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Catherine Heiner 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 A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Catherine Heiner By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Kaneisha lets out a scream that sends the gag falling out of her mouth and her body shivering from groin to skull. Kaneisha: Starbucks! Starbucks! Starbucks! Kaneisha falls off the bed and begins to cry. It is a full-bodied, all-hands-on-deck type of cry. Jim looks at Kaneisha, not sure what came over him, not sure why he did what he did, as the last light of the Virginia dusk begins to fade away, and a slight breeze knocks their window against the pane. Jim begins to crawl over to Kaneisha slowly when suddenly the all-hands-on-deck cry becomes a guttural laugh. Kaneisha is overcome. Slave Play (1) “What moment made you want to say ‘Starbucks’?” The question verges toward the silly, even in this context. Within Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play though, “Starbucks” resists our caffeinated associations. It functions here as a sexual safe word—a way for the characters to immediately stop their role play and return to reality. During what initially appears in the first act as a series of racially charged sexual exploits on a slave plantation—including a white mistress taking advantage of the young Black man working in her household, and an overseer awkwardly seducing a Black woman—“Starbucks” reveals that the whole scenario is a setup constructed by a pair of Yale graduate students to help three interracial couples work through their relationship issues. These characters spend the play parsing out baggage unique to these interracial relationships through an unconventional variation of therapeutic role play while attempting to name and interrogate complications around race. As the play hurtles toward the climactic third act—which includes an ambiguous and violent sexual interaction between Kaneisha, the central Black female character, and her white male partner, Jim, described in the stage direction excerpted above—whatever meaning this exchange and the use of “Starbucks” produces seems ambiguous and uncertain. This unsettled question remained in the air as the show concluded and facilitators turned the attention of remaining participants toward thoughtful reflection and discussion. From its inception, Slave Play encouraged discourse with and for audiences, originating with informal interactions with trained moderators available in the lobby (designated with “talk to me about the play” buttons) at the New York Theatre Workshop, to more formal post-show talkbacks with some members of the cast and creative team on Broadway.(2) By the time I encountered Slave Play at the Taper Forum, audiences were invited to stay after the show for brief conversations with facilitators immediately afterwards. For our conversation, facilitators focused on a structured format scaffolded by the language of the play—in this case, using “Starbucks” to encourage us to contemplate moments of discomfort. As I sat in the mostly empty auditorium of the Taper Forum in Los Angeles, I set aside my own tangled reactions to the play in favor of hearing from other audience members—given the play’s notoriety for its “shocking” material, I was curious how this self-selected community interpreted it. The premise of Slave Play , frequently alluded to in critical reviews and word-of-mouth reactions alike had been intriguing, but the humor seemed to land unevenly on the audience as the story swerved away from absurdity like a slow-motion car wreck towards the assault in act three. The conversation the play depicts involving gender, race, sexuality, and power, seemed to require a constant negotiation of audiences’ identities (in my case, white, queer, cis woman, as well as graduate student, theatre scholar, and dramaturg) in relation to the conflict, but as a whole the play resisted easy or prescriptive conclusions. For the bulk of the post-show talkback, the two facilitators led us through direct questions about these initial reactions, revelations, and what had stuck with us. Most responders prefaced their comments by clarifying that their responses “[weren’t] about the race thing, really,” and generally the conversation reflected how the discomfort of race, sexuality, and power intersected while watching the story. I noticed how these comments echoed larger observations about the play that I had seen in reviews and other publicity material,(3) identifying moments that appear “shocking” or “risky.” Finally, an older Black woman seated near the back of the auditorium raised her hand. “I would say I’m disappointed,” she began. “There was nothing here that was shocking, or…daring as everyone said this play would be. It was pretty typical. A white man having sex with a Black woman like she’s a slave? That’s expected.”(4) While there are numerous points of entry into critical analysis of Slave Play , I emphasize this moment in the post-show audience discussion to highlight the tensions of satire, empathy, and the play’s dynamics of race. Slave Play toys heavily with expectations, ultimately breaking with the initial conceit as the characters reveal the circumstances of their role play. This reveal may produce a shocking and unexpected twist for audiences, but it also cultivates an empathetic gap where any initial feelings toward these characters evaporate upon realizing the situation is not what it seems. The humor at this twist nearly carries the second act, but the unpredictability makes it difficult to interpret the threat of harm toward Kaneisha in the final act. Indeed, much of the post-show discussion focused on the individual emotional experiences of audience members in relation to discomfort and knee-jerk reactions. While this approach offered participants a chance to self-reflect, the questions center around moments of shock, surprise, or unexpected emotion, effectively side-stepping what made the humor in the first two acts effective or necessary. In examining this shift, I inquire: at what point does Slave Play cease to function as a comedy? I suggest that the initial framework of satire and humor for the first two acts significantly alters how this final moment of violence is understood in the context of its racial dynamics. All production choices of the first act lean into the comedy, including exaggerated movement that echoes the melodramatic. Given the sexual context, this blocking adds to the humor, with the wildly ridiculous postures heightening the sadomasochistic erotics. By the time the arc shifts to act three, the physical reaction of witnessing Kaneisha and Jim’s altercation seems to move from the humorous to the dangerous. In many ways, this particular altercation opens up potential for kinesthetic empathy, an “automatic, involuntary, kinesthetic response of one body to another” that produces a “feeling of sharing another person’s movement.”(5) Instead of strengthening an empathetic connection to a performance however, kinesthetic empathy can create an even further gap, since it is “limited by our own first-person experience,” where “what we simulate is our own experience of the movement, not the experience of the other. There will always be a gap between what we receive and what we experience.”(6) In negotiating this gap between a kinesthetic reaction to a staged act of violence and the use of satire, I build on Heather LaMarre’s framework of the cognitive load in satire—wherein audiences must refocus between what a satirist says and what message they initially intended.(7) In this case, Slave Play combines multiple components (including conversations on sexuality, race, and power) that increase the cognitive load to a such a point that it blurs the possibility of significant cultural critiques. (The focus of the post-show discussion highlighted this, as significantly more time was spent allowing audiences to self-reflect than to extrapolate toward larger thematic discussion.) Given the play’s portrayal of Kaneisha, this satirical imbalance reiterates rather than counteracts the hyperinvisibile status of Black women. In charting this trajectory, I position Slave Play within a larger context of satire to discuss the play’s use of humor and critique, followed by a more pointed analysis of Kaneisha addressing how her constellation of sexuality, gender, and race operates in conjunction with this satire. “A comedy of sorts” “The moment you know [Slave Play] has no consideration for black women is in act 3 when kaneisha sys something like ‘the ancestors don’t mind that we lay with demons cuz they laid with demons too” - @theeashleyray(8) Ashley Ray, a Los Angeles-based polyamorous Black queer comedian/actor/writer,(9) received a significant amount of praise for her critique of Slave Play , especially the treatment of Kaneisha, as followers noted how Ray articulated their own similar distaste. Although responses to Slave Play seem to suggest a deep concern with the final violent act, numerous critical reviews focused on the discomfort of those watching and witnessing rather than empathizing with Kaneisha. “This is a demanding play,” wrote Constance Grady for Vox in her 2018 review. “[O]ne of the things it demands is the audience’s discomfort. But that discomfort is productive—and in the end, it brings its own satisfactions.”(10) Charles McNulty, who reviewed the Taper Forum production, noted that “each time I’ve seen the work, I’ve had a different reaction, which to me is a sign of the work’s complexity.”(11) These reviews contrasted heavily with Ray’s critiques, particularly as Ray focused much of her perspective on Kaneisha’s lack of involvement as a larger observation on Black women. Ray pointed to Kaneisha’s silence as an example of this lack of consideration, noting instances where “when we think we Kaneisha’s actual motivations might be revealed, a Rihanna song plays instead.”(12) Indeed, the fact that Kaneisha cannot articulate her emotions through words functions as a primary plot point, with musical interventions representing her experience of alexithymia. (Alexithymia, a condition where an individual has trouble identifying, experiencing, and understanding their own emotions, also seems to be a common experience for most of the Black characters in this play.) Indeed, throughout much of the “process” of act two, Kaneisha’s dialogue primarily consists of defining terms, concepts, or sensations for her fellow participants rather than investigating her own experience. By including the bulk of Kaneisha’s dialogue and action in the first act through role play, the understanding of her character is based heavily in the humor and satire framed in those moments—further complicating the reading of the final scene. Indeed, beyond the comment that Kaneisha and Jim’s relationship was “expected,” very little of the post-show discussion I attended even referenced Kaneisha or the violence at the end of act three, seeming to confirm Ray’s initial critique of her treatment. In his introductory “Notes on Style,” Harris describes the world of the play as “a comedy of sorts” that “should be played as such.”(13) Harris does not include any additional guidance on this comedy, although many of the reviews include references to the “satiric” elements of the play, particularly within the overly academic second act. Sara Holdren’s Vulture review indicated that the play remained “ultimately humane,” even with its use of satire.(14) Amauta M. Firmino, who served as dramaturg for Slave Play from its origins at the Yale School of Drama through its Broadway premiere, recounted that this troubling between humor and discomfort served as an origin point for the play as well: “[Jeremy] was at a dinner party, and there’s…this conversation about a couple who, these two white people… They had been getting into role play in sex, and he had wanted to sort of…scare her or…surprise her or something. And people were joking at the dinner table about, like, pretending to rape his wife in a way, in role play, right?(15) This initial conversation led to questions of how power dynamics become visible in these moments, particularly if one partner is Black, as “[s]uddenly the power dynamics shift radically,” Firmino notes that “everyone is completely off their footing, right? And they’re no longer sure if they should be laughing or not, right?”(16) Unlike the first act, which elicited laughter through staging a sexual role play bordering on the ridiculous, the second act gets caught up in language and rhetoric, particularly as Téa and Patricia dance around buzzwords like “processing,” “interventions,” and “unpacking” as they lead the group therapy session. As the story moves into more emotionally charged dynamics in the third act, it seems to recreate this sensation of being “caught off foot,” uncertain of whether laughter is deserved. The slippery quality of satire only adds to the complicated nature of Slave Play —amid all the humor, the moments of critique get obscured. In her studies on satire and political humor, Heather L. LaMarre defines it as a genre that “uses laughter as a weapon to diminish or derogate a subject and evoke towards it attitudes of amusement, disdain, ridicule, or indignation.”(17) At its heart, satire relies on mimicry in order to exploit other existing literary genres.(18) LaMarre’s initial study included categorizing two primary forms of satire: Horatian, which mimics comedy and comments on social and ethical problems by “[telling] the truth, laughing,” and Juvenalian, which mimics tragedy, and therefore includes a more definitive, bitter approach.(19) The goal of Horatian satire seeks to evoke laughter, which “calls audiences to laugh at the folly of political circumstance without giving much credence to arguments.”(20) This laughter can quickly reduce any commentary to “just a joke,” or “not serious,” in what LaMarre refers to as message discounting. Message discounting also exists in Juvenalian satire. However, the complexity of this genre makes interpretation more difficult. Juvenalian satire can create a stronger sense of urgency for the audience in processing and understanding the material—to reconcile the humor, the audience must negotiate a larger gap between what the satirist says and what they mean.(21) The challenge for Slave Play comes in large part from Harris’s comedy—engaging with both Horatian and Juvenalian satire creates a sense of whiplash in attempting to understand how to read the emotionally charged situations. The description Harris provides suggests that some elements can (and perhaps should) emphasize the possibilities for comedy. Part one, which finds all characters in an elaborate antebellum sexual role play initially comes off as Horatian, allowing characters to “tell the truth” within their relationship dynamics “while laughing.” The second and third acts get decidedly more complicated, as it’s increasingly unclear whether Slave Play remains satirical, and if so, what exactly it satirizes. In this manner, Slave Play appears to move closer toward a Juvenalian satire. Mirroring the same pitfalls that LaMarre illuminated in her comparison of the two, Slave Play requires more input and discernment for individual interpretation. Based on her studies in media and communication, LaMarre notes that “Horatian satire leaves agency in the hands of the message recipient while Juvenalian satire places most of the agency in the hands of the message producers.”(22) The more interpretation an audience must process to understand the argument, the less ability they have to properly analyze various angles of the critique. As the characters move through their “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy” experience, they shift from Horatian satire to Juvenalian—from humor that audiences can write off as “just a joke” to interactions so steeped in ambiguity—making it unclear whether we should laugh with a character or at them. By including an intense and visceral assault on Kaneisha in this context, Slave Play seems to trouble what actions exist under the umbrella of Horatian satire’s “just a joke.” Throughout her study, LaMarre identifies that the heavier cognitive load of Juvenalian satire makes it difficult to differentiate between humor and meaning. Ultimately, the audience becomes so preoccupied attempting to negotiate what the satirist says versus the actual intended message, they cannot fully articulate and analyze the actual arguments presented. As a result, LaMarre argues that these forms reduce the public’s motivation or ability “to think about the issues, assess the strength of relevant arguments, and attend to the political issues being presented,” and that consequently, “we are entering a world where opinion, sarcasm, innuendo, parody, and satire may have more influence on our democracy than facts and relevant truths.”(23) The stakes that LaMarre lays out become useful in examining Slave Play to understand both critical responses and the discourse the play seeks to engage. By moving from Horatian satire to Juvenalian satire to realism in such quick succession, Slave Play makes it difficult for audiences to parse out where one ends and another begins—and similarly, what the play considers “just a joke,” and what elements audiences should take seriously. In this way, contextualizing Slave Play as satire also relies on the imagined contemporary “postrace” America. Ralina L. Joseph defines postrace as “a term used by race commentators to sometimes describe, sometimes decry, and sometimes imagine another racialized world. Postrace is far from neutral; indeed, as a racial ideology, it is so loaded and powerful that it delimited the iterative space for race critics in the Obama era.”(24) Joseph points to the pitfalls of imagining America as “postrace,” as the term suggests that race is no longer significant, implying that we have moved past discrimination based on race. Instead, Joseph argues that “postraciality remains embroiled in precisely what it claims not to be,” as it both contains the immediate awareness of racial difference and an acknowledgement of that race.(25) The implication that American politics and culture are beyond—or even past—race allows the discussion of race to seemingly disappear from the conversation. The conceit that these characters have arrived to unpack the dynamics of their interracial relationships hinges on this concept of postrace, as it both obscures and emphasizes racial power dynamics to underscore its satire. For Kaneisha, this creates a position where her race simultaneously becomes the central focus in this dynamic while avoiding her particular challenges of Black womanhood. Kaneisha exists at the difficult intersection for Black women that Ralina Joseph describes as being “both hypervisible—objects of desire and scorn—and invisible entities who fail to register as significant.”(26) The hypervisibility that Joseph defines evolves further, as Amber Johnson argues that “stereotyping the body so much that the stereotypes become more visible, and thus believable,” to the point where these stereotypes even replace bodies in interpersonal interactions, rendering them hyperinvisible.(27) Recognizing this hyperinvisibility echoes the sentiments from the comment from the post-show discussion, pointing out what is “expected” in Kaneisha’s position. Kaneisha’s hyperinvisibility becomes another feature to question in negotiating satire—rather than addressing the actual harm represented, the question of what messages the play offered and what meaning it intended dominates the cognitive load. Harris has described in interviews that his intention for the play centers on its function as “a litmus test for the audience that was engaging with it.”(28) Harris’s original goals included getting the audience talking about the relationships and dynamics they witnessed, which would seem to make it an excellent opportunity for dialogic empathy through this dramatic “litmus test.” Should the audience view Slave Play as a satire, it becomes necessary to identify the intentions of the satirist and the actual message. Extrapolating from LaMarre’s work, the audience’s attention redirects in an attempt to analyze what they just saw rather than engaging with the actual themes present. For instance, rather than considering the emotional impact of racial inequalities, the audience gets preoccupied trying to discern if Jim assaulted Kaneisha. Returning to Ray’s observations, this shift makes it difficult to determine whether the play has any consideration for Kaneisha, and by extension, Black women generally, particularly as the action moves closer and closwer to realism. “I always see Slave Play as a tryptich,” Firmino described. “The first act is the artifice of the thing, right? It’s the role playing. And then the second act is a comedy of manners…that unmasks the role play and kind of talks about all of the issues behind it, and the third act is reality, right, the third act is the most real.”(29) In the realm of satire, especially satire that draws on sexual dynamics and kink, the line between assault and humor gets troublingly blurry. “Why is whiteness so central to her identity?” Kaneisha exists as both hypervisible and invisible in the space of the play, particularly by attempting to negotiate power in these moments of sadomasochistic roleplay. Sadomasochism broadly references relationships based on giving and/or receiving pain, ultimately relying on a binary power dynamic such as teacher/student, nurse/patient, or in the case of Slave Play , slave/master. Initially, Kaneisha’s participation (and Jim’s, for that matter) should allow her to “reengage intimately with white partners for whom they no longer receive sexual pleasure,” as Teá describes in act two.(30) The sadomasochistic dynamic between Jim and Kaneisha may edge toward a historical reenactment, where Harris evokes the actual legacy of Black women raped by white masters, but as many critics have pointed out, he does so in a way that reaffirms the structures of white supremacy. In an interview with Harris, Cate Young, a Black woman from the West Indies who articulates her racial identity alongside her history as a descendant of slaves, mentioned how Kaniesha’s lines during this interaction “bumped” for her, leading to questions about Kaneisha’s relationship to whiteness. “If it’s about whiteness in general,” Young described, “why is whiteness so central to [Kaneisha’s] identity? Why is interacting with whiteness in this intimate way so central to [her] identity that [she] can’t just not do that anymore when it doesn’t work for [her]?”(31) Ray followed a similar line of questioning in her review, noting that whatever liberation could exist through utilizing sadomasochism and kink occurs only “when it is removed from systemic structures of whiteness and traditional power dynamics,” a situation that does not exist in the world of this play.(32) As this scene appears as the closest to reality, it would seem that Kaneisha’s behavior affirms white supremacy rather than creating a liberatory act that critiques it. In further exploring Kaneisha’s hyperinvisibility in this context, her roleplay highlights the difference between flesh and body as analyzed by Hortense Spillers. According to Spillers, the ability to differentiate between flesh and bodies allows for an expansion of understanding personhood. The flesh, which exists prior to the body, functions as “that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or that reflexes of iconography.”(33) The categorization of individual as body allows for the obscuring of violence, whereas the category of flesh allows for recognition of the marks and remembrances of the violence.(34) Spillers also suggests that the dynamic of body and flesh remains in flux throughout this narrative of enslavement, allowing space to exist as either a captive body, or as a site of crimes against the flesh. Each term offers separate possibilities in justifying racialized violence and the commodification of human life. The way that Harris evokes enslavement, both in the content of Slave Play and the title itself, suggests a bleeding between these categories. (Although during my encounter in the post-show discussion the topic of race was generally touched on in conversation, many comments suggested discomfort and avoidance of discussing the evocation of enslavement outright.) Ray similarly noted how “some people seemed to think it was a play about actual slavery which sparked the ‘I’m tired of slavery time stories!’ debate. ( Slave Play is not, technically, about ‘slavery times.’)”(35) Utilizing the history of enslavement both as a foundation for exploratory kink and for the humor of satire further adds to the cognitive load—after all, these sexual exploits seem to indicate that the power dynamics of enslavement can be laughed at as “just a joke” in this context. Leaning on Horatian satire not only leaves Kaneisha in an ambiguous place between flesh and body, but also between assault and “a joke.” This troubling of bodies, flesh, enslavement, and kink contributes heavily to the hyperinivisibility of Kaneisha due to the intersections of identities she inhabits. Kaneisha-as-body becomes hypervisible as a subject for her white partner, Jim, but Kaneisha-as-flesh remains invisible and he cannot bring himself to sexually satisfy her. In discussing how Black femininity has been understood as an excess of flesh, Nicole R. Fleetwood argues that it becomes “ a performative that doubles visibility: to see the codes of visuality operating on the (hyper)visible body that is its object . Excess flesh does not destabilize the dominant gaze or its system of visibility. Instead, it refracts the gaze back upon itself.”(36) Kaneisha’s engagement in S/M, particularly a historical scenario rooted in an unequal racial power balance, becomes an attempt to render both her Blackness and her sexuality-as-flesh visible. Black women face the most significant consequences based on this dynamic between flesh and/or body due to occupying a constellation of racialized and gendered categories. During the era of enslavement in the US, from approximately 1619 through the nineteenth century, Black women were categorized and recognized as flesh to support their position within the economic system, but not flesh capable of experiencing “fleshly” desires. Black women continued to hold this space of ambiguity—flesh unable to experience fleshly desire, only bodies in terms of labor production—in the same way that Spillers describes the captive personality as “unmade.” Saidiya V. Hartman similarly indicates that the conditions of slave agency express an oxymoron given that enslaved social existence is defined by lack of agency, asking, “What are the constituents of agency when one’s social condition is defined by negation and personhood refigured in the fetishized and fungible terms of object of property?”(37) Kaneisha’s initial appeals to Jim in act one illustrate desire of the flesh, particularly as she encourages him to dominate her in ways he finds degrading. By viewing Kaneisha as separate from her flesh (which includes her sexuality and her Blackness), Jim makes her both an object of desire and an invisible entity that fails to register as significant—he participates in her hyperinvisiblity. To bring this back to my earlier analysis on comedy, I return to my inquiry to understand when Slave Play ceases to be a comedy to further illustrate the risk of this hyperinvisibility regarding Kaneisha. Not only does she exist at a site of ambiguity between flesh and body, but between humor and critique as well. In his discussion of physical humor, John Wright identifies that staging scenes based in typicality is much more useful to humor, where “the vast majority of our comedy is based on recognition. We laugh because we can see ourselves in that situation. We laugh because we understand and we can share that understanding.”(38) Indeed, the first act allows for this recognition and understanding at the intersection of sex, desire, embarrassment, and the ridiculous . Moving into the third act, however, and an increasingly charged interaction between Kaneisha and Jim, the laughter remains. It would be impossible to conclude what exactly laughter from the audience might signify in that moment as it would require extensive generalization across multiple audiences in multiple cities and years. Still, Wright’s description of laughter as recognition is insightful—how is this situation of dominance recognized? And, to echo the comment from the talkback at the opening of this essay, does this recognition perpetuate what have (predominantly white) American audiences come to expect for Black women? Drawing on LaMarre’s conclusions, the cognitive load of balancing satirist’s intentions versus interpretations, Slave Play focuses predominantly on understanding what should be read as humor, leaving less cognitive capacity to properly analyze Kaneisha’s hyperinvisible status. Further, by utilizing sexuality as a means to explore this intersection of race, gender, and hyperinvisibility under the guise of satire, this cognitive load becomes even more challenging to fully process. In their analysis of Slave Play ’s exploration of these sexual encounters, Kari Barclay argues that this play functions as an erotic return, a performance that “restore[s] an imagined time and place of historical trauma and reconceptualize[s] it as a site of potential pleasure.”(39) While the inclusion of kink and sexual roleplay does suggest potential pleasure, as Barclay notes, the ambiguity of satire goes further to frame this pleasure as also humorous and verging on comedic. Regarding the violence of the final scene, Barclay goes on to note that “the play’s reenactment of sexual violence, even under consensual circumstances, may not have been paired with the context needed to shepherd audiences through an encounter with difficult history. […] …audiences may not have always had such a supportive environment in the theatre.”(40) I agree with Barclay’s observation on the challenges of “shepherding” the audience through these moments, and I extend this concern for Slave Play ’s audiences to address how the context of satire resists the supportive environment to engage with this difficult history while effectively reaffirming Kaneisha’s hyperinvisible status. “There sure are a lot of white people here.” The heavy cognitive load that results from layering satire, critique, and humor produces multiple instances where any given audience (or, in LaMarre’s terms, message receivers) potentially focuses excess energy on understanding the intent of the message rather than analyzing the argument itself. Given the overt nature of the play’s sexually explicit content, I suggest that this can produce situations where Slave Play unintentionally reproduces white supremacy. In her work on the subject, Dani Snyder-Young observes that white theatre audiences often desire to present themselves as “ good white people ,” which significantly impacts their conclusions about whatever performances they are viewing. She described that these white audiences “misrecognized realistically drawn white characters who perform their whiteness in ungraceful, hurtful ways as bad, racist white people, and find ways to distance themselves from these characters,” without reading these characters as representative of a generalized class of white people.(41) By denouncing racist white characters, “good white people” can distance themselves from racism without personal interrogation. In this context, the recognition of comedy within the satire allows for audience members to potentially categorize themselves as “good white people” based on the recognition of humor. Not only does the category of “good white people” resist intervention to break down white supremacy, but the movement between Horatian satire, Juvenalian satire, and realism challenges how “good white people” should interpret the action of Slave Play . Returning to his analysis of the play as a triptych, Firmino pointed out that the third act feels “the most real,” functioning predominantly as a reflection of reality rather than a satirical interpretation. Still, there is little information provided to help contextualize this transition. Indeed, the third act functions as the only time when the “Starbucks” safe word is evoked, but it lacks the immediate breakage as seen in the first act. In its first use, used by Kaneisha’s partner Jim, “Starbucks” severs the audience from the antebellum setting, creating an anachronistic dissonance that immediately hints these encounters are not what we initially believed them to be. As the play moves toward a sensation of “the most real,” the use of “Starbucks” relates to the more grounded portrayal of BDSM safe words—a term or signal that ends the sexual encounter immediately to protect those involved, particularly with rough or violent scenarios. The ambiguity of how Kaneisha uses the term at the end of the play and whether the encounter actually stops has been a point of discussion in many reviews and reactions attempting to determine if the play’s final moment should be categorized as assault or merely a specific type of sexual encounter. Actress Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, who both originated the role at Yale and performed as Kaneisha on Broadway and the West Coast, emphasized in one interview that “at the point [Kaneisha] says, ‘No,’ it stops. How it gets there is up to the interpretation of the audience.”(42) In her review, Ray reflected that on both occasions she saw the performance she thought she heard the actor playing Kaneisha say “stop,” and that she “realized [Kaneisha] uses the safeword when I read the script later.”(43) Positioning an indeterminate sexual encounter alongside extensive satire challenges precisely how the category of “good white people” gets defined, particularly when it comes to humor. I recognized this desire to align with “good white people” during my own attendance at Slave Play in 2022. I went into the experience with significant background knowledge of the play and the playwright, and upon arrival at the Taper Forum in Los Angeles felt an overwhelming wave of anxiety about how my white, female body might be interpreted in relation to the play. Unlike other aspects of my background (my theatre research, my experience as a dramaturg, etc.), the visual reading of my race and gender became more deeply felt throughout the performance. A line from Ashley Ray’s review kept swimming through my head, an observation that “there sure are a lot of white people here.”