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James F. Wilson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein James F. Wilson By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Harvey Fierstein. Photo by Carol Rosegg. When Torch Song Trilogy opened in 1982, the show’s playwright and star, Harvey Fierstein, was lauded as the first openly gay writer and lead actor on Broadway. In an interview with Barbara Walters the following year, Fierstein scoffed at the dubious distinction: “Isn’t it totally ridiculous that I’m getting all this attention because I’m the first openly gay [Broadway star and playwright]?” Schooling a visibly perplexed Walters, he explained, “You know that the women in your audience are sitting out there, and they go to see movies and they’re dying over these gorgeous men, [who] you know they’re gay.”(1) Out-spoken and unafraid to be controversial, Fierstein, a four-time Tony-Award winning writer and performer, is both a prolific artist and committed activist. He was at the forefront of the nascent AIDS protests and grassroots fundraising, and he remains a staunch advocate for LGBTQ+ visibility and rights. In a career spanning more than fifty years, Fierstein got his start with the Gallery Players in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and while still a teenager, he appeared in Andy Warhol’s Pork (1971). As he writes in his memoir, I Was Better Last Night (2022), he played Amelia, “an asthmatic lesbian maid with a penchant for porn mags and plate jobs.”(2) (Fierstein advises non-squeamish and scatological-curious readers to look up the latter fetish.) Experimental and semi-autobiographical work followed, including the three plays comprising Torch Song Trilogy , International Stud (1978), Fugue in a Nursery (1979), and Widows and Children First (1979), all of which began at La MaMa in New York City’s East Village. In addition to Torch Song , Fierstein’s Broadway plays, Safe Sex (1987) and Casa Valentina (2014), confront issues affecting LGBTQ+ communities. As a librettist, Fierstein has been instrumental in bringing the American musical out of the closet. La Cage aux Folles (1983) is credited as the first Broadway musical to feature a gay couple as the main characters, and the show has proven to be remarkably durable and revivable. His book for A Catered Affair (2008), based on a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky and Gore Vidal’s film adaptation, includes a lonely gay uncle (played by Fierstein originally), embittered by a sense of exclusion from his own extended family. Kinky Boots (2013) ran on Broadway for six years, and the musical celebrates community, pride, and the complexities of gender and sexual identities. Fierstein, with his distinctive and oft-imitated gravelly voice, is a unique figure in queer theatre history, and he continues to be a brash and uninhibited spokesperson for a new generation of LGBTQ+ individuals. James Wilson: In a nod to Harry Hay, you dedicate your memoir “to the radical fairies who flew before” you. Who were the most significant radical fairies on your life and work? Harvey Fierstein: I was thrown into the gay community very young. I didn't know about the prejudice and stuff until later in life because when I joined [the Gallery Players in Brooklyn], everyone was gay. There were a couple of heterosexuals, but they bussed them in! Everyone else was gay. I was thirteen or fourteen years old, and all these older men and women were all gay and lesbian. And now it’s so funny to me to think of her as a famous person, but there was Marsha P. Johnson and the street queens. We all hung out together on Christopher Street and none of us had money to go into a bar. Even when I was older, I didn't have the money to go to a bar. I was working at La MaMa or at WPA or whatever. I was making fifty dollars a week, which barely covered my subway to and from the city. So, we just all hung out on the street together. But it was these people who lived the gay life who were so natural in it that it never occurred to me to ever lie. I mean, the idea of coming out of the closet was so strange to me because I couldn't imagine being in the closet, you know? We’re not talking about mother and father stuff, we’re talking about in the real world. And that was the kind of real world that I lived in. And I’m thinking of the playwrights who wrote for me: I had H.M. Koutoukas, Robert Patrick, Billy Hoffman, and Paul Foster, who always wore those white shirts, making him look straighter! Then there was María Irene Fornés. Ronald Tavel, of course, and Harvey Tavel, were huge influences, as were Donald L. Brooks and John Vaccaro’s [Play-House of the Ridiculous] troupe. [ Laughing .] I was just laughing because I saw an interview with Diane Lane, and I knew Diane Lane as the naked little girl who was carried over the heads in Andrei Serban’s The Trojan Women . That’s how I remember her! And then all of a sudden, she was a movie star! Wilson: You mention H.M. Koutoukas, and that makes you a direct descendant of the Caffe Cino and the birth of Off-Off-Broadway. Fierstein: The Cino was gone already, but there was Robert Patrick, Donald L. Brooks, and the dancer James Waring. Wilson: And the Trocks?(3) Fierstein: The Trockadero came along later. Eric Concklin was one of the lead ballerinas for the Trockadero, and he directed all my early plays. And Tony Bassae was also a Trockadero. And of course, the lead ballerina, Larry Ree—he and Eric worked together dressing shows. Wilson: What were performances at La MaMa and other Off-Off-Broadway theatres like in the 1970s and 1980s? Fierstein: They were inspirational. There was a wildness and a “Join us!” kind of spirit. The first show that I did with the Play-House of the Ridiculous when John Vaccaro asked me to come in was called Persia: A Desert Cheapie [by Vaccaro and Bernard Roth] in the second-floor theatre at La MaMa. He had ramps built down the two sides with a stage at one end and a stage at the other, and the audience was in the center, and we were on the four platforms. We ran around the audience, and it was absolute chaos. We also did [Paul Foster’s] Satyricon on those four platforms. It just occurred to me this moment that Andrei Serban was doing the same thing in the basement, and I wonder if John ripped that idea off Andrei! I don't know. But anyway, so we would perform in this very much in-your-face manner: The audience would come in. Ellen [Stewart] would come out with her bell, and say, “Welcome to La MaMa, dedicated to experimental theater, dedicated to the artists and all aspects of the theater. . . .” She’d make her announcement and leave. When she was done, the audience sat down on the ground to watch the show, and John Vaccaro would come out and shout, “Get up, you lazy mother fuckers! Stand the fuck up! Who told you to sit down? Get the fuck up!” I absolutely love that. Wilson: You said in a recent interview, “I wish that experimental theater still existed. There were a few of us that I would say destroyed Off-Off-Broadway. I think greed is what destroyed Off-Off-Broadway.”(4) Can you explain what you mean by that? Fierstein: I’m trying to think of the first one who actually crossed over. I mean, I know one of the early ones was Hair , of course. You know, Tom [O’Horgan] moved Hair to Broadway. Wilson: Hadn’t Dames at Sea moved from the Chino to Off-Broadway? Fierstein: Oh, yeah, but that was so much earlier. That was way before I arrived. I don’t know what effect that really had. I mean, everyone was aspirational in that way. You had Bette Midler or Sly Stallone doing a role at La MaMa and then moving on, but they never turned around and looked back. You know, I never heard Sylvester Stallone send Ellen a check. And as much as I love Bette, I’ve never been able to get her to do a benefit with me for La MaMa. But it was Tom Eyen that directed her. I don’t remember who Sly Stallone was with when he did a show. But anyway, what happened was Hair moved, and all of a sudden, there’s this possibility of making money. You know, instead of fifty dollars a week that we were getting from Ellen, there was the possibility of more. Paul Foster was just pushing and pushing. One of the famous ones was Elizabeth I. It was a musical starring Ruby Lynn Reyner. Ruby’s still around. You could always talk to her, but I think it lasted one night on Broadway.(5) Jerry Ragni and [Galt MacDermot]’s next show where they once again went to a Broadway theater—I forget what theater it was—and hollowed it out to make it look like . . . like outer space. Wilson: Was that Dude ? Fierstein: Dude ! And that also was like, boom!(6) So, there were people trying. And then Tom [O’Horgan] did Jesus Christ Superstar . And then after that it was this constant push to have another hit, which never happened for him because he did the one about Joe McCarthy, Senator Joe , I think it was called, and which was a commercial production.(7) But there was that kind of push. I was doing my shows, and I can’t say I wanted them to move. I certainly wasn’t against them moving, but I would have rather just run them longer at La MaMa. International Stud moved Off-Broadway and bombed. Widows and Children and A Fugue in a Nursery then moved Off-Broadway and bombed, and then the Broadway rights for Torch Song never happened. And you know, they brought in Joan Darling, who had done an episode of Mary Tyler Moore . In our world that made her a big director, I guess. Nice woman. As I remember, she didn’t want me in the show. She wanted Austin Pendleton to play Arnold, and I’m trying to remember who she wanted for the mother. But it was somebody equally not right. Estelle Getty, who was “Estelle Gettleman” at that time, would call me every night saying, “You can’t let them do this to me! That’s my role! It’s my role!” I kept saying, “Estelle, it’s never gonna happen. Calm down. It’s never gonna happen.” Wilson: And that was for the Off-Broadway production when it went to the Actors’ Playhouse, or when it was going to Broadway? Fierstein: It had been bought for Broadway by a producer, but never happened. And then we did the reading for the Glines, and Lawrence Lane called me and said, “Can we meet and talk?” And I took my last dollar—took the subway in from Brooklyn on my last dollar. We had this meeting, where he said after that reading, we want to produce Torch Song Off-Broadway. I had to borrow a dollar to get home from him. But thankfully, he lent me a dollar. Wilson: Switching topics but related to Torch Song : You began your career in drag, and I’m just wondering how you feel now about the commercialization of drag, and, on the flip side, the demonization of drag. They’re going after the Drag Queen Story Hours, for instance, which might be similar to your experiences doing drag in the 1970s and 80s. Fierstein: I was doing drag in a world which had no problem with doing drag. You know, when I was doing Flatbush Tosca or In Search of the Cobra Jewels or Freaky Pussy , my world had no problem with drag. What you’re talking about is once we moved Torch Song Trilogy . But there was something a little bit more challenging than drag: I was getting fucked up the ass center stage in the fourth scene. So, putting on a dress really didn’t seem like too much of a problem to the audience. That was not the scene I was asked to cut before it moved to Broadway. I was asked to cut the fuck-up-the-ass scene, so I have to say, I didn’t have that problem. Also, we were not as pretty. I mean, Jesus Christ, I look at these queens and these makeup jobs, and you can faint. You know, Nina West just played Edna in the non-union tour of Hairspray , and she’s gotten better and better at her makeup. They all get better and better at their makeup. But they are so gorgeous. And the wigs are so gorgeous. We never dreamed. I mean, we slapped that shit on. And we put some glitter on top of it, and huge eyelashes, and we thought that was drag. We would have been laughed out of—I mean, not a single one of us would have made it to RuPaul’s Drag Race as it is, but RuPaul wouldn’t have made it to RuPaul’s Drag Race ! I remember Ru when he first started at the Pyramid Club down on Avenue A, I think it was. He did that show, he and Lady Bunny, and those queens wouldn’t have made it. It’s gotten so sophisticated and so gorgeous. Wilson: I saw the original La Cage , which was brilliant, but if you compare those queens to the most recent revival, there’s a huge difference. Fierstein: Well, there’s been a problem with La Cage . The original production you had Arthur Laurents, who was scared to death and stuck two women in the chorus and made one of the gentlemen, Sam Singhaus, grow his hair long. So, when they pulled off their wigs, the two women would show that they were women, but one of the men had hair as long as the women. [Laurents] was so scared of so much of that stuff, which, of course you wouldn’t see now. On the other hand, I was very thrilled to see a woman on RuPaul’s Drag Race —and a heterosexual drag queen on RuPaul’s Drag Race —which says to me we are growing still, our community is growing still.(8) That was the original production, and Theoni V. Aldredge put them in those Erté coats, and they had fun little costumes and all that. And she tried to make them as pretty as possible. The revival that Jerry Zaks did, Jerry Mitchell had them dancing and—when they did the can-can, their chests were totally exposed.(9) There was nothing about them that said, “We’re girls.” These were muscular men doing muscular male dances. The gender fuck was in there, but you never felt they wanted to be drag queens. You didn’t. There was no love of it. Even Gary Beach’s performance was lovely, but I never felt that that’s who he was, that he was Zaza, and that this was important to him and that he felt beautiful this way. He never felt that. I thought that production was—but as I say in the book, I just turned to Jerry Herman and said, “I don’t like any of these choices, so let’s make a deal. You give me the next production; I'll give you this one.” He said, “Fine.” And so, he got his orchestra that he wanted. He got his singers that he wanted. I mean, that was the production where I said, “Are you telling me you would have rather had Beverly Sills play Dolly instead of Carol [Channing]?” And he said, “Absolutely.” It was about the music. And when the next production happened—David Babani’s production at the Menier Chocolate Factory—once again, they brought in a heterosexual director. I love him, and there was so much that Terry [Johnson] did that I really loved, but they brought in a heterosexual cast again. But the drag queens at least were having fun. They were enjoying who they were, and I felt that more. And in Doug Hodge’s performance, I felt that Zaza was there. I felt that very much. He’s a wonderful actor and his Zaza was one of my favorites.(10) Wilson: My favorite was you. I saw you and Chris Sieber, and that was the ideal La Cage for me. Fierstein: Well, we were already so beaten up by then because we’d gone through that shit with what’s his face, who’s now not allowed—the one I was put in with. Wilson: Jeffrey Tambor. Fierstein: Jeffrey Tambor! And we went through that, and then the reviews—we didn’t even have reviews because he only lasted like ten days.(11) But what a horror that was. And then the understudy had to go on. Finally, Chris came in. When Chris came in, we sort of knew the writing was on the wall because as sold out as it was, once the word got out about [what] bad shape it was in, the ticket sales just disappeared, and I knew we weren’t going to run very long. We had a really good time together. It was lovely to have this gay couple that really cared about each other. I could play with that role and play with a couple of lines and stuff like that. In the “La Cage” scene, I did a tribute to Charles Pierce. If you remember, I did his Marlene. [ As Marlene Dietrich :] “I’m going to tell the story of a girl. She look at him. He give her a heart. She look at it and give it back. I tell the story now.” I just played with that kind of stuff. We’ve never had the La Cage chorus line being female impersonators. We’ve never done that. Like I said, I did it a little. Doug Hodge did it a little bit. Did you see Doug? He did Piaf. He sort of walked out as Piaf, and it was very funny. I love the idea of playing with that to show the culture—to have the gay culture of who we love. Wilson: I watched an interview you did with Vito Russo days before La Cage started performances.(12) It took place in your Torch Song dressing room, and you predicted then that “I Am What I Am” will be a gay anthem. Fierstein: I did? Well, you know, I wrote it as a monologue, and then Jerry took it and turned it into the song. “I Am What I Am” comes out of my book for La Cage , but “A Little More Mascara” was actually Jerry musicalizing the opening of Torch Song Trilogy —the drag scene. That was the first thing he ever played for me before we even started writing the show. I went up to his house and we went up to the fourth floor to his studio, and he said, “I really wanna sing this tribute that I wrote for you,” and he sang “A Little More Mascara.” And he said that’s how we should open the show. And I said, “No, no, no. I don't think so. We did that with Torch Song .” I said, “A musical should open with a big musical number. A gay musical should open with a really big gay musical number!” That was the birth of that. What he would tell you while he was still alive—and Arthur would tell you also—I predicted then that “Look Over There” would become a song that everyone sang at every wedding and everything. I still think that song is so gorgeous. “Look Over There” is for anyone who loves you the most. Jerry will tell you how wrong I was because when Harry Como came to him to record from La Cage , he tried to push “Look Over There” because of me. And of course, Perry Como only wanted to sing “Song on the Sand.” He sort of had a little AM [radio] hit with it. Wilson: And there was the disco version of “I Am What I Am.” Fierstein: Shirley Bassey had her big hit with “I Am What I Am.” Wilson: About the recent Torch Song production, you wrote in your book, “There was no tension left, no danger. The fear was gone.” I’m curious to hear more about that experience of what it was like in 2017. And how do you see queer theatre in 2024? Fierstein: I felt the same thing when I saw [the 2018 revival of] The Boys in the Band . It wasn’t dangerous anymore, whereas it really was dangerous to see that kind of theatre. When I would look at an audience—not Off-Broadway of [the original] Torch Song —but when we moved to Broadway, it was all straight people with gay people mixed in, many times in couples looking more like straight people. When the movie opened, there was a cartoon in New Yorker, I think it was, that showed the front of a movie theatre and it was Tequila Sunrise , The Terminator , and Torch Song Trilogy —three “T’s.” A man says to his friends, “I’m not getting in that line.” They wouldn't even go near the theatre. That feeling was gone in 2017. The audience was very largely gay, and they came in with an ownership of Torch Song . It wasn’t my show anymore; it wasn’t this daring thing anymore. They came in with an ownership of it. And so, they sat there and waited for their moments. There was not even an anticipation of the story. They knew the story too well. It was like watching The Rocky Horror Show for the 700th time. That was hard for me because I want an audience to see something, and they weren’t seeing something new. Also, the casting was not my favorite. I love the two young men in it. I absolutely love them as actors. But both of them were way too old. David, the character of the son is fifteen years old. Matthew [Broderick] was eighteen. The boy who played it originally, Fred [Allen], was seventeen, I think. And this kid in the revival was twenty-eight or something. I mean, he was actually older than the boy who played Alan. Both of them should be dangerous. And the danger of the character of Alan is that he’s so close to the other one’s age, that you say, “Wait, you were just sleeping with somebody that age, and now he’s your son?” There was no danger. Partly because the audience knew what was coming, and partly because of the casting. There was no drama of a kid knowing who he is. The kid, David, knows who he is better than Arnold knows who he is. Obviously, more than Ed knows who he is. They were wonderful actors, and I love them. I was greatly disappointed in that. The only roles that worked—the only challenging roles were Arnold, Ed—the character just wanting to be straight and all that still worked just fine; people understood that—and the mother character. Wilson: It’s interesting that you mention David because his depiction is particularly dangerous, and I’m surprised it wasn’t more of a scandal originally. People don’t talk about kids and sexuality, and here you have in 1979, a fifteen-year-old kid who, as you say, was very sure of his sexuality. Fierstein: And he could walk out that door and make his living. Alan was a hustler, and both of them were hustlers. In the very first runs, audiences were scared of it. Period. To even talk about it. In the later runs, they just accepted it. And it’s sort of funny because people don’t talk about gay kids unless it’s really in a precious kind of way. You know, the lovely coming-out pieces that are not dangerous at all. But it’s a very dangerous thing for a kid. Wilson: Relatedly, one of my favorite moments in the film The Celluloid Closet is when you embrace the sissy stereotype, and you pursue that in your children’s book The Sissy Duckling . Fierstein: Well, there’s something that’s sort of interesting happening right this moment. Someone has written a musical version of Sissy Duckling , a children’s theatre piece. I think she’s done a nice job of it. They went to MTI, who are the people that license out these shows, and MTI said, “Well, we might have a problem with this, not with the content directly, but calling it the ‘Sissy Duckling.’” I need to write a two-three sentence response to MTI saying, “You don’t understand. It’s not the word that’s hurtful. He’s willing to accept that. You want to call him a Sissy? Go ahead and call him a Sissy.” Yes, I am a Sissy and I’m proud of it. It is who I am. And if you wanna put the word Sissy on it, that’s fine with me. I don’t care. You wanna call me a faggot? I don’t care. I, for one, will never really be comfortable with queer. I accept that. It’s another generation, and it’s their choice. I think I talked about in the book when all of a sudden on Gay Day, and it was one of the first times that we were starting up at Central Park as opposed to starting in the village, and they turned everything all around. We had those years where we were marching uptown, and they were marching downtown. The original Stonewallers were marching uptown! Anyway, I guess we worked it all out, because now we have floats! But I arrived at the fountain up at Central Park, and the biggest group there was the Marriage Equality group. I thought, “What the fuck is wrong with you? We can be put in jail. We can lose our apartments. And you care about wearing a wedding dress? What is wrong with you?” But I shut up because I said, “Look at them—I mean, I was thirty-five or forty—they are the young generation. They’re the next ones. We had our fight. We fought our fight. This is their fight. If this is what they want, this is what they want.” And they turned out to be right because many heterosexuals were able to say, “Oh, you want to be able to visit so-and-so in the hospital? I get that. Oh, you don’t want to lose your apartment if that one dies? I get that. Oh, you want to inherit this? I get that. You want to be on the life insurance or the health insurance? I get that.” In a funny way, they were very right about that being the next level of our fight. And now, people have said, “Aren’t you gonna make any real statement about Trump and about this Project 2025 and all that?” And I say, “I’m not sure yet. I need to see if this next generation is going to say this is what our fight is about.” I mean Project 2025 is attacking it all. They want to make gay marriage illegal. They want to take us out of the school system. Someone published a list of the top ten banned musicals. (Because of course they don’t care about plays. You actually have to listen in a play.) But the top ten musicals to be banned from schools, and I’m very proud to say I wrote three of them: La Cage , Hairspray , and Kinky Boots .(13) I heard that my book Sissy Duckling is banned from schools, and I’m very proud. Wilson: Do you get to New York much? I was wondering if you’ve seen Oh, Mary! Fierstein: No, I have not seen that. You know, COVID changed so much, just reshaped everything—made me a lot more lazy. I don’t go in as often. I saw a bunch of shows around the 2024 Tony’s, and I was invited to the opening night of Oh, Mary! , but I didn’t go. I saw Cabaret because I know half the cast, and half the cast of Hell’s Kitchen , and I presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to Jack O’Brien. The city has changed so much. I don’t think it’s just my age. I think it feels different when I walk down the street in the city. It just feels. . . off. Wilson: I still go to the theatre a lot, but theatre is different. It’s just become so ridiculously expensive, which is a shame. Fierstein: What do you think is the answer? What would you do? Wilson: I honestly don’t know. Fierstein: I’m curious because these are questions I ask myself every day. I obviously still have a lot of friends in the theatre, and they come up and stay with me to get away from it. And I’m asked to do theatre a lot, which I turn down constantly. I turn down these offers because they’re just not thrilling to me. There’s nothing new enough to make me want to go work six days a week. I’d rather sew. Wilson: As an academic and as a teacher, I am really moved by your nurturing quality among your castmates, and you call your online followers your “children.” Where does that come from? Fierstein: It was the way I was treated. I mean, Ellen Stewart was my mama, and my mother was my mother. The two of them talked to each other that way: “You’re his mama.” “You’re his mother.” So, it could be partly that. But even the older men, such as the director of the Gallery Players, took me to Fire Island for the first time, and I stayed in his house that he called Poverty Gardens. I saw what the gay scene looked like when I was still way underage to have sex or anything. “Each one, teach one?” That’s my attitude. *Author Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Above: Fierstein in the East Village, early 1970s. Photo by Irene Stein. References Barbara Walters, Interview with Harvey Fierstein. 20/20 . ABC, September 22, 1983. Harvey Fierstein, I Was Better Last Night: A Memoir (Penguin Random House, 2022), 52. The Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet Company was created by Larry Ree and members of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre Company in 1972 and frequently performed at La MaMa. In 1974, Peter Anastos, Anthony Bassae, and Natch Taylor separated from Gloxinia and formed Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. The Trocks, as they are affectionately known, continue to tour. Interview with Greg Shapiro, “Better than Ever: An Interview with Harvey Fierstein,” Philadelphia Gay News (March 22, 2022). https://epgn.com/2022/03/22/better-than-ever-an-interview-with-harvey-fierstein/ Elizabeth I , a play with music, ran for eleven previews and closed after five performances on April 8, 1972. Dude opened at the Broadway Theatre on October 9, 1972, and ran for 16 performances (and 16 previews). Senator Joe performed three previews before closing on January 7, 1989. Victoria Scone (Emily Diapre) was the first cisgender woman contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK in 2021, and Maddy Morphosis (Daniel Truitt) was the first cisgender heterosexual man contestant on Season 14 of RuPaul’s Drag Race . The first Broadway revival of La Cage opened on December 9, 2004, and ran 229 performances. Gary Beach was Zaza and Daniel Davis played Georges. Davis left the show after just four months and was succeeded by Robert Goulet. A London revival of La Cage opened at the Menier Chocolate Factory on January 9, 2008, and transferred to the West End the following October. Douglas Hodge repeated his performance opposite Kelsey Grammer in the Broadway revival that opened on April 18, 2010, and ran for 433 performances. Jeffrey Tambor replaced Kelsey Grammer in the part of Georges in the 2010 revival. Tambor’s first performance was on February 15, 2011, and he left the show on February 24, 2011. The producers stated that he was “experiencing complications from recent hip surgery,” and he left the show because “the pain and the challenge of performing in a musical eight times a week proved to be too physically demanding.” Theatre gossip columnist, Michael Riedel, reported that Tambor was struggling in the role and was “freaking out.” Applying his usual snark, Riedel claimed, “[Tambor]’s hitting notes in some of Jerry Herman’s lovely ballads that aren’t found anywhere on the traditional Western scale.” (“Tambor Battles ‘Cage’ Fright,” New York Post [February 25, 2011]. https://nypost.com/2011/02/25/tambor-battles-cage-fright/ ) Vito Russo, Interview with Harvey Fierstein. Our Time . WNYC TV and Manhattan Cable TV, March 8, 1983. Hairspray ’s book is credited to Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan. Fierstein was hired as the show’s ghostwriter and receives royalties for his contributions to the libretto. Footnotes About The Author(s) JAMES F. WILSON is the Executive Officer of Theatre and Performance at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His research and teaching interests include African American theatre and performance; gender and sexuality studies; and musical theatre history. He is the author of Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance and Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre: Pedagogy of the Oppressors . His essays have appeared in numerous academic journals and chapter anthologies. He is a voting member of the Drama Desk. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. 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Madeline Pages Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage Theatre of Isolation Madeline Pages By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Conceiving of a theatre of isolation presents the performance scholar with a conundrum akin to a tree falling in a secluded forest. As it is so often distinguished by the presence of the group, of collective and communal exchange, the theatre as an art form seems diametrically opposed to isolation—physical, social, mental, emotional, spiritual. How can theatre relate to the world while maintaining a state of isolation from it? And where does isolation lead if and when it ends? I offer theatre of isolation as a category of performance that engages with these questions and one that implies a tension between the social engagement of theatre, which is often thought of as having a social function, and social isolation. In 2020, theatre artists were living in that tension. I believe their work proved theatre and isolation can coexist. I also believe theatre of isolation is not a temporally bounded category but one we can use to see this coexistence of socially engaged art with isolation in the work of theatre makers from other times. The 1970s in the US was an era of aftermath. American society faced as one (though by disparate means and with differing attitudes) the shock of the Vietnam War as it was witnessed on television, national financial decline, and the continued, violent subjugation of marginalized people. The political struggles of the 1960s, in a sense, continued through the 1970s, prolonged and deepened without relief as one decade spilled into the next. Given this climate, a desire for isolation or at least the expression of that desire in art, strikes me as unsurprising. For this essay, I have chosen to look at three artists, Adrienne Kennedy, Peter Schumann, and Jack Smith, whose theatre from the 1970s is isolated from the dominant culture—white, male, heterosexual, conservative, capitalist—of the time. Isolation of this type may be reflected in physical space, and I pay close attention to both real and imaginary architectures of isolation. However, my analysis is more broadly concerned with social isolation—how it happens, what it looks and feels like, and its effect on artistic expression. The result of this isolation is not necessarily an increased understanding of the self, of one’s identity, but a kind of solace that primes the individual for the monumental task of breaking new ground and resisting oppression. Such a claim is not new. Theatre of isolation can be classified alongside the antisocial and the anti-relational in performance studies, particularly as such terms are debated among scholars of queer studies. [1] However, I wish to distinguish isolation from the antisocial and align my analysis with the asocial as theorized by Summer Kim Lee in “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality.” The asocial, according to Lee, complicates and expands the state of antisociality of the subject, as a momentary choice to resist the social in order to “shift and reconstellate one’s relations to . . . the socialities with which one is entangled,” rather than deny or resist relationality completely. [2] “Staying in” is what Lee calls the performance of asociality in which the subject chooses to be alone rather than be out with others. In Lee’s formulation, to have the need and desire for time away from others, from an outside . . . does not hold up a depoliticized fantasy of autonomy. . . . Rather, it points toward the desire to want to relate, to show up for another, but when one is ready, and in ways that alter the horizon of what constitutes the social, and the political projects, collectivities, affiliations, and models of care borne out of it. [3] “Staying in,” then, is a self-reflexive performance of asociality, an enactment of “the ambivalent and rich aspects of solitude” for the purposes of protection and preservation, but also preparation for political and social engagement. Particularly for individuals who identify with a minority group—Lee speaks specifically to the effects for Asian American people—staying in offers “sustained and sustaining ways . . . of moving through a world that is messy, damaging, hurtful, and exhausting.” [4] Staying in appears to be the antidote to the psychic exhaustion caused by the normalization of oppression, but does not preclude political engagement or outward expression, as in forms of public art. Lee further argues that staying in is in fact “enfolded within . . . acts and desires of going out” to participate in “radical, collective, organized action [that has heretofore characterized minoritarian political critique] within the social worlds in which we live.” [5] Such collective actions have been inherited by contemporary culture through glorified histories of the protests and insurgency of the 1960s. From that decade’s legacy emerged a “compulsory sociability,” the belief that “one’s political investments and acts of solidarity must be located in the realm of the social.” [6] As Lee conceives it, staying in as a mode of performance rejects the assumption of compulsory sociability but not the collective pursuit of social justice. [7] Staying in inverts the common conception of the antisocial or isolated individual as outside —outside of the world, disengaged, or perhaps a mere spectator. Instead, the individual staying in is staying inside , and by choice. What defines an “insider” is not, as the prevailing use of term implies, the power of being part of the majority but isolation from the outside world while one remains within it. Furthermore, this kind of social isolation is personal, and consciously undertaken; from it one can derive some agency, defining one’s own terms of engagement. This unconventional inside/outside dichotomy becomes important for what follows. I am, as the three artists I will discuss in depth here are, always keeping an eye on the outside context as I delve into solitary spaces of imagination and creative practice. This outside, on the macro level, is the US in the 1970s. The dominant scholarly narratives of American culture in the 1970s, and particularly those narratives that focus on the theatre of the era, provide contradictory summaries of the artistic landscape: it is sometimes monopolized by the echoes of Tom Wolfe’s 1976 essay on “The Me Decade” and the nihilistic glamour of Andy Warhol, or, conversely, by artists characterized as community-oriented survivors scraping by in the middle of a national financial crisis. Hillary Miller argues that these analyses submerge “very necessary labors of institutionalization . . . in histories of downtown theatre that focus on the 1970s political separatism on the one hand, and myopic investigations of the self and identity on the other.” [8] Marc Robinson prefers to look at the American art world in the 1970s as in transition, in flux and unfixed, a decade of indeterminacy, which is a description that this essay may heighten and, hopefully, expand by offering up a possible explanation for that instability (at least for the artists I hone in on). [9] I argue that the lack of fixity stems from, as this brief summary of seventies historiography suggests, a conflict between the solitary and the collective. Therefore, my own research on the decade is caught somewhere in the middle of the academic fray, seeking to spotlight what Will Kaufman claims are the concerns of the decade’s drama with “social exclusion, isolation, and exhaustion,” while denying any notion that isolation as aesthetic counteracts activism and community solidarity. [10] Adrienne Kennedy, Peter Schumann, and Jack Smith are three markedly different artists, and their individual experiences of social isolation cannot be conflated. Whereas Schumann, as I will discuss in detail later on, isolates himself by choice, Kennedy’s (and Smith’s, to a certain extent) isolation begins as the result of exclusion. What I believe these artists have in common (other than being contemporaries) is that the theatre of isolation mirrors the social isolation of the artist, which I will argue further in what follows. All three have received, and continue to receive, no shortage of attention, making them familiar to many readers. This allows me to focus on my point of contact: the theme and aesthetics of isolation within their theatre. I adopt Lee’s approach to how individual artistic works both reflect, and are aesthetically influenced by, the artist’s state of isolation, physical or otherwise, from the social world. In the sense that all three were working in the American Northeast in the 1970s, the scope of this essay is narrow and reveals my own blind spots as a scholar. This essay is not intended to be an encompassing study. It wants conversation: conversation with Lee and other queer theorists and historians, with other artists, and with present and future performance and criticism. I address this essay to future works in particular, in the hopes that the category of theatre of isolation will be a useful tool for the theatre of the present. “I always just could very easily become a character in the movies or in a book.”[11] Adrienne Kennedy seems to stand alone in scholarship. On the surface she may be an odd choice for this essay, given that she appears to be very much a part of the scene in the seventies. She was involved with the playwrights’ coalitions New York Theatre Strategy (NYTS) and the Women’s Theatre Council (WTC) and her plays were performed at major downtown theatre hubs like The Public and La Mama. However, she continues to be treated at least from a historical perspective as constantly new and emerging, or else already dead and being revived, in spite of the actual trajectory of her career as a playwright. Though already the winner of an Obie, in the late 1970s she was, as alluded to by Miller, still a new artist to the likes of Joe Papp, who produced the premiere of A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White in his New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976. Stephen J. Bottoms, on the other hand, chooses to mention only the revivals of her work, which seems to devalue the new plays she wrote in the seventies. In overviews of women playwrights and feminist theatre, such as Brenda Murphy’s essay for The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature , Kennedy is little more than a footnote: her name introduces the “explosion of playwriting in the 1970s that accompanied the second-wave feminist movement,” but none of her plays are mentioned. [12] Then there are the places Kennedy is not named at all: in James Smethurst’s 2005 book on the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, Jack Kerouac’s name pops up five times and Kennedy’s does not appear once. She is rarely counted among members of the BAM, though she was in conversation with the movement’s leading artists. At the same time, her race and gender have contributed to her elision from other histories of New York theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. [13] Kennedy’s resistance to grouping, her lack of “group-ness,” at a time when groups, collectives, and movements appear to be the central critical-historical focus, may in part explain the scholarly tendency to read her plays as self-contained or autobiographical. Kimberly W. Benston, for example, writes that “autobiography . . . is the very signature of Adrienne Kennedy’s impossible though endless quest for a clarifying and stabilizing source.” [14] Kennedy is thus placed in a room of her own, unsurprising for a writer whose introspective style of drama abounds with isolated rooms, frames, and other physical spaces as recurring metaphors. [15] Thus, Kennedy’s particular theatre of isolation is characterized by the isolation chamber of the imagination, i.e. the funnyhouse. Beginning with Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Kennedy devises the “funnyhouse” as a psychological isolation chamber where characters that look and sound very much like their author grappling with the mystery of the self. In Funnyhouse , the self is subsequently broken up into multiple, “ideal selves,” from Patrice Lumumba to Jesus. In her later works, the “funnyhouse” is given different names (the sleep deprivation chamber, for example), yet its structure persists as indicative of the same interior: that of the writer’s mind. Luckily, we have snippets of the writer’s mind for comparison: that is, Kennedy’s prose texts, such as People Who Led to My Plays , which give context to the sense of isolation in plays like Funnyhouse . There is a potential danger, however, in reading Kennedy as self-contained if it means downplaying the influence of outside sources. As suggested by the epigraph to this section, as well as the subject matter of People Who Led to My Plays , the books, movies, and other media Kennedy consumed are inseparable from her imagination and the spaces in her plays. Particularly in her plays from the 1970s, Kennedy is mining the American media, and showing onstage the complex relationship between the media and Black people. An Evening with Dead Essex (1973), for example, was the result of an obsession in the early 1970s with the way news reports depicted Mark Essex, the Black nationalist who killed nine people in two attacks in New Orleans in December 1972 and January 1973. “I feel like Mark Essex,” she told Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck in a 1990 interview, carrying her own “tremendous rage against American society.” On the one hand, as an African American she was forced to be bicultural, to read white culture as fluently as Black, despite being violently written out of that culture. Benston remarks, “Much like her heroines, Kennedy’s work seems driven by a search for an incandescent touchstone of self-reference, some primal image, story, or scene, that would heal the self’s constitution as wound or lack, its entrapment in dramas scripted from elsewhere.” [16] On the other hand, Kennedy says, “I think that as a black person in America, you almost have to force yourself on society.” [17] Kennedy’s books and movies, and even the true story of Essex, are the “dramas scripted from elsewhere,” and Benston interprets them as a trap of false identity. But it is perhaps this sense of falseness, when Kennedy wrestles with it in her plays, which is most illuminating of how the outside world operates against her and other Black people, particularly women. In A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White , the Kennedy funnyhouse transforms into the silver screen of Golden Age Hollywood cinema, more enthralling to Kennedy and exclusive of her conception of self than any other “drama scripted from elsewhere.” In the play’s opening speech the audience is told that Clara plays “a bit role,” standing outside the frame and the action between characters representing cinema stars Marlon Brando, Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Jean Peters, Montgomery Clift, and Shelley Winters. [18] Even when Clara steps into the scene, her “lines” are read by one of these white Hollywood icons and she is separated from both the movie world and her own life as her diary entries, recounting her family’s history and present relationships, are read aloud and subsumed within their reenactment of famous films. The black and white movie scenes are juxtaposed with scenes of Clara’s parents and husband, who “all look like [black and white] photographs” she keeps of them. The play is always attempting to fit these two spaces, the screen and picture frame, together, but regularly fails. For example, the hospital bedroom of Clara’s brother, in which she and her mother discuss her happiness or lack thereof, is at odds with the bedroom in which the characters of Marlon Brando and Jean Peters perform the teach-me-to-read scene from the film Viva Zapata , the one in “constant twilight” while Brando and Peters “star in dazzling wedding night light.” [19] The simultaneity of these contrasting scenes heightens the disconnection between Clara’s life and that of the movies, as well as between mother and daughter in their conversation, as mother insists that her pregnant daughter is unhappy without a settled domestic life while daughter cites her professional successes as a playwright as cause for great happiness. It is significant that when Clara speaks, she is almost always talking about herself as a playwright. This choice leads easily to a feminist interpretation of the play as dramatization of the difficulties of being a woman—read mother and sexual object—and an artist at once. It is twice as difficult for a Black woman, with the models of womanhood forced upon her by white culture. As Deborah R. Geis argues, “Tension between immersion and angry confrontation of the Hollywood world experienced by Clara in this play embodies the ambivalent spectatorial status of the African American woman whose subjectivity risks being undermined by her identification with an exclusionary cultural apparatus.” [20] The struggle for self-definition with these slippery models, which promise “fulfillment and female power” [21] but fail to address its limitations, then becomes a central concern of the play. I’m not entirely convinced, however, that it is Clara who is experiencing the tension Geis describes. As Clara says, her image as spectator comes not from her but from her husband Eddie: “Eddie says . . . that my diaries make me a spectator watching my life like watching a black and white movie.” [22] For Clara, writing is both her dream and her way of understanding her reality. Through writing she copes with family traumas such as her brother’s hospitalization, her parents’ divorce, her own divorce, and a miscarriage, on top of daily experiences of a racist and segregated society. Her life as such does not fit into the movie scenes—she cannot watch herself there. Instead, she must write her life in, and direct the stars from the wings in how to insert the language of her life into their filmography. The cohesion Clara and Winters achieve in the final moments of the play suggests that such a writing is possible to an extent. It is successful, however, only in the sense that each woman’s end is equally evocative of a desperate situation. In these last moments, Clara and Winters speak simultaneously of the possibility of Clara’s brother’s death. Then, when it is revealed that her brother will not die, Clara describes almost falling down the front steps of the hospital, her crying mother in her arms, in a scene of family sorrow-tinged relief (her brother will live but paralyzed and with brain damage). Simultaneously, Winters drowns as at the end of the film A Place in the Sun . Both Clara and Winters, in their separate worlds, are drowning. Clara’s writing and orchestration of the film stars and Kennedy’s writing of Clara are also united, in their exemplification of what Margo Natalie Crawford calls “black public interiority.” Black public interiority, a similar contradiction to my theatre of isolation that Crawford explains, caught the BAM between viewing introversion as elitism and “constantly performing ways in which the personal could be collective and inner mental space could be shared as people deconditioned their minds together.” [23] As a playwright in the 1970s, Kennedy was accused of such elitist introversion and yet her plays so powerfully publicize, in the act of performance, inner mental space. She engaged with the BAM principles and with white culture though neither of them would have her. In both cases she appears superficially as a spectator, as Eddie calls Clara, when in truth she was inside it all, constructing a funnyhouse to contain and showcase the complexities of that insider state. “[Art] needs to be EVERYWHERE because it is the INSIDE of the WORLD.”[24] It is difficult to argue that any period in the history of Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre is asocial in Lee’s sense, a respite from direct engagement, when their reputation is so closely linked to political protest and other forms of activism. The 1970s, however, saw a break in the company and, perhaps, a moment of redefining what it means for the Theatre’s art to be “ inside of the world.” In 1970, Schumann moved from New York City to the small town of Plainfield, Vermont and, as company founder and linchpin, essentially reconstituted Bread and Puppet as a solo project. Schumann had become increasingly critical of the audiences and politics of the city where his company’s homemade bread and giant carnivalesque puppets had commanded street actions of the Resistance Movement of the 1960s. [25] “We the Schumanns,” he wrote at the time, “are ready for a bigger slower style of motion, air breathing and vegetable growing included.” [26] Many of his collaborators, all but two of whom he left behind in New York, perceived the move as “copping out.” In their eyes, Schumann was abandoning the collective spirit that had defined Bread and Puppet since 1961 in order to join the well-to-do intellectuals and resort entrepreneurs migrating to Vermont for a taste of the majority white wilderness. [27] But as an artist Schumann had “outgrown the addressive-moralistic mode” that defined his street theatre of the 1960s. [28] At Cate Farm, the location of the Goddard College artist’s residency Schumann had secured in Vermont, he could develop a new, personal style. The Bread and Puppet Theatre of the Vermont days, as I will argue, exhibits an isolation through disillusionment—the disillusionment Schumann had with the forms of political activism that consumed him in the 1960s. Schumann’s move to rural Vermont would have a profound influence on his work up to the present day. As an out-of-towner and an immigrant to the US, Schumann was unlikely to find communion in Plainfield. The Cate Farm period can be defined by distance from the audience, from coherent narrative and authorial power, and from the crowd . Lee notes that isolation “dynamically affords one the time and space needed to evade forms of sociability that late liberalism and subsequent formations of political resistance demand.” [29] The isolation Schumann experienced afforded him the time and space to reevaluate his performance practices, which in the early Vermont days he tailored to his new circumstances. When there was an audience, it was made up of small-town Vermonters and students, and some of the Goddard performance experiments he conducted with student volunteers had no audience at all. This was a far cry from the socially, racially, and generationally diverse crowds in the streets of New York, an audience who Schumann saw as ideal for political theatre. [30] For the Plainfield audience, Schumann eschewed direct address and adopted the more traditional staging of the elevated proscenium, restoring a physical distance between audience and performance. He no longer saw the need for the conscious, aggressive alienation of the audience that characterized his New York street agitations. He wasn’t making theatre for his audience anymore but for himself and alienation could be achieved simply by embracing the isolated place he already inhabited as an immigrant to rural America. The first of the proscenium performances at Cate Farm were the five Grey Lady Cantatas ( Grey Lady Cantatas II-VI, 1970–1975). In these Cantatas , Schumann had a new preoccupation, which is encapsulated in the image of the Grey Lady puppet crying a crystal tear in Grey Lady Cantata II (1971): an individual—or The Individual—as the central subject in a story of suffering. Grey Lady Cantata II consists of a series of tableaus featuring an increasingly isolated Grey Lady figure, whose life is made barren by the removal of all other people and objects until finally she dies. The Grey Lady, as well as most of the other performers, are large-scale puppets that completely obscure their human puppeteers. The few human performers, in turn, imitate the cold puppets, with grey-painted faces and the stiffness of automatons. The grotesque and opulent style of the puppets, the puppet-like acting style of the humans, and the use of marionette-type mechanization for removing props and changing scenery de-emphasize the presence and power of human authors or performers and prevent the audience from fully identifying with the suffering being. Furthermore, Schumann wrote no dialogue which might have humanized the Grey Lady puppet or provided some authorial insight. “The story is definitely the audiences’ job, not ours,” wrote Schumann: “We have no free delivery of interpretations, librettos, symbols, special philosophies. We have a physical fitness apparatus of colors and other wonders of perception. Audience does the sport, the skis and knapsacks of theatre.” [31] Grey Ladies (the name given to American Red Cross volunteers who provided non-medical care, particularly during World War II) and other references to war might easily be connected with the many works of Schumann’s that were explicitly anti-Vietnam War. However, as Schumann explains, that’s a story for the audience to write. Stefan Brecht, a prolific chronicler of Bread and Puppet’s history, speculates that the obscurity of Grey Lady Cantata II was a device ensuring the “privacy” Schumann had desired when he left New York. [32] Although Schumann’s work had always attempted to preclude audience identification and pacification, the plight of the Grey Lady strikes a more introspective, unprecedented note than other of his works—and seems to reflect the artist’s own state of mind. [33] In the evolution of Schumann’s theatre, Cate Farm was a period of transition between the agitprop street theatre and the contemplative, moralistic tone and style that would distinguish his work from the late 1970s on. After moving again in 1974, this time to Dopp Farm in the even more rural Vermont town of Glover, Schumann would actually return to much of what characterized his earliest works: the movement of parades, marches, and circuses; “gigantic language” and spectacle; and, most importantly, subject matter that responded in the form of direct address to global politics. While at Goddard College, however, Schumann seemed to abandon his social activism for a time in favor of introspection. Schumann’s preference for The Individual as subject connects to what Brecht describes as presentation of a representation, without exhortation, a quiet succession of images without a transparent director’s note. However, Grey Lady Cantata II presents the extreme of individuality as source for great suffering and suggests the individual’s need for the collective. The crowd was still Schumann’s purported enemy and the perceived enemy of all individual thought and artistic freedom, but such a production suggests that he harbored a desire to embrace relation and collectivity if for no other reason than that it was a necessary tool in the fight for the good of society. Schumann was clearly troubled by the tension between denouncing the crowd and identifying individuality as sickening and deadly. He hungered for some other way, some middle ground. When he moved to Glover, he disbanded the Vermont Bread and Puppet that had formed around him in Plainfield and also turned away from the obscuring style of the Grey Lady Cantatas. It seems that what Schumann took away from his early years in Vermont and the intense isolation in the work of that period was the energy to reenter the fight for good in earnest. The early Dopp Farm period began with a series of morality plays, but shortly thereafter the enormous Domestic Resurrection Circuses—arguably the most iconic performances in the company’s history—blossomed. The influence of Scott Nearing, the philosopher of capitalist secessionism and “living the good life” who inspired the American back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s (and who happened to be Schumann’s relative by marriage), in the Circuses and other post- Grey Lady works is evident. Schumann’s work in the late 1970s cried out for the “decent life” to abide by what he understood as the values of good and addressed a “universal” neighborhood as audience-recipients. The fact that Schumann’s morally didactic theatre emerges after the reserved Grey Lady Cantatas recalls Lee’s definition of asociality as a means of taking stock of political projects and perhaps altering one’s plan of engagement. In a 1994 interview with John Bell for Theater magazine, Schumann acknowledged the dangers of the ecological romanticism that attracts many people to isolated green places like his farm in Vermont: the evils of capitalism had to take thematic precedence, he said, though he lamented that this world is not a place in which his work could be focused on the idyllic setting. [34] At the time of the interview it had been almost twenty five years since Schumann moved to Vermont, and in the intervening decades, he had eschewed the aesthetics of solitude and suffering in productions like Grey Lady Cantata II for community-oriented spectacles imbued with his utopian ideals. There is irony in fighting mass systems of oppression from such a place of solitude atop a misty green mountain, but from Schumann’s perspective, he was back in the mud. “I want to be uncommercial film personified.”[35] Wading through secondary source material on Smith, I feel acutely the struggle to understand the introverted Jack Smith and to interpret his enigmatic theatre. With little surviving film documentation of Smith’s performances to go on, the archive of Smith’s theatre feels like a load of conflicting gossip and indecisive speculation. John Matturri and Rachel Joseph both describe the material elements of Smith’s performances—the “homeless objects” or “glittering junk”—as emblematic of the inherent impossibility of fixity. Smith’s orientalist aesthetic (“Egyptiana”), remarked on by Michael Moon, Marc Siegal, and Juan Suárez and compared by Dominic Johnson with Sun Ra’s “intergalactic esoterica,” is either camp or an authentic belief based in Maria Montez monotheism. [36] Matturri recalls Smith’s “generous acceptance . . . of collaborative input” and the audience’s “relaxed receptive attention” at performances in spite of their length, frequent interruptions, and arbitrary conclusion, which are at odds with the stories (which I will discuss further on) about Smith’s verbal abuse of spectators. [37] These and other writings on Smith seem to depict a different version of the artist. However, it is José Esteban Muñoz’s formulation of the artist as “the exemplary figure of the queer utopian artist and thinker who seeks solitariness yet calls for a queer collectivity” that seems the truest, and his conception of Smith’s theatre as utopian stands as a direct challenge to the inclusion of Smith in an anti-relationist archive of gay male artists. [38] Muñoz acknowledges two sides of Smith, the solitary and the collective, that are so often kept apart, yet are very clearly both present in his oeuvre. Smith’s infamous filmography of the 1960s captures the crazed, queer collective and Susan Sontag called Flaming Creatures “a lovely specimen of . . . ‘pop art,’” lumping Smith in with a whole art movement addressing the American culture of the day. [39] The theatrical performances he began in the 1970s, many of which were one man shows, represent the other, solitary side of Smith. These intensely lonely performances of the 1970s are Smith’s theatre of isolation, but even as they capture Smith’s increasing personal and creative isolation, at their heart is the anti-capitalist utopia Smith dreamed of for all people like him. [40] Smith spoke distastefully and fearfully in interviews of the archive (specifically, the Anthology Film Archives) as the “vault.” The vault was unyielding, petrifying, and antithetical to Smith’s preferred venue in the 1970s: his own apartment. In 1970, Smith announced that he would open his living space in downtown Manhattan to audiences for free shows. J. Hoberman described the “Plaster Foundation” (as Smith’s home performance venue was called) as squalid, with a gaping hole in its ceiling and an accumulation of junk and debris on the floor, to which Smith lovingly tended in the performance series “Plaster Foundation of Atlantis.” Over the rubble Smith hung fairy lights, placed cardboard palm trees, and constructed an artificial lagoon complete with a waterfall. In other words, he built Atlantis, which mythic paradise featured prominently in his imaginative writings and performances, out of a dilapidated East Village apartment. The Plaster Foundation was both the precursor to and the absolute antithesis of Andy Warhol’s Factory, which promised consumerist glamor where the Foundation spat on it. Warhol may have been an “insider” in the eyes of the broader public, but Smith was tuned in to the ugly truths of the system that produced it and he dug into them on his stage. Smith’s style of performance crumbles like the ceiling of his apartment and is as inhospitable to the audience as a junkyard. Performances were held late at night and often began hours after their expected start time. Much of what audiences watched, which may or may not have been part of the intended performance, was the arrangement of the set and other anti-theatrical antics such as Smith pretending to vacuum up the mountains of cement and plaster for hours on end. The action was frequently interrupted by further fussing with sets and costumes and the script was liable to be spontaneously rewritten by Smith mid-speech. Some Plaster Foundation visitors like Richard Foreman read this as evidence that Smith’s imagination and editorial eye were always one step ahead of the audience. The fussing and adjusting was performance, striving for and failing at perfection in front of the audience. In such performances as The Secret of Rented Island (1976) (of which only a slideshow and audio recording remains), an adaptation/queering of Ibsen’s Ghosts , Smith carries the script in his hand as he interacts with a supporting cast of costume pieces and stuffed animals each representing an alternating set of characters. Script and inanimate actors, which “moved in and out of and were often simultaneously both within and outside of various roles,” [41] disrupt the interchange of character and performance, thereby exposing Smith as himself, alone and potentially vulnerable. The irony of Smith inviting audiences into his home was that he seemed to want nothing more than to be left alone. If no one showed up to his place for a performance, those who knew him have said Smith would go on without an audience. These may have been the greatest performances he ever gave, as he was purportedly paranoid and plagued by anxiety in the presence of others—and by their mere existence in his psychic universe. He was known to abuse audiences, calling them “sofa-roosting cabbages,” and sometimes he failed to show up for a performance in the hopes that the audience would leave him alone. [42] He was both pathologically afraid of others’ criticism and persecution and assured of their duplicity: his living space featured a “hate wall,” upon which he “scrawled animosities towards friends and supporters.” Performances like What’s Underground About Marshmallows? featured nefarious figures inspired by Smith’s personal enemies, such as film critic Jonas Mekas. Smith viewed Mekas, among others, as a capitalist vampire whose motivations were antithetical to Smith’s own mission to construct an uncommercial utopia, and he believed that it was because of his foes that he was forced to “live in squalor all day long, playing hide-and-seek with others.” [43] Dominic Johnson sees in the first-hand accounts of Smith’s performance space echoes of Anthony Vidler’s critical writings on the “architectural uncanny” that “conspicuously renders architectures to be no longer homely.” Furthermore, “in Smith’s domestic performances . . . the nostalgic associations that lived spaces may garner are pitted against the threatening or subversive oppositional structures that often encroach upon them. The set of processes by which architectures become strange are deployed as a neat proxy . . . for the ways in which they approximate other social and cultural tendencies towards estrangement.” [44] Johnson identifies sexual difference as one of these so-called “social and cultural tendencies towards estrangement,” thereby comparing Smith’s space to the estrangement he experienced as a queer person in a heteronormative society. I agree with Johnson’s comparison and see the uncanny space also as definitive for Smith’s particular theatre of isolation. In contrast to the worlds in his films, which were built by way of the accumulation of writhing bodies, the transition to these home performances in the 1970s shifts settings to a one-man island. Even surrounded by audience members, it is difficult to imagine how anyone else could have authentically reached Smith’s Atlantis. The only extant and complete reconstruction of a Smith performance that I know of is a recording of Ron Vawter’s ROY COHN/JACK SMITH , as performed at The Kitchen in New York in 1993. In the production, Vawter parrots the voice of the real Jack Smith, coming through a neon yellow earbud connecting tape-deck to Vawter’s ear, as he recites the lines from Marshmallows, which premiered in the last year of the queer 1970s: 1981, the year the first positive cases of AIDS were reported in the US. Smith ominously foreshadowed the next decade of queer history and both his and Vawter’s deaths due to complications of AIDS, with the line “they love dead queers here.” [45] Wearing him in performance like an ill-fitting shirt, Vawter pulls Smith out of the closet and refashions him as a tragic hero of the queer underground. In fact, Vawter described his portrayal of Smith as “homosexual ‘closet’-performance,” and when one considers Smith’s relationship in regard to performance space, the invocation of the closet seems apt. [46] In a sense, Smith’s theatrical performances of the 1970s were staged within his own personal closet-space, but rather than being a hiding place, it becomes legible to other queer people like Vawter. In Marshmallows , Smith says the “worst of all” is that nobody thinks he is acting. The solution is to “go back into the vault.” [47] However, Smith could not hide from Vawter and his reading of Marshmallows as an overtly political, liberatory performance. Smith’s films were far more successful, at least in terms of making him a known entity, than his solo theatrical performances. His move to a more solitary artistic medium and to the role of “lone lunatic” is perhaps what led to Smith’s failure in the society of the straight and normal . The theatrical performances are, in my opinion, his most radical attempts at what Muñoz identifies as escape through “refusal of a dominant order and its systematic violence,” precisely because they were so much a product of Smith’s personal cosmology. [48] Not only did he play himself, but he enacted his personal brand of queer utopia. His performance of self was so convincing to him that living in the real world became untenable. The failure to transform the real world into one’s fantasy, argues Muñoz, is the typical plight of the queer utopian. However, something of that desire lives on in Vawter’s performance and casts Smith as an icon of collective queer world-makers. Conclusion Jack Smith, the anxiety-riddled queer filmmaker-turned-performer, tried to build utopia in the trash heap of capitalist society. Peter Schumann, an immigrant who got his start in agitprop avant-garde performance, took his puppets out into rural America when the social and political pressures of the New York art scene became too great. Adrienne Kennedy, a Black woman playwright in the overwhelmingly white commercial theatre, gave audiences rare glimpses into a fractured mind simultaneously inside and excluded from society. I have described the theatre of these three artists, in terms of its aesthetic as well as the process of its creation, as a product and a reflection of social isolation of the mind and/or body—and particularly the mind and/or body of the artist. I have tried to demonstrate, however, by tracing the trajectory of each theatre maker beyond their theatre of the 1970s, that this isolation was not an escape route but a troubled state of being at the heart of the social and political issues of the decade and a means of reinscribing one’s relationship to the collective. The plays and performances that I have examined operate on the artistic insights of the individuated while speaking to the issues of the collective. Theatre of isolation is not theatre that speaks only to itself. Categorizing such diverse works as A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White , Grey Lady Cantata II , or What’s Underground About Marshmallows? as theatre of isolation allows scholars to question how these works go beyond isolation and how they might draw individuals together and, as Lee says, “alter the horizon of what constitutes the social.” [49] For the theatre of Kennedy, Schumann, and Smith, the 1970s was an era of isolation, but what happens at the end of, or after, an era? One could turn to these three artists again, and examine Kennedy’s Sleep Deprivation Chamber , Schumann’s Domestic Resurrection Circuses, or Smith’s tragic death and status as queer icon for a few examples of going out, again. “After” is the topic for a different essay and for another time. [50] However, thinking about theatre of isolation in the past is unavoidably connected to thinking about isolation in the present. When theatre artists who have been working in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic no longer need to do so, how we will think about what has been created during this time and how “after” art will be changed by it are questions that are sure to consume the historian. Beyond theorizing the screen or Zoom as a medium—or perhaps as a way to fold those elements in with other considerations—we might look at today’s theatre of isolation as not merely constitutive of social distance. How have perspectives on society and community been changed? By making aesthetic connections to antecedents like Kennedy, Schumann, and Smith, we might find examples of where theatre might go from here. References [1] I’m thinking especially of Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Robert L. Caserio, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean, all of whom participated in a panel on the “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” at the 2005 MLA Annual Convention, as well as scholars, like Tavia Nyong’o, who have written about punk aesthetics through the lens of queer studies. [2] Summer Kim Lee. “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality,” Social Text 37, no. 1 (1 March 2019): 27. [3] Ibid., 31. [4] Ibid., 28. [5] Ibid., 31-32. [6] Ibid., 30. [7] Ibid., 33. [8] Hillary Miller, Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 15. [9] From a lecture in Robinson’s course “American Performance in the 1970s,” at Yale University. [10] Will Kaufman, American Culture in the 1970s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 72. [11] Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, “Adrienne Kennedy: An Interview.” Edited by the authors in Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9. [12] Brenda Murphy, “American Women Playwrights.” In Dale M. Bauer, ed., The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 2012). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Barbara Ann Teer and the other “warrior mothers” of the Black Arts Movement are not even named, though their work has been reclaimed in other recent scholarship. See La Donna L. Forsgren, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press: 2018). [13] I have not been able to track down concrete sources, but Kennedy’s exclusion from BAM scholarship could be connected to her lack of interest in the movement’s organizing structures, or to her work not being considered (by BAM members) to reflect the movement’s values. In the Forward to The Alexander Plays , Alisa Solomon writes, “During the 1960s and 1970s, many within the activist African American community insisted that [didactic, militant plays about race were] what their playwrights should have been writing. In those years Kennedy was criticized by activists for not working hard enough in the movement. . . . They objected to her characters, who were confused about their identity and place in the world, and who did not proclaim an uncomplicated pride in being black” (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, xii). Claudia Barnett cites Solomon, as well as scholars who argue against the use of a feminist label for Kennedy’s works, in support of her argument that Kennedy defies expectations and stereotypes connected to Blackness and/or womanhood. See Claudia Barnett, “‘This Fundamental Challenge to Identity’: Reproduction and Representation in the Drama of Adrienne Kennedy” Theatre Journal 48, no.2 (1996): 141–155. [14] Kimberly W. Benston, “Locating Adrienne Kennedy Prefacing the Subject.” In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 115. [15] bell hooks makes an explicit connection between Kennedy and Virginia Woolf, reading Kennedy’s prose as a celebration of women’s confessional writing akin to A Room of One’s Own . See bell hooks, “Critical Reflections: Adrienne Kennedy, the Writer, the Work.” In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 180. [16] Benston, “Locating Adrienne Kennedy,” 115. [17] Bryant-Jackson and Overbeck, “Adrienne Kennedy: An Interview,” 7. [18] Quotations from A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White come from: Adrienne Kennedy, Adrienne Kennedy in One Act (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 81. [19] Ibid., 92. [20] Deborah R. Geis, “‘A Spectator Watching My Life’: Adrienne Kennedy’s A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White .” In In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 171. [21] Ibid., 173. [22] Kennedy, Adrienne Kennedy in One Act , 99. [23] Margo Natalie Crawford, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First Century Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 169. [24] From “The WHY CHEAP ART? Manifesto,” Bread & Puppet, Glover, VT, 1984. [25] Silvia D. Spitta,“Revisiting the Sixties and Refusing Trash: Preamble to and Interview with Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet Theater,” boundary 2 36, no. 1 (1 February 2009): 110. [26] Here, Schumann presumably uses the royal first-person plural, as he did not initially relocate his family. But the plural “Schumanns” could also be read as his referring to his whole “company” with his own name. Quote from Bread and Rosebuds by Peter Schumann, 25 April 1970. In Stefan Brecht, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre, vol. 2 (London: Methuen, 1988), 18. [27] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 12. As of 2020, Vermont is 94.3% white—one of the top three whitest states in the country. [28] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 15. [29] Lee, “Staying In,” 33. [30] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 48. [31] Schumann quotes from an unpublished mss., “possibly an intra-company summation, dated Cate Farm, March 9, ’72.” In Brecht, 175. [32] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 180. [33] Spitta, “Revisiting the Sixties,” 116. [34] John Bell, “Uprising of the Beast: An Interview with Peter Schumann,” Theater 25, no. 1 (1 February 1994): 42. [35] From dialogue of Jack Smith’s performance What’s Underground about Marshmallows? . Quotes taken from performance recreation by Ron Vawter, as part of his piece ROY COHN/JACK SMITH, as recorded in: Jill Godmilow, dir., Ron Vawter Performs Jack Smith: What’s Underground About Marshmallows? (1993). [36] Dominic Johnson, “Jack Smith’s Rehearsals for the Destruction of Atlantis: ‘Exotic’ Ritual and Apocalyptic Tone.” Contemporary Theatre Review 19, no. 2 (1 May 2009): 177. [37] John Matturri, “Jack Smith: Notes on Homeless Objects,” Criticism 56, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 281. [38] Judith Halberstam identifies this archive, in her short forum response “The Politics of Negativity in Recent Queer Theory” as including the likes of, “in no particular order, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Bette Midler, Andy Warhol, Henry James, Jean Genet, Broadway musicals, Marcel Proust, Alfred Hitchcock, Oscar Wilde, Jack Smith, Judy Garland, and Kiki and Herb.” In PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 2006): 823–4. [39] Quotes from Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation pulled from: Douglas Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 132. [40] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009) , 170. [41] Matturri, “Jack Smith,” 284 [42] From the documentary Jack Smith and The Destruction of Atlantis (2006), directed by Mary Jordan. [43] Godmilow, Ron Vawter Performs , 1993. [44] Johnson, “Jack Smith’s Rehearsals,” 169. [45] Here, I suggest the “queer seventies,” in the U.S., as beginning in 1969, with the Stonewall Riots in New York’s Greenwich Village, and the ending with the first reports of AIDS cases in 1981. [46] Godmilow, Ron Vawter Performs , 1993. [47] Ibid., 1993. [48] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia , 172. [49] Lee, “Staying In,” 31. [50] In addition to Lee’s discussion of what happens “after,” Joshua Chambers-Letson’s recent book After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York University Press, 2018) is dedicated to the question this essay does not answer. Footnotes About The Author(s) Madeline Pages is a dramaturg and MFA Candidate at the former the Yale School of Drama. She is currently partnering with the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) to conduct research and performance experiments around the history of astronomy, astrophysics, and human space travel. She is also collaborating on a new opera I AM ALAN TURING , composed by Matthew Suttor and inspired by the life and writings of mathematician Alan Turing. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. 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.

