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Karl Kippola 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 American Tragedian Karl Kippola By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF American Tragedian: The Life of Edwin Booth. By Daniel J. Watermeier. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015; Pp. 464. More has been written on Edwin Booth than any other American actor. Three popular biographies lionize Booth in the late-nineteenth century. Another four in the mid-twentieth century, one of which ( Prince of Players , 1955) was even made into a movie, perpetuate his tragic legacy. Charles Shattuck’s several, more scholarly, works on Booth, beginning in the late 1960s, revived interest. In the last quarter century, fascination with Booth has grown: Gene Smith’s American Gothic: The Story of America’s Legendary Family—Junius, Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth and L. Terry Oggel’s Edwin Booth: A Bio-Bibliography (both in 1992), Nina Titone’s My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy (2010), Arthur W. Bloom’s Edwin Booth: A Biography and Performance History (2013), the more popularly focused Good Brother, Bad Brother: The Story of Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth (2005) by James Cross Giblin and The Assassin’s Brother: The Tragedies of Edwin Booth (2013) by Rebecca Wallace. With Between Actor and Critic: Selected Letters of Edwin Booth and William Winter (1971), Daniel J. Watermeier established himself as a formidable archivist and an authority on Edwin Booth. American Tragedian , dedicated to the memory of his mentor Shattuck, represents the culmination of Watermeier’s lifework on Booth and the American theatre. He effectively contextualizes the period, details the events, and explores the strengths, limitations, and temperament of “the last truly great American tragedian and Shakespearean actor” (362). Several recent works primarily and reductively view Edwin through the lens of his infamous brother. American Tragedian addresses the assassination in only six pages and wisely keeps the spotlight on the titular Booth. When Edwin returned to the stage a year after Lincoln’s death forced an early retirement, “It was as if the American psyche, scarred by years of war and then the shocking assassination of an esteemed president, needed to invest its collective suffering into a single individual. . . . Booth’s personal suffering . . . became emblematic of the nation’s suffering” (127). Watermeier honors the inescapable impact of John Wilkes’ act, but unwavering focus on Edwin encourages a more complex understanding of both the actor and the country. Previous Booth biographies often privileged limited aspects of his career, but Watermeier’s study is remarkably comprehensive. Readers finally experience Booth’s complete story, with scrupulous accuracy and documentation. Watermeier is at his best when he contextualizes and analyzes, fully capitalizing on the forty-year relationship with his subject and sources. Edwin as Hamlet wore his father’s portrait on a chain around his neck. When Watermeier posits, “It was as if his own father was King Hamlet, a tangible memento stimulating a complex emotional memory that fueled the believability of Edwin’s performance” (22), we receive genuine insight not only into Booth, but also into an acting process decades ahead of its time. Watermeier skillfully contextualizes the complex and often contradictory responses to Booth in his analysis of the “Joint Star” tour with Lawrence Barrett (a pair he convincingly identifies as pioneering “theatrical capitalists” [331]), which closely coincided with President Grover Cleveland’s own “Good Will Tour.” Cleveland had chosen not to intercede in the impending executions of anarchist assassins convicted in the 1886 Haymarket Riot, and “against these local events, Booth as Brutus [in Julius Caesar ]—whether heroic martyr or tragically misguided conspirator—may have had a special resonance with Chicago playgoers” (322), polarized in their response. If the book has a weakness, it lies in synthesis and interpretation. Too often Watermeier merely reports weekly theatres, roles, and box-office receipts, in lieu of complex analysis. Watermeier details the powerful connection that Booth shared with his audiences—an affinity that sometimes reached the level of obsession. Booth’s physical beauty, combined with his passionate and soulful portrayals, especially fascinated a number of young women and men who returned dozens of times to view his performances, to connect with him on a personal level, and to write voluminously and fanatically in their attempts to comprehend, if not demystify, his magical power. While Watermeier reports the fascination, he never truly grapples with the reasons behind it. Booth was born with a lucky caul, yet tragedy clung to him. Booth entered the profession when the first generation of serious American actors were in decline. Criticized for lacking tragic power, he aspired to a refined and intellectual approach that fortuitously matched temperament with the soon-to-be-dominant middle class and the sacred domain of the cultural elite. Booth consciously sought to elevate and ennoble audiences through repertoire selection, realistic stagecraft, and popular publishing of his acting texts. He built and managed Booth’s Theatre, arguably the finest in the world, to showcase his artistic ambition; yet, he was undone by bad choices and timing: “He did clearly put his trust too readily into the wrong partner and financial advisors, and, equally damaging, he overestimated his ability through hard work and substantial income to control the situation and unforeseen events—principally, the Panic of 1873” (175). In choosing his title, and in the focus of his study, Watermeier sees Booth as tragic, and tragedy did follow the actor in the death of his father, two wives, and infant son, as well as a crippling carriage accident, John Wilkes’ shooting of Lincoln, and an assassination attempt on his own life. Yet Watermeier frequently reveals playfulness, and often deliberate anti-intellectualism, in Booth’s private correspondence and poetry. Booth said of himself, “I was always of a boyish spirit. . . . But there was always an air of melancholy about me that made me seem much more serious than I ever really was” (358). Watermeier lets Booth’s self-assessment pass without comment or analysis, yet this contradiction between the man and his public perception seems key to a complete picture. While somewhat conservative and traditional, American Tragedian remains scrupulously researched and documented, accessibly written, and complete in scope. This comprehensive biography presents the clearest picture yet of its endlessly compelling and maddeningly elusive hero. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Karl Kippola American University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 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.

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

Amy B. Huang Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor Amy B. Huang By Published on June 12, 2020 Download Article as PDF A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor. Edited by Amy E. Hughes and Naomi J. Stubbs. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018; Pp. 353. What did it mean to strive after a life in the theatre in the United States in the antebellum period? Recent works by scholars such as Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Lisa Freeman have moved beyond a focus on a public sphere shaped by print culture and rational debate, showing how theatre and performance were also crucial sites of communion and forming a body politic. The diary of Harry Watkins (1825-1894), edited and published for the first time by Amy Hughes and Naomi Stubbs, continues to reveal the cultural importance of the theatre through a focus on the life of an actor, theatre manager, playwright, and prolific diarist. Watkins’s diary provides invaluable information about the quotidian life of a theatre professional over a fifteen-year period. In their introduction, Hughes and Stubbs make a strong case for their volume’s unique value to American cultural studies and theatre scholarship: “From 1845 to 1860, Watkins kept a diary in which he detailed the roles he performed, the plays he saw, the people he met, the books he read, and his impressions of current events. Now housed in the Harvard Theatre Collection, it is the only known diary of substantial length and density (nearly twelve hundred pages in thirteen volumes) written by a US actor during the decade leading up to the Civil War” (2). A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into nineteenth-century theatre and politics. Among other topics, it considers the following: salaries and contracts; problems with the star system; theatrical rivalries and tensions; American plays and the difficulties of adaptation; copyright laws; and encounters with famous actors and writers. In their compendium, the editors provide readers with a clear, helpful background of Watkins’s family, his time in the army before becoming an actor, and his political views. Watkins’s deep patriotism is evident across his diary and contributes to his tempered stances toward issues such as abolition, which he criticized for threatening the preservation of the Union. In their introduction and throughout footnotes, Hughes and Stubbs delineate Watkins’s specific political views while placing them in a larger cultural context; for instance, they note that “Watkins’s insouciant racism, fervent nativism, and casual misogyny were not exceptional . . . . His views mirrored those held by many white, US-born, working-and middle-class New Yorkers living during the antebellum era” (7). The editors further explain the sweeping scope of Watkins’s diary as well as their choices in the presentation. With rigorous care, they mark when Watkins’s entries become less consistent and gesture to when parts of the diary may have become lost, destroyed, or emended. Hughes and Stubbs also unpack their own editorial policies, including choices to preserve Watkins’s voice and diction, the selection of diary entries with attention to their cultural significance, and presentation of the diary in chapters grouped by the events of a theatrical season. (Their transcription of the entire diary is available via the University of Michigan Press website, as a companion to the book). Astutely, the editors strike a balance between directly presenting Watkins’s entries and providing useful, contextualizing annotations. More distinctively, the co-editors provide a map at the beginning of each chapter so that readers can easily track Watkins’s movements when traveling, often for the purposes of theatrical engagements. Such editorial contextualization greatly contributes to making Watkins’s voice, often immersed in theatrical allusions and financial and travel details, broadly accessible to a wide range of readers. Hughes and Stubbs’s chapters move chronologically, according to theatre seasons, and track Watkins’s increasing roles and growing importance in the theatre world. The entries in Chapter One, 1845-46, for example, allow readers to follow the touring actor as he plays minor roles in Corpus Christi, New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Louisville. The working-class Watkins describes financial struggles (including difficulty affording lodging and attire) at the start of his professional acting career. Later chapters such as Chapter Six: 1850-51 trace Watkins’s emerging role as a playwright, carefully attuned to play structure, dramatic effect, the abilities of actors, and the tastes of the audience. Thus, his prize-winning Nature’s Nobleman, set during the US-Mexican War and fiercely expressive of patriotic sentiment, served to connect with an audience in New York reacting to tensions and threats of disunion in the wake of policies related to slavery (such as Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850). Chapter Seven:1851-52 continues to track Watkins’s efforts at stage managing and establishing a theatrical company, highlighting the difficulties of wrangling performers. Finally, this edition of the diary ends with Watkins’s account of the theatrical seasons from 1858-60, where English audiences applauded his rendition of the blackface character, Jocko, in his play, The Pioneer Patriot, and his portrayal of a demeaning Yankee role in Tom Taylor’s The Brigand and the Banker . As this edition of the diary closes, it thus reiterates Watkins’s central emphases on American patriotism and nativism and his consistently careful consideration of his paying audiences and their tastes within widespread circuits of performance. A Player and a Gentleman offers a rare glance into the minutiae and everyday struggles of a U.S. American theatre professional in a period marked by tumult and potentiality, when theatre powerfully drew together audiences to face issues such as racial oppression and slavery, war and women’s rights. Although the diary’s ability to reflect the theatre and the antebellum period is limited in that it centers the perspective of a white, male nativist, the survival of a work of such breadth and detail is remarkable. Guided by the co-editors’ contextualization, readers can glean rich information from Watkins’s meticulous observations. For example, Watkins’s commitment to recording house size and audience appeal (as when a production of Othello fails spectacularly in the South) offers important clues to the shared political and aesthetic values in the specific communities he travels across the United States and England. The diary also vividly evokes the collaborative intimacies and unseen labor involved in creating theatre, as when managers and performers demand that Watkins cut portions of his plays, or when he arduously seeks to persuade actresses to perform in his productions. Watkins’s frank discussion of anxieties regarding finances and casting, and his hopeful expectations for and regrets over engagements also provide readers with a sense of the rich, affective undertones of life as a theatre professional in the antebellum period. As scholars increasingly attend to the wide reach of theatre and performance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hughes and Stubbs remind us of the powerful potential in using archival resources such as diaries to simultaneously focus on the landscape of a period and a singular life. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Amy B. Huang Brown University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Dan Colson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Dan Colson By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF The stage directions for Clifford Odets’s 1935 Awake and Sing! call for a “picture of Sacco and Vanzetti” to be hung in Jacob’s room. [1] The picture signals the play’s investment in 1930s radical politics and foreshadows Jacob’s role: the aging Marxist who hopes to pass his communism onto his grandson. Placing Sacco and Vanzetti as a physical image that haunts the entire play is, of course, unsurprising for perhaps the most prominent radical dramatist of the period. Even eight years after their deaths, Nicola Sacco (1891-1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888-1927) stood as symbols for the Left. The two men were arrested for an April 1920 burglary and murder in Braintree, Massachusetts. They spent more than seven years in prison as their trial and appeals played out and were executed in August 1927. The story of these two Italian anarchists captured the world’s attention, sparking widespread outrage. Many believed the men to be innocent and far more believed the guilty verdict emerged from a flawed legal process—in the midst of the era’s anti-radical environment, Sacco and Vanzetti were punished for being anarchists, not for any crime they committed. The two immigrants became a cause célèbre for the literary Left, as their perceived mistreatment intersected with the interwar era’s interest in radical politics. In the late 1910s, radical politics were a dangerous proposition: the First Red Scare—culminating with the infamous Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920—saw mass arrests and deportations that sent many American socialists, communists, and anarchists to prison or back to their home countries. [2] This anti-radical environment set the stage both for Sacco and Vanzetti’s arrests and for the outrage that followed: as anarchists, they risked being arrested (and sent back to Italy) at any time, so their arrest for a burglary only a few months after the Palmer Raids appeared to many as too convenient. As their trial unfolded and their lives hung in legal limbo for years, the Left saw in these two purportedly innocent anarchists a rallying cry: their prolonged ordeal reinvigorated the Left, as ardent radicals and soft-hearted liberals found common ground. Amongst those drawn to their plight, we find a large number of the period’s well-known writers: Odets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mike Gold, Lucia Trent, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos and countless others wrote about Sacco and Vanzetti. These writers—from a range of political positions—all cast doubt on the perceived justice of their conviction and eventual execution. While Sacco and Vanzetti were still alive, many writers focused their attention on immediate goals: delaying their execution, winning a reprieve from Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller, calling attention to the trial’s injustice, and swaying public sentiment in ways that might influence the powerful figures who were still in the process of determining the two anarchists’ fate. In short, authors writing up to August 1927 mostly sought to help Sacco and Vanzetti—two men’s lives were at stake. After their deaths, however, writers’ goals shifted. It was too late to save Sacco and Vanzetti, but many Left-leaning writers saw in their ordeal a potent symbol of what was wrong with the United States. This process of interpretation—of establishing the lasting meaning of these events—left us with a number of texts that lament the failures of the American legal system and call for major changes to ensure such a tragic miscarriage of justice would not occur again. None of these works, however, embrace the politics of their subjects. Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists; they believed the government was irredeemably broken and that no amount of reform could ever remedy the flaws of American democracy. In fact, they were followers of Luigi Galleani, an Italian anarchist who openly espoused violent anti-government actions. [3] As radical and progressive writers interpreted the significance of Sacco and Vanzetti’s plight, however, their anarchism tended to disappear—sublimated to other political agendas that rejected the extremes of anarchism. Despite the fact that many people believed Sacco and Vanzetti were treated unfairly precisely because they were anarchists, authors writing after their deaths minimized their politics, turning them into symbols for the writers’ political and artistic visions. In this essay, I focus on Maxwell Anderson, who wrote two plays about Sacco and Vanzetti: Gods of the Lightning in 1928, just after their execution, and Winterset in 1935, when the two men’s legacy had been almost entirely sublimated to others’ political agendas. Anderson is an interesting figure within the body of Sacco-Vanzetti literature. On the one hand, scholars have rightly recognized Anderson’s dalliance with radicalism which makes him a natural author to take up the topic. On the other hand, Anderson underwent a dramatic, yet prolonged, political transformation—a significant shift toward the Right. His two Sacco-Vanzetti plays appeared in the midst of this transition, as Anderson—like many Left-leaning authors from the period—responded to the rise of fascism and began to drift away from the more strident forms of American radicalism. The plays, then, were written in moments when Anderson still saw Leftist politics and economic policy as potential answers to social injustice, yet they were subsequently inflected by a playwright who gradually distanced himself from the Left. Interpretation of Gods of the Lightning and Winterset have been complicated by Anderson’s political transformation (and, in fact, by Anderson’s own understandings of the plays vis-à-vis radical politics). In what follows, I argue the plays—while different in key respects—demonstrate a consistent political fatalism that can help us better understand Anderson’s relationship to the radical Left. In them, he finds little hope for radical politics, as the plays’ plots turn away from anarchism to other, more personal matters and, in the process, tend toward hopelessness. These two plays thus portend Anderson’s disillusionment with the Left, which does not offer the answers he seeks and cannot redress the injustice he laments. At the heart of this fatalism, however, are his thinly veiled representations of two executed anarchists. Anderson builds his fatalistic political vision on Sacco and Vanzetti, an ubiquitous symbol of the nation’s failures. Doing so required, to a certain extent, abjuring their radicalism. As anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti rejected the nation outright. To them, there was no remedying legal injustice; the law itself was injustice. Gods of the Lightning and Winterset minimizes this anarchism, offering instead a mélange of vaguely Leftist politics and individualized, largely apolitical, personal strife. According to many, Anderson makes the anarchism that explained Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution impotent, if not irrelevant, in the plays. In this respect, Anderson’s portrayal of the men distills the broader evolution of their literary depictions: stripped of the specificity of their radicalism, Sacco and Vanzetti become generic symbols, manipulated for the political and literary visions of the authors who deploy their image. Ultimately, analysis of anarchism’s appearance in Gods of the Lightning and Winterset reveals a fundamental rejection of their subjects’ politics. Their anarchism is replaced by a sense of hopelessness, and then by a revisioning of the plays’ import: these are not plays about anarchism or anarchist plays; they are plays that happen to be about anarchists. My argument here thus offers us a better understanding of Anderson’s oeuvre (and the role his politics play in it), but also a clearer look at the ways in which Sacco and Vanzetti were deployed by the era’s literary Left as strikingly non-anarchist symbols of the nation’s shortcomings. Anderson’s Uncertain Politics Anderson’s father was a railroad-worker-turned-itinerant-minister, so Anderson’s childhood was marked by frequent moves, an uneven education, and a large dose of Protestantism (which he almost entirely rejected). Though his family often struggled financially and Anderson himself held a number of working-class jobs in his early adulthood, there are no meaningful radical influences in his social sphere during his formative years. He was early drawn to Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, from whom he learned a “distrust for ‘big’ government” and a “sometimes errant individualism.” [4] Then, while at the University of North Dakota, he studied Thorstein Veblen under a socialist professor. [5] In 1912, Anderson, then 23, declared, “I have become a Socialist.” [6] A few years later, in a letter to his life-long friend Upton Sinclair, he describes himself as “Bolshevistic.” [7] During this period, it appeared the “champion of liberty and justice” might embrace the radical Left. [8] Only a few years later, while working for The New Republic , Anderson seemed uninterested in “politics, national or international.” [9] In the 1920s he was a “staunch” liberal “against monopolies and for organized labor.” [10] By the late 1930s, however, he felt forced to choose between “the evils of capitalism” and the “evils of collectivism.” [11] He chose capitalism, and by the beginning of WWII he believed “Communism [was] dangerous,” and a threat to “democratic government.” [12] Eventually, Anderson aligned with Joseph McCarthy and others who contended that “any American member of the Communist Party was a criminal dedicated to overthrowing the government by force.” [13] In Anderson’s authoritative biography, Alfred S. Shivers describes the dramatist as an “individualist and a rebel,” a man with “wide-ranging sympathies.” [14] These sympathies intersected with the Left at moments, but they hardly suggest a man who would write multiple plays about arguably the most famous anarchists in American history. Like many fellow-travelers—individuals who flirted with radicalism, yet never fully embraced the more extreme Leftist politics that largely define “radical literature” from this period—Anderson’s politics transformed as he aged and as his political environment changed. In fact, Anderson’s political journey makes him a paradigmatic example of one type of fellow traveler: he came to socialism early in the twentieth century, when it was the most prevalent brand of American radicalism; he approved of and was drawn to the rise of communism in Russia; he associated with Leftist playwrights such as Odets and the Group Theatre during the 1930s, the heyday of radical literature and theater; he dropped his pacifism during the anti-fascist, pre-WWII era; he turned to American democracy during WWII; [15] and he fully rejected communism during the Cold War. Perhaps predictably then, during the interwar period Anderson’s politics are difficult to define at any given moment. His views were predominantly a mix of American individualism—an anti-institutional, yet malleable distrust for anything that intruded upon one’s “liberty”—and progressive economic ideas (i.e., his prolonged, if incomplete, infatuation with socialism and communism). In some, these dual concerns might combine into an anti-statist, economically egalitarian anarchism (as they did for Sacco and Vanzetti and numerous others from the turn of the century to WWII), but in Anderson, they generated a pendulous politics swinging from radical to reactionary based on the historical moment’s ideological climate. If there is any consistency in Anderson’s political stances, it comes from being “deeply distrustful of all institutional authorities.” [16] At times, this inclination manifests as a belief that the “American government is steadily encroaching on the individual’s rights and independence.” [17] Anderson’s Both Your Houses (1933), for instance, was “intended to be a blast at the Hoover administration.” [18] A critically acclaimed play that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, it offers relatively overt commentary on the era’s political milieu—especially the rejection of Hoover’s volunteerism and the increasing sense, amongst radicals and progressives alike, that major changes to the American economy were necessary—even if was not staged until after Hoover left office and the nature of the conversation had changed significantly. Anderson’s anti-authoritarian stance has even led some to label Anderson a “libertarian” and an “anarchist.” [19] But even Anderson’s peers were confused by his politics, with Odets once calling him “‘a damned reactionary, a fascist!” [20] By that time, Anderson himself self-protectively embraced detachment from organized politics, claiming merely, “I vote Democratic or Republican as I please.” [21] To this day, scholars continue to struggle to locate Anderson’s politics. As I detail below, some claim he was a socialist, others an anarchist, while others avoid the question altogether. Russell DiNapoli offers the lengthiest consideration of Anderson’s relationship to anarchism, linking the playwright’s politics to William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and, most strongly, early-twentieth-century American anarchist Benjamin Tucker. [22] In doing so, however, DiNapoli almost entirely distances Anderson from the major threads of American anarchism prevalent during his career. By the 1920s, Tucker’s influence had waned significantly as he turned away from anarchism as a viable political solution. Rather, figures like Galleani, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman held sway in American anarchist circles—they and their followers became the target of anti-radical sentiment because they were the most visible anarchists, and their punishments, in turn, increased their standing within radical circles. This “violent” anarchism, as DiNapoli calls it, achieved ascendency, [23] which is precisely why Sacco and Vanzetti presented such a threat: they were not philosophical anarchists; they advocated for the overthrow of US governance. DiNapoli concludes that anarchism appears in Anderson’s plays more as a “personal philosophy” than an “ideology,” and that “nowhere does the playwright uphold anarchism as it was defined” by prominent anarchists (past or present). [24] In short, Anderson was interested in anarchism, but his politics never reified around it or any other single radical position. Ethan Mordden perhaps sums it up best: “Anderson’s affiliation was anarchist, though he conceded that anarchy [was] out of reach and democracy was flawed but useful.” [25] In keeping with other scholars, Mordden suggests that Anderson was an anarchist who did not really accept the basic premises of anarchism! [26] Ultimately, Anderson is an example of the persistent difficulty in writing about literary radicalism from this period: a dramatist linked to radical and progressive political causes, writing in an era of radical literary politics, but with views detached from the dominant threads of radicalism. Anderson’s plays and his politics embody a not uncommon generic radicalism: though never fully embracing any of the era’s radical ideologies, he was often labeled as radical, and thus is emblematic of intellectuals and writers who drifted left during the period, many of whom were called radical, even when their politics resembled those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt more than Emma Goldman. Like many, the Sacco-Vanzetti affair attracted Anderson, but the motivation for his attraction remains ambiguous. Consequently, scholars who discuss Anderson’s purported radicalism sometimes fall into a type of circular reasoning: they argue that he was drawn to the case because he was a Leftist; therefore, he was a Leftist because he was drawn to the case. His two plays about Sacco and Vanzetti, Gods of the Lightning and Winterset , do not define the complexity of his political journey, nor do they establish him as a staunchly radical playwright. These plays do, however, provide insight into the floating, generic literary radicalism of the 1920s and 1930s. The plays deploy Sacco and Vanzetti as political symbols representative of anarchism, but the nature of these symbols is fragmented and detached from the men’s own lived anarchism. Anderson’s First Anarchists: Gods of the Lightning Gods of the Lightning , which Anderson co-wrote with Harold Hickerson, has been largely forgotten. [27] The play was completed in the spring of 1928, only a few months after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, staged later that year, and published in early 1929. The play immediately prompted a variety of negative responses to its perceived political transgressions and aesthetic shortcomings: “The Chief of the Licensing Division of the City of Boston, J. M. Case, ruled that [it] was practically ‘anarchist and treasonable’ and should not, therefore, be licensed for presentation in that city”; [28] it was dubbed “a failure” precisely because it was based on the Sacco-Vanzetti case and thus “missed a chance to [be] a decidedly finer play”; [29] and it has since been called “an indignantly one-sided and propagandistic account of social injustice that is practically devoid of literary interest.” [30] Nevertheless, it ran at the Little Theater in New York City for 29 performances in October 1928, and the Group Theatre revived it in 1934, signaling some acceptance from Leftist dramatic circles. Anderson and Hickerson attempt to create a one-to-one corollary to Sacco and Vanzetti in Gods of the Lightning : “Vanzetti becomes Dante Capraro, the gentle and humane Anarchist” while “Sacco is greatly transformed into the native-born American James Macready, a militant International Woodsmen of the World leader.” [31] Jennifer Jones argues that Sacco and Vanzetti “are combined in the character of Capraro, a pacifist organizer,” [32] but Macready clearly also reflects elements of their story and their politics, functioning as a rough amalgam of the two anarchists. While the play does privilege the “American man of action,” [33] Vanzetti’s labor organizing mirrors Macready’s union work, and the similarities between the case and the play favor reading Capraro and Macready as representations of Sacco and Vanzetti, even if their reproduction is inexact and overlapping. The plot similarly veils the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the thinnest veneer, reproducing the Left’s widespread message about the men by depicting the arrest, trial, and execution of Capraro and Macready as a heinous injustice in which the mechanisms of law are distorted and misused to eliminate a radical threat. Certainly, the play attacks the legal system’s failures, but it does not offer a cohesive “left wing message.” [34] Jones and others imagine Anderson set out to write a socialist play—they begin with the assumption that Anderson was a radical. [35] They then analyze the play and find it is not particularly radical in comparison to its radical author. This reading, though, is symptomatic of Anderson’s conflicted politics and his concomitant untidy representation of Sacco and Vanzetti. In addition, these critics’ efforts to evaluate a play about two anarchists by comparing it to the author’s purported socialism, inevitably pushes anarchism to the margins. Gods of the Lightning emerges in the historical moment that Sacco and Vanzetti are transformed from living victims to potent symbols: it marks a politically wavering playwright’s articulation of anarchism to a similarly diffuse, and increasingly generic, vision of radicalism. The unsettled role of anarchism in the play occurs initially through Capraro and Macready who each reject government for different reasons. Macready says “government’s nothing so important. It’s a police system, to protect the wealth of the wealthy.” [36] Though linked to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), his critique of government is purely economic. [37] Macready parrots Vanzetti’s economic ideology without embracing his anti-government stance. Capraro’s political views, on the other hand, are simple anti-state anarchism, as revealed by his testimony during the play’s version of the trial: Salter: Do you believe in capitalism?Capraro: No.Salter: You believe that all property should belong to the workers?Capraro: Property should belong to those who create it.Salter: You are a communist?Capraro: I am an anarchist.Salter: What do you mean by that?Capraro: I mean, government is wrong. It creates trouble.Salter: You would destroy all government?Capraro: It will not be necessary. I would rather wait till it was so rotten it would rot away . . .Salter: You are against this government of ours?Capraro: Against all governments. [38] He denies being a communist, rejects government regardless of its implication in economic oppression, and, elsewhere, eschews all violence: “When you take violence into your hands, you lower yourself to the level of government, which is the origin of crime and evil.” [39] Both Macready and Capraro contain elements of Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s specific lives and political beliefs, yet they “represent the gamut of nonviolent anti-government philosophy and action,” [40] a major deviation from the two Galleanists on which they are based. Perhaps reflecting his own conflicted politics, Anderson juxtaposes non-anarchist Leftism with strict anti-government anarchism (while excluding violence almost entirely), creating a field of indeterminacy. Were the play fully dedicated to a propagandistic retelling of Sacco and Vanzetti’s plight, it likely would end with their execution, or perhaps with a reiteration of the anarchist statements the men (primarily Vanzetti) made as their deaths approached. The play, however, does not end with an execution. Rather, it interprets the events for its audience, recasting the meaning of these purportedly unjust deaths. With the anarchists dead, the play’s final lines are given to Rosalie, Macready’s lover. She expresses the drama’s closing sentiment. The remaining living characters wait in the restaurant while Capraro and Macready are executed. There Rosalie speaks the play’s concluding words: Don’t whisper it! Don’t whisper it! Didn’t you hear me say not to whisper any more? That’s what they’ll want you to do—whisper it—keep quiet about it—say it never happened—it couldn’t happen—two innocent men killed—keep it dark—keep it quiet— No! No! Shout it! They’re killing them . . . Mac—Mac—my dear—they have murdered you—while we stood here trying to think of what to do they murdered you! Just a moment ago you had a minute left—and it was the only minute in the whole world—and now—now this day will never end for you—there will be no more days . . . Shout it! Shout it! Cry out! Run and cry! Only—it won’t do any good—now. [41] All but the last line of Rosalie’s monologue gesture toward martyrdom—a bold call to ensure Macready’s death is not forgotten—but her final sentence turns to fatalism: the deaths have no meaning. “It won’t do any good” to shout of this injustice. Rosalie’s despondency has two ramifications. One is political: if Gods of the Lightning is a propaganda piece, a socialist (or anarchist) play (failed or otherwise), her fatalism contradicts the men’s politics and denies Sacco and Vanzetti any legacy. Contrary to Marxian theory and the lived politics of these two anarchists, nothing can be done; all is hopeless, revolution is impossible. The other is personal: the drama is a tragedy playing out against the backdrop of a politicized trial, not a political tragedy. In this case, sharing the tragedy of their unjust deaths is meaningless, because they are still dead, and Rosalie’s individual sorrow will not be assuaged by any political action. As Michael Schwartz argues, the play evokes “the anger and the fatalism” many felt after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. [42] This “ultimate grimness,” [43] however, speaks more about those left to process their deaths than about the two anarchists themselves. By doing so, Anderson recast the men’s potential martyrdom as a reason for despair rather than action. And, he ignored Vanzetti’s own words before his execution: “Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as how we do by an accident.” [44] Despite his looming death, Vanzetti did not give into fatalism, and Gods of the Lightning need not either—Anderson’s politics recast the meaning of these events. Anderson chose to write about two anarchists, but he creates characters who espouse pacifistic anarchism and those who speak for radical labor. He links these two positions through their placement within a legal system that is subject to the play’s critique, yet he concludes by questioning the meaning and the lasting significance of Sacco and Vanzetti’s martyrdom. Anderson chose Sacco and Vanzetti as subject matter, but by exploring their politics through a pseudo-Leftist play that ends on a note either of political fatalism or apolitical loss, he sublimates anarchism. Though his ambiguous political agenda may be tied tenuously to Leftist ideologies, it is clearly not anarchist—it bears little resemblance to its real-life protagonists’ radicalism. Anderson’s Anarchist Trial: Winterset Unlike Gods of the Lightning , Winterset , written and published in 1955, was an immediate critical success, winning the Drama Critics Circle Award, and it continues to hold a secure position in the Western dramatic canon. [45] This success, though, tends to detach all political content from the play. [46] Anderson conceived of Winterset as “an experiment, an attempt to twist raw, modern reality to the shape and meaning of poetry.” [47] In his introduction to the play, he discusses his yearning for a “great theatre in this country,” one that has “outgrow[n] the phase of journalistic social comment and reache[d] . . . into the upper air of poetic tragedy.” [48] While outlining these ambitions, he fails to mention Sacco and Vanzetti. Setting out to write a tragic verse play and thus “establish a new [dramatic] convention, Anderson imagine[d] himself to be participating in a purely literary endeavor with little political import.” [49] According to DiNapoli, Anderson saw the Sacco-Vanzetti subject matter as a sure way to receive publicity in the politically charged 1930s, “and he judged that if he handled the subject in a way that did not infuse the potentially explosive event with newfound political life, a financial success might be achieved.” [50] Steven Richman more generously suggests, “Anderson, long a champion of individual liberties [was] clearly offended” by Sacco and Vanzetti’s plight. [51] Regardless of Anderson’s intent, the notion that Winterset is not a political play has retained remarkable traction: in the seventy-five years since it was written, scholars have focused on the play’s dramatic sources, conventions, and innovations, while frequently minimizing the historical event at its center. [52] It seems that when writing “propagandistic” plays, Anderson established a reputation for “Leftism” that was suspended temporarily when he wrote “pure literature.” [53] Put differently, when considered in the context of dramatic innovation, Winterset is granted a reprieve from the taint of radicalism, but given the overall context of Anderson’s work (including Gods of the Lightning and Both Your Houses ), it is strange to ignore the obvious political overtones in the play. [54] In 1935, Anderson had not yet fully rejected radical politics and he still associated with and was produced by Left-leaning theatre groups. Despite its subsequent sterilization, Winterset no more directly addressed the Sacco-Vanzetti affair and radicalism than did Gods of the Lightning . [55] In Winterset , Anderson again thinly veils his characters. Mio, the play’s protagonist, is the son of Bartolomeo Romagna, a radical fish peddler. Romagna is a conflated image of Sacco and Vanzetti, combining Vanzetti’s vocation (fishmonger) with Sacco’s fatherhood (Vanzetti had no children.). Notably, Romagna never appears in the play’s action: he haunts the text’s dialogue but is not a character; he establishes the link to Sacco and Vanzetti yet is a generic amalgam of both men’s anarchism. Winterset also includes Judge Gaunt, an obvious analog to Webster Thayer, the judge who presided over Sacco and Vanzetti’s trial, rejected several appeals and regularly defended the verdict, and, thus, was subject to particular ire from those who saw the entire ordeal as an injustice. In addition, Garth, Trock, and Shadow represent the real-life Morelli gang who may well have committed the crime for which Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted. [56] Set thirteen years after Romagna’s execution, the play depicts Mio’s search for the truth: he refuses to believe his father capable of murder and having sought the guilty parties for years, he eventually learns of and seeks out Garth, who witnessed Trock kill Romagna. This quest is paralleled by Trock’s efforts to kill anyone who might implicate him in the crime and by Judge Gaunt’s aimless, insane wanderings as he attempts to justify his court’s verdict. These three paths converge on the night of the play’s action, the same night on which Mio meets Miriamne and falls in love, providing a romantic plot which Anderson privileges over the Sacco-Vanzetti backdrop. Radicalism appears early in the play. Trock has come to see Garth, worried that continued interest in the case will lead Garth to confess and implicate him. Garth asks: who wants to go to trial againexcept the radicals? . . .Let the radicals go on howlingabout getting a dirty deal. They always howland nobody gives a damn. [57] Here, Garth gestures toward the continued interest in the Sacco-Vanzetti case but reduces this interest to the “radical” element; many may still take a voyeuristic interest in the case, but only the radicals are still interested in pursuing justice. Mio is aligned with this sustained “radical” interest because he too seeks the truth: No other love,time passing, nor the spaced light-years of sunsshall blur your voice, or tempt me from the paththat clears your name. [58] He seeks the truth because he must: Will you tell me how a man’sto live, and face his life, if he can’t believethat truth’s like a fire,and will burn through and be seenthough it takes all the years there are? [59] Mio does not believe the legal system’s findings, so he rejects them and seeks truth elsewhere; he wants to clear his father’s name, which is all that can be accomplished since Romagna is already dead. At the same time, the judge roams the streets, defending the legal system: Judge Gaunt’s gone off his nut. He’s gotthat damn trial on his mind, and been going roundproving to everybody he was right all the timeand the radicals were guilty—stopping peoplein the street to prove it—and now he’s nuts entirelyand nobody knows where he is. [60] The combination of Mio’s quest for truth contrary to the one produced by the legal system and Gaunt’s insane defense of the trial resemble Gods of the Lightning , suggests a substantive critique of the system that convicted Sacco and Vanzetti. Thirteen years after Romagna’s death (and eight years after Sacco and Vanzetti’s), however, Anderson suspends this critique, reducing it to context for the burgeoning romance between Mio and Miriamne (Garth’s sister), who meet and immediately fall in love. At this point, Winterset ’s attack on the legal system fades as Anderson redirects the action: [61] the play shifts from a pursuit of truth to an establishment of truth secondary to the pursuit of love. Suddenly, the Judge is no longer described as insane and he begins to sound cruel, yet reasonable in his defense of the verdict: I know and have knownwhat bitterness can rise against a courtwhen it must say, putting aside all weakness,that a man’s to die. I can forgive you that,for you are your father’s son, and you think of himas a son thinks of his father. Certain lawsseem cruel in their operation; it’s necessarythat we be cruel to uphold them. [62] As Mio, Garth, Trock, and Judge Gaunt interact, critique of the trial comes to the fore, with the tenement turning into a courtroom: Gaunt slips into his role as judge, calling for Order, gentlemen, order! The witness will rememberthat a certain decorum is essential in the court-room. [63] The fictive Judge Thayer, Morelli gang, and Sacco-Vanzetti family all reenter the legal system, and in this surreal recreation of the courtroom, Mio finds the truth he seeks. Romagna’s innocence and Gaunt’s complicity in the legal injustice are revealed, yet Gaunt still defends the verdict: [64] Suppose it known,but there are things a judge must not believethough they should head and fester underneathand press in on his brain. Justice once renderedin a clear burst of anger, righteously,upon a very common laborer,confessed an anarchist, the verdict foundand the precise machinery of lawinvoked to know him guilty—think what furorwould rock the state if the court then flatly said;all this was lies—must be reversed? It’s better,as any judge can tell you, in such cases,holding the common good to be worth morethan small injustice, to let the record stand,let one man die. For justice, in the main,is governed by opinion. Communitieswill have what they will have, and it’s quite as well,after all, to be rid of anarchists. Our rightsas citizens can be maintained as rightsonly while we are held to be the peersof those who live about us. [65] The romantic plot requires the resolution of critique, so Anderson dramatically retries the case. In the seemingly obvious climax of Mio’s life story, he confirms his father’s innocence, learning that the legal system failed him by succeeding in its main goal, the maintenance of social order. As in Gods of the Lightning , Anderson takes aim at the legal system and finds it corrupt. Mio’s beliefs are confirmed, and he can now spread word of Romagna’s innocence: Wherever menstill breathe and think, and know what’s done to themby the powers above, they’ll know. [66] Just like Rosalie in Gods of the Lightning , Mio calls for the truth to be spread—again dissemination momentarily appears to be the necessary step for redressing legal injustice. Yet Mio does no such thing. From the time he learns the “truth” until the end of the play, Mio’s love for Miramne triumphs over his pursuit for the truth, and the fatalism of Gods of the Lightning reemerges. Winterset ’s fatalism operates on two levels. First, after Mio learns the truth, the value of this truth—and its dissemination—are called into question. Miriamne’s and Garth’s father Edras questions the value of pursuing the issue: What will be changedif it comes to trial again? More blood poured outto a mythical justice, but your father lying stillwhere he lies now. [67] He then fundamentally denies the value of what Mio has learned: “there is no truth.” [68] This dismissal of the play’s revelation intersects with Miriamne’s desire that Mio not reveal Garth’s guilt. She asks Mio to keep their secret and he agrees: I tried to say itand it strangled my throat. I might have knownyou’d win in the end. [69] Second, Mio’s choice of Mariamne over his life-long goal of clearing his father’s name proves meaningless when both characters die at the play’s end. Mio abnegates the hope of “learn[ing] to live like a man . . . to live and forget to hate” and the “truth” for Mariamne, only to lose his life at Trock’s hand. [70] In Winterset , Anderson attacks the American legal system much as he does in Gods of the Lightning , but once again closes on a dual note of personal tragedy and political hopelessness. Any radicalism is sublimated to other concerns. In the earlier play—with its gossamer radicalism mirroring Anderson’s shifting, indeterminate politics—anarchism becomes pacifist, irrelevant, and impotent. In the later one, Sacco and Vanzetti linger as the nearly invisible background for dramatic innovation and poetic tragedy. In both cases, Anderson deploys the anarchists as neutered symbols of injustice: anarchism is sublimated, which in itself is not surprising, nor profound, but in the context of other literature from this period, Anderson’s choices resonate more powerfully. Twice he structured a play around Sacco and Vanzetti; twice he tentatively attacked the legal system’s failures; and twice he minimized the significance of this critique by ending with fatalism. The mere appearance of anarchists in Anderson’s plays does not make him an anarchist. He may have found some aspects of anarchism appealing, but neither of these plays nor his statements about politics suggest that Anderson aligned with the more radical forms of the era’s Left. Rather, he appears as another fellow traveler: someone who flirted with radical politics, yet ultimately sublimated them to his personal, political, and literary vision. Ultimately, Gods of the Lightning and Winterset distill the transformation of Sacco and Vanzetti into potent, yet disarticulated symbols: they continued to signify well after their deaths, but their signification was fully separated from their politics. Their appearance in literature functioned as radical bona fides : touching on the Sacco-Vanzetti affair’s injustice (even briefly) signified attachment to the broadly Leftist movement of the late 1920s and 1930s. Anderson’s plays, though—like much of the literature that shaped the meaning of Sacco and Vanzetti’s legacy—essentially strip anarchism of its power and specificity. Their image is no longer meaningfully anarchist; it simply marks a pseudo-radical shell that could be filled with literary and political content. References [1] . Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays , ed. Harold Clurman (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 40. [2] . For a brief history of anti-radical sentiment and laws from this period (with particular focus on anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti), see Dan Colson, “Erasing Anarchism: Sacco and Vanzetti and the Logic of Representation,” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 179-196. [3] . For a detailed analysis of Sacco and Vanzetti’s politics see Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991). Avrich convincingly argues the two men were Galleanists. Even amongst radicals, Galleani stood out as particularly extreme, so Sacco and Vanzetti were neither the naïfs some have claimed nor merely philosophical anarchists—they were aggressively opposed to all state governance and believed violence was justified to achieve an anarchist society. [4] . Alfred S. Shivers, The Life of Maxwell Anderson (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), 26. [5] . Ibid., 39. [6] . Anderson to John M. Gillette, 15 September 1912, in Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912-1958 , ed. Laurence G. Avery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 3. [7] . Anderson to Upton Sinclair, June 1919, in Dramatist in America , 13. [8] . Shivers, The Life , 111. [9] . Ibid., 61. [10] . Ibid., 63. [11] . Anderson to Brooks Atkinson, 21 August 1939, Dramatist in America , 90-91. [12] . Anderson to Donald Ogden Stewart, 11 March 1941, Dramatist in America , 110. [13] . Shivers, The Life , 238. [14] . Ibid., 56, 1. [15] . Shivers argues that “Anderson . . . believe[d] that under any conditions except wartime, government was the natural enemy of the average citizen” ( The Life , 198). According to Shivers, “[t]he exigencies of total war had compelled him to reach a truce within his own democratic government” ( The Life , 198). Note the rejection of pacifism linked to the anti-fascism: Anderson was willing to accept both government and war to fight fascism. Like many radicals and progressives from the era, he appears to have accepted the Popular Front logic that moderates, liberals, and radicals must all come together to fight the immediate enemy: the fascists. [16] . Shivers, The Life , 7. [17] . Shivers, Maxwell Anderson (Boston: Twayne, 1976), 137. [18] . Shivers, The Life , 125. [19] Russell DiNapoli, “Fragile Currency of the Last Anarchist: The Plays of Maxwell Anderson,” New Theatre Quarterly 18, no. 3 (2002): 277, 282. [20] . Hal Cantor, “Anderson and Odets and the Group Theater,” in Maxwell Anderson and the New York Stage , eds. Nancy J. Doran Hazelton and Kenneth Krauss (Monroe, NY: Library Research Assoc., 1991), 34. [21] . Anderson to the editor, November 1944, Dramatist in America , 192. [22] . Russell DiNapoli, The Elusive Prominence of Maxwell Anderson in the American Theater (Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2002), 56. [23] . Ibid., 53 [24] . Ibid., 54. [25] . Ethan Mordden, Sing for Your Supper: The Broadway Musical in the 1930s (New York: St. Marten’s Press, 2005), 230. [26] . Turning to Mordden, who does not write extensively about Anderson, captures the ubiquity of this seemingly contradictory view: the notion that Anderson was an anarchist—but one who did not really embrace anarchist views—saturates much scholarship on his plays. [27] . Calling the play “minor,” Shivers’s biography of Anderson almost entirely ignores Gods of the Lightning , and—in a suggestion of how scholars have struggled to deal with the appearance of Sacco and Vanzetti in Anderson’s plays—notes merely that it was “based on an internationally famous legal trial” (Shivers, The Life , 112). [28] . Shivers, Maxwell Anderso n, 106. [29] . Barrett H. Clark, Maxwell Anderson: The Man and His Plays (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1976), 17-18. [30] . Shivers, Maxwell Anderso n, 106. [31] . Ibid. The play also includes Celestino Medeiros, a convicted murder who confessed to the Braintree crime and claimed Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. Medeiros’s execution was delayed while Governor Fuller and the Lowell Commission considered his confession alongside other evidence, but ultimately they did not believe his story and he was executed the same night as Sacco and Vanzetti. In the play, “Madeiros [ sic ] is changed into the bleak-minded and fatalistic restaurant owner Suvorin” (Shivers, Maxwell Anderson , 106). [32] . Jennifer Jones, “A Fictitious Injustice: The Politics of Conversation in Maxwell Anderson’s Gods of the Lightning ,” American Drama 4, no. 2 (1995): 83. [33] . Ibid. [34] . Ibid., 107. [35] . Jones, for instance, reads the play as a “socialist drama” that merges “political protest with instinctive American worship of the individual” (89, 83). By claiming Capraro is a condensation of Sacco and Vanzetti and arguing that Capraro’s politics always come second to Macready’s, Jones attempts to demonstrate that the play “eviscerated the beliefs [Sacco and Vanzetti] died for” (94). She builds this argument, however, on the claim that “Sacco and Vanzetti were pacifists,” misreading their anti-war stance as the rejection of all violence (88). Ultimately, she accuses Anderson of focusing on an “American protagonist” at the expense of the “socioeconomic forces of race and class oppression that brought about the death of Sacco and Vanzetti” (93). [36] . Anderson and Harold Hickerson, Gods of the Lightning (London: Longman’s, Green, and Co., 1928), 26. [37] . Jones interprets Macready as an unabashed, liberal individualist who overwhelms Capraro’s anarchism, but Macready is linked to the IWW: he speaks from a political position similar to the one Jones attributes to Anderson. [38] . Anderson and Hickerson, Gods of the Lightning , 78. [39] . Ibid., 26. [40] . Michael Schwarz, Class Divisions on the Broadway Stage: The Staging and Taming of the I.W.W. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). [41] . Anderson, Gods of the Lightning , 106. [42] . Schwartz, ch. 5. [43] . Ibid. [44] . I quote here from John Dos Passos, The Big Money (Boston: Mariner, 2000), 372. Dos Passos regularized the spelling from a reporter’s transcription that originally appeared in the New York World on 13 May 1927. [45] . Winterset was first staged at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1935 and was a “smashing success at the box office” (Shivers, The Life , 149). Its original run lasted 179 performances. The play then toured nationally before returning to Broadway for 16 additional shows. It was turned into a film (directed by Alfred Santell and starring Burgess Meredith) in 1936. The play has not been revived frequently, though it was staged for short runs in Chicago in both 1991 and 2016. [46] . The long-standing tradition of foregrounding Anderson’s purported aesthetic triumphs may well explain the tendency to minimize his play’s political import. [47] . Anderson, “Acceptance Speech for the Drama Critics’ Circle Award to Winterset ,” in Dramatist in America , 295. [48] . Anderson, introduction to Gods of the Lightning , x, vi. [49] . Ibid., xi. [50] . DiNapoli, “Maxwell Anderson’s Misuse of Poetic Discourse in Winterset ,” in Staging a Cultural Paradigm: The Political and the Personal in American Drama , eds. Barbara Ozieblo and Miriam López-Rodríguez (Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2002), 101. DiNapoli contends that “[Anderson] knew the topic would entice audiences to see the play” (101). He claims that Anderson’s attention to Sacco and Vanzetti “exploited the Sacco-Vanzetti issue for other than artistic reasons” (101). [51] . Steven M. Richman, “ Winterset and the Recrudescence of Ressentiment,” Nova Law Review 18, no. 3 (1994): 1882. [52] . The body of scholarship on Winterset is quite small given the play’s critical reception in the 1930s. What little research there is largely ignores the play’s focus on anarchism in favor of other theatrical/dramatic concerns. The most common trope is to look at source materials and influences. As early as 1946, Samuel Kliger examined “Hebraic lore” in the play (“Hebraic Lore in Winterset ,” American Literature 18, no. 3 [1946]: 219-232). Explorations of other Biblical influences (Howard D. Pearce, “Job in Anderson’s Winterset ,” Modern Drama 6 [1963]: 32-41), Shakespearean elements (Jacob H. Alder, “Shakespeare in Winterset ,” Educational Theatre Journal 6 [1954]: 241-248 and John B. Jones, “Shakespeare as Myth and the Structure of Winterset , Educational Theatre Journal 25 [1973]: 34-45), and classical references (Frances Abernethy, Winterset : A Modern Revenge Tragedy, Modern Drama 7 [1964]: 185-189 and J. T. McCullen, Jr., “Two Quests for Truth: King Oedipus and Winterset ,” The Laurel Review 5, no. 1 [1965]: 28-35), amongst other allusions and inspirations, followed over the next few decades. After about 1980 work on Winterset is virtually non-existent, excepting the scholars I engage with in this essay. [53] . Shivers, The Life , 148 [54] . In part, Winterset ’s reputation emerges from the contradictions of post-WWII literary scholarship. During the Cold War, anti-communist backlash, scholars were forced to reconcile the play’s reputation as one of the best from the 1930s with its subject matter (Sacco and Vanzetti) and Anderson’s dalliance with the Left. Anderson’s rejection of communism makes the reconciliation possible, but scholars who wished to study Winterset were wise to ignore any political significance in the play that might appear radical. Thus, they focused on the fiction of apolitical formal characteristics. This scholarly juggling act may account for the seemingly disconnected reputations of Anderson (still viewed as a Left-leaning fellow-traveler) and Winterset (long considered a brilliant, yet apolitical play that just happens to be about two anarchists). [55] . Shivers claims “the passage of years since Gods of the Lightning gave [Anderson] the aesthetic distanced he needed in handling the Sacco-Vanzetti case” (Shivers, The Life , 148). In other words, Shivers reads Winterset as an aesthetic object worthy of consideration almost in spite of its subject matter, unlike the earlier play which he virtually ignores. [56] . In his confession, Medeiros implicated the Morelli gang, and many of Sacco and Vanzetti’s other defenders insisted the Morelli gang committed the Braintree robbery as well. Winterset obviously taps into this accusation, as its fictionalized Morellis try to avoid the exposure of their crime. [57] . Anderson, Winterset (Washington: Anderson House, 1935), 14. [58] . Ibid., 50. [59] . Ibid., 70. [60] . Ibid., 15. [61] .Richman rightly argues “the play stands for the proposition that a developed legal system may be seriously flawed” (1869), but after establishing its flaws, the play shifts significantly. [62] . Winterset , 73. [63] . Ibid., 95. [64] . Richman claims Gaunt’s depiction is open to a “sympathetic interpretation” (1882), but such an interpretation would have been difficult to sustain at the time, as outrage lingered almost a decade after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. [65] . Winterset , 98-99. [66] . Ibid., 99. [67] . Ibid., 109. [68] . Ibid., 117. [69] . Ibid., 125. [70] . Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) Dan Colson is Associate Professor of English at Emporia State University. His work has appeared in American Quarterly , American Studies , Radical Teacher , Studies in American Naturalism , Philip Roth Studies , and the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom , amongst other journals. