audience back to presence in the CRASHBOX. The Stage Manager, it is important to recall, is not nostalgic in the text, and the chorus of narratorial voices served to heighten their somewhat clinical distance from the emotional churn of the story even as they also amplified the poetic turns of Wilder’s language by rendering them less conversational. Functionally, they contrasted the diegetic events among the Grover’s Corners denizens, adding a layer of oblique commentary to elevate the townspeople’s lives. Correspondingly, the cast of eight other actors committed to a meticulous style of realism in their performances to cast the townspeople in relief. In this respect, Rommel Sulit (Doc Gibbs), Liz Fisher (Myrtle Webb), and Eric Ramos (George Gibbs) excelled in the precision of their psychologically rich, clearly motivated acting choices, providing a sharp distinction between the everyday world and the narration hanging above it. Ceremoniously presiding at a remove from the townspeople’s lives, the multi-voiced Stage Managers spoke directly to the audience with a gentle insistence that this is, in fact, their town. Their seated positions in the inner ring of the audience and sober tones underscored the emotional distance between the audience and the townspeople, the unbridgeable gap between past and present which is also famously dramatized in Emily’s return in act 3. Like Emily, the audience only gets a bitter glimpse at the quiet beauty of this community for a short time. Kira Small (“Emily”) and Eric Ramos (“George”) in Our Town. Photo courtesy Rude Mechs. There are limits, however, to just how much literalized community this interpretation of the script can manage. At select intervals, tertiary roles had been pre-distributed to willing audience members, who then read a few lines. Even when audibly delivered, this bid to draw the audience more tightly into the town also made Wilder’s script appear ungainly and overfull when the joke or the flash of poetry did not land. Staging the production in the round more effectively delivered on the aim to make the Austin community its subject, and Brian H. Scott’s lighting design complemented the arrangement by keeping most audience members’ faces visible as they sat alongside members of the cast. Simply repositioning a minimal number of chairs instantly placed spectators at eye level and quite close in (variously) a kitchen, a pew during a wedding, and, finally, the local cemetery. No flashiness nor trickery, just thoughtful staging. The straightforward theatricality of such gestures bespoke underlying faith in the principle behind the script’s iconic use of pantomime. If a certain action can represent stringing beans even when no beans are present, then the simple turning of a chair should just as effectively transport the scene to a new location. When artfully applied, this technique denaturalized the relationship between actors and their earthly trappings, suggesting that verisimilitude is not as vital as human striving in performance. Wilder’s fixation on what he has the Stage Manager call the world’s “straining” does, in fact, reach for the universal, and—intended or not—this urge’s tension with the reality of theatre’s constraints to here, now, and us characterized the production’s finest moments. Lana Lesley, for instance, as the town drunk and choir director Simon Stimpson, conducted the offstage choir in Act 1 with tremendous fervency down a corridor that left her visible to only perhaps a quarter of the audience. Later, when Simon spoke from the dead, his lines about “what it was to be alive … To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another” bit with particular ruefulness because Lesley’s zeal portrayed his ennobling passion for his art alongside his dependence on alcohol. The quick but bitter sensation that not every member of the audience could have seen this character so fully exemplifies the production’s refreshingly unsentimental take on the play’s plea to appreciate life while we can. On their website, the Rude Mechs write, “We’ll be using what we learn about Our Town to make a completely new piece in 2025/26.” Taken together with the stated goal of matching the playwright’s intent, we might best understand this production as a genuine experiment by one of America’s most consistently innovative performance collectives to systematically examine Wilder’s script, to understand its workings but also to find out through doing how the line between its familiar quaintness and its persistent darkness might be drawn. In the process, they may have discovered that the redrawing, the return, the perennial reperformance of Our Town is the very thing that keeps Grover’s Corners weird. References Footnotes About The Author(s) I. B. HOPKINS is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also earned his MFA in playwriting. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Grant and Michener Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modern Drama , Theatre Annual , Theatre Journal , and the E3W Review, as well as Austin arts publications. Hopkins’s dissertation, titled “Bad Actors,” explores the aesthetics of historical drama and adaptation in depictions of the U.S. South. 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.

Danielle Rosvally Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban Danielle Rosvally By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Real Time Fires As a researcher of the nineteenth century, I am no stranger to the destruction of collective memory vis-à-vis archival failure. Theatre fires are an omnipresent force in dialogues about every aspect of nineteenth century performance history knowledge, particularly speculative thought about what we do not know. Consider, for instance, the Iroquois Theatre fire of 1903—the second deadliest single building fire in US history (second only to 9/11). (2) Jane Barnette has explored this historic event through spectator testimonials. (3) Barnette proceeds with caution because, as she argues, the spectator experience, and particularly performed spectator experience, is innately biased. This nuance is reinforced through Jewel Spangler’s exploration of the 1811 Richmond Theatre Fire—when it occurred, it was America’s deadliest urban disaster—in which Spangler reminds the reader that curation of the archive is a communal act of editorial significance. (4) Who is left out of the story is as important as who is kept in. Whose story is told, and how, is continually shaped and re-shaped by the things that are kept: the journals that were deemed important enough to pass down through history, the images that were created and saved and who they depict, and the generations of choices that archivists both formal and informal made about what should take up precious space in physical holdings say as much about the event these holdings document as their contents do. This question of space is greatly nuanced in the digital era as information becomes easier to store in smaller footprints. The question of performance, too, has experienced similar shifts as platforms for theatre and performance have become greatly diversified. While analog theatre spaces continue to host precious and precarious repositories of information, robust archives of performance also exist in the digital realm via many platforms including social media. (5) As I watch congressional proceedings and national conversation surrounding the threatening potential of a TikTok ban in the United States throughout 2023 and into 2024, I cannot help but feel an uncanny similarity between historical theatre fires and the impending potential destruction of a massive repository of performance. What have we lost to the ashes that we might not even know is gone, and what (then) might we lose if history repeats itself? The difference, of course, is that I watch this slow burn in real time; the possibility of a day when I open my phone to find a pile of burnt charcoal in place of the familiar stylized TikTok icon does not seem so far away. I have often longed for a time machine to access unburnt relics of the past, and I feel as though I am being offered just such an opportunity with TikTok. To those of us paying attention, there is the possibility of packing a fireproof safe with a few pieces of content for safekeeping should a ban occur. What is at stake if TikTok, like the Iroquois or the Richmond Theatre, burns to the ground? What would happen if the United States experienced the same ban that has already been enacted in India or Hong Kong? Users from these regions describe how, overnight, their access to the platform and even their own back videos, was completely gone. (6) Too many theatre historians and performance scholars dismiss TikTok as a frivolous platform for Gen Z to make viral dance videos, participate in trends, and review products. (7) This dismissiveness plays right into the current political narrative being pushed by those who actively seek to annihilate the TikTok repository. But there is more to this app than the surface-level reading of its detractors. TikTok is a keystone to contemporary culture-making and a critical artifact of life in the COVID-19 era. (8) Losing TikTok to government action would not simply be a shame for Millennials and Gen-Z micro-influencers, who would no longer have their virtual playground, but would in fact be a significant blow to the preservation of pandemic-era collective trauma memory. Historians are well aware of the wide-ranging impact of a loss like this in myriad ways such as: further marginalizing already-minoritized voices; allowing mass re-writing of historical information and erasing individual trauma from national memory; and pointedly glorifying certain groups while villainize others. At present, TikTok is poised to combat these threats, but only if it can persist as a repository of theatrical information. The Looming Threat As I consider the proverbial contents of my fireproof safe, let us examine the spark that threatens to engulf this collection. For the past several years, TikTok has been at the center of debates in the United States regarding data security. On August 6, 2020, President Donald Trump attempted to use executive power via Executive Order (EO) 13942 to create a ban specifically targeting TikTok citing threats to national security. The arguments he made boiled down to a perceived threat caused by Chinese ownership of TikTok’s parent company (ByteDance) and provenance of data collected via the app. (9) After multiple court cases which ruled in favor of TikTok, President Joe Biden signed further EOs that repealed and replaced Trump’s and pledged to create better policy for regulating sensitive user data across diverse platforms. (10) Since then, TikTok has been a topic of conversations centered in the idea of security risks. In December of 2022, Biden signed a bill that prohibited the app on government devices. (11) On March 7, 2023, the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act or the RESTRICT Act (S. 686) was introduced to the senate as a bipartisan bill aimed to ban foreign technologies from operating in the US if they pose a risk to national security. (12) While TikTok is not named explicitly in the bill, it is fairly transparent what is being targeted. On April 14, 2023, the Montana State Legislature passed Senate Bill 419, “An Act Banning TikTok in Montana,” becoming the first US state to ban TikTok. (13) SB419 was signed by Montana State Governor Greg Gianforte on May 17, 2023. (14) The bill was set to go into effect on January 1, 2024 but then TikTok sued the state in an effort to block it (an effort which was ultimately successful as a court ruled on November 30th 2023 that this was a violation of the first amendment). (15) On March 13, 2024, the United States’s House of Representatives passed HR 7521 a bill called the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” which would, effectively, ban TikTok in the United States. (16) This bill was later tied to an essential foreign aid package (House Resolution 815), unanimously passed in the House on April 19, passed in the Senate on April 23, and was signed into law by President Biden on April 24. (17) I argue these conversations center around “the idea” of security risks rather than their actuality because all publicly available information in early 2024 indicates that TikTok poses no greater threat to an individual user’s data than any other social media app in common use. In March 2023, the Internet Governance Project, an organization based out of Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy whose mission is to perform independent analysis of global internet governance, posted a study done by Milton L. Mueller and Karim Farhat which found, among other things, “The data collected by the TikTok app is very similar to the data collected by its peer competitors. This data can only be of espionage value if it comes from users who are intimately connected to national security functions and use the app in ways that expose sensitive information. These risks arise from the use of any social media app, not just TikTok. They can easily be mitigated without banning the app.” (18) I will return to the specific motivations behind targeting TikTok in spite of the evidence below. In considering this ban, I turn to the wisdom of Stephen King who—in the face of book bans—encourages kids to go to the library, “get a copy of what has been banned. Read it carefully and discover what it is your elders don't want you to know. In many cases you'll finish the banned book in question wondering what all the fuss was about. In others, however, you will find vital information about the human condition.” (19) While the information currently available to the public does not point to a TikTok-specific security risk, it does indicate something more sinister about a greater worldview. The consumer tendency to diminish the platform leans into this harmful rhetoric. As Stephen King urges, let us go to the proverbial library by way of a primer on what TikTok is and how it works. TikTok is a social media app where users create, share, view, reshare, and comment on short-form videos. TikTok built on the popularity of Vine, another short-form video-sharing app that lived a brief but formidable life from 2012-2017. Notably: Vine videos were capped at 10 seconds. (20) 2019 saw TikTok begin to flourish in the United States—growth that would continue in the pandemic years to come. (21) It was the “most-downloaded app of 2020” when users were stuck in their homes with no way to connect in real time. (22) Instead, clearly, they connected on TikTok. And, since TikTok archives even as it offers a platform for performance, this makes TikTok the most robust and egalitarian archive of pandemic-era life in current existence. I pause here briefly to consider my use of the term “archive” for this collection. In 2003, Diana Taylor introduced the terms “archive” and “repertoire” to refer to two very different but intertwined systems of knowledge preservation. The “archive,” to Taylor, represents a gathering of materials collected through objects—memories mediated by recording technologies. “‘Archival’ memory exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly resistance to change.” (23) The “repertoire” is a collection of embodied knowledge, “performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing, in short all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.” (24) In her 2010 meditation on her prior work on Archive and Repertoire, Taylor added that: Digital technologies constitute yet another system of transmission that is rapidly complicating western systems of knowledge, raising new issues around presence, temporality, space, embodiment, sociability, and memory (usually associated with the repertoire) and those of copyright, authority, history, and preservation (linked to the archive). Digital databases seemingly combine the access to vast reservoirs of materials we normally associate with archives with the ephemerality of the ‘live.’ (25) Taylor has never conceived of the “archive” and “repertoire” as a binary (not in 2003 when she first introduced these paradigms, nor 2010 when she revised them to include the digital); rather Taylor has always argued that these three things “overlap and work together and mutually construct each other.” (26) To Taylor, the digital will never replace the archive since they require each other vis-à-vis this mutuality. Social media platforms have always enabled a form of performance; the putting-on of an avatar self to encounter the world in certain ways makes performance via social media innately entwined with social media use. (27) Theatre companies over the years have taken this invitation more literally and created full performance pieces over social media. (28) The pandemic ushered in a new wave of this phenomena: as we became isolated, we sought connection via digital art. Sarah Bay-Cheng asks “If we have seen the performance and the documentation, can we readily distinguish between the two? What if we have not seen the original performance, but we have seen detailed recordings? ... How do I delineate the performance I attended from the digital records I have collected, especially those that are personal to me in my mobile phone?” (29) Digital media blurs these boundaries and presents the opportunity for a broadened definition of memory spaces. (30) When considering TikTok’s applications to the pandemic-era audience and user base in light of the app’s pandemic-era popularity, part of this usage pattern lies in TikTok’s multiple facets as a platform. In addition to providing a viewing space, TikTok has a native editing client which allows users to turn their smartphones into recording suites: they can record, edit, upload, and shape videos all from the app itself. This reduces access barriers and effectively allows anyone with a smartphone to single-handedly become a content creator. (31) TikTok is also incredibly good at creating audiences by connecting users with niche interests. The app’s proprietary algorithm shows users content it believes they will like based on their interactions with other content. Unlike legacy social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, TikTok’s user experience is largely driven by a rotating “for you page” (FYP) that greets users when they open the app. The FYP is a constant scroll of videos that the algorithm has discovered for the user. The more a user interacts with TikTok, the better the algorithm becomes at predicting a user’s interest and providing them with things relevant to these interests. Because of the strength of the algorithm, TikTok enables niche audiences to find each other (a feature, Trevor Boffone and I have argued, which amplifies the voices tend most to be marginalized from mainstream archives, namely: queer, POC, and femme voices). (32) This aspect of TikTok’s usage, along with its prominence as a repository of pandemic-era performance, makes TikTok a vital tool to understanding and remembering life during the COVID-19 Pandemic. TikTok and Collective Trauma Memory Like a theatre, TikTok enables community building and content on TikTok exists in robust multi-modal conversations. Cremation of this theatrical repository would also incinerate these community ties because, unlike an analog theatre, TikTok’s communities are connected almost exclusively via the app and its features. In essence: as a theatrical repository, TikTok enacts collective memory. Collective memory is the idea that memories are not individual experiences, but rather connected to a greater whole. In his 1925 meditation On Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs proposes that all memories are collective memories. Even individual memories, that is: something that one individual person remembers in a room by themselves, is connected to a bigger picture. It is impossible to remember, argues Halbwachs, without creating some kind of discourse or connecting with some other perspective of the memory and this makes memory collective. (33) Considering TikTok, this description perfectly encapsulates how the app functions. TikTok allows users to respond to each other directly on posts using various frameworks. There are, for instance, more traditional means such as comments (i.e. simple text responses). But TikTok has one-upped the comment by giving creators the option to either respond in old-school text, or to compose a video response in which the comment will be visible at the top of the screen for whatever duration the creator chooses to set (see Figure 1; Creator @theanissagarza Responds to a Comment with a Video ). (34) Additionally, creators have the option to “stitch” on to other videos (to take another creator’s video and append their own content to the end), or “duet” a video (to have another creator’s video playing in half the screen while they record something going on in the other half). Duet videos allow creators to discourse across time and space—to hear and react in the fractured time-space of the internet but nonetheless more directly than legacy platforms have previously enabled whether the duet shows togetherness (as in Figure 2 where dancers are moving synchronously together to do Bob Fosse’s iconic choreography to “Rich Man’s Frug” from Sweet Charity ), or conversation (as in Figure 3 where two singers are enabled to sing in duet even amidst 2020 lockdowns ). (35) In this way, TikTok facilitates not just community-building, but also citational practices since original creators are, by default, identified in stitch and duel videos, as well as para-textual commentary. Sometimes, a call to duet will so wildly circulate on TikTok that it inspires its own sub-movements (called a “trend”). The Rich Man’s Frug became one such trend. In noticing a dominating presence of white dancers putting out Rich Man’s Frug videos, user @djouliet made her own call to action with the sound and choreography—mimicking the trend’s original creator @markstephen60 by doing the dance in her kitchen but calling out “come on, Black girls, let’s go” to invite other femme Black dancers to duet her. User @itsjust_lydia took up the call (see Figure 4; Black Dancers Claim Space with the “Rich Man’s Frug” ). (36) This is one example of how TikTok enabled creators who did not see themselves represented in a certain conversation to take control of the narrative and add their voices to a growing archive. While such interaction paradigms differ from those enacted in more traditional theatrical performance spaces, performance scholarship is already equipped to deal with them. Pascale Aebischer calls such interactions “ platea -based engagement” (referencing the medieval paradigms of locus as the mode of performance where a performer is quietly in a world of their own behind the proscenium arch and the platea as the mode of performance that invites the audience to comment on or engage with the performance in the here and now). (37) Valerie Fazel has argued how Aebischer’s notion of platea -based engagement might be used to more deeply understand marginal commentary on digital performance, especially on YouTube. (38) TikTok is a new generation of platform, but some of its uses are common with its ancestors. As a collective model of platea -based engagement, TikTok’s opus represents a communal construction of memory, and (specifically) pandemic-era memory. But “communal” does not necessarily mean “collapsed.” Because of TikTok’s strength at allowing creators to find other members of their own communities, the platform is unique in its ability to enable vibrant individualism. In her work on theatrical production during the shelter-in-place era, Dani Snyder-Young recognized a melting pot-esque treatment of audiences by performers and platforms. (39) Not a single pandemic-era performance examined by Snyder-Young’s research team displayed exceptionalism when dealing with its audience, but rather treated them as an amalgam and erased nuance. This is not what TikTok does. Because the algorithm is so good at connecting content and audience, TikTok content creators are encouraged to “let their freak flag fly,” and they will be connected with others who enjoy even incredibly niche content. This aspect of the platform effectively democratizes the archive and allows voices that Spangler notes are not frequently preserved in disaster narratives guaranteed spaces in the story. In Spangler’s words: “The archives themselves, and what they contain, are shaped by the understandings, needs, and desires of the powerful. To be sure, we can search out sources that purport to allow the disempowered to speak, or seem less influenced by elite perspectives, yet we have to be aware that so long as the archive is still the well from which professional historians primarily draw, the problem of power will always be with us.” (40) Because of the ways in which the pandemic had an undue impact on communities of color, this is an important ethical element of preserving pandemic-era memory. (41) While TikTok’s user demographics broken down by race are not currently available, a 2021 study done by Pew Research Center speaks to a degree of diversity in TikTok users. (42) According to this study, 31% of Hispanic US adults polled self-identified as TikTok users, 30% of Black US adults polled self-identified as TikTok users, and 18% of white US adults polled self-identified as TikTok users. Accordingly, TikTok’s ability to highlight and encourage individuality is both unique and necessary and underscores the stakes of taking this repository seriously. The COVID-19 pandemic was a moment of global collective trauma, and it is no coincidence that TikTok’s rise to prominence paralleled this. The work of scholars like Dena Al-Adeeb, Noe Montez, and Belarie Zatzman have explored the ways populations who have experienced collective trauma have created collective memory. (43) Past theories of collective memory have located it as a nexus of projects generally connected with nationalization. In an analog world, this makes complete sense. But there are two extraordinary forces at play with collective trauma memory in regard to COVID-19 and TikTok. First: the global nature of the pandemic. Second: the fact that TikTok overcomes geographic boundaries by way of its accessibility and international presence. TikTok connects content creators over broad swathes of the world. Not only is TikTok accessible from a technological standpoint, but language barriers do not stand in the way of the several visually oriented genres that make TikTok’s bread and butter: dance challenges, culinary videos, cosplay trends, lip synch. Because of this, TikTok’s oeuvre is what Astrid Erll would call a study of “transcultural memory,” or a mnemonic device which transcends the containers of a single culture or incident and instead reaches a global community. (44) Erll coins the term “traveling memory” to encompass a sense of “the incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms, and practices of memory, their continual ‘travels’ and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and political borders.” (45) TikTok serves as the medium for such traveling memory, and the destruction of the TikTok archive would mean an end to these proverbial transformations. It would mean not just a collective forgetting of the specifics the archive held, but also the destruction of the transformative possibilities that time and space could give to eccentric short-form videos containing incidents from day-to-day life and the creative reimaginings of collective trauma. Terri Tomsky devised the notion of “traveling trauma,” which is trauma which is able to move upon similar pathways as commerce in a digital world; either via analog or digital means. (46) To Tomsky, trauma can be viewed in similar ways that Edward Said views the notion of “theory” and “traveling theory”: it can be interpreted and re-interpreted by the communities who receive it globally. (47) Tomsky also created the idea of a “trauma economy” wherein trauma can be viewed under similar terms as production and capital: when the market is flooded with it, it becomes less valuable or holds less meaning. (48) I can think of few times in history when global trauma was as fungible on an international market than during the COVID-19 pandemic and assorted lockdowns. During this time, global isolation flooded the trauma market and human contact was a critical missing feature in our daily lives. So, while trauma was, perhaps, less meaningful (according to Tomsky’s paradigm) because of its prevalence, connection was more meaningful because of its lack. This market was part of TikTok’s recipe for success. Sarah Bey-Cheng has made the case that “the digital image is … not only a marker of memory… such images may now serve primarily as a kind of social connection.” (49) Boffone further argues that the pandemic-driven need drove massive global audiences to bond over “silly” dances, or share what life in lockdown was like via TikTok. (50) Tina Kendall highlights this function of TikTok in pandemic life, after all it offered “a means of working… performative play.” (51) In addition, Kendall argues, TikTok thrives off of the bingeability of its content— the never-ending scroll allowing a locked-down user endless access to more. (52) Thus TikTok provided a valuable commodity to a hungry market: the commodity of connection. Networking and community creation were a key part of TikTok’s marketing of itself in its early years and (as previously discussed) the app is exceptionally good at this task. (53) The marriage of market need with ready commodity availability is certainly one reason why the pandemic saw an uptick in TikTok usage, and in April 2020 the app crested 2 billion downloads which was the “best quarter for any app ever.” (54) In the United States at least, it is safe to say that TikTok is a commodity of the pandemic. If archival memory is political, and collective memory even more so, so is social forgetting. Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William Rosenberg emphasize this: “resistance to remembering is an equally powerful determinant of its moral, political, and social uses, especially if this resistance is abetted by the archives.” (55) Litigious action to try and exterminate the memorial cache that is TikTok threatens the collective memory of this trauma-driven time. There is, of course, a time and place for forgetting. Marita Sturken argues that forgetting is a necessary part of memory formation, and that “to remember everything would amount to being overwhelmed by memory…. Yet the forgetting of the past in a culture is highly organized and strategic.” (56) The politicization of this particular act of cultural forgetting entwines TikTok in the mire of racism that is linked with the pandemic in general. COVID-19, in its early days, was characterized by Donald Trump and far right followers as a “Chinese virus,” and this language has been called out as a root of xenophobia and anti-Asian racism during the pandemic era. (57) It cannot be ignored that the anti-TikTok legislation is flavored with the same type of xenophobia and anti-Chinese sentiment. Returning to an earlier thread: if the issue was about data security, as politicians contend that it is, then why not pass reasonable laws to govern that? Why target a single app? In Montana, the April 2023 attempt to make Senate Bill 419 apply to any “social media applications that send data to foreign adversaries” and shift the language of the bill from addressing threats posed by “the People’s Republic of China” to instead address “foreign adversaries” was rejected. (58) In her very first TikTok ( Figure 5: AOC’s First TikTok: A Statement on the TikTok Ban ), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discusses these issues and the notion that proposed legislation has been put forth, purportedly, to combat a national security risk. (59) Ocasio-Cortez notes that such risks are, historically, presented to Congress via classified briefing when they are first identified and no such briefing had been provided regarding TikTok and Chinese data infiltration. The racism in anti-TikTok rhetoric became even more clear via the various congressional hearings regarding the app. On March 23, 2023, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was called to testify before congress regarding the app’s usage of data, and the company’s relationship to the Chinese government. (60) The word “communist” appears in transcripts of that testimony 97 times. The phrase “Chinese communist party” appears 51 times, the most frequently-repeated three-word phrase in the testimony. (61) On January 31, 2023, Chew was again called to congress (this time along with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and X CEO Linda Yaccarino) to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the impact of social media on children. (62) During this hearing, all three CEOs were asked detailed questions about child protections on their platforms but Chew (notably the only one of these businesspeople who is not white) was the only CEO asked about his nationality and relationship to China. Senate Republicans Ted Cruz, John Cornyn, and Tom Cotton repeatedly hammered Chew about this relationship, Cotton going so far as to pester Chew about his citizenship through multiple questions as Chew continued to emphasize “I’m Singaporean.” (63) Accordingly, the undercurrents of xenophobia ring strong in the US attempt to institutionalize a massive act of forgetting. Despite allegations of national security threats via the app, the IGT report finds no evidence of a threat via TikTok to the US and, moreover, finds that, “Banning TikTok would impose unfair harms on millions of innocent American users of the app, who have established equity in their creations and followers. It would expropriate investors and eliminate hundreds of US jobs. … The attack on TikTok is really a kind of proxy war waged by a specific political faction in the US.” (64) It is once again time to remember Stephen King. Since the undertones of Anti-Asia(n) racism are now clear in anti-TikTok rhetoric, it is important that we take a closer look at what, exactly, this rhetoric is trying to make us forget. Let us go back to the library and check out some more banned books. Social Media, Social Memory Screens have an important place in the institutionalization of social memory. Sturken cites psychological research that “people often misremember the moment when they first heard of a national catastrophe by reimagining themselves in front of a television set. This particular mechanism of remembering, whereby we imagine our bodies in a spatial location, is also a means by which we situation our bodies in the nation.” (65) In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, this notion of re-envisioning the catastrophe in front of the screen was a process rather than a single moment. While the announcement of preliminary lockdowns certainly caused a wave of psychic shock, it was as the pandemic drew on for years that the true extent of collective trauma would begin to unreel itself. In 2024, we are still unpacking the effects of this trauma. Destroying TikTok’s repository of memory before history has been able to take full account of what is happening thus has destructive potential of unknown capacity. In trying to contend with what social media networks mean to the idea of collective memory, Andrew Hoskins argues that mediated memory can be viewed as a kind of “memory ecology” with each part of memory functioning like a part of a bio-organism. So, what happens when you amputate the leg of memory? Alison Landsberg’s theory of “prosthetic memory” addresses how mediated moments of history that an individual did not personally witness can be appended to a person’s memory like a prosthetic limb might be appended to a person’s body. Prosthetic memory, to Landsberg, is a memory that is “adopted as the result of a person's experience with a mass cultural technology of memory that dramatizes or recreates a history he or she did not live.” (66) While Landsberg’s theory might seem to answer my above query, unlike Landsberg’s prosthetic memories the TikTok archive of our shared pandemic time relates a history we all lived. It is not that dramatizing the pandemic in real-though-not-linear time introduces us to what pandemic living was like, but rather connects and connected us to aspects of this experience that were either very similar to or very different from our own. In this case, the mediated memory allows us to more fully engage with the collective trauma of pandemic living, and better understand how we (as humans living in the world) coped. As a case study, let us consider Stephen Sondheim. On November 26, 2021, Sondheim died at the age of 91. At this time, vaccines were available, but mask mandates were still enacted in states like New York. No at-home treatments were yet available for COVID-19. While Broadway had re-opened in September of 2021, audiences were still required to mask. The day of Sondheim’s death, TikTok user Jonny Perl posted a simple video of himself at a piano playing the opening notes of Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” (the opening number of his musical by the same name; see Figure 6: Jonny Perl at the Piano ). (67) Sondheim had a special relationship with this show. A piece about how artists relate to their work and legacies, Sunday in the Park with George contains lyrics that Sondheim would later use as the titles for two books of collected lyrics and autobiographic stories: Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat . (68) Accordingly, the selection of this music to accompany a short-form video memorial for its composer is fitting. Over the next few weeks and months, other TikTok creators used Perl’s sound to form their own memorial videos. Tyler Joseph Ellis, for instance, filmed a montage of himself visiting George Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” at the Art Institute of Chicago ( Figure 7 ). (69) User Sam Black choreographed a short dance piece to Perl’s sound ( Figure 8 ). (70) Other users dueted Perl with the spoken text that an audience would usually hear when this music was played in the theatre ( Figure 9 ). (71) Another user used Perl’s music to underscore a process video of themselves making a Sondheim-themed mask ( Figure 10 ). (72) Individually, these videos serve as touching tributes to a master of American musical theatre. As a conglomeration, they create a communal statement of memory in dialogue with each other. They allowed Sondheim fans to grieve in real time, though geographically distant from each other still in dialogue together. At a time when large gatherings entailed no small amount of risk, this connection created community. Sturken uses the term “technology of memory” to encompass not just the things that help memory (physical mnemonics such as objects, images, memorials, etc.), but also the body. The immune system, she argues, is a subset biological system of memory since it remembers the viruses it has previously encountered. (73) Sturken discusses this in regard to HIV and the AIDS epidemic, a period of history that has been widely compared to COVID-19 not the least because the leading national expect on both diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was the chief American voice during both healthcare crises. As I have contended throughout this essay, TikTok is a crucial technology of memory for the cultural memory of the COVID-19 pandemic, a virus which is notoriously immune-evasive and tricky for our bodies to fight. This novel coronavirus is something science is working every day to uncover more about, to explain more about how the body does or does not remember encounters with it, and how and why long COVID manifests. The systemic forgetting of a TikTok ban would enable not just the destruction of a specific archive of embodied performance, but also can be seen as none other than a metaphorical blow to the social collective along the very same lines. Forgetting what the pandemic was like at its height is a matter of national security—a matter of protecting those most vulnerable in our society. It is an act of violence to forget how we coped with social distancing, the zany things we did to find connection, and the silly skits we made to try and take ourselves somewhere else. The pandemic is still too fresh for there to be a national memorial or act of institutionalized memory commemorating those lost. (74) TikTok is the closest we have to such a thing. Destroying this repository is baldly political, boldly detrimental, and would constitute an egregious act of erasure. Theatre history scholars would do well to remember how such acts have impacted our work over time, and how burning it down has created hierarchies of remembering in archival footprints. Theatre fires erase massive repositories of information from archival memory that can only be reconstructed through careful piecemeal work that has the high possibility of omitting critical under-represented stories. In the same way, TikTok enables remembering things we cannot afford to forget. Historians and scholars must pay even closer attention to its fate unless we tacitly approve such erasures from collective memory. Editor Note: All videos in this essay are available as a YouTube playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ7A05JBnG_BgJdsklZt9mYtyFFVmNI9V&si=PipeRqsVDapSvMaQ This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References The author would like to thank Trevor Boffone for his feedback on early drafts of this essay This data can be found on the webpage of the National Fire Protection Agency, the NFPA: “Deadliest Single Building/Complex Fires and Explosions in the US | NFPA,” National Fire Protection Agency, accessed May 6, 2024, https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-research/fire-statistical-reports/catastrophic-multiple-death-fires/deadliest-single-building-or-complex-fires-and-explosions-in-the-us . Jane Barnette, “The Matinee Audience in Peril: The Syndicate’s Mr. Bluebeard and the Iroquois Theatre Fire,” Theatre Symposium: A Journal of the Southeastern Theatre Conference 20 (2012 2012): 23–29. Jewel L. Spangler, “Slavery’s Archive, Slavery’s Memory: Telling the Story of Gilbert Hunt, Hero of the Richmond Theatre Fire of 1811,” Journal of the Early Republic 39, no. 4 (2019): 677–708, https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2019.0086 ; The fire killed over 70 people including the Governor of Virginia. For more information on the fire specifically, see: Meredith Henne Baker, The Richmond Theater Fire: Early America’s First Great Disaster (LSU Press, 2012). Many scholars over the years have argued about this, but the most pertinent argument to this article can be found in: Trevor Boffone, “TikTok Is Theatre, Theatre Is TikTok,” Theatre History Studies 41 (2022): 41–48. An in-depth examination of this was done by Planet Money: “Nervous TikTok,” Planet Money, accessed January 3, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2021/01/13/956558906/nervous-tiktok . Trevor Boffone, “‘It’s Just TikTok,’” Conceptions Review, September 13, 2022, https://conceptionsreview.com/its-just-tiktok/ . For more on TikTok’s power to generate culture, see: Trevor Boffone, “The D’Amelio Effect TikTok, Charli D’Amelio, and the Construction of Whiteness,” in TikTok Cultures in the United States , ed. Trevor Boffone (New York: Routledge, 2022), 18. Federal Register. “Addressing the Threat Posed by TikTok, and Taking Additional Steps To Address the National Emergency With Respect to the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain,” August 11, 2020. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/08/11/2020-17699/addressing-the-threat-posed-by-tiktok-and-taking-additional-steps-to-address-the-national-emergency . Bobby Allyn, “U.S. Judge Halts Trump’s TikTok Ban, The 2nd Court To Fully Block The Action,” NPR , December 7, 2020, sec. Technology, https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/944039053/u-s-judge-halts-trumps-tiktok-ban-the-2nd-court-to-fully-block-the-action ; The White House, “FACT SHEET: Executive Order Protecting Americans’ Sensitive Data from Foreign Adversaries,” The White House, June 9, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/06/09/fact-sheet-executive-order-protecting-americans-sensitive-data-from-foreign-adversaries/ . David Ingram, “Biden Signs TikTok Ban for Government Devices amid Security Concerns,” NBC News, December 30, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-ban-biden-government-college-state-federal-security-privacy-rcna63724 . Mark R. Warner, “S.686 - 118th Congress (2023-2024): RESTRICT Act,” legislation, March 7, 2023, 03/07/2023, http://www.congress.gov/ . “An Act Banning TikTok in Montana,” SB 419 § (2023), https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/billhtml/SB0419.htm . Ayana Archie, “Montana Becomes the First State to Ban TikTok,” NPR , May 18, 2023, sec. Politics, https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176805559/montana-tiktok-ban . David McCabe and Sapna Maheshwari, “TikTok Sues Montana, Calling State Ban Unconstitutional,” The New York Times , May 22, 2023, sec. Technology, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/technology/tiktok-montana-ban-lawsuit.html ; “ACLU and EFF Applaud Ruling Halting Montana TikTok Ban,” American Civil Liberties Union (blog), accessed December 21, 2023, https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-eff-applaud-ruling-halting-montana-tiktok-ban . Mike Gallagher, “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” Pub. L. No. HR 7521 (2024), https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Protecting%20Americans%20From%20Foriegn%20Adversary%20Controlled%20Applications_3.5.24.pdf . Cathy McMorris Rodgers, “Making Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2024, and for Other Purposes,” H.R. 815 § (2024), https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr815/BILLS-118hr815enr.pdf . Milton L. Mueller and Karim Farhat, “TikTok and US National Security” (Internet Governance Project, March 1, 2023), 26, https://www.internetgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/TikTok-and-US-national-security-3-1.pdf . Stephen King, “The Book-Banners: Adventure in Censorship Is Stranger than Fiction,” The Bangor Daily News , March 20, 1992. TikTok videos recorded in the app are capped at three minutes and must be a minimum of fifteen seconds. One can, however, upload a video not recorded in the app that can be up to ten minutes long. Trevor Boffone, Renegades (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 1–3; Trevor Boffone, “The Rise of TikTok in US Culture,” in TikTok Cultures in the United States , by Trevor Boffone (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2022), 5; Boffone, “TikTok Is Theatre, Theatre Is TikTok,” 42. Jing Zeng, Crystal Abidin, and Mike S. Schäfer, “Research Perspectives on TikTok and Its Legacy Apps,” International Journal of Communication 15 (2021): 3161–72. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 19. Taylor, 20. Diana Taylor, “Save As... Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies,” Imagining America 7 (2010): 3. Taylor, 3. For more on this, see: Danielle Rosvally, “The Haunted Network: Shakespeare’s Digital Ghost,” in The Shakespeare User , by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). A few salient examples are Such Tweet Sorrow (a 2010 collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Mudlark Production Company which told the story of Romeo and Juliet via Twitter) and A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming (2013, Royal Shakespeare Company) which used the now-defunct Google+ to perform a digital version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Pixelated Memories: Performance, Media, and Digital Technology,” Contemporary Theatre Review 27, no. 3 (2017): 330. In another forthcoming essay, I propose the term “meso-archive” for these liminal spaces. For the purposes of this paper since I am not explicitly discussing the intricacies of storage and retrieval, I will use the term “archive” to reference TikTok’s collection of performance. Statistically, this is a large swathe of the US population. As of November 2023, 92% of US adults have at least one smartphone and the rate of smartphone ownership does not vary substantially by race or ethnicity. “How Many Americans Own a Smartphone? 2024 | ConsumerAffairs®,” November 1, 2023, https://www.consumeraffairs.com/cell_phones/how-many-americans-own-a-smartphone.html . Trevor Boffone and Danielle Rosvally, “Yassified Shakespeare: The Case for TikTok as Applied Theatre,” in Applied Theatre and Gender Justice , ed. Lisa Brenner and Evelyn Cruz (New York: Routledge, Forthcoming); Spangler also notes this omission of marginalized voices in her examination of how the voices of enslaved peoples are often lost from narratives about the Richmond Theatre Fire and archives in general: Spangler, “Slavery’s Archive, Slavery’s Memory.” Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory , trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 53. @theanissagarza. "Pandemic Theatre!!," TikTok, February 4, 2022. https://www.tiktok.com/@theanissagarza/video/7060995383224421678 . @oneinkimillion. "Love This Song and Show," TikTok, October 6, 2020. https://www.tiktok.com/@oneinkimillion/video/6880674673688841477 . Unfortunately, since @djouliet has since made her original video private, I cannot tell how many others did but I have seen several examples including: @itsjust_lydia. "Come on Black Girls - Let’s Get into That Fosse!," TikTok, April 30, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@itsjust_lydia/video/6957074188783914245 ; @mahoganymommy. "I’m Rusty, but I Gave It a Shot," TikTok, April 24, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@mahoganymommy/video/6954766488880336133 Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 13–28. Valerie M. Fazel, “‘A Vulgar Comment Will Be Made of It’ YouTube and Robert Weimann’s Platea,” in Shakespeare’s Audiences , by Peter Kirwan and Matthew Pangallo (Abingdon, UK: Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2021), 183–97. Dani Snyder-Young, “We’re All in This Together: Digital Performances and Socially Distanced Spectatorship,” Theatre Journal 74, no. 1 (March 2022): 1–15. Spangler, “Slavery’s Archive, Slavery’s Memory,” 677. J. Nadine Gracia, “COVID-19’s Disproportionate Impact on Communities of Color Spotlights the Nation’s Systemic Inequities,” Journal of Public Health Management and Practice 26, no. 6 (December 2020): 518, https://doi.org/10.1097/PHH.0000000000001212 . “Who Uses TikTok, Nextdoor,” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, accessed January 11, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/chart/who-uses-tiktok-nextdoor/ . To name a few: Dena Al-Adeeb, “Trauma, Collective Memory, Creative and Performative Embodied Practices as Sites of Resistance,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 12, no. 2 (2016): 268–74; Noe Montez, Memory, Transitional Justice, And Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017); Belarie Zatzman, “Applied Theatre Encounters at Canada’s National Holocaust Monument,” Canadian Theatre Review 181 (2020 Winter 2020): 1, https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.181.003 . Though, of course, TikTok has subcultures which emerge geographically, as well as regional nuance to its status as culture. TikTok is not viewed or treated the same way in every part of the world. For more on TikTok as regional culture, see the many wonderful projects affiliated with the TikTok culture research network: https://tiktokcultures.com/ Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 11. Terri Tomsky, “From Sarajevo to 9/11: Travelling Memory and the Trauma Economy,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 50. Tomsky, 51. Tomsky, 53. Bay-Cheng, “Pixelated Memories: Performance, Media, and Digital Technology,” 327. Boffone, “The Rise of TikTok in US Culture,” 5. Tina Kendall, “From Binge-Watching to Binge-Scrolling: TikTok and the Rhythms of #LockdownLife ,” Film Quarterly 75, no. 1 (September 1, 2021): 43, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2021.75.1.41 . Kendall, 42. Milovan Savic, “From Musical.Ly to TikTok: Social Construction of 2020’s Most Downloaded Short-Video App,” International Journal of Communication 15 (2021): 3173–94. Craig Chapple, “TikTok Crosses 2 Billion Downloads After Best Quarter For Any App Ever,” accessed April 14, 2023, https://sensortower.com/blog/tiktok-downloads-2-billion . Francis X. Jr. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 110. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7. Katie Rogers, Lara Jakes, and Ana Swanson, “Trump Defends Using ‘Chinese Virus’ Label, Ignoring Growing Criticism,” The New York Times , March 18, 2020, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/us/politics/china-virus.html . Blair Miller, “Montana House Advances TikTok Ban, Rejects Amendment to Make It Apply More Broadly,” Daily Montanan , April 14, 2023, https://dailymontanan.com/2023/04/13/montana-house-advances-tiktok-ban-rejects-amendment-to-make-it-apply-more-broadly/ ; Jameson Walker, “Amendment to Senate Bill No. 419,” accessed June 5, 2023, https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/AmdHtmH/SB0419.002.002.pdf . @aocinthehouse. "Some Thoughts on TikTok," TikTok, March 24, 2023. https://www.tiktok.com/@aocinthehouse/video/7214318917135830318 . The full hearing can be seen here: “Full Committee Hearing: ‘TikTok: How Congress Can Safeguard American Data Privacy and Protect Children from Online Harms,’” House Committee on Energy and Commerce, accessed May 31, 2023, https://energycommerce.house.gov/events/energycommerce.house.gov . Justin Hendrix, “Transcript: TikTok CEO Testifies to Congress | TechPolicy.Press ,” Tech Policy Press, March 24, 2023, https://techpolicy.press/transcript-tiktok-ceo-testifies-to-congress . A full transcript of this hearing can be found here: Hugh Allen, “Senate Hearing with CEOs of Meta, TikTok, X, Snap and Discord About Child Safety 1/31/24 Transcript,” Rev Blog, accessed February 29, 2024, https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/senate-hearing-with-ceos-of-meta-tiktok-x-snap-and-discord-about-child-safety-1-31-24-transcript . For a video of this incident, see: ‘I’m Singaporean!’: TikTok CEO Fires Back at GOP Senator Pressing Him about Possible Ties to China | CNN Politics , 2024, https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2024/02/02/tom-cotton-shou-zi-chew-singaporean-tiktok-testimony-vpx.cnn . Mueller and Farhat, “TikTok and US National Security,” 26. Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering , 26. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 28. @jonny.perl. "Original Sound," TikTok, November 26, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@jonny.perl/video/7035053268883590405 . Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes (New York: Knopf, 2010); Stephen Sondheim, Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany (New York: Knopf, 2011). @tylerjosephellis. "May His Memory Be a Blessing. Forever," TikTok, November 29, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@tylerjosephellis/video/7036160901216570630 . @samtheboynextdoor. "Sam Black," TikTok, December 14, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@samtheboynextdoor/video/7041666130166942981 . @ward027. "#duet with Jonny.Perl," TikTok, November 27, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@ward027/video/7035420095564270895 . @thebadjujudesign. "Sometimes People Leave You, Halfway through the Woods," TikTok, November 27, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@thebadjujudesign/video/7035113597479030062 . Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering , 12. Though several local memorials have been built, and there is at least one effort to create a national memorial: “Home,” COVID-19 Memorial Monument, accessed March 7, 2024, https://covidmemorialmonument.org/ . Footnotes About The Author(s) Danielle Rosvally is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo. Her forthcoming monograph ( Theatres of Value: Buying and Selling Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century New York City , State University of New York Press, 2024) considers the commodification and economization of Shakespeare’s work in America’s nineteenth century. Danielle's interest in the digital has fueled past work on database methodologies in humanist text, social media, and the personification of Shakespeare by performers/users. Her next project, Yassified Shakespeare (co-authored with Trevor Boffone; @yassifiedshax on TikTok), is a multimedia exploration of how iterations of Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare’s cultural capital critically intersect with drag and drag aesthetics. Her work has been seen in Theatre Topics, The Early Modern Studies Journal, Studies in Musical Theater, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Fight Master Magazine. She is the co-editor of Early Modern Liveness (Bloomsbury 2023), and the forthcoming special issue of Shakespeare dedicated to contingency titled "Inessential Shakespeares: Contingency, Necessity, and Marginalization in Early Modern 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 America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Thomas Keith 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 “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Thomas Keith By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Left to right: portrait of Robert Burns by Alexander Nasmyth, 1787; John Cairney as Burns, 1965; and Alan Cumming as Burns, 2022. (Credits: Nasmyth painting photographed by Antonia Reeve, used by permission of Scottish National Portrait Gallery; photo of John Cairney courtesy of Alannah O’Sullivan; photo of Alan Cumming by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan, used courtesy of The National Theatre of Scotland.) Then let us pray that come it may, As come it will for a’ that, That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that. For a’ that, and a’ that, It’s coming yet for a’ that, That Man to Man the warld o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that. — —Robert Burns, “Song—For a’ that and a’ that—” In most of the English-speaking world, Shakespeare is “The Bard.” However, in Scotland “The Bard” is their national poet, Robert Burns (1759-1796), and his popularity extends far beyond Scotland, having long ago reached global proportions. Since the early nineteenth century there have been annual gatherings called Burns Night Suppers—rife with whisky, tartan, haggis, bagpipes, poetry, singing, and dancing—to celebrate his birthday, now numbering in the thousands worldwide each year.(1) During the same period, well over one hundred plays and musicals about the Scottish Bard’s life and influence have been written and produced. However, in the last thirty years it is rare that a new stage work about Burns is performed in the United States.(2) In 2022, the announcement that transplanted Scot Alan Cumming would star in Burn , a dance theatre piece about the poet, was met with enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic, especially among Burns clubs and societies, Scottish organizations, scholars, Alan Cumming fans, and those in the dance and theatre communities. For over two-hundred and twenty-five years, since Burns’s death at the age of thirty-seven, there have been ongoing debates about his poetry, patriotism, morals, faith, politics, health, alcohol consumption, sexual prowess, romantic ideals, and cultural impact. Most recently questions about Burns’s mental health, his treatment of women, and his response to slavery have come to the fore. In spite of a life filled with contradictions and complications, his potency as a symbol of Scotland and Scottish identity has only grown stronger. Yet, the challenge for theatre artists is to sift through the layers of oversimplifications that have been imposed on Burns and have often reduced him to one hollow stereotype or another. This is due in part to the tug-of-war to define and claim Burns by different factions and interests. Orcadian novelist and poet Edwin Muir (1857-1959) described the role Burns 's malleability has played in the Scottish psyche: The myth is endlessly adaptable; so that to the respectable, Burns is a decent man; to the Rabelaisian, bawdy; to the sentimentalist, sentimental; to the socialist, a revolutionary; to the Nationalist, a patriot; to the religious, pious; to the self-made man, self-made; to the drinker, a drinker. He has the power of making any Scotsman, whether generous or canny, sentimental or prosaic, religious or profane, more whole-heartedly himself than he could have been without assistance; and in that way perhaps more human(3) Scottish poet and ethnomusicologist Hamish Henderson described the situation this way: “Like all great artists, Burns has needed a lot longer than his lifetime to come into his own. But the question is: are we ready for him? His own age emphatically was not. Already in his lifetime, attempts were being made to cut him down to size . . . What Scots succeeded in doing with Burns was a truly grisly spectacle. They wanted to turn him into a sort of literary equivalent of Lenin in his tomb. . . . how is it possible to rescue this poor painted, cosmeticized cadaver of a dead poet from the ghastly mess in which they’ve laid him? Can it be done?”(4) This is the legacy that Cumming and his collaborators were faced with when deciding why and how to embody the Scottish Bard onstage, and the question becomes whether or not they were able to find new ways to frame and understand the complexities of Robert Burns. Produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, The Edinburgh Festival, and the Joyce Theater, Burn opened August 9, 2022, at the King’s Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Festival. It subsequently toured Scotland, including performances in Glasgow, and concluded its run with six nights at the Joyce Theater, the distinguished dance venue in New York City, in September 2022. Actor Alan Cumming (creator and performer) and choreographer Steven Hoggett (creator and co-choreographer) have concocted a musical, epistemological, and biographical mediation on Robert Burns. The structure of the event, which lasts about an hour, is a chronological accounting of Burns’s life—the timeline indicated by projections of dates that continue year by year from 1759 to 1788, and then jump to 1796. For the initial fifteen minutes, Cumming used Burns’s 1787 autobiographical letter to Dr. John Moore—edited and often paraphrased—as a first-person monologue delivered via direct address and interspersed with images and dates that flashed on an upstage scrim while he performed dance-like movements and gestures that mimicked parts of the text.(5) As if employing an elementary form of sign language in this section, Cumming made gestures to emphasize at least one or more words in every sentence, sometimes an entire phrase or idea. Because the gestures were literal, they were often, though perhaps not always intentionally, funny; his dependable, knowing smirk indicated that they were at least clever. However, the larger implication was that the words themselves were insufficient to carry their own meanings. Had the gestures used been in opposition to the dialogue or conveyed action, one wonders if they might not have been cumbersome. The rest of the hour consisted of edited excerpts from letters by Burns, snatches of his poems and songs, dance sequences, and original music by Scottish composer Anna Meredith. An impressive creative team, including set designer Ana Inés Jabares-Pita, costume designer Katrina Lindsay, lighting designer Tim Lutkin, video designer Andrezej Goulding, sound designer Matt Padden, and illusion consultant Kevin Quantum, collaborated closely to create a whirlwind of light, sound, projection, and charming special effects including chairs that rested upon only one leg, a quill that wrote by itself, and a dress lit from within that emerged airborne from a dark pile of papers and rags. If there was a motif, it was that of extremes; the theatre was rarely silent, the energy on stage swinging from moments of excited sound, music, and dancing, to quieter recitations and lighter, easier movements. If that concept was intended as a metaphor for the concentrated, short life of Burns, it was successful. Although Cumming remained intensely focused and committed during the entire piece, he often had to compete with the volume of the music or sound effects, and at other times his prerecorded voice was heard while he was in motion. There didn’t appear to be a pattern as to when the recordings of Cumming’s voice were played versus when he spoke live—sometimes after an athletic section of movement, he would breathlessly speak a nearly inaudible stanza by Burns. I counted at least a dozen excerpts from Burns’s poems and songs (from over 700), most unidentified. The choices tended to underline the tone or mood of a given moment and, in some cases, served as a metaphor for an aspect of the story. For example, after excerpts from letters about the grueling life of a farmer juxtaposed with the joys of poetry and love, Cumming recited stanzas from “O Were I On Parnassus Hill.” Choreographer Hoggett is renowned for his work in physical theatre and his athletic style rooted in text. Co-choreographer Vicki Manderson and Hoggett’s contributions to Burn often began with the rudiments of utilitarian movements, usually related to farming or writing, then at times expanded into modern dance vocabulary, occasionally with what seemed to be touches of ballet and Highland dancing. Advance press for the production on both sides of the Atlantic set forth the allowance that the fifty-eight-year-old Cumming has had no formal training as a dancer.(6) The original score, rarely separated from physical action, recitations, or projections and sound effects, was most often bass line variations on low throbbing, a pulse, or an electronic thumping at high volumes. In and of itself, Meredith’s music was effective, but it seemed indiscriminately used so that it often masked other theatrical elements, creating a cacophonous effect. In addition to being a farmer, a poet, and later an exciseman, Burns was also a lyricist and song-collector, having written lyrics for upwards of three-hundred and fifty traditional Scottish tunes. Whether or not any of those melodies influenced, or were incorporated into, Meredith’s score, was not clear. The narrative moved from one well-known and well-trod episode in Burns’s life to another: his poor childhood in Ayrshire, his father’s hardships with debt and his early death, Burns’s love of poetry, then of girls, his womanizing, his plan to emigrate to Jamaica, the publication of his poems, his hot-and-cold treatment by the Edinburgh literati, his work in the excise, his illness, and death. Burn is in the tradition of a long line of Burns plays that have promised in their publicity to offer the elusive “real Burns” or the “truth about Burns,” but were unable to deliver.(7) This is an ongoing issue with Burns that artists quite rightly attempt to address: accumulated generalizations and stereotypes about Burns over the last two centuries have frequently resulted in depictions of a rather flat character, instead of a person.(8) Burns’s likeness was used to advertise and sell products from whisky to tobacco, so Cumming was quite justified in declaring that his interpretation would “challenge the ‘Hollywoodised’ and ‘biscuit tin’ image of Burns.”(9) In Burn , much time was spent recounting some of Burns’s love affairs and tribulations with women, several of whom were at one point effectively represented by shoes hanging on wires, which Cumming spoke to and about, flattered, relished sexually, and swung at contrasting speeds. He concluded this section with a rousing interpretation of the shocking “thundering scalade,” the description of sex with and beating of his wife Jean Armour contained in a 1788 letter to Robert Ainslie (edited in this case, perhaps for more impact).(10) Little context was given for the chain of women whom the audience was meant to understand had been used, abused, and abandoned by Burns, such that there was little or no distinction between the women he courted, corresponded with, wrote love songs about, or fathered children out of wedlock with—all of the latter’s children he acknowledged and supported financially. Cumming shared the women’s stories with an arched eyebrow of conspiratorial lasciviousness, rather than conveying the unguarded or unashamed sexuality attributed to Burns and evidenced in his correspondence and poetry, or much at all by way of the romantic strains central to his love poems and songs. Thus, Burns’s relationships with the women in his life—his mother, siblings, children, friends, girlfriends, and his wife—were mostly left unidentified and unexamined. Thus far, the most successful and well-known dramatic interpretations of the poet were in the one-person plays There was a Man by Tom Wright and The Robert Burns Story by John Cairney in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. In each, the handsome and charismatic John Cairney (1933-2023) became the personification of Burns on stage and television for several generations of Scots, Canadians, and Americans.(11) Cairney’s dashing, alpha-male stage Burns was exactly what the public would have expected, and likely wanted—he took a “realistic” and sentimental embodiment of Burns as far as it could go. As poet Donny O’Rourke observed, John Cairney was “Rabbie’s representative on earth, eradicating the Nasmyth and other portraits with a single toss of his pony-tailed head."(12) One way to look at plays about Burns is as “biographies come to life,” since the impulse to tell Burns’s story, or even part of it, usually requires enough biographical context to allow an audience to experience the character of an eighteenth-century Scottish farmer and poet without getting lost.(13) There is a long tradition of trying to cram Burns’s entire life into one theatrical evening instead of choosing a single incident, episode, or aspect to dramatize.(14) The attempt to cover such a vast amount of biographical information in Burn led to frequent oversimplification or misinformation, which has been the case for many of the previous plays and musicals about Burns. In Burn , it was not any errors in the facts offered about Burns that created confusion—Professors Kirsteen McCue and Moira Hansen from the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow were the Academic Consultants for the production—but rather the way in which the information selected was organized into a narrative often felt cursory or disjointed, and many times editorialized more than dramatized the story. In addition to the pitfalls of a cradle-to-grave biographical play told in one hour, Burn suffered from too many genres, too many subjects, and not enough time.(15) The high-speed combination of stage effects frequently obscured whatever it was we may have been meant to understand or feel. Some of the focus was surprising: the woman whom this Burns talked about the most was Mrs. Frances Dunlop and Burns bore so much humiliation at accepting the job of an exciseman that he fell into a weird self-pity. Certain incidents were cherry-picked such that if one didn’t already know all the primary events of Burns’s life, which most people both inside and outside of Scotland do not, they might be perplexed. One seasoned theatregoer I spoke with mentioned that he hadn’t known about Burns’s love affair with Frances Dunlop and wanted to know more about her. A middle-aged widow, Dunlop was in fact a friend and correspondent of Burns’s, twenty-nine years his senior, not one of his lovers. This audience member was also surprised to discover that Burns had lived in Jamaica. He had not. It was Burns’s desperation to escape financial ruin as a farmer and leave behind the contentious situation with Jean Armour and her family, that prompted him to self-publish, by subscription. The purpose of what became known as the Kilmarnock Edition of his poems was to raise enough money for passage to Jamaica. In part, because his slim volume of poems became such an immediate and resounding success—not just in Scotland but also when interest was fueled in London by Henry Mackenzie’s glowing review in The Lounger —Burns eventually abandoned his plans to emigrate.(16) That audience member’s misunderstanding was quite understandable considering the frenetic and fragmented ways in which information was conveyed in Burn . One aspect of Burns’s personality addressed in Burn , not previously explored theatrically, involved contemporary research into the poet’s mental health. Burn introduced the topic primarily using sections of his correspondence that described times of emotional distress, and then, during a shower of strobe lights, images, and sound that accompanied rapid-fire movements from Cumming—likely meant to represent Burns’s mental state when he was overwhelmed—the word “Hypochondria” flashed on the scrim, which at the time was a term used to describe anxiety and depression. This was followed by the word “Hypomania,” its letters beginning to distort. A clinical designation for a condition characterized by dramatic swings of mood, interest, and energy, hypomania is thought to be much like what is now understood as manic-depression or bipolar disorder. It has long been known that Burns experienced extended bouts of profound melancholy; considering the volume and intensity of Burns’s creative output, song collecting, correspondence, friendships and fraternal socializing, love affairs, and his responsibilities with farming, excise, and family that kept him engaged for the duration of his short, thirty-seven-year life, it is quite believable that his manic highs and lows may in hindsight indicate that he suffered from bipolar disorder.(17) However, if any connection was made between the projection of the word “Hypomania” and Burns’s mental state, it was experienced on a visceral level only, lost in the swirl of sound, movement, and light. The words “apoplectic” or “stressed” might have been projected with the same effect. The most innovative element of Burn was Cumming’s appearance: shoulder-length black hair untied, black fingernails, a ghostly pale whitened face and arms, almost blue in places, darkened lips, and the silhouette of a slender man who appeared to be quite a bit older than Burns was when he died. By creating an incarnation of Burns that bears no relationship to the well-known variations of the ubiquitous Alexander Nasmyth portrait (such as was John Cairney’s Burns), the audience was offered a rare opportunity to view Burns through a different lens.(18) Burns’s immediately recognizable image and established narrative—much like Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade—is ripe for reframing or fracturing to create a new and contemporary understanding of Burns, and quite in keeping with Cumming’s desire to dispense with the Burns of biscuit tins and bring him to life as a complex person.(19) Even for audience members who were not familiar with the standard Nasmyth image of Burns, they would have recognized immediately that Cumming’s Burns did not appear to be an eighteenth-century farmer.(20) This is where the creators succeeded, by offering a personification unlike any Burns character that has been previously embodied on stage: quite opposite to sometimes hyper-masculine depictions of Burns, and with a sexual ambiguity not previously attributed to the poet. Likewise, the choice to convey a biographical portrait via dance, contemporary music, and sophisticated audio-visual effects, had the potential to broaden our contemporary understanding of the poet. However, in addition to the Burns character who bears no resemblance to any known image of Burns, we are introduced also to the impish character of Alan Cumming himself, whose public persona is so well known that he also has the effect of a readymade. Further layers are added by the physical, verbal, musical, and visual techniques, so rather than merely a different lens, this Burns is seen through a prism in which not only is the readymade-Burns refracted, it is distorted by the readymade-Alan Cumming character; thus the biographical details, such as they are, take on meanings that may or may not have to do with Burns. How is an audience to know the difference: when are they seeing an embodied Burns from a different angle, and when are they actually witnessing a running commentary on Burns? The evening is therefore as much about Cumming, and often more so, than it is about Burns. Since Cumming has played many characters on stage and screen that bear no immediate resemblance to his public persona as a celebrity, one can reasonably understand that this characterization was a choice; Cumming never got lost in the role of Burns. To the contrary, he seemed to revel in the role of Alan Cumming, as when he ignited some flash paper then cheekily quipped to the audience, “Well, the show is called Burn .” The choice to portray the character of Cumming in turn portraying the character of Burns may have squandered an opportunity to reveal the humanity of Burns. It meant that the cursory narratives offered about various well-known incidents in Burns’s life, as well as facets of his personality, were reduced to clichés. It was all left for the audience to untangle, or not. Engaging a director or a dramaturge, or some other outside eye, might well have helped to sharpen the narrative and guide the audience’s focus. The description of Burn by the creators and producers as a “dance theatre” piece is accurate to a large extent—even more so, it is a hybrid that hasn’t prioritized any of its genres. Though much of Burn consists of monologues delivered via direct address—the audience being consistently assigned the role of Cumming’s scene partner—it’s not entirely a play. And while the projections and contemporary trappings are reminiscent of Scottish performance artist and drag king Diane Torr’s (1948-2017) successfully didactic, cross-dressing, and campy Ready Aye Ready (a standing cock has nae conscious) (1992)—about Burns and his collection of bawdy songs and poems, The Merry Muses of Caledonia — Burn is not quite performance art.(21) As it happens, the evening’s reliance on the recognizable persona of Alan Cumming is what gives it much in common with performance art. The combination of the vivid, often beautiful, projections, powerful lighting, intense music, and high energy Cumming sometimes resembled an art installation, except that members of the audience were, of course, unable to come and go as they pleased or share immediate physical space with the performer. The evening didn’t adhere to any traditional definition of a dance concert, and it wasn’t really a spectacle, yet there were times it came close. Within their construct, Cumming and Hoggett offered arresting theatricality that resonated with Burns’s status as a Scottish icon, such as when Cumming held the ends of what appeared to be a five-foot-long Saltire (the Saint Andrews cross flag) which, as he marched toward the audience rapping the lyrics of Burns’s “Scots Wha Hae” to a contemporary beat, became the long blue cape of a superhero. In a striking recreation, Cumming appeared in a black long coat and boots facing an upstage projection of mist and snow-covered mountains, replicating the famous painting “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (1818) by German Romanticist Caspar David Friedrich. Without any context, connective tissue, or narrative link to Burns’s recently accepted status as either an immediate forerunner to Romanticism or an early Romantic, the imposing image remained unexploited. Another arresting episode resulted from the simplicity with which Cumming stepped in front of the curtain during the final moments of the performance and sat on the lip of the stage with a glass in hand to quietly—without editorializing or indicating from the Cumming/Burns character—speak a stanza from Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne” and raise his glass to the audience. This was possibly the first time since the evening started that there were no sound effects, projections, dramatic lighting, movement, special effects, or music accompanying an encounter between the performer and the audience. Compared to the relentless sound and fury of the previous hour, the result was deeply charged and dramatic. However, the most powerful moment of the evening occurred during the curtain call. It was a revelation of truth and intense connection with the audience: a breathless and sweaty Cumming bowed before the applauding theatregoers, then stood and accepted their approval in stillness, a grave and vulnerable look of gratitude on his face. I wondered where that guy had been for the last hour. Alan Cumming in Burn , posing as a recreation of “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (1818) by German Romanticist Caspar Friedrich, photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan. (Used by permission of The National Theatre of Scotland.) This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Lauren Brancaz-McCartan, “The Twenty-first-century Burns Supper—a constantly evolving tradition?,” Burns Chronicle , 130.2 (2021): 149-173; Clark McGinn, The Burns Supper: A Concise History (Edinburgh: Luath Press Ltd., 2018), 144-150, 242-258; Centre for Robert Burns Studies, University of Glasgow: https://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/supper-map/ . For more on Burns’s international reach, see Murray Pittock, ed., Robert Burns in Global Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011). Thomas Keith, Robert Burns’s Life on the Stage, with a Bibliography of Dramatic Works 1842-2022 (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Libraries, 2022). Hugh MacDiarmid, Burns Today and Tomorrow (Edinburgh: Castle Wynd, 1959), 47. Timothy Neat, The Tree of Liberty documentary film (Edinburgh: Everallin, Scottish Televison, 1988). The Letters of Robert Burns, edited by G. Ross Roy, second edition, Vol. I - 1780-1789 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 133-146. Roslyn Suicas, “Alan Cumming Uses Dance to Get at the Truth of Robert Burns,” New York Times , September 18, 2022, AR 9. Keith, Burns’s Life on the Stage , 7-8. Josephine Dougal, “Iconic Burns: A Shape Shifting ‘Sign’ of the Times,” Gerard Caruthers, ed, The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 493-509; Ian Brown, Performing Scottishness: Enactment and National Identities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 237. Brian Ferguson, “Alan Cumming says new Robert Burns dance show has left him feeling exhausted but looking decades younger” The Scotsman July 25, 2022. The Letters of Robert Burns, edited by G. Ross Roy, Volume 1 – 1780-1789 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 250-251. Keith, Burns’s Life on the Stage , 10, 13. Donny O’Rourke “Supperman: Televising Burns,” in Kenneth Simpson, ed., Burns Now (Edinburgh: Canongate Academic, 1994), 120. Rhona Brown, “Robert Burns on the Twentieth-Century Stage,” Performing Robert Burns , Ian Brown and Gerard Carruthers, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 120. Keith, Burns’s Life on the Stage , 37, 38, 50, 53, 61, 65. To be fair, the collaborators did not try to include every biographical or literary topic related to Burns. They indicated that they deliberately chose not to create a dance theatre piece investigating Burns’s writing, and neither did they explore his travels in Scotland, song colleting, troubles with the Scottish kirk and subsequent satires, his bawdy collection and the Crochallan Fencibles, work as an exciseman, politics, education, or most of his love affairs. Henry Mackenzie, “Heaven-Taught Ploughman,” The Lounger, London, December 9, 1786. For further information about Professor Moira Hansen’s research into Robert Burns’s manic depression and possible bipolar disorder see: Moira Hansen, Daniel J. Smith, and Gerard Carruthers, “Mood disorder in the personal correspondence of Robert Burns: testing a novel interdisciplinary approach,” Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 48 (2018): 165-74, ( https://doi.org/10.4997/jrcpe.2018.212 . ); Moira Hansen, “’Melancholy and low spirits are half my disease’: physical and mental health in the life and work of Robert Burns.” (PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2020) ( https://theses.gla.ac.uk/79040/ ); Moira Hansen, "Burns and Blue Devilism" in Robert Burns Lives! no 246 (2018) ( https://www.electricscotland.com/familytree/frank/burns_lives246.htm ). Keith, Burns’s Life on the Stage , 69, 74. Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymade : Duchamp, Man Ray, and the Conundrum of the Replica (New York: Routledge, 2018), 1-17. Keith, Burns’s Life on the Stage , 9, 10, 73, 76. Diane Torr and Stephen Bottoms, Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 113-114, 173-79, 187-89. Bibliography Ian Brown and Gerard Carruthers, eds, Performing Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Ian Brown, Performing Scottishness: Enactment and National Identities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). John Cairney, The Man Who Played Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1987). Gerard Carruthers, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024). Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymade : Duchamp, Man Ray, and the Conundrum of the Replica (New York: Routledge, 2018). Thomas Keith, Robert Burns’s Life on the Stage, with a Bibliography of Dramatic Works 1842-2022 (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Libraries, 2022). Thomas Keith, “Robert Burns’s Life on Stage: A Bibliography of Dramatic Works, 1842-2019,” Studies in Scottish Literature Vol. 47, Issue 1 , ed. Patrick Scott and Tony Jarrells (Columbia, South Carolina: Dept. of English, University of South Carolina, 2021). Hugh MacDiarmid, Burns Today and Tomorrow (Edinburgh: Castle Wynd, 1959). Clark McGinn, The Burns Supper: A Concise History (Edinburgh: Luath Press Ltd., 2018). Murray Pittock, ed., Robert Burns in Global Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011). Diane Torr and Stephen Bottoms, Sex, Drag, and Male Roles : Investigating Gender as Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). Further Reading Robert Crawford, The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009). Alan Cumming, Not My Father’s Son (New York: Dey Street Books, 2014). Patrick Scott, ed., Robert Burns, A Documentary Volume (Farmington, Michigan: Gale, A Cengage Company, 2018). Footnotes About The Author(s) THOMAS KEITH , a consulting editor for New Directions Publishing and Associate Adjunct Professor of Theater at Pace University, has edited over twenty Tennessee Williams titles since 2002, including four volumes of previously unpublished one-acts. Co-editor of The Luck of Friendship: The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin (2018), he has also written extensively about Williams for academic journals. A 2004 Ormiston Roy Fellow of Scottish Literature at the University of South Carolina, Keith is the author of Robert Burns’s Life on the Stage (2022), and his work appears in Studies in Scottish Literature , The Burns Chronicle , Burns in the 21st Century , Robert Burns & America , and the Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns , among others. Keith has also written for American Theatre , Gay & Lesbian Review , The Drouth , Provincetown Arts , and compiled and edited Love, Christopher Street (2012), a volume of original LGBTQ essays about New York City. 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.