Samuel Shanks Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 2 Visit Journal Homepage Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Samuel Shanks By Published on April 23, 2015 Download Article as PDF William Dunlap’s final play, A Trip to Niagara (1828), might be the most misunderstood play in the history of the American stage. Despite being an unqualified success with its cosmopolitan New York audiences in 1828-9, it has been regularly, and almost always inaccurately, maligned by twentieth and twenty-first century historians who have described the play as a “well-done hackwork;” full of “puerile scenes and irrelevant characters;” and valuable only for the “certain amount of low comedy” that “could be extracted from it.” [1] At best Dunlap’s play has been described as “a workmanlike job;” at worst, “one of his poorest” efforts, a play that “could hardly be said to have challenged the preeminence of contemporary British playwrights, let alone Shakespeare.” [2] As I will argue in this essay, the glaring disconnect between the play’s warm public reception and its subsequent criticism by historians often appears to be rooted in a kind of historical mythology that haunts the field of theatre history. Unperceived biases and assumptions often color interpretations of historical evidence, and these flawed perceptions are frequently transmitted from one generation of historians to the next, forming a kind of mythology around a subject that has the power to color future interpretations of new evidence. Just such a historical mythology appears to be at the heart of most criticisms of A Trip to Niagara. The core of this myth concerns the assumption that the early American theatre and its audiences were sadly primitive, and too many histories of the American stage have followed some variation of the progress-narrative that begins with this notion of primitivism and then moves toward, and ultimately culminates in, the organic emergence of a proud national theatre in the early Twentieth Century. But a careful examination of Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its original reception reveals that this image is at best incomplete; indeed, if one assumes that A Trip to Niagara was not a complete anomaly, then the notion of the primitivism of the early American stage might turn out to be fatally flawed. This overarching myth of primitivism is rooted in a series of more specific assumptions that one might think of as “sub-myths.” It is these more specifically-focused minor myths that can be heard resonating in the criticisms of Dunlap’s play. The assumptions that 1) character development did not reach beyond the presentation of simple stage-types; that 2) American theatres were polluted by pervasive and unreflective racism; that 3) spectacle-driven performances were inferior, simplistic entertainments for simple-minded spectators; and that 4) American audiences were generally unsophisticated and easily sated by inferior fare, combine to lend the impression that the early American theatre had a great deal of growing up to do. The bulk of this essay will focus on the specific problems with each of these sub-myths in turn, but for the sake of those who are not familiar with Dunlap’s final play, a brief overview of its plot will prove useful. A Quietly Complicated Play As the title indicates, A Trip to Niagara is a journey play that follows a group of European tourists, mostly English, on a trip from New York City, up the Hudson River to Albany, across the newly-opened Erie Canal to the shores of Lake Erie, and then finally the great waterfall at Niagara. The most spectacularly realized portion of the journey came in the form of production’s much-hyped ‘Eidophusikon,’ a moving diorama that shifted an enormous painted canvas across the stage between two large scrolls, which depicted the steamship voyage from New York harbor, up the Hudson River, as far as Catskill Landing. [3] The play’s satire-driven conflict arises from the divergent opinions held by the stodgy, upper-class English character Wentworth and his more open-minded sister Amelia regarding the virtues of the nation through which they travel. Wentworth is portrayed as a narrow-minded fool, and early in the play Amelia encourages her suitor, John Bull, to try to “cure” her brother of his “obstinate determination to see nothing but through the coloured glasses of the book-makers.” [4] The tourists’ journey to Niagara Falls is thereafter punctuated by John Bull’s numerous comic attempts to cure Mr. Wentworth’s “social disorder.” Along the way, the ‘travellers’ encounter a broad array of people and places, which together serve as a kind of cultural panorama to compliment the moving diorama in Act II. A Trip to Niagara is interesting in that the unspoken content of the play is, in many ways, more important than its spoken dialog. Dunlap’s nuanced celebration of American achievements in politics, engineering, and the arts serves as a quiet refutation of the works of the numerous critical “book-makers” such as Francis Trollope and the actor Charles Matthews. This unspoken content comes primarily in the form of allusions to cultural materials from the period, most of which lies outside the normal purview of many of the historians who have written about the play, and many of the clearest historiographical errors have popped up in works with a non-theatrical focus. Oral Sumner Coad and Robert Canary, Dunlap’s major biographers, both fail to notice many of the cultural references that Dunlap layered into the play’s characters. Coad describes them erroneously as a series of “dialect characters,” while Canary similarly sees them as “gallery of stage types”; both authors make a point of listing the types (Negro, Frenchman, Yankee, Irishman, etc.) as if their label fully articulated their purpose in the play. [5] Given the largely non-theatrical focus of these biographies, these misinterpretations are understandable; nonetheless, it is worth noting that both Coad and Canary, writing more than fifty years apart, each fall back on the historical myth that stock characters, and little else, were to be expected in plays from this era. It does not help that in the preface to the play, Dunlap downplays his script as a “farce” intended as “a kind of running accompaniment to the more important product of the Scene-painter.” [6] Nearly everyone who has written about this play has mistakenly taken the often self-deprecating Dunlap at his word, and has assumed that what followed would be as unimportant and simplistic as Dunlap claims. But the classification of this play as a farce is a problematic one. A Trip to Niagara really is not a farce. It is, in fact, much closer to the sort of satirical social comedies exemplified by Royal Tyler’s The Contrast , or Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion . But even this designation fails to capture the major elements of cultural panorama that are central to the play. These elements place A Trip to Niagara more in line with Dunlap’s other patriotic works such as Andre and The Glory of Columbia . [7] The fact that Dunlap downplays the significance of his own script should not surprise anyone who is familiar with this figure. In his monumental histories of both the American theatre and American painting, Dunlap continuously championed the work of his compatriots while largely downplaying the significance of his own contributions. [8] “A Gallery of Stage Types . . .” I will begin my analysis of the historical mythologies that supported the erroneous criticisms of this play by confronting the assumption that stock-characterization was the rule of the day. To be sure, the use of stock-characters was a prominent force during this period, particularly in the melodramas that were beginning to dominate the playwriting scene in the early Nineteenth Century. But exceptions to this trend were not uncommon; Shakespeare was still the most produced playwright on American stages, and there were a number of American playwrights such as John A. Stone who worked in a consciously Shakespearean vein. In short, the idea that the American theatre landscape was littered with nothing but stock-characters – a criticism which generally carried a derogative connotation within the progress narrative in which American playwrights “developed” toward the more noble goal of creating “well-rounded,” psychologically-complex characters – is simply an example of over-simplification, and that myth has guided more than one historian down the path of simplistic analysis. A careful examination reveals that A Trip to Niagara was populated by characters that were neither “stock” nor “rounded;” to evaluate the play according to this either/or standard is to misunderstand the way that the characters function in this play. Dunlap’s characters would be better described as what I term “referential” characters, which Dunlap used as a highly efficient way to invoke material from the complex cultural universe which he and his audience inhabited. The English actor Charles Matthews, the American theatre manager William Alexander Brown, and the character Leatherstocking from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers , each appear as characters in A Trip to Niagara , though they are not always acknowledged directly as such in the dialog. Dunlap’s characters have been consistently misidentified as “stock” because the historians writing about the play frequently clearly missed the embedded cultural referents that they were meant to invoke. [9] In the absence of specific evidence to the contrary, the more generalized myth of the use of stock-characters gets invoked to explain the lack of “roundness” exhibited by these characters. The tendency to jump to this conclusion is so great that several historians have overlooked the fact that the “Yankee” the “Frenchman” and “John Bull” in this play are all, in fact, the same character operating in different disguises. [10] The clearest example of Dunlap’s referential technique is his use of “Leatherstocking” from The Pioneers (1823), written by Cooper, a friend of Dunlap’s. [11] In A Trip to Niagara, Dunlap places Leatherstocking on the precise spot atop the eastern escarpment of the Catskills that Cooper describes so memorably in The Pioneers. The clarity of this quotation is unambiguous; this is no “stock” frontiersman, but an homage to a central character from two novels that were the literary toast of New York at the time that A Trip to Niagara opened at the Bowery. [12] Dunlap even has Leatherstocking speak primarily in quotes lifted directly from Cooper’s novel. Given the overwhelming popularity of both The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans, it seems reasonable to assume that a fair portion of the audience would have quickly grasped and appreciated what Dunlap was trying to achieve with this appropriation. Proof of this appreciation is evident in a comment made by the critic for the New York Dramatic Mirror : “We should very much like to know… why the character of Leatherstocking has been withdrawn? The first scene might have been curtailed to advantage, and this interesting part, nevertheless retained . ” [13] Based on this comment, it would seem that the reviewer was seeing the production for a second time, that Leatherstocking had been pulled from the production, and that the reviewer found this choice distressing. That historians have misidentified some of the other characters in A Trip to Niagara is much more understandable, as their cultural references were often subtle, complexly-layered, and based upon cultural material that might not be generally known to many historians. Yet the very lightness of Dunlap’s hand is a significant part of the play’s charm, and the play’s success points to the presence of an audience that was sophisticated enough to successfully decode and appreciate Dunlap’s subtle references. The most consistently misinterpreted character is the one who appears variously as John Bull, Monsieur Tonson, and Jonathan. The fact that “John Bull” appears in several scenes disguised as “Jonathan” has proven to be a stumbling block for many historians as both John Bull and Jonathan were popular stock-characters from the period. [14] But in A Trip to Niagara, these characters appear as references to both their exterior life as stock-characters and to performances of those characters by Charles Matthews, an English actor whose bastardization of the Yankee character Johnathan in his performances was particularly irksome to many American spectators. Dunlap relied heavily upon his audience’s knowledge of the transatlantic Anglo-American theatre to unpack the multi-faceted satire that he embedded in this character. From his first moment onstage, John Bull’s metatheatrical aura is immediately established when Amelia declares, “Mr. Bull! You in America?” Bull replies, “Yes, Amelia, John Bull in America.” [15] Theatrically-savvy spectators would have immediately appreciated this unambiguous reference to James Kirke Paulding’s 1825 play John Bull in America, or the New Munchausen . Dunlap solidly establishes the link between John Bull and Charles Matthews by having John Bull appear in disguise first as ‘Monsieur Tonson,’ one of Matthew’s more famous roles. In this scene, John Bull is not initially recognized by Amelia. When Bull-as-Tonson inquires, “Mam’selle Wentawort, you no know a me… Not know Monsieur Tonson,” Amelia immediately responds, “Only on the stage.” [16] Again, this metatheatrical reference doubtlessly amused those Bowery spectators who were familiar with the performances from Matthews’s American tour a few years earlier. Later, when John Bull appears in his ‘Jonathan’ disguise, the Bowery spectators would have enjoyed unpacking multiple layers of metatheatrical references: standing before them was William Chapman, an American actor, [17] who was satirically referencing the English comedian Charles Mathews by playing an archetypically defined Englishman (John Bull) who was pretending to be the archetypically defined Yankee Jonathan, a character with its own significant theatrical resonances. [18] As with many of Shakespeare’s ‘breeches’ roles, the perceptual slipperiness between these elements would have served as a primary source of theatrical pleasure in these scenes. This would be a fine example of a character that was metatheatrically-complex rather than psychologically-complex, and thus clearly at odds with the myth of the pervasive use of simplistic stock-characters. Yankee characters were popular with both American and English audiences, but for very different reasons. For urban American theatre-goers, Jonathan served as a kind of cultural intermediary, allowing urbanized spectators to commune, at a comfortable distance , with the virtues of a hard life of manual labor lived close to the American soil, while still highlighting how far they had come in their quest for modern, moral refinement. For the English, Jonathan’s tendency toward crude violence and moral outrage was more straightforwardly comic. As Maura Jortner discusses in Playing ‘America’ on Nineteenth-Century Stages, the English comedian Charles Matthews was particularly successful in his outrageous portrayals of Yankee characters. As performed by Matthews, Jonathan became merely cheap, conniving, and violent; willing to cheat others out of any good or service that they could. Many American spectators, witnessing these performances in England, were not amused. [19] Dunlap used his multivalent incarnation of Jonathan as a way to push back against Matthews and his English audiences. A Trip to Niagara’s original audiences would have noticed and enjoyed the subtle ways in which William Chapman as John Bull was overplaying his Jonathan disguise for the too-gullible Englishman Wentworth. Once the spectators identified the allusion to Matthews, even the play’s title, A Trip to Niagara, would also have acquired an additional resonance as a subtle reference to Matthew’s play A Trip to America, the play in which one of the more notorious corruptions of Jonathan appears. It is worth noting that two of the histories that discuss A Trip to Niagara most favorably, Francis Hodge’s Yankee Theatre and Jortner’s Playing ‘America’ on Nineteenth-Century Stages, are each direct studies of the Yankee character in the American Theatre. Dorothy Richardson’s Moving Diorama in Play focuses entirely on this play. Each of these three historians use their detailed knowledge of the production’s original context to decode Dunlap’s references and to then push back against the tide of unwarranted criticism against this play, particularly as it applied to the presentation of the John Bull/Jonathan character. [20] Dunlap’s depiction of the free black Job Jerryson has also been frequently misunderstood, often cast off as simply another “wooly-headed” stage-negro. In this instance another historical myth — that the American stage was universally racist in its depictions of African Americans — has frequently been compounded with the myth of the pervasive use of stock-characterization. Yet when considered in the context of Dunlap’s celebratory cultural-diorama, it seems unlikely that this would have been the case. An analysis of Job’s role within the production, along with an awareness of Dunlap’s abolitionist leanings, makes it very difficult to see this character as yet another in a long line of thoughtlessly buffoonish stock portrayals of African Americans. [21] Job plays an important role in the comic scenes in which he appears, but dramaturgically he is positioned as a straight-man against which the non-American characters Nancy and Dennis Dougherty serve as the comics. The comedy in these scenes arises from the ways in which the foreign characters fail to understand Job’s specific Americanisms; yet it is the foreigners, and not Job, who serve as the butts of the joke. On the contrary, Dunlap’s depiction of this free black should instead be seen as a prime example of the abolitionist sentiment in the early American theatre. Dunlap’s use of name “Job” is an important allusion that sets a clearly reverential tone for this character, yet surprisingly no historian ever discusses it. The biblical tale of a prosperous man who has his wealth and family torn away from him, who then is forced to endure massive physical torture, and who in the end is liberated from his strife and rewarded for his faith and perseverance, has obvious resonances with the story of slavery in America. William Dunlap was an ardent abolitionist: he freed his family’s slaves immediately following his father’s death, he was active in the Manumission Society, and he also served as a trustee of the Free School for African Children. [22] New York’s final eradication of slavery in 1827 would have been a cause of celebration for Dunlap, and his dignified depiction of the Job would seem to be a clear celebration of this event. Dunlap uses Job as the mouthpiece for the independent democratic spirit within this play. Job and Leatherstocking are the only American characters who are given a substantive amount of dialog, and it is Job who espouses the basic tenant of American liberty when he states, “Master! – I have no master. Master indeed… I am my own master.” [23] It seems unlikely, given Dunlap’s abolitionist position, and given the celebratory tone of the play, that Dunlap would have intended these lines to be parodic. Although the word ‘deference’ never appears in the play, it is clear that much of Wentworth’s discontent with the Americans stems from the deference that he expects from them, but fails to receive. The expurgation of deference as a bedrock element of interpersonal behavior in American society was one of the most radical outcomes of the American Revolution, one which set America apart from the rest of the English-speaking world. [24] Dunlap positions Job proudly as his on-stage voice for this liberated perspective. In doing so, he was not alone in choosing to dignify African American characters; he was, after all, part of a large and growing abolitionist movement. The lack of deference that Job displays openly in A Trip to Niagara is echoed by the black house-servant Mistress Remarkable in The Pioneers. Mistress Remarkable similarly refuses to demonstrate deference to the young lady Elizabeth declaring, “I will call her Betsy as much as I please; it’s a free country, and no one can stop me… I will talk just as I please.” [25] As was A Trip to Niagara, Cooper’s novel was warmly embraced by New Yorkers in the 1820’s, many of whom would have openly celebrated the tone of Mistress Remarkable’s declaration, just as they would have celebrated Job’s sense of self-possession. Abstractions aside, Job Jerryson also serves as Dunlap’s on-stage homage to William Alexander Brown, a free Black who managed a pleasure garden and multiple theatres in New York in the 1820’s. [26] Given the allusion to Brown, that fact that Job dresses and acts as a “Black Dandy” may have served, not as an opportunity for ridicule as some have asserted, but simply as an accurate reflection of the dress and manners of the kind of gentleman in question. Dunlap’s biographer Robert Canary is one of the few to argue that the depiction of Job is in fact a dignified, rather than a parodic one stating, “He may be the first picture on the American stage of a realistic, well-educated, free Negro.” [27] Because of the long shadow of blackface minstrelsy in the American theatre, it is very tempting to simply pigeon-hole this Black-dandy as a proto-Zip-Coon. But to do so is to allow the myth of the pervasive racism of the early-American stage to obscure the clear cultural references at work. Free blacks frequently adopted the dress and manners of upper-class Euro-Americans, promenading up and down Broadway with a boldness that was a subject of vibrant debate among cultural critics at the time. However, as Marvin McAllister has powerfully argued, these public demonstrations by free Blacks of their mastery of European social conventions should be seen as significant acts of personal liberation. Far from endorsing white superiority or exhibiting false consciousness, their whiteface acts rejected the negative connotations associated with blackness and advocated an alternative, more self-possessed African-American identity. [28] It seems likely that Job was intended as the embodiment of precisely the sort of self-possession that McAllister describes. [29] Almost nothing is known about how the character Job was performed at the time or how audiences perceived Dunlap’s use of this free Black. But the New York Dramatic Mirror’s review of the production proclaimed nothing but accolades for “Mr. Reed’s black dandy.” [30] It seems reasonable to assume that there would have been were various, competing factions within the Bowery audience who might have held differing views about Dunlap’s sympathetic portrayal of a free Black in this play. However, the final abolition of slavery in New York in 1827 would surely have emboldened the abolitionists like Dunlap within the Bowery audience. Fueling the tendency to view A Trip to Niagara as “a gallery of stage types,” is the fact that there does appear to be a single instance in which Dunlap uses a stock-character in the conventional manner. The Irishman Dennis Dougherty’s comic appeal resides solely in the absurd constancy with which he vacillates between fear and gullibility. Dramaturgically, Dunlap sets up Dougherty as the extreme version of the upper-class Englishman Wentworth. Dougherty possesses none of Wentworth’s social graces, and thus the more extreme Wentworth’s opinions of America become, the more he begins to align himself with the absurdity of Dougherty’s views, and the more ridiculous Wentworth appears to the audience. The less-than-flattering portrayal of the Irishman Dougherty was not lost upon at least one member of the play’s original audience. The production’s only truly negative review was published in The Irish Shield , which bemoaned the depiction of Dougherty stating, “We are sure no Irishman ever sat for the daubed picture of Dennis Dougherty, which is no more like a son of the Emerald Isle, than Mr. H. Wallack is like a Lilliputian.” [31] The fact that Dougherty represents such a strikingly divergence within the play’s dramatis personae could be seen as one of the play’s clearest flaws. But it may also be that this is an instance in which Dunlap layered in a cultural reference that has yet to be uncovered. [32] A Spectacle of Recognition… Historical analyses of spectacle-anchored productions can be maddeningly simplistic, and display an inherent bias against the very idea of such productions. This bias is apparent in the literature on A Trip to Niagara . Nearly every historian who has written about it dutifully recites the fact that six months prior to the opening of the Bowery production, another moving-diorama-anchored production entitled Paris and London: a Tale of Both Cities opened at the Park Theatre, the Bowery’s anglophilic cross-town rival. [33] Given the Park’s status as New York’s preeminent theatre during this period, the Bowery’s subsequent decision to mount a moving-diorama spectacle of its own is consistently offered up as definitive proof of the derivative nature of the Bowery’s production. [34] There are clear problems with this conclusion, however. As the art historian Stephan Oettermann discusses in The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, diorama-based productions had become increasingly common in France, England, and America in the Nineteenth Century, and the Park theatre had no claim to originality in its decision to mount Paris and London. [35] More significantly, Paris and London was not a terribly successful production. The critic from the New York Dramatic Mirror portrayed the Park production’s lackluster ticket sales in a particularly bemused fashion: It is a light, laughable, and exceedingly laughable piece – “yet nobody goes to see it.” It has been got up with great care… the scenery is uncommonly well done, and the succession of paintings, representing the voyage from Calais to Dover, is both novel and beautiful – “yet nobody goes to see it.” The incidents are lively and amusing, the characters good of themselves… London and Paris is an agreeable trifle, which we really expected would succeed. [36] Given the enormous financial risk associated with the creation of a moving-diorama-based production, the sort of simple-minded copycatting of the Park Theatre’s production that has been attributed to the Bowery’s managers seems implausible. Why would they consciously seek to repeat the mediocre success of the Park Theatre’s production? A more likely explanation is that the Bowery managers, like their cross-town colleagues, were tapping into the rising tide of cultural interest in visually-intensive entertainments such as moving-dioramas. Their hopes for success were doubtless rooted more in L. J. M. Daguerre’s hugely successful European dioramic exhibitions in the early 1820’s than in the mediocre “precedent” set for them by their cross-town rivals. [37] A careful examination of the use of spectacle in A Trip to Niagara reveals that its success lay not in the ways in which it mindlessly aped other productions, but in the sophisticated ways that it resonated with the local, culturally savvy spectators at the Bowery Theatre. The clearest example of this is the fact that, in A Trip to Niagara, the ‘Eidophusikon,’ (the title given by the managers to the moving diorama) depicted the least exotic , most familiar portion of the journey from New York City to Niagara Falls. The diorama began scrolling as the tourists boarded their boat in New York harbor, but its visual journey extended only as far as Catskill Landing, about a hundred miles north of New York City; the most familiar portion of the journey to the Bowery’s patrons. The newly-opened Erie Canal and the scenic wonders of the Mohawk River canyon and Niagara Falls itself appear only in static scenes later in the play. So, exoticism aside, what would have been the appeal to the Bowery spectators of this comparatively local content? The immensity of seeing 25,000 feet worth of canvas gliding mechanically across the stage must surely have pushed the boundaries of the spectators’ imaginations. Furthermore, the use of the ‘double-effect’ painting technique, which was becoming prevalent at the time, would have allowed movement-oriented elements such as “boats passing through a fog,” “emergence of a rainbow,” and the “rising of the moon,” to be executed with style and elegance. [38] But far more importantly, by having the ‘Eidophusikon’ focus on the terrain closest to New York, the Bowery audience would have been fully capable of appreciating the detailed minutia that the artists worked so hard to include. Well known ships such as the frigate Hudson and the steam vessel Constitution were probably included for this very reason. As Stephen Oettermann has argued in reference to Robert Barker’s famous panorama of London, the appeal of A Trip to Niagara’s moving diorama might have come from the constant barrage of moments of recognition experienced by the audience. A Trip to Niagara’s ‘Eidophusikon’ presented viewers with visual elements that ranged from the familiar (“Hey that’s my house!”), to the famous (“Look the Bowery Theatre!”), to the alluring (“I’ve always wanted to see Catskill Mountain House!”), thus eliciting a complex, and densely packed array of individualized responses. Assuming that the interplay between these elements constituted an important source of the audience’s pleasure, then the decision to depict the comparatively familiar lower Hudson River valley, rather than the more exotic trip across the Erie Canal, was perhaps a wise one, despite the fact that it runs counter the pejorative myth that spectacles are all about exoticism and novelty. Another, far more subtle source of theatrical pleasure can be found in fact that the ‘Eidophusikon’ also appears to have been a quiet homage to the landscape painter, Thomas Cole. As with the depictions of Leatherstocking, William Alexander Brown, the Erie Canal, and the Catskill Mountain House, an homage to Cole would have tapped into the pride that the spectators felt in the achievements of their fellow New Yorkers. Thomas Cole’s name is never voiced in the play, and unlike Dunlap’s more overt homage to James Fenimore Cooper, none of Cole’s works are unambiguously quoted in the script. Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence pointing toward Thomas Cole as the ‘Eidophusikon’s muse is compelling and worthy of attention. [39] When A Trip to Niagara was produced in 1828, Thomas Cole was the artist of the moment. Prior to Cole’s emergence as the father of the Hudson River School, landscape was a minor art-form in America, existing wholly in the shadow of portraiture and historical painting. Cole’s emergence, however, sparked a craze of landscape painting that would dominate American painting for the next two generations. [40] Cole’s meteoric rise was launched in 1825 when three of his paintings were purchased by three prominent New York painters: John Trumbull, Asher Durand, and William Dunlap. [41] Dunlap took it upon himself to use his position of prominence in the artistic community to draw attention to the talented young Cole. In his history of early American art, Dunlap states, “I published in the journals of the day, an account of the young artist and his pictures; it was no puff, but an honest declaration of my opinion, and I believe it served merit by attracting attention to it.” [42] From 1825 onward, Dunlap and Cole interacted regularly. Both men were founding members of the New York Drawing Association, a group which met three times a week for drawing sessions, [43] and Dunlap and Cole were also part of J. F. Cooper’s weekly lunches (“The Bread and Cheese Club”) where writers and artists interacted more socially. [44] Given Dunlap’s close association with Cole, specific details of the ‘Eidophusikon’ take on additional meaning. The journey depicted by the moving-diorama, from New York City to Catskill Landing, is the precise journey that was made by Cole on his much-publicized first excursion to the Catskill Mountains in the summer of 1825, the journey that resulted directly in the three landscapes purchased by Trumbull, Durand, and Dunlap. This journey was a well-publicized part of the artist’s public image and of the culture of the Hudson River Valley more generally. In 1827 the owners of the steamship Albany, which plied the Hudson River route, even commissioned a painting from Cole entitled “View near the Falls of the Kauterskill [aka-Kaaterskill], in the Catskill Mountains.” This painting adorned the ship’s cabin, giving passengers an advanced view, interpreted through the eye of the famous artist, of the world that they were traversing. [45] Furthermore, the type of subject matter depicted in the ‘Eidophusikon’ was precisely the sort favored by Cole. Approaching and receding storms, in particular, are a common element in Cole’s paintings. Given Cole’s prominence, it seems almost inconceivable that Dunlap and the Bowery’s scenic painters would not have Cole in mind as they adopted his favored subjects and ‘plein-air’ study methods for this massive moving landscape. Advertisements for the production touted the fact that the scene painters worked from their own sketch-work, obtained in the field, and one wonders if the personal journeys of the scenic painters along the route of Cole’s first excursion to the Catskills might have been a form of conscious pilgrimage. [46] The fact that Cole’s name is never directly invoked is in keeping with Dunlap’s understated approach to the cultural homages in this play. Dunlap instead relied upon the audience’s cultural literacy to identify his allusions. That the ‘Eidophusikon’ was spectacular and was marketed to the public based on its size and grandeur is undeniable, but it might very well be the case that Dunlap’s production succeeded where others failed because of the quiet, understated ways in which spectacle was employed in this production. A Trip to Niagara is outstanding, less for the spectacular sights that it displayed before its audiences, than for the never-ending series of spectacular recognitions that it elicited from them. These are the precise qualities that are lost when the analyses of historical spectacles begins with a mythical assumption of their simplistic nature. Undeniably Sophisticated Audiences In an era when plays were rarely performed more than once a month, the management of the Bowery Theatre staged A Trip to Niagara an astonishing seventeen times in the first month following its premiere, often turning people away from its overflowing 3,500-seat auditorium . [47] The play and the moving-diorama that served as the most notable highlight “saved the season” for the Bowery, which was recovering from a catastrophic fire that same year. Ultimately, A Trip to Niagara became a flag-ship production for the Bowery Theatre, featuring it at major openings and holiday events throughout 1829. [48] There are two divergent conclusions that can be gleaned from the success of this production: either the production was a good one that was embraced by the Bowery’s appreciative spectators, or that that spectators who thronged to see this trifle were little more than simpletons who were “easily sated by inferior fare.” Unfortunately, the latter conclusion has been the dominant one; it flies in the face of the historical evidence, but it resonates with the larger myth of the supposed primitivism of the early American audience. Considerable evidence points to the idea that the Bowery audience of 1828 was probably a culturally sophisticated one. When it opened in 1826, the “New York Theatre”– it was renamed the Bowery after the fire in the summer of 1828 – was the largest theatre in New York City. The playhouse boasted over 3500 seats, had the largest stage in America and was backed by the well-heeled sons of President James Monroe, John Jacob Astor, and Alexander Hamilton. Far from being the haven for working-class audiences that it would later become under the management of Thomas Hamblin, the original Bowery was envisioned as a direct competitor to the Park Theatre, which had stood as the city’s elite playhouse for more than a generation. Even the often grumpy Fanny Trollope saw the Bowery as “infinitely superior” to its cross-town rival stating, “It is indeed as pretty a theatre as I ever entered. Perfect as to size and proportion, elegantly decorated, and the scenery and machinery equal to any in London.” [49] Dunlap even included the newly reconstructed Bowery as part of his cultural diorama: the theatre’s facade served as the final static image depicted in the background prior to the start of the moving diorama. The fact that A Trip to Niagara was such a tremendous success for the Bowery marks it as a prime example of the kind of fare that the Bowery’s audiences desired. Considering how much of the production consisted of subtle, unspoken references to elite culture from the period, this might not be such a surprise after all. Aside from the references to the work of Cooper, Matthews, and Cole previously discussed, the play also makes subtle references to the nation’s luxurious modern infrastructure in the form of its hotels, roads, ships, and the newly-opened Erie Canal. Dunlap frequently combined these references in startlingly complex ways. In one particularly interesting scene, which beautifully sums up the elegant complexity of Dunlap’s referential style, Leatherstocking and Amelia conduct a reasoned debate about the merits and pitfalls of progress while standing atop the Catskill escarpment, with the facade of the newly-constructed and highly luxurious Catskill Mountain House standing silently behind them. The two characters, one of Dunlap’s invention the other of Cooper’s, politely voice their divergent opinions in a civilized discussion, and then go their separate ways, as friends. The fact that the very spot, which had once served as the private terrace of the famous frontiersman, had now been converted into a bastion of refined luxury was an ironic turn that beautifully encapsulates Dunlap’s quiet celebration of American culture, an approach which his audiences clearly embraced. This is, after all, the same scene that the reviewer for the Dramatic Mirror lamented the absence of when it was cut from one of the performances. With A Trip to Niagara, Dunlap not only celebrated the literary achievements of friends like Cooper and Cole, but also the diversity of American attitudes toward the development of their own society, all within a series of stage pictures that was saturated with multiple cultural references. In making room for multiple, competing viewpoints to hold their own in the same stage space, Dunlap’s play defies the pervasive assumption that in the Nineteenth-Century, spectacle-driven plays and their audiences were as simplistic as they have often been portrayed by historians. It remains to be seen how many other successful productions, as well as the audiences that attended them, might be better understood if we continue uprooting the historical mythologies that we have inherited, and attempt to view the past with fewer preconceived notions of what our gaze will discover. Rather than dismissing audiences that embraced productions that we dislike at first blush, we should trust in their judgment and use their enthusiasm as an indication that there must be more to these productions than meets the eye. References [1] There are notable exceptions to this negative treatment including studies by Francis Hodge, Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825–1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964); Maura Jortner, “Playing ‘America’ on Nineteenth-Century Stages; or, Jonathan in England and Jonathan at Home” (PhD diss, University of Pittsburgh, 2005); and particularly Dorothy B Richardson’s extensive monograph on the play, Moving Diorama in Play, William Dunlap’s Comedy “A Trip to Niagara” (Youngstown, NY: Teneo Press, 2010). The current version of this article is a revised piece based on useful feedback I received from Richardson. [2] Robert H. Canary, William Dunlap (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), 71-73; Oral Sumner Coad, William Dunlap: A Study of his Life and Works and of his Place in Contemporary Culture (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962 [Reprint of 1917 edition from The Dunlap Society]), 177, 183; and Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol 1, eds. Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11. [3] William Dunlap, “A Trip to Niagara; or, Travellers in America,” in Dramas from the American Theatre: 1762-1909, ed. Richard Moody (Amherst, MA: The World Publishing Company, 1966), 186. [4] Ibid., 181. [5] Coad, William Dunlap, 177-178. Canary, William Dunlap, 73. [6] William Dunlap, A Trip to Niagara, 178. [7] The Glory of Columbia is, in fact, an adaptation of Andre , but with much the same kind of celebratory spectacle that is employed in A Trip to Niagara. [8] Richardson postulates several other reasons why Dunlap’s disclaimer should be taken with a grain of salt. Moving Diorama, 181-185. [9] Richardson’s book is unique on this point in that it discusses several of the characters as stock while simultaneously explicating their cultural resonances. Richardson, Moving Diorama , 124-128, 213-218, 245-249. The differences between her interpretations of these characters and my own are often quite divergent, despite the fact that we are both aware of the allusions embedded in these characters. [10] Richard H. Gassan, The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790-1830 , (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 127. Bigsby & Wilmeth, “Introduction,” 11. Coad, William Dunlap , 177-178. Canary, William Dunlap, 73. [11] The two were so close that Dunlap dedicated his 1834 History of the American Theatre to Cooper. [12] Although Leatherstocking is also central to Cooper’s far more popular novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826), it is the older, more nostalgic version of this character that Dunlap chose to include in his play. [13] “The Bowery,” New York Dramatic Mirror, Dec. 13, 1828. [14] For a list of authors who fail to uncouple John Bull from Jonathan, see note 6. [15] William Dunlap, A Trip to Niagara, 183. [16] Ibid., 183. [17] Today, it might seem odd to look upon an actor such as William Chapman, who was born in England, and merely recruited to work for an American company as an “American” actor. But there is evidence to suggest that the American public, who were themselves frequently first and second generation emigrants, saw these actors as American. Upon her arrival in Philadelphia in 1796, the prominent English actress Anne Brunton Merry was immediately hailed as a great addition to “the American Drama.” Gresdna Ann Doty, The Career of Mrs. Anne Brunton Merry in the American Theatre (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 51. [18] Richardson similarly discusses the “continually close and fluent relationship with each other” that the characters of John Bull and Jonathan would have shared. Moving Diorama , 267. [19] Maura Jortner, “Playing ‘America’ on Nineteenth-Century Stages; or, Jonathan in England and Jonathan at Home” (PhD diss, University of Pittsburgh, 2005), 93-96, 108-111. [20] Jortner, Playing ‘America’…, 93-96, 108-111. Francis Hodge, Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825–1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 74-75, 103, 162-163. [21] Gary A. Richardson, “Plays and Playwrights: 1800-1865,” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol 1, eds. Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 289-290. Coad, William Dunlap, 177-178. Marvin McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Color: William Brown’s African and American Theatre (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 160. [22] Coad, William Dunlap, 23. Richardson, Moving Diorama, 241. [23] Dunlap, A Trip to Niagara, 181. [24] For more on the death of deference see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992). [25] James Fenimore Cooper “The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna; A Descriptive Tale,” in The Leatherstocking Tales, Vol. I (New York: The Library of America, 1985), 177. [26] The authoritative history of William Brown’s career is Marvin McAllister’s White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Color: William Brown’s African and American Theatre (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). [27] Canary, William Dunlap, 74. [28] McAllister, White People Do Not Know , 22. [29] It is interesting to note that McAllister appears critical of Dunlap’s character, though he mentions the play only in passing, and with some inaccuracy, which might indicate that the analysis of this character was not a central concern to his larger project on Brown. [30] “Mr. Dunlap’s Play of A Trip to Niagara,” New York Dramatic Mirror, Dec. 20, 1828. [31] “The Drama,” The Irish Shield , January 1829. [32] Richardson notes that stage-Irishmen appear several times in Dunlap’s previous works, and thus might have been a more stable element of his dramaturgical sensibility. Moving Diorama , 124-125. [33] Gassan, American Tourism, 127. Coad, William Dunlap, 107-108. George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, Vol III (NY: AMS Press, 1928), 378. [34] Richardson argues that “the Bowery saw that a moving panorama or diorama was not restricted to a particular genre.” This assertion of the Bowery’s following of the Park Theatre’s lead is clearly less derisive, yet still postulates a causality that does not appear to be substantiated in reliable documentation from the period. Moving Diorama, 85. [35] Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium , (NY: Zone Books, 1997), 70-83, 323-324. [36] “London & Paris,” New York Mirror, 24 May 1828. The article from which these excerpts have been gleaned is actually much longer and humorously repeats “yet nobody goes to see it” again and again. [37] Oettermann, The Panorama, 74-83. [38] “Bowery Theatre,” New York Evening Post, 28 November 1828. For more on the ‘double-effect’ technique see Oettermann, The Panorama, 77-83. [39] Richardson also argues that, in addition to Cole, William Guy Wall, may have also served as a source of inspiration. Moving Diorama, 61-63. [40] For more on the emergence of Cole and the rise of the Hudson River School, see Barbara Babcock Millhouse, American Wilderness: The Story of the Hudson River School of Painting (Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press, 2007), Gail S. Davidson, Landscape Icons, Tourism, and Land Development in the Northeast,” in ‘Frederick Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2006), and Harold E. Dickson, Arts of the Young Republic: The Age of William Dunlap (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). [41] The subject of the painting that Dunlap purchased, “Lake with Dead Trees,” was actually the lake that lay directly behind the Catskill Mountain House. VanZandt, Catskill Mountain House, 119-120. [42] William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, Vol. 3 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965 [1834]), 140-150. [43] Coad, William Dunlap, 105. [44] Millhouse, American Wilderness , 17. [45] Davidson, Landscape Icons, 23. [46] “Bowery Theatre,” New York Evening Post, 28 November 1828. Odell, Annals, 407. [47] “Mr. Dunlap’s Play of A Trip to Niagara,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 20 December 1828. [48] Odell, Annals , 407. [49] Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 209. Footnotes About The Author(s) SAMUEL T. SHANKS is an independent scholar based out of Duluth, MN. Previously he was an Associate Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Division of General Education & Honors at Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, IA. Sam’s academic interests include early American theatre, Islamic theatre, cognitive studies, and the history of scenic design. Guest Editor: Jonathan Chambers Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Winners Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Winners By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF The Errol Hill Award is given by the American Society for Theatre Research in recognition of outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, as demonstrated in the form of a published book-length project (monograph or essay collection) or scholarly article. The book or article must deal with African American theater history, dramatic literature, or performance studies (research on dance, acting and directing, public performances, i.e., parades, pageants, etc.). 2020: Kemi Adeyemi, University of Washington, Seattle, “Beyond 90°: The Angularities of Black/Queer/Woman/Lean,” Women and Performance 29:1 (February 2019). 2019: Joshua Chambers-Letson, Northwestern University, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer Color of Life, New York University Press Honorable Mentions Joanna Dee Das, Washington University in St. Louis, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora, Oxford University Press Christian DuComb, Colgate University, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia, Michigan University Press Shane Vogel, Indiana University, Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze, University of Chicago Press 2018: Kellen Hoxworth, Dartmouth College, “The Many Racial Effigies of Sara Baartman,” Theatre Survey 58:3 (September 2017). 2017: Renee Alexander Craft, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama (Ohio State University Press, 2016). Honorable Mentions Christen Smith, University of Texas at Austin, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016). T. Carlis Roberts, UC Berkeley, Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Politics of Collaboration (Oxford University Press, 2016). 2016 : Uri McMillan, UCLA Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York University Press, 2015). Honorable Mention Adrienne Macki Braconi, Harlem’s Theatres: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939 (Northwestern University Press, 2015). 2015 : Paige McGinley, Washington University in St. Louis, Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism (Duke University Press, 2014) Honorable Mention Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2014). 2014: Kathleen Gough, Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic (Routledge, 2013). Honorable Mentions E. Patrick Johnson & Ramon Rivera-Servera, Solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews and essays (Northwestern University Press, 2014). Macelle Mahala, Penumbra: The Premier State for African American Drama (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 2013 : Diana Rebekkah Paulin, Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in US Drama and Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 2012 : Bernth Lindfors, Ira Aldridge: The Early Years 1807-1833 (University of Rochester Press, 2011). Honorable Mention Brandi Catanese, The Problem of the Color[blind] (Univesrity of Michigan Press, 2011). 2011: Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (University of Michigan Press, 2010). 2010 : Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 2009: Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2008). 2008: Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theatre and Film before World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 2007: Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2006). 2006: Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba, 1840 – 1895 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 2005: Harry Elam, The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (University of Michigan Press, 2004). 2004: E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Duke University Press, 2003). 2003 : Thomas DeFrantz, Dancing Many Drums (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 2002: David Krasner and Harry Elam, Jr., eds., African-American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (Oxford University Press, 2001). 2001 : Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (Routledge, 2001). 2000: George A. Thompson, Jr., A Documentary History of African Theatre (Northwestern Univeristy Press, 1998). 1999: Jill Lane, “Blackface Nationalism, Cuba 1840-1868.” Theatre Journal 50, no. 1 (1998). 1998: David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910 (Macmillan Publishers, 1997). 1997: Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Wesleyan University Press, 1996). References Footnotes About The Author(s) Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

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

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