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Ellen Gillooly-Kress Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Ellen Gillooly-Kress By Published on May 29, 2018 Download Article as PDF Introduction A quiet, yet hopeful group of young people gathered in front of the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens on January 22, 2017. They heard rumors that some of their favorite celebrities, including Jaden Smith and Shia LaBeouf, were participating in an activity that included a broadcast to the internet. This select group would soon balloon to include hundreds of individuals, as the news of this particular performance and installation spread like wildfire over social media channels such as Twitter and Reddit. Luke Turner, Shia LaBeouf, and Nastja Säde Rönkkö launched the live stream of #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS after a short planning period of a few weeks and released it to the public to coincide with the inauguration of the 45th president of the United States of America on January 20, 2017. The project was hosted by the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, and consisted of live audio and video streams to the website HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US. [1] Billed as a “participatory performance,” it invited, “the public […] to deliver the words “HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US” into a camera mounted on a wall outside the Museum of the Moving Image, repeating the phrase as many times, and for as long as they wish.” [2] Initially conceived as a way to bridge divides and act as a physical and digital gathering space, the project quickly became a logistical headache for those who ran the installation and for the museum itself. Crowds of people gathered at nearly all hours of the day to participate in this 24-7 live stream. The project was forced to shut down after only ten days at its initial home, yet this was not the only controversy to befall this performance project. Those who lived near the museum feared for their safety as the general camaraderie initially encouraged by the project gave way to a gathering place for those who self-professed their identity as the “alt-right,” a term coined to mask the white supremacy of Richard Spencer and others who use the internet to disseminate their caustic and ultra conservative ideas. [3] Within less than twenty-four hours of its opening, the live stream had been co-opted and molded into a physical manifestation of the internet–a living socio-technical assemblage. [4] What had started out as a participatory performance in a physical space had transformed into what Joseph Bernstein of Buzzfeed described as the “physical incarnation of social media,” with the ugliest parts of identity creation, authorship and maintenance heavily featured on this non-moderated feed for any denizen of the internet to witness. [5] Media outlets picked up and amplified bizarre stories of “Nazi milk parties” and generally disruptive behavior, further adding to the mayhem of the internet feed. [6] Some of the feigned frivolity and strange behavior attracted more members of this ultra conservative group to the activities surrounding this performance, both online and off. This project represents an example of the perfect storm of threats to the idealized cognitive model of the hegemonic political experience in America, containing all the elements that those who identify as far-right or white supremacist claim to be against. [7] Here were three artists using a public institution to disseminate their ideas to the internet at large. The message, “He will not divide us,” coincided with the inauguration of a president who had become the symbol of the public power of these far-right groups, who felt they were being left behind in politics. This participatory event reveals the inner workings of these far-right groups’ pursuit of creating what Teun A. Van Dijk describes as an “ideological square.” [8] These groups create an in-group and an out-group, “prototypically represented by the ideological pronouns Us and Them .” [9] Digital personas and memes are employed in pursuit of establishing an in-group and an out-group. This particular performance exposed these processes by forcing participants in the live stream to step from their highly insulated online communities into a sphere of performance that reflected the public at-large. The cooperation between members of far-right groups to sabotage this performance for their own needs constitutes a type of counterpublic, a term coined by Sarah Jackson and Brooke Foucault Welles while observing other social media co-option efforts by underrepresented communities in the past. [10] Instead of countering the dominant hegemony and narrative, “alt-right” individuals employ these tactics to enforce political norms in both the virtual public spaces created by social media and in the space delineated by the participatory performance. Identity creation and manipulation is cooperatively authored by this group, born and incubated on the internet, and portrayed through physical performance of online memes. Among many memes, some of the most frequently performed memes referenced Pepe the Frog, and the ability to consume milk in massive quantities, partly due to the feedback effect of both digital and traditional media. Online Identity Creation Disagreements flared between the museum and the creative team of #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS about issues of security and crowd control. A New York City Council member, Jimmy Van Bramer, pressured Carl Goodman, the museum’s director, to shut down the piece. [11] In response, on January 30th, LaBeouf sent an email to the American Civil Liberties Union, alleging political misconduct and undermining of artistic integrity: we have been denied a seat at the decision making table of an artwork we created – we are being used as a political hockey puck – I am seeking help in maintaining our integrity as artists & securing my rights as an American [12] Ten days after the appeal to the ACLU and no response from the organization, the piece at the Museum of the Moving Image was closed down, with the museum staff citing security issues over growing crowds and disruptive behavior. Disappointment was apparent for not only the creators, but the “alt-right” group that had co-opted the stream to spread messages to those both inside and outside of their ideological group. A little over one week after the shutdown, on February 18, 2017, the piece of art moved to downtown Albuquerque, NM relocating to a wall outside of the El Rey Theater. The project in its new location also faced a number of security issues, including reports of gun shots near the location. [13] The website and live feed went dormant for a few weeks, only to reappear again on March 8 as a video of a flag emblazoned with the words “HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US” in simple black script in an undisclosed location. In a matter of days, however, internet trolls and the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party were able to determine the location of the flag and steal it. [14] Subsequently, as of March 22, 2017, the project had been adopted by the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool. The final adopter of the project, Le Lieu Unique, has hung the flag above an art museum in an old biscuit factory in the French city of Nantes, and has a camera filming the flag at all hours of the day. These online actors employ several strategies—secret argot, often referred to as dog whistles, impersonating the opposing groups’ performance of identity, and taking advantage of the unique isolating structure of the internet—all in pursuit of what Teun A. Van Dijk describes in his cognitive-sociological work as the “ideological square.” [15] These identity performance tactics are meant to establish an in-group and reinforce the idea that those who are outside of the group will never penetrate the boundaries of the in-group. Further, individual attitudes are also controlled by those within the group, “mental models formed by individual members of a social group may be ideologically controlled by socially shared group attitudes about a specific issue.” [16] Language and symbolic behavior plays a key role in establishing this type of in-group behavior and attitude, often without one central member of the group controlling or authoring the attitude. [17] In this case, digital language has been expanded from the face-to-face communication of those of the “in-group” to the choice of memes that incorporate visual media. This type of visual communication has become the preferred medium in which to transmit these messages between members of the group. One key example that demonstrates the power of identity creation through these visual media is the fact that groups choose to imitate each other on social media. Impersonation and performance of identity is not a new tactic in the book of factions and groups competing for the hearts and minds of those in public spaces. This type of ideological warfare is not even necessarily a new concept; there are documented cases of Communists impersonating Nazi officers in the Weimar Republic in the events leading to World War II. [18] These impersonators received their own code name, often being referred to as “beefsteaks”—those that looked like Nazis on the outside, yet would bleed Communist red once cut. [19] This infiltration and explicit identity impersonation was undertaken for at least two reasons. The first reason was that impersonation was undertaken to discredit those on “the other side” of the argument. That is to say, the impersonator would commit acts that made the other side appear inhuman, cruel, and untrustworthy. By impersonating the “bad actor” (defined by those who are in-group), impersonators may instigate and sow discord both within the group and outside of the group. The “bad actor” simultaneously destroys trust networks within-group and delegitimizes the group for those outside of the nucleus of the group. An example of impersonation in action includes several “alt-right” groups creating fake Twitter profiles in May 2017, impersonating chapters of the Anti-fascist movement (often abbreviated as Antifa). The issue of impersonation has always plagued social media from its inception, yet the goal of these impersonations is to weaponize the identity of the competing ideological groups. [20] These Twitter profiles appeared to coincide with the Memorial Day holiday weekend, and claimed to celebrate photos of vandalized graves of veterans in cemeteries. [21] To combat this action, intrepid social media users used Google’s reverse image search option to discover that the images and Twitter accounts featured were not part of the Antifa movement, nor were the vandalized graves particularly recent examples. The double cross and identity impersonation had served its purpose to discredit the actions of these anti-fascist groups. In contrast to these online impersonations, performers on #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS would find it nearly impossible to accomplish this type of impersonation, due to the non-anonymous nature of the live video stream, as opposed to the anonymous membership of online social media communities. A second reason for identity impersonation is to gather intelligence about the plans and actions of the “other side.” Beefsteaks in the Weimar Republic infiltrated Nazi officer circles to not only discredit the regime, but also to gather intelligence on the plans of their enemy. [22] Groups on either side of the political spectrum seem to be highly aware of this tactic; journalists, who have an interest in reporting on these groups, must legitimize their authority and convince the interviewed party that they are not “working for the other side.” Traditional media offers both opportunity for publicity of the cause of these groups, but also opens these groups up to critical scrutiny. [23] Journalists are not the only force influencing the authorial power of identity creation on the internet. Algorithms serve a large role in the authorship of the types of memes that get disseminated throughout the network. The term “filter bubble” was first popularized by Eli Pariser in his 2011 eponymous book. [24] Pariser raises serious issue with algorithms that have been created to deliver the most relevant information for each user on the internet. Pariser first became concerned when he observed his friends with conservative viewpoints had all but disappeared from his timeline on Facebook. At first glance, this appears to be a benevolent feature of the internet. After all, with hundreds of hours of video footage being uploaded just to YouTube every minute, how are users expected to sift through all of this information? Social media companies have become increasingly aware of users’ attention spans and work very diligently to maximize their time on various platforms. The insidious nature of these relevance algorithms appears when individuals begin to exhibit homophily. For instance, on Twitter, individuals will follow those whom they support and with whom they feel an affinity. [25] This feeling of homophily leads users of social media to believe that their viewpoints are shared with a majority of those around them, since their self-selected social media circles also exhibit similar views. The perception expands Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the public sphere to a new networked public sphere, accounting for these social interactions governed by these networks enabled by the internet. [26] Still, the sense of public space is obscured by the fact that these spaces are far from public, and are in fact hyper-individuated by the algorithms that govern social media. The dream of the internet of the 1990s—a vast, open, and transparent structure that democratizes all information—has slowly been dying, and not all users understand this concept. [27] The misunderstanding of this concept is evident in the “fake news” crisis that permeated the 2016 United States Presidential election. [28] Demeaning mainstream media and vilifying journalism is a large part of the “complex meta-strategy” of creating the ideological square, where “group members tend to speak or write positively about their own group, and negatively about those outgroups they define as opponents, competitors, or enemies.” [29] Tarleton Gillespie cautions against vilifying the algorithms themselves in the creation of this filter bubble crisis, as filters are reflections of the social ideologies of their creators. [30] Users may further socially construct with the affordances of these algorithms individuated publics that may not reflect the lived experience beyond social media and the internet. These toxic technopublics then leech out from online creation in unexpected ways, as performances in #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS demonstrate. In the face of this phenomenon, Nieman Journalism Lab journalist Joshua Benton explains that he had been once a skeptic of the dangers of “filter bubbles.” [31] His observation, after what he and other journalists—including Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed —witnessed in this election, is that relevance algorithms on social media pose a very real and certain danger to shaping the ideologies of the millions of daily users of these services. Memes, neatly packaged and easily replicated and disseminated through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, are the perfect media for group identity creation and communication. The word “meme” was first coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene . [32] A meme, in this instance, acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, values, and meanings that can be easily duplicated and transmitted. Dawkins gives several cultural examples that include song, aspects of architecture, and even the concept of God. [33] The internet is the perfect breeding ground for these ideas that are often compared to a virus, as social media is purposely designed for the transmission of ideas between users. For example, total war rhetoric has become intimately entwined with this meme-y mode of performance, leading to dangerous beliefs about how society ought to be constructed. This war-like rhetoric is then reflected in the traditional media (news sources online, popular blogs, and television), thus legitimizing and reinforcing the original message that these groups are at war for the very hearts and minds of all participants on the internet. This identity performance as part of this “Great Meme War” that is being waged between groups, manifests itself in different ways with different goals. Maintenance of the ideological square, meme transmission, networked public spheres, and identity creation all intersect with one another in the performance of #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS , with several spoken memes that directly reference the war-rhetoric of Nazis, Hitler, and his Third Reich. [34] Bodily performances included salutes, and the display of white supremacist tattoos for the live feed. That these performers in New York gathered in groups served to embolden these performers in a series of escalating public displays, including drinking milk, as will be discussed in more detail later in this article. Performance of Memes Visual and verbal memes are coded within performance of identity and spill over into the physical sphere in different ways. In a complex nod to the existence of these memes as entities themselves, participants in the digital creation of memes must physically share these memes through their mobile devices. In this case, the medium is the message. [35] The fact that the message exists as a serious of pixels on an iPhone makes neither the medium nor the message any less “real” to those who use it as a part of a performance of their identity. The meme continues to be treated as an object with the virulence and cultural power that conveyed the message in the ephemeral moment. The act is then replicated several times and disseminated through social networks as both video and a moving Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) attached to tweets and Facebook posts. The level of performance varies wildly and serves to demonstrate for both intended audiences outside of and inside the established group. In an attempt to explain the appeal of the use and dissemination of memes, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson introduced the phenomenon of schematization and semantic frame building, a psychological phenomenon where humans create patterns by fitting their perception of their experiences into large embodied metaphors. [36] These embodied metaphors that govern human perception are referred to as “Idealized Cognitive Models,” in which a central stereotypical member exists. [37] The idealized cognitive model that drives conservative viewpoints may in part be responsible for the organization of groups that lean the farthest towards conservatism on the political spectrum. It is embodied experience of some form of lived metaphor that shapes the ideas of those who live in a specific culture. In this instance, the generally embodied experience of alt-right or ultra-conservative individuals includes perceptions of dehumanizing experiences of insufficiency in the patriarchal and economic structure in which they find themselves. [38] Online, individuals like Richard Spencer use this point of view to craft a digital environment that addresses these feelings of insufficiency, while providing a structure through a paramilitary or militia-like organization. Members of this group feel fulfilled through online participation and begin to embody the structures fed to them. This paramilitary stance achieved two things: creating a schema through which individuals may frame their individual experience, and establishing legitimacy of belligerent status, should individuals who may oppose these ideas decide to take action against this group. This construction of identity condones use of force and military tactics both online and off. A shared identity construction means rewriting the rules of this kind of militaristic identity for the new networked public sphere in which the discourse is found. Historically, the legitimate authority regarding warfare that had been enjoyed by state entities has been shattered or corrupted by intra-state actors, also vying for legitimate recognition of belligerent status. A just war requires legitimate authority for the war-like activities undertaken by states in traditional warfare. Increasingly, however, warfare in the 21st century does not include traditional state entities at war with one another. The new warfare includes factions within and without borders and the oversight of governments. A.J. Coates, quoting J. Keegan, argues in The Ethics of War that “The increasing predominance of internal over external or interstate warfare has led some to conclude that in the future war is likely to consist in ‘a fight for civilization—against ethnic bigots, regional warlords, ideological intransigents, common pillagers and organized international criminals.’” [39] An overwhelming fear is that this prescient quote from the early nineties has come true and that militaristic factions have chosen the internet as their “battlefield.” There are abundant pieces of evidence that intra- and extra-state actors are driving war on digital fronts specifically, taking advantage of technological opportunities presented by features such as YouTube’s relevance algorithms and general lack of oversight of content to advertise to individuals susceptible to their messaging. The overarching framing of the contentious language and symbolic behavior that “alt-right” groups employ has been to treat the digital antagonism as a type of “great meme war.” [40] The use of memes highlights both the embodied war metaphor, and the joke-like atmosphere in which memes are created. This levity provides plausible deniability when participants encounter opposition to their negative rhetoric dressed as a joke. The opening line in an article on Wired about the physical organization of far-right movements, shows just how ingrained in militarism and military language these groups have become. “Nathan Damigo moves through rioting crowds like a soldier, and for good reason.” [41] This 2017 article by Emma Grey Ellis explores how quickly and how deeply the symbology of either group (specifically the “alt-right” group) can shift and crystalize around certain objects and moments, including an infamous moment like the “punch in Berkeley” of a Antifa activist, or Pepe the Frog, or even the Expendables. [42] Van Dijk describes how individual attitudes can be captured by media and are also controlled by those within the group, manipulating the mental models of all who receive the message. In this case, socially shared group attitudes amount to easily packaged and shared memes that proliferate through a social network such as Twitter or Facebook. All of these acts carry meaning larger than the original meaning of the cultural artifact. To Ellis, “over the last few years, sharing a meme has become as much about defining your in-group as it is about abusing it.” [43] She goes on to make the distinction between right and left usage of memes, as “Antifa memes tend toward honoring the punch rather than the puncher. Some of that, of course, is because black bloc tactics prize anonymity, but the focal point is the act of resistance, rather than the agent of it.” [44] Ellis quotes Tim Highfield, a digital media researcher at the Queensland University of Technology, who warns that this kind of meme-ifying might also normalize the behavior, while flattening and cartoonifying the acts of violence on either side and simultaneously providing coherent identity formation, “The problem isn’t that these memes are out there, in other words—it’s that the internet is getting used to them.” [45] A part of mounting a successful campaign for the hearts and minds of the public is appealing to the legitimate authority of the movement. In order to claim that legitimate authority, actors within groups must strive to create a cohesive identity for the group and the philosophies that govern the group, which is aided in part by the creation of the ideological square. [46] Part of this cohesion is the consistent performance of identity, which includes the public persona exhibited by these groups. By extension, contemporary identity performance often includes digital performance on various social media platforms. The performativity of such acts appeals through affect to those who are susceptible to messages that appeal to their lived experience. These acts of identity are reflected through dissemination and result in a kind of mass authorship of identity. Enterprising and influential members of the movement will manipulate these identities to update and echo shared experience with in-group members. Brian Massumi, in his 2002 book Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation , discusses the use of socially shared sign posts as a shared experience of affect. [47] Massumi primarily focuses on affect and develops the theory that corporeal sensation connects with “exoreceptive sense perception.” [48] As the body folds both infinitely and without itself, increasingly, the exoreceptive sense perception is extending to online persona creation. The emotions and actions of the body affect the environment in the same way that the environment affects the body. This reciprocity of affect, then, expressly connects bodies in networks of shared experience. War rhetoric literally creates what Judith Butler declares is performativity, “the power of discourse to produce what it names.” [49] The performance of a war-like identity, through self-established identity performance, along with the framing reaction of the media, creates quite literally, a war-like scenario in digital space, i.e. an affect of war-like preparation. The ultimate concern is when this digital affect spills into the physical space, with real world consequences for those who recognize this war-like affect and oppose it. Pepe the Frog’s Debut Performance The live feed #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS opened with the help of Jaden Smith (the famous son of Will and Jada Smith). He stood for five hours on the opening day of the live stream, chanting and reciting the mantra, “He will not divide us.” [50] The momentum and celebratory atmosphere of the first day was soon replaced by members of far-right groups co-opting the feed to share their messages, coded with dog whistles (secret code words that signal in-group belonging), all in a general atmosphere of intimidation. The media picked up the story and framed it as a kind of anti-Trump protest, even though Rönkkö, Turner, and LaBeouf did not make any such explicit claims in their art installation. [51] Since media outlets echoed the story through their channels, the live feed became a sort of physical social media incarnate, stepping through digital affect to a space bound by physical dimensions and time. Those who profess far-right ideologies, white supremacists, and users of 4chan and Reddit were not the only participants in the feed. Plenty of people appeared out of the woodwork, grabbing their fifteen seconds of fame on the internet, often advertising their own social media accounts and asking all those who had been witness onto the live feed, which was available to any who had the URL. This nexus of social media transcended the highly individualized filtered digital spaces found online and entered into a true physical public space bound in time and place in ways that the internet is not usually bound. The live feed itself captured and preserved the video, archived by the website itself, yet within hours of the site’s launch, there were several dedicated YouTube and other feeds capturing and preserving the video that was broadcast from the space of the performance. The interplay between real time and the ephemeral performance of social media identity was captured and amplified by the very interface that made its existence possible. This setup became a version of a hyper-mediated haunted stage, complete with the mechanical memory of auto-capturing the live feed and preserving the video to YouTube. [52] This video and audio archive provided a stock of recycled images that remained rife with the possibility of becoming the next meme in the process of creation and authorship. Truly the idea of authorship shifted from ownership of the conception of the project by Rönkkö, Turner, and LaBeouf to the mediation of the project through a multi-faceted authoring reflective of content creation on the internet. One of the first memes emerging from the alt-right came the day after the inauguration, when one participant stood behind Shia LaBeouf and briefly flashed the screen image on his phone of a green character well known to many in the sub-group. Pepe the Frog, a character drawn by Matt Furie on his web comic and first appearing on MySpace in 2005 as a part of a series titled “Boys Club,” had been used quite heavily in the past as a kind of in-joke among “alt-right” leaders. According to the original cartoon author, Pepe “is a mellow dude getting stoned with his friends, regularly engaging in gross-out humor.” [53] While the author maintains that Pepe was created as a benevolent figure, it was an insidious mix of cultural stereotypes meant to reinforce negative views of Latinx people in the United States. Pepe the frog was a foul-mouthed pot-smoking character that could easily be co-opted by a group attempting to vilify immigrants in order to serve their ideologies of racial purity. It was a small logical leap for this character to be appropriated by the online far-right “meme militias” and promoted into an unofficial mascot for white supremacists who inhabit the subreddits r/pol and r/altright. The author was so horrified by the abuse of his figure as hate symbol, that he tried to “kill” off the character of Pepe in a 2016 cartoon. Of course, one cannot kill an idea or a meme, once it has been hijacked as an identity marker by an in-group. Figure 1. Twitter’s self-referential meme demonstrating the social construction of media, (Tweet from unknown author, 2017). The selection of a particular symbol is semi-arbitrary, yet the meaning behind the symbol is what holds the social and political power. This seemingly complicated concept is not lost on these internet-based groups, since several examples of self-referential media exist and are disseminated through different social media, using the same apparatuses available to all social media users. The above example was found with a simple Twitter search of the hashtag #hewillnotdivideus and #hwndu and appeared in the “top” tweets, according to Twitter’s relevance algorithms. At least a few members of these groups are aware of the power of their collective identity performance, and the irony is not lost on them. In fact, the co-option of the hashtag, meant as a way for users to collate and quickly organize vast amounts of data, demonstrates conscious use of the social apparatus on Twitter. Part of identity creation includes the assumption of the “enemy’s” identity through their available modes of performance. This effect has been documented previously, where oppressed minority groups co-opted hashtags such as #MYNYPD to expose the injustices perpetrated by oppressive regimes. [54] These minority groups create what Jackson and Foucault Welles call “counterpublics” that run counter to the overarching narrative in an effort to disrupt it. In a reversal, relatively small groups of “alt-right” members, who benefit from hegemonic norms, employ the same hijacking techniques as these minority groups, flooding well-intentioned social media movements with vitriol and their war-like rhetoric. This type of culture jamming instead creates a toxic technopublic that serves to continue to benefit those who already benefit the most from political hegemony. The use of Pepe the Frog as a part of this hijacking forms a calculated attempt to co-opt the narrative and bend it to the will of a handful of “alt-right” individuals. Pepe makes an appearance not only online, but several times physically throughout the public performance of #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS . Milk Drinking as Meme One of the most popular and often recreated performances of physical memes on the #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS feed is the drinking of copious amounts of milk. Here I want to contrast two different performances of white supremacy exhibited in two separate locations of the #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS feed. Both incidents involve the specific performance of the visual meme of milk drinking. This performative and nearly ritualistic act of milk drinking, to those who run in white supremacy circles, has become a dual symbol. Folk beliefs, as evident in online discussion, trace performative or ritualistic milk drinking to the superior lactose tolerance of those of the Aryan race, as opposed to those whose genetic makeup does not allow for such consumption. [55] Many also appeal to the more iconic significance of the “pure white” color of milk as a symbol for racial purity. The symbolic milk drinking is a divider between in-group and out-group (those who possess lactose intolerance and literally cannot partake in the activity), while simultaneously serving as a visceral example of Butler’s understanding of performativity, where discourse produces literally what it names. By ingesting the material support of the movement’s racial symbol, these milk drinkers supposedly come to incarnate the “purity” which they strive for. There is no doubt that some extreme white supremacist circles already used milk as a symbol before the live stream of #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS . [56] However, the popularity of this meme as means of identity creation sky rocketed after performance and documentation of this ritual on screen. After the live stream milk-as-white-supremacist symbol began to propagate more quickly, it culminated with an article posted by People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and drawing clear connections between milk drinking and white supremacy, even animal cruelty. Appeals to wider popular culture opens this article: “As when Christoph Waltz’s character in Inglorious Bastards drinks a glass of milk and a character in a pivotal scene of Get Out sips the cow secretion, dairy milk has long been embraced as a symbol of white supremacy.” [57] Traction by traditional news sources led to a harpooning of the practice by PETA, which in turn was touted as a victory on Twitter and mocked by chants of “down with the vegan agenda.” The transference of milk drinking from in-group activity to identity performance for the out-group was complete. It is hard to nearly impossible to predict the path of memes like this performative act, created as a symbol of identity by white supremacist and hate groups, mediated through #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS and subsequently re-distributed through white supremacist networks that were taking part in the liminal public space of real-time live performance. As a reaction to the popularity of these videos, Richard Spencer changed the frog emoji in his Twitter name (broadcasting his knowledge of Pepe the Frog) to that of a glass of milk. [58] Many other members of far-right groups changed their Twitter names to follow suit. A cursory check on Twitter’s emoji search function reveals thousands of Twitter accounts that also feature the frog emoji, along with evocative hashtags such as #deplorable (which was co-opted from an electoral insult presidential candidate Hillary Clinton produced during a hot-mic incident), and #MAGA (an acronym for Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.”) serving as signposts to their far-right ideologies. In the original New York City milk drinking performance featured on #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS , several shirtless men gathered in front of the live stream camera at night in the Northeastern winter weather for what would later be called a “Nazi party” by several sources, including clips found on YouTube. [59] Each man was holding and drinking from gallon-sized milk containers. Yet, they were boisterous in their mannerisms and emboldened by the numbers of participants both physically present and on the stream, loudly and proudly declaring their identities, yelling profanities and yelling, “down with the vegan agenda.” In the video, many shirtless participants showed off their physique and tattoos that included white supremacist imagery. This performance was meant to be witnessed by not only those who were physically at the location of the live stream, but the millions more who had tuned in to watch the live stream as a result of traditional media coverage. Their audience, in this case, was a combination of in-group white supremacists who knew of the symbol and the out-group due to the public nature of their performance; these white men were defiantly performing who they were for everyone to see, both online and off. The main video, titled He Will Not Divide Us ( ” Nazi ” Party FRIDAY NIGHT ) hwndu hewillnotdivideus racist milk was posted on February 5, 2017, and at the time of writing had garnered 175,209 views. Figure 2. Screen shot from video of “Nazi Party” captures a group of men drinking milk and chanting (YouTube video from Wyatt Pahr, February 2017). The visage of Ted Cruz (upper left corner) is used by Pahr as a watermark for his particular YouTube channel. [60] A separate incident of identity performing milk drinking appeared weeks after the initial “Nazi party,” from the second location of the stream in Albuquerque, NM. In contrast to the boisterous party bolstered by conversation that ensued from the first performance, one young man stands among a quieter crowd in broad daylight. This was on one of the first days of the second iteration of the stream which, like the initial performance, had attracted fairly peaceful protest. This crowd of about twenty were following the instructions of the piece and were chanting “He will not divide us” into the camera. This young man, placing himself centrally within the camera range, slowly slipped a half gallon of milk from a plastic bag to drink without bringing overt attention to his act. He seemed also to be aware of other participants in the stream, as he stopped his activity of drinking when another approached the camera to take up the entire field of vision. After the other participant had left, the first man resumes his activity of milk drinking, fully aware that those around him might not have let him continue his act had they known that this was a white supremacist meme for others who might be watching the stream. This young man was perhaps afraid that his presence in a physical public space stripped him of the anonymity that accompanies performances of identity on the internet. This forms a direct contrast to the boisterous party of the New York performance, where the number of members in the group offered relative safety from confrontation. At least one other stream participant of the in-group was watching, as he captured the live-streamed video and uploaded the video on YouTube. Titled Sneaking a Swig of Milk in during HWNDU (2017) and garnering less than 3,000 views, this video was not nearly as popular as the performative acts captured in New York City for the original stream. [61] However, curiously, the act of sneaky milk drinking was re-captured and converted into an animated GIF image for use and dissemination on other social media sites such as Twitter, Reddit, Imagur, and 4chan. This GIF image became a short hand symbol, much in the way that Richard Spencer co-opted the milk glass emoji in his Twitter name. Figure 3. Screen shot from “Sneaking a Swig of Milk” captures one man sneakily drinking milk on camera (YouTube video from H Drone, February 2017, used with permission from LaBeouf Rönkkö & Turner). In this case, the actual act of drinking the milk was less important than the performance of the affect of milk drinking and possessing the sign that pointed towards the act of converting a symbol into a performance act. Drinking milk, as a bodily sensate activity, extends past the visceral experience, oscillating between the act itself and the meaning for which it stands. Added is the digital environment in which consuming the milk was witnessed, captured and disseminated over vast networks of social participants. That dissemination was part of the affective nature of the symbol itself, demonstrating the cooperative authorship of identity for internet trolls on 4Chan to white supremacists organizing elsewhere in different digital spaces on the internet. Conclusion The performance of identity has often been used by opposition groups to galvanize both in-group solidarity and out-group exclusion. These tactics have existed as a social method of identity construction as part of Van Dijk’s “ideological square.” [62] The meme is a convenient package for virulent messages that carry meanings larger than themselves. The addition of the digital to the performance of identity means two seemingly opposing ideas: the world-wide dissemination of these memes to as many people as possible, and the closed off dissemination in a personalized web governed by relevance algorithms. Memes are used in identity creation and then employed in identity manipulation as part of a creation of war rhetoric that has emboldened this group to act in tangible ways. Performance, often conceptualized as an agent for progressive social change and good, is vulnerable to being used as a tool to promote dangerous ideologies. The performances of identity that the live stream #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS captured digitally demonstrate the power of these memes to continue to perform identity—even the identity of those on the far fringes of the political spectrum. The war rhetoric in identity creation, used to convince many to take up a mantle and fight for a righteous cause, translates and spills over into real-life consequences and radicalization of theses internet groups. Clearly, the anonymity of the internet allows for people to author some truly insidious creations. Constructing a toxic technopublic in real time, participants in #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS demonstrate that performance of identity is not just reserved for positive social change—identity performance is reserved for the trolls, as well. References [1] Shia LaBeouf, Luke Turner, and Nastja Säde Rönkkö. #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS , accessed June 11, 2017. http://www.hewillnotdivide.us . [2] Ibid. [3] Emma Grey Ellis, “Don’t Look Now, But Extremists’ Meme Armies Are Turning Into Militias,” Wired . Last modified April 20, 2017. https://www.wired.com/2017/04/meme-army-now-militia/ . Throughout the article I spell “alt-right” with scare quotes to mark my refusal to legitimize or normalize the white supremacists’ self-invented euphemism. I also use the phrase far-right to designate individuals with highly conservative views who may not formally take part in organized groups professing to be “alt-right.” [4] Tarleton Gillespie, “The Relevance of Algorithms,” Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society 167 (2014). [5] Joseph Bernstein, “The Public Square Belongs to 4Chan,” Buzzfeed News . Last modified May 18, 2017. https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/the-public-square-belongs-to-4chan?utm_term=.gijxZ6zmB#.tiMGDJZEm . [6] Jack Smith IV, “Shia LaBeaouf’s Anti-Trump Live-Stream has Devolved into a Neo-Nazi Broadcast Network,” Mic . Last modified February 9, 2017. https://mic.com/articles/168026/shia-la-beouf-s-anti-trump-livestream-has-devolved-into-a-neo-nazi-broadcast-networ [7] George Lakoff, The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014), 56. Lakoff frames all political arguments in terms of a national conception of family. In his introduction, the conservative conception of family is defined as the strict father model, where the preferred method for obedience is physical punishment. [8] Teun A. Van Dijk, “Discourse and Ideology,” Discourse and Society 9 (1998): 307-308. [9] Ibid., 397. Original emphasis. [10] Sarah J. Jackson, and Brooke Foucault Welles, “Hijacking #myNYPD : Social Media Dissent and Networked Counterpublics,” Journal of Communication 65, no. 6 (December 2015): 932–52. [11] Bernstein, “The Public Square Belongs to 4Chan.” Through personal communication, Luke Turner had this to say about working with the museum, “It was the institution in Queens, however, that did most to misrepresent, misframe and hijack the work, not least by holding a local politician’s partisan political rally in front of our artwork. As a result, the media and the ‘alt-right’ at large represented the artwork as something it is explicitly not, in order to make it a target and fabricate some kind of enemy.” [12] Bernstein, “The Public Square Belongs to 4Chan.” [13] Adrian Gomez, “’He Will Not Divide Us’ Video Stream Taken Down After Report of Gunshots,” Albuquerque Journal . Accessed February 23, 2017. https://www.abqjournal.com/955762/labeouf-takes-down-anti-trump-stream-due-to-reported-shots.html . [14] Bernstein, “The Public Square Belongs to 4Chan.” [15] Van Dijk. “Discourse and Ideology.” [16] Ibid., 390. [17] The oft-cited and biblical example of soldiers using the pronunciation of the word “shibboleth” to distinguish between friend and foe, is an example of the “ideological square” in action, demonstrating the exclusionary/inclusionary nature of language employed in this way. Linguistic or symbolic markers that are characteristic of a certain group of people are used to the exclusion of other groups, often with severely negative consequences. [18] Timothy Scott Brown, Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009). [19] Ibid., 15. [20] danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison, “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007): 210–30. [21] Craig Silverman, “Fake Antifa Twitter Accounts Are Trolling People And Spreading Misinformation,” Buzzfeed News . Last modified May 30, 2017. https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/fake-antifa-twitter-accounts [22] Timothy Scott Brown, Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance, 110. [23] Recently, journalists have uncovered cracks in the constitution of “alt-right” groups as they are being torn apart by domestic disputes, witness the work the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has done to uncover these groups. Matt Parrott, a high-level leader of the Traditionalist Workers Party designated a hate group by the SPLC, himself admitted “SPLC has won. Matt Parrott is out of the game. Y’all have a nice life.” Qtd in Erin Keane, “Infighting tears apart a modern hate group, just as it did for the Klan.” Salon . Last modified March 14, 2018. https://www.salon.com/2018/03/14/infighting-tears-apart-a-modern-hate-group-just-like-it-did-for-the-klan/ [24] Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How The New Personalized Web is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin, 2011). [25] Thomas Zeitzoff, “Does Social Media Influence Conflict? Evidence from the 2012 Gaza Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 16, no. 1 (2016): 29-63. [26] Lewis A. Friedland, Thomas Hove, and Hernando Rojas. “The Networked Public Sphere.” Javnost – The Public 13, no. 4 (2006): 5–26. [27] Pariser, The Filter Bubble , 12. [28] Joshua Benton, “The Forces that Drove this Election’s Media Failure Are Likely to Get Worse,” Nieman Journalism Lab . Last modified November 9, 2006. http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove-this-elections-media-failure-are-likely-to-get-worse/ [29] Van Dijk, “Discourse and Ideology,” 397. [30] Gillespie, “The Relevance of Algorithms,” 167. [31] Benton, “The Forces That Drove This Election’s Media Failure are Likely to Get Worse.” [32] Richard Dawkins, “Memes: The New Replicators,” in The Selfish Gene (1976): 203-15. [33] Ibid., 204. [34] These symbols are deeply embedded codes that include the use of 14, for the 14 words slogan “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” and 88, which stands for “Heil Hitler” since H is the 8th letter in the alphabet. Definitions are provided on the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate Symbols Database: https://www.adl.org/education-and-resources/resource-knowledge-base/hate-symbols [35] Marshall McLuhan, and Quentin Fiore, “The Medium is the Message,” New York 123 (1967): 126-128. [36] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 [1980]). [37] Ibid., 69. [38] “Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump | PRRI/The Atlantic Report.” n.d. PRRI (blog). last modified May 9, 2018. https://www.prri.org/research/white-working-class-attitudes-economy-trade-immigration-election-donald-trump/ . While many Trump voters certainly do not identify as “alt-right,” many “alt-right” individuals have constructed their identity around their affinity for Donald Trump as president and will indicate so in their social media profiles. [39] Anthony Joseph Coates, The Ethics of War (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016). Coates is quoting from Keegan’s A History of Warfare (Random House, 1993). [40] Bernstein, “The Public Square Belongs to 4Chan.” [41] Emma Grey Ellis, “Don’t Look Now, But Extremists’ Meme Armies Are Turning Into Militias,” Wired . Last modified April 20, 2017. https://www.wired.com/2017/04/meme-army-now-militia/ [42] Ibid. As a counter to the video of an Antifa activist punching Richard Spencer on Inauguration Day, alt-right internet users were quick to capture and replay a video of an Antifa activist in Berkeley receiving the same treatment. “The Expendables” are a group of para-military left-behind action heroes led by Sylvester Stallone in a movie that premiered in 2010. Pepe the Frog will be discussed in depth in a later portion of this article. [43] Ellis, “Don’t Look Now, But Extremists’ Meme Armies are Turning into Militias.” [44] Ibid. [45] Ibid. [46] Van Dijk, “Discourse and Ideology,” 380. [47] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). John Lutterbie employs the use of proprioception in his conceptualization of role creation and acting in Towards a Theory of Acting: Cognitive Science and Performance (London: Palgrave, 2011). [48] Ibid., 60. [49] Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 1 (1993): 17-32. [50] LaBeouf, Turner, and Rönkkö. http://www.hewillnotdivide.us . [51] Ibid. [52] Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). [53] Shaun Manning, “Pepe the Frog Is Dead: Creator Kills the White Supremacist-Hijacked Icon.” CBR.com . Last modified May 6, 2017. http://www.cbr.com/pepe-frog-creator-kills-white-supremacist-icon/ . [54] Sarah J. Jackson, and Brooke Foucault Welles, “Hijacking #MYNYPD : Social Media Dissent and Networked Counterpublics,” Journal of Communication 65, no. 6 (2015): 932-952. [55] Nikhil Sonnad, “What the rise of ‘its OK to be white’ says about the alt-right,” Quartz . Last modified December 7, 2017. https://qz.com/1144783/the-rise-of-the-alt-rights-catchphrase-its-ok-to-be-white/ . [56] Debate over the origins of this practice continues, with some scholars and journalists pointing towards the internet’s obsession with a 2011 photo of a woman bathing another woman’s feet with milk. The photo is also rife with Nazi symbolism and imagery. Other scholars date this practice as far back as a U.S. National Dairy Council pamphlet from the 1920s, “The people who have used liberal amounts of milk and its products are progressive in science and every activity of the human intellect.” Tracing the complex history of milk as a white supremacist symbol merits a more in-depth study which exceeds the scope of this article. The above theories are found in Andrea Freeman, “Milk, a Symbol of Neo-Nazi Hate,” The Conversation (August 30, 2017), http://theconversation.com/milk-a-symbol-of-neo-nazi-hate-83292 . [57] Zachary Toliver, “Why Cow’s Milk Is the Perfect Drink for Supremacists,” Peta . Last modified March 7, 2017. https://www.peta.org/blog/cows-milk-perfect-drink-supremacists/ . [58] Ellis, “Don’t Look Now, But Extremists’ Meme Armies Are Turning Into Militias.” [59] Wyatt Pahr, “He Will Not Divide Us ( ” Nazi ” Party FRIDAY NIGHT ) hwndu hewillnotdivideus racist milk.” Filmed [February 2017] YouTube video, 11:49. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTy6f_HyuQU” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank” [60] Another example of the complications of online authorship: I had to untangle the permissions for these stills from YouTube. This still represents my screen shot of a YouTube video copied from another YouTube video that was a screen capture of a video feed of the live event. This image is used with permission from LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner. [61] H Drone. “Sneaking a Swig of Milk in during HWNDU.” Filmed [February 2017] YouTube video, 01:55. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiTxH-7ZziI [62] Van Dijk, “Discourse and Ideology,” 390. Footnotes About The Author(s) Ellen Gillooly-Kress is a PhD student in the Theatre Arts department at the University of Oregon. Her work focuses on performance and the internet, and cognitive processing of language in theatrical performance. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Deric McNish Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Directing Shakespeare in America Deric McNish By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Charles Ney’s Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices is an illuminating and much-needed resource for directors, scholars, students, and Shakespeare aficionados. Between 2004 and 2015, Ney interviewed a veritable “who’s who” in the American Shakespeare scene. He selected 65 directors to participate in this study, an impressive feat as these are among the most prolific practitioners and artistic directors in the United States. Any of the interviewees in Charles Ney’s book could be the subject of an entire monograph, but Ney demonstrates a remarkable ability to curate this wealth of wisdom in a way that is compelling and easy to follow. Rather than presenting the interviews as self-contained essays, he has taken the much more useful approach of extracting and collating advice from each interviewee and organizing it based on topic. He identifies common approaches and creates convincing categories in which each director can be viewed. The book is engaging as a straight read-through, but it’s equally useful for the reader that wants to skip ahead and explore concise essays on various topics, such as approaches to table work, or how to navigate tech and previews. These practices are invaluable for directors of Shakespeare, but can be more broadly applied as resources for directing any kind of live theatre. A prolific director himself, Ney no doubt has his own informed opinions about how to approach directing Shakespeare, and yet he manages to serve as a fair and impartial conduit for each interviewee’s ideas. He transmits a variety of approaches without prejudice, saying “… there is more that can be learned by setting those judgements aside” (28). He is present in this work, not as a director, but as a keen scholar organizing a chaotic cacophony of ideas. Still, his underlying tone in this book is that of a person with great reverence for the artistic process and great respect for a diversity of approaches. Part I includes an introduction to each director’s career and attempts to identify their major beliefs and aesthetic sensibilities. Part II focuses on preproduction, how the director prepares to work with designers and actors. Part III explores the various approaches to rehearsal, with focuses on table work, staging, speaking the language, and middle stage rehearsals. Part IV, titled “Finishing the Production,” explores tech and dress, as well as the added element of the audience. Ney intends this book “to be a framework in which to view an individual’s work” (1). It accomplishes that and much more. A director can read Ney’s book and apply this framework to their own process. For example, a “Shakespeare as a Contemporary” director takes artistic license to promote the text’s relevance to the present. Conversely, an “Original Practices Director” works as a “director archeologist,” using Elizabethan staging practices to reveal possibilities in the text (31). The “Invisible Director” aims to “erase the traces” of the director (31) while the “Interpretive Director” actively attempts to collaborate with Shakespeare while putting forth a strong artistic vision for the play. For each of these approaches, Ney provides examples of specific directors’ processes. Categorizing directors based on their theoretical or practical approaches is challenging, but Ney makes convincing arguments for his breakdowns, while acknowledging that any individual director will defy those at times, based on the practical demands of their production or the nature of collaboration. These approaches are sometimes contradictory in a way that feels invigorating, as Ney creates a dialectic between powerful voices. The book then presents a breakdown of the common elements of production – selection, casting, concept, table-work, rehearsals, tech, previews, performance, etc. – and each section offers reflective advice from a number of directors. Ney doesn’t allow the discussions to become a collection of disconnected essays, but curates this information, extracting relevant information and placing it in appropriate sections. He develops useful categories and identifies major themes in each chapter. He sometimes identifies which approach is dominant, but never which approach is right. One can assume, based on the success of the interviewees, that every approach delineated has merit. The reader is invited to pick and choose. He manages to contextualize without getting in the way. These directors’ voices shine through. Ney’s contribution is unparalleled, in part because of his specific focus on the rich community of directors in the United States. A 1990 book by Ralph Berry called On Directing Shakespeare featured 12 interviews, including Trevor Nunn and Peter Brook, with no specific geographic focus. The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, edited in 2008 by John Russell Brown, includes interviews with 31 directors (4 of which were American), and each chapter focused on a different director’s approach. Nancy Taylor’s 2005 book, Women Direct Shakespeare in America, focused on feminist performance theory in practice during the 1990s. Elizabeth Schafer took a similar approach in 2000 with her Ms – Directing Shakespeare: Women Direct Shakespeare. Countless instructional books exist that focus on directing Shakespeare, but each of those only focuses on one author’s specific approach. Ney’s book astonishingly avoids privileging one approach over another. This is a study that attempts to truly capture diverse approaches and contextualize them. Each interviewee generously throws open the doors to their process and the result is instructive. There were moments when I craved more examples from specific productions to illustrate points, or to more clearly set up the contrast between directors, but I understand this would have made things lengthier and perhaps cumbersome. This book is an effective snapshot of an incredibly diverse body of work and a must read for Shakespeare directors, scholars, and enthusiasts. Deric McNish Michigan State University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Acting in the Academy The Theatre of David Henry Hwang Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Directing Shakespeare in America Writing, Acting, and Directing Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Kristin Leahey with Joseph Ngo 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 The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Kristin Leahey with Joseph Ngo By Published on May 23, 2022 Download Article as PDF When Lauren Yee approaches a new play, she considers the historical events she wants to address in her work. Yee contemplates, “What are the moments and people that have been forgotten?” Yee gathers copious research and identifies the primary icons of these periods. She then disregards these surrogates of the times: her plays are not historical renderings of the lives of the famous or infamous, such as Mao Zedong or Pol Pot. Her plays are stories of the people whose narratives have often been omitted from the archive and whose lives have been marginalized. She probes histories of Asians and Asian Americans. As a writer, she acknowledges their communities by conceiving plays based on the lives of fictional individuals from the communities themselves. By reclaiming history, Yee constructs main characters in the form of common people who refuse to accept their plights and choose instead to challenge overwhelming obstacles in order to construct divergent futures for themselves and subsequent generations. Ultimately, through contemporary dialogue, Yee explores paradigms of largely forgotten pasts, such as the Tiananmen Square Massacre in The Great Leap and the Cambodian genocide in Cambodian Rock Band . In this article, I, one of Yee’s primary dramaturgs, will share the dramaturgical processes for the development, production, and audience and community engagement for two of her most produced works, which both premiered in 2018: The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band . Additionally, Joseph (Joe) Ngo, an actor with whom Yee collaborates, contributes thoughts in the form of an interview I conducted with him over the past several months. Ngo reflects on his dramaturgical contributions as an actor and Cambodian American in the new play development process. By performing an analysis of these plays and sharing specifics of their development trajectories, I provide access to the dramaturgy of one of our most influential twenty-first century writers, unpack why these works about Asians and Asian Americans are so widely produced at PWIs (primarily white institutions, i.e., US regional theatres and off-Broadway institutions), and describe how Yee’s work and playmaking processes add to the discourse on Asian American dramaturgies. Figure 1. Joseph Steven Yang, Linden Tailor, Bob Ari, and Keiko Green in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and Seattle Rep co-production of The Great Leap (2018). Photo by AdamVisCom. The Great Leap In Yee’s works, fathers are often protagonists, which is true, too, of the The Great Leap . Set in 1989, The Great Leap follows Manford, a Chinese American high school student from San Francisco, as he plays in an exhibition game in Beijing against the Chinese men’s national basketball team. Over the course of the play, the audience discovers that Manford’s father Wen Chang—a devoted, ranking member of the Communist Party—is the Chinese team’s coach. Manford’s mother, Zhang Li, rebelled against the Party after the Cultural Revolution, and she miraculously defected to the United States early in her pregnancy. Wen Chang refused to join her at first and was subsequently unable to because of immigration laws in China and the US. Ultimately, Wen Chang defies the Party and protects his son, who has been unknowingly photographed with the student protestors in Tiananmen Square. He then allows Manford, a member of the University of San Francisco team, to take the last shot in the game, which enables the Americans to win, displeasing the Party. In his final monologue, delivered as a fax to his son, who has hopefully returned safely to California, Wen Chang states: “they are dealing with their most immediate threats. soon they will get to me. they suspect, i suppose, that i will not run.” [1] Wen Chang is the character in the play who experiences the greatest transformation and moves to action from stasis. As her dramaturg on the play from 2016 to its New York opening in June 2018 at the Atlantic Theatre Company, I discussed with Yee some of the variations of the title of the play in connection to who the protagonist of the play is: Manford at the Line , Manford at the Line or The Great Leap , and eventually, simply, The Great Leap , after the 2017 Denver Center for the Performing Arts Colorado New Play Summit Workshop. During the workshop, Wen Chang was played by Francis Jue who, like Ngo, serves as a consistent inspiration for Yee. With Jue, there was casual conversation about identifying the main character: Manford or Wen Chang. Manford was onstage throughout most of the play, and he traversed both of the play’s settings of the Bay Area and Beijing. But Manford didn’t change. Although he is the youngest character (and might be, therefore, most likely to change), his motivations are consistent: to discover his family, to reach his goals, and to honor basketball—the sport he loves. By contrast, Wen Chang renounces communism and looks to the US democracy as a place for his son to find a better life. He writes, “and if i have done my job properly, you are on your flight now, minor injuries, back to a country that will hopefully see you for the man you are. either way, my story ends here. and yours is still to begin.” [2] Wen Chang regrets the loss of his individualism, particularly the loss of his life with his family, for his belief and love of the Communist Party. In the end, retaining Manford’s name in the title didn’t make sense for either the rhythm or the meaning of the play, as he ultimately isn’t the protagonist. Additionally, Yee wanted to capitalize on the witticism of the title The Great Leap : it simultaneously alludes to the sport of basketball and the 1958–1962 economic and social campaign by the Communist Party to industrialize an agrarian economy, which led to famine, brutalization, and the deaths of 45 million people. Using The Great Leap as the title was a linguistically sophisticated, though controversial, play on words. In addition to the process of deciding the title, we practiced sensitive research in the form of primary source interviews. Yee and I conducted a number of anonymous interviews with Chinese expatriates living in Seattle and Denver. They informed our work, in terms of everyday life, competitive sports, and education in Communist China from the 1970s onward. One source said that a colleague, also Chinese and working in the US, asked them, after I initially contacted them, without their having made any public mention of working on the show, what they were doing working on a piece with this title. A different source stated that the closer you traveled to Beijing, the more you must omit about the protests to the point of pretending they never happened. One interviewee claimed that they knew the identity and narrative of the man in the “tank man” photo and that this was common knowledge in certain circles, but was unwilling to share more information. This image serves as the culminating moment in Yee’s play because is the surrogate for the Tiananmen Square Massacre for the West, while it remains unknown in much of Communist China. In her foundational work On Photography , Susan Sontag writes that “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.” [3] Yee further moves audiences to empathy, or a form of “participation” with an iconic photograph by transforming Wen Chang into “tank man.” In The Great Leap , audiences hear Wen Chang describe himself as the figure in the photo while he changes his clothes, and then they see him against the backdrop of the famous image. At this moment, every audience I have seen the play with across the country gasps. This final scene of Wen Chang’s journey is connected to grief, as it epitomizes the affect of much of Wen Chang’s journey in The Great Leap . In The Melancholy of Race , Anne Anlin Cheng writes about the transformative act of moving from “grief to grievance, from suffering injury to speaking out against that injury.” [4] Cheng describes a “racial grief” elicited from a a history of indifference, social injustice, and psychological or even physical injury. Applying theory from Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” Cheng explores a type of grief—melancholy—which I argue Wen Chang exudes throughout the play. Melancholy is a condition of “endless self-impoverishment” or the tendency to remain in an interminable state of mourning. [5] Wen Chang’s melancholia is an example of racial abjection experienced by Asian Americans that Yee imprints on the characters of Wen Chang and Manford because they both live in a liminal space between belonging and being ostracized by the US. A scene that conveys Wen Chang’s immense grief is “letter 3/pick and roll: 1971.” Wen Chang writes: “and her absence was noted in my dossier, ensuring that i would never leave this country. every year i applied for a visa, and every year, like the movement of a clock: denied. i was the pick. and she was the roll. and together we could have done so much. but she could not be patient and i was too much so.” [6] In the co-world premiere productions in Denver and Seattle (at Seattle Repertory Theatre) in 2018, not seeing Zhang Li onstage made the character omnipresent and became a significant production choice. The everlasting emotional and geographic separation between the couple spurred Wen Chang’s grief and eventually this melancholy is compounded when he learns that Zhang Li died from cancer just before the beginning of the play. Both Manford and Wen Chang mourn her loss throughout the narrative and seek “grievance,” as Cheng defines it, at different points on their journeys. The characters are called to action; they express and enact a search for voice, justice, and change through “grievance,” or overcoming their grief. Manford fights to join the University of San Francisco team immediately after the funeral of his mother, creating an impetus to live through grief and demonstrate his grievance by making the team. He expresses his anger for the death of his mother through his system-defying actions. He’s angry at the US health care system for not providing proper care for his mother. He’s angry that because she was a poor immigrant, she was forced to take taxing, manual labor-intensive jobs to survive that ultimately accelerated her death. Wen Chang expresses his grievance through protest and joins the students in Tiananmen Square. Yee intentionally bookends The Great Leap with these men, first Manford and then Wen Chang, essentially wearing the same costume: a white button-down collar shirt and black pants. In their matching attire, Manford restlessly insists on joining the basketball team, and Wen Chang protests for change in Tiananmen Square. Off-Broadway and regional audiences around the country experienced The Great Leap as it became one of the most-produced plays in the US, and Yee became the second most-produced playwright in 2020. [7] While working at one of the PWIs that premiered the play—Seattle Rep (as the Director of New Works)—I heard what was attracting many theatres to the work: it has a cast of four or fewer; it is a comedy; it is a father-son story; it is about a historical period and creates an iconic image; it is extremely well-written; it is ostensibly linear with flashbacks that are easy to follow; and it includes a popular sport in it, but doesn’t require a set with a full court. Because of these features, the primarily white audiences and subscribers of these theatres, also found this play interesting. However, unsurprisingly, many were shocked by the vulgarity of the language (i.e., “all right, you masturbating horsefuckers: i know you’re tired. i know you’re still jetlagged from last night. i know you’d rather be jerking off into a nice hot bowl of noodles than sitting in traffic this early in the morning.”) [8] which theatres such as Seattle Rep and Denver Center for the Performing Arts anticipated by sharing content warnings in advance through pre-show emails, on the show’s webpage, and in the program. In my dramaturgy, I learned that an inspiration for the play was Larry Yee’s (Lauren Yee’s father) investment in basketball. In the early 1980s, Larry Yee played on a team representing San Francisco in these types of exhibition games throughout China. He noted that the Chinese players from these very competitive teams were extremely tall, often at least 7 feet. In the play, they become coach Wen Chang’s “Tall Trees.” [9] I added images of Larry Yee (who is 6 feet) to the lobby display. I attended all the previews in Denver and Seattle, and I led talkbacks in both cities, where the director and the entire company were completely different. In every location, diverse audiences of white, Asian American, and other people of color seemed enthralled by the play’s climatic game in Beijing. They seemed equally captivated by the narrative of Manford and Wen Chang finding each other on the court and a history that is still forbidden in part of the world. In Denver, watching the first readings, sitting next to Lauren Yee, hearing her laugh along with the audience, then experiencing their immediate standing ovation, the company knew we had created a unique work. Fig. 2. Brooke Ishibashi, Joe Ngo, Jane Lui, Raymond Lee and Abraham Kim in South Coast Repertory’s world premiere production of Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee. Photo by Jordan Kubat/SCR. Cambodian Rock Band The band Dengue Fever and actor Joe Ngo brought a formidable dramaturgical voice to the development of Cambodian Rock Band , a 2015 commission from South Coast Repertory Theatre in Southern California. Yee partially developed the work at Seattle Repertory Theatre during a closed workshop, curated by me and performed with Ngo, where Yee learned that Ngo’s Cambodian parents survived the regime of the Khmer Rouge and the genocidal forced labor camps of the late 1970s. Ngo said in our interview: I think it came as [a] surprise to Lauren to discover that I was actually Cambodian-Chinese. When in the room, during the feedback session, I mentioned how much it meant to see that Lauren was aiming to tell a story so close to my family experience. For a play that Lauren had admittedly shelved for some time, it was as if in me she had found a match to light her dynamite, or perhaps vice versa and upon this discovery of my family history, Lauren had found a source. After that we headed to the Thai restaurant across the street for dinner, and [for] at least an hour … I shared my family stories… As someone who doesn’t believe in fate, it is rather difficult to swallow all the fantastical, it seems, coincidences that ended up making Cambodian Rock Band : the two looming the largest being Lauren and my meeting and the fact that Lauren realized that’d she wanted to have a band onstage and that I play the electric guitar. [10] Ngo describes his initial work as always aimed at authenticity in building the voices for the characters and advocating for that work beyond the page. Because he is one of Yee’s primary partners for Cambodian Rock Band , his personal family history added layers of anecdotal dramaturgy. He contributed family stories and song choices. For instance, his parents crossed the Thai border twice under extreme duress, which the character Chum describes. Ngo’s mother, who is based in Los Angeles, served as the language coach for the South Coast Repertory production. As the city Battambang is a setting in the play, Ngo suggested “Champa Battambang” in honor of his parents’ birthplace. While the cadence and style of Yee’s language is ultimately hers, it was his enactment of his father, uncles, and other Khmer community members that led Yee to solidify his portrayal of Chum. Ngo articulates, “In building the life journey of my character Chum, I consider this a transformation of grief to grievance; reflecting on the challenges, pain, loss, and grief my family endured and overcame and my subsequent embodiment of their grievance through my own performance.” [11] For the premiere at South Coast Rep in 2018, Yee, Ngo, the rest of the originating acting company, lauded director Chay Yew, and resident dramaturg and current Director of New Works Andy Knight thoroughly examined the historical context of the play’s world. In Cambodian Rock Band , Yee reminds audiences of the history of the genocide and how the US strategically ignored its existence. In A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson describes this “imperial amnesia,” [12] which led the US government to ignore reports of the killing fields and refugee accounts of the death camps. Under the Nixon Administration, in March of 1969, the US attempted to bomb North Vietnamese trade routes in Cambodia, resulting in the deaths of 100,000 Cambodian civilians. This action further fueled pro-communist factions, such as the Khmer Rouge, in Cambodia. Following the devastating loss of the American War in Vietnam and hundreds of thousands of American lives, the US found no imperialistic value in Cambodia or interest in continued involvement in another Southeast Asian conflict. Western media largely neglected to cover the genocide, as the Watergate scandal dominated headlines. Yee informs audiences of this omitted history through flashbacks with Chum, the character that links the two historical worlds of the play and the band, and with monologues delivered by characters such as Duch, who have a wry sense of humor: genocide genocide genocide. boo.(DUCH clicks off the slides)you think of everything that came after, once the shit hit the fan. the khmer rouge, pol pot, and two million dead. [13] Thus far, Cambodian Rock Band has been produced by PWIs with predominantly white audiences. Minneapolis’ Jungle Theater, in collaboration with Theater Mu, the second largest Asian American theater in the country, will coproduce the play this June and July. Having performed the show more than a hundred times, Ngo described how shocked audiences seem by the genocide: It’s odd to say, but more often than not, it seemed as if audiences weren’t prepared to see the brutality of the Khmer Rouge enacted onstage (which, to be honest, is only half as bad as most of the cruelty documented) and so, the general feeling I so often was able to discern from audiences was one of disbelief. It was not surprising to me that whenever our cast participated in talkbacks, we’d receive fewer questions and more of what seemed like condolences for what had happened, expressions of helplessness, statements that affirmed that older audiences “just didn’t know this was happening, Cambodia was a blackzone,” refutations from other older (typically white) folks asserting that our country just chose to turn a blind eye to the damage that it caused…all of it in a restrained cacophony cloaked in civility. The expression of disbelief indicated to me that they felt some amount of shame or guilt of responsibility (whether acknowledged or not). [14] Ngo shares his family’s story through not only Yee’s play but also extensive audience outreach. For Cambodian Rock Band , Yee and her team of artists launched Herculean efforts to promote and encourage Cambodians and other Asian and Asian Americans to attend the show because of the work’s subject matter. Yee and the cast created and sold tee-shirts. Also, Yee attended as many of the shows as possible, facilitated community engagement events, hosted Asian American nights, worked with student groups from local colleges and universities, emceed music nights with members of the cast playing songs from the show’s Dengue Fever catalog, and participated in massive press campaigns. Ngo contends that the attraction for audiences with Cambodian Rock Band is the rock music, the interpretation of story connected to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the intrigue of how the seemingly unrelated items are tied. What audiences—Asian and Asian American but truly all diverse audiences—receive is a deeper understanding of a culture, people, and history through this theatrical platform, which ends with a celebration of their humanity. Ngo says, “I believe we achieved something special when we had younger audiences at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and they, too, danced in the aisles, celebrated, and seemed to deeply absorb all the rawness of the characters, having survived their youth. And, with arms flailing and sweaty, they would then hug each other and cry, seeming to feel the immediate understanding of just having survived themselves.” [15] Dramaturgy is not a delicate art for a Lauren Yee play. When Yee writes, she mouths her characters’ words. She bangs on her computer keys with a ruthlessness. She becomes consumed by her subjects, reading an excess of texts, then putting them aside to structure the building blocks of her plays. With superpower speed, she writes 200 to 400 pages in a week and just as easily slashes pages upon pages of dialogue. She requires the same ferocity and fight in her collaborators, which Ngo and I can confirm. Audiences will often find a narrator in conflict with the past and a geopolitical power struggling to draw a map of their own future. She examines epic, world-building and (hopefully) change-for-the better historical moments, but always from the perspective of an ordinary person. References [1] Lauren Yee, The Great Leap (unpublished final manuscript, 2018), 112. [2] Ibid., 112. [3] Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Classics, 2008), 7. [4] Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3. [5] Ibid., 8. [6] Ibid., 84. [7] Diep Tran, “The Top 10* Most-Produced Plays of the 2019-20 Season,” American Theatre Magazine , 18 September 2019, https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/09/18/the-top-10-most-produced-plays-of-the-2019-20-season/. [8] Yee, Great Leap , 68. [9] Ibid., 88. [10] Joseph Ngo, interview with Kristin Leahey, 3 January 2022. [11] Ibid. [12] Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 176. [13] Lauren Yee, Cambodian Rock Band (unpublished final manuscript, 2018), 7. [14] Ngo, interview with Kristen Leahey, 3 January 2022. [15] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) Kristin Leahey served as the Director of New Works at Seattle Repertory Theatre, and prior to that post, as the Literary Manager at Washington D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, among other places. She has freelanced as an artist nationally and internationally. Her publications include articles in Theatre Topics , Theatre History , and Theatre Studies . Leahey is an Assistant Professor at Boston University. Joe Ngo is an Obie Award-winning actor, who has worked at South Coast Repertory, La Jolla Playhouse, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and off-Broadway at the Signature Theatre in New York City. As a writer, his work has been primarily geared toward solo performance and audio narratives with pieces such as Words, Words . Joe is a graduate of the University of Washington, Seattle’s MFA/PATP, and is based in Los Angeles. 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.