L. Bailey McDaniel Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States L. Bailey McDaniel By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF CRACKING UP: BLACK FEMINIST COMEDY IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY UNITED STATES. Katelyn Hale Wood. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021; Pp. 204. Cracking Up by Katelyn Hale provides a worthy addition to Humor Studies and an invaluable contribution to scholarship that explores Black feminist performance and comedy. Although often marginalized in performance archives, Black women comedians are “integral in the trajectory of stand-up comedy” (4) and occupy a vital cultural and political role as “storyteller, truth-teller, protest leader, and critical historiographer” (148). Wood’s four central chapters illuminate the ways that Black feminist comics have advanced feminist, Queer and queered expressions of joy and opposition to anti-Black racism & a vital act of social critique that is at once liberatory, recuperative, and agency-building. Beginning with a telling juxtaposition of stand-up pioneer Jackie “Moms” Mabley and concluding with comic Wanda Sykes’ 2019 portrayal of Mabley in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel , Wood demonstrates the “politic of joy” that defines Black feminist stand-up. The contributions of the artists she explores perform necessary cultural and political work, generating a productive nexus for the “pleasures, communities, and spiritual experiences that thrive in the face of, and in spite of, legacies of racialized grief.” Wood points out how these performances offer “both visceral and epistemological” insights that are facilitated not merely by performer, but audience as well (4). The text’s methodology bolsters its impressive rigor as well as its readability. Incorporating issues central to and lenses employed by canonical Black feminists (e.g. Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins), Wood also integrates (and at times, critiques) theoretical frameworks from humor scholars (e.g. Henry Bergson, Sigmund Freud), while at the same time making astute use of queer scholars who conspicuously consider intersectional issues of race and power (e.g. José Esteban Muñoz, E. Patrick Johnson). This interdisciplinarity offers a worthwhile resource to scholars of Black Feminism, Humor Studies and African American Performance. Wood incorporates a materialist historiography that gainfully attends to specific cultural and political realities; performer and character identities; performance implements such as costume, props, set design, marketing, make-up, and sound; and, of course, content. Wood’s archival labor is buttressed by analyses that integrate considerations of spectatorship, both original and subsequent, with the latter nodding to video and digital spectators after the live event & what Wood terms “mediated” audiences. These live and mediated audiences, whether incarcerated women watching Mo’Nique’s 2007 stand-up live and in person at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, or the consumers who view the same performance (and its editorial choices) after the fact, always exist as a requisite component of performance in Wood’s examination. Cracking Up also maintains an investment in contextualizing and acknowledging the multivalent connections shared by what initially and wrongly appear as disparate and/or disconnected performers and performance strategies. Not unlike Cracking Up ’s subjects, Wood repeatedly reveals (and celebrates) the political, Black feminist, and often queer throughlines of performers and performances over multiple decades. In a kind of “meta” technique, the text practices the Black feminist and queer methodologies that Wood brings to light in the individual performers/performances themselves. Wood’s first chapter supplements the still-under-researched figure of stand-up and Black feminist icon Jackie “Moms” Mabley. Initiating what she terms an “archival intervention” (23) into the overlooked achievements of Mabley, Wood expounds on Mabley’s rhetorical and performance-related innovations that lay the groundwork for the intersectional and radical Black feminist subjectivity that will benefit Black/Queer women comics and their audiences into the next century. Despite the limitations of Mabley’s performance archive to date, Wood fruitfully situates “Mabley’s dynamic civil rights comedy within Black feminist and Black queer performance aesthetics” while also “re-contextualiz[ing] histories of stand up” itself (27). As she does throughout, here Wood advocates for a productively fluid archive of Mabley that “centers [her] comedy as decidedly Black, feminist, and queer,” making sure to “read against histories that attempt to quiet or make mutually exclusive such identity markers and performative strategies of resistance” (32). Focusing on actor and comedian Mo’Nique’s 2007 stand-up special I Coulda Been Your Cellmate! , chapter two skillfully invokes José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of “disidentification” and concretizes the multiple ways that Cellmate! builds queer- and Black-feminist-informed communities while simultaneously establishing opposition to the carceral state. More than just Black, queer, feminist dissent, Mo’Nique’s stand-up event and subsequent/mitigated performances of it achieve a “cracking up” of the racist and heteropatriarchal status quo, often through a reclamation and celebration of Black/queer women’s erotic power. This chapter also presents a valuable offering to the field of Prison Studies, as Wood shrewdly explores the matrix of the audience’s (1) “Black feminist elsewhere” that is both “imagined and material” alongside (2) an “imaginary release from imprisonment and surveillance” that accompanies the literal “physical release of laughter" (54). Chapter three investigates what Wood describes as the queer temporalities that exist in the comedy of Wanda Sykes. For Wood, Sykes’ stand-up prompts a productive subversion of linearly-organized temporalities and myths of American progress. Looking specifically at Sykes' repertoire from 2008-2016, Wood unveils the ways that Sykes’ Black feminist comedy challenges more than just white supremacy and homophobia, but in fact cracks up notions of citizenship and progress that are invested in heteronormative, homoliberal taxonomies. Said another way, beyond its initial mocking of white supremacist and homophobic history, Sykes’ work advocates a disruption of restricting (and false) temporality as experienced by queer bodies of color. Wood’s final chapter contemplates Black feminist comics’ articulation of collective and individual mandates for equality and justice within the twenty-first century landscape of misogynist, anti-Black, anti-trans, and homophobic violence. Wood considers how the stand-up of Amanda Seales, Sasheer Zamata, Sam Jay, and Michelle Buteau advocates a specific kind of Black feminist agenda whereby comedy functions as critique of “the new racism” of the twenty-first century. Incorporating recent cultural phenomena (and resistance strategies) such as #MeToo , Wood effectively unpacks the post-Obama/Trump-era appeal for “new waves of stand-up comedy” that gainfully “combine[s] comedy and a desire for social justice” (110). Cracking Up reveals how Black feminist stand-up shapes Black subjectivity, while also disrupting modes of oppression that inspire discrimination and violence. Making expert use of her foundational concept of “cracking up,” Wood concretizes the ways that Black feminist comedians successfully and queerly influence national character and identity. Indeed, as they facilitate and celebrate embodiment, these truth-tellers breach anti-Black and heteropatriarchal narratives through performer and audience, alike. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Wood, Katelyn Hale. Cracking UP: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021. Footnotes About The Author(s) Professor McDaniel is a Michigan native who grew up in and around Wayne County. After earning an undergraduate degree in Economics at the University of Michigan, she spent five years in New York City studying acting and performing. She earned her graduate degrees in English at Indiana University. She is thrilled to be back home, doing the work that she loves with students she deeply appreciates and respects. The undergraduate and graduate courses she teaches typically investigate issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and physical abilities as they are engaged in modern drama, US ethnic literature, and postcolonial literature and 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 America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Dana Venerable 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 Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Dana Venerable By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. by Dana Venerable The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center During a 2010 tour of the United Kingdom, artist and musician Janelle Monáe visited the BBC Radio 1Xtra show with MistaJam to promote her 2010 album The ArchAndroid and its first single “Tightrope.” Dressed in black riding boots and a military jacket reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s 1980s fashion, she gave MistaJam a dance lesson. What Monáe calls the “Tightrope” dance—choreographed by Ladia Yates in collaboration with Lil Buck and Dr. Rico[1], but formally credited to “Janelle Monáe and the Memphis Jookin’ Community”[2]—involves mostly footwork reminiscent of West-African Juba dance, the Cakewalk social dance from the nineteenth century,[3] and Jackson’s 1983 Moonwalk dance. The Tightrope dance’s main influence is jookin,’ a social dance style rooted in Memphis, Tennessee, that emphasizes smooth footwork and steps. It concludes with Monáe lifting one foot in the air and moving it in a zigzag or S-like motion, keeping her other foot on the ground while switching her ankle from left to right. Another person behind the scenes recorded her teaching the dance and the show uploaded the footage to YouTube. Despite the video’s low quality, it captures Monáe’s bodily and verbal explanations of the dance. The recording may be just one of many Tightrope dance lessons given by Monáe, perhaps during similar promotional interviews. Here, Monáe presents the dance verbally over the airways and visually through a video that has amassed about 30,000 views. Through this private yet very public performance of movement, she expands the radio space’s potentiality for cultural production. I argue that the Tightrope dance acknowledges in its name and choreography the physical risk of black embodiment in the U.S. and offers emotional stability, physical balance, spontaneity, and support as navigational tactics. In reading Monáe’s explanation of the dance as a choreography of healing, I place her historically and theoretically in a lineage of black women performers and performance theorists, specifically Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham. In so doing, I archive the Tightrope as a dance as well as an account of human experience that indexes the pain and trauma of black life in the U.S. while proposing motion as a conduit for healing. Monáe’s contributions within the lineage reflect contemporary concerns about racialized embodiment emblematized by the Obama presidency. The Tightrope dance involves citational combinations of small steps from several performers, which encourages and helps to inscribe a collective social choreography of past, present and future black bodies navigating America .[4] Monáe expands the movement to include herself (as well as bodies and identities like hers[5]) within popular culture—alongside black women vocalists who are also skilled dancers, such as Beyoncé, Ciara, and Janet Jackson—but with a focus on highlighting Memphis’s signature move(s) as ones that, through embodiment, enact survival and triumph. Additionally, I contextualize Monáe’s choreography of black embodiment through racism’s ongoing effects on black women’s bodies and futures. Arline Geronimus’s “weathering” hypothesis proposes that black women’s health in the US deteriorates early and continues to decline due to struggling socioeconomic environments.[6] Geronimus notes an urgent need for collectivity (one of her proposals is the use of black doulas) to combat this deterioration.[7] I integrate this concept with Christina Sharpe’s recent theorization of “the weather” as the climate of antiblackness to establish the atmosphere that Monáe navigates. [8] A close reading of Monáe’s radio show appearance reveals potential sites where the Tightrope dance functions as a healing ritual, a mode of survival, and a collective citational practice, all of which foreground the contributions of black women. Tightroping Terrains To help with “reading” Monáe’s lesson alongside hearing and/or watching, I transcribed the radio segment into a text. Through this transcription, I treat Monáe’s explanation as a form of dance notation. “Make sure you have two legs or two feet, or use whatever you can.” At first Monáe comes off as a bit ableist, saying that participants should have two legs and/or two feet. However, she concludes the same line suggesting moving any body part within personal limits. Her first instruction and tool somewhat reflect a common assumption in the dance world of an able, physical body, yet she emphasizes right from the beginning that anyone is capable as long as they move what they have and use creativity, imagination, and/or personality. A similar approach valuing flexibility is apparent within yanvalou—an embodiment praxis of Haitian Vodou[9]—as Elizabeth Chin reports of Katherine Dunham’s research: “Under life’s often harsh demands…it is better to take on the present situation than to wait until the ‘proper’ tools are at hand.”[10] Monáe prepares her listeners to follow along but also to re-imagine the Tightrope dance for themselves. Monáe teaching the beginning steps of the Tightrope dance to MisterJam.[11] Screenshots by author. “These two feet go in and out opposite. You see how my feet are, you put the heel in front of the arch. So stay like this and go in and out. So first do that, you have to get familiar with that. So then, you’re going to take this front foot, and instead of being so mechanical-like, you gotta be smooth-like…You can do it on all floors.” Monáe makes sure to establish foundational movements and foot positions that allow dancers to build up the Tightrope dance from spaces where they feel most comfortable. She does get technical in terms of placement, reminiscent of the discipline behind codified dance forms, including Katherine Dunham’s technique. The Dunham Technique—inspired by her interests including Haitian folklore, yoga, karate, Balinese dance, Russian folk dance, flamenco, and ballet—was understood by Dunham as a form of social justice anthropology that operates and moves through the body, centering the body as the source of experience and knowledge over text-based theory.[12] The movement of the feet, which develops an openness upward towards the hips, loosens any rigidity and prepares the body for accompanying parts of the dance. The idea of “getting familiar” implies the capability to dance anywhere, on any floor or ground. “Once you get it, you’ll be able to understand this floor.” Not only does Monáe propose that people can do the Tightrope dance on any floor, but she also connects dancing the choreography to navigating social environments and their particular atmospheres. Through dancing, people learn and understand the ground they move upon, as well as the history of those who’ve moved before. By understanding dynamic relationships of the floor and the body, people can hone their abilities to dance within constrained areas and circumstances. Monáe performing the S-like foot movements of the Tightrope dance. Screenshots by author. “Like right now, I don’t have on my saddle oxfords, I have on my riding boots, but that just goes to show [the] tightrope can be done in all shoes, once you get that confidence…So now since we have the basics, you have to be smooth, see how I’m sliding in?” In these lines, there’s a correlation between establishing confidence through wearing clothes/shoes of preference while dancing, but also through the development of “smoothness” once one has the essential beginning steps down. As a verb, “smooth” means to “give (something) a flat, regular surface or appearance,” “modify (a graph, curve, etc.) so as to lessen irregularities,” “deal successfully with (a problem or difficulty)” or to “free (a course of action) from difficulties or problems.”[13] A common connotation is the ability to take on difficulties or problems with grace and eventually “smooth” them out. “Smooth” refers to moving gracefully despite but also because of mental and/or material obstacles. From Dunham’s perspective, achieving this sense of “smooth” evolves from the dancer’s deep self-knowledge, which extends “outward” and allows for “both self-healing and self-protection.”[14] Dunham elaborates: I’m telling you as a friend you must develop your whole body to match. One part to match the other, it is wholistic [sic]…you’re not teaching Dunham Technique unless you take each single person and know that person. You have to know that person. By knowing yourself. Then you can feel into it.[15] Self-awareness in movement opens up opportunities for healing, as well as identifying suppressed pain or trauma, interpreted as “smoothing things out” or “being smooth.” The correlation of confidence with “smooth” matters, considering the crisis of confidence black women experience as deeply marginalized bodies and voices navigating routes that are anything but smooth. Monáe demonstrating the Tightrope dance’s flexibility, regarding ability to move across the floor. Screenshots by author. “Now I’m just real smooth…Now let’s just say you keep this [back] foot static…Now the key is the tightrope is an illusion dance. I wanted to give the illusion, while working with kids in Memphis, Tennessee…that you were levitating off the ground, just an inch or two. So basically, this foot actually never touches the ground, that’s the key. That’s why it looks smooth, like I’m not touching the ground, this foot is not touching the ground, it cannot.” Monáe declares she has confidence, smoothness and self-awareness, partly through knowing herself as well as her historical position and her influences. She calls the Tightrope an illusion dance, as she creates the visual effect of levitating, that is inspired by young movers in Memphis, an important place for black dance and music historically in the US.[16] The Tightrope is an optical illusion dance, similar to Jackson’s Moonwalk, as Monáe simulates moving along a tightrope and/or dancing in air. One could also consider the Tightrope as an allusion dance. Through dancing and teaching the Tightrope, Monáe is intentionally and unintentionally alluding to artists before her in a performative citational practice. She draws these allusions choreographically without always verbalizing her sources outright. Monáe’s explanation aligns with Hurston’s theorization of “Negro expression” and Dunham’s evocation of spiritual ancestors through her technique.[17] These interactions of channeling and citation allow for Monáe to honor those who came before her as well as establish new accessible spaces of movement within the black performance archive. Monáe going back and teaching MisterJam the first groundings, movements and positions of the Tightrope. Screenshots by author. “You know you can’t get too high, you can’t get too low, you gotta tip on that tightrope, but never let that foot touch, never let that foot touch the ground, that’s wrong…you can do it on the side, you see?...Are you catching the feet?...Even if I go down, this foot never, never touches the ground…” Here, Monáe quotes the lyrics of her “Tightrope” song. When verbalizing the dance while moving, the lyrics help to theorize the work that her body is already doing. Her questions insist on her self-worth: “Are you watching me and how I can navigate most scenarios? I matter.” This insistence on self, as a black woman, is a form of “weathering.” Monáe repeatedly reminds her audience that she is enough in a world that expects black women to endure pain with ease. Her attention to her foot never touching the floor/ground implies calibrated knowledge of multiple “grounds” in order to develop the ability to remain upright. This type of grounding requires being vulnerable and knowing oneself despite society’s push to conform black women’s bodies into being, moving or presenting in particular ways. Dunham, Hurston, and Monáe resist stereotypes on their paths to freedom through activism and performance, while also understanding freedom’s constraints and demands.[18] Dunham discusses black embodied resistance as building upon personal energy: There is an energy within…we are given the capacity to use it. We use it in a way that is part of our basic culture. We use it in a way that we have been trained to…or maybe we use it in a way that results when all training drops off, and the clear pure strength of the person comes through. And that is the energy of that person, which is put into different forms…but once we discover that energy, I think that such a thing as dance becomes such a delight, because you’re moving on a stream that is you but is over and beyond you.[19] During one of her master classes, Dunham elaborated on her “wholistic” approach to understanding the self through the body and thus understanding energy and how to heal.[20] Monáe’s explanation of the Tightrope dance involves a similar self-awareness of the body moving, participating in a collective development of tactics to heal black women’s bodies as they weather U.S. culture. Theoretical Coordinates—A Flight Plan I began thinking about Monáe’s Tightrope dance as a possibility for healing and liberation after reading Soyica Diggs Colbert’s treatment of the Flying Africans myth[21] and its “black diasporic representations” in music.[22] Her analyses of LaBelle’s fashion during the 1960s and 1970s, Parliament’s lyric transition from sea-ship to space-ship, and Kanye West’s song sequencing, sampling, and lyrics to “I’ll Fly Away” and “Spaceship,” demonstrate black musicians’ manifestation of or connections to flight as liberation. These artists navigate oppression and create routes toward a new world within American geographies through the concept of flying, or lifting black bodies over limited systems of public transport. The fantasy of flying to Africa stems from collective hope while enduring the historical trauma of being black in America since chattel slavery, where gender discrimination, homophobia, mental illness, racial inequality, transphobia, and violence are persistent phenomena. As Colbert notes, the concept of flying happening within bodies through music, as well as social movements on the ground like marches, enables alternative forms of embodiment.[23] Colbert briefly mentions Monáe’s innovative style and “reclamation of black beauty” through her “android” identity.[24] Although Monáe’s fashion is important for her project of acceptance and self-esteem, her choreographic aesthetic and potential also contributes to the evolution of flight within black bodies, as well as offering other frames. In order to further develop how Monáe’s explanation and performance of the Tightrope dance could operate as a work of embodied flight and liberation, in addition to being a form of healing, I compare and connect it to earlier examples within the history and theory of black U.S. American performance. Analyzing and positioning the Tightrope dance as collective choreography, and a mode of healing, stems from a history of black performers and scholars in America, notably black women performers. Notating Monáe’s radio show appearance reveals strong affinities with both Hurston’s theory regarding black community/collectivity as well as Katherine Dunham’s exploration of movement as self-healing in her research and development of Dunham Technique. Hurston and Dunham’s theorizations of the liberatory possibilities of black performance can be usefully triangulated with dance scholar Danielle Goldman’s theorization of improvisation as a practice of freedom, a connection that Monáe’s choreography manifests in its use of improvisational structures.[25] Reading Monáe alongside these cultural anthropologists, dancers, and theorists, as well as considering improvisation as praxis, invites deeper insights into the Tightrope dance’s potentialities. The Harlem Renaissance was one of the first sites where black American artists and innovators began to write about and theorize their performance traditions. Both the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance took place during the 1920s, bringing forth black Americans as originators of and contributors to mainstream culture, in both obvious and covert ways. Scholars Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez describe the rise of commentary regarding black performance by “Negro” and “colored” artists in their introduction to their collection Black Performance Theory.[26] DeFrantz and Gonzalez emphasize scholar and writer Zora Neale Hurston as one of the first theorists to commit herself fully to black performance through her short article “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” which was published in the anthology Negro in 1934. They highlight that her writing, alongside the other researchers of the Harlem Renaissance era, “predicted a broad interest in understanding African diaspora performance. The implications of Hurston’s short essay still stand: black performance derives from its own style and sensibilities that undergird its production. And black performance answers pressing aesthetic concerns of the communities that engage it.”[27] Hurston’s influence is present in Monáe’s explanation of the Tightrope dance choreography as a site for theorizing black expressive culture, and shapes my reading of her dance lesson with MistaJam as notation. In “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Hurston highlights that action words and drama distinguish black performance.[28] Hurston writes that black people’s greatest contributions to language include their interpretation and use of metaphor and simile, “double descriptives,” as well as the use of “verbal nouns” for adornment such as: “sense me into it,” or “Jooking—playing piano or guitar as it is done in Jook-houses…”[29] She goes on to discuss the differences between “Negro dancers” and “white dancers,” starting with “Negro dance” being angular[30] and asymmetrical due to its musical influences and thus presenting challenges for white dancers: The presence of rhythm and lack of symmetry are paradoxical…Both are present to a marked degree. There is always rhythm, but it is the rhythm of segments. Each unit has a rhythm of its own, but when the whole is assembled it is lacking in symmetry. But easily workable to a Negro who is accustomed to the break in going from one part to another, so that he adjusts himself to the new tempo.[31] She writes that black dancers had to dance through certain limitations, therefore encouraging an adaptive and improvisational style instead of always performing fully rehearsed pieces.[32] Hurston additionally includes a brief dance notation as an example of black dancers’ dynamism and reliance on the audience.[33] Although she observes artists and performers as originators, Hurston also discusses the paradox of authenticity due to the difficulty of tracing origins: “It is obvious that to get back to original sources is much too difficult for any group to claim very much as a certainty. What we really mean by originality is the modification of ideas…While he lives and moves in the midst of a white civilization, everything that he touches is re-interpreted for his own use.”[34] Black artists created through navigating forms of mimicry and re-interpretation, which in turn were re-interpreted by white artists in ongoing cycles of appropriation.[35] This idea of sharing, Hurston notes, is central to black tradition through the role of community and an attendant “lack of privacy”: “It is said that Negroes keep nothing secret, that they have no reserve. This ought not to seem strange when one considers that we are an outdoor people accustomed to communal life.”[36] She also discusses the Jook at length, as both a verbal noun and a space, which is pertinent to the Tightrope dance’s origins: “Jook is the word for a Negro pleasure house. It may mean a bawdy house. It may mean the house set apart on public works where the men and women dance, drink and gamble. Often it is a combination of all these…The singing and playing in the true Negro style is called ‘jooking.’”[37] She writes that black people created dances within Jooks before they circulated to other Jooks and then eventually to mainstream culture, citing the “Black Bottom” dance, originating in “the Jook section of Nashville, Tennessee, around Fourth Avenue,” as an example. Jooking or the Jook is a form of vernacular dance, or “Negro social dance” accompanied by jazz that is “…slow and sensuous. The idea in the Jook is to gain sensation, and not so much exercise. So that just enough foot movement is added to keep the dancers on the floor.”[38] Although origins of social dances are constantly contested, roots in both place and purpose for movement remain significant to discussions within black performance. Hurston’s emphasis on action words and drama connect to the Tightrope dance through its terms: “tightrope,” “tippin’” and joined together through “tip on the tightrope.” Starting with the word “tightrope,” Monáe brings people into the air. Tightroping is like horizontal flying in a way, as one moves their body forward along an unstable route traversing huge gaps of space without substantial support. Sharpe’s “weather,” or an ongoing climate of anti-blackness, is by design unstable, thus tightroping becomes a survival tactic that is a teachable skill and form of preservation.[39] The route Monáe describes could also be on earth or over water, and she assures people that one can do the dance in any shoes.[40] Her description of elevation and “tippin’” on the tightrope points to potentialities of balance and flight as navigational modes instead of a one-time thrill-seeker’s stunt. Possibly through observation of the physical strains previous male-read performers placed on their own bodies (James Brown, Michael Jackson, and Prince all played with balance, flight, and forms of “tippin’” in their choreographies), Monáe says the Tightrope dance can be performed on “any” ground, while incorporating a slight risk with the illusion of levitation. At the same time, she decreases the risk of injury by keeping her feet closer together while dancing. This proximal shift emphasizes sustained awareness and self-care of black women’s bodies. Place and spectatorship also play a role within Monáe’s explanation of the Tightrope dance. In Jayna Brown’s cultural history of African-American women performers during modernism, she positions black vernacular dance as a way to claim a sense of place, relation, and community during the black migration: “For black people, dancing was an analogous creative response to shared and individual experiences of dislocation and relocation, itinerancy, and the fraught negotiations of claiming a geographical space to call home.”[41] Brown further describes how black expressive movement developed “gestural languages” within cities while simultaneously shaping those cities through social exchange, racial dynamics, and the back and forth of dance as gift or commodity. We might understand the radio station as a jook, where Monáe’s dance further develops and/or gains traction. Monáe’s performance involves people learning and recognizing movements as temporarily hers, then participating and eventually contributing their own versions, with variations of tempo and how high or low people lift their limbs. The dance offers opportunities for self-expression and individuality through the ways in which bodies maintain balance while performing it, as well as where and how they choose to move. Goldman’s work on improvisation speaks to the opportunities Monáe creates, such as knowing how to dance on specific “floors” and how to improvise in order to navigate particular experiences and terrains.[42] Monáe’s explanation of the Tightrope dance echoes Goldman’s claims about aesthetic and social choreographies of improvisation and their relationship to notions of freedom: After countless hours watching both live and recorded improvisations (and having been moved greatly in the process), I have come to believe that improvised dance involves literally giving shape to oneself by deciding how to move in relation to an unsteady landscape. To engage oneself in this manner, with a sense of confidence and possibility, is a powerful way to inhabit one’s body and to interact with the world.[43] Goldman further discusses some misconceptions about improvisation, mainly a popular emphasis on improvisation as spontaneous, rather than a learned technique that involves preparation, “…thereby eliding the historical knowledge, the sense of tradition, and the enormous skill that the most eloquent improvisers are able to mobilize.”[44] Goldman adopts Houston Baker’s term of “tight places” to understand distinctions in mobility constraints and possibilities based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and historical shifts in social positions.[45] “Tight places” relates back to Geronimus’s “weathering” through black women’s childbirth experiences and how they usually need assistance within the black community to receive necessary care. Sharpe’s idea of a climate of anti-blackness assists in visualizing what creates and sustains “tight places” of discomfort—such as non-adequate health care for soon-to-be black mothers as well as systematic oppression against black women—and how these communities improvise and find alternative routes in order to survive. Goldman calls improvised dance a “vital technology of the self—an ongoing, critical, physical, and anticipatory readiness that, while grounded in the individual, is necessary for a vibrant sociality and vital civil society,” that has potential to affect the dancer as well as the social landscape that the dancer both dances within and weathers.[46] Viewing improvisation as a type of technology or tool further contributes to my analysis of Monáe’s explanation and performances of the Tightrope dance as sites for healing and navigation. Monáe uses the Tightrope dance to redefine Baker’s “tight places.” The dance as a way of navigation opens up space by improvising alternative modes of thinking about access and identity. Improvisation and its possibilities for individuality within choreographic structures are prioritized in the Tightrope’s performances in the radio station and beyond, including larger-scale produced performances and the official music video wherein Monáe and accompanying dancers move in multiple directions, while adding their own micro movements in between group choreography. The “Tightrope” music video, directed by Wendy Morgan, begins with Monáe in an asylum called “The Palace of the Dogs,” which doesn’t believe dancing is healthy and the people living there are constantly monitored. Monáe sets the tone by temporarily avoiding the surveillance, which include tall, cloaked beings with mirrors for faces, reminiscent of Maya Deren’s 1943 short experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon [47] and “tightropes” her way to an open room to dance freely with other artists like herself. The Palace here symbolizes any “tight place” where one confronts themselves and their social position of not being acceptable or worthy of acknowledgment, and still maintains balance. The other residents of the palace join Monáe during both the initial introduction of the Tightrope dance and during the breakdown and improvisation near the end of the video. They develop their own variations of the Tightrope’s balance-based choreography. The “Classy Brass” section of the video involves all the residents dancing. Monáe reminds listeners that life is a tightrope for creative marginalized communities, as a deeper voice in the background sings what I decipher as: “well it’s a thin line…I mean white line…you and your right mind,” while Monáe is singing “gotta keep my balance” and “something like a Terminator.” She provides vocal runs to her own mix, concluding with a melody of her singing “Happy Birthday” and saying “Do you mind if I play my ukelele?” repeatedly, which works to celebrate black existence and experience.[48] During her performance of “Tightrope” on the reality television show So You Think You Can Dance, her back-up dancers come out right before the chorus and do the Tightrope in different directions while she focuses on vocals. During the song’s breakdown, Monáe performs improvisational footwork. The ensemble dances in a circle, giving everyone a chance in the spotlight. One dancer does the Moonwalk across the floor while wiping sweat off their forehead with a white handkerchief. They all get in a line and do the Moonwalk moving forward instead of backward in four directions before concluding the performance with an emphasis on the Tightrope dance. In addition, during her performance at the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway, her back-up singers do variations of the Tightrope dance. [49] Individuality and knowing oneself are key in executing the Tightrope throughout performance, as every dancer has a different approach and their own experiences that contribute to their interpretation. Katherine Dunham’s ethnographic research in Haiti and development of her own dance technique supports a reading of the Tightrope dance as a form of healing and spiritual connection to the self. Scholar Elizabeth Chin positions Dunham’s dance within the context of healing,[50] performance, and social resistance, arguing that Dunham proposed a radical reimagining of anthropology through “(black) bodies dancing (black) ethnographic knowledge…putting anthropology on its feet, into bodies, and onto stages.”[51] Throughout her lived experience as a black woman, Dunham was inducted into “the performative requirements of blackness” and the ways in which blackness functioned for white people to both define and manipulate.[52] She was invested in the physical and spiritual elements of yanvalou not solely for its “Africanness” and form, but also because it aligned with her vision of healing and understanding the world.[53] The Tightrope dance develops moving through and gaining the ability to weather past, present and future movement(s) as a healing praxis for both the self and the community. Monáe and her dancers make footwork a site for black pleasure, spontaneity, stability, and support instead of drudgery. Dunham stated that she had to “take something directly” if she wanted to fully express a culture, similar to Monáe’s practices of appropriation and interpretation of Memphis jookin’: “The techniques that I knew and saw and experienced were not saying the things that I wanted to say. I simply could not, with purely classical ballet, say what I wanted to say…to capture the meaning and the culture and life of the people, I felt that I had to take something directly from the people and develop that.”[54] Within her Dunham Technique, the emphasis on breath as that which “sustains what we’re putting forth”[55] provides an aesthetic practice akin to Sharpe’s emphasis on the importance of aspiration for black bodies and the need for freedom to breathe, as well as move, within and through “the weather.”[56] Chin further explains the significance of yanvalou to Dunham’s practice, emphasizing its never-ending cyclical structure and circular motions.[57] Dunham’s understanding of breath and circling have particular resonance with Monáe’s dance. Circles, cycles, and circling back are significant within the Tightrope dance’s choreography. The dance includes an S-like tracing of the foot in air, very similar to the figure of infinity represented and repeated during bodies-in-yanvalou. The senses of infinity as well as being whole within the symbols traced in these dances emphasize the persistence and strength of the black community throughout history. They bring forth reminders and strategies of collective embodiment that guide black people through surviving the highs and lows of an anti-black climate. “And I’m still tippin’ on it”[58]—Tightroping the Black Public Sphere Monáe theorizes the Tightrope dance as a collective, conceptual, and embodied antidote for living and moving in the US while black. For example, her articulation for possibly performing the movement “on all floors” and “in all shoes, once you get that confidence” might suggest moving through a local corner store or a school hallway with higher self-esteem and awareness of self-worth. However, Monáe’s performance, when contextualized through black performance history and theory, dance, and popular culture, invites further analysis of moments when movement contributes to healing historical traumas. Well-known signature moves within black popular music performance are mostly male-dominated and not always choreographed by the performers themselves, despite people often associating or interpreting the creation of dances with artists who repeatedly make them popular, visible or “put them on the map.”[59] A notable example is Jackson’s version of the Moonwalk dance[60] that choreographer Jeffrey Daniel first taught him, which evolved from tap dancer Bill Bailey’s performance of the move he called the “backslide” from the 1943 film Cabin in the Sky[61] and The Electric Boogaloos’ late 70s interpretation of the “backslide.”[62] Jackson’s performances of the Moonwalk, as well as James Brown’s quick footwork and overall physicality while conducting his backing band, are strongly reminiscent of soul performer Jackie Wilson, and Prince’s splits, turns and jumps also stem from his contemporaries, Brown and Wilson. Despite Wilson’s strong influence on black popular performance, people reductively termed him “the black Elvis.”