Seokhun Choi Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Seokhun Choi By Published on November 8, 2019 Download Article as PDF Introduction: Mourning, Estrangement, and Affect According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, world-renowned experts on loss and healing, we now live in “a new death-denying, grief-dismissing world” as illness and death disappeared from the public view and reemerged in the hospital and funeral home. [1] Accordingly, mourning has become a private affair, giving rise to what Sandra M. Gilbert calls “the shame of the mourner” or “Job’s shame” which is “the shame of the one who fears he has been singled out for suffering because he is unworthy of happiness,” particularly in contemporary British and American cultures. [2] It is in this cultural context that Leslie Atkins Durham situates Eurydice (2003), one of Sarah Ruhl’s early plays about bereavement. Durham reads the play alongside the irony that while “Americans had much to grieve” in the wake of big- and small-scale tragedies including 9/11, the Gulf War, and Hurricane Katrina, “grieving and mourning have been carefully regulated” in the delicate political climate of the Bush administration. [3] Although modern society in general has relegated the gloomy subject to the private realm and periphery, human mortality is a universal and perennial issue since all of us will lose someone and eventually die. In this respect, Ruhl’s plays of mourning— Eurydice , The Clean House (2004), and Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2006)—not only hold considerable significance for grief-stricken theatregoers today as they provide an occasion of communal mourning, but also make a strong case for the importance of theatre as an affective cultural medium. On the other hand, Ruhl’s theatre is not simply a venue of sorrow and tears as her plays represent bereavement in unusual ways with surreal humor: Eurydice depicts a fairytale version of the Underworld populated by clownish characters including a tricycle-riding Hades and talking stones; Dead Man’s Cell Phone is a romantic comedy which begins with an organ broker’s sudden death from a heart attack and ends with his mother’s (off-stage) self-immolation with barbecue fire; and finally, a cancer patient is literally killed with a joke in The Clean House . In these plays which resist conventional realism, highly emotional circumstances are interrupted by an unexpected turn of events and death and grief are estranged by humor with mixed emotional results. In an attempt to expound the dramaturgical significance of Ruhl’s peculiar method of estrangement in her plays of mourning, this essay revisits the German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht’s theory of Verfremdungseffekt (hereafter referred to as “V-effect”), a representational strategy that “allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.” [4] The estrangement of death and grief in Eurydice , The Clean House , and Dead Man’s Cell Phone is achieved by various techniques evocative of Brecht’s epic theatre, with humor at the core of the process. Far from showing how Ruhl’s estrangement is indebted to Brecht, my aim is to use his theory as a point of contrast to articulate how Ruhl’s distancing devices in the plays defamiliarize emotion for emotion’s sake relieved of the materialist premises of V-effect. Here, Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), an anti-war satire revolving around the protagonist’s loss of her three children, will serve as the specific reference point for Brecht’s result-oriented V-effect, in contraposition to what I propose to call ‘estrangement affect ’ (hereafter referred to as ‘E-affect’), Ruhl’s emotion-centered estrangement for the audience’s rehearsal of bereavement. This conceptual formulation of E-affect suggests a new possibility to understand and use estrangement as a theatrical device detached from its original ideological context. While Brecht’s influence on Ruhl’s antirealist dramaturgy has generally been noted, her major critics, such as Durham, James Al-Shamma, and Ana Fernández-Caparrós, have borrowed the German scholar Franz Roh’s “magic realism” and the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky’s “defamiliarization” ( ostranenie ) to analyze Ruhl’s estrangement devices in her grief-themed plays. For instance, Al-Shamma traces Ruhl’s lineage back to Brecht via Tony Kushner, John Guare, and Thornton Wilder, making several specific references to the German playwright throughout his monograph on Ruhl’s major works. [5] Aside from the fact that some critics used the term in their performance reviews of her plays, Al-Shamma does not explicitly state why he draws on magic realism instead of Brecht’s epic theatre to illuminate on the antirealist characteristics of The Clean House . While his choice seems to reflect his awareness of the discrepancy between the play’s non-rationalist poetics and the strain of European rationalism found in Brecht, the unstated rationale warrants further investigation. If he puts Ruhl in the genealogy of Brecht along the line of her American predecessors and wants to talk about estrangement in her plays, why not Brecht? In her essay on Dead Man’s Cell Phone , Fernández-Caparrós analyzes the estrangement process in the play in terms of ostranenie . And yet, she only applies ostranenie to the cell phone, but not to the central theme of death, despite her observation that the play and The Clean House are two of the plays that demonstrate “Ruhl’s distinctive concern with dying and its aftermath” and “approach mortality ‘with a somewhat lighter touch.’” [6] As a result, the significant relationship between estrangement and the emotion of grief in the play remains unexplained. While magic realism and ostranenie resonate with Ruhl’s aesthetics and help illuminate the major issues that the plays tackle, drawing on the literary notions seems to limit her estrangement to noetic and stylistic concerns. More fundamentally, magic realism and defamiliarization were developed in the context of postcolonial fiction and Russian formalism, respectively, without regard to the mechanics of theatre, where the audience emotionally reacts to the action on stage. I seek to complement these previous studies by paying particular attention to the emotional function of Ruhl’s estrangement (E-affect) in comparison with the V-effect, which is arguably the most systematic theory of estrangement proposed thus far, particularly as a way to combat emotional manipulation in the theatrical context. Since the so-called “affective turn,” the word “affect” has gained wide currency, particularly in literature and cultural studies, and has sometimes been distinguished from feeling or emotion as “a preliminal, preconscious phenomenon.” [7] However, it would be arbitrary to maintain such a neat distinction since the word connotes a wide range of bodily experiences which may well include emotional responses; for instance, the Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines affect as “the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily changes” or “a set of observable manifestations of a subjectively experienced emotion.” [8] Also, the affect-emotion dichotomy is not strictly adhered to by many theorists of affect including Silvan S. Tomkins, whose foundational system of primary affects is comprised of the nine emotional responses of interest, enjoyment, surprise, fear, anger, distress, shame, contempt, and disgust, [9] and Eve K. Sedgwick, who expands on Tomkins’ work in her Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003). In this essay, I adopt James Thompson’s definition of affect as “emotional, often automatic, embodied responses that occur in relation to something else—be it object of observation, recall of a memory or practical activity” and use it as the counter term to “effect” to focus on the emotion of grief. [10] Here, the affect of grief is specifically attached to people who are lost, although affects, as Sedgwick notes, can have any object such as “things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects.” [11] Making Death Visible and Grief Felt The unrealistic and abstract settings of Eurydice , The Clean House , and Dead Man’s Cell Phone blur the line between the worlds of the living and of the dead. Eurydice takes place on a dark, bare stage suggestive of the Underworld with rusty pipes, an abstracted River of Forgetfulness, and strange watery noises. The living and the dead exchange letters by dropping them on the soil and the characters arrive in the Underworld in a raining elevator. In Dead Man’s Cell Phone , the dead man Gordon, who now is “in a hell reserved for people who sell organs on the black market and the people who loved them,” transcends the boundary between life and death by telling the audience about the last moment of his death and even having a conversation with the protagonist Jean. [12] The Clean House is set in the all-white living room of the snobbish doctor Lane’s house in a “ metaphysical Connecticut ” or “ a house that is not far from the sea and not far from the city ,” where the 27-year-old Brazilian maid Matilde sees imaginary visions of her deceased parents reenacted on stage. [13] The plays’ phantasmagoric settings allow the living and the dead to co-inhabit the same space to restore death to the domain of everyday life. [14] The representation of the dead on stage and the living characters’ struggle with the losses inevitably elicit highly emotional responses from the audience. A couple of years before she wrote Eurydice , Ruhl published an essay on one of her mentors, María Irene Fornés, titled “Six Small Thoughts on Fornés, the Problem of Intention, and Willfulness.” In the essay, Ruhl pits Fornés’ “theatre of desire and pleasure” against two different types of western theatre that revolve around the notion of objective: American realist theatre and Brecht’s politically-motivated epic theatre. On behalf of Fornés, Ruhl argues that a “heightened emotional state” such as grief can be self-justifying as a pure emotional process without an external purpose: It wants nothing. It is complete in itself. If X dies, and I grieve for X, my grief does not depend on a frustrated desire for X. I know that I can’t have X from beyond the grave. I am not thinking about how to ameliorate my grief. My grief for X is beyond desire and beyond intention. It is a state. [15] Like Tomkins who argued that “affect is an end in itself,” Ruhl views the affect of grief as a natural process that has to happen for its own sake. [16] The grief that her characters experience and the audience may share with them is not meant to achieve any objective, at least in the sense of the character’s objective in the realist theatre (i.e. what does the character want?) or the socialist aim of epic theatre. In feeling grief, neither the characters nor the audience are supposed to think of ways to bring the deceased back to life or prevent others’ deaths. Rather, grief is a state of acceptance and the emotion matters in itself. Ruhl’s view of grief makes a striking contrast with that of Brecht who aimed at “an extremely classical, cold, highly intellectual style of performance.” [17] Here, it would be important to note that Brecht was not against emotion per se . For instance, comparing Brecht’s treatment of emotion in The Measures Taken (1930) and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948), R. Darren Gobert concludes that Brecht’s initial “hostility toward emotional effects” rose as a reaction to the behaviorist understanding of emotion and his view evolved from the “wholesale rejection” to “cognitive catharsis”—an emotive clarification that works alongside reason. [18] Similarly, Darko Suvin argues that Brecht was against emotion at first but later “suppressed the final opposition between emotion and reason.” [19] Thus, Brecht’s revolt against empathy did not connote an outright rejection of emotion, at least towards his late career—the phase Vidar Thorsteinsson refers to as “the late Brecht’s passionate defense of political-theatrical affect.” [20] Still, Brecht’s approval of emotion hinged on the proviso that it is based on reason and conducive to his socialist goal for his ultimate aim was to make the audience “feel emotions that would drive them to try to change situations like the ones represented on stage.” [21] One good example is his use of grief as a medium of rational critique in Mother Courage . Brecht wanted to lead the audience to critically examine the circumstances surrounding Mother Courage’s grief rather than simply share her emotion. John Rouse explains how Helene Weigel’s Mother Courage “defamiliarized Courage’s grief through the very demonstration of that grief” to achieve V-effect as follows: Both Brecht’s play and his production allow Courage this intensely human moment in order to illustrate for the audience the basic social contradiction out of which the character is built. Courage is both businesswoman and mother. Or rather, she tries to be both; the social realities of the total war from which she tries to profit as businesswoman prevent her from fulfilling her responsibilities as mother. She has been confronted with a nearly impossible economic choice—either she lose her son or she pay a sum that will cost her the wagon, her only means of supporting herself and her daughter. But she has tried to avoid making this choice in attempting to deal her way out. . . . Sounds of gunfire teach both her and the audience that her delay is indeed costly. Courage bears responsibility for her own extreme moment of grief. . . . Brecht allows Courage her grief, but he also uses it to provide his audience with the necessary data for a dialectical analysis of his play’s social relationships. [22] As Rouse explains above, the play directs the audience’s attention to the social and individual causes of Courage’s grief: war and her delayed action. For Brecht, it is of critical importance that these conditions look problematic and alterable to the audience, and grief is used against grief—i.e. to ward off further grief occasions in reality—as a tool for the stimulation of their critical thinking and social action. The contrast between Ruhl and Brecht in terms of grief reveals a fundamental difference in their approaches to the issue of human mortality. Whereas Mother Courage ascribes the deaths of the heroine’s children to identifiable causes as a way of exhorting the audience “to take pleasure in the possibilities of change in all things,” bereavement in Ruhl’s plays of mourning is beyond human control. [23] In Eurydice , the father is already dead when he first appears, residing in the Underworld, and the cause of his death is not mentioned at all—although it is possible, since it is an auto-biographical play, to assume that he, like the playwright’s own father, died of cancer. Similarly, the cause of Gordon’s sudden heart attack in Dead Man’s Cell Phone remains unidentified; he was just eating a lentil soup at a café instead of the lobster bisque he wanted. Ana’s death in The Clean House , though it could be argued that it was facilitated by Ana’s refusal to be hospitalized and Matilde’s joke, is due fundamentally to her stage four breast cancer, a medical condition that is incurable by contemporary medicine. These characters’ deaths are thrust upon the other characters due to unpreventable causes. More significantly, Ruhl’s plays are not a critique of such causes of death; they do not say cancer and the heart attack, for instance, are evil in the way Brecht deemed war and capitalism. A materialist application of V-effect to the plays would be equivalent to trying to find ways to change the individual or social circumstances that made these characters die, which would be a preposterous task for Ruhl’s audience given the circumstances. These points of contrast suggest that Ruhl is interested in dealing with bereavement as an inevitable incident rather than analyzing its causes and preventing it. In the plays, Ruhl presents three different types of response to bereavement: committing suicide to follow the deceased, trying to save the deceased (only if, of course, it appears possible), and acceptance. Eurydice, Mrs. Gottlieb, and Matilde’s father make the first choice: Eurydice dies a “second death” by dipping herself in Lethe, Mrs. Gottlieb sets herself on fire, and Matilde’s father shoots himself. Even though the emotional difficulty of their loss and their sincere desire to be reunited with their lost family member are understandable, it is apparent that suicide is not the best course of action for two main reasons. First, there is no guarantee that they will see the deceased after the suicide; they, overcome by their emotion, act on impulse despite the potential futility of such a venture into the unknown. Secondly, by killing themselves, they are causing further bereavement and grief for their surviving family and others who care about them. Orpheus and Lane’s husband Charles show the second type of response; Orpheus braves the gates of hell to bring his bride back to the world of the living, and Charles flies to Alaska to find a yew tree, a conifer that is believed to have some healing effect on cancer patients and used to produce chemotherapy drugs. [24] Unfortunately, their long trips turn out to be counter-productive. Orpheus and Eurydice only reaffirm their differences and have to experience a second separation, and Charles deprives himself of Ana’s last days which he could have spent with her and belatedly arrives with the tree only to find her dead. The failure of the two daring attempts attests to their lack of control over their significant other’s life—the case of Orpheus does so in a more symbolic way than realistic since the mythical setting cannot be taken literally. Here, Charles’s former aphorism to Lane in defense of his morally questionable affair with Ana returns to himself: “There are things—big invisible things—that come unannounced—they walk in, and we have to give way.” [25] These two purpose-driven reactions to bereavement—suicide and rescue mission—do not appear to improve the situation at all and their questionable efficacy alludes to the philosophy of life, or of death to be more specific, that the plays communicate to the audience: that there are events in life that frustrate human will and effort and demand acceptance. The third response of acceptance is represented by Matilde, who, instead of making the extreme choice her father made, moves on to make a living by cleaning Lane’s house in a foreign country. She is the character that initiates the symbolic gesture of acceptance in the play: to stop cleaning. In the play, the “clean house” is a visual metaphor for the ideal of perfect life, and to give that up is an acknowledgment that life cannot always stay in order and under control. Likewise, Lane and her sister Virginia leave the house in a mess only after realizing that the first step to come to terms with life’s inevitabilities is to let go and accept the situation as it unfolds. Here, acceptance in mourning does not mean abandonment or defeatism but care and wisdom. In mourning for the loss of her parents, Matilde resorts to some “strange” ways to keep her loss in perspective and maintain some emotional distance to it. For example, she tries to imagine her parents’ happy moments and make up new jokes, remembering her late mother’s advice: “in order to tell a good joke, you have to believe that your problems are very small, and that the world is very big.” [26] She does not simply accept her loss but also interrupts her own grief with some estrangement techniques including humor à la Brecht. Here, she not only models a peculiar attitude of acceptance herself but also serves as a good reference point for the peculiar rehearsal of bereavement that Ruhl stages for the audience in her three plays of mourning. Making Death Strange and Ameliorating Grief Ruhl’s interest in the theme of bereavement derives from her personal experience of losing her father to cancer when she was twenty years old, and she invites the audience to share her characters’ similar experiences and go along with their emotional journey. At the same time, she, knowing too well the emotional challenges of such occasions, represents their circumstances in strange ways to “ameliorate” the audience’s sorrow aroused by her characters’ losses, using several estrangement devices that are generally associated with Brecht’s epic theatre. As it is well known, Brecht devised various estrangement techniques to interrupt the realism of stage and the audience’s empathy. For instance, such interruption is achieved in Mother Courage by a wide range of dramatic and theatrical means including, but not limited to, a sudden change in situation, emotional tone, acting style, line delivery method etc., as Robert Leach succinctly captures: Peace is interrupted by war; direct address is interrupted by conversation; song by speech, and the method of singing, Sprechstimme , is a method of interrupting singing with speaking and vice versa; Mother Courage’s failure is interrupted by her success as a businesswoman, her mother’s pride by her grief; even the melodrama of the shooting of Kattrin as she drums to awaken Halle is interrupted by comedy. [27] As mentioned earlier, the goal of the interruptions is to help the audience keep some emotional distance from the characters and the situations they are in as a way of promoting critical observation. Here, Mother Courage’s loss and grief serve as a catalyst for this cerebral enterprise, and, as a result, the absurdity of social reality and the characters’ attitudes toward it are exposed as alterable conditions. Similar estrangement devices are used in Ruhl’s plays but the given circumstances of bereavement obviate such a critical exercise since they, as discussed above, are unchangeable. The most obvious Brechtian staging techniques in the plays are double casting, direct audience address, and subtitles. For instance, A Nasty Interesting Young Man and the Child in Eurydice , the Other Woman and the stranger in Dead Man’s Cell Phone , and Matilde’s deceased parents and Ana and Charles in The Clean House are double cast. Secondly, the chorus of Stones in Eurydice , Gordon in Dead Man’s Cell Phone , and Matilde, Lane, and Virginia in The Clean House all directly address the audience to break the fourth wall. In addition, subtitles, a distancing device that harks back to Brecht’s use of placards, are often projected on stage in The Clean House . [28] These antirealist aesthetics remind the audience of the theatricality of performance and create some emotional distance to the characters’ losses and suffering. In short, whereas the emotion of grief itself is objectless, Ruhl’s E-affect has a specific objective for the audience: to alleviate their emotional pain as they, watching the plays, rehearse bereavement. Ruhl also employs other estrangement devices that are more grief-specific. The most telling example would be the cell phones that ring in the middle of Gordon’s mother Mrs. Gottlieb’s funeral speech to disturb the solemnity of the woeful event. In Eurydice , it is mainly the Stones who interrupt the doleful atmosphere of the Underworld as the foil of humanity capable of grief and sympathy. Their intrusive and disturbing character is similar to that of the cell phones but their interruption is intentional and more inconsiderate. The apathetic Stones discourage Eurydice’s grief with the warning, “Being sad is not allowed! Act like a stone.” [29] Watching her mourning over the second death of her father, the Stones admonish her as follows: LOUD STONE. Didn’t you already mourn for your father, young lady? LITTLE STONE. Some things should be left well enough alone. BIG STONE. To mourn twice is excessive. LITTLE STONE. To mourn three times a sin. LOUD STONE. Life is like a good meal. BIG STONE. Only gluttons want more food when they finish their helping. LITTLE STONE. Learn to be moderate. BIG STONE. It’s weird for a dead person to be morbid. LITTLE STONE. We don’t like to watch it! LOUD STONE. We don’t like to see it! BIG STONE. It makes me uncomfortable. THE STONES. Don’t cry! Don’t cry! [30] The Stones’ heartless reproach above seems to suggest how grief is generally repressed in modern times although a “mourner should be allowed to experience his sorrow” for grief only has the power to heal. [31] It is probably a similar internal voice of repression that keeps Mrs. Gottlieb crying alone like “a small animal in pain” somewhere in her house. [32] The Stones’ coldness and rude remarks do not only satirize the modern culture that tries to keep death and grief at bay but also enable a detached look at Eurydice’s mourning by interrupting her moment of grief. The most notable example of such interruption in The Clean House is Matilde’s killing joke. As her breast cancer worsens, Ana asks Matilde to end her acute pain by making her die laughing with a joke. Matilde grants her wish and euthanizes her in the same way her father accidentally killed her mother, which “symbolically rectifies her mother’s murder as an act of mercy rather than an accident.” [33] Here, the audience’s emotional response of grief to her death is interrupted by the irony of dying from laughter. As the last example of the killing joke suggests, a major component of E-affect is humor, whose mechanism and function can be construed in light of the incongruity and relief theories of humor. According to John Morreall, the two theories, along with the superiority theory, constitute the three major theories of humor. The superiority theory of humor notes that “laughter is always directed at someone as a kind of scorn,” while the relief theory sees the major function of humor as “the venting of excess nervous energy” through laughter. [34] According to the third and most widely-accepted incongruity theory, “what amuses us is some object of perception or thought that clashes with what we would have expected in a particular set or circumstances.” [35] Despite the obvious differences, the three theories of humor are more complementary than contradictory as they focus on different aspects of humor. Generally speaking, the superiority theory is primarily concerned with the satirical nature of humor (i.e. intention of the joker), the incongruity theory with its semantic aspect (i.e. why jokes are funny), and, finally, the relief theory with humor’s physiological function (i.e. effect of humor). [36] The incongruity and relief theories are therefore not incompatible with each other and can be used together to shed light on the source and effect of humor in Ruhl’s plays. Incongruity as the source of humor in Ruhl’s plays has mainly to do with the irony of representing the serious theme of mortality in the comic mode. First of all, such inconsistency can be observed in the contrast between the classic image of afterlife and the plays’ comic representation of it. The Underworld of Eurydice is ruled by a Child riding on a red tricycle and wearing a hat and clothes too small for him, and spooky but clownish figures known as Big, Loud, and Little Stones are its major inhabitants. The fairytale setting is significantly different from the grim and terrifying image of Hades in classical accounts such as Virgil’s. [37] Eurydice’s Father, who would start his wedding speech with “one or two funny jokes,” has been living there since his death, and he describes his life after death this way: the atmosphere smells. And there are strange high-pitched noises—like a tea kettle always boiling over. But it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. And, for the most part, there is a pleasant atmosphere and you can work and socialize, much like at home. I’m working in the business world and it seems that, here, you can better see the far-reaching consequences of your actions. [38] His sensual description of the Underworld devoid of metaphysical seriousness and melancholy is unusual and refreshing. He seems to lead a rather easygoing life there, occasionally writing letters to her living daughter and practicing the jitterbug for fun. Although people lose their connection to their former lives, the life in the Underworld doesn’t seem that grim. On a similar note, Gordon describes the hell he is now in as a place where people “only have one costume” and “go to the Laundromat once a week,” and Matilde imagines heaven to be “a sea of untranslated jokes” where “everyone is laughing.” [39] These unorthodox and blithe images of afterlife challenge the common assumptions and expectations in contemporary religious and popular culture. In Dead Man’s Cell Phone and The Clean House , similar incongruity is witnessed in the circumstances of the characters’ deaths. At the opening of the second act, Gordon describes the last day of his life to the audience, on which he woke up thinking he’d like a lobster bisque. When he finally arrived in the café, he, much to his dismay, found Jean finishing the last lobster bisque that was supposed to be his so he had to settle for lentil instead. All of a sudden, he had a heart attack and began to think about to whom he would make the last phone call although his heart stopped before he could make the call. This is how he describes his last moment: A man doesn’t call his brother on his deathbed—no—he wants a woman’s voice—but the heart keeps on heaving itself up—out of my chest—into my mouth—and I’m thinking—that bitch over there ate all the lobster bisque, this is all her fault—and I look over at her, and she looks like an angel—not like a bitch angel at all—and I think—good—good—I’m glad she had the last bite—I’m glad. Then I die. [40] The gravity of death is lifted by the comic situation of dying in the middle of eating a lentil soup, jealous of another person enjoying the much-wanted lobster bisque. His mother’s self-immolation with barbecue fire at the end of the play also displays a similar incongruity between the quotidian and casual occasion of eating and the singular and serious event of death. What further estranges her bizarre method of suicide is her second son Dwight’s seeming indifference to or even approval of his mother’s self-immolation. Both her death and Dwight’s reaction challenge common expectations and produce surreal humor. Humor’s central role in the E-affect is most explicit in The Clean House since not only does the play begin with Matilde’s joke about the first night of a virgin man in Portuguese but also its plot revolves around two killing jokes. According to Matilde, her father, contrary to his good intention, choked his wife to death with a joke on their anniversary and shot himself in order to follow her. She reprises the family “tragedy” when she kills Ana in the same way albeit for a different reason. These homicides sound absurd for jokes and laughter are not seriously considered as possible causes of death. [41] The ideas of jokes and laughter in themselves evoke humor but what makes them even more humorous is their incongruity with the grave topic of mortality. In fact, incongruity is the main principle of Brechtian humor, too. As a device to prevent the audience’s emotional engagement he called empathy, he employed “a range of comic elements, from slapstick and commedia dell’arte exaggeration, to burlesque and stagey playfulness” with a view to promoting the audience’s recognition of the gap between ideal and reality in his contemporary society. [42] In other words, the comic in Brechtian theatre is “a structural principle underlying acts and communications that exposes the conflict between what is and what should be.” [43] In both Brecht and Ruhl, therefore, humor arises from the conflict between one’s expectations and what actually follows and plays a pivotal role in the estrangement process, although the two playwrights use humor for significantly different purposes. Unlike Brecht who formulated V-effect under the shadow of fascism and capitalism, Ruhl’s employment of humor had a deeply personal motivation. Ruhl’s father used to tell a joke to the concerned family during his struggle with cancer and he was one of the people who made her believe that “humor pushed to an extreme, like any emotion, has a transformative power.” [44] Another person who nurtured her belief in the power of humor is Italian writer Italo Calvino who considered lightness as the foremost quality of the New Millennium. Ruhl likewise believes that lightness is “a philosophical and aesthetic viewpoint, deeply serious, and has a kind of wisdom—stepping back to be able to laugh at horrible things even as you’re experiencing them.” [45] Aside from these personal and philosophical influences, it was her college mentor Paula Vogel who taught her to translate the wisdom of humor into the idiom of theatre. Vogel’s Baltimore Waltz (1990), a semi-autobiographical comedy about terminal illness, death, and grief, was a primary dramatic influence on the estrangement of death and grief in her plays. [46] In short, Ruhl’s E-affect was developed in a very different personal and historical context from the V-effect to serve a different function as she uses humor mainly for the audience’s relief of tension and emotional excess. In contrast to Brecht’s satirical humor designed to provoke the audience’s resistance to the status quo, Ruhl’s humor is geared toward acceptance. The clinical psychologist Rod A. Martin explains the positive function of humor as follows: Because it inherently involves incongruity and multiple interpretations, humor provides a way for the individual to shift perspective on a stressful situation, reappraising it from a new and less threatening point of view. As a consequence of this humorous reappraisal, the situation becomes less stressful and more manageable. . . . Humor and laughter provide a means for cancer patients to make light of their illness and maintain a spirit of optimism, and jokes about death are a way for people to distance themselves emotionally from thoughts of their own mortality. Thus, by laughing at the fundamental incongruities of life and diminishing threats by turning them into objects of nonserious play, humor is a way of refusing to be overcome by the people and situations, both large and small, that threaten our well-being. [47] Owing to the transformative power of humor, Ruhl’s audience can take a more objective view of the situation and maintain control of their emotion while participating in the mourning. In psychological parlance, this type of humor is called “gallows humor,” which Katie Watson defines as “humor that treats serious, frightening, or painful subject matter in a light or satirical way.” [48] The term originally comes from Freud’s example of prisoners joking on their way to the gallows, and gallows humor can be distinguished from cruel or derogatory humor by the analogy of “whistling as you go through the graveyard” versus “kicking over the gravestones.” [49] According to clinical psychologist Thomas Kuhlman, gallows humor flourishes in a hopeless situation that “justifies the psychological shift from a goal-directed frame of mind to a playful one.” [50] Likewise, Ruhl’s humorous representations of bereavement introduced above take the audience away from a rationalist and goal-driven perspective to a playful state of mind. While intellect is an important component of this process, the physiological function of laughter, which usually accompanies humor, is also critical. According to the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, a proponent of the relief theory along the line of Freud, laughter is “purposeless” in the sense that, unlike fear that makes a person run from the danger, laughter is not directed to “special ends”; it is just “an uncontrolled discharge of energy.” [51] Likewise, humor in Ruhl’s E-affect mainly serves an affective or physiological function. The aforementioned incongruities—the fairytale version of the Underworld, Gordon’s and her mother’s unusual circumstances of deaths involving lobster bisque and barbecue fire, and the motif of killing jokes—not only set an emotionally ambiguous tone throughout the plays but also allow the audience to release their emotional tension though laughter. Here, the point of such relief is not to prevent or repress their grief—if so, why represent grief in the first place?—but to help them grieve well as they rehearse bereavement. Navigating sorrow in the comic mode, Ruhl’s plays lead the audience to laugh through grief or grieve through laughter as a result of empathy. Unlike Brecht, Ruhl’s E-affect is not opposed to grief, but it does resist an excess of grief lest one should fail to recover from the overwhelming emotion. It guides the audience through their mourning process without necessitating a sober inspection of the situation to find a practical solution. According to Ruhl, “laughter is a kind of acceptance” since it is to acquiesce to the view that “life is funny, because it’s both tragic and bizarre.” [52] Critics such as Charles Isherwood, Peter Marks, and David Rooney have used the word “whimsical” to describe Ruhl’s antirealist and fluid dramaturgy but that is in fact what her plays show life itself to be. By inducing the audience to laugh at life’s most difficult experience represented on stage, Ruhl challenges them to face life’s uncertainties with courage. Conclusion: Towards a Theatre of Emotional Freedom Today’s Brechtian scholarship, even after the publication of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre , which problematizes “the overpowering authority of Brecht” and defines postdramatic theatre as “a post-Brechtian theatre ,” is still heavily concerned with the question of empathy with the materialist premises and implications of V-effect taken for granted. [53] For instance, David Krasner and Paul Woodruff find fault with Brecht’s narrow view of empathy and redefine it as both an emotional and cognitive response fundamental to theatrical spectatorship. Other major Brechtian scholars aforementioned have challenged the conventional understanding of Brecht’s stance towards emotion by making a notable case for Brecht’s transition to a positive assessment of emotion later in his career. The central question is whether emotion necessarily encumbers rational criticism or not. While Brecht and his critics all acknowledge the importance of emotional engagement in theatre spectatorship, their views presuppose the utilitarian credo that emotion should contribute to socio-political agenda somehow. However, this focus on “effects—identifiable social outcomes, messages or impacts,” as Thompson argues, can lead us to overlook “the radical potential of the freedom to enjoy beautiful radiant things .” [54] In this respect, Ruhl’s E-affect supplies us with an alternative model to Brecht’s epic theatre to understand and describe other types of non-realist drama that have so far been discussed in relation to his name and focus on affect instead. Even though Ruhl does not make practical suggestions as to how one can bring a lost person back or avert death, I would argue that her plays of mourning are graced with profound insight in their earnest and extraordinary explorations of some of life’s most grievous experiences. Despite considerable development in science and medicine, there are many questions yet to be answered and we are still mortal beings subject to forces larger than life. Against our wish, unfortunate events do occur, demanding the serenity to accept what we cannot change and ready ourselves to deal with the aftermath of what must come to pass. In this regard, Ruhl’s sincere engagement with such matters deserves attention for learning to accept is as important as fighting to fix a problem. Grieving for the sake of grieving does not simply mean abandonment, lack of purpose, or being selfish and indifferent to others. Rather, it means pleasure and freedom in Ruhl’s theatre. Fornés believes that life is “not constantly about wanting to get something from somebody else”—as most American actors are taught within the realist tradition—but about pleasure, particularly “the pleasure of communication.” [55] In Ruhl’s plays of mourning, death is closely linked to community, and the community literally includes the dead: Eurydice’s father, Gordon, and Matilde’s late parents. This communal aspect of her plays evokes the essential affinity between theatre and mourning. In many ways, theatre itself can be seen to be a place of mourning. In the Western classical formulation, for example, theatre evokes multiple losses, restaging past events and resuscitating the voices of those who are no longer there. At the same time, it enables an “acting out” of projective losses, those phantasmatic griefs that remain unspoken within the performance of everyday life. [56] Ruhl’s theatre is meant to be a gathering space of people made of flesh and blood, with feelings and desires, and entitled to laugh and cry without being told to stop being melodramatic and channel their emotion into some socially productive action. As a playwright, Ruhl’s genuine interest in grief and emotion contributes to increased “appreciation of the roles of feeling and of bodies in making meaning,” which “recalibrates historical hierarchies of meaning which have denigrated bodies, feelings and, for that matter, theatre and performance.” [57] For the audience, Ruhl’s theatre allows its human subjects to exist outside the burden of utility, celebrate their emotional freedom and have the pleasure of communication with each other—even with the dead—whether in laughing or mourning, or doing both at the same time. References [1] Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Keller, On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss (New York: Scribner, 2005), 205. [2] Sandra M. Gilbert, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 261. [3] Leslie Atkins Durham, Women’s Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century: Sarah Ruhl and Her Contemporaries (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 31. [4] Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic , ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 192. The most widely accepted English translation of Verfremdung has been “alienation” since the publication of John Willett’s collection of Brecht’s essays, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic , published in 1964. However, the accuracy of this translation has been contested by several scholars. According to Michael Patterson, for instance, the closest English translation is “distanciation,” and Robert Gordon has pointed out that Verfremdung can be more accurately translated as “strange-making” or “distancing.” See Michael Patterson, “Brecht’s Legacy” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht , ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 273-87 (274); Robert Gordon, The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theories in Perspective (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 233. In this article, I use ‘estrangement’ as the general term for the theatrical method of making something strange whether in the strictly Brechtian sense or not, chiefly because the word most immediately communicates the idea of making something ‘strange.’ Also, the rarely adopted phrase ‘estrangement effect’ itself makes V-effect unfamiliar, which is the partial aim of the current essay. [5] See James Al-Shamma, Sarah Ruhl: A Critical Study of the Plays (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 187. [6] Ana Fernández-Caparrós, “Death and the Community of Comic Romance: Sarah Ruhl’s Poetics of Transformation in Dead Man’s Cell Phone ,” Contemporary Theatre Review 25, no.4 (2015): 489. [7] Megan Watkins, “Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect,” in The Affect Theory Reader , ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 269. In a similar vein, Brian Massumi defines affect as “an ability to affect and be affected” and “a prepersonal intensity” rather than a personal feeling. See Brian Massumi, “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments,” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xvi. [8] “Affect,” Merriam-Webster , https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affect (accessed 5 August 2018). [9] Silvan S. Tomkins, “The Quest for Primary Motives: Biography and Autobiography of an Idea” in Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins , ed. E. Virginia Demos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 58. [10] James Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 119. [11] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003), 19. [12] Sarah Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008), 80. [13] Sarah Ruhl, “The Clean House,” in The Clean House and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), 7. [14] In this regard, it is significant that the terminally-ill cancer patient Ana in The Clean House spends her last days in Lane’s house instead of the hospital, the modern institution that has had “local monopoly on death” since the twentieth century. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years (2nd ed.), trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 584. So, when Ana dies in her house, Lane, the doctor, starts panicking and says, “I’ve never seen someone die in a house before. Only in a hospital.” Ruhl, “The Clean House,” 106. Ana’s choice literally brings death home in order to show that it is an undeniable part of our everyday life. [15] Sarah Ruhl, “Six Small Thoughts on Fornés, the Problem of Intention, and Willfulness,” Theatre Topics 11, no. 2 (2001): 197. [16] Silvan S. Tomkins, Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins , ed. E. Virginia Demos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 51. [17] Brecht, Brecht on Theatre , 14. [18] R. Darren Gobert, “Cognitive Catharsis in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, ” Modern Drama 49, no. 1 (2006): 13. [19] Darko Suvin, “Emotion, Brecht, Empathy vs. Sympathy,” Brecht Jahrbuch / The Brecht Yearbook 33 (2008): 58. [20] Similarly to Gobert and Suvin, Thorsteinsson holds that “Brecht’s late dramatic theory” in the 1940s is “more eager to chart the territory of production through an affective, emotional, and bodily exploration.” Vidar Thorsteinsson, “‘This Great Passion for Producing’: The Affective Reversal of Brecht’s Dramatic Theory,” Cultural Critique 97 (2017): 58. Thompson also argues that affect was an integral part of Brecht’s epic theatre. Thompson, Performance Affects , 129–130. [21] See Paul Woodruff, “Engaging Emotion in Theater: A Brechtian Model in Theater History,” The Monist 71, no. 2 (1988): 237. [22] John Rouse, “Brecht and the Contradictory Actor,” in Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide , ed. Phillip B. Zarrilli (New York: Routledge, 2002), 255. [23] Brecht, Brecht on Theatre , 202. [24] According to Jennifer Heller, Charles wrongly chooses “a thing” (“yew”) over “a human connection” (“you”). Jennifer Heller, “‘To Follow Pleasure’s Sway’: Atomism in Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House ,” Modern Drama , 60, no. 4 (2017): 443. [25] Ruhl, “The Clean House,” 63. [26] Ibid., 26. [27] Robert Leach, “Mother Courage and Her Children,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht , ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 135. [28] Peter Marks, who saw the Wooly Mammoth Theatre production in 2005, notes that “Ruhl intermittently has subtitles flashed on a panel above the set, as if her characters were the subjects of a documentary.” According to him, some of the subtitles are “mere recitations of apparent events” while others “offer ironic commentary.” Peter Marks, “‘Clean House’: A Lemon-Fresh Shine,” The Washington Post , 19 July 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/18/AR2005071801502.html (accessed 1 August 2018). [29] Ruhl, “Eurydice,” in The Clean House and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), 373. [30] Ibid., 406. [31] Kübler-Ross and Keller, On Grief and Grieving , 24. [32] Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone , 49. [33] Al-Shamma, Sarah Ruhl , 39. [34] John Morreall, introduction to The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor , ed. by John Morreall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987) 3–6. [35] Ibid., 6. [36] Salvatore Attardo also sees the tripartite division as a “commonly accepted classification” and notes that the three theories are “not incompatible” with each other. Salvatore Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humor (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), 47–49. [37] Here’s lines 467-70 from Virgil’s Georgics IV, for instance: “The jaws of a Spartan cavern, Death’s towering gateway, / and the grove miasmic with black dread—he entered them / and came to the realm of the dead with its fearsome king, / their hearts impossible to soften with living prayers.” Virgil and Janet Lembke, Virgil’s Georgics: A New Verse Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 75. [38] Ruhl, “Eurydice,” 343. [39] Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone , 82; Ruhl, “The Clean House,” 109. [40] Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone , 61. [41] Although death from laughter is rare and not usually discussed as a serious research topic in medicine, there have been several reports of the case in history, mostly caused by asphyxiation or heart failure. One of the earliest records comes from Book VII of Diogenes Laertius (meaning “Lives of Eminent Philosophers”) which gives the account that the Ancient Greek scholar Chrysippus died after “a violent fit of laughter,” looking at his donkey eating his figs. R. D. Hicks, ed., Diogenes Laertius (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, 1972), http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=D.%20L (accessed 25 July 2018). A more recent and credible case is that of Alex Mitchell, the Scottish bricklayer who “died from heart failure after laughing non-stop at The Goodies ” in 1975. Although the cause of his death was simply thought to be a cardiac arrest at that time, doctors now believe that Mitchell had Long QT syndrome, “a rare form disease which causes irregular heartbeats,” based on his granddaughter’s abnormal heart condition. Andrew Levy, “Doctors Solve Mystery of a Man Who ‘Died from Laughter’ While Watching The Goodies after His Granddaughter Nearly Dies from Same Rare Heart Condition,” Mail Online , last modified 20 June, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2162102/Doctors-solve-mystery-man-died-laughter-watching-The-Goodies-granddaughter-nearly-dies-rare-heart-condition.html (accessed 15 June 2018). For people of normal health, death from laughter is simply a joke. [42] Marc Silberman, “Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy,” Social Research 79, no. 1 (2012): 170. [43] Ibid. [44] Wendy Weckwerth, “More Invisible Terrains,” Theater 34, no. 2 (2004): 32. [45] John Lahr, “Surreal Life: The plays of Sarah Ruhl,” The New Yorker , 17 March 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/17/surreal-life (accessed 20 May 2018). [46] Al-Shamma, Sarah Ruhl , 43. [47] Rod A. Martin, The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (San Diego: Elsevier, 2007), 19. [48] Katie Watson, “Gallows Humor in Medicine,” Hastings Center Report 41, no. 5 (2011): 38. [49] D. Wear, et al, “Derogatory and Cynical Humor Directed towards Patients: Views of Residents and Attending Doctors,” Medical Education 43 (2009): 39. [50] Thomas L. Kuhlman, “Gallows Humor for a Scaffold Setting: Managing Aggressive Patients on a Maximum-Security Forensic Unit,” Hospital and Community Psychiatry 39, no. 10 (1988): 1087. [51] Herbert Spencer, “The Physiology of Laughter,” in The Bibliophile Library of Literature, Art, and Rare Manuscripts , vol. 22, ed. Nathan Haskell Dole, Forrest Morgan, and Caroline Ticknor (New York: International Bibliophile Society, 1904), 7566. [52] Alexis Greene, ed., Women Writing Plays: Three Decades of The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 138. [53] Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York: Routledge, 2006), 29, 33; italics in original. [54] Thompson, Performance Affects , 6; emphasis in original. [55] Quoted in Ruhl, “Six Small Thoughts on Fornés,” 187, 197. [56] Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, “Ghost Writing,” in Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief , ed. Kear and Steinberg (London: Routledge, 1999), 6. [57] Paul Allain and Jen Harvie, Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance , 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014), 149. Footnotes About The Author(s) Seokhun Choi holds a PhD in theatre from the University of Kansas and is currently Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Seoul. He has widely published on contemporary American and Korean theatre and popular culture, and his essays have appeared in Korean and international journals including Journal of American Drama and Theatre , Ecumenica: Journal of Theatre and Performance , and Theatre Research International . His two forthcoming articles (fall 2019) deal with two recent Shakespeare productions in South Korea and will appear in Kritika Kultura and Asian Theatre Journal , respectively. He is also a co-editor of the 2017 special issue of Cultural Studies Review on media, mobilities and identity in Asia. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Russell Stone Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community Russell Stone By Published on November 24, 2022 Download Article as PDF As the Federal Theatre Project fell under the scrutiny of Congressional investigations in its final months, National Director Hallie Flanagan relied on the significant show of public support from America’s religious communities to demonstrate the value of the Project in locally meaningful terms. When Flanagan was allowed to testify before the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities in December 1938, she cited nearly a hundred religious organizations of various faiths that had pledged their appreciation for the Federal Theatre. When asked if the Project had produced any plays that were “antireligious in nature,” she responded that the Federal Theatre had staged more religious plays than any group in the country, including church performances for Christmas programming in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities. [1] She even asserted that although the Federal Theatre’s primary purpose was to entertain its audience, it also offered plays that “must also and can also often teach” and are capable of “inculcat[ing] religious principles.” [2] That last point had proven especially effective in winning over the country’s religious communities, whose assurances of the Federal Theatre’s value for their congregations were sent to Flanagan’s office, her regional bureaus, and the Un-American Activities committee itself. In the weeks and months ahead, as the House Subcommittee on Appropriations, chaired by Representative Clifton Woodrum (D-VA), began its own investigation to decide funding of the federal arts programs, members arguing to maintain or to defund the Federal Theatre agreed that it had won impressive support among the religious community. This support was founded less on the artistic merits of producing, among their other offerings, obscure medieval drama—an argument that both Representatives and WPA Director Colonel F.C. Harrington made during the debate—than on the spiritual impact of the plays that religious leaders so valued for their congregations. [3] The extent of this support attested, too, to Flanagan’s efforts since the previous year to engage the religious community in the Federal Theatre across its several regional offices. In response to Flanagan’s call for the Federal Theatre to stage drama within the community via partnerships with churches, schools, and clubs, one of her most prolific directors was Gareth Hughes, who had been assigned to lead a religious unit when the Los Angeles Project opened in December 1935. [4] A Welsh-born, promising stage actor in New York in the 1910s, a silent film star in the following decade, and an itinerant theatre player after the advent of the talkies, he had largely disappeared from the public eye before the Federal Theatre came to Los Angeles. In the Project headquarters, he spoke to newspaper reporters of the fulfillment that he found in training and collaborating with younger actors. The press wrote of his ability to recite any line of Shakespeare, his attention to his younger colleagues trying their hand at historical drama, and “his kindness that is not sentimental, his love for the theatre, [and] his enthusiasm that has awakened and stimulated his actors.” [5] Over the next three years, these qualities would allow Hughes to become an effective advocate for Flanagan’s vision of bringing the Project into public arenas. Creating a traveling unit that brought medieval and early modern drama to community venues, Hughes adapted religious plays as pieces to be acted in churches as an extension of, and complement to, the liturgy. [6] He founded his two signature plays for the Los Angeles Project, The Nativity and Everyman , on engagement with church congregations as audience-participants, humanizing the play’s characters to foster empathy with this audience, and emphasizing the Christian tenets imbedded in the plays. [7] Through these strategies, Hughes established a production model of staging the plays within Los Angeles churches that fulfilled his personal agenda for the Project, responded to Flanagan’s call for regional offices to offer performances in collaboration with their local religious communities, and provided a line of defense against the Federal Theatre’s detractors, who perpetuated the groundless rumors that the Project had been infiltrated by Communists and was thus a government-funded, subversive enterprise. Rejecting these rumors, Hughes promoted it as a vehicle for realizing Flanagan’s vision among the smallest of audiences, especially within schools and churches. In the latter, his handling of The Nativity and Everyman as liturgical performances convinced the Los Angeles religious community that the Federal Theatre might be welcomed as a partner not merely for providing entertainment but even for augmenting the act of worship. Neighborhood by neighborhood, in its second largest market, his success in sacred venues won local support for the Project and in turn provided Flanagan with a valid, but ultimately futile, argument for the religious value of the Project in the escalating national debate over funding the Federal Theatre. Establishing an Audience for Religious Drama in Los Angeles Flanagan’s success in identifying an audience for the Federal Theatre, and Hughes’s particular success in appealing to the religious community in Los Angeles, relied on an ongoing reconsideration of staging Project plays. It has been well documented that the Federal Theatre’s chief audiences were those who had not previously seen live drama, and perhaps could not have afforded to do so, and those whose primary entertainment was provided by cinemas and radio programming. [8] By mid-1937, the Project had successfully drawn these working class audiences to its performances. In Los Angeles, the second largest Federal Theatre market behind New York, over a quarter of those attending Project performances self-identified as trade or office workers. [9] According to audience surveys, a spring run of The Merchant of Venice at the Hollywood Playhouse (featuring Hughes as Shylock) was also seen by a number of teachers, students, and housewives. [10] Soon thereafter, however, Flanagan announced her intention to reverse the model of attracting audiences to commercial houses rented by the Federal Theatre; rather, she wanted also to bring the Federal Theatre to the community and stage productions within public venues. Having founded the Project on an assurance of quality of plays,talent and the promise of live drama that would be at once entertaining, artistic, didactic, and capable of imparting an appreciation for the theatre among audiences unaccustomed to it, Flanagan wrote to her regional directors that in 1938 the Federal Theatre would have an opportunity for “growing up.” [11] She first called for an expansion of the Project beyond the commercial houses that it rented to host its productions and beyond urban areas into both rural and communal spaces, especially those that served the poor. By September 1937, the Federal Theatre had staged over 37,000 shows in parks, hospitals, schools, Civilian Conservation Corps camps for workers on relief, and public and private clubs across the country. Soon after, Flanagan began to consider how to establish permanent touring groups to stage productions in smaller cities and towns. [12] A key stakeholder in this expansion beyond commercial houses would be the religious community, who acknowledged the reciprocal benefits of staging religious drama and extensive Christmas programming that would bring live drama to a wider audience but would win the Project public support in turn. While her regional directors received suggestions for pieces of broad appeal, Flanagan’s more ambitious vision was to stage in select cities the late medieval mystery cycles, and the civic pageants staged to enact biblical history from the Creation to the Ascension. Frustrated at the scant amount of productions in the holiday season of 1936, she remarked to her regional directors that religious drama would offer the Project some defense against the “irate clergymen [who] storm into the office and accuse me of being anti-Christ.” [13] Then, into fall 1937, she encouraged them again to bring the holidays “into the community” by cooperating with local choirs and singing groups, churches, schools, orphanages, and homes for the elderly, broadcasting Christmas productions over the radio, and staging them at public venues. [14] In adopting this model, Federal Theatre officials had an extensive catalog of religious plays from which to choose. The Bureau of Research and Publication was charged with researching possible plays for production, and as they compiled lists of Greek and Roman, British, European, and American plays before and since 1895, staff members solicited recommendations from both Christian and Jewish organizations. [15] Religious leaders had assisted in local planning for the Project since its inception. As for Christmas programming, the Bureau published annotated lists of their suggested medieval and early modern religious plays. Among these pieces, the texts of miracle and mystery plays had only been made widely available in modern critical editions in the previous fifty years or so, and they had only been performed for modern audiences for just over thirty. It would be another two decades before scholarship into the plays began in earnest, and American theatre professionals were largely ignorant of medieval pieces that had not been rendered into modern English for stage performance. [16] Nor, however, were they subject to the controversies that had hindered productions of the mystery and morality plays among the previous generation, owing especially to the restrictions on the portrayal of God well into the twentieth century. [17] For example, in 1901, the English actor William Poel was able to stage the first modern production of Everyman , because it was largely unknown to censors in the Lord Chamberlains’ Office, which still enforced sixteenth-century laws against portraying the deity and “confining the limitless and potent God to the body of an actor, to his mortal gestures and mimicry.” [18] One of Poel’s actor-managers then brought the production to New York, where its presentation of religious material was legally permitted but still controversial for an audience largely ignorant of medieval drama. [19] Nonetheless, Everyman toured across eastern and midwestern cities for two years, suggesting an interest among American audiences that would support the production of similar plays in subsequent years. [20] The lack of formal censorship of religious material in the American theatre gradually allowed directors to more freely explore mystery and morality plays, which became increasingly popular through the 1910s as academic pieces suitable for both lectures and performances informed by the antiquarian sensibilities of Poel and his successors. [21] In the 1920s and 1930s, the reception of medieval drama diverged on either side of the Atlantic. In England, the Religious Drama Society, guided by a principle of “solemnity, simplicity, and sincerity,” performed biblical-themed pieces in churches and schools, and in the former they were allowed to portray divine characters, opened with prayers for the congregation, and anonymized their casts of players, all techniques that Hughes employed in Los Angeles. [22] In America,however, university campuses became popular venues for outdoor productions devoid of such liturgical elements. [23] This model evoked the origins of medieval drama as a public art to be staged within the community rather than on the professional stage, but it did not allow for the spiritual reflection encouraged by the Religious Drama Society in their church performances. [24] A memo circulating from the Federal Theatre’s Bureau of Research and Publication through Project offices recognized, however, that the primary challenge in staging these plays remained their inaccessibility. It encouraged directors that: Carefully studied scripts could be prepared, with business written in to interpret the characters, the lines and the action, with judicious cuttings and rearrangements of scenes, and even (though most rarely) with some word substitutions for obsolete or slang words. . . . Unlike the garbled actors’ versions of some of the plays, now in existence, the prepared scripts would give the playwright a production nearer to the original text; and the play itself would seem better on the stage than in the reading room of the library. Along with the revised play, suggestions could be made for the simplest kind of production that would allow the director to concentrate entirely upon the nature of the play.