Ariel Nereson 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 Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Ariel Nereson By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF In fall 2021, after three semesters of Zoom instruction, I returned to the classroom to teach my Advanced Dramaturgy course for graduate and advanced undergraduate students at the University at Buffalo – SUNY (State University of New York). As a practicing choreographer and dramaturg, I teach across dance and theatre undergraduate and graduate curricula, and many of my courses focus on composition through both textual and kinesthetic modes. As I continue learning, developing, and implementing antiracist and culturally responsive teaching practices, I connect these principles to how I generally teach script and movement analysis via a method that emphasizes the imbrication of form, content, and means of production. [1] I offer here a reflection on teaching an Asian American dramaturgies unit within my Advanced Dramaturgy course in order to practice critical self-reflection; model the composition of this unit and acknowledge its limits and affordances; and advocate for the use of theoretical contributions like Dorinne Kondo’s “reparative creativity” as pedagogical tools. I am chagrined to admit that though I taught this course previously in 2015, it took the anti-Asian violence in the US during the COVID–19 pandemic for me to incorporate and name Asian American dramaturgies in the course. I shared this with my students as evidence of my complicity with racism and its impacts on my pedagogy (was it the prevalence of the model minority myth that led to the absence of Asian Americanist critique in my 2015 syllabus?) and to model solidarity and justice as pedagogical tactics in need of constant energy and commitment. I share it here to practice accountability as a white educator. Kondo’s reparative creativity, a theory of performance’s worldmaking capacities toward liberation, is developed through her own artistic practice as both a dramaturg and playwright. In Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity , Kondo includes a variety of writings, from reflections on her experiences as a spectator and artist, to scholarly analyses of racial capitalism, to her full-length play Seamless . Thinking across these modes allows students to integrate script analysis with sociocultural structural analysis, to understand stakes as not only present in a script as a matter of dramatic structure but also vital to our decisions about season selection, marketing and promotion, educational programming, and audience outreach—to the myriad ways that performance functions as worldmaking. Kondo’s work has inspired this special issue of JADT , the summer 2022 Association for Theater in Higher Education (ATHE) conference theme, and my own research on racialization and embodiment. I wanted to give students this concept as one of their theoretical tools to think and make with as dramaturgs. Part of my responsibility as an educator, as I have learned from Felicia Rose Chavez’s teachings on antiracism in the creative classroom, is to clarify and name explicitly for my students that we are tracing power dynamics and their impacts on the historical development of dramatic theatre as we move amongst units. [2] While in this reflection I single out our unit on Asian American dramaturgies, I want to clarify that my approach to structuring the syllabus names each unit out of a desire to counter what Kondo characterizes as “power-evasive liberalism” and its “cousins,” “humanist multiculturalism” and color blindness. [3] My approach may, at first glance, appear as cultural tourism, where we spend a couple of weeks on each identity category and leave whiteness unmarked. [4] Instead, our class analyzed racialization as a project of all production, for example how Lisa Kron, Jeanine Tesori, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home engages with whiteness. This structure intends to counter a traditional drama pedagogy in higher education wherein, as Kondo writes, “the majority of plays are white but rarely marked as such.” [5] My goals for our collective thinking through this unit were threefold: to introduce more contemporary Asian American playwrights to myself and my students, to model some kinds of research that a dramaturg working on a production of a particular text might need to do, and to locate theatrical production in a vibrant practice of Asian Americanist critique. Our contemporary Asian American dramaturgies unit comprised four sessions addressing the following materials: Lauren Yee’s 2008 play Ching Chong Chinaman ; Kat Chow’s journalism on the history of “Ching Chong” as a racial slur; Faedra Chatard Carpenter’s chapter “Reading and (re)directing racial scripts” in our textbook, The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy ; selections from Cathy Park Hong’s 2020 memoir Minor Feelings ; Kondo’s play Seamless and her chapter “Racial Affect and Affective Violence”; and Donatella Galella’s essay “Feeling Yellow: Responding to Contemporary Yellowface in Musical Performance.” [6] As a way of establishing the experiential knowledge in the room, I asked students to reflect individually, by writing, on two sets of questions: What do you “know” about Asian Americans? How do you know it? What stereotypes have you encountered? How have you participated in stereotyping? [7] Can you name an Asian American playwright? Have you seen an Asian American playwright’s work produced? If so, who, where, and when? Have you encountered Asian American characters onstage? If so, who, where, and when? Students were given the choice regarding the first cluster of questions as to how much of their individual reflection they wanted to share in the group discussion. I also participated in the reflection and sharing. No students in this course self-identified as Asian American. Had this been otherwise, I would rethink this exercise – not eliminate it, but consider possible harms to Asian American folks in the room and reconsider the format given my own whiteness and its impacts. I did instruct students that if they wanted to share with the group, they needed to share through “I” statements. I emphasized that while in their personal reflections racial slurs may be part of their experience of Asian American stereotyping, we would not voice those slurs in our group discussion, a continuation of a class policy we had used all semester based on Koritha Mitchell’s teachings about discursive violence. [8] I found that the first set of questions produced predictable responses in the sense that racialized minoritarian identities are perpetuated through resilient stereotypes, here of Asian Americans as the “model minority,” as non-conforming to white US American ideals of masculinity and femininity, as linguistically “other,” and as pursuing academic achievement no matter the cost. Students had quite a bit to say in response to this first set of questions, which made the relatively short discussion of the second set of questions stand out. In our brief discussion of the second set of questions, two concerns for me as the instructor emerged: the first was a general conflation of Asian with Asian American. [9] Given the paucity of Asian American representation on US stages, I wasn’t exactly surprised that my students listed any Asian character they had encountered in a US production. The vast majority of characters on this list were defined through the violence of colonial encounter and compulsory heterosexuality, such as King Mongkut from The King and I and Kim from Miss Saigon . My second concern resulted from the dominance of male playwrights on the students’ lists: David Henry Hwang and Qui Nguyen were the two most frequently cited playwrights. One student mentioned Young Jean Lee, but otherwise female Asian American playwrights were not represented. Through this discussion, I realized that I had organized our Asian American dramaturgies unit without consciously attending to gender dynamics, so my selections provided a serendipitous, but nonetheless necessary, corrective that, in the future, I would be more intentional about framing. Rather than giving a sequential account of how these four sessions went, I want to emphasize some unexpected, rich, and welcome connections that emerged through the confluence of these readings. I firstly note that these authors, while all identifying as female, represent a range of Asian American identities (with the exception of Carpenter) that are taken up in their respective texts, including Chinese American, Japanese American, and Korean American communities. This turned out to be a particularly needed intervention into the generalization of “Asians” that students had experienced. The pairing of the two dramas—Yee’s Ching Chong Chinaman and Kondo’s Seamless —demonstrated the breadth of dramatic possibility that Asian American dramaturgies explore, and both plays read wonderfully on the page. Yee’s play is a laugh-out-loud comedy, filled with linguistic and physical humor, that moves at a rapid clip through the Wong family’s expert assimilation into US American tropes of “Chineseness.” Kondo’s play, a family drama, proceeds at a steady, more meditative pace, and takes up painful histories of Japanese American incarceration, as it stages the lead character’s confrontations with familial and national pasts. While Yee’s play is more realistic, both texts incorporate stylistic tactics of realism and non-realism and allowed for comparison with other texts throughout the syllabus. I felt it was important to begin this unit with a comedy in order to continue our discussions of the importance of affirming the right of minoritarian actors to have fun onstage, to appear and labor without the necessity of staging trauma. Both of these plays open with the staging of a family portrait (another connection to previous texts in our course like Fun Home ). In Yee’s comedy, the Wongs are attempting their annual Christmas card portrait as they deliver rapid-fire dialogue satirizing the US cultural hegemony of Christmas. The characters freely stereotype Chinese Americans, white Americans, and Christians in hyperbolic prose; the scene ends with a camera flash, directly preceded by patriarch Ed Wong’s line, a cue to racial alienation: “Everyone open their eyes nice and wide now.” [10] Kondo’s play likewise stages a family portrait that ends with a camera flash. Unlike Yee, Kondo opens with direct address to the audience, as the characters introduce themselves and provide a running commentary on each other’s characterizations. Characters occasionally share sentences, each speaking a fragment, in contrast to Yee’s realistic dialogue. The scene ends: KEN: Because you see. MASAKO: We’re a very. BEN: Happy. DIANE: Family. [11] Paying attention to the opening beat of a script is standard script analysis training for the dramaturg. Comparing Kondo and Yee countered the collapsing of distinct Asian American identities into a homogenous group as we traced how these playwrights depart in their dramatic structures following their shared set-up in order to articulate differential experiences of US racial projects. Another serendipitous cluster of inquiry emerged around critical race theory and affect theory as tools the dramaturg might bring to bear on structures of composition and representation. Our initial discussions about Asian American stereotypes on- and offstage were paired with discussion of Faedra Chatard Carpenter’s chapter “Reading and (re)directing racial scripts.” In this essay, Carpenter introduces the term “racial scripts” to indicate the interconnectedness of racial projects, i.e., plays ostensibly “about” race, with racial projects , i.e., the systemic distribution of resources according to racialized hierarchies of identity as defined by critical race theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant. [12] Carpenter’s work affirms Kondo’s dramaturgical approach wherein “Instead of asking what race is , I ask what work it is doing, when, for whom?” [13] Carpenter’s account of dramaturging Kwame Kwei-Armah’s 2012 production of Matthew Lopez’s The Whipping Man at Center Stage in Baltimore compellingly models how the dramaturg navigates both kinds of racial projects. This reading became critically important to how our Asian American dramaturgies unit unfolded because Carpenter’s terminology of racial scripts allowed our class to reflect back on our initial discussions about stereotypes and characterization, to see how systemic critique is often pushed aside in favor of psychological critique (particularly in the US American theatre and its obsession with psychological realism), and to acknowledge how an incessant focus on individualized racial identity avoids recognizing the structural workings of racial projects. A second cluster of ideas around feeling was another example of an effective, though accidental, compositional choice for our unit. I included, respectively, Donatella Galella’s essay “Feeling Yellow” in order to tie back to our previous unit on musical theatre, Dorinne Kondo’s “Racial Affect and Affective Violence” because of its readability and complexity, and selections from Cathy Park Hong’s memoir Minor Feelings to engage with contemporary Asian Americanist critique written for a general audience. These readings shared an investment in feeling, or affect, as evidence of racial projects and formed a primer in affect theory for our class that was sited in the seats of the theatre. They also share a grounded, first-person address that is integrated with textual analysis and cultural critique. Our discussion of these texts emphasized another of the course’s through-lines: that artists are not geniuses whose creative production is somehow above or below the political and the social. We are responsible for our content and to our audiences. I’d like to offer a teaching tool related to sharing dense scholarly texts. For Galella’s essay, I asked students to prepare a 3-2-1 assignment: identify 3 main points, choose 2 significant quotations, and propose 1 question to the class based on the insights of the reading. [14] Shared with permission, here are a few of their insights: There is a lot of hidden emotional labor that we ask of people…amplified through the work of marginalized groups—white folk need to take on educating themselves, rather than asking those within the group to explain. Why has it taken this long for creators, designers, and writers to notice the problem in this industry? It seems like all of a sudden every regional theatre developed a “new plan of action” for equal opportunity and diversity on stage, which is fantastic, but it seems like they are only doing it because everyone else is. Commonly selected quotes included: “A theory of feeling yellow makes visible how white supremacy preserves pleasure for the privileged in order to preserve hierarchy” and “While quiet dissent may not move the majority, loud laughter moves the minoritized. Racialized representation can make the spectator of color painfully conscious of racism even in anticipation of a performance.” [15] When I reviewed the students’ 3-2-1s, I observed that moving from Carpenter to Galella, as we moved through the plays, helped students identify connecting personal responses to dramatic material to structural critiques of US culture as dramaturgical work. We turned this theoretical discussion toward the concrete realities of season selection at our institution. Season selection was happening concurrently with our course and discussing a hypothetical season proposal that included both Kondo’s and Yee’s plays made space for students to be self-reflective, in terms of considering their roles and investments in our department, and also to engage in institutional critique, particularly of the commonplace, incorrect, and violent excuse of not selecting particular texts because “we don’t have the actors for that.” [16] Students noted the reappearance of this logic in our discussions, as we had previously analyzed texts that called for primarily Black and African diasporic casts and primarily Indigenous casts, in relation to the demands placed on minoritarian playwrights if they wish to see their plays regularly produced. Rather than lumping together racialized “others” through our course units, we used our tools from this unit’s authors, particularly those of systemic critique, to understand these plays as being in a relation of solidarity within racial projects that structure performance-making in North America. In this way Drew Hayden Taylor’s Berlin Blues and Yee’s Ching Chong Chinamen are similar not because they are comedies centered on people belonging to particular minoritarian identities written by playwrights belonging to these communities (and thus checking a set of diversity boxes) but because they are composed, produced, and received in a white supremacist theatrical environment that seeks to constrain their meanings. As I prepared this reflection for publication in early 2022, the Public Theater in New York produced Out of Time , a monologue project “written by five Asian American playwrights for Asian American actors over age 60.” [17] Days later, an Asian American performer who was headed to the Public to perform as part of a Lion Dance program before the first preview of Lloyd Suh’s drama The Chinese Lady was assaulted in a public act of anti-Asian violence. [18] This assault was a material consequence of anti-Asian racism experienced simultaneously with increased visibility for Asian American theatrical production within white cultural hegemony. This concurrence, as both a contemporary outcome of white supremacy and as related to long histories of violence against racialized “others” in the US, reflects the urgent stakes of the classic dramaturgical question “why this play now?” Asking this question of each play on our syllabus and in our season points to the necessity of centering minoritarian artistic production as an ethical pedagogical and dramaturgical practice. How does this play serve our students, our audience, and our worldmaking, be they harms or reparations? Kondo’s reparative creativity, as well as its intersection with other theoretical tools like critical race theory and affect theory, gives students language with which to answer these questions. I hope that readers who do not already engage with Asian Americanist dramaturgies will incorporate these readings into not only their own courses (and they certainly resonate beyond the dramaturgy classroom) but also the systems we teach with and inside of, like auditions, admissions, casting, season selection, internship placement, hiring, and guest artist residencies, among others. References [1] This tripartite focus (form, content, means of production) is inspired by the “grid of politicality” theorized by Ana Vujanovi´c, after Randy Martin, as the multidimensional space where we might register the politics of performance. For this theorization, see Vujanovi´c, “Notes on the Politicality of Contemporary Dance,” in Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity: Current Perspectives on Politics and Communities in the Arts, Vol. 1 , ed. Stefan Hölscher and Gerald Siegmund (Zurich: Diaphenes, 2013), 181-191. [2] In her book The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), Chavez writes, “It’s our responsibility as workshop leaders to verbalize our anti-racist agenda for them [students], in clear, unapologetic language, language that opens doors instead of closes them” (24). [3] Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 131. [4] I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewer who encouraged me to better clarify the structure of the course and the possible reading of cultural tourism. [5] Kondo, Worldmaking , 169. [6] Faedra Chatard Carpenter, “Reading and (Re)directing Racial Scripts On and Beyond the Stage” in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy , ed. Magda Romanska (London: Routledge, 2015), 145-150; Kat Chow, “How ‘Ching Chong’ Became the Go-To Slur for Mocking East Asians,” Code Switch , New York Public Radio, NPR, New York, NY: WNYC, 14 July 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/07/14/330769890/how-ching-chong-became-the-go-to-slur-for-mocking-east-asians (accessed 18 August 2021); Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings (New York: One World, 2020); Donatella Galella, “Feeling Yellow: Responding to Contemporary Yellowface in Musical Performance,” The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 32, no. 2 (2018): 67-77; Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity ; Lauren Yee, Ching Chong Chinaman (New York: Samuel French Acting Edition, 2011). [7] The emphasis on stereotyping in this set of questions relates to a broader throughline in the course about how identity-based stereotyping impacts dramaturgy as both composition and representation, and builds on prior discussion in the course about gender stereotypes in musical theatre and colonial stereotypes about Indigenous peoples in a previous unit on Indigenous dramaturgies and comedy. [8] Mitchell’s ideas and policies about discursive violence in the classroom are also available as a podcast at http://www.korithamitchell.com/teaching-and-the-n-word/. [9] I thank Donatella Galella for drawing my attention to Lisa Lowe’s formulation of “forever foreigners” to characterize this common racist experience ( Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996]). [10] Ching Chong Chinaman , 8. [11] Worldmaking , 242. [12] Carpenter, “Reading and (Re)directing,” 145-146. [13] Kondo, 169. [14] This tactic revises a popular K-12 teaching strategy wherein at the end of a class, students complete an exit ticket and identify 3 things they learned, select 2 things they want to learn more about, and formulate 1 question. [15] Galella, “Feeling Yellow,” 71, 73. [16] In future iterations of this course, I plan to include additional reading around the casting conversation, including the work of Brian Eugenio Herrera in his essay “‘But Do We Have the Actors for That?’: Some Principles of Practice for Staging Latinx Plays in a University Theatre Context,” Theatre Topics 27, no. 1 (2017): 23-35. [17] Matt Stevens, “Shared Stories in Asian American Voices,” New York Times , 20 February 2022, AR9. [18] Leah Putnam, “Asian American Artist Attacked During Commute to Perform at The Public,” Playbill , 25 February 2022, https://www.playbill.com/article/asian-american-artist-attacked-during-commute-to-perform-at-the-public. Readers can find ways to take action against anti-Asian violence at www.StopAAPIHate.org. Footnotes About The Author(s) Ariel Nereson is Assistant Professor of Dance Studies and Director of Graduate Dance at the University at Buffalo – SUNY. She is the author of Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past (University of Michigan Press, 2022). A recent Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, she researches racialization, embodiment, and movement-based performance. She is also a choreographer and dramaturg. I thank Donatella Galella and the anonymous peer reviewers for their generous challenges and affirmations provided in their feedback. I thank my students for being in conversation with me and for understanding our classroom as a space of worldmaking. 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.

Mia Levenson and Heather S. Nathans Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York Mia Levenson and Heather S. Nathans By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF It began, as it so often does, with a passing remark. Journalist Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underground , which offers a colorful and anecdote-driven account of nineteenth-century urban life, makes a fleeting reference to the gruesome 1891 Jack the Ripper style killing of a woman known to her compatriots as “Shakespeare.” According to popular legend, she had been famous in the city’s seamiest neighborhoods for her drunken recitations of the major female roles from Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice . [1] Who was this woman who performed Shakespeare’s most notable female roles of Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and Portia on the margins of American society—presumably for an audience as intoxicated and destitute as herself? Her moniker of “Shakespeare”—as well as her supposed murderer, the notorious Jack the Ripper—have helped to hold her place in the headlines and in history, [2] when tens of thousands of other impoverished women in New York have vanished from the record books—if, indeed, their names were ever known to any beyond their immediate circles. Her story invites historians to consider how apparently isolated incidents become history, and the ways in which archives can perform for researchers. In drunkenly declaiming passages from the Bard, Mrs. Shakespeare, also known as Carrie Brown, did no more than Edmund Kean, Junius Brutus Booth, and other male performers before her. Her association with Shakespeare’s work somehow tinged her demise with an additional touch of pathos. Here was a woman who supposedly mastered the poetry of the Bard, yet who, according to contemporary accounts, had fallen into a life of petty crime and debauchery. The manner of her murder, which echoed the sensational killings in London’s Whitechapel district only three years before, also became inextricably intertwined with her putative link to the sex workers and other women targeted by Jack the Ripper. Many US newspapers mentioned the “low” women or “drunkards” questioned in connection with her death, and the police investigation of her murder revealed anew the scabrous underbelly of New York’s most poverty-stricken areas. According to one newspaper, “the habitués of Water Street (the neighborhood of the murder) turned out in force [at the inquest].” [3] Amongst the many rumors circulating around the identity of her killer, ultimately a penniless Algerian immigrant, Ameer Ben Ali, stood accused of her murder. Would-be observers thronged the trial (supposedly hundreds of men and only five women) whom the court turned away from the “strangest criminal trial America has yet produced.” [4] But the performances around Mrs. extended beyond her penchant for the Bard. Her killing inspired its own series of performances. Only days after the murder, wax stagings depicting the grisly scene appeared in multiple city dime museums. Authors churned out pulp fiction, comic book style stories of that fateful night. The trial for her murder, meticulously recorded in newspapers around the country, revived “Shakespeare” for another role. Since police never caught the original London Ripper, the public craved a reason for his senseless crimes. Thus, crowds greeted the American trial with eager expectation, imagining it as an opportunity to mete out justice, bring calm to the chaos created by Mrs. Shakespeare’s murder, and to resolve the troubling questions about urban poverty exposed by her killing. But the trial soon degenerated into a racist spectacle when police charged Ben Ali with her murder and newspapers across the country vilified him as a Moor and an “Arab,” heaping religious and ethnic slurs on his head. Descriptions of Ben Ali’s ethnic and racial otherness echoed the speculation in London that their Ripper was a foreign Jew. [5] The spectacle of “Shakespeare’s” murder continues today, through internet forums run and inhabited by “Ripperologists,” amateur true crime investigators who scrutinize the details of her murder for evidence that Jack the Ripper killed her, or one of the many suspects responsible for grotesque crimes during the Ripper’s heyday. Across space and time, “Shakespeare” finds a theatrical afterlife as her body was produced, performed, and transformed for its audience. [6] This essay explores the spectacular print, stage, and public performances around Mrs. Shakespeare’s murder. Her case offers opportunities to unravel a complex tangle of questions: How did the identities of working woman, actress, and alcoholic play out alongside familiar nineteenth-century notions about gender roles and middle-class respectability? How did race, racial science, and racism intersect with the ways in which the trial unspooled for public consumption, so that it became a kind of parodied Othello with a Moorish assailant attacking this unlikely Desdemona? How does her connection with the mythological Jack the Ripper continue to produce new and eager spectators in the digital age? Theatrically speaking, the rhetoric around Mrs. Shakespeare’s murder sits at the tipping point in a genre shift from melodrama towards realism. Newspapers told her story using the familiar sentimental tropes of melodrama, particularly with its emphasis on transgression, redemption, and retribution. Melodrama framed addiction and poverty as evidence of moral weakness, while offering temperance, prosperity, and respectability as rewards for aspiring to white middle class values. [7] The tableaux—as part of the milieu of nineteenth-century family friendly entertainment—continued this narrative. In the hands of museum managers, the scene of her grotesque murder became representative of the seedy underbelly of New York City, a place for onlookers to gaze in wonder and repulsion. As the murder trial reshaped the theatrical performance, Shakespeare’s body shifted from a focus of pity to a site of empirical analysis. The influence of nineteenth-century forensic scientists Alphonse Bertillon and Cesare Lombroso legitimated criminology as a science, one that focused on the born criminal and bolstered racist theories about criminal appearance and behavior. That changing discourse extricated her murder from a romanticized narrative and resituated it in late nineteenth-century (racial) science. If mid-century melodramas had offered faith and compliance as “cures” for social ills, the emerging scientific language of realism and naturalism turned audiences’ attention towards new problems and new potential “solutions,” albeit based in racist and nativist assumptions of criminality that would imprison Ameer Ben Ali for eleven years before he was pardoned, released, and allowed to return to Algiers. [8] More than a century after her murder, modern day investigators figuratively exhumed “Shakespeare’s” body—sutured to the cultural mythology of Jack the Ripper—into the “annals of true crime” and “the imagination of modern horror.” [9] On internet forums such as “Jack the Ripper Forums”(jtrforums.com) [10] and “Case Book: Jack the Ripper” (casebook.org), self-identified Ripperologists share primary evidence material, revel in her autopsy, and speculate as to the murderer’s true identity, extending and expanding the spectacle of Carrie Brown’s brutal homicide. In her exploration of the true crime media genre, Jean Murley describes the emergence of modern true crime in the mid-twentieth century as “a new way of narrating and understanding murder—one more sensitive to context, more psychologically sophisticated, more willing to make conjectures about the unknown thoughts and motivations of killers.” [11] Internet communities formed around Jack the Ripper have democratized the discourse around “Shakespeare.” Any forum member can create threads, post evidence, share their research (both the highs and lows) and theorize about her murder while interacting with and sustaining the Ripperologist community. Her association with the cultural icon has enabled the spectacle of her murder to move into the twenty-first century—as of 20 December 2021, the most recent post on jtrforums.com about Carrie Brown had been made just a day earlier. In writing this essay, we acknowledge that we are contributing to the continued speculation and spectacle around “Shakespeare” and her gruesome demise. Yet, the speculation and spectacle become proof of how her theatrical afterlife moves through different mediums and genres (now into theatre history and performance studies). By examining the ways in which her performances have reverberated in popular culture, we explore how historical moments are shaped and reformed through theatrical interpretations. We use the name “Shakespeare” to invoke a character, a cultivated stage presence for the lower millions of the city, whether created by herself or bestowed upon her by others. We use the name “Carrie Brown,” the name identified in the press, to indicate the person, whose murder and subsequent undoubtedly impact her living descendants to this day. “Death lies on her like an untimely frost” Asbury’s fleeting mention of “Shakespeare’s” murder in Gangs of New York describes a horrific slaying that took place sometime on the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s own death. Reconstructing the circumstances around “Shakespeare’s” murder proves no easy task. Its sensationalism means that details vary among different accounts. What is known is that on 25 April 1891, police announced the murder of a woman the night before at the East River Hotel in the city’s Fourth Ward. [12] Newspapers from New York to Omaha reported that the victim had been strangled, stabbed, and then disemboweled. [13] Identical crosses were carved into the flesh of her back and on the wall. [14] She was naked except for an apron and another unnamed article of clothing that were both wrapped around her head so tightly the coroner had to cut them off. [15] Some of the garments found in the room were recognized as those worn by prisoners at Blackwell’s Island, suggesting that she had recently been released from one of her many terms of imprisonment for drunkenness, vagrancy, and other petty crimes. [16] Who launched the rumor that linked her murder with Jack the Ripper remains unknown, but early reports from the New York Herald and Evening World connected the crime to the London killer based on the body’s mutilated state and the marks on the wall. [17] Fig 1. John Jacob Riis, c. 1895. “A Fourth Ward Colony,” image owned by the Museum of the City of New York ( https://collections.mcny.org/ ). The murder immediately caused a sensation. The coroner’s delay in coming to the hotel allowed “curious crowds” to gather outside in hopes of getting a glimpse of the horrid scene. When the coroner finally arrived, enough people had assembled that the police had to physically push them back as the coroner brought down Carrie Brown’s body in a pine coffin and made his way to the morgue for examination. [18] There, the autopsy became its own spectacle. Conducted by Deputy Coroner Dr. William T. Jenkins, its audience included a group of seven doctors from Bellevue Hospital as well as a reporter from The Evening World . [19] The examiners posited strangulation as the cause of death, with the mutilation following. The details are horrifying. The body showed multiple cuts in addition to the cross-like etching on her back and parts of the intestines were missing. In a shockingly clinical tone, the newspaper noted that “the left ovary . . . was completely torn away.” The Evening World also felt compelled to remark that “there was no evidences [ sic ] of wounds or injuries on the breast.” [20] As Karen Halttunen notes, this kind of “sexual autopsy” circulated in the public sphere had become more and more pervasive since the mid-1830s (particularly after the notorious 1836 murder of New York prostitute Helen Jewett and escalating after the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888). [21] The public’s appetite for intimate and gory details grew as well. Halttunen chronicles the perceived escalation in “sexual narratives of murder . . . popular tales . . . extensively explored issues of sexual nature, development, and impulse, and attributed significant causal power to sexuality .” [22] Yet, these highly sexualized, clinical, and often grotesque accounts of female murder victims (which often included descriptions of sexual assault, sexual promiscuity, or failed abortions) were frequently juxtaposed with familiar tropes of fallen women whose romantic disappointments, innocence, or temporary lapses in judgement had led them into sin and thus to a violent end. For example, George Ellington’s 1869 study The Women of New York: Or, The Underworld of the Great City offers a chapter entitled “Women of Pleasure” that describes how a “nice girl” might have found herself stranded as a sex worker in an urban slum: Heartsick and utterly miserable, she left her home and entered on a life of sin in the metropolis. At first she was happy. She made plenty of money and gratified a long-cherished ambition to dress well. The gay society she was in pleased her. . . . But soon the taste for all these things began to fail. . . . And not knowing what this want was, she plunged wildly into dissipation. . . . And then she went down rapidly. All self-respect was lost. She was found drunk on the street, and taken to the station-house, and sent to the island. [23] Two decades later, these same tales about women’s descent into the dark side of city life persisted. The New York Herald made a similar claim about Mrs. Shakespeare herself, saying that after her husband died she, came to New York to dissipate [her money]. . . . She attracted a great deal of attention at once from the dissolute people she chose to associate with because of her superior intelligence. She was fairly good-looking, exceedingly vivacious, and spent her money with a free hand as long as it lasted. . . . When the woman’s money was spent, she went headlong into the gutter, and for many years she had revolved around the boozing dives, the Island [prison] and public institutions [workhouses]. [24] The paper’s account sets up the now-familiar tale of the innocent woman, led astray by her foolish choice to leave the safe shelter of a peaceful domestic setting for the unbridled license of the city and its anonymous encounters with strangers. Fig 2. An article on the slums of New York published weeks before Carrie Brown’s murder: “New York’s Inferno Explored by the Booths. Commissioner Ballington Booth and Mrs. Booth, of the Salvation,” New York Herald (New York, New York), no. 74, 15 March 1891. Relatively little seemed known of Mrs. Shakespeare at the time of her death. Rumors swirled through newspapers that she claimed at various points to have been an actress in Britain and the wife (or mistress) of a Broadway businessman. According to one witness, “Shakespeare” boasted that she received an allowance of thirty dollars a month from a wealthy Broadway man who had threatened to “have her mouth stopped” because she had become a liability. Another witness claimed that “Shakespeare” had been living with an Italian at the lodging house of “One-eyed Tony” and had had an argument with this man shortly before her death. [25] Soon after her murder, other narratives began to come out, claiming that she was Carrie Brown (possibly born in Liverpool as Caroline Montgomery) and that she had been a sea captain’s wife in Salem, Massachusetts. [26] Stories emerged about her marriage to Captain Charles Brown (who had abandoned her or whom she had deserted, depending on the storyteller). Some tales alleged that Brown had died and left her a wealthy woman, but that she had squandered her fortune. Others said she had been in service but dismissed for “riotous living.” By the time of her murder, she had supposedly been arrested at least twenty-eight times for drunkenness. [27] The coroner’s report supposedly confirmed her intemperate habit: the state of her kidneys and liver showed that she likely suffered from alcoholism. According to an officer who had detained her numerous times, she once told him, “I could have been one of the finest ladies in the world instead of what I am, and I suppose I’ll be a tramp until I die.” [28] Modern day amateur genealogical investigations of Brown’s life suggest that she was indeed born in Liverpool around 1834 as Ellen Caroline Montgomery. Census data puts her in the US by 1860, suggesting that if she had been an actress in England, she had immigrated to America comparatively early in her career, since she appears established in New England by age twenty-six. [29] To date, we have been unable to locate evidence of her work onstage in the US or England under variations of her maiden or married name. One contemporary account referred to her as a “failed” actress, so she may have either spread the story of her time in the theatre herself or made an abortive attempt at a career (and possibly under a different name). There is some circumstantial evidence that she knew a brief period of domestic stability in Salem, MA, married to one Captain Charles Brown. She had at least two children: Mary Ella Brown (born when Carrie was roughly twenty years old) and Charles E. Brown (born when Carrie was about twenty-three). The only widely-known photograph (supposedly) taken of her in life shows a modest-looking woman, apparently dressed in mourning—or at least in a very dark dress—with her hair covered by a white cap and wearing a white apron. She is posed against an ivy-covered balustrade with a rustic scene painted in the background. A sketch of her in profile appeared in W. B. Lawson’s sensational dime novel Jack the Ripper in New York in 1891. The face in the profile bears some resemblance to the photograph and is noteworthy for its demure appearance. [30] Despite these respectable, well-groomed images, it appears that by the time of her murder (at around age fifty-seven) she lived as a sex worker in New York City, far away from either her home in England or her family in Massachusetts. [31] Fig 3. Image reported to be of Carrie Brown (also known as Ellen Caroline Montgomery) that is widely circulated on Ripperology websites. It can also be found on FindaGrave.com , which sources some biographical information from casebook.org and jtrforums.com . Members continue to leave virtual “flowers” for her at https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/89386829/carrie-brown . “When beggars die, there are no comets seen” The grisly circumstances of her death led many at the time (and since) to speculate that the notorious Jack the Ripper, whose 1888 crime spree in London’s Whitechapel district had left a series of unsolved murders and terror behind, had come to New York. [32] Officials in charge of the case fueled these rumors. Before Brown’s murder, New York City police Inspector Thomas Byrnes had taunted his London counterparts with their inability to solve the Ripper case. Based on the circumstances surrounding her death, some New Yorkers imagined that the Ripper had taken Byrnes’s “dare” and crossed the Atlantic to continue his crime spree in America. Investigators heightened public curiosity by refusing to deny the possibility that she might have been murdered by the Ripper. When asked if he believed that “Jack the Ripper” had killed “Shakespeare,” the lead coroner on the case responded, “I believe this case is the same as those of London. . . . I do not see any reason to suppose that the crime may not have been committed by the fiend of London.” [33] After Ben Ali’s conviction, Byrnes reveled in his success, even claiming that he had “documentary evidence” that Ben Ali lived in London during the time of the Ripper murders: “I do not say that he is the London Ripper, but this has a tendency to indicate that he may be.” [34] Indeed, within one week of her untimely death the association between “Shakespeare” and Jack the Ripper would be cemented in the public imagination. On 29 April 1891, Doris’s Eighth Avenue Museum publicized an exhibit featuring, “a wax group representing the murder of Carrie Brown by Jack, the Ripper.” [35] An advertisement announced that the tableaux would present “The Tragedy Just as It Occurred” with the “Lifelike figure of Carrie Brown, known as Shakespeare, also Frenchy the supposed murderer, in the act,” and “the very room furniture.” [36] As the New York Herald reported, “The enterprise shown by Manager Doris is, perhaps praiseworthy, but the subject appeals rather to the morbid or perverted taste, and it is doubtful if the expense incurred in the affair will be offset by corresponding box office returns.” [37] Despite the Herald’s skepticism, the exhibit ran for months, drawing horrified spectators to this terrifying effigy of Mrs. Shakespeare’s final performance. Mark Sandberg has described these kinds of wax effigies as modeling cautionary tales for women through their “pedagogical bodies,” and indeed, tableaux of wax figures depicting the dire fates that awaited those who strayed from paths of rectitude were popular among both middle-class and working-class theatre managers. [38] Doris’s Museum featured a veritable buffet of these pedagogical bodies alongside Mrs. Shakespeare’s. A 13 September 1891 advertisement promises spectators tableaux of the “History of Crime,” including scenes of robbery and murder and “The Drunkard’s home,” described as a “scene of dirt and squalor.” In “The Drunkard’s Home,” the advertisement notes that, “Father, mother, and children are drunk,” and the paper guarantees that, “One look at this scene is worth more to the youth of this city than a score of temperance lectures.” [39] Spectators might stroll from their viewing of the “History of Crime” and “The Drunkard’s Home” past one labeled “Jack the Ripper and his victim, Old Shakespeare.” [40] Fig 4. The Evening World (New York), 29 April 1891, BASEBALL EXTRA, 3. We want to acknowledge that we first found this image digging through jtrforums.com . Doris’s Museum also helped spectators to draw contrasts between the “normal” and what lay beyond. In addition to his standard fare of enfreaked bodies (such as Maury the human pin cushion and Congo, the leopard man), Doris’s Museum featured fat shows and beauty contests – thus opening a forum for audiences to gauge appropriate vs. freakish female appearances. His space also became home to actress Fanny Herring, known as the Sarah Bernhardt of the Bowery. Herring had begun by performing with the likes of Edwin Booth and had been known for her breeches roles but ended her career as one of Doris’s resident actors. [41] In fact, this Bernhardt of the Bowery shared a stage with the Shakespeare of the Bowery—Herring appeared in shows at Doris’s Museum while the Mrs. Shakespeare murder effigies were still on display. [42] Andrea Dennett’s study of American dime museums characterizes John B. Doris’s downtown locale as a particularly lively specimen of the genre. By the end of the nineteenth-century, the Fourth Ward where Shakespeare/Brown enjoyed her final “performance” had become one of the most noisome and crime-ridden parts of the city. Observers described it as “the only rival of the Sixth (5 Points) in its triple distinction of filth, poverty, and vice.” And another observer noted, “Generally speaking, Water Street was a thoroughfare of vice and iniquity to challenge the imagination of the most graphic Victorian preacher.” [43] It proved the site of multiple murders, including those chronicled in Gangs of New York , and the showdowns between thugs with vivid nicknames such as Patsy the Butcher and Slobbery Jim. [44] As Dennett notes, the dense concentration of saloons and brothels in New York’s lower wards made such areas ripe for the kinds of spectacles Doris had on offer. [45] Yet by the late nineteenth century these crime and disease-ridden streets had also become a perverse kind of attraction for elite white spectators. The craze for “slumming” began in England, but had recently caught on in New York, and one city paper described it as a “fashionable form of dissipation,” through which wealthy citizens could experience the novelty of poverty, drug abuse, and alcoholism for an evening, before returning to the safety of their everyday lives. Fig 5. Cover of W. B. Lawson’s “Jack the Ripper in New York; Or, Piping a Terrible Mystery.” Image available through “Casebook,” a site dedicated to collecting “Ripperology.” View the dime novel in its entirety at “Jack the Ripper in New York; Or, Piping a Terrible Mystery,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, https://www.casebook.org/ripper_media/rps.dime1.html (accessed 22 October 2021). This same spectacle of poverty appears in Lawson’s 1891 novel about Carrie Brown’s murder. Jack the Ripper in New York uses the narrator as a vehicle to bring the reader into the seedy slums of the Fourth Ward. In lurid detail, the story follows a detective who is looking for “Shakespeare” when she is killed and then proceeds to investigate her murder. While the white upper class could visit the Fourth Ward as tourists, Lawson brought the slums into the home, illustrating the streets Carrie Brown frequented as places where “crime and sin flaunt their ugly heads,” and “debauchery runs riot,” describing it as a “hell-hole that will ever remain a black spot on a fair city.” Brown herself is described as merely “one of the great class of unfortunates to be met with in this Whitechapel of Gotham.” [46] Although the novel concocts and hypothesizes a number of suspects drawn from press reports and the author’s imagination, the story leads the audience to familiar conclusions: invoking the Ripper murders through the comparison to Whitechapel and implying that the perpetrator is a dubious, dark-skinned foreigner. [47] “Blood Will Tell” Ameer Ben Ali was not considered a murder suspect at the time of his arrest on Friday 24 April 1891, the night following the killing. According to the police, Ben Ali was the cousin of the man last seen with Carrie Brown as she entered the East River Hotel on that fateful night, and it was that man whom the police considered the primary suspect for her murder. [48] According to witnesses, the unknown man (who signed his name “C. Knick”) had a “small light brown mustache and light brown hair. [49] By contrast, Ben Ali—also known under the aliases George Frank, George François, and George Francis, but familiarly called “Frenchy”—was “a dark complexioned man with a black mustache and black hair.” [50] Unable to locate “C. Knick” a week into the murder investigation, the police changed their story. On 1 May, the Herald reported that police believed that Ben Ali, who had remained in police custody, was actually the man they had been looking for all along. While Carrie Brown had entered the hotel with a blond, fair-skinned man, Ben Ali also had a room at the hotel that night, across the hall from Brown’s. Although not noted in the original report, detectives claimed they had found blood in Ben Ali’s room and on his person, which they sampled and sent to microscopists for analysis. [51] Ben Ali found himself in a dangerous position. He had difficulty speaking English and his cousin, an early suspect, had been arrested but released since he had a “fair reputation” and had an alibi, unlike Ali who possessed “a savage disposition.” [52] The phrases used to describe Ali offer an eerie echo of those used in London in the 1880s to characterize Jack the Ripper. London police initially grabbed a number of Jewish men for the Ripper murders. They—like Ali—had “dark complexions, black hair . . . and heavy foreign accents.” [53] As Sara Blair points out, in Ripper narratives, Jack the Ripper became “representative of a deviant civic agency whose virulent corruption threatens the purity of native ‘Anglo-Saxon’ institutions and character.” [54] Noted cultural historian Sander L. Gilman theorizes that the image of the Ripper as a Jewish “ritual butcher,” or a shochet , arose from Anglo-Saxon conspiracies about Jews as sexually mutilated and diseased. [55] Not only did the United States import the Ripper sensation; it imported the xenophobic rhetoric along with it. Upon the New York Police Department’s proclamation that they had the Ripper in custody, the Herald remarked, “It is soothing to national pride to believe that we can catch our ‘Rippers’ on this side of the ocean.” [56] The Patriot in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania even dubbed Ben Ali, “The New York Ripper.” [57] Ameer Ben Ali’s conviction of second-degree murder on Independence Day of that year allayed the anxieties of white Americans, and further cemented the dogma of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Criminal profiles of Jack the Ripper festered with more than just malignant fears of violent immigrants. The rising field of criminology infused descriptions of the Ripper with scientifically supported racist understandings of the natural born criminal. The history of scientific criminology begins with Belgian statistician Lambert Quetelet, who in 1835 developed a statistical method to calculate the qualities of the “average man” (including body mass index, etc.) This “average man” was based on white-European notions of intellectual and physical capabilities. In the 1880s, French police officer Alphonse Bertillon applied Quetelet’s ideas to criminal investigations. Using eleven key physical measurements, he created an identification and categorization system for known criminals in Paris . Historians also credit him with creating the modern-day concept of a mugshot, using a face front-on and a profile view to give clear images of the skull. [58] In England, the search for the “criminal type”—that is, the biologically-determined criminal—was spearheaded by scientists such as Francis Galton (the cousin of Charles Darwin and the leader of the turn of the century eugenics movement) and Havelock Ellis, whose 1890 book, The Criminal , brought the theories of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso to English readers. Lombroso’s foundational text, Criminal Man (1877), used ancient theories of physiognomy combined with contemporary phrenology to explain behavior and personality types through skull measurements and facial features. “In general,” Lombroso argues, “born criminals have projecting ears, thick hair, a thin beard, projecting frontal eminences, enormous jaws, a square and projecting chin, large cheek-bones, and frequent gesticulation. It is, in short, a type resembling the Mongolian, or sometimes the Negroid.” [59] The Herald ’s description of Ben Ali certainly echoes this racist phenotype: “Nothing certainly in his physiognomy, his history, so far as it is known, or his characteristics makes it at all improbable that he would commit even such a horrible crime as this.” [60] The trial theatricalized the racist science undergirding early criminology, with newspapers paying close attention to Ben Ali’s appearance and behavior. Various papers described him as having a “small head” with a “sharp projection” in the back, a “long and thin” nose, and a “weak” chin. A lawyer for the prosecution insisted, “Ben Ali is an ignorant Arab, an Arab of the lowest type, ‘as low in the scale of intelligence as a fellah of the Egyptian rice fields, or a sikh or se poy soldier [ sic ]’.” In a dramatic finale, Ben Ali closed the trial with a passionate defense of his innocence, “The long, stoop shouldered, brown man raised himself as high as he could in his chair. A torrent of words broke from him. He threw his head far back and looked upward while he threw his long arms swiftly aloft and then crossed them on his gaunt breast.” [61] Accompanying these descriptions of his theatrical gestures are several sketches of these de facto tableaux vivants. Fig 6. “‘I Implore God!’ Cries Ben Ali,” New York Herald, 3 July 1891, 3. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of the medical gaze, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr coined the term “diagnostic gaze,” to describe how in the late-nineteenth century, scientific developments and theatrical innovation were encouraging audiences to focus on biological and psychological reasons for behavior, both onstage and off. [62] This anatomization of both spectator and performance coincided with the rising of the naturalist theatrical genre. In his manifesto on naturalism, playwright Émile Zola stated that, “Naturalism, in letters, is equally a return to nature and to man; it is direct observation, exact anatomy, the acceptance and depiction of what is .” [63] Thus, in the trial reports, the cloaking of racist discourse in scientific language (and influenced by scientific rhetoric) presented to an audience a definitive claim of “what is”: that Ameer Ben Ali was biologically predetermined to be Jack the Ripper. The seeming obsession with Ben Ali’s appearance points to this diagnostic gaze at work. It also appears in a spectacularly theatrical moment of the trial. On the second day of the trial, 1 July 1891, “two blue print photographs” of Carrie Brown’s mutilated corpse were shown to the courtroom. The autopsy photographs displayed the body of a relatively slender woman with her organs (intestines) protruding from a gash several inches long just below her abdomen, down her thigh, and around to her buttocks. [64] Rather than noting what the images depicted, court writers paid particular attention to Ben Ali’s gaze as he looked at them. The Herald observed, When the pictures came into Lawyer House’s hands Frenchy gazed at them with much interest. His forehead was lined with many wrinkles and his eyes showed intense speculation as he gazed—but that was all. Not one sign was there upon him of fear or remorse. If the man be a criminal he has a most marvelous faculty of self-control. [65] Patricia Cline Cohen notes that early colonists tried suspected murders by having them touch the corpse and if it “bled fresh blood,” that proved the suspect guilty. [66] In her extensive study of the 1836 murder of Helen Jewett, she remarks how the gaze had flipped; juries no longer focused on the murdered corpse but rather, scrutinized the suspect’s reaction as reflective of guilt. Towards the end of the century, the influence of criminal anthropology dictated that a suspect’s appearance reflected not only his propensity to commit crime, but his biological predisposition to criminal behavior. Without the man who was last seen with Carrie Brown, a witness to the murder, or a strong motive for Ameer Ben Ali, the prosecution rested its case on circumstantial forensic evidence. Prominent physicians Dr. Austin Flint, Dr. Cyrus Edson, and Dr. Henry Formad testified that amongst twenty specimens sampled from the crime scene and from Ben Ali’s person, all of them contained mammalian blood. Several specimens (including that from under Ameer Ben Ali’s nails, the sleeve of his shirt, and the sheet from Room 31) showed bile mixed in the blood that contained matter that examiners speculated to be the contents of Carrie Brown’s small intestine. [67] According to witnesses, she had eaten nothing for days before her murder until that night when a friend gave her corned beef sandwiches, cabbage, and some cheese. [68] Her last meal, according to the microscopists’ findings (summarized by Dr. Flint in the New York Medical Journal ), explained the presence of “partially digested muscular tissue” and “the hard residue of spiral and other vegetable cells” in the blood-bile admixture. [69] During the trial, the physicians’ testimony became a live-action scientific serial. Both Dr. Formad and Dr. Flint were given writing utensils and blackboards to use on the stand, with Dr. Flint drawing out diagrams of intestinal fluid cells to show the jury how to recognize them under a microscope. While the invention of the microscope dates back to the Renaissance, the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed major developments in technology as well as increasing medical specialization and the subsequent rise of microbiology, which made microscopy a prestigious science. As the diagnostic gaze in the theatre invited audiences to gaze inward, the microscope allowed spectators to go even further. However, the novel technology made the science out of reach for the average audience member. [70] During the trial, however, the inner life of “Shakespeare’s” cells and viscera were presented for lay spectatorship to prove that Ben Ali’s criminality was surely more than skin deep. Ultimately, Dr. Formad’s insistence that he would “stake his life” on the fact that the blood on Ali’s garments and on Carrie Brown’s bed were the same proved “the strongest thing said against Frenchy’s innocence.” [71] According to Dr. Flint, the case marked the first time a guilty verdict resulted from circumstantial blood evidence. [72] However, The Medical and Surgical Reporter later disputed the validity of this claim, arguing that “it would seem a little hazardous to convict a man on the microscopically established identity of minute collections of blood and intestinal matter” and that “at present there seems to be a feeling that the accused was made a scape-goat for the reputation of the Police Department.” [73] As a lawyer present at the sentencing pointed out, “the Police Department was on trial just as much as the prisoner was—that they stood or fell in popular estimation by reason of the verdict this jury should find.” [74] The eagerness of the New York police to prove themselves over their London counterparts amidst an increasing reliability on racist criminology enabled them to pin the gruesome crime on an innocent man. [75] In a surprising twist, Ameer Ben Ali received a pardon for Carrie Brown’s murder in 1902. Affidavits submitted by reporters Jacob Riis and Robert Butler claimed that when they had initially viewed the crime scene, they did not note any blood stains in Ben Ali’s room that the police officers swore were there. Furthermore, the key to Carrie Brown’s room—which had yet to be located by the time of the trial—was reportedly found in Jersey City in 1901, left behind by a Swedish boarder whose whereabouts were unknown. [76] The sensationalism of the story, bolstered by invocations of Jack the Ripper, nationalist pride, and racist/nativist notions of criminality, pushed the conviction of a man that would be overturned eleven years later. “She should have died hereafter” As Ben Ali’s trial and eventual pardon suggest, the fetishized afterlife of Brown/“Shakespeare” exposed the systemic racism that pervaded the growing field of medical criminology. To some observers, Ben Ali’s humiliation, terror, and abuse at the hands of the New York police must have seemed justified by the new “science” that supposedly gave credence to long-held prejudices. In Ben Ali’s story, Brown/Shakespeare’s body becomes the accusing prop—like Desdemona in Othello . After Ameer Ben Ali’s release, “Old Shakespeare” all but disappeared from popular culture. [77] In the contemporary era, she has found new resonance as the archive continues to perform her afterlife. Susan Stabile argues that museums such as Kimball’s, Barnum’s, and others juxtaposed sensationalism with “disciplinary systems of decorum, law, and order,” which “both perform and undermine heteronormative fictions of white womanhood.” [78] By the standards of her day, Shakespeare’s/Brown’s transgressions against the respectable middle-class female behaviors of her era appeared legion: She left her home and children to strike out on her own; she consumed alcohol; she refused to be rehabilitated into a temperance/Christian culture; she claimed to have been an actress; and she used her sexuality for profit as a sex worker. The relentless post-mortem re-norming of every transgressive aspect of Mrs. Shakespeare’s/Carrie Brown’s career appears in each of the spectacles constructed around her murder. It appears in the fixed tableaux at Doris’s Museum that erased her identity and subsumed it under the pseudonym of “Shakespeare” and tucked the tale of her life behind Jack the Ripper’s legend. The re-norming surfaces in each newspaper report that re-dissected her body for the public gaze, just as it was anatomized on the autopsy table. It creeps through the moralizing tone of the trial testimony and pulp fiction accounts that hold her up as a cautionary tale of how far a once-respectable woman might fall. For subsequent generations of archivists, her body performs as a puzzle to Ripperologists debating the Ripper’s identity. Ironically, both Brown and Ben Ali become supporting characters in these dramas, rather than central figures—and like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they “go to’t” [79] —their deaths moved offstage and attributed largely to their own faults and follies. On websites such as casebook.org (self-described as “the world’s largest public repository of Ripper-related information” [80] ) and jtrforums.com (“Ripperology For The 21st Century” [81] ), Ripperologists act as detectives, sharing and scrutinizing all bits of evidence regarding Carrie Brown’s murder. While their stated purpose is a gathering of primary evidence to deduce if Ameer Ben Ali or some other suspect could be Jack the Ripper, these forums serve another function. True crime can be found on a number of mediums, but on the internet, “true crime offers opportunities for audience-producer interactivity that changes the relationship between the consumer and the content.” [82] In Cornel Sandvoss’s illumination of performance in fandom, he observes that while fans are “consumers of (mediated) performances,” they are also performers “as others acknowledge their consumption.” [83] In the mediated universe of Ripperologists forums, their communal identification as Ripperologists performs and consumes their extensively curated collections of Ripper-related artifacts and information. It is through this medium that Carrie Brown/ “Shakespeare” again becomes a spectacle. In a way, these forums present a new kind of dime museum where the users are both the managers of the museum and the spectators. In the anatomical dime museums of the nineteenth century, “the boundaries between graphic sex education and pornography were blurred” as the public vied for any glimpse of the hidden body. [84] Similarly, as Jean Murley explains, “True crime is obsessed with full-on visual body horror.” [85] One notable interaction appears on the thread, “Photographs of Carrie Brown,” started on casebook.org in February 2003. Users shared their excitement over finding Brown’s autopsy photographs. Questions about the wounds and their similarity to other Ripper victims abounded, culminating in the final post of the thread, where a user posted a gruesome analysis of the photographs, linking the placement of the body and its wounds to various sexual positions. [86] Other less graphic posts include speculating where the East River Hotel would be located today, sorting fact from fiction in Brown’s case, and supporting the genealogical research being done by one of her descendants. [87] The extensive amount of time that regular users will spend interacting with other Ripperologists has cultivated a niche community. [88] While true crime enthusiasts are rigid about sticking to “just the facts,” there are moments in the threads where a user will comment on how long it had been since they had seen another user or to compliment someone on their writing (always Ripper-related, however). [89] New users are welcomed gracefully into the community, simply by announcing their interest in the Ripper. Sleuthing through primary source material that is posted in these online niches, Ripper enthusiasts recreate, reproduce, and recirculate knowledge about and through Carrie Brown. However, unlike other media such as novels, magazines, blogs, and podcasts that invoke Brown’s presence (through her deceased and mutilated form), these forums are not meant for mass consumption. Forums shape and sustain communities that are peripheral to Carrie Brown herself, yet are deeply invested in her presence. Critical analysis of her autopsy photographs imagines her body as a route to a different and novel answer to who Jack the Ripper might have been. Along the way, the community is maintained around the spectacle and speculation of Brown’s body. [90] References [1] Herbert Asbury, Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underground , 43. There actually seem to have been two women in the Bowery known locally as “Shakespeare,” which can make untangling the tale of the murdered “Shakespeare” even more challenging. Several sources also said that she had a second name, Jeff Davis, whose origins only the New York Times reports: her support for the “lost cause.” However, this would seemingly contradict another rumor that her supposed husband was in the Union navy during the Civil War. “Byrnes Says He Has a Clue,” New York Times , 26 April 1891, 2. [2] The Albany Law Journal waggishly (and callously) suggested that “Old Shakespeare” had not been murdered by Jack the Ripper, but by Bacon’s ghost. Albany Law Journal , 9 May 1891. [3] Troy Weekly Times, 14 May 1891. [4] New York Herald , 30 June 1891. [5] Ali (also known as George Frank), was referred to in some reports as “Frenchy” and in others as an “Arab.” It is not within the scope of this essay to unpack the racism and emerging eugenics in the press’s treatment of Ali, whom some papers labeled a “creature of strange and unnatural desires,” and as “little above a monkey in intellect,” but it certainly merits further exploration. According to the Wheeling Register (West VA) on 3 July 1891, Ali claimed, “By the garment of Allah, I am innocent.” The New York Tribune reported that he spoke Arabic at his trial and questioned why he had taken his oath on the Bible rather than the Koran (see 4 July 1891). Also see the Star and Herald (Panama), 16 May 1891 and the New York Herald , 30 June 1891. There was also speculation about his religion—primarily because of his tattoo of a cross: “‘Frenchy’s’ behavior since his arrest has shown that he is not a Moslem [ sic ], for he doesn’t pray at the rising and going down of the sun. Besides, a Moslem would not have a cross about him.” “Is it the Same ‘Frenchy’,” New York Herald, 4 May 1891, 4. Comparatively new (and untested) forensic methods were used to link Ali to the crime scene, including traces of blood and bodily fluids from the victim. [6] The term, “theatrical afterlife,” is drawn from Mechele Leon’s Molière, the French Revolution, & the Theatrical Afterlife (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), which explores the ways that Molière’s work echoed in the years following his death. Similarly, we use “theatrical afterlife” here to denote how Carrie Brown/Shakespeare’s murder reverberated across popular and theatrical culture. [7] Scholarly discussions about the histories and legacies of US melodrama have continued to shift over the last half-century. Foundational studies in the field include David Grimsted’s 1968, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theatre and Culture, 1800–1850 ; Bruce McConachie’s 1992 Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 ; Jeffrey D. Mason’s 1993 Melodrama and the Myth of America ; and Rosemarie K. Bank’s 1977 Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 . More recent studies include John Frick’s 2003, Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America ; Amy Hughes’s 2012 Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America ; Jeffrey H. Richards and Heather S. Nathans, eds. 2014, The Oxford Handbook of American Drama (which contains several chapters on melodrama, including those by Scott C. Martin, Amelia Howe Kritzer, Mark Mullen, and Mark Hodin); as well as recent works by John L. Brooke, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., Sarah Meer, Laura Mielke, Tavia Nyong’o, and others who have offered works that link the melodrama form to specific political issues in nineteenth-century America. [8] Ariela J. Gross further explains how eugenics, when it emerged in the late nineteenth-century, brought with it the empirical language about how racial science could enshrine white citizenship into law. Near Eastern and North African immigrants would be caught in the midst of this racist legal conundrum, with how to classify their whiteness debated heavily within state and federal court systems. This would begin to be litigated several years after Ben Ali’s trial but was firmly cemented in American consciousness by the time he was released. See Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 230–5. For evidence of Ben Ali’s pardon, release, and departure from the US, see “‘Frenchy’ Pardoned,” Daily People (New York, New York), 17 April 1902, 3; “Departure Of ‘Frenchy.’ to Bring an Action for Damages Against the State,” Daily People (New York, New York) 25 April 1902, 2. [9] Jane Caputi, “The New Founding Fathers: The Lore and Lure of the Serial Killer in Contemporary Culture,” Journal of American Culture 13, no. 3 (1990): 3. [10] Jtrforums.com is currently in a state of transition (the tribulations of digital archives!) and threads referenced in this essay are in the process of being archived. The site’s previous administrator is also uploading much of the research shared on the forum to CarrieBrown.net, although as of 22 October 2021, it is still very much a work in progress. [11] Jean Murley, The Rise of True Crime: 20th-Century Murder and American Popular Culture (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2008), 2. [12] Boston Herald, 25 May 1891. [13] The Patriot (Harrisburg, PA), 27 April 1891. British newspapers also picked up news of the murder, some reporting it only days after the fact. See Reynold’s Newspaper (London), 26 April 1891 and the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle , 2 May 1891. [14] “Ghastly Butchery by a New York Jack the Ripper’” New York Herald , 25 April 1891, 3. [15] New York Herald , 30 June 1891. The New York paper People complained bitterly that Shakespeare’s murder was yet another demonstration of police incompetence since they seemed unable to track down her killer. People , 26 April 1891. “Murder in the Second Degree,” New York Herald , 4 July 1891, 3. [16] “Ghastly Butchery by a New York Jack the Ripper’” New York Herald , 3. [17] New York Herald , 25 April 1891, 3; The Evening World , 25 April 1891, 1. [18] “Ghastly Butchery by a New York Jack the Ripper’” New York Herald , 3. [19] Other newspapers record an account of the autopsy, but The Evening World ’s account is the most complete, as well as the most clinical in its language. [20] The Evening World , 25 April 1891, 1. [21] Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 192. For more on the notorious Jewett case, see Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1999). [22] Halttunen, Murder Most Foul , 181. Italics original. [23] George Ellington, The Women of New York: Or, the Under-World of the Great City (New York: The New York Book Company, 1869), 295. [24] New York Herald , 26 April 1891, 17. [25] Ibid. [26] Some papers initially claimed that the “real” Carrie Brown had not been murdered and that the victim was an unknown woman. This story faded quickly however. [27] Omaha World Herald , 26 April 1891. Note that the paper has several misstatements about the case, including the location of the crime and the names of the initial suspects. They also claim that her husband’s first name was James, not Charles, and that she had two daughters, not a daughter and a son (though it should be noted that one of her daughters might have died). [28] Omaha World Herald , 26 April 1891. Mrs. Shakespeare may have been working as a sex worker during this time and it was also tacitly acknowledged (though not stated explicitly in the various newspaper reports we have reviewed) that there may also have been evidence of sexual activity. The coroner’s report also showed that she was anemic and that was reported in the paper, along with the physical evidence of her alcoholism, see New York Herald , 30 June 1891. [29] Note that this site offers census data as well as grave site location information for Brown: “Carrie ‘Old Shakespeare’ Brown,” Find a Grave, http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=89386829 (accessed 22 October 2021). [30] Of her appearance, the narrator notes “Ordinarily I would pass her without much notice.” W. B. Lawton, Jack the Ripper in New York , 1891, 2. See cover image below. [31] Note that her body was returned to her remaining family in Salem on 15 May 1891, according to the Star and Herald (Panama), 16 May 1891. [32] Indeed, the largest cache of present day information on Brown survives on websites devoted to Jack the Ripper that mention Brown’s killing as an attempt to place the Ripper in the US. [33] “Many Arrests: But No Identification of ‘Jack the Ripper,’” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle , 25 April 1891, 8. Italics added. [34] “Frenchy Found Guilty,” Pittsburgh Dispatch , 4 July 1891, 6. [35] George C. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage , vol. 14: 1888–1891 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 687. [36] Tableaux Advertisement, The Evening World , 29 April 1891, BASEBALL EXTRA, 3. Obviously, the furniture was probably not authentic and was likely to be a reproduction. The titillation of the crime scene also found its way into the theatre. One theatre in Pittsburgh restaged a popular show, advertising that the scenery had been altered to look like the East River Hotel and replicated the murder. See New York Herald , 3 May 1891, 10. [37] Odell, Annals of the New York Stage , vol. 14, 687. The wax tableaux were also available at the Gaiety Museum and the Eden Musée in New York City starting the week of 3 May 1891. See Odell, 739–740 and New York Herald , 3 May 1891, 10. One commentator in the Pennsylvania-based newspaper the Patriot wrote, “The morbid curiosity of the people was never more fully or disgustingly illustrated than in the announcement of a New York museum manager that all the details of the recent ‘Ripper’ tragedy will be re-reproduced [ sic ] in wax for the edification of his patrons. The person who can find any gratification in such a sight most assuredly has a peculiar twist in his mental structure.” Patriot , 27 April 1891, 4. [38] Quoted in Stabile, “Still(ed) Lives,” Journal of Material Culture 14, no. 2, 375. [39] New York Herald , 13 September 1891. For more on this topic, see John Frick, Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) . [40] Note that the tableaux retained that label even after Ameer Ben Ali’s trial and conviction for the murder. [41] Andrea Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 60. [42] It might be interesting to explore Herring’s career juxtaposed against Brown’s “performance” for Bowery audiences. Herring was roughly the same age as Brown (Herring was born in England in 1834), and Herring was described as “hoydenish” and became known for her success in breeches roles. [43] Michael Batterberry and Ariane Batterberry, On the Town in New York: The Landmark History of Eating, Drinking and Entertainments (New York: Routledge, 1998), 104. [44] Ibid., 106. [45] Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America , 61. Interestingly, Dennett adds that sites like Doris’s were often interspersed with dime museums that featured anatomical or medical exhibits, which were, in fact, thinly veiled quack clinics for patrons suffering from syphilis. [46] W. B. Lawson, “Jack the Ripper in New York; Or, Piping a Terrible Mystery,” in Log Cabin Library no. 115 (1891): 2. [47] For more on how crime fiction positioned race in its narratives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Maureen T. Reddy’s Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). [48] “New York’s ‘Ripper’ Known to the Police,” New York Herald , 26 April 1891, 17. [49] “Ghastly Butchery by a New York Jack the Ripper’,” New York Herald, 25 April 1891, 3. Some other reports have his name as “C. Niclo” or “C. Nichols.” [50] The “Ripper” Left a Fairly Plain Trail,” New York Herald, 27 April 1891, 3. [51] Ameer Ben Ali claimed that the blood found on his shirt and stockings was menstrual blood from a sex worker he had visited. The expert physicians who analyzed the blood testified that there were no epithelial cells found in the blood samples from his person, indicating that it was not menstrual blood. See Austin Flint, “Some Medico-Legal Points in the ‘Frenchy’ Murder Trial,” New York Medical Journal 54 (July 1891): 39–41. [52] “Is This New York’s ‘Jack the Ripper?’” New York Herald , 1 May 1891, 3. [53] L. Perry Curtis, Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 30. [54] Sara Blair, “Henry James, Jack the Ripper, and the Cosmopolitan Jew: Staging Authorship in ‘The Tragic Muse,’” ELH 63, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 490. [55] Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body , (New York: Routledge, 2009), 490–2. [56] “Not the Same ‘Ripper,’” New York Herald , 1 May 1891, 6. [57] The Patriot , Harrisburg, PA, 15 May 1891, 1. [58] Nicole Hahn Rafter explores the impact of European innovations in scientific criminology on American criminal anthropologists, including the adoption of Bertillon’s methodologies in the United States. See Nicole Hahn Rafter, “Criminal Anthropology: Its Reception in the United States and the Nature of Its Appeal,” in Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective ,” eds. Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell, 159–82 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). [59] Havelock Ellis, The Criminal (New York: Scribner & Welford, 1890), 84. Interest in phrenology in the mid-nineteenth century drove a demand for lecturing on criminality by displaying skulls from the cadavers of executed criminals, see Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 25. [60] “Is This New York’s ‘Jack the Ripper?’” New York Herald , 1 May 1891, 3. [61] “Implore God!’ Cries Ben Ali,” New York Herald , 3 July 1891, 3. [62] Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, “The Diagnostic Gaze: Nineteenth-Century Contexts for Medicine and Performance,” in Performance and the Medical Body , eds. Alex Mermikides and Gianna Bouchard (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 37-8. [63] Emile Zola, “Naturalism in the Theatre,” in Documents of Modern Literary Realism , ed. George J. Becker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 201. Italics added. [64] Autopsy photos from the New York City Municipal Archives (see below). [65] “Blood Stains May Prove Frenchy Guilty,” New York Herald , 1 July 1891, 3. The supposed images of her autopsy have circulated around internet forums See “Carrie Brown a.k.a. ‘Old Shakespeare,’” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, https://www.casebook.org/victims/carrie.html(accessed 22 October 2021). [66] Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett, 13. Interestingly, William Shakespeare invokes the same method in Richard III when Henry VI’s wounds supposedly reopen and bleed as his coffin is carried past Richard. [67] A definitive test for distinguishing human from animal blood would not be found until 1901. See “A New Forensic Method of Differentiating Human and Animal Blood,” Journal of the American Medical Association 36, no. 16 (20 April 1901): 1118. [68] Reports also note that roundworm eggs were found, which are not uncommon in people living in extreme-poverty and have poor hygiene practices, although this went unremarked. [69] Austin Flint, “Some Medico-Legal Points in the ‘Frenchy’ Murder Trial,” New York Medical Journal 54 (July 1891): 40. [70] For more about naturalistic theatre and microscopy, see Kari Nixon, “Seeing Things: The Dilemma of Visual Subjectivity at the Dawn of the Bacteriological Age in Strindberg’s The Father ,” Configurations 24, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 25-52. [71] “Frenchy Breaks Down and Weeps” New York Herald, 2 July 1891, 3. [72] Flint, “Some Medico-Legal Points,” 40. [73] “The Medico-Legal Aspect of the Jack-The-Ripper Case,” The Medical and Surgical Reporter, 15 August 1891 65: 279. [74] “‘I Implore God!’ Cries Ben Ali,” New York Herald , 3 July 1891, 3. [75] Ameer Ben Ali’s case is discussed in Yale Law Professor Edwin M. Bouchard’s Convicting the Innocent: Errors of Criminal Justice (New Haven: Yale University, 1932). [76] New Evidence for “Frenchy,” Daily People (New York), 24 May 1901, 3. [77] Two books in the 1930s reference her murder. The first is Edwin M. Bouchard’s Convicting the Innocent: Errors of Criminal Justice (1932) and the other is Alexander Woollcott’s short story “It May Be Human Gore: V MURDER FOR PUBLICITY” in his 1934 collection While Rome Burns . The short story recounts Old Shakespeare’s murder and the subsequent trial. Leaning heavily on the sensationalism of the story, Woollcott describes Brown as a “raffish sexagenarian prostitute” and a “dilapidated and jocular hag.” “The Frenchy case, famous in its day forty years ago but since largely forgotten,” Wollcott writes, “should, it seems to me, have a prominent place in American murder annals, if only for the felicitous proper names, ideal for melodrama, which were involved in it.” For more see, Alexander Woollcott, While Rome Burns (New York: The Viking Press, 1934), 220–3. A book has also recently come out that reexamines the case in detail and disagrees with Bouchard’s perspective that Ameer Ben Ali was innocent. Curiously, the author does not consider the racial dynamics at play and the rise of racist criminology in his argument. See George R. Dekle, Sr., The East River Ripper: The Mysterious 1891 Murder of Old Shakespeare (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2021). [78] Stabile, “Still(ed) Lives,” 375. [79] William Shakespeare, Hamlet , V, ii. [80] “Casebook: Jack the Ripper,” https://www.casebook.org/index.html (accessed 21 October 2021). [81] “Jack the Ripper Forums – Ripperology for the 21 st Century Statistics,” http://jtrforums.com (accessed 21 October 2021). See 10n. [82] Murley, The Rise of True Crime , 133. [83] Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 45. [84] Dennett, Weird and Wonderful , 64. [85] Murley, The Rise of True Crime , 5. [86] On Tuesday November 29, 2005 at 6:48pm, an unregistered guest (that is, not an official member of the forum) with the username sickard posted this explicit and graphic message that will not be reproduced here to a casebook.org thread discussing the wounds seen on the autopsy photographs. See “Photographs of Carrie Brown,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, https://www.casebook.org/forum/messages/4921/5374.html (accessed 21 October 2021). [87] Key examples of interesting threads about Carrie Brown include (but are certainly not limited to) a dissection started in 2016 about where exactly the hotel she was murdered in was located (“Carrie Brown Murder in the New York Times,” Jack the Ripper Forums, https://www.jtrforums.com/forum/the-victims/other-possible-victims/carrie-brown/27051-carrie-brown-murder-in-the-new-york-times?t=26525 [accessed 6 June 2021].), a “Shooting the Breeze Thread” from July 2020 to casually discuss aspects of her murder (“Carrie Brown: Shooting the Breeze Thread,” Jack the Ripper Forums, https://www.jtrforums.com/forum/the-victims/other-possible-victims/carrie-brown/34855-carrie-brown-shooting-the-breeze-thread?t=34156 [accessed 6 June 2021].), a thread from 2008 that questions whether or not she was a victim of Jack the Ripper where the original poster notes that they had made a separate post to acknowledge the anniversary of her death, but felt it inappropriate to begin the discussion there (“Was Carrie Brown A Ripper Victim?,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, https://forum.casebook.org/forum/ripper-discussions/victims/non-canonical-victims/carrie-brown/726-was-carrie-brown-a-ripper-victim [accessed 22 October 2021].), and a 2011 thread that begins with parsing through the contradictory details of Brown’s biography before moving to a discussion of the location of her grave in Salem, Massachusetts (and how several commenters had visited and been told to leave). A supposed descendant of hers interrupts the chat to state that he has no issue with anyone visiting the cemetery where she’s buried (“Carrie Brown: UK Background,” Jack the Ripper Forums, https://www.jtrforums.com/forum/the-victims/other-possible-victims/carrie-brown/12639-carrie-brown-uk-background/page2 [accessed 6 June 2021].). Interesting to note, there is some, although not complete, overlap between users of the forums. See 10n. [88] There’s also been a recent migration of jtrforums.com members to a private Facebook group called, “The Carrie Brown File.” See 10n. [89] In this thread from 2003, a forum user, Tom Wescott, writes of how he is happy to see a fellow user and even reveals that he knows about the other user’s work outside of the forum (although, still Ripper-related). (“Photographs of Carrie Brown,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, https://www.casebook.org/forum/messages/4921/5374.html [accessed 22 October 2021].). In a 2014 thread, a user asks if a frequent poster, Wolf Vanderlinden, is still working on his book about Carrie Brown and congratulates him for a “well done” article in a Ripperologist magazine (“Forthcoming book?”, Casebook: Jack the Ripper, https://www.casebook.org/forum/messages/4921/12087.html [accessed 22 October 2021,].). [90] It is interesting to note that the theatre is tangential to the work of Ripperologists, as this recent thread on Ameer Ben Ali’s attending a minstrel show during his time at the Matteawan State Insane Hospital demonstrates (“Ali at a Minstrel Show at Matteawan,” Jack the Ripper Forums, https://www.jtrforums.com/forum/the-victims/other-possible-victims/carrie-brown/576659-ali-at-a-minstrel-show-at-matteawan [accessed 6 June 2021].). See 10n. Footnotes About The Author(s) Mia Levenson is a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts University. Her research lies in the intersection of biomedical science, race, and performance, and her dissertation will explore the proliferation of eugenic science in American popular performances of the early 20th century. You can find her work in Theatre Journal , as well as two forthcoming anthologies. Heather S. Nathans is a professor in the Tufts University Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and is the Alice and Nathan Gantcher Professor in Judaic Studies. Her publications include: Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson (2003); Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787-1861 (2009); and Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (2017). She is also the editor of the Studies in Theatre History and Culture series with the University of Iowa Press. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jenna Gerdsen 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 Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Jenna Gerdsen By Published on May 23, 2022 Download Article as PDF When I left Hawaiʻi for college on the continent, I was in for quite a shock. As a mixed Asian woman born and raised in Hawaiʻi, I was used to being a part of a dominant majority. When I arrived in Washington, I lost the comforts that came with being a part of a majority and was eager to find an Asian community. I hesitantly joined the Asian American Student Association. Though I had never identified as Asian American, I assumed the group could replicate some of the comforts of home. Yet I did not feel at ease. I felt distant from the other students. My Hawaiian Pidgin and love for Hawaiian plate lunches set me apart. When someone suggested I check out the Hawaiʻi Club, I began to realize that Asianness looked and sounded differently outside of Hawaiʻi. I share this personal anecdote to illustrate that stories have triggered discussions around categorical schemas, representation, and historical fissures between Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. In The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University, Mark Chiang asserts Blu’s Hanging, the controversial novel by popular Japanese writer Lois-Ann Yamanaka, challenged fundamental assumptions of Asian American Studies and demanded new theorizations of Asian American cultural politics. [1] At the 1998 Association for Asian American Studies conference, Yamanaka received a fiction award, but a motion to revoke the award was initiated due her stereotypical depictions of Filipinos. The novel demonstrated the dominance of East Asians in Hawaiʻi and the prevalence of an ethnic hierarchy. In Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi, Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura assert that East Asians of Hawaiʻi often use “Local,” the pan-ethnic label unique to Hawaiʻi, to build a Pan-Asian nationhood and obscure Native Hawaiian history. [2] In less dramatic fashion, plays by Asian and Hawaiian playwrights of Hawaiʻi have reignited the urgency to reconceptualize Asian Americanness. Eager to assimilate in the continent, I turned to Esther Kim Lee’s A History of Asian American Theatre . Before reading her work, I assumed that theatre of Hawaiʻi would be a part of her study. I learned that merging theatre of Hawaiʻi with Asian American theatre comes with complications, just like my attempts to blend in at student gatherings. Lee made the strategic decision to limit her foundational study to the continent. She stated, In my view the inclusion of Hawaiʻi would necessitate a shift in the paradigm of Asian American theatre history, and the nature of this shift would hinge on whether Asian American theatre is considered as part of the larger Asian diaspora of theatre. Indeed, as Josephine Lee points out, the inclusion of Hawaiʻi in Asian American theatre history would “illuminate the fault lines” in how we, as theatre historians, have imagined Asian American culture. [3] Just as I was surprised that Esther Kim Lee’s study on Asian American theatre excluded theatre of Hawaiʻi, undergraduate students are often disappointed when Asian American theatre classes do not include Pacific Islander theatre. For instructors of Asian American theatre, the question becomes how to represent equitably both Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders without making them a monolith. Pedagogy should follow the recommendations of scholars such as J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Lisa Kahaleole Hall who argue that the label “Asian American Pacific Islander” privileges the experiences of Asian Americans over Pacific Islanders. [4] Despite its use in social justice conversations, “inclusion” in this context is an act of settler colonialism. The absorption of the Hawaiian Islands within the US empire and Americanist scholarship has obscured the identities, cultures, and histories of the various peoples of Hawaiʻi. Due to the illegal overthrow of Queen Lili’uokalani that led to the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands in 1898, Hawaiʻi has long been associated with the United States, been regarded as a strategic military base, and been a profitable appendage to the empire. The Hawaiian Islands have also been an appendage in a scholastic context. Information regarding theatre in Hawaiʻi has historically been included within Asian American theatre. The inclusion of theatre of Hawaiʻi in Asian American theatre demonstrates that the United States has played a large role in how we have come to understand Asianness. In the early 1960s, the label and genre “Asian American” were created as a way to assert that Asians have been essential members of the United States and replace the problematic descriptor of “Oriental,” which reduced Asians to foreign objects. [5] While many Asians of the continent were determined to demonstrate a sense of belonging in the United States, other Asians in Hawaiʻi were determined to demonstrate a sense of alienation from the United States. Plays written by Asians from Hawaiʻi that explore the realities of living in Hawaiʻi should be separate from but in conversation with Asian American theatre. My work is a direct response to Lee, and is also informed by the dissertations of Hawaiʻi-based scholars and theatre practitioners Tammy Haili’ōpua Baker, Sammie Choy, and Stefani Overman-Tsai that call for theatre of Hawaiʻi to be recognized as its own form and examined outside of an Asian Americanist lens. [6] I interviewed Asian and Hawaiian theatre artists and educators born and raised in Hawaiʻi to determine why theatre of Hawaiʻi should be studied separately from Asian American theatre. I concluded that it is debatable whether Hawaiʻi can be considered a part of the larger Asian diaspora considering its indigenous history and cross-racial alliances developed on sugarcane and pineapple plantations. I assert that dramatic literature of Hawaiʻi, particularly the work of Hawaiian-Samoan playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, makes these fissures visible and audible. Her large body of work dramatizes interracial alliances and conflicts of Hawaiʻi. This essay features an excerpt of an interview I conducted with Kneubuhl on July 22, 2019. Our conversation about her work and its categorization demonstrates that the foundations and future of Asian American theatre rest on and are guided by understanding the nuances of Asian and Pacific Islander identities. I use my conversation with Kneubuhl to claim that it is possible and necessary to separate Asian American and Pacific Islander dramaturgies while still keeping them in conversation. Because some of Kneubuhl’s work has represented both Hawaiians and Asian settlers and their alliances and conflicts, her work has been categorized under several labels, including Asian American theatre and Pacific Islander theatre. In our conversation, Kneubuhl revealed that she embraces all of the labels assigned to her work because that allows her to more accurately characterize individual plays. Kneubuhl’s body of work resists exclusive characterization because each play’s themes, setting, and characters vary greatly. With Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in both Hawaiian culture studies and theatre, Kneubuhl bridges Hawai‘i state archives, community theatre, and the Hawaiian Renaissance movement. Kneubuhl’s work has been locally, nationally, and internationally recognized. She won the Hawai‘i Award for Literature, and her plays have been commissioned and performed in Hawai‘i, the continental United States, Asia, and Britain. When Kneubuhl emerged as one of Hawai‘i’s representative playwrights during the 1980s and 90s, she was one of the only Native Hawaiian playwrights active in Hawai‘i’s theatre scene. Today, she continues to represent Native Hawaiians and produces work that teaches Hawaiian history and celebrates Hawaiian culture from a Hawaiian perspective and advocates for Hawaiian sovereignty. Kneubuhl has been a major contributor to the repertoire of Kumu Kahua Theatre, the institutional home of Local theatre. The genre demonstrates how those who identify as Locals, a wide umbrella term unique to Hawai‘i that includes Native Hawaiians and other ethnic immigrant groups who descended from sugarcane and pineapple plantation workers, regard themselves vis-à-vis Hawai‘i’s plantations. Her work is informed and inspired by both the Hawaiian Renaissance movement and the plurality of Local culture. Inspired by those in the Hawaiian community who were reclaiming and reviving Hawaiian culture during the early 1970s, several of Kneubuhl’s plays retell Hawaiian women’s history through a contemporary, retrospective lens. Kneubuhl’s highly regarded historical pageant play January 1893 replays the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and allowed the Honolulu community to revisit a pivotal moment in Hawai‘i’s history. Written, produced, directed, and sponsored by Hawaiian activists and artists, January 1893 represented the mission of the Hawaiian Renaissance to revive Hawaiian history and culture on a state and national level. The play debuted in 1993 to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the overthrow. Staged as an elaborate parade, January 1893 is still considered to be one of the most theatrically ambitious nonprofessional productions ever staged in Hawai‘i. January 1893 was performed on and around the grounds of ‘Iolani Palace, the home of the Hawaiian monarchy and the site of Lili’uokalani’s house arrest after the overthrow. As an anniversary event, the production exemplified all that remained after the annexation: ignorance and amnesia around the event, a pan-ethnic solidarity between Hawaiians and other ethnic groups in Hawai‘i, and a desire to reinstall a sovereign Hawaiian monarchy. The production reinforced the bonds between Hawaiians and other ethnic groups formed during the early days of Hawai‘i’s plantations, and rallied people in support of Hawaiian sovereignty. The play is an act of redress that fortifies Hawai‘i’s history as a legitimate, sovereign nation and challenges hegemonic interpretations of Hawai‘i’s history that characterize US imperialism as a positive force that shaped Hawai‘i into a utopic multicultural paradise. [7] Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl was one of the very first people I interviewed. Her words guided my research and offer tremendous insight for instructors and students who are eager to engage with both Asian American and Pacific Islander theatre. JG: How did you find your way to theatre? VNK: The Hawaiian Renaissance. At the time people were really interested in Hawaiian history and culture. We were attracted to the theatre because it allowed us to express who we are and where we came from in different ways. When hula and all kinds of traditional Hawaiian practices made a huge comeback, there were better plays and bigger audiences. Theatre, performance, history, and the street all came together for me. In the ’80s I participated in and wrote some of the early living history theatre in Honolulu. Now that performance type has really taken off in Hawai‘i. There’s all kinds of places and groups that are doing living histories now. When we started, a lot of academic historians were frowning on what we were doing. But the truth was that living history got people interested in Hawaiian history, in their personal history. People in Hawaiʻi need to be more aware of the colonial history. I don’t think enough people know. JG : Can you tell me about your involvement with Kumu Kahua Theatre? VNK: . I was in the right place at the right time. Kumu Kahua was new and I was new. They were hungry for scripts. I invested myself in Kumu Kahua because I really wanted to produce things that were written locally. Kumu Kahua didn’t always produce Local theatre because there just weren’t enough scripts. Sometimes they did Asian American plays that were written by Asian people who aren’t from Hawaiʻi. I was invested in a kind of theatre that was by and for the Local community and didn’t reflect the larger American theatre, popular theatre scene. I was hungry for things that reflected who I am and where I came from. I am still supportive of and invested in giving voice to our island stories or things that are relevant to our island communities. Now, there’s a whole bunch of young people and a much larger community that is invested in Local theatre. Other theatres are now just starting to do productions that have Local themes and are looking for really good locally written plays. There’s so many more people interested in our theatre. It is really rewarding to see that. JG : What would you call what you write? Would you call that Local theatre or Hawaiian theatre? VNK: People used to call my work Asian American theatre because when I started writing there was no Pacific Island theatre. I was really conflicted about that. You want people to read your plays and that was all that mattered to me. I wanted my plays out there. Some of my plays could be called Hawaiian theatre, but some are not. I’ve never quibbled over labels. I want the freedom to write whatever really touches and interests me and whatever I feel passionate about. I like to think of myself as a Pacific Island writer. Some of my plays could be categorized as Hawaiian theatre and some of them could be Local theatre and some could be neither. JG : I’ve seen your plays in anthologies by women of color. But I’ve also seen them in postcolonial anthologies. The label I’ve seen most often is either Asian American or Hawaiian. VNK : I think that people in academia need categories. Labels make it easier for them to teach. But as a writer, you’re not sitting at home thinking, “Am I a Hawaiian writer or am I a Local writer?” You’re just writing. You’re writing what comes into your head. And so I just kind of leave the labels to other people. I’ll just write the plays and they decide what they are. JG : How would you define Local theatre? VNK : That’s hard because Local theatre includes Hawaiian theatre, but Hawaiian theatre doesn’t necessarily include Local theatre. I guess you could say Hawaiian theatre is anything that has Hawaiian characters or Hawaiian issues as its main theme. Local theatre includes Asian and Asian American theatre. But out of all the labels out there, I like Pacific Island theatre the most because it’s so inclusive. Labels are hard because there’s always something left out and there’s always a gray area. It is really tricky because all these questions have come up for me for a long time. And so what I’m trying to do is not necessarily make hard and fast boundaries between things because that’s just impossible. JG: So would you say there are multiple, overlapping genres at play here? VNK: Yeah. The Local, Hawaiian, and Western. They overlap. They are not really separate from each other. I do think that there are certain kinds of colonial undertones and attitudes and certain dynamics that play out between the three. Colonialism permeated the arts in Hawaiʻi. When I was first involved with Kumu Kahua, I was just starting out in theatre. I remember I was at a party and I was talking to this woman. I said I was a theatre major, and she goes, “Oh, have you been in plays?” I said, “I’ve been in a few Kumu Kahua plays.” She looked at me and she said, “No, I mean, a real play.” Theatre in Hawaiʻi is something really special. But the problem is people have a certain idea of what Hawaiʻi is. I don’t think our island theatre really fits into that. [8] When we look at Hawaiʻi, particularly its contemporary theatre scene, we see insightful tensions that arise from the distinct yet overlapping categorical schemas of “Asian American,” “Asian,” “Pacific Islander,” “Local,” and “Hawaiian.” Kneubuhl’s remarks echo J. Kehaulani Kauanui’s essay “Asian American Studies and the ‘Pacific question’” that calls upon Asian American Studies to actively engage Indigenous and Pacific Islander Studies rather than passively absorb Hawaiian and Pacific Islander history and culture into Asian American culture. [9] Kneubuhl’s embrace of the label “Pacific writer” signifies the ongoing transpacific turn of Asian American Studies and a way to recognize holistically the many voices that make up Asian and Pacific diasporas. Decentering the United States highlights the inherent liminality and multidimensionality of Asian identities and cultures that exist across the Pacific. A transpacific, rather than a US-centric approach, can help us understand how theatre of Hawaiʻi and Asian American theatre are related but distinct from each other. Transpacific Studies, which draws from Asian American Studies, Asian Studies, Indigenous Studies, Pacific Island Studies, and American Studies, illuminates the flow in peoples, cultures, capital, ideas, and labor across the Pacific. [10] Theatre of Hawaiʻi and Asian American theatre are distinct representations of the people, cultures, and histories of the Pacific that directly inform each other and provide a model on how the field of Asian American Studies can produce new theorizations on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Kneubuhl’s work is a model for how to create equitable representation out of tremendous cultural plurality. References Footnotes [1] Mark Chiang, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University (New York: New York University Press, 2009). [2] Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds. Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). [3] Esther Kim Lee, A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3. [4] Lisa Kahaleole Hall, “Navigating Our Own ‘Sea of Islands’: Remapping a Theoretical Space for Hawaiian Women and Indigenous Feminism,” Wicazo Sa Review 24 no. 2 (2009): 15–38; Kauanui, J. Kehaulani, “Where are Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders in Higher Education?” Diverse: Issues in Higher Education , 7 September 2008. [5] Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989). [6] Tammy Haili’ōpua Baker, “The Development and Function of Hana Keaka (Hawaiian Medium Theatre): A Tool for Empowering the Kānaka Maoli Consciousness” (Dissertation, University of Waikato, 2019); Sammie L. Choy, “Staging Identity: The Intercultural Theater of Hawai‘i” (Dissertation, University of Hawai‘i, 2016); Stefani Overman-Tsai, “Localizing the Islands: Theaters of Place and Culture in Hawaii’s Drama” (Dissertation, University of Hawai‘i, 2015). [7] Craig Howes, “Introduction,” in Hawai’i Nei: Island Plays (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002); Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, January 1893 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Press, 1993). [8] Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, interview by Jenna Gerdsen, June 2019. [9] J. Kehaulani Kauanui, “Asian American Studies and the ‘Pacific question,’” in Asian American Studies After Critical Mass , ed. Kent A. Ono (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 121-143. [10] Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014). About The Author(s) Jenna Gerdsen is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Theatre at Florida State University. She is an emerging scholar whose work examines the racial formation of contemporary theatre of Hawai‘i and investigates how settler colonialism and immigration shape this theatre tradition vis-à-vis Indigenous and Asian American cultural production. Her research was featured in the curated panel “New Directions in Theatre and Performance” at the 2021 American Society for Theatre Research conference. 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.

Jordan Schildcrout 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 Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Jordan Schildcrout By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF I consider it a sign of the vibrancy of queer theatre scholarship that publications over the past few years contain a greater variety of subjects, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives than ever before. I would hope for no less from a field that celebrates transgression, categorical slippage, intersectionality, and the inability to follow a single “straight and narrow” path. At the most recent ATHE Conference , I attended a panel where scholars—many of them involved in the creation of the LGBTQ Focus Group 20 years earlier—spoke about the field’s early years, when pursing queer theatre scholarship could endanger one’s career and reputation. Since the emergence of seminal works such as “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians” (1987) by Kaier Curtin and The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988) by Jill Dolan, much has changed for LGBTQ people in America. Even though such work now has a more esteemed position in the academy, new queer theatre scholarship at its best continues to be bold—and maybe even a little dangerous. I still remember the thrill of being a college student and, on a trip to New York City, purchasing Curtin’s book on “the emergence of lesbians and gay men on the American stage” from a gay bookstore. Along with books like John Clum’s Acting Gay (1992), it allowed me to understand a history of the representation of my own cultural identity. Later, as a graduate student, I acquired theoretical frameworks for comprehending various relationships between gender, sexuality, performance, and society from books by scholars like Dolan , Sue-Ellen Case , Judith Butler , and Peggy Phelan . I remain drawn to scholarship that creates insightful readings of plays and performances, grounded in historical context and activated by original theoretical perspectives. So my bookshelf has been happily full of late, with a number of excellent volumes published over the past five years that enrich the field of queer theatre and performance scholarship. One key goal continues to be the preservation and illumination of what might be deemed the heyday of queer theatre from the 1960s through the 1980s. Kate Davy’s Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers (2011) is an excellent historical analysis of the seminal dyke theatre, the WOW Café, and it now has the perfect companion in the recently released Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café Theater , edited by Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jill Dolan. Robert Schanke, whose previous books include excellent anthologies of queer theatre history co-edited with Kim Marra, also celebrates the life and work of a pioneer in Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans (2011). The revolutionary fervor of that era can feel distant as LGBTQ cultural and political goals seem to move toward the mainstream and the “normal.” In opposition to that trend, Sara Warner’s Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure (2012) focuses on anti-normative plays and performances, celebrating the gleefully subversive. The interrogation of homonormativity, which informs my my own study of “ negative representations ,” is a major strain in queer theatre scholarship, evident most recently in Jacob Juntunen’s Mainstream AIDS Theatre, the Media, and Gay Civil Rights: Making the Radical Palatable (2016). While anti-normativity leads some queer scholars to look primarily at alternative systems of theatrical production, others dive into the mainstream, offering queer readings of popular culture. Broadway plays and musicals have been rich subjects for scholars like D.A. Miller , David Savran , and David Roman , and now Stacy Wolf has made a significant addition to the field with Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011). Brian Eugenio Herrera, in Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (2015), brings a critically astute and refreshingly queer perspective to his examination of mainstream cultural representations. José Esteban Muñoz, whose passing was a great loss to our community, helped bring greater interdisciplinarity and intersectionality to performance scholarship . It’s heartening that these goals are pursued by an increasing number of scholars, including Ramón Rivera-Servera, author of Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics (2012) and co-editor with E. Patrick Johnson of important contributions to black and Latino/a queer performance scholarship: solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays (2013) and the forthcoming Blacktino Queer Performance (2016). I’m also a fan of James Wilson’s Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies (2011), an impressively researched look at queer performance in the Harlem Renaissance, as well as Marlon M. Bailey’s Butch Queens in Pumps (2013), an ethnography based on Bailey’s own experiences with contemporary African-American ballroom culture in Detroit. If recent journal articles and conference presentations are any indication, then theatre and performance scholarship is trending toward a firmer commitment to exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and other identities. As we cultivate greater diversity in the systems that produce theatre and performance—and in the systems that produce theatre and performance scholars—I look forward to the publication of more books that represent a wide range of perspectives on a variety of different kinds of queer performance, particularly those focusing on trans* artists and representations. With all these exciting books published over the past five years, perhaps the most notable trend is the changing position of books in our culture. The gay bookstore where I bought that copy of “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians” ? It closed years ago . The Internet has now become a dynamic site for those writing about queer theatre and performance, potentially engaging with a broader and more diverse readership. I enjoy both new and old media and believe they can intersect in productive ways, which is why I’ve bookmarked Jill Dolan’s blog and have a copy of the published collection of her blog articles, The Feminist Spectator in Action (2013), on my shelf. Now that the Journal of American Drama and Theatre has “gone electric,” I’m looking forward to having another online source for articles and book reviews on queer theatre scholarship. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Jordan Schildcrout is an Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater (University of Michigan Press). 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.

Jordan Schildcrout 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 Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Jordan Schildcrout By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF From 1969 to 1974, after the premiere of Mart Crowley’s landmark gay play The Boys in the Band (1968) and before the establishment of an organized gay theatre movement with companies such as Doric Wilson’s TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence), there flourished a subgenre of plays that can best be described as gay erotic theatre. While stopping short of performing sex acts on stage, these plays featured copious nudity, erotic situations, and forthright depictions of gay desire. In the early years of gay liberation, such plays pushed at the boundaries between the “legitimate” theatre and pornography, and in the process created the most exuberant and affirming depictions of same-sex sexuality heretofore seen in the American theatre. Some of these works were extremely popular with gay audiences, but almost all were dismissed by mainstream critics, never published, and rarely revived. The most widely seen of these plays was Tubstrip (1973), written and directed by Jerry Douglas, whose career in the early 1970s was situated squarely at the intersection of legitimate theatre and pornography. An analysis of Tubstrip and its groundbreaking production history can illuminate an important but often overlooked chapter in the development of gay theatre in America. Tubstrip (which can be read “tub strip” or “tubs trip”) is a risqué farce set in a gay bathhouse, written by “A. J. Kronengold” and directed by “Doug Richards,” both pseudonyms for a single person: Jerry Douglas, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama who later became a popular and award-winning director of pornographic films. Infused with a post-Stonewall sense of gay identity and sexuality, the play ran for 140 performances off-Broadway in 1973, then toured to eight cities over nine months, and opened on Broadway for a five-week run in 1974. By the producer’s own estimate, Tubstrip played approximately 500 performances to an audience of 50,000. This article argues that this remarkably successful play is emblematic of a significant moment in gay culture, when the fall of stage censorship and the rise of the sexual revolution and gay liberation created an unprecedented surge of gay erotic theatre, beginning with Gus Weill’s Geese (1969) and David Gaard’s And Puppy Dog Tails (1969), and reaching its pinnacle with Jerry Douglas’s bathhouse comedy. [1] During the early years of gay liberation, other forms of queer theatre included elements of gay eroticism: Charles Ludlam’s Bluebeard (1970) and Andy Warhol’s Pork (1971) reveled in carnivalesque excess and carried the critical imprimatur of hip theatrical art, and British imports such as Butley (1972) and Find Your Way Home (1973) depicted gay relationships with the bleakness seemingly expected in “serious drama” of the era. In contrast, gay erotic theatre often appropriated light middlebrow genres, such as romantic comedy and farce, to create fantasies of same-sex romance and sexuality. To varying degrees, Tubstrip and its ilk imagined the possibility of a happy homosexual and a healthy sexuality based on mutual desire, liberated from the guilt and shame of the closet. Critics of these plays, however, often saw only lewdness and exploitative sensationalism, which, they argued, did not belong in the legitimate theatre. The plays of gay erotic theatre may have appealed primarily to gay men who aspired to see their identities and desires, long closeted, finally reflected and affirmed in the culture. Audiences, however, were not exclusively gay, and the battles fought over sexuality and legitimacy in the theatre had repercussions beyond this subculture of gay men who, while marginalized, had a degree of cultural and economic power denied to women and other minority groups. An examination of the “homosexploitation” plays of gay erotic theatre can further illuminate the ethos of the bourgeoning gay sexual culture, providing an opportunity not just to indulge in nostalgia for the liberation era, but to reflect on how our experiences and fantasies of sex and romance are constructed in our own cultural moment. Tubstrip and other “sex positive” plays of gay erotic theatre invite the audience to find pleasure in theatrical depictions of sexual liberation, which is itself an act of liberation. Frank Queerism: The Intersection of Gay Theatre and Pornography The 1960s witnessed the emergence of what we now call “gay theater,” with gay theatre artists—informed by a contemporary understanding of gay cultural identity—creating representations of gay lives, often (but not exclusively) for an audience presumed to be gay. Most historians trace the genre to the seminal work of off-off-Broadway playwrights like Robert Patrick, Doric Wilson, and Lanford Wilson at the Caffe Cino, and then recognize the crossover commercial success of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968) as a crucial turning point. While the plays of gay erotic theatre must be understood in relation to these previous gay plays, broader changes in gay sexual culture also influenced their production and reception. Gay erotic theatre thrived for many of the same reasons as the pornographic cinema of the era, as described by historian Whitney Strub: A confluence of forces, including gay activism and its push for increased visibility, the rapidly diminishing scope of obscenity laws (historically disproportionately aimed at queer expression), the market demands of a gay consumer base, and the broader spirit of sexual revolution, all worked in tandem to open a new space for gay erotic expression. [2] While many regarded pornography as both a cause and symptom of the urban decay of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Strub argues that the supposed “decline” of the city provided increased freedom for queer people, who were now less subject to such surveillance and control. . . . As the straight, white middle class fled for suburbs specifically designed for procreative heterosexual families, urban opportunities beckoned for gay communities. [3] The 1969 Stonewall Riots helped to create a more visible political movement for LGBT people at the same time that changes in censorship laws created opportunities for a more visible sexual culture, both gay and straight, on both stage and screen. However, as Elizabeth Wollman notes, “Many members of the commercial theatre industry worried” that sexually explicit theatre productions like Oh! Calcutta! (1969) and Che! (1969) “were not terribly distinct from the live sex shows and pornographic films that had begun to proliferate in New York City.” [4] Scholars such as Thomas Waugh have discussed the history of post-World War II gay pornographic films as a progression from beefcake models posing in pouches to softcore gay erotica with full nudity to hardcore narrative feature films with performers engaging in sex acts. [5] The emergence of hardcore cinema in the early 1970s precipitated the trend of “porno chic,” which Jennifer C. Nash describes as the “mainstreaming” of pornography, with “elaborately plotted, narrative-driven feature-length films that consciously effaced the boundary between the pornographic and the mainstream,” playing in “regular” movie theatres, reviewed by mainstream critics, and attended by millions of men and women. [6] One of the earliest entries in this phenomenon was the feature length hardcore gay film Boys in the Sand (1971), directed by Wakefield Poole, a former Broadway dancer. The film became an unprecedented commercial success and made a star out of blond and handsome Casey Donovan. [7] While occasionally intersecting with porno chic, the gay erotic theatre produced between 1969 and 1974 is most comparable to softcore erotica, which did not depict explicit sex acts. Richard Dyer, writing in 1985, endeavored to distinguish between pornography and erotica for gay men, although these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, and at other times have simply marked cultural privilege, with “erotica” being what Ellen Willis called a euphemism for “classy porn.” [8] Dyer creates a distinction by asserting that pornography “is supposed to have an effect that is registered in the spectator’s body,” and this goal dictates the structural form of the genre, since “the desire that drives the porn narrative forward is the desire to come, to have an orgasm.” Pornography, then, is characterized by the way in which its form follows its presumed function, to stimulate not just arousal but physical orgasm. Of course, it’s impossible to determine exactly how a work of art functions in different circumstances with different audiences, but Dyer’s point about narrative structure still holds: the dramatic narratives of gay erotic theatre, while they might arouse, are not structured to bring the audience to orgasm. Instead, erotic theatre places emphasis on the psychological, social, and aesthetic aspects of sex. Nevertheless, productions that offered gay eroticism for a paying audience were often accused of pornographic “gaysploitation.” [9] In a 1977 article titled “Theatre: Gays in the Marketplace vs. Gays for Themselves,” Don Shewey criticized plays, often by straight playwrights, that “exploit gay characters and gay themes for sensationalism or cheap comedy” like Norman Is That You? (1970) and Steambath (1970). [10] But he recognized that this sort of exploitation was different from what he called “semiporno gay celebrations like David Gaard’s And Puppy Dog Tails , A. J. Kronengold’s Tubstrip , and Gus Weill’s Geese ,” which he saw as emerging from “the nascent gay activist movement and an increasingly public gay populace.” [11] Jerry Douglas recalls that the first play he saw containing nudity and homosexuality was Geese by Gus Weill, produced at the Players Theatre in January 1969. [12] Consisting of two one-act plays—the first with a male couple, the second with a female couple— Geese broke new ground in the depiction of sexuality, with one outraged critic proclaiming the plays to be “shockers even by today’s permissive standards. The dialog is raw and unfettered, and there is emphasis on nudity, including homosexual and lesbian lovemaking.” [13] Both plays juxtapose the newfound pure love of a young same-sex couple with the bitter relationships and hypocritical sexual mores of their parents’ generation. [14] Critics accused Geese of engaging in “fast-buck-ism” and “frank queerism,” [15] risking “the reinstitution of stage censorship in New York,” [16] and performing “a faggot propaganda piece” [17] for an audience of “prurient peeping Toms” [18] and “flagrant pederasts.” [19] Gay erotic theatre aggravated the anxiety, always present in the professional theatre, over whether theatre aspires to the “higher values” of art or functions as a commercial product in a marketplace. Were plays such as Geese a) sincerely pursuing the cause of sexual liberation or b) offering cheap thrills in hopes of making a profit? The answer, of course, often seemed to be c) both. Wollman asserts that for every radical committed to using stage nudity toward social change, there were two or three entrepreneurs who were just as interested in the money that could be made by hiring young, good-looking people to show a little skin. . . . Most ended up with feet in both camps. [20] For example, the program bio of one of the actors in Geese states, with a combination of conviction and nonchalance, “Nudity or homosexuality, or whatever, is a product of life and it’s about time it got on the stage.” [21] Not all theatre artists shared this perspective, as evidenced by an actor’s departure from Robert M. Lane’s Foreplay (1970), which prompted the Variety front-page headline, “Won’t Depict A Nude Homo, Actor Quits.” [22] When industry papers featured banner headlines such as “NY LEGIT GOING SEX-HAPPY” and “NUDITY SELLS TIX?” in 1969, [23] the underlying consternation was the difficulty of objectively distinguishing between theatrical art and exploitative sensationalism in plays as varied as Marat/Sade , The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , Fortune and Men’s Eyes , Oh! Calcutta! , Paradise Now , Scuba Duba , and Geese . As British critic John Elsom argued in 1974, “One man’s decadence is another man’s sexual enlightenment.” [24] Despite negative reviews, Geese was commercially successful, playing off-Broadway for 336 performances through November 1969 (and thus during the Stonewall Riots in June), with subsequent productions in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Geese was inevitably mentioned as a point of comparison when David Gaard’s play And Puppy Dog Tails opened off-Broadway in September 1969. In this domestic comedy, John lives with his lover, a Southerner named Carey-Lee, but his head is turned by a visit from his straight friend Bud, a Navy man with whom he “fooled around” in his adolescence. [25] Forced to choose between the closeted sexuality of his macho buddy and a loving gay relationship with Carey-Lee, John chooses the latter. Most critics derided the play as nothing more than a poor excuse to get “a glimpse of male musculature and—briefly—male genitals” [26] and “a crudely devised apology for the right to be gay.” [27] Newsday worried that The Boys in the Band had created “an epidemic” of imitators, [28] while Variety registered homophobic horror over “a rising tide of limpwrist-oriented plays.” [29] Nevertheless, and despite not liking the play, Clive Barnes of the New York Times acknowledged that And Puppy Dog Tails was doing something new, which was reflected in the review’s slightly ironic subheader: “Homosexuals Depicted As Happy, A Novelty.” He wrote, “While we have had scenes before of homosexual sex and even declarations of homosexual love, this is the first play in my experience to show demonstrations of homosexual affection.” [30] He then parenthetically confesses that he found such displays of affection “embarrassing” because of his own “hang-ups.” But the necessity of such displays is precisely the point of And Puppy Dog Tails . Indeed, the play is not primarily concerned with the supposed battle between hetero and homo, as certain critics thought, but in the divide between a homosexual culture that eroticizes straightness as a masculine ideal and a gay culture that valorizes a romantic relationship based on mutual desire. Just as John does not need a straight lover, perhaps Gaard’s play did not need the approval of straight critics. And Puppy Dog Tails recouped its cost during previews and ran for 141 performances. Geese and And Puppy Dog Tails set the stage for Jerry Douglas’s entrance into the production of gay erotic theatre. Douglas studied playwriting and directing at the Yale School of Drama before moving to New York in 1960, and he spent the decade writing off-Broadway musicals, directing plays, and serving as the casting director for the Coconut Grove Playhouse. In 1970, he had his first experience directing a play containing nudity, Gerry Raad’s Circle in the Water , which dealt with repressed homosexuality and sadism amongst cadets in a military academy. Later that same year, he directed his own play Score , an example of “bisexual chic” avant la lettre , about a sophisticated married couple who compete with each other in seduction, battling for the greatest number of conquests—including those with partners of the same sex. [31] The production, which featured Sylvester Stallone in a supporting role, was dismissed as “one of the rash of sexploitation shows which have followed the easing of stage restrictions here” [32] and closed after 23 performances. [33] Jerry Douglas’s next endeavor was writing and directing the hardcore feature film The Back Row (1973), starring Casey Donovan as a New Yorker who attracts the attention of George Payne, a sexual neophyte from Wyoming who has just arrived at Port Authority. The film shows Payne learning “how to be gay,” including a meta-cinematic scene in which Payne, having followed Donovan into an adult movie theatre, watches the action on screen and imagines himself and Donovan taking the place of the actors. The scene encapsulates the ethos behind much of Douglas’s work: pornography has a pedagogical function, instructing gay men on how to fulfill their desires, not just as a technical matter of physical positions, but by diminishing the inhibitions created by a homophobic society and liberating their erotic imaginations. Douglas used the pseudonym “Doug Richards” for The Back Row , hoping to keep his career in porn separate from his legitimate theatre career, but the film became one of his most critically acclaimed and commercially successful creations. Jeffrey Escoffier lists The Back Row , which was filmed on location in New York City, as the first of the “homorealist” porn films, which “created a synthesis of a documentary-like view (in this case focusing on the gay sexual subculture) and the more psychopolitical themes of sexual liberation,” using “actual locations where public sex took place.” [34] Douglas’s next work continued his exploration of the gay subculture in one of the emblematic locales of sexual liberation: the bathhouse. The Boys in the Baths: Sexual Exuberance and Romantic Longing in Tubstrip Jerry Douglas recalls that producer Ken Gaston approached him with the initial idea for Tubstrip : “I want you to write a play about the baths, and I want it to be a love story.” Gay bathhouses like New York’s Continental and Everard Baths—colloquially knows as “the tubs”—occupied a unique position in urban gay life, which many remember as a sexual utopia. [35] In the documentary Gay Sex in the ’70s , activist and author Arnie Kantrowitz recalls: You could do everything. . . . You could eat in the restaurant, you could go swimming in the pool, you could have a massage—to orgasm if you preferred, you could dance on their dance floor, and you could have more sex than most people would consider having in a year. [36] But Kantrowitz also emphasizes that “Even during the days of the most advanced and reckless promiscuity, it was still a search for someone,” and he met his long-term romantic partner at the baths. This combination of sexual exuberance and romantic longing informs both the dramaturgy and ethos of Tubstrip . The play takes place in the central lounge of a popular New York City bathhouse, but the establishment is sparsely attended this particular Tuesday evening because “there isn’t a self-respecting faggot in this city who isn’t home watching the Academy Awards” (16). [37] Although it will eventually crescendo into the frenzy of farce, Tubstrip begins with a pensive silence, as the young attendant Brian, the play’s main character, sits alone in a suspended bamboo cage chair “in a fetal position. . . his thoughts a thousand miles away” (2)—an image used in much of the publicity for the show [Figure 1]. The opening tableau hints at the journey to come, with Brian leaving the nest of his egg-shaped chair and metaphorically taking flight—but toward what? Brian’s appearance is contrasted with the entrance of a patron named Darryl, emerging naked from the pool (installed below stage level, in the orchestra pit), splashing the audience in the front row. Before the first word is spoken, Douglas’s staging juxtaposes above and below, air and water, the mind and the body, the romantic and the erotic, and (as Darryl tries to gain Brian’s attention by arranging himself in sexually provocative poses) the desired and the desiring. Figure 1. Poster for 1973 off-Broadway production of Tubstrip at the Players Theatre, featuring Larry Gilman as Brian. Used with permission of Jerry Douglas, from his personal collection. Each of Tubstrip ’s nine characters comes to this bathhouse with his individual sexual and romantic desires, and the play culminates in the formation of different kinds of relationships. The denizens include Richie, a romantic and naïve young man who is searching for his lover Darryl, who has surreptitiously come to the baths in search of sexual variety; Andy, a witty black queen infatuated with Brian; Tony, a sadist, and his lover Kevin, a masochist; Dusty, a sweet-natured hustler; Wally, a middle-aged skin-flick mogul searching for new talent; and Bob, a Viet Nam veteran who knew Brian in high school. The stage is filled with young and attractive actors, almost all of whom, at one point or another, will be naked. Even 59-year-old Wally, although never naked, was actually played by a 26-year-old actor (Jake Everett) who shaved his hair and constructed a “fat suit” for the role. The play presents a fantasy version of a bathhouse; yet, even as it celebrates sexual liberation, Tubstrip dramatizes many of the tensions evident in the emerging gay sexual culture, between sex and romance, promiscuity and monogamy, sadomasochism and consent, competition and community. As Kevin Winkler has noted, the bathhouse was a theatrical space, not just for professional entertainers like Bette Midler, who famously got her start performing at the Continental Baths, but for the men cruising and engaging in sex. [I]t was always showtime. You just had to find your follow spot, be it in the steam room, the showers, the orgy room, or take your act on the road through the winding hallways. If your act flopped once, you could try it out again right down the hall, altering a bit of business, tightening up your dialogue (or maybe you preferred pantomime), and experimenting with a different characterization. [38] Much of the comedy of Tubstrip comes from an awareness of the theatricality involved both in the presentation of self and the pursuit of sexual fantasy at the baths. The bathhouse, like the playhouse, is a location in which people might wear masks and play roles, but it is also ultimately a place where truths are revealed, and by the end of Tubstrip , many of the characters see each other—and themselves—with greater honesty and clarity. Over the course of its twenty-one months of performances, advertisements for Tubstrip proclaimed that it was “Better Than a Trip to the Baths” (indicating erotic pleasure) and “Better Than The Boys in the Band ” (indicating theatrical legitimacy). The latter boast hints at the extent to which early gay liberation theatre artists were performing in the shadow of Mart Crowley’s hit play—and also reacting against it. [39] The Boys in the Band presented an ensemble of gay characters—including the bitter host Michael, the “fairy” Emory, the token African American Bernard, and the hustler known only as Cowboy—gathered for a birthday party that implodes in a swirl of alcohol, verbal attacks, and manipulative games. In Act II, characters play a game in which they phone their high school crushes and relive their rejection, while Alan, the play’s supposed straight man, denies his homosexuality and flees the party. As J. Todd Ormsbee observes, “The target of Michael’s party game is the failure of gay love, its pain and humiliation, perhaps its impossibility.” [40] The central plot of Douglas’s Tubstrip reverses this dynamic. We learn that Brian, as a gawky high school freshman, had a crush on the macho heterosexual athlete Bob. While he was at war, Bob received letters from Brian, which piqued his sexual interest in a kid he barely remembered. Now Bob, entering the bathhouse in full Green Beret uniform, has come searching for Brian, and he is impressed to find that the “short, skinny, uncoordinated” freshman (89) has grown into a desirable young man. The act one curtain falls on Bob passionately kissing Brian, which Douglas recalls was “daring” for the time. Tubstrip would seem to enact a homosexual wish fulfillment: the handsome straight prince desires the gay boy who was once an ugly duckling. Imagine how different Crowley’s play would be if “nelly” Emory’s high school crush confessed that he desired him in return. But Douglas goes a step further: once Brian learns that Bob is married, closeted, and won’t commit to more than a secret weekend fling with him, he rejects Bob—and also quits his job at the bathhouse. Instead, Brian leaves with the monogamously inclined Richie, who has just broken up with his lover. Throughout the play, the flirtation between Brian and Richie has been boyish and playful, as opposed to a “heavy cruise,” most evident in their second act water fight in the pool. Rather than consummating an affair with the “stud” of his adolescent fantasies, Brian chooses the naïve and sincere young man who perhaps reminds him of himself as that awkward, yearning freshman. The contrast between physical pleasures and emotional fulfillment was also evident in the casting of the roles of Bob and Richie, with Brian rejecting the character often played by porn stars (such as Jim Cassidy) in favor of the character played by actors (such as Tom Van Stitzel) who won critical praise for giving nuanced performances. Hinting at a life of domestic happiness, Brian and Richie discuss cooking breakfast for each other as they head out into the sunrise. The bathhouse functions in a manner similar to the Shakespearean forest where erotic desire is unleashed and lovers, liberated from social restraints, can meet their proper match. But in order to maintain that romance, the lovers must then leave the forest behind and return to the “civilized” world. (Wally, as the play’s most erudite character, makes this connection, ironically extoling the “midsummer madness” that exists at the baths all year round.) The central plot of Brian and Richie valorizes traditional notions of romantic fidelity, which necessitates leaving the bathhouse, but Tubstrip does not condemn characters who remain and seek what we might now call a “no strings attached” hook-up. Bob and Darryl, as the lovers rejected by Brian and Richie, respectively, are quite clear about their longing for purely sexual adventure and variety, and the play ends with them following each other into the steam room. They, too, can have their desires fulfilled at the bathhouse, and the play does not disparage them for doing so. The character most pulled by the tension between sexual exuberance and romantic longing is Andy, described by critics as “a chatty flirt” and “a black queen” who has some of the play’s best comic lines. Contemporaneous accounts of the baths illustrate the ethnic diversity of the patrons, but Andy is the sole person of color on stage, potentially putting him in the same tokenistic position as Bernard in The Boys in the Band . At the start of the play, Andy endures a couple of racist zingers from his friend Wally, but in contrast to The Boys in the Band , in which the racial disparagement of Bernard grows uglier as the play goes on, Tubstrip shows Andy and Wally moving toward deeper friendship and mutual support. While given to incisive “reads” and witty rejoinders, Andy is not a neutered commentator, but very much part of the sexual action of the bathhouse. His romantic pursuit of Brian and his flirtations with other patrons are often played for comedy, but they are also rooted in his genuine need for affirmation in a community that too often leaves gay black men out of its romantic and erotic fantasies. Most memorably, when Andy feels he is not getting enough attention, he emerges wearing an enormous Afro wig. According to Douglas, Walter Holiday, the actor who played Andy in every performance of Tubstrip , contributed a great deal to the creation of his character, including this visual assertion of Black Power and Angela Davis fabulousness. Andy is dejected when he does not end up with Brian at the end of the play, but his friend Wally assures him that someday he, too, will find love. In a final gesture of bold self-assertion, Andy removes his towel and nakedly strides into the steam room once again. The possibility of having both sexual variety and romantic fulfillment is realized in the sadomasochistic couple of Tony and Kevin, who also provide some of the play’s most sexually explicit sequences. Douglas recalls that one of the greatest laughs of the evening came when Tony, entering in conservative business attire, whips off his Brooks Brothers suit in one swift flourish to reveal the leather harness underneath. Tony then proceeds to unpack his attaché case, which contains a number of increasingly outrageous sex toys, from cock rings and handcuffs to chocolate syrup and bananas. His “pretty-boy” lover, Kevin, soon joins him, and the script shows them as an affectionate and caring couple who enjoy playing the roles of an abusive master and humiliated slave. In this, the play participates in the debate among early gay liberationists over the psychological and political ramifications of S&M, siding with Lyn Rosen’s defense of sadomasochism: Too may people confuse S&M with bad relationships in which one person dominates another or treats another badly. S&M is a sexual act in which both partners treat each other well. [41] Many of the play’s characters do not understand this distinction and show concern over the abuse Tony heaps on Kevin, including handcuffing him naked and face down on the pool table. Good-hearted Richie attempts to “rescue” him from this humiliation, but is taken aback when Kevin exclaims, “Look, prick, you do your thing, let me do mine. Now, fuck off ” (76). Later, when Kevin easily slips out of his predicament without a key, Richie is upset to learn that the cuffs weren’t actually locked. Kevin explains, as though it should be obvious, “Suppose there was a fire—” (82). [42] The joke points to Douglas’s metatheatrical understanding of S&M as a sexual act , complete with its own costumes, props, lines (“Yes, sir !”) and roles, enacted with the consent of all the performers. Yet Tubstrip also pushes at the limits of sadomasochism when the couple involves a non-consenting participant, the hustler Dusty. Unlike the sex worker known only as “Cowboy” in The Boys in the Band , Dusty has a name and his own desires, and the audience even learns a bit about his sexual journey. [43] When Wally, one of his clients, spots him in the bathhouse and snarkily berates him for previously passing himself off as straight, Dusty replies with simple sincerity, “I never lied to you. Things change” (45), indicating his growth into gay self-acceptance. [44] He initially agrees to a threesome with Tony and Kevin, but when Tony tries to pierce Dusty’s nipple without his consent, a violent fight and then a chase through the bathhouse ensues. While played for farce, this situation also involves a touch of Ortonesque menace, which only abates when Brian, in his authoritative role as bathhouse attendant, puts a stop to the fight and banishes Tony and Kevin from the premises. In a further show of ambivalence about Tony’s sadism, the play reveals him to be Wally’s psychoanalyst, a member of a profession that, in its role of arbiter of “sanity” and “normalcy,” had a history of causing great harm to homosexuals. Nevertheless, the play ultimately shows Dusty to be unharmed, and Tony and Kevin return to their affectionate and mutually supportive romantic relationship. At the age of 59, Wally is older than any character in The Boys in the Band , a play that paints a grim picture of gay men clinging to youth. Wally takes a more philosophical perspective on his status as “dirty old man,” since, as he explains, “there’s always someone a little older, a little dirtier” (79). Wally is comic because of his grand duchess affectations, and the play creates some farcical bits out of the other characters avoiding Wally sexually, such as when four men come running out of the steam room as soon as Wally goes in (51). One way that Wally deals with this rejection is by retreating into his profession as a pornographer, imagining the world as if it were a movie, commenting on the action around him by proclaiming, “It’ll make a gorgeous film” (28). When he learns that Brian’s high school crush has come to find him, Wally becomes effusive with purple prose: “Childhood Sweethearts—doing it with jock straps and football helmets! Separated by cruel fate—reunited by a twist of circumstance! Love conquers all!” (63). He’s excited by watching and creating fantasies, and his role as voyeur puts him in the same position as the audience. Wally is not “matched” with anyone at the end of the play, but he is not alone, in part because he is reunited with Veronica, his cat who happens to be in heat and has been lost in the bathhouse, adding to the farcical shenanigans. [45] Moreover, while his bitchy barbs might indicate his frustration with the sexual competition of the bathhouse, he ultimately achieves a sense of community, exchanging friendship with characters like Andy and Dusty, whom he previously disparaged. In Wally, we see that the bathhouse can facilitate not just sexual encounters, but also friendship and a larger experience of community. The play’s function as “community portrait” is reflected in the photograph featured in the center of the off-Broadway program, showing all nine men (and one cat) as an affectionate ensemble [Figure 2]. Figure 2. Centerfold photo from program for 1973 off-Broadway production of Tubstrip. Back Row: Jamey Gillis (Tony), Jake Everett (Wally) and Veronica, Larry Gilman (Brian), Tony Origlio (Richie), Richard Rheem (Kevin); Front Row: Bob Balhatchet (Darryl), Walter Holiday (Andy), Jim Tate / Dean Tait (Dusty), Richard Livert (Bob). Photo: Christopher Studios. Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. When Time Magazine reviewed The Boys in the Band , they highlighted its depiction of “rejection, humiliation, and loneliness,” [46] which were presumed to be the lot of all homosexuals, in part because Crowley’s characters assert such generalizations (e.g., “Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse”). Tubstrip makes no such generalizations, in part because the greater amount of queer representation post- Boys relieves it of the burden of representing all homosexuals. Instead, Jerry Douglas’s play creates a fantasy in which characters connect—as sexual partners, as romantic lovers, as friends, and as a community. The play does not dwell on the trauma of the closet, no one agonizes over what “made them” gay, no one is forced to pretend to be straight, no one drowns himself in alcohol, and even the characters who do light drugs (pot and poppers) seem motivated by sexual enhancement rather than self-destruction. Like Geese and And Puppy Dog Tails , Tubstrip depicts gay love, sex, and affection (which can be intertwined or not, depending on your desire) as exciting, fulfilling, and achievable. While this might be a sentimental fantasy, it’s a fantasy that proved immensely popular with gay audiences—and affronted many mainstream critics. Tubstrip on Stage: Audiences, Critics, and the Road to Legitimacy Tubstrip began performances at the 199-seat Brecht Theatre in the Mercer Arts Center on 17 May 1973. Suggesting the play’s location at the intersection of legitimate theatre and gay sexual culture, the cover of the program featured a drawing of two nearly naked blond boys, smiling and lounging in relaxed poses. Inside were advertisements for the boutique sex shop the Pleasure Chest, “metal inhalers” (for amyl nitrite), nude male photography, and hardcore pornography. Posters and flyers for the show did not include the words “gay” or “homosexual,” instead borrowing a phrase from pornographic cinema and touting the play’s “all male cast.” In gay magazines, advertisements for the play appeared next to those for porn films and bathhouses. These marketing tactics drew an audience, allowing the production to recoup its investment within five weeks. It played for a total of 100 performances, before the 103-year old Broadway Central Hotel, which housed the Mercer Arts Center, collapsed, leaving Tubstrip temporarily homeless. [47] The production reopened less than two weeks later at the Players Theatre, running for 40 more performances, from 14 August to 16 September, but never officially opening to the mainstream press. Instead, the producers took advantage of the fact that gay culture had grown more self-sufficient since the days of Geese and And Puppy Dog Tails , with a marked increase in gay-owned publications, bars, shops, and restaurants. Most writers invited from gay publications like The Advocate , Gay Scene , Michael’s Thing , and Where It’s At enjoyed the nudity and eroticism of Tubstrip, yet even when photos of semi-naked actors accompanied their reviews, they tended to focus on the overall quality of the play, particularly its wit and comic structure, as well as what they saw as its liberationist ethos. Lee Barton of the Advocate saw it as a welcome departure from “what’s been passing for gay theatre” and plays that “exploit, degrade, insult, or distort what it’s like to be gay.” He praised Tubstrip as “funny, sexy, [and] important,” but wondered whether mainstream critics could “tolerate anything gay that is so open and healthy.” [48] In his diary, Donald Vining was effusive about the play and highlighted the sense of recognition experienced by a gay audience member, describing the set as “a wonderful evocation of the Continental Baths.” I was so glad I had recently been there so that the hanging basket chair, the pool table, the steam room doors, and the mattresses on the floor all had meaning. I said to Ken, “They’ve got everything but the swimming pool” and lo and behold two actors emerged naked and wet from some kind of tub at the front of the stage. . . . We had nine naked men, eight of them quite attractive, and lots of hilarious lines. The play would be of no interest to anyone not a homosexual but it is actually very well crafted, the several plots skillfully managed, the laughs beautifully built up to, the characters nicely differentiated, and everything highly professional. . . . I found the whole thing a hoot and my sentimental nature was pleased when the two romantics, disappointed in their lovers for different reasons, found each other at the end. [49] Vito Russo, however, wrote that he was “more furious” at plays like Tubstrip than at Boys in the Band “because they pretend to be a product of our liberated culture” but actually just “exploit the situation to make a buck” from members of the gay community who will “pay any price” to see nudity on stage. [50] But Vining’s response indicates that Russo misjudged the desire of the ticket-buying gay audience. The nudity is one element of the larger theatrical fantasy, which also includes the pleasure of seeing one’s world represented, of being an insider who understands the meaning of that world, and of seeing gay romance and eroticism validated in a manner still rare in mainstream culture. The marketing of Tubstrip may have exploited sexuality in order to sell tickets, but the play itself offered much more to audience members like Vining, who saw no conflict between the erotic and the legitimate theatre. Indeed, he found pleasure in seeing the erotic within the legitimate. In a rare move for a sexually explicit gay play, Tubstrip then hit the road, travelling to eight cities over nine months in 1974. Jerry Douglas was with the production for the entire tour, making revisions to the script and rehearsing new actors, since only two actors remained constant through the entire run: comic duo Walter Holiday (Andy) and Jake Everett (Wally). The stops for the first leg of the tour were Boston (4 weeks), Washington, DC (5 weeks), Philadelphia (2 weeks), Toronto (3 weeks), Detroit (1 week), and Chicago (5 weeks). The only hint of trouble came in Detroit, where residents of the hotel in which the theatre was located covered up the poster, and the Free Press sounded alarm bells about the possibility of obscenity. [51] In general, critics who liked the play tended to downplay the significance of the nudity, while negative reviews accused the play of “homosexploitation.” [52] A common theme was determining whether the play could appeal to “open-minded straights” or was strictly for “a specialized audience.” [53] In Washington and Philadelphia, critics highlighted the “newness” of Tubstrip and discussed it as a first. Washington’s NBC station announced, “This may be our first ‘X’ rated theater review. . . so if you’re under 17, please go to bed. Gay theatre has come to town,” [54] while a local magazine expressed the hope that Tubstrip would encourage more gay theatre, since “there is a large gay community and others in the Washington area who no doubt would support quality productions.” [55] The critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer regarded Tubstrip as a sex comedy, one of many that have been produced off-Broadway but the first of its kind to reach Philadelphia. . . the tour being something of an event in the history of gay liberation. . . asserting as it does not the sickness but the validity of homosexual affection and homoerotic appeal. [56] The show won praise as “a comic statement about love” [57] and “an outrageously witty farce,” [58] and even the critics who panned the play grudgingly acknowledged that it “seems to please its special audience” [59] who “responded with great relish” [60] and “seemed to love every minute of Tubstrip , which must mean something.” [61] When the production reached Los Angeles, Tubstrip transformed from a successful play into a cultural phenomenon. Casey Donovan, star of the porn films Boys in the Sand and The Back Row , as well as the recently released film version of Score (1974), joined the cast in the lead role of Brian—but he used his “legitimate” name, Calvin Culver. Like Jerry Douglas, Culver worked both in the legitimate theatre and in hardcore pornography, known by different names in each realm. But Tubstrip , existing at this particular moment of gay liberation and porno chic, blurred the lines between these realms. Advertisements for Tubstrip promoted their star as “Calvin (Casey Donovan) Culver,” literally inserting the pornographic into the legitimate. Douglas recalls that the goal was for Culver to achieve respectability as an actor while not neglecting Donovan’s porno fan base, and Culver told the San Francisco Examiner , “I’m not the least bit ashamed of those films I made, but I hope my career will take off now in a more serious and legitimate direction.” [62] Having a celebrity in the show created more publicity for Tubstrip than ever before. Culver appeared on front covers and in photo spreads in magazines, the show scheduled “meet the cast” parties with local bars and bathhouses, famous actors including Shelley Winters and Larry Kert ( West Side Story , Company ) came to the show, Reverend Troy Perry of the gay-affirming Metropolitan Community Church attended three times, and the company appeared in the 1974 Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade. Douglas remembers, “There were gaggles of fans at the stage door every night. And Cal signed every autograph that was asked of him.” The production was enormously successful over the 11-week run in Los Angeles, but the new casting seems to have altered the critical reception of the play. Unlike actors who previously played Brian, 30-year-old Culver was no moony-eyed youth gazing into the romantic distance; in promotional photos, Culver glares directly at the viewer in a sexual come-on [Figure 3]. His co-star Jim Cassidy, newly cast in the role of Bob, was also a porn performer but had little acting experience, which seemed to contribute to the perception among some critics that the show was merely an opportunity to see porn stars in the flesh, with one review noting that some audience members “literally oohed and aahed when [Cassidy] stripped.” [63] For the first time, some expressed disappointment that the actor playing Brian did not engage in full-frontal nudity, since that was now the expectation with Culver in the role. Figure 3. Advertisement for 1974 touring production of Tubstrip in Los Angeles, featuring Calvin (Casey Donovan) Culver as Brian. Used with permission of Jerry Douglas, from his personal collection. Tubstrip concluded its tour with a seven-week run in San Francisco, where the city’s two major newspapers savaged the play, but the local gay press celebrated it as an exemplar of gay liberation and a “positive statement” that successfully captured gay life. One headline announced “No Suicides in This Homosexual Play,” [64] and one writer quipped, “When is the last time you walked out of a play or film about gays and felt good?” [65] Jerry Douglas (still operating under the name Doug Richards) had a more public profile in San Francisco, giving a press conference with Culver. Perhaps with an eye toward the planned Broadway production, Douglas asserted that, though a “gay play,” Tubstrip was not “about homosexuality” and appealed to a broad audience: It’s interesting the same pattern in every city we’ve played; the first week we get the dirty old men with binoculars in the front row, the second week we get the younger gay set, and by the third week it’s 50-50 mixed straight and gay. [66] After successfully running for over 400 performances off-Broadway and around the country, Tubstrip would now test its ability to reach a diverse audience in the commercial center of the American theatre. Tubstrip opened on 31 October 1974 at Broadway’s Mayfair Theatre (previously known as Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe) under what was known as a “middle theatre contract.” [67] For the first time, Jerry Douglas used his own name as the director (but not as the playwright), and Calvin Culver no longer had Casey Donovan splitting his name in two. But Tubstrip ’s desire for success on Broadway was a bit like Brian’s desire for heterosexual Bob: the big guy might be open to a fling, but he wasn’t about to make a commitment. New York critics took pains to warn heterosexual audiences that this play was not for them, up to and including dialogue that “might be virtually a foreign language.” [68] Mel Gussow in the New York Times was especially dismissive, and the Associated Press critic acknowledged that while the play might have “a nationwide gay housekeeping seal of approval,” he felt like a “straight intruder.” [69] In a positive review that praised “a uniformly superb cast,” Debbi Wasserman of Show Business attempted to dismantle the homo-hetero divide imagined by her fellow critics by redrawing the lines: “ Tubstrip is not for everyone, but it comes pretty close. It’s not for the prejudiced puritan, but it is for the romantic.” [70] Tubstrip had found extraordinary success as a gay play for primarily gay audiences, a reciprocal relationship based on mutual desire, but the straight trade of Broadway refused to see it as legitimate, and the production closed after 37 performances. [71] Tubstrip had a return engagement in Washington, DC, in January 1975, and has not been produced since. [72] Two months after Tubstrip closed, another comedy set in a gay bathhouse found greater success on Broadway. The Ritz by Terrence McNally had started at the Yale Rep with the title The Tubs . On the way to Broadway, the play not only changed its name (to avoid confusion with Douglas’s play), but also changed the sexual desires of its main character. In New Haven, the play concerned a married sanitation engineer from Ohio who has come to the baths to have a gay affair. In New York, the play concerned a married sanitation engineer from Ohio who has come to the baths unwittingly, and the greatest source of comedy is this straight man’s confusion and embarrassment when faced with the gay goings-on of the kooky patrons. In a stage direction regarding the “men endlessly prowling the corridors” of the bathhouse as though they are “on a treadmill,” McNally indicates that “Even though they never speak, these various patrons must become specific.” [73] But the playwright does not bother to make them specific, and they function as little more than part of the scenery for a comedy about straight people. Reconstructed to cater to non-gay audiences, The Ritz ran for 400 performances and won a Tony Award for Rita Moreno. Interestingly, Larry Gilman, who had first played Brian the attendant in the off-Broadway production of Tubstrip , was hired as a replacement in the role of an attendant in The Ritz , and Culver, performing as Casey Donovan, starred opposite Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn in a short-lived 1983 revival. After making the bisexual porn film Both Ways , Jerry Douglas spent the next chapter of his career working as a writer and editor in pornographic publishing. He returned to pornographic cinema in 1989 and steadily produced a series of popular and highly regarded films—including More of a Man (1991), Flesh & Blood (1996), Dream Team (1998), and Buckleroos (2004)—that won numerous industry awards for best picture, best screenplay, and best direction. The sexual exuberance and romantic longing that inform Tubstrip are evident in many of Douglas’s films, which have maintained their popularity in a way that his theatrical works have not. In the midst of gay liberation and looking ahead to the future, the actor John Bruce Deaven, who played Dusty and served as Equity Deputy, kept a record of Tubstrip ’s production history. He completed the document in 1975 with a fantasy—clearly inspired by the Sondheim musical Follies (1971)—that on 4 July 2001: Tubstrip casts from all the years (thousands) reunite at broken down Mayfair Theater in New York prior to the day it is torn down. All wear “year” they were in Tubstrip and what part! [74] This “reunion,” of course, never occurred, and many of the men involved in Tubstrip did not live to see 2001. Although largely forgotten, plays like Geese , And Puppy Dog Tails , and Tubstrip are significant for their role in opening the theatre as a venue for the expression of gay romantic and sexual desire. What was once condemned as “homosexploitation” has persisted in one form or another for over 40 years, often at the intersection of legitimate theatre and pornography, from staples of the “purple circuit” like Robert Patrick’s T-Shirts (1979), with porn star Jack Wrangler in the original production, and the erotic plays of Cal Yeomans and Robert Chesley; through a resurgence in the mid-1990s with works like David Dillon’s ensemble comedy Party (1995), Ronnie Larsen’s Making Porn (1996), and Robert Coles’s Cute Boys in their Underpants… series; to the long-running musical revue Naked Boys Singing (1999), the meta-pornography of Thomas Bradshaw’s Intimacy (2014), and the ménage à trois soap opera Afterglow (2017). By engaging in cultural battles with the theatrical establishment and critical gate-keepers, the erotic theatre of the gay liberation era also helped to create a cultural landscape where later Broadway plays as esteemed as Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1982), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993), Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), and Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out (2002), all featuring nudity and/or depictions of gay sex, could be seen as legitimate. Gay sexuality in the 21 st century is quite different than it was in the era of sexual liberation. The AIDS crisis, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and the use of apps like Grindr as a tool for meeting sexual partners have radically changed the ways that queer men experience their sexuality. The internet has facilitated renewed interest in “vintage” porn from the era of gay liberation, with films of 1970s restored, rereleased, and posted by aficionados on video sharing websites. These “classics,” along with contemporary documentaries about Gay Sex in the 70s and porn stars like Jack Wrangler and Peter Berlin, offer the viewer a nostalgic fantasy of an era of gay sexual abandon. It’s more difficult for “vintage” plays to maintain a place in the culture, particularly when critical disdain caused them to go unpublished. Yet revisiting erotic plays of the gay liberation era can do more than offer the pleasures of nostalgia. They illuminate how our experiences and fantasies of sex and romance are constructed by our changing social realities, allowing us to reflect more clearly on how we experience desire in our current moment—and to imagine ways in which we might experience it in the future. Acknowledgements: This scholarship would not have been possible without the generous friendship and well-preserved personal archive of Jerry Douglas. I’m indebted to David Román and Michael C. Oliveira at the University of Southern California, and grateful for the insights and contributions of Kevin Lustik, Stan Richardson, Richard Sacks, Paula Shaw, David Zellnik, and the peer reviewers and editors of JADT . References [1] Other plays in this subgenre, containing nudity and depicting gay relationships, often structured as romances and informed by the ethos of gay liberation, include: War Games (1969) by Neal Weaver, Foreplay (1970) by Robert Lane, Score (1970) by Jerry Douglas, Georgie Porgie (1968/1971) by George Birimisa, Minus One (1971) by Lawrence Parke, Brussels Sprouts (1972) by Larry Kardish, Mercy Drop (1973) by Robert Patrick, and Stand by Your Beds, Boys (1974) by John Allison and Ray Scantlin. Beginning in 1969 in Los Angeles, the SPREE (Society of Pat Rocco Enlightened Enthusiasts) Theatre Company staged performances of original gay plays, often comedies containing nudity, with titles like The Casting Couch and The Love Thief. While not necessarily featuring romantic relationships or liberationist ideologies, Sal Mineo’s 1969 revival of Fortune and Men’s Eyes by John Herbert and Jerry Douglas’s 1970 staging of Circle in the Water by Gerry Raad also featured nudity and homosexuality. [2] Whitney Strub, “Hey Look Me Over: The Films of Pat Rocco,” UCLA Film and Television Archive, https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/collections/inthelife/history/hey-look-me-over-films-pat-rocco . Accessed 8 September 2017. [3] Whitney Strub, “From Porno Chic to Porno Bleak: Representing the Urban Crisis in 1970s American Pornography,” Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 40. [4] Elizabeth Wollman, Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2. [5] Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 269-273. [6] Jennifer C. Nash, “Desiring Desiree,” Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s, eds. Carolyn Bronstein and Whitney Strub (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 86. Among the most famous (heterosexual) films associated with porno chic are Deep Throat (1972) and Behind the Green Door (1972). [7] Along with Poole and Douglas, another theatre artist who created gay porn in the early liberation era is counter-culture playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie, who wrote and directed the hardcore film American Cream (1972) under the name Rob Simple. [8] Richard Dyer, “Gay Male Porn: Coming To Terms,” Jump Cut 30 (March 1985), 27-29. [9] The term echoes the more prevalent phenomenon of “blaxploitation,” which functioned under a very different set of circumstances in regard to class, gender, cultural power, and, obviously, race. But both terms point to the concurrent burgeoning of previously underrepresented or disempowered voices in American culture. For more on instances of crossover between these cultural trends, see Joe Wlodarz, “Beyond the Black Macho: Queer Blaxploitation,” The Velvet Light Trap 53 (Spring 2004), 10-25. [10] Don Shewey, “Theatre: Gays in the Marketplace vs. Gays for Themselves,” in Lavender Culture, Revised Edition, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 236. [11] Shewey, 243. Shewey mentions these three erotic plays in the same context as Jonathan Ned Katz’s activist documentary play Coming Out (1972), as coming from and speaking to the gay community. [12] Personal interview with Jerry Douglas, 23 January 2017. All subsequent references to Douglas’s memories or assessments of the past come from this interview. [13] Richard Hummler, “Off Broadway Reviews,” Variety, 29 January 1969, 75. [14] My description of the play is based on contemporaneous reviews and articles, since an exhaustive search has yet to turn up a copy of the script. [15] “Off-B’way Geese Plugs Nudity, Frank Queerism,” Variety, 22 January 1969, 57. [16] Hummler. [17] “Sex Downtown: An Off-Broadway Review,” Screw, 7 March 1969, n.p. [18] William Glover, “Review,” AP Service, 12 January 1969, clipping. [19] John Simon, “Theatre Chronicle,” Hudson Review, Spring 1969, 102. [20] Wollman, 14. Wollman also notes the “relative tameness” with which adult musicals depicted gay sexuality compared to straight sexuality (52). The “straight plays” of gay erotic theatre were much bolder. [21] Dan Halleck, Geese Theatre Program, Players Theatre (New York, 1969), 2. [22] “Won’t Depict A Nude Homo, Actor Quits,” Variety, 25 November 1970, 1. Robert Jundelin’s departure caused a delay in the Broadway opening of the production, which received mixed-to-negative reviews and closed after 38 performances. [23] Richard Hummler, “NY Legit Going Sex-Happy: Off-B’way Porny May Reach B’way” Variety, 21 May 1969, 1, 70; Charlotte Harmon, “Nudity Sells Tix?: Bare Facts Still Not Totally Clear,” Backstage, 7 February 1969, 28. [24] John Elsom, Erotic Theatre (New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1974), 2. [25] David Gaard, And Puppy Dog Tails, manuscript, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. [26] Walter Kerr, “For Homos and Heteros Alike, A Swindle,” New York Times, 26 October 1969, D3. [27] Daphne Kraft, “Off-Broadway: Puppy Dog Tails,” Newark Evening News, 20 October 1969, 16. [28] George Oppenheimer, “And Puppy Dog Tails, Or How to Make Boys,” Newsday, 20 October 1969, n.p. [29] Richard Hummler, “Off-Broadway Reviews: And Puppy Dog Tails,” Variety, 29 October 1969, 70. [30] Clive Barnes, “Theater: And Puppy Dog Tails Opens,” New York Times, 20 October 1969, 60. [31] It’s important to note that male playwrights, directors, and producers created the lesbian eroticism seen in both Geese and Score. Women generally have had less cultural power than men, so the history of lesbian eroticism created by lesbians in the theatre had a very different path, which was also informed by arguments in feminism throughout the 1970s and 1980s over sexual representation, with different camps described as “anti-pornography” and “pro-sex.” Lesbian theatre scholars like Jill Dolan, Sue-Ellen Case, and Kate Davy have celebrated the eroticism in the groundbreaking plays of Split Britches and Holly Hughes at the WOW Café in the 1980s, as well as the plays of the Five Lesbian Brothers produced off-Broadway in the 1990s. More recently, lesbian eroticism has been seen on Broadway in productions of Paula Vogel’s Indecent and the musical Fun Home, adapted for the stage by Lisa Kron from Alison Bechdel’s memoir. See Jill Dolan, “The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Pornography and Performance,” Theatre Journal 39:2 (May 1987), 156-174; Sue-Ellen Case, Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance (New York: Routledge, 1996); Kate Davy, Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Café Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). [32] Dick Bruckenfeld, “Review,” Village Voice, 5 November 1970, 49. [33] Score was more successful in Radley Metzger’s 1974 film version, for which Douglas wrote the screenplay. The film, featuring Casey Donovan, was financially successful, leading the producers to take a full-page ad in Variety announcing “Score Scores at the Box Office,” 28 August 1974, 23. [34] Jeffrey Escoffier, “Sex in the Seventies: Gay Porn Cinema as an Archive for the History of American Sexuality,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26.1 (January 2017), 91-92. [35] Leo Bersani, however, does not. He describes the gay bathhouse as “one of the most ruthlessly ranked, hierarchized, and competitive environments imaginable.” Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (Winter 1987), 206. [36] Gay Sex in the ’70s, directed by Joseph Lovett, Lovett Productions/Frameline, 2005. [37] Citations refer to the manuscript available in the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive at the University of Southern California, currently the only accessible version of the play. However, the archived version is an early draft, not reflecting changes made over the course of rehearsing and performing the play, which appear in the final version in Jerry Douglas’s possession. While all textual citations are for the archived earlier version, this essay will also reference plot details that exist only in the final version of the script. [38] Kevin Winkler, “The Divine Mr. K.: Reclaiming My ‘Unruly’ Past with Bette Midler and the Baths,” Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater, ed. Robin Bernstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 69. [39] Although Douglas’s play expresses a very different perspective on gay identity and sexuality, he remembers finding Crowley’s play “brilliant” when we saw the original production. For a production history of the play and analysis of its complicated cultural impact, see James Wilson, “‘Who Does She Hope to Be?’: Celluloid Ghosts, Queer Utopias, and The Boys on Stage,” Matt Bell, ed., The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016). [40] J. Todd Ormsbee, “The Tragedy and Hope of Love Between Gay Men: The Boys in the Band and the Emotionality of Gay Love in the 1960s and 70s,” The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics, ed. Matt Bell (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 282. [41] Lyn Rosen, “Forum on Sadomasochism,” Lavender Culture, Revised Edition, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 88. [42] Sadly, on 25 May 1977, the Everard Baths was destroyed in a fire that killed nine people. Laurie Johnston, “9 Killed in Bath Fire Identified by Friends,” New York Times, 27 May 1977, 17. [43] For more on the “object-ification” of the Cowboy, see Matthew Tinkcom, “‘A Credit to the Homosexual’: The Boys in the Band and the Appearances of Queer Debt,” The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics, ed. Matt Bell (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 261-263. [44] Dusty was initially played by Dean Tait, a professional body builder who was also in Circle in the Water. Tait was featured in beefcake photo spreads promoting Tubstrip, and he would later appear in Jerry Douglas’s film Both Ways (1975) and the popular erotic musical revue Let My People Come on Broadway in 1976. [45] The production used a live cat on stage. Douglas recalls that when the production toured, “In every city we went to we got a different one, a baby kitten, and left the old cat behind.” [46] “New Plays: The Boys in the Band,” Time, 26 April 1968, 97. [47] The collapse occurred on 3 August 1973, at 5:10pm, when the play was not in performance, and most people were able to evacuate the building, used primarily as a welfare hotel, before it fell. Because the performance complex was on the east side of the structure, the theatres were not severely damaged, and the production’s cast and crew, after obtaining a court order, were allowed to rescue the set and props from the space. Newspapers reported the deaths of four people and the injury of a dozen more in the collapse. Murray Schumach, “Broadway Central Hotel Collapses,” New York Times, 4 August 1973, 1; Fred Ferretti, “Two More Bodies Found in Rubble,” New York Times, 11 August 1973, 23. [48] Lee Barton, “Tubstrip’s a Grand Hotel with Steam,” The Advocate, 20 June 1973, n.p. [49] Donald Vining, A Gay Diary: Volume Four, 1967-1975 (New York: The Pepys Press, 1983), 324-325. [50] Vito Russo, “Tubshit: A Parade of Tight Asses,” Gay, 18 June 1973, 14. [51] Chuck Thurston, “Staid Hotel Preparing For Gay Play,” Detroit Free Press, 24 March 1974, 8-D. [52] Lawrence DeVine, “Tubstrip: A Play for Posterity?” Detroit Free Press, 28 March 1974, 9-C. [53] Louise Lague, “It’s a Steam Bath, and the Gays Have It,” Washington Star-News, 5 February 1974, C-3. [54] Lou Robinson, “Review: Tubstrip [Transcript]” WRC-TV 4 (NBC), n.d. [55] Teddy Vaughn, Memo Magazine [typed advance copy, no title/date], collection of Jerry Douglas. [56] William B. Collins, “Tubstrip Made For Gay Audience,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 February 1974, 15. [57] Lague. [58] Vaughn. [59] Richard Christiansen “Tubstrip is Soggy,” Chicago Daily News, 10 April 1974, n.p. [60] David McCaughna, “Tubstrip Cashes in on Gay Mannerisms,” Toronto Citizen, 15-28 March 1974, 13. [61] Gregory Glover, “Tubstrip Sequel to Boys in the Band,” Toronto Sun, 8 March 1974, 24. [62] Jeanne Miller, “Gay Theatre that Draws Straight Voyeurs,” San Francisco Examiner, 16 August 1974, 29. [63] “Rub a Dub Dub, All Men in a Tubstrip,” UCLA Summer Bruin, 5 July 1974, 7. [64] Anitra Earle, “No Suicides in This Homosexual Play: The Porno Film Star of Tubstrip,” San Francisco Chronicle, 20 August 1974, 43. [65] Pola Del Vecchio, “Stepping Out,” Kalendar, 30 August 1974, 5. [66] Donald McLean, “Meet Calvin Culver,” Bay Area Reporter 4:17, n.p. Clipping, Jerry Douglas personal collection. [67] The goal of this contract, offered by the League of Broadway Theaters, was to bring plays from off-Broadway to Broadway, allowing lower production costs but also restricting capacity to 300-800 seats—not the full Broadway house. Industry commentators seem to have made no distinction over this contract, with both Variety and Otis Guernsey categorizing Tubstrip as a Broadway play. See Stewart W. Little, “The Lively Arts: Upward Mobility in the Theatre,” New York Magazine, 11 May 1970, 47. [68] Madd. “Review: Tubstrip,” Variety, 6 November 1974, 62. [69] William Glover, “Theater,” Associated Press, 1 November 1974, clipping, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. [70] Debbi Wasserman, “Review: Tubstrip,” Show Business, 7 November 1974, 6. [71] Most sources (including Theatre World, Otis Guernsey’s Best Plays of 1974-1975, the Internet Broadway Database, and the Playbill Vault) incorrectly state that the play ran between 22 and 25 performances, listing October 29 as the date of the first preview. However, advertisements and “Theater Directory” listings in the New York Times show that Tubstrip had its first preview on October 18, opened on October 31, and closed on November 17. The timeline created by the actor John Bruce Deaven (who also served as Equity Deputy for the production) corroborates these dates. [72] In 1975, Ken Gaston produced and took credit for writing the script of Hustlers, another play by “A. J. Kronengold,” which performed in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. Jerry Douglas had nothing to do with this production. David Richards, “The Producer, And Playwright, Is Hustling, Too,” Washington Star-News, 22 January 1975, C1/C3. [73] Terrence McNally, The Ritz and Other Plays (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1976), 6. [74] John Bruce Deaven, "History of Tubstrip," unpublished personal document, 1975, collection of Jerry Douglas. Footnotes About The Author(s) Jordan Schildcrout is Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance at Purchase College, SUNY. He is the author of Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater (University of Michigan Press), “Drama and the New Sexualities”(Oxford Handbook of American Drama), and “Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s boom” (JADT). His article “Envisioning Queer Liberation: The Performance of Communal Visibility in Doric Wilson’s Street Theater” will appear in Modern Drama (Spring 2018). 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.

Derek Munson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Derek Munson By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre is the first book-length study to chronicle Ellen Stewart’s exceptional contributions to twentieth and twenty-first century theatre. Written by expert in U.S. theatre Cindy Rosenthal, the book is ambitious in scope and stays true to the idiosyncratic tenets of avant-garde theatre that made Ellen Stewart famous. Rosenthal began research for the project in 2006 when TDR commissioned her to write a comprehensive article about La MaMa. Until this point, Ellen Stewart had been fiercely guarded about her privacy and determined that no book would be written about her or La MaMa. However, Rosenthal’s article pleased Stewart, so she agreed to a manuscript with the caveat that Rosenthal approach the book through the lens of La MaMa’s vast poster collection and through the words of the artists who had passed through La MaMa’s doors since its inception in 1961. The result is a historical narrative of colorful anecdotes, archival photographs, and rare posters that examine La MaMa’s longevity as the foremost Off-Off-Broadway venue. Ellen Stewart Presents is primarily an archival and ethnographic study that is organized into five chronological chapters beginning with the 1960s and ending in 2011, shortly after Stewart’s death at the age of ninety-one. Over the course of a decade, Rosenthal interviewed numerous artists and spent countless hours engaged with La MaMa’s vast collection of show business ephemera. Rosenthal tells the story of La MaMa’s early years, when the theatre was tucked away in a little basement in the East Village. She tells the story of playwrights like Lanford Wilson and Harvey Fierstein who began their careers at La MaMa and went on to achieve commercial success while other artists like Split Britches and Yara Arts Group remained committed to their downtown roots. She tells the story of the birth of the Off-Off-Broadway movement, which was instrumental in the development of avant-garde theatre in the United States. And she tells the story of print posters and how the medium arose, particularly in relation to La MaMa. But where Rosenthal excels is in the telling of the stories about Stewart’s theatre “babies,” artists who were nurtured with love and affection and enjoyed Stewart’s hands-off approach to producing (9). One such person is “Multidisciplinary artist, composer, filmmaker, and choreographer Meredith Monk” who, in 1976, created what John Killacky claims is “one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century,” the opera Quarry (67). A meditation on World War II, Quarry is characteristic of the avant-garde movement with its innovative narrative and “audience-as-set” convention. After a successful limited engagement, the opera was scheduled again a few months later, but La MaMa’s doors were closed for yet another building code violation (Stewart’s troubles with the city are chronicled in Hillary Miller’s Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York). Monk fondly remembers being with Stewart after La MaMa was shuttered, asking “What producer would be sitting there, crying with you?” (67) Quarry eventually moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and won an Obie Award, and Monk later brought the opera back to La MaMa in 1986. Ellen Stewart Presents features two of the posters from the original production of Quarry designed by Monk and Monica Moseley. Monk recalls that Stewart gave La MaMa artists complete freedom with poster designs, and she appreciates why Stewart finally approved a book about her life’s work: “Posters do it better than photographs. It’s hard to show in one photo what a play is about because a photograph capture[s]… a specific moment in time… a visual artist can distill one powerful image in a poster that can represent a production—and that is why she wanted to tell the story that way” (19). Indeed, Rosenthal selected more than one hundred posters from La MaMa’s archive of approximately twenty-five hundred posters (many now available online) to create a work that is as much a visual journey as it is an oral history. Ellen Stewart Presents functions on multiple historical levels—perhaps too many for a single volume—with glowing reviews and few critical detractors. Rosenthal celebrates Ellen Stewart as a force of nature who was instrumental in shaping the course of the American stage. Perhaps Stewart’s greatest legacy is the freedom she gave to theatre artists from all over the world, the freedom to innovate and explore with less constraint than commercial theatre. Today, under the new artistic leadership of Mia Yoo, La MaMa is a thriving international arts institution that includes the Umbria International workshop that gathers each summer outside of Spoleto, Italy. With so much more to tell about its subject, Ellen Stewart Presents opens the door to further scholarship about one of the most important theatre visionaries of the twentieth century. Meredith Monk remembers that if Stewart liked an idea and said, “do it,” the artist had found a new home: “Ellen was totally about love… And that’s La MaMa” (71-72). Derek Munson University of Missouri The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 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 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.

Joanna Mansbridge Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Kitchen Sink Realisms Joanna Mansbridge By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. In 1996, John Guare summed up the aesthetic battle in American theatre as “the war against the kitchen sink.” Although the phrase “kitchen sink drama,” in a British theatrical context, signifies a postwar turn toward gritty social realism, in American theatre, this same phrase carries with it vaguely derogatory connotations. The dominance of realism and the thematic emphasis on family in American drama has been pointed out often and emphatically. And while feminist scholars have ably deconstructed realism for its associations with a masculinist representational system, what has been consistently overlooked is the very labor signified by the kitchen sink. As Dorothy Chansky brilliantly demonstrates in Kitchen Sink Realisms, that infamous sink and the domestic labor for which it acts as a metonym have been used as theatrical material throughout the twentieth century, and its continued relevance – as both dramatic theme and stage action – suggests its enduring importance as a topic of social debate. Moreover, realism, Chansky reminds us, is itself a variable and varied form (hence the realisms in her title), shaped by (and shaping) specific socio-economic pressures. Chansky’s impeccably researched and engagingly written study examines theatrical representations of domestic work in twentieth century American drama, contributing an invaluable perspective to sociological questions surrounding feminized labor and theatrical debates regarding realism. Chansky is broadly concerned with reevaluating how the modern American theatre has negotiated the enduring question: Who is responsible for cleaning, cooking, and running the home? This question was posed differently in the 1920 than it was in the 1980s. However, Chansky underlines the structural issue that makes this a particularly persistent debate: “While the representations changed [...] the central issue has not: American society offers no practical and affordable way for most adults to combine gainful employment with child rearing and housekeeping” (60). Indeed. Chansky states her goal thusly: “My project here is to examine the multiple ways in which a too-often belittled but perennially popular realm of American theatre can be fruitfully and seriously reassessed” (77). Organized chronologically into seven chapters and an Introduction, the book covers the timespan between 1918 and 2005, the end of World War I and the dawn of the digital era. While the study overall has a chronological structure, Chansky productively complements that linearity by linking the plays thematically as well. Each chapter provides incisive close readings, as well as thick descriptions of the surrounding conditions of production and reception, incorporating relevant and often fascinating historical materials that give the plays a vivid context. Bringing some plays out of obscurity, Chansky points to their popularity in the original context, and their significance as forums for public debates around “woman’s work.” These debates were especially lively, not surprisingly, during periods when women were either gaining employment in greater numbers or marrying in fewer (such as the 1920s and 30s and the 1980s). As Chansky points out, “Domestic labor had not always been portrayed in American drama as a potential trap. Nor had it been something to avoid onstage and hand off to invisible help” (80). Domestic labor, in fact, was staged as pure spectacle in James A. Herne’s hit of 1893, Shore Acres, in which a full act was “devoted to the preparation and consuming of an anniversary dinner” (80). Chansky’s focus on food, cleaning, and domestic labor sheds new light on changing gender roles over the past century, as well as on issues relating to social class, immigration, ethnic identity, and assimilation in the US. In Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cooke’s Tickless Time (1918), for example, Annie, a first generation Irish servant (played in the original production by Edna St. Vincent Millay), accommodates the WASP couple she works for by adapting “ethnic” meals, like spaghetti, for a “modern” middle-class American palette (94). Incorporating data about the number and national origin of immigrant servants in this period adds a rich sociological understanding of this and other plays. Chansky astutely situates references to food and the people who prepare it, instructing contemporary readers about the meaning of these references to early twentieth century audiences. The author also sharpens how we might think about these audiences in the early years of legitimate American theatre. She writes, “theatregoers who read criticism by critics understanding themselves as specialists became, in turn, a cohort who saw theatregoing and drama as salutary and important, even when scripts or genres might suggest otherwise” (84-85). While each chapter offers crucial insights and intelligent reinterpretations, it is the last two chapters, “Prisoners of Total Blame, 1963-1990” and “The Clean House, or Change” that make this study seem especially urgent. The penultimate chapter covers feminism’s second wave and its aftermath in the Reagan era, when debates around family values and women’s new role in the public sphere were hotly contested. Adding to ongoing discussions of canonical plays such as Sam Shepard’s True West (1980) and Marsha Norman’s ‘night Mother (1984), Chansky reframes them from the standpoint of the domestic spaces and laborers depicted in these plays. Pointing out that critics often ignore or are baffled by the Mom character in True West, who enters after the brothers’ climatic fight (and into the decimated kitchen that results), unaffected by the disaster she comes home to find, Chansky succinctly summarizes her appearance on the scene: “While the brothers remain deadlocked in a stranglehold as the lights go down, Mom has shown that she is able to leave, come back, and leave again, as if in some kind of existentially realist fort da maneuver” (455). Sharp (re)readings such as these abound in Kitchen Sink Realisms. The final chapter outlines five post-Nannygate cultural phenomena that shaped American cultural attitudes toward domestic life and plays that dealt with it: the economic prosperity of the Clinton years; the rise in immigrants from Asia and Latin America; a decline in the two-parent family; a “no-turning-back presence of women of all classes in the workforces”; and lastly, a consumerism retooled “as a form of self-improvement or activism” (486-87). From within this context, Chansky looks at three works produced in 2003: Joan Holden’s Nickel and Dimed, a Brechtian play inspired by journalist Barbara Ehrenreich’s exposé of working class poverty; Lisa Loomer’s Living Out, which looks at the relationship between a privileged yuppie mother and her Latina nanny; and Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s through-composed musical set in 1963, Caroline, or Change (2003), which Chansky pithily describes as a work that “portrays tension within a maid/mistress household, the difference between the households of the two, and how historic distance can deflect assessment of present-day problems” (504). Chansky concludes her study with Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House (2005), a play focusing on the relationship between an upper-class white woman and her Brazilian maid, Ana, who is depressed and refuses to clean. This perceptive comedy brings kitchen sink realisms, as a genre, into an age of globalization. While the second-wave feminist struggle for the right to participate equally in the public sphere has largely been achieved, this seismic shift has resulted in a need for imported domestic care. What was once a local division of labor among the predominately white middle classes has now become global division of labor between a developed world in need of domestic laborers and developing world in need of better economic opportunities and living conditions. So just what does a kitchen sink signify onstage? How does it communicate gender, class, ethnicity, and Americanness? And how do these codes of social identity relate to broader public debates around the value of domestic work, the changing demands of the marketplace, and the erosion of “the good life”? The answers to these questions vary vastly, it turns out, depending on the historical context. Whereas in the early twentieth century, a clean kitchen with a live-in servant cooking the meals signified middle class-ness, in the late twentieth century, it might suggest a global division of feminized labor. Chansky’s nuanced, rigorously contextualized readings of both canonical and non-canonical plays provide a rich resource not only for theatre scholars, but also for Americanists interested in adding to their understanding of the social texture of the twentieth century. This immensely satisfying study will be of great value to those working in theatre history, feminist theory and theatre, and American studies, and is equally suitable for upper class undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars. Impressive in both its historical scope and interpretive depth, Kitchen Sink Realisms is an important contribution to scholarship in American drama. Joanna Mansbridge Bilkent University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle Affective Performance and Cognitive Science Kitchen Sink Realisms Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience Everything Plus the Kitchen Sink Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Milton Loayza Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Milton Loayza By Published on May 14, 2017 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. In 1980, Ricardo Monti’s play Marrathon premieres in Buenos Aires.[1] In this play, the Argentine playwright presents the self-destructive specter of fascism as the effect of ideologies with a long historical trajectory. In 2000, Dutch scientist Paul J. Crutzen proposes the use of the term Anthropocene to emphasize the destructive effects that human action is having on the earth’s geology and ecology.[2] These two events share a need to come to terms with deep-seated delusions about the benignant course of history—the ingrained collective belief that modern history has set us onto a path towards a universal progress. Paradoxically, the Anthropocene does not negate history but appears to propose a new universality that is more inclusive, in this case, of earth processes and life as objects, if not subjects of history. This new universality presents a dramaturgical problem, of having to retell history by incorporating the new actors and giving a language to relationships that have been hitherto ignored, like the relationship between industry and climate, between development and indigenous culture. The play Marrathon shares a similar paradox when having to retell a national story of socio-political impasse from the point of view of a longstanding dependence of peripheral modernity to the ideologies of the center. The play has a single main action, which is an ongoing dance marathon event set in a 1932 dance hall, during the so-called “infamous decade” of the 1930s under Uriburu’s ultranationalist dictatorship. The dramaturgical problem of a new universality is solved in this play with the suggestion of an action of long duration (the marathon) and the placement of the dancers as being on the same boat: they all compete for the same “unknown price” regardless of their social standing. This basic structure is relevant to what we imagine the Anthropocene to be: an epoch that puts all of humankind in the same long-standing block of planetary history. Marrathon has in fact a complex dramaturgy that is tantamount to an anthropo(s)cenography that also reveals some of the Anthropocene’s ethical and political challenges. Climate change scientists have proposed the concept of the Anthropocene to define an epoch of marked geological impact by humans on the earth, on non-human life, and on humans themselves. The concept is generally understood to push for a paradigmatic shift away from our understanding of history as homocentric. The Anthropocene is a geo-political event (the “geo” has here an added connotation) because it is a new condition for the earth as well as for human beings. Boneuil and Fressoz write in The Shock of the Anthropocene: “[If] the climatic stability of the last 10,000 years of the Holocene made possible the rise of cultures and civilizations on five continents, the end of this epoch and the entry into a new one will not be a smooth and steady process for human societies. Global warming means that people will die and countries disappear. The food situation already faces an uncertain future: the climate change of the last few decades has caused a shortfall of 4 to 5 per cent in world wheat and maize production in relation to 1980.”[3] The apocalyptic tone of this statement cannot be dismissed, for it reinforces the fact that we are facing a reality for which our current forms of historical consciousness and behavior are not prepared. This reality demands a reassessment of our relationship with, and conception of nature; it challenges our ingrained acceptance of the myth of progress, and of a neo-liberal global order; and it complicates our struggles for justice. The concept of the Anthropocene responds to this crisis of history by proposing an incorporation of ecological and heterogeneous temporal and spatial frames that would correct a homocentric perspective. If the Holocene is the geological epoch that precedes the Anthropocene, this last one reimagines recent history as the beginning of a new geological epoch. Framing the Anthropocene as a re-imagination of history allows me to segue into the critical narratives that contest Eurocentric histories of modernity. Historical re-imaginations of coloniality, capitalism and globalization, for example, already tell stories of violence against nature, both human and non-human, even if not recognizing the “terminal” nature of such assaults. Some current theorizations of the Anthropocene build on the study of coloniality and the critique of capitalism. Jason Moore, for instance, prefers the name “Capitalocene” and has it started in the long Sixteenth century. This periodization allows him to trace the process of capitalism’s environment-making “which has served to liberate, then fetter, then restructure and renew capital accumulation.”[4] A Latin American work like Marrathon can enlighten us about the Anthropocene through its representation of environment-making from the point of view of colonialism, imperialism and dictatorship. Marrathon was the second play (the first being Visit, in 1977) by Monti, presented during the years of military repression, or the so-called “Process of National Reorganization” (1976-1983). As Graham-Jones remarks, in 1980, “after four years of dictatorship, the Argentine people were exhibiting signs of a collective anguish, and [Marrathon] tapped into both this ongoing suffering under repression and a growing critical awareness regarding what have been called the guiding fictions that had led the country to such end.”[5] Marrathon begins with the Emcee introducing the spectacle of a marathon dance, which is already taking place, perhaps for days, to the attending or arriving spectators. On the stage, doubling as the dance-floor, dancing couples are participating for a yet unknown prize, under the watchful eye of a bouncer. The dancers are described as exhausted and desperate characters whose blind faith keeps them on the dance floor. Homer the poet is with his “muse” Helen, while Vespucci the immigrant bricklayer and Hector the unemployed office worker are with their wives Asuncion and Emma. A younger couple comprised of Tom Mix and Anna D participates with assumed names, and Charity the prostitute is with Mr. X the bankrupt industrialist. The Emcee addresses the dancers as he makes them follow the strict rules of the marathon, and takes every opportunity to ironically harass them while interviewing them. The characters are shown as failures and the contest seems to enhance our view of them as a pathetic spectacle. This grotesque collective is presented as the expression of stubborn faith in modern ideologies. Some scenes show the dancers in a sleep state, having visions or nightmares. Bodily signs of illness and exhaustion are shown as effects of lengthy exertion and/ or refer to a historical character. The exertion and exhaustion of bodies are a condition for the revelation of myths. These are expressed by some characters in some of the scenes in a half-sleep or dream state. The myths, numbered from 1 to 5 are, according to Monti, those of the Conquest, of Independence, of pastoral America, of industrial progress, and of fascism, all represented in a chronological order.[6] The myth of fascism, near the end of the play, signifies the brutal execution of a “history […] written by the rulers.”[7] It is as if arriving at the conclusion were also a repetition of history advancing on its own momentum. Therefore the spectacle of Marrathon is made to continue after the myth of fascism towards an uncertain future, as we hear the Emcee’s words: “if it weren’t so ridiculous, it would be a tragedy.”[8] Fascism is shown in the play as the dark side of politics, usually put outside of the repertory of historical dreams. After the enactment of fascism the dancers become increasingly restless: the poet Homer dies, Tom Mix decides to leave the contest, Vespucci attempts suicide and the Bouncer tries to kill the Emcee. In spite of this crisis of continuity, the marathon continues beyond the terminal point of fascism, as if insisting on the fact that history continues but the very impulse of history needs to be reassessed. The recurrence of authoritarianism in Argentine politics gave intellectuals a sense that the very logic and continuity of history was flawed, and that modern myths were inherently destructive. Monti’s 1980 play represents this realization and therefore begins with full blown fascism expressed in the metaphor of a coercive marathon dance —and proceeds with a look at the retroactive “fascisms” of previous modern politics. This consciousness of history as beginning with the end is also characteristic of the Anthropocene and its dramaturgy. The threat of imminent destruction gives an existential trait to the Anthropocene, forcing a reassessment of the ethical foundations of our society. A consciousness of the Anthropocene begins with an ethics because it repudiates the current foundations of politics. Such an ethical stance characterizes for example Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for an epochal consciousness. Chakrabarty frames this issue, of what I consider a re-imagination of history, “around a split between the homo, humanity as a divided political subject, and the anthropos, collective and unintended forms of existence of the human, as a geological force, as a species, as a part of the history of life on this planet.”[9] Epochal consciousness begins now, when the Anthropocene has reached its “homofascistic” moment with the imminent threats caused by climate change, and the power of climate change deniers. Chakrabarty, for instance, implies that the tension between homo and anthropos is an ethical tension that is new to political discourse and may not have a resolution for a while. Quoting from the philosopher Edward Jasper, he suggests that epochal consciousness “takes stamina” and “calls for endurance in the tensions of insolubility.”[10] Like Monti’s Marrathon, Chakrabarty acknowledges that the momentum of the epoch is too strong for us to be able to change its course in any drastic and short-term way. Consider, for example, Crutzen’s reminder that “because of the anthropogenic emissions of CO2, climate may depart significantly from natural behaviour over the next 50,000 years.”[11] Stamina is needed to both survive and to find a political transition from the homo to the anthropos. Thus far I have established a similar relationship between dramaturgy and ethical concerns in the Anthropocene concept and in Marrathon. Another level of relationship occurs between the physical structure of the play’s performance and the Marxist critique of capitalism that it deploys. This structure comprises a site defined as continental, and characters treated as biological bodies ideologically compelled to consume their energy on this site. The grounding of ideology on a continent results in a specific critique that is in this case postcolonial. This critique produces a genealogy of capitalism beginning with the imaginary and then economic expansion of Europe into colonial land. On the other hand, the exertion of bodies invites our consideration of a practice of embodiment that seeks to make up for our alienated consciousness, which has lost touch with its relationship to the land, biological processes, and the planet’s life. This is a critical practice aligned with Moore’s project of moving his critique from “capitalism and nature to capitalism-in-nature” by placing “human bodies as sites of environmental history.”[12] Therefore, in Marrathon, momentum of ideology and critical embodiment form a physical structure that constitutes the play’s anthropo(s)cenography. I will look at this structure to elaborate on how Marrathon’s critique of modern myths prefigures and adds to our understanding of the Anthropocene and its ethico-political tensions. To describe Marrathon’s dramaturgy as anthropo(s)cenography is also an opportunity to improve on existing assessments of Monti’s play. Most approaches diminish the relationship between structure and content in the play.[13] The author’s use of metatheatrical elements is not merely part of an avant-garde aesthetic;[14] nor should the political aspects of Marrathon be obscured by an emphasis on absurdist and metaphysical elements.[15] There are no studies that see in the play the representation of a concrete lineage between colonialism, capitalism and a relation to nature. This critique may have escaped the reception of the play because of its fascistic setting and the historical context of performance. Nevertheless Monti was building at the time from an existing tradition of ambivalence about Argentina’s modern identity, represented by writers such as Domingo Sarmiento in the Nineteenth century and Ezequiel Martinez Estrada in the early Twentieth century, as well as critiques of capitalism and neocolonialism in the 1960s and 70s. The physical structure of the play provides Monti a platform to explore this history in terms of both ideological and concrete relation to the land. The staging of dancing bodies that are at the same time identified with the land allows Monti to retrace the origins and development of Argentina’s modernity and capitalism in a serial fetishization of nature, or “America,” through the already mentioned myths of progress. These fetishizations, I will argue, correspond to the [hidden] capitalist strategy identified by Moore, of making nature capable of delivering larger and larger quantities of unpaid work/ energy, or Cheap Nature.[16] Monti’s play does not take Cheap Nature as an initial hypothesis, but by reading the anthropo(s)cenography of the play we may reach such a conclusion and learn from Monti’s own perspective. In this respect I will focus on Monti’s critical strategy of establishing a structural tension between an ideological separation of humans from nature and the embodiment of nature by the character’s bodies. In order to discuss this “structure of tension” I will introduce the concept of tectonics. Tectonics is used in theorizations of architecture to refer to the relationship of a building’s structure and ornament to its physical and visual setting or surroundings. The architect Kenneth Frampton uses the term to advocate for an architecture that would resist “megalopolitan development,” which represents “the victory of universal civilization over locally inflected culture.”[17] Frampton’s “critical regionalism” is premised on an opposition between world civilization and world regional cultures. It therefore opposes the “technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness” by engaging in the act of “building the site” of regional culture.[18] Frampton argues that with such engagement it is possible for the history/culture of the region to become “inscribed into the form and realization of the work.”[19] Frampton’s tension between megapolitan and regional cultures mirrors in some way the tension between homo and anthropos while embodying it as a structural site. Tectonics can thus be applied to building a critical awareness of “homo” settlement on or disruptions of local/global “anthropos” and Holocene processes. For example, Frampton explains tectonics in terms of an architectural inscription with “many levels of significance, for it has a capacity to embody, in built form, the prehistory of the place, its archeological past and its subsequent cultivation and transformation across time.”[20] Tectonics offers the Anthropocene a physical model for sustaining the enduring question of nature as “the matrix within which human activity unfolds, and the field upon which historical agency operates.” [21] It can thus embody a concept of Humanity-in-nature (oikeios) “where nature matters to the whole of the historical process, not merely as its context, or its unsavory consequences.”[22] The site specificity of tectonic architecture is not rendered by place or location alone, but by structural and aesthetic elements inlayed in a location to give it memory and historical endurance. With this in mind I will look at the tectonics of Marrathon. The autonomy of Marrathon as built form is prefigured in the anomalous spelling of the play title (“Marathón” in the original Spanish). Monti purposely adds the letter “h” to the correct (Spanish) spelling of the word to signify a metaphoric tension between the physical marathon of performance and the mythical and historical dimensions that it embodies.[23] Another layer of autonomy is intended between the mythical/historical embodiment and the physical site—it is at this level that the action will be “physically” inlayed on the site. The point of maintaining the autonomy of structural/aesthetic elements is precisely to enhance our experience and cognition of a particular site. The site is constituted by the metatheatrical identity of the 1932 event in Buenos Aires and the moment of the performance in a theater in the same city in 1980. This last element was further confirmed with the premiere of the play in the facilities of Teatros de San Telmo, still in construction, which offered “a central dance floor made of concrete with steps on one side, a balcony wrapping around other steps, and a circular stage allowing multiple view points.”[24] The contemporaneity of the “metatheatrical” event was also implied by the inescapable parallel between the Argentine dictatorships of 1932 and 1980. The character of the Emcee contributes to this site specificity by addressing the other characters, or the imaginary spectators of 1932, and, the contemporary audience of the play. The existence of a site/event establishes a location of the built form but not yet its tectonics, which is constructed by the action of the play. In Marrathon the myths come to life through the utterances of the characters who play “themselves” in 1932, project their exhausted bodies in the present of performance, and channel their historical alter egos in their half dream state. In this process of enactment, the setting also becomes multiple while signaling a hemispheric American location. In Marrathon, then, the setting becomes a changing or unstable site that, like the bodies, is a material and living expression of the myths. The unstable and living relation of body to land is reflected in the multivalent names. For instance, temporal and spatial “fractures” are inscribed in the composite names of the characters-- Homer Starr, Helen García, Peter Vespucci, Tom Mix, etc-- names that identify the characters as historical and/or contemporary, as foreign and/or local. Vespucci, for example, is an Italian working-class immigrant who in the 1930s was consolidating his own American/Argentine identity. His contemporary “Americanization” has already been embodied hundreds of years ago by his namesake Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian cartographer and voyager who was a precursor to Columbus’s discovery and therefore to colonization. In Scene Four Peter Vespucci enacts the first myth, that of the Conquest. In his words we recognize the body of Vespucci, apparently sick with tuberculosis, as channeling the body of Pedro de Mendoza, the Spanish Conquistador who founded Buenos Aires and later died of syphilis in mid-ocean during his last voyage to the Americas. In the process, the setting has been transformed into a much vaster spatial and temporal site, a site to which the character’s long durational bodies also belong. In Monti’s play, tectonics is evident in the multilayered spatio-temporal event that maintains the autonomy of a built form in relation to the scenographic “1932 dance marathon.” A universalizing allegorical impulse is resisted in favor of metaphors that inlay the action more precisely in the “nature” and history of the American continent.[25] Through tectonics, the built form is also a place-form. Autonomy of form resists scenographic identifications in order to create a critical awareness of its grounding within the particular existence of the place or region. In Marrathon, for instance, the dancers are already onstage, having “beaten all records” in time when the Emcee greets the audience and introduces them. The play’s tectonics force the audience to interpret the very site they occupy and produce with their theatrical spectatorship. The critical awareness of the spectators is engaged by the insistence of the play in the act of embodiment. The current life of the myths is embodied in the dancing and the unknown prize, and the failure of the myths is embodied in the failure of the characters and their exhaustion. A similar effect was extended to the whole theatre, when the director planted mannequins throughout the auditorium as surrogate spectators who could embody the tectonics of the play by the mere fact of being “bodies” in the theater.[26] Theatrical constructions are analogous to metaphors since they rely on a semantic tension between “place” and spatial “form,” between “setting” and embodied “event.” Monti’s tectonics takes advantage of the semantic distance between 1932 and the time of the performance in order to produce its embodiment of history and myth within that gap. This means that the play maintains a positive correlation between the enigma of the metaphor and the “truth” expressed through theatrical embodiment. Paul Ricoeur would say that tectonics builds a “live metaphor,” in the sense of resisting its death in the simile or the allegory.[27] A reading of tectonics through metaphor will point more directly to what is being embodied in the play. In “Myth One,” Vespucci sets the Conquest in a narrative of failed return and failed payment. The character suggests himself as Pedro de Mendoza, who is dying of syphilis. His historical “marathon” ends in mid-sea where the land of “America” is the undelivered prize of his journey.[28] Vespucci’s destiny, within the myth, fractures the mapping of Conquest with a mid-ocean line dividing the myth between the idea of the American Promised Land and the European Christian fear of final judgment (when Anna D plays the whore of Babylon). The setting/event of the map is a live metaphor that continues to produce meaning as in the spectral relationship between the bricklayer Vespucci’s mortgaged house and the Promised Land that he expects (when embodying Pedro de Mendoza) will finally “rise up from the sea.”[29] Here we may read the metaphor as “my house/property is a Promised Land rising up from the sea.” In this instance the myth persists as a macroworld as well as a microworld.[30] In the enactment of the myth, Vespucci inlays his wish, to finally own a house, in the conquistador’s dream of reaching the colonial territory promised to him by the Spanish king. The last words of the enactment are telling in this respect: Vespucci/Pedro de Mendoza describes this land as “my abode, my land, my home.”[31] The composite dream can be mapped according to a double matrix, one spatial, looking towards the “Promised Land,” and the other temporal, depending on “future” payment of the mortgage. In the context of a genealogy of Cheap Nature, Myth One shows the colonizer creating “nature” and making demands on it because of his situation of exile. This “nature” is internalized by Vespucci, who accepts his salaried work (an exhausting form of demand) as part of his “exile” (the mortgage) from “home.”[32] Back in the realm of the dance marathon, the scenes function as transitions between one myth and the next. There is a scene where Hector and Emma denigrate their own marriage, making a pathetic spectacle out of their emotional codependency. A short “sleeping” scene follows, which is interrupted when the Emcee orders all the dancers to move about and change partners. Some of the women react by seeking the attention of young Tom Mix. The bouncer separates the women from Tom Mix who is then interrogated by the Emcee. The grilling focuses on Tom Mix’s carefree attitude and on his taking his own sexual magnetism for granted. This focus on Tom Mix’s happy-go-lucky attitude (in contrast to Hector and Emma) gives a context to the character’s enactment of the myth of Independence. Tom Mix’s “myth” is a speech addressed to South Americans, preceded by the character’s suggestion that he has been taken prisoner and is about to be killed. He could be an Independence warrior, a victim of Spaniards or pro-viceroyalty creoles. The first part of the speech condemns Spaniards’ disregard for the life of Indians when used as forced labor. The second part laments that the utopian newness of America has been overshadowed by the suffering caused by colonialism, yet affirms that this “new” America of “immortal children” is still there waiting “in her splendor, infinite.”[33] Metaphorical tension consists here in the simultaneous acknowledgement of colonial tyranny and a utopian blank slate. This “enchanted” site repeats the colonialist vision of natives imagined as “children” while seeing the promise of utopian development emanating from a dreamy vision of the land.[34] At the end of the speech “Tom Mix falls down as if executed by a firing squad.”[35] The independence warrior’s death underlines the dependence of the dream on pure territoriality and futurity, as if the land didn’t need the body to produce the “agency” of the modern independent subject. Tom Mix’s carefree attitude of the previous scene, then, might reflect a gratuitous confidence in the manifest destiny offered by the land. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger can enlighten us about the tectonics at work here. Heidegger questions the causality of modern machines as simply being the application of modern physics and argues that the essence of modern technology comes historically earlier than machine-power technology. If modern technology reveals nature through a challenging forth of its energy, then both nature and machine end up revealed as a “standing reserve, inasmuch as [they are] ordered” to ensure the permanence of their being on call for duty, that is, for providing energy, for realizing their function.[36] Heidegger calls this demand, for nature and technology to be orderable, a rule of enframing, which is very different from the idea of a functional application of science. From a tectonics perspective, the modern subject who uses technology is inlayed in a space already enframed as standing reserve—that is, a land already endowed with a “technological” use. Marrathon partakes of a similar tension by tacitly defining the standing reserve that is America, and then attributing that utopia to the independent subject. The myth of Independence shows “America” to already be a machine that produces/reproduces the futurity of the modern subject. Marrathon’s tectonics indicates that Modern History is a territorial destiny machine. This insight could be added to a Marxist historical materialist critique by considering this fetishized nature/ destiny as part of modern modes of production. The scenes that follow illustrate the workings of the territorial machine within the petit bourgeois environment of the characters. The Emcee invites the poet Homer Starr to the side, and interviews him about his reason for participating in the contest. In the process, we learn that the small ambitions of Homer and Helen are redeemed in the spaces offered by culture and society, creating their own micro-territoriality. For instance we learn that Homer as poet defends “a lady’s honor” as his own poetic territory, while he characterizes his relationship to Helen as a form of repayment for a lost sexualized youth, in his old age. Helen, on the other hand, accepts her relationship as an egalitarian reward for her cultural work as a librarian. Helen’s service to Homer, of typing his poetry, is in turn perceived by the poet as a privilege of his cultural rank (to pay her would be “like paying a prostitute”).[37] These petty forms of territoriality reveal an enjoyment of small advantages and privileges rather than expressions of independence. When the Emcee tells Charity, the prostitute, that it is her turn to come to the “historic stage,” Charity, feeling humiliated, refuses by saying that she doesn’t “have any history,” she “is only a body here.”[38] In the context of the previous micro territorialities, we could say that it is Charity’s body that doesn’t have a history. Her reaction, we’ll see, raises our awareness of culture as already enframed in a culture-nature standing reserve or machine. Charity’s words can be read ironically, as her wanting to separate her body from a culture system that doesn’t acknowledge her. “Owning” her body is like rejecting the petty territorialities produced by culture. Charity’s “body” also contrasts with Homer’s poetic disembodiments in the word, and on the page. Furthermore, Homer’s poetry produces the normativity of bodies in society, according to a male gaze. In this context his alluded payment to prostitutes appears to be a way to keep the non-normative prostitute away from the privileges of culture. In other words the prostitute is made to forfeit her right to participate in culture. Culture allows Homer, for example, to have sex with Helen without paying her. To this, Charity retorts: “If it had been with me, Old man, I’d have cured you of any desire of getting it for free.”