(44) I became self-conscious of my reactions (or lack thereof), and I noticed my row included a small pocket of silence while the rest of the auditorium filled with loud laughter and guffaws at the first act. This internal tension and anxiety only intensified as the play went on and I found myself repeatedly wondering how I was supposed to be implicated in relation to the characters. The weight of the cognitive load gets distracting—I could not find the humor because I was so tangled up trying to understand what I was supposed to be laughing at, or whether that laughter was permitted. My experience highlighted this site of tension between satire and critique, while recognizing that my reaction was heavily informed by my particular intersection of identities. My preoccupation with understanding how to read the humor onstage became my primary focus in an attempt to track when the story shifted from “a comedy of sorts” toward the “most real,” a process which highlighted the extent of this cognitive load. It came to a head in the final moments of act three, excerpted at the beginning of this essay—in watching Kaneisha yell “Starbucks” over and over, I questioned what exactly I had been witnessing. Contextualizing this relationship—whether as kink, satire, or assault—felt deeply necessary in understanding Kaneisha as a character, and by extension, the play’s perspectives on Black women’s hyperinvisibility. In order to consider the consequences of positioning Kaneisha as hyperinvisible, I return to the gap between satire and cognitive load. Despite the fact that Kaneisha becomes a hyperinvisible figure throughout the narrative of Slave Play , the final encounter casts the audience as witness to a highly visceral moment of violence. The emotional experience of this witnessing, even alongside the potential comedic reading of satire, can evoke what Judith Herman describes with the dialectic of trauma. “It is difficult for an observer to remain clearheaded and calm, to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time, to retain all the pieces, and fit them together,” Herman stated. “It is even more difficult to find a language that conveys fully and precisely what one has seen. Those who attempt to describe the atrocities that they have witnessed also risk their own credibility. To speak publicly about one’s knowledge of atrocities is to invite the stigma that attaches to victims.”(45) Further, it is the victim who requires more from the witness. Herman continues that “the victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”(46) Herman’s indication that the bystander share in the burden of pain returns to Sara Ahmed’s description of the ethics of pain. The action, engagement, and remembering demanded of the witness implicitly requires that they “act about that which [they] cannot know” as Ahmed prompts, and to be “moved by what does not belong to [them.]”(47) The assault that audiences witness at the end of Slave Play may similarly move them, but Kaneisha’s hyperinvisibility further challenges the role of the witness. As Herman describes, the role of the witness comes with its own difficulties in articulating, processing, and engaging empathy—when aligned with satire, these burdens are colored by potential humor and discounting, further reinscribing Kaneisha as hyperinvisible. In acknowledging the relationship between pain and history, Ahmed indicates that the two come together through the body. She observes that “harm has a history,” and that “pain is not simply an effect of a history of harm; it is the bodily life of that history .”(48) The potential for pain that exists at the core of Slave Play could potentially offer an exploration of America’s relationship to enslavement. This approach, however, would require an acknowledgement of the specifics of this pain, rather than the ambiguity that takes place. Empathy cannot always access pain (as Ahmed argues), and the call of this pain “is a call not just for an attentive hearing, but for a different kind of inhabitance,” that results in a politics “based not on the possibility of what we might be reconciled, but on learning to live with the impossibility of reconciliation, or learning that we live with and beside each other, and yet we are not as one.”(49) The call of pain demonstrated in Slave Play , particularly in relation to Kaneisha, seems to hinge on keeping her in a state of hyperinvisibility. Slave Play asks audiences and characters to witness Kaneisha throughout her arc to sympathize with her situation, however doing so alongside the context of satirical humor still underscores the hyperinvisibility of Black female bodies. What moment made you want to say “Starbucks”? At the end of the post-show conversation, the two facilitators gave one final audience member a chance to discuss what resonated or what they would take away from this production. The young woman selected to speak sat on the opposite side of the auditorium from me, and framed her reflection as more of a question than a statement. She mentioned that she was Asian-American, and noted the importance of identifying herself that way as the play highlighted a similar gap between how we self-identify and how the world interprets or reads us. Her question centered around this gap—wondering when self-identification was no longer empowering because it relied on overt explanation rather than how one is perceived.(50) I found myself pondering this thought in relation to Kaneisha—in many ways, it didn’t matter how she self-identified because the world of the play and by extension, the audience, interpreted her based on her hyperinvisibility. Similarly, viewing what happens to Kaneisha as “expected,” as described by an earlier audience member, suggests that this hyperinvisibility had become ubiquitous with Black womanhood. The safe word “Starbucks” can remove the characters from the role play, and the audience can leave the theatre, but Kaneisha can’t seem to escape her hyperinvisibility. If this is still a comedy, perhaps it’s time to stop laughing. References Jeremy O. Harris, Slave Play , Theatre Communications Group, 2019, 161. Amauta Firmino described that the New York Theatre Workshop partnered with an organization to provide mediators/moderators after each performance. These individuals had had conversations with the creative team about the play and had been trained in mediation, providing audiences with highly informal opportunities to ask questions about what they just saw. See also: Green, Jesse. “Review: ‘Slave Play,’ Four Times as Big and Just as Searing.” New York Times , 6 October 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/06/theater/slave-play-review-broadway.html Accessed 8 November 2024 .; Holdren. Sara. “Theatre Review: Slave Play Blends the Terrifying and the Tantalizing.” Vulture , 10 December 2018. https://www.vulture.com/2018/12/slave-play-jeremy-harris-review.html . Accessed 8 November 2024. ; Knowles, Hannah. “A Broadway-goer railed against a play as unfair to white people. The playwright responded.” The Washington Post, 1 December 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/12/01/broadway-goer-shouted-play-was-racist-against-white-people-playwright-responded/ . Accessed 8 November 2024. Excerpt from personal field notes during post-show discussion. Harris, Jeremy O. Slave Play. Directed by Robert O’Hara, performances by Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, Jonathan Higginbotham, Devin Kawaoka, Chalia La Tour, Irene Sofia Lucio, Paul Alexander Nolan, Jakeem Dante Powell, and Elizabeth Stahlmann. 19 February 2022, Center Theatre Group, Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, California. Wanda Strukus. “Mining the Gap: Physically Integrated Performance and Kinesthetic Empathy.” The Journal of Theory and Dramatic Criticism , Spring 2011, 89 Strukus, 103. Heather L. LaMarre, Kristen D. Landreville, Dannagal Young, and Nathan Gilkerson. “Humor Works in Funny Ways: Examining Satirical Tone as a Key Determinant in Political Humor Message Processing,” Mass Communication and Society , 17, no. 3, (2012), 405. Ashley Ray. @theeashleyray, 11 February 2022. Formatting in original. Ray has since taken down the original Twitter thread, although she provides a more thorough analysis and explanation of her thoughts on Slave Play and Harris in her publication “Why I Saw Slave Play Twice” published on her Substack. “About,” https://theashleyray.com . Accessed 27 July 2022. Constance Grady. “In Slave Play, audience and actors alike spar over who has the whip.” Vox, 17 December 2018. https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/12/17/18140950/slave-play-review-jeremy-o-harris-new-york-theatre-workshop . Accessed 25 March 2024. Charles McNulty. “Jeremy O. Harris’ ‘Slave Play’ awakens the Mark Taper Forum with a jolt.” Los Angeles Times , 17 February 2022. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-02-17/review-jeremy-o-harris-slave-play-in-los-angeles . Accessed 20 March 2024. Ray. “Why I Saw Slave Play Twice.” Harris, np. Holdren, Sara. “Theatre Review: Slave Play Blends the Terrifying and the Tantalizing.” Vulture , 10 December 2018. https://www.vulture.com/2018/12/slave-play-jeremy-harris-review.html . Accessed 12 July 2022. Firmino, 18 August 2022. Firmino, 18 August 2022. LaMarre, “Humor Works…” 402. LaMarre, “Humor Works…” 402. LaMarre, “Humor Works…” 402. LaMarre, “Humor Works…” 405. LaMarre, “Humor Works…” 405. LaMarre, “Humor Works…” 421. LaMarre, “Humor Works…” 422. Joseph, 7. Joseph, 8, 10. Joseph, 18. Johnson, Amber. "Straight Outta Erasure: Black Girl Magic Claps Back to the Hyperinvisibility of Black Women in Straight Outta Compton." National Political Science Review 19, no. 2 (2018): 36. Quoted by Cate Young. “Interview: Jeremy O. Harris Knows You Hate ‘Slave Play.’” Thirty, Flirty + Film. 11 March 2022. https://30flirtyfilm.substack.com/p/jeremy-o-harris-slave-play?s=r . Accessed 13 July 2022. Interview with the author, 18 August 2022. Harris, 75. Young, emphasis in original, np. Ray, “Why I Saw Slave Play Twice,” np. Spillers, 67 Spillers describes this in the atomizing of the captive body on page 67. Ray, np. Nicole R. Fleetwood “Excess Flesh: Black Women Performing Hypervisibility.” Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. University of Chicago Press, 2011, 112. Emphasis in original. Saidiya V. Hartman. Scenes of Subjection . Oxford University Press, 1997, 52. Wright, John. Why is That So Funny?: A Practical Exploration of Physical Comedy . Nick Hern Books/Limelight Edition, 2007, 20. Kari Barclay. “Erotic Returns: Sleeping with Ancestors in Contemporary Plays about Sexual Violence.” Theatre Journal , vol. 75, no. 1, March 2023, 43. Barclay, 49-50. Dani Snyder-Young. Privileged Spectatorship: Theatrical Interventions in White Supremacy . Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2020, 124. Fitzpatrick, Felicia. “Antoinette Crowe-Legacy on Causing Conversation with Slave Play .” Broadway Direct , 7 December 2021. https://broadwaydirect.com/antoinette-crowe-legacy-on-causing-conversation-with-slave-play/ . Accessed 25 July 2022. Ray, “Why I Saw Slave Play Twice,” np. Ray, np. Herman, 2. Herman, 7-8. Ahmed, 31. Ahmed, 33-34. Emphasis in original. Ahmed, 39. Excerpt from personal field notes, 19 February 2022. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion . Second ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Barclay, Kari. “Erotic Returns: Sleeping with Ancestors in Contemporary Plays about Sexual Violence.” Theatre Journal , vol. 75, no. 1, March 2023. Chambers-Letson, Joshua. “The Body is Never Given, nor Do We Actually See It.” In Race and Performance after Repetition , edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Shane Vogel, and Douglas A. Jones. Duke University Press, 2020. Cummings, Lindsay B. Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance . London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Firmino, Amauta M. Personal Interview, August 18, 2022. Fitzpatrick, Felicia. “Antoinette Crowe-Legacy on Causing Conversation with Slave Play .” Broadway Direct , December 7, 2021. https://broadwaydirect.com/antoinette-crowe-legacy-on-causing-conversation-with-slave-play/ . Fleetwood, Nicole R. “Excess Flesh: Black Women Performing Hypervisibility.” Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. University of Chicago Press, 2011. Grady, Constance. “In Slave Play, audience and actors alike spar over who has the whip.” Vox, December 17, 2018. https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/12/17/18140950/slave-play-review-jeremy-o-harris-new-york-theatre-workshop . . Green, Jesse. “Review: ‘Slave Play,’ Four Times as Big and Just as Searing.” The New York Times , October 6, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/06/theater/slave-play-review-broadway.html Harris, Jeremy O. Slave Play . Theatre Communications Group, 2019. Harris, Jeremy O. Slave Play. Directed by Robert O’Hara, performances by Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, Jonathan Higginbotham, Devin Kawaoka, Chalia La Tour, Irene Sofia Lucio, Paul Alexander Nolan, Jakeem Dante Powell, and Elizabeth Stahlmann. Center Theatre Group, Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, California, February 19, 2022 Hartman, Saidiya V.. Scenes of Subjection . Oxford University Press, 1997. Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery . New York, N.Y: BasicBooks, 1992. Holdren, Sara. “Theatre Review: Slave Play Blends the Terrifying and the Tantalizing.” Vulture , December 10, 2018. https://www.vulture.com/2018/12/slave-play-jeremy-harris-review.html . Johnson, Amber. "Straight Outta Erasure: Black Girl Magic Claps Back to the Hyperinvisibility of Black Women in Straight Outta Compton." National Political Science Review 19, no. 2 (2018): 34-49. Joseph, Ralina L. Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity. New York University Press, 2018. Knowles, Hannah. “A Broadway-goer railed against a play as unfair to white people. The playwright responded.” The Washington Post, December 1, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/12/01/broadway-goer-shouted-play-was-racist-against-white-people-playwright-responded/ . Kondo, Dorinne K. Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity . Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. LaMarre, Heather L., Kristen D. Landreville, Dannagal Young, and Nathan Gilkerson. “Humor Works in Funny Ways: Examining Satirical Tone as a Key Determinant in Political Humor Message Processing,” Mass Communication and Society , 2014, 17:3, 400-423. Larson, Stephanie R. What It Feels Like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture . Vol. 27. Penn State University Press, 2021. Lee, Ashley. “How the Radical Set of ‘Slave Play’ Transforms LA’s Mark Taper Forum.” The Los Angeles Times , February 16, 2022. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-02-16/slave-play-set-transforms-la-mark-taper-forum . McDonald, Soraya Nadia.“The subversive ‘Slave Play’ peels back veneer of racial innocence in Northern whites.” Andscape, December 14, 2018. https://andscape.com/features/slave-play-theater-off-broadway-racism-peels-back-veneer-of-racial-innocence-in-northern-whites/ . McNulty, Charles. “Jeremy O. Harris’ ‘Slave Play’ awakens the Mark Taper Forum with a jolt.” Los Angeles Times , February 17, 2022. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-02-17/review-jeremy-o-harris-slave-play-in-los-angeles . Musser, Amber Jamilla. Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism . Sexual Cultures. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance . Routledge, 1996. Pinkins, Tonya. “‘Slave Play’: Racism Doesn’t Have a Safe Word.” American Theatre Magazine , July 1, 2019. https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/07/01/slave-play-racism-doesnt-have-a-safe-word/ . Ray, Ashley. “Why I Saw Slave Play Twice.” tv i say w/ Ashley Ray. 12 March 2022. https://ashleyray.substack.com/p/why-i-saw-slave-play-twice . . Rowen, Bess. The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. Snyder-Young, Dani. Privileged Spectatorship: Theatrical Interventions in White Supremacy . Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2020. Strukus, Wanda. “Mining the Gap: Physically Integrated Performance and Kinesthetic Empathy.” The Journal of Theory and Dramatic Criticism , Spring 2011. 89-105. Wright, John. Why Is That So Funny?: A Practical Exploration of Physical Comedy . Nick Hern Books/Limelight Edition, 2007. Young, Cate. “Interview: Jeremy O. Harris Knows You Hate ‘Slave Play.’” Thirty, Flirty + Film March 11, 2022. https://30flirtyfilm.substack.com/p/jeremy-o-harris-slave-play?s=r . Zillmann, Dolf. “Mechanisms of emotional involvement with drama.” Poetics , 1994, 23, 33-51. Footnotes About The Author(s) CATHERINE HEINER received her PhD in Theatre History and Performance Studies from the University of Washington. Broadly, her work considers empathy in conjunction with progressive political movements and the ways theatrical performances mobilize these affects. She has presented research at the American Society for Theatre Research annual conference, the Mid-America Theatre Conference, and the Comparative Drama Conference. As a dramaturg, she has worked on various productions, including The Oresteia (adapted by Ellen McLaughlin), The Importance of Being Earnest, American Idiot, The Lion in Winter, and the world premiere of An Evening with Two Awful Men . She currently teaches at Middle Tennessee State University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 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. 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Milton Loayza Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Milton Loayza By Published on May 14, 2017 Download Article as PDF In 1980, Ricardo Monti’s play Marrathon premieres in Buenos Aires. [1] In this play, the Argentine playwright presents the self-destructive specter of fascism as the effect of ideologies with a long historical trajectory. In 2000, Dutch scientist Paul J. Crutzen proposes the use of the term Anthropocene to emphasize the destructive effects that human action is having on the earth’s geology and ecology. [2] These two events share a need to come to terms with deep-seated delusions about the benignant course of history—the ingrained collective belief that modern history has set us onto a path towards a universal progress. Paradoxically, the Anthropocene does not negate history but appears to propose a new universality that is more inclusive, in this case, of earth processes and life as objects, if not subjects of history. This new universality presents a dramaturgical problem, of having to retell history by incorporating the new actors and giving a language to relationships that have been hitherto ignored, like the relationship between industry and climate, between development and indigenous culture. The play Marrathon shares a similar paradox when having to retell a national story of socio-political impasse from the point of view of a longstanding dependence of peripheral modernity to the ideologies of the center. The play has a single main action, which is an ongoing dance marathon event set in a 1932 dance hall, during the so-called “infamous decade” of the 1930s under Uriburu’s ultranationalist dictatorship. The dramaturgical problem of a new universality is solved in this play with the suggestion of an action of long duration (the marathon) and the placement of the dancers as being on the same boat: they all compete for the same “unknown price” regardless of their social standing. This basic structure is relevant to what we imagine the Anthropocene to be: an epoch that puts all of humankind in the same long-standing block of planetary history. Marrathon has in fact a complex dramaturgy that is tantamount to an anthropo(s)cenography that also reveals some of the Anthropocene’s ethical and political challenges. Climate change scientists have proposed the concept of the Anthropocene to define an epoch of marked geological impact by humans on the earth, on non-human life, and on humans themselves. The concept is generally understood to push for a paradigmatic shift away from our understanding of history as homocentric. The Anthropocene is a geo-political event (the “geo” has here an added connotation) because it is a new condition for the earth as well as for human beings. Boneuil and Fressoz write in The Shock of the Anthropocene : “[If] the climatic stability of the last 10,000 years of the Holocene made possible the rise of cultures and civilizations on five continents, the end of this epoch and the entry into a new one will not be a smooth and steady process for human societies. Global warming means that people will die and countries disappear. The food situation already faces an uncertain future: the climate change of the last few decades has caused a shortfall of 4 to 5 per cent in world wheat and maize production in relation to 1980.” [3] The apocalyptic tone of this statement cannot be dismissed, for it reinforces the fact that we are facing a reality for which our current forms of historical consciousness and behavior are not prepared. This reality demands a reassessment of our relationship with, and conception of nature; it challenges our ingrained acceptance of the myth of progress, and of a neo-liberal global order; and it complicates our struggles for justice. The concept of the Anthropocene responds to this crisis of history by proposing an incorporation of ecological and heterogeneous temporal and spatial frames that would correct a homocentric perspective. If the Holocene is the geological epoch that precedes the Anthropocene, this last one reimagines recent history as the beginning of a new geological epoch. Framing the Anthropocene as a re-imagination of history allows me to segue into the critical narratives that contest Eurocentric histories of modernity. Historical re-imaginations of coloniality, capitalism and globalization, for example, already tell stories of violence against nature, both human and non-human, even if not recognizing the “terminal” nature of such assaults. Some current theorizations of the Anthropocene build on the study of coloniality and the critique of capitalism. Jason Moore, for instance, prefers the name “Capitalocene” and has it started in the long Sixteenth century. This periodization allows him to trace the process of capitalism’s environment-making “which has served to liberate, then fetter, then restructure and renew capital accumulation.” [4] A Latin American work like Marrathon can enlighten us about the Anthropocene through its representation of environment-making from the point of view of colonialism, imperialism and dictatorship. Marrathon was the second play (the first being Visit , in 1977) by Monti, presented during the years of military repression, or the so-called “Process of National Reorganization” (1976-1983). As Graham-Jones remarks, in 1980, “after four years of dictatorship, the Argentine people were exhibiting signs of a collective anguish, and [ Marrathon ] tapped into both this ongoing suffering under repression and a growing critical awareness regarding what have been called the guiding fictions that had led the country to such end.” [5] Marrathon begins with the Emcee introducing the spectacle of a marathon dance, which is already taking place, perhaps for days, to the attending or arriving spectators. On the stage, doubling as the dance-floor, dancing couples are participating for a yet unknown prize, under the watchful eye of a bouncer. The dancers are described as exhausted and desperate characters whose blind faith keeps them on the dance floor. Homer the poet is with his “muse” Helen, while Vespucci the immigrant bricklayer and Hector the unemployed office worker are with their wives Asuncion and Emma. A younger couple comprised of Tom Mix and Anna D participates with assumed names, and Charity the prostitute is with Mr. X the bankrupt industrialist. The Emcee addresses the dancers as he makes them follow the strict rules of the marathon, and takes every opportunity to ironically harass them while interviewing them. The characters are shown as failures and the contest seems to enhance our view of them as a pathetic spectacle. This grotesque collective is presented as the expression of stubborn faith in modern ideologies. Some scenes show the dancers in a sleep state, having visions or nightmares. Bodily signs of illness and exhaustion are shown as effects of lengthy exertion and/ or refer to a historical character. The exertion and exhaustion of bodies are a condition for the revelation of myths. These are expressed by some characters in some of the scenes in a half-sleep or dream state. The myths, numbered from 1 to 5 are, according to Monti, those of the Conquest, of Independence, of pastoral America, of industrial progress, and of fascism, all represented in a chronological order. [6] The myth of fascism, near the end of the play, signifies the brutal execution of a “history […] written by the rulers.” [7] It is as if arriving at the conclusion were also a repetition of history advancing on its own momentum. Therefore the spectacle of Marrathon is made to continue after the myth of fascism towards an uncertain future, as we hear the Emcee’s words: “if it weren’t so ridiculous, it would be a tragedy.” [8] Fascism is shown in the play as the dark side of politics, usually put outside of the repertory of historical dreams. After the enactment of fascism the dancers become increasingly restless: the poet Homer dies, Tom Mix decides to leave the contest, Vespucci attempts suicide and the Bouncer tries to kill the Emcee. In spite of this crisis of continuity, the marathon continues beyond the terminal point of fascism, as if insisting on the fact that history continues but the very impulse of history needs to be reassessed. The recurrence of authoritarianism in Argentine politics gave intellectuals a sense that the very logic and continuity of history was flawed, and that modern myths were inherently destructive. Monti’s 1980 play represents this realization and therefore begins with full blown fascism expressed in the metaphor of a coercive marathon dance —and proceeds with a look at the retroactive “fascisms” of previous modern politics. This consciousness of history as beginning with the end is also characteristic of the Anthropocene and its dramaturgy. The threat of imminent destruction gives an existential trait to the Anthropocene, forcing a reassessment of the ethical foundations of our society. A consciousness of the Anthropocene begins with an ethics because it repudiates the current foundations of politics. Such an ethical stance characterizes for example Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for an epochal consciousness. Chakrabarty frames this issue, of what I consider a re-imagination of history, “around a split between the homo, humanity as a divided political subject, and the anthropos, collective and unintended forms of existence of the human, as a geological force, as a species, as a part of the history of life on this planet.” [9] Epochal consciousness begins now, when the Anthropocene has reached its “homofascistic” moment with the imminent threats caused by climate change, and the power of climate change deniers. Chakrabarty, for instance, implies that the tension between homo and anthropos is an ethical tension that is new to political discourse and may not have a resolution for a while. Quoting from the philosopher Edward Jasper, he suggests that epochal consciousness “takes stamina” and “calls for endurance in the tensions of insolubility.” [10] Like Monti’s Marrathon , Chakrabarty acknowledges that the momentum of the epoch is too strong for us to be able to change its course in any drastic and short-term way. Consider, for example, Crutzen’s reminder that “because of the anthropogenic emissions of CO2, climate may depart significantly from natural behaviour over the next 50,000 years.” [11] Stamina is needed to both survive and to find a political transition from the homo to the anthropos. Thus far I have established a similar relationship between dramaturgy and ethical concerns in the Anthropocene concept and in Marrathon . Another level of relationship occurs between the physical structure of the play’s performance and the Marxist critique of capitalism that it deploys. This structure comprises a site defined as continental, and characters treated as biological bodies ideologically compelled to consume their energy on this site. The grounding of ideology on a continent results in a specific critique that is in this case postcolonial. This critique produces a genealogy of capitalism beginning with the imaginary and then economic expansion of Europe into colonial land. On the other hand, the exertion of bodies invites our consideration of a practice of embodiment that seeks to make up for our alienated consciousness, which has lost touch with its relationship to the land, biological processes, and the planet’s life. This is a critical practice aligned with Moore’s project of moving his critique from “capitalism and nature to capitalism-in-nature” by placing “human bodies as sites of environmental history.” [12] Therefore, in Marrathon , momentum of ideology and critical embodiment form a physical structure that constitutes the play’s anthropo(s)cenography. I will look at this structure to elaborate on how Marrathon ’s critique of modern myths prefigures and adds to our understanding of the Anthropocene and its ethico-political tensions. To describe Marrathon ’s dramaturgy as anthropo(s)cenography is also an opportunity to improve on existing assessments of Monti’s play. Most approaches diminish the relationship between structure and content in the play. [13] The author’s use of metatheatrical elements is not merely part of an avant-garde aesthetic; [14] nor should the political aspects of Marrathon be obscured by an emphasis on absurdist and metaphysical elements. [15] There are no studies that see in the play the representation of a concrete lineage between colonialism, capitalism and a relation to nature. This critique may have escaped the reception of the play because of its fascistic setting and the historical context of performance. Nevertheless Monti was building at the time from an existing tradition of ambivalence about Argentina’s modern identity, represented by writers such as Domingo Sarmiento in the Nineteenth century and Ezequiel Martinez Estrada in the early Twentieth century, as well as critiques of capitalism and neocolonialism in the 1960s and 70s. The physical structure of the play provides Monti a platform to explore this history in terms of both ideological and concrete relation to the land. The staging of dancing bodies that are at the same time identified with the land allows Monti to retrace the origins and development of Argentina’s modernity and capitalism in a serial fetishization of nature, or “America,” through the already mentioned myths of progress. These fetishizations, I will argue, correspond to the [hidden] capitalist strategy identified by Moore, of making nature capable of delivering larger and larger quantities of unpaid work/ energy, or Cheap Nature. [16] Monti’s play does not take Cheap Nature as an initial hypothesis, but by reading the anthropo(s)cenography of the play we may reach such a conclusion and learn from Monti’s own perspective. In this respect I will focus on Monti’s critical strategy of establishing a structural tension between an ideological separation of humans from nature and the embodiment of nature by the character’s bodies. In order to discuss this “structure of tension” I will introduce the concept of tectonics. Tectonics is used in theorizations of architecture to refer to the relationship of a building’s structure and ornament to its physical and visual setting or surroundings. The architect Kenneth Frampton uses the term to advocate for an architecture that would resist “megalopolitan development,” which represents “the victory of universal civilization over locally inflected culture.” [17] Frampton’s “critical regionalism” is premised on an opposition between world civilization and world regional cultures. It therefore opposes the “technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness” by engaging in the act of “building the site” of regional culture. [18] Frampton argues that with such engagement it is possible for the history/culture of the region to become “inscribed into the form and realization of the work.” [19] Frampton’s tension between megapolitan and regional cultures mirrors in some way the tension between homo and anthropos while embodying it as a structural site. Tectonics can thus be applied to building a critical awareness of “homo” settlement on or disruptions of local/global “anthropos” and Holocene processes. For example, Frampton explains tectonics in terms of an architectural inscription with “many levels of significance, for it has a capacity to embody, in built form, the prehistory of the place, its archeological past and its subsequent cultivation and transformation across time.” [20] Tectonics offers the Anthropocene a physical model for sustaining the enduring question of nature as “the matrix within which human activity unfolds, and the field upon which historical agency operates.” [21] It can thus embody a concept of Humanity-in-nature (oikeios) “where nature matters to the whole of the historical process, not merely as its context, or its unsavory consequences.” [22] The site specificity of tectonic architecture is not rendered by place or location alone, but by structural and aesthetic elements inlayed in a location to give it memory and historical endurance. With this in mind I will look at the tectonics of Marrathon . The autonomy of Marrathon as built form is prefigured in the anomalous spelling of the play title (“Marathón” in the original Spanish). Monti purposely adds the letter “h” to the correct (Spanish) spelling of the word to signify a metaphoric tension between the physical marathon of performance and the mythical and historical dimensions that it embodies. [23] Another layer of autonomy is intended between the mythical/historical embodiment and the physical site—it is at this level that the action will be “physically” inlayed on the site. The point of maintaining the autonomy of structural/aesthetic elements is precisely to enhance our experience and cognition of a particular site. The site is constituted by the metatheatrical identity of the 1932 event in Buenos Aires and the moment of the performance in a theater in the same city in 1980. This last element was further confirmed with the premiere of the play in the facilities of Teatros de San Telmo, still in construction, which offered “a central dance floor made of concrete with steps on one side, a balcony wrapping around other steps, and a circular stage allowing multiple view points.” [24] The contemporaneity of the “metatheatrical” event was also implied by the inescapable parallel between the Argentine dictatorships of 1932 and 1980. The character of the Emcee contributes to this site specificity by addressing the other characters, or the imaginary spectators of 1932, and, the contemporary audience of the play. The existence of a site/event establishes a location of the built form but not yet its tectonics, which is constructed by the action of the play. In Marrathon the myths come to life through the utterances of the characters who play “themselves” in 1932, project their exhausted bodies in the present of performance, and channel their historical alter egos in their half dream state. In this process of enactment, the setting also becomes multiple while signaling a hemispheric American location. In Marrathon , then, the setting becomes a changing or unstable site that, like the bodies, is a material and living expression of the myths. The unstable and living relation of body to land is reflected in the multivalent names. For instance, temporal and spatial “fractures” are inscribed in the composite names of the characters– Homer Starr, Helen García, Peter Vespucci, Tom Mix, etc– names that identify the characters as historical and/or contemporary, as foreign and/or local. Vespucci, for example, is an Italian working-class immigrant who in the 1930s was consolidating his own American/Argentine identity. His contemporary “Americanization” has already been embodied hundreds of years ago by his namesake Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian cartographer and voyager who was a precursor to Columbus’s discovery and therefore to colonization. In Scene Four Peter Vespucci enacts the first myth, that of the Conquest. In his words we recognize the body of Vespucci, apparently sick with tuberculosis, as