[63] Wilson, however, did not take issue with being likened to Presley.[64] As Presley acknowledged rhythm and blues music as one of his main influences, it’s plausible to summarize the interrelationship between these male performers as one wherein white artists appropriate, interpret, re-circulate, re-introduce within and return these styles to black collective performance culture rather than being the originators. [65] These signature moves, and the struggle for black artists to legally claim their origin as Anthea Kraut describes, embody and signify not only artistic expression, but also black pain and trauma. [66] The steps require endurance and physical virtuosity, involving risks that could injure the body with repeated performance and make it more difficult to keep moving or indeed living.[67] In her lesson, Monáe proudly demonstrates the seemingly straightforward dance, while MistaJam (as well as myself) initially struggle to follow along. Although tricky, the Tightrope dance allows one to move across the floor without jumping onto or off of something, focusing on balance and themes of emotional/physical stability over alternative terrains of risk. Her explanation of the Tightrope dance is inspired by and engages a black performance lineage of masculine-dominated signature moves, while contributing to the tradition of black women performance theorists who describe dance as collective culture. She, along with Yates, helped to revitalize Memphis’s dance culture, as well as foreground black women and queer black bodies within collective movements and the black women performers who document and theorize them. Through her positioning within multiple lineages, Monáe’s performance moves back and forth between appropriation and interpretation, allowing for a complicated yet generative tension akin to Dunham’s practices, as she sings in the lyric “Now put some Voodoo on it.”[68] In a 2017 interview Lil Buck said that he supported Monáe giving collective credit to the Memphis Jookin’ Community for choreographing the Tightrope dance, since putting Memphis’s jookin’ back on the map emphasized the dance style as part of “Memphis’s identity.”[69] He added that Yates wanted to choreograph updated “old school” dance styles, along the likes of Brown and Jackson but with more jookin’,[70] thus the Tightrope dance also functions as a new interpretation—through Yates and Monáe’s subjectivities as black women choreographers and dancers—of jookin’ within a mainstream framework of social and vernacular dance.[71] The Tightrope dance, accompanying song, and explanation help to move Monáe and listeners toward expressive improvisation regarding ways of moving and ways of being through or alongside modes of socialized performativity. Further, “Tightrope” is a method and a response to the stresses placed upon black public figures in all realms of American society. At the time of “Tightrope’s” release, Barack Obama was serving as the first black president of the U.S., and Michelle Obama as the first black First Lady. For Monáe, the Obamas represent a huge historical victory that strongly impacted her music.[72] “Tightrope” references Obama’s much-needed capacities of constant emotional centeredness, regulation, and stability in his presidential role. In a 2012 interview Monáe stated, “President Obama absolutely inspires me. He’s inspired a lot of my music…I wrote ‘Tightrope’ because it talks about dealing with balance—don’t get too high, don’t get too low—and that’s one of the things that I noticed about President Obama…He stays very centered.”[73] Monáe performed the song and dance as tribute to the struggles involved with making one’s own way through Sharpe’s “weather,” including traversing to the most powerful leadership position in the US. Michelle Obama, through her speeches and her wellness campaign, also influenced Monáe’s vision of collective awareness and black female strength. Monáe’s aesthetic praxis and the Obamas’ self-representation in the political public sphere met during the 2014 event “Women of Soul: In Performance at the White House,” circulated on PBS, which featured Monáe’s performance of “Tightrope.” While performing, she explained the meaning of the song, including the Obamas’ influence, and her joy in getting to perform at the White House alongside other powerful women in music. She almost entirely focused on singing the lyrics, emphasizing the chorus. Monáe went down into the audience and sang to people individually, incorporating Brown’s lyrics, a form of citation through sound and voice, while also being unapologetically herself. Black public figures, from Hurston, to Monáe, to the Obamas, create and teach methods of survival in the most unreasonable of circumstances through navigating an embodied middle ground—or tippin’ on a tightrope between highs and lows—creating lineages of performers who allow for healing through their collective-signature movements. Dana Venerable is a PhD student in English, and an Arthur A. Schomburg Fellow at the University at Buffalo—SUNY focusing on critical race theory, dance studies (especially jazz and tap), performance, poetics, and sound. She's interested in the ways communities and events choreograph, constitute and/or manipulate movement, and how movement complicates identities, land/space, language, and senses of home. Dana has written for VIDA Review, Zoomoozophone Review, The Dartmouth, and Mouth Magazine, and recently performed in UB’s first MFA dance concert. For her poem “Church Bus,” she was nominated for the 2017 “Best of the Net” award by Sundress Publications. [1] MY COMEUP WORLD, “Lil Buck On Getting His First Break Working With Janelle Monáe,” 6:02, posted on Jan. 30, 2017, YouTube, https://youtu.be/uUv5M7iry8Q. Monáe brought in Ladia Yates to choreograph, and Yates then contacted Lil Buck and Dr. Rico. They all co-choreographed it together, and both Buck and Yates share the experience of relocating to Memphis at young ages where they both started jookin’. [2] MTV. “MTV Video Music Awards 2010,” MTV.com, Sept., 12, 2010. The music video for “Tightrope” was nominated for the Best Choreography VMA in 2010, crediting the Memphis collective instead of the specific individuals involved. [3] For more on the cakewalk, see Megan Pugh’s America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), Soyica Diggs Colbert’s chapter “Reenacting the Harlem Renaissance” from In The African American Theatrical Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Jayna Brown’s Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). [4] For more on the navigation of black bodies through dance, see Brenda D. Gottschild’s The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). [5] The Tightrope dance, through Monáe’s theory, becomes a rich cultural site for further analysis, for example there’s potential for an explicit engagement with queer studies, since her explanation of the dance has intersectional implications along with moments of what José Muñoz calls disidentification, particularly as gender, race and sexuality intersect. For more information, see José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). [6] A.T. Geronimus, “The Weathering Hypothesis and the Health of African-American Women and Infants: Evidence and Speculations,” Ethnicity & Disease 2 no. 3 (1992). [7] Linda Villarosa, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis,” The New York Times, Apr. 11, 2018. [8] Christina Sharpe, “The Weather,” in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). [9] Elizabeth Chin, “Dunham Technique: Anthropological Politics of Dancing through Ethnography,” in Katherine Dunham: Recovering an Anthropological Legacy, Choreographing Ethnographic Futures (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2014), 84, 91. [10] Chin, “Dunham Technique,” 93. [11] BBC Radio 1Xtra, “Janelle Monae teaches MistaJam the Tightrope,” 3:40, posted on May 18, 2010, YouTube, https://youtu.be/h9VtQWSdXho. Screenshots by Dana Venerable. [12] Chin, “Dunham Technique,” 81-82, 87. [13] Oxford English Dictionary s.v., “smooth,” https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/smooth. [14] Chin, “Dunham Technique,” 90. [15] Ibid. [16] For more about Memphis and black cultural production, see Katrina Hazzard-Donald’s Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). [17] Chin, “Dunham Technique,” 98. “…yanvalou claims an unbroken kinship with African cultural forms and content. This kinship is generational, and just as over generations the faces and stories of a human family change while remaining part of that family, so the dances change over generations as well. Like the families that carry them, the dances have moved across oceans and many centuries.” [18] Ibid., 86, 98-99. Chin explains that Dunham Technique “is designed to inculcate in dancers a set of principles that have everything to do with persevering in impossible circumstances. As a form of resistance, the technique accurately diagnoses problems and discourses of power about race, about bodies, about anthropology, and about social theory.” [19] Library of Congress, “Katherine Dunham on the Circle of Energy,” Video Clip #40, 1:14, posted on September 2002, https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200003847/ [20] Chin, “Dunham Technique,” 90-91. “When somebody sees you, sees you dance, sees you dance well, you can remove from them many of their anxieties, their doubts, their feelings of being earthbound—any number of things can be removed. So dance, but for heaven’s sake do it with everything in you, mind, body, and spirit. Don’t ever think just of your body.” [22] Soyica Diggs Colbert, Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2017), 23. [23] Alternative texts that discuss the significant connections between black embodiment, movement, flight, and liberation include EmBODYing Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance (Piscataway: LIT Verlag, 2001); Anthea Kraut's “Re-scripting Origins: Zora Neale Hurston’s Staging of Black Vernacular Dance,” 59-78; Dorothea Fischer-Hornung's “The Body Possessed: Katherine Dunham Dance Technique in Mambo,” 91-112; Alison Goeller's “(Re) Crossing Borders: The Legacy of Alvin Ailey,” 113-124, and Angela Gittens's “Black Dance and the Fight for Flight: Sabar and the Transformation and Cultural Significance of Dance from West Africa to Black America (1960-2010),” Journal of Black Studies 43 no. 1 (2012): 49-71. [24] Colbert, Black Movements, 49-50, 7. [25] Danielle Goldman, I Want to be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). [26] Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, “From ‘Negro Expression’ to ‘Black Performance,’” in Black Performance Theory (Durham, Duke University Press, 2014), 2. [27] Ibid. [28] Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in Negro (1934), 49. “The Negro’s universal mimicry is not so much a thing in itself as an evidence of something that permeates his entire self. And that thing is drama. His words are action words. His interpretation of the English language is in terms of pictures. One act described in terms of another. Hence the rich metaphor and simile.” [29] Hurston, “Characteristics,” 52. [30] Ibid., 54. “Everything that he touches becomes angular…Anyone watching Negro dancers will be struck by the same phenomenon. Every posture is another angle. Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieved by the very means which a European strives to avoid.” [31] Ibid., 55. [32] Ibid., 56. [33] Ibid., 55-56. “For example, the performer flexes one knee sharply, assumes a ferocious face mask, thrusts the upper part of the body forward with clenched fists, elbows taut as in hard running or grasping a thrusting blade. That is all. But the spectator himself adds the picture of ferocious assault, hears the drums and finds himself keeping time with the music and tensing himself for the struggle. It is compelling insinuation. That is the very reason the spectator is held so rapt. He is participating in the performance himself—carrying out the suggestions of the performer.” For more on Hurston and dance, see Anthea Kraut’s Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). [34] Ibid., 58. [35] “Sampling does not take place in a vacuum, and the exchange of dance almost never occurs on an equal playing field. As recent dance scholarship has shown, the history of dance in the United States is also the history of white ‘borrowing’ from racially subjugated communities, almost always without credit or compensation,” Anthea Kraut, Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (Oxford University Press, New York, 2015), 4. [36] Hurston, “Characteristics,” 60. [37] Ibid., 62-63. [38] Ibid., 63. [39] Sharpe, In the Wake, 106. [40] BBC Radio 1Xtra, “Janelle Monae teaches MistaJam the Tightrope.” [41] Brown, Babylon Girls, 15-16. [42] Goldman, I Want to be Ready. [43] Ibid., 5. [44] Ibid. [45] Houston A. Baker, Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T. (Durham, Duke University Press, 2001). [46] Ibid., 22. [47] Colleen Claes, “Janelle Monae: Avant-Garde Film Geek (‘Tightrope’ Video),” open salon, Apr. 4, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20120706044921/http://open.salon.com/blog/colleenclaes/2010/04/04/janelle_monae_avant-garde_film_geek_tightrope_video. There’s an interesting connection here, as Deren worked closely with Dunham early in her career. Judith E. Doneson, “Maya Deren,” in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, Mar. 1, 2009. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/Deren-Maya. [48] Janelle Monáe, “Tightrope [feat. Big Boi] (Video),” 5:12, posted on Mar. 31, 2010, YouTube, https://youtu.be/pwnefUaKCbc. [49] So You Think You Can Dance. “Season Seven, Week Eight.” Fox Broadcasting Company, Aug. 4, 2010. Janelle Monáe, “‘Cold War,’ ‘I Want You Back,’ ‘Tightrope,’” 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Concert, Oslo Spektrum, Oslo, Dec. 11, 2011. [50] Chin, “Dunham Technique,” 99. People have used her technique for healing purposes, like original Dunham company member Tommy Gomez. Gomez went through two open-heart surgeries and had the bottom half of his right leg amputated in 1993, and the Dunham Technique helped him adjust and move through these obstacles. [51] Ibid., 81. [52] Ibid., 84. [53] Ibid., 84, 91. [54] Library of Congress, “Katherine Dunham on need for Dunham Technique,” Video Clip #38, 0:40, posted on September 2002. https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200003845/. [55] Library of Congress, “Katherine Dunham on Breathing in Dunham Technique,” Video Clip #39, 1:01, posted on September 2002. https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200003846/. [56] Sharpe, In The Wake. [57] Chin, “Dunham Technique,” 94. “The yanvalou is a never-ending cycle, and if viewed from a certain perspective, the body-in-yanvalou traces the figure of infinity again and again as the dance is performed. Cosmic cycles of the universe, the snake eating its tail, the circuits of life and death, seasons, love and loss, a rippling wave that holds within itself the potential for a devastating tsunami, the shrugging of the earth’s mantle resulting in a cataclysmic earthquake—the yanvalou is all of these and more. And additional circles can be layered onto the ones already described.” [58] Janelle Monáe. “Tightrope (feat. Big Boi).” Genius. Accessed April 2018. https://genius.com/Janelle-monae-tightrope-lyrics. [59] For more on appropriation of signature steps, see Danielle Robinson’s Modern Moves: Dancing Race During the Ragtime and Jazz Eras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), and Susan Manning’s Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). [60] For more on the Moonwalk, see Pugh’s, America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk. [61] Kostas Kofinas, “The First Moonwalk Onstage! Bill Bailey 1955,” 1:46, posted on Sept. 13, 2017, YouTube, https://youtu.be/s3sn0ezbKk8. Cabin in the Sky, Directed by Vincente Minnelli and Busby Berkeley, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1943. [62] All Things Considered, “‘Bad’ Choreographer Remembers Michael Jackson,” NPR, June 26, 2009. [63] Greg Kot, “Putting the Right Sin on Elvis, Jackie,” Chicago Tribune, July 31, 1992. [64] Ed Masley, “It’s Good To Be King,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 15, 2002. [65] Ed Masley, “Elvis may have been the king, but was he first?” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 4, 2004. [67] This is true regarding Prince’s hip and joint injuries: “…Repetitive extreme or high impact actions are likely to cause injury when executed by anyone during the ongoing practice of dance or athletics. Especially without a careful regimen of strength training and warm-ups, as hips are the main axis of all leg movement, they can place intolerable stress on the joints, often resulting in osteoarthritis...” Carla Blank, “Prince: Pain and Dance,” in CounterPunch, May 6, 2016. [68] Janelle Monáe. “Tightrope (feat. Big Boi).” Genius. Accessed April 2018. https://genius.com/Janelle-monae-tightrope-lyrics. [69] MY COMEUP WORLD, “Lil Buck On Getting His First Break Working With Janelle Monáe.” [70] Ibid. [71] For more on vernacular dance, see Marshall and Jean Stearns’s Jazz Dance: the Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968). [72] Caitlin McDevitt, “Janelle Monae: I’m inspired by Obama,” Politico, Feb. 29, 2012. [73] Ibid. "Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis 'Tightrope' Dance" by Dana Venerable ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction: Embodied Arts" by Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson "'Must Be Heavyset': Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies" by Ryan Donovan "Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville" by Jennifer Schmidt "Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis" by Shilarna Stokes "Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis 'Tightrope' Dance" by Dana Venerable www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical Introduction: Embodied Arts "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance History, Musicals, and the Americas 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.

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 Footnotes [i] Fondakowski, Leigh. Feminist Files. Accessed November 10, 2022. https://feminist-files.sounder.fm . 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 Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater 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 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Baron Kelly Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Baron Kelly By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF For Asian American actors, there is a persistent fear of being left out of the diversity conversation entirely, since “diversity” has often been conflated with Black representation only. Black actors Earle Hyman, James Earl Jones, Gloria Foster, and Franchelle Steward Dorn broke ground by playing leading roles in classical and contemporary plays. Joining their ranks, Randall Duk Kim is a Hawaiian-born Chinese-Korean American actor whose work may also be held up as an extraordinary yet under-examined example of Asian American representation. Kim has performed leading roles in the works of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Molière, and Ibsen at institutions like the esteemed New York Shakespeare Festival as well as regional theatres, including the American Conservatory Theater, Guthrie Theater, and his own American Players Theatre, which he founded in Wisconsin in 1979. Among his television and film performances, he is most well-known as the Key Maker in The Matrix Reloaded and Oogway in Kung Fu Panda. Kim starred in the American Place Theatre’s historic Asian American productions of The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon. His Broadway appearances include The King and I (1996), Golden Child (1988), and Flower Drum Song (2002). The following is an edited version of the interview that I conducted with Kim on January 4, 2022. Baron Kelly: Let me start by saying that this is a genuinely incredible honor for me to dialogue with you, Randy. You have been a true inspiration for me and countless others in your work and craft. Randall Duk Kim: That is very kind and gracious of you to say. BK: Let’s start with talking about Earle Ernst at the University of Hawaiʻi when you were a theology major there. RDK: He was the head of the Drama department. And, of course, he was a kabuki expert. He oversaw the censorship program of legitimate Japanese theatre during the American occupation. After the war, Earle was part of the American occupation forces there, and he got to know the kabuki actors and the kabuki theatre. Earl also established The Great Play Cycle at the University of Hawaiʻi. Those works in our dramatic western heritage had a significant impact on me. I became entranced by the great plays’ questions they encompassed. BK: Were you a student actor in the productions, and did that ignite your love of classical drama? RDK: I never had a formal acting class. I jumped right into the work itself. I watched by imitating. I studied under the tutelage of a kabuki master, Oneo Kuroemon II, whom Earl had brought over from Japan. His family is six generations in the kabuki theatre starting in the 18th century. He was passing on centuries of physical and vocal work. In the kabuki tradition, one of the key methods of a student learning anything is imitating someone who’s teaching you specific methods and ways of doing a walk, a gesture, a way of speaking to have the visceral experience in your body, your voice. Another influence was my upbringing as a fundamentalist Baptist and learning my Bible. I had a foothold into Elizabethan speech by using the King James Bible and being familiar with that. In the Bible, you’re dealing with poetic language. BK: Eventually, you left the university, went to New York, and dove into trying to become an actor going to auditions for classical theatre. Did you face any resistance being an Asian American actor auditioning for classical theatre? RDK: No, not really, although I was at a cattle call for a film, and the woman running the call came in the room, saw me, and announced in a booming voice with everyone present, “We don’t need any Orientals. Orientals are not needed for this.” BK: She said “Orientals”? RDK: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I vowed that I was not going to permit myself to be in a situation like that ever again. I was not going to be in a position where either my race or my height would prevent me from doing what I love to do. I was going to prove to people that I could do the job. When I got to New York, I started looking for summer Shakespeare festival work. So, I would send out pictures and resumes and get rejection letters. I finally got hired by the Champlain Shakespeare Festival up in Vermont. I did three summer seasons with them. I also managed to work between summers. I did a couple of stints with the New York Shakespeare Festival. In the meantime, in the city, the American Place Theatre used me. BK: When you talk about the American Place Theatre, are you referring to your work in Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and Year of the Dragon (1974)? The Chickencoop Chinaman was the first play written by an Asian American to be produced professionally in New York. Frank Chin paved the way for playwrights, including David Henry Hwang and Philip Kan Gotanda. From your standpoint, what was the importance of the premieres of Frank Chin’s plays at the American Place Theatre? RDK: Frank is significant. And just a singular and unique voice among playwrights in general, not just as an Asian American playwright but among playwrights. Frank’s voice is of a contemporary poet. I had to wrestle with the language in his work. The character of Tam Lum in Chinaman said things that I would never say in my life. That was a whole new experience for me. I thought the play was out of my league because it was a contemporary work, and I was uncomfortable doing it. The character was verbose and rough. I was doing too much Shakespeare. Frank would say to me, “I want to dirty your mouth.” BK: Randy, Miss Saigon (1991) framed the modern discussion of racial diversity and Asian American representation. It was argued that the production supported the practice of yellowface, casting non-Asians in roles written for Asians, often relying on physical and cultural stereotypes to make broad comments about identity. Slant eyes have also been used in popular culture as a form of erasure, that whiteness is the norm in the US. Because your artistry is also about transformation, were there any feelings you had? RDK: Asian American actors have been underrepresented in the business. Society has got to deal with issues of representation and wrestle with them. One of the best ways the theatre can deal with these issues is to start a multiracial company. Let me say that nobody under the sun would accept me without my doing something with my physical being in doing Falstaff. They would never believe that I was Falstaff without the padding, face, and makeup. An older man who’s overweight. So, I created a vision of how I thought Falstaff could look. BK: This is a nice segue into my next question. When did your interest in the art of makeup and transformation begin? RDK: I got my first makeup kit in the 6th grade. I found an early makeup book called The Last Word in Makeup. And for a while, I carried that around, my little Bible. It was amazing that someone could have the tools to make themselves into another person. And for me, that was like a key. It was a way to step into somebody else’s shoes, to take on somebody else’s life for a time, for a moment, whether it was an older man or a hag or a Quasimodo. It was a magic key. Our eyes can be biased, and I will play with the audience’s bias to take them on a deeper journey into a story and a character’s life that they may not have expected. We’re drawing up lines now, and we’re drawing each other out of our box. BK: Did no one ever approach you about why you transformed your features as part of your craft? RDK: During a summer Shakespeare workshop at the Public Theater, a young Asian American man practically called me a banana, yellow on the outside, white on the inside. He wanted to know why I had to use makeup. As far as being white on the inside, I was educated in the west; I wasn’t educated in the east. I am closer to Plato than I am to Confucius in my whole frame of reference. I played the role of Hamlet at the Guthrie without makeup, but there are certain characters like Falstaff, Shylock, or Puck I have done makeup for because they deserved their own unique look. In my education, these plays are part of my history. Recently, I saw The Lehman Trilogy with Adrian Lester on Broadway. Lester played the brother of two white actors, and no one batted an eye. BK: Asian American actors have been historically underrepresented on the stage and usually have not been allowed to tell their own stories. You have been and continue to be the exception. Randy, you have been the only Asian American actor to build a track record and develop a reputation in many classical roles. Other actors did not follow your path. You are a true anomaly. RDK: We’ve got to get back to the art of acting. The argument is sometimes used, “Well, it’s more truthful to be without makeup.” It’s nonsense. The Greeks used masks, and a lot of truth was spewed out on their stages. So, don’t tell me masks or makeup inhibit the truth. Theatre should be a place for transformation and that our instruments can be conduits for experiences that are greater than we are. We need to develop a racially diverse and genuinely American repertory company. How we cast our stories is an essential part of creating the American culture we want. BK: When you’ve worked with younger actors on Broadway in plays like Golden Child or Flower Drum Song and The King and I, did anyone ask you to share any advice or wisdom? RDK: What I could share was that I want them to find a way to strengthen and expand their imaginations because possibly what’s happening in our time is imaginations are withering into nothing. I don’t know whether there’s a study on our capacity to imagine. And yet, Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. We need to strengthen our imagination somehow to do meaningful work in the theatre. Otherwise, it’s all going to be small, withered, malformed, not healthy, not robust, not as wide-ranging as humankind is. I think. All our stories are rich. BK: I hear you saying that we should encompass the broadest possible human experience. Have you seen courageous casting choices? RDK: I think the most courageous casting choice is to recognize talent regardless of its package. For the actor to communicate to the audience that, “I belong here. I belong in this world.” That’s what’s courageous. The challenge to the actor is to make us believe you’re a Roman. I don’t care what the color of your skin is. You make us believe. Society has to get a grip on itself. Also, I believe the prejudices of the powerbrokers who are casting directors, directors, and producers must be tackled. We must get away from making judgements on a person’s appearance. BK: I think we can both agree that if an actor’s ethnicity aligns with a role whose ethnicity is pertinent to the character in the script, that character should be cast as written. RDK: Yes. BK: Today, many young actors are skimming along the surface of the text without understanding how phrasing plays a large part in speech discipline. The text must live through them. It’s like scoring music. RDK: The best writers manage to take language and almost give the soul a means to express itself. I often use the image of an iceberg. The play itself sits on the top of the iceberg. That’s what you can see and touch. But beneath the iceberg is this vast amount of unknown. And that’s what you’ve got to explore and plummet and find out. BK: You founded the American Players Theatre with your artistic life partners, your wife, Anne Occhiogrosso, and your late business partner, Charles Bright, who had an idea to form a theatre company in Spring Green, Wisconsin. RDK: For fifteen years, we talked about an American classical repertory company. We discovered that cutting a text for whatever reason, whether it’s to get the audience out so they can catch their bus, or whether it’s too long, or whether the scene is repetitious, didn’t make any sense ultimately. We needed to know how the plays worked uncut and conducive to the story in a period that the playwright probably imagined, Ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy, or wherever, to see the story within a context that could perhaps reveal something about the characters living in that world. We needed to start a company to do that kind of work and find out what these great plays say to us. If you already begin to twist it about and manipulate it, you’re not going to learn anything. It’s like a scientist going into an Amazonian village and saying, “Okay. If you dress in jeans, then I’ll observe you.” What are you going to learn from that? So, we needed to do it. By and large, it worked. Audiences sat there thinking, “I understand this. It’s not obscure.” BK: You also had a particular vision to train an acting company. You wanted to form a center for the classics, research, training, and productions. That’s above and beyond just presenting plays. RDK: I wanted to start a school for the actors to study the plays, the playwrights, and the periods in which those plays developed. We hired a superb teacher of martial arts and tai chi. Jerry Gardner was our tai chi teacher. He was a champion kung fu fighter who knew sitting meditation, tai chi, kung fu, and ballet. We were beginning to form a faculty. Then the board came along and said, “No. It’s too costly.” Throw it together, turn it out for the summer, make money, bring in an audience. But the very idea of a quality world repertory company, an American company, couldn’t be had. BK: You had a clarion call for about a decade in this belief for a company. RDK: It was an uphill battle with the board. Every season I felt like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn. I also frequently thought about the description of John the Baptist, the voice in the wilderness. BK: You’ve had many honors in your life, including an Obie for sustained excellence of performance. Currently, you’re participating in the Actors’ Equity Association’s Performing Arts Legacy Project to document your career. How does Randall Duk Kim measure success? RDK: I think I measure it by how well I’ve built a bridge between the past and the present. Has it been a good bridge where the past and the present can meet, see, and hear each other? BK: The legacy and artistry of Randall Duk Kim must not be forgotten. Is there an essence of Randall Duk Kim that you want people to know and always remember? RDK: I would say, “An actor who tried to see clearly.” References Footnotes About The Author(s) Baron Kelly is a four-time Fulbright Scholar and Professor of Theatre in the Theatre and Drama Department at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His teaching of acting has led him to teaching and lecturing residencies in more than a dozen countries on five continents and in twenty American states. Baron has performed internationally for the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain; Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada; National Theatre of Norway; Yermelova Theatre, Moscow, Russia; Constans Theatre, Athens, Greece; Academy Theatre Dublin; Edinburgh Theatre Festival; Bargello, Florence, Italy; among others. Broadway credits include Salome and Electra. Classical and contemporary roles for over 30 of America’s leading regional theatres including the Oregon, Utah, Dallas Fort Worth, and California Shakespeare Festivals; Yale Repertory; the Guthrie; Old Globe San Diego; among others. He has a PhD in Theatre Research from UW Madison and a diploma in Acting from London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lynn Deboeck 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 Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Lynn Deboeck By Published on December 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF BEYOND TEXT: THEATER AND PERFORMANCE IN PRINT AFTER 1900. Jennifer Buckley. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019; Pp. 278. Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 challenges the historiography of print media as we have known it and brings together text and performance practices as symbiotic, rather than mutually exclusive. Taking on the rich and contradictory history of “killing off the Book,” Beyond Text calls out anti-textual artists and their use of print media—not to emphasize hypocrisy, but rather to illuminate text’s enduring life in and around the performance art worlds. Jennifer Buckley highlights that the evolution of text has largely been recorded within essentialist narratives that have made trouble by assuming text to be the opposite of performance because it“ precedes, in time, the process of theatrical production; because writers accord it artistic precedence over production; and because its traditional medium is durable and static while performance is ephemeral and mutable” (10). The physical book of Beyond Text is hard-covered, with the image of Carolee Schneemann on the front, perusing a book with her cat, Kitch, on her lap. The binding of this tome creaks at its initial openings, almost as if it has the first line in our interactions. The nine-inch by six-inch pages, with their copious open margins, allow the reader easier access and a bountiful opportunity for note-taking—indeed, it seems to be encouraged. Rather than simply negating what has been documented about print media’s history and its relationship with performance, Buckley’s deep analysis of each performance artist or group she covers allows us as readers to make the journey beyond text with her by taking up how theatre makers have interacted with and made bookworks or engaged with text-based formats. Her arguments include that the avant-garde anti-textualist movement that is often brought forward in discussions of late twentieth century performance is not just limited but is actively limiting what we can know about our own histories because it has not“encompass[ed] the book arts, which are experiencing yet another boom in yet another era when print is supposed to be dying” (24). The book is divided into five chapters with an introduction and a coda. In her introduction, Buckley uses Big Dance Theater’s bookwork Another Telepathic Thing as an entry point for how we have understood the relationship (or, perhaps more accurately, disdain) between performance art mediums and print matter (she bristles at the exclusionist term ‘the book’). In so doing, she simultaneously calls out those of us who have historically ignored print practices and their role in performance and reveals that in fact, bookworks are experiencing yet another explosion in the here and now (one of many since 1900). Each chapter addresses, in chronological order, the evolution of performance-makers’ relationship with text and print. In chapter 1,“A Place for Seeing,” Beyond Text takes up Edward Gordon Craig’s vision of what the theatre could be and the bookworks he created. Buckley establishes the trajectory of text as non-linear with Craig’s banishment of playwrights and his contradictory use of much older media, such as wood engraving. She examines Craig’s written intentions to “exhibit" and “show” actors what he wanted in performance, rather than resort to speech since he saw words as having only “technical” status—though perhaps useful for notation. Chapter 2, “Scoring Theatre,” takes the notation idea from Craig and connects it to Lothar Schreyer’s ideas around how to score theatre in a way that others could reasonably emulate. Schreyer’s system, Spielgang , was an attempt to do this and Buckley dissects the technique, revealing how it was used in specific performances and how it affected art writ large in its elevation of the notation-system’s use to a spiritual endeavor intended to help create reproducible community works ( Gemeinschaftswerk ). Chapter 3 shifts forward in time yet again, but in this instance, Buckley pulls the thread of community works forward to look at a theatre collective in lieu of individuals. The Living Theatre and their publication negotiations are detailed in this chapter, highlighting how ironically Julian Beck and Judith Malina used the printed works they published commercially to establish their agenda of anti-texualist and anarchist performance principals. Chapter 4 returns to an individual, Carolee Schneemann, and is titled “The Body in the Book” for her ability to“see and articulate the conceptual and material intersections between her visual artworks, performances, and publications” (126). From Schneemann’s Interior Scroll to her work with the Beau Geste Press, Buckley traverses the evolution of print media through the microcosm of a single performer/art-maker to demonstrate a collaborative kinetic aesthetics that invites participation from the reader/viewer. Chapter 5 also investigates the use of participation of spectators in the immersive work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Códices . Buckley considers how his codices serve as border sites and kits for participants to encounter the “other” in “participatory identity rituals” as “good bordercrossers” and as “models for the usefully creative appropriation of others’art” (195). In her Coda, Buckley firmly asserts (which, by this point, she no longer has to) that print matter will have a future relationship with performance, the shape of which she does not wish to speculate about. It is telling that a full 15% of the book—the remainder after the Coda and before the bibliography—is notes. For those with the intention, time, and appetite to delve into this printed work further, Buckley provides fodder from her extensive archival research. Beyond Text teaches that text work and live performance are“no longer locked in a Darwinian struggle for precedence, [but] coexist under the rubric of the performatic...” (197) This monograph provides a valuable contribution to the fields of Performance Studies, Print Media and disciplines that straddle the two. As I closed this book, my thoughts drifted back to one of Craig’s performance descriptions:“‘And then a pause... a perfect balanced thought is poised before us, and all is still... All is accomplished. Silence. All rests...’” (36) Revelatory and well-researched, Beyond Text ends with so much potential energy vibrating within and beyond its covers and performance histories—waiting to be experienced again and again. References Buckley, Jennifer. Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Footnotes About The Author(s) Dr. Lynn Deboeck is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She earned her PhD in Theatre and a Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies from the University of Kansas. Her research interests include reproductive women on stage, gender and representation in performance, pedagogy in higher education and feminist theatre. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Natka Bianchini 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 Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Natka Bianchini By Published on March 9, 2014 Download Article as PDF Alan Schneider, one of the most important American directors of the twentieth century, was know for being a "playwright's director." He believed it was his responsibility to interpret the script as a faithful representation of the playwright's intent. For this reason, so many major playwrights [ . . . ] [scribd id=211700074 key=key-171aa737vjlfcqtl6q57 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.