[39] Charity jokes out of resentment, perhaps not realizing the implication that culture has the capacity to use bodies, and, by extension, use nature for free. These various readings point to an inlaying of culture on bodies while creating a dichotomy between culture and non-culture. This is to say that nature is simply what has not been colonized-- nature disappears in non-culture. If to be “only” a body is to not have a history, that body is absent in history. This means that Homer’s art and discourse reproduces a colonizing culture while denying the inlaying of culture on a collective body and nature. Meanwhile, the “pure presence” performed by Charity’s statement, puts her for a moment outside of this culture machine—in this instance, Charity is not yet “Cheap Nature” but simply non-culture. This allows us to understand the payment to the prostitute as a gesture of “non-cultural” appropriation for a subsequent “economic” transaction—in the form of sex. In the genealogy of Cheap Nature we must therefore include the fetishization of nature as property, which is the legal form of the land as destiny machine (this last defined in the myth of independence). For instance, property can “exist” without the presence of the body of the owner, yet offers itself to its owner, and makes itself the owner’s “destiny” or “standing reserve.” It is appropriation that gives the owner the illusion of being an “independent” agent while reproducing the destiny machine. Marrathon’s enactment of a “pastoral America,” as well as the scene leading to that myth, develop a more complete picture of the modern machine. In Scene Eleven an elegant character named Woman enters the ballroom and goes to the dance floor languidly.[40] Her brother, Man, also arrives (they have been walking all night) to tell her that their boat is leaving soon. Woman insists that they should join the marathon and Man finally pays the Emcee for them to do so. The entrance of the couple performs a separation between the cultured Europeans and the collective of bodies that they see dancing. Their incorporation into the collective signals a switch of focus from individuals to the collective. Yet their late incorporation signifies the advantage they are taking within the collective because of their cultural and economic “superiority.” In Myth Three the dancers become a herd of cattle in a “wild” land, and Man anticipates in his dream the fencing of land for cattle-raising and a meat exporting business. The play thus draws a seamless transition between cultural transactions that use the body and the economic use of the land that exploits labor and land for high profits. That transition is contained in the description of America as “one motionless, thick, grimy mass of land. An immense, pregnant woman. Ceaselessly giving birth to sheep, cow, horse.”[41] In the transition from Charity to the Argentine Pampa, the “female body” goes from offering sex to offering offspring. “She” is the Argentine Pampas where intensive cattle raising for meat exports is initiated in the Nineteenth Century by English investors and rich landowners, with the help of immense slaughterhouses and refrigerated ships.[42] This new economy demanded the exploitation of the countryside’s inhabitants’(gauchos) cheap labor in their new status as rural peons. The labor of the gauchos, embodied in the people-cattle of the marathon dance is thus incorporated into the natural “wealth” of the pampas. The transition can then be defined as going from culture to economy to production. The signaling of culture by the French speaking siblings suggests that culture and economy have become one and the same, or rather they always were. The difference is that, in the world of international capital investments, production, and trade, the language of economy takes over, and culture becomes obsolete for human transactions. Man’s speech (said while the dancers move in circles like cattle) does not exalt the export economy but focuses first on the skill of the gaucho in catching the cattle, and then on the brutal destiny of the cattle in the slaughterhouse. In melancholic tension, between the rationality of the economy and the violent assault on the cattle’s flesh, we may locate the pastoral dream whose loss is lamented in the enactment. The pastoral dream is presented through its negation, as if the utopian impulse of modernity were redirected toward the past (the traditional gaucho culture). From this perspective the pastoral points to a mechanism of modern temporality that consists in “dreaming” the past as the ideal “future” site of rational Man. The pastoral is therefore an impossible dream of a “rational” nature represented by a state economic policy that rationalizes the use of workers and land (profit producing Cheap Nature). The dream of the rational seeks to eliminate the culture/non culture dichotomy by imagining economics as a pseudo natural and a pseudo cultural system.[43] This is equivalent to a fetishization of nature as a producer of both culture and wealth, or nature drawn in the image of the State as guarantor of Cheap Nature. The pastoral contains Marrathon’s rationalizing machine between two dreams, one past and one future. Such tension is enacted and resolved in the scenes that follow. The Emcee proposes to dim the lights for the dancers to rest, but the dancers are anxious and resist the idea. The bouncer suggests that the theatre protects the dancers not only from the cold outside, but also from the anxiety of seeing an emptied auditorium in the middle of the night. The reasons he gives is that, in this theatre, time and exhaustion are the real spectacle, therefore they should keep dancing after all, even if tired. The theatre thus quarantines the dancers in a place where a new temporality protects them from the past/future threats of nature and of an unfinished competition. The dancers become their own spectators of a time that consumes them. In the following scene Homer offers a romantic poem about a woman who falls in love with a stranger who leaves after promising to marry her in a year. The woman, still a virgin, has fallen ill by the time the lover returns. The story ends with the woman dying in the lover’s arms. In this story the woman stays in the same village to experience her love, and the stranger appears from nowhere, with no past or future, to fulfill the woman’s romantic experience. The threat of “natural” irrationality coming from romantic passion is tamed by the woman’s containment in one place. The scene partakes of the same temporality as the quarantine in the theatre, abstracting time from history and nature and resolving pastoral melancholy with the production of a single “place” and a single time. Here nature is rationalized in the form of exertion (or the patience of a woman’s love), which is akin to the dancers’ expenditure of energy rendered intensive by the spectacle of a clocked time— Marrathon is now a work-producing machine. This is the spectacle of labor in the world’s factories, and of the abstraction of nature’s energy from its “future” exhaustion. Work is imposed on both nature (exhausting its energy) and humans (consuming nature’s and their own energy) through a quarantine that “temporalizes” space in the present, away from the threats of “irrationality” (that is, non-work) coming from the past and the future. The spectacular present of Marrathon tectonically inlays the American pastoral dream in an “inexhaustible” human and natural “work.” The spectacle of the factory is the realization of a non-melancholic pastoral dream. It improves on the functionality of the standing reserve which relied on a subject-object relationship to the dreamed land, by making reality a totality “at work” for its own “economic” reproduction. In this respect I propose to identify Work as the condition of Cheap Nature. Moore defines Cheap Nature’s condition as “the periodic, and radical reduction in the socially necessary labor-time of these Big Four inputs: food, labor-power, energy, and raw materials.”[44] Work is by definition cheap, because it is the appropriation of “uncapitalized natures,” which include human and non-human elements. As Moore puts it, if “the endless accumulation of capital is the ceaseless expansion of material throughput, [...] this can only occur if food, labor-power, energy, and raw materials prices can be contained.”[45] In other words, Cheap Nature, or Work, is the effective economic control of exhaustion by a socialized time. Work creates Cheap Nature by imposing an economic time. In this sense “Work” is semantically close to “labor,” which in Marx’s critique of capitalism is also related to a rationalization of time. Work, as I’ve defined it, initiates the historical possibility of not going back to nature (the site of past and future) and envisioning a global present for modernity (or post-modernity). In Marrathon, the incentive to continue dancing without rest points to the logic of inertia giving this machine its momentum. Inertia transfers Marrathon’s spatial tectonics onto the kinetic. It consists of the friction between the synchronic time marked by the ticking of the clock and the diachrony of a historical relation to past, present and future. Here the clock keeps time anchored in a naturalized “present” of factory production, and global markets. The “objective” prize that the dancers are competing for exists in an eternal “global present.” In reality the elusive prize is being produced and consumed by the kinetic inertia (Work) of their dancing. The dancers are Cheap Nature through the simple fact of being there—Work is simply (but not easily) to be ready to be put to work.[46] Work is the existential condition of modern “nature.” The meaning of this “present” differs, of course, if one is a worker or a boss. The boss’s time relies on a correlation between productive time (the economy) and profits, that is, the time of capital growth. The factory, nature, time, markets, and capital are, on one hand, piled up onto the present of productive time, where workers are located as part of a global labor market. The enigma is that the time of profit for the boss is not part of this global time. The boss is not really in this “present” but appears to straddle on the “past” and “future” sides of the present, corresponding to capitalist investment and return.[47] Investment and return enter and leave production and the market as if by magic. Therefore the global world of production and the capitalist’s world exist on different time frames. As the play nears the enactment of the myth of Industrial America, a scene between Charity and industrialist Mr. X tackles the enigma of the capitalist’s time. Charity suddenly appears flustered because her watch has stopped. Her gesture is a challenge directed quite appropriately at Mr. X. The stopping of the watch is suggestive of the collapse of past and future in the capitalist cycle, and therefore can reveal the irrationality of capital accumulation. At the same time a stopping of the watch may shatter the monolithic time of the capitalist factory-machine where measuring time benefits the capitalist in spite of himself. The implicit double threat is accompanied by Charity’s reminder that her “time is of some service” to him. She thus calls attention to the simultaneous existence of two time frames, hers being the one that serves his. Charity’s gesture plays on her previous one, when she presented herself to the Emcee as a body only. That “body,” she says, is not there “just for the hell of it” like the bodies exploited in his factory.[48] Her “time of service” may refer to her sexual services, but in the context of tectonics we are reminded of the spectacle of time in the previous scene. Charity is thus ironically allying herself to the collective present of all workers and “working” nature and presenting her body as that unpaid “surplus time.” Charity first protests Mr. X’s non-payment of “the other five [hours] from before these that are up at seven,” to which Mr. X responds that he is on schedule with his payments to her. Then Charity specifies that what she is charging for is “the time, whether I’m horizontal or vertical, of services rendered.”[49] “Horizontal or vertical” continues to use sexual innuendos to suggest a more absolute time of all bodies, hers and the “bodies” of workers and nature. This time cannot be clocked because it is already there in the present of all bodies— and that present has never been included in the capitalist’s payments. The “time of service” is revealed as a euphemism for “the service of time” to the capitalist cycle. The service is the time of borrowed bodies (or bodies of borrowed time) for the subsequent extraction of “work time” in the “present.”[50] “Borrowed time” allows political economy to focus merely on the management of the time of reproduction of Work without considering the long durational cycles of reproduction in ecological relationships. Charity’s protest allows us to see the real nature of Mr. X’s participation in the economy: he borrows diachronic time and turns it into a synchronic global present that is his investment. Mr. X puts time in the bank, so to speak. This borrowing explains the now virtual collapse of past and future in the capitalist cycle. This situation is shown when Charity threatens to leave and Mr. X surrenders to Charity’s demand by desperately paying for her mere presence, while refusing to acknowledge that he owes her anything. The scene reveals that the capitalist indefinitely “borrows” the time of nature to turn it into his own “investment.” To recapitulate: a) Mr. X’s performance consists in keeping his payments on schedule as a way to separate individual work time while hiding the present of global economy that provides him with workers and nature; b) The borrowing of the time of all bodies and nature is forgotten in the capitalist payment to each worker, hence Charity’s reminder. c) Charity’s performative challenge reveals the illusion of the collapsing of past and future in the capitalist cycle, and forces the capitalist’s symbolic payment of a debt that cannot be really be repaid. The tectonics of the scene may be summarized as “Mr. X’s capital investment and return is inlayed in a time that he has “borrowed” to fashion a “present” economic machine. The borrowed present of production serves to theorize the limits of Capitalism’s project of creating a world “in which all elements of human and extra-human nature are effectively interchangeable.”[51] This global system of industry and markets, become a world, has refashioned nature in the image of Capitalism— as when Mr. X sings about his mythical dream of industrial America: “Chimneys and petroleum, rivers of electricity, and mountains of tall ovens against the gray sky of industry.”[52] Borrowed time shows that this is more than an analogy, since the present is a banked time that effectively allows for a capitalist cycle to exist on the side. For this reason, Moore can consider nature, in the condition of Work, a “historical nature” proper to Capitalism. This project, he says, “seeks to reduce the time of life to the time of accumulation.”[53] This results in a systematic loss of time that the character Emma expresses when mourning her dead child and saying that she, Emma, was only alive for those two months that the child lived. From the perspective of the Anthropocene, borrowed time means that human beings have tampered with the long duration frame of the Holocene by enframing nature as modern destiny and as the present of production economy. Marrathon’s myths show the origins of such enframing to reside in the colonialist/racist imagination of the land/people, temporalized later in an economic system that erases the diachrony of anthropos relationships between past, present, and future. Marrathon exposes a continuum between the vision of the “new” American land and the straddling of the present by the capitalist cycle. In both cases there has been an advantage taken on nature by a rule of enframing that created the “destiny machine” of the modern “homo” subject and the capitalist. From an anthropos perspective that advantage is illusory, for we all suffer from the destructive power of the system. As Marrathon nears the enactment of the myth of fascism, the elegant Man wants to leave the marathon, thinking it is his privilege. Woman stops him saying “we’re trapped. Don’t you see our bodies there, in front of us? They’re dancing. And where would we go without our bodies?”[54] The two contradictory destinies of the modern subject are contained in her statement: she needs to have bodies/nature at her disposition to maintain her privilege; and she also is part of this collective of bodies and nature that is being exploited. In the Anthropocene the losers have been culture and nature, whose past and future have been pushed into an economic present. Human action’s (culture) inlaying in nature has been refashioned into an economic pseudo culture-nature that has no interest in anthropos processes because it lives in a borrowed time. Epochal consciousness needs to acknowledge that climate change, species extinction, and ecological impoverishment do not matter to the “present” of capitalist economy because the prize of economy (formed in the cycle of capital) is not grounded in any place. The colonial inheritance of capitalism indicates that an ethics for the Anthropocene must have a peripheral location, as the one rehearsed by Marrathon. The reason for this is that it is in the colonized land that homo dreams his modern identity and settles the economic machine. In this land the inertia of the Anthropocene can be embodied in ways that a Eurocentric subject, still enthralled by his own utopian destiny, may not. In the periphery, the marathon is made to continue because only through embodiment can culture and nature be recuperated and homo find his/her way to the anthropos. The tectonics of the play allows us to recognize that in the deep history suggested by the Anthropocene both the planet Earth and humanity are being embodied.[55] It is not possible to abandon deep history as we would leave a scene from a play, or a stage “setting,” unless we reject or abandon our own corporeality. Towards the end of Marrathon Homer dies and the Emcee tries to dismiss the gravity of the moment saying that Homer lives in his works. Tom Mix has decided to leave the marathon to keep his utopian dream alive. These exits are possible because they are disembodied as dream, negation or death. When Tom Mix asks Hector if he is staying, he answers positively, for the sake of Emma who says she still wants to make up for lost time, “have servants […] see the ocean.”[56] We can read in her words an ethical perspective for the Anthropocene if we consider her desires as being transformable through her continued embodiment of anthropos in the dance—it is an ethics of becoming that, having gained awareness of the marathon that is her anthropos life, is able to embrace desire while questioning its existing tectonics.[57] How do our desires reproduce the fallacies of the Promised Land, the Standing Reserve, and borrowed time? Where does our anthropos identity lie? Charity may be pointing more directly to an Anthropos politics when she mocks Mr. X’s suicidal thoughts by pointing to her sex saying it is “the only hole that matters to [her].”[58] Charity’s statement makes sense in the context of the tectonic layers of the prostitute’s body as standing reserve, as Work and as a presence emptied of past and future. The hole typifies Cheap Nature’s revolutionary class position, as the Anthropocene’s proletariat, whose life needs to be refilled, through a practice of critical embodiment, and a political struggle for restitution of anthropos life, that is, a human/historical life inlayed in the natural life of the planet. Milton Loayza is Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at the State University of New York at Oswego. His work has been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, among others. His research interests are in Latin American theatre, and performance and philosophy. Milton is also an actor and director dedicated to bringing Latin American works to the stage and is currently performing a lead speaking role in Maria de Buenos Aires by Piazzola/Ferrer, at various opera houses nationwide. [1] Ricardo Monti, Marrathon, in Reason Obscured: Nine Plays By Ricardo Monti, ed. Jean trans. Graham-Jones (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell UP) 133-83. [2] Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene E. Stoemer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” in The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Newsletter 41, 2000: 17-18. (accessed March 14, 2017). [3] Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2016) 24. [4] Jason W Moore, Capitalism In the Web Of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015) 11. [5] Jean Graham-Jones, “‘A Broader Realism’: the Theater of Ricardo Monti,” in Ricardo Monti, Reason Obscured 17. [6] Ricardo Monti, interview with R.G. “Con ‘Marathon’ vuelven Monti y Kogan,” Clarín, Buenos Aires, 18 June 1980. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Spanish are mine. [7] Marrathon 171. [8] 181. [9] Chakrabarty, “The Human Condition In the Anthropocene,” in The Tanner Lectures in Human Values, Yale 2014-2015, 173-174. (accessed December 12, 2016). [10] 174. [11] Crutzen and Stoermer 17. [12] Moore 26. [13] More to the point Jean Graham-Jones asserts that the play “interweaves and fuses levels of daily existential, subconscious and collective experience into one human experience.” See Jean Graham-Jones, Exorcising History: Argentine Theatre Under Dictatorship (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000) 78. [14] See Peter Podol, “Surrealism and the Grotesque in the Theatre of Ricardo Monti” Latin American Theatre Review 14.1 (1980): 65-72; Julia Elena Sagaseta, “La dramaturgia de Ricardo Monti: la seducción de la escritura,” in Teatro argentino de los 60: polémica, continuidad y ruptura, ed. Osvaldo Pellettieri (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1989) 227-41; and Jorge Monteleone, “El teatro de Ricardo Monti,” Espacio de crítica e investigación teatral 2.2 (April 1987): 63-74. [15] See Osvaldo Pellettieri, “El teatro de Ricardo Monti (1989-1994): La Resistencia a la modernidad marginal,” in Ricardo Monti, Teatro, tomo 1 (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1995) 9-13. [16] Moore 62-63. [17] Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Al Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983) 17. [18] 25-26. [19] 26. [20] 26. [21] Moore 35. [22] 35-36. [23] See Ricardo Monti, note 89, Marathón, in El Teatro Argentino. 16. Cierre de un ciclo. ed. Luís Ordáz (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1981) 130. [24] As Ricardo Monti remembers, the director Jaime Kogan “had been looking for another space that would put the spectator in the situation” of the 1932 dance marathon event. In this space, the performance is the occasion for “the 1932 ballroom” to become the contemporary event. Thus, both actors and spectators are possibly made to be complicit with this transformation of setting/action into site/event. See Ricardo Monti, in interview with Celia Dosio, quoted in Celia Dosio, El Payró: Cincuenta años the teatro independiente (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2003) 95. [25] See Frampton 28. [26] See Celia Dosio 96. [27] See Max Statkiewicz, “Live Metaphor in the Age of Cognitivist Reduction,” Monatshefte 95.4 (2003): 548. [28] Marrathon 142-143. [29] 143. [30] As Monti explains, “there is a relation between that marathon, lost in a corner of the universe, and the place of the myth [in America and/or the World].” See Ricardo Monti, interview with Zully Ruiz Moreno, “Una gestación de dramaturgos,” La Opinión Cultural, Buenos Aires, June 27, 1980. [31] Emphasis in the original. [32] According to Una Chaudhuri, the realist stage environment gives a home to characters who feel homeless, through narratives of arrival, departure, homecoming, and travel. She understands the reification of homelessness as “exilic consciousness” from the point of view of “geopathology,” a long struggle with the problem of place. Marrathon’s tectonics, I suggest, grounds this struggle in a mythical historical reality. See Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) 1-20. [33] Marrathon 150. [34] Mignolo explains the relationship between geography and modern temporality with the fact that “it was during the eighteenth century and the European Enlightenment that people outside Europe began to be located in time. The secular idea of ‘primitives’ replaced that of the ‘infidels.’” See Walter D. Mignolo, “Enduring Enchantment (or the Epistemic Privilege of Modernity and Where to Go from Here),” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (2002): 943. [35] Marrathon 153. [36] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) 7-8. [37] Marrathon 155-156. [38] 158. [39] 157. [40] Woman’s brother, Man, who comes behind her repeatedly sings “London Bridge is falling down…” but the two siblings speak to each other in French. [41] Marrathon 161. [42] Esteban Echeverría wrote the short story “El matadero” [The Slaughterhouse] (c. 1838) as an allegory that accused the violent dictatorship of General Juan Manuel de Rosas. [43] We may anticipate a connection between the pastoral dream and right wing and fascist cultural politics. [44] Moore 53. [45] 124. [46] Kinetic inertia can be related to the development of systems theory where a simulation of nature consists in defining organizations as “flexible, dynamic ‘organisms.’” This allows the performance management of organizations under the premise that, like “nature,” they have “natural” tendencies characterized by feedback loops. Jon McKenzie marks the use of systems theory as a paradigm shift in performance management, from “Machine Thinking to Systems Thinking.” See Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001) 69-73. [47] It is worth noting here that “straddle” is a stock exchange term defined as “an options strategy in which the investor holds a position in both a call and put [option to buy and to sell] with the same strike and expiration date, paying both premiums. This strategy allows the investor to make a profit regardless of whether the price of the security goes up or down, assuming the stock price changes somewhat significantly.” The straddle intuitively makes sense if we understand the notions of “strike,” “expiration date” and “premium” as equivalent abstractions in a compressed present of the capital cycle. See (accessed January 9, 2017) [48] Marrathon 166. [49] 166. [50] From a Marxist perspective, “borrowed time” produces the time of reproduction of labor force which, in the present context, should be called Cheap Nature force. [51] Moore 204. [52] Marrathon 158. [53] 235. [54] Marrathon172. [55] Chakrabarty 183. [56] Marrathon 181. [57] For a discussion of Monti’s work as site of becoming, see Milton Loayza, “Planes of Immanence: Deleuzian Assemblages As a Mode of Thought In the Theatre of Ricardo Monti,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 30.2 (2016): 79-99. [58] Marrathon 167. “The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon" by Milton Loayza ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring 2017) ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy in the AnthropoScene” by Theresa J. May “Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene" by Shelby Brewster “Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine” by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta “The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon" by Milton Loayza “Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity" by Clara Jean Wilch www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Acting in the Academy The Theatre of David Henry Hwang Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Directing Shakespeare in America Writing, Acting, and Directing Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Book Reviews Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Writing, Acting, and Directing Book Reviews By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF Susan Kattwinkel, Editor Acting in the Academy By Peter Zazzali Reviewed by Jennifer Joan Thompson Directing Shakespeare in America By Charles Ney Reviewed by Deric McNish Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines By Jessica Silsby Brater Reviewed by Catherine M. Young The Theatre of David Henry Hwang By Esther Kim Lee Reviewed by David Coley If you know of a publication appropriate for review, please send the information to current book review editor Susan Kattwinkel at kattwinkels@cofc.edu . A list of books received can be found at www.susankattwinkel.com . References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Acting in the Academy The Theatre of David Henry Hwang Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Directing Shakespeare in America Writing, Acting, and Directing Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Ryan Donovan 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 "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Ryan Donovan By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Introduction Casting director Craig Burns worked on Broadway’s Hairspray (2002) from its first workshops, and it remains his favorite production because of the opportunity to cast people who “weren’t normally considered for leads in a show, and now all of a sudden these girls are getting a chance because we need a fat girl. There was so much joy in that.”[2] Katrina Rose Dideriksen was one such woman given the chance to play Hairspray ’s Tracy Turnblad on Broadway and on tour. She remembered feeling excited to play Tracy because she “is the ingénue, she wins the guy, she saves the day . . . she’s funny and she’s lovable and all those things, but in this very real-girl way.” Dideriksen then noticed a “weight clause” in her contract: “It was really this underlying pinch to realize that subconsciously I was being told I was still wrong for it, that there was something I had to fix. . . I don’t think they realized how hurtful, and how anti- Hairspray it really was for them to be like, ‘Lose 20 pounds.’”[3] Apart from a few roles (including Tracy), fat women are almost never cast in roles beyond the comedic sidekick or best friend in commercial theatre. The casting of Broadway musicals reproduces aesthetic values from the dominant culture, especially the notion that thin bodies—ones that conform to these values—are superior to other bodies, especially fat ones.[4] The aesthetic values placed on bodies are gendered, especially relative to size. Author Roxane Gay explains, “most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society.”[5] Society informs fat women that they are unfeminine and undesirable, which in turn determines everything from how fat women are represented to how and where they work. In her memoir, Lindy West notes the material effects of these values, writing, “As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and—the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on—my ability to be loved.”[6] When a fat female actor walks into an audition, these sociocultural strictures delimit her presence and reception there. While all actors are often told they aren’t the “right fit” because of their appearance, fat women confront a double standard: one actor I interviewed was bluntly told, “You’re not fat enough to be our fat girl.”[7] For fat women, the inability of the industry to think inclusively about body size proves a major barrier to employment. Fat is typically hurled as an insult rather than claimed as an identity position in the United States. It is something seen as needing to be eliminated, which sociologists Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves argue is due to the “fashion-beauty complex,” in which “advertisements remind us that unwieldy, loose, and jiggly fat must be tamed. The taut body . . . then becomes a reflection of moral fortitude, perseverance, and bodily mastery.”[8] Advertising exhorts women to be the right kind of consumers—purchasing products that help one achieve thinness. The word fat itself can be discomfiting, and in order to neutralize stigma associated with the word, fat studies scholars have reclaimed and repurposed fat .[9] Fat studies scholar Marilyn Wann explains, Casting notices are rife with euphemisms to avoid saying fat , admitting the stigmatization of fatness while aiming not to offend. Hairspray star Marissa Jaret Winokur notes, “People don’t want to say the word ‘fat.’” She kept a record of the words used to avoid describing her as fat when she was starring in the musical on Broadway; these included “‘chubby,’ ‘hefty,’ ‘dumpling-shaped,’ [and] ‘dimple-kneed.’”[11] The disconnected, tentative relationship between language and fat corporeality is thus reproduced in theatre from casting to reception. Casting necessarily includes processes of disqualification, yet the lack of opportunities for fat actors reveals that size-based discrimination remains so widespread on Broadway that it is accepted as natural and, crucially, neutral. By examining casting practices, this article combats what theatre scholar Brian Eugenio Herrera terms the “mythos of casting,” namely the discourse around casting practices masking “how an actor’s labor is (and is not) valued as a commodity.”[12] To extend Herrera’s formulation, I suggest that the mythos of casting also masks how the actor’s body becomes a commodity in the theatrical marketplace. In the closed economy of Broadway musicals, this mythos provides cover for the operation of ideologies espousing bodily conformity (e.g., the plethora of articles about “Broadway Bodies” on Playbill.com ).[13] Musicals celebrate performative excess while disciplining other kinds of excess: differences of ability, gender, race, size, and sexuality. This essay centers on the casting, production, and reception of Hairspray in order to demonstrate how stigma determines how fatness has been employed in Broadway musicals since the 1980s. The aesthetics and politics of casting Tracy Turnblad provide a history of body shame and questionable labor practices spanning from the early 2000s to today. Musicals embody how and where Broadway (and, by extension, U.S. society) expects fat women to sound, to move, to behave, and to labor; class, gender, race, and sexuality further impact these expectations. Fat Stigma in/and Casting Broadway Musicals Dreamgirls and Hairspray are the only hit Broadway musicals of the past fifty years where fatness is sometimes a prerequisite for playing the female lead. Hairspray (2002) was the first Broadway musical to star a fat woman since Jennifer Holliday starred as Effie White in Dreamgirls (1981). Bonnie Milligan’s casting as Princess Pamela in Head Over Heels (2018) is arguably the first Broadway musical to star a fat woman in a role where the character’s size is not mentioned in the libretto, and the role could have gone to a traditional ingenue-type instead.[14] Milligan explains how Head Over Heels differs from previous treatments of fat female characters in musicals: “This world celebrates her! And it’s not just her. It’s everyone on stage who calls her beautiful. That’s part of the intention.”[15] Jeff Whitty conceived the role expressly for Milligan, who played Pamela in every iteration of the musical on its way to Broadway.[16] Milligan’s casting and Pamela’s narrative reflect contemporary attitudes toward body positivity just as Dreamgirls and Hairspray represent then-contemporary stances toward fat women. These roles (Effie White, Tracy Turnblad, and Princess Pamela) are unique because they give fat actors the chance to play a full range of emotions beyond self-deprecation. Fat women in Broadway musicals are always considered in terms of their bodies and fitness in very specific ways; being considered plus-sized isn’t usually a plus for women on Broadway. Sometimes the stigma is overt: casting notices for the 2016 City Center Encores! production of The Golden Apple repeatedly stated, “We are not looking for heavy character actresses.”[17] Discrimination in casting and enforcement of bodily norms exists in all arenas of theatre from amateur to professional. Men do not face the same kinds of body scrutiny—Nathan Lane has regularly played leading roles where the guy gets the girl during the time span covered by this article, and The Book of Mormon has regularly cast fat men in the leading roles of Elder Cunningham following original star Josh Gad. John Waters hoped the musical adaptation of his film Hairspray would be a hit because “there will be high school productions, and finally the fat girl and the drag queen will get the starring parts.”[18] Part of Hairspray ’s power comes from the fact that Tracy is portrayed as feminine and desirable while also being fat and being okay with that. Hairspray ’s onstage narrative intersects with offstage narratives of casting its Broadway production, a process that often made a spectacle of young women hoping, like Tracy, for a big break. Hairspray exemplifies Broadway’s ambivalence toward casting nonconforming bodies. Even ostensibly fat-positive musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray became complicit in labor practices contributing to fat stigma. Stigma has been grounded in bodily difference since, as sociologist Erving Goffman explains, ancient Greeks coined the term “to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier.”[19] Stigma rests on a paradox of visibility, because certain bodies become invisible due to the very visible attributes that stigmatize them—fat people may be stared at but not seen, or viewed as having uncontrollable appetites. The social psychology of stigma indicates that “‘visibility’ and ‘controllability’ are the most important dimensions of stigma for the experience of both the stigmatizer and the stigmatized person.”[20] In other words, fat people are perceived to have shirked the mandate of personal responsibility that undergirds neoliberal capitalism.[21] Weight is seen through a moralistic lens equating fatness with failure; this perceived failure being the inability to control behaviors and appetites or to conform to dominant aesthetic body standards. As theatre and fat studies specialist Jennifer-Scott Mobley summarizes, “Fat people go against our collective social, political, and economic ethos.”[22] This is despite the fact that “more than two-thirds of American women [were] classified as overweight or obese.”[23] Despite vague and indeterminate meanings of “overweight” and “obese” (and their pathological implications), the vast majority of American women inhabit nonconforming bodies. The systemic, structural nature of the value placed on the minority of conforming bodies becomes further clarified by the data. U.S. culture attends to bodies centrally through weight-based discourse. Fatness, according to American studies scholar Amy Erdman Farrell, has historically been used to determine who fits where in society, in which venues one is allowed to participate, and what kind of labor one’s body performs.[24] Many of the roots of contemporary fat stigmatization can be traced to the nineteenth century and the growing industrialization and urbanization of America, which changed the kinds of bodies capital needed for labor. Fatness went from being a sign of wealth to a sign of excess, self-indulgence, laziness, moral failure, and lower-class status.[25] Conceptions of ideal bodies increasingly tilted toward thinness during the twentieth century, to the point that what once was considered average is now considered fat, and weight loss carries its own kind of cultural capital. The growing power of the fit body as a physical and moral standard marked fat as other despite its statistical prevalence. In the U.S. workforce, fat women today face an additional economic burden simply from being fat in a society restricting their earning power—being just thirteen pounds “overweight” reduces a woman’s annual earnings by an average of $9,000.[26] At the same time that fat women in the early twenty-first century are more economically disadvantaged, the U.S. economy relies upon consumer spending on diet, exercise, and weight loss products devoted to eliminating fat, and “spending money on becoming thin is the perfect solution for both neoliberal subjectivity and neoliberal capitalism more broadly.”[27] This is on top of the wage penalty for being a woman, placing fat women in a catch-22. Farrell explains that thinness then becomes “a strategy [employed] to mitigate against the identity of ‘female,’ which poses so many risks of discrimination and inferior status.”[28] According to fat studies scholar Kathleen LeBesco, “a fat person’s only shot at citizenship comes if he or she gratefully consumes the panoply of diet and fitness products made available by industry and government.”[29] Thus, Tracy Turnblad is simultaneously a good consumer (of beauty products) and a failed one (by not only being fat but celebrating it). A “Big Girl Now”: Performing Tracy Turnblad Tracy stands out in a sea of theatrical representation that clearly articulates the devaluation of fat people and reveals uncomfortable truths about what kinds of bodies are valued in the U.S., where the fat body is actually the most common kind of body. The tendency to view fat people as somehow less-than is revealed by the number of leading roles continually cast with conforming bodies, even when the script or character description does not mention weight. Broadway has not cast a fat Annie Oakley or Eliza Doolittle—even though there is nothing about these roles inherently requiring a specific body type; to do so would be to concede that fat women can play and experience the full range of representation readily available to thin people. Broadway musicals thus admit, through exclusion, which bodies are valued as they attend to the imperatives of neoliberal consumption. That Hairspray is named after a beauty product makes it almost the perfect commodity, save for its body positivity. Hairspray deliberately subverts the gap between representation and reality. Filmmaker John Waters openly wanted “to make sure that Tracy will be fat, not just plump. When was the last time you saw two fat girls as stars of a Broadway musical who also get the guy?”[30] Waters based his 1987 film on a local Baltimore television show from his youth, though he noted, “The one thing that was pure fiction in [ Hairspray ] was the idea that a fat girl could have gotten on that show. A fat girl never would have gotten on ‘The Buddy Deane Show.’ Even in segregated Baltimore, a black girl would have had more chance.”[31] For Waters, Hairspray ’s fairy tale aspect was precisely why it was empowering: “It’s about the teenage white girl who gets a black guy. The fat girl gets a straight guy, and her mother’s a man who sings a love song to another man.”[32] Apart from Waters, Hairspray ’s creative team embraced Tracy’s fatness but also employed humor undermining its fat-positive stance; the film includes numerous jokes about the appetites of its fat women. As Edna sings in the show’s finale, “You can’t stop my happiness/’Cause I like the way I am/And you just can’t stop my knife and fork/When I see a Christmas ham.”[33] While Hairspray works hard to be in on the jokes, it also subtly subverts the identities it means to celebrate by laughing not only with but sometimes at its characters. Hairspray ’s setting in 1960s Baltimore speaks to social change and body image as mediated on television. When Tracy’s mother, Edna, hears of Tracy’s desire to dance on the local television station’s The Corny Collins Show , she says, “They don’t put people like us on TV—Except to be laughed at.”[34] Tracy breaks the mold of fat girl as doormat, victim, or comic relief as she is the musical’s self-possessed, exuberant, romantic leading lady who can “shake and shimmy” with the best of them. The plot centers around her drive to dance on Corny Collins and win the love of its resident heartthrob, Link Larkin—this musical is about casting, too. She remains acutely aware of how her desires are viewed; in “I Can Hear the Bells,’” she sings, “Everybody says/That a girl who looks like me/Can’t win his love/Well, just wait and see.”[35] Tracy ends up winning a place on the show when Collins spots her dancing at her sophomore hop. The show’s tongue-in-cheek tone extends to social issues like segregation. Paralleling Tracy’s ambition to dance on television is her drive to racially integrate the Collins show. She inspires a protest to integrate the program and goes to prison as a result. Tracy ultimately wins Link’s love, makes a jailbreak, and is crowned “Miss Teenage Hairspray 1962” as the Collins show is racially integrated in the musical’s finale. Fat, in Hairspray , is both specific and universal; its creators explain, “Tenacious Tracy Turnblad, lovable as she is, is fat, and all of us, lovable as we are, are somehow, metaphorically, fat.” They describe Tracy’s fatness as a metaphor for being “skinny, clumsy, new in town, female, foreign, black, Jewish, gay, naïve, brainy, too short, too tall, overeager, shy, poor, left-handed, over-freckled, pyrokinetic (like Carrie ), scissor-handed (like Edward ), or musical-comedy-loving.”[36] Tracy never lets dominant cultural views of fatness stop her and does not view herself as inferior—a new narrative for a fat female character in a Broadway musical. Such supreme self-esteem was certainly not represented in Dreamgirls ’s narrative arc; Effie had to admit “I Am Changing” to find success in a thinner body. Tracy’s narrative arc “implodes the myth of the unlovable fat woman” (as Head Over Heels too would go on to do) at the same time that, according to social psychologist JuliaGrace Jester, “it gives unrealistic representations of the ease with which Tracy is both accepted by others and how she accepts herself.”[37] The show functions as a fantasy for the very real reasons Jester critiques it: its alternative world of empowerment and wish fulfillment sidesteps actions toward real fat acceptance. Hairspray instead creates its own myths in which struggle and injustice are resolved through song, black people and white people are assimilated into a community through dance, and all are linked through being consumers (of music, television, and beauty products). Tracy uses her consumption of hairspray to break the rules of what 1960s white girls are supposed to look like, teasing and spraying her hair into a bouffant, while challenging how she was prohibited from moving by dancing with the black kids. Casting Hairspray for Broadway presented challenges, beginning with choosing the language used in the casting breakdowns. Despite Waters’s comfort with fat , the casting breakdown for Tracy scrupulously avoided using it. Telsey Casting decided on “heavyset” instead: Burns explains that the word choices were made “because . . . you don’t want to offend anybody in a breakdown.” He went on to add that initially they knew “you need a fat girl. It’s like, ‘that’s the role’ . . . But it was definitely set up at the beginning, that on the breakdown, that we would always use ‘heavyset.’”[39] Size was of course only one element under consideration for potential Tracys. Broadway actor Kathy Deitch was brought in to audition for Tracy several times over a period of four years, never getting cast because she read as “too sophisticated” for the role. She remembers, “Just because I’m chubby, everyone assumed that I would be Tracy.”[40] Being the right body “type” alone is not enough, though it helps the actor get an audition. The height requirement noted in the breakdown further limited the applicant pool, in addition to the specific 1960s-inflected vocal style and dance ability required. Winokur played Tracy in all of Hairspray ’s readings before she was contracted to originate the role on Broadway. Telsey Casting launched a national casting search in Baltimore to find unknowns to play Tracy while Winokur was rehearsing the role for the final reading in New York.[41] Burns notes this was not, as was reported, about replacing Winokur before the opening, but rather was about finding understudies and future replacements: “We knew we were going to need to start finding these girls, so I think it was about starting early.”[42] Casting replacements effectively began before the musical even opened in New York. When the production held auditions in New York the month after its Broadway opening, hundreds of hopefuls showed up, including many who saw playing Tracy as their chance to break through. “The role is something that I can play, because I can never be Eponine in Les Misérables . I’ve struggled with this for a long time, because on stage it doesn’t matter what you look like, but what you weigh,” relates Tracy-hopeful Lisette Valentine.[43] Casting director Bethany Berg notes, “These girls are real people; they’re what most of America looks like, and we’re looking for those people that are happy and confident.”[44] Berg’s language acknowledges fat women as real people as well as explicitly nods to what actual American bodies look like—implicitly admitting the composition of the musical’s audience. However, even when acknowledging the progressive elements of casting a fat female lead, the press was still unable to resist weight- and size-related puns and metaphors. The title of the article referenced above, for example, is “Sizing Them Up.” Despite (or perhaps because of) Hairspray ’s fat positivity, the press felt licensed to write numerous feature stories commenting on the body of the actor playing Tracy in addition to emphasizing her diet and exercise routine. Fat became a punchline for headline writers: a typical headline was Variety ’s “‘Hairspray’s’ Full-Figured Tony Tally.” To a degree, the production itself encouraged this kind of winking treatment; its advertising tagline was “Broadway’s Big Fat Musical Comedy Hit.” A New York Times feature on Winokur repeatedly made the point that she was breaking “conventional wisdom” about how fat women should act and what they should wear: “Heavyset women are expected to wear their clothes long and loose-fitting. Ms. Winokur likes her skirts short and her T-shirts tight.”[45] Winokur noted the significance of her opportunity as Tracy, saying, “Here I am, the young character actress . . . I’m the lead this time.”[46] She was positioned as transgressive for doing things considered normal by thin women. It was not just the press who focused on the body of the actors playing Tracy though; the production team had its eyes on those bodies as well. Winning the Role and Weighing In Hairspray stands out for its celebration of size, and yet its costume design and contractual weight clauses undermined its fat-positivity.[47] The show promoted fat acceptance as it simultaneously mandated weigh-ins for cast members, a practice much more common in ballet companies. The irony is that Tracy is essentially a dance lead—the show’s structure bears this out, as she is not even given the traditional leading lady spots for her songs (Maybelle sings both the eleven o’clock number and the act one finale). Dideriksen, initially a standby Tracy, discovered at her first backstage weigh-in that she was not alone in having her weight monitored; the actress regularly playing Tracy was also contractually obligated to maintain a certain weight, whereas Dideriksen was told to lose 20 pounds. A member of the production’s wardrobe team would round the scale’s number up or down accordingly out of kindness. She remembers the weigh-ins as “sending us into panics” over whether their contracts would be terminated if the scale moved in the wrong direction, even though both actors wore fat suits.[48] Burns said the fat suits were not an issue as far as he knew during the casting process: Whether the young women cast as Tracy knew before they signed the contract does not mitigate the complexity of feelings stirred by being padded and/or weighed, the ambivalence of the simultaneous burden and privilege of playing Tracy, or the fact that many understood this was their only shot to play a lead. The use of fat suits emblematizes this ambivalence because fat suits exacerbate the bind of inhabiting a fat body: being perceived as excess and lack, simultaneously too much and not enough. Yet using fat suits is more complicated than simply exercising artistic license. The fat suit itself reinforces stigma because it can be put on and taken off at will, an act unavailable to the fat person perceived as morally suspect for their inability to take off the weight.[50] At the same time, it is the literal embodiment of the myth that inside every fat person is a thin person who is somehow more “real.” Fat suits, and fat itself, then are seen as a performative embodiment. If the creative team and producers were so invested in maintaining the weight of the actors playing Tracy, then why bother with fat suits at all? [caption id="attachment_3191" align="alignnone" width="413"] LAS VEGAS, NV - FEBRUARY 15: Actress Katrina Rose Dideriksen (L) as the character Tracy Turnblad and actor Harvey Fierstein as the character Edna Turnblad perform during the opening night of the Broadway musical "Hairspray" at the Luxor Hotel & Casino February 15, 2006 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)[/caption] One plausible reason why the production used padding is because Tracy’s physicality was so demanding. Tracy dances so intensely throughout the show that the creative team was afraid actors would lose too much weight. The New York Post reported, “Winokur has lost weight—enough to send a frantic theater crew bringing candy and chocolate shakes to her dressing room. As the chunky star of ‘Hairspray’ . . . [Winokur] needs to stay plump to play the Ricki Lake role.”[51] The article’s headline, “Worth the Weight,” raises the question of what is worth the weight—Winokur? The chocolate shakes and candy? Starring on Broadway? The seesaw of being told to maintain your fitness while being “fed”? As the production was trying to fatten up its leading lady, it was also pressuring her to exercise and increase her stamina. For the creative team, Tracy’s weight was always a concern during casting. Employment law scholar and fat activist Sandra Solovay details stereotypes concerning fat people’s employability: “They are not fit so they should not be in any position that requires strength, speed, stamina, or other significant physical demands.”[52] In the New York Times , “Jack O’Brien, the director of ‘Hairspray,’ said he never doubted that Ms. Winokur was right for the role, only whether she had the stamina for it. ‘Did she have the chops to do eight shows a week?’”[53] Winokur had previously appeared on Broadway in a revival of Grease and regularly performed eight shows a week without apparent issue. Concerns about stamina and ability significantly contribute to fat stigma in general. On Broadway they added pressure to an already-tough job. Hairspray was the first time many actors playing Tracy were asked to carry a show, let alone a Broadway production, and they had more than their weight to worry about. Winokur was bluntly informed during the show’s Seattle tryout that she was “carrying a ten and a half million dollar show.”[54] Keala Settle explained the pressure of playing Tracy: Some candidates for Tracy were sent to “Tracy Camp,” a training program for actors whom the creative team determined needed more vetting before being offered a contract.[56] Dideriksen went to “Tracy Camp” with no promise of future employment.[57] Burns notes “Tracy Camp” was borne out of practical considerations to keep the various productions up and running smoothly, because it was a struggle to cast the role. He explains, “They had to be really special, so we found them all but it wasn’t like we had twenty people in our back pocket that we could go to . . . We definitely had to go out there and train and find the really special ones.”[58] Yet “Tracy Camp” was arguably as much about seeing whether the fat women’s bodies were fit enough as it was teaching the role. Dideriksen describes her perspective on the process: Burns backs up Dideriksen’s assessment of the particular demands of this role: “I remember Jerry Mitchell saying what the girls would have to . . . be really good at cardio to dance the show, and he was like, ‘I need you to do 45 minutes on the bike and then you’ll have a milkshake.’”[60] Kathy Brier, Broadway’s first replacement Tracy, told Newsday , “It’s a weird kind of a thing. You’re supposed to be this chubby girl, and yet the show is so active you have to train to be an athlete.”[61] Tracy had to be fit and fat in order to perform the role, which are not contradictory demands despite popular misconceptions including those of the musical’s creative team. As much as getting cast as Tracy was an opportunity, it often came with a price once the contract was over. Dideriksen played Tracy on Broadway and opposite Harvey Fierstein in Las Vegas but details how after she left the show, “There was this stigma of still seeing me having Tracy on my resumé.”[62] No actor who played Tracy during Hairspray ’s nearly eight-and-a-half year Broadway run has since appeared in another leading role on Broadway.[63] Winokur herself has maintained her celebrity status by becoming associated with weight loss. She was a contestant on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and hosted a cable television weight loss competition show called Dance Your Ass Off . In 2009, she wrote a blog series for People magazine titled “Calling in Fat,” aimed at taking readers along on her “weight loss journey.”[64] Winokur’s notion that one could “call in fat” to work emphasizes the relationship of fat stigma to labor issues. The inability to be cast in leading roles after playing Tracy exists for those who played the role on Broadway as well as actors who have played the role in regional theatres. Personal trainer Geoff Hemingway regularly trains performers, including a client who played Tracy: “When she started she was like, ‘I just played Tracy Turnblad in this regional production of Hairspray . That was my dream role, and now I’ve done it and I don’t want to be fat anymore.’ Since coming in to Mark Fisher [Fitness], she’s shed about fifty pounds and is now being seen for ingénue roles.”[65] Tracy, of course, is an ingénue role, but her fat body prevents her from being seen as such. This anecdote underlines the internalization of fat stigma within the industry and its relation to actors’ legitimate concerns regarding employability. Broadway Cares? The lack of fat actors cast in leading roles belies Broadway’s vision of itself as a fully inclusive institution, and the use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses has perpetuated fat stigma. Stated simply, if you are fat, you will rarely be considered for a leading role in a Broadway musical because of how your body looks—being fat means being seen for fewer roles, which translates into less work. Ethnographer D. Soyini Madison exhorts us to remember that the stakes of representation are not merely about who is seen: “representation has consequences: how people are represented is how they are treated.”[66] Casting contains the possibility to alter these consequences and make an immediate, visible impact because it reveals which bodies are considered fit for Broadway.[67] Casting directors can bring diverse, nonconforming bodies into auditions, but they are still bound to the small army of decision makers comprised of the creative team and multiple producers. Power over what and who makes it to the stage remains in the hands of those controlling the money. Commercial theatre’s profit motive materially effects the lives of all actors, especially fat actors who will not be considered or seen for leading roles—the highest paying ones. When asked whether he had been able to cast anyone who played Tracy in another leading role, Burns demurred: “That’s a good question. . .There have been other opportunities, but I don’t know. I still think it’s definitely a type, and it’s harder to find roles that are right for these girls.”[68] Finding the right roles proved tough not just for the Broadway Tracys but also the stars of Hairspray ’s film and television adaptations, Nikki Blonksy and Maddie Baillio respectively, who have worked sporadically in featured roles since playing Tracy. What would happen if fat women were recognized as deserving of the full range of representation given to women with conforming bodies? It might look something like Head Over Heels . During the show’s brief run, Milligan tweeted, “We are serving amazing body positivity at @HOHmusical, where I get to play the most beautiful girl in the land, who has a love story, and nothing about my weight!!”[69] Audience members would wait for Milligan at the stage door to tell her what seeing her onstage meant to them. She explains, Unlike Dreamgirls and Hairspray , Head Over Heels struggled to find an audience and closed after just 188 performances. The presence of a show like Head Over Heels on Broadway might seem to precipitate casting practices becoming more inclusive, yet Broadway’s recent history indicates that, despite economic imperatives to return investors’ money, the financial success of inclusively cast, albeit conflictedly-so, musicals does not automatically beget more inclusivity. If we recognize the twenty-one-year gap between Dreamgirls and Hairspray and the sixteen-year gap from Hairspray to Head Over Heels , then we must confront the fact that money must not be the sole concern: Dreamgirls and Hairspray were both long-running, award-winning, financially lucrative successes that proved stories about fat women starring fat women are viable money-makers. While Head Over Heels was a financial flop, it nevertheless marks important progress in the representation of fat women on Broadway. The presence of only these three roles, along with the handful of supporting roles in musicals like Escape to Margaritaville (2017) and Waitress (2015), demonstrates how fat stigma operates on Broadway from conception to casting. LeBesco explains, “the stigma attached to being fat is a control mechanism which supports a power structure of one group of people over another.”[71] By not casting fat women outside of prescribed roles, Broadway musicals enforce a system of gendered bodily norms that police how all women act, consume, and labor in the U.S. A few months before Dreamgirls opened, Bennett described his view of that musical’s central conflict in three questions summing up the lens through which Broadway, and arguably US society itself, continues to understand representation: “[I]t’s about, are you marketable? Is it saleable? Will it make money?”[72] Despite the smash hit status of Dreamgirls and Hairspray and the progress made by Head Over Heels , Broadway continues to say no to most fat women. Ryan Donovan received his PhD in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research on casting and identity examines the inclusion of stigmatized and non-normative bodies in contemporary Broadway musicals. Ryan is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre and the special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre (13.1) on dance and musical theatre. He would like to thank everyone he interviewed for this research. ryan-donovan.com [1] Ira J. Bilowit, “Hairspray,” Back Stage , January 31, 2003. [2] Craig Burns (casting director), in discussion with the author, September 2017. [3] Katrina Rose Dideriksen (actor), in discussion with the author, April 2017. [4] The framing of bodies as either conforming or non-conforming is drawn from Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), and Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves, Framing Fat: Competing Constructions in Contemporary Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013). [5] Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 13. [6] Lindy West, Shrill (New York: Hachette Books, 2016), 67-68. [7] Dideriksen, discussion. [8] Kwan and Graves, Framing Fat , 28-29. [9] The interdisciplinary field of fat studies’ beginnings can be traced to the 1980s, though it emerged from movements for fat acceptance that began in the 1960s and 1970s. By the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars were publishing fat studies monographs and collections and Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society was established in 2012. Marilyn Wann, foreword to The Fat Studies Reader , edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: NYU Press, 2009), x-xi. [10] Ibid., xii. [11] Joe Dziemianowicz, “Baby, You’re a Big Curl Now,” New York Daily News , August 14, 2002. [12] Brian Eugenio Herrera, “The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. 2 (Spring 2015), available at http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/the-best-actor-for-the-role-or-the-mythos-of-casting-in-american-popular-performance/. [13] A prime example of this kind of article is Richard Patterson, “The Secrets to Broadway Bodies: How “Theatrical Ninjas” Stay Trim, Toned, and Tight for 8 Shows a Week,” Playbill.com, January 31, 2015, http://www.playbill.com/article/the-secrets-to-broadway-bodies-how-performers-stay-trim-toned-and-tight-com-340312. [14] Dreamgirls , Head Over Heels , and It Shoulda Been You (2015) could be considered ensemble musicals as opposed to Hairspray , in which Tracy is very clearly the leading lady. While Jennifer Holliday won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical, Jennifer Hudson won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing the same role in the film adaptation of Dreamgirls . [15] Bonnie Milligan, interview by Holly Rosen Fink, Women and Hollywood (blog), September 25, 2018, https://womenandhollywood.com/bonnie-milligan-talks-representation-female-empowerment-in-broadways-head-over-heels/. [16] Raven Snook, “Big, Blonde and Beautiful in Her Broadway Debut,” TDF Stages (blog), July 24, 2018, http://bway.ly/4o61zu/#https://www.tdf.org/stages/article/1960/big-blonde-and-beautiful-in-her-broadway-debut. [17] Michael Gioia, “Heavy Character Actress Need Not Apply? Women Get Real on Casting,” Playbill , August 25, 2016, http://www.playbill.com/article/heavy-character-actresses-need-not-apply-women-get-real-on-casting. [18] John Waters, “Finally, Footlights on the Fat Girls,” New York Times , August 11, 2002. Head Over Heels complements Waters’ ideas about casting and LGBTQ+ representation: it featured the first trans-woman, Peppermint, in a Broadway musical in addition to the fact that Pamela is fat and comes out as a lesbian in the musical, replete with a kiss. [19] Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 1. [20] John F. Dovidio, Brenda Major, and Jennifer Crocker, “Stigma: Introduction and Overview,” in The Social Psychology of Stigma , edited by Todd F. Heatherton, Robert E. Kleck, Michelle R. Hebl, and Jay G. Hill (New York: The Guildford Press, 2000), 6. [21] See also Jennifer Crocker and Diane M. Quinn, “Social Stigma and the Self: Meanings, Situations, and Self-esteem,” in Ibid . , 153-183. [22] Jennifer-Scott Mobley, Female Bodies on the American Stage: Enter Fat Actress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 24. [23] Deborah A. Christel and Susan C. Dunn, “Average American women’s clothing size: comparing National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys (1988-2010) to ASTM International Misses & Women’s Plus Size Clothing,” International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education 10, no. 2 (2017), 129. [24] Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 18. [25] Laura Fraser, “The Inner Corset: A Brief History of Fat in the United States,” in The Fat Studies Reader , edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 12. [26] Jennifer Bennett Shinall, “Occupational Characteristics and the Obesity Wage Penalty,” Vanderbilt Law and Economics Research Paper 16-12 (2015), available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2379575. [27] Julie Guthman, “Neoliberalism and the Constitution of Contemporary Bodies,” in The Fat Studies Reader , 193. [28] Farrell, Fat Shame , 115. [29] LeBesco, Revolting Bodies , 57. [30] Patrick Pacheco, “Water’s ‘Hairspray’ Is Beginning to Gel,” Newsday , December 20, 2001. [31] Chris Jones, “Welcome to the ‘60s,” Chicago Tribune , January 18, 2004. [32] Mark O’Donnell, Thomas Meehan, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman, Hairspray: The Roots (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2003), 12. [33] Mark O’Donnell, Thomas Meehan, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman, Hairspray: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Hit Broadway Musical (New York: Applause, 2002), 123. [34] Ibid., 14. [35] Ibid., 24-25. [36] O’Donnell et al., Hairspray: The Roots , 5. [37] JuliaGrace Jester, “Placing Fat Women Center Stage” in The Fat Studies Reader , 250. [38] Craig Burns, email message to the author, September 2017. [39] Burns, discussion. [40] Kathy Deitch (actor), in discussion with the author, April 2017. [41] “Spotlight: Hairspray ,” Variety , April 21-27, 2003. [42] Burns, discussion. [43] Elena Malykhina, “Sizing Them Up,” New York Newsday , September 23, 2002. [44] Ibid. [45] Robin Pogrebin, “Big Hair and Personality to Match; For a Young Actress’s Career, A Bouffant Moment in ‘Hairspray,’” New York Times , August 21, 2002. [46] Ibid. [47] Dideriksen, discussion. [48] Ibid. [49] Ibid. [50] Fat suits have been widely used in contemporary theatre, notably in musicals like Dreamgirls but also in plays like Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig (2004) and Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale (2012). [51] Farrah Weinstein, “Worth the Weight,” New York Post , August 8, 2002. [52] Sandra Solovay, J.D., Tipping the Scales of Social Justice: Fighting Weight-Based Discrimination (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 160-161. [53] Robin Pogrebin, “Big Hair and Personality to Match; For a Young Actress’s Career, A Bouffant Moment in ‘Hairspray,’” New York Times , August 21, 2002. [54] O’Donnell et al., Hairspray: The Roots , 39. [55] “Keala Settle,” Theater People 31, podcast audio, February 8, 2015, https://www.buzzsprout.com/19639.rss. [56] Hairspray was one of the first musicals to groom potential cast members this way, followed by Billy Elliott (2008), Jersey Boys (2005), and Hamilton (2015), among others. [57] Dideriksen, discussion. [58] Burns, discussion. [59] Dideriksen, discussion. [60] Burns, discussion. [61] Kathy Brier, interview by Gordon Cox, Newsday (New York), September 28, 2003. [62] Dideriksen, discussion. [63] Two exceptions are Tracy understudies Shoshana Bean and Donna Vivino, who went on to play or understudy Elphaba in Wicked . [64] Staff, “Marissa Jaret Winokur: I Had to Call in Fat,” People , August 25, 2009, available at http://people.com/bodies/marissa-jaret-winokur-i-had-to-call-in-fat/. [65] Patterson, “The Secrets to Broadway Bodies.” [66] D. Soyini Madison , Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2012), 4. [67] Scholars have largely studied casting’s power dynamics by focusing on race and ethnicity. See Brandi Wilkins Catanese, The Problem of the Color[Blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Donatella Galella, “Being in ‘The Room Where it Happens’: Hamilton , Obama, and Nationalist Neoliberal Multicultural Inclusion,” Theatre Survey 59, no. 3 (2018): 363-385; Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Looking at Hamilton from Inside the Broadway Bubble,” in Historians on Hamilton : How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past , edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018); and Angela C. Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). [68] Burns, discussion. [69] Milligan, Bonnie, Twitter Post, September 6, 2018, 1:18 pm, https://twitter.com/beltingbonnie/status/1037752011335376896?s=11. [70] Snook, “Big, Blonde and Beautiful.” [71] LeBesco, Revolting Bodies , 63. [72] Michael Bennett, interview with John Gruen, After Dark , (unpublished manuscript, October 2, 1981), MGZMT 3-1038, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 'Must Be Heavyset': Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies" by Ryan Donovan 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 by Ryan Donovan The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center “We need a young girl who is—what shall we say—chubby/fat/big. But a healthy version of a fat girl, because she is dancing her ass off for two hours.” —Bernard Telsey, casting director[1] Introduction Casting director Craig Burns worked on Broadway’s Hairspray (2002) from its first workshops, and it remains his favorite production because of the opportunity to cast people who “weren’t normally considered for leads in a show, and now all of a sudden these girls are getting a chance because we need a fat girl. There was so much joy in that.”[2] Katrina Rose Dideriksen was one such woman given the chance to play Hairspray’s Tracy Turnblad on Broadway and on tour. She remembered feeling excited to play Tracy because she “is the ingénue, she wins the guy, she saves the day . . . she’s funny and she’s lovable and all those things, but in this very real-girl way.” Dideriksen then noticed a “weight clause” in her contract: “It was really this underlying pinch to realize that subconsciously I was being told I was still wrong for it, that there was something I had to fix. . . I don’t think they realized how hurtful, and how anti-Hairspray it really was for them to be like, ‘Lose 20 pounds.’”[3] Apart from a few roles (including Tracy), fat women are almost never cast in roles beyond the comedic sidekick or best friend in commercial theatre. The casting of Broadway musicals reproduces aesthetic values from the dominant culture, especially the notion that thin bodies—ones that conform to these values—are superior to other bodies, especially fat ones.[4] The aesthetic values placed on bodies are gendered, especially relative to size. Author Roxane Gay explains, “most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society.”[5] Society informs fat women that they are unfeminine and undesirable, which in turn determines everything from how fat women are represented to how and where they work. In her memoir, Lindy West notes the material effects of these values, writing, “As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and—the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on—my ability to be loved.”[6] When a fat female actor walks into an audition, these sociocultural strictures delimit her presence and reception there. While all actors are often told they aren’t the “right fit” because of their appearance, fat women confront a double standard: one actor I interviewed was bluntly told, “You’re not fat enough to be our fat girl.”[7] For fat women, the inability of the industry to think inclusively about body size proves a major barrier to employment. Fat is typically hurled as an insult rather than claimed as an identity position in the United States. It is something seen as needing to be eliminated, which sociologists Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves argue is due to the “fashion-beauty complex,” in which “advertisements remind us that unwieldy, loose, and jiggly fat must be tamed. The taut body . . . then becomes a reflection of moral fortitude, perseverance, and bodily mastery.”[8] Advertising exhorts women to be the right kind of consumers—purchasing products that help one achieve thinness. The word fat itself can be discomfiting, and in order to neutralize stigma associated with the word, fat studies scholars have reclaimed and repurposed fat.[9] Fat studies scholar Marilyn Wann explains, In fat studies, there is respect for the political project of reclaiming the word fat, both as the preferred neutral adjective (i.e., short/tall, young/old, fat/thin) and also as a term of political identity. . . Seemingly well-meaning euphemisms like “heavy,” “plump,” “husky,” and so forth put a falsely positive spin on a negative view of fatness.