channeling the body of Pedro de Mendoza, the Spanish Conquistador who founded Buenos Aires and later died of syphilis in mid-ocean during his last voyage to the Americas. In the process, the setting has been transformed into a much vaster spatial and temporal site, a site to which the character’s long durational bodies also belong. In Monti’s play, tectonics is evident in the multilayered spatio-temporal event that maintains the autonomy of a built form in relation to the scenographic “1932 dance marathon.” A universalizing allegorical impulse is resisted in favor of metaphors that inlay the action more precisely in the “nature” and history of the American continent. [25] Through tectonics, the built form is also a place-form. Autonomy of form resists scenographic identifications in order to create a critical awareness of its grounding within the particular existence of the place or region. In Marrat hon, for instance, the dancers are already onstage, having “beaten all records” in time when the Emcee greets the audience and introduces them. The play’s tectonics force the audience to interpret the very site they occupy and produce with their theatrical spectatorship. The critical awareness of the spectators is engaged by the insistence of the play in the act of embodiment. The current life of the myths is embodied in the dancing and the unknown prize, and the failure of the myths is embodied in the failure of the characters and their exhaustion. A similar effect was extended to the whole theatre, when the director planted mannequins throughout the auditorium as surrogate spectators who could embody the tectonics of the play by the mere fact of being “bodies” in the theater. [26] Theatrical constructions are analogous to metaphors since they rely on a semantic tension between “place” and spatial “form,” between “setting” and embodied “event.” Monti’s tectonics takes advantage of the semantic distance between 1932 and the time of the performance in order to produce its embodiment of history and myth within that gap. This means that the play maintains a positive correlation between the enigma of the metaphor and the “truth” expressed through theatrical embodiment. Paul Ricoeur would say that tectonics builds a “live metaphor,” in the sense of resisting its death in the simile or the allegory. [27] A reading of tectonics through metaphor will point more directly to what is being embodied in the play. In “Myth One,” Vespucci sets the Conquest in a narrative of failed return and failed payment. The character suggests himself as Pedro de Mendoza, who is dying of syphilis. His historical “marathon” ends in mid-sea where the land of “America” is the undelivered prize of his journey. [28] Vespucci’s destiny, within the myth, fractures the mapping of Conquest with a mid-ocean line dividing the myth between the idea of the American Promised Land and the European Christian fear of final judgment (when Anna D plays the whore of Babylon). The setting/event of the map is a live metaphor that continues to produce meaning as in the spectral relationship between the bricklayer Vespucci’s mortgaged house and the Promised Land that he expects (when embodying Pedro de Mendoza) will finally “rise up from the sea.” [29] Here we may read the metaphor as “my house/property is a Promised Land rising up from the sea.” In this instance the myth persists as a macroworld as well as a microworld. [30] In the enactment of the myth, Vespucci inlays his wish, to finally own a house, in the conquistador’s dream of reaching the colonial territory promised to him by the Spanish king. The last words of the enactment are telling in this respect: Vespucci/Pedro de Mendoza describes this land as “my abode, my land, my home .” [31] The composite dream can be mapped according to a double matrix, one spatial, looking towards the “Promised Land,” and the other temporal, depending on “future” payment of the mortgage. In the context of a genealogy of Cheap Nature, Myth One shows the colonizer creating “nature” and making demands on it because of his situation of exile. This “nature” is internalized by Vespucci, who accepts his salaried work (an exhausting form of demand) as part of his “exile” (the mortgage) from “home.” [32] Back in the realm of the dance marathon, the scenes function as transitions between one myth and the next. There is a scene where Hector and Emma denigrate their own marriage, making a pathetic spectacle out of their emotional codependency. A short “sleeping” scene follows, which is interrupted when the Emcee orders all the dancers to move about and change partners. Some of the women react by seeking the attention of young Tom Mix. The bouncer separates the women from Tom Mix who is then interrogated by the Emcee. The grilling focuses on Tom Mix’s carefree attitude and on his taking his own sexual magnetism for granted. This focus on Tom Mix’s happy-go-lucky attitude (in contrast to Hector and Emma) gives a context to the character’s enactment of the myth of Independence. Tom Mix’s “myth” is a speech addressed to South Americans, preceded by the character’s suggestion that he has been taken prisoner and is about to be killed. He could be an Independence warrior, a victim of Spaniards or pro-viceroyalty creoles. The first part of the speech condemns Spaniards’ disregard for the life of Indians when used as forced labor. The second part laments that the utopian newness of America has been overshadowed by the suffering caused by colonialism, yet affirms that this “new” America of “immortal children” is still there waiting “in her splendor, infinite.” [33] Metaphorical tension consists here in the simultaneous acknowledgement of colonial tyranny and a utopian blank slate. This “enchanted” site repeats the colonialist vision of natives imagined as “children” while seeing the promise of utopian development emanating from a dreamy vision of the land. [34] At the end of the speech “Tom Mix falls down as if executed by a firing squad.” [35] The independence warrior’s death underlines the dependence of the dream on pure territoriality and futurity, as if the land didn’t need the body to produce the “agency” of the modern independent subject. Tom Mix’s carefree attitude of the previous scene, then, might reflect a gratuitous confidence in the manifest destiny offered by the land. In The Question Concerning Technology , Heidegger can enlighten us about the tectonics at work here. Heidegger questions the causality of modern machines as simply being the application of modern physics and argues that the essence of modern technology comes historically earlier than machine-power technology. If modern technology reveals nature through a challenging forth of its energy, then both nature and machine end up revealed as a “standing reserve, inasmuch as [they are] ordered” to ensure the permanence of their being on call for duty, that is, for providing energy, for realizing their function. [36] Heidegger calls this demand, for nature and technology to be orderable, a rule of enframing, which is very different from the idea of a functional application of science. From a tectonics perspective, the modern subject who uses technology is inlayed in a space already enframed as standing reserve—that is, a land already endowed with a “technological” use. Marrathon partakes of a similar tension by tacitly defining the standing reserve that is America, and then attributing that utopia to the independent subject. The myth of Independence shows “America” to already be a machine that produces/reproduces the futurity of the modern subject. Marrathon ’s tectonics indicates that Modern History is a territorial destiny machine. This insight could be added to a Marxist historical materialist critique by considering this fetishized nature/ destiny as part of modern modes of production. The scenes that follow illustrate the workings of the territorial machine within the petit bourgeois environment of the characters. The Emcee invites the poet Homer Starr to the side, and interviews him about his reason for participating in the contest. In the process, we learn that the small ambitions of Homer and Helen are redeemed in the spaces offered by culture and society, creating their own micro-territoriality. For instance we learn that Homer as poet defends “a lady’s honor” as his own poetic territory, while he characterizes his relationship to Helen as a form of repayment for a lost sexualized youth, in his old age. Helen, on the other hand, accepts her relationship as an egalitarian reward for her cultural work as a librarian. Helen’s service to Homer, of typing his poetry, is in turn perceived by the poet as a privilege of his cultural rank (to pay her would be “like paying a prostitute”). [37] These petty forms of territoriality reveal an enjoyment of small advantages and privileges rather than expressions of independence. When the Emcee tells Charity, the prostitute, that it is her turn to come to the “historic stage,” Charity, feeling humiliated, refuses by saying that she doesn’t “have any history,” she “is only a body here.” [38] In the context of the previous micro territorialities, we could say that it is Charity’s body that doesn’t have a history. Her reaction, we’ll see, raises our awareness of culture as already enframed in a culture-nature standing reserve or machine. Charity’s words can be read ironically, as her wanting to separate her body from a culture system that doesn’t acknowledge her. “Owning” her body is like rejecting the petty territorialities produced by culture. Charity’s “body” also contrasts with Homer’s poetic disembodiments in the word, and on the page. Furthermore, Homer’s poetry produces the normativity of bodies in society, according to a male gaze. In this context his alluded payment to prostitutes appears to be a way to keep the non-normative prostitute away from the privileges of culture. In other words the prostitute is made to forfeit her right to participate in culture. Culture allows Homer, for example, to have sex with Helen without paying her. To this, Charity retorts: “If it had been with me, Old man, I’d have cured you of any desire of getting it for free.” [39] Charity jokes out of resentment, perhaps not realizing the implication that culture has the capacity to use bodies, and, by extension, use nature for free. These various readings point to an inlaying of culture on bodies while creating a dichotomy between culture and non-culture. This is to say that nature is simply what has not been colonized– nature disappears in non-culture. If to be “only” a body is to not have a history, that body is absent in history. This means that Homer’s art and discourse reproduces a colonizing culture while denying the inlaying of culture on a collective body and nature. Meanwhile, the “pure presence” performed by Charity’s statement, puts her for a moment outside of this culture machine—in this instance, Charity is not yet “Cheap Nature” but simply non-culture. This allows us to understand the payment to the prostitute as a gesture of “non-cultural” appropriation for a subsequent “economic” transaction—in the form of sex. In the genealogy of Cheap Nature we must therefore include the fetishization of nature as property, which is the legal form of the land as destiny machine (this last defined in the myth of independence). For instance, property can “exist” without the presence of the body of the owner, yet offers itself to its owner, and makes itself the owner’s “destiny” or “standing reserve.” It is appropriation that gives the owner the illusion of being an “independent” agent while reproducing the destiny machine. Marrathon ’s enactment of a “pastoral America,” as well as the scene leading to that myth, develop a more complete picture of the modern machine. In Scene Eleven an elegant character named Woman enters the ballroom and goes to the dance floor languidly. [40] Her brother, Man, also arrives (they have been walking all night) to tell her that their boat is leaving soon. Woman insists that they should join the marathon and Man finally pays the Emcee for them to do so. The entrance of the couple performs a separation between the cultured Europeans and the collective of bodies that they see dancing. Their incorporation into the collective signals a switch of focus from individuals to the collective. Yet their late incorporation signifies the advantage they are taking within the collective because of their cultural and economic “superiority.” In Myth Three the dancers become a herd of cattle in a “wild” land, and Man anticipates in his dream the fencing of land for cattle-raising and a meat exporting business. The play thus draws a seamless transition between cultural transactions that use the body and the economic use of the land that exploits labor and land for high profits. That transition is contained in the description of America as “one motionless, thick, grimy mass of land. An immense, pregnant woman. Ceaselessly giving birth to sheep, cow, horse.” [41] In the transition from Charity to the Argentine Pampa, the “female body” goes from offering sex to offering offspring. “She” is the Argentine Pampas where intensive cattle raising for meat exports is initiated in the Nineteenth Century by English investors and rich landowners, with the help of immense slaughterhouses and refrigerated ships. [42] This new economy demanded the exploitation of the countryside’s inhabitants’(gauchos) cheap labor in their new status as rural peons. The labor of the gauchos, embodied in the people-cattle of the marathon dance is thus incorporated into the natural “wealth” of the pampas. The transition can then be defined as going from culture to economy to production. The signaling of culture by the French speaking siblings suggests that culture and economy have become one and the same, or rather they always were. The difference is that, in the world of international capital investments, production, and trade, the language of economy takes over, and culture becomes obsolete for human transactions. Man’s speech (said while the dancers move in circles like cattle) does not exalt the export economy but focuses first on the skill of the gaucho in catching the cattle, and then on the brutal destiny of the cattle in the slaughterhouse. In melancholic tension, between the rationality of the economy and the violent assault on the cattle’s flesh, we may locate the pastoral dream whose loss is lamented in the enactment. The pastoral dream is presented through its negation, as if the utopian impulse of modernity were redirected toward the past (the traditional gaucho culture). From this perspective the pastoral points to a mechanism of modern temporality that consists in “dreaming” the past as the ideal “future” site of rational Man. The pastoral is therefore an impossible dream of a “rational” nature represented by a state economic policy that rationalizes the use of workers and land (profit producing Cheap Nature). The dream of the rational seeks to eliminate the culture/non culture dichotomy by imagining economics as a pseudo natural and a pseudo cultural system. [43] This is equivalent to a fetishization of nature as a producer of both culture and wealth, or nature drawn in the image of the State as guarantor of Cheap Nature. The pastoral contains Marrathon ’s rationalizing machine between two dreams, one past and one future. Such tension is enacted and resolved in the scenes that follow. The Emcee proposes to dim the lights for the dancers to rest, but the dancers are anxious and resist the idea. The bouncer suggests that the theatre protects the dancers not only from the cold outside, but also from the anxiety of seeing an emptied auditorium in the middle of the night. The reasons he gives is that, in this theatre, time and exhaustion are the real spectacle, therefore they should keep dancing after all, even if tired. The theatre thus quarantines the dancers in a place where a new temporality protects them from the past/future threats of nature and of an unfinished competition. The dancers become their own spectators of a time that consumes them. In the following scene Homer offers a romantic poem about a woman who falls in love with a stranger who leaves after promising to marry her in a year. The woman, still a virgin, has fallen ill by the time the lover returns. The story ends with the woman dying in the lover’s arms. In this story the woman stays in the same village to experience her love, and the stranger appears from nowhere, with no past or future, to fulfill the woman’s romantic experience. The threat of “natural” irrationality coming from romantic passion is tamed by the woman’s containment in one place. The scene partakes of the same temporality as the quarantine in the theatre, abstracting time from history and nature and resolving pastoral melancholy with the production of a single “place” and a single time. Here nature is rationalized in the form of exertion (or the patience of a woman’s love), which is akin to the dancers’ expenditure of energy rendered intensive by the spectacle of a clocked time— Marrathon is now a work-producing machine. This is the spectacle of labor in the world’s factories, and of the abstraction of nature’s energy from its “future” exhaustion. Work is imposed on both nature (exhausting its energy) and humans (consuming nature’s and their own energy) through a quarantine that “temporalizes” space in the present, away from the threats of “irrationality” (that is, non-work) coming from the past and the future. The spectacular present of Marrathon tectonically inlays the American pastoral dream in an “inexhaustible” human and natural “work.” The spectacle of the factory is the realization of a non-melancholic pastoral dream. It improves on the functionality of the standing reserve which relied on a subject-object relationship to the dreamed land, by making reality a totality “at work” for its own “economic” reproduction. In this respect I propose to identify Work as the condition of Cheap Nature. Moore defines Cheap Nature’s condition as “the periodic, and radical reduction in the socially necessary labor-time of these Big Four inputs: food, labor-power, energy, and raw materials.” [44] Work is by definition cheap, because it is the appropriation of “uncapitalized natures,” which include human and non-human elements. As Moore puts it, if “the endless accumulation of capital is the ceaseless expansion of material throughput, […] this can only occur if food, labor-power, energy, and raw materials prices can be contained.” [45] In other words, Cheap Nature, or Work, is the effective economic control of exhaustion by a socialized time. Work creates Cheap Nature by imposing an economic time. In this sense “Work” is semantically close to “labor,” which in Marx’s critique of capitalism is also related to a rationalization of time. Work, as I’ve defined it, initiates the historical possibility of not going back to nature (the site of past and future) and envisioning a global present for modernity (or post-modernity). In Marrathon , the incentive to continue dancing without rest points to the logic of inertia giving this machine its momentum. Inertia transfers Marrathon ’s spatial tectonics onto the kinetic. It consists of the friction between the synchronic time marked by the ticking of the clock and the diachrony of a historical relation to past, present and future. Here the clock keeps time anchored in a naturalized “present” of factory production, and global markets. The “objective” prize that the dancers are competing for exists in an eternal “global present.” In reality the elusive prize is being produced and consumed by the kinetic inertia (Work) of their dancing. The dancers are Cheap Nature through the simple fact of being there—Work is simply (but not easily) to be ready to be put to work. [46] Work is the existential condition of modern “nature.” The meaning of this “present” differs, of course, if one is a worker or a boss. The boss’s time relies on a correlation between productive time (the economy) and profits, that is, the time of capital growth. The factory, nature, time, markets, and capital are, on one hand, piled up onto the present of productive time, where workers are located as part of a global labor market. The enigma is that the time of profit for the boss is not part of this global time. The boss is not really in this “present” but appears to straddle on the “past” and “future” sides of the present, corresponding to capitalist investment and return. [47] Investment and return enter and leave production and the market as if by magic. Therefore the global world of production and the capitalist’s world exist on different time frames. As the play nears the enactment of the myth of Industrial America, a scene between Charity and industrialist Mr. X tackles the enigma of the capitalist’s time. Charity suddenly appears flustered because her watch has stopped. Her gesture is a challenge directed quite appropriately at Mr. X. The stopping of the watch is suggestive of the collapse of past and future in the capitalist cycle, and therefore can reveal the irrationality of capital accumulation. At the same time a stopping of the watch may shatter the monolithic time of the capitalist factory-machine where measuring time benefits the capitalist in spite of himself. The implicit double threat is accompanied by Charity’s reminder that her “time is of some service” to him. She thus calls attention to the simultaneous existence of two time frames, hers being the one that serves his . Charity’s gesture plays on her previous one, when she presented herself to the Emcee as a body only. That “body,” she says, is not there “just for the hell of it” like the bodies exploited in his factory. [48] Her “time of service” may refer to her sexual services, but in the context of tectonics we are reminded of the spectacle of time in the previous scene. Charity is thus ironically allying herself to the collective present of all workers and “working” nature and presenting her body as that unpaid “surplus time.” Charity first protests Mr. X’s non-payment of “the other five [hours] from before these that are up at seven,” to which Mr. X responds that he is on schedule with his payments to her. Then Charity specifies that what she is charging for is “the time, whether I’m horizontal or vertical, of services rendered.” [49] “Horizontal or vertical” continues to use sexual innuendos to suggest a more absolute time of all bodies, hers and the “bodies” of workers and nature. This time cannot be clocked because it is already there in the present of all bodies— and that present has never been included in the capitalist’s payments. The “time of service” is revealed as a euphemism for “the service of time ” to the capitalist cycle. The service is the time of borrowed bodies (or bodies of borrowed time) for the subsequent extraction of “work time” in the “present.” [50] “Borrowed time” allows political economy to focus merely on the management of the time of reproduction of Work without considering the long durational cycles of reproduction in ecological relationships. Charity’s protest allows us to see the real nature of Mr. X’s participation in the economy: he borrows diachronic time and turns it into a synchronic global present that is his investment. Mr. X puts time in the bank, so to speak. This borrowing explains the now virtual collapse of past and future in the capitalist cycle. This situation is shown when Charity threatens to leave and Mr. X surrenders to Charity’s demand by desperately paying for her mere presence, while refusing to acknowledge that he owes her anything. The scene reveals that the capitalist indefinitely “borrows” the time of nature to turn it into his own “investment.” To recapitulate: a) Mr. X’s performance consists in keeping his payments on schedule as a way to separate individual work time while hiding the present of global economy that provides him with workers and nature; b) The borrowing of the time of all bodies and nature is forgotten in the capitalist payment to each worker, hence Charity’s reminder. c) Charity’s performative challenge reveals the illusion of the collapsing of past and future in the capitalist cycle, and forces the capitalist’s symbolic payment of a debt that cannot be really be repaid. The tectonics of the scene may be summarized as “Mr. X’s capital investment and return is inlayed in a time that he has “borrowed” to fashion a “present” economic machine. The borrowed present of production serves to theorize the limits of Capitalism’s project of creating a world “in which all elements of human and extra-human nature are effectively interchangeable.” [51] This global system of industry and markets, become a world, has refashioned nature in the image of Capitalism— as when Mr. X sings about his mythical dream of industrial America: “Chimneys and petroleum, rivers of electricity, and mountains of tall ovens against the gray sky of industry.” [52] Borrowed time shows that this is more than an analogy, since the present is a banked time that effectively allows for a capitalist cycle to exist on the side. For this reason, Moore can consider nature, in the condition of Work, a “historical nature” proper to Capitalism. This project, he says, “seeks to reduce the time of life to the time of accumulation.” [53] This results in a systematic loss of time that the character Emma expresses when mourning her dead child and saying that she, Emma, was only alive for those two months that the child lived. From the perspective of the Anthropocene, borrowed time means that human beings have tampered with the long duration frame of the Holocene by enframing nature as modern destiny and as the present of production economy. Marrathon ’s myths show the origins of such enframing to reside in the colonialist/racist imagination of the land/people, temporalized later in an economic system that erases the diachrony of anthropos relationships between past, present, and future. Marrathon exposes a continuum between the vision of the “new” American land and the straddling of the present by the capitalist cycle. In both cases there has been an advantage taken on nature by a rule of enframing that created the “destiny machine” of the modern “homo” subject and the capitalist. From an anthropos perspective that advantage is illusory, for we all suffer from the destructive power of the system. As Marrathon nears the enactment of the myth of fascism, the elegant Man wants to leave the marathon, thinking it is his privilege. Woman stops him saying “we’re trapped. Don’t you see our bodies there, in front of us? They’re dancing. And where would we go without our bodies?” [54] The two contradictory destinies of the modern subject are contained in her statement: she needs to have bodies/nature at her disposition to maintain her privilege; and she also is part of this collective of bodies and nature that is being exploited. In the Anthropocene the losers have been culture and nature, whose past and future have been pushed into an economic present. Human action’s (culture) inlaying in nature has been refashioned into an economic pseudo culture-nature that has no interest in anthropos processes because it lives in a borrowed time. Epochal consciousness needs to acknowledge that climate change, species extinction, and ecological impoverishment do not matter to the “present” of capitalist economy because the prize of economy (formed in the cycle of capital) is not grounded in any place. The colonial inheritance of capitalism indicates that an ethics for the Anthropocene must have a peripheral location, as the one rehearsed by Marrathon . The reason for this is that it is in the colonized land that homo dreams his modern identity and settles the economic machine. In this land the inertia of the Anthropocene can be embodied in ways that a Eurocentric subject, still enthralled by his own utopian destiny, may not. In the periphery, the marathon is made to continue because only through embodiment can culture and nature be recuperated and homo find his/her way to the anthropos. The tectonics of the play allows us to recognize that in the deep history suggested by the Anthropocene both the planet Earth and humanity are being embodied. [55] It is not possible to abandon deep history as we would leave a scene from a play, or a stage “setting,” unless we reject or abandon our own corporeality. Towards the end of Marrathon Homer dies and the Emcee tries to dismiss the gravity of the moment saying that Homer lives in his works. Tom Mix has decided to leave the marathon to keep his utopian dream alive. These exits are possible because they are disembodied as dream, negation or death. When Tom Mix asks Hector if he is staying, he answers positively, for the sake of Emma who says she still wants to make up for lost time, “have servants […] see the ocean.” [56] We can read in her words an ethical perspective for the Anthropocene if we consider her desires as being transformable through her continued embodiment of anthropos in the dance—it is an ethics of becoming that, having gained awareness of the marathon that is her anthropos life, is able to embrace desire while questioning its existing tectonics. [57] How do our desires reproduce the fallacies of the Promised Land, the Standing Reserve, and borrowed time? Where does our anthropos identity lie? Charity may be pointing more directly to an Anthropos politics when she mocks Mr. X’s suicidal thoughts by pointing to her sex saying it is “the only hole that matters to [her].” [58] Charity’s statement makes sense in the context of the tectonic layers of the prostitute’s body as standing reserve, as Work and as a presence emptied of past and future. The hole typifies Cheap Nature’s revolutionary class position, as the Anthropocene’s proletariat, whose life needs to be refilled, through a practice of critical embodiment, and a political struggle for restitution of anthropos life, that is, a human/historical life inlayed in the natural life of the planet. References [1] Ricardo Monti, Marrathon , in Reason Obscured: Nine Plays By Ricardo Monti , ed. Jean trans. Graham-Jones (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell UP) 133-83. [2] Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene E. Stoemer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” in The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Newsletter 41, 2000: 17-18. < http://www.igbp.net/download/18.316f18321323470177580001401/1376383088452/NL41.pdf > (accessed March 14, 2017). [3] Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2016) 24. [4] Jason W Moore, Capitalism In the Web Of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015) 11. [5] Jean Graham-Jones, “‘A Broader Realism’: the Theater of Ricardo Monti,” in Ricardo Monti, Reason Obscured 17. [6] Ricardo Monti, interview with R.G. “Con ‘Marathon’ vuelven Monti y Kogan,” Clarín , Buenos Aires, 18 June 1980. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Spanish are mine. [7] Marrathon 171. [8] 181. [9] Chakrabarty, “The Human Condition In the Anthropocene,” in The Tanner Lectures in Human Values, Yale 2014-2015 , 173-174. < http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/Chakrabarty%20manuscript.pdf > (accessed December 12, 2016). [10] 174. [11] Crutzen and Stoermer 17. [12] Moore 26. [13] More to the point Jean Graham-Jones asserts that the play “interweaves and fuses levels of daily existential, subconscious and collective experience into one human experience.” See Jean Graham-Jones, Exorcising History: Argentine Theatre Under Dictatorship (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000) 78. [14] See Peter Podol, “Surrealism and the Grotesque in the Theatre of Ricardo Monti” Latin American Theatre Review 14.1 (1980): 65-72; Julia Elena Sagaseta, “La dramaturgia de Ricardo Monti: la seducción de la escritura,” in Teatro argentino de los 60: polémica, continuidad y ruptura , ed. Osvaldo Pellettieri (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1989) 227-41; and Jorge Monteleone, “El teatro de Ricardo Monti,” Espacio de crítica e investigación teatral 2.2 (April 1987): 63-74. [15] See Osvaldo Pellettieri, “El teatro de Ricardo Monti (1989-1994): La Resistencia a la modernidad marginal,” in Ricardo Monti, Teatro, tomo 1 (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1995) 9-13. [16] Moore 62-63. [17] Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture , ed. Al Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983) 17. [18] 25-26. [19] 26. [20] 26. [21] Moore 35. [22] 35-36. [23] See Ricardo Monti, note 89, Marathón , in El Teatro Argentino. 