Jennifer Schmidt 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 Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Jennifer Schmidt By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF by Jennifer Schmidt The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Belle of Mayfair, a musical comedy composed by Leslie Stuart with book by Basil Hood, Charles Brookfield, and Cosmo Hamilton, premiered in London in 1906. The comedy was loosely based on Romeo and Juliet, which did not prevent it from including a number called “Why Do They Call Me A Gibson Girl?” commenting on the American fashion craze sparked by Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrations. The lyrics for the song instructed the listener on how to “affect” the Gibson style: Wear a blank expression, And a monumental curl, And walk with a bend in your back, Then they will call you a Gibson Girl. … The girls affect a style As they pass by With down-cast eye, And a bored and languid smile, … They do their best, for they’ve seen the pictures. [Chorus: They’ve missed the point of the Dana picture,] Which are intended, don’t you see, For all in perfect type should be.[1] For the New York production, which ran from December 1906 through March 1907, Valeska Suratt, a milliner from Indiana, used the role and her dressmaking skills to launch her acting career. Commenting on the hit song for the production’s Baltimore transfer, a review in The Sun exclaims that “Miss Surratt…looks like she had just stepped out from one of Charles Dana’s $1,000 sketches.” The reviewer also notes that the chorus featured a different look than the typical “chubby chorus girls,” stating, “Their places were well filled by tall, willowy creatures, called Gibson girls, who wore the most stunning gowns imaginable and who lifted up their chins in preference to their toes.”[2] This new, aloof physicality and the uniformity sent up by the lyrics of the song—“for all in perfect type should be”—correspond to a general trend in depictions of women in the United States. In Imaging American Women, Martha Banta argues that “the woman as image was one of the [Progressive] era’s dominant cultural tics.”[3] The allegorical figure of Columbia, for instance, the young attractive woman representing America, appeared with great frequency during this period in political cartoons or as a brand symbol, such as in Columbia Records and Columbia Pictures. Other female allegorical figures towered over the United States in the form of the Statue of Liberty and the 65-foot Statue of the Republic at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition or graced the facades of buildings like the Four Continents statues at the United States Customs House.[4] Matching these stately figures were Gibson’s pervasive drawings of narrow-waisted, large-busted women with upswept hair, button noses, and distant gazes. As Adams, Keene, and Koella discuss in Seeing the American Woman, the Girl was “unindividualized”: “she generally looked down or away…or she danced and promenaded in lines of similar beings.”[5] Thus, as the United States entered the twentieth century, the types of women presented to the public in mass media and entertainment were often idealized, generalized, and detached. With the cultural turn to the visual, “woman as image” became increasingly separated from the living, breathing, individual bodies of women. As images of the American Girl proliferated, however, solo female performers in vaudeville offered alternatives to the disembodied anonymity of these aloof female types. In particular, the practice of mimicry allowed performers like Gertrude Hoffmann, Cissie Loftus, and Elsie Janis to break the “girl” mold with their vividly individualized impersonations of celebrities. Hoffmann, Loftus, and Janis brought attention to the manufactured nature of womanhood in the public sphere through an embodied form of imitation, which allowed them critical, creative space to comment on the celebrity culture of their time. The malleability of their form, in which they embodied several figures at once, gave them an unusual freedom from the strict types and categories for female performers, and their abilities as shape-shifters emphasized a bodily rather than an artificial or mechanical means of reproduction. In response to the commercialization and replication of the female image in the Progressive Era female mimics in vaudeville countered the mass-produced, male-created depictions of women, seen in magazines and chorus lines, with their own unruly reproductions.[6] At the beginning of the twentieth century, mimicry became a highly popular act on variety stages, and while both male and female mimics thrived in vaudeville, women especially dominated the field. A retrospective Variety article from 1948, titled “Vaudeville: Mimics,” reveals the prevalence of female mimics. The author, Joe Laurie, Jr., recalls the “heyday” of mimicry on the vaudeville stage, claiming that “There was an epidemic of imitations in vaudeville from 1905 to 1930.”[7] In a list of the “great artists” of mimicry, the majority are women, and of the artists he mentions who created original material for their acts, all five are women: Cissie Loftus, Juliet Delf, Elsie Janis, Gertrude Hoffmann, and Venita Gould. These mimics “used their own special material,” and Laurie, Jr. considered this to be a superior practice than simply copying material from the acts they were imitating. The majority of imitations in vaudeville, however, like the Gibson acts, consisted of more direct copying. The success of Suratt’s Gibson act, for instance, lay primarily with the gown—in her ability (as a dressmaker) to copy, make, and wear the “$1,000” look. Thus, while the Gibson Girl moved from two-dimensions to three, the emphasis remained on the visual, a priority that was in keeping with the period’s image obsession. In her book, Women and the American Theatre, Faye Dudden discusses theater’s turn to the visual, arguing that the commercialized theater at the end of the nineteenth century was part of an entertainment industry that created a “new kind of public realm.”[8] This new public realm “was not concerned with politics or community interests, but rather aimed at private profit and derived its publicness from the breadth of its marketing ambitions.”[9] While female audience members made an enormous impact on the growth of the mass entertainment market, the period also saw the mainstream success of the “leg business.” This type of entertainment, designed for the male gaze and formerly prevalent only in entertainments for working-class men, became standard fare in vaudeville and on Broadway. Perhaps the best theatrical example of the new public realm and its exploitation of feminized bodies and images was Florenz Ziegfeld’s “Follies,” the annual musical revue that ran from 1907 through 1931 and centered on its spectacular displays of chorus girls. In Seeing the American Woman, Adams et al. discuss the chorus girl as an incarnation of the Gibson Girl, explaining that Ziegfeld “sought primarily the Gibson look for his chorus girl.”[10] Sharing the Girl’s elegant but undifferentiated appeal, these choruses likewise represented youthful beauty and vigor, were vehicles for displaying the latest fashions, and were meant for replication, requiring hordes of women to fill the ranks. Often the extravagant costumes worn by Ziegfeld’s choruses functioned more like scenery, explicitly framing the women as objects and set pieces. Further emphasizing their conformity, the choreography comprised precision line dancing and “geometric formations” that, Susan Glenn argues, “mirrored the early twentieth-century industrial culture” and turned the chorus into a “disciplined female mass.”[11] The “new public realm” also corresponded to the explosion of print media, which, like commercialized theater, increasingly relied on exploitation of the female image. Matthew Schneirov dates the beginning of the “new era” in magazine publishing from 1893, “the year S. S. McClure established McClure’s” as well as “the year that Frank Munsey cut the price of his magazine to ten cents—well below the cost of unit production—and made his profit through advertising.”[12] Other magazines quickly followed Munsey’s example, and advertising became the chief means of profit, driving down prices for periodical publications and making weekly and monthly illustrated magazines affordable for a broad swath of consumers in the United States. Like the magazines they funded, advertisements became increasingly visual, cutting down on text and relying on imagery, especially that of young, attractive women, to sell their products. The replicable nature of the Gibson Girl led her to be the perfect tool for selling the latest fashions. The Girl, according to Martha Patterson, “created the first national modeling of the one right look,” and walking down the streets of an American city in the early 1900s meant encountering a sea of Gibson Girls, wearing the uniform of the New Woman.[13] Some of the Girl’s attributes disseminated progressive ideas about womanhood; she was often shown as independent, athletic, and assertive. The popular magazines, in which the Girl appeared, sold women the possibility of refashioning themselves into these sophisticated beings. Of course, by exploiting this attractive image to sell products, the advertiser’s promise of greater freedom led to greater conformity through consumption. Moreover, it was clear that her independence lasted only as long as the period of single life before marriage, and as the model for white beauty and sophistication, she also perpetuated ideas of racial superiority. In the summer of 1907, after Suratt made a hit as a Gibson Girl in The Belle of Mayfair, several vaudeville bills featured imitations of her and the Gibson aesthetic. The Broadway Theatre featured “a new Gibson girl travesty,” and Eddie Foy’s show, “The Orchid,” at the Herald Square Theatre added “a new… imitation of Miss Valeska Suratt, the ‘Gibson Girl,’ by Miss Laura Guerin.”[14] Most notably, the well-known impersonator, Gertrude Hoffmann, added a Suratt imitation into her program. The common vaudeville practice of copying coupled with the viral commercial popularity of Gibson’s drawings—spreading from postcards, to calendars, to cigarette cases, and wallpaper—made the Girl’s appearance on stage rather inevitable. Responding to these trends, imitations in vaudeville and musical comedy both exploited and satirized the superficiality and conformity in the Girl’s appeal. For her Gibson imitation, Gertrude Hoffmann, who used elaborate costumes and make-up to create the effect of her impersonations, copied the gown made famous by Suratt. A review of her performance dwells on the look of her costume: Miss Hoffman [sic], whose eccentric dancing and imitations nightly win much applause, also costumes her part smartly….for the first, of The Gibson Girl, she wore a black velvet Princess of the design worn by Valeska Surratt [sic] in The Belle of Mayfair, with it’s [sic] tight fit and deep V cutout back and front, the fluffiest of fluffy Titian hair. As an exaggeration and burlesque of the type of girl with a kangaroo walk and outlandish poses it was great.[15] Although the review pays close attention to her dress and hair, it also describes her act in decidedly embodied terms. In addition to celebrity impersonations, Hoffmann was known for her elaborate imitations of dance, such as her famous version of Salome.[16] Whereas reviews of Suratt’s performance describe her, in passive, visual terms, as a “living Gibson picture” or “living replica,”[17] the Hoffmann reviewer notes the dancer’s exaggerated movements, which provide a burlesque of the Girl’s unnatural posture. Gibson drew his female figures with an “S”-shaped spine—the result of combining a narrow waist with a large bust and hips. The corsets of the period also emphasized these features, forcing a posture that humorists likened to the curved back of a kangaroo.[18] Hoffmann’s “kangaroo walk” and “outlandish poses” thus satirized the consequences of an actual woman’s body attempting to imitate an impossible ideal. Hoffmann brought further physicality to her imitations by making her costume changes a conspicuous part of the act. An October, 22 1907 review in The Sun describes her practice of changing in full view of the audience: She cavorts back of the scene and is revealed behind a web-like screen changing costumes for dear life with the help of several maids. In a moment she flashes out as George Cohan and gives a rattling good imitation. Behind the screen she goes anon, emerging in the glare of the spotlight as Valeska Suratt singing her ‘Gibson Girl’ melody. In a minute she is Anna Held singing her nonsensational ‘eye’ lyric, and then with another flip of skirt and change of wig she is funny Eddie Foy.[19] Making the frenzied mechanics of her quick changes visible to the audience, Hoffmann exposed the labor behind her visual transformations. This choice, Susan Glenn argues, allowed Hoffmann to “deliberately establish her own presence within each imitation.”[20] It also made a spectacle out of the process of becoming an Anna Held or Eddie Foy, belying any sense of ease behind the elaborate costumes, make-up, and personalities seen in vaudeville through a display of the physical effort behind the curtain. Much of this effort was expended in donning the various trappings of gender presentation. In the space of a few costume changes, Hoffmann represented the masculine figure of George Cohan, two feminine beauty idols, Suratt and Anna Held, and an imitation of the male comedian, Eddie Foy, in ballerina drag. Ending with Foy, as another reviewer comments, made for an effective finale: “to the surprise of the house in the last character, Eddie Foy, in pink tights, ballet skirts, the funny little hat and ostrich walk, with the Eddie Foy smile; she had it all down fine.”[21] After praising Hoffmann’s imitation of Foy’s comedic physicality, the reviewer cannot help but note that she also wore the costume better: “Foy…would find it difficult to imitate Miss Hoffman’s splendid figure.” By highlighting Hoffmann’s feminine physique, the reviewer rushes to reinforce the gender expectations which Hoffmann’s act disrupts. Despite the prevalence of drag in vaudeville, especially female drag, this indicates a discomfort with Hoffmann’s quick assumption of several, differing presentations of gender. Male impersonation by women on stage, such as in breeches roles, has primarily been acceptable as a way for actresses to show off their bodies. Hoffmann follows this rule by choosing Foy’s ballerina act to copy. Like the on-stage costume changes, however, her choice also problematizes artificial markers of gender, taking a typically feminine garment like pink tights and using them to signify a male performer. Moreover, Hoffmann’s athletic physical presence in these acts, which reviewers describe in zoological terms, makes her dangerously masculine. Like other fearfully athletic New Women, Hoffmann displayed an unnerving ability to take on male as well as female attributes. Femininity, of course, has often been equated with reproduction, and the prevalence of female mimics in vaudeville opened questions about the cultural assumptions surrounding women’s “natural” capacity for imitation. With the ingrained associations between mass culture and femininity, Susan Glenn argues, female mimics exacerbated the period’s anxiety surrounding authenticity: “The mimics on the vaudeville stage…could be seen as personifications of a feminized urban consumer culture where being and imitating were one and the same.”[22] Like with the Gibson Girl, advertising used the reproducibility of the female image as a promise to women that they could buy their way to “the one right look.”[23] By impersonating various stars, the mimics encouraged the imitative behavior fostered in celebrity product endorsements, for instance, which were growing in popularity at the time. Want to look like Lillian Russell? Buy Recamier cosmetics. Want to be like Sarah Bernhardt? Buy Pear’s Soaps.[24] Providing a model for successful imitation, the mimics reinforced these attitudes. They did not, however, imitate only the beauty idols of the day. Instead, they often went in the opposite direction, transforming from lovely young women into the absurd, excessive, or racially-coded personalities of the vaudeville stage. In their acts, mimics could play a range of roles, male and female, and surprise audiences with their transformation from a demure young girl into the brassiest of vaudeville personalities. A look at the careers of Hoffman, Loftus, and Janis indicates how the mimic, as solo performer, had artistic control over her performance, and though she based her act on the personalities of other performers, she was free to interpret them according to her own design. This, as Glenn contends, gave female mimics a powerful role: “that of the artist-intellectual who both participated in and critically evaluated the cultural practices of the day.”[25] Mimicry afforded these women the chance to work in a manner similar to the caricaturists of popular magazines, and like caricature they used exaggeration, distortion, and their own unique style to offer a critical and parodic perspective on popular culture. Unlike caricature, however, the mimics’ embodied form of parody went beyond surface-level depictions of women and in return, gave them an unlikely freedom from the restrictive image of the “Girl” in American culture. Hoffmann’s practices as a mimic demonstrate how, as opposed to the photographs of star performers in mass circulation, the portraits offered by mimics were living and breathing imitations—a manual form of reproduction in a mechanical age. Two of the most famous mimics of the time, Cissie Loftus and Elsie Janis similarly emphasized physicality in their acts. Unlike Hoffmann, they eschewed the use of make-up or costume, but highlighted their natural, bodily abilities as mimics. In an interview, Loftus explained that “the born mimic is very independent of such aids to art as costumes, wigs, and makeup,” and Janis, in a separate interview, agreed: “Make-ups do not trouble me. I rely entirely on the inflection of the voice and the copying of action and gesture. That to my mind is the true art of mimicry.”[26] The desire to defend mimicry as an “art” and to stress the inherent skills of the “born mimic” relate to the broader cultural unease associated with imitation. The readiness with which the personalities of other performers could be replicated, challenged the integrity of both live performances, star and mimic, and placed mimicry in an ambiguous relationship to authenticity. Indeed, the vogue for mimicry coincided with modernist cultural anxieties over the impacts of mechanical reproduction in the age of the machine. Inventions from the phonograph to the photograph to the ready-to-wear shirtwaist blurred the lines between imitation and authenticity in an urban, industrialized society. As Walter Benjamin would later theorize in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the “criterion of authenticity,” central to the function of “art objects,” began to break down, as, with the advent of photography “to an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.”[27] Unlike mechanical forms of reproduction like film or photography, however, mimicry was a form of imitation that preserved some of the “auratic” quality Benjamin ascribes to the traditional art object. In interviews, Janis would “compare herself to a newspaper cartoonist,” Glenn notes, who “exaggerates certain characteristics in order to give a more striking air of reality to the finished picture.”[28] The caricaturist and critic Max Beerbohm also makes this comparison in his review of the mimic J. Arthur Bleackley. Beerbohm scoffs at the mimics who give “exact faithful reproduction[s]” of their subjects, because “an exact reproduction of the real thing can never be a satisfactory substitute.” Rather, he writes, the mimic should have a critical perspective: “The proper function of the mimic is, of course, like that of the parodist in words, or of the caricaturist in line, to exaggerate the salient points of his subject so that we can, whilst we laugh at a grotesque superficial effect, gain sharper insight into the subject’s soul, or, more strictly, behold that soul as it appears to the performer himself.”[29] Beerbohm’s insistence that mimicry can reveal the “soul” of both the mimic and the subject articulates the desire of his age to find art and humanity within reproduction and to validate mimicry as an art with “aura.” Moreover, mimicry constituted an embodied form of parody, and unlike most newspaper cartoons, the creators were likely to be women. While both Loftus and Janis had long and varied careers in entertainment, their practices and stage personas as mimics had many similarities. Cecilia “Cissie” Loftus was the daughter of famous performers on the British music hall stage, and in 1891, at the age of 15, Loftus began performing her imitations at music halls to instant acclaim. She made her New York debut in 1895 at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, and although she continued to perform on both sides of the Atlantic, she centered her career in the United States. When Elsie Janis began performing, also at a very young age, she was hailed as “the American Cissie Loftus.”[30] With the encouragement and guidance of her mother Jennie, the quintessential stage-mother, Janis was touring the vaudeville circuits by ten and starring in musical comedies by sixteen. Both rising to fame as girls, Loftus and Janis’s effectiveness as mimics stemmed in part from their youthful, feminine personas, which served to heighten the transformation into their various subjects. Known for her astonishingly wide vocal range and deft physical caricature, Loftus would string together impressions of such myriad acts as the following from a 1908 program: Marie Dressler singing ‘A Great Big Girl Like Me,’ Hattie Williams and her ‘Experience’ song, Caruso as he sings in a phonograph, George Walker singing ‘Bon Bon Buddie,’ Ethel Barrymore reading the letter from the boys in ‘Sunday,’ Bert Williams singing ‘Nobody,’ and dancing the ludicrous figure that is appended, and finally Nazimova in a scene from ‘A Doll’s House’ follow in order.[31] With a range of impersonations from vaudeville, opera, and the legitimate theater, Loftus exhibited the flexibility of her voice, which could capture, for example, the specific quality of the opera tenor, Enrico Caruso, as recorded on a phonograph. That her voice stretched to low vocal ranges added novelty and transgression to her act. Reviews of her performances, however, stressed the simplicity of her acts. A notice in the Chicago Daily Tribune describes Loftus’s charm as stemming from her ingenue-like demeanor: “A dainty winsomeness, supplemented by a sense of genuine humor, the deft touch of the artist, and a mimicry that never in any analysis could be construed into coarseness, was the secret of her popularity.”[32] Despite the sometimes provocative subject matter of her impersonations—like minstrel songs or Nazimova’s Nora—Loftus, as the Tribune is eager to confirm, maintained an image of maidenly propriety. Her decision to perform without make-up played into her girlish appeal. Max Beerbohm notes this effect in his comments on Loftus: “It seemed so strange, that neglect of convention. To be behind footlights and not rouged! Yes, hers was a success of contrast. She was like a daisy in the window of Solomon’s.”[33] Beerbohm’s language evokes a striking comparison between Loftus’s simple, natural artistry—like that of a daisy—and the commercial spectacle of vaudeville likened to a flashy department store window. The critical response to Loftus reveals a difference between the superficial representations of the typical vaudeville act and the embodied nature of Loftus’s mimetic skill. Her style of mimicry surpassed artificial or technical means of imitation to get beneath the skin of her subjects, and thus, beyond the innocent appeal of Loftus’s unrouged face, her decision to forego makeup contradicted advertisements that sold the idea of transformation through consumption (i.e. buying the right beauty products). Moreover, her cultivation of a simple, “dainty” persona, gave her, conversely, significant career versatility, allowing her to experiment with more rebellious personalities as a mimic, or as an actress, to play androgynous roles, such as Peter Pan. Elsie Janis, one of the first American women to get her start in vaudeville through mimicry, similarly maintained a girlish persona to accompany her mimetic talent. From childhood, Janis displayed a natural capacity for capturing the voices and gestures of others. She was rumored to give excellent impromptu impersonations, a skill which she reportedly demonstrated before President William McKinley in 1898, when she was invited to perform at the White House. After performing a few songs, recitations, and imitations of Anna Held and May Irwin, Janis surprised the guests with an impersonation of President McKinley, followed by imitations of “members of the United States Senate, the Justices of the Supreme Court (tripping over their robes), and the stereotypical national mannerisms of some of the assembled ambassadors.”[34] As with Loftus, audiences responded to the contrast, both charming and subversive, of a young girl imitating the mannerisms of mature men and women. One reviewer of her early performances commented, “It might seem incongruous for a child to evoke mental portraits of buxom, beautiful women for an audience. But Elsie’s inflections, gestures, and postures, her duplication of the star’s mannerisms, created a perfect illusion every time.”[35] Despite his reassurance about Janis’s talent, the author’s tone reveals a certain unease with the effect of her impressions, and if the incongruity between a girl portraying buxom women was unsettling, then the difference between the young Elsie and the powerful men she caricatured could only be more so. Janis’s supposed innocence, however, also made her transgressions of power and gender easier to digest. A review of Janis’s September 10, 1923 appearance at the Palace indicates this effect. The author, Mark Henry, is filled with admiration, explaining that he “has reviewed Miss Janis many times, but the pleasure is all his, and if anyone should get a laurel wreath, a gold medal or any other recognition hereafter, it certainly is ‘Little Elsie.’”[36] Even though Janis was 34 at the time of this review, Henry still uses the nickname, “Little Elsie.” Because of the close relationship, both personal and business, between Janis and her mother, Elsie did not marry until after her mother’s death in 1931. Thus “Little Elsie” maintained the image of maidenhood well into maturity, and her act continued to rely on the pleasing transformation from “winsome” girl into crude and brash performer. Henry describes her as “the only woman in the world who can swear, do it with refinement, and make you like her,”[37] excusing her mannish behavior through her feminine charm. With her capacity for creative interpretation, Janis famously added “idiosyncratic combinations” of impersonations to her act.[38] These combinations included “[George M.] Cohan singing one of his songs out of the corner of his mouth; Eddie Foy doing a clog dance; Ethel Barrymore doing Fanny Brice; and Sarah Bernhardt singing ‘Swanee.’”[39] As this description from Armond Fields indicates, Janis’s comedic talent lay in jumbling the famous performers of the day into ludicrous juxtapositions. To do so, it is worth noting, she flexed her virtuosity as an embodied performer, mixing the already intertwined fields of song, dance, comedy, and theater on the vaudeville stage into further entanglement. The effusive Mark Henry of the 1923 Palace review provides another example of this kind of celebrity jumble. He considered her “rendition of ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas,’ as different artistes would sing it” to be “a masterpiece.”[40] Although this review may be hyperbolic, Janis clearly had a propensity for parodying the vaudeville stage, which thrived on the big personalities of its stars. Such pronounced types were ripe for mockery, and by easily mixing and matching the mannerisms of stars, Janis’s act highlighted the way in which the celebrity culture surrounding her rewarded strong personalities. For herself, however, she cultivated an image of the all-American girl;[41] she was a New Woman freed from the pages of a magazine to sendup the star-crazed culture. Especially for attractive young women like Loftus and Janis, simply the act of presenting solo, comic material on the vaudeville stage was a risky move.[42] There was a stark divide in the cultural ethos between beauty and comedy, and most female comedians in vaudeville compromised their femininity in some way in order to succeed as comics. For instance, Florenz Ziegfeld stated that his audiences expected “girls and laughter,”[43] but the subtext of that statement was, of course, that an act consisted of either “girls” or “laughter.” An act was either one of his spectacles composed for the male gaze or a comedy act in which the performer, if female, sacrificed any pretensions to beauty. Often this was achieved with a racial mask, such as Fanny Brice’s Yiddishisms and May Irwin’s “coon songs,” or by making reference to their failure to conform to beauty standards, such as the comedian Trixie Friganza’s jokes about her large build and failed diets. With mimicry, Loftus and Janis found a way to be both feminine and funny. Not only did they maintain reputations of demur womanhood while living public lives, they were also able to inhabit a range of more transgressive personalities in their acts while keeping a stable identity as “legitimate” actresses. They were not immune from the racism and xenophobia of the vaudeville stage: like May Irwin, whom she was imitating, Janis sang “coon songs,” taking advantage of the same racially-based humor. But the chameleon nature of her act gave her the privilege to separate herself from the performance. Indeed, Loftus and Janis exploited the difference between their identities as pretty white women and the ethnic stereotypes or outsized personalities they imitated to prove their skill as mimics. That they chose to capture their subjects without the artificial means of make-up constituted an unusual move to eschew superficial means of representation on the vaudeville stage. That they did it so successfully only further demonstrated the inherently artificial nature of cultural representation in vaudeville. Occasionally, battles broke out between vaudeville performers and their imitators, which exacerbated questions of authenticity. Hoffmann and Eva Tanguay, for instance, engaged in a well-publicized feud in 1908 over who could give the best performance of Eva Tanguay, the original or the imitator.[44] The interpretive flare that the mimics brought to each imitation also made it possible for the imitator to be imitated. At the beginning of her career, for instance, Janis always included of few of Loftus’s impressions in her act. Indeed, Loftus’s imitations were so well-known that several performers imitated Loftus’s imitations of themselves. This practice turned competitive when Loftus and Letty Lind became embroiled in a “dancing war” in London, which ended with Loftus adding an “impression of Lind imitating Loftus imitating Lind to her own act at the Palace” in 1894.[45] A similar battle of Loftus imitations occurred in Louisville in 1902 without the presence of Loftus herself. Since managers often liked to arrange programs so that a star would be performing in the same program as a mimic who impersonated her, it was not unusual that Elsie Janis was performing on the same bill as one of her frequent subjects, Josephine Sabel. Sabel, however, was also performing an impression of Loftus’s imitation of herself at the time. Janis took advantage of this by announcing that she would be giving an “imitation of Josephine Sabel in her imitation of Cissie Loftus giving an imitation of her.”[46] After receiving loud applause for this act, Janis brought Sabel back out on stage, and together they performed an encore of the “Loftus imitation” for the audience. With dueling imitations like these, the acts were no longer about best representing another star’s performance but about valorizing mimicry as a feat in itself. Their battle, therefore, became a virtuosic display of imitative embodiment, the movements back and forth demonstrating each star’s ability to maintain control over representations of herself. By copying themselves to a ridiculous extent, however, they also lampooned the reproducibility of popular performance, and, as each iteration of “Sabel” or “Janis as Sabel” or “Janis as Sabel as Loftus as Sabel” became further abstracted from the original performance, they pointed to the inauthenticity within forms of representation that replicated women’s bodies or images. Unlike the passive, uniform representations of women in magazines or chorus lines, they maintained agency over the act of replication, presenting themselves as accomplished parodists and critical participants in popular culture. Throughout their careers, mimics like Hoffmann, Loftus, and Janis displayed a canny understanding of women’s place in the culture of popular entertainment, and they used their imitations to undermine the expectations surrounding beauty, comedy, and women’s bodies. Perhaps the reliance on spectacle in Hoffmann’s case or the preservation of conventional femininity by Loftus and Janis limited their ability to make radical or political statements—their acts were light satires rather than biting critiques—but their careers demonstrated the opportunities that mimicry presented for experimenting with and embodying different types, personalities, and gender roles. Beyond the range of their performances, their creative interpretations also fought back against the superficialities of feminized consumer culture. Unlike the images of celebrities and the “American Girl” in magazines and advertisements, their mimicry pierced beneath the skin, destabilizing the artificial representations of women in mass media and entertainment by drawing three-dimensional portraits and caricatures with the body as image-maker. Their acts thus exemplified the cultural and political potentials of embodied performance, taking advantage of the live, moving body as a tool for creating original, critical, and “auratic” parodies of popular culture. Jennifer Schmidt is a teacher, scholar, dramaturg, and performer. In 2018, she received a Doctor of Fine Arts degree in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from Yale School of Drama. Her research traces the history of the one-woman show in America, focusing on women who write and perform monologue-based solo shows. Schmidt received the American Theater and Drama Society’s Emerging Scholar Award in 2015 and has presented papers at ATHE, ASTR, Theatre Symposium, and the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Her writing has appeared in Etudes and HowlRound Theatre Commons. In the fall of 2019, she will be joining the faculty of Hanover College as Assistant Professor of Theatre. [1] “Why Do They Call Me A Gibson Girl?” The Bystander, October 10, 1906, Vol. 12 no. 149, 83, https://books.google.com/books?id=yvERAAAAYAAJpg=PT32#v=onepageqf=false (accessed 29 January 2019). [2] “ ‘The Belle’ At Academy,” The Sun. (1837-1993), Nov 13, 1906, https://search.proquest.com/docview/537283401?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019). [3] Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia UP, 1987), xxviii. Emphasis original. [4] In Strange Duets (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), Kim Marra discusses the Montana Silver Statue, another allegorical statue at the World’s Columbian Exhibition, which presented “Justice” modeled after the actress Ada Rehan. That these statues were sometimes modeled on famous actresses suggests a cycle of influence between theater and visual media, with the “American Girl” type moving from two-dimensional magazine prints, to living portrayals on stage, and back to three-dimensional images cast in metal and stone. [5] Katherine H. Adams, Michael L. Keene, and Jennifer C. Koella, Seeing the American Woman: 1880-1920 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Co., 2012), 84. [6] While in other contexts, the term "female mimic" might refer to a drag performer, such as Julian Eltinge, who mimicked females in his act, I use the term to refer to female performers. Throughout the essay then, "female mimics" refers to women who performed imitations of celebrities of all genders. [7] Joe Laurie Jr., “Vaudeville: Mimics,” Variety, Vol. 170, no. 11 (May 19, 1948): 52, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1285922332?pq-origsite=summonaccountid=15172 [8] Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American theatre: actresses and audiences, 1790-1870 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), 182. [9] Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 182. [10] Adams, Keene, Koella, Seeing the American Woman, 77. [11] Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000), caption to image 21. [12] Matthew Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America 1893-1914 (New York: Columbia, UP, 1994), 4-5. [13] Martha H. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 33. [14] “Beginning of Summer Season,” New York Times (1857-1922), May 26, 1907, https://search.proquest.com/docview/96730772?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019); “Roof Gardens Open,” New York Tribune (1900-1910), Jun 2, 1907, https://search.proquest.com/docview/571882732?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019). [15] Cady Whaley, “The Cohans,” The Billboard (Archive: 1894-1960), Jun 29, 1907, 10-11, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1031381111?accountid=15172. [16] For further discussion of Hoffmann’s dance impersonations see Glenn, Female Spectacle, and Sunny Stalter-Pace, “Gertrude Hoffmann’s Lawful Piracy: ‘A Vision of Salome’ and the Russian Season and Transatlantic Production Impersonations,” Theatre Symposium, Vol. 25 (2017): 37-48, 110. [17] “Modernized Romeo; Up-To-Date Juliet,” New York Times (1857-1922), Dec 04, 1906, https://search.proquest.com/docview/96609309?accountid=15172; “She Won’t Copy That Gown Again,” Detroit Free Press (1858-1922), Jun 06, 1907, https://search.proquest.com/docview/ 564061242?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019). [18] Ruth Turner Wilcox, Five Centuries of American Costume (Mineola, NY: Dover Publishers, 2004), 146. [19] “Vaudeville At Maryland," The Sun (1837-1993), Oct 22, 1907, https://search.proquest.com/docview/537464261?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019). [20] Glenn, Female Spectacle, 76. [21] Whaley, “The Cohans.” [22] Glenn, Female Spectacle, 81. [23] Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 33. [24] Daniel Delis Hill, Advertising to the American Woman, 1900-1999 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 29. [25] Glenn, Female Spectacle, 95. [26] Loftus quoted in “The Art of Cecilia Loftus,” The Billboard, May 16, 1925; Elsie Janis, “Elsie Janis Tells the True Art of Mimicry,” The Sun (1837-1993), Aug 08, 1915, https://search.proquest.com/docview/534100838?accountid=15172 (accessed 29 January 2019). [27] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn, (Shocken/Random House ed. Hannah Arendt), https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm (accessed 1 February 2019). [28] Janis quoted in Glenn, Female Spectacle, 77. [29] Max Beerbohm, “A Play and a Mimic,” The Saturday Review, June 11, 1904: 749, https://search.proquest.com/docview/9532068?pq-origsite=summonaccountid=15172. [30] Lee Alan Morrow, Elsie Janis: A Compensatory Biography, Dissertation, 1988, 57. [31] “News of the Theaters,” Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1922), Apr 09, 1908, https://search.proquest.com/docview/173390463?accountid=15172. [32] “ ‘Cissie’ Loftus is More than ‘Cecilia’,” Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1922), Jun 22, 1902, https://search.proquest.com/docview/173068991?accountid=15172. [33] Max Beerbohm quoted in John Anderson, “Miss Cecilia Loftus,” Harper's Bazaar 71, no. 2710 (June 1938): 52-53, 114-115, 120, 126. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1832505976?accountid=15172. [34] Morrow, Elsie Janis, 24. [35] Irene Corbally Kuhn, “Elsie Janis, the one-woman U.S.O. of World War I, is gone,” in Slide, Selected Vaudeville Criticism (Metchuen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1988), 111. [36] Mark Henry, “This Week’s Reviews of Vaudeville Theaters From Coast to Coast by Special Wire: B.F. Keith’s Palace, N.Y.” The Billboard, 35, no. 37 (Sep 15, 1923): 16-17, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1031707084?accountid=15172. [37] Henry, “This Week’s Reivews.” [38] Armond Fields, Women Vaudeville Stars (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Company, 2006), 159. [39] Fields, Women Vaudeville Stars, 159. [40] Henry, “This Week’s Reviews.” [41] See Deanna Toten Beard, "A Doughgirl with the Doughboys: Elsie Janis, “The Regular Girl,” and the Performance of Gender in World War I Entertainment," Theatre History Studies 33 (2014): 56-70, for a discussion of Janis’s cultivation of her image as an all-American Girl who could be “one of the guys” with soldiers in WWI. [42] Glenn, Female Spectacle, 43. [43] Glenn, Female Spectacle, 48. [44] Glenn, Female Spectacle, 79. [45] Catherine Hindson, Female Performance Practice on the Fin-de-Siecle Popular Stages of London and Paris: Experiment and Advertisement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 150. [46] Morrow, Elsie Janis, 61. "Unruly Productions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville" by Jennifer Schmidt ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction: Embodied Arts" by Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson "'Must Be Heavyset': Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies" by Ryan Donovan "Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville" by Jennifer Schmidt "Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis" by Shilarna Stokes "Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis 'Tightrope' Dance" by Dana Venerable www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical Introduction: Embodied Arts "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance History, Musicals, and the Americas Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut 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 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Adil Mansoor in Amm(i)gone at Long Wharf Theatre. Photo: Curtis Brown Photography Black Trans Women at the Center Eva Reign, Elisawon Etidorhpa, Simone Immanuel, Asteria LaFaye Summers, Indie Johnson (28 Sept. online, then streamed through 1 Oct.) The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion, adapted by Jonathan Silverstein (8 Nov. – 10 Dec., various locations) A View from the Bridge Arthur Miller (10 Feb. – 10 Mar., Canal Dock Boathouse, New Haven) Sanctuary City Martyna Majok (28 Mar. – 21 Apr., TheaterWorks Hartford) Darren Criss Benefit Concert (13 May, Lyman Center for the Performing Arts) Amm(I)gone Adil Monsoor (28 May – 23 Jun. Yale Theatre and Performance Studies Black Box) Long Wharf Theatre used two marketing slogans during the 2023-24 season: “Theatre is for Everyone” and “Theatre of Possibility.” The two themes come together in the statement on the theatre's home page, “We are committed to revolutionizing the power and possibility of live theater [sic] as a catalyst to bring people together and   fulfill our promise of 'theatre for everyone.'” The themes came together in Long Wharf's four in-person dramatic productions, which were presented in a variety of venues, exploring where it is possible to do theatre, and bringing people together to experience stories representing the diversity of New Haven's communities. Three of the four shows were co-productions with other East Coast theatres, connecting these theatre communities. The Year of Magical Thinking, produced in partnership with the Keen Company, was an adaptation by Jonathan Silverstein, the director, of Joan Didion's book, performed by Kathleen Chalfant. Last year Long Wharf left the theatre space it had occupied since 1965 and adopted a mobile theatre model; The Year of Magical Thinking took that to an extreme by being performed in Long Wharf supporters' living rooms and public libraries around New Haven. In a New Haven Register article, Kit Ingui, Long Wharf's managing director, explained that the show is designed to be staged in intimate spaces. Indeed, the show I saw was simply Kathleen Chalfant, as Joan Didion, talking to us, the audience, about the year during which both her husband and daughter died. The staging at the Milford Public Library was minimal: a low platform, two side tables, a chair, and a table lamp at one side of the library's meeting room—space enough for a grieving woman to tell us her loss. Anshuman Bhatia was credited with the lighting design, but there was no stage lighting. It was a simple, powerful piece. A View from the Bridge was performed on the top floor of the Canal Dock Boathouse, a carpeted room with a curved wall of windows looking out at the New Haven Harbor and Long Island Sound. The setting was composed of planked platforms, three free-standing doorways, a row of coat hooks, furniture, and a hanging lamp in a corner of the room, with the audience in seating banks wrapping the playing space by 90 degrees. Stage lighting equipment was hung on a black truss grid. The open deck outside the windows was used for street scenes, and the fateful knife fight was staged there. Microphones and speakers brought the noise and dialog inside for the audience, but it was easier to hear the action than to see it. The show tapped themes important to Long Wharf Theatre—immigration, gender roles, and homophobia—and probably had resonance for New Haven's large Italian-American community. However, the casting muddied the message. Alfieri, Eddie's lawyer and the narrator, was played by Patricia Black, a woman wearing a man's suit. It was hard to believe that Eddie, who worries that Rodolpho is homosexual and who has trouble dealing with the two female characters as his equal, would confide in a woman. Sanctuary City was a coproduction with TheaterWorks Hartford and was performed in TheaterWorks's theatre. It was co-directed by Jacob G. Padrón, Long Wharf's artistic director, and Pedro Bermúdez. Set in Newark, starting shortly after 9/11 and running through late 2005, it's a three-character piece about two undocumented alien teenagers—girl G and boy B—trying to stay in the USA, and B's lover, who complicates G and B's relationship. It's a compact story about the struggles of two Dreamers, well-acted by Sara Gutierrez and Grant Kennedy Lewis, but a tight playing space made it hard for me to see them. Emmie Finkel designed a setting with translucent panels for video projections by Pedro Bermúdez. The panels forced the action downstage where audience members and support columns blocked my view. Some of the projections were pretty but slowed the show. The show's opening was a video of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. That attack triggered tighter rules and suspicion of immigrants—part of the play's background—but I doubt anyone in the audience needed to be reminded of what happened on 9/11. For the final show, Long Wharf Theatre presented Amm(i)gone , a Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and PlayCo show produced in association with Kelly Strayhorn Theater and presented in the Theater and Performance Studies Black Box at Yale University. It was a one-person show created and performed by Adil Monsoor, supported in his storytelling by recorded video, live video, and audio recordings in a setting of Ramadan lanterns, cubes, and panels with mashrabiya lattice work. It was an intensely personal story about coming to America from Pakistan, Adil's relationship with his mother, and the tension between familial love and religious duty. His mother has become extremely religious and struggles to accept Adil’s queerness. To connect with her, Adil engaged with her by phone on a project to translate Sophocles' Antigone into Urdu. Antigone is often viewed as a conflict between Antigone and Creon over civil law and religious duty, but Adil emphasized the love between Ismene and Antigone, which endures despite Ismene's concern that Antigone is making a terrible mistake. During the post-show talk-back, one audience member identified herself as a gay Asian woman who came from an extremely religious family. This was the first time she'd seen her story on stage, and she was grateful. I thought about my own Catholic grandmother struggling to reconcile Church Law with her daughter's remarriage after divorce. It was a show about being gay, Muslim, and an immigrant, but it spoke to many. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Long Wharf Theatre has announced the 2024-25 season with the marketing slogan “Building our future together”: Artistic Congress, the 5th Annual Black Trans Women at the Center: New Play Festival , She Loves Me , El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle Of Doom,  and Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Toward Destiny . The Artistic Congress will be a conference, held a little more than a week before the US presidential election, to discuss theatre and democracy, consider the intersection of creativity and civic engagement, and create a broad network of artists amplifying the impact of collective effort—building our future together. References Footnotes About The Author(s) KARL G. RULING is the technical editor for Protocol , the journal of the Entertainment Services and Technology Association. Prior to that position, he was the technical editor for Theatre Crafts and Lighting Dimensions magazines, and a contributor to Stage Directions . He has an MFA in theatre design from the University of Illinois, and a BA with majors in Dramatic Art and Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has designed scenery, lighting, special effects, or sound for over 100 productions. 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.

Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. by Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The education and training of young scientists includes the acquisition of a large and technical vocabulary, understanding a variety of experimental approaches, and application of statistics and mathematical models to analyze experimental and observational results.[1] Small wonder then, that young scientists often miss the larger point that science is a process of imperfect model building. That is, students don’t understand that effective communication of scientific discoveries to all audiences must include colorful metaphor and models, and that these models aid understanding without doing harm to the scientific enterprise. We describe here our adaptation of theatric improvisation techniques to build students’ science communication skills in an undergraduate life science curriculum at Lawrence University. These techniques have been informed by, but significantly modified from, a program for graduate education at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. As the Argentinian author Jorge Louis Borges would have us understand, perfect scientific models are useless. He wrote, In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it.[2] Undergraduate students, who are just at the start of their scientific training, have instead a view that science is a process of learning about reality so that, eventually, we will understand perfectly the nuances of even the messiest biological systems. They often think that we are in the business of making perfect maps of the world and they are loath to relinquish this view. Though all our students read Borges in our required freshman course, science students usually maintain their view that the accuracy of science is so critical that their communication of a scientific understanding of the world must include a great deal of detail delivered with a high degree of accuracy. They try to communicate scientific vocabulary, the degree of imperfection of current scientific understanding, and the methods by which scientists arrived at their conclusions. While all this detail is needed for students to build their own understanding of scientific results, or for the communication of science to professional scientists, students hold fast to this method of communication in all cases, thus obscuring both the beauty and truth of science. Perhaps an example is in order. When a student wished to explain how genes get used differently in different parts of our bodies, she said, “Tissue-specific patterns of gene expression are created by cell-specific transcription factors binding to DNA sequence motifs upstream of the start site of transcription.” Did you roll your eyes? We did! While what she said was terrific if she were talking to a group of molecular geneticists, anyone else’s eyes would appropriately glaze over. Our goal is to have her ask: “Did you ever wonder why your pancreas makes insulin, but your eyeball doesn’t?” Then she could explain that both the pancreas and the eyeball contain the instructions (a gene) to make insulin, but only in the pancreas does the on/off switch for insulin production get flipped to the ‘on’ position. Do we really need to know that only certain cells of the pancreas do this? Do we need to know what genes are made of? No! If she really wanted to explain the on/off switches, she could describe the DNA sequences as musical notes and their particular order as musical motifs, and she could demonstrate how these switches can vary, much as the opening theme to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony varies throughout the piece. Is it ‘dumbing it down’ to use these metaphors? Also, no! We have learned to be explicit in saying to our students that we are not ‘dumbing down’ the science – we are making it accessible and understandable by linking scientific concepts to concepts the audience already knows. Goals This then, is our goal for graduating life science majors: yes, they learn a technical vocabulary, experimental design, data analysis, and scientific writing, but they also learn that scientific models are already imperfect, so using a metaphor or an evocative description is a wonderful way to distill and communicate scientific information to a lay audience. We want our graduates to be cognizant of their audience, to be able to react in real time to the cues that audience members send concerning their understanding of oral and visual communication, and we want our students to channel their creative energy and enthusiasm for their work to communicate scientific information effectively and engagingly. To accomplish our goal of facilitating effective and clear science communication, we designed a capstone course in our undergraduate life science curriculum in which we use theatrical improvisation as the main tool to improve oral communication of science. The capstone course enrolls 40-50 biology, biochemistry, and neuroscience majors in their senior year at Lawrence University. Lawrence University, located in Appleton, Wisconsin, is a private liberal arts college enrolling 1500 undergraduates. The college has a strong tradition of individualized learning[3] that has shown great success in stimulating student interest in, and mastery of, disciplinary research. Small group research projects are an integral part of the biology curriculum from the very first introductory course through the upper level, and many students individually elect to undertake research with a faculty mentor. We have consciously constructed our curricula to build students’ creative and technical science skills, including hypothesis development, experimental design and execution, data analysis, and oral and written dissemination of results. We couple hands-on research with course content so that students receive integrated, practical instruction in the application of scientific methodology and concepts. In 2011, the faculty of the college voted to include a required ‘Senior Experience’ with every major and allowed each department or program to design their own experience for senior students. Life science faculty designed a capstone course that would directly address students’ needs to communicate science beyond a specialized scientific community and that would allow students to dive deeply into a biological topic of their choosing, whether as lab or field research or as literature review or distillation of a biological topic for a lay audience. Our biology capstone course facilitates the transition from the life of a student to the life of a professional. Our explicit goals for the students are the following: (1) direct a project and produce a substantial paper written for a scientific audience, (2) understand ethics in the life sciences, (3) acquire skills to reach and teach non-scientific audiences about one’s project. Students begin their capstone course with their topic chosen and, in many cases, research or off-campus activity completed. The course is therefore reserved for the production of several papers on the student’s topic and multiple types of oral communication about their project. Students are primed with a deep understanding of some small area of biology and, since they chose their own topics, hopefully a great deal of enthusiasm for disseminating their understanding of this topic. Oral Communication in Science It is important to state here that even professional oral communication in the sciences is much more free form than it is in the arts and humanities. Thus, the link between theatrical improvisation and scientific communication is not as distinct as one might initially think. Scientific conference presentations, for example, always include visual aids and are never read. Speakers are expected to deliver either memorized or extemporaneous prose while using visual aids as an organizational guide. Such professional presentations are jargon-heavy and detailed. Our undergraduates learn professional presentation skills throughout their life science curriculum and are acculturated into a biological way of understanding and describing the world. Our goal in the capstone course is to expand those skills to include distillation of complex material to create engaging presentations for broader audiences. We, as a society and as individuals, need a clear understanding of biological concepts in order to make wise and safe decisions about our healthcare and our environment. For example, individuals and political entities need to decide about whether to eat farmed or wild seafood, comprehend the effects of our exercise regimens on our descendants, or accommodate an endangered thistle on the beach. The efficacy of a doctor explaining treatment or a researcher testifying in a Congressional hearing depends on clear, accessible communication. Thus, we work on student distillation of science for audiences that range from the students in the room (whose expertise ranges from ecology to neuroscience), to the college’s (non-scientist) President, to one’s grandparents, or to people in an elevator with them. Well-known American actor Alan Alda and the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University inaugurated a program in 2009 using improvisation exercises to teach graduate students in the sciences to respond to, and interact with, their audiences when speaking about their scientific work. Their initial students volunteered from many of Stony Brook University’s graduate and professional programs for a semester-long program. The changes in the graduate students’ ability to relate more naturally to their audiences brought to life subjects ranging from optics to molecular biology. In an interview published in The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine, author Kelly Walsh wrote: “To facilitate objectivity, Alda explain[ed], ‘you have emotion trained out of you when you're writing science for other scientists in your field.’ But communicating science to broader audiences requires the opposite approach because, as Mr. Alda [said], ‘people like me, ordinary people, rely on story and emotion.’”[4] Early publicity from the Stony Brook program began to circulate in science communication circles just as we at Lawrence University began our pilot life science capstone course for a few undergraduate students. Encouraged by Stony Brook’s success, we tried using theatrical improvisation to improve the communication skills of undergraduates. Our early goals for our students included breaking down communication barriers and giving students permission to drop the jargon when describing their work. As summarized by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, “Mild to moderate short-term stressors enhance memory. This makes sense, in that this is the sort of optimal stress that we would call ‘stimulation’ – alert and focused.”[5] He later states that “the sympathetic nervous system pulls this off by indirectly arousing the hippocampus into a more alert, activated state, facilitating memory consolidation.”[6] If the neuroscience is right, our students should internalize better the lessons of science communication in the heightened alert state induced by improvisation games. Early Attempts at Improvisation with Undergraduate Scientists Lawrence theater faculty member Kathy Privatt introduced us to Viola Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theater, teaching us to use a few exercises, including Play Ball and Mirror. Undertaking these exercises, let alone the idea of leading students through them, was uncomfortable and awkward for us. Professional scientists do not typically engage in physical improvisation, though we do have experience with mental versions. We swallowed our fears and jumped into using the exercises as a way to loosen rigid, nervous, and stultifying student presentation styles. We initially presented the exercises as our American theater-based colleagues had indicated was appropriate for theater students, with minimal preliminary instructions plus a bit of Spolin’s side-coaching. In the first two years of our undergraduate course, the students only half-heartedly took part in improvisation exercises. We estimate that the leaders’ energy exceeded the total of that put forth by our students. Some students responded with outright hostility and derision. Their body language and grumblings said, “This is stupid. I shouldn’t have to do this!” We wondered whether we were on the right track or whether undergraduate students lacked the necessary motivation to use these exercises as they were intended. We also struggled to fit all our goals in the allotted 36 hours of instruction. Improvisation was therefore tucked into odd 10-minute corners of class time. Students delighted in moving about but not in learning to interact with their audience. Although instructors participated alongside the students to persuade them that the activities were not below our dignity and were valuable, students still did not relate the exercises to communication skills we addressed in other lessons. We did note, however, that most students responded very favorably to a discussion of body language and its impact on oral communication. We mentioned research that had shown measurable results of changing one’s body posture while speaking, but we did not cite any particular study. The least expressive student of our initial class departed immediately after this discussion for an Ivy League graduate school tour and interview, and returned amazed that open limbs, leaning forward, and smiling had made the process easier and the response of the school warmer. We had our first student-provided clue as to how to make improvisation palatable. Science students are further motivated when we connect the need for body language and facial expression to the fact that their audience imitates emotional behaviors (e.g., excitement) unconsciously in response to the emotional body language of a speaker.[7] In the summer of 2011, the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University began a summer institute for theater instructors, university administrators, and science faculty to learn more about science communication. Among the colleges represented, only Lawrence University was planning a program solely for undergraduates. We returned from the summer institute even more convinced of the value of Spolin’s improvisation games as a tool to help our students speak with their audiences, rather than at them and we vowed to increase the amount of time in our class devoted to these exercises. What We’ve Learned about using Improvisation with Young Scientists We have learned that one cannot just jump into improvisation with a scientific audience and expect the desired results. The barrier to doing improvisation is just too high and the students are trying to be too analytic to allow the necessary playful mindset. While theater students expect that they must transmit both information and emotion to their audience, science students feel emotion doesn’t belong in science. We therefore use science-specific modifications to open students’ minds to the benefits of improvisatory sessions. We begin with a video from Stony Brook that demonstrates how improvisation can improve science communication by graduate students.[8] Students immediately recognize the problems with the graduate students’ presentations done prior to improvisation, and they recognize themselves in this position! They are then a bit better primed to accept improvisation as a tool. We bookend improvisation sessions with explicit exposition of the goals of the exercises and a frank discussion of how students felt during and after the improvisation exercise. In particular, we find that it helps to connect the improvisational activity to human physiology. For example, use of Amy Cuddy’s excellent TED talk, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are”[9] is well received because Dr. Cuddy explains the effect of body posture on physiology as well as on the reception of the content of one’s communication. Early in our next course iterations, we implemented several small exercises that involve minimal speaking. The first exercise is a silent improvisation called Exposure.[10] We modified this initial improvisational game from one half of the group standing in front as the other half sits as the audience, to both halves of the class facing one another across the room, first just staring at each other, and then coached to count the blue shirts. As the two halves of the class face one another, inevitably someone begins to fold in on himself, or another person tries to turn away, or yet another starts to laugh. Left alone, as instructed by Spolin, the behavior will devolve into a group giggle. These signature attitudes of discomfort and lack of confidence, of being undignified, have been a plague in past years. Our perfectionist students fear being judged, in no small part because their presentations involve a grade, and being found inadequate will not (they think) get them into medical school or a research program. So as each behavior manifests itself, we address it. Their reflection on and discussion of Exposure have proved more meaningful than the activity itself and set a pattern of reflecting on why we undertake each specific activity. Exposure has proved to be the first time many students recognize the roots of stage fright, but as science students, they need to name and analyze aspects verbally. We ask the students what makes these reactions surface. We then describe each as a normal psychological reaction to stress. When we can talk about cortisol and other stress hormone levels, we are on comfortable, biological ground, and students become more receptive to physical improvisation as a way to reduce stress in oral communication. Instructors also emphasize that we need to know why we are speaking in front of an audience, what our role and purposes are, and what we mean to do. We emphasize that the point of our improvisations is not to become actors or entertainers, but to grow to become more responsive communicators, for no communication occurs unless two or more people share a common idea. We want students to use the exercises to gain valuable insights to communicating with more clarity and to be more responsive to audiences’ non-verbal feedback. The discussions with our students helped us better realize the purpose of our improvisational work and, in turn, better articulate its goals to future students. We also realized that we needed to start our biology students at an earlier stage of the theatrical process. We begin each year now with an activity we call Audience. Improvisation Exercises that Work with Scientists Audience The students are seated in a lecture room. They are instructed to close their eyes. This is done to reduce self-consciousness while imagining, and to simultaneously accentuate the emotional and physical states. Closed eyes also reduce that urge to giggle or feel foolish. Next we say: “Imagine yourself in an overly warm and stuffy room listening to a very boring lecture. How are you positioned in the seat? Where are your legs and feet? The presenter is talking about a subject you don’t quite understand, using words you cannot quite catch. How do you hold your arms and hands? The voice is a monotone, droning on, buzzing along with no variation in pitch or rate or intensity. What positions are your head and neck in? What expression is your mouth showing? Stay in this position, open your eyes, and without moving, slowly look around the room.” At this point, the entire class is usually slumped back in their seats, legs extended, many heads are lolling, a great many have their arms crossed, some may even have put their heads down on their desks. We then ask: “Why are so many of you in the same positions? How do you feel? What are you, the audience, communicating to the speaker?” We begin to discuss defensive and distancing body language that demonstrates where the audience members are emotionally and perhaps intellectually. Next: “Please rise, stretch, and reseat yourself, for another day comes. Today’s speaker is animated, clearly one of the most knowledgeable experts in the world. How are you positioned in the seat? Where are your legs and feet? The presenter is talking about a subject you never realized mattered so significantly. New terminology is introduced gradually and only as needed. The words are connected to concepts you already know. How do you hold your arms and hands? The speaker’s voice conveys meaning with variation in pitch and rate and intensity. What positions are your head and neck in? What expression is your mouth showing? Stay in this position, open your eyes, and without moving, slowly look around the room.” This time postures are erect, many students are leaning forward, their faces are relaxed, and some are even smiling! “Why are so many of you in the same positions? How do you feel? What are you, the audience, communicating to the speaker?” We also ask: “Which audience do you want to speak to? Why?” Students need to hear very explicitly that any talk or presentation is two-way communication. Although only one person may be speaking, everyone is involved in sharing a common idea. An audience contributes to the success of a speaker when it collectively shows interest or enthusiasm, or can, through disinterest or antagonism, make the speaker’s job more difficult. This activity sets up the importance of watching one’s audience while speaking and communicating as an audience member. Each student is only a presenter for five percent of the class time, but part of the audience for all the rest. Some realize for the first time that they can gauge the success of their talks by postures of their audiences, watching for confusion or comprehension and changing their own delivery to meet the needs of that audience. The class changed attitudes about the usefulness of the remainder of the improvisation activities! Mirror Following implementation of Audience and Exposure, with students ready for something more active, it is a natural progression to move on to Mirror[11]. In this exercise, pairs of students face each other, and all the students facing west, for example, are designated the first leader. Each leader is coached to move one limb slowly, and the other student is told to mirror all movements and facial expressions. When the inevitable giggling begins, the instructor stops the exercise and then asks, “Why are we doing this exercise? How does it connect to the previous exercises?” We hope that students will see that public speaking is a two-way communication between the audience and the speaker, and we hope they will concentrate on providing and receiving feedback when it is their turn at public speaking. We then continue the exercise, asking for complete silence, and adding another limb to the movement, speeding things up, changing leaders, and eventually leading and following simultaneously (Figure 1). Figure 1. Leaderless mirroring as students explore two-way communication. (Image courtesy of C.L.Duckert.) Mirror is a great place to introduce some of the key neuroscience behind communication that convinces our students. Mirror neurons were discovered in the late 1980s by a team from the University of Parma.[12] These neurons are active in our brains and the brains of animals as we engage our attention, watch, act, or imagine another being performing some action.[13] We activate mirror neurons when we smile and make faces at babies and delight in their response. We continue to use them throughout our lives, not only to learn new things but also to interpret the emotions of others. Cuddy remarks, “In everyday life, this mimicry is so subtle and quick (it takes one-third of a second) that … it allows us to feel and understand other people’s emotions.”[14] When people use Botox to reduce facial wrinkles, they also impair their ability to smile or frown or mimic others, and as a result, fare less well when interpreting the emotional states of those others.[15] Our students’ mimicry of each other’s postures and gestures is crucial “in the collaborative process of creating a mutually shared understanding.”[16] They then realize that their enthusiasm while speaking will be mirrored by their audience, thereby increasing audience receptivity. Play Ball Our most successful active improvisation is Play Ball, which students easily understand as relevant to public speaking.[17] Instead of plunging into this game immediately, we ask two student athletes to be the first participants, and the first ball throw announced is from their sport. After a toss or two, we ask for a defensive or a scoring move. We then ask them about the changes in their bodies and postures and why they made those changes. We ask how the recipient of the throw altered her stance or hand position. It quickly becomes clear to the audience that the goal of this exercise is to respond appropriately to the actions of one’s partner. Next, half of the class is lined up on each side of the room, and students make eye contact with their partners. Now, as our class enters into ball play (with the instructor calling out ‘throw a baseball,’ ‘throw a bowling ball’), they use their entire bodies and change stances, throwing with different arm movements and strength for various ball types. After instructors chastise the group if balls change size between catch and throw, soon the students’ bodies make meaning evident and they prepare the recipient for whatever is coming next. Faces look up as both their eyes and their understanding widen once the ball toss changes from lobbing water balloons or ping-pong balls, to “throw an insult” or “deliver a compliment.” Recipients flinch or throw their arms wide. Student discussion has emphasized the teamwork aspect of communication, where success depends on reading each other’s physical and emotional states. We add how every speaker must watch their audience reaction for confusion or comprehension so as to adjust the pace, depth, and detail of explanations. The deliverer and recipient influence one another, whether in the improvisation or in public speaking or teaching. Students realize that communication involves anticipation, intent, reception, and reaction to concrete actions and metaphoric ideas. They begin to notice how their most effective science communication requires continual non-verbal monitoring of their audience to ensure comprehension. Transformation of Objects[18] If our students have a favorite, it is Transformation of Objects. Participants conjure objects from empty space. In our version, the objects must be pieces of equipment they would use doing their work or research in the life sciences, including equipment whose purpose or function may be unknown to them. Students are placed in a large circle, facing inward silently. An object is created and used by the first person and passed to the next person who repeats the use. The receiver then morphs the piece of equipment into another, uses it and passes it on. Students usually start with the very familiar -- microscopes, binoculars, pipetters -- but soon they are trying to stump one another. Less familiar equipment such as a mist net for trapping bats or a fraction collector for protein purification is handed off to the consternation of the next person. Surely we have all had to use something by rote that we did not really comprehend. Students have acted out explosions and failures, eureka moments, and malfunctioning equipment. This entirely silent exercise forces students to focus on describing things without words, a risky undertaking for students who have spent four years honing verbal and written descriptions of science. Taking risks visually, in front of a group of people, gives students permission to take what seems to them like oral risks when presenting their science. They are more willing to be informal, to use descriptive language, and even to use their bodies to describe how they did an experiment, to indicate the behavior of an animal, or to illustrate how two molecules interact. They get the idea that communication is much more than words. In short, they become more comfortable, even playful, in front of their peers! Bumper Sticker, a Written Improvisation After these initial improvisations, some barriers have been broken down, and students feel that the next important exercise is so much easier than it would have been without improvisation. We call this exercise Bumper Sticker. Students are asked to create a two to four word ‘bumper sticker,’ or a tweet that describes their project in 140 characters. Students are given time to think for a bit on their own and then they write their slogan on the board to be examined by the class. The subjects of their projects are precise and detailed. To communicate, we must first answer why should anyone else care? “ABT-737 resistant and BIM-SAHB sensitive cells ” becomes “I kill cancer.” “Hereditary pancreatitis…so rare it is painful” is easier for anyone to understand than “the p16v mutation of human cationic trypsinogen (PRSSI) gene and hereditary pancreatitis.” We could be intrigued by “Let Buddha change your brain” to consider “the underlying anatomical correlates of long-term meditation on the hippocampus and frontal gray matter.” “Got Guts?” and “Polly want a forest” can move us to action more than “surgical protocols and patient selection in intestinal transplantation,” and “behavioral changes in psittacines in modern Neotropical contexts.” Now we are beginning to communicate our science! What Do I Do for a Living?[19] + How Old Am I?[20] + Where?[21]= What’s Going On? Lastly, we use activities that cast students as performers and audience. The object is to have the audience identify what is going on. A scientist’s activities and collaboration with co-workers often requires coordinating actions in time or sequence. Spolin’s three games focus attention on behaviors that identify character as well as action. We use the three in combination, not to understand any specific aspect of life science directly, but to motivate students to learn how to assist audiences in understanding by using timing, pace, and the more nuanced aspects of body language. The students easily become self-conscious and stiff, with some even refusing to participate, but group activities ease the awkward feelings by reducing the attention focused on any single person. Simultaneously, injection of humor keeps student interest up and tensions down. We found it useful to break up close associates in the class by dividing the students randomly into groups, each assigned one of the defined activities performed in the order below. 