[10] Casting notices are rife with euphemisms to avoid saying fat, admitting the stigmatization of fatness while aiming not to offend. Hairspray star Marissa Jaret Winokur notes, “People don’t want to say the word ‘fat.’” She kept a record of the words used to avoid describing her as fat when she was starring in the musical on Broadway; these included “‘chubby,’ ‘hefty,’ ‘dumpling-shaped,’ [and] ‘dimple-kneed.’”[11] The disconnected, tentative relationship between language and fat corporeality is thus reproduced in theatre from casting to reception. Casting necessarily includes processes of disqualification, yet the lack of opportunities for fat actors reveals that size-based discrimination remains so widespread on Broadway that it is accepted as natural and, crucially, neutral. By examining casting practices, this article combats what theatre scholar Brian Eugenio Herrera terms the “mythos of casting,” namely the discourse around casting practices masking “how an actor’s labor is (and is not) valued as a commodity.”[12] To extend Herrera’s formulation, I suggest that the mythos of casting also masks how the actor’s body becomes a commodity in the theatrical marketplace. In the closed economy of Broadway musicals, this mythos provides cover for the operation of ideologies espousing bodily conformity (e.g., the plethora of articles about “Broadway Bodies” on Playbill.com).[13] Musicals celebrate performative excess while disciplining other kinds of excess: differences of ability, gender, race, size, and sexuality. This essay centers on the casting, production, and reception of Hairspray in order to demonstrate how stigma determines how fatness has been employed in Broadway musicals since the 1980s. The aesthetics and politics of casting Tracy Turnblad provide a history of body shame and questionable labor practices spanning from the early 2000s to today. Musicals embody how and where Broadway (and, by extension, U.S. society) expects fat women to sound, to move, to behave, and to labor; class, gender, race, and sexuality further impact these expectations. Fat Stigma in/and Casting Broadway Musicals Dreamgirls and Hairspray are the only hit Broadway musicals of the past fifty years where fatness is sometimes a prerequisite for playing the female lead. Hairspray (2002) was the first Broadway musical to star a fat woman since Jennifer Holliday starred as Effie White in Dreamgirls (1981). Bonnie Milligan’s casting as Princess Pamela in Head Over Heels (2018) is arguably the first Broadway musical to star a fat woman in a role where the character’s size is not mentioned in the libretto, and the role could have gone to a traditional ingenue-type instead.[14] Milligan explains how Head Over Heels differs from previous treatments of fat female characters in musicals: “This world celebrates her! And it’s not just her. It’s everyone on stage who calls her beautiful. That’s part of the intention.”[15] Jeff Whitty conceived the role expressly for Milligan, who played Pamela in every iteration of the musical on its way to Broadway.[16] Milligan’s casting and Pamela’s narrative reflect contemporary attitudes toward body positivity just as Dreamgirls and Hairspray represent then-contemporary stances toward fat women. These roles (Effie White, Tracy Turnblad, and Princess Pamela) are unique because they give fat actors the chance to play a full range of emotions beyond self-deprecation. Fat women in Broadway musicals are always considered in terms of their bodies and fitness in very specific ways; being considered plus-sized isn’t usually a plus for women on Broadway. Sometimes the stigma is overt: casting notices for the 2016 City Center Encores! production of The Golden Apple repeatedly stated, “We are not looking for heavy character actresses.”[17] Discrimination in casting and enforcement of bodily norms exists in all arenas of theatre from amateur to professional. Men do not face the same kinds of body scrutiny—Nathan Lane has regularly played leading roles where the guy gets the girl during the time span covered by this article, and The Book of Mormon has regularly cast fat men in the leading roles of Elder Cunningham following original star Josh Gad. John Waters hoped the musical adaptation of his film Hairspray would be a hit because “there will be high school productions, and finally the fat girl and the drag queen will get the starring parts.”[18] Part of Hairspray’s power comes from the fact that Tracy is portrayed as feminine and desirable while also being fat and being okay with that. Hairspray’s onstage narrative intersects with offstage narratives of casting its Broadway production, a process that often made a spectacle of young women hoping, like Tracy, for a big break. Hairspray exemplifies Broadway’s ambivalence toward casting nonconforming bodies. Even ostensibly fat-positive musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray became complicit in labor practices contributing to fat stigma. Stigma has been grounded in bodily difference since, as sociologist Erving Goffman explains, ancient Greeks coined the term “to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier.”[19] Stigma rests on a paradox of visibility, because certain bodies become invisible due to the very visible attributes that stigmatize them—fat people may be stared at but not seen, or viewed as having uncontrollable appetites. The social psychology of stigma indicates that “‘visibility’ and ‘controllability’ are the most important dimensions of stigma for the experience of both the stigmatizer and the stigmatized person.”[20] In other words, fat people are perceived to have shirked the mandate of personal responsibility that undergirds neoliberal capitalism.[21] Weight is seen through a moralistic lens equating fatness with failure; this perceived failure being the inability to control behaviors and appetites or to conform to dominant aesthetic body standards. As theatre and fat studies specialist Jennifer-Scott Mobley summarizes, “Fat people go against our collective social, political, and economic ethos.”[22] This is despite the fact that “more than two-thirds of American women [were] classified as overweight or obese.”[23] Despite vague and indeterminate meanings of “overweight” and “obese” (and their pathological implications), the vast majority of American women inhabit nonconforming bodies. The systemic, structural nature of the value placed on the minority of conforming bodies becomes further clarified by the data. U.S. culture attends to bodies centrally through weight-based discourse. Fatness, according to American studies scholar Amy Erdman Farrell, has historically been used to determine who fits where in society, in which venues one is allowed to participate, and what kind of labor one’s body performs.[24] Many of the roots of contemporary fat stigmatization can be traced to the nineteenth century and the growing industrialization and urbanization of America, which changed the kinds of bodies capital needed for labor. Fatness went from being a sign of wealth to a sign of excess, self-indulgence, laziness, moral failure, and lower-class status.[25] Conceptions of ideal bodies increasingly tilted toward thinness during the twentieth century, to the point that what once was considered average is now considered fat, and weight loss carries its own kind of cultural capital. The growing power of the fit body as a physical and moral standard marked fat as other despite its statistical prevalence. In the U.S. workforce, fat women today face an additional economic burden simply from being fat in a society restricting their earning power—being just thirteen pounds “overweight” reduces a woman’s annual earnings by an average of $9,000.[26] At the same time that fat women in the early twenty-first century are more economically disadvantaged, the U.S. economy relies upon consumer spending on diet, exercise, and weight loss products devoted to eliminating fat, and “spending money on becoming thin is the perfect solution for both neoliberal subjectivity and neoliberal capitalism more broadly.”[27] This is on top of the wage penalty for being a woman, placing fat women in a catch-22. Farrell explains that thinness then becomes “a strategy [employed] to mitigate against the identity of ‘female,’ which poses so many risks of discrimination and inferior status.”[28] According to fat studies scholar Kathleen LeBesco, “a fat person’s only shot at citizenship comes if he or she gratefully consumes the panoply of diet and fitness products made available by industry and government.”[29] Thus, Tracy Turnblad is simultaneously a good consumer (of beauty products) and a failed one (by not only being fat but celebrating it). A “Big Girl Now”: Performing Tracy Turnblad Tracy stands out in a sea of theatrical representation that clearly articulates the devaluation of fat people and reveals uncomfortable truths about what kinds of bodies are valued in the U.S., where the fat body is actually the most common kind of body. The tendency to view fat people as somehow less-than is revealed by the number of leading roles continually cast with conforming bodies, even when the script or character description does not mention weight. Broadway has not cast a fat Annie Oakley or Eliza Doolittle—even though there is nothing about these roles inherently requiring a specific body type; to do so would be to concede that fat women can play and experience the full range of representation readily available to thin people. Broadway musicals thus admit, through exclusion, which bodies are valued as they attend to the imperatives of neoliberal consumption. That Hairspray is named after a beauty product makes it almost the perfect commodity, save for its body positivity. Hairspray deliberately subverts the gap between representation and reality. Filmmaker John Waters openly wanted “to make sure that Tracy will be fat, not just plump. When was the last time you saw two fat girls as stars of a Broadway musical who also get the guy?”[30] Waters based his 1987 film on a local Baltimore television show from his youth, though he noted, “The one thing that was pure fiction in [Hairspray] was the idea that a fat girl could have gotten on that show. A fat girl never would have gotten on ‘The Buddy Deane Show.’ Even in segregated Baltimore, a black girl would have had more chance.”[31] For Waters, Hairspray’s fairy tale aspect was precisely why it was empowering: “It’s about the teenage white girl who gets a black guy. The fat girl gets a straight guy, and her mother’s a man who sings a love song to another man.”[32] Apart from Waters, Hairspray’s creative team embraced Tracy’s fatness but also employed humor undermining its fat-positive stance; the film includes numerous jokes about the appetites of its fat women. As Edna sings in the show’s finale, “You can’t stop my happiness/’Cause I like the way I am/And you just can’t stop my knife and fork/When I see a Christmas ham.”[33] While Hairspray works hard to be in on the jokes, it also subtly subverts the identities it means to celebrate by laughing not only with but sometimes at its characters. Hairspray’s setting in 1960s Baltimore speaks to social change and body image as mediated on television. When Tracy’s mother, Edna, hears of Tracy’s desire to dance on the local television station’s The Corny Collins Show, she says, “They don’t put people like us on TV—Except to be laughed at.”[34] Tracy breaks the mold of fat girl as doormat, victim, or comic relief as she is the musical’s self-possessed, exuberant, romantic leading lady who can “shake and shimmy” with the best of them. The plot centers around her drive to dance on Corny Collins and win the love of its resident heartthrob, Link Larkin—this musical is about casting, too. She remains acutely aware of how her desires are viewed; in “I Can Hear the Bells,’” she sings, “Everybody says/That a girl who looks like me/Can’t win his love/Well, just wait and see.”[35] Tracy ends up winning a place on the show when Collins spots her dancing at her sophomore hop. The show’s tongue-in-cheek tone extends to social issues like segregation. Paralleling Tracy’s ambition to dance on television is her drive to racially integrate the Collins show. She inspires a protest to integrate the program and goes to prison as a result. Tracy ultimately wins Link’s love, makes a jailbreak, and is crowned “Miss Teenage Hairspray 1962” as the Collins show is racially integrated in the musical’s finale. Fat, in Hairspray, is both specific and universal; its creators explain, “Tenacious Tracy Turnblad, lovable as she is, is fat, and all of us, lovable as we are, are somehow, metaphorically, fat.” They describe Tracy’s fatness as a metaphor for being “skinny, clumsy, new in town, female, foreign, black, Jewish, gay, naïve, brainy, too short, too tall, overeager, shy, poor, left-handed, over-freckled, pyrokinetic (like Carrie), scissor-handed (like Edward), or musical-comedy-loving.”[36] Tracy never lets dominant cultural views of fatness stop her and does not view herself as inferior—a new narrative for a fat female character in a Broadway musical. Such supreme self-esteem was certainly not represented in Dreamgirls’s narrative arc; Effie had to admit “I Am Changing” to find success in a thinner body. Tracy’s narrative arc “implodes the myth of the unlovable fat woman” (as Head Over Heels too would go on to do) at the same time that, according to social psychologist JuliaGrace Jester, “it gives unrealistic representations of the ease with which Tracy is both accepted by others and how she accepts herself.”[37] The show functions as a fantasy for the very real reasons Jester critiques it: its alternative world of empowerment and wish fulfillment sidesteps actions toward real fat acceptance. Hairspray instead creates its own myths in which struggle and injustice are resolved through song, black people and white people are assimilated into a community through dance, and all are linked through being consumers (of music, television, and beauty products). Tracy uses her consumption of hairspray to break the rules of what 1960s white girls are supposed to look like, teasing and spraying her hair into a bouffant, while challenging how she was prohibited from moving by dancing with the black kids. Casting Hairspray for Broadway presented challenges, beginning with choosing the language used in the casting breakdowns. Despite Waters’s comfort with fat, the casting breakdown for Tracy scrupulously avoided using it. Telsey Casting decided on “heavyset” instead: [TRACY TURNBLAD] Female, Caucasian, 5’3” or shorter, to play high school age. Must be heavyset. Outgoing, unstoppable, goodhearted with a vibrant, lovable, spirited personality. Loves to dance. Becomes a teen heroine. Strong pop belt singer and great mover. LEAD.[38] Burns explains that the word choices were made “because . . . you don’t want to offend anybody in a breakdown.” He went on to add that initially they knew “you need a fat girl. It’s like, ‘that’s the role’ . . . But it was definitely set up at the beginning, that on the breakdown, that we would always use ‘heavyset.’”[39] Size was of course only one element under consideration for potential Tracys. Broadway actor Kathy Deitch was brought in to audition for Tracy several times over a period of four years, never getting cast because she read as “too sophisticated” for the role. She remembers, “Just because I’m chubby, everyone assumed that I would be Tracy.”[40] Being the right body “type” alone is not enough, though it helps the actor get an audition. The height requirement noted in the breakdown further limited the applicant pool, in addition to the specific 1960s-inflected vocal style and dance ability required. Winokur played Tracy in all of Hairspray’s readings before she was contracted to originate the role on Broadway. Telsey Casting launched a national casting search in Baltimore to find unknowns to play Tracy while Winokur was rehearsing the role for the final reading in New York.[41] Burns notes this was not, as was reported, about replacing Winokur before the opening, but rather was about finding understudies and future replacements: “We knew we were going to need to start finding these girls, so I think it was about starting early.”[42] Casting replacements effectively began before the musical even opened in New York. When the production held auditions in New York the month after its Broadway opening, hundreds of hopefuls showed up, including many who saw playing Tracy as their chance to break through. “The role is something that I can play, because I can never be Eponine in Les Misérables. I’ve struggled with this for a long time, because on stage it doesn’t matter what you look like, but what you weigh,” relates Tracy-hopeful Lisette Valentine.[43] Casting director Bethany Berg notes, “These girls are real people; they’re what most of America looks like, and we’re looking for those people that are happy and confident.”[44] Berg’s language acknowledges fat women as real people as well as explicitly nods to what actual American bodies look like—implicitly admitting the composition of the musical’s audience. However, even when acknowledging the progressive elements of casting a fat female lead, the press was still unable to resist weight- and size-related puns and metaphors. The title of the article referenced above, for example, is “Sizing Them Up.” Despite (or perhaps because of) Hairspray’s fat positivity, the press felt licensed to write numerous feature stories commenting on the body of the actor playing Tracy in addition to emphasizing her diet and exercise routine. Fat became a punchline for headline writers: a typical headline was Variety’s “‘Hairspray’s’ Full-Figured Tony Tally.” To a degree, the production itself encouraged this kind of winking treatment; its advertising tagline was “Broadway’s Big Fat Musical Comedy Hit.” A New York Times feature on Winokur repeatedly made the point that she was breaking “conventional wisdom” about how fat women should act and what they should wear: “Heavyset women are expected to wear their clothes long and loose-fitting. Ms. Winokur likes her skirts short and her T-shirts tight.”[45] Winokur noted the significance of her opportunity as Tracy, saying, “Here I am, the young character actress . . . I’m the lead this time.”[46] She was positioned as transgressive for doing things considered normal by thin women. It was not just the press who focused on the body of the actors playing Tracy though; the production team had its eyes on those bodies as well. Winning the Role and Weighing In Hairspray stands out for its celebration of size, and yet its costume design and contractual weight clauses undermined its fat-positivity.[47] The show promoted fat acceptance as it simultaneously mandated weigh-ins for cast members, a practice much more common in ballet companies. The irony is that Tracy is essentially a dance lead—the show’s structure bears this out, as she is not even given the traditional leading lady spots for her songs (Maybelle sings both the eleven o’clock number and the act one finale). Dideriksen, initially a standby Tracy, discovered at her first backstage weigh-in that she was not alone in having her weight monitored; the actress regularly playing Tracy was also contractually obligated to maintain a certain weight, whereas Dideriksen was told to lose 20 pounds. A member of the production’s wardrobe team would round the scale’s number up or down accordingly out of kindness. She remembers the weigh-ins as “sending us into panics” over whether their contracts would be terminated if the scale moved in the wrong direction, even though both actors wore fat suits.[48] Burns said the fat suits were not an issue as far as he knew during the casting process: It didn’t really come up, because I think everybody just knew . . . You look at the costumes and they just want a certain shape. A girl could be heavy, but they might need padding somewhere else to just give that Tracy-kind-of-shape that [the creative team] wanted. So, it really wasn’t something that we said, “Oh, you’re gonna need to be padded,” it just went with the territory, and girls just accepted that.[49] Whether the young women cast as Tracy knew before they signed the contract does not mitigate the complexity of feelings stirred by being padded and/or weighed, the ambivalence of the simultaneous burden and privilege of playing Tracy, or the fact that many understood this was their only shot to play a lead. The use of fat suits emblematizes this ambivalence because fat suits exacerbate the bind of inhabiting a fat body: being perceived as excess and lack, simultaneously too much and not enough. Yet using fat suits is more complicated than simply exercising artistic license. The fat suit itself reinforces stigma because it can be put on and taken off at will, an act unavailable to the fat person perceived as morally suspect for their inability to take off the weight.[50] At the same time, it is the literal embodiment of the myth that inside every fat person is a thin person who is somehow more “real.” Fat suits, and fat itself, then are seen as a performative embodiment. If the creative team and producers were so invested in maintaining the weight of the actors playing Tracy, then why bother with fat suits at all? LAS VEGAS, NV - FEBRUARY 15: Actress Katrina Rose Dideriksen (L) as the character Tracy Turnblad and actor Harvey Fierstein as the character Edna Turnblad perform during the opening night of the Broadway musical "Hairspray" at the Luxor Hotel & Casino February 15, 2006 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) One plausible reason why the production used padding is because Tracy’s physicality was so demanding. Tracy dances so intensely throughout the show that the creative team was afraid actors would lose too much weight. The New York Post reported, “Winokur has lost weight—enough to send a frantic theater crew bringing candy and chocolate shakes to her dressing room. As the chunky star of ‘Hairspray’ . . . [Winokur] needs to stay plump to play the Ricki Lake role.”[51] The article’s headline, “Worth the Weight,” raises the question of what is worth the weight—Winokur? The chocolate shakes and candy? Starring on Broadway? The seesaw of being told to maintain your fitness while being “fed”? As the production was trying to fatten up its leading lady, it was also pressuring her to exercise and increase her stamina. For the creative team, Tracy’s weight was always a concern during casting. Employment law scholar and fat activist Sandra Solovay details stereotypes concerning fat people’s employability: “They are not fit so they should not be in any position that requires strength, speed, stamina, or other significant physical demands.”[52] In the New York Times, “Jack O’Brien, the director of ‘Hairspray,’ said he never doubted that Ms. Winokur was right for the role, only whether she had the stamina for it. ‘Did she have the chops to do eight shows a week?’”[53] Winokur had previously appeared on Broadway in a revival of Grease and regularly performed eight shows a week without apparent issue. Concerns about stamina and ability significantly contribute to fat stigma in general. On Broadway they added pressure to an already-tough job. Hairspray was the first time many actors playing Tracy were asked to carry a show, let alone a Broadway production, and they had more than their weight to worry about. Winokur was bluntly informed during the show’s Seattle tryout that she was “carrying a ten and a half million dollar show.”[54] Keala Settle explained the pressure of playing Tracy: Truth be told, every Tracy had that [pressure]. They went through the same thing . . . Each of us got shot out of a cannon, expected to become this torch for their company, and for everybody around them, producers. That’s what it was. I can’t even describe what that feels like or how to even deal with it because I didn’t deal with it so great. But if I was asked to live it again, you bet . . . I would do it again.[55] Some candidates for Tracy were sent to “Tracy Camp,” a training program for actors whom the creative team determined needed more vetting before being offered a contract.[56] Dideriksen went to “Tracy Camp” with no promise of future employment.[57] Burns notes “Tracy Camp” was borne out of practical considerations to keep the various productions up and running smoothly, because it was a struggle to cast the role. He explains, “They had to be really special, so we found them all but it wasn’t like we had twenty people in our back pocket that we could go to . . . We definitely had to go out there and train and find the really special ones.”[58] Yet “Tracy Camp” was arguably as much about seeing whether the fat women’s bodies were fit enough as it was teaching the role. Dideriksen describes her perspective on the process: It was really this challenge of feeling they needed this extra preparation, also worrying bigger girls weren’t as coordinated . . . that’s what it seemed like, because we had this extra week of dance that was just dance rehearsal, and a lot of talk about getting our stamina up, and how to last . . . It’s a lot of dancing and singing at the same time, it would be a lot for anyone, but they were especially concerned that this was supposed to be a bigger girl on top of it.[59] Burns backs up Dideriksen’s assessment of the particular demands of this role: “I remember Jerry Mitchell saying what the girls would have to . . . be really good at cardio to dance the show, and he was like, ‘I need you to do 45 minutes on the bike and then you’ll have a milkshake.’”[60] Kathy Brier, Broadway’s first replacement Tracy, told Newsday, “It’s a weird kind of a thing. You’re supposed to be this chubby girl, and yet the show is so active you have to train to be an athlete.”[61] Tracy had to be fit and fat in order to perform the role, which are not contradictory demands despite popular misconceptions including those of the musical’s creative team. As much as getting cast as Tracy was an opportunity, it often came with a price once the contract was over. Dideriksen played Tracy on Broadway and opposite Harvey Fierstein in Las Vegas but details how after she left the show, “There was this stigma of still seeing me having Tracy on my resumé.”[62] No actor who played Tracy during Hairspray’s nearly eight-and-a-half year Broadway run has since appeared in another leading role on Broadway.[63] Winokur herself has maintained her celebrity status by becoming associated with weight loss. She was a contestant on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and hosted a cable television weight loss competition show called Dance Your Ass Off. In 2009, she wrote a blog series for People magazine titled “Calling in Fat,” aimed at taking readers along on her “weight loss journey.”[64] Winokur’s notion that one could “call in fat” to work emphasizes the relationship of fat stigma to labor issues. The inability to be cast in leading roles after playing Tracy exists for those who played the role on Broadway as well as actors who have played the role in regional theatres. Personal trainer Geoff Hemingway regularly trains performers, including a client who played Tracy: “When she started she was like, ‘I just played Tracy Turnblad in this regional production of Hairspray. That was my dream role, and now I’ve done it and I don’t want to be fat anymore.’ Since coming in to Mark Fisher [Fitness], she’s shed about fifty pounds and is now being seen for ingénue roles.”[65] Tracy, of course, is an ingénue role, but her fat body prevents her from being seen as such. This anecdote underlines the internalization of fat stigma within the industry and its relation to actors’ legitimate concerns regarding employability. Broadway Cares? The lack of fat actors cast in leading roles belies Broadway’s vision of itself as a fully inclusive institution, and the use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses has perpetuated fat stigma. Stated simply, if you are fat, you will rarely be considered for a leading role in a Broadway musical because of how your body looks—being fat means being seen for fewer roles, which translates into less work. Ethnographer D. Soyini Madison exhorts us to remember that the stakes of representation are not merely about who is seen: “representation has consequences: how people are represented is how they are treated.”[66] Casting contains the possibility to alter these consequences and make an immediate, visible impact because it reveals which bodies are considered fit for Broadway.[67] Casting directors can bring diverse, nonconforming bodies into auditions, but they are still bound to the small army of decision makers comprised of the creative team and multiple producers. Power over what and who makes it to the stage remains in the hands of those controlling the money. Commercial theatre’s profit motive materially effects the lives of all actors, especially fat actors who will not be considered or seen for leading roles—the highest paying ones. When asked whether he had been able to cast anyone who played Tracy in another leading role, Burns demurred: “That’s a good question. . .There have been other opportunities, but I don’t know. I still think it’s definitely a type, and it’s harder to find roles that are right for these girls.”[68] Finding the right roles proved tough not just for the Broadway Tracys but also the stars of Hairspray’s film and television adaptations, Nikki Blonksy and Maddie Baillio respectively, who have worked sporadically in featured roles since playing Tracy. What would happen if fat women were recognized as deserving of the full range of representation given to women with conforming bodies? It might look something like Head Over Heels. During the show’s brief run, Milligan tweeted, “We are serving amazing body positivity at @HOHmusical, where I get to play the most beautiful girl in the land, who has a love story, and nothing about my weight!!”[69] Audience members would wait for Milligan at the stage door to tell her what seeing her onstage meant to them. She explains, It’s been really lovely meeting so many women who are moved and say, “Thank you! You don’t know what it means to have a big girl up there being joyful and pretty and dancing.” I understand how important and beautiful it is because I never saw that, so I’m happy to oblige. I don’t think we talk enough about size diversity in casting. I very much want to be a template.[70] Unlike Dreamgirls and Hairspray, Head Over Heels struggled to find an audience and closed after just 188 performances. The presence of a show like Head Over Heels on Broadway might seem to precipitate casting practices becoming more inclusive, yet Broadway’s recent history indicates that, despite economic imperatives to return investors’ money, the financial success of inclusively cast, albeit conflictedly-so, musicals does not automatically beget more inclusivity. If we recognize the twenty-one-year gap between Dreamgirls and Hairspray and the sixteen-year gap from Hairspray to Head Over Heels, then we must confront the fact that money must not be the sole concern: Dreamgirls and Hairspray were both long-running, award-winning, financially lucrative successes that proved stories about fat women starring fat women are viable money-makers. While Head Over Heels was a financial flop, it nevertheless marks important progress in the representation of fat women on Broadway. The presence of only these three roles, along with the handful of supporting roles in musicals like Escape to Margaritaville (2017) and Waitress (2015), demonstrates how fat stigma operates on Broadway from conception to casting. LeBesco explains, “the stigma attached to being fat is a control mechanism which supports a power structure of one group of people over another.”[71] By not casting fat women outside of prescribed roles, Broadway musicals enforce a system of gendered bodily norms that police how all women act, consume, and labor in the U.S. A few months before Dreamgirls opened, Bennett described his view of that musical’s central conflict in three questions summing up the lens through which Broadway, and arguably US society itself, continues to understand representation: “[I]t’s about, are you marketable? Is it saleable? Will it make money?”[72] Despite the smash hit status of Dreamgirls and Hairspray and the progress made by Head Over Heels, Broadway continues to say no to most fat women. Ryan Donovan received his PhD in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research on casting and identity examines the inclusion of stigmatized and non-normative bodies in contemporary Broadway musicals. Ryan is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre and the special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre (13.1) on dance and musical theatre. He would like to thank everyone he interviewed for this research. ryan-donovan.com [1] Ira J. Bilowit, “Hairspray,” Back Stage, January 31, 2003. [2] Craig Burns (casting director), in discussion with the author, September 2017. [3] Katrina Rose Dideriksen (actor), in discussion with the author, April 2017. [4] The framing of bodies as either conforming or non-conforming is drawn from Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), and Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves, Framing Fat: Competing Constructions in Contemporary Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013). [5] Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 13. [6] Lindy West, Shrill (New York: Hachette Books, 2016), 67-68. [7] Dideriksen, discussion. [8] Kwan and Graves, Framing Fat, 28-29. [9] The interdisciplinary field of fat studies’ beginnings can be traced to the 1980s, though it emerged from movements for fat acceptance that began in the 1960s and 1970s. By the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars were publishing fat studies monographs and collections and Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society was established in 2012. Marilyn Wann, foreword to The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: NYU Press, 2009), x-xi. [10] Ibid., xii. [11] Joe Dziemianowicz, “Baby, You’re a Big Curl Now,” New York Daily News, August 14, 2002. [12] Brian Eugenio Herrera, “The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. 2 (Spring 2015), available at http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/the-best-actor-for-the-role-or-the-mythos-of-casting-in-american-popular-performance/. [13] A prime example of this kind of article is Richard Patterson, “The Secrets to Broadway Bodies: How “Theatrical Ninjas” Stay Trim, Toned, and Tight for 8 Shows a Week,” Playbill.com, January 31, 2015, http://www.playbill.com/article/the-secrets-to-broadway-bodies-how-performers-stay-trim-toned-and-tight-com-340312. [14] Dreamgirls, Head Over Heels, and It Shoulda Been You (2015) could be considered ensemble musicals as opposed to Hairspray, in which Tracy is very clearly the leading lady. While Jennifer Holliday won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical, Jennifer Hudson won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing the same role in the film adaptation of Dreamgirls . [15] Bonnie Milligan, interview by Holly Rosen Fink, Women and Hollywood (blog), September 25, 2018, https://womenandhollywood.com/bonnie-milligan-talks-representation-female-empowerment-in-broadways-head-over-heels/. [16] Raven Snook, “Big, Blonde and Beautiful in Her Broadway Debut,” TDF Stages (blog), July 24, 2018, http://bway.ly/4o61zu/#https://www.tdf.org/stages/article/1960/big-blonde-and-beautiful-in-her-broadway-debut. [17] Michael Gioia, “Heavy Character Actress Need Not Apply? Women Get Real on Casting,” Playbill, August 25, 2016, http://www.playbill.com/article/heavy-character-actresses-need-not-apply-women-get-real-on-casting. [18] John Waters, “Finally, Footlights on the Fat Girls,” New York Times, August 11, 2002. Head Over Heels complements Waters’ ideas about casting and LGBTQ+ representation: it featured the first trans-woman, Peppermint, in a Broadway musical in addition to the fact that Pamela is fat and comes out as a lesbian in the musical, replete with a kiss. [19] Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 1. [20] John F. Dovidio, Brenda Major, and Jennifer Crocker, “Stigma: Introduction and Overview,” in The Social Psychology of Stigma, edited by Todd F. Heatherton, Robert E. Kleck, Michelle R. Hebl, and Jay G. Hill (New York: The Guildford Press, 2000), 6. [21] See also Jennifer Crocker and Diane M. Quinn, “Social Stigma and the Self: Meanings, Situations, and Self-esteem,” in Ibid., 153-183. [22] Jennifer-Scott Mobley, Female Bodies on the American Stage: Enter Fat Actress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 24. [23] Deborah A. Christel and Susan C. Dunn, “Average American women’s clothing size: comparing National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys (1988-2010) to ASTM International Misses & Women’s Plus Size Clothing,” International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education 10, no. 2 (2017), 129. [24] Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 18. [25] Laura Fraser, “The Inner Corset: A Brief History of Fat in the United States,” in The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 12. [26] Jennifer Bennett Shinall, “Occupational Characteristics and the Obesity Wage Penalty,” Vanderbilt Law and Economics Research Paper 16-12 (2015), available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2379575. [27] Julie Guthman, “Neoliberalism and the Constitution of Contemporary Bodies,” in The Fat Studies Reader, 193. [28] Farrell, Fat Shame, 115. [29] LeBesco, Revolting Bodies, 57. [30] Patrick Pacheco, “Water’s ‘Hairspray’ Is Beginning to Gel,” Newsday, December 20, 2001. [31] Chris Jones, “Welcome to the ‘60s,” Chicago Tribune, January 18, 2004. [32] Mark O’Donnell, Thomas Meehan, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman, Hairspray: The Roots (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2003), 12. [33] Mark O’Donnell, Thomas Meehan, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman, Hairspray: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Hit Broadway Musical (New York: Applause, 2002), 123. [34] Ibid., 14. [35] Ibid., 24-25. [36] O’Donnell et al., Hairspray: The Roots, 5. [37] JuliaGrace Jester, “Placing Fat Women Center Stage” in The Fat Studies Reader, 250. [38] Craig Burns, email message to the author, September 2017. [39] Burns, discussion. [40] Kathy Deitch (actor), in discussion with the author, April 2017. [41] “Spotlight: Hairspray,” Variety, April 21-27, 2003. [42] Burns, discussion. [43] Elena Malykhina, “Sizing Them Up,” New York Newsday, September 23, 2002. [44] Ibid. [45] Robin Pogrebin, “Big Hair and Personality to Match; For a Young Actress’s Career, A Bouffant Moment in ‘Hairspray,’” New York Times, August 21, 2002. [46] Ibid. [47] Dideriksen, discussion. [48] Ibid. [49] Ibid. [50] Fat suits have been widely used in contemporary theatre, notably in musicals like Dreamgirls but also in plays like Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig (2004) and Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale (2012). [51] Farrah Weinstein, “Worth the Weight,” New York Post, August 8, 2002. [52] Sandra Solovay, J.D., Tipping the Scales of Social Justice: Fighting Weight-Based Discrimination (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 160-161. [53] Robin Pogrebin, “Big Hair and Personality to Match; For a Young Actress’s Career, A Bouffant Moment in ‘Hairspray,’” New York Times, August 21, 2002. [54] O’Donnell et al., Hairspray: The Roots, 39. [55] “Keala Settle,” Theater People 31, podcast audio, February 8, 2015, https://www.buzzsprout.com/19639.rss. [56] Hairspray was one of the first musicals to groom potential cast members this way, followed by Billy Elliott (2008), Jersey Boys (2005), and Hamilton (2015), among others. [57] Dideriksen, discussion. [58] Burns, discussion. [59] Dideriksen, discussion. [60] Burns, discussion. [61] Kathy Brier, interview by Gordon Cox, Newsday (New York), September 28, 2003. [62] Dideriksen, discussion. [63] Two exceptions are Tracy understudies Shoshana Bean and Donna Vivino, who went on to play or understudy Elphaba in Wicked. [64] Staff, “Marissa Jaret Winokur: I Had to Call in Fat,” People, August 25, 2009, available at http://people.com/bodies/marissa-jaret-winokur-i-had-to-call-in-fat/. [65] Patterson, “The Secrets to Broadway Bodies.” [66] D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2012), 4. [67] Scholars have largely studied casting’s power dynamics by focusing on race and ethnicity. See Brandi Wilkins Catanese, The Problem of the Color[Blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Donatella Galella, “Being in ‘The Room Where it Happens’: Hamilton, Obama, and Nationalist Neoliberal Multicultural Inclusion,” Theatre Survey 59, no. 3 (2018): 363-385; Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Looking at Hamilton from Inside the Broadway Bubble,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past, edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018); and Angela C. Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). [68] Burns, discussion. [69] Milligan, Bonnie, Twitter Post, September 6, 2018, 1:18 pm, https://twitter.com/beltingbonnie/status/1037752011335376896?s=11. [70] Snook, “Big, Blonde and Beautiful.” [71] LeBesco, Revolting Bodies, 63. [72] Michael Bennett, interview with John Gruen, After Dark, (unpublished manuscript, October 2, 1981), MGZMT 3-1038, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. "'Must Be Heavyset': Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies" by Ryan Donovan 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.

Sharyn Emery Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Sharyn Emery By Published on May 28, 2018 Download Article as PDF Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas . Sandra M. Mayo and Elvin Holt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016; Pp. 341. The history of black theatre in the United States tends to be analyzed as a product of the coasts, from New York City during the Harlem Renaissance to San Francisco during the Black Arts Movement. In the twenty-first century, we continue to look to Broadway and off-Broadway as significant sites for study, yet the development of black theatre runs throughout the US. Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas by Sandra M. Mayo and Elvin Holt turns the spotlight on the state of Texas and its remarkable history of community theatre, from small amateur groups to professional theatre companies. The book provides a historical overview of black-run companies in five cities: San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, complete with a chronological list of productions for each company in each year of its existence. Most of these theatres have all-black administrators and produce mainly—though not exclusively—plays by black playwrights from throughout the African diaspora. Mayo and Holt emphasize that the book is “a people’s story” (xii) that honors and builds upon the work and scholarship of others, including James Hatch, Erroll Hill, Samuel Hay, and Leslie Sanders, even as it provides new insights. Holt and Mayo begin by noting a gap in scholarship in both general black theatre historiography and the study of the black experience in Texas. Before turning to parallels between the growth of black theatre in Texas and in the country at large, the authors carefully explain black theatre aesthetics and influences. Black theatre in Texas presents a significant challenge to the narrative of Texas’s own cultural identity, which is dominated by violent stories featuring white male heroes, often to the exclusion of minoritized people. Thus, Mayo and Holt create space for a new narrative, one that places black artists at the center of the cultural development of Texas. In Stages of Struggle and Celebration , the existence of these highly professional and successful black companies proves the significance of their work. The text also uncovers the close, fruitful relationships between black theatres and the black church, and between black theatres and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in Texas. Part I of the book establishes the theoretical framework of black theatre, providing a helpful overview of the debates as to what “black theatre” actually is. Beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois’s “criteria for Negro theatre,” Mayo and Holt trace the debate through the scholarship of Paul Carter Harrison and Mikell Pinkney, and the aesthetic theories of August Wilson. The afterword pulls together theory and praxis, evaluating the book’s research and history through the lens of the five questions: who, what, where, when, and why. These sections are beneficial for any reader unfamiliar with the history of black theatre, dating back to the Jim Crow era and moving toward the present day. Part II contains one chapter about each of five major cities in Texas using specific companies to represent the history of black theatre in each area. In the preface, the authors acknowledge that the availability of archival materials and other research sites vary widely by city and individual company. This means that in each chapter, some of the write-ups are much shorter than others, due to the disorganized nature of most of the companies’ archives. Yet the authors make the most of what they have, including detailed performance histories, racial/ethnic demographic information of each city, and, in some cases, frank analysis of problems that affected companies and their ability to stay productive. Examined side by side, these companies share many striking similarities. Plays such as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s From the Mississippi Delta are performed regularly. The section concludes with a list of plays by African-American Texans. Chapter one focuses on San Antonio and offers the most interesting history of the entire book due to the longevity and variety of institutions in this city. Theatre began here earlier than in most other cities, at the turn of the twentieth century. Today, several companies, including the nearly 100-year-old Carver Community Cultural Center and the Hornsby Entertainment Theatre Company produce full seasons of theatre, sometimes in collaboration with local churches or other arts foundations. Chapter two explores black theatre in Austin, the only city in the book that does not currently have an active black theatre. The most recent company, Progressive Arts Collective, saw its founder pass away in 2005, and then it closed in 2012. Holt and Mayo use this example to unpack some inherent difficulties in sustaining a black regional theatre without regular funding and public support. When a theatre company runs almost entirely on volunteer power, it remains on the precarious edge between survival and failure. Dallas emerges as the city with the most theatrical companies as well as the largest population of African Americans. Chapter three covers two currently active companies in depth, the African American Repertory Theatre (AART) and the Black Academy of Arts and Letters (TBAAL), which is most famous for its collaborations with Tyler Perry. Perry began working with TBAAL in the late 1990s and developed several of his characters and scripts there that would later appear in his feature films. Chapters four and five cover Fort Worth and Houston, respectively. Fort Worth contains just two companies, allowing the authors to discuss thoroughly the Jubilee Theatre, which continues to produce work. In Houston, the authors uncover the Thespian Society for “Cullud Genman,” likely a minstrel troupe from the 1860s, but focus mainly on two currently operating companies, the Ensemble Theatre and the Encore Theatre. Stages of Struggle and Celebration is not a critique of persons involved in running the companies, or an evaluation of the companies’ productions, although the authors do analyze why certain companies failed to maintain funding and include some media reviews where available. Instead, this text is a chronological, mainly favorable rundown of the important work done by black theatre companies in Texas. This is a book for students and scholars to use as a starting point for further research. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Sharyn Emery Indiana University Southeast Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Sarah Alice Campbell Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Sarah Alice Campbell By Published on May 23, 2020 Download Article as PDF Jan Cohen-Cruz argues in Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States that the criticism of conventional theatre is ineffective at assessing the scope, intent, and success of community-based performances. She writes, “expecting virtuosity, we miss the pleasures offered by commitment and risk. We are used to formal, distanced aesthetics and may underappreciate art driven by a personal connection to the material and a need to communicate.” [1] In this article I argue that this is precisely the phenomenon that has occurred in the criticism surrounding community-based Yucatec Maya theatre in Mexico. Evidence of such criticism can be found in the work of Carmen Castillo Rocha on theatre in the state of Yucatán. In explaining the relevance of theatre in Maya communities compared to the importance of other forms of performance within festivals and rituals in those same communities, she writes el teatro entre las comunidades mayas, en el mejor de los casos, queda como un fenómeno marginal cuyo origen fue el contacto con la cultura dominante; y en el peor de los casos aparece como un intento occidental de convertir la vida ritual de los mayas en un espectáculo para los ojos occidentales.Theatre among Maya communities, in the best of cases, remains a marginal phenomenon whose origin was contact with the dominant culture; and in the worst of cases appears as an occidental attempt to convert the ritual life of the Maya into a spectacle for occidental eyes. [2] I take issue with Castillo Rocha’s statements above in three respects: first, she argues that Maya theatre is a marginal phenomenon compared to festival and ritual; second, she insists that in the best-case scenario, theatre in the peninsula owes its existence to western or dominant cultures; and finally, she implies that theatre in Maya communities is intended for western eyes. I explore Castillo Rocha’s statement more below, but I introduce it here to argue that Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula has been viewed as marginal because of the way that it has been mediated in scholarship, not because it is inherently marginal within the community that created it. In this article, I argue for the necessity of studying Maya language theatre in the Yucatán peninsula as an art world. [3] This approach reveals the ways in which the multiplicity of discourses regarding Maya identity and the outside alliances that intersect with individuals and organizations that produce theatre have had an effect upon the valuing of theatre in some Maya areas but not in others. [4] This recognition is critical for understanding why Maya language theatre in the peninsula has been dismissed as marginal when compared to Mayan language theatre in the Mexican state of Chiapas, for example. I do this by first reviewing the relevant literature on the art world and artwriting, I explore the literature regarding contemporary Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula and Chiapas, and I end with a short exploration of the community-based performance in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo, Mexico, called “La conjura de Xinum,” (The Plot of Xinum) as an act of artwriting. Through this discussion, I argue the play “La conjura de Xinum” should not be dismissed as merely a marginal act by a community theatre group in rural Mexico; rather, I maintain it reveals the agency of Maya artists in advocating for language and cultural revitalization. An in-depth overview of Maya identity is not possible in an essay of this scope, but a brief review is necessary to contribute to a deeper understanding of Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula. The Maya peoples are comprised of a number of interrelated yet distinct linguistic and cultural groups. They have been grouped together under the name “Maya” by both academics and Maya peoples themselves as an act of resistance. The Maya civilization spanned a large portion of Mesoamerica (present-day Mexico and into the countries of Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador). Colonization and independence movements in these countries had a profound effect upon the Maya peoples and their resistance strategies and contributed to shaping distinct practices within linguistic and cultural groups. [5] While Maya people continue to live throughout Mesoamerica, in this essay, I am focusing on the Maya in Mexico, and even more specifically, within the states of Chiapas, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo. Yucatán and Quintana Roo are two of the three states which comprise the Yucatán peninsula, Campeche, the third, will not be explicitly addressed in this article. [6] Yucatec Maya people are the ethno-linguistic group who live in the Yucatán peninsula. In Quintana Roo, Maya is by far the preferred term to use for an Indigenous person from the area, whereas in the state of Yucatán, mestiza/o is the preferred term. I use the term Yucatec Maya theatre to refer to theatre created by Maya people in the Yucatán peninsula. While most of these plays are presented in the Yucatec Maya language, some use Spanish as well. On Art Worlds and Artwriting My approach for this study of Maya theatre is based on a recognition that the creation, production, and distribution of art, both in its original form and how it is mediated through writing and other modes of criticism, is a collective activity; and further, that the discourses around the work of art itself allow for artwork to gain value in new markets. Howard Becker and David Carrier have theorized these issues through the concepts of “art worlds” and “artwriting,” respectively. [7] Becker describes an art world as “an established network of cooperative links among participants.” [8] Amongst these participants are the artists, the people who interact with the art during and after its production, as well as the critics and scholars who write about the work. Becker refutes the idea that an artist creates their work independently, arguing that the systems within what he calls the art world affect the way that the art is produced, received, and written about. [9] Thus, the study of Maya language theatre, including this article, is an integral part of the art world of Maya language theatre. Becker describes this further in his chapter on aesthetics in his book Art Worlds : Aestheticians study the premises and arguments people use to justify classifying things and activities as “beautiful,” “artistic,” “art,” “not art,” “good art,” “bad art,” and so on. They construct systems with which to make and justify both the classifications and specific instances of their application. Critics apply aesthetic systems to specific art works and arrive at judgments of their worth and explications of what gives them that worth. Those judgements provide reputations for works and artists. [10] Becker, through his concept of art worlds, argues that criticism about art is not outside of the artwork but creates value for a particular work of art or artist. Instead of relying on established aesthetic systems to critique the work of community-based artists, we should heed Cohen-Cruz’s call to look to the totality of the community-based endeavor, considering the context around the work itself in order to understand “what critical approach is appropriate.” [11] In order to better understand how the “cooperative links” comprising the art world affect the work of art itself, it is first necessary to understand who is involved in the process and how the work of art or artist has been mediated in writing or other forms of criticism. [12] David Carrier argues through his concept of artwriting that art can gain or lose value culturally and materially based on how it is mediated in various discourses that interpret the art. [13] George Marcus uses Carrier’s notion of artwriting in his book on the anthropological study of the art world, The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology . He notes, “objects (or performances) only accumulate cultural value to the extent that they are inscribed in ‘histories.’” He continues, neither the early debates about the avant-garde and modernism nor more recent framings of artistic activity in postmodern terms are external commentaries. They are neither part of a scholarly framework to be settled nor outside the production of art in which the boundaries between the “discipline” and its “object” are distinct. Rather such debates comprise much of artwriting itself; they are quintessentially enabling art to have a “history.” And history, or the narrative of art history, is central to the evaluation of paintings and other objects, whose importance is established by their place in a privileged story of culture and civilization. [14] Thus, it is the discourses accumulating around art that create a history of it. I am not advocating that art without history lacks intrinsic value, but rather that art can be mediated in such a way as to allow for the possibility of acquiring a material or new cultural value within a different society or economy. George Marcus highlights the influence of artwriting on the market: Imagine, for example, a painter such as Frida Kahlo, who is reevaluated after her death, in contrast to the previously more celebrated Diego Rivera. Her paintings, valued at $30,000 ten years ago, are now worth over $1 million. Her work—which emphasizes gender, informality, and the body—becomes significant in the light of current theoretical trends. And, although Rivera’s work is far more concerned with the Mexican state, as soon as Kahlo became important outside Mexico, her work acquired national value exceeding Rivera’s. [15] Although Marcus here refers to visual arts, one can extend this concept to an understanding of theatre and performance. As I explore below, Maya theatre in the state of Chiapas has been represented in criticism as internationally relevant. The influence of participating scholars and institutions have lent credibility to the theatre in Chiapas and as a result, it has acquired value outside of the original context of production. By comparison, Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula has not had the same level of attention and, as a result, it is generally described in scholarship as a local phenomenon of little consequence when compared with other performance forms. Director of “La conjura de Xinum,” Marco Poot Cahun, is keenly aware of the value of academic writing to his work, as he wants people outside of the peninsula to know about what he and his company are doing. He wants people to know about the Caste War of Yucatán (1847-1901) and the continual struggle that Maya people in the peninsula face—poverty, inability to access lands that were once their own, discrimination, and appropriation by the tourism industry. [16] In interviews I conducted during fieldwork, both Marco and his brother and co-collaborator Manuel Poot Cahun acknowledged that academic writing has value for their work in language and cultural revitalization. [17] As reflected in the above review of the literature on art worlds, the discourses around a work of art are implicated in the study of that artwork. In the following section, I review literature on theatre in Chiapas and the Yucatán peninsula in order to explore how Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula has been made to seem marginal when compared to Maya theatre in Chiapas. The Art World of Maya Theatre in Chiapas Contemporary Indigenous theatre in Mexico often features international collaborators and Maya theatre in Chiapas is no exception. This international component is indicative of how pan-Indigenous organizing has traversed the borders of nations to involve collaborations with international partners, especially non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that seek to protect against human rights abuses. [18] Pan-Indigenous organizing has also occurred on a national level in Mexico through a series of workshops and programs aimed at Indigenous revitalization beginning in the 1980s. These programs had a profound impact on the production of Indigenous language texts in Mexico. [19] It is within this context that Maya theatre collectives emerged in the state of Chiapas. Maya theatre in Chiapas is largely represented by two theatre groups: Lo’il Maxil (part of the collective Sna Jtz’ibajom ) and La FOMMA. Both collectives work out of San Cristóbal de las Casas, a popular tourist destination in the state. The work of these two companies has been described by and associated with anthropologist Robert Laughlin as well as the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, based at New York University. In this section, I briefly review these two theatre groups and the reason why they have become almost emblematic of Maya theatre in Mexico. The civil association, Sna Jtz’ibajom (House of the Writer), began through the efforts of former local members of the Harvard Chiapas Project in coordination with anthropologist Laughlin. Laughlin helped the group secure funds from Cultural Survival, an NGO, based in the United States with a mission of “advocat[ing] for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and support[ing] Indigenous communities’ self-determination, cultures and political resilience.” [20] Cultural Survival granted $3,000 of seed money for the establishment of the writers collective, Sna Jtz’ibajom, in 1982. [21] Laughlin’s approach has been as an active collaborator since the beginning. Early on, Laughlin insisted upon the use of puppets in the production of plays by Lo’il Maxil, a hallmark of the group’s work. [22] After deciding to use puppets for the productions, Laughlin brought in Amy Trompetter of the Bread and Puppet Theater and Ralph Lee, founder and artistic director of the Mettawee River Theatre Company. The presence of both Trompetter and Lee in Chiapas has served to reposition the work of these Maya artists in Chiapas as internationally, interculturally, and cross-culturally significant in the discipline of theatre. Further, because of the influence of Laughlin, and his post at the Smithsonian Institute, the work of Sna Jtz’ibajom and Lo’il Maxil has always been seen as important outside of Chiapas. Underiner describes it as such, “thus, from the beginning, Lo’il Maxil’s work, celebrated everywhere as “Mayan theatre,” has been in fact a highly collaborative effort by artists and researchers trained in very different traditions.” [23] The civil association La FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya/Strength of the Maya Women) was started by two former members of Sna Jtz’ibajom, Isabel Juárez Espinosa (Tzeltal) and Petrona de la Cruz Cruz (Tzotzil). [24] [24] Underiner describes the extent of the international reputation that La FOMMA has acquired: La FOMMA’s reputation both in Mexico and internationally has grown, facilitated by their contacts with U.S. supporters, who have coordinated their participation in women’s playwriting symposia and arranged performances and speaking engagements in university settings, usually in conjunction with programs on indigenous political and cultural movements. [25] The influence of these scholars and institutions have allowed the theatre to acquire value outside of the original context of production. In discussing value here I am not speaking to aesthetic value or inherent value, as that can and should really only be decided by those who are creating the work and by those for whom the work is intended. I am discussing value in terms of the stake that it provides to Indigenous organizing; increasing exposure internationally can provide tangible results within home communities. The idea of appealing to governing bodies larger than the state is a characteristic feature of Indigenous organizing. Ronald Niezen notes that one of the hallmarks of international Indigenous organizing is the avoidance of state mechanisms for grievances and moving to address these grievances on an international level. He notes that this “represent[s] a new use of the international bodies of states to overcome the domestic abuses of the states themselves.” [26] Just as these grievances can be delivered to international bodies in hopes of having them addressed at the level of the state, an international reputation for artists can provide results in terms of funding and recognition of cultural significance within the state. In comparing the international exposure in Chiapas with that in the Yucatán peninsula, Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula has not had the same level of attention. The Art World of Maya Theatre in the Yucatán Peninsula Tamara Underiner and Donald Frischmann have been actively writing about Maya areas of Mexico since the 1990s and they often highlight continuities between Yucatec Maya theatre and the theatre of other Mayan language communities. [27] Their work has been influential in developing the field of Yucatec Maya theatre and performance scholarship in the US. Three trends are particularly noteworthy to highlight regarding their work: both focus on theatre in the state of Yucatán, except in the case of the recently published anthology U suut t’aan ; second, the authors focus predominantly on those individuals who have been working in the literary revitalization movement in the Peninsula; third, both focus on historical and cultural elements in performance. [28] Their contributions have paved the way for this particular research project, which shifts the focus to the theatre produced outside of the literary revitalization movement within the state of Quintana Roo. [29] Building on their analyses of cultural and historical elements within performance, I turn my attention specifically to how the Maya language is used in performance. Anthropologist Carmen Castillo Rocha has also written on theatre in the Yucatán. I cited her discussion above regarding the marginality of theatre in Maya communities. I do not believe it was Castillo Rocha’s intention to dismiss Maya theatre outright as not important, but rather to argue that performance forms occurring within festivals and rituals have deep historical continuity, whereas theatre does not. [30] I would like to spend a moment exploring her statement, however, because it reveals a number of misconceptions about community-based Maya theatre. In comparing festivals to theatrical activities, Castillo Rocha claims that theatre is marginal. I argue that theatre is an important platform for cultural and linguistic expression in Maya communities in the peninsula. Castillo Rocha argues that Maya theatre owes its origin to Western influence. Western influence is certainly present in the structure of many of the plays but that does not mean that they are not Maya plays. [31] This statement discounts the agency of these theatre artists, even when working with someone from the west or dominant culture to shape the work of theatre to their own worldview. Additionally, productions in Maya communities are not always performed for “occidental eyes” as she suggests. [32] The audiences for productions of “La conjura de Xinum,” for example, are overwhelmingly composed of members of the local community or Maya people from surrounding communities. An understanding of why and how the Maya language is being used in the work of Maya theatre artists is critical for appreciating the ways artists are engaging with the discourses of language and cultural revitalization in the peninsula. Current scholarship on Yucatec Maya language theatre has not focused on the language itself in performance, leaving an incomplete picture of how the work is significant within the community as well as on the international stage. In the next section, I put forth a brief example of artwriting that provides a view of how language is used within the play “La conjura de Xinum,” centering the performances as a tool for social change, specifically the revitalization of the Yucatec Maya language. “La conjura de Xinum” as a tool for social change In this section, I advance a brief sample of artwriting through an analysis of productions of the play “La conjura de Xinum.” I argue that “La conjura de Xinum” enacts a scenario of rebellion in order to highlight the contemporary conditions of Indigenous peoples in the peninsula. [33] Diana Taylor’s concept of scenario is useful in this study as it reveals the appeal of the historic event of the Caste War for contemporary Maya artists. Taylor’s scenario provides a framework for viewing the performances of “La conjura de Xinum” as part of a larger set of similar performances of conquest, revolution, and resistance in the Maya world. These performances, notes Taylor, make use of “paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes.” [34] The Caste War was a nineteenth century war fought in the peninsula between factions of Maya rebels (and their criollo allies) and the elite of Yucatán. The usefulness of the Caste War as subject matter for a performance hoping to inspire social change might be called into question, as it ultimately ended in defeat for the rebels. Though this particular Caste War was ultimately unsuccessful, actor Manuel Poot Cahun notes that he wants to start a “second Caste War,” using Indigenous intelligence versus weapons. [35] His work in Maya language revitalization through the arts is one way that he is doing this. Despite the outcome of the Caste War, the strength and durability of the scenario of rebellion contributes to its repeatability and makes it useful because, as Diana Taylor remarks of the concept of the scenario, it is a “remarkably coherent paradig[m] of seemingly unchanging attitudes and values.” [36] The Maya language is central to an understanding of how the actors are performing their identity onstage in the play “La conjura de Xinum” and I argue that the actors achieve this through their positioning of the Maya language in opposition to Spanish. I analyze how the actors position the two languages through a study of verisimilitude. Verisimilitude, or likeness to “real life,” considers how characters select from their repertoire of languages based on their social setting. [37] I begin with a brief summary of the play and performance contexts, a description of the events of the Caste War of Yucatán as depicted in the play, and finally an analysis of language vis-à-vis verisimilitude. “La conjura de Xinum” “La conjura de Xinum” was written by Carlos Chan Espinosa, director of the Museo de la guerra de castas (Caste War Museum) in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo from 1994-2019. [38] Marco Poot Cahun has edited and further refined the play after he took over as director in 2010. [39] The play is structured as a series of narrations interspersed with five short scenes that are largely improvised in performance. Though the dialogue within these individual scenes varies in performance, the actors follow the scenario as outlined in the text. The title of the play, “La conjura de Xinum,” or “The Plot of Xinum,” comes from the historical title given to the early events of the Caste War, which make up the plot of the play. Figure 1– from L to R: Alfredo Pool Poot, Manuel Poot Cahun, and Marco Poot Cahun. Photo by the author. The play features three main characters, the three early leaders of the Caste War: Manuel Antonio Ay, played by Marco, Cecilio Chi, played by Alfredo Pool Poot, and Jacinto Pat, played by Manuel. The narration, which opens the play, quickly covers 500 years of colonization, oppressive land and labor policies, and a famous 1761 revolt by the Maya leader, Jacinto Canek. These events are framed as causes of the Caste War of the Yucatán in 1847. After the opening narration, the first scene features the leaders Chi, Pat, and Ay discussing the oppressive circumstances in which they find themselves. The second scene depicts Chi writing a letter to Ay regarding specific plans for the rebellion. In the third scene, a messenger delivers the letter to Ay. The fourth scene depicts Ay and fellow residents of Chichimilá at a cantina in the house of Antonio Rajón, where Rajón discovers Chi’s letter in Ay’s possession. In the fifth scene Rajón tells Eulogio Rosado, the commandant in Valladolid, about the letter. Rosado then sends soldiers to capture Ay. Ay is interrogated and finally put to death by firing squad. The play has been performed regularly in the area, especially in the towns of Tihosuco and Tepich, since at least 2002, usually in association with the annual commemoration of the start of the Caste War, which falls in the last week of July. I first saw the play in 2015 and saw three more performances over the following two years. All four performances were staged outside in public spaces in the center of the towns. These public spaces play a significant role in everyday life and are frequented by residents often. Residents of Tepich made up the majority of the audience members for the Tepich performances, whereas the performances in Tihosuco included local audiences as well as those from surrounding communities, some from as far away as Pisté, in the neighboring state of Yucatán, and Orange Walk, Belize. Interpretation of the Caste War within the Play The play “La conjura de Xinum” is based upon the novella of the same title written by Ermilo Abreu Gómez. In an interview, Marco mentioned that the text was used as a resource by the playwright Chan Espinosa. Abreu Gómez was a Yucatecan by birth and is known predominantly for Canek based upon the Jacinto Canek rebellion of 1761. While Abreu Gómez’s work has been considered by many to be overall sympathetic to the Maya cause, it still represents, according to Paul Worley, a means of control over the Maya in terms of who is allowed to tell their stories. He notes that Abreu Gómez’s La conjura de Xinum , “revises the literature on events in the peninsula’s history while denouncing the exploitation and abuse visited on the Maya from the conquest down through the twentieth century, and Abreu Gómez highlights his role as an indigenista cultural broker in his attempts to represent the subaltern voice of the Indio storyteller.” [41] While Chan Espinosa used the work as a source for the play, its subsequent reformation into dramatic form means that “La conjura de Xinum,” the play, represents a shift from what Worley calls the “discourse of the Indio” to an activation of “cultural control,” wherein Maya artists write from their own perspective. [42] Just as Abreu Gómez’s La conjura de Xinum highlights a source of the conflict within the Caste War as ethnic or racial in origin, so too does the play version with which it shares a title. We can see this through the use of humor which pokes fun at the Spaniards in the play, as well as through physical gestures of the soldier characters, who are portrayed as dullards who have difficulty capturing Manuel Antonio Ay. The capturing of Ay is always an audience favorite. The soldiers are directed by Rosado to go and search for Ay. If anyone in the audience is not part of the community, this individual will typically be selected first. Thus, although they are marking difference (often racial difference, especially when white American students are present) they are also signaling to the audience that the Spaniards are unable to perform their mission satisfactorily. The search continues and finally on the third visit to the crowd, they find Ay and bring him to Rosado. This moment of highlighting outsider presence, whether racial in origin or not, is key to understanding how the actors are creatively using the play to comment upon social conditions. For