16. Cierre de un ciclo . ed. Luís Ordáz (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1981) 130. [24] As Ricardo Monti remembers, the director Jaime Kogan “had been looking for another space that would put the spectator in the situation” of the 1932 dance marathon event. In this space, the performance is the occasion for “the 1932 ballroom” to become the contemporary event. Thus, both actors and spectators are possibly made to be complicit with this transformation of setting/action into site/event. See Ricardo Monti, in interview with Celia Dosio, quoted in Celia Dosio, El Payró: Cincuenta años the teatro independiente (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2003) 95. [25] See Frampton 28. [26] See Celia Dosio 96. [27] See Max Statkiewicz, “Live Metaphor in the Age of Cognitivist Reduction,” Monatshefte 95.4 (2003): 548. [28] Marrathon 142-143. [29] 143. [30] As Monti explains, “there is a relation between that marathon, lost in a corner of the universe, and the place of the myth [in America and/or the World].” See Ricardo Monti, interview with Zully Ruiz Moreno, “Una gestación de dramaturgos,” La Opinión Cultural , Buenos Aires, June 27, 1980. [31] Emphasis in the original. [32] According to Una Chaudhuri, the realist stage environment gives a home to characters who feel homeless, through narratives of arrival, departure, homecoming, and travel. She understands the reification of homelessness as “exilic consciousness” from the point of view of “geopathology,” a long struggle with the problem of place. Marrathon ’s tectonics, I suggest, grounds this struggle in a mythical historical reality. See Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) 1-20. [33] Marrathon 150. [34] Mignolo explains the relationship between geography and modern temporality with the fact that “it was during the eighteenth century and the European Enlightenment that people outside Europe began to be located in time. The secular idea of ‘primitives’ replaced that of the ‘infidels.’” See Walter D. Mignolo, “Enduring Enchantment (or the Epistemic Privilege of Modernity and Where to Go from Here),” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (2002): 943. [35] Marrathon 153. [36] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays , trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) 7-8. [37] Marrathon 155-156. [38] 158. [39] 157. [40] Woman’s brother, Man, who comes behind her repeatedly sings “London Bridge is falling down…” but the two siblings speak to each other in French. [41] Marrathon 161. [42] Esteban Echeverría wrote the short story “El matadero” [The Slaughterhouse] (c. 1838) as an allegory that accused the violent dictatorship of General Juan Manuel de Rosas. [43] We may anticipate a connection between the pastoral dream and right wing and fascist cultural politics. [44] Moore 53. [45] 124. [46] Kinetic inertia can be related to the development of systems theory where a simulation of nature consists in defining organizations as “flexible, dynamic ‘organisms.’” This allows the performance management of organizations under the premise that, like “nature,” they have “natural” tendencies characterized by feedback loops. Jon McKenzie marks the use of systems theory as a paradigm shift in performance management, from “Machine Thinking to Systems Thinking.” See Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001) 69-73. [47] It is worth noting here that “straddle” is a stock exchange term defined as “an options strategy in which the investor holds a position in both a call and put [option to buy and to sell] with the same strike and expiration date, paying both premiums. This strategy allows the investor to make a profit regardless of whether the price of the security goes up or down, assuming the stock price changes somewhat significantly.” The straddle intuitively makes sense if we understand the notions of “strike,” “expiration date” and “premium” as equivalent abstractions in a compressed present of the capital cycle. See < http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/straddle.asp > (accessed January 9, 2017) [48] Marrathon 166. [49] 166. [50] From a Marxist perspective, “borrowed time” produces the time of reproduction of labor force which, in the present context, should be called Cheap Nature force. [51] Moore 204. [52] Marrathon 158. [53] 235. [54] Marrathon 172. [55] Chakrabarty 183. [56] Marrathon 181. [57] For a discussion of Monti’s work as site of becoming, see Milton Loayza, “Planes of Immanence: Deleuzian Assemblages As a Mode of Thought In the Theatre of Ricardo Monti,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 30.2 (2016): 79-99. [58] Marrathon 167. Footnotes About The Author(s) MILTON LOAYZA is Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at the State University of New York at Oswego. His work has been published in Theatre Journal , Theatre Topics , and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , among others. His research interests are in Latin American theatre, and performance and philosophy. Milton is also an actor and director dedicated to bringing Latin American works to the stage and is currently performing a lead speaking role in Maria de Buenos Aires by Piazzola/Ferrer, at various opera houses nationwide. Guest Editor for Special Issue: Bruce McConachie Editorial Board for Special Issue: Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions By Gergana Traikova Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF In the course of the last decade, the tandem of Veselka Kuncheva, director, and Marieta Golomehova, set designer, managed to develop their special creative process and make a name as theatre-makers with a distinctive style characterized by deep symbolism, visual richness, and a combination of puppets, live actors, multimedia elements and music. Other features of their works are a dark aesthetics and experimental approach, where text seems to lose its primary importance and give way to the visual. In 2019 Kuncheva said in an interview “...I realized at some point that we start serving the text, and there is much more to theatre than just text. That is why my way of working is almost upside down - I accept the text only as one of the instruments of theatre. For me, the main thing in theatre is what we call life." ( Kultura newspaper: Issue 9 (2982), November 2021) The tandem’s performances have invariably been receiving predominantly rave reviews . Almost every year they have been awarded the main theatre awards Ikar and Askeer , thus cementing their status as leading figures of the Bulgarian theatre. However, behind the adulation and accolades there are issues that rarely get raised publicly. Recently, the tandem’s work has begun to follow one and the same, familiar pattern: repetitive visual elements with an emphasis on darkness and smoke. In almost every performance Kuncheva develops a similar idea, placing in the center a human being who is afraid, or corrupted by society, or possessed by their own demons. Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson I have been observing the tandem’s work for ten years now and, during the first three of them I was not only impressed but truly enchanted by the visuality of their theatre and the richness of stage means of expression. In the summer of 2016, I had the opportunity to attend the rehearsals of the Queen of Spades by Pushkin, at the State Puppet Theatre of Plovdiv, and I kept a diary about the work process. I remember the rapture of the rehearsal atmosphere and Kuncheva's mastery of creating a team, her ability to challenge the actors every day with new tasks for creative experiments. A year later, though, I remember the premiere of Demon Life, based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Demons at the State Puppet Theatre of Stara Zagora, as a moment of sobering down of my enthusiasm. The performance looked like a sequel to Queen of Spades: with the same approach, similar mise-en-scène and subject matter, albeit in a new visual form. With each subsequent performance of Kuncheva, the repetitive elements became more noticeable to me. Many would call it a style, but where does a style and creative language end, and uniformity and predictability begin? The newest work of Kuncheva and Golomehova, The Little Prince at the Youth Theatre “Nikolai Binev,” represents a slight departure from their otherwise typical dark aesthetics. Although the production is aimed at a children's audience, smoke and repetitive mechanical movements again take center stage, creating a feeling of depression. The plot of Saint-Exupéry's story is nearly entirely followed, with its key moments, like the Little Prince’s encounters with the Fox, the Rose and his travels through the wondrous planets, but they seem to remain on the surface, deprived of the depth and philosophical message of the original work. Repetitive elements, such as mass dance scenes, which have no clear connection to the plot or characters but are intended to summarize the previous scenes, deepen a sense of disjointedness and a lack of original directorial ideas for presenting Saint-Exupéry’s work. The theme of the individual and society – a Kuncheva favorite – creeps in here as well, but it does not bring anything new or different from her previous performances. Loud music, dancing and smoke once again dominate the stage space, making the transitions between scenes mechanical and devoid of emotional fluidity. The cast of The Little Prince is undoubtedly trying with utmost dedication to accomplish the tasks set by the director. Especially Kuncho Kanev, in the role of the Pilot, builds up a brilliant and complete character who goes deftly from the very striving for life and the steadfastness, through childish naivety, to the touching love for the world around him. The appearance of the actress Anna-Valeria Gostanyan is very impressive too; she plays the part of the Serpent, twisting around a descending spiral. It is a truly acrobatic moment where the airiness and beauty of the movement stand out against the repetitive mass dance scenes. Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson It should be noted that Kuncheva and Polina Hristova, the authors of the dramatization, have managed to introduce some humor through several comic scenes that illustrate the absurdity of the world we live in. For example, the scene with the stargazers who count stars on an exaggeratedly large abacus in order to own, sell and earn money for more stars; or the geographer, who strongly resembles a bureaucrat from a government office refusing assistance because of a missing document. Although these moments capture the meaninglessness of the modern world, they also highlight the main problem in Kuncheva's work : lack of a clearly identified central idea that would unify the scenes and result in an overall integrity of the production. The visually appealing sets created by Marieta Golomehova manage to take the viewer briefly into the magical world of the story, transporting them through the stars and universes and introducing them to the whimsical characters. Golomehova incorporates spirals and rounded elements throughout the set design: from the descending spirals around which the planets are located, to a massive spiral platform in the center of the stage around which all the journeys of the Little Prince take place. Ultimately, though, despite the visually impressiveness of the production, it remains empty in terms of content. There is something of this combination in the previous production of the tandem: The Portrait of Dorian Gray at the Racho Stoyanov Theatre in Gabrovo. There, the fragmentary nature of the structure is taken to an extreme: the scenes often end upbruptly, as if literally cut off . This is sometimes rather confusing and makes it difficult to follow the overall storyline. The production follows the main thread of the novel, where Dorian Gray, obsessed with his beauty, sells his soul to preserve his youth while his portrait ages. Although the atmosphere of mysticism and decadence around the character are conveyed, the emphasis again falls mainly on the visual side and mass scenes. The idea of a tableau-vivant in which Basil (Dimo Dimov) models the actors' bodies in front of a translucent fabric, creating works of art, is impressive. A visually strong moment is also the coming to life of the portrait that finally swallows Dorian. Unfortunately, though, Blagovest Mitsev, in the role of Dorian Gray, fails to achieve anything memorable, playing as if one note almost through the entire performance. This contrasts strongly with Tsveti Peniashki, who demonstrates impressive vocal and acting skills in the part of Sir Henry Wotton. Penyashki manages to create a multi-layered character, while Mitsev seems to fail to capture the complexity of his character, and his achievements remain only on the level of plasticity. In The Portrait of Dorian Gray there again are dance scenes and mass scenes, in which the actors repeat movements and lines that have no essential meaning to the plot, except to re-emphasize the theme of aimlessness of existence. As in other recent productions of the tandem there is a combination of costumes inspired by a concrete era and rather neutral materials, such as elastics, nets, nylon and fabric. So the production has impressive plastic scenes, yet features the familiar flaws: excessive focus on the visual side at the expense of content. In 2016 the theatre critic Veneta Doycheva wrote in her review of Kuncheva’s Escapes performance, "If there is something that could be desired, it is towards the purely dramatic side of the performance. Individual etudes quickly exhaust their internal charge and do not trespass into a more generalized level of meaning. Many of the scenes get stuck in repetition and fail to develop the literal saturation of gesture or movement in a new plane. The metaphorical key is laid bare, and instead of poetry, the image acquires only technical dimensions." (HOMO LUDENS 19/2016) No doubt, the productions of Kuncheva and Golomehova represent a well-balanced hybridity between elements of dramatic theatre, puppetry, musical theatre and acrobatics. However, a major problem remains the very telling of a story. Attempts at creating a poetical atmosphere often turn into a maelstrom of repetitions which bring about stasis and cyclicity in the dialogue. What Doycheva underlined in 2016 has, alas, worsened now, and the repetition unfolds on two levels: first, in the repetition of scenes within one and the same production and, second, in their transfer from one production to another. An example of this can be seen in the repetitive lines and mechanical movements of the nobles in Dorian Gray , the nobles in The Queen of Spades , the controlled figures in The Last Man (2019) and the collective images of society in Momo (2014), Don Quixote (2022) and The Little Prince . Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson Actually, the repeated mise-en-scène, themes and means of expression in Kuncheva's work began after her production I, Sisyphus (2013), which is still running. In it, the main artistic element is the multiplication of the actor's face by means of puppets made from a plaster cast of his face. It is nearly in the same way that the collective image of the Gray people in Momo is built up. In Fear (2014), another production of Kuncheva (co-authored with Ina Bozhidarova), the same technique is used to present the fears of the main character. In The Queen of Spades , the repetition comes in the form of a dress made of multiple baby dolls, and in The Last Man , based on Orwell's 1984 (2019), there are busts again with plaster casts of the face of one of the actors in order to stress the lack of individuality. While the multiplication of faces gradually receded in the tandem's collaborative work, the "dancing woman," or an ensemble of "dancing women." remains a constant element in their performances. This motif appears in various forms: from the ballerina in Fear , through the Countess and Lisa in The Queen of Spades , Mary Magdalene in The Last Temptation (2017), the Dulcineas in Don Quixote (2022), Sybil in The Portrait of Dorian Gray (2024) to Roses in The Little Prince (2024). Photo © Alexander Bogdan Thompson In light of these observations, a question arises: does Kuncheva's focus on visual elements, at the expense of dramaturgy and analysis, contribute to the repetitiveness in her performances? In her interview at the Kultura newspaper, she reportss that she bases her approach on the personal experiences, skills, and perspectives of the actors. From my observations during the rehearsal process of Queen of Spades , I can add that she provides actors with the freedom and time to express themselves through a series of tasks related to the materials to be used in the performance (such as wire mesh, rubber bands, foam, etc.) and the themes and subthemes of the literary works. However, the freedom offered in the laboratory process seems not to have a significant impact on the final result, as it is often suppressed by already established visual images. This leads to a disconnection between content and form, resulting in performances that resemble scattered thoughts, devoid of a unifying overarching idea. The distinctive artistic approach of Kuncheva’s tandem with Golomehova is undoubtedly an important part of the contemporary Bulgarian theatre, but perhaps the time has come for a change: for an escape from the familiar dark narrative, for researching new themes, for challenging themselves. After all, the biggest challenge for an established artist is not to stay in the comfort zone, but to find new ways to inspire and be inspired. The human beings’ biggest battle is with themselves, as Kuncheva herself emphasizes in almost every work of hers. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Gergana Traykova is completing her Ph.D. studies at the Department of Theatre Studies, NATFA "Krastyo Sarafov" in Sofia, Bulgaria. Her writings have been published in national theatre journals in Bulgaria, including KuklArt, Artizanin , and Stranitsa . She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Theatre Studies and Theatre Management at NATFA "Krastyo Sarafov", followed by a Master’s in Puppet Theatre Directing. In 2021, she directed her thesis production, an original dramatization of Margarit Minkov's tale Merry Tickling Laughter at the State Puppet Theatre "Georgi Mitev" in Yambol, Bulgaria. Currently she is the dramaturg of the Drama and Puppet Theatre – Vratsa, Bulgaria. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Shane Strawbridge Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Shane Strawbridge By Published on January 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. In 1982, Christopher Bigsby penned A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. What was originally planned as a single volume expanded to three, with volume 2 being released in 1984 and Volume 3 in 1985. Although Bigsby, a literary analyst and novelist with more than 50 books to his credit, hails from Britain, he is drawn to American playwrights because of their “stylistic inventiveness…sexual directness…[and] characters ranged across the social spectrum in a way that for long, and for the most part, had not been true of the English theatre” (1). This admiration brought Bigsby’s research across the millennium line to give us his latest offering Twenty-First Century American Playwrights . What Bigsby provides is an in-depth survey of nine writers who entered the American theatre landscape during the past twenty years, including chapters on Annie Baker, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Katori Hall, Amy Herzog, Tracy Letts, David Lindsay-Abaire, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, and Naomi Wallace. While these playwrights vary in the manner they work and styles of creative output, what places them together in this volume “is the sense that theatre has a unique ability to engage with audiences in search of some insight into the way we live…to witness how words become manifest, how artifice can, at its best, be the midwife of truth” (5). This explanation, however vague, does little to provide a concrete rubric for why these dramatists were included over others. Yet productively, although most of the playwrights included in this collection have had productions on Broadway, Bigsby eschews the misguided notion that American theatre means only Broadway with his inclusion of several writers more well-known in universities, regional theatres, and Off-Broadway—providing a refreshing change from many playwright surveys. Bigsby’s recent monograph presents a combination of playwright biography, oeuvre studies, philosophies, working methods, and dramaturgical analysis. Detailed and information-rich, his discussions can be experienced like episodes in a documentary series, gently guiding audiences through the life and catalog of these nine playwrights, proving it an accessible read for academics and enthusiasts, alike. The volume is organized so that each playwright gets their own chapter, any of which could be read independently from the rest of the text for artists and scholars wishing to do a deep dive on a single playwright. Readers do not need to be familiar with each playwright’s work to follow Bigsby’s scholarship, as he takes time to give a thorough description of each play while also unearthing the themes, styles, and methods favored by each writer. The tell-tale marks of each dramatist is dissected, including, for example: Annie Baker’s penchant for pauses (“it’s not actually silence I’m after so much as the things that we do when we’re not talking” (19)); Naomi Wallace’s political narratives (“politics and art can never be divided…that’s terribly exciting” (194)); Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s “radically different” oeuvre (“each of my projects are in part a rejection of or violent departure from a previous project” (35)); Katori Hall’s examination of diverse Black experiences (“everybody is influenced by who they are and unfortunately how other people perceive them” (68)); and Lynn Nottage’s unearthing of “memoir-less” narratives that implicate audiences (“I think that provocations is when you enter in the space and everything you believe in is challenged” (165)). In allowing the playwrights to speak for themselves, Bigsby opens the door to revealing the dramatists’ relationships to the canon. This proves useful to both students and scholars searching for context in placing the latest generation of American writers against the dominant voices of the 20th century. He analyzes many of their plays against titans of not only the American theatre, but also the world’s stage. He draws parallels between Baker’s characters in The Aliens to the vaudevillian clowns of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the “characters on pause” from Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, for instance . Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County gets read against Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for its ability to “get through the skin and muscle, down to the bone and the marrow” of familial secrets (109). David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole is compared to O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, both plays having to “recycle their sense of lost purpose within the constraints of what should have been a place of safety” (132). Yet the text is more than an exercise in comparing and contrasting work with what came before, and 20th century models; Bigsby also considers how these works navigate contemporary socio-political issues and historical contexts on both macro and micro levels. Thus he evokes Amy Herzog’s uncomfortable family history as inspiration for After the Revolution (77-78), Sarah Ruhl being inspired to write The Clean House after overhearing a conversation at a cocktail party in which a doctor claimed they “didn’t go to medical school to clean house” (178), and Lynn Nottage’s use of the 2008 financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street as the inspiration for Sweat (164). If there are any flaws to the volume, they mostly lie with the publishers themselves. There are proofreading errors throughout — including calling Albee’s work Whose [sic] Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, referencing the Vermont Senator Bernie Saunders [sic], and an indecision about whether or not there is a second hyphen in “twenty-first century.” These detract from an otherwise engaging and solid read. Bigsby himself is not above question, however. Although he doesn’t say so directly, Bigsby gives the impression that his definition of “playwright” rejects those who write for the musical theatre, a disappointing exclusion. His introduction gives credit to the “financially no less than critically rewarding” plays—sorry, musicals—of Lin-Manuel Miranda, for instance, but still Bigsby denies him a chapter’s sustained discussion. (And because Miranda is denied, we are less likely to question the omission of other critically, commercially and culturally successful musical theatre writers). Bigsby addresses this line of critique in a way, stating that “to name some of [the excluded writers] would invite complaints of further omissions” (2). While none of his volumes to date have examined musical theater writers with his impressive, engaging lens, one can hope that he is deliberately keeping a few aces hidden up his sleeve that will serve as the basis for the inevitable—and welcome—volumes yet to come. References Footnotes About The Author(s) SHANE STRAWBRIDGE Texas Tech 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 "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson | Nehad Selaiha draws attention to important performers, directors, dramaturges, critics and managers of Egyptian Theatre. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Selected Essays: Perspectives Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson Download PDF Perspectives is the third volume in Nehad Selaiha’s (1945-2017) Egyptian Theatre series, after New Directions and Plays and Playwrights. Here, the focus shifts to performers, directors, dramaturges, critics and managers, and they are presented through their work in accurate, sympathetic portraits which combine the personal and artistic. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Heather S. Nathans 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 Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF In 1986, during my first year at Dartmouth College, I had the good fortune to take a seminar on Black Theatre with Professor Errol Hill (1921-2003). [1] More than thirty years later I still count myself lucky to have had my introduction to the history of Black Theatre under Errol’s guidance. His rigorous scholarship and penetrating questions helped to set the standards for my own further explorations of Black Theatre History over the coming years, and I still remember our final chat many years later at a 2002 ASTR conference when he was asking me about the progress of my new book on slavery and US theatre. Errol would have been 100 years old this year. A century after his birth, he still stands as one of the giants in the field of Black Theatre scholarship. His landmark History of African American Theatre with Jim Hatch (1929-2020), his work as a playwright, his foundational study, Shakespeare in Sable , his pioneering book, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900 , his many edited collections of plays by Black dramatists, as well as his monumental Theatre Collection, now housed at Dartmouth College—all of these contributions have shaped the development of the field in innumerable ways for thousands of scholars and students who never had the chance to meet him. For those who did have the chance to work with him, his mentorship proved equally invaluable—generous and exacting in equal measure. The award that bears his name with the American Society for Theatre Research has recognized more than thirty outstanding works in Black Theatre since its launch in 1997. (The list of those winners is included in the Book Review section of this issue and can also be found on the ASTR website at astr.org.) What I miss most—even thirty-five years after our first encounter in Hanover, NH—is the bellow of laughter that would erupt from this most dignified and handsome of men, transforming him into a joyous figure always ready to welcome new colleagues to the field. I spoke recently with his wife, Grace Hope Hill—his partner in his life, his research, his theatrical productions, and over many years of travel and adventure. I said how much I still missed his laugh. Grace exclaimed, “His laugh was so loud.” She also shared a story of Errol’s early days that links to so many of the themes shared in this issue about the need to support and document Black Theatre. In the 1950s, the University of the West Indies in Jamaica received a 300£ donation from a British bookstore owner (at Foyles Bookshop) and Errol, then serving as a “Drama Tutor” in the program, headed out into communities across Jamaica to develop new works by regional authors. As Grace recalls, “He helped with the writing, directing, and acting… We worked with very limited funds and did everything ourselves. Errol was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” That statement sums up Errol’s contribution to Black Theatre Studies so beautifully – for both those who knew him and those who never had the chance to meet him, “He was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” Help us celebrate Errol’s legacy in this issue dedicated to Black Theatre. Honor the innumerable artists and scholars who have created and documented the field of Black Theatre for more than two centuries of passionate work and those who are propelling it forward into the future. Ronald N. Sherr, "Errol G. Hill," oil on panel, Dartmouth College References [1] For more on Errol’s extraordinary career, including his time with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Yale University, Dartmouth College, as a professional actor and playwright, and as an accomplished scholar, see the link to his papers now housed at Dartmouth College: https://archives-manuscripts.dartmouth.edu/agents/people/1185 . Footnotes About The Author(s) HEATHER S. NATHANS Professor, Tufts University 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.

Hui Peng 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 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. Hui Peng By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor brings attention to Disney tourism as a significant site of theatre and performance study, particularly immersive and participatory theatre. By placing the idea of “tourists as actors” at the center of analysis, this multi-author collection helps readers to understand Disney’s experience economy and goods through the lens of theatre and stretches the definition of “actor,” charging it with more cultural and societal connotations. Just as tourists at Disney can decide their own way to navigate the theme parks, readers here can decide how to approach this book: follow the order of the chapters or jump from one chapter to another, connecting the dots themselves to chart an interdisciplinary journey of the quintessential American theme park experience. Thirteen chapters are divided into five sections based on analogous subjects and methodologies: “Introduction,” “Time, Tomorrowland, and Fantasy,” “Environments as Ideologies,” “Liveness and Audio-Animation,” and “Counter Identities.” In the introduction, editors Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson borrow David Allen’s concept of the “tourist as actor” to challenge the stereotype of passive guests who lose their control in the “Disney virus” made of “artificiality, consumerism, and lack of depth” (6). This concept calls attention to the guest’s autonomy and agency—tourists are actually agentive subjects; they consume the illusive Disney experience with self-awareness and an understanding of how that illusion is constructed, scripted, and delivered. The subsequent four sections discuss how tourists take on their role as actors through “complicated negotiations with race, gender, sexuality, capitalism, nationality” (19). The first section, “Time, Tomorrowland, and Fantasy,” explores the dissolution of linear time and performed temporalities. Tom Robson’s opening essay excavates nostalgic time travel in Main Street and Tomorrowland installations of Disney World Park. In this signature essay, Robson investigates how the Main Street serves as a theatrical lobby, where guests transform from citizen to tourist to actor, detaching from real-time as well as the normative behavior in their everyday lives. Attuned to historical erasures, Victoria Pettersen Lantz delineates four problematic portrayals of indigenous Americans in the Disney narrative of consumerism, critiquing the romanticized representations and staging indexical absence of First Nation peoples. The section closes with Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy’s illuminating essay about “inserting the values of Middle Class America into the European Middle Ages”; as she notes, the pricy ticket and food in Fantasyland crafts the participatory experience of tourists as actors specifically for the white middle-class, making the experience a privileged act, or at least, an exclusive one (66). Section two, “Environments as Ideologies,” considers how Disney creates a reality game through the use of characters and landscapes. This reality game, “does not simulate the ‘real’; rather, it celebrates the art of simulation, or the ability to construct fantasy worlds as if they are ‘real’” (93). Jennifer A. Kokai’s essay, “The Nemofication of Nature, Animals, Artificiality, and Affect at Disney World,” succinctly criticizes the depiction of nature as “controllable, consumable, and even constructible good that is superior to geographically occurring nature” in her historical investigation into the evolution of The Living Seas to The Seas with Nemo and Friends (102). Kokai asserts that such problematic depictions further reinforce the stereotypes of increasing anthropomorphism and human estrangement from nature. This section also features Chase A. Bringardner’s essay about the Splash Mountain attraction, which details the erasure of racial narratives and identities in Song of the South as well as problematic queer representations of Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear. The section closes with Laura MacDonald’s insightful essay on Shanghai Disneyland and its mantra “authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese” (128). Through the strategy of a “glocalized” Broadway-branded musical, for instance, on the one hand, The Lion King in Mandarin with its all-Chinese cast, enables local consumers to appreciate the familiar Chinese elements, while satisfying the Western fantasy and global experience on the other. As such, they are rehearsed to “feel” authentic and become normative guests who contribute to Disney’s rising enterprise in the East. The third section, “Liveness and Audio-Animation,” explores the non-human and human performers in Disney Park and how they interact with tourists, shaping guest performances in changing contexts. This section begins with Li Cornfeld’s illuminating essay about the must-see, yet boring auto-animatronic robots performing in The Carousel Theater of Progress. These once-futuristic robots were originally featured as a prelude to an expo of forthcoming General Electric products introduced in 1975, and a portrayal of American families enjoying advances in household technology. Yet, decades later, the once-futurist robots now function as objects of cultural nostalgia. Cornfeld uses the robot dramaturgy, such as the asymmetrical aging of the Carousel cast, to showcase how Disney naturalizes its historical vision. Joseph R. D’Ambrosi focuses instead on how non-human performers create an idealized way of behaving for human beings. Drawing upon Jill Dolan’s notion of utopian performativity, D’Ambrosi proposes the term “prescriptive performativity” to describe the forms and functions of Disney’s utopian framework in a case study on the Audio-Animatronic actors in the Hall of Presidents. The final essay by Maria Patrice Amon shifts our attention from non-human actors to human ones. Amon explores how space and narrative in the Magic Kingdom construct a melodramatic imagination for the guests, encouraging and even teaching them to participate in this alluring environment as actors. The fourth section, “Counter Identities,” explores how the tourist-as-actor evolves over time and influences Disney’s audience today. Jill Anne Morries’s refreshing essay outlines the history of gated amusement parks from Luna Park to Disneyland to argue that the pay-one-price ticket shifts our attention from racial exclusion to class construction—everyone is welcomed as long as they can afford the tickets, which actually feeds colorblind racism and requires more ethical reexamination. Christen Mandracchia, in turn, focuses on the villain characters in Disneyland including the Big Bad Wolf, the Evil Queen, and Captain Hook, attuned to the ethics of their representation. Dismantling the dichotomy of good and bad, Mandracchia brilliantly explores how bad characters are normalized and celebrated as good in merchandise, attractions, and events. This fascinating section ends with Elizabeth Schiffler’s analysis of Disney’s radical consumers from Disneyland Social Club to subcultures, such as the communities attending Bats Day or Gays Day. Schiffler argues that the tourists and subcultural fans deploy agency to re-cast specific characters as their heroes, which changes their reception and meaning. Building on Maurya Wickstrom’s conception of the “Disney brandscape,” Susan Bennett closes the book by proposing the term “exemplary Disney” to scrutinize how the theme park “has provided a stage for conceiving and realizing (as well as regularly updating) performance practices, contexts, and markets” (269). This edited collection is a worthy addition to popular cultural studies, tourism, environmental studies, and theatre and performance scholarship. Accessible and interdisciplinary, Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience contributes significant American nuances to the scholarship of immersive, interactive, and participatory theatre, a realm that is predominantly occupied by British and European scholars. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Hui Peng The Graduate Center, City University of New York Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 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.