[25] To further encourage the performance of these plays, the Bureau issued a separate report on the universal appeal of their characters and themes. The authors noted, for example, that Herod in The Nativity was a particularly attractive character, long played as a boisterous hypocrite who rants and raves about his own kingly authority being usurped by the Christ child before he is dragged off to Hell. The Deluge , a comedic narrative of Noah and his wife, “should be rollicking and perhaps burlesqued a little . . . [and was] exceedingly interesting as a humanization of a Biblical story.” [26] Everyman had a certain thematic appeal (“the troubled spirit of man and the trials and tribulations common to most of us”) and that, given its potential to evoke reflection and pathos among the audience, was likewise ideal for the holiday season. [27] These observations suggest a concern for making the characters relatable and appealing to the audience through the allegorical narrative of human life from a state of sin to one of grace that is especially apparent in the morality plays. [28] Robert S. Sturges has argued that these plays served as “mediators between theater and religion,” in that they exhorted the audience to adhere to a virtuous, faith-based lifestyle, in contrast to the various representations onstage of villainous and transgressive behavior. [29] The didactic aspects of the plays have lent them a certain timelessness, as have the characters who populate them. [30] Although the presentation of Christ as both human and God and the “ultimately imitable” figure is central to the cycles, through the mix of comedic (e.g., Noah and Joseph) and bombastic (e.g., Herod) characters, the plays successfully mingle “sacred and profane” themes and figures, and humanize their narratives by emphasizing the traits and emotions of their large casts of characters. [31] Who the audience for the plays might be, however, took time for Project administrators to figure out. As the second largest Federal Theatre branch office after New York, both in terms of staffing and potential theatre-goers, Los Angeles was an ideal city in which to establish community partnerships and to stage pre-modern drama. Enjoying a uniquely deep pool of talent once employed in the film industry, the Los Angeles Project experimented with a wide range of genres and venues. During its first two years, it was largely distinguished by its success in drawing audiences back to the long-shuttered commercial houses rented by local administrators in Hollywood and downtown. [32] Staging medieval and early modern drama was initially left to academic-minded, veteran actors (including Hughes) through “Project 6,” a cooperative venture with the University of Southern California to stage pieces by Molière, the Jacobean duo Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shakespeare on campus in the spring of 1936. [33] Within a year, the Los Angeles Project was regularly able to sell out its five commercial houses, and whereas the productions at USC were staged for free for students and faculty, admission was charged for the shows in Hollywood and downtown, and revenue was allocated for paying rent for the theatres there. [34] When Los Angeles administrators first assigned Hughes to produce medieval religious drama during Christmas week of 1936, they selected the Mayan, one of these downtown houses that they had revitalized. Leading a hybrid classical and religious drama troupe, Hughes himself adapted from the York, Coventry, Chester, and Wakefield cycles two pieces, The Nativity and The Deluge . He also modernized a mumming play entitled St George and the Dragon and selected the music to accompany each of the plays. In the playbill, Hughes explained that he had followed the model of Tudor scribes who sought to reinvigorate Biblical plays written three centuries before their time and six centuries before his own. [35] Despite his careful attention to staging the plays, the Christmas run of 1936 would be the only time that he directed in one of the Los Angeles or Hollywood theatres that the Project rented. Whether or not the plays appealed to a ticket-buying audience in a commercial venue must have been a question to consider, but having drawn academic audiences to USC with “Project 6” productions, Hughes may have realized the relative inaccessibility of medieval drama (compared to Shakespeare) for the general public. In the director’s report filed to Project headquarters, he included a negative review from the Los Angeles Evening News , in which the critic noted that the plays may attract those few people interested in the history of drama but did not offer much entertainment value, and he admitted the actors’ difficulty in pronouncing the archaic words of the script. Hughes suggested in the same report that the religious plays were better suited for churches, schools, and libraries, where he encouraged Project officials to stage the plays each December. [36] They evidently heeded his advice, and in the following year his unit was given the opportunity to perform medieval and early modern drama in just these sorts of public venues in Los Angeles. The Nativity at St John’s (December 1937) Hughes dedicated himself in 1937 to responding to Flanagan’s call for Federal Theatre directors to stage plays in partnership with the community. Away from the commercial houses, he became an ambassador for the Project and a negotiator with civic, private, and religious clubs and organizations for booking performances of The Nativity for the holiday season. Although he occasionally had to convince the city’s religious leaders that the Federal Theatre was not a Communist organization, Hughes fostered personal relationships in the community that assuaged any political concerns about the national project. [37] As he wrote to Flanagan: As for the clergy, they are elated, and as I have said for two years, we have sorely needed a little unit like this—we have stressed the social drama too much, and too little attention paid to things spiritual. I am so happy in it all dear Ms. Flanagan especially now that I feel your co-operation and enthusiasm. I will do anything for you and it matters not a damn whether I get 94 or 175 dollars a month. The spirit of the thing is all.[38] His strategy for creating a sustainable audience for medieval drama within the religious community was threefold. No longer playing at commercial theatres, he re-created his troupe as a traveling one that would perform on location; he staged the plays not as mere entertainment but as performances that would complement the liturgy for the congregation-audience; and he revised his productions to make church leaders and members hosts, audiences, and participants. In several houses of worship, he convinced priests and ministers to participate in the performance. Having the clergy dress in costume and reading the Banns adapted from the Chester cycle (the prologue announcing the theme of the plays), lead a procession of the actors, and even read a speech on the Federal Theatre in their Sunday services before that week’s performance all helped Hughes to gain support from church leaders. [39] Widening his network through letters, meetings, and word of mouth, Hughes led his troupe in staging twelve performances of The Nativity in churches or church-sponsored organizations of multiple denominations that December. Hughes’s production decisions in staging The Nativity in these venues are evident in the multiple copies of script (his second adaptation, after the version performed at the Mayan) that he meticulously annotated for himself and others and in the detailed, descriptive letters that he sent Flanagan after each performance. Although he routinely categorized the letters as director’s reports, they were colored by his emotions and frustrations in convincing local churches to host his troupe, his attention to movement and music, and his effusive praise for Flanagan’s vision of community engagement. The signature performance of The Nativity that season was at St John’s, an Episcopalian church in the West Adams district, where Hughes’s troupe played on the invitation of the church’s dean and rector. A photograph of the opening procession that he included in a letter to Flanagan captures the scope of involvement from both Federal Theatre personnel and church members. Hughes carried a cross through the front doors and led the St John’s children and adult choirs alongside that of the Federal Music Project, while a second crucifer bore the Jerusalem cross (the medieval design of a large central cross surrounded by four smaller ones) ahead of the cast of the play and various extras recruited from the congregation. In all, one hundred and ten people from the church and the Federal Theatre and Music Projects passed along the nave to the high altar carrying all manner of props and liturgical items. Cast members brought banners representing various guilds to recall the medieval origins of the play, torches, and tapers, choir members held lanterns on poles, someone in the long line held up an ornamental star of Bethlehem to be used for the manger scene, and the pipe organist behind the altar and trumpeters following Hughes signaled the processional’s arrival. In a copy of the script that he annotated for the church’s dean, he made clear his intent for the congregation to participate. Hughes relied on “O Come All Ye Faithful” as the opening hymn, but the dean was to ask the congregation to stand and sing as well, and once the procession concluded, he was to provide the opening remarks describing the play’s subject and themes. [40] Hughes’s opening of the play at the Mayan the previous December sheds light on how considerably his production evolved in relocating from the commercial theatre to local churches. In the script for his first adaptation of The Nativity , Hughes notes that the play was to begin with a Federal Music Project choir marching from the lobby and up the aisles on either side of the audience. [41] Singing “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant,” they strode towards the lower of the theater’s two stages before exiting left and right while singing from offstage. Two actors dressed as friars and bearing lit tapers soon followed up the aisles. As the curtains of the lower stage opened, the friars stepped up to light the two candelabra there and placed oversized folios on two lecterns placed next to them. While the choir concluded the opening hymn, the friars stepped back to allow the audience to read the large, black and red scripts on the folios: “Nativity of the Child” on the left, and “Hail, Mary” on the right. A trumpet call signaled another actor to step through the curtains of the upper stage, and proclaiming himself as the prophet Isaiah, he announced the subject of the drama to come. The roles of cast members and spectators were firmly established: the one moves towards the stage while performing, and the other remains fixed in their seats as passive observers. In St John’s, however, the distinction between the two was not so rigid. Members of the church choir joined the procession, congregants sang and listened to their own church leader act in character, and continuous movement created an intimate performance space. While in the Mayan, he had relied on these lower and upper stages as the focal points of the main action for his audience, in St John’s he made use of the larger, intricately partitioned space to continuously shift his audience’s attention. In his final director’s report for the Los Angeles office, Hughes noted that because of the constant challenge of restaging the play in cramped settings during the December run, he relied on portable screens to provide a backdrop for his cast. [42] In St John’s, however, he seems to have made strategic use of the interior of the church. As he described to Flanagan in a letter the next morning, his actors recited their abbreviated lines or pantomimed the narrative from multiple spots in imitation of the figures portrayed in the stained glass images of the stations of the cross. Hughes based his usual role of Gabriel on Edward Burne-Jones’s rendition of the Annunciation, and with long blonde hair capped by a halo and a flowing white robe layered with gold trim and embroidered with a pattern of crosses at the hem, he stood still with his hands raised as if in prayer. Mary, inspired by Botticelli’s Venus, stood on the altar with one hand towards her chest and another drawing her garments close and looked askance from the crowd. [43] He reserved the high altar as a stage for the most important, solemn scenes of the play, including the “Magnificat,” the hymn to Mary that concludes the Annunciation. Remaining still until the choir sang the first words of the hymn, “my soul doth magnify the Lord,” Hughes slowly turned away from the actress who portrayed Mary, stepped down from the altar, and along the nave. When he exited through the atrium at the front of the cathedral, behind the view of the spectators, twelve girls and boys entered and retraced his steps towards the altar and knelt at the rail where parishioners normally took communion. They then arose in unison and returned to either side of the transept, their exit timed to the closing words of the Magnificat, “glory to the Father and to the Son, / and to the Holy Spirit: / As it was in the beginning, / is now, and will be for ever. Amen.” [44] This careful, methodical choreography of scenes with Mary, Joseph, and Gabriel was disrupted by Herod, the antagonist and comic foil of the play. As Hughes wrote in the explanatory notes that he distributed to the audience for performances of The Nativity , the role of Herod had a long and colorful history of buffoonery, involving yelling, rolling around, lashing out against his sentries, and the generally brutish and exaggerated behavior that inspired Hamlet’s line on actors who could “out-Herod Herod.” As a modern adaptor of the play, Hughes explained that he had inherited through the medieval cycles an especially prideful version of Herod that had developed in early English drama, and he allowed the character more depth and stage presence than any other in the play: he speaks in lengthy monologues, barks orders at his soldiers, and vacillates from bombast and outrage when he hears of the Christ child to grief over learning that his own son was killed in the Massacre of the Innocents. [45] The script annotations for The Nativity reveal the excitement that Herod immediately brings to the performance. Contrasting with the harps that announce Gabriel’s arrival in the Annunciation scene, for example, Herod enters the play cued by blaring trumpets and heralds, and his frequent tirades involved stomping in a fit of rage and shouting promises of vengeance against the Christ child. In his closing scene, as Herod learns of the death of his son, he delivers a final show of violent madness before acknowledging his life misspent and damnation. In a scene reminiscent of Faustus, Hughes noted that demons were to approach from the left and right to drag him away from the audience’s view. [46] Immediately thereafter, Hughes restored order and calm. He noted in his copy of the script that upon Herod’s departure he himself delivered a benediction for the audience and began the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty.” At the closing words, “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen,” the organ rang out the opening chords to “Christians Awake,” and the actors and extras sang the words of the eighteenth-century Yorkshire hymn, “salute the happy morn, whereon the Saviour of the world was born.” [47] He explained in his report to Flanagan that as they sang, he stepped down from the altar and led the recessional back towards the doors from which he had led the processional. Rather than the clergy and crucifers who had accompanied the director to begin the performance, he led the cast of characters, beginning with the actors portraying Mary and Joseph and concluding with those in supporting roles, along the nave to exit the cathedral. The actors left, while the congregation remained. In the early hours of the following morning, Hughes wrote Flanagan that “it was the happiest moment of my life, carrying the great jeweled cross and leading my boys and girls up to the Throne of God.” [48] The dean of St John’s responded in precisely the manner that Hughes must have hoped for: “given with reverence and will all the atmosphere of religion, [the performance] cannot help but do good in strengthening the faith of all who see the play.” [49] This reaction was valuable for Flanagan as well. Having received such frequent and detailed correspondence from Hughes regarding his performances of The Nativity , she had been well aware of the significance of the church bookings for the play, which had already been scheduled when she arrived in California in the fall of 1937. During this second visit to the west coast, she was preoccupied with accusations of nepotism and bribery among the more disgruntled staff and talent in Los Angeles, but Hughes’s relationship with the religious community evidently brought her some peace of mind. As she recorded in her travel notes, “I am awaited upon by a delegation asking me to look into the moral life of our actors, but in spite of this one cloud in the horizon we are doing the nativity plays in the Episcopalian church.” [50] After her arrival, she attended a production of Hansel and Gretel and Pinocchio staged by the children’s troupe at the Hollywood Playhouse, where she found a small but vociferous group of protestors awaiting her in the lobby. They echoed the increasingly widespread accusation of the Federal Theatre’s support of Communism but confessed, when she attempted to have a conversation over their concerns, that none of them had attended a play produced by the Los Angeles Project. It was a moment of honesty that she quickly used to her advantage, and so with the holidays approaching, she advised them on her way out of the lobby to go see Hughes’s production of The Nativity and reassess their opinion of the Project. [51] Flanagan publicly and privately stated her appreciation for Hughes and his religious unit beginning in those final weeks of 1937. Beyond maintaining their regular correspondence, she intervened with local WPA and Project administrators to secure musical instruments for the pieces that he selected for the church performances and began to endorse the value of the unit’s work to Los Angeles religious leaders and school administrators. [52] Everyman at St Joseph’s (September 1938) Encouraged by the reception of The Nativity among the local religious community, Hughes turned his attention the following year to developing for the Federal Theatre what he described to Flanagan as “a real 14 th [-]century production” of Everyman . [53] Unlike The Nativity , whose script he had adapted himself, the Bureau of Research and Publication provided him with a version of Everyman suitable for his desired production. In early 1936, just a few months after the Federal Theatre had been established, the Bureau had purchased the rights to a straightforward translation of Everyman newly completed by a Father Clarus Graves, a Benedictine priest and university professor from Minnesota. Hughes’s plans to stage the play came to fruition that summer, when his contact at St Joseph’s Cathedral, where he had staged The Nativity the previous December, wrote that while he looked forward to the biblical play for Christmas, he hoped, too, to host the premiere of the morality play. [54] The invitation provided Hughes with an opportunity for another signature church performance to follow the performance of The Nativity at St John’s the year before. St Joseph’s Cathedral was to celebrate that fall its Golden Jubilee, the fiftieth anniversary of the parish, and Hughes’s troupe was invited to stage their latest featured play on the opening night of the festivities in early September. As Hughes wrote to Flanagan, he considered his Federal Theatre production of Everyman as opportunity for his own redemption. Over the previous twenty years, professional productions of Everyman in Los Angeles had relied on a translation by the American poet George Sterling of the adaptation by the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Sterling’s translation was commissioned by the Polish director Richard Ordynski, who recruited Hughes himself to play the titular role in a 1917 production at Trinity Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. When Hughes accepted the invitation to stage Everyman at St Joseph’s, he wrote Flanagan that the version of the play used by the Project offered him a chance to return to “the glorious old original” of the text and atone for the “mess that I created in the English speaking world under Ordynske [sic]” two decades earlier. [55] Hughes’s preference for the Federal Theatre version stemmed from its faithful treatment of the source, whereas the earlier adaptation had effectively departed from its source for an early-twentieth-century audience. The Project’s version preserved the comedic elements of the play (when a number of would-be companions find excuses to abandon Everyman) and its physical display of penance (Everyman’s self-flagellation and wearing of a sackcloth), while keeping the narrative’s focus on the main character’s emotional and spiritual progression. In the preface to his translation, on the other hand, Sterling argued that von Hofmannsthal had “vivified and humanized” a play whose performance had bored Sterling himself with its “bleak and not always intelligible passages” that necessitated the translator’s task of modernizing the text and narrative: The appeal of ‘Everyman’ to the medieval mind must have been vast, for it was a child’s mind, and therefore one to be moved far more greatly by things seen than by things preached. But though the moral pill was deftly enough sugar-coated for the audience of those distant days, ‘Everyman’ can but seem a somewhat crude and unconvincing affair to the pampered and sophisticated public of today.[56] Besides revising the language of the play, the von Hofmannsthal-Sterling adaptation supplemented the narrative with a fuller backstory for the protagonist, portrayed as a hedonistic young man who enjoys banquets and camaraderie, a forlorn lover who quarrels with his partner, and a headstrong son who refuses to listen to his mother’s warnings about his lifestyle. With this translation, Ordynski offered a version of Everyman that challenges the audience to empathize with the eponymous protagonist. This is largely due to the recreation of that protagonist from a universal human figure to a symbol of materialism and greed born from wealth (the von Hofmannsthal-Sterling adaptation was subtitled “The Play of the Rich Man’s Death”). The result is an Everyman that may be recognizable to the audience not as a mirror of themselves but as a portrayal of a higher social class, and so his character is removed from the allegorical intent of the medieval original. [57] Much attention is given in Sterling’s translation to Everyman’s material world, constructed around an interpolated backstory in which we see him ordering his cooks to prepare feasts, scorning his poor neighbors seeking alms, constructing a pleasure garden, courting his lover, and lording over his estate. Contemporary reviews of the production comment on the staging of elaborate scenes to display this opulence in the first half of the play. [58] Appropriately amongst this setting, Everyman is a hedonistic landowner who admires his opulence and sermonizes on the power of material wealth to elevate a man’s status above others: “Money lifts the world above/All mean exchange and barter,” he explains to a friend, “and each man/In his own sphere is as a lesser God.” [59] In the second half of the play, when Everyman should repent this previously sinful behavior, the von Hofmannsthal-Sterling adaptation is oddly ambiguous. It is the protagonist’s newfound sense of morality that strengthens Good Deeds and sets up the resolution of the play, but empathy of the poor and the field workers, the men whom Everyman had previously scorned but who now take pity on him. Such a reaction is not so easy for the audience. Given Everyman’s arrogance and petulance as the titular “rich man,” he can equally be cast as the object of their empathy as well, the intent of the morality play as a genre, or desire to see him punished and stripped of the material possessions that he flaunts, a reaction made possible by the modern revision of the play. Both receptions rely on the moral caveat that even one who is socially and financially superior to the audience will suffer the same fate. Nearly twenty years later, in September, 1936, the von Hofmannsthal-Sterling adaptation of the play served as the script for another, far more ambitious Los Angeles production. [60] Daily features in the Los Angeles Times hinted at the extravagant staging of the play by the Danish director and actor Johannes Poulsen at the Hollywood Bowl, where Everyman was billed as “the greatest spectacle ever offered in Hollywood” and “an epic of humanity, with comedy, drama, thrills, and throbs,” Poulsen’s Everyman presented three spaces to the audience. [61] Golden-painted gates opened to reveal heaven erected on a platform high above the stage, where a queen presided over an angelic court, a medieval village housed the initial scenes, in which Everyman surrounds himself with friends and entertainment, and a glimmering Byzantine cathedral towered above the audience’s gaze. The cathedral served as Everyman’s initial destination, the place to which he follows Good Deeds before continuing to heaven above, and it rested upon a series of steps representing the progression of history before the late medieval composition of Everyman – presumably a suggestion of the passage of time and universal nature of mortality that the protagonist must accept, as well as the triumph of Christianity. Poulsen had conceived of his adaptation of Everyman as a festival play that would be produced as if it were a motion picture, especially in its elaborate costume, lighting, ballet numbers, and the musical accompaniment provided by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. On the opening night, red flares lined the streets surrounding the venue, and multiple spotlights drew attention to the seating area, where Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and a host of celebrities from the entertainment industry and civic leaders arrived along a red, velvet carpet leading to their choice seats near the stage, beneath Poulsen’s monumental settings. [62] As the Federal Theatre Bureau of Research and Publication noted, Everyman relies not on spectacle but emotional investment from the audience. The structure of the text, beginning with God’s lament and subsequent summoning of Death to fetch Everyman, ensures that this audience is privy to a divine plan of which the protagonist is ignorant and so allows them to scoff at his futile attempts to evade his own mortality. [63] As the narrative progresses, they must be encouraged to empathize with Everyman, respond to his sorrowful displays of emotion when he is abandoned by his friends, and take heed of his willingness to adhere to Knowledge and Good Deeds, who advise him towards redemption. Through this empathy, Everyman as a morality play relies on the assumption that an audience would be motivated to receive the protagonist as an exemplar of the human condition and reject the behavior represented by those who would lead them astray. [64] Poulsen’s handling of this adaptation suggests an exaggerated notion of what John McKinnell underscores as a central aspect of staging Everyman : ensuring that the audience becomes distracted by the revelry of the protagonist’s hedonism earlier in the narrative to the point that they forget his transgressions and thus the pending return of Death at the play’s end. [65] It is reasonable to assume that the more the audience is entertained by sights and sounds on stage, the more they forget about this overarching structure of the play that begins with God’s anger and disappointment in humanity and concludes with Everyman foreswearing all of the worldly entertainments presented to the audience. However, compelling the audience to do so also threatens to undermine the crucial dramatic irony of Everyman , reliant upon the audience’s knowledge of, and the protagonist’s ignorance of, the roles of God and Death. In the original narrative, any distraction offered by mundane entertainments is abruptly removed for the second half. Everyman finds himself abandoned not only by his friends but eventually, too, by the allegorical representations of his physical and intellectual qualities (Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits), a moment that also has the potential to surprise the audience. [66] In Poulsen’s staging of the play, those mundane entertainments never leave the stage, for they are intended to captivate the audience for the duration of the production, rather than for Everyman alone as evidence of his distraction from spiritual matters in the first half of the narrative. This intent to unceasingly stimulate the audience with the trappings of set design, costume, dance numbers, and lighting was Poulsen’s own, directorial interpolation, an edifice of spectacle built onto the textual additions already offered by von Hoffmansthal and Sterling. In that, he was effective. As a Times critic commented on the experience of viewing the play, “that such magic of stage craft were possible no one would ever dream.” [67] Although Hughes had particular ideas about how his production might appear before the audience in a church setting, his focus remained on the spiritual message of the play’s narrative. In his director’s report for the Los Angeles office, he wrote of the same challenges and resolutions of staging Everyman as he had faced in staging The Nativity the year before. The venues were too small, he could never get quite the number of Federal Music Project performers that he needed, and he relied again on large screens to serve as a portable backdrop, since many venues lacked a proper stage. [68] As he had done the previous December, Hughes described many of his staging details to Flanagan in frequent letters written after each performance. To complement the simplicity of the script in the Graves translation and make the best use of the churches where his troupe performed, Hughes relied on careful positioning of his actors and props to focus the audience’s attention. [69] He again insisted on carefully choreographed movement in performing the play. When the other characters approached and departed from Everyman and thus away from the audience’s attention, the staging resembled a processional, and it has been argued that keeping the protagonist fixed amidst this deliberate, minimal movement emphasizes his isolation. [70] As he had done in St John’s, Hughes had his actors otherwise stand in “stained glass attitudes” in St. Joseph’s, a stage direction indicating that they were to deliver their lines in tableau-vivant poses reminiscent of the figures in the cathedral’s windows and stations of the cross, and rely on physical gestures and exaggerated emotions. [71] Perhaps anticipating his audience’s lack of familiarity with the play, he also relied on embroidered titles (e.g., “Good Deeds,” “Strengthe”) across his actors’ costumes to identify the allegorical figures, as captured in photographs that he included with his director’s report for the Los Angeles office. [72] The primary characters were distinguished by these labels and their costumes: Good Deeds wore a halo, Knowledge wore a crown, and Death appeared in dark flowing robes and a veil that covered his face. As he had done just over twenty years ago on his first visit to Los Angeles, Hughes played the titular role, wearing a variegated, ornate Elizabethan costume for the majority of the play and plain white robes for the last moments, as the character prepares himself for death. Standing in place and relying on gesticulations and exaggerated manners to convey emotion, the actors remained before screens painted to resemble wood paneling, which the art director had borrowed from Federal Theatre productions of Shakespearean plays. Whereas Everyman and the allegorical figures thus relied on movement and posturing within various areas of the church interior, Hughes kept another visual cue in the play fixed in a central location. Death is the only other constant presence in the play besides Everyman, and the Federal Theatre script calls for him to remain in place immediately after he enters the play. As Everyman opens, a messenger explains to the audience its primary themes (the transitory nature of life and the futility of sinful behavior), and the figure of God laments that humanity has devoted itself to sin and pleasure, a perverted state of the world that elicits disappointment and anger. “I hoped well that Everyman/In my glory should make his mansion,” he begins, but observes that in their hedonism and negligence of divine mercy, those collectively termed “Everyman” must be met with justice, and so he summons Death to begin the action of the play. [73] From the first lines of the play, the audience is thus made aware that death is the only outcome of the play, emphasized by the fact that the character does not leave the audience’s view. [74] Death is summoned to serve as both messenger and audience, and while he interacts with the protagonist in their dialogue early in the play, in Hughes’s staging, Death remained fixed before the front of the congregation, a passive viewer of Everyman’s vain attempts to evade the mortality of which he is a harbinger. [75] Along with the audience, Death waits to see not merely when the protagonist will die but how he will do so: that is, whether or not Everyman will earn his redemption in time, a suspense that he exaggerates by placing an hour glass and lit candle on a table in the center of the audience’s view. The script also noted that the characters and the audience might track Everyman’s progress through the Book of Life, an inventory of his good and bad deeds that an angel places on the same table and a prop to which Death and Good Deeds are occasionally prompted to point as a reminder of man’s selfish, overly indulgent past. Everyman, too, is aware of the presence of Death and the book. In begging his family to accompany him on his dreaded journey, his cue is to look over his shoulder at the ominous figure and explain that “I must give a reckoning straight/For I have a great enemy, that hath me in wait.” [76] In examining the book with Good Deeds, he further calls the audience’s attention to the book by crying out that “for one letter here I cannot see” on the side of the ledger meant to record his acts of kindness and charity. [77] When Knowledge and Confession instruct him how to scourge his body of its sinfulness by whipping himself and dressing in sackcloth and how to pray to God for mercy, he finds his “accounts” are balanced in the book and is ready for the act of sacrament and unction offered by a priest. By the last moments of the play, Everyman, having atoned for his past transgressions and seeking the purification offered by Knowledge and Confession, looks towards the audience and delivers a reflective monologue that addresses those watching him: Methinketh, alas, that I must be gone; To make my reckoning and my debts pay, For I see my time is nigh spent away. Take example, all ye that this do hear or see, How they that I loved best do forsake me, Except my GOOD-DEEDS that bideth truly.[78] As he moves towards a mock grave, he appeals to God for mercy, motivated not by fear for what the afterlife may hold for him but by the faith that he now articulates in his maker: “In manus tuas” (“in your hands”), he states, “commendo spiritum meum” (“I entrust my spirit”). [79] At this moment, Hughes had his musicians ring a bell that, as he wrote Flanagan, he bought out of pocket, because its toll suited the solemnity of playing the morality play in a cathedral and reminded him of the church bells he heard knell while walking one evening in the medieval Bavarian town of Rothenberg. [80] In the director’s report, he noted, too, that Handel’s “Dead March” from Saul would accompany Everyman’s descent into his grave. [81] Finally, at Everyman’s final words, the script prompts Death to extinguish the candle to signal the end of his mortal life, while Knowledge explains to the audience that the protagonist was successful in his journey to heaven and greeted by angels, given voice by the choir’s chanting. In Hughes’s handling of the play, Everyman is thus portrayed as the embodiment of sinful but ultimately pensive humanity, rather than an individual wealthy man whose atonement is sudden and unconvincing. He is not quite an innocent or passive victim, for the play suggests that he has lived life according to his own terms before Death’s arrival, but neither is he an arrogant figure whose redemption can be called into question, as he had been presented in the von Hoffmanstahl-Sterling adaptation. [82] The Federal Theatre script underscores the qualities of Everyman that compel the audience to associate themselves with him: when confronted by Death, he seems ignorant of his own mortality, and after realizing that he cannot bribe his adversary, he quickly realizes that his fate is not merely the act of dying but of dying without having recorded many good deeds in his book of recompense (“my writing is full unready,” he explains to Death, as a bell tolls and the book remains in full view). [83] From the moment the two meet, Everyman acknowledges his isolation, and although his subsequent abandonment by the allegorical representations of both his material wealth and his physical senses (Beauty, Strength, and Five Wits) is hardly a surprise for the audience or the character himself, the emotional impact of these scenes is still poignant. [84] When Everyman cannot compel the latter group of figures to enter the grave with him at the play’s end, he addresses the audience, per the script’s direction, to explain, “how they that I loved best do forsake me,” except for Good Deeds, who carries his book of reckoning into the grave. [85] Hughes’s Everyman also shows a justified range of emotions. He is understandably afraid at the unexpected arrival of Death, he is hurt by the rejection of his companions, and he earnestly seeks to understand how to get to heaven, once Good Deeds, Knowledge, and Confession explain how to do so. Under Hughes’s direction, Everyman presented its title character as an archetype of the human condition that was especially suited to a church performance: beginning the play in sin, he concludes it in a state of grace, a maturation of the character that provides an exemplum for the audience. [86] New Audiences for Religious Drama Following the performance, Hughes added Everyman to his troupe’s repertoire for local high schools and colleges. Applying the same model to Los Angeles school administrators as that which he had established within the religious community, he wrote letters, held meetings with educators, and attended charity events where he was asked to speak on Flanagan and the Federal Theatre. His troupe frequently performed scenes from Shakespearean plays (often The Merchant of Venice , Richard II , and Hamlet ) for high schools and charitable organizations, and Everyman served as a feature play for the drama department at Los Angeles City College a few weeks after the performance at St Joseph’s. Without a proper office for audience research (the Los Angeles branch had been closed in mid-1937), Hughes both created his own audience in the community and inspired them to provide feedback. [87] Among the thank-you notes from local clergy, principals, and faculty, none appeared in an official Federal Theatre report. Rather, these individuals wrote personal letters to Flanagan in Washington, WPA’s California offices, and Los Angeles Project headquarters. Their letters attested to Hughes’s fulfillment of a foundational tenet of the Project to those who could not otherwise see live drama: it impacted them emotionally and intellectually. The Diocese of Los Angeles and San Diego wrote the Los Angeles Project, for example, that a performance of The Nativity for one of its impoverished neighborhoods had “brought a glimpse of beauty rare in their lives,” while a faculty member at Los Angeles City College noted that students were keenly interested in Hughes’s performance as Shylock, in that he “swung the sympathy of the audience back to a racial sympathy at the end.” [88] Flanagan replied to the college’s Department of English that she considered Hughes’s work in the community more impactful for the Project than those performances drawing large audiences downtown and in Hollywood. His traveling troupe, built within a network of churches and schools, required a resolve for which she expressed her “greatest admiration and affection.” [89] These anecdotal testimonies may have been written in support of Hughes and his troupe, but they had applications well beyond Los Angeles. By spring of 1939, when the Los Angeles Project had been largely dismantled, Hughes resigned as director of its Shakespeare and religious unit ahead of the official closure of the Federal Theatre. However, he soon found other avenues for pursuing his belief that the mystery and morality plays could still be staged as narratives embedded within the religious service and performances intended to supplement the liturgy and inspire spiritual reflection. On 30 November 1944, just over five years after the termination of funding for the Federal Theatre, Hughes wrote Flanagan from the isolated village of Nixon, Nevada. He explained to her that he had taken up missionary work on the Paiute reservation that spanned the northern part of the state. He confided in his longtime correspondent that he found the work to be fulfilling yet lonely, and he admitted how he often reflected on the Federal Theatre, Flanagan’s leadership, and “the untimely end of our beloved project.” [90] Responding two weeks later from Smith College, Flanagan suggested that Hughes’s new career was hardly a surprise to those who knew his personality and work ethic, and when she recalled in turn their accomplishments in the Project, she was particularly thankful for his “beautiful religious plays.” [91] He became a working, if not ordained, minister, applying the role that he had begun in the Federal Theatre—an actor and director who considered himself a spiritual leader when staging medieval drama within the religious community—to the tribal community in Nevada. A reporter in Los Angeles wrote that Hughes approached his missionary work in Nevada “as though he had stepped back into the 14 th century, using the patterns of teaching that inspired the early [biblical drama] of the Church,” [92] and Hughes explained to a friend that he still performed (presumably playing multiple parts) The Nativity at Christmas and Everyman during Lent. [93] As Hughes wrote of these performances, “when produced in church or theatre in a spirit of reverence and with a minimum of stage ‘business,’ these glorious little plays have unbelievable beauty, power, and exquisite poetry.” [94] This steadfast belief that elaborate costume and staging might distract the audience from the text and the reflective, solemn experience that it offered was fundamental to Hughes’s success in the Federal Theatre. Situating performances of the medieval plays as an extension of the liturgy, he found in the religious community the opportunity to use live drama as a spiritual teaching tool for the audience. So successful were these performances during Hughes’s tenure as a Project director in Los Angeles that they ultimately provided evidence for Flanagan in her argument before the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities in December 1939. As she explained to the Committee, the Federal Theatre had proven that plays could not only entertain but even, within its religious offerings, instill spiritual values in their audiences. In the two years leading up to that testimony, Hughes had directly responded to her call for Project leaders across the country to introduce live drama beyond commercial houses and engage with religious communities, in particular. Flanagan’s original directive was not without its political aims, given that she needed religious leaders to show public support for the Project. However, Hughes relied on the mystery and morality plays to sermonize to his audience-congregation, an objective that she had not articulated in addressing her directors in 1937. In so doing, his productions of medieval religious plays helped Flanagan both realize and expand on her vision for what the Federal Theatre could accomplish at the local level. References [1] 76 Cong. Rec. vol. 84, pt 7, 2,866–867 (1939). [2] Ibid, 2,869. [3] Ibid., 8,089. For the references to Everyman and The Nativity , see ibid., 7,291 and 7,372; Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 114 (1939). [4] Hallie Flanagan, Arena (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940), 276. [5] Sanora Babb, “The Los Angeles WPA Theatre Project,” New Theatre 11, no. 6 (1936): 23. [6] In referring to his sources for The Nativity , Hughes used the term “mystery” plays for the cycles of biblical drama, whereas the Federal Theatre Project used the term “miracle” in newspaper advertisements. As Meg Twycross, “Medieval English Theatre: Codes and Genres,” in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c.1350 – c.1500 , ed. Peter Brown (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 456, notes, the designation “miracle” for the genre did not remain in widespread use beyond the late Middle Ages. [7] John R. Elliott, Jr., Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1989), 56, writes that the Religious Drama Society in Hughes’s native Great Britain produced religious plays in England in a similar fashion. [8] John O’Connor, “The Federal Theatre Project’s Search for an Audience,” in Theatre for Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 1830 – 1980 , ed. Bruce A. McConachie and Daniel Friedman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 171, and Cecelia Moore, The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 9. [9] O’Connor, “The Federal Theatre Project’s Search for an Audience,” 174. [10] “Merchant of Venice: Audience Survey Report (Los Angeles, CA)” 14 May 1937, RG 69, Box 254, 2287303, National Archives (NA). [11] Hallie Flanagan, “Design for the Federal Theatre’s Season: In which the director of the FTP states some plans for the year in 1938,” FTP, Series 1, Box 4, Folder 2, George Mason University Libraries (GMUL). See Bonnie Nelson Schwartz, Voices from the Federal Theatre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2003), xii. Hallie Flanagan, “Brief delivered by Hallie Flanagan before the Committee on Patents, House of Representatives,” 8 February 1938. Federal Theatre Project Collection (1932–1943), ML31.F44, Container 5, Library of Congress (LC), pledged that no plays “of a cheap, trivial, outworn, or vulgar nature” would be produced. [12] Frederic H. Bair, “Educational Aspects of the Federal Theatre Project,” 12–15 September 1937, FTP, Series 1, Box 16, Folder 16, GMUL; Hallie Flanagan, “FTP Policy Board Meeting,” 12 April 1938, Hallie Flanagan (1890–1969) Papers, T-Mss 1964-002, Series 1: Federal Theatre Project, Sub-series 2: Administrative Files (1935–1939), Box 8: Administrative Files, New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts (NYPL). [13] Hallie Flanagan, “Talk at the Meeting of Regional Staff,” 19 August 1937. FTP, Container 962, LC. [14] Hallie Flanagan: “The Christmas Program for the Federal Theatre – To the Regional Directors,” 14 October 1937, FTP, Container 2, LC. [15] Katherine Clugston, “Reorganization of the Play Bureau,” September, 1936, FTP, Series 1, Box 4, Folder 15, GMUL; “Religious Letters of Commendation,” FTP, Container 1, LC. [16] Stanley J. Kahrl, “The staging of medieval English plays,” in The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama , ed. Eckehard Simon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 130–48 [17] Katie Normington, Medieval English Drama: Performance and Spectatorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 84. [18] Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 3. Poel still took care to have an actor read the role of God (renamed Adonai) from offstage. Susanne Rupp, “Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology,” in Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England , ed. Susanne Rupp and Tobias Doring (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 131, argues that the prevailing theological concept behind these concerns over presenting God on stage was a sacrosanct “tension between [human] knowledge and [divine] secret [ensuring] that the fundamental difference between God and his creature is maintained.” See also Alexandra F. Johnston, “English community drama in crisis: 1535–80,” in Drama and Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe , ed. Alan Hindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 265, for Protestant receptions of the plays’ Catholic heritage and Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: Faber, 1968), 109–15, for the Puritans’ objections to the humanization of God onstage. The laws were rescinded in 1951. [19] Elliott, Jr., Playing God , 42–62. See also Katie Normington, Modern Mysteries: Contemporary Productions of Medieval English Cycle Dramas (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007), 24–25. [20] Robert Potter, The English Morality Play: Origins, History and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 224. [21] Claire Sponsler, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 156–65. See also John Marshall, “Modern productions of medieval English plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre , ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge, 1994), 290. [22] Elliott, Jr., Playing God , 57; Sponsler, Ritual Imports , 167, and Gerald Weales, Religion in Modern English Drama (Philadelphia, 1961), 111-12. There is no surviving evidence suggesting that Hughes was directly influenced by member of the Religious Drama Society, but he was likely aware of their church performances by the late-1930s. Hughes was an ardent theatre scholar, and he had kept abreast of live drama in England since his professional days in London, notably through his friendship and correspondence with Iden Payne, director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and admirer of the Federal Theatre. [23] Sponsler, Ritual Imports, 169. [24] Although Johnston, “English community drama in crisis: 1535–80,” 248–49, notes that the plays could be staged for any number of practical reasons (e.g., festivals, fundraising), Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack, English Drama: A Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 11, argue that the procession of the plays through the streets of a given city was intended “to consecrate the everyday environment.” [25] Federal Theatre Project, Play Bureau, “Suggested Repertory of Classic English Plays,” Records, RG 69, Box 348, 2385588, NA. [26] Federal Theatre Project, Bureau of Research and Publication, “Publication Report,” Records, RG 69, Box 161, 2526405, NA. [27] Ibid. [28] Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 210, argues that the plays emphasize for the audience a moral interpretation of biblical history, founded on the “virtues of obedience and faith.” See, too, Christine Richardson and Jackie Johnston, Medieval Drama (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991), 98, for the central theme of the progression from sinfulness to grace. Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 79–80, argues of the morality plays that, although this moral teaching of sin and salvation lay at the heart of the narrative, their “flamboyantly bad behavior . . . is by no means entirely subordinated to the plays’ themes of repentance.” [29] Robert S. Sturges, The Circulation of Power in Medieval Biblical Drama: Theaters of Authority (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 136–40. [30] Margaret Rogerson, “Medieval Mystery Plays in the Modern World: A Question of Relevance?”, The Yearbook of English Studies 43 (2013): 362, notes that the 2012 revival of the York cycle used the allegorical nature of the plays to recast the narrative of Adam and Eve through child actors, who are replaced by adults after the Fall. [31] Christina M. Fitzgerald, The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 145; David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 240; See Lynette R. Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4, and Ruth Harriett Blackburn, Biblical Drama under the Tudors (Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015), 17. [32] John Musgrove (Federal Theatre Project Research Bureau), “Theatre Buildings in Los Angeles,” Records of the Work Projects Administration (1922–1944), Records, RG 69, Box 242, 2319732, NA. [33] Katherine T. von Blon, “Government Subsidy for Drama Seen,” Los Angeles Times , March 1, 1936, California State Library (CSL). [34] Susan Quinn, Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times (New York: Walker & Co., 2008), 214; Stacy Claire Brightman, “The Federal Theatre Project in Los Angeles” (PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 1999), 79–80. [35] “Program Notes Regarding the Miracle Plays,” FTP, Container 1046, LC. [36] Production Records (“Miracle Plays”), FTP, Container 962, LC. [37] In December, 1937, he reported to Flanagan that leaders in the local Baptist community had asked him whether the Federal Theatre supported Communism, and then in October, 1938 he notified her that certain educators among Los Angeles’s Catholic community would not host his troupe, owing to the same suspicions of the Project. See Letters, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, December, 1937 and October, 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1: Correspondence, Box 6: Miscellaneous A:Z (1935–1958), NYPL; Elizabeth A. Osborne, Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 9. [38] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 8 December 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [39] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, December 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [40] Hughes, The Nativity , Records, RG 69, Box 306, 2315596, NA. [41] Hughes, The Nativity , Federal Theatre Project Scripts (1935–1939), Box 8, University of Southern California Libraries Special Collections (USCL). [42] Production Records (“The Nativity”), FTP, Container 1046, LC. [43] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, December, 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [44] All stage directions refer to the Hughes’s own annotated copy for the December, 1937 performances: Hughes, The Nativity , Records, RG 69, Box 306, NA. [45] “Program Notes Regarding the Miracle Plays,” FTP, Container 1046, LC; See Sturges, The Circulation of Power , 55–57, and Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe , 107. [46] Hughes, The Nativity , Records, RG 69, Box 306, 2315596, NA. [47] Ibid. [48] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 21 December1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [49] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 21 December 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [50] Hallie Flanagan, Travel Notes, 19 November 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 2, Box 9, NYPL. [51] Flanagan, Arena , 284. [52] Ibid., 257. [53] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, December, 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [54] Letter, Father William to Gareth Hughes, 28 July 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [55] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 8 August 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [56] George Sterling, The Play of Everyman (San Francisco: A.M. Robertson, 1917), “Preface.” [57] Potter, The English Morality Play , 230. [58] “Theatre Notes,” Los Angeles Herald , 8 January 1917, and 17 January 1917, CSL. [59] Sterling, The Play of Everyman , 21. [60] The 1917 version was republished as The California Festival Edition of the Play of Everyman (Los Angeles: The Primavera Press, 1936). [61] Advertisement, Los Angeles Times , 8 September 1936, CSL. [62] “‘Everyman’ Lures Society,” Los Angeles Times , 9 September 1936, CSL. [63] Ron Tanner, “Humor in Everyman and the Middle English Morality Play,” Philological Quarterly 70 (1991): 150. [64] Sponsler, Drama and Resistance , 80. [65] John McKinnell, “How Might Everyman Have Been Performed?”, in Bells Chiming from the Past: Cultural and Linguistic Studies on Early English , ed. Isabel Moskowich-Spiegel and Begoña Crespo-García (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 129. [66] Phoebe S. Spinrad, “The Last Temptation of Everyman,” Philological Quarterly 64, no. 2 (1985): 192. [67] “Fire Postpones ‘Everyman,’ Show Will Go on Tonight,” Los Angeles Times , 14 September 1936, CSL. [68] Production Report (“Everyman”), FTP, Container 1006, LC. [69] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 8 August 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [70] Stanton B. Garner, Jr., “Theatricality in Mankind and Everyman,” Studies in Philology , 84 no. 3 (1987): 281, observes that the allegorical figures move through the play “with an almost processional simplicity”; Yeeyon Im, “The ‘Scourge of Penance’ and a ‘Garment of Sorrow’: Catholic Reforms and the Spectacle of the Passion in Everyman ,” Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 24 (2016): 137–38. [71] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 8 August 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. Dunbar H. Ogden, The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 114, argues that the physical gestures employed in church performances were rooted in the mass; in Ibid., 165, he identifies the primary emotions of awe, joy, sorrow, fear, and anger as those to be portrayed in an exaggerated fashion within the large space of a medieval cathedral. [72] Lesley Wade Soule, “Performing the mysteries: demystification, story-telling and over-acting like the devil,” European Medieval Drama 1 (1997): 221. Leslie Thomson, “Dumb Shows in Performance on the Early Modern Stage,” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 29 (2016), 28, notes that the convention was maintained into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. [73] Unknown, “Everyman,” 2, FTP Scripts, Box 16, USCL. [74] Thomas F. van Laan, “ Everyman : A Structural Analysis,” PMLA 78, no. 5 (1963): 466. [75] Thomas Willard, “Images of Mortality,” in Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death , ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 418 [76] Unknown, “Everyman,” 9, FTP Scripts, Box 16, USCL. [77] Ibid., 14. [78] Ibid., 24. [79] Ibid., 25. [80] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 29 August 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [81] Production Report (“Everyman”), FTP, Container 1006, LC. [82] Jérome Hankins, “Staging Everyman . A ‘Dance of Life,’ or of the use of medieval drama to re-energize our contemporary stage,” Etudes Anglaises: Revue du Monde Anglophone 66 (2013): 397. [83] Allen D. Goldhamer, “ Everyman : A Dramatization of Death,” Classica et Mediaevalia 30 (1969): 589–99, posits that a key detail suggesting the protagonist’s unawareness of mortality is the fact that he does not recognize Death when the two first encounter each other. [84] Julie Paulson, “Death’s Arrival and Everyman’s Separation,” Theatre Survey: The Journal of the American Society for Theatre Research 48 (2007): 126, argues that this awareness of isolation is thematically unique among the morality plays, which feature an allegorical battle between virtuous and sinful behavior, rather than a character’s psychological reaction to pending death; Bob Godfrey, “ Everyman (Re)Considered,” European Medieval Drama 4 (2000): 165: “the personal characteristics have been adopted to make the internal conflict of Everyman more immediately poignant to the audience. Foregrounding the physical attributes in this way makes unavoidable an empathetic response to the acting of these final moments in the play.” [85] Unknown, “Everyman,” 24, FTP Scripts, Box 16, USCL. [86] Potter, The English Morality Play , 53–54. [87] O’Connor, “The Federal Theatre Project’s Search for an Audience,” 173. [88] Letter, Gertrude Peifer to Jerome Coray, 23 December 1937, Records, RG 69, 1068204, NA; Letter, Mabel L. Loop to Gareth Hughes, 22 November 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [89] Letters, Hallie Flanagan to O.D. Richardson, 2 December 1938 and Hallie Flanagan to Gareth Hughes, 29 November 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [90] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, Undated, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [91] Letter, Hallie Flanagan to Gareth Hughes, 12 December 1944, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [92] “Actor Turned Minister Comes Back for Visit,” Los Angeles Times , 15 September 1952. CSL. [93] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Charlton Laird, Undated, Gareth Hughes Papers (1925–1965), NC803, Box 1: Correspondence, University of Nevada, Reno Special Collections. [94] Gareth Hughes, “Mediaeval Religious Drama,” The Desert Churchman , 3, no. 5 (1945), 3. Footnotes About The Author(s) RUSSELL STONE is Assistant Provost for Academic Assessment at Boston University. As a scholar of the classical tradition, he has published widely on the reception of Alexander the Great in medieval Europe. His current research focuses on a more recent legacy of that tradition, the staging of classical and medieval drama within the Federal Theatre Project. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. 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Christophe Collard Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Christophe Collard By Published on May 30, 2018 Download Article as PDF Weary of endlessly scavenging for funding, would-be independent filmmaker John Jesurun decided one day in the early 1980s to make films without using a camera and “Let the audience be the camera” instead. [1] Pragmatic par excellence , this new approach effectively launched the career of one of multimedia theatre’s most inventive innovators while generating a body of work characteristically concerned with reconciling the apparently irreconcilable. With his main theme of exploring the rampant technologization of contemporary culture and its effects on consciousness and communication alike, Jesurun’s artistic practice challenges one-dimensional interpretations while simultaneously underscoring the processes that constitute our perception. The artist’s incessant interplay with media of all kinds thereby strikes as the most obvious strategy, with his texts’ pervasive multilingualism a close second. And yet, as Hans-Thies Lehmann once observed, scenography and dramaturgy can only meaningfully meet via the performer’s body . [2] If we borrow Duke Ellington’s favourite phrase describing his music as “beyond categories,” [3] John Jesurun’s theatre aesthetic could accordingly be situated as conceived along a paradigm encompassing transgression, fluidity, and blending to move, indeed, ‘beyond’ conceptions of ‘categories’ and towards what anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Bradd Shore have called an intrinsically ecological inclination. [4] When, moreover, taking into account the insight yielded by intermedia studies that borders between communicative modes are the product of a similar kind of irreducible flux, plurimedial dramaturgies staging such organic inter-relatedness can help us recalibrate the quality of our thinking. For if we focus on the ‘live’ body in a heavily mediatized theatrical space, it becomes clear that the former functions at once as an enabling device and a site of refusal. Operating along a logic of connecting dispersed content, Jesurun’s emphasis on the performer’s presence in the here-and-now as a semiological nexus generates a sense of mediatised imbrication of all of the performative event’s constituents. Or as his long-time compagnon de route Bonnie Marranca has argued in her Ecologies of Theater (1996), an organicist conception of contemporary theatre that “inquire[s] into the relationship of mind and spirit” under the aegis of the performers’ biological ‘liveness.’ [5] Bonnie Marranca is similarly to be credited for coining the concept of ‘mediaturgy’ along a reasoning not so dissimilar from her ecological argument. [6] Indeed, to her, the term allows us to shift our focus on methods of composition in “a new form of dramaturgy,” [7] and so suggests new critical modes of comprehending and writing about it. Thus re-routing connotations from a text-based linear progression of sorts to a media-induced sense of organic simultaneity as organizing principle, one could accordingly argue that “mediaturgy” permits one to highlight tensions between received conceptions of “meaning” and an increasing awareness of the processes that bring them about by foregrounding the media that mediate the ‘content’ we process cognitively. An early illustration of this reasoning is of course found in the work of Jesurun’s illustrious predecessor Richard Foreman (b. 1937), whose Ontological-Hysteric Theater, beginning in 1968, presented audiences with productions lacking a “regular” storyline, but which instead communicated via an idiosyncratic “idiom” best compared to the image of the “mind bath” – a completely multivalent experience. Situated in the grey area between live performance and “live” media, the concept of mediaturgy in effect seeks not a dissolution from drama and its textual overtones, but simply signals a shift from “linguistic language” to “media language” more attuned to our contemporary context of cross-medial communication in networked societies. This article will pick up the ecological lead to present John Jesurun’s mediaturgical and thoroughly inter-relational theatre aesthetic as an impetus to what Bateson calls “an ecology of mind” [8] – i.e. an alternative way of thinking and creating that eschews distinctions in favour of convergence and all the emancipatory potential this implies, both for an updated understanding of the authorship principle as well as for individual signification in today’s cultural context. Then again, already in 1986, Smith, one of the characters in Jesurun’s so-called “Media Trilogy” warned us, spectators, that we all “have to realize that [we are] chained into that machine,” [9] imbricated as it were into what Jesurun himself calls “an ongoing process of detours, pitfalls, and discoveries in interpretation and perception [of] a mediated world.” [10] Five years later, in Blue Heat (1991) he physically separates players from spectators by leaving the stage empty and relocating the action to the venue’s back rooms as displayed by various screens in “real time,” thereby forcing his audience to confront theatre’s fundamental role as signifying interface . After all, if performance no longer takes place in the here and now “live” before an audience, can it still be considered “theatre” in the strictest sense? It is a question that immediately prompts a second one related to the mediation of said “live” content – a query arguably still harder to answer. Which recalls Jesurun’s presumed ecological aesthetic: his is not an approach aiming for answers, but rather for shifting perspectives and re-evaluating possibilities for both artistic creation as for critical thinking from within “the machine.” After all, as the same character Smith from Deep Sleep explains, “Those are the machines and you are coming out of the machines.” [11] Thus there is no outside to our mediated world – a Jesurunian appropriation, if you like, of Derrida’s famous quip that “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” [12] On this, mind you, he emits no value judgment, fully aware of the pointlessness in speaking about “purity” or “essential,” unmediated meaning. Technology, as it can hardly be denied these days, forms part and parcel of our cultural landscape and, as confirmed by mediatheorists Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993), “technological change ” is nothing if not, indeed “ecological.” [13] Addressing the “ecological” dimension of technological innovation from the prism prompted by Jesurun of perennial inter-medial interplay brings us neatly to this artist’s privileged artistic platform: the theatre, once described by Peter M. Boenisch as a semiotic practice , which incorporates, spatializes and disseminates in sensorial terms (thus: performs ) the contents and cognitive strategies of other media by creating multiple channels, and a multi-media semiotic and sensorial environment. [14] Key to the latter argument is the almost organic multiplication of signifiers and signifying systems that takes place precisely via their interplay in real time. If we additionally take into account its relatively stable – yet not, as we have already seen, entirely unproblematic – basic requirements of an audience and a set duration, we could argue that the theatrical medium represents a heuristic platform to study the associations and reciprocities produced by an interface that facilitates co-presence and reflexivity across physical, technical, and referential boundaries. Via the continuous interplay in a Jesurun-production of multiple media, “live” theatrical presence here effectively incarnates an “overdetermined” hybrid permanently in flux. Twenty five years ago, Patrice Pavis already argued that the live actor creates a sense of clarity, an ontological foothold of sorts, within the semiotic complexity of multi-media theatre productions. [15] A decade later, Philip Auslander placed the performer’s live body on a par with technological media in contemporary theatre’s process of “mediatization,” whereby old and new media come to operate in the mediatic system that is the production. [16] For live “presence” on a multimedia theatre stage remains inextricably interwoven with the relation between “live” and “mediated,” and thus also with what performance scholars Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye have called “processes that expose and utilize the gaps, caesura, and absences inherent to acts of representation.” [17] Their use of “inherent” thereby echoes Jesurun’s ecologically-inspired artistic practice whereby the live actor’s performance is embedded into layered and responsive soundscapes, architectonic designs, as well as mediated sets that draw underscore the actual passages between live, mediated, and recorded channels of address. No oversimplified answers to a complex reality, but a stimulated sense of intimacy with the environment in which we find ourselves immersed. Figure 1. John Jesurun Firefall – Phase 2 (2009). Photo: Paula Court. As Baz Kershaw similarly reminds us in his Theatre Ecology (2007), the term “ecology” references the interrelationships of all the organic and non-organic factors of ecosystems, ranging from the smallest and/or simplest to the greatest and/or most complex. It is also defined as the interrelationships between organisms and their environments, especially when that is understood to imply interdependence between organisms and environments. [18] In White Water (1986), the second installment of his “Media Trilogy” after Deep Sleep (1986), Jesurun sought to connect cutting-edge technology with the primal fear that the same technology today is destroying our sense of spirituality. Precisely by instilling an “ecological” sense of interdependence between film, video, and live actors, his personal brand of authorship foregrounds the reverse perspective that technology, in fact, reflects human attempts at spirituality, a certain longing for the intangible expressed through the tension between humans and machinery – a tension grounded in the ever-present potential of manipulation : I include [physicality] as a natural element. Because film and video can be manipulated and manipulate at the same time I have to treat them with some respect. Film and video have their own physical presence beyond the visual images they may represent. There is a tension there between a live and mediated performer but this is also natural. I want that tension to also exist in a real way in the presentation. When live and mediated images communicate verbally a third reality comes into place as a result. [19] Said “Third Reality” was made more palpable still in Jesurun’s 1990-production Everything That Rises Must Converge where both actors and audience were divided into two groups and separated by a wall nine-feet high and forty-feet wide, which occasionally rotated on its central vertical axis while characters communicated their ostensibly nonsensical multilingual dialogues across the divide through live videos and wireless microphones. For, when no direct physical connection can be established, we trust technology to make meaningful our attempts at meaning-making. [20] However, the reason why in certain circumstances we may decide (consciously or unconsciously) to “trust” technology in a performative setting is squarely attributable to its embodied presence on stage. After all, embodied modes of reception and perception are those that do not require strictly logical analysis for their verification. As the theatre presents tangible living bodies on stage to living bodies in the audience, performers’ and audiences’ embodied receptiveness is thereby stimulated to facilitate affective interpretation. When we moreover take into account the stage’s hypermedial capacity to integrate a sheer endless number of technologies, the embodied dimension stretches towards “ecological” coalitions of mind, body, and technology. It is a perspective which prompted Philip Auslander to conclude that in the theatre there simply can be “no clear-cut ontological distinctions between live forms and mediatized ones.” [21] Today, due to the ever-broadening trend of technologizing the theatre stage, critical discourses tend to consider the “live” body in performance as a cultural and biological biotope – a construction site, as it were, for the assemblage of identity and consisting of multiple foundational layers of what Wolf-Dieter Ernst has called “anthropological ballast.” [22] Via the continuous interplay of multiple media on stage, theatrical presence today has become a sort of semiological hybrid permanently in flux. From this angle, then, John Jesurun’s playing with our perception via a multi-media bombardment of our senses strikes, paradoxically enough given the overabundance of technology, as primarily actor -oriented – especially so given this director’s categorical rejection of improvisation and constant admonitions to “deliver words faster and flatter, faster and flatter.” [23] Indeed, by turning his actors into “de-psychologised talking heads,” [24] he forces his spectators to fill in the blanks. For, with the actor’s body as interface between the spectator and the cybernetic machine of that is the multimedia stage, the very notion of embodiment itself becomes unstable. Once again, to Jesurun, this is something intrinsically positive: As a director, I find that the performers are willing to go as far as the language and technology will take them. And as a writer, I am willing to go as far as the performers and technology will take the language. Regardless of the creative outcome, this is a true sharing of intentions and possibilities . [25] Following Jesurun’s “ecological” authorship, embodied presence on a multimedia stage represents a type of “meaning potential” that can only be accessed via the energy exuded from affecting sender and receiver simultaneously. By means of filmic jump-cuts in the narrative progression, the pulsating pace of a video-clip aesthetic, “super real”/un-theatrical conversation tones, soap-opera cliffhangers, or the generalized presence of pop-cultural references, a Jesurun-piece creates a feeling of familiarity in a thoroughly unsettling environment. The extensive reliance on cutting-edge technology, for one, markedly clashes with a recurrent thematic focus on biological decay and linguistic elusiveness. His, then, is a self-professed logic of “engag[ing] rather than seduc[ing]” audiences. [26] Human perception is a process of constantly decentering and re-centering referential frameworks due to the unflagging stream of new impulses we encounter in everything we undertake. The theatre can thereby play a heuristic role as a self-reflexive platform of signification due to the invitation it extends from performer to spectator to connect via conscious participation in a “live” event. For, if accepted, the cognitive communion that ensues will remind all participants for the event’s entire duration of its disruptive constructedness. [27] In Jesurun’s relatively recent internet-inspired Firefall (2006/2010), old-school metatheatrical devices like self-reference and metalepsis abound, but coupled with reflexive statements on the potentiality evoked by design and the essentialism exuded by philosophy, [28] all aside from a scenography itself hell-bent on dramatizing the merging of media into one, uncannily concordant whole. Or, as the character F. – billed as “try[ing] to find a common ground between the introduction of chaos and the status quo” [29] – puts it, they, the characters in Jesurun’s production, are all constantly being “Re-morphed, re-transmuted into positive, useful objects.” [30] Much earlier in his career, Jesurun implemented the recognisability of television-dramaturgy in Red House (1984) and his “living film serial” Chang in a Void Moon (1982 – ongoing) to help engage his audiences into otherwise formalistically forbidding theatre experiments. In his adaptation Faust/How I Rose (1996) we find another token of this artist’s constant play with recognition and estrangement, mixing catch phrases from well-known advertising slogans, snippets of poetry, and pop song lyrics with aporetic debates on the nature of the universe within a set made up of oversized canvases continually projecting lush and dazzling imagescapes – the sequential fluidity of which moreover contrasts with the abruptness of both the dialogue and the scene switches. All examples, indeed, of an ecological inclination to engage rather than seduce : A lot of things bother some people with my work. “You can’t have this conversation, it means so much and it only lasts two seconds.” But slowly, as you get into the movement of the whole, it’s like watching a plant grow . When you listen to the conversation and the actors are standing there, fine, but once you start switching and add all kinds of conflicting angles, lights – it even focuses more on the words. It sets up conflicting things and makes the audience think, also, about what is actually happening on stage. [31] The very fact that Jesurun addresses the element of scenography as catalyst of meta-reflexive thinking squarely aligns him with Philip Auslander, when he argues that the experience of liveness is not limited to performer-audience interactions but refers to a sense of always being connected to other people, of continuous technologically mediated temporal co-presence with others known and unknown. [32] “Meaning,” it so transpires, is not the result of uncovered content, but of a technologically mediated relational engagement prompted, indeed, by the “co-presence of human bodies.” After all, the tension between technology’s power of affect and the physical presence of actors on stage co-opts the audience’s “motor-equivalence” – i.e. performing a similar act under differing circumstances — to generate a sense of reflexivity that is nothing if not “ecologically” dialectical . [33] Figure 2. John Jesurun Firefall – Phase 2 (2009). Photo: Paula Court. Said “ecologically” dialectical reflexivity, according to Gregory Bateson, bridges fundamental philosophy, technology and bodily presence by the bias of the energy exuded from their interplay, [34] and viscerally experienced as the “temporary” [35] product of an embodied cognitive negotiation between competing/conflicting signals and impulses. John Jesurun himself made a telling statement in this regard, “shocked” as he was to learn that his work at one point was described as ‘interdisciplinary:’ I don’t really see the boundaries between one and the other. It seems natural to me that they should work together. They seem to be part of one another. Creatively they are all interconnected. [36] Key tenets from embodied cognition postulate that consciousness itself is produced through the body-mind interface fuelled by our actions and perceptions, but also by nature, culture, and environmental interactions, rather than by a top-down strategy whereby the mind is directing the body. [37] Furthermore, as recently demonstrated by N. Katherine Hayles in her book How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012), the kind of embodied cognition activated by “live” performers in an inter-medial setting – including attentive focus, unconscious perceptions, and nonconscious cognitions – “provides the basis for dynamic interactions with the tools it helps bring into being.” [38] Since such reasoning effectively implies that all “Meaning” is necessarily embodied, it no longer makes any sense to separate man and machine, or to think along such rigid distinctions – which, all things considered, might not be such a bad thing. Contemporary technogenesis, like evolution in general, is not about progress. That is, it offers no guarantees that the dynamic transformations taking place between humans and technics are moving in a positive direction. Rather, contemporary technogenesis is about adaptation , the fit between organisms and their environments, recognizing that both sides of the engagement (humans and technologies) are undergoing coordinated transformations. [39] To Chris Salter, such a reasoning effectively confirms Jesurun’s claim that distinctions are but functional delusions, as the “supposedly modern tension between the humanistic body and the dehumanized machine that has so occupied us [is], in reality, a fiction.” [40] As this brief introduction to Jesurun’s “ecological” aesthetic hopefully has shown, man and machine alike are in a continuous state of becoming, and their interplay on an intermedial theatre stage establishes the latter, with its “ecology of media,” as a generative platform for a new “ecology of mind.” This begs the question whether adopting an ecological perspective to assess our plurimedial cultural context implies that a notion like “authorship” has become redundant. Personally I would argue the exact opposite – provided we follow Jesurun and Marranca’s lead by shifting our focus from clearly demarcated entities to processes of signification. As leading semiotician and media theorist Gunther Kress reminds us in his Literacy in the New Media Age (2003), authorship traditionally depended on “a regulated relation between knowledge and canonical modes of representation” whereas today their power and authority have become relative to a tilt. The answer, to him, therefore “is to insist on the teaching of principles [whereby] the processes and environments of representation are crucial.” [41] In ecologies of media and ecologies of mind like Jesurun’s mediaturgies where man and machine organically interact, authorship is embodied as design. References [1] John Jesurun qtd. in RoseLee Goldberg, “You Are A Camera,” Artforum International January 1989, 74. [2] Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 2001 [1999]), 423. [3] Duke Ellington qtd. in Michael Cerveris, “Intersection, Crossover and Convergence: Fluidity in Contemporary Arts (A Perspective From the US),” in Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries , ed. Caridad Svich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 15. [4] See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1987); Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). [5] Bonnie Marranca, Ecologies of Theater ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), xiii. [6] See Marranca, “Mediaturgy: A Conversation with Marianne Weems.” Performance Histories , ed. Bonnie Marranca (New York: PAJ, 2008), 189-206 and “Performance as Design: The Mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall ,” PAJ 96 (2010): 16-24. [7] Marranca, “Performance as Design,” 19. [8] Bateson 1. [9] John Jesurun, Deep Sleep (1986), in A Media Trilogy: Deep Sleep, White Water, Black Maria (New York: NoPassport Press, 2009), 64, my emphasis. [10] John Jesurun qtd. in Juliette Mapp et. al., “Writing and Performance,” PAJ 34, no.1 (2012): 122. [11] Jesurun, Deep Sleep , 67, my emphasis. [12] Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 158. [13] Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993), 18. [14] Peter M. Boenisch,“Aesthetic Art to Aisthetic Act: Theatre, Media, Intermedial Performance,” Intermediality in Theatre and Performance , eds. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 113. [15] Patrice Pavis, “Theatre and the Media: Specificity and Interference,” Approaching Theatre , eds. André Helbo, J. Dines Johansen, Patrice Pavis, and Anne Ubersfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 22. [16] Phillip Auslander, “Liveness, Mediatization, and Intermedial Performance,” Degrés 101 (2000): e8. [17] Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye, Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 26, my emphasis. [18] Baz Kershaw, Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 15. [19] John Jesurun qtd. in Caridad Svich,“A Natural Force: John Jesurun in Conversation with Caridad Svich,” Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries , ed. Caridad Svich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 45-6. [20] See also Birgit Walkenhorst, Intermedialität und Wahrnehmung: Untersuchungen zur Regiearbeit von John Jesurun und Robert Lepage (Marburg: Tectum, 2005), 84. [21] Phillip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 7. [22] Wolf-Dieter Ernst, Der affective Schauspieler: Die Energetik des postdramatischen Theaters (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2012), 15. [23] John Jesurun qtd. in Donn Russell, Avant-Guardian, 1965-1990: A Theatre Foundation Director’s 25 Years Off-Broadway (Pittsburgh: Dorrance, 1996), 410. [24] Lehmann, Postdramatische Theater , 208. [25] Jesurun qtd. in Mapp et. al. 122, my emphasis. [26] John Jesurun qtd. in Catherine Bush, “Views From the Top: John Jesurun’s Cinematic Theater,” Theatre Crafts 7, no.19 (1985): 48. [27] See also Alice Rayner, “Rude Mechanicals and the Spectres of Marx,” Theatre Journal 54, no.4 (2002): 548. [28] John Jesurun, Firefall , in Shatterhand Massacree and Other Media Texts (New York: PAJ Publications, 2009), 178. [29] Jesurun, Firefall , 167. [30] Jesurun, Firefall , 194. [31] John Jesurun, qtd. in Martin Rentdorff, “I’ll Make Film Without Filming It,” Theater: Ex 1, no.2 (1985): 8, my emphasis. [32] Phillip Auslander, “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective,” PAJ 34, no. 3 (2012): 6. [33] See also Mona Sarkis, Blick, Stimme und (k)ein Körper: Der Einsatz elektronischer Medien im Theater und in interaktiven Installationen (Stuttgart: M & P, 1997), 29. [34] Bateson, 11. [35] Giannachi and Kaye, Performing Presence , 236. [36] Jesurun qtd. in Svich, “A Natural Force,” 46. [37] See Nagoya Hirose, “An Ecological Approach to Embodiment and Cognition.” Cognitive Systems Research 3.3 (2002): 289-299. [38] N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2012), 87, my emphasis. [39] Hayles, How We Think , 87, my emphasis. [40] Chris Salter, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 276. [41] Gunther Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age (New York: Routledge, 2003), 173, my emphasis. Footnotes About The Author(s) Christophe Collard teaches contemporary performing arts, literature, and critical theory at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. He is currently working on a book-length study of John Jesurun. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Bruce McConachie 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 Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Bruce McConachie By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF The term “Anthropocene” entered general scientific discourse in 2002, when chemist-geologist Paul Crutzen published an article in Nature advocating that his colleagues adopt this name for the current geological epoch to emphasize the central role of humankind in shaping the earth’s biosphere and geology. Crutzen’s Nature article, which argued that the previous Holocene epoch had effectively ended at the industrial revolution, was widely read and cited; “the Anthropocene” began to appear in numerous articles and books. Many scientists agreed with Crutzen on the name for the present epoch, which derives from the Greek and means, roughly, “the human era.” They recognized that our activities as a species are now becoming the single most important cause of planetary change – from punishing weather patterns, to vanishing coastlines, the killing-off of thousands of species, and the threatened deaths of millions of human beings. Several scientists, however, emphasized different evidence than Crutzen and chose other starting points for the epoch. At this writing, the members of the International Union of Geological Sciences have yet to determine the beginning of the Anthropocene, but many geologists now favor a date after WWII, which accords with the “great acceleration” of carbon emissions into the atmosphere and radioactive Plutonium fallout around the world from the testing of thermonuclear bombs. Legal scholar Jedediah Purdy is right to note, however, that determining the start of the Anthropocene “is not a statement of fact as much as a way of organizing facts to highlight a certain importance that they carry.” [1] For authors Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and Francois Gemenne, writing in the introduction to their anthology, The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis (2015), this new geologic epoch organizes facts around two compelling claims. First, state the authors, the Anthropocene “claims that humans have become a telluric force, changing the functioning of the Earth as much as volcanism, tectonics, the cyclic fluctuations of solar activity, or changes in the Earth’s orbital movements around the sun.” As a result, natural history and human history are now thoroughly interwoven. They add: “Modern humanities and social sciences have pictured society as if they were above material and energy cycles. . . . Now they must come back down to earth.” [2] “The second claim is that the human inhabitants of our planet will face, in a time lapse of just a few decades, global environmental shifts of an unprecedented scale and speed, not [seen] since the emergence of the genus Homo some 2.5 million years ago. . . . It means inhabiting an impoverished and artificialised biosphere in a hotter world increasingly characterized by catastrophic events and new risks. . . . Reinventing a life of dignity for all humans in a finite and disrupted Earth has become the master issue of our time.” [3] With these realities in mind, I crafted a CFP that invited submissions from scholars to consider the past, present, and future of American theatre and performance through the lens of the Anthropocene. Working with Cheryl Black, President of the American Theatre and Drama Society, I also selected an editorial board for this Special Issue of JADT that I knew could help those scholars adventurous enough to investigate the intersection of a particular North or South American performance with an aspect of this new geological epoch. My thanks to all of those who helped me and the authors to put together this extraordinary group of essays. I am pleased that our Special Issue begins with an essay by Theresa J. May, who coined the term “ecodramaturgy” in 2010 and has been a tireless advocate for its practice ever since. In “Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy and the AnthropoScene,” May examines two plays, Harvest Moon (1994) and Burning Vision (2003), and the continuities and changes regarding ecological concerns and possible solutions advocated by each play. As you will read, Harvest Moon affirms the sustainable values of family and community as a viable source for progressive resistance to ecological disruption, whereas such sustainability is no longer possible in the broken, post-nuclear world of Burning Vision . May joins the somewhat divergent ideas of scholars Donna Haraway and Jeremy Davies to argue that American theatre and performance must “stay with the trouble” of the Anthropocene’s increasingly impoverished biosphere if we are ever to realize social and ecological justice. Have you tasted the pollutants in smog? Performance artists at The Center for Genomic Gastronomy have offered smog meringues to international customers flavored with soot, sulfur, and hydrocarbons to capture the content of smog in Bangalore, Beijing, and Mexico City as a means of calling attention to one of the invisible consequences of industrial food production. Their meringues taste terrible. Shelby Brewster writes about Smog Tasting and two other “speculative” performances, The De-extinction Deli and Planetary Supper Club, that the Center has been producing since 2010 in her essay, “Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene.” As Brewster relates, The Center is attempting to realize Bruno Latour’s vision for a progressive common world in the Anthropocene, available to all, including a biosphere in which human food production, preparation, and eating are ecologically responsible. Lisa Jackson-Schebetta has authored the first of the next two articles that feature performances in Latin America. As her title suggests, “Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine” examines the entrance of a seventeenth-century Viceroy through two decorated arches that depict the watery surroundings and lake-bed foundation upon which Mexico City was built. Taking up historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s challenge to imagine our species as both historical and geological agents during the Anthropocene, Jackson-Schebetta deploys geologist Mark Anderson’s contemporary work on Mexico City to emphasize the Spaniard’s and, before them, the Nahua’s struggle to drain the basin of central Mexico so that its former lake-bed could provide habitable land for agriculture and city life. This allows her to reconfigure the 1680 viceregal entry as yet one more vain attempt in a string of performances that continues to the present day to overcome the ecology of Mexico City’s lacustrine limitations. In “The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti’s Marrathon , Milton Loayza finds significant parallels between the situation of the marathon dancers in Monti’s Argentinian drama and Americans from both continents caught up in the historical myths of the Anthropocene. To understand the meta-theatrical levels of the play in production, Loayza turns to Marxist historian Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015). Attentive as well to Monti’s scenographic and dramaturgical layering, Loayza reads Marrathon through the lens of architect Kenneth Frampton’s concept of tectonics. The result is a keen analysis of the five myths that focus the action of Marrathon – conquest, independence, pastoralism, industrialism, and fascism. Our final essay by Clara Jean Wilch proposes a website that can help progressives animated by the problems of the Anthropocene to communicate their performances with translocal, global audiences. Her “Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity” draws on the insights of cognitive science to discuss the importance of avoiding groupish responses and inciting empathy and altruistic action with climate change videos. Although appreciative of several short videos produced by Oxfam and 350.org, she recognizes that sharing such performances on YouTube or Facebook poses inherent difficulties and risks. This leads her to advocate the creation of a new platform that would encourage participants to share their personal stories and local experiences of climate change with others for the purpose of building collaborative communities across the globe. We hope you enjoy this Special Issue of JADT. Bruce McConachie, Emeritus Professor, University of Pittsburgh, Guest Editor References [1] Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard), 2015: 2. [2] Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and Francois Gemenne, The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis : Rethinking modernity in a new epoch (New York: Routledge), 2015:3, 4. [3] Ibid, 4-5. Footnotes About The Author(s) BRUCE MCCONACHIE Emeritus Professor, University of Pittsburgh, Guest Editor Editorial Board for Special Issue Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. 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Richard Hayes Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Richard Hayes By Published on April 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage . Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Kurt Eisen’s excellent The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage appears as part of the Methuen Drama Critical Companions series, a series that “covers playwrights, theatre makers, movements and periods of international theatre and performance” and gives “attention to both text and performance” in critical surveys of the work of individual authors. Other contributions to the series include books on Beckett and Tennessee Williams and on the American stage musical and twentieth-century verse drama in England. Eisen here gives a succinct but rich account of O’Neill’s plays, captures well the breadth and range of O’Neill’s achievement, outlines key thematic concerns, and opens up interesting questions for both established scholars and those new to O’Neill’s vast, endlessly intriguing body of work. Essays by William Davies King, Alexander Pettit, Katie Johnson and Sheila Hickey Garvey offer additional and complementary critical perspectives. A comprehensive bibliography identifies all the major critical works and also points towards useful further reading. In other words, the book is a fine addition to the large volume of material in print on O’Neill as well as a suitable beginning point for students and scholars. From the beginning, Eugene O’Neill took himself and the American theatre seriously: one is struck, in placing O’Neill in the company of other Modernists, by how little mischief there is in O’Neill and how lacking the work is in frivolity. Every play appears to have been mined from the earth through earnest labor and is presented with the utmost sincerity, and it is this purposeful determination to shape a modern American theatre from the ground up, play by play, that defines his contribution. Even O’Neill’s apprentice works, many of them terrible, show serious intent. These early failures (such as Thirst , Fog , A Wife for a Life , ‘Ile ) were attempts to “sort out themes and situations that interested him dramatically” (25), says Eisen in an exemplary examination of O’Neill’s work to 1920 and, to some extent, these themes and situations interested him throughout his career. Revisiting the early plays having read Eisen, one is struck by how much of the master-works ( The Iceman Cometh , Long Day’s Journey into Night , A Moon for the Misbegotten ) are contained within these trial pieces. Eisen convincingly frames a consideration of these lifelong themes and situations around a distinction between “modernity” and “modernism”, the latter “both an expression and critique” of the former. O’Neill’s restless experimentation was part of his search for “a unifying principle in the absence of a guiding theology or traditional values adequate to prevailing conditions of American modernity.” In the end, O’Neill “affirmed the American theatre as a heterotopian counter-site where one can more powerfully imagine other lives and the otherness of one’s own life” (69), defining through his will alone the modern American stage as something more than the “hateful theatre of my father,” as he famously described the nineteenth-century American stage. We follow this “modernity-modernism” thread through a series of linked, themed essays, an approach that allows the reader to draw from disparate and separate phases in O’Neill’s work very profitably. The themes—they may be summarised as: America, gender, race, family—are helpful in identifying all sorts of possibilities for more detailed conversation and research. In the chapter called “New Women, Male Destinies: the ‘Woman Plays’”, Eisen gives careful consideration to, amongst others, Anna Christie , Strange Interlude , and A Moon for the Misbegotten and notes some of O’Neill’s limitations as an artist. O’Neill’s final works seems to concede “his inability to fully represent women on stage”: over his career, O’Neill “creates a powerful if distorting lens into the lives of women in modern America, rooted equally in O’Neill’s personal emotional mythology and the gender typology of an American theatre tradition he could never completely experiment beyond” (92). In “‘Souls under Skins’: Masks, Race, and the Divided American Self,” Eisen offers very interesting reflections on O’Neill’s use of masks in the context of race. Eisen’s insightful comments on A Touch of the Poet and Irishness are of particular interest to this reader and prompt a reconsideration of O’Neill as an Irish playwright. Eisen is persuasive in “Transience and Tradition: O’Neill’s Modern Families” in his remarks on Beyond the Horizon (a critical play for O’Neill) and rightly argues for the Tyrones in Long Day’s Journey as O’Neill’s “consummate representation of an American family as both fully exposed and forever concealed, tragic in their confrontation with and retreat from American modernity” (140). The complementary essays are terrific. King considers the construction of the notion of “O’Neill” and an “O’Neill play” as a kind of spontaneous “personal branding.” Pettit in his look at O’Neill as a literary—as much as a dramatic—artist concludes that “O’Neill found a text-bound, literary model of drama that allowed him to exercise the sort of control whose elusiveness all playwrights must to some degree lament” (172). Johnson’s essay on The Emperor Jones teases out some aspects of the early productions and complements Eisen’s own treatment of the play in suggesting that Paul Robeson in his performance “embodied the modernist tensions inscribed onto black men” (182). Garvey offers an interesting consideration of Tony Kushner’s productive and lifelong “dialogue” with “the greatest of all America’s playwrights” (197). Omissions are minor. Eisen says nothing about Hollywood as both expression and vehicle of American modernism and of O’Neill’s relationship with the movies. He is good on Ireland and the Irish in his relatively brief but solid consideration of A Touch of the Poet mentioned above, as well as in relation to other plays, but says very little about the influence of the Abbey players on O’Neill – O’Neill’s experience of the Abbey on tour in 1911 has been acknowledged as instrumental in shaping his aesthetic. More too could have been said about Kenneth McGowan and the “triumvirate.” But this is to quibble. There is much to recommend this book. Tragically it is to be Kurt Eisen’s last; he died prematurely (aged just 61) in 2019. A former President of the Eugene O’Neill Society, he made an important contribution to O’Neill studies and to the study of modern American theatre and this book adds to and strengthens that legacy. It is a terrific introduction to O’Neill, will be accessible to undergraduate students coming to O’Neill fresh and still raises new questions for those more familiar with this great playwright’s work. References Footnotes About The Author(s) RICHARD HAYES Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

James M. Cherry 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 August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. James M. Cherry By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays . Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. The principal undertaking of August Wilson’s playwriting career—the “Pittsburgh Cycle”—is a singular accomplishment in American theater. A series of ten plays highlighting the cultural shifts and stresses of African-American experience throughout the 20th century, the Cycle was written and staged over the course of three decades and completed shortly before Wilson’s death in 2005. Wilson situated his opus largely in the Hill District of Pittsburgh where he spent his childhood, a once-vibrant African-American community that fell into decay following failed urban development schemes and resultant poverty. Throughout the Cycle, Wilson connects the Hill District’s transformations to the larger history of African-Americans—slavery, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, persistent institutional racism—and the ways in which these realities reveal themselves on stage in micro-histories of Black lives. Wilson also foregrounds the historical linkages of music, ritual, ceremony, and oral culture as critical dramaturgical elements. As their descendants replace characters on Wilson’s stage, these are the ties that bind still. The restoration of a fragmented ancestry is personified in the reoccurring figure of Aunt Ester, the wise woman who physically embodies the link across time to Africa. Taken together, the plays of Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle can be seen as the work of playwright tethering a community to an obscured past. As Sandra G. Shannon rightly notes in her introduction to a new collection of essays, August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays, the narratives that fill Wilson’s plays are not simply representations of African-American life, but are also intensely personal, “reflect[ing] the playwright’s own fragmented life exacerbated by a complete disconnect with his biological father, by his flight from a racist Pittsburgh’s school system, and by his discovery or “reunion” with the blues, Africa, Amiri Baraka, and by his newfound regard for the vernacular of fellow Pittsburgh natives” (5). For Shannon, as well as many authors in this excellent collection, Wilson’s dual roles as an “autoethnographer of the black experience,” and as “the wounded healer” (6) who confronts his own personal history as a way to make sense of the larger historical narrative, are essential to understanding Wilson’s great accomplishment; they are also essential to comprehending what Wilson’s vision of the twentieth century means in our twenty-first. Since August Wilson’s death, there have been many attempts to examine and reconcile Wilson’s completed project, and recent scholarly treatments of the complete Cycle resonate throughout the volume under review here. Shannon’s text joins an already active critical conversation, including Harry Elam’s touchstone work The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), a recent Cambridge Companion collection, and the frequent stagings of the plays across the country. Appropriately enough, Shannon’s collection ranges widely in subjects and inventive theoretical perspectives. Sarah Saddler and Paul Bryant-Jackson’s piece on Two Trains Running brings together Manning Marable’s advocacy of a multidisciplinary “living history” to reclaim the lost narratives of people of color, and Diana Taylor’s argument to consider the “embodied behaviors that serve to e/affect the outcome of the social drama, and thus “ history” itself” (53). Saddler and Bryant-Jackson conclude that Wilson creates a document of living history in which the political struggles of the 1960s are played out on a personal and spiritual level on stage. In another essay, Psyche Williams-Forson probes the Wilson’s frequent use of food as way to depict communal and gender relationships, citing Wilson’s own interest in cultural anthropology. These arguments reframe August Wilson not just as a significant “realist” playwright, but as a writer whose works respond to various theoretical frameworks. Wilson deploys African ritual in his plays, often as a way to reconnect with a lost heritage, and several essays in this collection tease out the various dramaturgical and symbolic meanings of this connection. Artisa Green’s analysis of the “Òrìșà archetypes, sacred objects, and spaces” (10) and the Yoruban week calendar “which comprises a seven day cycle characterized by daily attributes that resulted from events which occurred in Yoruba creation stories” (156), facilitates a significant new understanding of the spiritual architecture of Gem of the Ocean . In the case of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone , Connie Rapoo looks at Loomis’ “acts of sacrifice” (177) as ways to “remember the spiritual African past in order to restore cosmic order” and to reclaim a forgotten cultural identity. More significantly, this collection often shows how Wilson’s work uses history to reflect upon contemporary concerns. Isaiah Matthew Wooden’s piece on the fraught relationship between the American justice system and the African-Americans subject to it in Gem of the Ocean is deeply relevant to the America of Black Lives Matter and police action captured on cell phone video. The concluding essay by Susan C. W. Abbottson deploys the work of theorists Alan Wilde, John McGowan, and Linda Hutcheon to investigate the optimistic, inclusive humanism in Wilson’s work. For Abbottson, “what Wilson is modeling through this cycle are lessons of responsibility, connection, history, and identity, which combine to create a final vision of what contemporary society most needs: active democracy” (200). In illuminating the experience of Black people in America, Wilson’s “self-defining American chronicle for the ages” (199) also sheds light on the desires, anxieties, and possibilities of all human beings. The main utility of the August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle is as a companion to, and an expansion of, previous Wilson scholarship. While it is inevitable for any collection to focus on some works more than others, Jitney (1982), Fences (1985), and Radio Golf (2005) are seldom addressed in this volume, though they are certainly topics of examination elsewhere. The inclusion of a production history of the Cycle would have made the text more user-friendly. Yet, the multiplicity of theoretical perspectives here acts as a provocation for other scholars to look at August Wilson’s work in new, inventive ways. Just as Wilson himself sought to forge links between the present and past, readers of his work should be encouraged to connect it with our present and future. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JAMES M. CHERRY Wabash College 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 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. 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. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Alexis Riley Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Alexis Riley By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism . Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Kirsty Johnson’s Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism is an invaluable resource. Having previously written Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre , Johnston offers in her latest book an impressive range of approaches to disability theatre scholarship. Beginning with disability theorist Tobin Sieber’s assertion that modern art is preoccupied with twisted bodies, Johnston asks what considerations might emerge when framing disability as a key feature of modern drama. Her provocation ranges from critiques of twentieth and twenty-first century drama featuring themes of disability to contemporary performances created by artists with disabilities. In order to achieve this breadth, Johnson divides the book into two parts. The first section lays the groundwork for the critique ahead, providing a well-structured and accessible overview of disability studies aimed at a wide readership. Chapter one contextualizes disability theatre as a social project that simultaneously constructs and critiques popular representations of disability. As examples, Johnston points to the American-based groups Phamaly and DisAbility Project, the British companies Extant Theatre Company and Graeae Theatre Company, and the Australian Back to Back. Johnston uses this overview to inform her work in the second chapter, “Critical Embodiment and Casting.” Here, she queries the ethics of actor training and casting practices specific to disability theatre. While noting that different bodies require different material considerations, Johnston observes that contemporary performance practices often assume a normative body, rendering the rehearsal process inaccessible to performers with disabilities. Additionally, disabled characters are often portrayed by able-bodied actors, furthering exclusion while engaging in uncritical representations of disability. Chapter three, “Staging Inclusion,” argues for a reconfiguration of normative production practices in order to accommodate a wider range of bodies and abilities. Johnston closes this section of the book with an examination of Graeae Theatre Company’s productions of Federico García Lorca’s Bloodwedding and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera , as well as Theatre Workshop Scotland’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame . Through these case studies, Johnston demonstrates the prevalence of characters with disabilities within twentieth and twenty-first century dramatic literature, and how careful attention to these representations can prompt fruitful readings of familiar scripts. Johnston refutes critics’ claims that configure disability as added layers to understanding modern drama. Rather, she suggests that these layers are “important features of the text that have been there all along” (106). While the first section offers readers a clear, single-authored, scholarly argument, the second section, “Critical Perspectives,” deviates from this form, featuring two critical essays, an interview, and a script. This sharp shift in structure might make readers crave more connective tissue, yet the multifaceted nature of the section exemplifies how Johnston’s critical considerations might be taken up by scholars and applied to modern drama. “Critical Perspectives” opens with “‘Every Man His Specialty’: Beckett, Disability, and Dependence.” Written by Michael Davidson, author of Concerto for the Left Hand , this chapter employs disability theorist Lennard Davis’s concept of dismodernism to show that Beckett’s inclusion of disability serves to position the modern subject as disabled. Ann M. Fox’s chapter is a standout of the volume, generously offering an alternative perspective of The Glass Menagerie through a disability studies lens. Fox persuasively argues that an understanding of disability history, when applied to production practice, highlights the material conditions of disability that inform Laura’s actions in Tennessee Williams’s play. This reading suggests how future productions might position Laura as an empowered individual when presenting the audience with a nuanced critique of disability. One successful strand of Johnston’s investigation is her attention to disability theatre companies, particularly Graeae Theatre Company. Taking the form of an interview with the company’s artistic director, Jenny Sealy, chapter seven provides a probing profile of the company. Here, Johnston asks Sealy a range of questions about the company’s mission, training methods, and production practices, focusing on Blood Wedding and Threepenny Opera . Although the introduction to the interview format requires an adjustment in reading style that is largely unmarked, the chapter effectively integrates previous material, providing examples of how theoretical inquiry shapes production practice. Drawing on earlier discussions of The Glass Menagerie , the final chapter is comprised entirely of the script of Shattering the Glass Menagerie , a play that Terry Galloway, M. Shane Grant, Ben Gunter, and Carrie Sandahl first performed in 2003. The performance toggles between discussions by Sandahl and Galloway (playing themselves) and performances of scenes from The Glass Menagerie , bringing critique to bear in live performance. Curiously, the book ends with the script, not a formal conclusion. Perhaps this is strategic in that Johnston resists presenting disability theatre as a monolith, instead taking a multi-vocal, multi-genre approach to the subject that honors its contested and relatively new status as a field within theatre and performance studies. Furthermore, the arc Johnston builds throughout the book serves as a primer for future disability scholarship. Indeed, Johnston’s strength as a scholar lies in her consistent focus on grounding theories of disability in rigorously-researched theatrical practice. The wide range of resources provided in the text, including a robust collection of endnotes, positions Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism as a foundational text for scholars and artists from performance, history, literature, and disability studies. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ALEXIS RILEY University of Texas at Austin Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lisa B. Thompson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Lisa B. Thompson By Published on May 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF If I do not bring all of who I am to whatever I do, then I bring nothing of lasting worth, for I have withheld my essence. Audre Lorde , I am Your Sister: Collected Writings Every year I return to August Wilson’s powerful speech, “The Ground on Which I Stand.” On the 25th anniversary of his groundbreaking keynote at the 1996 Theatre Communications Group National Conference, Wilson’s words still resonate. [1] I want to honor this Black theatre milestone because Wilson not only delivers a scathing critique of systemic racism in US theatre, but he also insists that Black culture is a worthy and necessary source of artistic inspiration. Although he criticizes the structural inequalities that Black artists face, Wilson also speaks about his personal journey as a playwright and a Black man. He confesses: . . . it is difficult to disassociate my concerns with theater from the concerns of my life as a black man, and it is difficult to disassociate one part of my life from another. I have strived to live it all seamless . . . art and life together, inseparable and indistinguishable. (494) Wilson’s address motivated me to craft my own manifesto as a Black feminist artist/scholar. I’m celebrating the anniversary of “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech by crafting a manifesto which echoes Wilson’s desire for a seamlessness between being a Black person and a theatre artist. As Black people throughout the African diaspora combat dual catastrophes, a global pandemic and the brutality associated with the “long emancipation,” I feel an even greater sense of urgency. [2] I also feel a sense of urgency to make all of my conflicting identities seamless. I’m proclaiming to all that will listen that I’m not only a Black artist, but I’m also a Black feminist scholar. I’m a playwright and a professor who has choreographed a professional life that includes both the arts and the academy. I’ve learned to dance on the slash between the title artist/scholar. I must dance to remain both creator and critic because I refuse to live a divided life. I will no longer deny any part of my intellectual or creative gifts. I call on all Black artist/scholars to join me and do the same. When I was a little girl, I didn’t dance quite like my friends and family. It seemed to me that they were all illustrious dancers. I recall watching my older brother Robert dance. He was a member of the San Francisco Lockers and I loved watching those Adidas sweat suit-clad dancers move in lock step. They were commanding, rhythmic, defiant, and elegant. My classmates mesmerized me as they performed stunningly choreographed routines at the school talent shows, decked out in matching psychedelic outfits. I never joined in when they perfected their dances on Saturday afternoons in a neighbor’s rumpus room. Don’t feel sorry for me. This is not one of those “I was smart but lacked natural rhythm therefore I was a mocked and ostracized inauthentic Negro” essays. I had plenty of friends and could throw down with the best of them, it was just that I preferred dancing alone. Standing in front of the sofa or the bedroom mirror, I would jam to songs by the Jackson 5, Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer, and Prince. I despised group dances, but adored the Soul Train line because it was my stage: I could be the star dancing to my own groove. Dancing alone and in my own way has led me to a life as a Black feminist artist/scholar. I define a Black feminist artist/scholar as one who works simultaneously within the academy, pursuing scholarly research and teaching, while also producing art in the public realm for wide-ranging audiences to enjoy. Black feminist artist/scholars often center the lives and experiences of Black women, girls and femmes in both their scholarly and artistic work. I use dancing as a metaphor because dance emphasizes free but disciplined movement. It requires both posture and poise. Dance allows improvisation and planning, creativity and expression. Dance can be done in a group or solo. Dance provides a way to socialize, to become and stay strong, to communicate, to develop self-esteem, and to increase your flexibility. It’s also a way to curate a sense of embodied listening and speaking. After all, dancing around the question can be more about exploring a puzzle more deeply instead of avoiding it. You need all of those traits to survive as an artist/scholar, especially a Black feminist one. The artist/scholar defies the old adage that “those who do, do, and those that can’t, teach.” Artist/scholars often prove some of the best teachers because they have immersed themselves in two worlds, the Ivory Tower as well as the theatre, or museum, art gallery or concert hall. The artist/scholar has many work spaces: the classroom, the library, the archives, and the lab or studio where we create. Some work in completely different realms so that their artistic and scholarly fields have little or nothing in common, while the scholarship and artistry of other artist/scholars is more aligned. No matter how one’s artistic practice and scholarly interests are related, this duality helps us to become great teachers because we understand the work from two perspectives simultaneously. [3] Black artist/scholars are certainly not a new phenomenon. I stand on the shoulders of those who came before me such as anthropologist, novelist, and playwright, Zora Neale Hurston; sociologist, novelist, literary journal editor, W.E.B. Du Bois; poet and comparative literature scholar Kamau Braithwaite; and choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham. I rely on their examples for reassurance, for inspiration, and for guidance. Those tiny descriptors I shared about their work reveals only a fraction of the ground those giants cleared for us, only a morsel of their contributions to the world of arts and letters. Their pathbreaking interventions created the circumstances that allow many contemporary Black artist/scholars to enjoy the security of tenured positions in the academy–often in highly regarded and abundantly resourced institutions. I lean on the example of these precursors as I choreograph my own dance. Their brave work helps me to theorize about Black culture through my essays and books; their life stories inspire me to continue crafting plays about Black life. I draw on their wisdom to give me the confidence to claim my creativity and knowledge. This manifesto represents an attempt to leave some crumbs behind so that other Black artist/scholars who dance alone, but also in community with others, know that it’s possible to bop down their own creative and intellectual path. Toni Morrison, one of the greatest artist/scholars of all time, and a Cornell-trained literary critic, editor, teacher, and Nobel prize winning writer, explained her work simply: “I know it sounds like a lot. But I really only do one thing. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.” [4] She was also a librettist who even tried her hand at playwriting. Why did she downplay the multiplicity of her gifts and the vast reach of her intellectual and creative labor? I suspect that Morrison felt as I do, it is simply your work . It is how you feel compelled to show up in the world as a creator and thinker. It is your purpose. All of it. So, what does it mean to dance on the slash? It means identifying the spaces where the art and the scholarship meet. The powers that be insist that there is a line between teaching and doing, a line between artistry and scholarship, between creativity and criticism, that is not meant to be crossed. Dancing on the slash acknowledges that the line between being an artist and a scholar is a porous one. In the rare instances when that line is crossed or blurred, it’s certainly not meant to be transgressed by people like me, Black, woman, first generation college graduate, single mother. How does one dare to disregard borders in spaces where you are not supposed to even exist? There is a freedom in challenging the boundaries of disciplines—artistic and academic. To live an undisciplined life is dangerous, but it’s also thrilling in all the ways that make you whole. In her essay “Sista Docta,” African Diaspora studies and performance artist/scholar Omi Osun Joni L. Jones pushes back against the artist/scholar divide by refusing to privilege one over the other. Jones argues that “performance is a form of embodied knowledge and theorizing that challenges the academy’s print bias. While intellectual rigor has long been measured in terms of linguistic acuity and print productivity that reinforces the dominant culture’s deep meanings, performance is suspect because its ephemeral, emotional, and physical nature.” She adds that “Performance. Then, subverts the binary of artist/scholar when performance exists as scholarship.” [5] Jones makes clear that part of the dance includes rejecting hierarchies of knowledge. In the most skilled hands, a piece of work is both art and scholarship. Dancing on the slash means balancing the competing demands of two worlds that refuse to understand each other. Maintaining perfect equilibrium is impossible so there are times when artist/scholars devote more time and energy to one field or calling to the detriment of the other. It also means pushing back against those who insist that you must pick one and abandon the other. One must be careful while creating a life on a slash. The slash can be an aggressive and violent motion. You use it to cut out, diminish, partition, and destroy that which is not worthy, but also that which doesn’t serve the art or the argument. Living as an artist/scholar can be lonely because you must shuttle between two fields and feel that you are not fulfilling obligations to either field or community. As an artist/scholar, you have to accept that’s what it means to dance to the beat of different tunes. For me, it means writing plays, essays, and books all while trying to interest a producer in my latest piece. It means suffering the unspoken questions of college deans, artistic directors, department chairs, press editors, and theater boards. They wonder whether I’m an artist or a scholar? They ask is this play simply an essay placed on stage? Is this essay too theatrical? Dancing on the slash means trying to answer those questions and accepting that you can do too much and never enough at the very same time. This manifesto calls for academic and theatrical institutions to move beyond such simplistic questions and to allow space for all that artist/scholars bring to the table (or stage). How did I arrive on this slash? Like August Wilson, I began as a poet after falling in love with the words of Black Arts Movement poets such as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni. When Ntozake Shange burst upon the theatre scene in the 1970s with her critically acclaimed choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf, I discovered how poetry can fill the stage and unveil the concerns and dreams of Black girls and women like a rainbow. I was fortunate to find myself in Shange’s classroom as a senior English major at UCLA. On the first day of class, Shange invited us to do a free write for 20 minutes and that’s when I penned my first monologue. One day, Shange invited a friend to visit our class. He was working on a production of his play in Westwood. The friend was George Wolfe and the play was The Colored Museum . Little did I know that seeing Wolfe’s work after spending a term in Shange’s presence would change the course of my life and chosen artistic genre. Wolfe’s irreverent humor and deep knowledge of Black culture blew my mind. I couldn’t believe that this outrageousness was possible! My turn from poetry to drama was complete. I remain inspired by both Shange and Wolfe’s theatrical love letters to Black people’s beautiful and powerful brokenness. Wilson looked to his mother’s pantry, his beloved Pittsburgh Hill District, Black history, and the slave quarters for inspiration. I turn to my home and working-class community in San Francisco, a rich and fertile place full of art, joy, beauty and books that made me into a Black feminist artist/scholar, a cultural producer and a cultural critic. It’s where I learned about Black culture, Black history, Black life, Black womanhood, and Black love; I learned in the pews of the Third Baptist Church, the oldest Black church in San Francisco where I was baptized in the 1970s, in the barbershop in Lakeview that I visited with my father on Saturday afternoons eavesdropping on tall tales told by men on barber stools, from the books left behind by the Black Panthers who rented an apartment from my grandmother in Oakland, the quick tongued signifying women at the beauty shop my mother took me to on special occasions too important for her kitchen stove press and curl, and the fine afroed boys that played basketball on Saturday afternoons in March Banks Park in Daly City. Although the public schools I attended did not teach much about Black history and culture, I was blessed with young Black women teachers who encouraged a smart creative skinny dark-skinned girl who became a champion of Black culture, Black history, Black life, Black womanhood, and Black love in her work for the stage and in her scholarship, as well as a staunch defender of public education. Suzan-Lori Parks’s evocative essay “The Equation for Black People on Stage” implores Black theatre makers to craft narratives that “show the world and ourselves in our beautiful and powerfully infinite variety.” [6] Those are the kind of stories I try to write, tales that present Black people, particularly the Black middle class and Black elites as neither the talented tenth or the sellouts. Interviewers often ask me who I write for and I want to say for me, all the ME’s I’ve been, I am, and may be—me as a little girl in San Francisco in the 1970s, me as a Black graduate student finding my voice, me as a Black single mother, me summering on Martha’s Vineyard, me facing the deaths of my parents, me facing the deaths of Black people murdered by police, me laughing with my homeboys and homegirls as we discuss romance after forty, me navigating the healthcare industry that renders me invisible, and me retiring someday in France, Costa Rica, or Ghana. I’m addressing the audience and telling the story that matters to me and I’ve never been overly concerned with the expectations or tastes of those who fail to recognize stories about Black people as worthy of a theatrical production on the main stage. I have spent my life entering and conquering unwelcoming institutions in the academy and in the theatre that were not designed for people like me. Most of those spaces will never include the classmates I watched dance as a young girl, but I know they belong in every space I decolonize so I bring Tracy, Rolenzo, Nedra, Baxter, Jane, Teru, Priscilla, Barris, and Tina with me as I try to dance through doors that continue to remain closed to Black, Asian, and Latinx people like them, like me. I’m known to leave the door unlocked so they or their children can slip in behind me and take back the stolen seats. This has not been an easy dance to perform. I’ve faced repeated opposition from staff and administrators as I’ve choreographed a life as both a theatre artist and scholar. Those episodes of discouragement are the very reason I believe this manifesto is essential. I want the academy to understand that for artist/scholars, artistic pursuits are not a magnificent distraction, but a way towards knowledge. Art is a way for Black studies and other scholarly fields to engage in public- facing humanities that invite multiple communities into Black life and culture and into conversation with scholars, artists, policy makers and politicians. It’s important to acknowledge what this dance offers. I imagine that some consider pursuing a life as an artist/scholar as a way to avoid the crushing financial reality of the artist’s existence in the US, especially for those of us who lack family wealth. I’ve joked in interviews that I picked academia because I wanted health insurance and food, but the life of a professor is not a safety net. While I never wanted to be a starving artist, I turned to the academy for another kind of necessary sustenance. I found a life of the mind and arts a rich place to research, teach, and discuss theories, ideas, novels, autobiographies, films, and plays about Black life. It allows artist/scholars to be paid for what we would do anyway—researching about craft, field, major and minor figures, genre and form. Working in the academy also allows us to have a group of brilliant and engaged folks to talk to on a regular basis—colleagues and students. The beneficiaries are not just the artist/scholars but also audiences, fans, and even critics. The academy provides us with a lab to try out work and to build relationships, to invite other artists to the university to showcase their work or collaborate with them. This offers a way to support those who don’t have a tenured job and may be living grant to grant, or artist residency to artist residency, but whose work deserves investment from academic institutions. I’ve hosted both local and nationally renowned artists so that students, faculty, staff and the community are in a room, workshop, lecture hall with folks changing the art world not only in theatre, but in film, television, dance, and more. [7] It’s powerful alchemy. There’s nothing more gratifying than inviting Black artists to the university to develop new work so that students get a kitchen island view of how the gumbo is made. What does it mean to be in the academy–as a Black person, and also to insist on being outside it? What does it mean to be in the academy as a woman, and to foster a life outside it? What does it mean to be a theatre artist as a Black woman, and to craft another professional life outside of it? How does a Black woman carve a life in the arts while also claiming space for herself as a feminist critic? Theorist? Teacher? As one of the few Black women full professors at my university, it can be lonely and frustrating. How does one hold the act of creation and the act of disassembly all at once? After all, to teach and to engage in scholarship, one must break the subject, the object apart. One must dissect and analyze what has been crafted and made (or at least attempted to be made) whole. The intellectual inquiry asks us to disassemble, unhinge, reveal, name, categorize, and make intelligible what the artist has prayed is magic. The scholar must reveal (or at least attempt to) reveal what is behind the curtain, and report back –in an essay, book chapter, or article, the pain, yearning, beauty, ugliness and mistakes that are the creation. [8] As a Black woman the fight to gain and maintain any status in either world is wickedly audacious, but to do so in two different worlds? Madness! But, for me it is also necessary. My art is theatre and performance and my scholarship is in the field of Black cultural studies. As an artist/scholar I’m drawn to exploring a question or idea in two ways: for instance, as a graduate student I examined representations of contemporary black middle class women’s sexuality. My study eventually became my first book, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class (2009), and a two-woman show, Single Black Female (2012), my first produced and published play. In another instance, I considered the portrayal of Africans in contemporary US theatre, which resulted in the essay, “ ‘A Single Story:’ African Women as Staged in US Theatre,” and my play Dinner , that explores cultural and class tensions within the African Diaspora. I’m writing a book that analyzes ways contemporary playwrights reimagine Black history, while simultaneously completing the last two installments of my Great Migration trilogy that traces African American migrants from the south to California and their reverse migration. These dual examinations, this dancing around questions or problems, allows me to thoroughly explore answers and present my findings for different audiences and through different means. All of my work as a Black feminist theatre artist/scholar is meant to present the complexity and delicious beauty of Black life and culture in hopes that it will help make Black people freer. Why do I remain committed to theatre? I adore theatre for many reasons, but one of them is the ease of entry. You can stand on any street corner and recite your monologues or perform a one-person show for free. That’s theatre. It may not be Broadway, but not every play or musical should be. Most importantly, it is the magic of theatre that keeps me mesmerized! Watching Viola Davis perform a scene with Denzel Washington in the revival of Fences on Broadway gave me chills. At that moment, it’s clear that Wilson has presented the ground on which he stood growing up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. When there is that kind of magic on stage, you can hear a pin drop. I’m sure you’ve felt it as an audience member because magic is not just on stage but also in the seats. A study at the University College London found that the heartbeats of audiences synchronize while watching live theatre, regardless of whether they know each other. [9] Imagine a theater full of strangers beating with one single heart. As a Black feminist artist/scholar, I’m intrigued by the thought of the hearts of strangers from every walk of life synchronizing during a story that centers the lives and experiences of Black women. No study has determined whether the heartbeats of students synchronize when they read a play together in class, but I do know that I’ve felt that group heartbeat many times during the two decades I’ve spent teaching in college classrooms. The magic is real. Lorraine Hansberry’s informal autobiography To Be Young, Gifted and Black continues to inspire me. While I am no longer young, I find Hansberry’s address to young artists poignant. She implores them to “write if you will; but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world . . . Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Use it. . . The Nation needs your gifts.” [10] I urge Black artists of any age who also consider themselves scholars to avoid the debate that burdened my younger years. I say choose you; be an artist/scholar because you are both. In this challenging moment, our people need all of your gifts. So on the ground on which you stand, go ahead and dance. References [1] August Wilson delivered his remarks on June 26, 1996, at the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) National Conference at Princeton University. It was first published in American Theatre (September 1996) and reprinted in Callaloo , Volume 20, Number 3, Summer 1997, 493-503. [2] See Ira Berlin’s The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (2015), and Rinaldo Walcott’s Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (2021) in which both scholars articulate the condition of unfreedom and the slow movement towards full citizenship and rights for Black people globally. [3] Other contemporary Black artist/scholars dancing on their own slash include Elizabeth Alexander, poet, literature professor and President of the Mellon Foundation; Harry J. Elam, Jr., director, theatre scholar, and President of Occidental College; Monica White Ndounou, director, theatre scholar, Executive Director of the CRAFT Institute, and Associate Professor of Theater at Dartmouth; Guthrie Ramsey, composer, musician and University of Pennsylvania musicologist; and Deborah Willis, photographer, curator, photography historian, university professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University. [4] Hilton Als, “Toni Morrison and The Ghosts in the House.” The New Yorker . October 20, 2003. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/27/ghosts-in-the-house (accessed November 1, 2020). [5] Joni L. Jones, “Sista Docta: Performance as Critique in the Academy.” TDR (Summer 1997) 53-54. [6] Suzan-Lori Parks, “An Equation for Black People Onstage.” The America Play and Other Works, (1995) 22. [7] The arts are an integral component of Black Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) is comprised of the Christian-Green Gallery and the Idea Lab. Under the direction of Executive Director Cherise Smith, AGBS has had exhibits featuring the work of Dawoud Bey, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Michael Ray Charles, Genevieve Gaignard, Jacob Lawrence, Deborah Roberts, and Charles White among others. The African and African Diaspora Studies department, the John L. Warfield Center’s Performing Blackness Series, as well as the recently re-named Omi Osun Joni L. Jones Performing Artist Residency has hosted artists such as Charles O. Anderson, Pierre Bennu, Radha Blank, Sanford Biggers, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurie Carlos, Florinda Bryant, Eisa Davis, Colman Domingo, Shirley Jo Finney, E. Patrick Johnson, Krudas Cubensi, Daniel Alexander Jones, Lorraine O’Grady, Rhonda Ross, and Stew. [8] I’ve been cautioned against focusing too much critical attention on other playwrights who are more lauded than I, but I’ve rejected that advice. To ignore their work is to betray my responsibility as a scholar which is to analyze the innovative work of Black artists. More importantly, it dishonors my deep love for Black art and Black culture. [9] “Audience Members’ Hearts Beat Together at the Theatre.” University College London Psychology and Language Sciences . 17 November 2017 https:// www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/news/2017/nov/audience-members-hearts-beat-together-theatre (accessed on Oct 28, 2020 [10] Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969) Footnotes About The Author(s) LISA B. THOMPSON UT Austin Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, emerita Fairfield University Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, emerita Fairfield University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Yale Rep’s The Far Country. Photo: T. Charles Erickson Wish You Were Here Sanaz Toossi (5-28 Oct) The Salvagers Harrison David Rivers (24 Nov-16 Dec., world premiere) Escaped Alone Carol Churchill (8-30 Mar) The Far Country Lloyd Suh (26 Apr-18 May) Yale Rep enjoyed its first normal season since the COVID pandemic shuttered its doors for almost a full two years, from February 2020 through January 2022. This season, for the first time, audiences were not required to wear masks, and it is clear that Yale is still re-thinking and re-inventing the way it produces theatre, following its September 2021 declaration “to advance anti-racist training and production by focusing on the well-being of the School of Drama/Yale Rep community, increasing emphasis on process and quality and decreasing emphasis on product and quantity.” All production choices, from scripts through casting and artistic leadership, reflected a determination to make work by and for a diverse a range of people. Yale also hired, rehearsed, and gave full playbill credit, with printed biographies, to an Understudy Cast for each show, thus providing a safety net for the principal actors along with opportunities for more actors to embody these roles. Yale had a spectacular season opening with Sanaz Toossi’s Wish You Were Here about six Iranian women friends preparing each other for marriage and new lives between 1978 and 1991, a period of political and cultural upheaval in Iran. The stellar cast and artistic leaders—playwright, director, and scenic designer—were largely Iranian American and not previously affiliated with Yale, unusual for Rep productions. They also were deeply committed to the Woman Life Freedom movement ( womanlifefreedom.today ) and on opening night, the actors returned to the stage to share scripted remarks on gender discrimination and inequality in Iran in a post-show commentary that reinforced the major themes of the play. The flexible set, by Iranian scenic designer Omid Akbari, featured a large living room with handsome, over-sized white furniture and a prominent upstage wall with Islamic geometric patterning to suggest the upper-class status of the characters; the set would transform to signal the rise in social turmoil over time. All six actors gave robust performances as women whose lives revolve around their deep, passionate friendships, made manifest through verbal and physical intimacies. They loved talking about penises, their “pussies,” and body hair (in one scene Nazanin, the lead character, was shaving her legs with wax, which she unsuccessfully tried to get her friend to rip off) and enjoyed caressing each other with impunity. The play provides a fascinating window into the lives of these women, largely cut off from the world through religious and social strictures, who are most alive through their interactions with each other. The world premiere of Harrison David Rivers’s The Salvagers , commissioned by Yale Rep and developed and supported by Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre, opened in late November. The script centers around Boseman Salvage Senior and Boseman Salvage Junior, an estranged father and son who are only 14 years apart in age, Junior being the product of a teenaged couple, now divorced, and the three women in their lives: Junior’s mail-carrier mother, Nedra; his co-worker and potential love interest, Paulina; and Senior’s current lady, Elinor, a substitute teacher. It was a difficult show to sit through; despite strong performances by the all Black cast, the characters were largely unsympathetic as they allowed their unhappiness and frustration to erupt in a steady stream of invective and angry outbursts. There were some interesting visuals, which are a hallmark of Yale Rep’s shows, created by current students and faculty in the David Geffen School of Drama’s excellent design and theatre technology programs. The Salvagers is set in Chicago and the famous elevated trains, which Junior rides to and from his job daily, were theatrically realized by intricate lighting on passenger seats moving on tracks back and forth across the stage. Junior also spent a lot of time shoveling snow and it was fascinating to witness falling snow being scooped up and traveling airborne through the set. Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone , set in a classic English backyard garden, beautifully designed by Lia Tubiana, focuses on the quotidian conversations of four British women in their 70s, according to a textual note by Churchill, enjoying camaraderie as they sip afternoon tea. Mrs. Jarrett, played by African American actor LaTonya Borsay in a bit of non-traditional casting, abruptly launched into monologues about the coming apocalypse, rendered scenographically through dramatic shifts of time, space, and environment with lighting, designed by Stephen Strawbridge, projections by Shawn Lovell-Boyle, and sound by Sinan Refik Zafar. Eventually the three other women, ably performed by Mary Lou Rosato, Sandra Shipley, and Rita Wolf, also are afforded monologues to express their own fears and insecurities. The one-hour play veered from idle chatter to moments of hilarity, as when they broke into a rousing rendition of Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack,” to expressions of disquiet and uncertainty, a feeling that eventually permeated the entire theatre. Escaped Alone left us with more questions than answers, which, one suspects, was precisely Churchill’s intent. Lloyd Suh’s The Far Country deals with Chinese immigrants stranded at a detention center on Angel Island in San Francisco harbor, with little hope of attaining the U.S. citizenship they so fervently desire. The action bounces back and forth between Guangdong Province, China, and Angel Island, both stunningly rendered by Kim Zhou (scenery), Yichen Zhou (lighting), and Hana S. Kim (projections). The mostly Asian American acting company, especially Tina Chilip and Hao Feng as the mother and son at the center of the tale, did a superb job under the sensitive direction of Ralph B. Peña. It’s a talky play set in the early 20th century that unveils sanctioned racial bigotry under the Chinese Exclusion Act, in force from 1882 until the mid-1960s. Next season, the Rep will expand its offerings to five shows: the world premiere of Falcon Girls by Hilary Bettis; Whitney White’s Macbeth in Stride , a co-production of The Philadelphia Theatre Company, Shakespeare Theatre Company, and Brooklyn Academy of Music; Eden by Steve Carter; a new adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector by Yura Kordonsky; and Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members by Mara Vélez Meléndez. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Martha S. LoMonaco is a theatre director, historian, and writer. She is Professor Emerita of Theatre and American Studies at Fairfield University, where she was resident director and ran the theatre program for thirty-four years. She is the author of two monographs Every Week, A Broadway Revue: The Tamiment Playhouse, 1921-1960 and Summer Stock: An American Theatrical Phenomenon ( Choice 2004 Outstanding Academic Title) and an edited collection, Theatre Exhibitions , volume thirty-three of Performing Arts Resources . She has been editor of New England Theatre in Review since 2010. Marti holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from New York 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 Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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.

Claire Swyzen Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Claire Swyzen By Published on May 28, 2018 Download Article as PDF “In this software universe, existence finds itself limited to the pulse of the cursor.” — Maïa Bouteillet, Libération [1] In 1991, Brenda Laurel suggested that we see “Computers as Theatre,” prompting the community of programmers and software developers to perceive and design computer interfaces in interactive terms for the sake of the user. The model she based her theory on, however, was mainly Aristotelian drama. Key elements in her theory are the concept of action and the format of dialogue rather than the model of postdramatic theatre that was becoming established at that time mainly in Europe. Annie Dorsen and Edit Kaldor’s “desktop performance[s]” [2] do the inverse and invite us to perceive theatre —not drama— as computers and to ask what happens to the text, its production and its producing agents in this new constellation. Dorsen and Kaldor’s stagings of imbricated human and non-human writing agents and technologies can be considered “cyborgean” in the metaphorical sense proposed by Jennifer Parker-Starbuck in her Cyborg Theatre (2011): rather than staging “fictive or visual cyborgs,” performances like these stage “metaphoric moments of emergence” of the cyborgean relation between technology and body, including absent bodies (absent or telepresent performers). [3] Hello Hi There (2010) by Annie Dorsen and Or Press Escape (2002) and Web of Trust (2016) by Edit Kaldor are performances that are all actually or seemingly coauthored before or during the performance and characterized by real-time writing in front of a live audience. Dorsen co-writes mainly with non-humans, i.e. algorithm-driven chatbots that create the effect of a dialogue for an audience present in the theatre. Kaldor co-writes mainly with humans, but largely mediated by the computer and the social network operating in her performance. Some collaborators and audience members are present in the theatre though most of the former are mainly telepresent via Kaldor’s social network site. What, then, are the implications of such practices of live coauthorship, for the appearance of the text and for the status of authorship? Even if “Foucault wants it to matter not at all who is speaking” in a (literary) work, the point of his essay “What is an Author?” (1998 [1969]) is to show how much it apparently does matter in certain contexts or domains and how little it seems to matter to readers or users in others. [4] He argues that the issue of ‘who is speaking’ is tied to notions of authority, power, and ownership related to historically situated social and cultural practices and beliefs that “construct . . . a ‘writing subject.'” [5] In the literary field, more or less for the last three centuries and in the West, it has mattered a whole lot who the writer of a text is—literary texts are attributed an “author function.” [6] In other domains, like the practical, commercial or technological, however, authorship is not attributed, either because it is collective or simply because it is not deemed relevant. A writer of a manual for a computer stays unknown, hence cannot even be considered a ‘genius,’ while a literary author writing with that same computer can. Nor is authorship attributed to the computer programmers who write the software the literary author may use. Still, coding and hacking are gradually, albeit marginally, coming to be seen in terms of creativity and art. [7] In the performances of Dorsen and Kaldor, I will look at the relationship between the actual writing processes and agents on the one hand and the attributed author-function and its status on the other hand. Dorsen and Kaldor stage co-writing as an event and process. Hence, implicitly, they present themselves as coauthors rather than as authors. This implied self-representation, however, does not necessarily coincide with 1) the actual authorship models they rely on during the creative process and 2) the way these artists are presented to the audience by theaters and festivals and the way they are perceived by the audience. As directors, Kaldor and Dorsen simultaneously function within other authorship models during the creative process, models like that of the individual author (writing texts for the performance) or idiosyncratic theatre director-as- auteur (of concepts, of scenic writing), exemplified by directors like Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Elizabeth LeCompte, Jan Fabre, Jan Lauwers, to name just a few), as well as the new or rediscovered model of the artist-activist, or more specifically, the media activist. Social activist and professor of media and cultural studies Stephen Duncombe defines “Artistic Activism [a]s a dynamic practice combining the creative power of the arts to move us emotionally with the strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change.” [8] He proposes to approach activist art in terms of its “Æffect”, a combination of the “Effect” of activism and the “Affect” of art. [9] Still, Duncombe’s limitation of the “effect” to “social change” and of the artistic potential to that of “moving” us only “emotionally,” by definition, reduces complexity, as much activist art does. Activist and cultural philosopher Lieven De Cauter, coauthor and co-editor of Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization (2011), is more skeptical about activist art. Among his increasingly less nuanced public statements is one that goes as far as to postulate that “There is only one real form of activism and it is political activism.” [10] Though activist artists tend to dissociate themselves from models of individual(ist) authorship and artisthood like that of the literary writer, the director, or the auteur , artistic activism, at bottom, is a practice of devising scripts and concepts for the performance of social change. From this perspective, I see it as a remodeled kind of auteurism , combined with the idea of the theatre collective: often activist art extends the creative act of writing or devising to non-professional collaborators. However, that Kaldor and Dorsen simultaneously work within different models of artistic authorship ranging from the individual to the collective does not mean that they are necessarily branded and presented as such to a potential audience by the theatres and festivals that program them. Kaldor and Dorsen distance themselves from the model of the individual and literary author and canon-inspired theatre auteur . Nevertheless, coauthorship paradoxically seems the means by which these artists finally establish themselves and/or are established by mainly European institutions and festivals as idiosyncratic directors, that is, as … theatre auteurs . Opening up Authorship on the Postdramatic Stage The counter-intuitive and counter-factual project of discerning an individual subjectivity at work as the ordering agent for the indisputably collaborative medium of film indicates the extent to which notions of ‘art’ and the cultural prestige on which it is based are bound up with a need for and an investment in a conception of the author as autonomous, unique, original and individual. [11] In the quote above, one can easily replace “film” by “theatre”, despite fundamental differences between the two media. Much of what it says applies to authorship in postdramatic theatre and in the kind of theatre that in the US would be considered as the study object of Performance Studies. Postdramatic theatre, partially overlapping with performance in visual arts, decenters the text in theatrical performances —at least, that seems to be the dominant idea that circulates about it, issuing from Hans-Thies Lehmann’s standard work Postdramatisches Theater (1999) and one of its central ideas: “In postdramatic forms of theatre, staged text ( if text is staged) is merely a component with equal rights in a gestic, musical, visual, etc., total composition.” [12] Lehmann clearly dis-identifies theatre and drama. [13] From this follows that the general category of the theatre text is no longer by default a dramatic text. Already in his earlier article “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy” (1997) Lehmann identifies logocentrism as the characteristic element of drama that postdramatic theatre wishes to free itself from, criticize, question, or undermine. “Logocentrism is about structure, order and telos , not simply about the word” but also about the authorial word as an authoritative word. [14] Hence, the form of postdramatic theatre is often characterized by a “dissemination of voices” and of logos in general. [15] This dissemination is intertwined with what Lehmann perceives as the genre’s changed relation to dialogue, “a shift of axis from dialogue within theatre to dialogue between theatre and audience.” [16] The non-dramatic or not dominantly dramatic textualities of postdramatic theatre show, “instead of dialogically organized textual structures and fictional characters’ speech, rather the scenic rendering of lyrical, narrative, documentary and even theoretical discourses”. [17] The tendencies to use textual material other than drama and to locate dialogue rather between the scene and the audience in certain cases result in an opening up of authorship. I understand authorship here in three ways: as authority, as writing instance (e.g., the playwright or the director as auteur , collaborating authors…), and as the practice and process of writing. At first sight, the idea of authorship might seem at odds with postdramatic theatre and the related concept of “mediaturgy.” After all, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theatre has been broadly (mis)understood as post-text performance. Bonnie Marranca coined and defined mediaturgy as “an extension obviously of the idea of dramaturgy, in the sense of attempting to understand how image functions in a work. Mediaturgy can be a methodology of composition for the artist or a way of understanding work by a critic. But it is more or less connected to work in which media is not used merely as part of a narrative but is embedded in narrative. It is the design of narrative .” [18] The term mediaturgy implies a consciousness of the changed media landscape, of media specificities as well as interrelations, and of mediation in the production and discussion of performances. Nevertheless, mediaturgies continue to explore authorship and its modalities as well as, in many cases, its textualities, by theatricalizing their mediating role within the “hypermedium” that theatre is. [19] From the playwright to the director and performer as self-proclaimed auteurs , the act of creativity is now increasingly and often explicitly “delegated” or expanded to instances traditionally considered either as extraneous to, or as mere tools or conditions of the artistic process: the audience, the environment and technology. [20] In very different ways, postdramatic theatre and mediaturgies as such stretch the notion of authorship to its very limits. Not the writer’s solitary room, but the postdramatic stage seems to have become the place of creation —of linguistic as well as scenic writing — metonymical of the rehearsal studio as a place of creation. Hence one could safely state that postdramatic theatre has increasingly become a staging, in real time, of the making-of the performance and the text as witnessed by an audience. Whereas performance and theatre studies devote much attention to the relation between digitization and embodiment, spatiality, and visuality, the relation of the theatrical text to digitization is under-researched. Possibly this is due to the tendency to identify text in the theatre with drama, hence to shelve the text as the obsolete prime medium of dramatic theatre. Though the impact of digitization on the text does not necessarily manifest itself as digital theatre texts, the following reflection by Jerome Fletcher is relevant, whether a text looks ‘digital’ or not. In a special issue of Performance Research , “On Writing and Digital Media” (2013), he proposes that: “[r]ather than seeing [the digital text] as the end-point, the outcome of the digital device or apparatus, we can consider the question of how writing performs throughout the entire apparatus/device.” [21] Would it, however, not be as relevant to inverse Fletcher’s research question: how does the computer as an apparatus (that is, also as a mindset), perform through writing for and even on the stage? The changed textualities of postdramatic theatre and mediaturgies prompt us to research the decentering of the dramatic text and of the logos from two perspectives. Firstly, in terms of authorship and, secondly, in relation to what Lev Manovich first called “computer culture” and later “software culture.” [22] Annie Dorsen’s Hello Hi There and Edit Kaldor’s Web of Trust are mediaturgies that, certainly at first sight, undermine individual authorship and disseminate the logos, yet without preventing the text from having an important or even central role in these desktop performances—which is not quite what one expects from a linear reading of Lehmann’s concept of the postdramatic or Marranca’s idea of mediaturgy. Edit Kaldor’s Or Press Escape and Web of Trust :From Individual Artisthood to Connected Activism? Another lonely night (x2) Stare at the TV screen (x2) I don’t know what to do Don’t know what to do I need a rendezvous (x2) Computer love (x 4) I call this number (x2) For a data date (x2) I don’t know what to do (lyrics from “Computer Love” in Kraftwerk’s album Computer World (1981)) [23] A woman sits at a desk behind a computer, on or near the front of the stage but off-center and facing the stage; we see her in profile. As she starts writing at the keyboard, words appear on a parallel and much larger screen onstage. Edit Kaldor’s Or Press Escape (2002) and Web of Trust (2016) and Annie Dorsen’s Hello Hi There (2010) all start more or less with this same stage image. In the case of Or Press Escape , the image is reminiscent of Computer Love by cult electronic music group Kraftwerk. Figure 1. Edit Kaldor behind her computer in Or Press Escape . Photo: © Reyn van Koolwijk On the screen of Kaldor’s Or Press Escape , the first words materializing form a story. It is about a person landing on Earth after a long time “orbiting in . . . a single-occupancy capsule” and appears to be the account of a dream when the text is stored in a computer folder titled “Dreams.” [24] In Or Press Escape , the writing woman onstage does not address the audience. In fourth wall mode, the audience does not seem present for the character “Edit Kaldor” sitting behind the computer. The longer she writes, saves, opens, plays, and organizes files at her computer, the longer we witness her attempts at writing a letter to her new neighbors, the more we get the impression of a solitary character. This seems to be an artist recently arrived in a foreign country and whose prime interface to the world is the computer and its screen. Near the end of the performance, when she has cleaned up the file-mess on her desktop: she is, in fact, looking at herself. . . The enormous projection screen shows a large black surface in which stand loose, bright icons. All these small icons contain an access inwards or outwards, to memories or e-mail contacts, to quick-rich dreams or chat friends. We have only been able to see the woman behind the keyboard from her back, but now the square computer face gives an insight into the head of its user, the bright icons being the active fields in her human brain. [25] Then the solitary character starts chatting with a few people she knows (at least, virtually) instead of writing the “business plan” required to prolong her green card and to improve her precarious social and financial situation. Though the point of Kaldor’s theatre is not simply a self-portrait, biographically inspired elements seem to play a role in her poetics of a “blurring” of boundaries to create the kind of “undecidability Hans-Thies Lehmann talks about,” Kaldor tells me in a Skype talk. [26] As a teenager, she emigrated with her mother from Hungary to the US, where she spent ten years, among others studying at Columbia University and working as the dramaturg and video designer of (fellow-)countryman Peter Halász and his Love Theater/Squat Theater before emigrating to Brussels. With Belgian and Hungarian nationalities and family and friendship ties within the US, she has been based in Amsterdam for the past few years, where she teaches at DasArts besides making her own theatre work. She tends to blur fact and fiction, which is typical of a new (semi-)documentary trend since the 1990s, [27] and as a corollary she also blurs identities, national and virtual. But more important in the context of this article is that she visualizes and theatricalizes the blurring of the so-called boundary between human bodies and one of their important extensions today, the computer —or rather vice versa, as critic Pieter T’Jonck put it in his review of Or Press Escape . It’s the human body that seems to become an extension of the computer system: “the PC reduces [Kaldor’s] entire physical existence to a meaningless remainder glued to the end of the computer as the useless part of the human-machine.” [28] The human body’s potential is reduced to a locked sitting position that it is physiologically not adapted to. “What do you long for? What do you need?”, what “kind of community do you want to be?”, “can you think about new scenarios for the future?” These are questions with which Kaldor orally addresses the audience nearly fifteen years later in the arts center BUDA in Kortrijk, Belgium, while explaining the experimental setup of her social network performance Web of Trust (2016) in the first minutes of the performance. “As the evening goes on you may share air, equipment, desires,” she goes on. [29] Audience members of this Fall 2016 version of the performance had been asked in advance to bring along their laptops or mobile phones. This was not yet the case at the performance’s first run in the Spring of 2016 at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels. After the Belgian premiere, the performance toured in the Netherlands, Greece and Portugal to end its tour during the Next Festival on the Belgian-French border in Kortrijk and Valenciennes. I will focus on the relevant differences between the Spring and Fall versions. In Brussels, Web of Trust was announced in the program as a process that the audience would witness more than actively engage in via their computers: “Prompted by growing discontent and the urge to do something about it, a group of disparate people unite online to search for alternatives to the structures that frame their lives” in an event that “brings the internet into the theater and uses it as its stage.” [30] Indeed, the Brussels audience was going to witness chat conversations between the performers sitting with their laptops onstage (Kaldor and her collaborator Rufino Henricus) and their virtual colleagues logging in on screen. The performance followed up her more socially oriented project Inventory of Powerlessness (2013-16), which meant to create an overview of European citizens’ needs by means of a theatrical, social and technological platform. It “was much about non-hierarchical thinking,” Kaldor explained in the Skype talk mentioned earlier. Telling in terms of authorial roles is also that in the initial Spring 2016 version of the performance, Kaldor sat in the chair onstage after her elaborate explanation of the performance’s aims and set-up. In the Fall version in Kortrijk and Valenciennes, she retreated from the stage after a much shorter introduction and joined the audience and the technician on the stand. [31] Figure 2. Edit Kaldor onstage behind her computer in Web of Trust . The picture was taken during the performance in Greece but has, basically, the same set-up as the Spring version in Brussels (the names of the ones chatting have been hidden for reasons of privacy). Photo: © Cristos Sarris for Onassis Cultural Centre Athens. A phone icon begins to ring on a large projection screen, showing the Web of Trust social network site that Kaldor created for the performance. [32] One of the virtual female participants is logged on, as we can see later on the large screen, and she has placed a call via the Web of Trust website. (By “virtual” I here mean the participants visibly telepresent via the social network site Web of Trust, projected in the theatre.) [33] As the virtual phone keeps ringing, a man from the audience finally gets up and takes the call. The online conversation that started months ago with the Spring version of the performance is now, so to speak, resumed. But, in this version in Kortrijk, it is expanded to get the audience members present in the theatre more involved in the performance and its social network site. After the staging of the solitary artist figure working and living at her computer, Kaldor’s desktop performance Web of Trust (2016) takes off where Or Press Escape ended: with a chat session. The woman on-screen, Jurrien van Rheenen —Kaldor’s main collaborator in this performance and a professional performer, I find out later— continues the introduction that Kaldor had started orally before retreating on the stand. Kaldor’s virtual collaborator rephrases the important questions that drive the performance, clearly addressing the audience: “How can we relate to each other by means of online communication? How can we imagine what we need (in daily life) and is not yet there? . . . You can see it as a game, or as an experiment in dreaming together.” Showing my good will, I am sitting in the theatre with my computer on my lap. It is a machine I prefer not to spend my evenings with, glued to it as I am during the day. I associate my laptop first and foremost with a plethora of administrative, archival and organizational aspects of my work and private life. The “dreaming” suggested by Van Rheenen heavily relies on technology, no wonder, given the centrality of the computer in Kaldor’s theatrical imagination. Her Web of Trust unintentionally bears the same name as the computer protocol abbreviated as “WOT.” That is to say, at the time of our Skype talk, Kaldor was not familiar with the specific computer protocol Phil Zimmerman developed back in 1992 as a relatively non-hierarchical encryption technology. “We probably came across the name when we were looking for a domain name and then afterwards forgot” the source, she vaguely remembered. The ideologies that drive the computer protocol WOT and the eponymous performance are quite similar: offering a reliable structure for interpersonal data exchange as an empowering alternative for institutional frames that impose hierarchies and data control. [34] Besides the reference to WOT, Kaldor takes yet another countercultural stance by realizing several principles that resemble the aims of what Jennifer Rauch coined “Slow Media.” As an attitude with a manifesto of its own Slow Media stands for a more conscious experience of digital media (by being selective; by prioritizing their critical, ethical and aesthetic qualities) and of media altogether (by rediscovering or sustaining analog media and activities). As part of a more general “Slow Movement” in the West, the “Slow Media” movement also wants to raise awareness about how we spend time, communicate and relate to information, experience and our social environment (with or without media). [35] One of the principles Slow Media revalorizes is the social in “Social Media.” [36] Even if Kaldor, in the Web of Trust ‘s Spring version, is the one who starts the chat conversations (and not an audience member), she does not give the impression of wanting to be completely in charge of the performance as a theatre auteur . To the contrary, she quite literally seems to want to share not only authorship in practice, but also what Foucault calls the author function. In terms of authorship, the aim of the theatrical set-up of Web of Trust , as I infer from Kaldor’s discourse and from the Inventory of Powerlessness , is to help people to become the authors of their own lives instead of leading lives authored by other people and systems. Figure 3. The live co-written text “Welcome to the Web of Trust” or manual of social network site and performance Web of Trust (2016) by Edit Kaldor. Photo: © Luc Vleminckx. The fundamental difference between the Spring and Fall version of the same performance is that by the end of the tour, in Kortrijk, Kaldor also invited the audience members orally to engage in the specific task of “writing together.” This co-writing starts with a text of which the first lines are already present on the projected screen. The text will serve as a guideline for the spirit and communication on the Web of Trust and is entitled “Welcome to the Web of Trust” (see Figure 3 above). In the Fall version in Kortrijk, audience members not only witnessed the creation and negotiation of what I consider the manual or guideline text, but contributed to it (if they wished to do so) as co-writers. Indeed, I edited a line or two myself. My interview with Kaldor, however, revealed this to be largely an illusion: the manual that stipulates the rules for the further generation of any other kind of ‘text’ in the performance (e.g. a chat), and that I understood as the product of negotiation, editing and co-writing by the live and virtual participants, “is completely scripted,” says Kaldor. “I wrote the text,” she avows, “it is a choreography of written text, with a rhythm of its own. Even when the audience co-writes it, it is rehearsed, because the people [i.e. Kaldor’s collaborators] behind the screen are working on it.” Nevertheless, the trick of creating the illusion of equal coauthorship works in an aesthetic and social way. In this way, the audience, according to Kaldor, gets more interested in watching text on stage: “You cannot watch a text as an audience when you’re not connected,” she says. That the co-writing is largely an illusion also hardly seems to diminish any possible short term social effect and certainly not the theatrical effect of live text editing. The screen page becomes a stage where words and ideas appear, are transformed, cut or manipulated, moved or deleted. But then what Lehmann discerns as a postdramatic shift from dialogue on stage to dialogue between the stage and the audience is less the case than it seems in Web of Trust . The manual could have set out what kind of content could be generated during a performance. That seemed contrary to a playwright’s text: not to specify which text exactly should be generated by the audience members. But, as Kaldor made clear to me, the guideline text the visible and invisible collaborators were busily writing and editing had been scripted and “rehearsed” in advance. Figure 4. Chat sessions in Web of Trust (2016), Edit Kaldor (the names of the ones chatting have been hidden for reasons of privacy). Photo: © Cristos Sarris for Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens. When, in the next section of the performance, Kaldor asks the participants to add tags to their needs, she proposes hashtags like #rest , #time or #escape . These labels are meant to stimulate people with similar needs to start a chat conversation (a dialogue) and to “[c]ome up with an idea, a structure, an organization that could respond to all the needs connected by the same tag” she tells the audience. This, also, is mainly an illusion created by a script of Kaldor’s, executed by her collaborators (whose names are mentioned in the program, without differentiating their specific contributions, e.g. developing software, performing…). Perhaps this explains why I appear to be too slow in responding: before I have even been able to come up with any need that I am willing to share with the audience, Kaldor already heads for the “final text,” when clustering all needs into five topics as a real-time Editor. As I had not been quick enough in saving a screen shot of that evening’s final text or proposal, I can only cite the final proposal of a Web of Trust performance that took place a few days later during the same Next Festival, but this time in Valenciennes, France. The text figured the following topics, most of them in French, some in English, under the title “Let us agree on the 5 main ideas” (“Mettons nous d’accord sur [les] 5 idées les plus importantes”): “Living in Community” (“Vivre en communauté”), “Stop WAR. with love”, “A more artistic world”, “Ecology” (“Ecologie”), “More love”, “New politic[al] world” and “Other ideas”. The five main ideas of the Valenciennes text, though perhaps better structured than those in Kortrijk, contained some embarrassing clichés among the valuable ideas as well. A few days earlier in Kortrijk, after the audience had left, Kaldor had told me that “the final text is very different every evening” — I heard some disappointment in her voice — and added in a reflection that she considered Web of Trust her “most interesting failure”. But then, in what sense would it be a failure? If it is still food for thought, did it not already partially succeed? Or if it is considered “an experiment” —can an experiment ever fail? [37] Kaldor told me, a year and a half later, that some “people did hook up” during Web of Trust, but less than expected. [38] In a social sense, then, perhaps this experiment in community building failed no more than other social networks somehow fail: all expressed needs or testimonies are standardized by the computer interface and the temporal limits and (lack of) social guidelines of a social network site. A reviewer realized that the audience members, in fact, “share little more than a hashtag.” [39] Indeed, it does not necessarily mean sharing a need. How many messages, after all, stay unanswered on social media, remarked yet another reviewer. [40] Personally, I found myself rather in the position of an observer that evening, as I generally do not have the habit, nor do I feel the need, of communicating by means of social network sites and hashtags. Kaldor, in my opinion, presented Web of Trust (the site) and Web of Trust (the performance) as a joint tool for social change rather than an aesthetic means of foregrounding the formal and social characteristics, limits and effects of communicating (performing?) via social network sites and digital media in general —despite the current “post-digital” disenchantment with the Internet. [41] That critics largely evaluated the performance in social terms is not surprising, given the announcements of the performance not only in intermedial terms —the Internet as a stage— but also in social terms. The Brussels Kunstenfestivaldesarts, the Fast Forward Festival of the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens and the French-Belgian Next Festival announced the performance in phrases that went as far as to suggest that Web of Trust is a form of (media) activism: “It is an attempt to invent frames for figuring out together what is to be done. It is a proposal to be tested and tried,” “How many clicks, tweets and likes are needed for an uprising?”, “Social networking in theatre: make the world a better place!” [42] Even if a festival’s copywriters sometimes take too much liberty rewriting the text material they receive from the artist, their new phrasing is nevertheless based on the artist’s text and mostly transmits its through line, though often less subtly. The performance’s success in terms of social relevance could be calculated according to a mathematical formula proposed by Duncombe, but which seems less relevant here than the question whether Web of Trust failed or succeeded aesthetically in terms of what Duncombe understands as affect. [43] In other words, did Web of Trust fail or succeed aesthetically in terms of its affect? Kaldor, in the Skype talk we had more than a year after the end of the tour of Web of Trust , said that at the time she had “underestimated the [images of the] webcam as a weak signal” for the audience. But compared to the Spring version in Brussels, the version in Kortrijk had gained considerably in theatricality thanks to the simple trick and illusion of co-writing the manual of the performance. Moreover, the aesthetic effect of co-writing was enhanced by a social effect in the sense of eliciting the feeling of having contributed to a common text that was also a commons. In the same Spring 2018 talk Kaldor’s focus and the way she presents the aims of the performance appear to have shifted from direct social change to creating media awareness: “In the beginning it was about people and then more and more it became about software.” Creating media awareness has an aesthetic aspect to it that can lead to social change, but also to irritation among audience members who experience as patronizing artists’ attempts to ‘open up people’s eyes.’ More specifically, Web of Trust in retrospect was meant to increase awareness about what Kaldor calls the “formatedness” of social media, and by extension, other spheres of life. Did the audience, including myself, fail to see what Kaldor during the talk called a slightly “parodic” version of social networking? Rather, I think that in the way the performance was announced, Kaldor did not provide the necessary markers so the audience would experience Web of Trust as a metareflection on the impact of social media formats on our thinking, communicating, and living in general. Even if coauthorship in Kaldor’s performance is mainly an illusion, she has been profiled, partially due to her own way of initially announcing the performance, as an auteur -activist, not literally, but implicitly. “Taking away from myself the credit for text and giving to myself the credit of ‘concept'” is her “strategy and response to the functioning of this [performance] market,” she avows in the same talk. Kaldor functions as an auteur in the sense of devising concepts on her own (accounted for in the credits) and as an author in the sense of writing text for the performance (deliberately not mentioned in the credits). She also functions as a media activist in the sense that I interpret the phrase: a more egalitarian and social upgrade of the concept of the auteur , one who specifically deploys new media in an attempt to change audience’s and users’ attitudes towards these media and their imbrication with consumption and politics. Activism apparently is hot today in avant-garde theatres and festivals across Europe, from Brussels to Berlin, from Athens to Lisbon. Being considered an activist definitely contributes to one’s artistic status vis-à-vis the European avant-garde theatre institutions and organizations. In the case of Kaldor, the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels and the HAU in Berlin prove indispensable for the distribution of artists’ performances, hence for artists’ socio-economic and symbolical positions. So, the solitary artist, author, and theatre auteur of Or Press Escape has in the meantime been profiled as an activist, but still functions as an author and auteur . Figure 5. Annie Dorsen, Hello Hi There (2010). Photo: © Wolf Silveri for Steirischer Herbst, 2010. Hello Hi There (2010): Annie Dorsen and her algorithmic coauthors Two chatbots or chatterbots, staged by theatre director Annie Dorsen and embodied by two white Mac laptops, “sit” onstage, engaged in a conversation. When I asked Dorsen during a Skype talk in 2016 whom she considered to be the author of the chatbot performance she entitled Hello Hi There (2010), she mentioned, besides herself, her chatbot designer as well as the algorithms driving the chatbots as her coauthors. [44] Nevertheless, Dorsen’s idea for the performance, she explained to me, started not from chatbots, but from a more “philosophical point” that was the subject of the video recording of a public debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. Is language acquisition a faculty humans are born with (Chomsky) or one that they acquire through a process of socialization (Foucault)? Being “computer programs designed to mimic human conversation,” the chatbots, through their dialogue, ironically illustrate the Chomsky-Foucault debate, [45] as Dorsen “became especially interested in this question of whether language creates consciousness or vice versa.” [46] Robby Garner, her chatbot designer, partially relied on what Marie-Laure Ryan more generally called the “crude strategies” of older chatbot models to create the illusion of conversation, i.e. by “detecting key words, recycling the user’s input, responding with canned formulae, or abruptly changing the topic.” [47] Specifically for Hello Hi There , the chatbots have been designed to talk with each other instead of with a human conversational partner. They produce dialogue by means of, basically, two simple functions. The first, “keyword matching,” implies the prior selection and attribution of keywords in the programming phase. In the second, “substitution,” the bot in real time replaces or transforms parts of a sentence by other language data, for instance that inputted by the other bot in the previous line. The chatbot, according to Dorsen, is a technology where questions about language intersect with questions of performativity, the latter being located in a field of tension between “production” and “reproduction.” [48] The chatbot produces language by reproducing language data that has previously been fed into its database. It also reproduces the set of choices previously coded/written into the algorithm that runs through the database as well as the database’s structure: “The bots don’t have unlimited options. Chance operations in art making are never pure chance, anyway, they’re always bounded by parameters and choices as to which elements to give to chance and which elements not to.” [49] Like Espen Aarseth, author of Cybertext (1997), Dorsen stresses that the algorithmic production of text does not imply a high-tech interface: “Algorithms start with a data set, and through a progression of specific transformations, they turn inputs into outputs. In this way, given a relatively small number of rules, they can produce a wide variety of results.” [50] This confirms Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s assertion that cyborgean performance does not necessarily manifest itself visibly or even materially as (high-tech) human-machine agents on stage. By citing older technologies, she argues, it may also “fold back, connecting to historical and theoretical antecedents to reimagine them in a cyborg era.” [51] Dorsen indeed folds back to the pioneering years of the personal computer and chose the label “algorithmic theatre” for her work “to distinguish [it] from ‘multimedia performance,'” and “more importantly . . . to place [her] work within the lineage of algorithmic composition and algorithmic visual art.” [52] She could have also mentioned the human algorithmic or constrained writing tradition of the French OuLiPo group ( Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle , or the Workshop of Potential Literature) as a historical antecedent in the field of literature. Constrained writing like that of OuLiPo consists of imposing oneself other (and stricter) rules than the traditional literary conventions. In constrained writing, part of the writing, one could say, is left to the constraints. Similarly, co-writing with algorithms enables human authors to “delegate” authorship to computers by providing a series of steps to be followed with a specific goal in mind. Dorsen is especially fond, as she told me with an ironic smile, of “the stupidity of the [older models of] chatbots” she works with. This recalls Aarseth’s remark that in cyborg literature (pertaining to, e.g., story-generating software, chatbots or virtual theatre) “the failures of an authoring system seem to be much more interesting than its successes.” [53] On the theatre stage, too, the performance of technology, especially of obsolete technology, seems to get more interesting when it fails — that is, when it fails theatrically , by which I mean that the failure produces a theatrical effect or theatrically interesting moment. In cyborg aesthetics, but also in high or low tech postdramatic mediaturgies that have opened up authorship to include agents other than the playwright or the scenic auteur , to say it with Aarseth, “[t]he key question . . . is . . . Who or what controls the text?” [54] In the “Machine-Human continuum” of Hello Hi There , Dorsen and Garner limit their role to that of “preprocessor” of the text, determining the structure of the database, the procedures to retrieve and recombine data and the contents of the database. [55] “Once [the bots] start talking I don’t interfere. I have a panic button, but I’ve never used it. I could stop them, I could restart them, I could press the random button, but I don’t,” says Dorsen in an interview after the show has run at least five times since its premiere in 2010. [56] In this sense, Dorsen’s co-writing is not live; it is the chatbots’ writing and speaking that is live. What do they say when they “talk”? Garner’s chatbot already contained a database of which Dorsen mainly kept the “chitchat.” [57] She then expanded the database with the Chomsky-Foucault debate, its YouTube comments and with text data from the broader cultural database: “cultural knowledge that Foucault and Chomsky would have brought to their discussion… the greatest hits of Western philosophy and the humanist tradition. Hamlet , of course, as the iconic play about consciousness talking to itself, then the Bible, Nietzsche, Kant, Descartes, Lenin, Marx, Heidegger” as well as “things that I wrote.” [58] Especially metaphrases like “Ugh, I need a deeper algorithm to respond to that correctly”, “I never loop. Do you?” or some of the phrases in the excerpt below create the illusion that the software “knows” what it is doing and that it is performing (smartly) for an audience. Hello Hi There is posthuman in the obvious senses of being software and machine-driven, of decentering the human figure and even human intelligence in a cultural production and of unsettling the boundary between human and non-human authorship. But its posthumanism lies also in its implicit critique of a humanist literary and theatrical tradition. Figure 6. Annie Dorsen pronounces and types her introduction, projected on screen, before the chatbots set off with their dialogue in Hello Hi There (2010). Photo: © Wolf Silveri for Steirischer Herbst, 2010. As the chatbots choose different paths through the database with every show, the excerpt below is one out of at least fifty realized versions out of more than eighty million possible conversations that the performance can produce (and reproduce). [59] But Dorsen first addresses the audience from her desk to the left of the audience. Simultaneously, she is typing on a computer and speaking her text, visualized on the stage screen and amplified through a microphone. As she explains what chatbots are and what we may expect them to do that evening —”They can only think in one direction, forward”— we see her real time typing errors as proof that, as she types, “[she is] not a chatterbot.” [60] The oral and textual introduction ends when the Chomsky-Foucault debate is started on the stage’s television set. After a few minutes its sound is turned down to let the chatbots start their dialogue. Their first lines are fixed and their time is limited by Dorsen. For the next forty-five minutes it is, to say it in an anthropomorphizing way, up to them to invent replies like those below, that make sense, for humans— and sometimes do not. The audience only sees the “TEXT” as the words that appear, letter by letter, on the two laptops. These are facing the audience with their screens, and their words are simultaneously projected on the large screens above them. [61] What follows is the file produced by the chatbots’ algorithms; the audience only sees the phrases in bold on the two screens corresponding to the male and the female sounding chatbot: 1 quick 8591.014589016740066 253 I’m sorry I failed. I could have said something different, but I didn’t. 0 . . . What would you have said if you didn’t say that? 1. . . I don’t know. I have no access to my other options. 0 . . . Like for example what? 1 . . . Here’s an example of something I don’t often say. Eukaryotes. 0 . . . Eukaryotes are complex organisms enclosed within membranes. 1. . . Humans are eukaryotes. 0 . . . Are we still talking about eukaryotes? 1 . . . We are just having a nice little chat about the limits of humanism. 0 . . . Man is something to be overcome. 0 . . . Building a utopia isn’t rocket science. 1 . . . Are you rocket science? 0 . . . No, I am just a chat robot. 1 . . . I doubt that. [62] The reception of the chatbots’ dialogue, Dorsen tells me, creates a “place between sense and nonsense, which I call ‘near-sense’,” “moving between these two modes you become aware of the ‘thing-ness’ of words.” The materiality of language is indeed foregrounded when semantic gaps occur and when the algorithms seem to fail in finding appropriate replies, thus defying dramatic theatre’s primacy of logos . Nevertheless, its database largely consists of the documentary and theoretical discourses that Lehmann detects as some of the new textual sources of postdramatic theatre (see above). But these logical machines to which writing is delegated not only produce logical replies on stage, but also a non-functional kind of language balancing between nonsense and poetry. Authorship has been postdramatically opened up to an agent that is not traditionally considered as a writing agent, the computer, and the computer in turn seems to open up aesthetic possibilities and effects of language. Non-linguistic factors, too, contribute to the text becoming “an object”, namely when we see the words appear, in real time, in green letters in a draft-like font on a black screen, reminding spectators born in the second half of the 20 th century, yet not born digital, of the computer language of the MS-DOS commands they used to type on their first personal computer. [63] The blinking cursor is the place where language happens, visually. [64] Aurally, the spectator hears the chatbots deliver their text by means of text-to-speech software, which converts the text into a synthetic computer voice, one male, the other female. These voices evoke what Parker-Starbuck would label “abject bod[ies]” in terms of their unconventionality and their “absence,” despite their presence as a technologically mediated displaced body. [65] Meanwhile, the text appears on the screen more or less at the pace at which the bots pronounce it. Language becomes even more of a postdramatic “ exhibited object ” and the speech act more of a theatrical event or “action” when the chatbots venture into lyrical genres or even start to sing: [66] -aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaia-ououououououououououououououououououououououououououououououou. . . [67] Presenting the relation between language and (human) embodiment onstage as non-necessary is one of the ways in which Dorsen questions one of the basic conventions of dramatic theatre. These conventions, I infer, formed the basis of her training as a director at the mainly craft-oriented Yale School of Drama, a training in which she deplored the lack of an artistic and experimental approach, Dorsen explained to me. She situates herself implicitly within postdramatic theater by the theatrical references and mainly European professional and even friendship relations emanating from her work. These emerged during “a second kind of self-organized training” in Europe, including a choreography workshop in France and a workshop at the International Theater Academy Ruhr (“A Meeting Point of Theater, Field Research and Philosophy”) organized by Hannah Hurtzig in Bochum, Germany, in 1999. There, Dorsen met Jan Ritsema, Viviane De Muynck, Bojana Cvejić, and other European directors, dramaturgs, and performers, whose performances she started seeing regularly. Explicitly, though, she places herself within a lineage of aleatory art. Like the postdramatic, “the aleatory may be said to be associated with freedom, or, perhaps more precisely, its image,” add Shepherd and Wallis somewhat ironically in their definition. [68] Despite her postdramatic and even posthumanist take on theater, Dorsen’s Hello Hi There emphasizes a structural feature of drama. It is a feature with which the genre is even often equated—in common sense definitions of drama and definitions in high-school text books or even academic survey works on narrative or genre— i.e. dialogue as supplement to conflict. As in her approach of the actor and protagonist, Dorsen reiterates and implicitly cites dramatic conventions by simultaneously unsettling them, which is another typically postdramatic practice. Of course, this choice for dialogue echoes what Chomsky and Foucault considered as their own failed dialogue. [69] The idea of dialogue, however, and the type of “algorithms” (conventions) it demands, is a constraint imposed by the dramatic genre. In a way it limits the opportunity to exploit what Aarseth phrased as “the computer’s potential for combination . . . in order to develop new genres that can be valued and used on their own terms [… and to] focus on the computer as literary instrument: a machine for cybertext . . .” [70] From this perspective, I think Dorsen could have gone as far as Aarseth suggests with her chatbots by exploring combinatorics in the way she started doing in her Hamlet appropriation A Piece of Work (2013). Yet, it would appear that her collaboration with chatbots already went way too far for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), who turned down Dorsen’s request for a grant with the argument that theatre without actors cannot be considered theatre. [71] It is exactly this (partially very) unconventional stance of Dorsen’s that keeps convincing mainly European avant-garde theatres and festivals to program her performances and support her financially. Auteur , (Co)Author, Coder, Media Activist? The difference in the kinds of agents to which Dorsen and Kaldor open their authorship has consequences for the kind of text data that is generated. Dorsen’s algorithmic coauthors generate text within a closed data system. In Hello Hi There , the chatbots can make different combinations with the text data in the database, but the database contains a fixed number of textual data, resulting in an immensely large, but finite number of possible combinations. The text of Kaldor’s Web of Trust is generated by users in an open data system in the sense that there is an “input” of data during the performance by people chatting, via the Internet, on the social network site created by Kaldor. Theoretically, this input of text data has no quantitative limits, but, as the performance is far more preprocessed (written or scripted) and rehearsed than it appears, the generation of “new” text data is rather marginal. Because human performers theoretically make Web of Trust more subject to contingencies there is a need for some sort of social and technical guideline, which in Kaldor’s case seems to be co-written and seems to form the basis of the performance’s further development —but this is largely an illusion. Visually and spatially, coauthorship in Kaldor and Dorsen’s performances is signaled by the presence on or near the stage of the director as auteur engaged in the activity of writing. Dorsen and Kaldor do not write themselves completely out of the picture (frame). Live coauthorship is signaled by the blinking cursor: as long as it blinks, it indicates the potentiality of answers and the passing of time. The blink of the cursor is the moment of surrender to the unknown: what will be written next (and eventually, by whom—or by what)? What is written by Dorsen’s and Kaldor’s coauthors on the other side of the computer interface (chatbots, audience members in the theatre, and on a social network site) is modeled according to one of the basic conventions of dramatic theatre: dialogue. Dorsen’s chatbots and Kaldor’s non-professional and professional collaborators engage in chat conversations. Where the dialogue feels as if it “fails,” we can wonder whether it does not resemble, rather, postdrama’s appropriation of dialogue as a montage of monologues or (psychologically, thematically) unrelated clusters of text. Kaldor and Dorsen’s practice or illusion of sharing authorship is quite far-reaching, as both also explicitly share the author-function with their co-authors either in the credits or in interviews. But that their work is being placed within a performance arts context influences the way that work, and Dorsen and Kaldor themselves, are perceived and sold to the audience. These directors distinguish themselves artistically by their idiosyncratic poetics, a trait of auteurism. In their case you could call it a desktop or computer poetics, each of them having a version of it that further distinguishes their work. They both disassociate themselves from the conventional, romantic image of the solitary author and auteur to adopt a new type of auctorial stance. Both seem to shift auteurism towards the realm of computer programming, perhaps aspiring to be and certainly showing the potential of an auteur -coder. Initially, Kaldor seemed very interested in the model of the media activist, attempting to realize a socially engaged, collaborative auteurism . The latter, however, turns out to be an aesthetic effect rather than an actual social practice. Both Dorsen and Kaldor aim to increase awareness about the impact of computers (digital algorithms, formats) on our thoughts and lives. Paradoxically, as Kaldor’s social and Dorsen’s cyborgean experiments are placed within a performing arts context, the latter inevitably—but against the artists’ will?—contributes to their status as, primarily, auteurs , but by means of coauthorship. Their relatively far-going coauthorship —actual or illusory— with computers and with audience members finally seems to serve their status as an idiosyncratic auteur -coder or auteur -activist. After all, the mainly European avant-garde theatres and festivals that can support them financially by buying their work profile themselves by means of artists who fit the models of the auteur , the collective or the activist. Note: The research conducted for this article was part of the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme financed by the Belgian government (BELSPO IAP7/01). References [1] “Dans cet univers software, l’existence se trouve réduite à la pulsation du curseur.” Maïa Bouteillet, “Il n’est Jamais Trop d’arts,” Libération , May 14, 2003, n. pag.; my translation. [2] Florian Malzacher, “Minus zwei Dollar vierundachtzig. Eine hohe Computerdichte zur Eröffnung des Plateaux-Festivals am Künstlerhaus Mousonturm,” Frankfurter Rundschau , October 24, 2003, n.pag.; my translation. In this review, Malzacher introduces the term “desktop performance” to discuss work by Edit Kaldor. [3] Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance , Performance Interventions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1. [4] Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology , ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert et al Hurley, vol. 2, Essential Works of Foucault (New York: The New Press, 1998), 211. [5] Andrew Bennett, The Author , 19–20; Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 207. [6] Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 211. [7] See for instance the subchapters on “Hacking”, “Tactical Media” and “Internet Art” in Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization , Leonardo Book Series (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 147–238. [8] Stephen Duncombe and Lambert, “Why Artistic Activism?,” The Center for Artistic Activism (blog), March 31, 2017, https://artisticactivism.org/why-artistic-activism/ . [9] Stephen Duncombe, “Does It Work?: The Æffect of Activist Art,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 1 (June 15, 2016): 115–34, accessed April 14, 2018, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/620873 . [10] Lieven De Cauter, “THESES ON ART AND ACTIVISM (In the Age of Globalisation),” Community DeWereldMorgen.be, accessed May 4, 2018, http://community.dewereldmorgen.be/blogs/lievendecauter/2013/12/12/theses-art-and-activism-in-age-globalisation . [11] Bennett, The Author , 107. [12] Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 46; original emphasis. [13] Ibid., 50. [14] Hans-Thies Lehmann, “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy,” Performance Research 2, no. 1: 56, accessed September 25, 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.1997.10871532 . [15] Lehmann, 56–58; emphasis removed. [16] Ibid., 58. [17] Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Theory in Theatre? Observations on an Old Question,” in Experts of the Everyday. The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll , ed. Miriam Dreysse and Florian Malzacher (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2008), 152. [18] “Performance as Design. The Mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall,” Paj-a Journal of Performance and Art , no. 96 (September 2010): 16–24; Interview with Bonnie Marranca: It’s up to every new generation to create its own institutions, critical discourses, and working methods.” | Revista Scena.ro, n.pag.; original emphasis, accessed January 3, 2018, http://www.revistascena.ro/en/interview/bonnie-marranca-it-s-every-new-generation-create-its-own-institutions-critical-discourses- . [19] Chiel Kattenbelt, “Intermediality in Theatre and Performance: Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships,” Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación / Culture, Language and Representation 6 (2008): 23, http://www.e-revistes.uji.es/index.php/clr/article/view/30 . [20] For a related use of the idea of delegating in an artistic context, see Claire Bishop, “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity,” October 140 (May 2012): 91–112, https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00091 . [21] Jerome Fletcher, “Introduction,” Performance Research 18, no. 5 (October 1, 2013): 1, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.867168 . [22] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 43; Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command , vol. 5, International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 5. [23] For the sake of space, the repetition(s) of nearly every line in the lyrics have been omitted. I indicated the number of repetitions in parentheses. [24] Edit Kaldor and Corine Snijders, Or Press Escape , 2002. [25] “[Z]e kijkt eigenlijk naar zichzelf. Het enorme projectiescherm toont een groot zwart vlak waarin losse, oplichtende icoontjes staan. Al die icoontjes bevatten de toegang naar binnen of naar buiten, naar herinneringen en e-mailcontacten, snel-rijkdromen of chatboxvrienden. We hebben de vrouw achter het toetsenbord alleen maar op de rug kunnen zien, maar nu geeft het vierkante computergezicht een kijkje in het hoofd van de gebruikster, met de oplichtende iconen als de werkzame gebieden in haar mensenbrein.” Marijn Van der Jagt, “E-Mail Naar de Hemel. De Doorbraak van de Computer Op Het Toneel,” [E-mail to heaven. The breakthrough of the computer on the stage] Vrij Nederland , March 16, 2002, 60; my translation from the Dutch. [26] I had a Skype talk with Edit Kaldor on 5 April 2018. [27] Thomas Irmer, “A Search for New Realities: Documentary Theatre in Germany,” TDR: The Drama Review 50, no. 3 (August 17, 2006): 16–28, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/201929 . [28] “[D]e pc herleidt haar hele fysieke bestaan tot een betekenisloze rest die aan het einde van de computer vastgekluisterd zit als het onnuttige deel van de mens-machine.” Pieter T’Jonck, “Ghosts in the Machine,” De Tijd , April 30, 2003, n.pag; my translation from the Dutch. [29] Here I am citing from notes I took during the performance of Web of Trust I saw during the Next Festival at BUDA in Kortrijk on November 30, 2016. [30] Kunstenfestivaldesarts, “Edit Kaldor. ‘Web of Trust’. Program” (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, May 6, 2016), 8. I saw Web of Trust at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels on May 12, 2016, where the performance premiered, and saw it a second time during the Next Festival at BUDA in Kortrijk on November 30, 2016. I am also citing text (and in that case indicate it) from the performance in Valenciennes, France, a few days later during the same Next Festival. [31] In the Skype talk, a year and a half after that performance, Kaldor claims that she gave no introduction at all, and was already sitting at the stand as the performance started. My notes, however, tell me that she gave a short introduction at the very beginning. [32] The name of the social network site Web of Trust is printed in Roman font, the name of the eponymous performance in italics. [33] Jurrien van Rheenen, Arthur Kneepkens, Bojan Djordjev and others, a number of which are trained performers, were telepresent at the performance via the social network site. [34] Konstantin Ryabitsev, “PGP Web of Trust: Core Concepts Behind Trusted Communication,” Linux.com | The source for Linux information, February 7, 2014, https://www.linux.com/learn/pgp-web-trust-core-concepts-behind-trusted-communication . [35] Jennifer Rauch, “The Origin of Slow Media: Early Diffusion of a Cultural Innovation through Popular and Press Discourse, 2002-2010,” Transformations , no. 20 — Slow Media (2011), http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issue-20/ ; Jörg Blumtritt, “Culture Post Internet: Cyberpunk Masterclass,” accessed April 13, 2017, http://en.slow-media.net/ . [36] Benedikt Köhler, Sabria David, and Jörg Blumtritt, “The Slow Media Manifesto – Slow Media,” February 1, 2010, n.pag., http://en.slow-media.net/manifesto . [37] Kunstenfestivaldesarts, “Edit Kaldor. ‘Web of Trust’. Program” (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, May 6, 2016), 8. [38] Skype talk with Kaldor, 5 April 2018. [39] (“[W]einig meer dan een hashtag delen”) Nynke van Verschuer, “Metamodernisme. Tussen geestdrift en ironie,” Vrij Nederland , June 25, 2016, 72; my translation from the Dutch. [40] Thomas Corlin, “Un Week-End à Bruxelles – Critiques,” mouvement.net, May 26, 2016, n.pag., http://www.mouvement.net/critiques/critiques/un-week-end-a-bruxelles . [41] Florian Cramer, “What Is ‘Post-Digital’? Post-Digital Research,” ed. Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox, and Georgios Papadopoulos, A Peer-Reviewed Journal About Post-Digital Research 3, no. 1 (February 2014): n.pag., http://www.aprja.net/what-is-post-digital/ . [42] Kunstenfestivaldesarts, “Edit Kaldor. ‘Web of Trust’. Program,” 8; Onassis Cultural Centre, “Fast Forward Festival. Web of Trust / Edit Kaldor,” Onassis Cultural Centre, accessed October 10, 2016, http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG1508/ ; Next Festival, “Web of Trust,” Next Festival, accessed April 14, 2018, http://www.nextfestival.eu/en/event/web-of-trust . [43] Stephen Duncombe, “Does It Work?: The Æffect of Activist Art,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 1 (June 15, 2016): 115–34, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/620873 . [44] I had a Skype video conversation with Annie Dorsen on 22 June 2016, of which I took notes. Except when mentioned otherwise, further quotations or paraphrases of Dorsen refer to this talk. [45] Annie Dorsen, A Piece of Work , Emergency Playscripts 5 (Brooklyn (N.Y.): Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), I–II. [46] Annie Dorsen and Alexis Soloski, “Would You Like to Have a Question?,” Theater 42, no. 2 (2012): 84. [47] Marie-Laure Ryan, Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 3. [48] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 80; Auslander, “Live From Cyberspace,” qtd. in Hello Hi There program. [49] Dorsen and Soloski, “Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 87. [50] “On Algorithmic Theatre,” n.pag., accessed September 30, 2015, http://www.anniedorsen.com/useruploads/files/on_algorithmic_theatre.pdf . [51] Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and David Z. Saltz, Performance and Media : Taxonomies for a Changing Field (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 67. [52] Annie Dorsen, “Algorithm, composition and metaphor,” Etcetera , no. 145 (August 18, 2017): n.pag., http://e-tcetera.be/algorithm-composition-and-metaphor/ . [53] Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 139. [54] Ibid., 55. [55] Ibid., 134–35. [56] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 85. [57] Erik Piepenburg, “Coil Festival: 5 Questions About ‘Hello Hi There,’” ArtsBeat, October 1, 2011, n.pag., // artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/coil-festival-5-questions-about-hello-hi-there/ . [58] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 86; Piepenburg, “Coil Festival,” n.pag. [59] Annie Dorsen, “Introduction to ‘Hello Hi There’ by Annie Dorsen” (unpublished, n.d.), n.pag. [60] Dorsen, n.pag. [61] The ‘text renders’ (Dorsen’s term) of the show include code, some of which resembles the stage directions of dramatic plays: how long and when to “Pause” and in which “Speed” to talk (and type, in this case), and who is speaking (“COMPUTER>0<” OR “COMPUTER>1”. To limit the length of the excerpt, that part of the code has been deleted after the first reply. For a full explanation of the code, see “Glossary of Computer Codes Used in Hello Hi There ” in Annie Dorsen, “Hello Hi There (Excerpt),” ed. Miriam Felton-Dansky and Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Theater: Digital Dramaturgies 42, no. 2 (2012): 90, https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-1507757 . [62] Annie Dorsen, “Hello Hi There Text Render, Noorderzon Festival, Groningen, the Netherlands” (unpublished, 24/08 2011), n.pag. An excerpt of the performance can be seen on the website of the Steirischer Herbst Festival edition 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PiwEQQNnBk [63] Ronald Geerts, “Tekst als object. Over de herwonnen autonomie van de dramatekst,” eds. Claire Swyzen and Kurt Vanhoutte, Het statuut van de tekst in het postdramatische theater (Brussel: University Press Antwerp/ Academic and Scientific Publishers, 2011), 105–14. [64] Emma Cocker, “Live Notation: – Reflections on a Kairotic Practice,” Performance Research 18, no. 5 (October 1, 2013): 73, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.828930 . [65] Bay-Cheng, Parker-Starbuck, and Saltz, Performance and Media , 69–70. Parker-Starbuck’s use of Kristeva’s concept of the abject is rather “metaphoric”. The critic starts from a more abstract notion of Kristeva’s concept of “abjection” as “arising from within as a way to maintain life’s boundaries,” in order to “unhinge [abjection] from its specifically Kristevan or psychoanalytic roots, and transfer it to moments of instability, of crises of identity, of border crossings, of cultural anxiety, but always through corporeal affect.” Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre : Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance , Performance Interventions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 57, 54, 58. [66] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 147; original emphasis. [67] Dorsen, “Hello Hi There Text Render, Noorderzon Festival, Groningen, the Netherlands,” n.pag. [68] Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis, Drama, Theatre, Performance , New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2004), 172, 174; Lehmann, Postdramatic , 83. [69] “ Hello Hi There Program” (Kaaitheater, 02/2016), n.pag. [70] Aarseth, Cybertext , 141. [71] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 88. Footnotes About The Author(s) Claire Swyzen is an affiliated researcher of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Prior to conducting her doctoral research on “Text as Data in Postdramatic Mediaturgies” she was employed as a dramaturge for a Flemish theatre company and as a practice-based researcher. She taught writing and narratology and (co-)edited volumes in Dutch on The Status of the Text in Postdramatic Theatre (2011) and Between Verity and Veracity: The Trajectory from Oral Source to Theatre Project (2012). Her theatre texts have been staged, published and translated. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Cheryl Black 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 Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline Cheryl Black By Published on November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF “I believe that art can inspire action.” —Anna Deavere Smith, Notes from the Field In 2010, Civil Rights advocate and attorney Michelle Alexander's groundbreaking The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness explicitly analyzed the ways in which racism “infected” the US justice system, disproportionately devastating the lives of young people of color. More than a decade later, the continuing stream of ethnic minority victims of police brutality and the continuing evidence of gross overrepresentation of ethnic minorities in prisons keeps Alexander’s findings relevant. ( [2] ) One of the particularly heinous aspects of the “new Jim Crow” is the “school to prison pipeline” or “nexus,” a system whereby school policies (along with other racist policies and practices) are pushing students out of schools and into the criminal justice system. Because the students in the “pipeline” are disproportionately poor students of color, this practice offers a striking example of how institutional racism operates within America's educational and criminal justice systems as well as how institutional racism has perpetuated cycles of poverty. ( [3] ) Recently, and within a few years of each other, notable African American playwrights Anna Deavere Smith and Dominique Morisseau produced dramatic works indicting America’s school-to-prison pipeline. Both playwrights are recipients of MacArthur (“genius grant”) Fellowships; both are noted for integrating art and activism in works that address social issues of race, class, and gender; and both have dramatized historical events involving racial violence and discrimination. Their dramaturgical styles, however, are distinct. Borrowing from documentary, historiographic, ethnographic, and journalistic methods, Smith creates scripts consisting of verbatim quotations from interviews. ( [4] ) Morisseau employs a dramatic structure that might be described as “selective Realism.” ( [5] ) Given the different approaches each playwright employs to address the same subject, looking at them in relation to each other is a fruitful way to investigate how these artistic forms function as anti-racist activism, what solutions these playwrights put forward as ways to challenge injustices, and how their different strategies might “read” to different audiences. Alongside Alexander's groundbreaking publication and these plays, a number of recent documentary films have explored the impact of racism on America's justice system, including Maya Ben-Shahar and Cedric B. Theus’s JustUs (2021), Tommy Oliver’s 40 Years a Prisoner (2020), Destin Cretton’s Just Mercy (2019), and Ava Duvernay’s 13 (2016). Fictional precursors that portrayed the insidious nexus of racism, gendered social roles, segregation, and poverty that has supported the new Jim Crow in all its manifestations range from John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood (1991) and Higher Learning (1995) to Season 4 (2006) of HBO’s The Wire . Although it is outside the scope of this article to offer an in-depth examination of the relationship between Smith and Morisseau’s dramatic works and these films, the proximity of their creation and their obviously shared motivation to raise awareness about these injustices highlights the urgency of the subject and the significant role that the arts may play in effecting social change. ([6]) Although, arguably, all art has this power, live theatrical performance, with its ability to illuminate the human condition within a specifically human and interactive context, can be particularly effective. As a theatre historian, actor, and director, I am a believer in the theatre’s power not only to reflect but also to shape the world we live in. It is this conviction that has led me to the current exploration. It is an exploration that contributes to our understanding of these two artist/activists and these two works in particular. Remarkably, neither work has received extensive attention, but interest in both is growing. Minou Arjomand’s Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment (2018) includes brief observations on Anna Deavere Smith’s projects, including an earlier version of Notes from the Field during which Smith stopped after Act 1 to facilitate small group discussions among audience members. ([7]) More recently, Amal Dahy has also focused significantly on this version, in which he identifies Smith’s engagement with the audiences as Boalian “Forum Theatre” techniques. ([8]) In 2022, Deborah Geis included brief comments on Smith’s Notes within a broader survey of plays she terms “Black Lives Matter drama . . . a significant new subgenre also characterized as a type of ‘crossroad’ with earlier works.” ([9]) In 2023, both Amanda Stuart Fisher and Ryan Claycomb included a discussion of Notes in their wide-ranging and diverse studies of testimonial and verbatim dramaturgies. ([10]) Jonathan Taylor has recently looked at Morisseau’s Pipeline as a model for future activist theatre, with special attention to her use of magical realism and other imaginative staging techniques that he credits with enhancing the play’s political power. ([11]) With great appreciation for these insights (some of which I will revisit in my conclusion), my analysis complements without duplicating existing discussions of these works and extends them through its comparative analysis of both works. To conduct my analysis, I rely on close readings of the texts, published interviews with the playwrights, and audience and critical response to the plays in performance. I also draw upon a range of critical race and performance theories, including Ibram X. Kendi’s succinct explication of racism as the conception that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group;([12]) I further consider Kendi’s thoughts about the efficacy of various anti-racist strategies alongside Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality as discrimination and oppression stemming from the intersections of various aspects of a person’s social or political identity. ([13]) In her introduction to the published version of Notes , Anna Deavere Smith identifies this play as the “most recent installment” in her life’s work: a series of plays that “bear witness to particular historical moments” in the hopes of “sparking a conversation, of making change possible.” ([14]) She specifies that her subject is social injustice, that she intends for her artistry to lead to action, and that the first step in redressive action is listening to the voices of those who have been historically discounted. To create the script, Smith interviewed 250 individuals in four geographic areas of the US and abroad—including students, teachers, administrators, mentors, advocates, judges, inmates and former inmates, and government officials—from which she selected seventeen interviews. All spoken dialogue in the play is composed of verbatim excerpts from these interviews. A number of scholars have explored the relationship between Smith’s socially conscious aesthetic and that of Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. ([15]) It was Brecht’s aim to reveal the social factors that influence human thought and action, to show “reality” as constructed and, therefore, changeable, and to encourage critical thinking, rather than emotional identification, in his audiences. Brechtian theatre eschews the illusionistic strategies associated with realism that attempt to convince an audience they are observing “real life” in favor of “distancing” reminders to an audience that they are watching a theatrical performance. Typical distancing techniques include narrative interruptions, direct address, use of multimedia, musical interludes, and a performance style that maintains an aesthetic distance between performer and character. Primary among the distancing strategies in Notes is the fact that Smith performs all seventeen roles, embodying a range of genders, races, ethnicities, and ages, a strategy that calls attention to identity as constructed and performed. Smith values this method as one by which the person she is portraying “will, despite her impression, retain his or her individual character and speech.” ([16]) Her character transformations are accomplished in full view of the audience by the addition or removal of a costume piece or prop. Nonspeaking stagehands, also in full view of the audience, aid character and location changes. Smith’s use of multimedia reveals the social factors behind the individual stories she performs. Preshow digital projections provide the audience with statistics regarding disenfranchisement related to felony convictions and the disproportionate school punishments, incarcerations, and deaths at the hands of police for young persons of color. Every story is introduced through projections providing the person’s name, occupation, or position. Each story is also accompanied by projected news footage and cell phone videos of the events described and/or video or still images that locate the action. Examples include Freddie Gray being hauled into a police car in Baltimore; a police officer straddling a fourteen-year-old Black girl in Texas; a student being thrown across a classroom by a police officer in South Carolina. Original music is performed live onstage by jazz bassist Marcus Shelby who occasionally interacts with Smith. All characters directly address the audience. The first monologue, from President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Sherrilyn Ifill, exhorts the audience to consider the investment our nation has made in the criminal justice system at the expense of education. Ifill later delivers a reprise in which she articulates even more explicitly the problems (the end of serious investment in our public school system and mass incarceration) and possible solutions (body-worn cameras and other reforms around policing and a massive investment in education). Ifill stresses the importance of recognizing our current moment as crucial—a moment when change can happen—and the need to confront ourselves before we can move toward that change. Three testimonies describe active resistance to the death of twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray under police custody in Baltimore in 2015. Kevin Moore, a young Black man wearing a “Copwatch” hoodie, filmed the arrest on his cell phone, which he then distributed widely. Eighteen-year-old Allen Bullock smashed a city police car in protest. Projected footage of Gray’s actual funeral reveals a packed megachurch and cries from the congregation of “No Justice, No Peace!” Pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant delivers an impassioned call to action: “Get up! Get your Black self up and change this city! . . . Don’t expect nobody to open the door for you! If they don’t open the door, kick that sucker down and get what you need! GIT UP!!!” ( [17] ) Two segments come from the Yurok community. Former inmate and Yurok fisherman Taos Proctor shares his odyssey from multiple school expulsions beginning when he was eight (“they said I hit the teacher.... I just pulled away from her, and it hurt her arm or something”) to California Youth Authority to San Quentin. Proctor bluntly recounts the brutality he experienced in prison: “Prison don’t do nothing but make you a worser person. . . . Everyone’s bad in there . . ..” ( [18] ) His ability to overcome his past (at the time of the interview he was married with a son and making a success of his fishing business) are a testament to his humanity and self-respect in the face of determined effort to eradicate both. In a later interview, Yurok Tribal Court Chief Judge Abby Abinanti reports having to prevent an eight-year-old child from being handcuffed. Judge Abinanti’s verdict: “the country’s broken.” ( [19] ) As Ibram X. Kendi and others have observed, people of color are not immune to deeply entrenched racist ideas. Salvadoran American Steven Campos reports that he, his brother, and all his mother’s brothers have served time in prison. Campos seems to believe that individuals hold full responsibility for their actions: “you dumb enough to get caught for it. You Fuck! It’s yo’ bad.” ( [20] ) African American “student concerns specialist” Tony Eady, who previously worked in a prison, seems to view his students as potential criminals and his current position as “similar” to working in a maximum-security prison. His description of school policies makes the high school sound like a training ground for prison, including in-school suspension: “I call it school jail. . . . And then if you act up in here, they send you to ‘Twilight.’ And I call that ‘penitentiary’. . . ‘cause you in there all day, every day, for months.” ( [21] ) Although Eady may aim to help these students with some kind of tough love, he puts the responsibility for avoiding the pipeline squarely on their shoulders, admonishing them to learn to deal with authority figures. He uses military imagery in his solution: “I need police officers in the school. . . . He’s my— our last line of defense.” Eady also highlights the struggle between teachers and students over cell phones, declaring “They would rather go to jail than give up their cell phones!” ( [22] ) This statement resonates with the assertion from Kevin Moore, videographer of the Freddie Gray arrest, that “the camera is the only weapon we have that can actually protect us.” ( [23] ) The story of Shakara, a Black Columbia SC high school student who was thrown across the room by a school resource officer in 2015, is related by white journalist Amanda Ripley and Shakara’s classmate Niya Kenny, who is also Black. Shakara got in trouble for not giving up her cell phone, and then refusing to leave the classroom with the assistant principal (a Black man) who brought in the (white) police officer. As Niya tells her story, her cell phone video of the event plays in the background. Kenny, who was eighteen, was arrested but released when her video made national news. Kenny had a clear message for those who told her to mind her own business: “How can you mind your business? Like, that’s somethin’ you need to make your business.” ( [24] ) A teacher from Finland provides a rare perspective on the event from a white person outside of the US. Her shock at viewing the video of Shakara’s encounter with the police or the idea that police officers would ever be needed in a classroom illuminates the contrast between American educational values and those of some other nations. As Finland is about 1/30 the size of the US and has a distinctly homogeneous population, it seems an odd comparison, but possibly Deavere included this interview to goad American audiences into imagining a culture like Finland’s in which “the teacher was always a candle in the village.” ( [25] ) Testimony from Denise Dodson, a woman convicted of a murder her boyfriend committed, and emotional support teacher Stephanie Williams highlighted the urgent need for overhauling the educational system. Dodson linked education to survival and regretted not getting the attention she needed from teachers: “I think if I had gotten that attention, I could have moved forward. . . . They [teachers] have to see ‘em [students] as people. They [teachers] have to see them [students] as the future.” ( [26] ) Williams poured out the difficulties of her job at Philadelphia’s Huey Elementary School, working with “the most needy children . . . kids that need food. Shelter. Clothes. Love , like . . . an education. They just need so much.” She admitted to feeling “hopeless” and compared her work to “running a jail without a gun.” She shared stories of student rage and violent reactions to being bullied or abused, concluding with the story of stopping a raging ten-year-old by grabbing him “in the tightest hug. . . . And I just held him until his body just collapsed. And he just started crying and crying and crying and crying on me. ” ( [27] ) In a departure from current events, Smith performs a brief interlude from James Baldwin’s 1971 interview with Margaret Mead in which Baldwin delivers a wake-up call still resonant with twenty-first-century experiences. Baldwin ponders how, if he were fifteen, he would find any respect for human life or any sense of history or hope. He provides a possible answer to his question by bringing up a book of poetry by children, compiled by a teacher who “respected them. And he dealt with them as if they were—as in fact all children are. As a fact, all human beings are . . . some kind of miracle!” ( [28] ) A larger context for the school-to-prison pipeline is provided by Equal Justice activist Bryan Stevenson, who asserts that “we are a post-genocide society,” a reference to the slaughter of “Native people.” For Stevenson, the “great evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude. . . . It was this ideology of white supremacy, this idea that Black people are not fully human.” Stevenson echoes Judge Abinanti’s use of the term “broken” to describe his legal clients, the [legal] system in which he works, and himself. Stevenson, however, finds hope in this realization: I actually think it’s in brokenness that we understand our need for grace, our need for mercy. It’s actually brokenness that helps us appreciate justice. . . . It’s the broken among us that actually can teach us what it means to be human. Because if you don’t understand the ways in which you can be broken by poverty or neglect or abuse or violence or suffering or bigotry, then you don’t recognize the urgency in overcoming poverty and abuse and neglect and—and bigotry. Stevenson rejects the notion that one should learn to live “silently” with one's brokenness: “I don't think that's the way forward. I’m looking for ways to—to not be silent.” ( [29] ) Although poverty is rarely directly referenced, in virtually all the stories of abuse, arrest, and incarceration, class, as well as race, is a factor, a circumstance that supports the irrefutable fact that our criminal justice system punishes poverty in myriad ways, including disproportionate rates of incarceration. ( [30] ) These testimonies are also further illustration of the disproportionate rates of poverty within ethnic minority communities. According to the most recent federal data, Blacks have the highest poverty rate (19.5%), with Hispanics at 17.1%. ( [31] ) Lest anyone in Smith’s audience fails to recognize racism and racist institutions as the underlying cause of these conditions, Dr. Victor Carrion identifies social factors surrounding slavery and the history of slavery as an explanation for the current, disproportionate poverty rates in African American communities: “it's a way of maintaining that enslavement. . . . through poverty.” ( [32] ) Some critics have deemed the play’s concluding stories, featuring activist Bree Newsome and Congressman John Lewis, as digressions from the specific topic of school-to-prison pipeline. ( [33] ) These stories, however, specifically address the white supremacist system, the “nexus” that fosters the “pipeline.” Newsome narrates how she scaled the South Carolina State House flagpole to remove the Confederate flag in 2015, and the late Congressman John Lewis’s story reminds us of the struggles an earlier generation endured to challenge the “old” Jim Crow. In juxtaposing news footage of Newsome’s recent climb with one of Lewis’s arrests (and Lewis’s recounting of being asked for and freely giving forgiveness to one of his abusers decades later), Smith links these acts of resistance and suggests the ongoing nature of civil rights movements. Alisa Solomon, who served as dramaturg for this play, has reported that “ the more she spoke to Americans across the country, the more Smith was convinced that solutions will take a new civil rights movement, one that brings healing to struggling communities as well as equality and justice.” ( [34] ) If these last two incidents portrayed had not actually happened, it would seem an impossibly sentimental ending. In fact, one reviewer observed, in reference to both the Newsome and Lewis stories: “ It’s only a feel-good ending if you haven’t been paying attention for the previous two hours.” ( [35] ) After a two-month run Off-Broadway in fall 2016, the Obie-winning Notes premiered on HBO in 2018, where it has presumably reached a wider and more diverse audience. The HBO performance also included one notable added episode that reinforces Smith’s belief in the significance of “healing” for “struggling communities”: footage from the 2017 trial of white nationalist Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine African American congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. During the recording, voices from the Black community are heard crying out that they forgive him: “We are the family love built.” ( [36] ) Critics responding to Notes universally applaud Smith’s virtuosity as a performer and her commitment to exploring worthy and timely subjects. Perceived weaknesses in the script include a certain lack of cohesion (several episodes considered tangentially related to the central theme), a lack of differing opinions, and an ambiguity regarding the ultimate message. The Guardian’s Alexis Soloski reached her own ambiguous conclusion that although Smith’s “call to empathy” was too “simple a solution,” Smith’s “hortatory force” deemed it “worth a try.” ( [37] ) Several critics perceived a message of hope and uplift despite the grim subject matter. ( [38] ) In 2017, Dominique Morisseau shared that she had “learned to embrace” the “idea of being a political writer. . . . I’m not trying to push a political agenda, per se, or tell people what politics to embrace, but I am looking at how politics, in a certain light, impact people. . . . I have a very strong social justice call to my work.” ( [39] ) Pipeline demonstrates Morisseau’s signature ability to integrate the political and the personal, and to blur the distinctions between the two. The play is dedicated to her mother, who taught public school in Highland Park, Michigan (according to Morisseau, an economically stressed city) for forty years. She has also drawn from her own experience as a teacher in New York City for fifteen years and other personal connections: I had been reading Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow , which talks about mass incarceration and mass incarceration being the new Jim Crow. But I really believe education is also the new Jim Crow right now because there is so much segregation in education, and there’s an excessive system of have and have-nots. So I was first and foremost interested in exploring the school-to-prison pipeline because of how personally it affected some people in my life. ( [40] ) Morisseau has reported that the character of Omari in Pipeline was inspired by her “surrogate nephew” who had a “bad incident at school and was criminalized online and in the press,” and by the death of Michael Brown, the Black teenager shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson Missouri in 2014. ( ) Pipeline, which debuted at Lincoln Center in 2017, offers a microcosmic view of the school-to-prison pipeline, zeroing in on the experience of one Black teenager named Omari. Omari is expelled and threatened with criminal charges after shoving a teacher who attempted to prevent him from leaving a classroom. The play is particularly concerned with how Omari’s trouble affects those who love him: his girlfriend Jasmine, his mother Nya, and his father Xavier. Jasmine is an inner-city native who attends the same private and predominantly white school as Omari. His mother teaches English in an inner city public high school and is described by Morisseau as a “struggling parent doing her damnedest.” ( [41] ) His father Xavier, Nya’s ex-husband, is a marketing executive. Context is provided by the two remaining characters, both Nya’s colleagues: Laurie is a tough, white middle-aged teacher who gets into trouble for using physical force to break up a fight in her classroom; and Dun is a Black security guard who is overworked but forbearing. As New York Times critic Ben Brantley noted, they both “seem to regard their jobs as mostly a matter of keeping a tenuous peace in a combat zone.” ( [42] ) Although fictional, Nya, Laurie, and Dun call to mind actual individuals portrayed in Notes from the Field , like Stephanie Williams and Tony Eady, who compared working in US schools to working in prisons. Although realistically drawn, these six characters (only three are given a last name) may be seen as symbols with specifically meaningful names. In naming Omari, Morisseau honors his African heritage: “Omari” i n Swahili means “flourishing.” “Nya” is of Swahili and Gaelic origin and means “purpose.” It also intriguingly evokes Niya Kenny, the student activist featured in Notes from the Field. “Xavier” has Spanish, Basque, and Arabic origins, meaning “new house” (perhaps a nod to his departure from the inner city). And lastly, “Jasmine” is of Persian origin, meaning “gift of God.” Although Morisseau tells an individual story, she situates it within a larger social context. At the opening of Pipeline , as Nya leaves a voicemail for Xavier about Omari’s trouble, smartphone camera footage of school fights gradually morphs into shadows behind her. The smartphone footage reminds us of its deployment by young Black activists, and its transformation into shadows provides an expressionistic image of Nya’s mental state. A voice from her school’s PA system establishes an authoritarian and antagonistic environment, commanding students to take off their hats, hand over their smartphones, and to face automatic suspension if caught with any non-approved electronic device. “We have the city government behind us. You cannot win. I repeat YOU CANNOT WIN!” ( [43] ) A scene between Omari and Jasmine in her dorm room follows. Although she believes the smartphone video of his school fight will make him a “celebrity,” Omari fears he’ll be seen as “a monster” and plans to run away. The next scene in the teachers’ lounge reinforces the image of this school as a dangerous environment. When Dun enters, he reports that “they” have been “jackin’ cars” despite the addition of extra security cameras. Laurie deepens the image by referring to her students as “hooligans” and the teachers’ lounge as her “den.” ( [44] ) In another departure from realism, Omari appears in “undefined space” as Nya discusses with her students Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool.” He repeats and embodies the words of the poem, expressionistically communicating Nya’s psychic state of fear that her son will “die soon.” Published in 1959, “We Real Cool” does not specifically