Marco, however, the importance of this production of “La conjura de Xinum” is to teach audiences about the causes of the Caste War. [43] Verisimilitude Language use, despite its imprecision as a characteristic of identity, has been a category used to classify one as Indigenous from the colonial period to the present. Thus, it is a natural place to begin an exploration of the play “La conjura de Xinum.” In his book on language play in theatre, Marvin Carlson discusses what he calls the “purest” form of heteroglossia: the copresence of two languages on stage. He remarks: Often verisimilitude is the major structural motivation for such linguistic mixing, but no cultural activity, and certainly not language, is devoid of associations and values, and so beyond the rather simple and straightforward concern of verisimilitude, theatrical heteroglossia almost always involves a wide variety of social and cultural issues. [44] As Carlson suggests, verisimilitude is merely the beginning of an exploration of language use in a play, a fundamental consideration for understanding the “wide variety of social and cultural issues” that exist in a given instance of heteroglossia. [45] What Carlson calls verisimilitude operates on a basic level: just as in real life, some characters in the play speak only Maya, some only Spanish, some a combination of both. Verisimilitude thus corresponds to reality: in this case, both historical and contemporary. The languages spoken by the characters in each of these performances for the most part mirrors the language choice of their historical counterparts, where such language choice diverges from verisimilitude is a key place for investigation. For the majority of the characters in the play little fluctuation occurs in language spoken amongst the various performances. The soldiers, the judge, and Eulogio Rosado only speak in Spanish; and Jacinto Pat and Cecilio Chi only speak in Maya. The script that I received was entirely in Spanish, however, some actors use Maya in performance, depending on the character they play. When Spanish is used it almost exclusively matches the text in the script, whereas when the actors replace the Spanish text with Maya, they rarely follow the Spanish via a direct translation but instead incorporate a virtuosic display of conversation in Maya – as one might hear offstage in everyday interactions. The decision to change languages for individual characters in “La conjura de Xinum” is significant as it represents contemporary attitudes regarding language use that do not necessarily reflect the historical situation being portrayed. The clearest example of this is in scene five, where a judge interrogates Manuel Antonio Ay after he is captured. To understand the way language use differs from historical accounts it is first necessary to briefly review the history of Maya language use after the conquest. The onslaught of the attempted destruction of the Maya language and writing system began, of course, with the conquest. Diego de Landa, famous for his auto de fé at Maní, preserved selective aspects of the language and culture through his Relaciones de las cosas de Yucatán . [46] Spaniards as well as children of the Maya elite carried out the gradual change from glyphic writing to alphabetic throughout the early years of the conquest. [47] However, by the late colonial period, Maya, in both written and spoken forms, was used even amongst those who were not considered to be Indigenous. Mark Lentz notes that local government officials “in majority Maya-speaking pueblos absolutely needed to speak the Indigenous language in order to carry out their daily tasks effectively. Many showed an ability to read and write in Maya.” [48] Using records from court cases throughout the late colonial period, Lentz discusses how individuals in rural communities, Indigenous or not, typically relied on Maya in their everyday lives. Some were even monolingual speakers of Maya. Lentz, in particular, highlights the use of Maya among local officials like the juez español . He notes that “ jueces españoles were the officials most immersed in Maya society and thus the likeliest to speak, read, and write Maya.” [49] In other words, Maya was used by non-Indigenous Yucatecans both for and outside of official duties. Lentz’s findings become particularly striking if we consider them alongside the interrogation scene in “La conjura de Xinum.” In this scene, a judge asks several questions to Ay in Spanish. Ay, in turn, responds only in Maya. The judge repeats his questions multiple times, occasionally slamming his hands on the table, as he grows more and more impatient. Knowing what we now know about the tendency of local officials to know Maya, it is likely that the historical judge would have understood and possibly been able to speak Maya. Therefore, the actor’s choice to use Spanish as the language of interrogation in the scene is an important divergence from historical accounts. It is critical to note that by highlighting this moment, I am not indicating that there is something wrong with diverging from historical accounts in the portrayal of this scene. Rather, I am advocating for an approach that considers this an exercise of agency by the actors in actively engaging with history and shaping it to fit present attitudes and anxieties regarding language loss. The choice to have the actor playing the judge speak Spanish instead of Maya creates the opportunity for the actor playing Ay to highlight the act of speaking in Maya as a statement of resistance. This aligns with the priorities of Marco and Manuel in their work within language and cultural revitalization – speaking Maya is a way to combat erasure. While the Yucatec Maya language is not in immediate danger of extinction, the number of native speakers is dwindling as English is often the focus in schools due to the influence of the tourism in the peninsula. [50] Thus, by engaging with this well-known episode in history and pitting the two languages against one another, the actors have successfully mapped contemporary attitudes of language use onto a past event. Conclusion: Community-Based Theatre and the Scenario of Rebellion Diana Taylor’s notion of the scenario is a useful descriptive framework for understanding how “La conjura de Xinum” re-activates the cultural memory of rebellion in the town of Tihosuco each year. I use Taylor’s concept of scenario, a theatrical or performative formulaic structure that references pre-existing cultural memories and meanings, to argue that the performance of “La conjura de Xinum” has larger ramifications than might be initially thought were we to follow Castillo Rocha’s conclusion about Maya theatre’s marginality. [51] Taylor writes, “instead of privileging texts and narratives , we could also look to scenarios as meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes.” [52] In Taylor’s formation “the scenario makes visible what is already there,” including “ghosts, images, and stereotypes.” [53] The play “La conjura de Xinum” can be viewed as a scenario of rebellion as it dramatizes the events of the Caste War of Yucatán. For some, this performance is radical. Others believe that the government has co-opted this scenario and that its performance every year is no longer radical, but rather a showpiece to demonstrate that the Maya are a willing part of Mexico’s pluricultural nation. Even though the actors recognize the historical and contemporary injustices in Maya communities, they believe that the elected officials and other dignitaries who attend the Caste War festival don’t take their concerns seriously. [54] Although the productions of “La conjura de Xinum” are funded by the government, the invited officials don’t often stay to watch the play, which is always the final event in the evening’s schedule. This leaves an audience comprised almost entirely of community members. The actors have a stage where they can voice their concerns but the politician’s and elected official’s exit before the start of the performance speaks volumes of their symbolic (lack of) attention to the issues the community faces. Despite the fact that the invited officials do not always stay to watch the play, their appearance at the Caste War festival is critical. Taylor notes that “the scenario places spectators within its frame, implicating us in its ethics and politics.” [55] It is clear here, that the political officials “watching” the event, whether they actually stay for the performance or not, are akin to the Spaniards in the play – Antonio Rajón, the soldiers, Eulogio Rosado, and the cantinero . Thus, the performance of “La conjura de Xinum” is not just a play performed as part of the Caste War festival, it is part of the larger scenario of recent Indigenous cultural and language revitalization movements–where Indigenous people fight to be heard in a neoliberal multicultural nation. The performance of this scenario of rebellion thus has a part for all to play: for state officials, who participate as oppressors; for actors and local audience members, who participate as the rebels; and academics, like myself, who participate as well-intentioned documentarians, but nonetheless possess an, often unstated, privilege in writing about Indigenous peoples. Year after year this scenario is reified in the Caste War festivities. Director Marco and actor Manuel believe that their work is making a difference in the community despite the lack of real government support. They often view the government officials in an adversarial manner, but still ultimately believe that “La conjura de Xinum” has a positive effect in their community by encouraging young people to speak Maya and to learn more about their history. Manuel is especially inspired by the Caste War and views his linguistic and cultural revival efforts as a “second Caste War.” [56] Charles Hale poses the question at issue for many Indigenous peoples in the Americas: “Under what conditions can Indigenous movements occupy the limited spaces opened by neoliberal multiculturalism, redirecting them toward their own radical, even utopian political alternatives?” [57] Juan Castillo Cocom argues that disconnecting from this system, by refusing to perform scenarios of rebellion as well as the stereotype of the rebellious “ indio ” is the only way that Maya people will be taken seriously in the political climate of neoliberal Mexico. [58] For others, performing within the system but using their own language to subvert the multicultural game is the best option. Whatever the standpoint, the performance of Maya identity through language and culture is an important phenomenon and is critical for understanding how neoliberal Mexico interacts with its Indigenous citizens and the way in which those same citizens fight back or decide to disconnect altogether. By viewing the alliances and connections that ultimately shape the reception of a work of community-based performance like “La conjura de Xinum,” I argue that Maya theatre is not just an inconsequential phenomenon. Theatre is used by Maya artists as a tool for voicing dissent, anger, and highlighting injustice. Maya theatre is not marginal; it is a vital force for social change. References [1] Jan Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States , (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 109. [2] Carmen Castillo Rocha, “El Teatro Regional en Tierras Mayas,” (PhD diss., Unviersität Hamburg, 2007), 86. [3] In common parlance, and even in academic contexts, the terms Maya and Mayan are frequently confused. In this article, I subscribe to the use of the terms most clearly elucidated by Quetzil Castañeda in the field guide for the Maya language, “Ko’ox Tsikbal Maya T’aan.” See Castañeda, “Ko’ox Tsikbal Maya T’aan,” (Field guide, Open School for Ethnography and Anthropology, 2014), 10-12. Castañeda notes that Mayan is not used to refer to a group of people, but rather a language family, the Mayan language family, which contains around 30-some different languages spoken in Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, and Belize. Within the family of Mayan languages there is one particular language called Maya. While scholars might refer to it as Yucatec Maya, speakers of the language rarely do—to them it is more likely maayat’aan or simply maaya . In addition to the name of the language as spoken in the Yucatán peninsula, Maya can be used as an adjective—Maya culture, Maya traditions, Maya theatre, but Mayan languages (unless you are referring to the specific language of the Yucatán, in which case it would be the Maya language). Maya is a mass noun so it does not need to pluralized. To call the Maya of the Yucatán “Mayans” is not just incorrect in terms of cultural practice, but as Castañeda notes, would be like referring to native English speakers as “Germanics,” because “the language that these persons speak are part of the Germanic branch” of languages. (Castañeda, “Ko’ox Tsikbal,” 11); See Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). [4] See Stuart A. Day, Outside Theater: Alliances that Shape Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017). [5] See Matthew Restall, “Maya Ethnogenesis,” The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9, no. 1 (2004). Translation by author. [6] I am not addressing Campeche in this article because I have not completed fieldwork there and thus my knowledge of the specific circumstances with regard to community-based theatre is limited. [7] See Becker, Art Worlds ; See David Carrier, Artwriting (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). [8] Becker, Art Worlds , 35. [9] Becker, Art Worlds , 35. [10] Becker, Art Worlds , 131. [11 Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts , 111; 113. [12] Becker, Art Worlds , 34-35. [13] Carrier, Artwriting . [14] George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, eds., The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 27. Within the passage Marcus cites three works by Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); “Critical Reflections,” Artform 28 (September 1989): 132-133; and “The State of the Art World: The Nineties Begin,” Nation (July 9): 65-68. [15] Marcus and Myers, The Traffic in Culture, 28. [16] The Caste War of Yucatán (1847-1901) was a rebellion against the government based in Mérida, Yucatán by a majority Maya peasant force. Although the war was not explicitly racial in origin, its interpretation in academic writing in the 1960s and 1970s certainly provides that impression. Today, scholars mostly agree that class rather than race or ethnicity had more to do with the reasons for the revolt. See Victoria Bricker, Indian Christ, Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Don E. Dumond, The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatán (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Wolfgang Gabbert, “Violence and Ethnicity in the Caste War of Yucatán,” (presentation, Latin American Studies Association Annual Conference, Miami, FL, March 16-18, 2000); Wolfgang Gabbert, “Of Friends and Foes: The Caste War and Ethnicity in Yucatán,” The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9, no.1 (2004); Reed, Nelson. The Caste War of Yucatán . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964; Restall, “Maya Ethnogenesis;” Terry Rugeley, Rebellion Now and Forever: Mayas, Hispanics, and the Caste War Violence in Yucatán , 1800- 1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). [17] Marco Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 8 October 2017; Manuel Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 29 July 2016. [18] See Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). [19] See Alicia Salinas, “‘Tu táan yich in kaajal’ [On The Face of My People]: Contemporary Maya-Spanish Bilingual Literature and Cultural Production from the Yucatan Peninsula,” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2018) and Carlos Montemayor and Donald Frischmann, U túumben k’aayilo’ob x-ya’axche’: Antología de escritores mayas contemporáneos de la península de Yucatán (Mérida: Instituto Cultural de Yucatán, 2010). [20] Cultural Survival, “Mission.” “About Cultural Survival.” See https://www.culturalsurvival.org/about. [21] Robert Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom, Monkey Business Theatre , (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 2-3. [22] Laughlin, Monkey Business Theatre , 3. [23] Tamara Underiner, T heatre in Mayan Mexico: Death Defying Acts , (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 51. [24] Underiner, Theatre in Mayan Mexico , 54. [25] Underiner, Theatre in Mayan Mexico, 57. [26] Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism ,16. [27] Although there are several theatre scholars writing in Spanish on Maya theatre in the state of Yucatán (See Carmen Castillo Rocha, “El Teatro Regional en Tierras Mayas,” (PhD diss., Unviersität Hamburg, 2007); Fernando Muñoz Castillo, Teatro maya peninsular: precolombino y evangelizador (Mérida, 2000); René Acuña, Farsas y representaciones escenicas de los mayas antiguos (Ciudad de México: Universidad Nacional Aútonoma de México, 1978); and Jennifer Lynn Cassels, “La Utopía en Tierras Mayas: El Teatro Comunitario Maya Yucateco 1982-2002.” (MA thesis, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2004) Frischmann and Underiner are two that have helped the work to gain a larger audience in the US. [28] I am intentionally leaving the work of the Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena (LTCI) out of consideration here despite the fact that they have an international reputation as the company did not originate in the peninsula, but rather in the state of Tabasco. Underiner in Theatre in Mayan Mexico , writes that “almost everyone I spoke with expressed concern over the community participating as ‘extras’ in the spectacle, with the maestros having the central performing parts” (98). This, in addition to Maya rituals being staged out of context and fetishized for a tourist audience (93-99), leaves the company’s work outside of the scope of this particular view of community theatre in the Maya language. A more mild critique of the work of LTCI appears in Carmen Castillo Rocha, “The ‘Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena’ and the Construction of a Good Life in Ticopó, Yucatán, Mexico,” Intercom: Revista Brasileira de Ciências da Comunicação 39, no. 2, (May-August, 2016): 131-144; Donald Frischmann and Wildernain Villegas Carrillo, U Suut T’aan: U t’aan maaya ajts’íibo’ob tu lu’umil Quintana Roo (Chetumal: Plumas Negras Editorial, 2016). [29] This is an important consideration because it tends to leave out those who are working at the community level but aren’t publishing their work. [30] Castillo Rocha, “El Teatro Regional,” 85. [31] See Donald Frischmann, “Contemporary Mayan Theatre: The Recovery and (Re)Interpretation of History,” in Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance , ed. J. Ellen Gainor (New York: Routledge, 1995), 71-84; and Carlos Montemayor and Donald Frischmann, U túumben k’aayilo’ob x-ya’axche’: Antología de escritores mayas contemporáneos de la península de Yucatán (Mérida: Instituto Cultural de Yucatán, 2010), 48-54. [32] Castillo Rocha, “El Teatro Regional,” 86. [33] See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). [34] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 28. [35] Manuel Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 29 July 2016. [36] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 31. [37] See Marvin Carlson, Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). [38] The Caste War Museum is a community museum based in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo that opened in 1993. See http://www.museogc.com/Museo/Museo-Museum.html. [39] Marco Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 8 October 2017. [40] Marco and Manuel have been involved with the play since 2010 and I found production photos dating back to 2002 in the museum archives. I found another photo that seemed to show the three Maya leaders from the year 2000, but I can’t be sure that this was from the play “La conjura de Xinum.” Doña Antonia, who works at the museum told me that the play had been in production since she could remember, starting a year or two after the opening of the museum in 1993. Don Carlos did not state an exact year either, saying it had been at least ten years, but said that the play was developed for the annual commemoration and that it was first performed after the museum opened in 1993. [41] Paul Worley, Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 78. [42] Worley, Telling and Being Told , 17; Here Worley is referencing Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s concept of “cultural control.” See Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, “Lo propio y lo ajeno,” in La cultura popular, ed. Adolfo Colombres (México: Dirección de Culturas Populares, Premia editora de libros, 1984), 79-86. [43] Marco Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 8 October 2017. [44] Carlson, Speaking in Tongues , 14. [45] Carlson, Speaking in Tongues, 14. [46] Published in a commonly available English translation by William Gates, trans., Yucatán Before and After the Conquest by Friar Diego de Landa (New York: Dover, 1978). [47] Victoria Bricker, “Linguistic Continuities and Discontinuities in the Maya Area,” in Pluralizing Ethnography , eds. John M. Watanabe and Edward F. Fischer (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004), 71-3. [48] Mark Lentz, “Castas, Creoles, and the Rise of a Maya Lingua Franca in Eighteenth-Century Yucatan,” Hispanic American Historical Review 97, no. 1 (2017): 48. [49] Lentz, “Castas, Creoles,” 49. [50] Lentz, “Castas, Creoles,” 56-7. [51] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 13. [52] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 28. [53] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 28. [54] Alfredo Pool Poot, Personal Interview, 8 September 2017. [55] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 23. [56] Manuel Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 29 July 2017. [57] Charles R. Hale, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism: The Remaking of Cultural Rights and Racial Dominance in Central America,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 28, no. 1 (2005): 11. [58] Juan Castillo Cocom, Personal Interview, 10 October 2017. Footnotes About The Author(s) Sarah Alice Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History, Literature, and Criticism in the University of Idaho’s Theatre Arts Department. She received her Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama with a minor in Folklore and a Ph.D. Certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Indiana University in 2018. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Erica Stevens Abbitt Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Erica Stevens Abbitt By Published on December 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF EMILY MANN: REBEL ARTIST OF THE AMERICAN THEATRE. Alexis Greene. Guilford, CT: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2023; Pp. 391. Alexis Greene has written a timely, accessible biography of one of America’s greatest living theatrical icons, playwright,director and artistic visionary Emily Mann.The creator since the 1970s of a unique brand of documentary theatre featuring the contradictory, impassioned testimony of real people in crisis, Mann is also an award-winning director, and one of a handful of successful female theatre administrators in this country, recognized for her 30-year tenure asartistic director of Princeton’s McCarter Theater. As the title suggests, Greene argues that Mann’s allergy to preconceived assumptions and the status quo (both politically and theatrically) has been the engine of her achievement. For Greene, Mann’s career does not simply represent triumph over personal trauma, chronic illness and a patriarchal theatre establishment: it provides a testament to the power of radical resistance. In Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater , Greene has wisely used an approach akin to Mann’s own “theatre of testimony.” After hours of interviewing family, friends, associates and the artist herself, Greene uncovered a series of compelling (but sometimes contradictory) narratives. These rich conversations, woven into a deceptively simple chronological structure, provide the reader with a nuanced view of a complex artist and activist. Well-illustrated, with an excellent bibliography and index, the text is divided into a series ofshort, readable chapters. The first third of the book moves briskly through Mann’s family history and its Jewish roots, the influence of her activist parents, her coming-of-age in Chicago in the1960s, and her early theatrical experiments as a student at Radcliffe. In the next section, Greene provides a valuable overview of Mann’s evolution as a creative artist,as she developed techniques for representing real people threatened by forces larger than themselves. The arc of Mann’s early work, from Annulla: An Autobiography (regarding a Jewish woman in post-Holocaust Britain) to Still Life (featuring a Vietnam vet, his mistress and his abused wife) and the landmark drama Execution of Justice (exploring the 1978 assassination at San Francisco City Hall of Harvey Milk and George Moscone) reveals two key insights on Mann’s aesthetic and social praxis. The first insight involves the way Mann gradually widened her perspective and added characters to her plays, creating a vast, polyphonic and more explicitly political dramaturgy. The second is how Mann’s youthful experience of violence (as the victim of sexual assault) drove her need to represent both victim and perpetrator, and sharpened her emphasis on the process of reconciliation and recovery. The final third of Greene’s book hones in on Mann’s tenure as Artistic Director at the McCarter Theatre, her development of translations and new works exploring race and social legacies in America (such as Having Our Say and Greensboro: A Requiem ), and her forays as a director to regional and Broadway stages. Here, Greene gives readers a perceptive take on the patterns of failure and success that have marked Mann’s career— bruising challenges, including her struggles with multiple sclerosis and conflicts with her board, juxtaposed with artistic successes and national recognition. Greene reads Mann's career to exemplify ongoing gender inequity in theatre, despite many generations of women’s achievement and advocacy. But persistence is all, and that is what Mann has contributed. As Greene puts it, "Sometimes being a rebel simply means staying the course" (131). Well-documented and engaging, Greene’s Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater will appeal to a wide range of constituencies. Those concerned with identity and performance in an era of cancel-culture will find descriptions of Mann’s techniques reaching across divisions of race, class, gender and ideology to represent difference (including Blackness and queer experience) relevant in ongoing debates on a core issue of contemporary theater practice. In this, the book interacts with several recent publications on race, equity, diversity and performance,such as Casting a Movement (edited by Claire Syler and Daniel Banks), as well as the innovative"calling in” movement developed by educator/activist Loretta J. Ross. Unexpected tidbits in this biography will provide keen theatre-goers with lively insights, including descriptions of Mann’s encounters with Winnie Mandela, and her long-standing friendship with leading performers, activists and advocates, from John Spencer to Nadine Strossen and Gloria Steinem. Themes of advocacy, alliance building and mentorship run through the volume, furnishing the reader with a vivid sense of the generous, collectivist process that may be one of Mann’s least acknowledged, but most important accomplishments. Greene’s exploration of Mann’s experience with chronic illness during some of the most productive years of her career provides an important contribution to a growing scholarship on trauma, disability and theatre, as well. Her treatment of Mann’s work as part of a national conversation on truth and power should prove valuable to"discourse in the public square" (ix) and to those committed to the study of theatre as civic practice. For students and emerging artists, especially, Greene’s text is an excellent resource, providing a detailed critique of Mann’s major works and methodology in clear and accessible prose. The book’s depiction of the travails of a theatre administrator on the shop floor of the industry should prove enlightening to would-be producers and artistic administrators, especially those from under-represented groups. Indeed, this biography serves as both a cautionary tale and a blueprint for success, reminding outsider aspirants to positions of power the strategies they may need to transform a supposedly “liberal” theatre establishment. For theatre scholars in general (and feminist scholars in particular), Greene’s examination of this significant artist fills a gap in the literature, providing a much-needed comprehensive and updated appraisal of Mann’s career and legacy in the 21st century. Greene, author of Lucille Lortel: Queen of Off-Broadway , and a novelist, educator, critic and theatre practitioner in her own right, notes that one of the major goals in her work is to reveal the everyday lives (as well as the extraordinary achievements) of women in the field. In the end, Greene’s approach for this volume, sympathetic but never sycophantic, is resonant with Mann’s own process and vision. It reminds us that keen observation and empathetic representation are at the heart of effective theatrical expression. This volume validates the career of a woman whose focus on theatre as means of advancing social justice has never wavered—and it underscores, for theatre-makers, students and researchers alike, the potential of performance as a radical force for change. References Greene, Alexis. Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater. Guilford: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2023. Footnotes About The Author(s) Dr. Erica Stevens Abbitt is Professor Emerita in the School of Dramatic Art. From 2015-17, she also served FAHSS as director of the Humanities Research Group. A native of Montreal, Erica earned a BA in political science from McGill before training as an actor. Her theatre career in Canada, the US, New Zealand and the UK included the BBC series OPPENHEIMER, stage roles in London and Off-Broadway and directing, writing and producing credits in regional theatre. In 1999, she returned to her studies, receiving an MA in Theatre History from California State University, Northridge and a PhD in Critical Studies from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. Joining the University of Windsor in 2004, she focused on revitalizing the theatre studies curriculum to include contemporary thinking on race, nation, gender, power and identity, as well as performance. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Arnab Banerji Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Arnab Banerji By Published on May 21, 2020 Download Article as PDF The South Asian Theatre Festival (SATF) is held annually in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The thirteenth edition of the festival was held on August 4th and 5th, 2018 at the George Street Playhouse. The festival featured seven one act plays in four Indian languages beside four short segments of improvised and devised performances. The festival, now an important fixture in the socio-cultural calendar of the Indian diaspora in the New York-New Jersey area, is not only a celebration of South Asian theatre, but also a confident stride made by the community to organize itself as a significant American subculture. The 2018 edition of the festival and the plays that it offered made it abundantly clear that the artists in the diaspora are ready to celebrate their identity distinct from and yet firmly intertwined with their home culture of the United States. This critical take on the festival offers an insight into the various layers of performance that were evident during the 2018 edition. True to the nature of any South Asian event in the diaspora, the SATF was not simply a theatre festival but became an extended community affair. Packed into the George Street Playhouse lobby were several vendors selling jewelry, clothing, and even insurance and finance products. One of the halls in the playhouse was temporarily converted into a cafeteria where patrons took a break between watching plays to sip on tea and feast on deep fried Bengali delicacies like the vegetable chop. [1] The fair-like atmosphere at the George Street Playhouse made one forget, after crossing the threshold of the auditorium, that this was not suburban India, where theatre festivals like SATF are a regular feature of the milder winter months. The SATF opens up room for the South Asian community to claim cultural citizenship in the United States. In doing so, it becomes an act of creative citizenship by the diasporic subject. In 2008 playwright Sudipta Bhawmik observed that, “[i]n parts of the [United States] , the South Asian population has reached the critical mass to be able to sustain a South Asian-only kind of theatre and arts”. [2] With a large concentration of South Asian Americans, the New York-New Jersey area certainly boasts the critical mass that Bhawmik describes in his comment. And the playwright’s prediction seems to have held its ground in the case of the SATF and the popularity that it has enjoyed over the last fourteen years. The festival by virtue of using the more inclusive South Asian in its title rather than Indian or Bengali has also been able to appeal to an audience and a group of performers that do not always and necessarily conform to those geographic, linguistic, and socio-cultural boundaries. In the discussion that follows I examine the SATF as a space for the South Asian diaspora to claim cultural citizenship and how the festival itself is an act of creative citizenship. I argue that each play presented at the festival and the festival itself are creative acts corresponding to various levels of cultural and creative citizenship substantiating the South Asian American claim to achieving cultural citizenship in the adopted homeland. Scholarship on South Asian American theatre is scant. The scholarship that exists is often focused on the more visible and public examples of South Asian theatre. Essays by Aparna Dharwadker (2003) and Sudipto Chatterjee (2008), while taking insightful peeps into South Asian community-based theatres, spend time examining artists who are crossovers in the American mainstream or on the cusp of breaking into it. While an analysis of recognized artistic voices certainly adds to the conversation on South Asian American theatre, it does so at the expense of the everyday creative acts that form the mainstay of the diasporic subject’s confident strides towards asserting cultural citizenship. Theodore Zamenopoulos, Katerina Alexiou, Giota Alevizou, Caroline Chapain, Shawn Sobers, and Andy Williams write in their 2016 article that, “[c]reative acts are […] expressions of originality and meaningfulness within a certain context”. [3] Overall, the South Asian Theatre Festival, as well as each performance within it hold specific meanings for specific sections of the community within the context of their diasporic experiences. Zamenopoulos, et al. continue to elaborate on one of the challenges surrounding any discussion of creative acts: conflating creativity with “an exceptional product, process, or person”. [4] Dharwadker and Chatterjee seem to have stepped into the same trap even as they set out to look at everyday acts of creativity in their analyses. The ensuing discussion, like the festival at its center of inquiry, recognizes that “creativity is also a general human capability”. Taking a cue from Jean Burgess’s “vernacular creativity,” Zamenopoulos et al add to the potential of creative acts, calling them acts “that help to unearth a hidden potential in a given situation”. [6] The SATF appears to be no more than a public event featuring plays on the surface. Yet a closer analysis of audience participation, festival curation, and the overall presentation of the festival reveals that there is significantly more at play than what meets the eye in a surface evaluation. Dharwadker and Chatterjee’s assessment of local community-based South Asian American theatres gets mired in contemporary dramaturgical concerns not addressed by these community-based theatres themselves. Both scholars seem to be searching for an exceptional product, process, or artist at the expense of evaluating the creative acts playing out in the local desi stage. Ashish Sengupta,on the other hand, erroneously conflates mainstream South Asian thespians like Ayad Akhtar with the large number of South Asian community theatres peppered across the United States as part of the same continuum. [7] Sengupta, of course, has the disadvantage of being at a geographical and therefore critical distance from the subject of his inquiry. A professor at the University of North Bengal in India, for Sengupta, the South Asian roots of Ayad Akhtar are no different than those of the anaesthesiologist Manoj Shahane, who dons a playwright and a director’s mantle outside of the operating theatre. In reality though, and as I hope to demonstrate, Shahane’s theatre is a far cry from those of artists like Akhtar. Akhtar and other artists like him (Asif Mandvi, Ranjit Chowdhry, Aditi Brennan Kapil etc.) are representative examples of what Royona Mitra refers to as the “New Interculturalism,” Shahane’s theatre is fueled by a completely different and distinct set of motivations. [8] Mitra studies British choreographer-dancer Akram Khan’s body of work and the ways in which it seamlessly integrates Khan’s astute understanding of the South Asian kathak and his formal training in Western modern dance. The resulting New Interculturalism, Mitra demonstrates, celebrates cultural similarities without discounting differences. [9] Akhtar, Mandvi, Chowdhry, Kapil, and others represent the New Interculturalism in American mainstream theatre. They are definitively moored in their South Asian milieus but taking confident strides to change the ways mainstream American drama represents the subcontinent. Although an intriguing subject unto itself, plays by seasoned and celebrated artists like the roster presented above, are representative of the exceptional that Zamenopoulos, et al. mention. Conflating them, as Sengupta does in his analysis, with everyday creative acts of cultural citizenship is therefore erroneous and misleading. Before delving into the particulars of how this suburban New Jersey festival galvanizes a community together, it is imperative to understand what I mean by cultural citizenship and what constitutes creative acts. Toby Miller writes, “the last two hundred years of modernity have produced three zones of citizenship, with partially overlapping but also distinct historicities”. [10] Miller’s “three zones of citizenship,” political, economic, and cultural, correspond to the history of the South Asian diasporic subject in the United States, which is a history that has its roots in the nineteenth century British system of indenture and immigrant labor, as discussed by Vinay Lal and others. [11] But for the present context, I will look at two pivotal historical episodes from the twentieth century that shifted the ways of South Asian immigration and integration into American society. In its 1923 verdict on the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind case, the Supreme Court, referring to Section 2169, revised statutes, had opined that the “Naturalization Act ‘shall apply to aliens, being free white persons, and to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.’” [12] The following Immigration Act of 1924 further specified that, “no alien ineligible to citizenship shall be admitted to the United States”. [13] These two pieces of legislation effectively ended Indian immigration to the United States for nearly four decades. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 significantly altered this by declaring that “No person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of his race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.” The new legislation re-opened the doors for South Asians to claim legal and uncontentious political citizenship in the United States. Vinay Lal writes, “The vast bulk of Indians arrived in the US following the immigration reforms of 1965, and though they occupy a disproportionately significant and highly visible place in the professions, Indians also ply taxis in New York and dominate the Dunkin Donuts franchises around the country.” [15] In 2017, there were nearly 4.1 million South Asian Indians in the United States with seventy percent of the population above sixteen employed in, “management, business, science, and arts occupations” with a median household income of $114, 261. [16] As is evident from above, in the five decades since South Asians attained political citizenship, they have made significant strides towards economic citizenship too, becoming one of the most successful ethnic minorities in the United States. Yet the third zone of citizenship, cultural, has eluded the community for a long time. Cultural citizenship calls for “flexible citizens” who are able to navigate the transcultural and intercultural worlds that we inhabit today. [17] Miller says, “it does appear as though more and more transnational people and organizations now exist, weaving political, economic, and cultural links between places of origin and domiciles.” [18] Although South Asians are one of the most well-educated ethnic groups in the United States, the community has thus far fit itself smugly into the melting pot metaphor. This means that the community has chosen to not distinguish itself as a subculture, focusing instead on living up to Franklin Roosevelt’s insistence on the “swift assimilation of aliens” through the “language and culture that has come down to us from the builders of the republic.” [19] The SATF challenges the narrative of assimilation and opens up a space where the transnational/transcultural South Asian diasporic subject can counter the mainstream American cultural hegemony. In other words, the festival corroborates Miller’s observation that the United States cannot continue with its cultural nationalism of being a “Monolingual Eden.” [20] The SATF space for claiming cultural citizenship is facilitated through acts of creative citizenship involving the production, creation, and consumption of theatre that is aesthetically similar, yet culturally distinct from the theatre in the country of origin as well as the country of domicile. Before examining the acts of creative citizenship witnessed during the SATF and discussing how each performance in the festival fits into various levels of creative citizenship, it is imperative to understand the many layers of cultural citizenship at play within the South Asian community. In the South Asian context, cultural citizenship is itself multi-layered. Each generation of immigrants has their own version of cultural identity that they want to claim within the same space of the festival. For some, the festival and especially the plays performed in it represent a nostalgic hook, a reminder of the country left behind at the time of the start of the diasporic movement. For others, the festival is the opportunity to relive an idyllic irrecoverable past left behind in India. And yet for others, the festival is an opportunity to find themselves and their culture being valued, nurtured, and adapted to its current environment, that of the adopted homeland. These multiple levels of cultural citizenship are celebrated over the course of the festival through creative acts. These creative acts, as Zamenopoulos, et al. demonstrate happen at four levels: doing, adaptation, making, and creating. The festival itself is of course an example of doing which Zamenopoulos, et al. define as “acts with the purpose of ‘getting something done.’” [21] The various plays individually fit the other criterion of creative acts, making the festival an act towards claiming creative citizenship. In the examples that follow, I map the various levels of creative acts onto the layers of cultural citizenship that I outlined above. I have written elsewhere describing the beginning of the diasporic movement as a crisis that is eventually mitigated by social dramas of community events in the adopted homeland. [22] The older generation of South Asian immigrants, especially the first wave that arrived in 1965 or immediately thereafter, did not seem to have the recourse to resolve the crisis of their diasporic movement. These community members were pioneers of the new wave who created the diasporic version of “South Asian-ness,” themselves existing in what Victor Turner calls “an instan[ce] of pure potentiality,” allowing the generations that followed an avenue to mitigate their crises. [23] Certain performances at the SATF like A King’s Tale: Shiladitya , which draw on a well-known children’s book Rajkahini by Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951), serve as a conduit for the older generation of South Asian immigrants to witness stories that connect them to a distant and yet beloved past left behind in India. A King’s Tale becomes the nostalgic hook from the structure outlined above for this section of the audience. Seeing younger members of the community, children born and raised in the United States, assume the roles of princes, princesses, and sages from the Indian folklore allow older immigrants to not only celebrate their presence in the United States but also the success and resilience of the community for having been able to pass on vital cultural knowledge intergenerationally. For the community, therefore, it does not matter that the performance of this particular play did not rise to a professional caliber or that an operatic piece was forcibly appended to it. All of these dramaturgical concerns, which bothered the critic and the theatre educator in this correspondent, were dwarfed under the celebration of children successfully embracing, albeit temporarily, their South Asian-ness. This play, directed by guest director Parthapratim Deb, from India, became an act of doing with some adaptation (the operatic addition) to cater to the section of the audience for whom the festival is the nostalgic hook to a distant past. For a different section of the audience the festival is itself a social drama, a set of redressive actions that facilitate social reintegration into the diasporic forms of South Asian-ness. This section of the audience, comprising students turned professionals, or professionals seeking a creative outlet, forms the largest spectator subgroup at the festival. Consequently, the material catering to this section of the audience is very often either sourced directly from, or owes serious allegiance to, the homeland. In other words, this is the section of the audience that is seeking to relive the irrecoverable past left behind in the homeland, in this case, South Asia. The homeland continues to hold a position of extreme significance for the South Asian consumers of festivals like the SATF. A large majority of the attendees are first generation immigrants and suffer from what Anita Mannur has described as “the desire to simultaneously embrace what is left of a past from which one is spatially and temporally displaced, and the recognition that nostalgia can overwhelm memories of the past.” [24] Strategies of negotiation with this in-betweenness have resulted in a longing for ethnic authenticity which has propelled diasporic subjects to turn towards the home to provide cultural markers of continued belonging. These take the form of tours by performers from the homeland which “add to the memory archive of the diasporic community and create a new bridge to ‘home.’” [25] Other coping strategies take the form of creating “social dramas.” These take the form of the annual Durga Puja amongst South Asian Bengalis or the Navaratri observation amongst Gujaratis, etc. These celebrations seek to restore the rupture caused in the continuum of performing ethnic identity by the diasporic movement from the homeland to the host country. [26] In SATF 2018, the Spotlight Columbus production of popular Bengali playwright Tirthankar Chanda’s Achin Doshor (The Unknown Partner) catered to this white-collared middle-class audience. Spotlight Columbus, or Spotlight, has been a longtime supporter of the SATF and since 2014 has been hosting their own version of the festival in Columbus, Ohio to cater to the burgeoning South Asian population in the midwestern town, a growing demographic that comprises of the second category of audiences mentioned above. [27] The performers at the 2018 Spotlight offering were all amateurs with a majority holding day jobs as software professionals and graduate students of the Ohio State University. The group invited noted Bengali actor Debshankar Haldar from Kolkata to direct this play. Haldar is a much celebrated and feted stage performer in Kolkata. This performance of Achin Doshor demonstrated Haldar’s astute understanding of Bengali Group Theatre and its characteristic qualities. [28] He directed a flawless albeit ordinary script with finesse and careful attention to specific comic moments. These moments punctuated the narrative at regular but never overbearing intervals, ensuring that the narrative’s forays into everyday middle-class “Bengaliness” and its pitfalls were highlighted, laughed about, and then ultimately glossed over. The play’s frequent jokes landed well with the Bengali-speaking audience while those unfamiliar with the language were invited to follow along with supertitles. It was interesting to observe the ease with which Spotlight has been able to recreate a performance culture in the American Midwest that comes remarkably close to the Bengali Group Theatre in Kolkata. The Bengali Group Theatre makes a virtue of its poverty and amateur status. [29] While Spotlight’s financial health was not available for scrutiny, it was evident that almost the entire group was comprised of amateurs with a passion for the stage. In fact, Haldar, now a successful stage professional, was an amateur himself when he made his first foray into performance nearly three decades back in Kolkata. Haldar’s shepherding of the 2018 Spotlight presentation was a rite of passage for this young performance company, one that mimics the redressive action of the Turnerian model towards mitigating the crisis of the diasporic movement. In this instance, the redressive action took the form of being able to successfully recreate a slice of urban India and its many foibles in America, thus allowing the dominant section of the audience to relieve their idyllic Indian past. Several other plays over the course of the two-day festival also targeted this section of the audience. The highlight of these offerings was the adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding , led by Indian thespian Mahesh Dattani, titled Rakt Phera . The Hindi adaptation of Lorca’s 1932 masterpiece Blood Wedding is a translation of the Spanish classic by Indian playwright Abhinav Grover. The performance was directed by the noted Indian-English playwright Dattani and presented by the Indian Cultural Society of New Jersey (ICS). Dattani, recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award,one of India’s highest literary recognitions, for his anthology Final Solution and Other Plays in 1998, is also an accomplished director. His films Morning Raaga , and Mango Souffle were critical successes. Dattani has been directing for some time with North American performance companies and on North American college campuses and this was the veteran thespian’s third presentation at SATF. Dattani’s directorial vision lived up to his reputation as a master craftsman. The audience trickling into the theatre were greeted with a haunting light scheme bouncing off smoke and haze on a stage space, empty except for a few small stools. Haunting music, part of Vikram Kumar and Aditya Datey’s original score for the piece, pervaded the environment. In this version of the play, the action shifts from the Spanish countryside to North West India, at the borders of the states of Rajasthan and Haryana. The socially conservative and deeply religious content of the play finds a perfect home in its new setting. Rajasthan and Haryana are notoriously conservative and are often the subject of national and international news thanks to their ignominious human rights and women’s rights records. [30] The ensemble excelled under the able guidance of the seasoned director. Rakt Phera revealed an imaginative directorial vision that encompassed every theatrical element, from lighting, to music, to scenic elements, to create a truly excellent if not always engaging theatrical experience. The adaptation of a foreign context to a completely novel one echoed the creative act of adaptation. Zamenopoulos, et al. define this creative act of adaptation as “acts with the purpose of ‘making things my own.’” [31] The ICS adaptation of Blood Wedding succeeded in transporting the Spanish classic to a new South Asian context while not compromising the narrative integrity of the original. Not unlike the Spotlight presentation of Achin Doshor , Rakt Phera was an attempt for South Asian immigrants, otherwise employed, to recreate a cultural space for themselves in their adopted homeland. It was an interesting choice to adapt a foreign text to cater to a South Asian milieu. The adaptation reverses the diasporic processes undergone by South Asians adjusting to life in a foreign land. The Spanish idiosyncrasies of the original are replaced with their Indian counterparts in the same way that the South Asian diasporic subject has to adapt to life in their adopted homeland. And yet the act of adaptation shifts the message of the Lorca original to address gendered violence in South Asia. The shift echoes the ways in which South Asians, or any other diasporic community, alters the adopted homeland ever so slightly with their presence. It was not clear how familiar the audience was to Lorca or his work, but it was evident from their response that Rakt Phera had succeded in transporting the audience to North West India. Lorca was not the only European author lending creative inspiration at the festival. The festival also featured Four Walls , a stage adaptation of novelist Dr. Rajeev Naik’s Manoos Ghar (A Doomed Home). Manoos Ghar is a freewheeling South Asian American adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House . Four Walls , the stage adaptation of Naik’s novel, was done by writer/director Manoj Shahane. Shahane, an anesthesiologist by the day, has been involved with South Asian American theatre in all imaginable capacities for more than a decade. The play, presented by the New Jersey-based Theatrix, took the story of Ibsen’s Torvald and Nora and located it in an upwardly-mobile South Asian diasporic residence in the United States. The content, context, and setting for the play fit well with current hot button issues in the South Asian diaspora community, including domestic abuse. The adaptations of Lorca and Ibsen represent the diaspora’s journey from the creative act of adaptation to that of making. The creative act of adaptation as defined by Zamenopoulos, et al. is akin to improving a ready-to-eat meal, by say, adjusting condiments, or adding a splash of lime. Whereas the making refers to creative acts undertaken “with the purpose of making things ‘with my own hands’ (such as cooking a recipe from scratch).” [32] Lorca and Ibsen’s original narratives serve as the recipes for Grover and Shahane’s theatrical adaptations. The theatrical adaptations (different from the creative act of adaptation) make the original narratives their own by situating them in a South Asian socio-cultural context. The final play that embodied the creative acts of adaptation and making was the finale performance of the festival. Nirastra (Unarmed) was presented by Epic Actors Workshop and directed by Golam Sarwar Harun and Gargi Mukherjee. The story takes its cue from the Magsaysay award-winning Bengali author Mahasweta Devi’s short stories on the denotified tribal communities of India. The play puts a special emphasis on the story “Draupadi,” which first appeared four decades ago in 1978 as part of a set of loosely connected political narratives Agnigarbha (The Womb of Fire). [33] In their freewheeling adaptation of this story along with others by Mahasweta Devi, Harun and Mukherjee took the specificities of the stories and gave them a more universal framework. In their version, the firebrand tribal woman Draupadi, or Dopdi Mejhen as she is colloquially known in the forested hinterlands of tribal India, stands in for a whole community of oppressed people. Dopdi and her husband Dulan, played emotionally by Harun and Mukherjee respectively, fight on behalf of the disenfranchised tribal people even as government forces aided by local money-lenders launch a severely repressive counter-strike to quell any rebellion. Eventually, Dulan is brutally gunned down while Dopdi is arrested. While under arrest, the Senanayak, the unscrupulous chief of the government forces, played admirably by Sajal Mukherjee, leads a gang rape of Dopdi. In a moment of severe retaliation, Dopdi strips her clothes and offers her body to her oppressors while screaming, “Are you a man? There is no man here to be ashamed of. I’ll not let anyone put a cloth on me. What more can you do? Kill me?” [34] Both Mukherjee and Harun are well-known names in the South Asian American theatre community in the New York and New Jersey areas. Both hold daytime jobs as advertising executives and have appeared in critically successful South Asian American films. The producers, Epic Actors’ Workshop, have nurtured South Asian theatre in its diasporic home over the last several decades. Although the group primarily produces work in Bengali, it has made concerted attempts to attract the larger South Asian community as supporters and stakeholders in the work of promoting and upholding South Asian theatre in the United States. Not unlike the performances of Achin Doshor and Rakt Phera discussed above, Nirastra was also aimed at audiences seeking reintegration into the diaspora version of South Asian-ness and reeling under the crisis of the diasporic movement. Mukherjee’s heart-rending disavowal of the hyper-masculinity of the state represented by the oppressive police chief Senanayak at the end of the play therefore takes on several more layers of meaning beyond a fearless heroine’s last act of resistance. At that moment, Dopdi Mejen rejects any and all state machinations, including those of repressive immigration regulations that continue to deny the South Asian diasporic subject unencumbered access to political and economic citizenship. The clarion call that emanates metaphorically from the hearts of the tribal hinterlands of India is also a firm affirmation that in spite of all odds, the South Asian subject is here to firmly celebrate their cultural ubiquity unfettered by the need to assimilate. The title of the play, Nirastra , meaning unarmed, is symbolic perhaps of resolute steps that the community has taken and continues to take to become equal stakeholders in the evolution of America as a modern nation-state. For the older generation of South Asians who use the festival as a nostalgic hook to connect with their South Asian-ness, plays that correspond to the Zamenopoulos, et al. model of adaptations and making (i.e. Achin Doshor , Rakt Phera , Four Walls , and Nirastra ), are opportunities to update their vocabulary on what constitutes the cultural ethos of the homeland since the beginning of their diasporic movement. As an audience, this generation responds to the dramatic ingenuity of the presentations, even if the content does not hold as much significance for them. In a similar vein for the white-collared audiences seeking redressive action through the festival and its contents, and arguably the largest section of the audience, a presentation like A King’s Tale is an indulgence to allow the second and third generation South Asians to regale the older members of the community. Not unlike the response outlined above, this section of the audience is hardly moved by the folklore but rather celebrate being able to offer the community elders the opportunity to celebrate intergenerational knowledge transfer. In addition to the above, the third section of the audience, drawn from a wide heterogenous cross-section of the community, use the entirety of the festival as an act of celebrating creative citizenship. For this section, the redressive action represented by SATF as a whole supersedes the dramatic merits (and demerits) of individual presentations at the festival. The mere act of being able to celebrate their South Asian-ness while soaking in the festive atmosphere of the occasion is a resounding reminder of the community taking confident steps towards cultural citizenship in their country of adoption. Aparna Dharwadker warned and reminded South Asian American theatre enthusiasts that a new theatrical language cannot emerge in the diaspora unless the theatre practice “distances itself from the culture of origin and embraces the experience of residence in the host culture.” [35] I contend that most South Asian American theatre artists have embraced the experience of being resident in the host culture. It is only that they have adopted a more circuitous route to celebrate their presence in the United States. Playwrights like Sudipto Bhawmik, amongst a few others, have tried including the diasporic experience in their vernacular plays. [36] However, the plays have continued to be written with, primarily, a South Asian audience in mind. It is so because, as the discussion above has demonstrated, the community is still grappling with achieving cultural citizenship while negotiating with the crisis of the diasporic movement. For the community, the performances and the festival become critical creative acts towards achieving cultural citizenship in their adapted homeland. To substantiate and complement the claim of creative acts towards cultural citizenship further, I now turn to the Subhasis Das-led “Theatre in Break” team, an experimental breakout performance component that continually accompanied the more traditional performances at the SATF. The team’s work took performances outside of the proscenium’s confines and into one of the banquet halls of the George Street Playhouse. The celebratory nature of this experiment was evident from the way the space had been set up to resemble a cheery children’s party. The performance segment (a total of four segments would be presented over the two days) was based on classic improvisational workshop modules and Augusto Boal exercises. Das drew on his experience of working with Badal Sircar and his company Satabdi in Kolkata to inform these routines and practices. [37] In the first segment, titled “Hamelin – a Musical Path,” Das and his crew of actors demonstrated basic improvisation exercises based on the prompt “Yes, And….” Audiences were encouraged to provide actors with prompts besides asking actors to use props creatively in their improv routines. The whole demonstration seemed to excite the audience, many of whom were perhaps being exposed to this kind of a performance rhetoric for the first time. The final segment of the Theatre in Break, titled, “Jukti Tokko Gaal Goppo – A Debated Path,” however, did inspire significant audience engagement beyond effervescent enthusiasm and evoked some strong inspired reactions from the audience. As opposed to the largely unscripted improvised bits of the previous three segments, this segment was planned more as a traditional play. Das and his team asked audiences to engage in on-the-spot conversations about marijuana legalization. The audience reflected the mood of the larger community, which is sharply divided on whether to support or denounce this legislation. Das beautifully navigated around the troubled waters of the argument to allow parties on both sides to present their cases without talking about which side of the spectrum he identified with. The conversation on marijuana was followed by a heartwarming presentation on transgender issues. Weaving together Tagore songs, contemporary poetry, and a brief but compelling narrative, actors Tandra and Aparna Bhattacharya created a beautiful moment on stage. While there was certainly some room and possibility for dialogue at the conclusion of this piece, Das chose to postpone that, suggesting instead that while the issue of trans rights was as relevant to the South Asian community as it is to any other, he would rather wait than take an immediate plunge. The Theatre in Break segments represented the fourth level of creative acts in the Zamenopoulos, et al. model, “creating.” Breaking through the imaginary mold of traditional South Asian performance and narrative drama, Das and his team showed the possibilities of a distinctly South Asian American theatre aesthetic, an aesthetic that relied as much on the South Asian-ness of the performers as it did on their American experiences. Filmmaker Jayasri Hart had lamentably written, “In our country of adoption, ours has long been an assigned identity,” an identity forcibly assigned by the American civic bureaucracy. [38] Das’ team demonstrated that the everyday regular South Asian American diasporic subject is finally ready to unfetter themselves and assert their own identity rather than accept any monikers arbitrarily assigned to them. The team successfully celebrated this assertion by showcasing improvisation techniques and by sharing stories that are idiosyncratically South Asian American. Over the last thirteen years, the SATF has certainly created a niche for itself. As I hope to have demonstrated, the festival has opened up a space for the South Asian community to engage in creative acts of cultural citizenship. For the 2018 festival, the Middlesex county of New Jersey formally endorsed the festival. This was evidenced by the two county advertisements in the festival brochure and by the attendance of a county representative at the opening ceremony. The presence of the official seal lent further credence to the idea that the festival is not simply a community event, but a formal stride towards cultural citizenship. Incidentally, South Asians are represented fairly strongly in all levels of the New Jersey administration. The formal endorsement and its presence at the festival signified the “osmosis” between first and second generations of South Asian immigrants and “their combined interaction with the U.S. mainstream,” which Chatterjee identifies as the marker of South Asian creative success. [39] At the time of this writing, the 2019 SATF has been held. The 14th edition of the festival, drawing on the critical mass of South Asians who call the New York-New Jersey area their home, continued to make definite and deliberate strides towards guaranteeing cultural recognition through the creative acts of doing, adapting, making, and creating. The SATF has scripted a success story for itself and has created the space for South Asian Americans to practice and hone their theatre skills and stake their claim as a unique American subculture. The 15th edition of the festival, scheduled for summer 2020, promises to be the biggest and the best edition of the festival and is slated to be held at the new facilities of the George Street Playhouse in downtown New Brunswick. The move to this more centrally located and easily accessible location would have signified the metaphorical move of the South Asian diaspora subject from the assimilative goo of the melting pot to a bright, vibrant, and unique presence in the cultural salad bowl of the South Asian experience in the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic has however cast a spell of doubt over the future of the 2020 edition of the festival. In a recent conversation, the founder and the artistic director of the festival Dr. Dipan Ray mentioned, he was hopeful that the festival will be held sometime in the fall. In the meantime, Ray and his team are not sitting idle. In the cards is a virtual theatre platform, launching on May 23, 2020, that will bring together creative voices from India, Bangladesh, and the South Asian American theatre community to discuss the life and legacy of the recently deceased Indian director-manager-actor Usha Ganguly (1945-2020). Incidentally, Ganguly had served as one of the biggest supporters of the festival when it first started in 2005. She mentored both the New Jersey and the Columbus, Ohio festivals in their early years. Irrespective of whether the 2020 edition of the festival happens or not, the yeoman work that the SATF has done to foster a community of dedicated South Asian American thespians will undoubtedly allow it to return with more aplomb. The formidable groundwork that the festival has laid down bears the promise that it will continue to celebrate South Asian America’s confident stride to achieving cultural citizenship in America, their adopted homeland. References [1] A deep fried cutlet made of beets and other vegetables, see “Vegetable Chop,” YouTube video, 08:44, posted by BongEats, December 21, 2017, https://youtu.be/VOKgeZMwrv4 for more. [2] Sudipto Chatterjee, “South Asian American Theatre: (Un/Re-) Painting the Town Brown,” Theatre Survey 49, no. 1 (May 2008): 116. [3] Theodore Zamenopoulos, Katerina Alexiou, Giota Alevizou, Caroline Chapain, Shawn Sobers, and Andy Williams, “Varieties of Creative Citizenship,” in The Creative Citizen Unbound: How Social Media and DIY Culture Contribute to Democracy, Communities and the Creative Economy , eds. Ian Hargreaves and John Hartley (Bristol, UK; Chicago, IL, USA: Bristol University Press, 2016), 106. [4] Zamenopoulos, et al., “Varieties of Creative Citizenship,” 106. [5] Ibid, 106. [6] Ibid, 106. [7] Ashis Sengupta, “Staging Diaspora: South Asian American Theatre Today,” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 4 (November 2012): 831-854. [8] Royona Mitra, Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). [9] Arnab Banerji, “What lies Beyond Hattamala? Badal Sircar and his Third Theatre as an Alternative Trajectory for Intercultural Theatre, “ in The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance , eds. Daphne P. Lei and Charlotte McIvor (London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 56. [10] Toby Miller, “What is Cultural Citizenship,?” in Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 35. [11] Vinay Lal, 1999. “Establishing Roots, Engendering Awareness: A Political History of Asian Indians in the United States,” in Live Like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience , ed. Leela Prasad (Philadelphia: Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, 1999), 42-48; Brij V Lal, Peter Reeves, and Rajesh Rai, The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006). [12] Jayasri Hart, “Meet the Filmmaker,” Roots in the Sand . Accessed March 10, 2020. https://www.pbs.org/rootsinthesand/filmmaker.html. [13] “The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act),” United States Department of State Archive, accessed on March 8, 2020. https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/id/87718.html. [14] Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Pub.L. 89-236, 79 Stat. 911 (1968), accessed March 8, 2020. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-79/pdf/STATUTE-79-Pg911.pdf#page=7 [15] Vinay Lal, “Diaspora Purana: The Indic Presence in World Culture,” UCLA South Asian MANAS (n.d.), accessed on May 15, 2020. http://southasia.ucla.edu/diaspora/indic-presence-world-culture/. [16] “Selected Population Profile in the United States: 2017 American Community Survey 1-year Estimates,” United States Census Bureau, accessed on March 10, 2020. https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_17_1YR_S0201&prodType=table. [17] Miller, “What is Cultural Citizenship?,” 50. [18] Ibid, 54. [19] Ibid, 52. [20] Ibid, 53. [21] Zamenopoulos, et al., “Varieties of Creative Citizenship,” 106. [22] Arnab Banerji, “The Social Drama of Durga Puja: Performing Bengali Identity in the Diaspora.” Ecumenica: Performance and Religion 12, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 1-13. [23] Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), 44. [24] Anita Mannur, “Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora,” in Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 28. [25] Chatterjee, “South Asian American Theatre,” 114. [26] Banerji, “The Social Drama of Durga Puja.” [27] “Ohio Asian Americans.” Ohio Development Services Agency, accessed on March 12, 2020. https://development.ohio.gov/files/research/P7004.pdf. [28] Bengali Group Theatre is the dominant form of theatre in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. For a precise definition of this form of theatre and some of its distinguishing characteristics, see Ananda Lal, Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 139. The specific qualities reproduced in this performance were the sparse suggestive staging and the melodramatic tendency in individual performances. [29] Lal, Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre , 139. [30] Nishu Mahajan, “Honour killing continues unabated in Haryana,” The Pioneer , 27 August 2018, https://www.dailypioneer.com/2018/state-editions/honour-killing-continues-unabated-in-haryana.html; Dev Ankur Wadhawan, “Rajasthan’s shame: It’s paying a heavy price for killing the unborn girl,” Daily O , 28 February 2017, https://www.dailyo.in/politics/female-infanticide-rajasthan-sex-ratio/story/1/15896.html. [31] Zamenopoulos, et al., “Varieties of Creative Citizenship,” 106. [32] Ibid, 106. [33] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “‘Draupadi’ by Mahasveta Devi,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 2 (Winter, 1981): 383. [34] “13th South Asian Theater Festival,” (New Brunswick: Epic Actors’ Workshop, 2018). [35] Aparna Dharwadker, “Diaspora and the Theatre of the Nation,” Theatre Research International 28, no. 3 (October 2003): 305. [36] Bhawmik’s plays Ron, Taconic Parkway, Curious Case of a Casual Terrorist , and Nagorik come to mind. [37] Banerji, “What Lies Beyond Hattamala?,”43-59. Badal Sircar (1925-2011) is one of the most celebrated playwrights and directors in modern Indian Theatre. Sircar devised the third theatre borrowing extensively from Western avant-garde theatre practices. [38] Hart, “Meet the Filmmaker.” [39] Chatterjee, “South Asian American Theatre,” 112-113. [31] Dipan Ray, phone conversation with author. May 14, 2020. Dr. Ray became emotional while discussing the selfless guidance offered by Ganguly as a mentor, guest director, and performer to the New Jersey and Columbus, Ohio editions of the festival throughout their fifteen and six year journeys respectively. Footnotes About The Author(s) Arnab Banerji is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History, Literature, and Dramaturgy at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. His first monograph Contemporary Group Theatre in Kolkata, India (Routledge) was recently released. Arnab researches modern Indian theatre, performance by the South Asian American diaspora, Asian-American theatre, and translation of Indian plays into English. His articles and reviews have appeared in Theatre Topics , Studies in Musical Theatre , Ecumenica , Asian Theatre Journal , BOOM California , Sanglap , Theatre Symposium , Virginia Review of Asian Studies , SERAS , Theatre Journal , and TDR . He has also contributed chapters on modern Indian performance to various anthologies. A detailed publication list and information on his teaching and research can be found on https://arnabbanerji.weebly.com/ . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.