Natka Bianchini Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 1 Visit Journal Homepage Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Natka Bianchini By Published on March 9, 2014 Download Article as PDF Alan Schneider, one of the most important American directors of the twentieth century, was know for being a "playwright's director." He believed it was his responsibility to interpret the script as a faithful representation of the playwright's intent. For this reason, so many major playwrights [ . . . ] [scribd id=211700074 key=key-171aa737vjlfcqtl6q57 mode=scroll height=930 width=600] References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Between Blackface and Bondage: The Incompletely Forgotten Failure of The Underground Railroad's 1879 Midwestern Tour “One Live as Two, Two Live as One”: Bert Williams and the Uprooted Bamboo Tree Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival Feminist Periodization as a Structural Component of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Benjamin Gillespie Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Scene Partners Benjamin Gillespie By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Eric Berryman, Kristen Sieh, Carmen M. Herlihy, and Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners. Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre Scene Partners By John J. Caswell, Jr. Directed by Rachel Chavkin Vineyard Theatre New York, NY November 8, 2023 Reviewed by Benjamin Gillespie Scene Partners , written by playwright John J. Caswell, Jr. (author of the critically acclaimed play Wet Brain ), is a non-linear exploration of memory and trauma that riffs on both the hopes and fears of its aging protagonist, Meryl Kowalski. Developed during the COVID-19 pandemic (while Caswell was in residence at the Vineyard Theatre), and directed by Rachel Chavkin, the play centers on the journey of 75-year-old Meryl, who attempts to become a Hollywood movie star as a septuagenarian—an unlikely feat considering the movie industry’s notoriously ageist reputation, especially toward older actresses. Over the course of the play, Meryl travels from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, finds an agent, and ends up in the starring role of a movie about her own life. Embodied by a (then) 75-year-old Dianne Wiest, actress and character are the same age, significant for a play that, in many ways, is about the resilience of aging. Wiest brought a wisdom and strength to the role that helped to center a purposefully fragmented, though often perplexing, production which celebrated the possibility of an artistic third act for its determined heroine. Meryl’s backstory is told piecemeal to set up the play’s present tense in 1985. Meryl was born around 1910 in Los Angeles. At a young age, her parents separated, and she lived with her insensitive mother who relocated them to Wisconsin, where her mother then remarried. As we come to find out, Meryl’s stepfather repeatedly raped her as a child, but neither her mother nor stepsister, Charlize (played as an adult by Johanna Day), acknowledged this pattern of sexual abuse. Around 1930, Meryl married another abuser named Stanley Kowalski (“I know what you’re thinking” Meryl says. “I have no idea who’s responsible for feeding the details of my life to Mr. Williams for his little play! But my Stanley, he was so much worse, in every possible way”). Her ungrateful daughter, Flora (played by Kristen Sieh), is a drug addict dependent on her mother’s support to survive. The play begins just after the death of her husband (“that motherfucker!” she exclaims), at which point Meryl has had enough and decides to head west to become a Hollywood film star. But this is only the backstory, with the action of the play taking place in the present tense of 1985, but also (at least partially) in Meryl’s imagination. Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners . Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre. The play presents the often painful, albeit revelatory, journey of a woman trying to process a lifetime of hardship in order to discover herself for the first time after spending three quarters of her life in abusive relationships. The fragmented reality of her mind (and consequently, the play) often leaves audiences with more questions than answers. But in a way, this is the point. The poetic, dream-like world of Scene Partners is contrasted by the harsh realism of Meryl’s life; anchored by the strength and tenacity of its aging central character, played expertly be Wiest, Meryl is akin to the great female roles of Tennessee Williams (who, as mentioned above, is directly evoked in the play several times). Deciding whether what’s happening in front of us is “real” or not misses the point: the focus here is rather for audiences to see Meryl telling her own story in the way that she (finally) wants and gets to tell it. But memory is a funny thing, and Meryl’s is as fragmented as it comes, not only blocking out experiences of trauma but also facing an unnamed neurological disorder that suggests she is losing cerebral control. “Is this like a memory play?” asks one of her acting classmates who Meryl recruits to act in her life story. “Do you want realism or should it be more like whoa! ?” “All of the above” answers her director/acting teacher. “It’s a work in progress” Meryl replies. Work in progress is an apt description for the play and production as it often loses its footing in between worlds, sometimes taking on the air of a rehearsal. But this does not detract too much from the beauty of Wiest’s performance or the stylish and dynamic staging by Chavkin, supported by a superb design team. The fragmentation of the play was emphasized through the innovative scenic and video designs by Riccardo Hernández and David Bengali, respectively, who utilized shifting screens and projections to illustrate the fluidity of Meryl’s memories. The use of large, moving screens not only bifurcated scenes but also served as a visual metaphor for Meryl’s fragmented, layered remembrances. However, while visually striking, this design choice occasionally created navigational challenges for the actors: on the night I saw the performance, one moving screen ran into Wiest mid-scene, though the seasoned stage actress hardly flinched and kept going without missing a beat. Eric Berryman, Kristen Sieh, Carmen M. Herlihy , and Dianne Wiest in Scene Partners . Photo: Carol Rosegg. Courtesy Vineyard Theatre. Scene Partners seems to be a memory play, but not a traditional one: the world is split between “real” (or perhaps more appropriately live ) performance sequences along with pre-filmed screen performances. Sections of the play are created with projected films on the large screens that shift in and out of frame to represent different environments on Meryl’s journey. In fact, the production opened with an enormous projection of Wiest’s face on screen introducing herself, reassuring audiences, “This is exactly how it happened!” But we are never sure if the play is supposed to be perceived as being composed in the present tense, or if this is a more traditional memory play. “My life starts now!” she says. And perhaps it is through Meryl’s newfound artistic license that we should understand it all. The facial projection of Meryl shifts to black as words populated the screen with character names, like a script being written in real time, which is then read in voiceover as changes and corrections happened “live” in front of us. A sudden crash brings the lights up on Weist as Meryl descending from the heavens in a white chair before getting stuck in what seems like a chairlift (from where, no one knows) so that Wiest’s body could only be seen from the waist down. Stuck halfway between a dream and reality, in hindsight, this signaled where we would remain for the entire play. We later find out this process of getting stuck is a recurring dream Meryl has that she is performing for the film, but perhaps also dreaming. Half the fun of Scene Partners is putting together who is really there and who is only imagined by Meryl. In fact, the generic title of the play is a reference to metatheatrical roleplay, as we never fully understand when characters are just roles inside Meryl’s head or if they are actually there. The audience’s collective logic is often challenged when characters appear and disappear at pivotal moments in the production—is that really her sister in the interview scene or a figment of Meryl’s imagination?—not dissimilar to Florian Zeller’s award-winning play The Father . One thing is sure: Meryl is hellbent on being a great actress, but the trauma of sexual and physical abuse from the men in her past haunts her throughout the play. Again, Scene Partners is highly metatheatrical, beginning with Meryl’s first entrance, reminiscent of Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days (a role Wiest played at Theatre for a New Audience in 2017). This initial scene sets the tone for a production that constantly questions the boundaries between reality and fiction. The play-within-a-play and film-within-a-play structure allows for a complex narrative that keeps the audience questioning what is real and what is imagined throughout. Indeed, Caswell’s directive in the script that “people and things should seem to suddenly materialize and vanish” adds to this sense of disorientation and surrealism. Determined to tell her story on her own terms, Meryl faces ageism and skepticism on her journey to Hollywood from those around her. She is told by all (including her daughter and would-be agent) that she will only play old women in stereotypical roles. “I have been acting all my life. It’s time to get paid for it!” she replies. “There’s a market for durability. I’ll play a queen! Those roles are mine!” After receiving a suggestion to improve on her acting from her agent, Meryl enrolls in acting classes where her teacher “discovers” her and decides to help her develop a series of monologues that will be the basis for her life story in a series of films, each representing a different decade in her life. “I’m a maximalist at heart!” she says, which could also be a mantra for the expressionistic approach to Caswell’s writing, which created mixed reactions from viewers. Scene Partners is a compelling exploration of a woman’s struggle to reclaim her own narrative and identity against the backdrop of Hollywood’s unforgiving landscape, and society more broadly. A rich and multi-layered theatrical experience, the play is a significant contribution to contemporary theatre focusing on age and aging outside of the typical narratives of decline we see so often in mainstream culture. While the production was, at times, a little wayward, Wiest’s portrayal of Meryl was both poignant and powerful, capturing the character’s complexity and depth, her humor and kindness, but also her confusion and sadness. Her interactions with other characters, including her abusive deceased husband Stanley (who keeps returning in Meryl’s nightmares) and her over-the-top acting teacher-cum-director, highlight the various challenges she faces with unwavering resolve. Performance Review: Scene Partners © 2024 by Benjamin Gillespie is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International References Footnotes About The Author(s) Benjamin Gillespie (PhD) is Doctoral Lecturer in Communication, Gender Studies, and Theatre at Baruch College, City University of New York. His essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review , and a wide range of scholarly anthologies. He is currently editing two volumes: Split Britches: Fifty Years On and Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging , both to be published by the University of Michigan Press. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

an in-process performance of Michael McClure's absurdist anti war"gargoyle cartoon." Directed by Dan Safer. With Tony Torn as "Spider Rabbit", and Lee Ann Brown as "A Vision." PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Spider Rabbit Dan Safer/Tony Torn Theater, Multimedia English 45m 7:30PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All an in-process performance of Michael McClure's absurdist anti war"gargoyle cartoon." Directed by Dan Safer. With Tony Torn as "Spider Rabbit", and Lee Ann Brown as "A Vision." Content / Trigger Description: Grand-guignol style cartoon violence Dan Safer is the Artistic Director of dance/theater company Witness Relocation (www.witnessrelocation.org ) and has directed/ choreographed all of their shows, ranging from fully scripted plays (including world premieres by Chuck Mee, and an English language premiere by Toshiki Okada) to original dance/theater pieces, to many things in between, all over the place, from the back rooms of bars in NYC to Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris to a giant leaky warehouse at a dance festival in Poland where a light fell off the grid halfway thru a show and almost killed him. WR is a resident company at LaMama in NYC. Dan recently choreographed “Jedermann”, at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. His work has been at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace, Les Subsistances (Lyon, France), and many other places. In 2011, he choreographed Stravinsky's RITE OF SPRING for Philadelphia Orchestra with Obie-winners Ridge Theater. Artforum Magazine called him "pure expressionistic danger" and Time Out NY called him "a purveyor of lo-fi mayhem.” He has choreographed plays, fashion shows, operas, music videos, films, flash mobs and more, got kicked out of high school for a year, used to be a go-go dancer, and once choreographed the Queen of Thailand’s Birthday Party. Tony Torn is an actor and director with over a hundred professional credits in film, television and theater since 1985. Recently he was featured on stage in Bedlam's FALL RIVER FISHING, Mabou Mines' MUD/DROWNING and DOM JUAN at Bard's Fisher Center. Tony is known for working extensively with experimental theater makers Reza Abdoh and Richard Foreman, as the founding director for Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, playing Rusty Trawler in Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Broadway opposite Emilia Clark, and creating and starring in Ubu Sings Ubu with Dan Safer. He manages Torn Page, a private event space named in honor of his parents Rip Torn and Geraldine Page. @dansafer, @t0nyt0rn Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

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

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

Angela L. Robinson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Angela L. Robinson By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Given the ubiquity of “aloha” in Pacific tourism and marketing, Hollywood feature films, and Hawai’i state politics, what precisely does the concept offer for Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) now? Stephanie Nohelani Teves’s Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance crucially intervenes into the discourses, practices, and performances of aloha that appropriate the concept from its Hawaiian cultural context to the detriment of Kanaka Maoli. Drawing from Native Pacific cultural studies, American Indian studies, performance studies, and queer and feminist theory, Teves’s multidisciplinary text examines the complex negotiation and resignification of aloha within a range of contemporary Hawaiian performances, from Hip Hop musician Krystilez and drag queen Coco Chandelier to ghost tours and online commenting forums. The varied performances that Teves examines point to how Kanaka Maoli experience aloha as both a constraining, disciplinary force and a connection to Indigenous identity and community. Teves tracks these contradictions of aloha throughout chapter one, such as its actual codification into law through the 1986 Aloha Spirit Law. She ultimately argues that Hawaiian performance articulates aloha as a strategy to disarticulate it from its most commodified forms and to enact defiant indigeneity. According to Teves, defiant indigeneity is performance that challenges, deconstructs, and resists colonial settler state politics, while also affirming the ongoing defiance, existence, and survivance of Indigenous peoples. Akin to José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, defiant indigeneity “pushes forward this possibility of something else that creates and reconfigures Kanaka Maoli life through performance” (84). As a theory and method, defiant indigeneity allows for a capacious understanding of Indigenous performance and performativity as world-making. For Kanaka Maoli, Teves contends, aloha has become the essence of Hawaiian Indigeneity, circumscribing what is expected and valued by non-Natives. This normative version of aloha is at once Hawai’i’s welcoming gift to tourists and non-Natives and a strict regulatory measure of specific forms of Hawaiian cultural expression. In the next two chapters, Teves focuses on how Hawaiian performance refuses, subverts, and queers the prescriptive nature of aloha and its subsequent policing of authentic Indigeneity. In her close readings of work from Hawaiian Hip Hop artist Krystilez and drag performer Coco Chandelier, Teves draws from theories of performativity, such as Judith Butler’s gender performativity and E. Patrick Johnson’s racial performativity, to outline a specifically Indigenous performativity. She argues, “As the process by which indigenous bodies generate social meaning, Indigenous performativity centers Indigenous articulations of culture, outsider perceptions of such, and the constant interplay between them” (52). For example, in her readings of a photograph of Coco Chandelier at the 2006 Diva of Polynesia Pageant and the photo’s Facebook comments, Teves observes how the photograph operationalizes both a sense of Kanaka Maoli pride and a queered aloha “in drag.” In their refusal to submit to hypercommodified notions of Hawaiianness and aloha, both Krystilez and Coco Chandelier create new ways of performing Indigeneity through countercultural spaces that at once draw from Hawaiian cultural knowledge and critique notions of a pure, authentic Indigeneity. Moving away from the fringe performance spaces of chapters two and three, Teves uses the fourth chapter to analyze the narrative and afterlife of Princess Ka’iulani through mainstream media productions, such as the 2009 film Princess Kaiulani and the 2015 revival of the 1987 play Ka’iulani written by Dennis Caroll, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Robert Nelson, and Ryan Page. Focusing on the 1898 illegal overthrow and annexation of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the legacy of heir to the throne Princess Ka’iulani, these texts underscore the power of cultural memory. Cultural memory provides the opportunity for Kanaka Maoli to mourn history and loss, restage resistance to the ongoing occupation of Hawai’i, and connect to their ancestors and to the kingdom. To this end, cultural memory provides Kanaka Maoli with a linkage to Hawaiian nationhood, past, present, and future. A primary concern of Defiant Indigeneity is how Kanaka Maoli at times wield authenticity as a weapon to disconnect and exclude in their debates around Hawaiian nationhood. For example, in chapter five, Teves argues against the “inauthentic” moniker often applied to those in the diaspora, those who are queer, and those who simply know the experience of un-belonging. Through a close reading of Kristiana Kahakauwila’s short story, “The Old Paniolo Way,” Teves illustrates how connections to Indigeneity can and should look different, take alternative paths, and occur in unexpected places. Teves expands upon the connections made possible through cultural memory in the previous chapter, and she concretizes them through present relations between Kanaka Maoli in order to advance alternate forms of Hawaiian belonging and membership that can hold the various contradictions and complexities of Indigeneity. In her conclusion, Teves examines the 2014 U.S. Department of Interior public meetings in Hawai’i. While the meetings were intended as a forum to discuss Hawaiian governance and nation-building, Teves remarks on the ways the meetings exacerbated the contentious divide between pro-federal recognition Kanaka Maoli and pro-independence nationalist Kanaka Maoli. Thus, Teves contends that what Hawaiian performance offers to these debates is not only a warning of how aloha can silence, erase, and marginalize, but more importantly, an understanding of how Kanaka Maoli can re-center and reaffirm aloha as a relationship with and between each other and the land. Calling for an expansive understanding of belonging, community, and nationhood, Teves writes, “Our belonging as a people cannot be contained within a document, and our sovereignty and nationhood are about relationships with each other, the plant and animal worlds, and the land and water that surround us” (165). For the past two decades, Indigenous Studies scholars, such as Mishuana Goeman and Vilsoni Hereniko, have highlighted the importance of performance for thinking through Indigenous identity, nationhood, and sovereignty. Defiant Indigeneity effectively supplements that genealogy while also breaking ground as one of the first texts to engage in a theoretical dialogue between Native Studies and performance studies. As such, Defiant Indigeneity is itself performative—a bold enactment of defiant indigeneity. Teves’s dynamic voice, nuanced readings, and careful attention to her community highlight a deep commitment to the world-making potentiality of insurgent aloha. After all, as Teves argues, “We [Kanaka Maoli] need aloha—not the wasteful forms of aloha spread through tourism, but the kind of aloha that is sustainable and has actually allowed us to survive” (21). Defiant Indigeneity is a critical addition to Native Studies and performance studies, and a powerful testament to Kanaka Maoli survivance. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ANGELA L. ROBINSON University of California, Los Angeles Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Tamara L. Smith Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 3 Visit Journal Homepage “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour Tamara L. Smith By Published on November 16, 2014 Download Article as PDF Tamara L. Smith/ In the wake of the attacks of September 11, Americans of Middle Eastern heritage experienced a sudden and dramatic change in how their ethnicities were perceived. As comedian and activist Dean Obeidallah explained, “On September 10, I went to bed white, and woke up Arab.”[1] Once comfortable in their American identities, they now had to contend with new cultural forces that configured them as dangerous outsiders. In the months and years that followed, the supposed existence of a so-called “Axis of Evil” of dangerous, anti-American regimes became the justification for expanding military operations abroad, while domestically it fed into a growing Orientalist sentiment that continues to configure Americans of Middle Eastern descent as potentially dangerous outsiders. In 2005, a group of United States comedians of Middle Eastern heritage adopted the alarmist moniker as a tongue-in-cheek title for their stand-up comedy performances. Part commiseration and part public relations, the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour served both as an expression of solidarity between Middle Eastern-Americans and as an act of cultural diplomacy, recasting Middle Eastern ethnic identities as familiar, patriotic, and safe. In this article, I look back to a 2006 performance by the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour in Santa Ana, California, including sets by tour members Ahmed Ahmed, Maz Jobrani, and Aron Kader as well as their guest, New York Arab-American Comedy Festival founder Dean Obeidallah. Capturing a moment in which the performers were still reeling from their abrupt expulsion from mainstream American identity, the comics used the intimacy of stand-up comedy, the fluidity of their identities, and their ability to address a dual audience to reinsert themselves into what it means to be “American” in a post 9/11 world. Their performance of liminality is particularly prominent in their use of accents, which they deployed at turns to emphasize their simultaneous access to Middle Eastern and American identity positions, and to disrupt the distinctions between them. By creating a feeling of cross-border intimacy between themselves and their non-Middle Eastern audiences, and by positioning themselves as a friendly and authoritative intermediary, the comics lay the groundwork for a humanizing familiarity to develop. Once this relationship was established, the comics deployed comic inversions and juxtapositions to defuse the dominant culture’s fears of violence and fanaticism and disrupt stereotypes, while at the same time configuring themselves and others who shared their ethnicities as safe, good-humored, and—perhaps most importantly—American. Aron Kader, Maz Jobrani, and Ahmed Ahmed first came together at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, where they began staging “Arabian Nights” in 2000.[2] In 2005 they began touring to other venues, and decided to change their name to the edgier “Axis of Evil.”[3] While in interviews they cite factual accuracy as the primary motive for the name change (Jobrani, who was born in Iran, is ethnically Persian rather than Arab) the choice of this provocative, topical name was inescapably a political statement that marked the group’s comedy as a reaction to the pervasive hostility towards people of Middle Eastern descent in the United States following the terrorist attacks of September 11. With their tour performances selling out, the comics put on a promotional performance and invited television producers to come see their work. The result was a partnership with Levity Productions to film a one hour special for Comedy Central. In 2006, Arab-American comic and activist Dean Obeidallah joined them in Santa Ana to film the performance, which aired on Comedy Central on 10 March 2007.[4] Although this performance was recorded and distributed both on air and on DVD, it nonetheless operates primarily as an archive of a live performance rather than as a film. Some of the techniques used to record the performance—the use of close-ups, for example—are undoubtedly filmic, but the show itself was one of a series that played out in real time before substantial live audiences. The arrangement of the space serves as a visual cue that the performance operated primarily as a live theatrical event. The OC Pavilion Theatre in Santa Ana, CA is regularly used as a live performance venue, and features a raked auditorium with fixed seating and a raised not-quite-proscenium stage. Furthermore, since the television special came into being only after the tour had become successful, the live audiences must have been the ones that the comics had in mind when they devised their sets. Most importantly, the presence of an audience is central to understanding how this performance operated. The spectators’ responses and apparent demographics, as well as how the comics addressed and referred to them during their sets were key elements in how the comics intervened in the perception of their ethnicities. The version of the show that was recorded for Comedy Central is divided into four sets, each of which is about fifteen minutes long and is performed by a single comedian. Emphasizing the increased scrutiny that people of Middle Eastern heritage have experienced since the attacks of 9/11, each of the comics begins his set by entering the stage through an airport-style metal detector, and engages in a brief skit with an ignorant and obnoxious TSA agent, played by African-American actor and comedian Loni Love. During each of their sets, the comics address the same basic question: what is it like to be an American of Middle Eastern heritage in a post-9/11 world. There is, consequently, considerable overlap in the content of the sets, as each comic offers his own take on several subjects, including terrorism, the absurdity of racial stereotypes, frustration with negative media portrayals of the Middle East and its people, and the ubiquity of racial profiling at airport security. While all of the sets present variations of the same general theme, each of the comics has a unique style and presents his set with a slightly different focus. Throughout the performance, race remains in the foreground as all of the comics self-identify by ethnicity, and each asks at least one group within the audience to do the same. Opening the show is Dean Obeidallah, a half-Arab/half-Italian from New Jersey who identifies primarily as Palestinian. Performing his set with a quiet geniality, Obeidallah’s focus is on encouraging his audience to think critically about race, racism, and the erosion of civil liberties. The second comic to perform is Egyptian-born Arab, Ahmed Ahmed. Ahmed’s comedy is more acerbic and cutting than Obeidallah’s, and he skewers the racism of the TSA and Hollywood (including his own complicity as an actor) with unflinching directness. Aron Kader performs the third set. The American-born son of a Palestinian father and white Mormon mother, Kader’s comedy focuses on his simultaneous access to, and discomfort with, the two sides of his ethnic identity. Closing out the show is Iranian Maz Jobrani. Performing with a warm and easy affect, Jobrabni is a master of the ridiculous. His high energy comedy often hinges on proposing an absurd scenario, and then acting it out to highlight its impossibility, a technique he applies with equal abandon whether imitating a terrorist who (having dialed the wrong number) accidentally tips him off to an attack, or children playing hide and seek with a young Osama bin Laden. Although the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour was unquestionably intended to entertain, the comics have also expressed the hope that their performance would serve a larger, more progressive purpose. In a March 2007 interview with the New York Times, the comics explained that they saw their work as an extension of a tradition of minority comedy in the United States, by which Jewish, black, and LGBT comedians used their craft to fight discrimination.[5] Elaborating on their desire to address negative attitudes towards Americans of Middle Eastern heritage, Obeidallah remarked that “There’s a sense of activism [in the show.] We want to show the talent and try to do something for positive coverage in the mainstream media.”[6] Indeed, the desire to foster understanding and counter negative stereotypes was a pervasive theme during the 2006 performance. During a period when the dominant image of Middle Eastern men was, as it continues to be, that of the terrorist—a role both Jobrani and Ahmed have played in order to make a living as actors—the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour was, as Jobrani explained “about putting out the positive and expressing that we can come together and laugh.”[7] This desire to “come together and laugh” echoes what sociologist Muchait Bilici argues is the central project of contemporary Muslim ethnic comedy: the desire “to bridge the divide that separates Muslims from the rest of American society by reaffirming both sides’ common humanity.”[8] While Bilici frames this process as a multilateral exchange (and, indeed the comics’ subsequent tours to the Middle East have made explicit efforts towards this kind of mutual understanding) this particular performance is focused on one side of the equation: rehabilitating the image of Muslim and ethnically Middle Eastern-Americans in the eyes of the wider US population. As Obeidallah later explained in a 2010 interview: Of course if all you see on TV is that Muslims are dusty dudes walking around with AK47’s in some kind of formation, that’s what you are going to think of Muslims. But, if you are given competing examples, like Muslims who are nice and fluffy adorable comedians running around the country, bowling with people, then I think that will change what you are going to think of Muslims.[9] The comics in this performance are working towards the expressed aim of communicating what it is to be Arab/Persian/Muslim in a way that is intelligible and accessible to the wider American population. It is the humanity of Middle Eastern-Americans that has been called into question and that needs to be reaffirmed; consequently, it is the wider US community whose perceptions the comics are out to change. This focus on changing outsider perceptions does not, however, mean comics are dismissive of those members of the audience who do share their ethnic background. To some extent, the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour is at least partly concerned with engendering a feeling of shared experience and common identity among its Middle Eastern-American audience members. The comics frequently address the audience in a way that presupposes a shared heritage. At the beginning of the show, for example, Dean Obeidallah introduces the performance by saying: “Let me ask: how many people are of Middle Eastern heritage here tonight? [Most of the audience cheers].” Similarly, Jobrani begins his set with a chant of “doo du doo doo IRAN!” that would be immediately intelligible primarily to people familiar with Iranian soccer matches. Later, he addresses his Arab audience members with the comment “We [Arabs and Persians] are very similar [. . . ] I get stupid questions, I know you do too.” Clearly differentiating between Middle Eastern insiders and the wider dominant USA culture, these moments do privilege Middle Eastern audience members. But while this type of insider reference may mark a portion of the audience as “outsiders,” it does not seek to exclude them. Instead, the comics in this performance make specific and deliberate attempts to reach out to those audience members who do not identify as Arab or Persian Americans, inviting them to view the border between their identities and the performers’ as permeable. The comics make their comedy accessible to a wider audience by frequently framing their insider comments with explanations for outsiders. Jobrani, for example, explains that “doo du doo doo IRAN!” is shouted at soccer games, and Ahmed clarifies that “haraam” means “against God,” explanations that would be unnecessary when addressing an audience comprised entirely of insiders. By granting those audience members who do not share their insider knowledge access to these references, the comics invite their understanding and, by extension, empathy. At the same time, the comics use these moments to establish their role as emissaries, performing both their status as an insider who can speak with authority on behalf of their group, and their willingness to share their knowledge with those outside it. When the portion of the audience that does share the comics’ heritage laughs at these references, they signal their agreement with the perspective that the comics express, lending further weight to their claims. In effect, by addressing multiple audiences simultaneously and by alternating between inside references and outreach, the comics reinscribe “Middle Eastern-American” as a cohesive community, while at the same time rebranding it as open and accessible to outsiders. As Ahmed puts it when addressing the white people in the audience, “welcome to our meeting.” Dean Obeidallah makes use of his position as emissary in a bit he performs part way through his set, mocking a list of offensive comments people have made about his ethnicity. Speaking conversationally, Obeidallah sets up the bit by emphasizing that the stories he is about to tell are true. He explains, “I think the best way to explain what it’s like to be Arab-American now is to share with you some of the comments people have said to me about my own heritage to my face. And I’ve actually written them down in this notebook.” Pulling a notepad from his pocket, Obeidallah provides physical evidence that the material he is about to deliver comes from his own lived experience. As he flips through the notepad, he further emphasizes this point: “But these are actual—I’m not exaggerating—these are actual comments that people have said when I tell them I’m Arab.” Framing his narrative as an explanation for presumably sympathetic non-Middle Eastern audience members, Obeidallah positions them as allies. By laughing at the racist comments other people have made, these audience members perform their acceptance of this role. These invitations extended to the wider population are even more effective because they take place in a performative context that depends on creating a sense of personal connection between audience and performer. Folklorist Ian Brodie describes this aspect of stand-up in his 2008 article, “Stand-up Comedy as Genre of Intimacy.” Brodie theorizes that stand-up comedy is “predicated on the illusion of intimacy” between audience and performer, an illusion it cultivates in two ways. First, the performance’s use of artificial amplification allows the performer to speak in a natural, conversational tone. Second, the performers incorporate personal statements and descriptions of their lived experiences into the comic narrative, typically framing these revelations as true.