1. Watching a tennis match – simultaneous identical individual actions 2. Getting on a passenger jet – sequential individual actions with different roles 3. Launching a canoe - coordinated actions in unison 4. Doing laundry at the laundromat – distinct individual actions in parallel 5. Carrying a 3m x 3m pane of glass – unfamiliar coordinated action in parallel Unbeknown to the groups, each small activity becomes more difficult to portray, from the tennis match to carrying the pane of glass. After three to five minutes, each group presents their short, wordless play. The rest of the class guesses the activity, but we also describe how we knew what was happening in each scene. The students do not react to this as criticism or evaluation, but recognize that they are unraveling a puzzle as the performers struggle to communicate their intentions clearly. Although there is some concern initially, students rise to each challenge as they learn from the performances of the earlier groups even as each scene becomes more challenging. By the end, students are relaxed and feeling successful, recognizing that they often attune their actions to those of lab mates and partners as well as to less participatory audiences. Science Café, an Oral Science Improvisation To this point, all improvisational activities are performed silently, but we and our students also need to speak. Biologists are often asked to explain concepts to family, friends, even strangers met while running errands. Agriculture, the environment, and medicine are in the news and in our lives. Biological terms such as DNA, evolution, and genetics surround us. We want our students to be willing and ready to engage in public dialogue about science; thus we have invented an exercise we named Science Café in which students must explain biological terms to non-biologists without using jargon. Alan Alda speaks of the "curse of knowledge, the cognitive bias that makes it difficult to think or talk about a familiar subject as if from a position of unfamiliarity.”[22] In Science Café, we work extemporaneously to explain basic biological terms to intelligent strangers. Students have either the role of explainer or questioner, both drawn from a collection of possibilities in a jar (examples in Figure 2). The term to be defined and the role of the questioner are announced to the audience. The explainer must describe the term to the questioner, who then asks a clarifying question that a person in that role would want to know. The explainer must respond using terminology or metaphors appropriate to the questioner. Initially, our students prefer to act as the questioner rather than the explainer. But soon they realize that thinking inside the mind of a non-biologist is also hard work. Also, we found that student explainers felt that they were “dumbing down” material when speaking with those outside the field. We countered this tendency by ensuring that questioners were identified as highly educated in other fields or in positions of power. Students are not graded on their content or performance, but we use the definitions the students develop to help assess our departmental efficacy in teaching key biological concepts. Terms to Explain Roles of Questioners Autotroph The president of the college DNA Your grandmother Endergonic reaction An orchestra conductor Gene An investment banker Transcription A human resources manager Trophic level cascade An electronics engineer Figure 2. A sampling of Science Café Components Results Over the six years we have been running the capstone course, we have become more comfortable with the inclusion of improvisation, better able to articulate its goals and utility, and student presentations have improved remarkably. If we have learned anything in our experiments with improvisation in a science course, it is that our students are more willing to participate when the scientific rationale behind arts techniques is considered. The more frequently we can identify and name, discuss, and analyze phenomena, the more willing they are to embrace these methods. The neurological, physiological, and behavioral aspects of improvisation belong in a biology class. The improvisational exercises we adopted remind us that we live among many intelligent and curious non-scientists. Sharing why we care, accessing the emotion behind our inquiry, can connect us with others. Current student Terese Swords writes that she “noticed [her] explanatory and communication skills considerably strengthen” as she “can more easily improvise responses to questions and tailor explanations to a wide array of audiences.”[23] Curiosity, awe, and wonder draw scientists into our fields. Our search can never prove anything absolutely true, so we employ precisely developed tools to answer narrowly defined questions about detailed phenomena. Recent graduate Konstantinos Vlachos provided this explanation of the importance of improvisation in our course: Many scientists today are afraid of talking to people about their work. It's not that we don't want to share our work, it's that we are afraid to do it because our subjects are oftentimes so elaborate and sometimes so overwhelming to others. Instead, we choose to keep a distance from many people. The improv sessions helped me not to be afraid of my own knowledge and skills.[24] We have found that discussion of the goals and utility of improvisation is key to its acceptance by undergraduate science students. Interrupting an activity to discuss, re-focus, or analyze our physiological and behavioral responses places it in a familiar context. Importantly, improvisation has become a more featured component of the course; it is started on the first day and is continued throughout the term with increasing expectations of student participation. An unintended consequence of students’ rising comfort with science communication is that student projects have become increasingly multi-media and less traditional. We have had student projects culminate in videos, art projects, games, music, and even one play script and public reading! The culminating event of our Senior Experience course is BioFest – a mix of posters, videos, and demonstrations of each student’s senior project. In 30-minute increments, one-quarter of the class presents their work to anyone who walks by. Younger students are encouraged to attend as the room buzzes energetically with friends and colleagues from all disciplines visiting the students’ presentations. Family members fly in from across the country; mentors from the campus and the community come to see the results. Posters, as seen at any conference, predominate, but some students bring along research tools or organisms they have investigated (Figure 3). Figure 3. Poster presenters display confidence and approachability while presenting the science adapted to their audiences. (Image courtesy of Tracy Van Zeeland.) Some students even stage their projects. A book on what happens after death is displayed against a crime scene tape outlining a body, staging the project’s scientific title, “The breakdown of decomposition: the processes involved as influenced by environmental processes”). Audience participation is encouraged. A website, part of the project “Therapeutic efficacy of spp in treating cancers,” displays the pharmaceutical benefits of Navajo tea, a traditional medicine, as visitors sip tea samples. An amateur winemaker tastes the results of a student’s vintages made from wild yeasts growing on grapes (“Identification and characterization of wild yeasts”). In the afore-mentioned project, “Surgical protocols and patient selection in intestinal transplantation,” there is action in the real world: a Wikipedia page describing intestinal transplants already has 1500+ hits, and visitors are able to sign up to be organ donors. Lawrence University’s Vice-President of Development speaks with the student who analyzed current and projected climate change on species growing on university property (“Bjorklunden bioclimate envelope models -- their practice and utility”). Athletes watch a video about biofeedback effects on hockey performance (“The role of biofeedback in autogenic training on physiological indices and athletic performance”). We watch with pride as our students talk with whoever comes by, answering questions and sharing their enthusiasm (Figure 4). In our first years, this was a staid and serious event. In the past three years, the room has erupted in chatter, laughter, and questions. Students and faculty are disappointed that they can’t possibly visit each student’s presentation in the time allowed. Parents and administrators attend and are impressed with our students’ enthusiastic and accessible presentations of their work. We are convinced that improvisation has improved our students’ ability and willingness to communicate their scientific know-how immeasurably. The Senior Experience course in biology has capped students’ undergraduate science training with projects of their own design, and helped them become better science communicators, obtain jobs, and find their professional passions. Figure 4. Students must be prepared to speak with any audience as they come by. (Image courtesy of Tracy Van Zeeland.) Appendix What Our Students Say We have solicited reactions to capstone improvisation from a sample of recent Lawrence University graduates. “You will not always know the knowledge level of your audience and have to be ready to either simplify or elaborate. Additionally, it is hard to know what kinds of questions will be asked after you have finished and because of this you have to be ready to improvise in order to communicate the information to your audience.” Nick Randall, Class of 2013 “When a student or colleague asks a question, and you give a response that does not follow the context of the question, they are not going to understand the answer. Much like improv, you need to stay within the context given.” David Cordie, Class of 2013 “I had such an extreme fear of public speaking that I struggled to raise my hand to answer a professor's simple question in a small class of people I knew well. When I found out we were doing improv in my science class I was very surprised. The improv techniques and speaking skills I learned in this class pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone. Fast forward a few months after graduation to my first presentation in a temporary job. Using the skills I learned in class, I wowed the upper management. Before I knew it, I was well known as a great speaker, solicited by people I barely knew for communication advice, and invited to present at several workshops. It was at one of these talks that my boss and our partners realized they needed to keep me longer than originally planned because of the work I was showcasing and my ability to excite our partners into action. I strongly believe that without the communication skills I learned in class, I would not have gotten the job I have now, and I would have been less successful and had far fewer opportunities to promote my work and engage others. I think this was the most important class I ever took.” Maria De Laundreau, Class of 2013 “Many scientists today are afraid of talking to people about their work. It's not that we don't want to share our work, it's that we are afraid to do it because our subjects are oftentimes so elaborate and sometimes so overwhelming to others that we don't want to make them uncomfortable. Instead, we choose to keep a distance from many people. The improv sessions helped me not to be afraid of my own knowledge and skills. It helped me to be ready to respond more effectively to the variety of reactions that an audience may have during public speeches. But most importantly it taught me not to be afraid of failure and criticism. After all as a young scientist, I have a lot room for improvement, which makes occasional failure and criticism an inevitable part of my career. Bio 650 showed me how to respond thoughtfully in this criticism, thus reaching my ultimate goal, which is to learn and share effectively how life works!” Konstantinos Vlacho, Class of 2015 “Initially I was horrified to participate in improv, but even after doing it for only a couple weeks, I have noticed my explanatory and communication skills considerably strengthen. I am much more confident in job interviews and feel that I can more easily improvise responses to questions and tailor my explanations to a wide array of audiences. I can now say that I am completely comfortable [with] public speaking (even about topics I am unsure of) and it is all thanks to my biology major.” Terese Swords, Class of 2016 Summary of Oral Communication Activities Audience (our own invention) Teaching Improvisation to Scientists with Alan Alda Exposure Amy Cuddy’s TEDTalk Self-Introductions (name & project title) Mirror Play Ball Bumper Sticker production 12-minute oral scientific presentation of student project & relevant background Transformation of Objects What’s Going On? Science Café BioFest Elizabeth A. De Stasio is the Raymond H. Herzog Professor of Science and Professor of Biology at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She earned her PhD in Biology and Medicine at Brown University working in the area of molecular biology and did post-doctoral training in the Department of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is currently collaborating with researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and at Rutgers University to understand which genes are used to make functioning nerve cells. She is devoted to making science accessible to all students through her courses in introductory biology and genetics, and a course for non-majors she calls Biotechnology and Society. Cindy L. Duckert is a Lecturer in Biology and Senior Experience Facilitator at Lawrence University and the Senior Museum Educator at the Weis Earth Science Museum in Menasha, Wisconsin. Her career began as an engineer (California Institute of Technology) building airplanes at Lockheed and making toothpaste tube material more efficiently at American Can Company when she realized that explaining technical things to non-technical people is her forté. The discovery that interpreting one field of study to another is an unusual skill came as mid-career surprise. She taught K-12 teachers how to do real science in their classrooms with the JASON Project’s online courses and thousands of visitors to the Experimental Aircraft Association Museum what keeps airplanes in the air. [1] We thank Alan Alda first and foremost for his vision of improving science communication. We thank the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University for providing evidence that improvisation works wonderfully to free the stories and remind us why science intrigued us in the first place and for the concept of distillation that enables students to see that accuracy, brevity, and clarity are not the same as dumbing down science. We thank Kathy Privatt of the Lawrence University theater faculty for the choice of activities winnowed from another realm. And we thank our co-teachers of the capstone course for their patience and wisdom; without you the course wouldn’t have evolved as it has: Bart De Stasio, Kimberly Dickson, Alyssa Hakes, Brian Piasecki, Jodi Sedlock, and Nancy Wall. We thank our students both for their trust in us and for their willingness to grow and add a playful enthusiasm to imbue their science. [2] Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 325. [3] E. A. De Stasio, M. Ansfield, P. Cohen, and T. Spurgin, “Curricular responses to ‘electronically tethered’ students: Individualized learning across the curriculum,” Liberal Education 95, no. 4 (2009): 46-52. [4] Kelly M. Walsh, “Discovering a Common Language,“ The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine, October 6, 2015. http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Detail.aspx?cid=d77626ca-e830-47da-a546-7fbeab1846f1. [5] Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers 3rd ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 2011. [6] Ibid, 2011. [7] Beatrice de Gelder, “Towards the Neurobiology of Emotional Body Language.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7 (March 2006): 242-49. [8] School of Journalism, Stony Brook University, Teaching Improvisation to Scientists with Alan Alda (2010) http://www.youtube.comwatch ?v=JtdyA7SibG8. (5:24-8:38 in particular). [9] Amy Cuddy, Your Body Shapes Who You Are, TEDGlobal, (June 2012) http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are. [10] Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 53. [11] Ibid., 61-63. [12] G. Di Pellegrino, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti, “Understanding motor events: a neurophysiological study.” Experimental Brain Research, 91 (1992): 176-80. [13] Marco Del Giudice, Valeria Manera and Christian Keysers, “Programmed to learn? The ontogeny of mirror neurons,” Developmental Science 12, no. 2 (March 2009): 350-63. [14] Amy Cuddy, Presence (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), 179. [15] Eddie North-Hager, “Botox Impairs Ability to Understand Emotions” (6 June 2011) https://news.usc.edu/28407/Botox-Impairs-Ability-to-Understand-Emotions/ [16]Judith Holler and Katie Wilkin. “Co-Speech Gesture Mimicry in the Process of Collaborative Referring During Face-to-Face Dialogue.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 35, no. 2 (June 2011): 133-53. [17] Viola Spolin, Improvisation for Theater, 64. [18] Ibid., 82. [19] Ibid., 74. [20] Ibid., 69. [21] Ibid., 88. [22] Kelly Walsh, “Discovering a Common Language.” [23] Personal communication with the authors. [24] Personal communication with the authors. “Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Imrpovisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum” by Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: James Armstrong Editorial Assistant: Kyueun Kim Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Bill Demastes Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D. W. Gregory’s Radium Girls” by Bradley Stephenson “Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of The End of the Moon” by Vivian Appler “iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change” by Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth “Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum” by Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio “Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters” by George Pate and Libby Ricardo www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Al Evangelista Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Dance Planets Al Evangelista By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF In every class remotely related to dramaturgy, I encounter performance studies scholar Elinor Fuchs’s critical essay “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet.” [1] When I was an undergrad, I was taught Fuchs’s article twice. Grad school? Twice more. When I want to teach choreography and composition, I teach Fuchs’s dramaturgy of planets. I’m grateful every time. When we take aspects of world-making as the work of a dramaturg, I believe that this is one way to arrive at our traumatic present. How to arrive in spaces of wide-ranging, inequitable, and systemic traumas? Or, how do I reveal this traumatic present as everyday, as repetition (ongoing, both physically and historically), as also a dramaturgy? My parents imagined brighter futures. Their planet made of dreams. I find myself in a constant battle with how their imagined futures sometimes were (mis)guided and influenced by colonial mentalities. [2] A planet of complication. Nevertheless, this planet is one in which their children flourished in opportunities, even though their own brown bodies did not. I even think my parents have multiple planets—worlds made in their imaginaries. In section V, “Theatrical Mirrors,” the shortest section of “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet,” Fuchs offers a consideration of multiple planets and how they could affect a dramaturgical world: “Important as these internal systems are, dramatic worlds don’t just speak to and within themselves; they also speak to each other.” [3] In the paragraphs that follow, I expand on section V through a queer Filipinx American choreographic strategy and explain how the dramaturgical planets in these choreographies relate, speak, and move with one another. This strategy takes into account a range of planets, their array of invisibility and gravity. This is a dance with the incomplete as a practice of care. It’s not just my planets or my parents’ planets or the number of planets. It’s also the orbiting pathways, the circuitous dance of repetition, release, and rotation through space. [4] Dramaturgy, to me, is an intimate act of analysis. Dramaturgy in dance—an analysis of bodies, movement, context, and performance—becomes entangled in these conceptual imaginaries even more when focused on queer Asian American performance. My choreography and dramaturgy, embodied by my Filipinx American body, fall into these traumas: my own, my family’s, and my ancestors’. These owned and inherited traumas are invisibilized in a landscape of systemic oppression, but performance can highlight their embodied worlds. And yet they are more than all of these things. My dramaturgy is not simply connected to my Asian American history or identity; my performances do not simply represent Asian American histories. Many other histories and planets, often not seen, are part of my dramaturgy. [5] Dramaturgy could be explained as research done for, by, and about a production. But what if those productions explicitly involve the personal and familial experiences of the researcher and performer? And why is it something worth revisiting within a container of performance? The practice of dramaturgy helps answer these questions. I work with the dance of planets to highlight the many complex pathways and vast space that, because invisibilized, become easier to ignore, to move with the emptiness and make it intentional. The process of making something not seen can be a choreographic or dramaturgical choice. In Fuchs’s work, the last instruction after all the amazingly detailed questions is to look at the planet from a distance, to squint. But these planets may not be visible or static, and they might not want to be visible. They move unseen. And as a choreographer noticing this movement and invisibility, repeating it in performance is one way to grow this complexity. If I were to expand on this, and move with and beyond Fuchs’s essay once more, I would further imagine what this complexity might mean within my own performance work. It might look something like this. A queer Filipinx American performer, choreographer, and artist-scholar’s visit to dance planets: My dramaturgy. or feelings about my feelings. My dramaturgy is a Barong. Which might mean a symbol of resistance or might mean a perpetuation of US colonialism. [6] My dramaturgy is singing Santo Niño because as a child, I loved the upbeat tempo and clapping despite the Catholic prayer event that lasted hours. [7] My uncles sometimes left the room because they were allowed a break outside, but children no matter their gender had to stay. My dramaturgy is the lack of primary interviews from the St. Louis World’s Fair “human-zoo” participants. [8] One of the few direct quotes I could find is from Antero Cabrera, the 14-year-old translator known for singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” [9] My dramaturgy is having to explain the preference to not be seen because sometimes being seen is more dangerous than they can imagine, not having had to imagine any sort of danger in their position. My dramaturgy is recording a phone conversation with my mother about how line dancing (cha-cha, electric slide) in Filipinx American bodies cannot be attributed to a single historical event. After conversations with family still in the Philippines and other Filipinx American artists, I still could not identify a definitive or specific event (besides the obvious: cultural imperialism). But to not know where it originated beyond that? Is it dramaturgically necessary? My dramaturgy is a complicated relationship to hip hop dance. Especially having grown up in the land of the Ohlone people, the San Francisco Bay Area, I tend to choreograph more productively when there is a good beat to a song. The dramaturgy in hip hop dance is starting to grow even more eloquently in academic spaces thanks to Imani Kai Johnson, Naomi Macalalad Bragin, grace shinhae jun, and J. Lorenzo Perillo, to name a few scholars. [10] But what does it mean that a good beat is what drives more movement in my choreographic practice? [11] This dramaturgical question could be essentialized to the steadiness of the beat, the bass better felt through the speakers, and the nostalgia of youth. It can also be complicated by the musicology and history of downbeats in dance or further complicated by the lived experiences of hip hop dance practitioners. Johnson mentions the nuance required in discussions of appropriation in hip hop culture. [12] This too is part of the dramaturgy. These orbiting pathways and their traces do not fully capture all dramaturgical motion in performance, nor should it. If the goal of dramaturgy is to create a fuller, more critical, and more nuanced performance and world, then my dramaturgy is intricately linked to but simultaneously complicated by the everyday and the loss in them. My dramaturgical practice as a queer, cis, Filipinx-American, artist-scholar (and as of this writing) Midwesterner takes all of these labels and throws them into the orbit of vast empty space. This dramaturgy, while performed onstage in singular events, is lived every day, unfolds every day, and dances every day. That is to say, we see only partially what is illuminated, what is possible, with detail we could never imagine, and that is okay. Otherwise, we reinforce a colonial approach of assuming we can and should fully know what it means to be any marker of difference. [13] My Filipinx-American dramaturgies are incomplete and whole at the same time. The missing and incomplete are part of my post-colonial Filipinx-American framework. To return to Fuchs’s “Theatrical Mirrors,” the invitation to dance with more planets is always there in an ever-expanding multi-directional universe. To which planets do we hold ourselves accountable? What are we doing to dance with this ever-expanding complexity? Through these complex dramaturgical orbits, I hope my performance work and dramaturgy provide care for the everyday. Sociologist Valerie Francisco-Menchavez demonstrates care work in Filipina migration as multidirectional. [14] In my screendance How to Dance with Filipinx Ancestors? , I work with artist and scholar Julian Saporiti’s track, “Gimme Chills” as the underlying music score. Julian Saporiti, performing as No-No Boy , has dramaturgical planets rooted in cross-cultural loss, Japanese American incarceration, histories of war, and abuses in Asia and the United States. When Julian Saporiti granted me permission to use the track first for movement research and then for the screendance work, the care work was present not just in the song or in the dance, but in the unseen interactions in the building of relationships, the sharing of archives, and the everyday construction of artistic practice and research. To be clear, this is not the same as the care work studied in Francisco-Menchavez’s research that focuses on Filipinx export labor and the international flow of care. However, the multi-directional movement of care does link to the plural traces of planetary orbits rather than a dramaturgical planet in isolation. Queer Filipinx American dramaturgy offers a dance with incomplete colonial and postcolonial narratives. These rich diasporic stories parallel a complex colonial and postcolonial history. We intentionally do not see all of these planets. This withholding can sometimes fail. Ultimately, this failure and repetition are parts of the dance work, whether intentional or not. Suzan Lori-Parks might call this type of dramaturgy “rep and rev.” [15] Imani Kai Johnson might call this dramaturgy a dance away and with complexity, at the very least pushing away binaries that hold us back when repeated. [16] In the doing, I hope to choreograph invisible orbits that include the dramaturgical consideration of what is seen, not seen, lost, imagined, and moving in the opposite direction all at once, not in isolation. When my parents imagined opportunities in diaspora, the doing, the actual immigrating movement of their bodies is what put that dramaturgy into practice. And the moment here, now. References [1] Elinor Fuchs, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” Theater 34, no. 2 (2004): 4-9. [2] René Alexander Orquiza, “Lechon with Heinz, Lea & Perrins with Adobo,” in Eating Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 177-85. [3] Fuchs, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet,” 9. [4] My deepest thanks to Kevin McDonald for dramaturging this article and helping me arrive at this point. [5] Katherine Profeta, Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 87. [6] Mina Roces, “Dress, Status, and Identity in the Philippines: Pineapple Fiber Cloth and Ilustrado Fashion,” Fashion Theory 17, no. 3 (2013): 341-72. See also Mina Roces, “Gender, Nation and the Politics of Dress in Twentieth‐Century Philippines,” Gender & History 17, no. 2 (2005): 354-77. [7] Christina H. Lee, Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines Under Early Spanish Rule (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). [8] Al Evangelista, “How to Dance with Filipinx Ancestors?” in “Six Illuminated Videos,” Journal of Embodied Research 4, no. 2 (10 October 2021), https://doi.org/10.16995/jer.91. [9] Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). See also, Alfred C. Newell, Philippine Exposition: World’s Fair, St. Louis, 1904: 40 Different Tribes, 6 Philippine Villages, 70,000 Exhibits, 130 Buildings, 725 Native Soldiers (St. Louis: s.n., 1904), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiuc.2869262, and Carl Wilhelm Seidenadel, The First Grammar of the Language Spoken by the Bontoc Igorot: With a Vocabulary and Texts, Mythology, Folklore, Historical Episodes, Songs (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1909), Special Collections Research Center, University of Michigan Library. [10] Naomi Bragin, “Shot and Captured: Turf Dance, Yak Films, and the Oakland, California, Rip Project,” TDR/The Drama Review 58, no. 2 (2014): 99-114. See also, Imani Kai Johnson, “Black Culture without Black People: Hip-Hop Dance Beyond Appropriation Discourse,” in Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Simone C. Drake and Dwan Henderson Simmons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 191-206; grace shinhae jun, forthcoming, “Asian American Liminality: Racial Triangulation in Hip Hop Dance,” in The Oxford Handbook on Hip Hop Dance Studies , ed. Mary Fogarty and Imani Kai Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press); J. Lorenzo Perillo, Choreographing in Color: Filipinos, Hip-Hop, and the Cultural Politics of Euphemism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). [11] Alan Chazaro, “A New Generation of Filipino Hip-Hop Builds On a Deep Bay Area Legacy,” KQED , 26 October 2021, https://www.kqed.org/arts/13905208/a-new-generation-of-filipino-hip-hop-builds-on-a-deep-bay-area-legacy. [12] Johnson, “Black Culture without Black People,” 191-206. [13] C. Nicole Mason, “Leading at the Intersections: An Introduction to the Intersectional Approach Model for Policy & Social Change” (New York: Women of Color Policy Network, 2010). [14] Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018). [15] Steven Drukman, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Liz Diamond, “Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond: Doo-a-Diddly-Dit-Dit: An Interview,” TDR 39, no. 3 (1995): 56-75. [16] Johnson, “Black Culture without Black People,” 191-206. Footnotes About The Author(s) Al Evangelista is Assistant Professor of Dance at Oberlin College and Conservatory. Al is an interdisciplinary artist whose creative process engages with social justice, queer Filipinx-American diaspora, and performance studies. His research identifies ways in which theatre and dance provoke and create change. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Fiona Gregory Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 2 Visit Journal Homepage Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet Fiona Gregory By Published on May 29, 2014 Download Article as PDF In 1970 Judith Anderson, doyenne of the classical American stage, fulfilled a long-held desire to play the title role in Hamlet. Employing a heavily cut text and minimalist setting, the production relied on the power of voice to illuminate Shakespeare’s poetry. Yet most viewers were unable to see past Anderson’s seventy-three-year-old female body to the spirit of her Hamlet, and her performance was widely criticised. Anderson later described the experience as a “heartache and a tragedy.”1 Despite its disappointing reception at the time, Anderson’s performance merits recognition, and re-examination, as a notable event in theatrical history with significant aesthetic and social implications. Anderson’s Hamlet was an extraordinary exercise in boundary crossing—rejecting conventions of Shakespearean performance alongside those of age and gender. Furthermore it refused to be aligned with either classical theatre or avant-garde performance, existing in a state of otherness and demanding to be assessed on its own terms. Australian-born Anderson began her Broadway career in the 1920s, later balancing her stage work alongside steady employment as a character actress in film. Her career was transformed when she appeared as Medea in Robinson Jeffers’s adaptation of Euripides’s play. Anderson’s intense and archly theatrical performance met with popular and critical acclaim and enhanced her status, positioning her as “first lady” of the American stage. In the 1950s and 1960s she cemented this identity, touring both the full production of Medea and her program of excerpts from Medea and Macbeth in America and abroad. Although she continued to appear regularly on film and television, Anderson repeatedly figured the stage as her true metier. As well as lauding the performative freedom of the theatre, she expressed an understanding of the stage as a site that enabled communion with “genius:” “That’s why I like to do great plays—to be a part of greatness.”2 In the 1960s and 70s, Anderson became increasingly disillusioned not only with film and television but with the contemporary theatre. Her solution was to retreat into the classics: “There’s so little that is good. I would rather fail as Hamlet than succeed in something less worthy.”3 Anderson’s Hamlet, directed by William Ball and produced by Paul Gregory, performed predominantly at university theatres but also appeared at venues such as New York’s Carnegie Hall. Anderson’s performance, Ball’s direction, the supporting cast, and the design were all repeatedly deemed weak and ill-conceived by critics, but the production proved a commercial success: the two nights at Carnegie Hall sold out before rehearsals even commenced. [caption id="attachment_1124" align="alignnone" width="420"] Figure 1., Hamlet program, signed by Judith Anderson, in Author’s collection.