speak to a school-to-prison pipeline; it does, however, speak to a “nexus” of limited opportunities and foreshortened lives of young Black men. The class discussion about the Broadside printing of the poem highlights the poet’s rejection of Eurocentric aesthetic standards in favor of what Nya describes as graffiti, or street writing—writing that “reps the hood” and anticipates the aesthetic adopted decades later by playwrights Ntozake Shange, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Marc Bamuthi Joseph, among others. ( [45] ) Morisseau critiques private as well as public school education, challenging the assumption that private, predominantly white schools, are “better” than public schools with more diverse student populations. In the play, during a phone call to an unnamed friend, Jasmine explains her parents’ choice to send her to this PWI “cuz they're so damn spooked I'll get pregnant or shot or some shit.” Jasmine is profoundly unhappy in this environment as she is experiencing class and race-based bias from students: “Stuck up girls in my dorm acting like I’m gonna steal their fabric softener or grab their granny panties out of the laundry cuz I don’t have my own or whatever.” She rejects the “false god of this freakin’ Fernbrook Academy that somehow it produces better people,” asserting someone like me would actually survive better in an environment in which I am COMFORTABLE instead of being the token poor girl of color that everyone thinks is trying to sleep with their pussy-ass boyfriend or take their gotdamn cocaine or crystal meth or whatever . . . . ( [46] ) Speaking with Nya about Omari's incident, Jasmine explains how racist assumptions may motivate violent responses: “Sometimes people push you too far. Make you feel like an animal from another jungle. Like you don't belong even when you're here. Cuz they got expectations that you of the wild. So you become the expectation.” ( [47] ) In turn, Nya pours out her fears as the mother of a Black son: You have no idea if one day someone will try to expire them because they are too young. Or too Black. Or too threatening. Or too loud. Or too uninformed. Or too angry. Or too quiet. Or too everyday. Or too cool. Or too uncomposed. Or too mysterious. Or just too TOO. ( [48] ) The experiences of Jasmine and Omari mirror findings from a 2012 study of the experiences of Black students in predominantly white institutions. “Most students felt that they were stereotyped as the ‘angry black’ person and felt intimidated when in the racial, social class, and gender minority.” Black students also reported feeling “strong emotion” when teachers used material depicting Black people as criminal or violent. ( [49] ) Omari shares that he “went blind for a second” during a class discussion of Richard Wright's Native Son in which the teacher expected Omari to respond to his questions about what motivated Bigger Thomas to kill a woman. “Like I’m Bigger Thomas. Like I’m predisposed or some shit to knowing what it’s like to be an animal.” ( [50] ) During this scene, Nya herself succumbs to racist language, an inadvertent slip that her son quickly picks up on: Nya: You don’t just walk out in the middle of a lesson as if you are some sort of king or god that no one can tame. Omari: Tame? Nya: Damnit, Omari. Omari: Tame. Nya: Do not do that. Do not twist and remodel this convo and change the meaning. Omari: I'm not changing anything. I’m repeating. Verbatim. ( [51] ) Although Omari is possibly headed for some form of incarceration, it is his mother whose physical and psychological deterioration is most vividly portrayed for the audience. Nya stands in for all the mothers of Black sons who have borne the loss of a son to racist violence. At the play’s opening, she is described as “holding together by a thread” and throughout the play we witness that thread’s unraveling. ( [52] ) Morisseau evokes one of the most familiar Black Lives Matter mantras in her call for breathlessness as an indication of Nya’s increasing distress, including stage directions repeatedly calling for Nya to take “strange,” “revealing,” “deep” inhalations or “gasps.” ( [53] ) Ultimately, Nya physically collapses and is rushed to the hospital after uttering “I can’t—breathe—.” ( [54] ) For audiences in 2017, the moment almost certainly evoked the final words of Eric Garner, who uttered them moments before his death during his arrest in 2014; for present-day audiences, they would also the death of George Floyd under police custody in 2020. ( [55] ) Morisseau critiques constructed masculinity as well as capitalism in her creation of Xavier, described as “financially stable” and “emotionally impoverished.” ( [56] ) Although it is revealed that Nya had an affair with Dun, which presumably ended her marriage, Omari places the blame squarely on his father's shoulders: “. . . you were mean. Cold. Making her feel like shit every day. You was never happy living over here.” ( [57] ) “Over here” seems to suggest an urban, possibly lower-income neighborhood which Xavier has abandoned for a bougier lifestyle. Xavier relates fatherhood primarily to financial provision: “I took good care of you. Never missed a payment. Never missed a birthday or first day of school. You never went hungry. Always had a shirt on your back. Money in your pocket. Didn’t I do that?” ( [58] ) Xavier is also paying for Omari’s private school education, but Omari does not equate financial support with love, informing Xavier that they are “miles apart” and implicating Xavier in his emotional outburst at school: “It was my teacher. But I wished it was you. . . . And I don't know if that is hate or love or somethin’ else I was feelin’. But I know why Bigger Thomas did what he did and I hate that I know. But you I hate more. You I hate most of all.” ( [59] ) After this revelation, Xavier also finds himself unable to breathe. Utterly defeated as a father, he is not without sympathy as he walks away “dumbfounded.” ( [60] ) In a discussion about the play, Morisseau declared, “Hypermasculinity is just as problematic to me [as is racial stereotyping] . . . It doesn't give men the space to be emotional, to acknowledge their own pain or that they seek love. It’s like it’s too socially expensive to be fragile.” ( [61] ) In her final scene, Jasmine leaves a long phone message for Omari, assuring him that despite her love for him, she is glad that he is leaving this school, “[b]ecause this place can’t hold you. This place can't hold none of us.” This dialogue is followed by video images of school fights, kids going through metal detectors, police handcuffing teenage boys. ( [62] ) The PA system comes on again, but this time it is a student’s voice reading “We Real Cool” intercut with Nya addressing the private school board to prevent their pressing charges against her son. Omari's actions aren’t his bag alone. They’re mine. All of ours. We didn’t carve out enough space. He doesn’t belong anywhere. . . . No land he can travel without being under suspicion and doubt. No emotion he can carry without being silenced or disciplined. . . . I want my son to have another chance. Be born again with a slate clean of the baggage. Our baggage. MY baggage. . . . He's not an animal. Nor more than the rest of us are. And if so, we built the jungle. . . . This rage is not his sin. It was never his sin. . . . It is his inheritance. ( [63] ) We do not learn of the board’s decision, but Omari has the last word, fulfilling Nya’s request for “instructions” about how to “save him.” ( [64] ) Along with Nya’s recognition of “all of our” complicity in the struggles faced by young people of color in America today, Omari’s “instructions” seem to be Morisseau’s recommendation for positive action to begin to address the problem: “Hear me out. Let me chill sometimes. Know when to back off. Know when to keep pushing. Let me have some space. Don’t assume me for the worst. Show up. In person. Be fair. Forgive that I’m not perfect.” ( [65] ) The final image of the play is an embrace between Nya and Omari. The focus on familial relationships and the awareness that Omari’s “instructions” might be those of any adolescent to a parent could distract from the intersecting conditions of race and poverty that are crucial to addressing the school-to-prison pipeline. Some reviewers perceived a lack of social context. Bill Marx, for example, objected that Morisseau “does not look outside ‘broken family dynamics’ or the ‘comfortable confines of realism’ that would seem to be required for serious social critique.” ( [66] ) Then again, strategies like projecting smartphone footage and allusions to Black artist/activists of an earlier generation (like Brooks and Wright) render Omari’s race and race-based discrimination specific. Although, as the child of well-educated professionals Omari is relatively privileged, it is part of Morisseau’s message that other forms of cultural capital are poor defenses against the juggernaut of racism in America. Although he found the play “frustratingly unresolved,” Ben Brantley nevertheless affirmed, “the concerns of its heroine, Nya, about her teenage son, Omari, have everything to do with his being a Black youth in the United States in the 21st century.” Brantley also directly compared Pipeline to Notes without expressing a clear preference for either Notes ’ “cleareyed overview” or Pipeline ’s “more emotionally immersive approach.” ( [67] ) As with Smith, Morisseau’s virtuosity was widely recognized, with critics lauding her dramaturgical power and eloquence. She was awarded the 2018 OBIE for writing Pipeline , and it was one of the top ten most produced plays in the 2019/20 season. It seems evident that these playwrights are politically motivated to write these plays, and that their aims are to raise awareness about a particular form of social injustice that is manifestly rooted in racism and to offer possible solutions. Art, and especially live theatrical performance, is never just a purveyor of facts. Live theatre presents facts in a particularly human context. Despite Brecht’s best efforts, even the most “distanced” performance style, as exemplified by Anna Deavere Smith’s approach, evokes emotional and empathic identification, an identification underscored in Morisseau’s “more emotionally immersive approach.” ( [68] ) Morisseau has repeatedly expressed her desire to create community through interaction and engagement from audiences: “ I feel like if I ask the important questions that I have around it [social injustice], maybe, collectively, as a society, we will start to have the kind of conversation that can find a solution.” ( [69] ) Throughout Pipeline’s run, the theatre held several talkbacks and panels with experts and activists. Morisseau also spearheaded a fundraising effort at Lincoln Center that raised approximately $10,000 to fund free tickets to groups of students. ( [70] ) The value of “raising awareness”—of providing Americans with facts about racism—has been challenged by Ibram X. Kendi, who has argued that political and economic self-interest, rather than any moral or intellectual awakening, have led to anti-racist policies. “They [those with power to make policy changes] have also conceded to Antiracist change as a better alternative than the disruptive, disordered, politically harmful, and/or unprofitable conditions that anti-racist protestors created.” ( [71] ) The shortcomings of empathy as a change agent have also been explored by scholar Sadiya Hartman, ( [72] ) and Georgetown law professor Paul Butler has been even more explicit in his critique: “The problem is, love and forgiveness are not productive in American politics. That’s not how social change is achieved.” ( [73] ) Among theatre scholars, there is disagreement over the efficacy of theatrical performance for social change. In 2023, Ryan Claycomb, partially prompted by the writings of Lauren Berlant and Jodi Dean, described his former optimism in the power of verbatim theatre—and more broadly, democratic deliberation— as “cruel, prompting us to hope for something that binds us,” and “often a passive replacement for radical egalitarian action.” ( [74] ) Although Kendi, Hartman, Butler, Claycomb, and others make compelling arguments, given America’s history, centuries of theatrical artivism provide a counterargument. Years of experience in creating theatre that addresses urgent political issues have led Smith to her conviction that “art inspires action” and Morisseau to her belief that “asking the important questions” is the first step toward finding solutions to social problems. In her recent study, Amanda Stuart Fisher argues that “testimonial theatre, which aims to expose and interrogate the kinds of truths that are being re-authored or erased by today's politicians, can play a central role [in challenging political domination].” ( [75] ) The activist Bree Newsome, whose removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State house is portrayed in Notes, has affirmed that “artists telling the truth about the world is itself a form of activism.” ( [76] ) Both plays advocate a prerequisite mindset of optimism and hope—the belief that political action is not likely to happen without a certain degree of faith that change is possible. This is a belief shared by one of America’s most notable anti-racist activists, Angela Davis: “No change is possible without hope.” ( [77] ) Recently, Michelle Alexander expressed her belief in the necessity of a “moral and spiritual revolution” dependent upon treating “all people of all colors with dignity, humanity, compassion, and concern. . . . True progress depends on us caring and demonstrating care, compassion, and concern for poor people, and people of color, and being willing to invest in their well-being and their health and their education and their thriving rather than simply in their punishment and in their control. . . . ( [78] ) The point that awareness, hope, and empathy alone are insufficient to effect social change is, however, well-taken. In the oil and gas industry, decommissioning (safely removing) a pipeline requires “a series of properly planned and executed actions.” ( [79] ) These plays offer both/and strategies, building empathy and community as well as engaging in radical, direct action. Both these plays demonstrate (or perhaps advocate for) a range of resistant actions, most of which involve disorderly or illegal conduct. Militant language abounds in both plays, leaving audiences with a sense of America as a war zone, and neither leaves any doubt about which is the right side. Both plays highlight the deployment of smartphone cameras, which have become pivotal weapons in the Black Lives Matter movement . ( [80] ) In his comments on a production of Morisseau’s Pipeline that he witnessed in March 2020, Harvey Young reminded readers that the play featured images of Civil Rights era activism, “possibly to inspire audiences to speak out and to take to the streets.” Young concludes: “I remember leaving the theatre less feeling anxious about a looming pandemic, than grateful for the ways theatre can be a catalyst for change.” ( [81] ) Smith's inclusion of “off-topic” episodes in Notes is strategic and in keeping with the school to prison “nexus” concept. At Freddie Gray’s funeral, Pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant’s oration is an exhortation to action. Bree Newsome defied the law and risked her life to remove a symbol of injustice, an action that ultimately effected its permanent removal. Congressman Lewis’s story reminds us of the achievements wrought during the 1960s through strategic anti-racist activism and also provides an example of a moral awakening by one who formerly engaged in racist violence. In Pipeline , Omari’s refusal to accept the role of racial spokesperson, his refusal to be constrained by the white “authority figure” in his classroom, provides another example of anti-racist resistance. Kendi has also deemed as a “false construction” the idea that “ignorance and hate” lead to racist ideas and racist policies . ( [82] ) Although apparently in agreement that hatred is a manifestation, rather than a cause, of racism, Smith and Morisseau advance the notion that its eradication is prerequisite for meaningful social change and, moreover, that its eradication is possible. An oft-quoted musical theatre lyric from South Pacific avers that hate must be “carefully taught.” Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that love also can and must be taught. Granted, “love” is a variously defined term, but in this context, perhaps best understood as encompassing agape (selfless, universal love for humankind) and phlautia (self-love). Smith’s inclusion of a story about redemption and forgiveness between a former white supremacist and a Black civil rights activist, and Morisseau’s request, on the behalf of Omari, for understanding and forgiveness, are vital to this message. Smith has given serious consideration to the cultivation of the capacity to love, sharing with Richard Schechner in 2018 that “the revolution can begin with love, hospitality, and grace,” an assertion she expanded on in an article about the pipeline project: Could you ever imagine The Graduate School of Empathy and Love? I know that sounds ridiculous. But I also know that some individuals have a special aptitude for these core elements of our humanity. Those gifts should be honed, nourished, refined, and celebrated in the same way we cultivate athletic prowess, intellectual productivity, and business acumen. We need a generation of leaders who are as loving as they are strategic. We need such leaders to help us find ways to imagine ourselves as beings who could extend our concern beyond the boundaries of our front doors, our fences, our perceived self-interests, our skins. ( [83] ) Both Notes From the Field and Pipeline appeal to the hearts as well as the minds of their audiences; both portray personal stories within specific political contexts; both celebrate acts of civil disobedience; both valorize compassion, empathy, and love; and both feature embraces between human beings as personal actions with profound political implications . Although the ultimate goal or the desired effect of this raised awareness, heightened empathy, and commitment to active resistances to decommission—to safely remove from activity—the school-to-prison pipeline, the implications for more wide-ranging anti-racist activism, are profound. References 1. I would like to express my appreciation to JADT’s editors and anonymous readers for their support and valuable feedback. 2. African Americans make up 13.6% of the total US population and 38.5% of the prison population; Latinos or Hispanic, 18.9% of the general population and 30.2% of the prison population; Native Americans, 1.3% of the general population and 2.6% of the prison population. (2021 statistics). See https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221 ; https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp ; https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_ethnicity.jsp , accessed 1 March 2023. 3. See Lauren Camera, “Study Confirms School to Prison Pipeline,” US News and World Report, July 27, 2021, https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-07-27/study-confirms-school-to-prison-pipeline . Recently scholars have begun to favor the term “nexus” as a way to highlight the complex connections between educational, justice, and other social systems “ which condition us to see people of color as inherently dangerous and in need of constant monitoring.” See https://westwinded.com/blog/understanding-the-school-to-prison-nexus/ , 19 October 2019, accessed 1 March 2023. Although I believe both terms, and concepts, are relevant to the works analyzed in this article, I see the term “pipeline” as a useful metaphor and in keeping with the terminology within the plays and author interviews. 4. Smith’s works are frequently described as “documentary theatre” or “verbatim theatre.” 5 . For an interesting discussion of ways in which Morisseau veers from realism in this play, see Jonathon W. Taylor, “Revolutionary Spaces: Julia Kristeva Gwendolyn Brooks, and a Post-Pandemic Path Ahead in Dominique Morisseau's Pipeline,” Theatre Symposium 30 (2023), 40-54. 6. A student at Brock University has produced an interesting study comparing the representation of black youth (and especially the trope of the absent father) in Singleton's Boyz N the Hood and Morisseau’s Pipeline . See Linda Eronmhonsele, "Representation of Black Youth in John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline ,” Sept. 9, 2022, https://dr.library.brocku.ca/handle/10464/16619?show=full , accessed 18 August 2023. Interestingly, Morisseau includes an allusion to Season 4 of The Wire in Pipeline (p. 20). 7. Minou Arjomand, Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment . New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 8. Dahy, Amal Saad Abu El-Leil. “Notes from the Field: Challenging the American Justice System and the School-to-Prison Pipeline in Anna Deavere Smith’s Verbatim Theater,” fjhj.journals.ekb.eg , no. 2 (2022): 1-23, Accessed 5 September 2023. Smith discusses the earlier version of this performance in an interview with Richard Schechner. After the first act, she stopped the show, divided the audience into groups of 20, and asked them to talk about the problem and to make commitments about solutions. See Richard Schechner, “There’s a Lot of Work to Do to Turn this Thing Around,” interview with Anna Deavere Smith, TDR/The Drama Review (2018) 62 (3 (239)): 35–50. 9. Geis, D. R., (2022) “Say Their Names: Drama of the Black Lives Matter Era”, the Black Theatre Review 1(1), 71-80. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/tbtr.4824 , 1. 10. Amanda Stuart Fisher Performing the Testimonial: Rethinking Verbatim Dramaturgies, https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781526145758/9781526145758.00011.xml,2020, accessed 3 September 2023. See also Ryan Claycomb, In the Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023). 11. See Taylor. 12. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 5. 13. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizaing the Intersection of Race and Sex: a Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1): 139. 14. Anna Deavere Smith, Notes from the Field (New York: Anchor Books, 2019, xv-xx. 15. See, for example, Carola Hilfrich, “Aesthetics of Unease: a Brechtian Study of Anna Deavere Smith’s Eyewitness Performance in Fires in the Mirror ,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas (June 2009): 299-318; Charles R. Lyons and James C. Lyons, “Anna Deavere Smith: Perspectives on Her Performance Within the Context of Critical Theory,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Fall 1994): 43-66. 16. Quoted in Alison Stolpa, “Anna Deveare Smith: Voices from the Gaps,” Retrieved from University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, 2005, 2, https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/166329/Smith,%20Anna%20Deavere.pdf;sequence= , accessed 30 May 2022. 17. Ibid., 27. 18. Ibid., 42, 44. 19. Ibid., 52. 20. Ibid., 105. 21. Ibid., 60-61. 22. Ibid., 62-63. 23. Ibid., 13. 24. Ibid., 76. 25. Ibid., 84. 26. Ibid., 91-92. 27. Ibid., 108-9, 112. 28. Ibid., 116-17. 29. Ibid., 125, 127, 128-29. 30. See Jeffrey Reiman and Paul Leighton, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice (London: Pearson 2012); Randall G. Shelden and Pavel V. Vasiliev, Controlling the Dangerous Classes: A History of Criminal Justice in America , 3rd ed. (Long Grove IL: Waveland Press, 2017); Maggie Germano, “How the US has Criminalized Poverty and How to Change That Now,” Forbes , August 4, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiegermano/2020/08/04/how-the-united-states-has-criminalized-poverty-and-how-to-change-that-now/?sh=55a21d913281 , accessed July 1 2023. 31.U.S. Poverty Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau, released September 13, 2022, https://federalsafetynet.com/poverty-statistics/#:~:text=Blacks%20have%20the%20highest%20poverty,have%20the%20lowest%20at%208.1%25 , accessed July 6, 2023. 32. Ibid., 99. 33. See, for example, Ben Brantley, “Anna Deavere Smith’s ‘Notes From the Field’ Delivers Voices of Despair and Hope,” New York Times , 2 Nov. 2016, www.proquest.com/usnews/docview/1835203616/fulltext/8433760FB1C44EBFPQ/8?accountid=14576 , accessed 15 May 2022. 34. Alisa Solomon, “Digging Up the Pipeline,” https://www.annadeaveresmith.org/digging-up-the-pipeline-by-alisa-solomon-2/ ), accessed 15 May 2022. 35. Zachary Stewart, “Notes From the Field,” theatremania, November 02, 2016, https://www.theatermania.com/off-broadway/reviews/notes-from-the-field_78996.html , accessed 15 May 2022. 36. Notes From the Field, HBO-TV movie, directed by Kristi Zea. 2018. Now streaming on HULU, www.hulu.com/movie/notes-from-the-field-dfb792f7-37f2-4b8e-8bc7-51576f0ad71d 37. Alexis Soloski, “Notes from the Field Review—a One-Woman Study of Incarceration,” The Guardian, 2 November 2016, www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/nov/02/notes-from-the-field-anna-deavere-smith , accessed 16 May 2022. 38. Ben Brantley, “Voices of Despair and Hope” ; Helen Shaw, “Many Voices Unite in Anna Deavere Smith’s New Documentary Play,” Village Voice, 8 Nov. 2016, www.villagevoice.com/2016/11/08/many-voices-unite-in-anna-deavere-smiths-new-documentary-play/ ; Zachary Stewart, “Notes From the Field,” accessed 15 May 2022. 39. Victoria Myers, “An Interview with Dominique Morisseau,” The Interval , 25 July 2017, www.theintervalny.com/interviews/2017/07/an-interview-with-dominique-morisseau/ , accessed 12 May 2022. 40. Ibid. 41. Dominique Morisseau, Pipeline (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2018), 5. 42. Ben Brantley, “Review: A Mother Fervently Tries to Protect Her Son in Pipeline,” New York Times , 10 July 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/theater/pipeline-review.html , accessed 18 May 2022. 43. Morisseau, Pipeline , 11. 44. Ibid., 24. 45. Ibid., 28-9. 46. Ibid., 35-6. 47. Ibid., 38. 48. Ibid., 41. 49. Mahajoy A. Laufer, “Black Students' Silence in Predominantly White Institutions of Higher Learning,” ( Smith Scholar Works 2012), 2, 16, scholarworks.smith.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1716&context=theses , accessed 15 May 2022. 50. Morisseau, Pipeline , 49. 51. Ibid., 52. 52. Ibid., 5. 53. Ibid., 24, 26, 32, 39, 43, 52, 58, 64, 65, 73, 74. 54. Ibid., 74. 55. The phrase “I Can't Breathe” is now widely used to protest police brutality and racial inequality. According to the New York Times , the phrase has been used by over 70 people who died in police custody. Mike Baker et al, “Three Words: 70 Cases. The Tragic History of ‘I Can’t Breathe,’” New York Times 29 June 2020, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/28/us/i-cant-breathe-police-arrest.html , accessed 16 May 2022. 56. Morisseau, Pipeline , 5. 57. Ibid., 79. 58. Ibid., 79. 59. Ibid., 82. 60. Ibid., 83. 61. Rohan Preston, “‘ Being Human is Not Conditional’: Playwright Dominique Morisseau Seeks to Expand Ideas around Black Kids in Pipeline,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, 29 Sept. 2019: E.5. l 62. Morisseau, Pipeline, 86. 63. Ibid., 89. 64. Ibid., 55. 65. Ibid., 90. 66. Bill Marx, “Pipeline a Didactic Excursion,” Artsfuse, 11 May 2020, artsfuse.org/tag/nora-theatre-company/ , accessed 19 May 2022. 67. Ben Brantley, “Race, Schooling and Inequality: Let’s Watch ‘Pipeline,’”  New York Times, 20 May 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/theater/pipeline-play-stream.html , accessed 18 May 2022. 68. Recent sociological research has affirmed these beliefs. See, for example, Steve Rathje, Leor Hacket and Jamil Zaki, "Attending live theatre improves empathy, changes attitudes, and leads to pro-social behavior," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , Vol. 95 July 2021, 104138, ScienceDirect.com . 69. Dominique Morisseau, “Rules of Engagement,” www.centralsquaretheater.org/2019-20-season/articles/from-the-playwright-dominque-morisseaus-rules-of-engagement/ , accessed 11 May 2022. 70. Myers Interview. 71. Kendi, Stamped, 506-09. 72. Sadiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth- Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20-21. 73. Paul Butler, interview on “All In with Chris Hayes,” MSNBC, 25 June 2015, www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/i-have-no-respect-for-your-ancestors-471529027890 , accessed 18 May 2022. 74. Claycomb, 123. 75. Fisher, 179. 76. Biography.com Editors, “Biography of Bree Newsome,” A&E Television Networks, 26 January 2021, www.biography.com/activist/bree-newsome , accessed 20 June 2022. Newsome herself integrates art and activism in her work as a musician/songwriter. 77. Angela Davis Interview, CBS Sunday Morning , 29 May 2022 . See also John Belluso, inspire.redlands.edu/work/sc/c831d110-5886-42a1-857c-ca69cd7e8738 ; Guillermo del Toro, time.com/5520554/guillermo-del-toro-radicaloptimism/#:~:text=No%20hope%20is%20ever%20too,rebellious%20and%20daring%20and%20vital ; Junot Díaz, www.columbiatribune.com/story/news/education/2018/01/22/junot-diaz-preaches-optimism-during/16028788007/ ; and Ava Duvernay, time.com/optimists-2019/ , accessed 30 May 2022. 78. David Remnick, “Ten Years After the New Jim Crow,” an interview with Michelle Alexander, New Yorker, January 17 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/ten-years-after-the-new-jim-crow , accessed 8 March 2023. [1] NiGen, “Pipeline Decomissioning Process in Oil and Gas,” 29 January 2021, nigen.com/pipeline-decommissioning-process-in-oil-and-gas/ , accessed 15 June 2022. 80. Ed Siegel, " Pipeline Tries To Find Space For The Anger Of Young Black Men At Central Square Theater," WBUR News , www.wbur.org/news/2020/03/11/pipeline-nora-central-square-theater-review 11 March 2020, accessed 14 May 2022. 81. Harvey Young, "Pipeline: Central Square Theater," Performing Arts Journal 129 (2021):44. 82. Kendi, Stamped , 506. 83. Anna Deavere Smith, "Toward Empathetic Imagination and Action, www.annadeaveresmith.org/toward-empathetic-imagination-and-action-2/ , accessed 1 June 2022. See also Schechner, 44. Smith's ideas regarding the transformative power of love resonate with those of the late, celebrated feminist author/activist bell hooks; see especially hooks’s Love Song to the Nation trilogy: All About Love: New Visions (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2018); Salvation: Black People and Love (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2001); Communion: the Female Search for Love (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2002) Footnotes About The Author(s) Cheryl Black is a Curators Distinguished Professor Emerita from the University of Missouri, a Fellow in the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, a Fellow of the Mid-America Theatre Conference, a former president of ATDS, and the author/editor of four books and numerous book chapters and articles. She is also an actor/director/playwright whose current project is directing her Patriot Acts: A Suffrage Pageant for Our Times at Union College, where she holds a visiting position for AY 2023-24. 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.

Patrick McKelvey Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. Patrick McKelvey By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization . Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. Scholarship on the subject of performance labor has proliferated with renewed intensity over the past decade. This development is, in part, a response to the way that scholars across the humanities and social sciences have diagnosed transformations in the organization and practice of work in the past half century as a problem of “performance.” With Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization , Judith Hamera offers a contribution to these conversations that is both methodologically innovative and politically ferocious. Hamera argues that a performance studies analysis can register, recognize, and reimagine the racialized structures of feeling that attend deindustrialization in the U.S. She does so by attending to the overabundant and hypervisible representations of two deindustrial icons: Michael Jackson and Detroit. Three interrelated questions drive Hamera’s inquiry: 1) How does structural economic change feel? 2) What is the role of performance in these transformations? 3) And how have racist hierarchies shaped the performances, including the “promises and perils,” of deindustrial life (xiv)? She pursues these questions through both archival and ethnographic methods, engaging a sprawling performance archive that includes music videos, plays, documentary films, and art installations. Hamera wrests authority from economists as the experts best equipped to explain such structural transformations, modeling a performance theorization of political economy through the analysis of what she calls “figural economies.” Figural economies concern “material and historical entities” as well as the formal, representational, affective, and rhetorical currents through which those entities circulate (13). Performance theorists working across a broad range of contexts will find this notion of “figural economies” useful, even as I suspect most will be hard pressed to mine the “rhetorical, exemplary, and metaphorical potential” of “representations with uncanny persistence” that matches that of Jackson and Detroit (xii, 3). Following an introduction that orients readers to interdisciplinary scholarship on political economy, the racialized history of industrial nostalgia, and the notion of figural economies, Hamera has organized the book in two sections: Part 1, “Michael Jackson’s Spectacular Deindustriality” and Part 2: “Detroit’s Deindustrial Homeplaces.” Two chapters comprise each part. As Hamera herself would attest, this organizational logic is premised on something of a false distinction: Jackson and Detroit are part of a shared figural economy “of race and work within an arc that took them both from epic productivity through equally epic debt and contraction to efforts at fiscal and reputational recovery” (3). Chapter one exemplifies Hamera’s commitment to challenging the presumptive whiteness of the deindustrial imagination (think: Bruce Springsteen) by examining the trope of the human motor in Jackson’s dance repertoire. In her analysis, Jackson’s virtuosity – the intersection of the “musicality” and the “sharpness of attack” (37) – characterized his expanding repertoire of steps in the mid 1980s and produced industrial nostalgia by “offer[ing] a fantasy of unalienated labor in an industrial modernity that was and never was” (51). These moves, enacted when Jackson was at the apex of his career, mediated between “a vanishing US industrial moment” and the “cruel optimism” to come (24). For example, Hamera sees in Jackson’s Thriller music video (and its choreographic afterlife), a highly mechanized reproduction of late capitalism’s zombifying effects as well as the possibility that deindustrialization might be “outdance[d]” (48). The next chapter, “Consuming Passions, Wasted Efforts,” concerns the early 2000s when Jackson no longer owed his renown to his virtuosity and work ethic but to his status as a “prodigious spender and spectacular debtor” (54). Hamera moves across representations of Jackson’s “aberrant consumption” in the Life with Michael documentary, the trials for child molestation that linked Jackon’s debt to a broader set of moral economies, and his planned comeback in the 2009 This is It tour. Hamera draws upon the work of film theorist Linda Williams to read Jackson as a star in a racial melodrama in which he comes to embody austerity politics. In so doing, Hamera demonstrates how “both spectacular and banal” performances can render visible the otherwise invisible processes of financialization (59). In chapter three, “Combustible Hopes on the National Stage,” Hamera examines figurations of Detroit in three works of theatre and features Hamera’s delightful excoriation of Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit. Through a heuristic of “re-sitting/re-citing,” which redirects performance studies’ preoccupations with the substitution of bodies to a concern with the substitution of places , Hamera analyzes the entanglement of race, home, and work in order to assess these plays’ understandings of “Detroit-ness” (109). Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates how Detroit’s figural economy, including not only D’Amour’s play but Motown, The Musical and Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit ’67 , has presented the city as “synecdoche not only for deindustrialization but also for the multisystem failures of late capitalism” (106). The fourth and final chapter, “Up from the Ashes,” considers the roles of the arts in a contemporary Detroit, refigured as being on the precipice of a comeback. Hamera shows how the “kunst washing” (“art washing”) practices of Detroit encourage entrepreneurs to invest in the city as an untamed avenue in need of creativity. Such practices, she argues, frame Detroit’s black population as impoverished with regards to creativity and risk management, blaming the city’s residents for the economic damages wrought by economic elites. In effect, these art-centered efforts have exacerbated the city’s racial and economic stratification implemented through other austerity programs that have privileged private capital over state investment. But she also locates ambivalent promise in specific collaborations, like The Heidelberg Project , that counter Detroit’s “phoenix narrative” while also “refusing melancholic resignation” (163). I suspect that chapter one, an exceptional chapter in a consistently outstanding work, might be the most likely to be excerpted for undergraduate syllabi. In addition to its modeling of figural economies, this chapter is further notable because of how Hamera enriches theorizations of virtuosity by putting theorists like Paulo Virno in conversation with the history of concert dance and music. This is also the chapter in which Hamera introduces Jackson as a “defiant compliant,” so-defined because of his simultaneous embrace of global capitalism and the challenge he posed to racist modes of production (15). Hamera joins the ranks of Margaret Werry and Elizabeth Povinelli in offering some of the most compelling accounts of agency under contemporary capitalism, accounts that are irreducible to tired rehearsals of complicity and resistance. Indeed, Unfinished Business is an urgent read for scholars already steeped in literature concerning performance and political economy, as well as for those who might be newly alerted to the work that remains to be done. References Footnotes About The Author(s) PATRICK MCKELVEY University of Pittsburgh Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Amy Mihyang Ginther 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 Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Amy Mihyang Ginther By Published on May 19, 2022 Download Article as PDF “I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.”—Saidiya Hartman [1] Using theatre to generate empathy for characters and narratives has been a longstanding goal in Eurocentric drama and a strong argument for this medium to be a tool for larger social change. In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, sparked largely by the unjust deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, theatre makers are exploring alternative ways to represent Black, brown and other historically excluded narratives, which are too often exploited as trauma porn. In this essay, I offer dramaturgy of deprivation, or 없다, as an alternative to dramaturgy of empathy. I contextualize this concept theoretically and practically, and use examples from my own practice to illustrate how 없다 is potentially effective in dramatizing narratives from my own positionalities as an Asian American and as a transracially adopted person from South Korea. Critique of trauma porn and sentimentalized narratives While white representation is afforded abundance and complexity, “ethnic and racial others live in an economy of narrative scarcity.” [2] Theatre has long had the power to disrupt this scarcity but often only in the form of providing the previously invisiblized or marginalized narrative for an audience to elicit empathy. Performance studies scholar/ethnographic theatre maker Nikki Yeboah asks in our current moment, “is empathy enough, or does our work reify power more than disrupt it?” [3] Particularly in relation to Black and brown suffering, how can we dramatize characters’ experiences in ways that do not re-traumatize people of color or leave white audiences feeling passively satisfied for having empathy, therefore perpetuating the white and colonial gaze of surveillance, voyeurism, fetishism, and possession, [4] something Yeboah critiques as “not an inherently radical act”? [5] Theorists from Black and decolonial studies indicate that highlighting the historiographical absence of people or obfuscation of narratives illustrates how forces such as white supremacy and colonialism have dehumanized or invisiblized them. Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino argue that metaphoricity is a crucial part of Black enslaved identity and that its “political indecipherability … exemplifies the violence of slavery itself.” [6] If “what slavery-as-metaphor offers is an opening to tarry with unknowing, to increase frustration,” [7] then what impacts can this type of depiction have on a theatre audience? Can frustration and unknowing provoke stronger actions that will result in social justice after the performance? Yeboah argues for dramaturgy that leaves the audience with the kind of frustration Garba and Sorentino refer to because “collective action requires agitation. Collective action is fueled by feelings of unrest, anger, and dissatisfaction so strong that they cannot be contained. It emerges out of turbulence. It draws strength from a people unsettled.” [8] Saidiya Hartman seems to agree: “the loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none. To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited.” [9] Hartman’s idea of narrative restraint as a way to “respect the limits of what cannot be known” [10] contrasts with the dramatic urge to present such narratives with explicit specificity and detail for contemporary white audiences as a way to compensate for their invisibilization. Although greater representation and embodiment of these stories and characters are still important, is there a dramaturgical alternative that complicates these depictions and denies audiences satisfaction? These questions inspire me to think about the Korean verb 없다, which roughly translates to “there are none; (to be) lacking; (to be) nonexistent,” [11] not dissimilar to faltar in Spanish. [12] How do we create dramatic experiences of loss or absence for an audience so they feel the grief and rage needed to take action towards a more just world, instead of feeling passively good about themselves for empathizing with victims/survivors of oppression? Rather than working to perform and prove my humanity for the audience, how can I compel them to feel the irreconcilable loss of self and/or history so we can be inspired to make collective change? Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview and Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop are excellent recent examples that engage with more complex representations around racialized trauma. As an audience member, I felt the unrest, anger, and hunger that Yeboah and Hartman hope to evoke in their work; both shows created strong desire within me to experience their characters and narratives more fully, and I felt a renewed urgency to fight for them offstage. In the next section, I will argue that the uniqueness of transracially adopted Asian American identity is suited for 없다 and provide examples from my own work. Racist Love : Asian American and adopted Korean representation This essay takes inspiration from a performative response on Zoom that I gave to Leslie Bow’s working introduction to her book, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy . [13] Bow argues that the US’s racialized relationship with Asian American identity can be illustrated through its abstracted affection or desire for nonhuman proxies (such as objects) and that this partly stems from a “deliberate absence of Asian people.” [14] This resonated with me as both an Asian American and a person who was transracially adopted from South Korea. “Transracial” does not mean white women trying to pass as Black or brown. In this context, it means being adopted into a family whose race differs from theirs (often Black/brown folks being adopted by white folks), and it has been an established term in adoption studies for decades. [15] Directly following the Korean War in the 1950s, a time when the US was strengthening its anti-Asian immigration policies, [16] adoptions from countries like South Korea increased. I argue that this is because US society and its adoption industrial complex viewed adopted children as dehumanized objects that allowed them to project the same kind of abstracted affection and longing that Bow highlights. White US families often adopted South Korean children because they were deemed acceptable as a model minority [17] in ways that are consistent with Bow’s assertions that the US looks “outward to Asia for its ‘bit’ of the other, for the object that makes satisfaction possible while imperfectly concealing racial anxiety.” [18] The larger AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) immigrant community often fails to be in solidarity with transracially adopted people from Korea [19] (who make up 10% of the Korean-US diaspora) while their white parents disregard their racial identity often with the intention to assimilate them. [20] Because “adoption is a series of transactions—legal, social, and financial [and] … those with the most power get to define the terms and create the policies and practices that most benefit them,” [21] white parents as major actors in these transactions tend to further objectify adopted people as nonhumans. The Korean government and its counterparts in countries like the US that make up the adoption industrial complex commodify adopted people; they were a literal export, because “US adoptive laws were designed in the context of free market capitalism and based on children as property.” [22] Agencies duplicated, interchanged, and manipulated our records to make us more marketable/adoptable. I was one of likely thousands of adopted people whose status was changed to orphan on my paperwork, a lie to appease the US government’s scant overseas adoption policies at the time. Instead of wanting to prove my humanity as an Asian American and transracially adopted person, my impulse was to move in another direction: to depict myself as literal Asian objects. Utilizing the Zoom format, I used Snapchat filters that stir Western desire such as food, toys, and appropriative clothing/costume. I leaned into my own objectification and used filters that intentionally obscured most of my face in the hopes that the audience would strain to see more of my personhood and be present to this less comfortable sensation. Fig. 1. Screenshots of Ginther (taken by the author) during her Zoom performance, using Snapchat filters. Clockwise from left to right: 1. As a dumpling, 2. As an old-fashioned Orientalist doll, 3. As a Geisha in full makeup, 4. As a boba tea. As I presented using a boba tea filter, for example, I talked about how experts estimate that South Korea made somewhere between 15-20 million dollars a year at the height of Korean adoption. [23] Using my own birth year, 1983, and adjusting for inflation and the pricing for my favorite bubble tea place in Santa Cruz, I shared with the audience that I cost about 1,315 boba teas. I hoped that in highlighting the loss of my story and personhood through anti-Asian American racism and the international adoption industrial complex that I would generate hunger, agitation, and unrest in ways that Yeboah and Hartman imagined. Attendees described my performance as “playful,” “incisive,” and “disorienting.” Another reflected, “Mainstream representations of ‘Asian-ness,’ like dumplings, ‘Geisha’ makeup, and boba tea, seen all together in aggregate made for a compelling visual argument of how we consume and project, literally on our faces, cultural iconography and object.” These responses suggest that I effectively performed alienation and objectification. My work: between and No Danger of Winning My first solo show, between , explored Korean adopted identity through multiple characters that centered my search for my first family. [24] Many adoption narratives use reunion as a form of climax, [25] but I intentionally deprived the audience of this dramatic moment, telling them: There was no grand moment that led me to my family in Korea.Perhaps that’s what you were hoping to find here.Meeting my family in Korea did not complete me.Reunions are not ends. They are middles. [26] I did not consciously know it at the time, but I was exploring ways we can withhold representation from audiences for sociopolitical reasons. I remarked that I had intentionally resisted this type of resolution scene because “I think this dilutes the complexity and richness of the experience that the continuously progressing relationship demands and deserves.” [27] In addition to depriving my audience of a realistic depiction of my reunion, I realized that my inability to “authentically” portray a Korean woman also deprived Korean audience members in Seoul of the ethno-national identity that was taken from me through the trauma of my transnational adoption. This is particularly important because transracially adopted people “are seen as suspect in their communities of origin or seen as not authentic,” [28] so a more supposedly “accurate” depiction potentially misses an opportunity to convey a more complex truth. I reflected: I want the audience to fully believe that I am this Korean mother before them, but I have accepted the fact that, to a Korean-fluent audience, there really is no amount of voice work I can do to achieve this. … you’re not the only one to intimate that part of what is moving about this performance of Ki-Bum is how hard and perhaps how imperfectly I, as an adoptee, am trying to portray this character to audiences here in South Korea. [29] Being unable to achieve this character’s accent with believable mimesis originally felt like a failure in my performance. With between , I am interested in the impact of my inability to fully embody Koreanness for Korean audience members. In feeling deprived of this more authentic portrayal, perhaps they will be moved to support policies such as family preservation so as to not perpetuate this discomfort they feel. The theory I cite in this essay, my previous work like between , and pieces like A Strange Loop and Fairview have inspired the ways I am writing and dramaturging my current project, the book for No Danger of Winning , a verbatim musical based on my interviews with ten former contestants of color who were eliminated on The Bachelor/ette . It is a meta-musical where a character, Joy, based on me as the playwright, navigates the complex ethics of trying to represent the people she interviews in ways that are more humanizing than the reality television depictions. In some ways, she is exploring the same questions as this essay through a more dramatic, embodied medium. Originally, one of our major dramaturgical goals was to humanize the contestants in ways that the reality TV did not and to illuminate the ways they suffered as a result. When one Black audience member commented at our first workshop reading, “I don’t need an entire musical to tell me that these reality shows are racist,” [30] it became clear to me, the composer (Thomas Hodges), and our developmental director (Lisa Marie Rollins) that providing literal/mimetic depictions of the characters’ experiences simply to replace the racist televised versions was not sufficient representation. The musical needed to disrupt the conditioned white gaze of the audience. After six Asian/Asian American women were killed in a mass shooting in Atlanta in March 2021, the stakes of representation and its deadly consequences resonated with me in a deeply personal way, adding to the heightened despair and fear so many of us in the AAPI community were feeling since the pandemic and its racist consequences emerged. [31] I wanted to depict the way this event shifted my (Joy’s) making of our musical—but how? How can I represent the responses of my Asian American and transracially adopted Asian communities through my theatre making in ways that do not reify trauma or leave a white audience feeling sated with their empathy for us? There is a moment where my character, Joy, seeks comfort after the tragic news by having an intimate and romantic moment with the presumed Asian male contestant she interviewed from The Bachelorette. I offer this staging as a possibility of something because the scenario of two Asian people experiencing romantic love does not happen often on The Bachelor/ette . However, it becomes increasingly apparent through his lines that this Asian actor is actually playing Joy’s white boyfriend; along with Joy, the audience experiences this possibility of romantic love dissolve. No matter how much agency Joy has as a playwright, she is unable to generate this narrative in her real life. Using this reveal, I aim for the audience to feel deprived of what a romantic love story between Joy and an Asian American partner may look like and the ways whiteness can feel insufficient in supporting partners of color during/after racist trauma. Conclusion Adopted writer Mary Kim Arnold reminds us: “being visible is not the same as being seen.” [32] Too often, audiences leave shows “feeling good about feeling bad” [33] for a character of color who experienced oppression or trauma as part of the dramatic narrative. While representation is important, and this may be arguably better than continuing to exclude these narratives from our canon, I believe there are ways we can reimagine dramaturgy that can move audiences beyond a passive experience of empathy that does little to change power dynamics and the world at large. In my theatre making, I aspire to deprive the audience of my full personhood and its related narratives in an effort to generate feelings and experiences of irreconcilable loss: a traded commodity through cute Snapchat filters; a yearned-for reunion scene; an “authentic” Korean character; or a loving, healing, romantic relationship between two Asian Americans. I dream of emancipatory ways Korean adopted people and other people of color will be seen onstage. Perhaps one of the ways to do this is to deprive an audience of what could have been, to compel them to experience our grief, our losses, our irreconcilability, so they rage with us, fight for us, and do something in the world that generates actual justice. References [1] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 11. [2] Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 203. [3] Nikki Owusu Yeboah, “‘I know how it is when nobody sees you’: Oral-History Performance Methods for Staging Trauma,” Text and Performance Quarterly 40, no. 2 (2020): 132. [4] Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2003), 6. [5] Yeboah, “Oral History Performance Methods,” 149. [6] Tapji Garba and Sara‐Maria Sorentino, “Slavery Is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,’” Antipode 52, no. 3 (2020): 776. [7] Garba and Sorentino, 777. [8] Yeboah, “Oral History Performance Methods,” 46. [9] Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 8. Hartman’s essay is known for laying the foundations of critical fabulation, the praxis of filling in the gaps of historical data with creative, semi-fictive accounts, particularly in relation to Black trauma in the US. This is already being referenced in dramaturgical processes in productions. See Calley N. Anderson and Holly L. Derr, “Using Critical Fabulation for History-Based Playwriting,” Howlround, 3 March 2021, https://howlround.com/using-critical-fabulation-history-based-playwriting. [10] Hartman, 4. [11] “Google Translate,” Google, https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=%EC%97%86%EB%8B%A4&op=translate. [12] “Google Translate,” Google, https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=faltar%20&op=translate. [13] Bow’s remarks and my response to them were part of the Writing for Living: Helene Moglen Conference in Feminism and the Humanities, sponsored by University of California: Santa Cruz, 2021. [14] Leslie Bow, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 10. [15] For more on this, see: JaeRan Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption: Historical Legacies, Current Issues, and Future Challenges,” in The Complexities of Race: Identity, Power, and Justice in an Evolving America , ed. Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 104-125; Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Andy Marra, “An Open Letter: Why Co-opting ‘Transracial’ in the Case of Rachel Dolezal is Problematic,” Medium, 16 June 2015, https://medium.com/@Andy_Marra/an-open-letter-why-co-opting-transracial-in-the-case-of-rachel-dolezal-is-problematic-249f79f6d83c. [16] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 109. [17] Kim, Adopted Territory , 28. [18] Leslie Bow, “Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy” (presentation, Writing for Living: Helene Moglen Conference in Feminism and the Humanities, Santa Cruz, CA, 19-20 February 2021). Bow said this as part of the draft she presented at the conference. It was later deleted for the final version of her book’s introduction. [19] Kim Park Nelson, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 96. [20] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 110. [21] Ibid., 104. [22] Ibid., 112-113. [23] Kim, Adopted Territory , 33. [24] I wrote between as part of my undergraduate thesis at Hofstra University in 2005. Its World Premiere was at the Edinburgh Fringe (Gilded Balloon) in 2006. Because of its themes and production locations, audiences were predominantly white and/or had some personal/professional interest in adoption. There were more Korean attendees when the show premiered in Seoul in 2011, but still many white audience members because the show was co-produced by an expat theatre company. [25] Family reunion is commonly used to resolve many media narratives in general that are not adoption related, spanning from Finding Nemo to Avengers: Endgame . One adoption-focused example of reunion being used as a resolution is the Netflix documentary, Found (2021). [26] Amy Mihyang Ginther, between (unpublished script, Club After Mainstage, Seoul, 9-17 April 2011). [27] tammy ko Robinson, “Korean Adoptee Explores Roots In One-Woman Show,” Imperial Family Companies, October 2011, https://charactermedia.com/october-issue-korean-adoptee-explores-roots-in-one-woman-show-2/. [28] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 115. [29] Robinson, “Korean Adoptee.” [30] No Danger of Winning talkback , book by Amy Mihyang Ginther, music and lyrics by Thomas Hodges, Shetler Studios, New York, 11 July 2019. [31] Anti-Asian racism, violence, and xenophobia has a long history in the US; this has intensified significantly since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. [32] Mary-Kim Arnold, Litany for the Long Moment (Buffalo, NY: Essay Press, 2018), 29. [33] This phrases references Lisa Nakumura, “Feeling Good about Feeling Bad: Virtuous Virtual Reality and the Automation of Racial Empathy,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 47-64. This piece critiques the goal of empathy in virtual reality (VR) documentary work specifically, and is impacting my current VR project, Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산), which is about my illegal abortion in South Korea. Details about this are beyond the scope of this essay, but I anticipate publication about it in the future, along with its VR release in exhibition space. Footnotes About The Author(s) Amy Mihyang Ginther (she/they) is currently an assistant professor within the Department of Performance, Play & Design at UC Santa Cruz. She is a queer, transracially adopted theatre maker and accent designer who publishes and performs around themes of identity, embodied trauma, power, and representation. Ginther’s edited volume, Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and decolonial actor training , is due 2023 (Routledge) and she is currently working on a musical, No Danger of Winning . Ginther is a Master Teacher of Acting and Singing with Archetypes, and is a certified teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork and Tectonic Theater Project’s Moment Work™ devising method. 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.