[10] In this respect, stand-up comedy is predisposed towards fostering an illusion that the audience has come to know the performer personally. According to Brodie, the result of this illusion of intimacy is that stand-up takes on the folkloric character of legend: it becomes a dialogic, interpersonal mode of communication in which one party communicates a worldview through a story told as true, and the other is expected to signal their agreement (through laughter, in the case of comedy).[11] In this construction, the seemingly intimate nature of the performance encourages the audience to empathise with the performer, to embrace their perspective and to perform their assent through laughter. Having emphasized that he is about to share a personal narrative, Obeidallah deploys his lived experience in a dialogic format that encourages the audience to perform their agreement with his perspective. “Oh, you’re Arab,” he begins. “Wow, I love hummus.” After a brief pause, he continues, often using facial expressions of pain or embarrassment to signal the effect that these comments have had on him. “‘Oh, you’re Arab. Oooh-kay.’ Nothing more. ‘Oh, you’re Arab. But you seem so nice.’” Implicit in his narrative is the argument that these views of his ethnicity are both pervasive and so blatantly false as to be worthy of ridicule. He pauses briefly between each example, signaling to the audience that he expects them to signal their agreement through laughter. The segment operates dialogically, and its success depends on Obeidallah’s ability to effectively address his dual audience. For those audience members who share the comic’s Middle Eastern heritage, it serves as an act of solidarity as well as a cathartic repudiation of the ignorance of the wider US population. At the same time, their presence and laughter serve to confirm to those outsiders present that Obeidallah’s narrative represents a collective truth. For those audience members who do not share his identity position, the segment serves to model the rejection of these microagressions. Much as Obeidallah appeals to his dual audience in order to engender empathy, Kader deploys a similar technique to undermine a pervasive fear of Middle Eastern hostility by demonstrating a shared sense of humor. As Bilici notes, “humor usually stands for humanity. If someone has a sense of humor, then he is just like us: likeable.”[12] Thus, content aside, the mere act of appearing in a comedy show as a Muslim or Middle Eastern-American is an act of ethnic/religious rebranding. Kader acknowledges as much early in his set when he jokes, Usually Arabs don’t come to a comedy show. . . . In the past, Arabs would come to a comedy show but they’d sit in the back in the dark and go [folds arms and assumes an Arab accent and a serious tone] “yeah, that was good. That was funny; I like that. . . . You can almost hear me laugh. . . . Anyone who thinks Arabs don’t have a sense of humor I will kill you and burn your flag. We have a very good sense of humor.” Performing the humorless Arab in the context of his own comedy show, Kader creates comic dissonance that highlights the distance between the humorless stereotype and his own humorous reality. By laughing at the joke, the Middle Eastern members of the audience perform the falseness of the stereotype en masse, amplifying the dissonance that Kader created and engaging in their own act of collective outreach. The subtext of this joke goes beyond suggesting that Middle Easterners are human because they can laugh; like many moments in the show, it directly confronts the dominant culture’s fears that people of Middle Eastern extraction are religiously fanatical and violent. The Arab that Kader performs does not merely fail to laugh; he threatens violence, saying he will “kill you and burn your flag.” In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler theorizes that most comedy stems from what he terms “an aggressive-defensive tendency.” That is to say, most comedy is an expression—however indirect or subtle—of a desire to either exert one’s superiority over, or to defend oneself from, something or someone deemed threatening. Illustrating this second type, Koestler explains that “one of the typical situations in which laughter occurs is the sudden cessation of danger, real or imagined.”[13] In this vein, much of the comedy of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour stems from invoking the fear that people from the Middle East are dangerous, and rebranding them as safe and likeable. This particular thrust of rebranding comedy is especially prominent in Jobrani’s lovable Persian character, which uses comic incongruity to defuse fears of Iranian hostility. Describing Persians as a group, Jobrani smiles, leans backwards, and repeatedly opens his arms in a welcoming gesture. Adopting a Persian accent, he explains “Iranians don’t even say we’re Iranian. We say we’re Persian. You know, it sounds nicer, friendlier . . . I am not dangerous; I am Persian. I am Persian, like the cat. Meow!” This bit is not without irony: underlying the lovable Persian character is the implication that Iran, as a country, actually is dangerous (Jobrani describes Iran’s “peaceful nuclear program,” for example, as “first we blow you up, then we hug you”). But while the humor depends on an acknowledgement of Iran’s danger as a state, it contrasts this against the outgoing affability of Persians as a people, and suggests resistance to the country’s aggressive international stance. Later, Jobrani frames the perception that people from the Middle East are violent as the product of selective representations in popular media. “Just once,” he laments, I wish they would show us doing something positive. Just once, right? . . . Show us doing something good, like, you know, like baking a cookie or something. Right? ‘Cause I’ve been to Iran; we have cookies. Just once I want CNN to be like “now we’re going to go to Mohammad in Iran.” They go to some guy who’s like [switches to Middle Eastern accent] “Hello, I’m Mohammad. And I’m just baking a cookie. I swear to God, no bombs, no flags, nothing. Back to you Bob.” Recasting the supposedly violent Iranian as a nice guy who likes to bake, Jobrani sheds light on the discriminatory incompleteness of media portrayals, inviting the audience to repudiate it through recognition and laughter. At the same time, his comedy allows for a comedic release of tension for both those who have been afraid of Middle Eastern violence, and those who have been burdened with the stereotype. Addressing both sides of his audience simultaneously, Jobrani momentarily brings together his Middle Eastern and non-Middle Eastern spectators by undermining the power of the fear that separates them. Jobrani’s use of accents in this bit serves to further emphasize the ease with which he can slip between identity positions, a strategy that is particularly common among comics of Middle Eastern heritage. As Bilici notes, “These cultural entrepreneurs claim knowledge of both worlds: ethnic and mainstream,” an intermediary position Bilici claims is “best illustrated in their ability to go back and forth between accented and normal speech.”[14] Occupying a liminal space between minority and majoritarian culture, Bilici explains, the Muslim comic “stands uneasily on the fault line, yet by standing there he becomes a sort of stitch that holds together the two sides of the cultural rift.”[15] While I would question Bilici’s designation of an American accent as “normal speech,” he makes the apt observation that the fluid transition between deliberately accented English and their own habitual North American speech patterns serves to mark the comic as a go between with access to two distinct cultural identities. This function of the comic’s fluid use of accents is particularly apparent in the work of Maz Jobrani. Early in his set, after first introducing himself as “the Iranian of the group” in an American accent, Jobrani slips into a Persian accent to chant “Doo du doo doo IRAN!” By transitioning smoothly between American and Persian accents, and by first introducing his Persian accent in the context of an expression of national pride—a soccer chant—Jobrani establishes his insider status in both groups: he is proud of his Persian heritage, but this identity is in no way incompatible with his identity as an American. Later in his set, Jobrani does an extended bit in which he performs and describes the difference between Persian and Arab accents. Where his soccer chant seemed to be directed primarily to those audience members who shared his ethnic identity (and who would, therefore, be more likely to recognize and appreciate the chant), his discussion of different Middle Eastern accents is directed to both Middle Eastern and Non-Middle Eastern Americans. For the former, his gentle mockery of Persian and Arab accents makes an appeal to familiarity, confirming a shared cultural knowledge between Jobrani and those audience members already acquainted with the accents in question and the differences between the two. For those audience members who are less familiar with the accents, Jobrani’s description serves a different purpose: it positions Jobrani as an inside informant who can provide his non-Middle Eastern audience with access to unfamiliar cultural groups. But while the comics’ use of Arab and Persian accents does often work to establish their simultaneous access to and knowledge of multiple groups, the choice to use an accent that reads as foreign can also serve to differentiate between their own American identities and characters who cannot as easily lay claim to insider status in the United States—the foreigner, the recent immigrant, and the terrorist. Obeidallah and Kader, for example, each transition into Middle Eastern accents when representing their foreign or immigrant relatives. Obeidallah uses a Palestinian accent to perform his father as an innocent and befuddled immigrant who does not understand American idioms. When his Jersey friends ask his father “‘Yo, Mr. Obeidallah! What’s goin’ on? How you doin’? What’s goin’ on,” Dean Obeidallah explains, his father would reply, “I don’t know what is going on! My wife tells me nothing. Dean, what is it? Are things going down? Please somebody tell me what it is.” Similarly, when the elder Obeidallah takes communion at his wife’s Catholic church, he remarks that the wafer “needs more salt. . . . Why it does not taste better, I do not get. Ok? You can’t have like a nacho flavor, or a baklava, something fun for everybody?” By gently mocking his father’s bewilderment and pairing it with a foreign accent, Obeidallah contrasts his father’s status as an immigrant and outsider with his own insider status as a native-born American. Kader’s accented performance of his America-hating cousin serves a similar purpose. Adopting a thick Arab accent, Kader embarks on a monologue depicting his Jordanian cousin who complains continuously about “you son of a bitch bastard United States,” but who embraces Burger King and Starbucks. By positioning himself in contrast to his foreign cousin, Kader establishes himself and other Americans of Middle Eastern heritage as Americans first and foremost. In the middle of his cousin’s rant about American imperialism and his hopes for the empire’s collapse, Kader explains, he interrupted and said “Listen, Fayed, if America goes down, we’re taking Snickers and Coke and Pepsi and Twix—you know we’re not leaving a McNugget behind.” Here, Kader makes his Americanness and allegiance to American cultural interests explicit. Although Kader is critical of the United States’ tendency to “dominate with products,” he is nonetheless defensive in the face of his foreign cousin’s anti-American diatribe. Like Kader’s representation of his cousin, Ahmed’s performance of Arab speech patterns serves to underscore his own Americanness as well as his allegiance to the USA in its interests abroad. He claims to love watching news reports from the Middle East because all Middle Eastern people always start each sentence with [clicks tongue] ehhhhhhhhhhhhh. [Clicks tongue] Ehhhhhhhhhhhh [continues for three seconds, then begins speaking in a heavy Arab accent], The damned United States of America, they come into our country and they bomb our, ehhhhhhhhh. . . . [switching to North American accent] Just finish the sentence, Mustafa! Performing the resident of a Middle Eastern country as a bumbling half-wit who can barely speak (rather than an educated polyglot searching for the right words in his second language), Ahmed distances Americans of Middle Eastern descent from foreign Arabs and Muslims on the receiving end of United States military action. Ahmed’s self-identification as Egyptian at the beginning of his set softens the representation by implying an element of self-mockery, but by performing the foreign Arab as heavily accented and blundering, Ahmed implies that he has more in common, linguistically and culturally, with the Americans doing the bombing than the intellectually inferior, and potentially enemy, Arab “Mustafa.” While the performances of foreign relatives are mitigated by the performer’s affection—however frustrated—for the character he portrays, Ahmed’s performance seems less forgiving. In contrast to Kader and Obeidallah whose mockery can be characterized as the familial teasing of a specific relative’s quirks, Ahmed’s representation is targeted at a broad foreign type. In this respect, his portrayal of the foreign “Mustafa” has more in common with the other performers’ enactment of the terrorist archetype, and risks reinforcing prejudices against Middle Easterners abroad. In this respect, the comics tread a dangerous line between defusing and merely displacing such prejudices in their performances of Middle Eastern terrorists. In the course of the hour long show, each of the performers evokes the specter of Middle Eastern terrorism in two ways: commenting on the effects that Middle Eastern terrorism has had on them as Americans of Middle Eastern descent; and presenting stylized representations of terrorist figures. When performing a terrorist character, the comic almost invariably signals the transition from his own persona to the character by switching to a thick Middle Eastern accent. Ahmed, for example, uses an Arab accent to portray a terrorist, somewhere in the Middle East, who shares his name. Jobrani uses an Iranian accent to depict a terrorist who, having dialed the wrong number, tips him off to an impending attack in a midnight phone call. In his critique of the Patriot Act, Obeidallah imitates an Arab terrorist seeking information from an American library. In a thick accent, he asks the imagined librarian: “Do you have a book on, how you say, waging a Jihad against the infidel dog?” This exaggerated performance serves a dual function. On one level, by enacting the caricature of the Muslim as America-hating Jihadist, Obeidallah exposes the inherent contradiction of the stereotype used to justify the Patriot Act’s erosion of intellectual freedoms: Muslims are configured both as perpetual foreigners who cannot fully integrate into the culture of the United States, and as sneaky infiltrators who could pass unnoticed if not for government surveillance. But although Obeidallah is critical of the stereotype as a whole, by juxtaposing his own New Jersey speech patterns with implicitly foreign accent and phrasing (“how you say...”), he also highlights the distance between foreign terrorists and native-born Americans of Middle Eastern heritage. In sum, Obeidallah both calls the stereotype into question as incongruous, and illustrates that—even if it were an accurate representation of someone—it does not represent him. Moments such as these in which the comics use foreign-sounding accents to differentiate between the American of Middle Eastern heritage and the foreign terrorist are troubling: at the same time that they make Arab and Persian-Americans seem less threatening by emphasizing their Americanness, they run the risk of reinforcing prejudices directed at foreigners. But while such moments may be problematic, the comics counterbalance them with segments in which they deliberately question and destabilize the Orientalist assumptions that “foreign” accents can evoke. Obeidallah, for example, openly challenges the audience’s perception of Middle Eastern speech patterns, explaining to them that, “you’ve been conditioned by the media to be afraid of people with accents. And I can show you; I can say the same thing with or without a Middle Eastern accent; it can change the whole meaning.” He proceeds to illustrate his point by repeating the line “Hey, wait ‘till Friday night: we’ve been planning this for months. People will be talking about this for years,” first with an American accent and subsequently with an Arab accent. As the audience laughs, he reproaches them “Scary right? It’s scary because, sadly, you’re all racists.” While other moments in the show might use accents to differentiate between the Middle Eastern foreigner and the Middle Eastern American, Obeidallah’s commentary on how these accents are received calls on the audience to re-examine their assumptions. Jobrani executes a similar disruption through his imitation of his ethnically East Indian wife. Following this impersonation—of which a key feature is a heavy Indian accent—he reverts to his natural speaking voice and reveals that “she doesn’t sound like that. She was born here.” This is a moment of disruptive finesse. From the beginning of this bit, he was open that he was performing a stereotype—differentiating between East Indians and American Indians, he clarifies that his wife is “the computer kind” and not “the casino kind”—an example of his usual technique of repeating stereotypes so brazenly that they seem shockingly absurd. But his subsequent revelation that his wife does not, in fact, have a foreign accent packs a subtle double punch. On one hand, it marks the preceding imitation as a fabrication, reiterating that the generalization that Indians are good with computers is suspect. At the same time, the revelation also addresses those in the audience to whom the heavy accent seemed natural, and destabilizes the assumption that this woman who identifies as East Indian is necessarily foreign. This moment in which he reveals that he has been performing a stereotype rather than a person destabilizes every racial enactment he engages in throughout the set—from his wife, to the racist white Texan, to the generic Middle Eastern terrorist, to the lovable Persian—as well as those enacted by his fellow comedians in the rest of the show. In their 2006 performance in Santa Ana California, the comics of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour used their liminal positions and the intimacy of stand-up comedy to combat prejudice and create positive representations of people of Middle Eastern heritage in the United States. In their subsequent work, they have broadened their diplomatic mission, using the same techniques to foster mutual understanding between residents of both regions. In 2007, Jobrani, Ahmed, and Kader took the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour to the Middle East, performing twenty-seven shows in five countries. In the years since the tour disbanded, all of the comics have continued various acts of political and cultural outreach, both in the United States and abroad. In 2009 Ahmed founded Cross-Cultural Productions, with the expressed purpose of using comedy to create cross-cultural dialogue and understanding. For the company’s inaugural project, eleven American comedians—including Ahmed and Jobrani—went on a tour of the Middle East, a diplomatic project they chronicled in the 2010 film Just Like Us.[16] In 2012, Obeidallah and Kader also toured in the Middle East. Like Ahmed and Jobrani, their recent work has been characterized by a shift towards reciprocity. As Daily News Egypt reported when discussing Kader and Obeidallah’s visit to Egypt, “Building bridges is a two-way street. While these comedians are challenging the status quo of Middle Eastern misconceptions in America, they are also winning hearts and minds in the Middle East.”[17] Throughout this work, their dual identities as Middle Eastern-Americans have allowed them to serve as intermediaries. As Kader notes, “in America I feel obligated to inform an audience about the Middle East and there I am an American with an obligation to describe what Americans are feeling.”[18] In this sense, their work continues to depend on their liminal identities, and their ability to cross between a dominant culture and a feared Other through their simultaneous status as insider and outsider. This shift in the work of these comics is in keeping with changes in how United States audiences perceive the Middle East. In the years since they performed in Santa Ana, the political landscape has shifted somewhat, allowing a more nuanced popular view of the Middle East to emerge. Osama Bin Laden is dead. While the region remains unstable, the United States has withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan. Hawkish representations of the terrorist threat, though still present, have consequently become less urgent and less monolithic in US media. At the same time, internal conflicts within Middle Eastern countries have changed how people within the United States see the citizens of those countries. Uprisings such as the protests following the disputed 2009 elections in Iran, the Egyptian revolution of 2011, and the ongoing civil war and humanitarian crisis in Syria have allowed a more nuanced image of their populations to emerge: although images of people in the Middle East as America-hating terrorists have by no means disappeared, they are now mitigated by narratives of the people of that region as human beings who can suffer and resist, and with whom dialogue is possible and desirable. In this sense, the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour stands as both a record of its historical moment, and as a starting point for the comedians’ future acts of cultural diplomacy. By destabilizing the border between Middle Eastern-American and broader USA identities, and by positioning themselves as emissaries who could bring the two groups together, the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour sought to improve perceptions of a mistrusted ethnic group through strategies that extend well beyond presenting positive images. This is not to say that the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour was entirely unproblematic: at times, it ran the risk of displacing problematic stereotypes onto a more distant foreign Other rather than disrupting them, and the comics’ insistence on their own patriotism had the potential to lend unintended support to the same national hegemony their comedy critiqued. Despite these pitfalls, however, the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour stands as an example of how stand-up comedy can be used as a response to prejudice, and points to its potential as a humanizing expression of multi-ethnic connectivity. Tamara Smith holds a PhD in Theatre History and Criticism from the University of Texas at Austin. An independent scholar whose research focuses on expressions of identity in popular performance, she has presented at SETC, MATC, ASTR and ATHE, and has published in JADT and Ecumenica. She currently lives in Halifax, Canada. [1] Maz Jobrani, et al., The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, directed by Michael Simon (Los Angeles, CA: Levity Entertainment Group, 2008), DVD. [2] Felicia R. Lee, “Comedians as Activists, Challenging Prejudice,” New York Times (via Maz Jobrani's Press Kit), 10 March 2007, B7. [3] Paul McLoughlin, “Home-Grown Comedy,” in Y: Pulse of the New Generation, 20 April 2010, 27. [4] Betsy Rothstein, “Laughing with the Axis of Evil,” The Hill (via Maz Jobrani's Press Kit). 2007;Lee, “Comedians as Activists,” B7. [5] Qtd. in Lee, “Comedians as Activists,” B7. [6] Qtd. in ibid. [7] Jobrani et al., “The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour.” [8] Mucahit Bilici, “Muslim Ethnic Comedy: Inversions of Islamophobia,” in Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend, ed. Andrew Shyrock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 196. [9] Natasha Baker. “The Muslims are Coming! U.S. Comedy Duo Combats Islamophobia.” Interview with Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah. Al Arabiya, 17 September 2013. [10] Ian Brodie, “Stand-up Comedy as a Genre of Intimacy,” Ethnologies 30, no. 2 (2008): 170. [11] Ibid., 162. [12] Bilici, “Muslim Ethnic Comedy,” 195. [13] Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Arkana, 1989), 54. [14] Bilici, “Muslim Ethnic Comedy,” 196. [15] Ibid. [16] Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada,“My Name is Ahmed Ahmed, and I am Just Like You.” Interview with Ahmed Ahmed, Magazine Intercultures, Centre for Intercultural Learning, http://www.international.gc.ca/cfsi-icse/cil-cai/magazine/v07n02/1-3-eng.asp (accessed 10 March 2014). [17] Sadia Ashraf. “Mideastern US Comedians Combat Politics with Humor,” Daily News Egypt, 9 April 2012, 3. [18] Ibid. “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with "The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour" by Tamara L. Smith ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 3 (Fall 2014) ©2014 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: 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 Table of Contents: Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre by Karen Bowdre History is Distance: Metaphor, Meaning, and Performance in Serenade/The Proposition by Ariel Nereson Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Histories, Futures, and Queer Lives by Vanessa Campagna “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with "The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour" by Tamara L. Smith www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2014 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre History is Distance: Metaphor, Meaning, and Performance in Serenade/The Proposition Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Histories, Futures, and Queer Lives “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour 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.

David Pellegrini Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. David Pellegrini By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF In 2019, the Langham Court Theatre in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada inaugurated the Risk Theatre Modern Tragedy Competition, awarding top prize ($8,000 Canadian) to In Bloom by Brooklyn-based playwright Gabriel Jason Dean. Selected from 182 new play submissions from 11 countries, In Bloom focuses on a “well-intentioned, but ultimately reckless documentary filmmaker in Afghanistan” whose actions led to the death of an Afghan boy—a tragedy he lies about in his award-winning memoir. This 21st century competition for tragic playwriting began as a partnership with classicist Edwin Wong, who lays out a blueprint for playwrights (and the competition’s rules) in The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Wong exalts three golden eras—ancient Greece; the English Renaissance; and German Romanticism—noting that after Eugene O’Neill, whom he cites as the last “true” tragedian in the Aeschylean tradition, tragic art largely vanished. That tradition is premised on a fairly simple formula, albeit with myriad variations: each dramatic action is also a gambling act involving varying degrees of unforeseen or unexpected risks. Wong’s goal with this book, like the contest, is to revivify this tragic principle for our contemporary age in which “low-probability, high consequence events lie in wait” (xxv). Although tragedy may have trafficked in uncertainty since its inception, Wong emphasizes the moral exigencies of examining the upside and downside values of risk and unintended consequences in an era in which there is an over-reliance on technology, nuclear energy, and the variabilities of global economic exchange. Wong’s overall argument in The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy is erudite, elucidated with extensive passages from canonical and lesser-known works and a wide range of theoretical citations. He is partial to the troika, apropos of ancient trilogies, and efficient in outlining the tripartite structure by which characters confront temptation, make wagers, and cast dice. In the first three chapters, Wong elaborates on the gambling metaphor and constructs a lexicon of qualifying terms. His first major categorization is premised on “tempo”; specifically whether the three gambling acts are presented gradually over the course of a play; backloaded, in which time lapses between wager and die-cast to build suspense; or frontloaded, in which the wager occurs early with the bulk of action depicting the ensuing chaos. Nestled within these categories is the frequency of the wager, e.g., standalone, if it occurs once as in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus; parallel-motion, in which several characters confront multiple risk events as demonstrated by O’Neill’s Strange Interlude; or perpetual-motion, whereby one wager generates subsequent wagers as in the Oresteia. Together, these first three chapters become a kind of periaktoi, the ancient, multi-surfaced scene-changing device conjectured by Vitruvius, underpinning Wong’s structural analysis. This first section grounds the third, “A Poetics of Tragedy: How to Write Risk Theatre,” providing playwrights with a comprehensive, formal analysis of the genre and a toolbox of dramaturgical strategies from which to choose. These “commonplaces” include the following features: a range of heroic types all driven by “white-hot” passions and best represented by elites since they have the most to lose; the interference of unreliable confidantes and meddlers; and dangerous, unstable environs, including, if necessary, the supernatural. As a writer, Wong’s associative style is entertaining, tempering what might appear to be an overly schematic approach. Moreover, when employing a wide range of ideas from social theory to the physical sciences to elucidate his foundational metaphor, Wong manages some impressive hypothetical risk-taking of his own. This audacity emerges most clearly in the book’s second and fourth sections in which Wong expounds on the philosophy of tragedy and galvanizes his case about risk theatre’s relevancy to modernity, respectively. For example, Wong poses an original paradigm (“the myth of the price you pay”) in which he traces how tragedy developed as a counter-force to the commodification of life via labor, when the psychic and existential dimensions of humanity such as camaraderie, desire, and honor became objects for philosophical contemplation. Tragedy, therefore, emerged when it became necessary to demonstrate that “what is worth possessing cannot be monetized” (107). Relatedly, Wong’s paradigm of “counter-monetization,” refers to the human costs of the wager depicted in tragedy—its irrevocability, gravity, and frequent culmination in death and destruction. The final, equally compelling strand of his argument surveys the time-bound parameters of tragic theories from the French Academy through Hegel and Nietzsche to arrive at our own “risk age,” in which “the scale of technology to do good or to do evil has increased, and continues to increase, by powers of ten” (262). There is much to admire in Wong’s argument, and it is remarkable how much the language of so many tragedies explicitly allude to gambling, economic costs, and risk-related values, both monetary and existential. Still, there are numerous counter-arguments advanced in the seemingly inexhaustible body of tragic theory that are noticeably absent or side-stepped in this study. For example, Wong’s opinion that the best tragic heroes come from a nobler breed legitimates the aristocratic bias rebuffed by practitioner/theorists from Lessing to Miller. Also, since he devalues the artificiality of the deus ex machina, Sophocles fares far better than Euripides, even though scholars have long argued that the latter’s subversion of tragic structure served to critique Attic social hypocrisies and cosmological fallacies. Further, feminist scholars will certainly reject the phallocentrism and linearity of what is, at base, a reformulation of Aristotelian and neoclassical models; it is noteworthy that Wong does not discuss any plays written by women. Relatedly, although Wong’s aim to rejuvenate tragic theatre is valiant, some consideration of film and, especially, any number of episodic television programs that veer towards tragedy would perfectly illustrate his parallel- and perpetual-motion categories since the cliff-hanger is predicated on temptation, wagers, and risks—and sometimes all three at once. Still, the fact that there were over three-hundred entries in the Langham Court Theatre competition in its first two years and that the top prizewinners, including most of the nine runners-up, are American suggests that risk theatre may well be a fitting response to an era in which the United States confronts improbable, (perhaps) unforeseeable, and oftentimes catastrophic events. References Footnotes About The Author(s) David Pellegrini Eastern Connecticut State University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 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.