[/caption] Anderson’s popularity suggests a nostalgic longing for the grand theatre of the past amongst some sections of the community during a period of immense change in America. The consequences of involvement in the war in Vietnam, the rise of second wave feminism and the civil rights movement, and the emergence of the gay liberation movement transformed American society during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These issues were explored in the work of avant garde troupes such as Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre, and Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre Company, as well as in more mainstream forms such as the rock musical Hair. Judith Anderson was removed from these trends; from the early 1960s, she repeatedly conveyed her distaste for modern theatre. In 1969, she told a journalist: “[there] isn’t anything that I want to see today. You hear about Hair and Oh Calcuatta! (sic) and it’s all disgusting to me. There is no quality or imagination in the theatre today [and] I object to the nudity.”4 She also raised her objections to “thrust” stages that brought the actors into the audience: “For her it’s too much reality . . . and not enough left to the imagination.”5 Anderson articulated a preference for performance that occurred inside the pictorial frame of the proscenium and maintained its distance from the audience. Yet despite her conservative outlook, her Hamlet was read as potentially radical, and she was obliged to deny that it held feminist intent or was an experiment in “camp.” Female Hamlets The desire to play Hamlet had been experienced and fulfilled by many women before Anderson, including Mrs. Furnivall, Sarah Siddons and Elizabeth Inchbald during the eighteenth century.6 These women were led, Tony Howard suggests, by the desire to claim ownership over a role that was becoming identified as the greatest work of England’s greatest poet.7 Female Hamlets proved particularly popular in the Romantic age, a move attributable in part to changing conceptions of Hamlet’s character. Robin Headlam Wells notes the “age of sensibility invented a new Hamlet—sensitive, delicate, distressed,”8 and Elaine Showalter suggests this feminisation of the character opened the role to women.9 According to Tony Howard the first woman to essay the role in an American theatre was likely the touring English actress Mrs. Bartley at New York’s Park Theatre in 1819, closely followed by Fanny Wallack, Charlotte Barnes and, most notably, Charlotte Cushman.10 Departing from earlier models, Cushman privileged Shakespeare’s text in her production—she reinstated much of the play that was typically cut, as well as restoring her understanding of emotional “truth” to the Hamlet role, in a “conscious critique of what many men had done with it” before her.11 Anderson drew attention to the long tradition of actresses in the role and particularly cited Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet, which the actress premiered in 1899 at the age of fifty-four, as a precedent for her own performance. Bernhardt performed her Hamlet within the tradition of “travesti” performance popular on the French stage. Actresses in travesti sought to create a stylised masculinity that male actors were thought to be unable to achieve in their representations of young men and boys. Gerda Taranow notes the object of travesti was not “androgyny.” Despite its insistence on the feminine within the masculine and vice versa, the aim of travesti was not to unite the sexes but to highlight difference through the contrast of female body and male attire. Female travesti “did not seek to intermingle opposite sexualities, but to emphasize, with delicate insistence, the feminine presence [of the actress in the male role].”12 Anderson, in contrast, would seek to direct attention away from her gendered identity and body when playing Hamlet. While many French critics applauded Bernhardt’s depiction of masculinity, some questioned the suitability of Hamlet for travesti performance, as they believed Hamlet’s feminine soul needed to be contrasted with a masculine body.13 English critics also objected to Bernhardt’s performance in terms of the body, finding it impossible to read this Hamlet as anything but a woman—specifically a very famous French woman named Sarah Bernhardt. In Max Beerbohm’s analysis, Bernhardt’s Hamlet “betrayed nothing but herself, and revealed nothing but [her] unreasoning vanity . . . her Hamlet was, from first to last, très grande dame.”14 The actress’s body and, more particularly, her celebrity, prevented critics from seeing the “real” Hamlet. The same phenomenon would attend Anderson’s appearance in the role. From Anderson’s personal scrapbooks, she appears also to have been interested in two lesser-known female Hamlets: Asta Nielsen and Esmé Beringer.15 These actresses demonstrate radically different readings of Hamlet by women in the twentieth century, and provide a counterpoint to Anderson’s own approach to the character. Nielsen played Hamlet in the German film, Hamlet: The Drama of Vengeance (1920), directed by Svend Gade. The plot followed Edward P. Vining’s 1881 monograph The Mystery of Hamlet in suggesting Hamlet had been born female but was raised as a boy for political reasons. As the title suggests, this adaptation rejected the passive protagonist of Romanticism for an active avenger. Nielsen’s Hamlet is a young “man” of intellect and honour, troubled by “his” (inexpressible) love for Horatio and grief at the death of “his” father. The film disrupts traditional readings of Hamlet’s delay, or resistance to revenge, as a “feminine” trait. Nielsen had become renowned for playing freedom-seeking new women and enigmatic prostitutes, and Lawrence Danson contends that she brought the memory of these roles to her Hamlet, thereby aligning the character with sexual transgression. In Danson’s analysis, this Hamlet thus became a spectacle of simultaneous liberation and containment: “In Nielsen’s polymorphous sexuality a viewer could read the strong image of a conceivable freedom from gender restrictions, crossed with the pathos of that freedom’s bafflement by actual social conditions” as represented in the material circumstances of the play.16 Nielsen’s Hamlet demonstrates the radical potential of cross-gender casting in Shakespeare, a potential that would also circulate around Anderson’s Hamlet. Esmé Beringer played Hamlet in London in 1935 at the age of sixty-three, and later published an article in which she justified actresses playing Hamlet. She repeatedly figures the character in emotional terms: prior to the catastrophe he is “happy,” “highspirited” and “in love;” following it he is “grief-stricken,” and “runs the gamut of love, scorn and despair.” Beringer does not explicitly comment on the implications of cross-gender casting, but the aspects of the character to which she draws attention are those that seem particularly suited to female performers. She stresses Hamlet’s sensitivity, and finds his interpersonal relationships with Ophelia, Horatio, and Gertrude amongst “the most vital themes of the play.”17 Even within a normative reading of the play, and a conservative approach to theatre, Beringer implicitly validated actresses playing Hamlet. As an older woman performing Hamlet, Beringer also functioned as a precedent for Anderson. Had Anderson read the Times’s review of Beringer’s performance she would have seen that the actress’s age was ignored by the critics, but her ineffectual representation of masculinity and male behaviour, and her “monotonous, sing-song intonation,” were openly criticised.18 Anderson decided not to attempt a representation of masculinity in her reading, and to focus her performance on her greatest asset—her powerful and flexible voice. Anderson on the road to Elsinore In 1954, Anderson told an American journalist she wished to play the role of Hamlet.19 She reiterated this desire in the press that attended her appearance in Medea in Epidaurus in 1955.20 The opportunity to do so did not arise until 1969, a delay she attributed to the difficulty of finding a suitable director.21 Bernhardt had also stated that her desire to play Hamlet was long-standing but she had been delayed by production difficulties—in her case the search for an appropriate translation.22 This discourse of desire thwarted by circumstances beyond the actresses’ control has a number of effects: it foregrounds the actresses’ professionalism; inhibits reading their decision to play Hamlet as a “whim” or rash act of folly; and frames their eventual appearance in the role as in some way “destined.” Anderson’s trouble finding a director also suggests the limited commercial potential of a female Hamlet on the American stage in the late twentieth century. Anderson did eventually find someone to guide her Hamlet: William Ball, founder and director of the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT), based in San Francisco from 1965. Under Ball’s vigorous leadership, ACT presented modern classics by authors such as Chekhov, Pirandello and Tom Stoppard, rising to become “one of the most active and prosperous resident repertory companies in the country.”23 During the 1960s, Ball also directed John Gielgud, Edith Evans and Margaret Leighton in A Homage to Shakespeare, and worked at a number of America’s major Shakespeare festivals. The venture was produced by Paul Gregory, who had worked in Hollywood and the music industry in addition to the theatre. In 1953, he had produced John Brown’s Body, a dramatic reading starring Anderson, Tyrone Power, and Raymond Massey. In this production, Anderson had demonstrated two things above all else: her range, and her ability to build characters through voice—she created, through recitation, “anything from a great Southern hostess to a child of the woods.”24 In the Hamlet program, Gregory and Ball are described as initiators of the production and, if this was the case, it may have been Anderson’s creation of diverse characters through voice in John Brown’s Body that inspired the project.25 The program notes state Gregory and Ball have (like the actress herself) lived with the idea of Anderson as Hamlet for a long time: “It has been a long cherished dream of [Gregory and Ball] to bring Dame Judith back to the stage as the doomed heir of Elsinore, and when she became available, they lost no time in bringing it to fruition.”26 This comment “authorises” Anderson’s performance by framing it as the “brainchild” of two respected and experienced theatre practitioners, and forestalling its being read as the whim of an aging actress. The idea of Anderson as Hamlet held a popular appeal few might have anticipated. The actress herself stated she originally intended the play for university audiences (a decision she framed in part as a pedagogical exercise27), but Lewis Funke noted that when “the big city managers heard that she would be going out in the production they “demanded” that she play for them too, hence Carnegie Hall.”28 Anderson’s desire to remove the production from Broadway and other avenues of “high status” theatre suggests she was conscious of the risky nature of her venture. The managers’ insistence that she play Carnegie Hall shows the actress remained tethered to a position of status within the American theatre. This status meant Anderson was obliged to present herself as an item of consumption to the critics and patrons that would descend on Carnegie Hall—some of whom then read the “failure” of her Hamlet as a transgression of her status. While some reviewers (especially those from regional and university papers) supported Anderson’s performance, most were critical of her interpretation and of Ball’s production in general. Dan Sullivan, of the Los Angeles Times, found Anderson’s performance “so far off the mark in conception and execution that it is hard to know where to start to describe it.”29 Chris Curcio, of the California State University at Hayward, described the performance as “misconceived,” “monotonously boring,” and “awkward and contrived.”30 Nathan Cohen, of the Toronto Daily Star, suggested Ball had “done nothing to benefit Dame Judith or the play,” and the New York Times’s Mel Gussow described Ball’s Hamlet as “a bloodless production, with no power, poetry, or humour.”31 The reviews indicate the voice was the focus in this Hamlet. As Nick Milich noted in the Watsonville Register, the “point” of this production was “Shakespeare’s poetry, not action, not swordfights.”32 Indeed Milich and Cohen referred to the production as a “recitation,” and Gussow felt “it was almost like a concert reading.”33 In A Sense of Direction, his manifesto on directing, Ball lists “language” as one of the five basic elements of a play, alongside “theme,” “plot,” “character,” and “spectacle.” In any production, writes Ball, a director should identify one of these as the “predominant element;” this element then becomes the focus of the work.34 In keeping with a focus on language, Ball devised a minimalist production: “There are no props, and red velvet backdrops take the place of sets. All the characters except Hamlet wear variations of the same costume, deep red velvet and silk. In vivid contrast, Hamlet is garbed—boots, tights and vest—all in black.”35 Such costuming of Hamlet in black can be read as a further effort to erase the body, but with the set and remainder of the cast in red it is likely that it highlighted not only Hamlet’s body, but also the character’s singularity and Anderson’s star status. [caption id="attachment_1123" align="alignnone" width="606"] Figure 2., Judith Anderson as Hamlet, production still. Department of Special Collections, Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara.[/caption] A number of critics went so far as to describe the production as “stylised.”36 The actors used gestures rather than realistic movement, and there was little “action.”37 These factors enhanced the sense of a recital, although Ball also incorporated some more striking production choices, such as when “the ghost makes its entrance to the sound of amplified heartbeats.”38 The performance text was cut to run under two hours; it was in fact so abbreviated that one critic suggested “a more honest title would be ‘Gems from Hamlet.’”39 Anderson’s degree of input into the performance text is difficult to determine. In Ball’s 1985 manifesto on theatre, A Sense of Direction, he states that his preferred method was to cut the text himself and distribute the arranged script to the cast at the first rehearsal.40 Such a method was unlikely to appeal to Anderson, and Lewis Funke in the New York Times notes “[some] of the original pruning wasn’t to Dame Judith’s liking.” However, the text developed in performance, and Funke added that “things are better now [in November] than when the tour started out [in October].” Anderson later admitted: “[Hamlet] wasn’t done the way I wanted it done.”41 Yet, despite the friction between them, Ball and Anderson actually held the same vision for the production: the desire to focus on language, and a belief in the power of the voice.42 Anderson had played Gertrude opposite John Gielgud’s Hamlet on Broadway in 1936, and this actor’s reading is likely to have influenced her. Gielgud evoked the character’s grief, sensitivity, intellect, and emotional connectivity to those around him. The actor himself described his Hamlet as “introverted,” and located his voice as his focus during the performance: “[I was] more worried about the inflection, the phrasing, and the diction [when I played Hamlet].”43 Anderson also used “grief” as a keynote of her reading, and one critic pejoratively described her as the “Melancholy Dame.”44 The actress conveyed grief through vocal effect: reference was made to her “frequent sobbing voice.”45 While some reviewers criticised her “blubbering” and “sobs,” another admitted, “nobody hovers on the edge of tears so thrillingly” as Anderson.46 In one of the few interviews discussing her interpretation of Hamlet, Anderson suggested she would “be a more emotional Hamlet than, say, Gielgud or Olivier. I might cry.”47 This seemingly innocent comment provides a clue to the critical reception of Anderson’s performance. As Tom Lutz notes, “the meanings assigned to tears are always compounded by the age and sex of the crier.”48 The performance of Hamlet by an elderly woman held the potential to radically destabilise the play’s accepted meanings. James W. Stone has explored Hamlet in terms of its ordering and expulsion of the feminine through language and action. In Stone’s analysis, the feminine is represented in the play in images of dissolution, of movement into water, and therefore in tears: “Whether tears . . . represent Niobe’s sincere expression of grief or Gertrude’s masquerade of seeming, they serve variously to define the bifurcated feminine.”49 Stone describes Hamlet’s journey in the play as a movement away from the feminine. Anderson’s decision to make Hamlet more emotional, to cry noticeably and often, had the potential to instead show him collapsing into the feminine. Such a reading of the text would unsettle critics by its unconventionality, and by its disturbance of the play’s symbolic function: the ordering and expulsion of the feminine. And while the focus on the voice in this production was to draw attention away from the body, the act of crying—a manifestation of the feminine—may have actually underscored the presence of the actress in the role. “She is Judith Anderson” Critic Dan Sullivan described Anderson in Hamlet as the “victim of three obdurate facts. She is a woman. She is a rather short woman. She is Judith Anderson.” For Sullivan, the actress’s association with performative evil through her appearances in Rebecca, Macbeth, and Medea prevented her from becoming Hamlet.50 Frank Hains found Anderson’s Hamlet in conflict with her celebrity, rather than her performance identity. He found he “was never able to associate in any way that Great Lady of the Stage before me with the character which my program told me she was playing.”51 In his review, Hains divides “Judith Anderson” into two personae: “Miss Anderson” and “Dame Judith.”52 “Dame Judith” is linked with Sarah Bernhardt, connoting celebrity, wilfulness, and performative excess. In contrast, “Miss Anderson” is linked with roles such as Lady Macbeth and Medea, which signify tradition, professionalism, and the craft of acting. Lady Macbeth and Medea are described as Anderson’s “property,” suggesting these roles form the basis of her “authentic” performance self. The appearance as Hamlet is a transgression of this self, or as the critic himself puts it, “madness.”53 We can also read Anderson’s Hamlet as a transgression of her status and established identity in Chris Curcio’s response to her performance as “grotesque,” and Bernard Grebanier’s description of it as a “strange [undertaking].”54 For Grebanier, Anderson’s Hamlet became “strange” when considered alongside her “brilliant” performances in Medea and Macbeth.55 Like Medea, Hamlet explores the protagonist’s desire for revenge that leads to murder, but does so via contemplation rather than hasty action, and through lyric, philosophic musings instead of raw and bloody dialogue. It is, paradoxically, a more “feminine” role than was usually associated with Anderson. In addition, unlike the wicked and wilful Medea and Lady Macbeth—Anderson’s most famous roles—Hamlet aims to do good and is obsessed with “right.” Hamlet thus exists at a considerable distance from Anderson’s trademark roles. Anne Davis Basting’s analysis of another actress’s return to Broadway helps us appreciate the transgressive effect of Anderson’s Hamlet. In 1995, at the age of seventy-four, Carol Channing played Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly!, a role she originated in 1964, and with which she was strongly identified. Basting suggests the popularity of Channing’s 1995 performance resulted in part from its performance of “authenticity”—its nostalgic affirmation of a much-loved actress’s identity, and of a golden, “lost” period in Broadway’s history.56 Anderson’s Hamlet, in contrast, denied her authentic self, and was compromised not by the lingering presence of Medea or Lady Macbeth, but by their very absence. While critics figured Anderson’s Hamlet as a transgression of her status and performance identity, I would like to suggest Anderson herself perceived it as an escape from her performance identity—an identity epitomised by the emotion and arch theatricality of Medea. Emerging as it did in the early 1950s, Anderson’s desire to play Hamlet arose in the midst of her journey with Medea. In 1969, Anderson reflected that playing Medea had been a physically and emotionally draining experience: “Medea consumed every bit of me . . . I saw nobody and did nothing, other than concentrate entirely on my work. It took everything out of me, including all my blood. I had to have a blood transfusion.”57 Anderson read Hamlet in distinctly cerebral terms and perhaps Shakespeare’s sensitive, reasoning Danish prince appeared to her here as a tantalising retreat from the physical onslaught of Medea. The body and its sufferings were at the centre of Medea, but Anderson’s vision for Hamlet virtually elided the body: the actress told Robert Feldman that the production “will be in chiaroscuro with lots of shadows,” and the “shadows will include everything from the waist down.”58 Anderson made this comment ten months before the production opened and it is not clear from the reviews and still photographs if her vision was realised in performance. What is apparent is that in Anderson’s approach to the text (she focussed on the poetry); in her performance style (she privileged the voice); and in her proposed design (she hoped to mask the body), she turned away from the mode that the physical had been configured in her landmark role, only to have it reinscribed by the critics. During the tour, Anderson expressed frustration at the media’s interest in her age. As she told the New York Times: “Sure I’m old . . . but I am sick and tired of you writers who keep dwelling on that. I want people to see me and not be thinking of how old I am.”59 In this conceptualisation of her identity, Anderson distinguishes between her essential self and her physical self. She spoke of Hamlet in similar terms: figuring the character as a “soul” rather than a “body.” In her vision for the production, Anderson denied Hamlet a physical identity, but she also denied him a gender identity. Lewis Funke noted that “she doesn’t think of [Hamlet] as being a man . . . She sees the role as asexual.”60 Anderson refused to align Hamlet with either male or female subjectivity. She asked a student reporter: “‘Well, what did you think of me as while watching the play? Did you think of me as a woman or as Hamlet?’” The student replied: “‘At first I thought of you as a woman . . . [but later] I thought of you as Hamlet.’”61 Hamlet is here not female but is also, perhaps, not male. For Anderson, Hamlet appears to have been simply “human” and “his” experience “universal,” and there is a suggestion here that at least one viewer shared her vision. Despite the negative criticism, there were other viewers who approached the play on Anderson’s terms. Nick Milich suggested the majority of critics were searching for the wrong production: “[this Hamlet] is very hard for a modern audience to take . . . [For the players] offered nothing else but the poetry; their production was stripped down to essence, to a dreamlike state.”62 Prior to its opening, Variety predicted Anderson’s Hamlet would dismay theatre purists.63 Most reviews suggest this prediction was realised, as does Bernard Grebanier in Then Came Each Actor, his 1975 history of Shakespearean performance, in which he lists Anderson’s Hamlet as a “total failure.”64 Yet for Milich, Anderson’s Hamlet did not fail. Rather it affirmed the significance of Shakespeare’s poetry and the power of performance to transform the written word. In addition, for several viewers it provided a glimpse of some universal human “essence” that transcended age, gender, celebrity and the body. It was for such transcendence that Anderson had essayed the role: to escape her seventy-three year old body and the yoke of established celebrity and performance identities, and become “part of Shakespeare’s riches and poetry.” Anderson seems to have received the most positive responses from students, her intended audience. The audience at La Crosse University, for example, was described as “rapt” in the production; they gave Anderson a standing ovation.65 Anderson told the New York Times she regularly received letters from appreciative students: “I had a three-page letter only the other day from a girl thanking me, saying ‘Thank God you exist, thank God I saw you’.”66 Grebanier refers to this letter in Then Came Each Actor. It had prompted him “to wonder whether or not the college girl had not already been enlisted in that branch of the woman’s lib movement which would like to see men unsexed.”67 He was not the only writer to suggest Anderson’s performance held some affinity with contemporary feminism. The New York Times told its readers not “to go running over the landscape in praise of Women’s Liberation . . . [as Anderson is] not the first and surely not the last of her sex to essay the Dane.”68 Chris Curcio admitted, “Women’s Liberation proponents may be astatic [sic] that Dame Judith Anderson is playing Hamlet, [but] theatre aficionados were dropping in the aisles.”69 In common with much contemporary media commentary on the women’s movement, these critics’ alignment of the production with feminism was done jokingly and/or disparagingly. Anderson herself denied any feminist agenda in her work, and described “Women’s Lib” as “a lot of tommy-rot.”70 And yet, although she seems unaware of it, Anderson’s Hamlet performed a destabilisation of gender distinctions that, like the discourse of women’s liberation, questioned gender boundaries. “I’m Not Going to Camp it Up”71 When Anderson announced her desire to play Hamlet, the media recognised the camp potential of such a project: a syndicated newspaper article published throughout America “predicted that [Anderson] would camp up the role.”72 “Camp” had entered the American mainstream with the publication of Susan Sontag’s influential essay, “Notes on Camp,” in 1964.73 Fabio Cleto notes that “within weeks” of this essay’s appearance, camp “exploded as a mass media keyword.”74 In 1970, as a consequence of Sontag’s essay and its application by the mass media, the word “camp” signalled excess, incongruity, and theatricality, and while recognised as an important part of gay culture was not thought of as exclusively “homosexual.”75 In “Notes on Camp,” Sontag describes an enormous variety of cultural moments, objects and persons as “camp,” and her essay has been criticised as “unsystematic” and “inconsistent.”76 Yet, due to its influence, Sontag’s essay provides a useful insight into how camp was perceived at the time of Anderson’s Hamlet. For Sontag, the “essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”77 Camp is thus found in excessive and/or incongruous displays of gender, age, class, or style. A number of Anderson’s performances prior to Hamlet can be identified as camp in their excess. In films such as Salome (1953) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and in Hallmark Hall of Fame television productions, “Elizabeth the Queen” (1968) and “The File on Devlin” (1969), Anderson’s overt theatricality could not be contained by the camera. Her performances in the above productions were characterised by emotionalism and exaggerated gestures and movement. In his review of “The File on Devlin,” George Eres described Anderson’s “dramatics” as “out of all proportion” to the script and the medium.78 The implication here is that Anderson’s performance is not only “excessive” but also “passé,” belonging to an earlier, and superseded, style of performance. As Andrew Ross notes in an important definition, the “camp effect” is created “when the products . . . of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to produce and dominate cultural meanings, become available, in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste.”79 Ross notes that the distance between contemporary and historical performance was highlighted by the “recirculation of classic Hollywood films on television.”80 Repeated screenings of Anderson’s intense emotionalism in Rebecca and Salome, and the theatricality of her television appearances, rendered her anachronistic in a culture influenced by the understatement of the Method. These performances, and Anderson’s performance and celebrity identities, were liable to be received as camp in Ross’s terms. The idea of such an actress playing Hamlet, especially at the age of seventy-three, was so incongruous that some sections of the media automatically presumed her performance would become camp. However, as Anderson had shown in films such as Laura and The Red House, she could produce restrained and realistic performances when necessary, and her relatively measured Hamlet did not become camp solely on the grounds of “excess.” Nor was its old-fashioned style purely to blame, despite Bill Marvel’s description of Anderson as “out of her depth” in “attempting to make the Bard come alive for members of the Woodstock generation.”81 Indeed, as discussed earlier, some of the most appreciative viewers of the production were university students. Anderson’s Hamlet is more completely read as an example of what Sontag terms “naïve” or “pure” camp, the “essential element” of which is “seriousness, a seriousness that fails.” Sontag goes on to note that “not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.”82 This Hamlet was expressive of each of these elements: “exaggeration” in its style; the “fantastic” in its casting of a seventy-three year old woman as a young man; “passion” in that woman’s intense desire to play the part; and “naivety” in her belief it could work. Ultimately Anderson’s experiment with Hamlet stands as an audacious, boundary-defying act, yet one that also demonstrates the very fixity of the boundaries it was attempting to cross. ------------------------- Fiona Gregory lectures in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University in Melbourne. Her research on issues of celebrity representation and performance identity has appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, Australasian Drama Studies and Affirmations: Of the Modern. She served on the editorial board for Twenty-First Century Drama: The First Decade (Gale, 2012). She is currently undertaking a major research project on representations of the actress and mental illness from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. ------------------------- Endnotes: [1]“A Heartache and a Tragedy,” Sydney Morning Herald, 19 April 1973. [2] Michael Clowes, “Dame Judith Anderson,” Adelaide Advertiser, 19 February 1966, 8. [3] Barbara Cloud, “Judith Playing Hamlet,” Pittsburgh Press, 3 January 1971, 19. [4] Louis Calta, “Judith Anderson Plans to Play Hamlet,” New York Times, 19 November 1969, 44. [5] “A Theatre Great is Still ‘A Country Girl,’” Sydney Morning Herald, 24 April 1973, 2. [6] For a fascinating analysis of the history of actresses in the role into the twenty-first century see Tony Howard, Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). [7] Ibid, 36. [8] Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 81. [9] Ibid.; see also Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), 79. [10] Howard, Women as Hamlet, 43. [11] Ibid, 49. [12] Gerda Taranow, The Bernhardt Hamlet: Culture and Context (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 83. [13]Ibid., 85. [14] Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres (New York: Greenwood Press, 1930), 36-7. [15] Anderson’s personal scrapbooks, boxes 10-11, Dame Judith Anderson Collection, PA Mss 6, Department of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). [16] Lawrence Danson, “Gazing at Hamlet, or the Danish Cabaret,” Shakespeare Survey 45 (1993): 45. [17] Esmé Beringer, “Woman’s View of Hamlet,” 15 October 1953, unidentified fragment, UCSB. [18] “Miss Esmé Beringer in Hamlet,” Times, 22 January 1938, 8. [19] New York Herald Tribune, 18 October 1954, Judith Anderson Clippings file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (NYPL). [20] Fragment from unidentified article dated 4 July 1955, NYPL. [21] Morning Telegraph, 11 August 1970, NYPL. [22] Sarah Bernhardt, The Art of the Theatre (London: G. Bles, 1924), 139. [23] Gerald M. Berkowitz, New Broadways: Theatre across America: Approaching a New Millennium, rev ed. (New York: Applause, 1997), 78. [24] Power’s opening speech, page from Anderson’s script of John Brown’s Body, UCSB. [25] Nick Milich states Anderson “selected Ball to direct her,” in “Critics Missed the Point,” Watsonville Register, 13 October 1970, DJA. This does not preclude the possibility that Gregory initiated the project. [26] Hamlet program, in author’s collection. [27] Ibid. [28] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [29] Dan Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role,” Los Angeles Times, 1 October 1970, UCSB. [30] Chris Curcio, “Anderson’s Hamlet: A Fiasco,” Daily Pioneer, 6 October 1970, UCSB. [31] Nathan Cohen, “Female Hamlet Never Satisfying,” Toronto Daily Star, 27 October 1970, UCSB; Mel Gussow, “Stage: A Lady ‘Hamlet,’” New York Times, 15 January 1971, 18. [32] Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [33] Ibid; Cohen, “Female Hamlet;” Gussow, “A Lady ‘Hamlet.’” [34] William Ball, A Sense of Direction: Some Observations on the Art of Directing (New York: Drama Book Publishers, 1984), 27-8. [35] Bill Marvel, “Hamlet’s Mother Plays Him,” National Observer, 5 October 1970, 17. [36] Frank Hains, “Dame’s Dane: Madness in Great Ones Must Now Unwatched Go,” Jackson Daily News, 17 November 1970, DJA; Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [37] Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role,” Los Angeles Times. [38] Marvel, “Hamlet’s Mother.” [39] Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role.” [40] Ball, A Sense of Direction, 99. [41] Robert Berkvist, “When a Great Role is Passed Along,” New York Times, 2 May 1982, NYPL. [42] Anderson referred to the “friction” between herself and Ball in an interview with Clyde Packer, in No Return Ticket (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1984), 67. [43] Richard L. Sterne, John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals (New York: Random House, 1967), 294. [44] Hains, “Dame’s Dane.” [45] Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [46] Curcio, “Anderson’s ‘Hamlet;’” Gussow, “A Lady ‘Hamlet;’ Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet.” [47] Robert Feldman, “The Dame from Rose Park, Adelaide,” Bulletin, 27 December 1969, 54 [48] Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 151. [49] James W. Stone, “Androgynous ‘Union’ and the Woman in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Studies 23 (1995): 76. [50] Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role.” [51] Hains, “Dame’s Dane.” [52] Ibid. [53] Ibid. [54] Curcio, “Anderson’s ‘Hamlet;’” Bernard D. N. Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor: Shakespearean Actors, Great and Otherwise (New York: McKay, 1975), 262. [55] Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor, 262. [56] Anne Davis Basting, “Dolly Descending a Staircase: Stardom, Age, and Gender in Times Square,” in Kathleen Woodward, ed., Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 251. [57] San Fernando Sun, 19 November 1969, UCSB. [58] Feldman, “The Dame from Rose Park.” [59] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [60] Ibid. [61] Fragment of article by Melinda Wojtasiak, circa 1971, UCSB. [62] Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [63] Variety, 30 September 1970, NYPL. [64] Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor, 262. [65] Grant Blum, “Dame Judith Triumphs,” La Crosse Tribune, UCSB. [66] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [67] Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor, 263. [68] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [69] Curcio, “Anderson’s ‘Hamlet.’” [70] Wojtasiak, “Dame Judith Anderson.” [71] Show, 20 August 1970, NYPL. [72] Kernan, “Dame Judith.” [73] Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” was first published in Partisan Review in 1964 and reissued in Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966). It is reprinted in Fabio Cleto (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 53-65. [74] Fabio Cleto, “Introduction to Section One,” in Cleto, Camp, 46. [75] See points 50-53 in Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” in Cleto, Camp, 64. [76] Mark Booth, “Campe-Toi!: On the Origins and Definitions of Camp” (1983), in Cleto, Camp, 67. [77] Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 53. [78] George Eres, Long Beach Independent, 25 November 1969, UCSB. [79] Andrew Ross, “Uses of Camp” (1988), in Cleto, Camp, 312. [80] Ibid., 310. [81] Bill Marvel, “One View of Will Shakespeare: Let’s Respect the Stories,” National Observer, 23 November 1970, 20. [82] Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 59. ----------- The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014) Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Guest Editor: Cheryl Black (University of Missouri) With the ATDS Editorial Board: Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University) Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg Circulation Manager: Janet Werther Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director 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 The Border that Beckons and Mocks: Conrad, Failure, and Irony in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Alex Ferrone Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Appropriate Alex Ferrone By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Corey Stoll in Appropriate. Credit: Joan Marcus. Appropriate By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Directed by Lila Neugebauer Helen Hayes Theatre New York, NY November 30, 2023 Reviewed by Alex Ferrone A prolonged blackout opens Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate , so it is through sound—the tremulous hum of “ a billion cicadas ”—that the audience first encounters the yet unseen world on stage. In Lila Neugebauer’s production at the Hayes Theatre, the play’s first time on Broadway, ten years after regional co-premieres in Louisville and Chicago, sound designers Bray Poor and Will Pickens immersed the audience in a surround-sound cicada song that seemed almost to overwhelm the senses. I say senses (plural) because the soundscape’s penetrative quality was intended to exceed audition: as Jacobs-Jenkins explains in the stage directions of the play’s prologue, the sound “ sweeps the theater […] over and beyond the stage – washing itself over the walls and the floors, baptizing the aisles and the seats, forcing itself into every inch of every space, every nook, every pocket, hiding place and pore until this incessant chatter is touching you. It is touching you .” We were thus meant to feel the sound on our bodies, on our skin. When the lights finally came up on the meticulously cluttered interior of an old two-story Arkansas plantation house, designed by the collective Dots, the play’s premise was deceptively familiar: the semi-estranged family of a dead white patriarch reunites to auction off the property and divide the assets, but their long festering resentments soon dominate the proceedings and cause irreparable fissures. Appropriate knowingly riffs on the American tradition of the family reunion play, inviting easy comparisons to plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Buried Child , and August: Osage County —a tradition Jacobs-Jenkins admires and also problematizes for its racial exclusivity. “No one ever talks about Raisin in the Sun as a family drama,” he told Diep Tran in the December 2023 issue of Playbill : “It’s always ‘a social allegory about race and class.’” Jacobs-Jenkins expressed a similar misgiving in American Theatre nine years earlier, the first time Appropriate was mounted in New York in an off-Broadway production at the Signature Center: “there were a lot of triggers for me in hearing people list and describe the ‘great American family dramas.’ I’d look around and be like, ‘There’s no people of color on these lists.’ […] Who has access to this idea of ‘family’ as a universal theme?” Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Corey Stoll in Appropriate . Credit: Joan Marcus. Of course, the Lafayette family drama was front and center at the Hayes Theatre for Appropriate ’s almost three-hour runtime. The cast, led by an indomitable Sarah Paulson, traded endless verbal (and eventually physical) assaults as they aired their grievances and exposed each other’s indiscretions. Supporting performances were uniformly excellent: Corey Stoll, as the absent, entitled son for whom care entails merely signing checks, and Nathalie Gold, as his apprehensive wife who struggles as an outsider in the family, were standouts; so was Michael Esper, as the prodigal son whose serial transgressions alienate those close to him; Elle Fanning was especially memorable as his suspiciously young girlfriend, whose new-age spiritualist word salad was a consistent source of humor. But the evening belonged to Paulson: she gave an astonishing performance as the eldest daughter Toni, at times beset with exhaustion, at others ferociously stalking the stage, her fierce commitment to her family barely concealing both vulnerability and venom. If there is familiarity here, soon comes the curveball, a series of disturbing discoveries as the family sorts through Daddy’s things: first, an album of lynching photos; then, jars of “weird stuff” that resembles human remains; finally, a Klan hood over the head of the youngest grandchild, which, when I saw the show, drew the night’s loudest combination of belly laughs and horrified gasps. It is a rupture the family is determined to avoid, as they downplay and outright deny Daddy’s obvious involvement in anti-Black violence. But their insistence on centering themselves, on claiming victimhood at each other’s hands, wilfully sidelines the Black victims of racist violence whose traces continue to crop up on the family estate. And so the photo album shifts signification, no longer a physical record of heinous racist violence but a commodity worth “hundreds of thousands of dollars” whose sale would enact yet another indignity on the murdered Black people among its pages. While the family cannot fathom calling Daddy an outright racist (gasp!), daughter-in-law Rachael points out that the Antebellum South is “the soil upon which his worldview was fashioned.” This mention of soil is no coincidence, for the vast property includes two burial grounds: one, a cemetery for generations of the Lafayette family; the other, the unmarked graves of generations of enslaved people who worked on the plantation. Even unseen, they are nevertheless there. And so we return to the cicadas, whose characteristic life cycle confines them to the soil for thirteen years at a time. In Appropriate , the cicadas never left, their low thrum pulsating through the theatre for the full length of the show. (In the text, Jacobs-Jenkins specifies that they “ fade to a place just beyond us but never disappear ,” and, sure enough, the stage directions that end each scene reinvoke their continuous presence.) It is an unnerving element of the sound design, something the audience acclimates to, often drowned out by the onstage histrionics, but never absent—an ongoingness that recalls Christina Sharpe’s figuration of “antiblackness as total climate” in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Ultimately, little is resolved by the end of the play. Instead, Jacobs-Jenkins pulls another narrative trick (and maybe exacts some revenge) by absenting the Lafayette family altogether: generations whoosh by (“ it is some day – any day – tomorrow – thirteen years from now – twenty-six years from now. It is the future. It is the present. It is any present. Is the past – any past – now ”), and, in a stunning coup de théâtre , the house falls apart before our eyes. Jane Cox’s dazzling lighting produced a cinematic timelapse as shelves collapsed and windows shattered and a chandelier swung from a rope. Finally, a colossal tree grew from the ground, its wide trunk and full branches stretching out of view, high up into the fly space—radical growth after so much decay. Neugebauer’s final image departed from the text, but it was perhaps in direct conversation with the titles of the play’s three acts, not reproduced in the Playbill. Where Act II, “Walpurgisnacht,” gestures to paganism and witchcraft (and surely to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , another “family drama” in its own way), Acts I and III, titled “The Book of Revelations” and “The Book of Genesis,” take us from the end of the world back to the beginning, to the garden and the great flood, to regeneration. The production’s final scene, with its spectacular collapse and its magnificent tree growing through (or perhaps from) the ruins, beautifully captured the extent to which Appropriate is not really about the Lafayettes at all: it’s about the house and about the land on which it stands and eventually falls. It’s about the soil. Sarah Paulson in Appropriate . Credit: Joan Marcus. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Alex Ferrone (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of English in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at l’Université de Montréal, where he teaches dramatic literature, theatre history, and performance studies. He is the author of Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London (Springer, 2021), and his articles and reviews have been published in Theatre Survey , Theatre Journal , and Comparative 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. 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