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 18, Fall, 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage “Regietheater:” two cases By Ivan Medenica Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF It is well known that the main characteristic of Middle and East European theatre during the past century has been the so-called “directorial theatre” (the most familiar formulation being in German,“Regietheater”), quite unlike the mainstream of British and American theatre. In this text I review productions of two highly regarded directors from this part of Europe, whose work is clearly in this tradition: Czech director Dušan David Pařízek and his Bulgarian colleague Alexander Morfov. The Moscoviad . Photo: Patrik Borecký. The performance The Moscoviad , based on Yuri Andrukhovych’s novel and staged by Dušan David Pařízek, was performed within the PQ+, a show-case of contemporary Czech theatre offered as a side program to the 2023 Prague Quadrennial. Andrukhovych is a contemporary Ukrainian writer, and this novel about the collapse of the Soviet Union was written in 1993. Pařízek is one of the foremost Czech directors of the middle generation, mostly working in German speaking countries. Unlike other performances in the PQ+ program, all of which were productions of leading Prague institutional theatres, The Moscoviad was produced by an independent platform,Theatre X10, which seeks to create critical thinking that reflects social reality. Audiences familiar with Pařízek’s earlier work will most certainly recognize the main features of his directorial poetics in The Moscoviad. In terms of stage design, and in general, in terms of its visual aspects the performance is marked with noticeable minimalism and reduction of stage devices. In the middle of the non-theatre space of TheatreX10 (originally a gallery in the basement of a modernist high-rise built in 1936) Pařízek put a wooden platform resembling a stage on a stage. The actors play around it, on it and, also, with it—transforming it, moving it and rearranging its densely arranged planks which cover and thus bridge the desks. When put together, the desks and the planks form the said platform which is at the same time the functional space of the performance and an independent visual installation (Pařízek himself is credited for the stage design). Visual, performative, but most of all, metaphorical climax in space utilisation happens when the actors disassemble the platform energetically and vociferously, leaving just separated desks as performance space. They then stab the planks between the desks, amplify them with light, projecting their shadows on the walls, thus creating a stunning abstract installation. However, the installation is not as abstract as it seems at first, because it can be interpreted as a rather direct and blunt metaphor. The collapse of the stage world is equivalent to one of the central topics in Andrukhovych’s novel which Pařízek himself dramatized: the equally vociferous and violent collapse of the Soviet Union. Those familiar with his much awarded production of Wolfram Lotz's The Ridiculous Darkness at the Burgtheater Vienna will recognize his directorial signature: a wooden wall composed of planks which disintegrates vociferously at the most important moment in the performance and is scattered across the stage. The Moscoviad . Photo: Patrik Borecký. The novel The Moscoviad seems realistic at first. It is about a day in the life of a young Ukrainian poet Otto von F. who is spending the last weeks of the Union in an “artists’ residence” at the institute of Soviet writers in Moscow. There, he is in the company of equally drunk and disheartened writers from other regions of the dying empire. They spend their time arguing and quarrelling about nationalism, communism, democracy, god and all else that preoccupies Slavs’ poetic souls. The context of the literature institute, vivid descriptions of Moscow and, as we shall later see, certain fantastic elements—all form intertextual links with another novel by another renowned writer also originating from the Ukraine, Mikhail Bulgakov and his famous novel The Master and Margarita . The story is only just realistic. In essence, it is really a foundation for a grotesque, fantastic, macabre parable, including the descent into the underground world, concerning Russia’s profound blindness regarding the direction in which the whole of Europe was heading at the beginning of the 1990s. One of the main topics in both the novel and the performance are Russian political and police elites’ insincere and unsuccessful attempts to adapt to these circumstances, while in reality they continue to fantasize about not only of upholding the Soviet/Russian empire but also of expanding it westwards, to Western Europe. One needs not emphasize how strikingly real and painful this story is today, even more so at the time of Russian aggression against Ukraine. Yet, in my opinion, the real value of both the novel and the performance lies elsewhere, in something just a shade different. Despite being uncompromisingly criticizing of Russian imperialism, neither Andrukhovych’s novel nor Pařízek’s production are mere propaganda. Quite the contrary, they are interwoven with subtle (auto)irony and genuine humanity. The auto-irony stems from, most of all, the text itself. In his letters/dreams the main character, already mentioned (fictional) Ukrainian poet Otto von V., addresses the, also fictional, heir to the throne of what one might call the “Ukrainian world.” This, in itself, may not be significant to Anglo-Saxon audiences. Yet, those from Central and East Europe are all too familiar with these national confabulations and cannot but at least smile (if not laugh due to respect for the tragedy happening in Ukraine) upon recognizing them. This subtle irony is maintained in Pařízek’s work with four great actors appearing in different roles: Gabriela Míčová, Stanislav Majer, Václav Marhold and Martin Pechlát. Besides the ironic and grotesque, their amazing performances showcase other registers as well: strong emotionalism, igneous energy, clearly differentiated characters and their relationships, skillful improvisation … Such an acting approach combined with fitting poetics employed by both the writer and the director result in an artistically relevant and politically balanced performance. In conclusion, I would like to stress that although uncompromisingly critical towards Russian imperialism, the performance of The Moscoviad does not fall into the trap of Russophobia, which today is, sadly, often the case even in the matters of arts. The 70th anniversary of the Montenegrin National Theatre in Podgorica was celebrated with a premiere of The Visit , a performance based on a well-known play by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Visit of the Old Lady (Der Besuch der alten Dame) , written in the 1950s. The performance was directed by one of the foremost Bulgarian, and European directors Alexander Morfov. The Visit . Photo: Dusko Milhanic. Although it belongs to what one might call “contemporary classics,” Dürrenmatt’s play is not so well known today, thus requiring further illumination before proceeding to the analysis of the performance itself. The play may be classified as “theatre of the absurd,” “tragic farce” or any similar genre in which, as Dürrenmatt himself points out, the tragic stems from the comic, surfacing as “a moment of utter despair, a gaping abyss.” The story is comical in the sense that one economically and in every other way devastated town is expecting a visit from its most affluent citizen ever, and in doing so they perceive her visit as their last chance of salvation. Clara Zachanassian, living abroad for decades and changing husbands (at the beginning of the play she has seven ex-husbands, but as the play progresses the number increases) has become a billionaire. Her appearance is comical, with her entourage of bizarre servants, a litter, a panther, ever new husbands, cynical and eccentric behavior, but also comical are the citizens of Güllen in their cowardice, servility and readiness to do anything to improve their conditions. The tragic begins to surface with her request that in view of her willingness to donate a billion to her hometown, she wants “one head” to be delivered to her: she wants her once lover, grocer Alfred, to be killed because after he had impregnated her and ascribed his responsibility to others, he forced her into a vagabond lifestyle which started with prostitution. The feeling of the tragic is crystalized in the theme of “buying justice,” and in succumbing to the criminal demands of big capital. Although the offer is at first rejected with strong moral indignation, the citizens of Güllen, including Alfred’s own family, will, quite expectedly, finally accept paying for a higher standard of existence (loans are being taken before the billion is deposited) with somebody’s life. When writing about two performances in one review, points of comparison impose themselves as a sort of tedious itching even if, as is the case here, there are no real grounds for them. In that respect, while Pařízek’s production features strong visual symbolism, minimalist staging and is charged with energy, Morfov’s is visually decorative, marked with lushness of stage and energetically diluted. Without radical adaptation, Dürrenmatt’s text requires the presence of a large number of actors and stand-ins on stage. Morfov skilfully groups, moves, and rearranges numerous actors, as if making a composition for a painting or a film shot. His “stage stills” are based upon actors’ playing in several planes and levels for which effect he uses stage technology (stage podium drops), elements of stage design (the balcony of Clara’s hotel room), separating close-ups from wide-shots by light, and shaping choreographically particular scenes (Alfred’s murder, for example). Such combining of stage elements creates the association—maybe because we know subconsciously that The Visit of the Old Lady has been turned into a musical—that we are watching a Broadway spectacle that requires skillful technical and artistic orchestration of a large number of actors, dancers and singers. Just to make things clear: from my aesthetic perspective, this Broadway association--and which is highly conditional—is not a compliment. Still, as if all of that were not enough for Morfov, to this densely packed stage he adds full-size mannequins that sometimes appear in isolation or are scattered, and at times are densely grouped. The use of mannequins representing citizens of this small town is both redundant and unjustified simply because there already is a large enough number of live performers. In terms of their symbolic meaning, it is superficial if the objective was to signify loss of individuality, transformation of people into big capital’s marionettes or anything similar. That said, I do not reject the possibility that the use of mannequins is purely decorative in purpose and holds no special meaning. Considering all of the above, one gets the impression of an old-fashioned and somewhat conventional theatrical style, and not just a self-complacent one. Scenes with mannequins are a good illustration of the performance’s central feature: stage attractiveness overshadows dramatic action, thereby glossing over feelings and meanings that this action should incite. In addition, one of the consequences of the underdeveloped dramatic action is the overwhelming feeling of boredom. All of this is the result, at least one gets such an impression, of the director’s greater focus on stage stills instead of on his work with actors who seemed as if left to themselves. For this reason, Clara, played by a leading Montenegrin actress, Varja Djukić, lacks that sharp transformation of a comic, grotesque character into a mythical revengeful figure that looks as if she is appearing out of a tragedy. Throughout her performance the actress is shaping and developing her character, emphasizing psychological motifs and thus totally missing the point of both the play and her character. Such an approach dilutes the very comicality of the first part of the play, but also the anxiety and tragic perception of the world when Clara asks the citizens to sell her justice which, she believes, belongs undisputedly to her. The comic effect is subdued further by the fact that the actors, it seems, have either failed to recognize the very lucid and bitter humor of the play or they just lacked confidence in it. Because of this they “covered” it with their own forced, and thereby, unconvincing comical skills. However, the tragic and critical view of the world ensuing from the awareness that money is the absolute ruler of our lives—which is the point that makes this 1956 play relevant today and the reason why it is still played—is clearly delivered at the end of the performance. The performance ends with a bleak song that through association links the citizens of Güllen with today’s populist and right-oriented forces. The Visit . Photo: Dusko Milhanic. It is a pity that this disquieting, critical attitude is just “glued on” at the very end of the performance by a directorial intervention. Pity, because this attitude should have been present and readable throughout the entire performance, and especially throughout its second half. Yet, in terms of production and artistic choice, including the financial investment, this project of Montenegrin National Theatre in Podgorica deserves to be supported. It suggests that in the seasons to come this theatre will try to raise its artistic ambitions and step out of its local context. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) A native of Belgrade, Ivan Medenica studied at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, where he completed his PhD thesis entitled “Actualization and Deconstruction as Models of Directing Drama Classics.” He is an associate professor at the FDA, where he teaches history of world drama and theatre. He regularly publishes articles in national and international journals. He chaired or co-chaired three of the international symposia of theatre critics and experts organized by the prestigious Serbian theatre festival Sterijino Pozorje in Novi Sad and the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC). He has participated in a number of international conferences, such as in St. Etienne, Moscow, Vienna, Budapest, Avignon, Thessaloniki, Sofia and Lisbon. He has received a number of national awards for his theatre criticism and was the artistic director of Sterijino Pozorje. Medenica is one of the editors of the theatre magazine Teatron, and he holds the post of Adjunct General Secretary at the IATC. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Report from London (December 2022) Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 “Regietheater:” two cases The Grec Festival 2023 The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Report from Germany Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Jan Fabre | This volume of monologues is the second collection of works by Jan Fabre for the theatre in an English translation. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Jan Fabre: The Servant of Beauty Jan Fabre Download PDF Seven Monologues for the Theatre Flemish-Dutch theatre artist Jan Fabre is considered one of the most innovative and versatile artists of his day. Over the past twenty-five years, he has produced works as a performance artist, theatre maker, choreographer, opera maker, playwright, and visual artist. This volume of monologues is the second collection of works by Jan Fabre for the theatre in an English translation. Fabre, born in Belgium, is a total theater artist: writer, director, designer, and choreographer. Includes: We need Heroes Now (2010), Little Body on the Wall (1996), The Emperor of Loss (1994), She was and She is, Even (1975), and others. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Bess Rowen Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames Bess Rowen By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Photo: Selfie by James Ijames. Playwright James Ijames was already a household name in Philadelphia before he won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Fat Ham . He first garnered critical attention as a performer after graduating with an MFA in Acting from Temple University. He then turned his attention to directing at major Philadelphia theaters such as the Arden and the Wilma, and he later became one of the co-Artistic Directors of the latter. And plays like 2017’s Kill Move Paradise , a meditation on the killing of unarmed Black men by police set in limbo, had already gained important national interest. As his colleague at Villanova University, I have had the opportunity to watch his accomplishments grow. And in 2022, I watched as audiences flocked to the family cookout for his explicitly Black and queer adaptation of Hamlet , first at The Public Theater and later on Broadway. His public profile continues to rise, as proven by his newest play, Good Bones , which was in rehearsal at The Public as I sat down to ask him about the current state of the American theatre. Bess Rowen: I’m curious to start by asking what are you excited to see in the forthcoming season? What excites you about the American theatre season right now? It can be individual plays, playwrights, or themes you’re seeing pop. And it can include your own work! James Ijames: What am I excited to see? I’m excited to see Branden Jacobs-Jenkins back on Broadway. Soon. And in a new play category. I’m excited that Jamie Lloyd is going to be directing on Broadway again. Rowen: Yes! And are there any themes that pop for you? What stands out to you as something that’s going on right now, or something that’s coming, that marks a difference? Ijames: Yeah, that’s the thing. I actually think we’re actually reverting back to some of our old stuff. A little bit. I think we, as an industry, were like, ( smugly ) “Wow, look at us. We did it. They saw us. They saw the white American theatre. And we fixed it. We’re great, right? Okay, we’re great.” It feels like that a little bit. And that’s not everywhere. But there is this sense of congratulation, of making it through a trying time—if you were able to make it through a trying time. And then I think the very real, and natural, impulse right now is to stop the hemorrhaging and get people back into the buildings. And the quickest way that people do that is by doing things that feel comfortable. And what happens when you start to make art that feels comfortable is that you start to build systems around it that also offer certain people comfort—not everybody comfort, but certain people comfort. Yeah, I think we are flipping a little bit on some of the stuff we were gonna do. Now, I do think we overcorrected as well. There were some places where I thought “how many of these do we gotta…?” There was a bit of that as well, but now we’ve sort of patted our collective selves on the back and said we’re this great inclusive space. But hey, you know, as always in transition…I do think it is better than when I started. I do think young people coming into this industry are finding a much better industry than the one that I found when I came in. Both as a Black person, as a queer person, as a person not born in an urban setting and doesn’t know how to move through those spaces, who had to sort of learn how to do that. Yeah, I don’t know. Rowen: That’s such a good point, too. Because it reminds me that so often the theatre is reacting. It’s reacting and trying to kind of guess at what the next thing it needs to touch is. Ijames: Yes. Rowen: And I have noticed more butts in seats at theaters that I’m going to that have new work in them a lot of the time. But I think a lot about what “new work” means. Is it the same story by a new person, or is it actually a new story? And those are two different ways of selling tickets, which is important for us to remember. But you’ve been a part of that change of moving the dial at least slightly forward, and that’s something! That is really an impressive feat. And I do hope that now that we went very far in one direction and are now heading kind of far in the other direction that we land in some sort of happy medium. Ijames: Yeah. I think we learned a ton so that there are lessons we all learned that we can come back to. But it’s just so easy to go back to the how you used to do it. It’s so easy. It’s so intoxicating to just go there. And just because of the circumstances, I think there’s a bit of that. But, I will say this. I also think this is a moment that is kind of ripe. I think the best work to come…How do I say this? We haven’t seen the great works that are gonna come out of this moment. We might start to see that, but I really do think we’re gonna see artists be theorists in their craft more. That’s the thing I’m kind of hungry for. Like, who’s doing something formally interesting? There was this moment with Jackie Sibblies Drury and Lucas Hnath where there were some real formal challenges. You know, we usually let Europe do that for us ( laughs ). Rowen: Yes! It’s true. But Europe is more anti-text than we are. So, we have this American writing tradition that can also be a staging tradition. But often we have not thought of it like that. We’ve thought of it as, “look at this great piece of literature that someone wrote.” And, right, but those people staged that. And that’s what’s so cool about Jackie Sibblies Drury’s work and Lucas Hnath’s work, because those plays say “okay, I need a pool on stage. Okay, there’s a moment where the audience needs to come on stage.” That’s a bold choice, and people were up for it. Ijames: You know, people are really game for that! And I think in this moment where is so easy to watch some of the best dramatic writing in the world on television, on your couch—I mean, Succession is a beautifully written show. It is incredible writing! So, what can we do in the theatre that requires liveness, that requires you to be in space with other people, to sort of be in citizenship with other people. I think we have to begin to find forms that feed that and that will draw people back. Because people pay thousands of dollars to see Beyoncé because they want to be in a community with a lot of people. Rowen: And they want to see something they can’t see anywhere else! Like we need to give them something they can’t see anywhere else, and they can’t experience everywhere else. And you’re so right about the TV aspect, too. I think about that because I watch these shows like Only Murders in the Building , which I’m not saying is the best written show in the world. But it’s a very smart show that is written by a bunch of theatre people, which is why the characters are so interesting and fully fleshed out. Bringing the theatre to TV is really interesting, now we have to figure out what we can bring from those series back into the theatre. And that’s a little more challenging. Because I feel like we often not quite apologizing to our audiences, but we’re saying, “don’t worry, it’s so worth this money, and we won’t even keep you here that long! It’s gonna be fine!” There’s something about the safeness of “don’t worry, you’re gonna sit there and see this thing and you don’t have to come back for the next episode. Just sit back and relax!” Ijames: ( laughs ) Yes! Rowen: I want us to trust our audiences a little bit more, because I do think that what we’ve learned is that they will show up for something different. It’s a different audience that might show up for something different, but they will. Ijames : They will! Yes, I think that’s the thing we haven’t confronted. Is that what an audience is has changed a little bit. And we have all of these “rules” about our industry that we have from, I guess, the 19th century. Like plays start at 8. Why do plays start at 8 still? If I wanted to catch a show on my way home from work, no, I have to wait. If I’m in midtown, I’ve got to wait around, if I’m downtown…that’s a thing that we have just accepted and not questioned. So, that’s one example of audience changing, and the needs of the audience changing. Rowen: Right! Ijames: I also think that there’s a lot of talk about how our attention span has been shortened—I just think it’s been reorganized. Like, I’m able to pay attention. You just have to hold my attention. And it’s a little more difficult to hold my attention. Rowen: Exactly! But people will sit there and binge a show. We do have the attention span to do that, you’re right. It’s just that we won’t sit there passively for just anything. Ijames: Yes. Rowen: That’s the change. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Ijames: I don’t think that’s a bad thing either. And I also wonder about…what are some things that can happen in a theatre—I won’t call these play—that people can come in and out of? Like if you can get people in there because they can have some agency about how they can move through the space, you can reorient people into what this is. So, when you do ask them to sit down, they’re not like “I’ve never been here before.” Rowen: Right. Ijames: So, I just think we have to mix up what we’re doing. We can’t just plan a season of a bunch of plays and musicals and think just because they won Tony’s last year they’re going to automatically sell. The thing I always wonder about in Philadelphia is that it has this huge sports fan culture. And I just wonder: what is the way to harness and invite those people into our space to come and see? Because they wanna be in a collective. Maybe they just don’t feel like they’re allowed in that space, so they don’t come into that space. I don’t know. Rowen: Yeah, because at an Eagles game you could leave and get a refreshment and come back. Some people do sit or stand there and watch the game the whole time, and don’t go anywhere, but some people are coming in and out. And still, that creates community and there is an overwhelming community feeling with the sports teams at the center. And those fans would do anything to see those teams, like they travel all over to see those teams compete. And I’ve heard people say that the difference is that there’s no competition in the theatre. Ijames: Hmmm. Rowen: Which is fascinating because I feel like I can talk about plays where there is competition, but it’s not “real” competition. Like it’s falsified somehow because the understanding is, I think, that there’s no real risk. Ijames: Right. Rowen: But we know there is a real risk in doing live theatre. But the competition can’t be between the actors and the audience. It has to be something that people are signing up to watch. So, I’m sure there’s a way to harness that. That’s such an interesting point. Because also, as a New Yorker, I tend to defer to thinking about New York. But the New York is a very particular theatre community, and it is not like what is happening in most of our country and the world. So, we have to think local in terms of what our community needs from the theatre. And I think a lot of people don’t think like that. Thinking of an untapped audience who would be into it is a great way of thinking about it instead of worrying that we’re going to scare off our subscribers. There’s so often a reaction of, “we’re going to lose them if we don’t do something.” Ijames: And I’m like, “we’ve lost them. They’re already gone. They’re not coming back.” Rowen: And also, are we raising the next generation of subscribers? There’s no rule that subscribers have to be a certain age. If you make a season people want to see, they’ll come. […] That’s a really interesting point about untapped audiences and what we’re actually doing, aside from just doing programming we think is interesting to get people into “the American theatre.” In terms of what you’ve seen recently, what excites you as an audience member lately? Ijames: What have I seen lately? I’ve been pretty intensely in rehearsal. But I really loved Stereophonic . Yeah, I really loved that. Rowen: Me too. What an unusual, creative play. The basis is so simple and it’s so unique. Ijames: Right? I just was sort of dazzled by it. Rowen: Also proof that people will sit there for three hours if it’s good. Ijames: This is also very true, yeah. I saw Kenny Leon’s [direction of Suzan-Lori Parks’s] Topdog/Underdog last season…was it last season? The season before last? Rowen: I think it was two seasons ago. It was excellent. Ijames: And I also saw his [direction of Samm-Art Williams’s] Home at the beginning of this season. And I just love what he’s doing with bringing those plays back that, you know, had a life but didn’t really get the wind in their sails the way they should have because of the time. And it was really lovely to see that play. What else have I seen lately that I’ve liked? I really liked Hilma at the Wilma ( laughs ). Rowen: Hilma at the Wilma! Ijames: The Comeuppance . Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance . I just…he can do anything. Rowen: Yeah. I said to him when I talked to him that when I was sitting there and watching that play I literally had a thought in my head that was: this must have been what it felt like to watch a new Eugene O’Neill play at the time. Something that makes you think, formally, I’ve never seen anything that does this. It totally works, but what a different approach. What a fascinating and subtle change. I’m excited to see it at the Wilma this season. And I’ve been telling everyone I know to see it. Ijames: It’s such a good play, and I haven’t been in any rehearsals, but I imagine it will be a very good production. What else? I haven’t been seeing a bunch lately. Rowen: It’s okay, you’ve been a bit busy! I’m gonna let you go in a second, so for a final provocation for you: If you could say something to the current American theatre about what you hope is coming next, what would you like to see happen next in the US queer theatre? Ijames: Oh. I want to see larger and more robust and sustained systems of support and development for trans playwrights in particular. I feel like there are times sometimes people will come to me with “oh, this is kind of interesting, you should do something with this.” And I say, “there’s a trans playwright who should be writing this and you should find them to write it.” You know, I think organizations maybe feel timid to program it, but the audience is there. People are ready for that kind of storytelling. I think a lot of formal and structural things that we don’t even think about are happening in that space that we could all learn from. And that could really change and elevate what we’re doing in this country in theatre. So, that’s a thing I want. I want there to be plays about queer people where their queerness is completely quotidian. Rowen: Yeah, yes. Ijames: Like, the problem is: we’ve gotta sell the cherry orchard. You know, just like in a straight play. Rowen: Right! We, a gay couple, must sell our cherry orchard. Ijames: Yeah, are we gonna keep the piano or sell it? Can the problem be, “Laura, what are you gonna do if you don’t get married?” We don’t get to do that. It’s always gotta be: “Oh, you’re queer. What a problem!” ( laughs ). Rowen: ( laughs ) It’s true! Well, I feel like you do that, though. One of the things I love about your work in terms of representation, and I’ve said this to you before, is that you write bi and pansexual men, particularly Black men, who are…where that’s not the problem of the play. And specifically for bi and pan people, that is often the problem of what the representation is. It’s often like, “oh no! What kind of gender do you want to be with, and how does that define your personhood?” And, it’s like, no, they’re just existing in space. And when that’s revealed, that’s never the conflict. That is such a radical move, and so generous. It always moves me so much when I see those particular kinds of representation. And I’ve been lucky enough to see it live in a few of your plays. And I’m always thinking that there is someone in the audience who this is opening up…this is a moment where they’re just going ( exhales ). They’re relaxing. And they’re thinking, “Okay, I’m alright. I’m safe here.” And it isn’t going to be an hour and half more of people being like “Oh, but what about your identity?” So, thank you for that! References Footnotes About The Author(s) BESS ROWEN is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and affiliated faculty in Gender & Women’s Studies and Irish Studies at Villanova University. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2021. Recent articles have appeared in Theatre Survey , Theatre Topics , Modern Drama , and The Eugene O’Neill Review . Her next book project focuses on the representation of mean teenage girls on stage. She also served as the co-editor of the Journal of American Drama & Theatre and the performance review editor for The Eugene O’Neill Review . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. 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Sarah Courtis 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 Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Sarah Courtis By Published on November 17, 2022 Download Article as PDF The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical . Warren Hoffman. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020; 285 pp. Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity . Ed. Sarah Whitfield. Methuen Drama, London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2019; 241 pp. For a relatively young form, musical theatre carries a long history of racism and white supremacy (among many other issues of identity and representation). Indeed, musicals often reflect the society in which they are written and performed, complicating the often naïve view of what the musical means or does by their expression of deeper political frameworks of creation, production and reception. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical was first published in 2014 in an effort to address the racially-coded history of American musical theatre as a form “by white people, for white people and about white people” (5). The second edition, published in 2020, builds upon this provocation by adding a new chapter on more recent blockbuster shows: The Book of Mormon and Hamilton . An important contribution to musical theatre scholarship, The Great White Way seeks to identify and combat white supremacy in musicals by tracing issues of race historically from Show Boat to Hamilton with a focus on ‘normative’ whiteness, which is often left out of the discussion in musical theatre literature. In an attempt to reveal and (eventually) deconstruct racist notions of white supremacy, Hoffman first endeavours to make it visible, noting that this is just the “ initial step ” to be taken. He acknowledges the context of this book being specifically about the American musical, joining many preeminent scholars in this narrow focus (particularly as he narrows it further to only successful Broadway musicals), leaving a rather large gap to be addressed elsewhere. The overture lays out the premise, challenging preconceived notions of the way race is constructed in musical theatre, particularly in works which don’t appear to be about race at all. Indeed, he notes that “their silence about race speaks volumes” (4) and that “community really means white community, while people of colour are often absent from the utopia that musicals represent” (6). Hoffman complicates the idea of race “revealing that racial meaning is sometimes located in the space between the text and the performers” (26). He interrogates and problematises the concept of ‘universality’ and addresses several myths of musical theatre which uphold normative whiteness, while critiquing nostalgia for ‘simpler times’ which can be found in the revivals of ‘Golden Era’ texts. Act One of The Great White Way consists of three chapters, with case studies of Show Boat , Oklahoma! , Annie Get Your Gun , West Side Story and The Music Man . These chapters consider the early classics which shaped the American musical, while acknowledging the wide field of criticism available and gaps still to be filled. Hoffman provides a close reading of each of these productions, often juxtaposing their use of stereotypes (as in Show Boat and Annie Get Your Gun ) and their silences on race (as in Oklahoma! and The Music Man ). These early texts don’t just portray “the creation, negotiation and consolidation of Caucasian identity” (56), they enact them and solidify normative whiteness through their silences on the topic. Hoffman challenges readers to take note of their own internalised prejudices by noting that “race is a category that affects everyone, whites included, regardless of whether they see themselves implicated in the discussion” (80). These case studies reveal the importance of historical and political contexts in the creation and reception of the original productions and their revivals, outlining the rise and fall of musical theatre through American culture over the last century. The second “act” consists of five chapters, tracing the history of Black and Interracial productions of white musicals and considering the inherent racism of nostalgia. It also includes case studies on A Chorus Line , The Book of Mormon and Hamilton : productions which take clear stances on race and casting practices. Hoffman considers the trend of Black versions of classic white musicals (most notably Hello, Dolly! ) and how they revealed “the way in which the supposed normativity of whiteness was made visible when non-white performers played roles assumed to be the domain of white actors” (112). He suggests that ignoring colour can be a form of whitewashing, and that more diversity in new shows is required. The American political context continues to be traced in the case studies, as A Chorus Line portrays a naïve expression of the American Dream; revivals and revisals are seen to have an economic rather than artistic focus and many of them reflect a nostalgia for ‘simpler’ times (which Hoffman connects to Trump’s slogan: ‘Make America Great Again’). Finally, Hoffman notes the inherent whiteness in The Book of Mormon and Hamilton , both of which (on the surface) appear to be race-conscious. Notions of colonialism and neoliberalism surface within the shows, however, they are subsumed with the musicals’ rather hopeful suggestion that these “are necessary steps on making the Broadway musical a more inclusive and democratic artform” (224). Reframing the Musical, a recent collection edited by Sarah Whitfield, picks up on many themes of The Great White Way , filling some of the gaps left by Hoffman. Whitfield brings together a series of essays by preeminent scholars in the musical theatre field, each focussing on reframing different productions through the lenses of race, culture and identity. In this more democratic format, multiple authors come from diverse backgrounds and bring fresh perspectives on popular musicals as well as shows which had limited runs (and perhaps a more limited impact). Whitfield frames the anthology’s approach by considering who is left out of the “cool white guy narrative” (xvii) consciously centering Critical Race Theory in order to challenge “expectations of default whiteness” (xix). Part one provides three chapters under the theme of reframing identity/identities. The first chapter, by Donatella Galella, considers The Fortress of Solitude (2014) and the power dynamics inherent in a text which “relies upon white authorisation” (4). Her chapter is a call to arms (often cited and taken up by the other authors) for white people to use “racial privilege to do anti-racist work” (5). Galella centralises the Black experience through this case study and notes the way the text mirrored the life of the creative team who were attempting systematic change, while benefitting from a racist system. Broderick Chow provides a personal account of viewing Here Lies Love (2014) as a Filipino, considering the impact of distancing for many audiences in contrast to his more personal gaze. Brian Ganger presents a moving analysis of The Lion King (1997) as both a Black and white musical. He complicates the ‘double event’ by considering the predominantly white creative team and Imperialist story being told by Black bodies, to a Black sound. Part two provides a more historical approach via five chapters aimed at challenging historiographies. Maya Cantu utilizes an approach of ‘recovery’ and “cultural acts of resistance” (67) by recognising the historical and cultural significance of Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith. Arianne Johnson Quinn examines the legacy of Oscar Hammerstein II in Britain, while critiquing the white saviour complex. Sean Mayes calls for justice for the ‘invisible’ roles and contributions, particularly those of Musical Directors and Black people. He calls for more diversity in all shows as well as utilization of the Practice as Research methodology. Alejandro Postigo considers the history of musical theatre in Spain, focussing on the forms of zarzuella and revista . Phoebe Ramsy returns to the concept of ‘recovery as resistance’, highlighting the importance of choreography in Shuffle Along – Or The Making Of The Musical Sensation Of 1921 And All That Followed. This set of scholarly essays establishes the volume’s cross-cultural scope, as well as its activist contributions. Part Three moves away from race in order to interrogate musical structures in identity and social change over the final four essays. Rebecca Applin Warner discusses the musematic relations in Fun Home as a way of analysing Allison’s relationships with her family. Sarah Browne considers the counterculture musical Hair (1967) , providing two calls to action: firstly, to revisit and question older texts, and secondly, to develop and adopt approaches from other disciplines when analysing musical theatre texts. James Lovelock calls for a more nuanced approach to sexuality, noting the lack of representation of Bisexual, Asexual and transgender stories after analysing The Colour Purple, Yank!, Fun Home and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. Wind Dell Woods concludes this volume through a provocative critique of Hamilton, focussing on the casting choices and the conflation of ‘immigrant’ and ‘slave’. These two volumes— The Great White Way and Reframing the Musical— complement each other well, taking up different approaches to topics of white supremacy and racial identity in musical theatre. While there are gaps in each, they are acknowledged; indeed it would be difficult to provide a comprehensive treatise on race in musical theatre (even forgetting the other intersectional identities discussed) in one, or even two, volumes. Each testifies to the centrality of this form of popular theatre in America, while raising important questions for scholars, for artists and for audiences. Their provocations are boldly presented for a new generation of artists and academics to continue building upon—so the initial step of making white supremacy and other issues of discrimination visible will no longer be the only step taken. References Footnotes About The Author(s) SARAH COURTIS Murdoch University/Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

Sharrell D. Luckett Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 2 Visit Journal Homepage YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Sharrell D. Luckett By Published on May 29, 2014 Download Article as PDF The body will tell the truth when all else fails, with or without you.1 Misty DeBerry, Performance Artist I am a black woman who wishes for a time That I could gain my weight back And still be fine Four years ago I lived as a fat black female, actress and teacher, trying to learn to love my curves and to maintain a healthy lifestyle. I was failing miserably. I ate McDonald’s and Zaxby’s nearly every day coupled with home cooked meals. I imagined myself unattractive, undesirable, and unworthy of love and attention from men. At the same time, through weight loss advertisements, public ridicule, and size discrimination, society made it very clear that I was the gross unwanted “other.” My body was classified as morbidly obese, and I was getting larger every month. Even I began to view my largeness as unacceptable, and the only way I knew to rectify my situation was to lose the weight. As body image scholar Kathleen LeBesco has affirmed: “the possibility of passing, trying to lose weight, wanting to become ‘normal,’ is about the only recognized option available to fat women in twentieth century Anglo-American culture.”2 However, losing a large amount of weight is extremely difficult, and even if this nigh-impossible feat is accomplished, only 5% of people who achieve substantial weight loss are able to keep the weight off for long periods of time.3 Still, we diet and diet again in hopes that one day we will cross the border that separates fat from skinny. Though the efforts of Fat Studies4 scholars have not gone unnoticed, their textual and political reach has not yet proved significantly influential in the weight loss and health industries. Both Fat Rights by Anna Kirkland and Human Rights Casualties from the “War on Obesity”5by Lily O’Hara and Jane Gregg highlight the need for America to end the vilification, harassment and abjection of the fat body. As SanderGilman has noted, “Obesity presents itself today in the form of a ‘moral panic’—that is, an episode, condition, person or group of persons that have in recent times been defined as ‘a threat to societal values and interests.’”6 As my dieting failures multiplied, the constant, disapproving scrutiny of the world affected my well-being, and I spiraled into a deep depression. In America, a fat person is classified as diseased, one who must be cured of a pathological and physical illness, despite the acknowledgement that most people will fail at dieting; thereby making the border-crossing from fat to skinny a remarkable feat. In addition, physicians argue that an obese body creates exorbitant health costs and is directly correlated with mortality risks,7 while sociologists and cultural observers assert that the size and appearance of one’s body determines marriageability, upward mobility, and/or perceived attractiveness, especially for women.8 Feminist scholar Sandra Lee Bartky argues that “the disciplinary project of femininity is a‘setup:’ it requires such radical and extensive measures of bodily transformation that virtually every woman who gives herself to it is destined in some degree to fail.”9 Yet, “diet we must . . . to be saved.”10 Thus my doomed quest to achieve “normal” weight was never-ending. My depressive state of failure rendered me hopeless. The sadder I got, the bigger I grew, until I experienced my first nosebleed. The illness of my body must have scared me skinny because only a few months later I enrolled in a low-calorie shake diet and lost nearly 100 pounds within 8 months. Having succumbed to the physical and mental attacks from society by nearly starving myself, I crossed one of the most contentious, palpable borders known to women in America: the border that separates fat from skinny. This essay recounts how my border-crossing journey from morbidly obese woman to slender11 woman shaped my awareness of my outsider-within12 identity as a black woman, a theatre artist, and scholar. It is an exploration of how straddling vastly different physical and psychological identities led me to performance, what I term transweight performance, as a means of understanding this experience for myself and as a means of communicating and perhaps illuminating such experience for others. Just as the Latin prefix trans has been attached to various identity markers to signify crossing from one condition or location to another, as in transgender, I employ transweight as a term to identify someone who willfully acquires a new size identity by losing or gaining a large amount of weight in a short amount of time.13 Recently, there has been a proliferation of studies on the black female performing body, including solo/black/woman, an anthology of scripts, interviews, and essays edited by E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera; Troubling Vision by Nicole Fleetwood, which considers the visual commodity of black bodies; and Embodying Black Experience by Harvey Young, which investigates the black performative body in various socio-political contexts.14 While these works are all significant studies that explore the black female performing body, none focus specifically on the issue of weight, or the performance of “weighted” (fat/thin) identities. This lack of literature on the black/female/transweight performative body is most likely due to the absence of black transweight women writing about and/or performing weight loss, and can also be attributed to the fact that the fat body rarely transforms. Thus, my research aims to carve out a space in scholarship for the transweight black female, one that is intensely personal and, at the same time, profoundly political. With this exploration of my border crossing, I offer my slender palimpsest of a body as an entryway into a liminal world largely unexplored. The perception that black women do not wish to be slender is a myth situated in the American imagination. Oprah Winfrey’s decades-long public struggle with her weight, Kerry Washington’s recent admittance to battling bulimia, and Jennifer Hudson’s commercially marketed, drastic weight loss are only a few examples of the stark reality about black women and their bodies. Many African-American women aspire to Eurocentric standards of body size. As Bartky asserts, “There is little evidence that women of color or working-class women are in general less committed to the incarnation of an ideal femininity than their more privileged sisters.”15 Though authors Andrea Shaw (The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies) and Susan Bordo (Unbearable Weight) provide compelling arguments as to how and why the presence of the fat female body serves as a marker of direct resistance to Eurocentric standards, one could offer that the very existence of these types of arguments hinge partially on the truth about weight loss, that is, weight is extremely hard to lose.16 Thus, in America, fatness leaves women few options, and one of them is to claim fatness as honorable and admirable. But do we love our large bodies because we adore fat or do we love our large bodies because we cannot lose the weight? I revere those Fat Studies scholars who are able to embrace their largeness, and I am in the fight with them against size discrimination. I wish I had the confidence to appreciate my largeness as actress Gabourey Sidibe, who seems not to have lost a pound since her big screen debut in Precious, apparently does. You go girl! However, in my case, I could not love the weight that categorized me in my eyes and in the eyes of others as ugly, disgusting, and non-sexual. I work to live in my honesty, and at this moment I lack the volition to re-embrace the fat body. So what occurs when the fat black female performing body transforms to slender and then engages in the performance of “thin-ness”? What happens when the black female body physically ‘passes’ in a new way? What happens when a formerly fat, black body experiences ‘double consciousness’ in a historically new way: a way in which how the ‘other’ sees the body affords that body a privilege that is unfamiliar, abounding with humanistic perks. This liminal space—the space around and within the border—is where my ethno-theatre work begins. When I crossed the border, not only was my physical body altered, but my psychological state was significantly affected as well. I changed physically and mentally in ways that I am aware of and ways that I am still discovering. I transformed from physically inferior to physically elite, from ugly to attractive, and from undesirable to desirable. My body now reads as happy, healthy, and worthy of protection. As an actress I went from mammy to mother (or wife), and from asexual, ensemble roles to sexy leading roles. I went from my body being fully costumed to scantily clad. My new body serves as a document of acceptance, my ‘passport,’ if you will, into a new privileged location. At near starvation, I crossed the border that allowed me to immigrate into an ideal American size. However, I’m just as morbidly obese mentally as I was morbidly obese physically five years ago. My outer appearance morphed, but my psyche remained the same. I do not believe myself to be a slender woman, so I feel as though I’m performing slenderness and femininity in life or in the virtual reality of the stage. As I experience fat and thin, unprivileged and privileged separately, I purposefully create and write towards a desegregation of identity. Though the world now experiences me as a slender black female actress, I process my current encounters, both on and off the stage, as a morbidly obese female actress, inhabiting an outsider-within identity. Coined by Patricia Hill Collins, an outsider-within identity initially referenced the social location of black women in the field of domesticated work. Here I use the outsider-within identity marker as theoretical framing to explore what it means to be a fat black woman living within a privileged body or ‘home.’ Simply stated, I am not fully who I appear to be, nor am I where I appear to be. I envision my mental location as one similar to that of Gloria Anzaldúa’s new mestiza: a place where she could be all that she was.17 Furthermore, I am working to build a healthy ‘third space'18 both within my psyche and in performance where my two dis/identities encounter one another. The implications of my border-crossing from morbidly obese to slender first captured my attention as an artist and scholar when I moved away from home to attend graduate school. Being surrounded by all new people and a new environment, my recent weight loss remained a secret. I was not aware that my colleagues and professors were experiencing a different physical persona. I was still living and seeing myself as a morbidly obese person, but the people at the university saw me as a slender person who belonged. There, I auditioned for and landed the leading female role in the world premiere of Holding Up the Sky, a play adapted from folklore and tales from across the globe. In the play a young married couple survives a devastating war and proceeds to build a new life with the help of other members in the community.19 At the time of auditions, I hadn’t realized that my mindset was still that of a morbidly obese woman and actress. My habits of being a workaholic and a homebody did not change when I lost weight. I still rejected the nightlife scene, for I had little desire to mingle with or even talk to men who had consistently neglected me in the past. Furthermore, I was unaware that I was negotiating space as a new physical person. Thus, when I greeted the director and production associates in auditions I believed they were seeing me as I still experienced myself: a fat woman. In The Politics of Women’s Bodies, Rose Weitz affirms that “attractiveness typically brings women more marital prospects and friendships, higher salaries, and higher school grades.”20 In the theatre, attractiveness and a thin body bring more, and better, roles for women. In her dissertation, “The Poetics of Excess: Images of Large Women on Stage and Screen,” Claire Van Ens lists five stereotypical film roles played by overweight actresses: The Butch/Bitch Lesbian, The Dowdy Dowager, One of the Boys, The Asexual/Non-Woman, and The Maternal Earth-Mother.21 Not surprisingly, as a fat stage actress, I was usually cast in similar roles. So when I perused the script for Holding Up the Sky, I focused on the ensemble roles, ignoring the lines of the leading characters. During auditions, however, the director asked me to read for the lead female role. My heart started racing because I thought surely he had made a mistake. I glanced up at the table and just as I was about to ask whether I’d been given the wrong sides, he asked me to go out and practice the lines with a young man, who eventually played my husband. I was confused and anxious. In my mind I didn’t fit the lead role. This role was clearly written for a slender, attractive woman who could believably play a beautiful, sexually desirable female. Although the young man expressed his opinion that I was perfect for the role, I squinched my face in denial as I rehearsed the lines with him. I had never been asked to play a beautiful, feminine lead, and I didn’t know how to believably accomplish this in the small amount of time that I had. Judith Butler has argued that femininity is a “mode of enacting and reenacting received gender norms which surface as so many styles of flesh.”22 Furthermore, she identifies three types of discipline that produce the feminine aesthetic: “those that aim to produce a body of a certain size and general configuration; those that bring forth from this body a specific repertoire of gestures, postures, and movements; and those that are directed toward the display of this body as an ornamented surface.”23 I knew what it meant to perform femininity because the media and public had taught me; however, as a big woman I was rarely expected to perform femininity, so my repertoire of feminine gestures was lacking. Nonetheless, when reading the role for the director, I used my imagination in a way that I’d never done before, unknowingly employing methods that Butler mentions to accurately portray femininity. I implemented the stereotypical feminine gesture of loosely hanging my hand from my extended wrist. I made sure that my long kanekalon braids were flowing down my back during the scene, and I elongated my neck as if I were a giraffe to appear model-esque. I imagined myself to be thin as I walked daintily across the floor, because I knew I had to control what I sensed was my big body. I blocked my negative thoughts and read for the part. Later that week, I received the email that I, Sharrell D. Luckett, had been cast as the lead female in the play. Although initially excited by the opportunity, extreme panic soon set in because in my mind I was convinced that I could not play the part.Because of my history as a morbidly obese person and my lack of experience on stage in a newly transformed, transweight body, my work on this role led me to suffer from psychological and physical stress. I started to experience uncontrollable anxiety when I was told that my costume would be sleeveless and would reveal my legs and torso. Also, I learned that I had to be lifted in the show twice. I was so scared that my cast mates would not be able to lift me that I promised them I would not gain weight during the rehearsal period. They brushed off my promise as one from a slender, body-conscious woman. My character also simulates sex on stage with her husband, inclusive of a vocal orgasm. Morbidly obese actresses are rarely portrayed as sexually desirable, rarely lifted, and rarely have orgasmic sex on stage. As I worked to understand the extreme anxiety that I was experiencing during the rehearsal and performance process in Holding Up the Sky, I decided that I wanted to further explore the implications of mentally living as a morbidly obese woman and actress while physically maneuvering in a slender body. Thus, I began to conduct an autoethnographic study of my transweight identity as a black, female actress. Building upon Lesa Lockford’s use of Victor Turner’s theory of social drama to analyze a weight loss support group, I used Turner’s theories to explore my transweight journey.24 As Turner posits, “the third phase [of social dramas], redress, reveals that ‘determining’ and ‘fixing’ are indeed processes, not permanent states or givens.”25 When I began my shake diet I was entering the phase of “redress” for what felt like the hundredth time (yo-yo dieting). It is in the phase of redress that I lost my obese body, while still maintaining my fat psychological existence. Similar to the writings on the “new mestiza” and “third space,” the scholarship on liminal spaces in relation to transformation describes my state of entrapment as a person who lost a large amount of weight. The liminal space I am speaking of is one in which my mind manifests in both a fat body and slender body on a daily basis. Though I’ve physically crossed a border, I am trapped by psychological borders, thus my reintegration, or transformation, is incomplete. With this discovery I realized that I was performing on various levels. My morbidly obese psyche performs as the slender person, and the slender person performs as the slender actress, and the actress performs the character. In Richard Schechner’s familiar construction, I am not me (morbidly obese Sharrell), not not me (slender Sharrell), not not not me (slender actress), and then not not not not me (slender character).26 I constantly oscillate among these liminal spaces. I am always in between entities and never feel as though I’m one integrated self. The intensive exploration of my performed affectations of survival as a black actress culminated in the creation of a solo performance text, YoungGiftedandFat, which explores my various performative selves. As D. Soyini Madison notes in her foreword to solo/black/woman, the performativity that transcends the black female performing body is a “complex mix and blend of discursive circulations, gestural economies, and historical affects that break up repetition and scatter style across hearts and minds making black female performativity contingent, otherworldly, and radically contextual.”27 My work on body size and image perception joins a long lineage of other women of the Africana diaspora who dismantle hegemonic institutions and discourses through solo performance, including my favorites Beah Richards, Nina Simone, and Whoopi Goldberg. I approached the creation of YoungGiftedandFat as an actress, a black woman, and a Fat Studies scholar. YoungGiftedandFat was birthed out of my need to suture my fat world, slender world, and liminal world; to bring together my separate lived existences, so vastly different that they would be portrayed as two complete beings. With this performance I re-affirm that black women do have serious issues with body image. And when black women are cast as sexually desirable leading ladies, they too must conform to existing expectations of thinness. With my interests and various identities in mind, I developed questions: How much of my offstage fat identity is informing the textual creation of my slender performative identity? When I write my slender voice, am I writing first through the voice of my fat self? I am also thinking about the performance of identity in relation to space. What does it mean to create a textual space (border) in which both bodies simultaneously exist? What does it mean to have both voices speak through one organism/body? My goal is not to provide universal answers but to share one woman’s attempt to suture these two selves for a unified performance. By addressing the aforementioned questions, a malleable, yet tangible script emerged. My script is a testament to the trials and tribulations of fat women and a call for critical conversations about insecurities and oppression projected onto the fat body. Though my script is an autoethnography, I also consider it a testimonial. Regarding the history of testimonials in Latina feminist tradition, Chandra Talpade Mohanty has argued that “testimonials do not focus on the unfolding of a singular woman’s consciousness (in the hegemonic tradition of European modernist autobiography); rather, their strategy is to speak from within a collective, as participants in revolutionary struggles, and to speak with the express purpose of bringing about social and political change.”28 My collective consists of fat women, slender women (however brief my encounter with this culture), and the voice(s) in my head. My story is told through the voice of my fat identity (Fat), my slender identity (Skinny), and my liminal identity (Sharrell). ‘Fat’ often speaks from the past, when she lived in the fat body, but Fat recognizes that she is trapped in a slender, unfamiliar body. ‘Skinny,’ who lives and experiences the world in a slender body, is a purposefully under-developed character because she is relatively young, existing only a little over four years. ‘Sharrell’ is the character who straddles the border. She represents the fat psyche coupled with the premature slender psyche who both live in the slender body. By writing the voices of my fat body, my slender body, and my liminal existence, I work to disrupt the “solo” versus “multiple” cast dichotomy, an artistic trait of other solo performances by black women that highlights experiences with race and gender.29 In my case, however, I am highlighting race, gender, and various size identities, making this disruptive dichotomy even more complex. For my present body houses the lived experiences of both a fat and a slender person, as well as the psyche of a bordered identity. The characters are created through prose, movement, and poetry that aims to express the complex mental reality in which I exist. In “Fat’s Lament” I struggle with my desire for the sexual gaze of black men. I’ve always wanted my black brothers to be curious about my sexual prowess so when my slender body afforded me sexual freedom and an abundance of newfound attention from men, I found myself in virtual spaces, places, and relationships that I had ‘no business’ being in. In a slender body, I am no longer sexually invisible, and I have a difficult time negotiating sexual advances from my male counterparts. This poem was born out of my new sexual identity and the agency I was afforded in ‘pullin’ attractive men. [caption id="attachment_1125" align="alignnone" width="606"] Figure 1., Sharrell D. Luckett performs an excerpt of YoungGiftedandFat at for the Univ. of Missouri’s 10th Anniversary Life Literature Series. Photo by: Rebecca Allen[/caption] “Fat’s Lament” Look at you skinny Got me wide open and hot like a pot uv grits Now I’m getting served Bubbling brown hot dog sticks Too many I ain’t got enough holes They all won’t fit; don’t make me choose dumb decisions; I ain’t used to this abuse is bliss is this what dem thin bitches be complainin’ about count me in; let em out pass the cuties but save the cooties wink at the married ones cuz they smoking guns ready to burst, pop, spaz at any second shawty swang my way, I’ll be ur 2nd blessing dumb decisions I’m rolling my 3rd blunt; all thanks to my cuteness Yeah, I’m loose and I think I’m losin. I ain’t used to this Fullness; all wrapped up in his arms Don’t mind if he’s an alcoholic cuz He, he be my daddy remind me of my daddy That’s a shame; rolling blunts with my daddy Sexing up his frame Drowning in a spa full of cold water Posin for a pic that’s gone take me under I swear I’ll let him go if you promise to love me When he leaves Wither up and get off of me; I gotta go to school Big ambitions and a lot of talk But dem mens make me fall I asked God to send me a sign I’m layin on my back just taking it I wish she’d call I swear I’ll pick up and suck the milk from her breasts Even share my eggs cuz motherhood I missed. Now skinny has got me wide open Legs stretched and I’m hoping Something good will come out of this Whipped cream rushing All this like has got me blushing And I laugh; cuz all this like is something I ain’t never had . . . In “Riot,” the personal is political, beckoning collective resistance. Again, I am solo, while at the same time representing many women who struggle with the burden of losing weight. I speak from within the border, and on both sides of the border. In this piece, my liminal identity is exploring my haunted past of being neglected and abused by men, while working to make sense of what has happened to my body. Skinny admits that she feels as though she is living a lie, but she knows that teaming up with Fat would surely strip her of her privilege. Skinny is dreaming of an imaginary world in which size doesn’t factor into how she is valued. “Riot” Father of black back Mother of strong bones Consecrated in the middle to create my song Within me, his wit The curve of his smile pearly white teeth legs that run for miles Not to mention my mathematical genius Goes unused But who needs chemistry when u’ve got the blues Too much pressure In the crock pot To be like her: hot From Jane Eyre to Elizabeth Taylor, From Beverly Johnson to a fine black woman, just name her Nothing like her The woman who bore me pain Nothing like, yet identical all the same A thing for men who didn’t love me back A thing for boys that scolded my fat These rolls on my back This meat on my thigh cut it off and it’ll stand a mile high Big, black, bitch That was my name Big, black, bitch All the lil n*ggas would proclaim Threw me into silence Forced me into shame Ran from me while playing “take yo fat friend home” “take yo fat friend home” and don’t bring her back the next day I think those boys made me hide my song In this next section, the liminal identity (Sharrell), begins to speak from the border. At the border she envisions a song. Her song is a metaphor for her ‘true identity.’ One that she feels is fat, black, young, and gifted. But which identity marker is the first marker, second, and so on? One might assume that Sharrell’s skin pigmentation of deep dark cocoa brown is her primary identity marker, especially in America. It is at this point that I, the writer, would like to note that I ‘missed’ the colorism discrimination in childhood that other dark-skinned women endured, and am not able to clearly recognize pigmentation bias against my dark skin within the black community in my adult life. My dark skin color was rarely an issue in or outside of my home. In fact, when the boys on the back of the school bus titled me ‘Big, Black, Bitch’ I remember thinking that they had the ‘black’ identity marker correct, and not understanding why being ‘big’ was so bad. That they coupled ‘big’ and ‘black’ with ‘bitch’ was the signifier that their beat box performance was meant to hurt me. Lesson learned at age nine: don’t sit in the back of the bus. The world made me hide my song My song I’m not singing it yet It’s tucked away somewhere Catching its breath Been running far too long Hiding under clothes too small Under hate that’s well worn Under burgundy rivers that sleep in my womb In feathers of the pillow that catch my tears released too soon In long awaited nights In all my years My song transcends my fears Beah Richards says A black woman speaksAbout oppression, about slavery, about all this heat Fuck those little black boys and these grown men That withheld their drooling Down with skinny bitches and all this schooling Fuck the scale Fuck a diet Fuck fruits and vegetables This is my riot And although I open my mouth My song won’t come out It sits in silence I am a black woman who wishes for a time That I could gain my weight back And still be fine That I can let my curly hair show and blow in the wind Without being seen as a threat to all men So I wear straight wigs This degree that flows down my back; I want it for every black person that has been attacked All of my n*ggas that’s been held back I read and write and read and fight Read and write and read and cry Read and write, and when I speak I fly Bag lady, why you carrying all them bags I carry them to remind me of my past All of the “no you can’ts” all of the “you’re too bigs” All of the “why you so black and yo mama light skinneds” All of the “you won’t get a jobs” all of the “they won’t let you ins” All of the “you can’t ever be a teacher cuz you distract the kids” I wish I could fall into the arms of my father and do it all again I’d whisper in his ear, that he’s a great man, I’d tell him to keep his sperm Locked away in his pants, but I guess my mama felt too good and the universe decided to give me a chance. So here I am. At this point, the “I” in the final phrase “So here I am” is the borderland. “I” is the place and space that my obese psyche and slender body share. “I” is black, a woman, and a site of total confusion, while Fat is literally trying to catch up with Skinny. “I” is Sharrell, who waits patiently at the border, hoping to fully integrate with Fat and Skinny to build a new, complete life. “So here I am” also affirms my presence in this world and my right to interrogate my identity as a means to peel myself apart and put me back together again. As I continue to think through my various personas, I have come to understand that Fat and Skinny truly experience the world differently, while my liminal self acts as sort of mediator between the two. The work that I am doing in the borderlands is born out of a desire to love that part of me which is fat just as much as the world loves that part of me which is slender. My journey is a difficult one because I am consciously making an effort to erase the border, revealing a whole human being. As I continue my research and performative inquiry, I do so knowing that I may never reach a resolution. I am also aware that the possibility of being physically deported is quite real, as my genetic make-up and appetite work against my slender existence at every meal. Nonetheless, I do believe that peace, harmony, and healthiness can co-exist in my mind, my body and my art. Thus, I explore and I write and I perform and I write some more. The work at the borderlands is multifaceted. This work is integral to my survival, for crossing over is never an easy task. I went missing in 2008 Shed my skin, withered away This body ain’t mine; it never belonged to me Escaped like a thief in the night and now I’m tryna find me With all my might What is this in my hand? What is this in my hand? If you force me to speak, I will surely tell a lie When I killed myself, I had an alibi I was at home, alone, wanting to be let out Had to find my song And now my ancestors tell me it’s been within me all along so why in God’s name am I so far from home A skinny bitch could NEVER do this shit That fat, black girl sings my song -------- Sharrell D. Luckett is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at California State University-Dominguez Hills. She is an award-winning director/producer of over 60 shows and has co-created four musicals. Luckett received her Ph.D. in Theatre at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she was selected to serve as Doctoral Marshal and keynote speaker. Her upcoming projects include the world premiere of her one-woman show, YoungGiftedandFat, and a seminal manuscript outlining the Freddie Hendricks acting method. --------- Endnote: [1] Solo performance artist Misty DeBerry made this statement at the Mellon/Northwestern University Institute of Feminist Performance in the African Diaspora, 20 June 2011. [2] Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 62. [3] F. Grodstein et al., “Three-year follow-up of participants in a commercial weight loss program. Can you keep it off?” Archives of Internal Medicine (JAMA) 156, no. 12 (June 1996): 1302-1306. [4] Fat Studies is a field of study dedicated to ending discrimination against large people and accepting size diversity. [5] Lily O’Hara and Jane Gregg, “Human Rights Casualties from the “War on Obesity”: Why Focusing on Body Weight Is Inconsistent with a Human Rights Approach to Health,” Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight Society 1-1 (2012): 32-46. [6] Sander Gilman, Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 9. [7] Steven N. Blair and I-Min Lee, “Weight Loss and Risk of Mortality,” in George A. Bray, et al, eds. Handbook of Obesity (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008), 805-818. [8] Rose Weitz, introduction to Section III: The Politics of Appearance in Rose Weitz, ed.,The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 133. See also Susie Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue (New York: Paddington Press, 1978). [9] Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Weitz, The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, 25-45. [10] Gilman, Fat, 13. [11] For this essay, I define slender as being in one’s BMI (Body Mass Index) normal range or lower overweight range. [12] Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 11-13. [13] 6 months to a year. [14] E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Eds., solo/black/woman: Scripts, Interviews, and Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014; Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). [15] Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” 34. [16] Andrea Shaw, The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006); Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). [17] See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). [18] See Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture for further discussion of the ‘third space’ (New York: Routledge, 1994). [19] Holding Up the Sky is an original play adapted by Milbre Burch, first produced in 2009 2010 at the University of Missouri-Columbia, directed by Clyde Ruffin. [20] Weitz, The Politics of Women’s Bodies, 133. [21] Claire Van Ens, “The Poetics of Excess: Images of Large Women on Stage and Screen” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1999). [22] Judith Butler, “Embodied Identity in de Beauvoirs The Second Sex,” paper presented at the American Philosophical Association, 1985, quoted in Bartky, 27. [23] Ibid. [24] See Lesa Lockford, “Social Drama in the Spectacle of Femininity: The Performance of Weight Loss in the Weight Watchers Program,” Women’s Studies in Communication 19 (1996): 291-312. [25] See Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), 77. [26] See Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 4-5. [27] D. Soyini Madison, foreword to solo/black/woman, E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, eds.(Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2014), xiii. Emphasis in original. [28] Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 81. [29] E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, introduction, solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays, xx. ----------- The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014) Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Guest Editor: Cheryl Black (University of Missouri) With the ATDS Editorial Board: Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University) Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg Circulation Manager: Janet Werther Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue The Border that Beckons and Mocks: Conrad, Failure, and Irony in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.